Falling into You [COMPLETED]✓

Fermented Grief

We arrive at my shop, an old garage with the door facing an alley, a little apartment above. I pull my keys from my pocket, open the side door to the shop, and snap on the lights.  Cracked, stained concrete floor; hanging, flickering fluorescent lights in warped cages; stack after stack of red and silver tool chests along the walls; counters with more tools hanging from hooks; chains from the ceiling suspending engines; the metal frame of a ’66 Mustang Shelby GT; a couple huge gray plastic garbage cans and overflowing ashtrays and abandoned beer bottles and pizza boxes… “It’s not much, but it’s mine.” I laugh. “It’s really, really not much. I can’t believe I brought you here. It’s so dirty and ugly.”  I’m seeing it for the first time, in a way. I’ve never brought a girl here before. I’ve brought girls to my place before, but they never want to see the shop; they’re only interested in the bed. I look around, seeing what she must see.  Then she surprises me. “I love it. It…feels like home. It’s a place that you obviously love.” I stare at her. “It is home. I may sleep upstairs, but this garage is home. More than you know.”  I think of all the times I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor where the Mustang is now, before the apartment upstairs was renovated to be livable. I bought this place for a pittance, because it was a dump. Rejected, abandoned, unwanted. Like me. I fixed it up. Made it mine.  She lets go of my hand and wanders around the shop, pulling open drawers and examining tools, which look bulky and awkward and dirty in her clean, delicate hands. She always puts the tools back exactly where they were. I wonder if she realizes how anal I am about that, or if she’s just polite. Probably just polite. We really don’t know each other at all. She couldn’t know about my OCD about the tools. “Show me what you do,” she says. I shrug. I point at the engine. “That engine there.” I walk over and run my finger around the opening of a piston. “I bought it at a junkyard a few weeks ago. It was rusted and dirty and ruined, basically. It was in an old car that had been in a wreck, rear-ended and totaled. A ’77 Barracuda. I took the engine, fixed the parts I could fix, replaced the ones I couldn’t. I took it apart completely, down to the components.” I pull the tarp off a long, wide table in a corner, showing a dissected motor, each part laid out in a very specific pattern. “Like this. Then I put it all back together, one piece at a time, until you see it there. It’s almost done. Just gotta install a few more parts and it’s done, ready to be put into a car.” She looks from the table to the reassembled motor. “So you turned that—” she points at the pieces on the table, “into that?” I shrug. “Yeah. Those are completely different engines, but yeah.” “That’s amazing. How do you know where all the different parts go? How to fix them?” I laugh. “Lots of experience. I know from having done it a million times. All engines are basically the same, just with little differences that make each kind of engine unique. I took my first motor apart when I was…thirteen? Of course, once I got it apart, I couldn’t get it back together again, but that was part of the learning process. I tinkered with that fucked-up engine for months, figuring out how the thing worked, which parts went where and what they did and how to get them back in. Eventually I did get it back together and running, but it took me, like, I don’t know, more than a year of dicking around with it every day. I took it apart again, and put it back together after that. Over and over again, until I could do it without stopping to think about what came next.” She tilts her head. “Where’d you get the engine?” I stare up at the ceiling, trying to remember. “Hmm. I think I bought it off the shop teacher at the high school. I’d saved my allowance for months.” She still looks confused, and I laugh. “I had a tutor at the high school after classes ended at the middle school. I happened to walk by the shop one day and saw the engine, and something just clicked as I watched the shop instructor, Mr. Boyd, puttering with it. He ended up being one of my best friends until I moved out here.” Nell is peering at me as if seeing me for the first time. “You had a tutor?” I wince, wishing she’d have missed that part. “Yeah. I wasn’t very good at the whole school thing.” I turn away and throw the tarp over the table, and lead her to the private stairway leading to my apartment. It’s my way of politely indicating I don’t want to talk about it, and she seems to get the message.  