These Things About Us

by Laura Beege

“It’s so good you’re here,” Trace slurred. He’d had too much too drink.

  “Instead of outside?” Pushing Sabrina’s phone into my pocket, I used my own to cast a blue gleam over us.

  “Back here. With me. I miss … so bad … you’re not … me.” He was too drunk for normal conversation. His alcohol-thick tongue combined with the strong accent made it terribly hard to find sense in a single word he said. His eyes, however, pierced through me. They were crystal clear and fixed to my face.

  “You should go back outside, Trace. I’ll make sure you get home safely, okay? But I have to be alone right now.”

  “Don’t go…”

  “No, you go. I stay.” I poked at my phone to keep the display lit up.

  “Good. I go. You stay.” He nodded so frantically his head should have come off. Then, instead of leaving, he tumbled that one step forward and suddenly his arms were wrapped around my waist. The whiskey stung in my nose, as he pressed me against his chest and lifted me up. I lost the floor beneath my feet. In my surprise, I opened my hand and my phone tumbled to the floor.

  “Trace! Let me down.” I hooked my fingers into his shoulders, just in case he’d let me go too suddenly. I had no intention of cracking my skull open by accident.

  Instead of listening, Trace pushed his face into my hair, just into the crook of my neck. His hot breath danced over my collar bone, as he mumbled some more incoherent words about missing something and going somewhere.

  I swung my feet a bit, but he had a stealth grip on my mid that made it impossible for me to reach the floor, so I propped them up on his thighs, hoping the tiny heels dug deep into his flesh. “Trace,” I warned again. My phone flickered out and we were shut into blackness. “Shit,” I hissed.

  “Don’t leave me.”

  His words cut through the dark, clearer than anything he’d said in the last few moments, stabbing me right into the gut.

  “I don’t leave people,” I whispered and inhaled slowly to relax my claws in his shoulders.

  He buried his face deeper in my curls and clutched my shirt in his fists. Whatever he was trying to tell me in his drunken state, I understood as much as I needed to in order to start moving my hands up and down his back, trying to comfort him. Nobody deserved to be left – I knew that better than anyone - and maybe Trace just needed a hug from time to time. I could let him hug me.

  It had been too long since anyone had given me a genuine hug, instead of a quick excuse for one. “Nobody’s going to leave,” I whispered and tilted my head to his. “You won’t be left. I promise.” I wasn’t sure if those words were for him or for me. He nodded against my shoulder and lowered me to the ground. As soon as my feet touched ground, I tumbled a step back, away from the warmth his arms provided. “Let’s get you home.”

  I wasn’t sure how much space there was between us now, but I could still smell his lemon shampoo. Feeling my way around him, I crouched to grab my phone from where it fell, then opened the door to the yard and waited for Trace to step out after me. Using one hand as a shield against the colorful light, he used the other one to snatch mine up and laced his fingers in between mine.

  Jon stepped in our way and smiled at us through his beard, spreading his arms in a weirdly religious gesture. Maybe he really was stoner Jesus. “You two are going to have the most beautiful children. Flourish and be happy about it.”

  “Uhm… thanks,” I said, although I was definitely never going to have children with Trace. “We’ll flourish, yes, that sounds good.”

  “We’re going home now,” Trace announced and dragged me away from Jesus, I mean Jon, and around the house to the front. Even in this deserted place we managed to find a cab within minutes. We settled into the back and Trace dropped his head to my shoulder without letting go of my hand for a minute. Drunk Trace equaled cuddly Trace, alright. It was better than angry Trace.

  “Don’t fall asleep,” I said and watched the orange street lights zip by. “I can’t carry you up to your room.”

  “I won’t,” he mumbled drowsily.

  I squeezed his hand. “Stay awake. Talk to me.”

  He said something that sounded a bit like “My dog, Sloppy, ran and ate a burger,” but I doubted that was what he actually said. He was drifting off.

  „What’s your favorite color?“ I asked in order to keep him awake.

  “Blue,” he mumbled.

