by Shelly Crane
I slammed the door and bolted it. I heard him through the fiberglass door. "Keep the change? You only gave me ninety-two cents, douche."
"Take it or leave it, buddy!" I called.
"Thanks a lot, freak. Who answers the door in a towel?" He kicked the door before walking away.
Marley and I looked at each other and laughed. She kept giggling and it was contagious. I kept laughing and then she laughed harder. Finally, we settled and ate our pizza with no plates. She folded hers in half the long way and dug in. She plowed through five slices like I'd never seen a girl do. It was pretty awesome.
We tried to watch some TV, but we were pretty exhausted. I flipped it off, turned on my side that wasn't hurting, and tried to pretend that my arm wasn't aching like something was seriously wrong. My eyes closed, but my mind didn't stop. I waited for her to come out of the bathroom, and when she did, I went in. When I came out, I could see her in the light streaming in from the open bathroom door. She was messing with her nose again, like in the truck.
I saw red.
I took off in a stomp toward her, forgetting all about my aching shoulder. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. How dare she snort whatever the hell she was snorting in the predicament we were in? Where had she even gotten it from?
I slammed the bathroom door, but it bounced back, shutting us to almost darkness. Climbing over the bed hastily on my knees, I yanked her over to lay flat on her back. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
She gasped and tried to fight me so I couldn't see. "Get off me!"
"Why? Show me what you got, Marley," I taunted in anger. "Maybe I want some, too."
"Get off me!" she screeched. It sounded haunted and terrified.
I finally got her flat on her back, her hands over her head held by mine, my face right in hers. "What the hell, Marley?"
"Get off me," she said, her voice crumpling. "Get off, get off, get off!" Her legs scissored under me, trying to move them to the side.
I loosened my grip a little and hated that she had so much control over me. She started to whimper and confusion ran through my blood. She moved her legs to the side and turned her face away... A repulsive thought flitted through my mind... Her in foster homes, so many of them, so many men she must've come into contact with... She was acting as if I were about to hurt her or....something way worse than that...
I jumped off her as quickly as I could and didn't stop until my back slammed into the wall. It jarred the bathroom door open a little with the impact and I groaned at the rage of pain through my shoulder. I gripped my arm and tried to breathe through my nose to stave off my rush of breaths making the pain worse.
I saw her through the crack of light covering her body on the bed. She had scrambled up to the headboard, her knees to her chest, and was looking at me with a mix of horrified terror and sympathy. Her breaths were loud and ragged as she watched me. I slid to the floor, but could still see her over the bed.
"I'm sorry I...scared you," I said because I didn't know what to say.
"It was dark," she admitted after a couple minutes of silence. "And you jumped on me. Why?"
"This is the second time I've caught you snorting," I said evenly. "I couldn't let it go this time."
"Snorting?" Her brow creased, her cheeks still red. "Coke?" She said incredulously. "Cocaine? You thought I was snorting cocaine?"
"What were you doing?"
She held something up in the light. It was a small wrapper that kind of looked like a Band-Aid. She pulled what was behind it out and I saw a small butterfly bandage looking thing.
"It's a nose strip. Jackass."
Nose strip? "What do you use those for?"
"To breathe, obviously."
"You got a cold or something?"
She shook her head slowly but angrily. "No, I don't have a cold." She seared me with her gaze. "The foster dad who raped me also broke my nose. I have a deviated septum and have never been able to get it fixed. There. Now you know all my little secrets. Poor Marley." She choked on a sob, switching gears faster than I could keep up. "Poor Marley's homeless and can't be in the dark because she has nightmares about an ass that came in her bedroom. And she has to steal nose strips from pharmacies when they stop to get supplies because she can't afford them otherwise and she can't sleep well without them. Poor Marley doesn't eat with forks because she doesn't have any and she's so used to eating without it that she doesn't feel right using them. There, Jude. All my crap's on the table now."
She got up and went into the bathroom. She didn't slam the door, which surprised me. It closed gently behind her and I felt like a bastard through and through as I listened to her soft mewls through the door. She didn't come out for a long time. I knew she wouldn't so I propped myself up on it and lay there all night. If she wasn't getting a good night's sleep on the bed, then I wasn't either.
Seven
I paced the room slowly for a long time before opening the bathroom door, knocking softly first. No answer. It was so hot in the room that morning, but the air conditioning was on full blast. When I pushed the door open, she was lying in the tub, using a towel as a pillow. She was awake and looked up at me. She was no longer angry, but she didn't look normal either.
I sat down on the floor beside the tub opposite her head, careful to keep the towel around my hips secure. We stared at each other. My eyes felt hot and strange, but I stared back. Minutes passed before I finally spoke. "Life sucks, Marley."
Her eyes widened for a second before her lips twitched, begging to release a smile. "Yeah, sometimes."
"Pretty much all the time," I countered.
"You're so jaded, Jude," she repeated what she'd said the other night. I guess it was pretty true.
I nodded. "It appears that way."
She gripped the edge of the tub as if hanging on to keep from falling and swallowed. "I've never told anyone about what happened to me when I was younger. I've never had someone to tell before. I've never wanted to tell anyone before."
