by Daryl Banner
“Obligating?” She huffs. “Nice. What a big, smarty word for you.”
“It didn’t seem all that serious to me.”
“Maybe that’s because, no matter the girl you’re with, you don’t really see them, do you, Brant?” She stares at me, her nose rings and earrings catching a stray glint of the sunlight coming in through the window. “You act like you respect all the women you’re with, but we’re just … different sauces you can dip your corndog in,” she spits out.
“Ew,” grunts Sam.
“Imagery,” agrees Dmitri with a wince.
“Just quit lying to yourself,” Chloe tells me, her eyes burning me with their darkness. “You’re not a ‘lover’, Brant. You’re not a boyfriend. You are just a plain, straight-up slut. Sex is your game, not love. Just a basic, shallow, dumb, animal hunger for getting off … and that’s it.”
I swallow hard, staring down at the foot-long sub I haven’t even taken a single bite of yet. I want to disagree with her and argue about how serious I am, about this new girl in my life Nell, about how wrong she is … but can’t for the life of me come up with a single argument.
Then the gods of lady luck ask: How can we make this moment for Brant just a little bit worse?
Their answer comes in the form of an excited shout. “Brant!”
I look up to find a girl with chin-length auburn hair waltzing up to our table, her eyes bright and her lips pouty. This might be bad timing, but the first thing I recognize about her—before even her face—is her big tits accentuated exquisitely by that skintight tan shirt she has on. They bounce in the most hypnotizing way as she approaches, and it’s those dancing knockers that I peel my eyes away from to meet her face.
“You didn’t answer my text, sweetie! Oh, hi,” she absently says to the rest of the table, then returns her eyes to me. “Are you up for it? Maybe six or seven tonight, sweetie? Or eight, if you got things? Or nine? I’m flexible.”
If my time with her behind that privacy screen in the art class was any indication, I know exactly how flexible she is.
“I got a, uh … a Theatre thing,” I tell her, feeling my skin crawl. “I can’t. Sorry. I …”
“Oh? I can come! You know my dance classes are in that building too, right? School of Theatre: Acting, Dancing, Excellence,” she sings, reciting the name just so I can enjoy the sound of her grating, overly-chipper voice.
Chloe smirks. “It’s Theatre, Dancing, Excellence,” she mumbles to herself with a roll of her eyes.
The dancer either doesn’t hear her or outright ignores her. “So I’ll come too, then! You obviously need a date. What time? Seven?”
“It’s tomorrow,” I say. “Listen … C-Candace …” I had to fish around in my brain for her name. I still haven’t read the text she sent me last night. “I was sorta just planning to go with my roommate here since he’s friends with an actor in the show.”
“Playwright,” Dmitri hisses unhelpfully across the table.
“Playwright of the show,” I amend.
“That’s okay!” she says cheerily. “I can just tag along. Really, I haven’t actually taken the time to see a show at the theater in, like, months.”
Chloe sighs dramatically, exasperated on all our behalf. “Since the message is clearly flying over your head,” she states loudly, “Brant here is trying to gently let you down. He’s lost interest and has moved on. There’s some girl at the art school he’s all obsessed with for now until he’s tired of her, too. We are all sitting here patiently waiting for your attempts at manipulating Brant into another date to die out. And really, it’s for the best.”
I shoot Dmitri a look. You told Chloe? my eyes seem to say. The guilty look on Dmitri’s face is my answer.
For only a moment, Candace the dancer appears to have been punched deep in her gut. Then, just as fast, she recovers and offers me a tight smile. “Come to think of it, I think I have a rehearsal tonight for my recital in two weeks.” She saves herself yet another scrap of dignity by giving me a cheery sigh—as if all this news didn’t just smash up her heart like a bag of wasted fast food tossed out the car window—then waltzes away just as fast as she’d come.
“You really know how to set it straight,” I mutter at Chloe without looking at her.
