I think of Tatiana Watkins, the woman who started the ball rolling for the end of my and Blaze’s relationship. The hussy who trapped me in a room of three naked women—Tatiana included—and then took photographs of it and sent them to Blaze as if I’d been sleeping with her and her friends.
She never got what she wanted from me in that bedroom, on the day she fabricated those pictures, and she destroyed my relationship with Blaze because of it.
And then I think of what happened after...
Poetic justice.
In the end, I’d expected to feel good at having “won.”
I didn’t.
The drinking started after that. So did the drugs. So did every self-destructive habit you can think of. Sex was just another drug. I had a lot of it, always hoping to reach that level, that ecstasy that I’d reached before with...Blaze...but it never worked.
I partied.
I drank.
I smoked.
And then I crashed.
-3-
Back in the day...
Blaze had left me. It was August. We’d been dating for eight months, the time of the slight hiccup after Tatiana had sent Blaze the photos in January included.
I’d seen it coming for weeks, months in fact. Blaze’s friend had died—Xavier Lopez. I know damn well the punk wasn’t a “friend.” I know he’d tried to strike her once and she’d gotten the better of him.
He’d tried to take his life after that, the shame had taken him, engulfed him, swallowed him whole. Ironically, I can relate to that feeling. And I find myself warming to the slimeball, at least on a fundamentally humanistic level. Because shame will make you do all sorts of things to yourself.
Blaze saved his life. Actually saved the fucker’s life by sensing through some miraculous ether that he was about to take it.
Did she do the right thing? Maybe a dude like that is better off dead. But it’s never cool when someone takes himself out the game. Never cool. I know these things I’m saying are “callous” or even “irreverent!” I look at them as being coldly factual. Xavier Lopez was a murderer in sheep’s clothing. He killed with drugs slowly filtered into society, drugs which people like his own sister took, and which he gave her.
Xavier Lopez, in my books, will not be missed to the world.
But I can appreciate that Blaze had a place for this pit of filth in her heart. Her heart is that big that even he fit in it. But he had also been her friend once. And her best friend’s brother. He had also been her first lover, back in a time when she’d been more naive, more innocent. But, from what she’d told me hesitantly later, he’d actually cared for her once.
I can live with that. I can respect that in a man.
As for Blaze’s story, she’d lost someone. And losing that someone had brought about a waterfall of old memories into an already frail state of mind. In addition, my father had died some months earlier, an ex boyfriend of hers had threatened her and me, Dino Moretti had almost killed me and was still at large. He’d been apprehended in April of Year Zero, gotten out on bail, and was basically free until after she and I had split up. But even though Dino left us alone (I think his mother’s rage was scarier to him than the force of federal law), at the time we could not be sure that he would. It was a constant source of fear, at least for Blaze, and I can respect that she had been on edge.
So I let her tantrums slip, I let her edge me and accuse me of things I never did. I never did sleep with Tatiana Watkins when Blaze and I had been together, never did anything with anyone back then!
But Blaze wouldn’t have it.
Perhaps I should have been more patient. She’d been through a lot. Old memories had resurfaced. She’d needed my support, not my anger.
Rearview mirrors.
I took months of it. But my patience had worn thin. By this time, Gina Moretti had miraculously pulled out of her stupor. She’d pulled out of her psychotic daze and was, bit by bit, looking out into the world with new eyes and fresh hope.
Fresh hope...
I remember sitting at St. Dymphna’s, the massive estate on which Gina was being treated, out on a several-acre lawn that rolled and spread like a scene out of a movie set on the grounds of a large English manor. Gina and I were on a concrete bench, under a tree, just talking. It was June of Year Zero.
You have to understand that Gina was well now. I mean really well. Doc Abrahams had said back in January that all they needed was to “push the right button” and she’d snap back to reality. Damn, I thought the dude was a quack, but I’d gone along.
