by Anthology
He orders dinner in and we eat it on the balcony, wrapped in hotel robes. The sunset over the bay is enough conversation for the first half of the meal, as I watch the orange and red and the promise that places far away still exist. I like the chicken, which floats in sauce with the tang of wine.
Afterwards, I sit in his lap and let him feed me bites of chocolate cake. My toes tangle in the wrought iron of the balcony. It’s cold, but I need somewhere to balance myself so I’m not putting my full weight on his lap. I don’t want to crush him. I’ve always liked the concept of sitting in a guy’s lap, but I’ve never liked the execution.
He puts the fork down and smoothes my hair over my shoulder, toward him. “Are you from Berkeley? Did you grow up there?”
I laugh. “No one is from Berkeley. We all just end up there like flotsam on waves.”
“From whence did you originate?”
“You’re being an ass.” I hide my head under his so we’re both looking out across the Bay. “I’m from the East Bay. I bounced around a lot.”
“East Bay means over the Bay Bridge.”
I nod. I wish there was more of that cake. I’d have something to do with my hands. “Past Oakland. Walnut Creek and Concord and Livermore.”
“Why did you move so much?”
I knew that question was coming. I was practically waving orange flags so it could come in for a landing. I don’t know why. Normally I wasn’t so eager for anyone to ask me anything about my background.
It’s not like it’s a pretty story.
“You don’t want to hear that,” I demur, and I’m shocked at myself. I’m playing games. I’m practically begging for him to ask me more. Dig deeper. Be the different person. Someone new in my life.
“I think I know what I want to hear and what I don’t.”
Tears prickle my eyes at how easy it was. How easy he is. It’s like he’s made of magic and fairy dust and I don’t get where he came from. “I was in foster care.”
“Did you ever get adopted?”
I’d had dreams of it. I didn’t even want a mommy and a daddy, or anything typical like that. I had this feeling some aging hippie who was settling into corporate boredom would need a way to feel like they were still giving to the world.
I’d been wrong. No one came for me. I’d lost count of how many times I’d put myself to sleep with silent tears against my pillow.
“No. I aged out.”
“Meaning you left the system at eighteen.” His muscles tighten under me. “They kicked you out.”
“Eighteen and out is a thing for people who aren’t in the system too. It’s not a horrible policy. There’s only so much cash and they have to draw the line somewhere.”
At least I finished my high school diploma and found a job with Cindy, who had been totally great when I’d needed help figuring out how to write a check. I don’t say that. I don’t think Tom would understand.
“So you’ve been on your own for two years.”
“I’ve got a cozy little nest.”
He makes a little noise in the back of his throat. Considering that he’s displeased with me, I shouldn’t like it. “You forget that I’ve seen that ‘nest.’ The building has atrocious security.”
“I don’t have much to steal.”
He goes silent, and I do too. We live on different sides of the ocean. Of the world, even. I’m not sure why it matters right now, but I can’t help thinking about how I’ve never been on a plane. I’ve wanted to. I wonder what it’s like to have the flight attendant bring you a drink as you watch the world fall away.
He twines a piece of my hair around his fingers, staring toward it. I think he’s actually looking past me though. The back of my knees tense. Does he want me to get up? Has he realized that I’m not exactly the kind of girl he must normally be with?
“Do you know how old Corey is?”
That tightness slips from my knees, up to my thighs, and into my stomach. “Nineteen? Maybe eighteen? He doesn’t seem much younger than me, at least.”
“I think that might be because you carry a strange innocence, Veronica.” He sighs. “Corey is seventeen. He turned seventeen about two months ago.”
I’d known him then. Skittles’ birthday had slipped by without him saying anything to anyone, as far as I know. Probably because we’d have asked how old he was. Maybe we wouldn’t have, though. Questions like that are rude when all your friends are on the run from reality.
I twist, trying to get up. His arms lock and he holds my head to his shoulder. I shouldn’t melt, but I do.