  “Okay, and what’s your favorite number?”

  This time, I didn’t get an answer.

  It took the cabbie forever to drive us back to The Dirty Dungeon and I paid the sum he wanted with gritted teeth. He had probably taken the longest way around possible, because the American girl wouldn’t know where the heck he was going. Asshole. London was expensive enough without his input.

  I managed to drag Trace out of the cab, but he leaned heavily on me as we pushed into the busy pub. People were scream-singing and laughing, not sparing any attention to the tiny girl almost carrying the tall guy diagonally through the room. They bumped into us from each side. We almost toppled over once. Sierra hurried past, not even glancing in our direction, taking an order from some sleek young guy on her way. We somehow managed to reach our floor, only crashing into the wall twice.

  “Here we are,” I groaned and kicked the door to his room open.

  I fumbled for the light switch, but Trace just loosened his hold on me and tumbled into the dark room. Finally, I flipped the lights on only to see him already in his big, black-sheeted bed, his face kissing the mattress, arms sprawled out on either side of him.

  “Okay then…” I was about to leave him in comfortable darkness, when my eyes were caught by the wall on the other side of the bed. Two guitars hung from thick, frayed leather straps. An ivory acoustic guitar and an electric guitar the same dark green as his eyes. I hadn’t known Trace played an instrument. Or two. A keyboard, almost unrecognizable beneath a heap of clothes, was shoved into a corner behind a big shelf filled with hundreds or thousands of CDs.

  “Good night, Kitty.”

  “God!” I jumped at Trace’s voice. “I thought you’d passed out.” No answer. Maybe he was passed out now. “Good night, Trace.”

  After leaving his room, I contemplated helping out downstairs, but I didn’t feel like putting on different clothes just to work for an hour or two. The only change of clothes would be into my night shirt. My phone vibrated in my pocket. The display read “Moon Shadow” – which was stoner Jesus’s other name. I didn’t have Jon’s number and I sure as hell hadn’t given him mine.

  No. My phone didn’t have an orange rubber case. Oh, holy freaking shit, no. This was Sabrina’s. I still had Sabrina’s phone. “Fuck.”

  I couldn’t let anyone see me with this. Bolting to my room, I did what Trace prevented earlier in the garden shed. I finished copying that number belonging to the only “Lawrence” in her contacts, then peeled out the phone’s battery just in case Sabrina had one of those GPS things installed. After dumping the pieces on my bed, I finally allowed myself to sink to my knees and dig my fingernails into my thighs.

  Oh, God. I was in so much trouble. I’d end up in jail. In English jail. I had just started some international shebang, because I was too stupid to remember giving someone their phone back after having stolen it. No normal person would have kept something they took. Well, a normal person wouldn’t have taken something in the first place, I guessed.

  But I had come here to be normal. Why had Trace distracted me with drunk hugging?

  “Motherfucking Trace.”

  I had to stop cursing. Two F-bombs within minutes was a terrible quota.

  Focus, Antonia. I’d take care of what – or who – I was turning back into later. Now, I had a phone to get rid of.

  The moment I reached for it, my father’s low, never-faltering voice popped into my head.

  “You don’t give anything back. What you’re given is yours. What you take is yours. If you don’t want it, destroy it. It’s not for anyone else to have, understood?�
�

  I pressed my palms into the sockets of my eyes until tears started stinging behind my lids. He had been wrong about so many things. Back then, I shouldn’t have thrown Rachel Turner’s Barbie into the waste grinder, and now I had to find a way to get this phone back to Sabrina.

  Walking up to her all smiles and ‘Hey I have your phone. When I crashed into you accidentally on purpose, it must have slipped from your pocket right into mine.’ wasn’t really an option. ‘Sorry for stealing from you’ probably wouldn’t go so well either.

  Wiping the pooling tears from my lashes, I frowned at the dooming evidence. I couldn’t look at Sabrina when I gave it back. I couldn’t give her the chance to connect me to theft. There was no way I was going to rot in prison for doing the right thing and returning it, instead of throwing it away.

