I studied your pictures for hours. Hours over weeks, because it took that long to arrange a date. Not because of you, because of me—in the aftermath of my breakup, I spent long days on worthless magazine pitches: tired ones about California cuisine, unhinged ones about the erotics of wildfire. Work was the only way to forget Elena. But I was forcing myself to date, at least once, at least to try. I’d clear the air, open myself to possibility.
In your only picture not taken from suspiciously far away, you pursed your lips into a plug of flesh, which was meant to seem fun but made me worry your mouth needed to be obscured. Your skin was clear, your hair greasy, hanging rogueishly around your face, and you looked like a regular suburban girl. You didn’t have cheek piercings or scarification or an explosion of blue hair or sex-nerd acronyms in your profile, like everyone else. Not that I didn’t want my hair pulled, but the terms and outfits leant sexual adventure a corporate air. I still don’t know what a kitten is or a brat or a demi tenderqueer or a switchy top-leaning service bottom, and I refuse to look any of it up. I’m too old at not-even forty. Before I met Elena, almost a decade ago, I’d been on one internet date with a doctor in Wisconsin. By the time I met you I’d spent a month flipping through hundreds of profiles, and I already had rules, at least regarding the terms I could decipher: no sex jargon, no fur mommas, no INFJs, no California sober, no cishet men who accidently listed themselves as mtf instead of m4f, no straight girls arching their backs in bikinis, seeking a unicorn for their man’s thirty-fourth. You were none of these. You were plain, unthreatening, so you were a go.
The moment I entered the historic lesbian bar a few blocks from my apartment and clocked you on a bench, I couldn’t turn from your mouth. It was soft, moved fluently, a separate organism from the rest of you. Your lip rolled down, and seeing the soft interior made me shudder, like spying a nipple nosing through a buttonhole. You were crumpled and skinny amid the swirl of patrons, and your clothes were cut out in the approximate shape of a normal outfit: a chunky-strapped tank top made of a single sheet of plain black cotton, boxy shorts, the edges rolled in complaint from being freshly sliced. But you were shaped like a girl. And there was something lithe and slippery about you, wriggling before your empty beer glass. You couldn’t stop moving, each muscle twitching in a different direction. Then you saw me, and your face brightened like you couldn’t believe your luck, and I drifted toward you. I wasn’t dressed any nicer than you—in a hoodie and jeans—but I was boyish enough that it didn’t matter.
“I know I told you my name is Molly,” you said. “But I go by Stephanie.”
I’d called friends on the East Coast and asked them where we should meet, how to talk to you. What if you didn’t like me? What was the point of dating anyhow? Wasn’t it too soon? Wasn’t I happy enough, alone and heartbroken, across the country from Elena, consoled by dramatic California vistas? The moment you looked at me, with that jumping lip, I sank in relief. You were hungry. I was not.
“Can I get you a beer?” you asked.
“I’ll get you one.” But you didn’t want another beer, you wanted a whisky soda, my order before I quit drinking eight years earlier. I’d decided to indulge in alcohol that night with you, because I couldn’t imagine dating without it. I’d made this decision when you asked me out for a drink, and I began to type that I was sober, and then stopped when I anticipated your follow-up questions. I didn’t feel like explaining. The truth was, I’d quit alcohol after I overdosed on a weed brownie. I tell the story like a joke, but when I remember, I want to die. I ate an entire medical-grade brownie and a chunk of my skull popped free. I vomited and put my hand through a car window and wandered the ritzy beach community where I was reporting a story, knuckles leaking blood on pricey flagstones.
Elena pinned me to the bed and talked me through the next twenty hours, assuring me my brain wasn’t broken. But it was. Whenever I drank or took drugs after that, an evil molasses descended. Since all my brothers are addicts, since both my aunts died from AIDS contracted from heroin needles, since my grandfather hit me when I was five and he was drunk, since my great-grandmother overdosed on pills alone in a room somewhere in 1932, since my eyes bled when I tried cocaine and several times, while blackout drunk, I’d sliced my arm with broken mirrors, I figured I should stop, that even if I wasn’t as bad as my family I would be soon, inevitably, and I did quit, and it was easy, and kind of nice, never worrying about the next day again. But all those sober years I’d had Elena by my side. Elena to hold in cold blood. I couldn’t imagine touching a stranger’s body sober.