Saying I wasn’t very good at the school thing was a huge understatement, but she doesn’t need to know that. I’m hoping to avoid the subject as long as I can. My apartment isn’t much. A galley kitchen I can barely fit in—like, I can’t have the stove and the cabinets opposite open at the same time, not that I ever use the stove, but still—a living room in which I can just about touch all four walls standing in the center, and a bedroom that contains my queen bed and nothing else. All my clothes are in the dresser, which is in the living room, and the dresser also doubles as the TV stand. Not that I ever really watch TV. I throw my arm out to gesture at the apartment. “It’s even less than the shop, but it’s home. I’d say I would give you the ten-cent tour, but I’d need to give you nine and a half cents back.” She laughs, the Tinkerbell giggle, and my heart lifts. But even with all the normality, the questions, the interest, I can see her fighting for calm. She hides it well, hides it like a pro. It’s buried deep, thrust down under the surface.  I respect the hell out of her for how hard she’s working to be okay. I just wish she’d let me show her how to let go, how to let herself hurt. I want to take her pain.  She’s plopped down onto the couch, and I can see the exhaustion in her eyes, in her posture. I leave her sitting on the couch, head back, legs splayed out. Making sure my room isn’t a complete pigsty, I change the sheets and add an extra blanket, then go back out to tell her she can crash in my bed. She’s already passed out in the position she sat down in. I lift her easily. She’s light as a feather, like an actual, factual fairy, made of glass and magic and fragile porcelain and deceptive strength. I set her in the bed, tug off her shoes, then debate whether to take her pants off for her or not.  Selfishly enough, I decide to go for it. I mean, I know I hate sleeping in pants, so I can’t imagine she does, either. I pop the button, slide the zipper down, grip the denim at her hips, and pull. She wriggles, lifts her hips, and I pull them down to her knees. The sight of her thighs and her pale cream skin is almost too much for me to take, especially with her tiny yellow thong, barely disguising the tender “V” in which I want so desperately to bury my face, my body. I can’t help my fingers from tracing a featherlight line across her thigh, just a brief touch, but too much. And not nearly enough. I jerk myself away and scrub my hands over my face, through my hair, fighting for control.  I turn back, close my eyes, and peel her jeans off the rest of the way. As I’m in the process of pulling them past her toes, she speaks, muzzy and sleepy and ridiculously goddamn cute. “You’ve already seen me in my panties. Why the shy guy now?” I settle the blankets at her neck, and she presses them down with her elbows on the outside, staring up at me with long fluttering lashes and tangled strawberry blonde hair wisping across her perfect features. I back away before I give in to the temptation to brush the hair away with my callused fingertips. I can’t read the expression on her face. She just looks so fucking vulnerable, as if all the hurt is coming up and boiling over and she’s barely keeping it in, now that sleep has nearly claimed her. “That was an asshole move,” I say. “I shouldn’t have done that. You were asleep, I didn’t want—” “It was sweet,” she says, cutting in over me. “I’m a lot of things, Tinkerbell. Sweet ain’t one of them.” I brush my hand through my hair, a nervous gesture. “I only closed my eyes so I wouldn’t feel you up in your sleep.” Her eyes widen. “You wanted to feel me up?” I don’t quite succeed in stifling my laugh of disbelief; she doesn’t understand how bad I want her. Good for her. She can’t know.  I take a step closer to her, next to the bed, and I just can’t summon the strength to resist. A strand of hair lies across her high, sculpted cheekbone. I brush it away, mentally cursing my weakness. “You have no clue, Nell.” I back away before my mouth or my hands betray me further. “Sleep, and think of blue.” She snorts. “Think of blue?” “It’s a technique I learned to keep bad dreams away,” I tell her. “As I fall asleep, I think of blueness. Not things that are blue, just…an endless, all-encompassing sense of blue. Ocean blue, sky blue.” “Blue like your eyes.” Her voice is unreadably soft. I shake my head, smirking. “If that’s what brings you peace, then sure. The point is, think of a soothing color. Picture it floating through you, in you, around you, until you are that color.” I shrug. “It helped me.” “What do you dream about?” Her eyes are awake, and piercing. I turn away and flick the light off, speak facing away from her. “Nothing for you to worry about. Bad things. Old things.” I turn back to glance at her, and her eyes are heavy again. “Sleep, Nell.” I close the door behind me and retreat into the kitchen. It’s nearly five in the morning by this point, and I’m beyond exhausted. I was up at seven yesterday finishing a Hemi rebuild, and the guys are going to be here to start working on the ’Stang around eight. I end up writing a note and leaving it taped to the frame, saying I won’t be in today. They know what to do. Perk of being the boss, I guess. I trudge back up the stairs and slump back on the couch, eyes heavy but brain whirling. I’ll never get to sleep at this rate. I curse under my breath, trying to banish images of Nell’s naked thighs, begging to be caressed. It’s not working.  