  Eight

  "Wake up,” I hissed for the ten thousandth time while shaking his shoulder.

  “Bugger off,” he mumbled and pushed his face deeper into the pillow.

  “I have no idea what that means. Trace! Get up.”

  “Get the fuck out of my room.”

  I huffed and dropped my hands. I could just ask Wes instead of dragging Trace out of bed and risking a black eye here. But that meant endangering whatever sort of friendship I was building with Wesley when he came to the realization that I wasn’t such a nice girl after all. I’d rather Trace hated me some more.

  “I need your help, please.”

  He grumbled and turned, blinking at the window. I’d stared at my watch for hours until I deemed it about time for shops to open. Which was just an hour after sunrise.

  “What?” he barked.

  “Where’s the next post office?”

  “You’re such a bitch.” He attempted to turn again, but I grabbed his shoulder to keep him facing me. Trace looked at my hand on his shirt and caught my wrist in his fingers. The pressure was nothing I couldn’t handle. It was a stale grip but not hard enough to leave bruises. “Let go,” he warned.

  “No. I’m stuck with a stolen phone because I took care of your drunk ass last night. That means you’re going to tell me how to get to the next post office, so I can send it back to its rightful owner, understood?”

  He tightened his grip. In return I buried my fingernails in his shoulder.

  “Fine.” He finally agreed and I let him climb out of bed and march across the room to his dresser. “I’m taking you.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Yes, I do. The second you get lost, I’m the one to blame for sending you off alone.”

  “I speak English. I can ask around for the way back home.”

  “You do know that not everyone in England is a fine gentleman, don’t you?”

  “I noticed.”

  “Lost, small girl in a pretty dress comes along, asking for help. I’ve met way too many men eager to take advantage of that sort of situation. I won’t be held responsible for that.” Tapping my foot against the floor, I turned towards his wall of CDs while he changed. My back was crawling with the idea of him naked just a few feet away. The metal clinking of his belt and the slur of his zipper echoed in my ears, reminding me of how very far I’d veered off my good girl path.

  Maybe it would be better if I simply didn’t think about it. Trying my best to ignore the rustling fabric, I tried to find a pattern in the rows of CDs. They were neither ordered alphabetically, nor by color of the spine.

  “How does someone like you end up with a stolen phone?”

  “Someone like me?”

  “Spruce with a collection of neat dresses and skirts. Some politician’s daughter, grown up sheltered, now on her big European adventure before business or law school. Very fond of fake, overblown morals.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” That girl he described wasn’t who I wanted to be.

  “I know your type.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “Let’s go, Kitty, before the alcohol wears off completely and hungover asshole mode is activated.”

  I bit back my comment about the asshole mode already running, picked up my bag and followed him through the pub. An older lady in a nice dress narrowed her eyes at us on the second floor, but she was the only witness to us getting rid of evidence. At least so far.

  My hopes for the post office being an empty little corner shop were quickly trashed. The stupid thing was in the back of a grocery shop.

  “You didn't tell me there were four security cameras in here,” I hissed and tightened my grip on my bag.

  „I had no idea. Wait. We just walked in. How did you...?" His head snapped up as he scanned the ceiling for the cameras.

  "I told you, you don't know me. You don't know the least about me," I said through gritted teeth. There were things not worth talking about. The fact that I had a mental map of the security system in a shop within moments of entering was one of those things. With the positions of the cameras in mind, I wove my way around the shelves.

  "There's only three."

  "You missed the one behind the counter, up behind the Tequila bottles." Mr. Obvious swiveled around to check if I was right. Of course, I was. "Stop being so obvious."

  "You're a little paranoid, Kitty. For all they know, we're returning a stranger's lost phone."

  The post office was a box in the back of the supermarket, crammed into a corner with an old dude sitting behind a window. I pulled one of the vanilla envelopes from their shelf and slapped it against the wall, pulling the ready pen from my jacket and scribbling down the address.

