Her bronze eyes glow especially bright tonight when she looks over at Deck and me. Each of the peeps here have just sort of accepted that Deck and I are “back together” and I can just tell Vikki’s chomping at the bit to get me alone and ask me why I didn’t come home last night and how is he now that he’s “more experienced” (urgh, not looking forward to that question!) and about endless other racy details that only Vikki could want to know about.
I think it’s because she’s thirty now. Maybe I’ll also want detailed sex descriptions of her and Skate when I get to her age.
The only person who’s not here is Clarissa, she has the night off. And that’s probably a good thing, because despite all the many years that have gone by, she just can’t seem to get over Skate. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve seen her “mistakenly” spill coffee on his pants, especially when Vikki’s here.
But the boys come here for Mr. De Luca, he’s supported Trev and Skate and Deck ever since they were in High School at Lincoln way on the other side of the borough. He has a class picture of them in their final year on his counter, signed by Trev and Deck, along with all the other autographed pics that he puts up on the wall for them. Skate also signed that class pic. Mr. De Luca said, “You guys never woulda made it on your own, so Skate’s gotta sign dis baby as well!”
We talk about football and the latest gossip around “America’s Favorite Bad Boy” (skillfully avoiding the latest gossip which includes the unflattering granulated photos of yours truly), catch up on how business is going with Skate (“Makin in the tens of thousands a month now, baby. If Deck were still around, we’d be dead broke, ’cause he’s one ugly bastard!”) We talk about Vikki’s music. Red Lipstikk, her band, never made it big, but Vikki will never stop singing for the love of it. We talk about shit that don’t mean shit.
We talk like friends.
That is, until Skate, tactlessly, blunderingly, foolishly!, finally pops the question that’s been on everyone’s mind, but which no one has bothered to ask. Vikki’s hand is stretched out to him, holding a long spoon in his mouth with a drop of ice cream falling from the side. And precisely in that position, he asks, “So, you guys a permanent item now or what?”
Are we? I thought we were, but we don’t make love... We just...can’t...no matter how hard I try and get him to do it!
The spoon hangs for a second in Skate’s mouth as he sees my hesitation, then Vikki pulls it away. Her eyes go to mine, mine go to the table, then up to Deck. His grip tightens on my shoulder, my skin goes suddenly nervously moist. Trev coughs.
“Oh,” says Skate, “sorry. I just thought...y’know...since...never mind!”
And we don’t, but the question’s on my mind, and we try and get back onto the meaningless topics of earlier but suddenly the air is thick and I need to go outside and the heating is too high or Deck’s arm is too heavy. “Uhm, can you excuse me, I need to go to the ladies’.”
Trev gets up, lets me through. Vikki says, “Uhm, yeah, me too.” Skate gets up, lets her out.
She sidles up next to me as we start walking, and holds my hand, giving it a quick squeeze. I’m here, the squeeze says. The world was spinning a little before, but this brings me back. I slide my arm around her waist, bring her closer, and we move into the Women’s Lair. Just before opening the door, I hear Trev say to Skate, “You fuckin moron! Couldn’t you just let it roll!?”
I stop to try hear some more, but Vikki doesn’t let me. She shoves me inside the ladies’ room, and then she closes the door.
-3-
“Come, talk to Viktoriya.” The bathroom lights are blinding. Vikki’s got her arms crossed and is leaning back on the sink counter. She looks dazzling, alluring, like she always did. Her frazzled her falls over her shoulders like a storm of hay, and her bronze eyes hunt me like someone rummaging for a dark secret. “Come, talk, talk to Vikki.” Her accent’s in full rage now, she’s in Mysterious Fortune Teller from The Far East mode. It sounded like tohhkk, tohhk too Veekee.
I have a moment of a dazed headrush as I think of Declan’s hard body pressing against my soft, ready center...but clothed. I think of the gurgle and moan that had formed in my throat as he’d pushed and pressed and...
...reminded me of the good ole days, the days when he used to enter me freely, not a worry in the world, not a care for what anything or anyone could throw at us. Until Xavier’s untimely death (when is death ever “timely”?) threw me into a whirlwind of chaotic panic—
Vikki shakes me! Her hands are on my shoulders and my head thrashes back violently. “Wake up, Blaze!”