Desperate times call for desperate measures. In the top drawer of my dresser is a little white medicine box. I keep it for times like this, when I can’t sleep, can’t stop thinking. It’s a holdover from the bad old days. I roll a pin-thin joint and smoke it slowly, savoring it. I rarely smoke these days. I don’t even remember the last time, to be honest.  I gave up hard drinking, gave up cigarettes, gave up pot, gave up a lot of other shit when I decided to get my life straight. But every rare once in a while, a little bit of weed is a necessity. I pinch off the cherry and stow the kit, and I’m finally lying down on the couch, fading away, when I hear it. Strained, high-pitched humming. An odd noise, scary, tense. As if she’s struggling with every fiber of her being not to sob, teeth clenched. I can almost see her rocking back and forth, or curled into a fetal position. I’m through the door and cradling her in my arms in the space of three heartbeats. She fits on my lap, against my chest, in my arms so perfectly. She’s shuddering, trembling, every muscle flexed. I brush her hair back with my fingers, cup her cheek, feel the tension in her jaw. The noise is coming from deep inside her, dragged up from the bottom of her soul. It breaks my heart. Wrecks me.  “Nell. Look at me.” I tip her chin up, and she jerks away, burrows against my chest, as if she wants to climb between my ribs and nestle in the spaces between my heart and my lungs. “Okay, fine. Don’t look at me. But listen.” She shakes her head, and her fingers grip my bicep so hard I’ll have bruises later. She’s crazy strong.  “It’s not okay,” I tell her. This gets her attention; it’s not what she was expecting. “You don’t have to be okay.” “What do you want from me?” Her voice is ragged, desperate. “I want you to let yourself be broken. Let yourself hurt.” She shakes her head again. “I can’t. If I let it out, it’ll never stop.” “Yes, it will.” “No, it won’t. It won’t. There’s too much.” She judders, sucks in a fast breath, and shakes her head in a fierce denial. “It’ll never stop coming out, and I’ll be empty.” She tries to climb off me, and I let her. She tumbles off the bed, falls to her hands and knees on the floor, scrambles away, and stumbles into the bathroom. I hear her vomit, retch, and stifle a sob. I move to stand in the doorway and watch her. She’s got her forearm gripped in clawed fingers, squeezing so hard trickles of blood drip where nails meet flesh.  Pain to replace pain. I step in front of her, take her chin in my hand, and force her to look at me. She closes her eyes, jerks away. The sight of her blood makes me panic. I can’t watch her hurt herself. I wrestle with her hand, but she won’t let go, and if I force her, she’ll only hurt herself worse.  I need to know what’s driving this girl. What’s devouring her. “Tell me.” I whisper the words to her, rough and raw in the unlit bathroom, gray dawn filtering through dirty glass. “He’s dead.” “That’s not enough.” “It’s everything.” I sigh deeply, glare at the top of her head. She feels it, finally looks up at me with red-laced eyes. Sad, haunted, angry eyes. “Don’t fucking lie to me, Nell.” The words are grating and too harsh. I regret them, but keep going. “Tell me.” “No!” She shoves me back so hard I stumble.  She sinks backward, shrinking down into a ball in front of the toilet, next to the tub. I kneel down, creep forward as if approaching an injured, skittish sparrow. I am, really. She’s clawing her nails up and down her thighs, leaving red, ragged scratch marks. I catch her hands and still them. God, she’s strong. I heave another sigh, then scoop her up into my arms again and carry her into the bedroom.  I cradle her against me and settle onto the bed, slide down with her until her head is pillowed on my chest and I’m holding her tight, squeezing hard, clutching her wrists in one of mine. She’s frozen, tensed. I take long, even breaths, stroke her hair with my free hand. Gradually she begins to relax. I count her breaths, feel them even out, and then she’s limp on top of me, sleeping, twitching as she delves into slumber. I wait, stay awake, knowing what’s coming.  