“I told you,” he said. “Dinner. Dessert. Sex. Life.”
Somehow hearing him say it sort of hurt, because of how much I wanted to believe it versus how much I really did believe it. I told him, “You’re saying that because you think you look good saying it.”
Cole made a dismissive sound. “I am, but I also mean it.”
I removed his hand from my ass so I could think better. “Slower, Cole.”
He sighed, noisy and melodramatic. Then he dropped his head onto my shoulder, breathing into my collarbone. For once not moving, not needing, not asking, not doing. Just holding me, and letting me hold him up.
It was the most shocking thing.
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.
And here was what I was most afraid of: that Cole St. Clair would fall in love with me, and I’d fall in love with him, both of us human weapons, and we’d both end up with broken hearts.
Isabel didn’t come back with me, which meant I was still in the apartment alone, the giant moon observing me through the glass deck doors. I wanted her so badly that I couldn’t think. There were an uncountable number of minutes between now and morning.
I looked at the keyboard, and it looked back. Neither of us was interested in the other.
In the kitchen, I investigated the cameras affixed to the edge of the counter, pointed at the floor. I crouched in front of one and said, “Hello. I’m Cole St. Clair. And this is my instrument.” I straightened and gyrated my hips in front of it for a minute or two. The camera wasn’t a satisfying audience.
I climbed onto the counter to see if I could reach the ceiling. I could. I kicked the toaster onto the floor to see what sort of sound it would make. Not much.
It wasn’t morning yet.
I couldn’t understand Isabel’s resistance to my irresistibility. I could only stand being this furious with wanting her if I thought that she was somewhere wanting me, too. I longed to call her and ask her if this was the case, but even I could tell that such a phone call would violate every parameter she had set for me.
The bed was too much of a commitment, so I crouched on one of the chairs in the living room and picked at threads on the arm until I fell asleep. I dreamed of being awake in a chair that smelled like old ocean water, and I woke up alone with a crick in my neck and the moon still in my face. My heart and lungs were still eating me from the inside, so I got my things and went up to the roof deck.
This late-early night-morning Los Angeles was cool and violet. The moon was just past full, but it was still close enough to be a wide-open eye. I heard the sounds of people laughing from a bar several streets over.
I prowled the deck, running my fingers under the deck railing and the edges of the furniture and around the potted lemon trees. There were no cameras, and I was above most of Venice; all I could see were other roofs. The deck next door was vacant; I thought the entire house was, actually. A rental. And the deck on the other side of that, barely visible in the dark, was also empty.
It was safe. Probably. It was out in the open, so technically it was not bulletproof. But it was close enough. The margin of risk was not large enough for me to even pretend I cared about it. I would get away with it for five to seven to twelve minutes.
I injected and I swallowed and I waited.
When I was a wolf, the space felt smaller. My senses felt fragmented. I kept remembering a young man with a jittering pulse and I saw the world out of his eyes, higher, and then I forgot him. I paced the edge of this space, trapped high above the hissing ground below. The leaves of the lemon trees murmured to me. The smell of nearby food was hot and sweaty. Overhead, a star smeared noisily from one side of the sky to the other.
I put my paws on the edge — sand gritted under the pads of them — and looked down below. Too far to jump. But the world stretched out invitingly nonetheless. I whistled in soft frustration.
Everything in this place called to me, but I was trapped up above.
I fell back into my human body beside the lemon tree’s decorative pot. Lying on my back, I looked up through the leaves of the captive fruit tree. My thoughts and memories slowly reassembled themselves.
Even as a wolf, I wanted more.
Here are things that never get old: the first word said into a recording studio mic, the rough cut of a song, the first play on the radio.
Here are things that do get old: me.
Whatever part of me that had been able to pull off all-nighters or something close before had evidently been left behind in my ill-spent youth, or maybe just in Minnesota. I slept until the sun was high and then discovered I had nothing but an empty donut bag of bored ants for breakfast. I clearly couldn’t work under those conditions, so I went out on foot to hunt/gather (lyric possibility? Jot in notebook)(gather/hunt more interesting as it is unexpected).
(I gather/you hunt/we both miss the trap)
By the time I got back to the apartment, the sun was even higher and Baby was waiting for me.
She sat in one of the two white vinyl chairs in the vestigial sitting area, working away on her iPad. When I slid open my door, she looked up.
“You’re supposed to be working.”
I slid the door shut behind me with my elbow. “I was working.”
“What do you have there?”
I looked at my hands. I couldn’t remember everything I’d gotten. “Stuff. For things. For. Work.”
She watched me unload my arms onto the table in front of her chair: a small wicker basket that crackled very intriguingly and would probably crackle even better into a microphone, a fake ivory candelabra, a not-gently-used Hawaiian shirt in extra large, and a small purple Buddha statue as a welcome-back present for Jeremy.
“This isn’t The Bachelor,” she told me. “I don’t have the budget to stalk you. So you’re going to have to do interesting things when my cameras are there. Or call me when you’re about to do something. Meanwhile, my feelings are hurt that you fired the musicians I picked out just for you.”