I laugh, and grab her shoulders as well, shake her back and say, “OK! I’ll wake up!” Now we’re both shaking each other and I feel my tiny tits jangling up and down and see her considerably larger ones do the same. Skate must really love those breasts.
I look away, feeling my own illogical inferiority.
I look behind me at the stalls, two of them are closed. I walk over to them, push the first door, then the second. The doors swing open with a creak, then swing back. Empty.
We’re alone.
I sigh loudly, move to the counter, lift myself up on it and sit. “We didn’t have sex,” I say.
Vikki leans against the same counter, pulls out a Parliament from her purse and puts it in her mouth. She takes out her Zippo and starts pretending to light it. “And?” she asks, looking at the cigarette mostly.
So I tell her, I tell her as much as I can in a women’s bathroom while our three men wait outside. I figure I can stretch it fifteen minutes in here, maybe twenty. Women are renowned for taking an incessantly long time in bathrooms, right? Men know that, don’t they?
I tell her all the things that went through my mind, all the things he told me, how he explained his motives, blamed himself. I tell her how I saw that Fear in his eyes as well, that “he looks as afraid as I do, Vik.” I tell her that both he and I doubt if we’re gonna make it through this, that we doubt if we’re “healthy” for each other, if we shouldn’t just let sleeping dogs lie and be glad with what we had and just...move on now.
She sighs, and I’m expecting some motherly advice but all she says is “carry on,” gesturing at the same time for me to continue.
I open my mouth to speak but a short and buxom redhead walks in, realizes she’s interrupting girl-talk and says, “Oh, honey, don’t mind me! Y’all just go ahead and carry on talkin!” She slides into a cubicle and we hear the sloosh-splash of her urinating and Vikki and I smile at each other for a second. The girl (who must be no older than sixteen or seventeen) bellows out from behind the cubicle door, “Really, whatever, I’m not interested in what y’all have to say. Just go ahead and talk freely!”
I open my mouth again, but then remember the Flash! of Mr. iReport and my pictures on TMZ and PerezHilton and suddenly I’m paranoid and don’t want to say anything. Is this sixteen year old buxom babe sitting there with her recording app set to “record”?
We hear toilet paper, hear a flush, a violent clearing of the throat that would be great as the butt-end of many jokes; this followed by a thoomp sound as she spits whatever it was she was getting from the back of her throat back out into the world. I start to snigger and cover my lips but Vikki’s going as red as her dress and then the shortish girl comes out and smiles. “Sorry, weed sucks!” When she gets closer I see the redness in her eyes and it all makes sense now. But it would still make a good joke...
Buxom Babe walks out, round ass jiggling and jaggling forth into the world.
Vikki and I crack up and Vikki starts copying what she said in exaggerated tones, “Oh, don’t mind me! Harumph—thoomp!”
We’re falling over ourselves, cracking up. My mind eases, the worries disappear, my eyes start watering from all the laughter. Vikki’s as well. Just like old times... When we finally catch ourselves, I ask her, “So? What do you think?”
She pretend-lights her smoke again.
“Vikki, come, what should I do?” My voice is frantic.
I desperately feel the need for her to approve of my actions, for her to say that what I did is OK and that what I’m gonna do (not sure what that is yet) is also OK!
She looks at her lip-dangling cigarette, then up at me. She shrugs. “We should get back.”
“You’re kidding me.”
She shakes her head slowly, the cigarette going the opposite direction each time her head moves. “I really don’t know, Blaze. I interfered once and look where that got you.”
“No, you were right to interfere last time! He hadn’t cheated on me with that...skank.”
“But he did after, and that hurt you even more.”
“He didn’t cheat on me, Vikki.”
“Yes, I don’t mean ‘cheat,’ but I do mean that it hurts more that he got together with her after. And I was the one who told you to get back together with him. Well, not quite, but you had closed the door on him, I told you to reconsider it.”
“And as a result you gave me seven more months of happiness that I never would have had.”
She cocks an eyebrow.
“OK, fine, I wasn’t happy all the time. But when we weren’t fighting I was happy with him, Vik. I went crazy. I...lost my mind after...”