“I need your help, Roni.” His voice is so deep that I want to cry. “You know what it’s like to not have anyone. To be on your own, don’t you?”
The Bay is still gorgeous. I could throw rocks into its gray-green waters anyway. “I didn’t say that.”
“I can hear it in the things you’re not saying.” He holds me so firmly, even when I make myself as heavy as a thousand of those rocks. “You didn’t mention the sweet church-going family who took you in, and weren’t you so lucky. It’s not in your eyes either, Roni.”
I’d never wanted a church-going family. I wouldn’t have known how to talk to them. I wouldn’t have known how to be regular, much less as nice and kind as a soccer mom would expect me to be. Sitting in a Suburban with five other kids on my way to afternoon practices? It sounded like an especially painful heaven.
“Was this all some kind of head fuck? Toss the poor thing a bone and she’ll bend over and tell secrets?” I scrub the heel of my hand across my eyes. It comes away wet. “I guess the bending over and the secrets were two separate events.”
He wrenches me out of his lap finally, but he doesn’t let go the way I expected. He holds me by the shoulders as if he’s afraid I’ll run away. Maybe he should be. “I didn’t say that, Roni. I didn’t say anything like it.”
“Forgive me if the timing seems a little suspicious.” I lift my chin like I’m not crying. I don’t want to be crying.
He kisses me. It’s not the reaction I expected. I’m standing in front of him, and he’s sitting, but the crazy thing is that I feel like I’m floating. We taste like salt where we’re joined. It’s my tears. I whimper a little bit. I’m weirded out by how much I like this, but that’s on a whole different plane. Like I’m looking in on a scene that I’m inside of at the same time.
I’m going to fall away. Maybe that’s okay.
When he finally pulls away from me, his eyes are burning. He’s still holding my shoulders and I’ve laced my fingers through the tie of his robe. “Does that feel like pity, Veronica?”
“You always call me that.”
His gaze flicks over me for a minute, from my eyes to my mouth and back again. I can almost see the moment when his anger turns over into something else, but I don’t know what that something else is. “It’s a beautiful name.”
“I can’t stand pity.”
“I’m beginning to figure that out.”
“I need to go home.”
He smoothes a thumb over the inside of my wrist and I know I must be upset by the way I don’t shiver. Normally it doesn’t take much from him to get me wound up. “I’ll call down for my car.”
Huh. I hadn’t expected him to let me go so easily, not when there’s something he wants from me. Still, I can’t accept that either. “I can get myself home.”
“It’s getting late. The sun has gone down.”
He’s telling the truth, but he doesn’t understand that it doesn’t matter. I hide my smile. I don’t want him to feel like I’m being condescending. But come on, I’ve walked home after the shop closed more times than I could count. The Bay Area is kind to people on public transportation. “I’m going home alone. I need time to think, and I can’t do that in your car, with you five inches away from me.”
He doesn’t like it. I see the tenseness around his eyes and the way his jaw shifts from right to left. “You won’t be safe.”
I don’t say I’ll be safer tha
n I would be here, in his arms. I don’t say that I’ll be less lost than when I look into his eyes. I don’t say any of that. I touch his cheek instead. His skin is warm under my fingertips and rough with the kiss of an unshaven jaw. “Does it matter?”
Chapter 4
By the time I’m on the train heading home, I can hardly believe that the last twenty-four hours has happened.
Maybe it hasn’t. DJ Dan drops a heavy beat through my headphones and I close my eyes. I start to let my head drop back, but the headphones going around the back of my neck catch. I lean my cheek against the cold metal of the standing pole.
I don’t know what I should do. Who I should trust. I’ve known Skittles for about nine months. He came into the record shop with a fistful of crumpled cash and bought a few bootleg CDs from DJs I knew. It felt natural to start chatting.
It had felt natural to tell him about the party that Saturday, when Abstract was performing at the Mariner’s Hall in San Francisco. Only a train ride away.
