Axis of Aaron

by Johnny B. Truant

  “I’m tired, Aimee,” he said, falling to his knees.

  “Keep walking!”

  “I need to sit. I need to lie down.”

  “Goddammit, Ebon! Don’t you fucking dare!”

  “I tried. It’s too much. It wants me. It’s here. I’ve been trying, but I can’t stop it.”

  Aimee shouted between gasped breath and hitching sobs from a sprint.

  Ebon’s vision was clouding, the time cycles around him now shrinking toward equilibrium. It was winter, the time of dying. Autumn had gone. He was cold, too cold. The memory, on the other hand was warm: two bodies under sheets and a comforter, his tired bones eager to lie down and join them. To become them.

  He looked back along the white beach, trying to see her approach. But “her” who? But who was he trying to see? He couldn’t remember. Was it Holly? Vicky? Aimee? Yes, Aimee. But he could see nothing other than sand and snow and a skim of ice. The winter must still be new. It took a lot for salt water to freeze over, but in a long enough, cold enough, deep enough winter, he’d always felt like he’d be able to skate to the mainland. The idea was childlike, stirring memories of being nine years old, before he’d known any of them, any of those stirred and combined and shaken women, when life had been simple and bold, tying ice skates to glide across a frozen inland lake only to find uneven ice under his weak ankles.

  “Ebon!”

  “It was you first, Aimee,” he said into the small, cold brick of metal and plastic in his hand. “But now I see the problem. I never gave Holly a chance to be second.”

  The phone slipped from Ebon’s ear. He watched it disappear into the snow as his face crashed into white powder, chilling his skin, wrapping him like a corpse’s blanket.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Who I Am

  “CUTE.”

  “NO, REALLY. WHO AM I?”

  Ebon reached past the pillow, aiming to move aside the mop of blonde hair covering Holly’s face. She must have been able to see past it, despite appearances, because she slapped his hand deftly away before he reached the first strand.

  “I don’t know. A very satisfied woman?”

  “Who else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She whipped her hair back with one hand to show her piercing green eyes. “I was Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.”

  Ebon laughed, returning her witticism and following her lead into idle banter. He felt content, but odd at the same time. He had the most curious sense of watching the conversation unfold through known-ahead twists and turns. It felt like they were following a script. He could pre-guess everything Holly said (and then, in turn, his required reply), but mostly he didn’t care. The comforter was warm, and Holly’s nude body, beside him, was warmer. Life was good. Better than it had any right to be, in fact. Or, for that matter, any right to remain.

  Holly spoke her parts of the script. Ebon spoke his. Ebon saw her lips move and felt his do the same. The whole scene was numb and predictable, guided from the outside as if they were puppets. As if Ebon were an observer watching a play from inside the lead actor’s skin. He could do nothing wrong, nothing right, only what was real. Cognition wasn’t required or worth the effort. Only the moment, here and in this second, mattered.

  “I will always be down to fuck you, Ebon Shale,” said Holly, faux-serious. Then she laughed.

  But Ebon, with a fondness like nostalgia, could only smile. Who wouldn’t want to fuck Holly Moone? She was twentysomething, ripe, vibrant, and perfect. The kind of girl Ebon had always dreamed of. They constantly laughed, and made love just as much. They were the perfect couple — in many ways like he and Aimee had been, but in other ways the exact opposite. Aimee had always been a tease. With Aimee, he’d had a playground version of love. Then with Julia, he’d found comfort blended with inexorable pleasure. Holly, on the other hand, was a blend of both women — sans Julia’s emasculation and control, of course.

  Ebon felt himself slipping, as if dropping along a greased sliding board. Both body and mind seemed to sigh. The moment was perfect. Ideal. He spoke, but barely noticed. Moments passed. He felt like floating, flying, dipping into and out of his own mind.

  “How did we end up together?” he found himself asking.

  Holly said, “I saw what I wanted and went after it.”

  “But really. I didn’t exactly see myself with someone like you.”

  Holly made a frown. “That hurts.”

  Again Ebon felt the sensation of slipping down a greased board. More time passed. He saw it, felt the exchange, slid along the moment’s warmth. When he dipped back down into himself, Holly was again speaking as she always had: Blunt. Direct. No filter at all.

