I sit there on my couch, sweat again rising to my skin, feeling sick in a way that has nothing to do with the flu.
Shane’s home. And she’s brought someone with her. Someone who just complimented her on my paint job.
“It’s not mine. My friend’s letting me stay here.” Shane’s voice. Hushed and subdued.
I was thinking too much. I was crazy to think that we could ever be more than this. I want to puke.
Of course they have to come through the living room before getting to the stairs.
The girl is short and dark, Latina or perhaps Middle Eastern like me. A stone femme, with jeans hug her *****, and her hair, pulled up in a ponytail, is long and silky black. She is a complete piece of *****. She does a double take when she sees me.
“Oh, hi,” she says, smiling genuinely. No clue what shitstorm she’s wandered into. She’s adorable in a geeky way. I really don’t want to like her. “I’m Carmen, how’re you doing?”
“Hey Carmen,” I smile. They say smiling suppresses the gag reflex.
Shane comes to stand behind the piece of *****. I can’t look at her directly. “Hey,” she says in a muted voice.
“Hey. Whatsup?” I try hard to harden my face into a neutral expression and in order to do that I can’t look at her. I pretend to be engrossed in The Daily Show. Jon Stewart and his moment of Zen. That’s what I need. Zen, detachment.
“Not much.” I see her tug Carmen’s hand with her own hand, her bad arm.
“Nice to meet you,” Carmen says, then they are walking up my stairs.
“You too,” I lie, knowing that Shane is looking at me.
I sit there for a long moment, staring into space. Bile threatens at the base of my throat and I breathe slowly, urging it down. Zen. Right.
I sit there, not moving for a long time. There are a lot of cliches swimming in my head, but the one that sticks is the idea of a wrecking ball hitting my belly, again and again.
I need to get out of this house. But I feel like *****. I don’t dare go upstairs, lest I hear something I shouldn’t.
Shane is upstairs, putting the moves on some girl. In my house.
Shane’s taking off that girl’s clothes, in her smooth and expert way…
Something rises inside me, and it’s so blindsiding, so intense, that it takes me a minute to identify it as rage.
I need to get up and run. I need to hit something, preferably Shane.
What does it all mean to her? What does she think we have together?
The knowledge slams me in the gut, twice as hard as the shock of seeing her bring someone home. Now I know. She thinks it’s nothing. Friends with benefits.
Then the tears come, stinging in my eyes and sinuses like nettles.
.
I wake up cold, in a glorified toolshed. Something has shifted the balance of my mattress and my head is aching. I open my eyes but the light out here is too bright. Jenny. I close my eyes so tightly the skin wrinkles, and even this hurts.
“Want to come in for breakfast?”
“Sure.” I feel worse than yesterday. I feel Jenny’s hand on my hair, moving softly, and it makes the tears come back.
“Wanna tell me what happened?”
“She brought someone home.”
“Oh, *****, D.” Her hand stops moving, perhaps surprised, then starts again.
“Don’t tell anyone.”
.
Jenny drops me off at home and the deja vu of it, combined with my feverish aching, makes my head spin.
I almost hope Shane’s here, I think, as I walk inside. I slam the door, though I’m pretty sure she’s gone, and the piece of ***** is surely long gone, because Shane never lets anyone stay.
Except me.
And that’s what I’m afraid of.
Go head, show your face, I dare you.
I call in sick from the kitchen phone and stumble into the shower. There are droplets at the bottom of the tub. She’s showered. Cleaned the brunette off of her skin.
Where is she? Did she think I’d be mad so she left? She better ***** think it.
I get out of the shower, raw and naked, and swallow a dose and a half of Tylenol PM. The wind in Bette’s palm trees kept waking me up all night. I lie down on the unmade bed, pulling the unsoiled duvet over me. I hug my pillow, and cry myself to sleep.
When I wake it’s dark. I sit up and blink, disoriented by all the sleeping and waking that’s been my life. I can barely breathe and I take another hit of cold medicine, then admit to myself that I need to eat. Hunger gnaws inside me.
I toss my covers off, thinking this is ridiculous. I refuse to act like a ***** in my own house.
It’s mercifully quiet. Shane’s door is closed and I’m praying that she’s not in there. And that she isn’t in there. Carmen or whatever her name is.
I have no right to be upset, but I don’t want strange women in my house. Do I have a right to make that edict? Sure I do, but at what cost? I need to talk to Alice about this. But she’s always with Dana. *****.
I haven’t heard a noise, so when I walk into my kitchen and see Shane at the kitchen table, reading the paper, I’m surprised.
Our eyes meet, startled, and it is there, irrevocable, between us.
“Hi,” I say dumbly.
“Hey,” she says, something in her eyes afraid and softened.
Angry. So ***** angry. It courses through me, wanting out. I turn toward the cupboards and try to figure out what to eat. Very difficult when I have the sudden urge to puke.
“How’re you feeling?” She sounds afraid, and she should be afraid, because it takes a lot of nerve for her to ask me that.
“Peachy. How’s the PT going?”
I know she’s staring at me, at my bared back, my hair up in a a haphazard clip on top of my head. I’m very aware of my body in the little nightgown. One of the perks of having her around is the joy of showing my flesh. I’ve been enjoying it.
Now, it feels like an entreaty. Look at me, dammit. Look at me.
“Good,” she says.
I grab a box of crackers, a slab of cheese. I turn and meet her eyes.
“Your girl’s hot. What’s her name, Carmen?”