So at Liquor Box—whose pun I didn’t register until I spoke the name—I accepted from the bartender my old drink for you and a cool cylinder of beer for myself. The beer was nearly black in its moisture-beaded pint glass, amber light threading through. I set the glasses the wrong way on the table, then switched their positions. You fidgeted like a teenager. Was it possible you were one? Your profile listed you as twenty-six. Maybe twenty-six was just much younger than I remembered.
“So,” I said. “You live in Lafayette?” I was new to California, had moved from Manhattan a few months before, a month after Elena left me, so the names of the towns still evoked magic: Vallejo, Fresno, Port Costa, El Granada, El Cerrito, El Sobrante, Los Altos, Vacaville, Pescadero, Redwood City, Orinda, San Gregorio, Santa Rosa, Half Moon Bay—how could I not want to visit them all? My time was now my own. I could travel to magical Lafayette, discover what classic Bay Area treasures it hoarded: sequoias, wild Pacific coast, brown hills studded with melancholy oaks. Homesteader’s cabins, ghost towns, rocks extruding up from the sand.
“Concord,” you said.
“Oh,” I said. “Your profile said Lafayette.” “I guess,” you said. “I move a lot.”
You said it in the sad way of moving a lot, not the thrilling way. “Do you like where you’re at?”
You shrugged. “I have all these roommates. So that sucks.” “Sounds festive, though.” When I first met Elena she had roommates—she hadn’t even had a door—and it had been fun, falling in love like that, in a nest of dirty law school sheets, lesbians buzzing all around, bringing home girlfriends, sharing cheese. Their comings and goings flapped the curtain that stood for a door, chuckles broadcasting through undulating cotton, while I rested on Elena’s sternum and delighted in her joy in torts.
You snorted. “This one guy, in September? Totally trashed his room. He had secret cats. Like, four secret cats. He moved out the day before rent was due. I had to lease this whole machine that shampoos carpets. It cost forty dollars.”
I let this first nugget of information settle. It had plenty to tell me if I was willing to listen. On the one hand, your living situation was bleak: you lived with people who did not respect you and who liked cats, but on the other hand, you’d cared enough to tend the messy room. You knew where to rent a machine that washed carpets. And the way you’d said “forty dollars” was the way I’d say “four hundred dollars,” at least in my old life. I was relieved I’d bought the drinks.
“Your other roommates wouldn’t contribute?” I asked.
“Fuck no. They wouldn’t even help carry the machine. I was groaning so hard, and they were like, whatever. Shooting Martians.”
“Martians?”
You waved your hand. “Some videogame. I don’t even know if they were Martians. They could’ve been messed-up people.”
I sipped my beer. I’d forgotten how rich and delicious beer was, how it warmed and loosened my rat brain. I wanted to suck the whole syrupy pint down. Why had I ever stopped drinking? The answer dangled in the distance. “Do you hang out with your roommates?” I’d longed for a roommate since my breakup, feet padding the carpet, lazy questions. “No free time, even if they were decent.” You pinched the swivel stick and turned it against the clatter of ice. The sliver of amber plastic was too slick for your fingers, and you lost it to the abyss of whisky. “I work in Oakland, basically filing—it’s not as cool as it sounds. Every night I go to this bar in Concord, an old gay bar like this except more dudes.” I followed your gaze to the rainbow lights and the gawky girls with pixie cuts flirting by the door, unready to release each other. “Anyway, there’s regulars there. This old lady, she comes all the way in from Berkeley. She’s fifty or something. She said if I come live with her, she’ll pay for everything, even clothes and, like, plates.” The strap of your tank top slipped. Once your shoulder was exposed you picked at the skin, pink patches rising. But I couldn’t look away, because you were my gatekeeper into the world of dating. This sturdy face, this unwashed mane. Guarding the wild, unknown, post-breakup land of other girls. “She said I didn’t have to fuck her, but that’s a lie.” You laughed forcefully, demonstrating your gameness not to fuck this old woman—or to fuck her, I couldn’t tell. “And once I did go home with her?” Your eyes skittered to me, checking whether this was cool, whether I’d judge. Would I think you were a slut? Did I care? Was that what would happen tonight? “And there were all these pictures of her girlfriend. This lady with tall yellow hair, like a sponge.” You reached your hands way above your head, higher, too high, fingers wiggling to climb yet higher, sculpting the hips of the sponge. “I thought this old lady was cheating or whatever on the sponge girl, and I didn’t mind. That’s her business, right?”