Maybe it was all my fault. I toyed with the idea for a couple stops, turning it over in my mind. But I didn’t think it sounded right.
Music was freedom. Dance was expression. There wasn’t much more to it than that. People only partied as hard as they wanted to. I certainly wasn’t the one who suggested Skittles find his way to a distributor and turn into our personal dealer in less than three months. He was a mover for certain.
Maybe it made a strange amount of sense that he and Tom were related after all. If Tom had decided to take over product distribution, he’d have kicked plenty of ass. Even if it were drugs. Maybe especially? Less competition to wade through, or something.
I rub the top of my eye, beneath my eyebrow. My mind was wandering. Maybe Tom had been right, and I didn’t need to travel home alone so late. I’d been doing it for years, though. Even before I was living on my own. My good grades bought me leniency at my last group home.
My stop was coming up. I stand, catching the metal bar but otherwise letting myself sway with the chug of the train. Outside the windows, night comes and goes in sweeps as we move above ground and below.
I twist with a particularly steep curve of the tracks and realize a middle aged woman with dark hair going white at the temples is watching me from the seat next to the door. A frown carves her mouth into something harsh. Maybe she was never the type to smile at strangers.
I am. I smile at her.
She only frowns deeper.
The train sweeps to a stop. I let my knees bend with the movement rather than be buffeted around like a reed in a storm. The doors chug open to show off a nearly empty platform.
“It’s rude as hell to make us listen to your crappy fucking music,” the woman snaps as I step through the doors.
My legs are toothpicks, stiff and fragile. I go past the yellow line on some instinctive level that doesn’t want the train to catch on my small backpack and drag me to third-rail-death, but that’s all I have.
I turn and watch the train go, unsure that I’d even heard what I thought I did.
My fingertips lift to my headphones. They poke into my ears, and I know they have a tendency to spill over around me, but that was why I’d had my dial to about midway. I blow my ears out enough at the parties anyway. My eardrums still whined with noise from the night before. I didn’t need to kill them any earlier than necessary.
So why had she felt it so very necessary to kill my night?
I walk home trying to figure out what it meant. The why of it. I know there wasn’t any karmic message in a pissy old woman. It’s not like she was my spirit guide.
I’m more concerned with my reaction to her. The gut-sick response that had me clamming up and not saying anything in response. I let her talk to me however she liked, and I hadn’t defended myself. Even now, I can’t think of what I should have said. I was worth more than that.
Wasn’t I?
I turn toward my apartment building, halfway down a block lined with robust trees that provided shade across my one window when I curl up on afternoons I have off. I like it when the shadows dappling across me kind of matched what I felt.
I’m three houses down before the sleek black car catches my attention. It’s not the kind that shows up here very often. Too nice, but at the same time not flashy enough for the occasional drug dealers driving Cadillacs. It’s parked across the street from the awning-covered entrance of my building.
Tom leans against the front fender. His long legs are crossed at the ankle, and his arms across his chest. He wears the same jeans and button-down broadcloth shirt he’d been wearing when I left his hotel. Somewhere along the way he’d found the time to comb his hair. I only want to muss him up again.
I stop and hitch my backpack a little higher. The toes of my Doc Martens turn in toward each other as I try to brace my knees. It wasn’t that I’m wobbly, exactly…Okay. I am wobbly. “What are you doing here?”
“It was important to you to show independence and get home on your own.” He shrugs. A night breeze, sweet with my neighbor’s oleander bushes, drifts between us. “It was important to me to make sure you got home.”
I will remember this moment. The way the orange streetlight glimmers off Tom’s wavy hair. The way his eyes are cast into shadows. Even the precise inches between his collar and his sharp jawline.
Every girl remembers the moment she wanders into a fairy tale. I hook a lock of hair behind my ear. “I have to work tomorrow. I hope you don’t think I’m going to invite you up.”