I didn’t mean for it to sound like an attack, and it doesn’t sound that way, but she clearly perceives it as such. And I know exactly what the next words out of her mouth will be.
“She’s not my girl.” She makes the word sound loathsome and that hurts me. Because I want to be her girl. Ridiculous.
“Okay. Well she’s cute.” I shrug, and walk away.
“You’re not gonna make me feel guilty,” she says, so low and menacing I can barely hear it.
Okay, now I’m pissed. I stop in my tracks.
I turn around, walk until I’m right in front of her. “Excuse me?”
I have the positional advantage here. I’m standing very close to her, and she has to look up at me. The result is hostility. “I said, you’re not gonna make me feel guilty.” She has the nerve to look angry. What the *****?
I raise my eyebrow at her. She looks so beautiful, pale, lips pink without makeup. I want to kiss her and crush her all at once.
“Who said anything about feeling guilty?”
She is quiet. I am quiet. I hear the hum of the refrigerator. She narrows her eyes but I can see that she doesn’t feel it, not all the way down. She’s confused and soft and hard all at once.
Are you guilty, Shane? Are you?
I’ve never felt so angry at her. It’s like an alien thing thrumming through my veins, dying to get out.
She meets my eyes, and I see shame there, and guilt, indeed. It does nothing to soothe my rage.
“You should watch your accusations,” I say, and walk away. I know dimly that I’ve just pushed her further away, but I don’t care. I feel my fury in the sway of my hips, the way my bare feet move me across the floor.
.
The next day I feel like *****, but I’d rather feel like ***** at work then deal with the situation at home. The majority of the sniffles and coughing have passed, leaving only bone deep fatigue and aches, so no one is the wiser.
By the end of my shift I’m regretting that decision, and despite taking several Tylenol, my head is spinning. This was a bad idea. Maybe I’ll call out tomorrow.
I dig my keys out, pepper spray dangling at the ready, same as I always do. I scan the parking garage as usual, looking for movement. It’s a habit I developed in New York. There’s never any movement by my car, but today there is.
Shane is standing there, looking dangerous, red lips and tight black leather pants and black tee shirt. Her perfect legs, just so.
Is she trying to kill me? Torture me?
I open my mouth, but before I can, she steps close to me. If I didn’t know her, I would think that she was going to hit me. Her brows are drawn together in a serious, solemn expression, her eyes intense. My heart is pounding.
She lifts her hand, touches my shoulder. Then she’s kissing me, kissing me hard, but it seems, damn it, like her whole soul is there. She’s being almost violent, but yet I feel she’s feeding me her heart. Is she playing with me? Cruel.
Anger flares up through me and I push her away, not caring when I realize it’s her bad shoulder. But her lips are on me like glue, and her hand tightens on the back of my neck. She holds my face in her hands and kisses me, grip like steel.
I remember tying her down, all those months ago, and something so sweet spears through my mind and body, brief and followed only by pain twice as strong.
Does she know what she’s doing?
She tugs my hand, into the shadows behind her truck. The cab of it shields us from anyone who might see, and in that seedy darkness she looks in my eyes, so beautiful it hurts me like a heartful of glass. I stand there trying to formulate the words to scream at her. Then her hand is on my breast and her lips are back on mine.
What are you doing? What the ***** are you doing to me, Shane, I think, but I can’t articulate it. She has me pinned, not by the concrete at my back, or by the hand that reaches into my scrubs to cup my *****, but by the look in her eyes. A complicated and sweet and dangerous look.
Very simply, I can’t walk away because I can’t stop looking at her.
I glare at her but she doesn’t look away. I’m starting to feel sick in my stomach, disgusted by what she’s doing. Her fingers curl into my underwear and press flat against my sweetest spot, and a bolt of pleasure hits me. I cry out, but it’s not the sound of pleasure, it’s confused and pained. Still she watches me, her green eyes dark in the half-light of the parking garage. Her fingers grapple and slip and feel so good.
I think my thoughts as a disembodied head while down below, she fingers me to *****. What is she thinking? What is she feeling? Is this some sort of lame Shane-style apology? As if a handjob in a dank shadow will undo the hurt? I would have thought that a handjob has long since stopped being currency in her world, and it sickens me, even as I groan brokenly and press my hips forward into her touch.
Headlights shift and sweep through the space in which we stand. She hovers closer to me, as if protecting me, fingers not missing a beat in their driving rhythm, so close I can feel her breath, smell her glorious green tea and soap smell.
What are you doing to me, Shane? What are you doing that I’m pinned here and I can’t move? I can’t do this. I’m not cut out for this. You’re killing me. I could stop you, but I’m too weak.
The sound of the passing engine rises and falls, and the car is gone, but still she is so close, so close to me, and she has never felt so far away, and her fingers are moving…
I come, hating it, a few seconds later, to the sound of traffic in the distance, discordant bass thump of a car stereo, muted by concrete and space. My breath sounds ragged and I feel tears in my eyes and in that instant I hate her.
She stops, but doesn’t withdraw her fingers. She still gives me that plaintive mute stare that generates more questions than answers.
Her eyes glitter. She has the nerve to look as if her world’s been pulled out from under her.
“***** you,” I hiss, hating myself for not saying it before I let her make me come. I roughly yank her hand out of my pants and push past her, giving her a wordless look of my own. I get in my car, pull it out, squealing.
She stands there, framed in the rear-view, looking after me, looking lost.