She doesn’t respond, poking at her salad. I glance at Dmitri across the table, who only offers an apologetic shrug, his eyes appearing like two innocent black beads behind his glasses. Sam has her mouth full of cheeseburger and staring up at something on the ceiling, which appears to have caught all of her interest.
“I got class soon,” I lie, gently swiping my uneaten sub into my backpack and slinging it over a shoulder. “See you later.” Though I’m not sure who exactly I’m addressing.
I hear Dmitri say my name, but I pretend not to hear it, leaving them to enjoy their lunch in peace without the apparent disturbance of the all-evil, heart-annihilating pussy destroyer Brant in their presence.
The sunlight cooks me again as I stroll slowly across campus. It might be something to do with Chloe’s words, but I find my mind trying to defy her, as if her scathing speech was a challenge. She thinks I have no depth? Nell thinks the idea of me being deep is a joke? Even Dmitri, as nice and polite as he is about it, never goes into much detail with me about the stories he writes. I sometimes wonder if it’s because he thinks I won’t get it … or care.
I’m sick of people treating me like a dumb jock. I didn’t even play sports in high school. Hell, the jocks I was friends with back then were driven and smart, from what I remember. One even got accepted to goddamn Yale.
Dmitri’s latest story is about an organ donor coming back to life to go on a quest to get his heart back? That shit’s deep. I wish I’d thought of it. Then again, an idea is just that until you make it into a story and, well, I don’t know if I have the patience to put that many damn words together.
Then you have Nell painting headless dogs and beautiful women with nothing censored but their mouths. Isn’t that shit deep, too? That kind of work makes a statement.
So what the hell kind of depth do I have to show for?
What statement am I trying to make?
Just thinking about Nell makes me hurt all over again.
Students pass by me in pairs, like everyone in the world’s a couple but me. I walk alone, passing lovers and buddies and groups gathered under trees. Among one such group by the psychology building, a girl turns away from her friend to watch as I pass by, and I’m struck by her knowing gaze, wondering if she’s checking me out, or if we’ve already done the deed in the back of a supply closet in that very building.
I should remember, shouldn’t I?
Or is she just another bowling pin I struck down at the end of the lane, swept away, forgotten?
I finally settle in a spot under a tree near the School of Art tunnel on a grassy knoll. It’s there that I pull out my sub, unwrap it, and finally sink my teeth into its peppery, meaty goodness. I watch people as they pass by, trying to see something beyond what I’m just literally seeing. I’m determined for something bold and brilliant to occur to me. The deep and meaningful thing worthy of an artist’s attention … Something worthy of a photographer’s skillful eye.
Chewing with conviction, I stare and I stare at the world, waiting to see that brilliant … amazing … something.
Chapter 11
Nell
I might be wearing clothes, but over them I’m wearing something else, something thicker and darker, something that can’t be seen.
Guilt?
Frustration?
Embarrassment?
And it weighs so much, my posture is literally broken all day. I stare at the blank canvas, which taunts me. Here I am with a campus studio all to myself, and nothing’s coming.
I feel like I totally ruined my night with Brant. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but maybe some innocent, dreaming part of me actually enjoyed his presence. He did everything right, didn’t he?
Somethin
g happened after I got off. Suddenly, I grew afraid. With all the horniness drained from me, my emotions changed, and all the reality flooded in like a cold, unwanted shower. That was worsened by the ill-timed text Brant received, which served as some dark, ironic reminder of whose face I just let between my legs.
Just thinking about that makes my thighs squeeze together. I can still feel him there when I close my eyes.
Fuck. No one has ever touched me like that. No one has ever made me climb so damn high before.
My breathing changes just from thinking about it.
As if he’s already down there again. Oh, god.
I pop open my eyes, pushing those irresistibly sexy memories of Brant and the other night away. I take a deep breath, as if that’ll help, but it only seems to remind me of how I sighed deeply when his tongue probed me … and his mouth did whatever the hell sort of sexy voodoo it was doing down there.
