“Let me decide for you then,” I say. And without another word I move past Ethan as he stares after me forlornly. I have to say goodbye to Posey before I leave, so I push past a couple making out and have to step over a drunken guy slouched against the wall. Ethan follows me into the living room where Posey is sitting on the couch half sprawled across her girlfriend. Her white blonde hair is combed back in a low ponytail and her eyes are sleepy either from the liquor or the joint she smoked earlier. I lean down and kiss her on the forehead, promising to call her next week to set up a lunch date. All the while Ethan lingers awkwardly behind me.
“You taking this one home then?” Posey says, jutting her chin toward him.
I glance over my shoulder before shaking my head.
“No,” I say. “I don’t take advantage of drunk men.”
Posey laughs and reaches her hand toward me. I take it and she squeezes my fingers.
“He’s not always an arse,” she says. “He’s quite kind if you look really deep. Really, really, really deep.”
We all laugh, even Ethan who curses colorfully at her before she shows him the finger and tells him to get the fuck out of her house. And then we’re walking out of the flat together, down the stairs, and past the doors with their bright white paint and shiny gold numbers. The minute I push open the doors to her building, the song of London greets me: cars, music, laughter drifting out of a pub, the sounds of people as they love, and flirt, and play. Ethan grabs my hand and I don’t pull away. I figure I’ve given him a hard enough time.
“I’d like it if you walked me home,” he says. “Just to be safe.”
I roll my eyes. “Where do you live?”
“Over by Paddington Basin,” he says. “Next to Selfridges.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m not walking all that way. I’ll call you an Uber.” I pull out my phone but it’s dead.
“Shit, do you have yours?”
He shakes his head.
Such a fucking liar, I think.
“Battery died hours ago.”
I notice he’s not slurring anymore. The wanker was faking.
“I can just come to yours then,” he says, cheerfully. “I don’t mind at all.”
We’re trudging through the streets now. It’s started raining. I shoot him a dirty look. Part of me wants the company, but I’d prefer to be the one to suggest it.
“Is this how you get women to sleep with you? Because it’s pathetic. I don’t take strays in, I’m not the bloody pound.”
He laughs. “No, actually. I never have to work this hard. I’m trying a new tactic where I sort of beg and act like a loser and hope you feel sorry for me.”
“Right,” I say. “Unfortunately that won’t work for you. You might want to reconsider.”
“Your friends said nothing would work.” He shrugs. “They reckon you’re still hung up on that David guy.”
I recoil at the sound of his name. It’s like someone just tasered me. How dare they tell him about David! God, I desperately need new friends.
“Who’s David?” I ask.
“Exactly,” he says.
I open the door to my building. Time to move on, Yara, I tell myself.
I live in a whitish building with ten units and worn espresso colored floors. The place is old, but the floors are new, made to look old. I love those floors, how they try to be something they’re not. The flats are four to a floor, except for the third floor, which only has two units. That’s where I am, in the attic space that has been converted into two small studios and divided by a thin sheetrock wall. My side has the skylight; my neighbor, Bidi, has a slanted ceiling and a window seat with built-in bookshelves. I’m jealous of her window nook, and as far as I know she is too busy fucking the guy from 5M to use it. I’ve been in her place once to return the vacuum she loaned me and spotted five varieties of bongs on the shelves that were meant for books. I bought my own vacuum after that. I won’t be taking loaners from someone who desecrates bookshelves. The room came with a single bed and a dresser that is so worn and chipped I’m not even sure what color it had originally been. I papered the drawers and packed away what little I had. You’d think someone who traveled America for as long as I did would have…more. But, I don’t. I shed things like a snake shed its skin. When I left I didn’t take anything with me but some clothes.
