Half an hour later, she was in her work clothes and on her way to a coffee shop near her job, where Jay was holding a table, eyes idly fixed on a tile on the floor. She sat down, and looked at him, resting her chin in her palm.
"So, what's up?" he eventually asked.
"Nothing," she said, putting her feet up on a stray chair. "I was bored."
"Bored, huh?"
"Yeah. And maybe I wanted to see your face again."
"Well, I can't blame you for that. How are things with Miss Girlfriend?"
"Shitty. She's acting pissy because she thinks I'm cheating on her."
"Well…"
"Well, what? I didn't do anything wrong, did I?"
"Only in your mind," Jay said with a smirk—an annoying smirk—and stood up. "What do you want?" he asked, and Josie raised an eyebrow at him. "To drink."
"Surprise me," she said. After Jay walked away, she chewed her tongue. She knew he was just being an ass, but it didn't help that he was accurate. He returned several minutes later with a mug of black coffee and a plastic cup filled with light brown. "What is it?"
"Sugar, milk, and caffeine."
"You know me so well."
"You're not hard to figure out."
"I hate you," she chirped, taking a sip of her drink.
"The feeling is mutual, toots," he said. "So, what are you going to do about your ex-girlfriend situation?"
"We haven't broken up."
"Yet."
"You don't know that."
"Are you happy?"
Josie broke the shared gaze and pretended to find the corner of the table very interesting, picking at it with her nail. "No."
"So…"
"So, what?" Josie snapped. She glanced up to a catch Jay's matter-of-fact expression. "Fine, you win. You were right," she muttered.
"What was that?"
"You. Were. Right."
"Once more?" Jay asked, and Josie buried her head in her hands. She felt his fingers on her arm. "Hey, you're going to be okay."
As he tugged at her shoulder, she allowed herself to be pulled into his body, cradled in his arm.
"You just want me to leave her so you can get in my pants, huh?"
"Need I remind you that I had the opportunity, and I turned it down? Besides, we'd be a mess together."
"Yeah, probably," Josie said. "Why?"
"Because we're both fucked up."
"Well, I know I'm a crazy bitch—I've been told enough times. What makes you so fucked up?"
"Just am."
"That's not fair," Josie said, sitting up straight in her chair. "You know my shit. I get to know yours."
"Alright. I'm an asshole."
"I already knew that. What else?"
"I'm a magnet for unstable chicks," Jay said, rubbing the back of his neck, his usual facetiousness wholly absent. "Poppy still hasn't forgiven me for one of them."
"What happened?"
"She was bat-shit nuts, is what happened."
"Tell me!" Josie demanded.
"You're grinning."
"I'm excited to hear about your misery."
Jay sighed. "You're a little sadist, aren't you?"
"Just a little," Josie said, holding her thumb and index finger a centimeter apart. "I've been sad lately, and you're making me feel better. Doesn't that mean anything?"
"It means you're a regular Venus in Furs, but I suppose that's my type."
"Whips and chains, huh? Kinky."
"With Courtnia, it was more along the lines of ball-and-chains."
"Courtnia? What the fuck kind of name is that? I already don't like her," Josie said, smiling.
"Good intuition. She wanted a lot of things I wasn't ready to give her—a ring, a baby. I even moved out to bumfuck Modesto for her."
"So that's why you hate the valley."
"There are a lot of reasons to hate that place. Courtnia is just the frontrunner."
"How long were you with her?"
"About a year before it finally fizzled, and I got out."
"If it was so awful, why'd you stay, stupid?"
"I tried leaving her a couple of times. She would threaten suicide, then homicide, and I would just let her win for the night, and the next morning, she would insist I was blowing everything out of proportion, that she didn't say anything she did. After a while, these things just become… normal, I guess. Arguments over the same old stupid shit every other day. Gets in your head, breaks you down."
"Ah," Josie said, unsure of what else she could say. She laced her fingers into his; it seemed like an okay thing to do.
"Jealous as fuck, too." Jay shook his head and almost laughed. "At a point, I was sneaking behind her back to see Poppy—my lesbian best friend was a fucking threat in her eyes. She started creating rifts between me and my family, too. I don't know if she was consciously trying to isolate me, though. She was a victim of abuse as well—just the cyclical nature of that shit, you know? She was a good person underneath it all…"
"You're defending her, babe," Josie said softly. Jay squeezed her hand.