She moans, writhes, begins to whimper, and then she’s awake and making that fucking horrible high-pitched whining noise in her throat again. I hold her tight, refuse to let go. She struggles against me, waking up.  “Let me go!” she growls. “No.” “Let me fucking go, Colton.” Her voice is tiny, scared, vulnerable, and vehement. “You let go.” “Why?” A hitch in her voice. “Because holding on to it is killing you.”  “Good.” She’s still struggling, thrashing against my hold.  “‘There’s a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It would be a pity to ruin yours.’” She stops thrashing and laughs. “Did you just quote The Princess Bride at me?” “Maybe.” She laughs, and the laugh turns into a sob, quickly choked off. I sigh. “Fine. How ’bout I start?” I really don’t want to do this. “When I came to New York, I was seventeen. I had five dollars in my pocket, a backpack full of clothes, a package of Ritz crackers, a can of Coke, and nothing else. I knew no one. I had a high school diploma, barely, and I knew I could fix any engine put in front of me. I spent the first day I got off the bus looking for a mechanic garage, trying to find a job. No one would even let me apply. I hadn’t eaten in two days. I slept on a bench in Central Park that night, at least till the cops made me move.” I have her interest now. She’s still in my arms, staring up at me. I’m speaking to the ceiling, because her eyes are too piercing.  “I nearly starved to death, to be honest. I knew nothing. I’d grown up privileged, you know my dad, how much my parents have. I’d never even had to make my own food, wash my own clothes. Suddenly, I’m alone in this insane city where no one gives a shit about anyone else. Dog eat dog, and all that.” “How’d you survive?” “I got in a fight.” I laugh. “I had a nice little spot to sleep beneath a bridge, and this old bum comes along and says it’s his spot and I have to move. Well, I hadn’t really slept in days, and I wasn’t about to move. So we fought. It was sloppy and nasty, since I was hungry and tired and scared, and he was old and tough and hard, but I won. Turns out this guy was watching the whole thing. He came up to me after I won and asks if I wanted to make a quick hundred bucks. I didn’t even hesitate. He brings me to this old warehouse in a shitty part of I don’t even know where. A back alley in Long Island, maybe. He feeds me, gives me a cold beer. I was a new man after that. He brings me down into the basement of this warehouse where there’s a bunch of people in a circle, cheering and shit. I hear the sounds of a fight.”  Nell gasps, and I can tell she knows where this is going. “Yeah. I won. The guy I fought was huge, but slow. I’d been in my share of trouble in high school, so I knew how to fight. This guy was just big and strong, no technique. I did three fights that night, all in a row. Took an awful beating in the last one, but I won. Made four hundred bucks, and that was how I started. Then I met Split. He was at one of the fights and offered me a job, sort of. Said he needed someone to be muscle for him, collecting debts, be scary. Well, I could do scary. So I went with Split and I…well, it wasn’t bare-knuckle prize fighting. Intimidation, mostly. People owed him for favors, for drugs…I’d solve the problem. That’s how I met Split, how I ended up in the Five-One Bishops.” “A gang?” “Yes, Nell. A gang.” I sigh. “They were my family. My friends. They fed me, gave me a bed to sleep in. Gave me booze to drink and pot to smoke and girls to roll. Sorry, but it’s the truth. I’m not proud of some of the shit I did, but those guys, they were tight. Honorable, most of ’em, in their own way. They’d never, ever betray me, no matter what. They’d back my play, no questions asked. Even now, years out of the game, living clean and honest, working for myself, if I called them, they’d come, and they wouldn’t flinch to do whatever I asked.” “Like Split today.” I nod against her hair. “Exactly.” “Tell me the truth, Colton. Where did he take Dan?” I shrug. “I honestly don’t know. I told him I didn’t want to know. I told Split I didn’t want a body on my conscience, though, but I also didn’t want you to ever have to worry about Dan again. So forget him.” A long silence, and I knew she was formulating a question. “Do you?” “Do I what?” “Have bodies on your conscience?” I don’t answer. “Does it matter?” “Yes. To me it does.” “Yes. I do.” I hesitate for a long moment. “You can’t understand that life, Nell. You just can’t. It was survival.” “I guess I can get that.” “But?” She sighs. “I don’t understand why you came here alone with no money. What about college? Why didn’t your parents help you? Do they know about how you survived?” I shake my head and examine my knuckles. “That’s a different conversation.” “My turn?” “Yes,” I say. “Your turn.” “You know the story, Colton. Kyle died.” I