I thought the question rhetorical, but you waited until I said, “Right.”
“I thought she was cheating and that’s kind of hot or whatever, to me personally. And her house was super nice. We sat on this couch that was so soft I almost fell asleep. So I went through with it. I mean I fucked her,” you added, perhaps seeing I was old, too, though probably not as old as fifty, and might not understand youthful insinuation. “But as soon as we came she starts crying. And I’m like, what?”
You said “what” the way you must’ve said it that night—pleading, lost, begging the tears to climb back inside this woman’s eyes, begging to continue enjoying the couch. I had the sudden urge to offer you an even better couch, velvet, structured, soft as butter, though I had no couch at all. “And it turns out the sponge girl died. Not just from cancer or something normal, but she killed herself, in the house. Maybe even in that room, the lady didn’t say.” The speed drained from your voice as you tripped over what the sponge girl had done, and you sat there, one hand on your whisky, the other pinching your shoulder, head bowed so scraps of hair fell in your face—your hair was appealingly wild. “She said I had to leave.”
“What?”
“I couldn’t sleep over. This was in Berkeley. The hills. I had to drive all the way to Lafayette in the middle of the night.” You threw back the rest of your whisky, your bottom lip damp and revived.
“I thought you live in Concord.”
“Oh. Well, yeah, sure. I moved.” You worked a piece of ice from your mouth and slid it across your big lip, cooling it.
Sitting across the table, watching you detail your story—no mother, two brothers, a childhood in Martinez, another beautiful name—it was too much. You were becoming whole and I couldn’t have that. I conjured Elena’s small body, her fuzzy hair, our fights over compromises and who’d made more—I’d been stuck in Manhattan a decade for her law career, but she didn’t consider that a compromise. She wanted, always, more from me: more time, more tidiness, more maturity, leading to fights that built to Elena frozen in a silent tower of recrimination, me dancing around her, louder and so desperate for her attention that, once, six months ago, I bit my own arm so hard I swallowed blood. Elena came at me with love: hugging me, tending my wound, insisting I shouldn’t hate myself like that, not ever, and I’d filled with power knowing that, as extreme as my action was, I’d turned the fight around, had pulled us closer. That old scene—blood sliding over my molars, Elena’s cheeks pinkening with affection—spooled out behind my eyes as you sipped your second whisky and described your dead greyhound named Jellyroll. We split a third drink, migrating into a deeper room, darker, mildewed and close with the smell of bodies, with folding chairs and tinsel and rubber molds of vulvas, like an erotic community center. I was making this date happen. I wasn’t running into the night to hide. I settled beside you. I couldn’t work out a rhythm for passing our beer. Sometimes you took custody of the glass for a while and enjoyed luxurious swallows over the course of many minutes, while on other turns you barely sipped before thrusting the drink back at me like it was boiling. A lesbian with crisp hair squeezed past, patting my knee with a hand still damp from the bathroom. She gave us a blank look, like we didn’t belong together.
I was relieved that someone here knew me that well, at least.
“Have you ever had a girlfriend?” you asked, clutching our shared beer with two hands. You pronounced the word like some rare, impossible accomplishment.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Wow,” you said, sliding the beer back to me. “Are you still friends?