I headed to the keyboard. It was a Dave Smith. Maybe my Dave Smith. I didn’t know if it had been liquidated or something when I was reported dead/missing/werewolf (lyric possibility?)(too on the nose)(another word for werewolf?)(beast)(unicorn)(suicide)(jot in notebook?)(nothing to see here).
I pulled out my notebook and wrote nothing to see here in it.
“Cole.”
“What? Oh. I didn’t want a guitarist, and the bass player was totally wrong.”
Baby tapped at something on her iPad. “For the record, he was chosen by users on the show’s forum before you even got here. They knew him by name. It was their way of being involved.”
This was the way I preferred my listeners to be involved: buy the album, come to my shows, know all the words.
I turned on the keyboard. Lights flared across the board. For a moment, I rested my finger on one of the knobs. Just to feel what it was like again. It had been so long. Even though, chronologically, I had spent much more time playing my keyboard on tour than I had playing it at home, it was those early days I remembered now. My first keyboard, my bedroom, morning sun across keys, cell phone photos snapped of the settings, songs hummed with my eyes closed. It was like NARKOTIKA had never happened.
“Get out your phone,” Baby said, “and call him back. Tell him you’ve made a mistake.”
I didn’t even bother to turn around. “No.”
“This is not optional.”
I bristled inside, but I kept my face blank and my voice careless. “Is making a good album optional?”
No answer.
“They didn’t like the first episode?” I knew they had. “They didn’t like Jeremy?”
“I didn’t mean for this to be a NARKOTIKA reunion show. Is Victor going to appear out of the woodwork?”
I could feel the song drain out of me. “I can pretty much guarantee that is not going to happen.”
There was a very long pause from behind me. I heard Baby tapping away at her electronic li
fe while I flicked on the speaker and concentrated on making the biggest, fattest, meanest synth-swell this apartment had ever heard.
The chord grew and grew until I was imagining the album cover and the number of tracks on the back and the feeling of releasing it out into the world to sink or swim — only they always swam; it was only ever me that sank — and wondering what in the world I would call myself if I wasn’t called NARKOTIKA.
Finally, Baby said (loudly, to be heard over the biggest, fattest, meanest synth-swell this apartment had ever heard), “Here is the deal. You aren’t going to take Chip back?”
I released the chord I’d been hitting. The sound slowly trailed off. “Who the hell is Chip? Oh. No. I’m sticking with Jeremy.”
“Then here’s the deal,” she said again. “This is yours now.”
I turned. In her outstretched hand was a phone. “What’s this?”
She didn’t answer until I’d taken it, reluctantly. “Your new work phone. I just signed you up for every social media avenue on the Internet. And I told the world you’re going to be handling all those personally. You want to be able to call the shots on the band? You’re going to have to work twice as hard for it.”
I stared at the phone in my hand. “You have murdered me.”
“You would know if I’d murdered you.”
I groaned.
“Don’t even,” Baby said, standing. “Don’t act like I’m your jailer. Because we both want the same thing. This show does well, I get to do another one. This show does well, you don’t have to tour for the rest of your life. So get to work and don’t forget you have studio time booked for this afternoon.”
I got to work.
Because she was right.
“What’s the next meal?” Cole asked me.
“Lunch,” I replied. I glanced at the classroom door to make sure it stayed closed as I walked in the direction of the girls’ restroom. Bathroom breaks were the only allowed excuse to escape my CNA class, a fact that seemed to trouble only me. The other students in the class seemed genuinely engaged, a concept I could only understand if I told myself they hadn’t read the textbook closely enough to note the redundancies in their learning experiences.
In any case, Cole’s number on my vibrating phone screen was more than enough to make me play the bathroom card. In the hallway, I tried to breathe through my mouth. It takes a certain sort of intestinal fortitude to willingly enter another high school after you’d graduated from your own. The sheer smell of the hall triggered a variety of feelings, any one of which would have been a good topic for a therapy session.
Cole said, “Tell me you want me.”
I pushed into the bathroom. “I have a very short lunch break.”
“I forgot that you were being educated. Teach me something you’ve just been taught.”
“We’re working on professional courtesy. It turns out that no matter how friendly you are with the clients, you’re not supposed to call them sweetie.”
“You are going to make a great C-A-N. C-N-A. Right? Although you do have a great C-A-N.”
In the mirror, my mouth smiled. It looked mean and happy.
“Doctor,” I replied. “I am going to med school. This is just a necessary evil.” Although that wasn’t strictly true. I could probably get into a fine premed program without it. But I didn’t want fine. There was very little point to fine.
“Come get me,” Cole said piteously. “In your car. My car makes me look like a loser.”
“That’s not your car,” I said, and Cole snickered at himself. “I’ll come get you. But I’m picking the place this time.”