I scoffed. "I doubt you wanted to tell me either." I shook my head. "I'm sorry I forced that out of you."
"But you didn't. If I hadn't wanted to tell you, I wouldn't have."
I felt a little spark hit me, like a ray of sunshine right to my heart. She wanted to tell me, to trust me with something like that?
"Why me? Why me when I was being a jerk?"
She sighed. "You thought I was doing something awful. I get that. I'm sorry, I'm just so broken I don't even know how to be a real human being anymore."
I stared at her. I had said that exact same thing about myself. This felt like more than some fluke. This felt like a path was thrown in front of us and we could either take it or walk away. We both had learned to live a normal life—what was normal for us. Even though our lives weren't ideal, and we may not be the most pleasant people in the world, we survived.
And that was the point.
"You're human," I said, my voice deep and meaningful with my revelation. "And you are beautiful, and it's more than just your face. You took care of me even after knowing that I'd taken everything from you." Her face scrunched in question. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry about everything you had to go through to get here."
"I just wish I could be normal. Not be scared, not be scarred." She touched her lip and I wanted to pull her to me, but I didn't. "I got this from another foster parent. The mom caught me sneaking out and hit me. I fell into the window pane."
My heart stopped. "Gah...Marley."
"I'm not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me...Really, truly, I'm over it all for the most part. The…rape. It was one time and he was so drunk that he didn't even remember it. I don't think about it anymore…unless it's dark. I have more issues with this," she touched her scarred lip, "to be honest. I just feel like..." She leaned a little closer and opened up her very soul. She looked as raw as I felt. "I feel like you may not know exactly what I'm going through, but you're still right there with me on your own. We're both paddling against th
e current, just trying to catch up, just trying to simulate some sense of normalcy...though neither of us are normal."
I leaned forward, too, and let my hand rest on her arm. I moved my thumb back and forth over her wrist, marveling at how incredibly soft her skin was in that spot. "You have to take the things that happened to you and push it all toward something else. We have to take those things, those awful things, and make our lives better because we lived through it."
Her eyes glistened, but she smiled a little. I wanted to kiss that scar so badly. "Like beauty from ashes?"
"Exactly like that." It was so warm in there. The air conditioning must've been broken. My shoulder pulsed with each heartbeat and my eyes were so hot they burned. "You and me, Marley, we're going to be all right one day."
She put her hand over mine on her arm. Her smile changed and she leaned a little closer. "Are you all right? You have sick eyes."
"Sick eyes?"
"It's what one of my foster moms used to say. It's what your eyes look like when you're sick, when you have a fever."
"I'm fine," I reassured her.
"You're pretty hot, Jude," she remarked, running her palm up my arm. "Are you sure you're all right?"
"Yeah." I stood and stretched, but immediately regretted it.
"Your arm," she hissed. "I didn't clean it last night. I'm sorry. Hold on."
She stood and ran to get the aspirin. "It's freezing in here," she said, rubbing at her arm. It wasn't cold, it was blazing in there, but I didn't argue. Girls were always cold.
Then she spent the next ten minutes being extra careful and gentle while she fixed me up. The towel was securely under her arms and above her chest. Her extremely nice chest that was right in my line of sight as I sat on the toilet. Her soft, lean arms that brushed my face several times during her ministrations as she stood between my knees. It was the time that her chest brushed myface that killed me. I groaned—totally not my fault—and she stopped dead. "Oh, my gosh. I'm so sorry."
I chuckled and looked up at her with a grin that wouldn't stop. "Are you really apologizing? Come on, that was the highlight of my week."
She shook her head, but smiled. "Wow, the male species has seriously declined."
"Guilty," I admitted. "I live on the four basic food groups. Meat, sweet tea, a place to sleep, and a pretty girl."
Her face changed to that sad one that kept coming back no matter what I did. "Yeah," she said softly.
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing." She put the last piece of tape on and leaned back. "I can just imagine that you get lots of girls."
"I did," I answered truthfully. "Honestly...it's not all it's cracked up to be."
"But I bet you used to really enjoy it, right?" she asked harder. "I bet you used to just eat up all that attention."
I scowled. "What's going on?"
"Nothing."
"Are you jealous?" I asked, but as soon as it left my lips, I knew I was an idiot.
She scoffed. "I think we'd have to be together for me to have something to be jealous about first. Secondly, no, not jealous, I just used to know a jerk exactly like you. And he loved it."
I stood, thinking that I wasn't sure if I believed her or not. Her being jealous would be sexy as all get out.
"That's not true. You can be jealous even when the person doesn't belong to you." I wiped at my forehead and wasn't surprised by how much I was sweating. "And you kind of sound jealous."
"I'm not jealous," she spouted and tacked on a head shake. "I'm not interested in being with a guy that can be with any woman, anytime, anywhere and it doesn't even faze him. For someone to be so uncaring, so unattached, doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. Someone that doesn't care about anything but his current conquest..."
"What makes you think that I'm that way?"