Or do you still have her now?”
“I don’t have her now.” I stroked the surface of the beer with the pad of my pinkie, forgetting it was both of ours. You hid your mouth behind your shoulder, squirming like I’d touched you. I licked my finger and you closed your eyes.
Your lids, when they fell down, were smooth and soft. You looked peaceful and vulnerable and sweet. I wanted to lean forward and kiss your eyes, wanted to hold you as the bar rattled around us, the sticky chairs under our asses disappearing. We could stop talking, just press against each other and let my breathing slow for the first time in months.
I wanted to stay in that peaceful feeling forever, but you opened your eyes. Their light startled me. “Why not?” you asked.
Elena and I had turned tranquil in the weeks after the bite, like I’d cast a spell. I’d been relaxed and happy for the first time in years. I’d laid my head on her belly while she dropped gummy bears between my teeth, lazily proofing a deposition. A month later, I woke to find her in the kitchen, sitting high, hair brushed. I froze in the threshold, knowing already. Since the bite she’d asked nothing of me, and I’d felt relieved. But of course. This was why. She explained, her voice controlled, that she’d been thinking over our fights and had decided the bite was physical abuse. I hadn’t argued. I’d been so ashamed that I hadn’t realized until weeks later, heaving my stuff into a new apartment across the country, four steps wide and seven long, that her assessment was unjust. Because the bite was melodrama, maybe, violent, yes, immature, but it wasn’t abuse. I’d acted like an animal, had behaved disturbingly, but I hadn’t harmed her. If I had, I would’ve killed myself. “We just didn’t work out,” I told you, over the remainder of our beer.
“It’s last call,” you said.
“I should go.” I stood up and had to sit back down immediately. I’d forgotten how the dim bar light could disguise how gone I was. The feeling was worse than the molasses.
We left. I weaved close to you down the block, my wrist grazing yours. I was surprised to buzz at the bump.
“Want a ride?” you asked.
Desire stung me. We reached your car. At first I thought you were joking, or confused, when you paused at the flank of the sunken sedan. Though the car was normal enough on the outside—two doors, charcoal, scratch on the hood but recently washed—inside it was full to the ceiling with trash, the kind of car that makes you worry for its owner. My focus sharpened through my haze. There were expected items in the slurry—books, sweaters, extra shoes—appropriate for the shifting Bay Area weather and traffic, for the surprise beach or hike. But there were worrying items, too—giant soda cups, tinfoil, bright red parking tickets, lighters, pipes, broken umbrellas, wadded blankets, a slumped pillow, cereal boxes bleached by the sun, sealed shut with fruit stickers.
“I can walk.” The idea of squeezing into that mess turned my stomach.
“This will take two seconds.”
You opened the passenger door, releasing a sweet, close odor: particles of you. Cans tumbled out, underwear, a packet of dry shampoo that exploded over the concrete. You didn’t move to collect what had fallen. You stuck your torso deeper into the car and shoveled items to the back. I was fascinated by the Milky Way of dust on the asphalt—how many washes lost? I dangled behind, but two seconds passed, then three, then seventy.
“That’s good,” I said.
“Hang on.” You lifted an armload of shopping bags and hamburger wrappers and launched them deeper into the car. Wrapper-fists bounced back into the front seat.
“Do you live in here?”
“No way.” Your arms shook under a gallon jug of blue liquid. “This is my friend’s stuff. I’m dropping it off for him later.”
Did you think I was stupid, or that I didn’t care? My throat melted. Maybe you’d been the roommate who’d left before rent was due, the carpet steamer a figment of guilt. I steadied my hands to gather the remains of the dry shampoo. I didn’t want you to lose any clean days. You freed yourself from the car. I held out my hands. You batted the packet to the ground, the scent of raspberry erupting with the pink powder, then flung your head back and laughed. Your laugh was thin and terrified, and I had the urge to hug you.