  “Why don’t you fuck the terror right out of my body?” she purred.

  It was an arousing suggestion, but Ebon felt drained. They’d just had sex moments ago. And still, he felt as fresh as he did spent. He felt an afterglow, but it lived beside a distant pining, like something from long ago.

  “I can’t just keep going like that, over and over,” he said.

  Slip. It was like God had pressed fast-forward. Ebon found he didn’t mind.

  “That’s a big difference between us, you know,” he told Holly.

  “What?”

  “Sex.”

  “We both like it,” said Holly. “Problem solved.”

  “Yes, but your … appetites … are beyond mine.”

  Ebon felt the moment sharpening around him. The script suddenly seemed foggy, less rehearsed with each spoken line. He still felt like a voyeur to his own experience as if watching a favorite film, but now the twists were harder to recall. Why couldn’t he remember the ending? He should know how a favorite film ended, shouldn’t he? But he didn’t remember at all. Or had perhaps once remembered, but somehow made himself forget so he could be surprised the next time he saw it. Memory was like that. If you wanted badly enough to forget something, you could.

  “You’re complaining about a horny girlfriend?” asked Holly.

  “Not complaining at all. I just wonder … Well, I wonder if I’m enough for you. If it could cause problems.”

  Her eyes watched him. He was supposed to say more, wasn’t he? Or she was; he was no longer sure. The slide behind him still felt greased, but his words no longer were. There was a beat of quiet. A moment. And then …

  Slip.

  “Believe it or not, Ebon,” said Holly, “I can separate my feelings about you from my throbbing biological needs. I can also suppress things that need suppressing until the appropriate time.”

  (That makes two of us.)

  “I don’t want you to have to suppress anything.”

  (Or to suppress anything myself.)

  Ebon’s mind blinked, wondering at the loose and unbolted thoughts. Then he sloughed back down the slide, feeling time fade without effort. The bed was soft. Holly was soft. He was spent, but found himself wanting her anew. But the need wasn’t coming from below. It was coming from somewhere higher. From another place, as if from the outside.

  An internal whisper began to pre-guess the coming action — a spoiler in the movie’s audience, intent on ruining the lines for everyone even though he, himself, seemed determined to forget.

  (How many people)

  “Okay, E,” Holly said. “Cards on the table. How many people have you slept with?”

  (Don’t answer that)

  “I don’t want to go first.”

  (Ask her)

  So Ebon, feeling himself still as both watcher and participant, said, “How many?”

  (Twenty. Fifty. A hundred.)

  Slip.

  (TWELVE)

  That last voice — that last loose and rattling thought in his head — somehow sounded different. Almost chastising, as if correcting the first. Ebon could almost imagine the new voice rolling its eyes at the other, groaning at the first’s stupidity. Holly could only have been with around a dozen people, not fifty. Of course it was only a dozen. What kind of a person did Ebon
think she was?

  (A whore. A slut. A monster. A ruiner.)

  “Maybe twelve?” she said.

  “Oh, that’s not too many,” he replied. Because it wasn’t. Twelve before Ebon. Two after meeting Ebon, including Ebon himself. Only two.

  There was another slipping, sliding sensation. Ebon watched Holly move, now less content than he had been earlier, still lightheaded as if floating but now feeling like his disorientation came from a drug. Groping through fog. Uneasy. Uncertain.

  As the actors played the scene out, two internal voices — the spoiler and the scolding, correcting curmudgeon — traded lines, giving an odd sort of play-by-play.

  (Now you)

  (One)

  (Only one?)

  (Julia. And what was she?)

  (Pleasure. Delights.)

  Comfort, said the scolding voice, again correcting the heckler. Comfort and belonging and worth.

  (Because she was hot. Because she was a goddess.)

  (Because sex was the only available mental slot still up for grabs. Something was jammed into the other slot. Something that retarded growth. Something from a past that was never set free. But not something. Someone.)

  (She messed you up.)

  (They both messed you up.)

  “I’m sorry, Ebon,” said Holly, her face serious. How often was Holly serious? Now that he thought about it, there had been plenty of times. Plenty of meaningful discussions, beyond sex, beyond lust.

  “Why?”

  “I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m sorry she hurt you.”