She laughed humorlessly. "Well, for one, you brought a freaking girl back to bang in the hotel room that I was in with you. I had nowhere to go for this little tryst, since you won't let me go anywhere without you, so what were you going to do with me, huh? Stick me in the bathroom?"
"I hadn't thought that far," I muttered to myself. Her eyes widened. "Look, I'm sorry about that. I wasn't really going to have sex with her, I was just...trying to prove a point."
"A point? What, that you're an ass? I already knew that."
My jaw tightened, but I knew I deserved it. "I'm sorry, Marley. I've done some things in my life that I'm not proud of. We just talked about taking the things in our life and giving them new life and purpose somewhere else, to push it into another direction to make us better people?" I sighed. "I don't like who I used to be. I want to be different."
She looked away. "Can I just ask why?" She looked back at me. "Why you would bring a girl back here with you?"
Honesty is the best policy, right? "I was trying to make you angry, make you hate me."
She pulled her clothes from the towel rack and turned to glare at me. "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Get dressed. We need to get to the docks and see if I can sweet-talk another day of work outta them or else this crappy hotel won't last long."
She slammed the door, leaving me feeling like a tornado just went through. She yelled through the door, "And don't you even think about coming out without knocking!"
"Yep."
I got dressed in a stupor. The fever was lessened, but I still felt it raging in my arm. When I knocked and came out, she was sitting, her knees to her chest by the door. "Ready?"
She glanced up. "Always."
x
The fishermen let us work that day and the next three for the same amount of money each day, but said they'd be heading to the next port and wouldn't need us anymore. So we'd have to find more odd jobs elsewhere. Marley was quieter than normal, but we were both so tired and exhausted when we got back that we didn't really have time to talk anyway.
I had started to reconsider my leaving her there in that town, but with this recent shift in our 'relationship', it was unclear. I thought we'd made this breakthrough and then she...blocked everything out and hid inside herself.
When I got out of the shower that night, Marley wasn't in the room. I freaked and ran, looking under the beds, closets, and out the door. I shut it and gripped my forehead in anger. They'd taken her from the room? I hadn't heard anything. I jerked my shoes on to go after them, somehow, but saw a note on the bed.
Went to the bar. Had to get out of this room. Maybe I'll make a few bucks while I'm there, too.
Mother… I ran out the door to the bar downstairs. I opened the door, bypassed the bouncer who could give a crap, and then gripped the doorframe at what I saw. Marley was there, her short shorts and cowboy boots on as she sat on the bar. She waited for the bartender to fill up the tray and then hopped down, carrying it to a group of eager guys by the pool tables. "Now," she said and passed them around, "double or nothing, boys."
My teeth ground together. She was betting our money? But then guilt rose up. Hadn't I been in a bar just a few nights before spending it on booze? I grabbed a water from the bar and then watched her from the room, moving from one side to the other. My arm ached, radiating pain and making it hard to breathe. Making me want to get a shot just to calm down the pain, but I'd made enough of an ass of myself that night.
She watched, a pool stick in her hands, as one of them lined up his shot. She bit into her lip and then yelled, "Come on, Pablo! You got this."
He grinned at her and missed his shot. She bounced and giggled before setting up her own. I growled under my breath at the way she bent over the pool table. There wasn't a guy in the place not staring at that behind.
She sunk her striped three ball in the corner pocket. She squealed and they laughed and huffed, willing to lose to her. She watched another go round with the four guys playing, doing all the right things at the right times to make them lose, and then she sunk her seven ball.
Holy crap. She was hustling them.
I never knew if she saw me or not, but once the g
ame was over, they paid her some amount I didn't know and she hugged them all and laughed loudly. It almost looked like she was drunk.
I knew that she wasn't though.
They all left, but there was still plenty of people in the bar. She went to the jukebox, much like my boss had that day, and put her dollars in, selecting a song that she loved, and started to dance.
She was a siren sucking me into her web because I couldn’t look away. I was mesmerized at how incredibly sexy she was. Her eyes were closed, her hips moved to their own rhythm. I was so pissed at her for leaving, so worried about her, so freaking turned on.
She danced right there, the angle perfect for my viewing. She turned and gave me a show, almost like she knew…I was there.
I scowled. She was hustling me, too.
Daggumit.
I stood, the stool creaking across the floor causing her eyes to open. She didn't seem surprised to see me there. I gave her a look to let her know I was pissed. She didn't smile, she just kept dancing, turning away from me.
When the song was over, she moved on to something else. She joked with the guys playing darts, she even took a few orders and brought them their drinks, happily accepting their tips with a little shoulder shrug and a smile.
I'd had my fill and wasn't about to stand there and watch anymore. I willed her to look at me, taking the last sip of my water, and when she did, I jerked my head toward the door. She looked like she wanted to protest, but obliged me by moving slowly toward me.
"Did you enjoy yourself?" I said harshly, though I had no right to.
"I did actually." She turned on the stairs up to our room and handed me a wad of folded cash. "There's one-fifty there. You're welcome."
I scoffed and watched the back of her jeans as we went upstairs. "There are better ways to do it."
"I needed to get away from you." She looked at me as I unlocked the door. "And this room. All of it."