Ethan kisses me as the rain tinkers softly against the skylight in my living room; the one good thing about my sad little flat is that small piece of joyful sky. A slice of light. He undresses me slowly, which puts me at ease;his long fingers flick across the buttons on my dress, popping the little beads out of their assigned holes. He doesn’t say stupid shit about how hot my body is, I appreciate that. Maybe he doesn’t think my body is hot, I don’t really care. We’re here now and on the way to orgasmic glory. I need time to acclimate to this new man who is touching my skin and breathing hard against my neck. I know that once he’s inside of me I’ll have taken a step away from David and toward my future. It’s all for the best. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.
I breathe him in. A new smell. Maybe I’ve missed this: the first smells, and touches, and kisses. It’s so different with each man. Ethan’s not at all what I thought, quite gentle actually. I imagine it’s all a show with him, the fucking, and flirting, and whatnot. He goes full bravado like a Hollywood action flick and then settles into a romance once you’re impressed. It’s a grand tactic and a great relief. Bad boys are only fun when they’re threatening to break your heart. There isn’t a hair on his chest, just smooth, white skin and lean muscle. I try not to remember the dark hair I liked to run my fingers through. Another man, another lifetime. I hadn’t known I liked hair on a man’s chest until I saw David’s. Ethan is going to make love to me—I can tell by his movements. There won’t be any fucking tonight. Tonight? I think maybe it’s morning. He licks my clavicle. He’s the sort of guy who wants to stare into your eyes as he pokes around inside of you. A literal fucking romantic. And in ten years, when someone asks how we met, he’ll tell them that he tried to play it cool, but he was in love with me from the first moment. This was how beautiful things started, I assure myself—at the tail end of something else.
Ethan leads me toward the bathroom and I have to redirect him to the bedroom, both of us laughing. I kick open the door. Before he pushes me down on the bed he turns on the radio. I almost laugh except I’m caught up in the moment, the potential for love songs and lovemaking. I want to believe again, to feel. The adverts are on: a car dealership, and then a dating service. He takes off my bra while a woman with a smoky voice talks about the husband she met online.
His mouth is on me when a jingle about Nando’s chicken plays; first one breast and then the other. The irony is sort of hilarious. I arch my back because it feels so good to be touched after such a long hiatus. Why did I ever stop doing this? He rubs me through my panties and then suddenly yanks them off. I lift my hips to help him and he tosses them somewhere over his shoulder. Finally a song comes on. I haven’t heard it before, but it has a nice beat. A sort of ra ta ta ta that makes your heart accelerate.
I relax as Ethan settles himself between my legs and I curl around him. I like this part. I get lost in it, my eyes rolling back, my hands gripping his too-cool-for-school hair. The song plays, but I’m too lost to hear it. His tongue keeps beat with the music. And then he crawls up my body until his weight is on me. And it’s the very moment Ethan is pushing himself inside of me, while I’m moaning into his mouth, that the song reaches me. I recognize the voice, and I listen to the lyrics as a strange man moves in my body.
Atheists who kneel and pray, the voice sings. Begging for just anything. Non-believers bitten down to the core. Pass them a word, give them a string. When you’re dying you cling. Yara, Yara, the god of disbelief. I worship between your legs. Pray to your fallacy, pray to your winter. You kill everything.
Ethan at first thinks I’m having an orgasm. He speeds up, pushing into me harder while he
bites at my neck and shoulder. I convulse against him, my grief so profound I shudder. Thousands of miles away, and David has crawled into bed with me, crawled right in the middle of Ethan and me and punched me in the gut. I feel him release into me and I wonder dumbly if he put a condom on. Drunk was bad. Drunk was irresponsible. Drunk was potential pregnancy or STD from a stranger.
Stupid, stupid, Yara, I think. And then David is on his second verse, accusing me of ugly things.
We’re all just atheists who kneel and pray, you made me believe and then erased the day. Fallacy, Yara, a molten idol. A flesh and blood god, not a god at all. A girl who calls you just to kill. Yara, Yara, the god of disbelief.
Ethan is looking into my watery shocked eyes and I notice that his are weatherworn blue. Like an old pair of denim. Had we made love? Had we fucked? Was I pregnant and riddled with STDs? He rolls off me and I breathe a sigh of relief when I spot the condom. I want to cry from relief.