"Yeah, I know. Been years, and I'm still working through it. It lingers."
"So, what, did she just hide her crazy really well until it was too late?"
"Not at all. Red flags from the start. I wanted to save her from herself, ended up just getting sucked into the same mess, and it took me a year to realize I was miserable." He took a large swallow of his cooling coffee. "Trying to do the same with you, I guess," he said, his smile weak, his eyes dark.
"I'm a big girl—you don't gotta save me."
"Everybody needs to be saved sometime."
Josie bit her lip. "I should get to work."
"Alright," Jay said, releasing her hand. Within the span of a deep inhalation, Josie saw Jay's face change back to his usual sarcastic, whimsical mask. "The bar harkens."
They stood, and Josie wrapped her arms around him, muttering into his chest, "Thank you."
"For what?" he asked, holding her firmly.
"For not being an asshole for a minute," she said. The hug remained unbroken, and Josie relaxed into it. "Glad I got your number, even if I was too blacked out to remember doing it."
"Actually, you left your phone out when you went to the bathroom at the bar. I put it in for you."
"You're a smooth one, mister," Josie said, falling away from the embrace. "I'll see you later," she said, though her feet resisted every step she took away from him.
*~*~*
For the next week, every noise in the apartment, the running of a faucet, the creak of a cupboard door, the grinding of a window being opened, echoed through the silence of the voices they swallowed around each other. Marjorie's hours became erratic, and she decided to take the best pillow from the bed and sleep on the couch. She came home smelling like pot once or twice, and occupied herself solely with her phone. Josie had the urge to text Jay for stupid reasons she didn't want to think about but refrained. When she gave her shoes another chance, they led her to a liquor store, where she decided to buy a 40 and pick up smoking again.
After three days, two packs, and 160 ounces, time was becoming a bit blurry. She went to work one evening, only to be informed when she got there that it was not Wednesday but Tuesday, and she had the night off. On the way home, she stopped at a convenience store. Standing outside, fingers wrapped around the paper bag-covered neck of the bottle, she closed her eyes and clicked her heels together, chanting, "There's no place like home" several times.
She opened her eyes.
She was still on the streets of San Francisco.
"Stupid shoes. Why couldn't you have been some goddamn red slippers instead?" As she began walking back to the apartment, it occurred to her that it really wasn't a home anymore. It was just a place where her stuff was. It was a trench in a warzone where she slept, a No Man's Land of guerilla glares and combative comments. She considered not going back in, never going back up there, and just becoming another nut job vagrant: the Malt Liquor Queen of
Magic Shoes.
She deliberated this option at what had become her usual post outside her building until the yellow liquid sloshed just below the top of the label. At this point, the pressure on her bladder reminded her of her preference for clean facilities. She hurried upstairs, giving Marjorie the courtesy of opening the door loudly as she walked inside, though there were no signs of her presence, and Josie considered relocating inside, where she could undress and blow her smoke out the window. From inside the bathroom, however, she heard a creak of mattress springs.
It wasn't a problem, Josie thought—it was technically Marjorie's bed in the first place—but it would be a hassle going in the bedroom to change out of her work clothes. She walked up to the closed door and braced herself for the several seconds of the discomfort of sharing a room. Opening the door, she felt an urge to vomit that usually only came after she finished a bottle of Steel Reserve.
Marjorie was lying naked on the bed, thighs spread around a blonde mess of hair attached to a tall, pale body. The words 'What the fuck' got caught in Josie's throat, a part of a larger paralysis that stopped her from looking away, from leaving, from grabbing at anything she could lift and chucking it across the room. Marjorie looked at her, her face red, but not with shame.
"Fuck," said the wet-mouthed stranger, looking up. "I should—" she began, but Marjorie placed a hand on the back of her head.
"I guess we're even now," Marjorie said, leering at Josie, who finally found her voice, weak and diminished from disuse.
"Except I didn't cheat, you cunt," Josie said, barely audible. By the time she made it to the front door, her hand was shaking to the point that it was almost impossible to grasp the knob.