growl low in my chest. “There’s more.” I lift her wrist to trace the scars there. “That’s not enough to make you do this.” She doesn’t answer for so long I wonder if she’s fallen asleep. Eventually she speaks, and when she does it’s a raw whisper. I barely breathe, not daring to interrupt. “We were up north. Your parents’ cabin. We’d been dating for over two years, and we were so excited to be taking a vacation together, like adults. Your parents and mine gave Kyle and me the talk about being careful, even though we’d been sleeping together for almost two years by that point. Until then it seemed to be ‘don’t ask don’t tell,’ I guess. I don’t know. But we had a great time. Swimming, sitting by the fire, having sex. I…god…god…I can’t.” She’s struggling so hard against her emotions. I comb my fingers through her hair and scratch her back. She continues, her voice tight, but a bit stronger. “Sunday, the last day, it was stormy. Rain so hard you couldn’t see shit, windy as hell. I mean, I’ve never seen wind like that, ever, before or since. Those huge pine trees around the cabin were bent nearly double.” She pauses, panting as if exhausted, then continues in a much softer and more vulnerable voice. “A tree fell. It should have hit me…it almost did hit me. I saw it falling toward me, and I couldn’t move. Some of the nightmares, it’s that moment I see, over and over again, the tree coming for me. Those are the nice and easy nightmares. A split second before it hit me, Kyle knocked me out of the way. I mean, he straight-up football-tackled me. Knocked me flying. I landed on my arm. I don’t remember hitting the ground, but I remember coming to and feeling pain like a white wave, and seeing bones sticking out of my forearm, the whole bone bent almost at a ninety-degree angle.” I barely hear the next words. “I should have died. He saved me. It hit him instead. Broke him. Just…fucking shattered him. A branch broke and—and impaled him. I can still see the blood coming out of his mouth…bubbling on his lips like froth. His breath…it whistled. He—I watched him die. I didn’t even know the address of the house, and he, he told me the address as he died for the ambulance that wouldn’t get there until after he was dead. I ripped my fingernails off trying to move the damn tree. I broke my arm worse when I fell in the mud. That’s the worst dream-memory: lying in the mud, watching him die. Watch—watching the light go out of his eyes. His beautiful chocolate brown eyes. The last words he said were ‘I love you.’” I don’t dare speak. She’s shaking so hard I’m worried it’s almost a seizure. She’ll break soon.  “The other thing I see, every goddamn night, is his shoe. We’d gone to dinner at that fancy Italian place. He had on his dress shoes. Black leather. Stupid little tassels on the front. I hated those shoes. When the tree hit him, it hit so hard his shoe was knocked clean off. I see that shoe, in the mud. Smeared with brown mud, like shit. I see that one stupid fucking shoe, with the tassels.” I have to say it. She’s gonna get mad, but I have to say it. “It wasn’t your fault.” “DON’T SAY THAT! YOU DON’T FUCKING KNOW!” She shrieks it in my ear, so loud my ears ring.  “Then tell me,” I whisper. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” She’s shaking her head, twisting it side to side, a refusal to break. “It was my fault. I killed him.” A sob, then a full, unchecked sob. “Bullshit. He saved you. He loved you. You didn’t kill him.” “You don’t understand. I did kill him. We were arguing. If I had just said yes, he’d be alive. You don’t understand. You don’t—don’t. Can’t know. No one knows. If I’d just said yes, he’d be alive. But I said no.” “Said yes to what?” Shuddering, heaving in ragged breaths, still denying the breakdown, she murmurs the words, and I know they break her, once and for all. “He asked me to marry him. I said no.” “You were eighteen.” “I know. I know! That’s why I said no. He wanted to go to Stanford, and I wanted to go Syracuse. I would have gone to Stanford with him, just to be with him, but…I couldn’t marry him. I wasn’t ready to be engaged. To get married.” “Understandable.” “You don’t get it, Colton. You don’t—you don’t get it.” Hiccups, now, words coming in stutters. “He asked me to marry him, in the car. I got out, angry that he didn’t understand why I said no. He followed me. Stood in the driveway arguing with me. I was on the porch. Minutes like that, him in the driveway, me on the porch. We should’ve gone inside, but we didn’t. The rain had stopped, but the wind was worse than ever. I heard the tree snap. It sounded like a cannon going off.” “You didn’t kill him, Nell. You didn’t. Saying no didn’t mean—” “Shut up. Just…shut up. I said no. He thought it meant I didn’t love him, and we wasted