It wasn’t quite a “snap.” It took time. And, in May, Gina had regained possession of herself. She’d started gaining her memory back. The memories of her time of psychosis (a good five-plus years) however, were gone. Completely gone. She could remember taking the LSD trip five years prior, and she could remember waking up in a room decorated to look like a seventeen-year-old’s typical pink and fluffy room. So, in all fairness, in front of me sat a seventeen-year-old girl in terms of development, even though she was actually twenty-two now.
Gina was happy to be around me. In her mind—a mind that had lost over five years—she and I were still dating. Of course, the Docs had explained all of this to her, but how would you feel if you woke up a “day” later and were told that your last “yesterday” actually happened over five years ago?
So, even though it had been explained most thoroughly to Gina Moretti that all this time had gone by, that people had moved on, that she’d been “stuck in time” if you will, she didn’t have a fundamental grasp of that reality.
In her mind, she and I were still an item.
Back in the day, back in High School when she and I used to date, we’d had a steamy relationship. Gina had been extremely experienced in the bedroom (a fact that had never ceased to amaze me because she’d apparently been a virgin before me, or so she’d said.) It had been in the high-time of my drug-use, before my Ma passed, before the cancer had eaten her alive. Back in those days, I’d been high. And I’d had sex. All to escape.
Not too different to what I do now, I guess. Only, instead of drugs now it’s booze.
I’ve never been a guy to pretend I didn’t know why I dropped and smoked weed: I did that shit to escape. I don’t do drugs now only because I’m too shit-scared the NFL would find out and bar me from playing. But if I could, I would.
Always an addict.
Sex, drugs and Molly rolls. The story of my life, the story of the crowd I grew up with. Trev’s been about the only guy in our trio who’s had enough sense about that shit to try it only a few times and then leave it completely. Skate went on using it for years himself, until his girl Vikki pulled him straight. It took him months to clean up, and so it took months for her to finally take him. Dude’s in deep with her if you ask me.
But I don’t believe either he or Trev ever really needed the stuff like I did. It’s the way I’ve always been. And if it hasn’t been booze it’s been dope. And if that wasn’t available it was sex. Sometimes I wonder if I don’t play football simply for the high of it.
When Gina and I had started “dating” (in other words, “having sex”) it had been Ma’s face in my mind, the fear of losing her, the slowness with which she had lost her senses, her ability to coordinate parts of her body...
It had been a horrible time for me.
Although it had been purely physical with Gina, it had been comforting. It always is with someone you sleep with. It had been more comforting, back when I’d been seventeen, than I’d realized at first.
So, years later, sitting on this bench under the rustling shade of a large oak tree in June of Year Zero, talking to Gina, watching her dark blue eyes smile and her thick black hair fall in straight lines over her now slightly emaciated shoulders, I began to sense the need of that comfort again.
Blaze had shunned me, she’d attacked me and accused me of things I hadn’t done. She’d closed the door on her affection for me.
Except for sex. She hadn�
��t closed that door.
Sex with Blaze had always been something else. It had been electrifying, invigorating. The unhealthiest drug I could ever imagine taking. Blaze and I were more than just two bodies coming together, we were lightning and thunder. We were heat and flame, water and potassium. We were match to kindling, hammer to bullet. Having sex with—making love to—Blaze was the most confusing experience I’ve ever had with anyone. We could be clawing at each other, ripping each other’s guts out by day, but get us naked, and we were wildfire, a conflagration of needful passion that burned and roared and exploded like fireworks over the silver ocean on a summer night.
There was—and is—something else to being with Blaze. I always imagined (and still believe in some deep part of me) that Blaze and I making love was the ultimate truth of our relationship. No matter what else was happening, so long as the fire burned in the bedroom the way it had, that was the proof that she and I had something different, and that we could still survive anything.
Sex is not the same as Sex. There comes a time when it transcends the physical, when it transcends all known logic and the rules which are known to Man. There comes a time when the spark ignited by two human bodies is so far beyond the comprehension of mathematics and science that it can only be called one thing: True Fucking Love.
Gina and I had never had that.