Yara, Yara, the god of disbelief.
I curl up on my side, too wrung out to even pull up the sheet. He does if for me before climbing into bed and molding his body against mine. I don’t tell him to fuck off and leave. I don’t want to be alone, I’m afraid of what I’ll do. I did it. I did what I’d set out to do. I wanted to break a man’s heart for his art. Rip his belief system to shreds so he’d have to rebuild it. And that was the thing about a scorned artist, wasn’t it? Their new medium was you. Just ask Bukowski, ask Plath, ask Taylor Swift whose blood they used for ink. David was going to hate me for the rest of his life. But, he was going to make beautiful music. He already had.
“Yara,” Ethan says softly.
I pretend to be asleep.
A bar. The basics: you restock, pour, clean, pour some more, have entitled servers tap their fingers on the bar top you just wiped down while shooting you dirty looks.
“I need it now,” they say. “Can you hurry? I fucked up the order.”
You listen, you nod, you pour. You smile, and frown, and cut citrus until your fingers sting. You soak the guns, clean the speed racks, count your drawer. The coins go ting, ting, ting as they shuck out of your hand and into the plastic dividers. You tell off a server for ruining your liquor count with their overly generous pours, you ignore the manager who always looks at your tits unless he’s handing you your paycheck. You are extra nice to the hostess so she ushers the best people into your section. You eavesdrop on conversations that are none of your business.
I used to be into that sort of thing.
Her husband gave it to her then left.
I’m obsessed with that show. Have you seen it?
I’ve been trying to get rid of you for years.
Pass the salt, you salty bitch.
He fucking worships her, the cow.
One tit looks like a cantaloupe, one tit looks like an avocado.
At night I still hear them speaking, broken bits of their conversation passing through my dreams. I consider another occupation, but bar life is the only life I know, and I quite enjoy it. I’m offered a job at Bronte, right off Trafalgar Square and situated on the Strand. I worked with one of the managers before I left for the States, and he told me if I were to ever find myself in these parts again to look him up. It’s an airy setup with floor to ceiling windows, decorated with the sort of color palette that Posey’s grandmother would have worn on her face: peaches and golds. I imagine most of the writers of old would have steered clear of the place, but it made non-writers feel charming to come here and sip cocktails named Billy Bones or Sgt. Pepper.
I keep a low profile, but eventually my friends hear I’m back and pass through for drinks. Some of them come in twos; some come alone. People I went to school with, or worked with, or tried to forget. They all ask the same questions: What was New York like? Did I shag anyone famous? Seattle’s just like London, yeah? No, I think. Seattle has David. London is lacking.
I hear his song—my song—on the radio all the time. I want to shut it off, but I reckon I deserve the punishment. I listen each time, to the words, his hurt, his anger, and let the ache build in the pit of my stomach. If I listen too hard, I start to remember the way his lips felt—the soft, wet comfort of them. Fuck this life, I think.
“I love this song,” someone always says.
My name is in the song, but nobody notices. No one but Posey, who jokes one day as we’re having lunch in Camden Town: “Did you fuck the guy who wrote this song? While you were across the pond?”
I stare at her, and she sits up in her seat, ramrod straight, her eyes becoming large.
“You can’t just fuck celebrities and not tell me, Yara,” she says.
“He wasn’t one. Not then. He was just a guy who came into the bar and flirted with me.”
“And what did you do to deserve a song like that?”
I picked at the bun on my burger and stared at the floor.
“Look, I don’t want to talk about it,” I say. “It’s bad enough I have to hear the bloody song everywhere I go.”
“I’m so impressed,” says Posey. “I always knew you were a muse, but you got a song on the top ten. Epic shit right there.”
“Posey!”
“All right, all right. When you’re ready, yeah?”
“How are things with you and Samantha?” I ask, trying to change the subject.
She gives me the side-eye. “How many girlfriends have I had in the last five years?”