  Ebon felt himself nod, sensing the approaching end that he couldn’t quite recall, inexplicably nervous. He wanted to change course. But the way was still greased, the script still written. There was no way to change it. No way to alter course, like a freighter sliding inexorably toward an iceberg, unable to arrest its momentum.

  “She had her own baggage,” Ebon said. “I imagine she thought it was a fair trade and didn’t think of herself as the bad guy — bad girl — at all. If anything, it let me see right through her, and like I said, that made me feel sad. Sad for her. But it went both ways, because I didn’t just want sex. She made me feel wanted too.”

  “But you were only a kid.”

  “A lonely kid,” he said.

  Ebon found himself telling Holly about his distracted parents and distracting siblings. He told her how shy he’d been, how worthless he’d felt. And he told her about Leonard: how he’d died that year at the hands of a drunk driver.

  “Oh,” said Holly.

  “That accident hit me hard, but my parents were too busy to get me through it. Julia made me feel safe. She made me feel understood and anchored during a time of chaos.”

  Because a desperate captain will accept any port in a storm. Because a drowning man will cling to anything he can find … and drown another swimmer if that’s the only way to climb high enough for breath.

  Holly reached for him. Her touch was warm from time spent under the covers. When her hand laid on his arm, it was as if the hand belonged to someone other than Holly. It wasn’t sliding, groping, urging the action into something salacious and lusty. It was sitting still, feeling his pulse, just being there.

  Ebon looked back at Holly. Her lips weren’t smiling, and they weren’t parted with the precursors of desire. She was just being there too. Being there for him, now, when he needed her.

  “You know, I could be your anchor,” she said.

  Ebon looked into Holly’s deep-green eyes. She was serious. Too serious. He wasn’t used to this side of her, and seeing it felt raw and strange. It was as if Holly had become someone else. The turnabout made Ebon uneasy. They’d always had a good time, but this moment was like ice on a still pond. It wasn’t cold or unfeeling, but it definitely wasn’t supposed to be there in the middle of a hot summer.

  “Well, you’re certainly good at raising my mast,” he said, forcing a grin through his discomfort.

  Holly’s head cocked. She looked almost disappointed. “Is that really your reaction?”

  Ebon ignored Holly’s look, deciding instead to reach down between her legs, feeling inexplicably aroused. She didn’t pull away, or respond. She continued to look at him with those deep-green eyes, both Holly and not Holly at once.

  They’d been going out for a couple of months, and Ebon thought he’d seen all of her, from top to bottom, back to front, inside and out. But as he watched her serious gaze now, he realized he didn’t know her at all. Not at all. He knew facts about her, sure — about her family and friendships, about her college major and where she thought her career might take her, about which classes she took and where they were held, which clubs she liked, the date of her birthday and what he’d buy her if they stayed together that long. But did he know her story? Did he know her goals and dreams? Not at all.

  Before now, he’d never seen her truly serious. He’d never seen her angry. He’d never seen her sad. He’d never seen her cry. He’d never seen her empathetic or concerned. And as he watched her beside him, Ebon realized something astonishing: On some level, he hadn’t thought she’d had those emotions in her. Playing with Holly was like playing with a doll. Dolls didn’t go off script when you pulled their strings. They said what they were supposed to say, even after you pulled them from the box.

  Maybe she wasn’t always good-time Holly. Maybe she actually had emotions beyond lust and laughter. Maybe she had a deeper backstory than he realized, and maybe she was a real and whole person, just like him. Ebon felt suddenly small, an inner partition threatening to sigh and spill something unwanted. He had felt safe with Holly, safe in the assumption that he could keep their relationship in pleasant territory, happy away from shark-infested waters. But she wasn’t good-time Holly right now. Ebon had no idea who he was sleeping with, and didn’t want to face that person. Didn’t want to open any of those old boxes, whether she wanted him to or not.

  He shouldn’t have told her about Julia. It had felt like innocent play at first, but he’d delved too deep. Deep was where the pain lived, and it had been decently buried for years. Now she wanted to talk about it, to air out all that dirty laundry. Why had he said anything? And how could he get them back to normal?

  He moved his gaze from her face to her chest.