She puts a hand on my shoulder. After Xavier, I was going to say. She lived that hell with me, with us, and she knows, so I don’t need to mention it.
“It screwed me up,” I continue, “but only when I saw you and Skate together, years later, did I realize that maybe I had been perceiving things wrongly!”
She shakes her head slowly again.
“What!” I bellow.
“You’re fucked, Blaze. Totally and completely fucked is all I can say. But I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’ll be here to listen, sure, but you have to come to this conclusion on your own.”
“That’s OK. I can live with that.” Vikki fires up her Zippo several times. “You really need to smoke that, don’t you?”
Another girl walks in, giggling loudly and talking on the phone. “Oh. My. God! NO WAY!” She sounds like she’s from Cali. “NO WAY!” She waves a hand at us and makes a gesture that says, Oh, don’t mind me, go on, go on, we’re all friends here!
And I’m thinking: Harumph—thoomp!
The girl slips into a cubicle. “NO. WAY!”
I’m thinking, Yes, way, honey. Believe it!
Vikki looks up at me, makes a throat-clearing sound, and then a thoomp sound. We crack up.
“NO. FUCKING. WAY!”
I roll my eyes.
Vikki asks me, “Are you wanting to be with your man tonight?”
I shrug. “Dunno, why?”
“Come over to my place, we’ll crack open the Imperial and talk like real women.”
“I think I do wanna talk more, Vik. Last night...” I lower my voice, sure that Mizz No Way wouldn’t hear us anyway. “I’m sort of glad it didn’t go all the way last night, Vikki. I...yeah, could I come over?”
She smiles at me, then pulls me down for a hug. I almost fall over the counter.
“OH. MY. GOD. NOOOOOOO WAY! Hold on a sec...” Toilet paper scruffle sounds. Scratch scratch scratch. Scruffle-scruffle-wipe. “Uh-huh. M-hmmm. Oh no he didn’t. Oh no—” Flush! Door opens. Girl smiles at us, does that Go on talkin, sisters movement, and walks out the door without washing her hands. As the door starts closing, we hear her fading voice saying, “NO WAY!”
Back at the booth I sit between Deck and Trev again. Skate looks like a raccoon that’s been hit a few times over the head with a bat. I can only imagine how the boys made him feel for what he asked earlier. But why should he feel bad? The question wasn’t what made it awkward. It was the lack of an answer, and that’s my and Deck’s fault. No one else’s.
Vikki tells Skate she and I will be having a girls’ night in. Skate gets excited and invites Deck and Trev over to a bar to get drunk. “Well, I know you guys can’t drink, training and all, but I can!”
Deck and Trev agree. They’ll play chaperone while Skate parties it up. And so it’s planned: A girls’ night in. And a boys’ night out.
Someone should’ve spotted that this could only lead to disaster...
-4-
Outside Tom’s a gust of wind so cold and hard hits us that it forces me to take a step back. I hit into Deck’s chest as if it were a wall made of rock. He holds me, and when I turn to look at him, he’s smiling. “Wanna hang out again tomorrow after practice?” he asks.
“I’d love to.”
He moves down and kisses me, and the kiss is so warm, so loving, so needful that my mind clears, all negative thoughts purged from it, and my heart races and scatters. I love you, Declan Cox, I catch myself thinking. The thought is a Truth exhumed from a death it pretended to die when, in actuality, it had been simply buried alive, never dead in the first place!
His lips leave mine and I realize my eyes are closed, and that my own lips are still reaching out to his, that my feet are on their tip toes, that his hands are on my arms, holding me to this spot lest I get blown away by this forceful wind. Slowly, gracefully slowly, I come back down to earth, settle, open my eyes again (and notice he’s doing the same), and rock back on my heels. Kissing Deck was always like getting one majorly smacking shot of Harry Powder straight to the veins...
My drug.
And like every drug—
No! I stop that negative thought in its tracks! I stop it before it takes root and grows like wild weeds, infesting my mind with Proclamations of Doom and Messages of You-Should-Have-Known-Better or, worst of all, Told You So.