“Too many to count.”
She points her fork at me. “Exactly.”
“So what are you saying? You’re going to break up with her?”
I pictured them the night I was at her house for the party. They’d seemed really into each other: affectionate, comfortable. But, maybe I’d been too drunk to see the truth. And wasn’t Posey always affectionate? That was just her thing. Even if you weren’t a hugger and she forced you into one, you’d suddenly make an exception.
“I don’t know. For now we’re okay.”
I want to ask more, clarify what she means, but I don’t think she knows yet.
“Ethan talks about you a lot.”
The conversation shifts again, back to me. I hate this ritual of information sharing. When you’re a bartender you can listen to everyone’s dirt without having to be personally involved. That’s the way I like it. Can’t we just sit here in silence and enjoy each other’s company that way? She drains the last of her beer, slams the bottle on the table, and looks at me expectantly. I blink at her, not sure what to say. The morning after he spent the night I’d told him I had a dentist appointment and had to leave. He’d gotten dressed, and so had I, and then I walked him downstairs, waiting until he was around the corner before returning to my flat.
He’s called a couple times since then, texted too. But, I’ve been firm about my rejection. I am in no way, shape, or form willing to date someone. I don’t know that I ever have been. Most people move through life looking for some elusive soulmate experience. I am trying my hardest to avoid it. Does that make me fucked up or wise? Who knows, who cares?
“He’s not my type,” I say, looking around for the server. If Posey is going to be launching questions for the rest of lunch I need to top off my wine.
“So, this David Lisey guy is…was—?”
She’s baiting me. I shoot her a dirty look and slouch down in my seat.
“I don’t have a type. That’s the honest truth. I believe in connections, and yes, I had one with him.”
Posey has sleepy eyes. If you didn’t know her, she gave you the impression that she was incredibly bored with whatever you were saying. When she smoked pot her lids drooped even lower, and it looked like she was sneering at you. But, at the mention of David, her eyes are wide open, like someone has just thrown water in her face.
“Did you fuck him?”
It’s a trigger. I see myself lost beneath him as he moves over me. His smooth skin beneath my fingertips, hot and damp. He’s not constrained like other men, he’s not trying to be careful with his
reactions. Each time he pushes into me, he moans, his face flashing expressions that ranged from pain, to relief, to shock. I felt like music the whole time. I was an instrument and he was reveling in the way I played.
“Yeah,” I tell Posey.
She smiles. It takes a minute for me to be back in this dingy pub, the windows filmed over with a layer of scum. I can still taste him on my lips, smell his skin.
“When did you run?”
I shrug.
“I’d always meant to. So, I just stuck with it.”
“Has he tried to find you?” She drained the last of her beer, licking her lips and staring at me expectantly.
“There’s no way, really. I don’t have a Facebook, my number changed when I moved home. He knows very little about me.”
“But, he wrote you that song,” she says. “He’s trying in his own way.”
I turn away. “He’s angry with me. That’s why he wrote the song.”
“He’s angry because you left. He’s not angry you’re you.”
“That is me, though, isn’t it? I leave.”
Posey’s mouth pulls into a tight line. “Stop trying to convince the world that you’re more damaged than anyone else, Yara.”
The words come out immediately, an electric denial. “I’m not,” I say. But, maybe that’s exactly the narcissistic thing I was trying to do.
“You broke a man’s heart because you thought your love was so important it would damage him beyond recognition. And what’s a true artist anyway, Yara? What you say it is?”
I don’t even know how she’s figured that. I guess one just has to listen to the lyrics of the song. I could be angry with him for outing me like that, but the truth is I deserve it.
“I don’t understand why you’re being like this. You asked and I told you. It’s not fair that you’re attacking me for it.”
Posey touches my face like she’s searching for me underneath my skin. I don’t like when people touch my face, but when Posey does it I don’t pull away. There are too many years, too much familiarity. Her finger is on my forehead, pressing.
Atheists Who Kneel and Pray Page 15