  “The great thing about you is that you’re so hot that even when I think I’m spent, I realize I’m not.” Ebon moved closer, within easy reaching distance, ready again after all. She just needed to get back to doing her part and they could move along, beyond this odd hiccup.

  “You know, I can be more than just ‘hot.’”

  “Oh, of course.” Ebon sensed that he should lean in and kiss her, but right now he didn’t want to. His hands continued to trace lines along her body under the covers, but for all the reaction he was getting, he might as well be touching a pillow.

  “I have my own painful past,” she said, still serious.

  “This is so hot,” said Ebon, still trying to grin.

  “Did I ever tell you about my friend Ginny?”

  “Is she into threesomes?”

  Holly waited a beat. Ebon felt his grin soften. Someone had taken the wheel and was steering this ship away from safe waters, into the open ocean. Where, the old mapmakers used to say, there be dragons.

  “No. Because she’s dead.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t like to think about it, but Ginny came from this horrible, horrible family. Lived in this shithole of a house, totally poor. Her father used to hit her — and her uncle, who lived next door, used to abuse her. But when we were growing up, Ginny and I were best friends, and it’s like we didn’t even know any of that was going on. Like she didn’t know it was going on, even though it was happening to her. She was, honestly, the most fun person I’ve ever known. She wasn’t dark, and she wasn’t mopey or sad. It’s like she flipped a switch when she was away from the house, and all we did was laugh and run around and get into trouble. Good-natured trouble, of course. ‘Shenanigans,�
�� we called it. We were inseparable.”

  Holly paused and seemed to wait for a response, but Ebon was unsure what to say. He sensed that his earlier comment may have left him on thin ice, though, and the best move, when on thin ice, was to remain perfectly still and do nothing whatsoever.

  With a sigh, Holly continued. “When we were thirteen, Ginny hooked up with this guy — Nick, older than us but not by a ton. He was maybe sixteen, and really cute. Ginny said she loved him. Then they became inseparable. She and I spent less and less time together. They spent more and more time together, which was totally possible because she never wanted to go home and usually didn’t have to. Sometimes her family would make a fuss and she’d stick around the house for a while — long enough for a beating and rape, I suppose — but then she’d sneak out, and come to me because I lived across the street. We’d sleep in my garage on these gross old blankets. My parents thought it was strange, but didn’t really care. They knew what was happening over at Ginny’s, and as far as they were concerned, any place was better for her — for us — than there.

  “My house was just kind of a temporary bivouac after Nick though, and when my parents were away Ginny would always want to use their car to drive over to his place. So we would. And it was fine, I guess, and even though I didn’t like the idea of driving home by myself at thirteen, I did for a while and just let them be. But I always wondered what would happen if her family found out, until I found out something that was worth worrying about more.”

  “What?” said Ebon.

  “Nick was a real party guy. He had all the best drugs. Well known around the neighborhood, apparently. I just never saw it. I was naive.”

  Ebon looked at Holly. It was hard to imagine her as being naive. He hadn’t asked when she’d started on her dozen guys. He’d assumed it had been very early. But had it been? And was a dozen really that many?

  “My mom said, ‘Poor Ginny, she needs someone to hold her hand.’ Meaning she needed someone to be there for her, I guess. Mom didn’t know about Nick. I did, and for a while I thought, ‘Great, now Ginny has someone to hold her hand.’ It kind of never dawned on me that I’d been doing that job before him. Kind of sexist, I guess; I thought she needed a man. Ginny was like that. She started having sex at, like, twelve or something, and it was all she talked about afterward. But I was only thirteen myself. I didn’t see how wrong the arrangement was until I caught on about the drugs, after she was already half-dead and strung out more and more often, and her family never seemed to notice or care, and even my mom didn’t see it because as things got worse Ginny wanted to keep more secrets. ‘Just between us,’ she said all the time. It felt like I was her … her anchor … when I was actually just her excuse. I didn’t realize it until one day I went over to her house after I hadn’t seen her for a week and her uncle — the one who used to rape her — told me she was dead. But not just dead. Buried. They’d had her funeral already, pathetic affair that it must’ve been. And I never even got to say goodbye. One day she was there, big as life, this thing in my world that I was slowly realizing was my responsibility, because no one else both knew and cared. A week later, she was cut out of my life like a bad spot from a piece of cloth.”