You drove the five blocks to my house while I sat up to my knees in candy wrappers and cigarette cartons and the carcass of a kite. When I kicked the kite to make room for my feet, its tail tangled around my ankles. I pictured the green diamond floating in the sky, me dangling upside-down from its string.
“Thanks for the ride.” My voice came out slow, sensual. I cupped my mouth.
“You already said that,” you said. “It smells good in here.”
You glanced at me as though checking whether I was joking. But it did. Berries all around, a bush heavy with cartoon berries. You turned back to the road. Your neck, arched over the steering wheel, was thinner than it had been in the bar, too slender to bear your skull. I looked away, as though my gaze could snap it.
We found you a parking spot almost as distant as the bar and walked to my house. We crept up the stairs past the neighbors and, in my room at last, plugged in the Christmas lights. We stood around, limbs unwieldy in the small space, before we settled on my bed because I had no couch, our backs against the wall, our focus aimed resolutely at the window. Beyond the glass was a house in which a heterosexual couple that had divorced continued living together in order to “challenge traditional relationship structures” and who now watched television all evening, casting an aqua square on my floor. By the time we’d inched toward each other until our hips grazed, I was completely sober.
“How long have you lived here?” you asked, in awe of my institutional box of a studio.
“Just a few months,” I said. “I came out from New York.”
This, of all the moments that night, was the one I needed to be tipsy for. But my focus was sharp on your renegade hair and homemade outfit, strings poking from the seams. And that lip, pulsing, restless.
Your irises rolled toward me, your spine straight, fingers pinching the flesh on your knees. You were as twitchy as a squirrel. You were waiting for me to kiss you, and you were so obvious that I couldn’t bear to do it, as though the moment my lips met yours, you’d burst. But now that we were in my room and you’d parked on my bed, kissing you was the only route through. I could’ve turned back at any earlier moment—could’ve had just one drink or just two, could’ve declined the ride. I could’ve left upon finding you at Liquor Box, or at your car packed with trash. Were your roommates real? The secret cats and the sugar-mommy widowed by suicide? I’d come this far, right? What was the point of your chronicles of carpet shampooers if I wasn’t going to kiss you, at some point, in the end? I had to break the seal. Then dating would turn easy and normal. The suburban girl from your pictures was in you, in your healthy cheeks, your graceful arms draped at your flanks.
“Why’d you leave?” you said. “New York, I mean.” I hesitated. “My life fell apart.”
A long, low exhale. “I’m glad it’s all better now.” You peered at the postcards curling from my walls, the string of lights thrown in a tangle over my desk and around the former tenant’s crispy plant. And then your hand was on my arm, so soft, sliding up. You pushed back my sleeve.
I’d gone a hot California autumn in long-sleeved shirts, had become an expert in which materials adhere to sweat. I tried not to look at the scar, which was worse than the original wound, keloid ridges extruding up in gooey beads.
“What happened to you?”
“A wolf,” I said, the first thought that came to mind. The mark did look like a wolf bite, or how I’d imagine one—merciless, unflinching, with no hesitation marks. A dog would’ve been more believable, but a dog would’ve been less certain than I’d been. By the time I’d bitten myself, Elena had already drifted so far away. I’d believed some extreme action, some shared trauma, would draw us close again. And so here was the wolf’s assured mark.
I looked up from the bite, face twisted and chagrined, expecting you to laugh, to spit on me, to leave. After all, you’d known actual pain. You had that car parked out there with your smell infusing it, a dense sleep smell, private and thick. Wolves did not bite city lesbians. And the scar was in the exact spot I could reach with a turn of my head—wasn’t it obvious? But you regarded me with shiny-eyed sympathy. “A real wolf?” “In Yellowstone.” I’d passed through on my drive out here, hadn’t even seen a squirrel.
You squinted. “How’d he get you?” I swallowed. “It was my fault.”
“You’re messing with me.” You sat back, hair falling over your ears. “What really happened?”
My throat went rigid. “Really.”