Even with the shadows painting him with loving dark fingers, I can see the way his mouth curls up. I want to feel that smile against my neck and my pulse.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” He makes a flicking gesture with his fingertips. “In you go. Make sure the common door locks behind you. Can I see any of your windows from the street?”
I point up and over my shoulder. “Second floor. On the end.”
“Wave to me?”
Part of me melts. I wish I could name which part, but there are blocks in my soul that I’ve never mapped. My mind is made up. “I can do better than that. I get off at five. Meet me at the record shop?”
His brows draw together. “I didn’t come here to convince you to help me.”
“But you managed anyway.” I turn, feeling saucy. Silly word. I claim it anyway. I let my hips swing side to side so that my ass twitches.
When the entryway door closes behind me, I laugh. A whooshing, exploding burst of laughter that turns me dizzy. Or maybe that’s just how Tom makes me feel.
I practically fly up the stairs to my apartment. Throwing my bag down on the card table that served as my dining room table, kitchen counter and entertainment center all together, I flip on the overhead light. I take a deep, inflating breath before pulling the mini-blinds cord.
He’s still there. Still in the same position, leaning against his sleek car.
I wave. He waves.
I blow him a kiss, then I shut the blinds again. I didn’t want to see what he might do. The mystery of him is big enough already.
Chapter 5
I don’t remember much of my childhood. Things only start kicking in around third grade, so I was about eight. It was a year before I was taken from my mom. She had problems, of course she did, or I would have stayed with her.
She had her moments though, and she never, ever broke a promise to me. A lot of the time that meant that she refused to make any promises at all, even about whether we’d have any dinner that night, but I know she tried.
Once, we went to the circus. I don’t know how she got the tickets or what she had to do for them. I didn’t think to ask then and I don’t want to know now.
The magicians were cool, and I liked the acrobats, but I lived and died for the elephants. They had a baby who clung to his mother’s tail and stood on his own podium for short bursts of time. Afterwards they let you pet an elephant’s trunk and take a picture with them. I stood in that line, my sticky hand in my mom’s, and bounced up and
down on my toes. I wanted to touch that baby’s rough skin and feel the life of him so badly that I burned with it.
I burned with the same need to see Tom all through the next day.
Even Cindy noticed. She sat on the counter, her black Doc Martens swinging as she sucked on a lollypop. “Jesus, you’re about as useful as tits on a frog today.”
“I’m sorting!”
She rolls her eyes. “You just moved the same stack of New Kids on the Block CDs like four times. From your left to your right and back again. I don’t even know why we have them.”
I flush with guilt. Had I? It was possible. I wave my drill at her. “I told you I wanted to decorate the men’s bathroom door.”
“You put that drill down this instant, missy.” She points her lollypop at me and narrows her eyes. The stern effect is ruined by the Gwen Stefani-style mini-buns all over her head. “If you think I’m letting you near power tools today, in this weird mood you’re in, you’re crazy.”
I bite my lip. I could tell Cindy all about Tom, and she’d understand. More than that. She’s been the one telling me a hundred times about getting her heart broken by some guy. But that was the problem. I wasn’t sure what type of story I was telling yet. A love story or a tragedy.
Maybe they didn’t have to be separated.
I change the subject instead. “Did you do the statements? We have to get those sent in by the thirty-first or the IRS will be on your ass again.”
Cindy grins at me. “You ever wanna buy me out?”
I scoff. The back of my neck feels like fire, all hot with embarrassment. I’d probably run the place into the ground in less time than it took to say “didn’t get a degree.” I start taking CDs out of cases and stacking them up. “What are you going to do? Retire?”
“I think I’d play a mean game of shuffleboard.”
“What is shuffleboard, anyway?”
Cindy cocks her head and stares into nothing. “You know…I’m not really sure.”
The bell over the front door trills and I know without even looking around that it was Tom. As if the look on Cindy’s face wasn’t enough, I can feel it in the way the hairs on my arms climb up and wave.