The exclamation finally forced its way out of her mouth once she made it outside, screeched to the point that it stung her own ears. Seething, she fumbled to bring a cigarette to her lips, but fury-clumsy fingers couldn't get a flicker from the lighter. Her vision began to blur, and she found the mostly-full bottle in her hand. She unscrewed the cap, brought it to her lips, and found herself unable to swallow. On a wild impulse, she flung it against the side of the building and was sprayed in a mist of malt liquor and glass.
"I'm going to call the cops!" someone somewhere, yelled, mistaking her for a homeless person—though maybe they weren't really mistaken. She started running, in her jeans and polo under a hoodie, in her stupid shoes.
She ran past the point that her chest felt like it was about to collapse. She continued running through the ache in her calves and despite the sweat that made her clothes cling to her body and the stares of pedestrians and drivers she dodged, afraid to pause even for a moment. She ran away from the mess she had made, and Marjorie, and the mess she had made. In her mind, she repeated the words, to drown all else out, There's no place like somewhere else.
When her body demanded she stop, she looked around, and realized she was exactly where she wanted to be: lost. Her lungs, struggling for air and as confused as she was, demanded a cigarette. She found the pack in her hoodie pocket and realized, checking her jeans as well, that her phone had disappeared. Icing on the cake. In bringing the filter to her lips, she noticed the blood on her hand and wiped it on her jacket, though it had mostly dried, only then feeling the collection of minute lacerations from the shrapnel of broken glass
She watched the ground through puffs of smoke as she walked, unsure of where she was, indifferent to where she was going. She had nothing left to trust but her feet. She didn't look up until the cherry destroyed everything on its way to the filter, and she crushed the ember under her sole. She paused, ran her eyes up the building, and sighed. Of course.
She rang the buzzer and collapsed against wall in the doorway, finally feeling the emotional and physical drain. The intercom asked, "Hello?"
"It's me," she responded. "Josie."
She heard the door unlock.
A few exhaustive flights of stairs up, she found a door ajar. Jay stood in the middle of the room, wearing socks, torn jeans, and an unbuttoned black dress shirt over a gray wife-beater, a half-empty beer in his hand. "Hey, stalker, to what do I owe the pleasure?"
"I need a shower."
As Jay took in the sight before him, his face softened. "Are you okay?"
Josie knew she couldn't answer that question without having a breakdown. "I need a shower."
*~*~*
An hour later, Josie was sitting on Jay's couch, stretching out the chest of his last clean t-shirt and the elastic band of a pair of his boxers.
"Please tell me that was your blood," Jay said, bringing over a pair of cold beers.
"Yeah," she said, holding up her hand, beads of blood forming in the small cuts. He found a dishtowel and threw it at her.
"If I knew how to wrap that up for you, I would."
"It's okay, I can do it," she said as she wound the cloth around her hand.
"I forgot that you're a Girl Scout, Shortbread," he said, sitting down with her and handing her a cold bottle.
"My savior," Josie said, accepting the amber ale.
"So, I was about to go out and grab a drink, if you'd like to come with, and, you know, talk."
She exhaled deeply and stared at her bare knees. She took Jay's hand and placed it on her thigh. "How about we skip that part?"
*~*~*
After lying naked and physically spent against Jay's likewise body for several minutes, Josie asked, "So now what?"
To which Jay responded, "Woof." His fingers combed through her hair, and he kissed her forehead. "If you need a place to stay, you can stick around here for a while." He hummed with a small chuckle. "As long as you're a good girl."
"Woof," she muttered into his chest, her lips curving upward. As it turned out, she could run away from all her problems; it seemed, though, that she wouldn't have to… at least, not for a while. The last thing she saw through her dimming vision was the pair of pink-and-white Jaguars lying next to a pile of beer-and-sweat-and-blood-stained clothes, one shoe pointing toward their pressed bodies, the other toward the door.
Fin
About the Author
Subsisting off of coffee, cigarettes and gin, Caesar is a hopeless dreamer who quit his day job to pursue his writing career. A Silicon Valley local, he has earned some acclaim as a spoken word poet, and the resident writer at a few open mic nights and dive bars in the South Bay Area. When not writing or California Dreaming, he can usually be found hanging around with his lesbian best friend, Debbie, making puns of understated brilliance.
https://www.facebook.com/caesarjmkent
No Place Like Somewhere Else Page 4