“You brought me here just to lie?” You cocked your head. You were curious.
“I’m not lying.”
You watched me for a long time, wheels turning behind your face. Then, your mouth softened, loosening, like you’d made a decision. “It must’ve hurt like hell.”
“It did.”
As soon as I turned my head one click toward you, you snatched me with your mouth. You shoved me down so hard the mattress banged my spine. You crawled on top of me and kissed me animatedly, like we knew each other all of a sudden, with that great, active lip, like your kissing could free me from the wolf. You kissed me like you cared and affection splashed through me. Once your mouth was on me, I couldn’t isolate your lip, couldn’t decide whether it wiggled any more than your muscular tongue or your top lip, even your teeth, all of which worked together to press the back of my skull deep in the wool blanket Elena had bought me, though she hated wool blankets, for my last birthday, like she already knew I’d cuddle in it without her.
In minutes, we were naked. Possible mediocre maker of clothes, you were a genius at removing them. I barely had time to acclimate to my own body before I confronted yours, pink starbursts where you’d pinched your skin, breasts swinging like angry tubes. This body coming at me, so different from the one I’d aged alongside for a decade. You had smaller breasts and bigger hips than Elena, rougher skin and a three-dimensional mole like a coffee bean beside your nipple, a torso so skinny that every dent in your ribcage showed, where Elena had a wide, soft stomach I could nuzzle into. Your face was tight with intensity, like you wanted all of me, forever, and you bit my neck and chest. You were a whirlwind of flesh, touching and nipping everywhere, and for the first and only time in my life I understood what it meant to have sex with a young guy—that uncontrolled energy, that sloppy touch, that indifference to the experience of anyone else. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get ahold of your breast or shoulder, couldn’t stroke your cheek. The light was too bright, my mind too sharp. Your touch sparked when your hand landed in the right place, when your tempo slowed, here and there, but I was too aware of every crease and raspberry whiff, every detail of you sourer or slipperier or rougher than Elena. And your dirty talk, like a bad audition.
“Slap me,” you said, the first proper words you’d spoken since we kissed. You were still above me—you’d been on top forever, and I had to unpeel my spine from the bed to reach around for enough airspace to bring the flat of my hand down on your ass. The angle weakened my
delivery, the sound a dry puff. “No,” you said. “Slap my face.”
“What?” I said. “No. I’m not doing that.” “Yes,” you said. “You are.”
Your hand rubbed between my legs, itchy and mashing. I would’ve done anything to stop it, except ask you. Asking seemed impolite, aggressive, so I lay there, frozen, hoping you’d notice I’d turned off. “Fine.”
You rolled free and kneeled on the bed whose covers we hadn’t drawn back: eyes bright, spine straight, my good dog. You were motionless for the first time, every muscle engaged.
“How do I do it?” I asked.
“Just slap me,” you said. “In the face.” “But how do you like it?” I was stalling.
“Real,” you said, shaking back your hair. “None of that stage shit.” I wished I hadn’t asked. I’d have given you the stage shit for sure. “Come on,” you said, bouncing on your knees. “I can’t stand waiting.”
Your face was bright, your neck. You were rigidly upright, a child awaiting dessert. You were turned on. Only seeing you like this did I realize you hadn’t been before. The flopping and nipping and mewling—all that had been show. This, your naked body calm and ready, this was you for real. My chest loosened. The sweet way you closed your eyes in the bar returned to me. What if we were both here, together for real, on this bed, your car cleaned out because you no longer had to live in it. The idea made no sense, but for a flash I could see us, filling up this tiny apartment. The notion overwhelmed me, a blast of light filling my head. I shook it out. Shut up. I was always trying to live in fantasy. My arm shuddered as I lifted my hand above my shoulder, higher. Maybe if I exaggerated the wind-up, your anticipation would enrich the pain. You closed your eyes, your hands resting on your knees. Your cheeks pinkened.