Blaze... Oh, Blaze. You ruined my world, Blaze.
The fire never died with me and Blaze. Almost to the stinking end we were lighting up our sheets with needful lust. It’s always confounded me, and it’s what keeps me holding onto her memory. She’ll always be my Blaze, no matter the girl sharing the sheets with me.
But as the arguments grew more, the arguments that were not carried out in the bedroom (we never argued in the bedroom), my need for comfort, for solace, grew. My need for comfort out of the bedroom, grew.
And so I started seeing Gina more often. What started as five or ten minutes became more. Thirty minutes became forty, an hour, two hours, three!
We’d sit under that same tree, talking, chatting, remembering. And then Gina stepped over the border. And this is when it hit me that Gina was no longer “crazy” but very well aware of what she was doing, because she was the same old Gina again: Seductive, alluring, tempting.
She asked me, “Do you ever think about when we had sex?”
Her dark eyes had taken on that exotic glint you’d expect to see in a gypsy fortune-teller or some other carny woman. I remember the day clearly, because I had just turned twenty-three a few days earlier. And the whole thing with Xavier would happen only two days later, on June twelfth. And that, if there had been tension and unease before, would close my and Blaze’s communication paths down completely.
Today was June tenth, Year Zero.
Gina glanced up at me, her head slightly tilted, grinning mischievously. Her black hair fell in a sheet down the left side of her face, her pale and vampiric face. She even had small incisor teeth that looked like growing fangs. I remember the sheen on her brow that particular day. It was hot, approaching high summer, and we were both gleaming with sweat. And as Gina had asked me the question, I became suddenly acutely aware of the heat. And images—uncontrolled and triggered by human hormones, I’m sure—began to rolodex themselves in front of my eyes! I was not aroused by these images, not at all. Merely...confused. But seeing them was beyond my control. They started spinning in my mind like an old film set to automatic: Images of Gina’s breasts, her large areole under my lips once upon a time, her hand under my jewels, caressing, juggling, sticking to the sweat falling—
“Deck?” She grinned, the same grin she’d given me the night we’d first gotten together all those years prior.
“Uhm, yeah, sorry, I phased out there for a second.”
Gina looked up at the main St. Dymphna’s house, an old stately brick house with bars on the windows and long turrets in the corners. She grinned, and took a crunchy bite of an apple she’d been holding, chewed loudly. The apple Eve gave Adam, I considered.
And then she held the apple out to me. “Want a bite?” She kept chewing, ever grinning, her eyes twinkling with something like lustful mischief.
“Sure.” I took the apple, bit it, felt its juice seep into my glands and wondered about the philosophical connotations of that.
Gina laughed, then took the apple back from me and bit it again herself, letting her tongue glide smoothly over my bite mark and then tilted her head slightly back and inhaled deeply, closing her eyes as if she’d just taken a bite of the most decadent, deliciously rich food on earth. She lifted her leg over the concrete bench so that she straddled it now. If she hadn’t been wearing cycling shorts, it would have been a Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct moment. She leaned forward, and her baggy white shirt revealed a line of hefty cleavage that, despite her loss of weight, had not disappeared, not disappeared in the slightest.
She bit the apple again, gave it back to me. I took it, but suddenly didn’t feel like biting it anymore. Suddenly I didn’t feel like we were simply sharing an apple anymore.
Gina leaned back, obviously feeling like she’d achieved whatever goal she’d set for herself for the day, and then thanked me for coming by. She got up abruptly, took one final bite of the fruit, then handed the core over to me. “Want the leftovers?” she asked. And here I began to see the old Gina, the suggestive grin. The mind-games, the guise of being coy but of actually being so secure.
The manipulator.
“No, thanks.” I got up, brushed off my pants. Gina flung the apple core away. It hit the tree. We stood there looking at each other for a moment. She took a step forward. And this is where I made a fatal mistake: I didn’t take a step back.
She placed her hands on my shoulders.