My heart’s beating so fast, I literally set down my charcoal pencil and put a hand to my chest.
It’s more than what he does to my body. I learned that, too, after I came. There’s more there than just a hot face, a perfect sculpted body, and a cocky smile that can level trees. And when I realized that I’d let my feelings ignite, when I realized that even after my orgasm I still wanted to hold him close, when I realized that I wanted him to stay … that’s when I knew I was royally fucked.
Brant isn’t someone to grow feelings like that for, especially this fast. I’d be the world’s greatest moron. That’s like building a tower of cards at the peak of a hill just because the wind’s calm that day. Sure, admire your tower and all its delicate balance for its short little life, but you’d better be ready to watch it fall.
Any chance at love would fall to pieces where Brant’s concerned. The second he loses interest—which I imagine coincides with the moment at which he comes—he’ll be leaving me faster than smoke from a window in that burning tower.
I’ll be the glowing embers that remain.
“Embers,” I mumble to myself, inspired, then lift the charcoal pencil back to the canvas and get to work.
As the hour passes, I tunnel myself into making the vision appear before me in smeared shadows and crisscrossed lines. I’m not even conscious of my hand moving; it simply exists with a messy, charcoal instrument glued to the end of it, and through the little firing neurons and warring synapses in my brain, a scene appears before me.
“Now that’s something.”
I turn at the voice. My worst critic Iris stands there, all her annoying pink-and-white hair tossed to one side as she tilts her head, arms folded, studying my work.
“Not today,” I mutter at her, returning to my canvas.
She ignores me, strutting up to my side to get a closer look. Even her footsteps are annoying.
“It’s a … big tower on a hill?”
“Embers,” I say, naming it.
She shifts her weight from one leg to the other. “I don’t get it. But there’s no fire,” she complains.
“Not yet.”
“Oh.”
A moment of gentle scratching passes as I add details to the bricks, a crack here, a hair there, a weed here, a tendril of vine there.
“Maybe the fire’s inside,” she ponders, “and we just can’t see it.”
“Sure.”
“Isn’t that how it usually goes? The problem’s burning inside us, so deep inside that we don’t even know it’s there?”
I sigh, dropping my charcoal pencil onto the desk. “What do you want, Iris?”
She bristles slightly at my brashness. “I saw your exhibit.”
“Congratulations.”
“The one with the model. The sexy model. Object, you called it.”
“So are you here to offer your feedback on how obvious and boring and unoriginal it was?” I ask, smirking at my canvas and refusing to face her. “Maybe you can bring it up in front of everyone next class instead of interrupting my studio time.”
“Actually …” She circles around the desk, coming to my other side. “I was wondering if you were planning on attending the Renée Brigand show tomorrow night.”
I frown at her. “Why would I want to subject myself to that?”
Iris looks as if I might have just stolen her bubblegum. “Because she is the most successful alumni from the art school. Because maybe—yeah, I know, this concept may be totally foreign to you—but maybe we have something we can learn from her. Did you know one of her pieces, God’s Oven Mittens, sold for over fifty thousand dollars??”
“She’s a pretentious sell-out who’s had her ass kissed her whole life. I don’t support her ridiculous pop art.”
Iris rolls her eyes. “Why am I not surprised you’d have this reaction to getting a chance to meet the Renée?”
“If her work peddled any more than it already does, it’d be a damn bicycle. Besides,” I add, “I already know a Renée. My mother. And that’s enough Renées for one person to know.”
With that, I turn away and equip myself with a charcoal pencil and return to my tower, which is already fast burning down in my mind. I study my work and try to deduce how to put out a fire with charcoal.
Iris huffs. “You are such a miserable person.”
“Of course I am,” I say back mildly. “I’m an artist. Misery is our common denominator.”
She brings her face up to my ear and hisses, “I’m a happy person. I’m happy and my work is fulfilling and I’m an artist. You, on the other hand, are miserable, and your work is contrived—at best—and you do nothing but bring pain and misery to anyone you touch.”