  Trace leaned back against the wall and watched. "You know, they could take a sample of your handwriting and find you with that."

  "I'm usually right-handed, when I use my left hand instead, I have a different handwriting, too." I held up my left hand for demonstration, but only when my eyes locked with Trace's did I understand. He was joking, and I wasn't.

  "Kitty, you didn’t answer my question earlier," he started, but I pressed the pen into his chest to stop him.

  "Don't," I warned.

  His gaze scorched my skin, as it moved over my face once again. It drifted from my forehead down my nose, to my lips, my chin, and finally into my eyes. This time, he didn't gag.

  "You keep your secrets, I keep mine." The words clicked. His secrets. He had something to hide just like me.

  "Sounds good to me." I was somewhat curious about the hugging attack but for now, I was more intent to keeping my past buried than figuring out the story behind his issues, so I dumped the pieces of the phone into the envelope and licked the flap to close it.

  "Oh no. Now they have your DNA."

  "You're not very funny."

  "I think I'm hilarious."

  I rolled my eyes at him and let the package be weighed before paying for the envelope and the stamp. “You owe me.”

  “Right. Because it’s my fault that you stole that phone.”

  “Trace!” I eyed the guy behind the counter but his ever-bored frown didn’t falter. “I never said I stole it.”

  “Every rich girl steals. It’s nature’s law.”

  “I’m not rich.”

  “Rich girls lie, too, you know.”

  I sighed and went to collect a few essentials from the shelves since we were here already. I grabbed a bottle of shampoo and something to eat, then made a great show of carrying the items to the cashier, where I intended to pay for them, by holding them on shoulder-level. Trace noticed but turned while shaking his head. I found him outside with his foot propped up against the wall.

  “Ready?”

  “Yes.” We’d already walked most of the way back in silence when I looked over at Trace and found him studying the sky. “So, how did you end up at that party?”

  “That’s none of your business,” Trace grumbled, but then added, “I know Jon, or rather I knew him. Before he turned into Jesus.”

  “He totally looks like Jesus.”

  “Wait here for a moment. Don’t wander off.” Just like that T
race forked off into the pharmacy we were about to walk by. I contemplated going the rest of the way alone but even if the booze had washed last night’s events from his memory, I still remembered promising that I wouldn’t leave him, and I wasn’t going to start breaking promises.

  He came back empty-handed.

  “What was that about?”

  “That, too, is none of your business.”

  A dozen ugly names to call him ran through my head, but I kept them inside. I had just gotten rid of the evidence that I was still my father’s daughter. It was time to switch gears. Instead of letting Trace rattle me I tried to picture the sad and desperate version of him from last night. It was easier to be nice to someone beaten down.

  “Well, I hope you’re not getting sick and got everything you needed,” I smiled.

  Twenty minutes later, I was standing under the hot stream of the shower, scrubbing my skin until it turned pink. But even after half the bottle of shampoo, I could still smell the pot. I squeezed more shampoo into my palm and rubbed it over my face and neck and shoulders and all over, but the smell lingered. Maybe it was my nose. Maybe I had inhaled so much smoke, it still clung to the inside of my nose. I scooped some bubbles from my arms, made sure I had enough on my index fingers and then stuck them up my nose.

  “Shit,” I hissed. The foam stung, but I kept going, rubbing the shampoo in until I couldn’t smell anything anymore and only the burning remained. That was better.

  Hopefully the towel sucked in the last bits of the smell when I dried off. The clean denim dress I was about to put on was not supposed to smell like I’d spent the night at a fraternity party.

  “Tony?” Wes shouted from the other side of the door. “Your phone keeps ringing.”

  He’d barely had time to complete that sentence when I ripped the door open, half of my dress still unbuttoned, and dashed through the hallway.

  “What the hell?”

  I didn’t look back to explain. I ran into my room and grabbed my phone. Unknown caller ID. This could be her. Right on the other side, she finally decided to call back. I clicked the green button and breathed an almost voiceless “Hello?” into the phone.