As if trapped by a hypnotist, I waited, seeing where this was going. Blaze’s accusations of earlier, that very morning, played over and over in my mind: You’re cheating on me, aren’t you, Deck!? Cheating! With that...GINA!
Was I in the Twilight Zone? Could this really be happening? Gina pressed her lips to mine so softly that it could be taken either way: A friendly peck, or the beginnings of much more.
But the kiss left me cold. I suddenly snapped to. I upbraided myself for letting this go so far! I pushed her away but she kept smiling. “See you again soon, Deck!” Gina spun around, and trotted off, ass swinging, just like a teenage schoolgirl. Because that’s what she is.
I ran my hand through my hair and cursed myself. “Fuck!” I whispered. “Fuck, Deck, get a grip! Get a fucking grip!” I looked at the apple core on the ground. Ants had found it and were swarming it. A wasp hung around it, trying to get at it as well.
Bees to honey.
More philosophy...
-4-
That was the last time I saw Gina alone. I told the Doc what had happened and told him I was willing to help her recover, but not at the expense of my relationship with Blaze.
After Gina had gone psycho on the LSD, I’d been accused by her parents of sourcing her the A (which I hadn’t) and I wasn’t willing to have any more misunderstandings about me and Gina with anyone. Heck, her brother damn-near killed me—twice!—because of those misunderstandings.
So I insisted on chaperoned visits after that.
Little did I know it would end up having the opposite effect on her and my relationship than I’d planned. By having chaperoned visits (there was always a nurse, female, that sat with us a close-enough distance away to hear our conversation), Gina and I talked a lot. We talked endlessly, for hours, day after day after day.
Blaze and I had stopped talking. We were only having sex by now. And sex is not talking. Love comes about by talking, and is expanded through sex. Not vice versa. I believe this now.
I tried to be there for her after Xavier had passed. I really did. But she was inconsolable. She would disappear for hours, turn her phone off, avoid me. We’d argue. What I needed was someone to talk to, about the weather, a good movie, an opinion of a restaurant. Noth
ing more. All Blaze and I did was fuck. Oh, it was beautiful sex, it made all the pain go away.
But it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough.
Gina and I never spoke about anything of consequence. I never spoke to her about Blaze, didn’t mention a thing about what I was going through. We spoke about shit, meaningless things that made us both feel good about just being alive.
Gina was, perhaps, “falling in love” with me. My love for her was purely a friendship kind, platonic, a need to have someone to listen to me, the need of a female companion with female ideas. Her love for me was...maybe a little more than that. After a while of this, I started to feel the sting of deceit, started to sense that what I was doing—this constant conversation, constant spending time with a woman other than the one I was dating—was, in actuality, a kind of cheating. Honest-to-goodness cheating.
Because it was. And even though Gina and I never had anything more physical than that one dry kiss of her lips to mine, the endless hours of conversation had warmed her deeply to me, had made me seek her companionship over Blaze’s, had made me dread with abject horror seeing Blaze sometimes. And that’s cheating. That’s cheating with its Ts crossed and the Is dotted.
Blaze accused me of it. Accused me of sleeping with someone else.
She was right. Because it’s all the same. In my books, it’s all the same.
Blaze wasn’t paranoid. She was right. And so, when I got that call from her, the one where she didn’t need to say it was over because I’d been expecting it for so long already, I never fought for her. She let me “walk out the door.” And I kept on walking, tail between my legs, left to wonder what might have happened if I’d only tried harder, tried with more effort to get Blaze to be that female companion I so desperately needed.
Rearview, baby. Rearview.
The sick irony of it is that not having Blaze around turned my desire to communicate with anyone, male or female, into a naught. I stopped seeing Gina. They didn’t need me to “help” her anymore. They hadn’t needed me for a while, in fact. Gina had long been out of the woods. I wasn’t helping Gina anymore, she was helping me. She was helping me make it through the days and weeks of mess and turmoil and atom bombs going off in my relationship and in my life.
Need Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy Book Three) Page 10