I’d strike you lightly. I had no confidence in my ability to hurt you worse than that. I’d long flirted with masochism—over-zealous scab-picking in early childhood, cutting on the eve of puberty, the glass slicing my arm, the bite. But I’d never touched sadism. But there was my hand, gathering speed as it arced toward you, the momentum of my arm siphoning into my palm—it was your eagerness, how you wanted something from me, anything, even if it was only pain; it was the released energy of this whole date, getting drunk when I’d stopped years ago; it was the wildness of your lip, and that’s where I was aiming, for that wet seam in the center of your face, my hand faster now, displacing the air, and landing at once, too early, with a crack.
The impact rushed to my groin. Could skin make such a sound, like steel, like a car crumpling against a guardrail? Tremors echoed through my arm. You moaned. A sexy moan, but no, you were holding your lip. The skin had split. Could skin split from a slap? No, it could not, that was the point of a slap, why it was selected, in moments like these, over a punch or a kick in the face. A slap was painful but left no mark. Whoever heard of a black eye from a slap? But a shadow was gathering around your eye, an eye I hadn’t so much as touched. My hand felt fine, my palm the same color as my other palm, soft-bellied, harmless. I seized my hand like it had betrayed me.
“Jesus,” you said, hanging onto your face, your voice threading out thin and young.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” I said. “Yes, you did.”
“Not that hard, I mean.”
“You did,” you spat, cheeks darkening. “You’re fucking with me.”
You gave me Elena’s hard look, your idea of me draining away. My hand was my own, my arm, my teeth.
I had no right to be hurt, or sad, but dark oil welled inside me. Before I could hurt you again, I pitched off the mattress, scrambling, graceless. “What’s wrong?” You fingered the bruise by your eye like you could feel the color.
⸻
Down on the sidewalk, in the dry Oakland night, we didn’t share a word. My hands shook as your lip bled into a clutch of toilet paper, the only treatment you’d accept. I’d offered to walk you back to your car because I felt both guilty and grateful you were leaving. You shuffled ahead, past the palm trees and motel-style apartment buildings. My neighborhood suddenly looked smaller and too thoroughly known: instead of forests and beaches to be explored, my world was suburban, contracting, and dirty. Fire season had just ended, and ash softened protected ledges, not enough wind or rain to clear it.
When we reached your car, you looked beyond my shoulder, disengaged. You said, flatly: “Sorry about the wolf.”
“What?” I looked behind me—I’d seen a coyote once, slung low and ratty, maybe one had died in the road—but of course, there was nothing. “It’s okay. He got shot.”
The night I’d bitten myself, rust sprang into the back of my mouth, flooding the root of my tongue, and that look on Elena’s face, of true, maternal love—her reaction overriding my physical pain—she wanted to hold me, beaming concern so intoxicating that I’d longed to bite myself again, deeper this time, to pull free a cube of my arm. But now that I’d seen what I could do, I knew Elena was right to leave. A ghost left my body, and I straightened in relief.
You sat in your car, rolled down the passenger window. “Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked.
“Yes,” you said, but your tone said the opposite.
You craned up to kiss me—automatically, maybe, because your face was still wrinkled in concern. As you approached, that lip that was darkening and swelling now, I wished I could kiss you back. I missed the chaos of ten minutes ago. All that fervent, unhappy fucking, driven by pity about the wolf.
After that night, I’d try to track you down. I’d feel awful that I hadn’t apologized, hated to think of you walking around battered, me responsible. But I couldn’t find you anywhere. You blocked me, deleted your profile, and I couldn’t unearth a Molly or a Stephanie who looked anything like you in Lafayette or Concord or Martinez. But of course those were the wrong names, the wrong towns.
“I can’t,” I said, stepping back from your car before your lips reached mine. Your body relaxed. You shifted into drive. In a moment, I’d be alone again. Alone on the street and then alone in my apartment, Elena infusing every warped paperback, every bottle of aging vanilla extract. Beside you in the passenger seat was the cavity I’d carved, the holes for my legs still forced through candy wrappers and cigarettes and the kite.
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