I hung up. I didn’t want to go back into class. I didn’t want to do my clinicals this week, either. I didn’t want to roll old people over and clean whatever was left beneath them. I didn’t want to be told by my instructor that I needed to smile when I introduced myself to clients. I didn’t want to have to put the gloves on and have that gross hand-glove feeling that happened after I pulled them off. I didn’t want to feel like I was the only person in the world who hated people.
You’re taking a class in this.
You’re going to be a doctor.
This is life.
In the mirror, I looked stark and out of place in front of the worn stall doors. I wasn’t sure if that was actually how I looked or just how I stood, with my elbows tucked so that nothing in the room would accidentally touch me. That was the rule: Nothing was to touch me.
I didn’t know why I kept letting Cole break it.
An hour later, Cole and I were headed to lunch at an obscure L.A. food establishment.
I wasn’t sure why people still got credit for “finding” obscure places to eat. Friends of your parents took you and your mother to some tiny place that made great omelets or something, and the friends preened as if they’d invented omelets, and your mother’s all, “How did you ever find this place?!” I could tell you the answer: the Internet. Five minutes, a zip code, and cursory access to the Internet would grant anyone the secrets to culinary obscurity.
It pissed me off when people called common sense a magical power. Because if it counted, I was the most magical creature I knew.
I took Cole to a place that I’d discovered with my magical powers, a hole-in-the-wall pie shop that was easy to drive by if you didn’t know where you were going. Outside, the front was painted a deep purple. Inside was L.A. at its most visually appealing. The skinny eat-in area was concrete floors, sparse white walls, and reclaimed wood benches. The air was coffee and butter. The ordering area was tiny and quaint: a cooler with interesting drinks, chalkboard menu, a pie case full of delights. I had tried them all, from the velvety citrus tarts to the salty caramel drizzle chocolate pies.
It was so far from the gross high school classroom that I’d started the day in that it felt as if one or the other must not be real.
We stood in line. I kept finding myself standing too close to Cole, close enough that my shoulder blade pressed into his chest, and then I would realize we were both inhaling and exhaling at the same time.
I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay here with him. Or I wanted to take him with me. I was sometimes so damn tired of being alone —
I suddenly felt strangely and unpleasantly tearful.
I took a deliberate step to one side. Without my body to anchor him, Cole restlessly turned to the drink cooler and then to the shelves of merchandise and then back to the drink cooler and then back to the shelves of merchandise.
“I’m not really a sweets person.” He fingered a T-shirt that I could already tell he wanted to buy purely because it said THE PIE HOLE on it.
I said, “Don’t be a bastard.”
“Then tell me what to get. Apple? That’s a pie.”
“Shut up. I will order for you. In fact, you’re making me crazy pacing. Go get a table out front.”
“Da,” replied Cole, and vanished.
When I came outside, I found him at a tiny metal table in dappled shade, staring at two phones he’d set on the tabletop. There were two other tables, one of which was occupied by a cheerful but very ugly woman and her beautiful but very pissy-looking little dog. The third table was occupied by a camera guy, who I gave the finger. He waved back at me with a guileless smile.
I put Cole’s coffee in front of him and sat down with my back to the camera.
“What did you order for me?” he asked, not lifting his eyes from the devices.
“I’m not going to tell you. It’ll just have to surprise you when it comes out. It’s not apple. What’s that other phone?”
Cole glumly explained Baby’s mandate.
“That’s not that bad,” I said. “So she wants you to talk to your fans?”
“I don’t want to talk to them,” he said. “All they want to talk about is whether I’ll take their virginity or write another song like ‘Villain’ or come play a show in whatever impossibly small place they live in. Did you put sugar in this?”
“No. It’s
a grown-up coffee. I made it for you the grown-up way. Also, you don’t have to be one-on-one. You could just update them in general.”
“Update them! I’m being brilliant. Now I’m being amazing. How tedious that would be for them.”
“Oh, it’s tedious already. Baby knows I’m not on the show, right?”
Cole glanced up at the camera. “Legally, she can use the back of your head but not your face. All that” — he gestured to the street — “is too loud for him to pick up any audio, but — do you want to go inside?”
I thought about how there was a certain dark pleasure to anonymously marking my territory, letting the fangirls know that he already had someone. And my hair looked great from the back.
“No,” I replied. “Drink your coffee.”
Cole took another sip. He looked pained. I slid a sugar packet I had been hiding from behind my mug and he leaped upon it. As he sprinkled its contents into his absolutely already-perfect latte, I picked up the Baby phone. It was a rather nice one.
“Look at the way it sits in your hand.” Cole squinted critically at the phone in my palm. “It respects you. You could be Cole St. Clair, you know.”
I laughed, a little crueler than was strictly necessary. “Oh, I don’t think so. That position is already filled by someone incredibly overqualified.”
“I mean, you could be my voice. Try it. Say something.”
I gave him a scathing look. But the truth was, although Cole was a complicated creature, his projected self was quite simple. I opened Twitter and typed: hi hi hi world.
I hit POST.
I had to admit, it was vaguely thrilling.
“What did I say?” Cole asked.
I showed him.