Deck’s hands hesitate for a second, not quite letting go, not quite holding on. Is he thinking the same thing? Is he stopping a negative thought of his own that threatens to kill and destroy this promise of hope before it even begins?
The mind plays tricks. Don’t follow the Love or else you’ll get hurt, Blaze. You’ll get hurt just like you got hurt when Savva left, when your mom left, when Xavier left... Stop it now before the Love grows in you and you climb up to rarefied heights and fall, baby, fall, fall, fall and splatter.
The thought is a lucid one, spoken with crystal clarity. And I hear it. And that’s the difference, because when it’s said out in the open, it can’t affect you. These thoughts, these ideas, the Trickster’s Speeches, always used to appear in my subconscious, surreptitiously, hidden from my immediate awareness, just as a “hazy feeling” or a “gut sensation.”
But now I can hear it clearly. And hearing it, I can see it for what it is: A Mind-Trick.
“What are you smiling at, Blaze?”
“A personal epiphany.”
He laughs. “Care to share it?”
I start, but then decide not to. I grab his sweater tightly, pull him a little closer to me. “Let’s do it better this time, Deck. Let’s...try and figure out where our doubts are coming from, inside ourselves, before doing anything rash. OK? And I know I sound as if I’m trying to convince myself as much as I am you. And that’s because I am. It’s true.”
“You sound like one of those new-agey types.”
“Whatever works. Whatever gets us through.”
Wind gusts across us and even Deck is moved back an inch. It stabs me through my sweater and I feel myself falling into his warmth, carried there by his arms which are pulling me into him. Icy rain breaks from the sky and, even though we’re under an overhang, it washes over us in thick sheets and leaves me drenched. Vikki hoots. “IT’S FUCKIN POURING, BLAZE! LET’S GO!”
Deck kisses me. A blanket of cold rain slaps my back and hair and he turns me away from it so that it’s hitting him now and not me. The sound is ghastly. Water crashes down like a hurricane. Vikki hoots again, and again, and again. “I gotta go,” I say through the howl.
He holds me a second. “I love you so much, Blaze. So much.”
And there’s that doubt again, flashing in his bright blue eyes. I caused that doubt, I think to myself. So I need to fix it.
Vikki hoots.
“I love you, too. Always
have.” I swallow the rest of my words, and am suddenly grateful the rain’s gushing down in buckets. Because I’m crying. And I’m crying because I’m in love, so in love, and because I almost lost it forever...
Have I regained it? And if I have, is it secure?
I let go of Deck’s fingers, he moves away from me, and I bolt out into the roaring rain.
He drives off with his boys, headlights glowing forebodingly as they slash across our vision and then pull away, leaving us only with a splash of red as we look at the back of their car. Vikki puts on the windscreen wipers. They’re not effective at all at wiping off the rain. “Should we wait awhile?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Weather’s been like this all month. There’s no point. It won’t settle down until January according to the weather reports.” Her engine roars into life. Her lights go on in the dark. I think I see a kid in the middle of the street, looking straight at the vehicle and dressed in nothing but a hoody. I give a faint scream when Vikki increases her speed towards it.
“What?” she bellows.
I look behind me, realize it was only a reflection. “Nothing, just...thought I saw something.”
“The weather can do that, plays tricks with what you see.”
Uh-huh. Tricks.
Or is it premonitions?
-5-
Vikki pulls out the Imperial Vodka from her never-ending supply and slams it on the table in front of me. I’m sitting on her comfy red couch, looking up at her as she stands behind her center table, legs slightly parted, a woman on a mission. All she needs now is a low belt with a revolver on each side and I’d be calling her Sheriff Golovkina.
She points at me, points at herself, points at the bottle. “You, me, it. We’re getting drunk, and we’re gonna do some real girl-on-girl bonding tonight.” She opens the bottle, doesn’t even bother to pour it in a glass, and flips it upside down into her gullet and starts gulp gulp gulp gulp gulp... “Ahhh!” she says, then she whooshes a hot breath outwards like a dragon breathing fire. “WOW! Sheesh!” She sways a little, staggers back a step. She takes another long, hard swig. Does that whoosh-ahhh! thing again, and then thrusts out the bottle in my direction.
Need Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy Book Three) Page 21