“Better step back then,” I warn her coolly, “before I touch you.”
She stays put, breath held and anger flooding her eyes. I sincerely wonder, as I gage how likely I am to still put up a fight, whether she’s going to back off or not. Thankfully for the both of us, she does. After a long, measured glare, Iris finally stalks out of the room, and the sound of her annoying footsteps echo into my ears as she goes further and further down the hall.
And I’m left to wonder how much of what she said is true.
What if Brant and I actually have a chance at being something … real? Would I only be capable of ruining it, bringing my misery and my pain into Brant’s happy-go-lucky life? He has no idea the darkness that lives in me. All he sees is an “interesting person”, as he put it. His eyes are all aglow with the fantasy of me, with the idea of what he thinks I am. He’s infatuated with his own imagination and doesn’t know it.
My heart breaks, thinking of the way I could unintentionally break his. I wouldn’t mean to, either. Really, my pushing him away is an act of protection. I’m protecting him from my miserable, horrible self.
My finger pushes hard against the canvas, blending the tiny shadow under the bricks at the tower’s summit.
And if he was smart, he’d know to keep away. I don’t want more unhappy people in the world. There’s enough of them. Maybe the world needs more Brants. More sex demons. More pleasure for the sake of pleasure.
Maybe I should have finished him off and given him the chemical permission his brain needs to move on to the next woman.
I apply a few strokes to make grass at the foot of the tower.
Then I stand back from the desk and stare at the canvas, thinking about Renée Brigand and what sort of drawing she would have done. She doesn’t draw, I remind myself. She makes “experiences”. Ugh. The pretention is so thick, I can already imagine what sort of crap she’s going to have shown at the gallery. The amount of eye-rolling I might do is temptation enough to consider actually going.
Maybe I should find Brant and take him with me. We could make fun of the art together.
I kick myself for even thinking that. Keep away from him.
But just that thought alone pulls me into a powerful whirlwind of his crystalline blue eyes. I watch him watch me, falling into his gaze like a big, bright pool.
I hear his voice and see him smile. “You alright, babe?�
�� he’d ask.
No. Everything sucks. I suck. I’m a big ball of black oil and you’re the crisp spritz of water from a lawn sprinkler, Brant. I’m the heat that reaches into the chest of a man stranded in the desert, dropped to his knees and staring at millions of dunes ahead of him …
And you’re the oasis.
I won’t be able to control myself if I’m near him again. I’m already losing all my resolve and he’s not even in this room with me.
Just his memory is.
His face.
His strong arms and soft chuckle.
His know-it-all smirk and messy hair.
His bright, curious eyes.
I stare at the tower I’ve built on a hill. I stare at it and wonder whether anyone will know the fire that’s within it, burning it down from the inside out.
Chapter 12
Brant
The glass doors and windows of the School of Theatre reveal a crowd of excited students awaiting the start of the show. The lobby is lit, its bright light glowing across the darkened courtyard outside.
“Why’s the show so damn late?” Dmitri complains.
I shake my head, giving him a hearty pat on the back. “It’s not even eight yet. Calm your balls. We’re supportin’ our favorite roomie Eric.”
“Is that what we’re doing?”
I punch Dmitri in the shoulder, which he hates. Clayton and I used to do that all the time to each other. The habit has not quite grown on Dmitri. In fact, I’m probably bruising his jerking arm.
The moment we enter, I spot Chloe right away standing on the other side of the lobby with some others, including Dessie. I don’t see Clayton with her. Maybe he’s in the bathroom and I can catch him there instead of dealing with Chloe and her rolling eyes.
“I need to take a leak before the show,” I tell Dmitri.
He smirks. “Hey, maybe she’ll behave. I think she got out what she wanted to say at lunch the other day. We can sit with them, okay?”
“Clayton’s gotta be here somewhere.”
He sighs, then gives me a nod. “Good luck, man.”