so much time out there, in the way of the tree. If I had just said yes, gone inside with him, the tree would have missed us both. Missed me, missed him. He’d be alive. I hesitated, and he died. If I hadn’t frozen, if I had just moved out of the way…one jump to the left or the right. I could have. But I froze. And he saved me…and he—he died. He’s gone, and it’s my fault.” “It’s not.” “SHUT UP!” She screams it into my chest. “I killed him. He’s gone, and it’s my fault…my fault. I want him back.” This last, a shattered whisper, and I feel—finally—warm wet tears on my chest. It’s silent, at first. I think maybe she’s waiting to be condemned for weakness. I don’t, of course. I hold her. I don’t tell her it’s okay. “Get mad,” I say. “Be hurt. Be broken. Cry.” She shakes her head, tiny side-to-side twisting of her neck, a denial, a futile refusal. Futile, because she’s already crying. The high-pitched whining at first, high in her throat. Keening.  I once saw a baby kitten in an alley sitting next to its mother. The mama cat was dead, of age or something, I don’t know. The kitten was pawing at the mama’s shoulder and mewling, this nonstop sound that was absolutely heartbreaking, heartrending. It was a sound that said, What do I do? How do I live? How can I go on? This sound, from Nell, is that. But infinitely worse. It’s so fucking soul-searing, I can’t breathe for the pain it causes me to hear. Because I can’t do a goddamn thing except hold her.  She starts rocking in my arm, clutching my bare shoulders so hard she’s gonna break the skin, but I don’t care, because it means she’s not hurting herself. Now it’s long, jagged sobs, wracking her entire body, and god, she’s got two years’ worth of pent-up tears coming out all at once. It’s violent.  I don’t even know how long she sobs. Time ceases to pass, and she cries, cries, cries. Clutches me and makes these sounds of a soul being ripped in two, the grief so long denied taking its toll.  Fermented grief is far more potent.  My chest is slick with her tears. My shoulders are bruised. I’m stiff and sore from holding her, motionless. I’m exhausted. None of this matters. I’ll hold her until she passes out. Finally the sobs subside, and she’s just crying softly. Now it’s time to comfort. I only know one way; I sing: “Quiet your crying voice, lost child.  Let no plea for comfort pass your lips. You’re okay, now. You’re okay, now. Don’t cry anymore, dry your eyes.  Roll the pain away, put it down on the ground and leave it for the birds.  Suffer no more, lost child. Stand and take the road, move on and seal the hurt behind the miles. It’s not all right, it’s not okay.  I know, I know. The night is long, it’s dark and cruel.  I know, I know. You’re not alone. You’re not alone. You are loved. You are held. Quiet your crying voice, lost child.  You’re okay, now. You’re okay, now. Just hold on, one more day. Just hold on, one more hour. Someone will come for you.  Someone will hold you close. I know, I know. It’s not okay, it’s not all right. But if you just hold on, One more day, one more hour. It will be. It will be.” Nell is silent, staring at me with limpid gray-green eyes like moss-flecked stone. She heard every word, heard the cry of a lost boy. “Did you write that?” she asks. I nod, my chin scraping the top of her scalp. “For who?” “Me.” “God, Colton.” Her voice is hoarse from sobbing, raspy. Sexy. “That’s so sad.” “It’s how I felt at the time.” I shrug. “I had no one to comfort me, so I wrote a song to do it myself.” “Did it work?” I huff at the ridiculousness of the question. “If I sang it enough, I’d eventually be able to fall asleep, so yeah, kind of.” I finally glance down at her, actually look into her eyes. It’s a mistake. She’s wide-eyed, intent, full of heartbreak and sadness and compassion. Not pity. I’d flip my shit if I saw pity in her eyes, just like she would if she saw it in me.  Compassion and pity are not the same: Pity is looking down on someone, feeling sorry for them and offering nothing; compassion is seeing their pain and offering them understanding.  She’s so goddamn beautiful. I’m lost in her eyes, unable to look away. Her lips, red, chapped, pursed, as if begging me to kiss her, are too close to ignore. I’m suddenly aware of her body against mine, her full breasts crushed against me, her leg, one round thigh, pale as whitest cream, draped over mine. Her palm, long fingers slightly curled, rests on my shoulder, and lightning sizzles my skin where she touches me. I’m not breathing. Literally, my breath is stuck in my throat, blocked by my heart, which has taken up residence in my trachea.  I want to kiss her. Need to. Or I might never breathe again. I’m an asshole, so I kiss her. She deserves ultimate gentility, and my lips are feathers against hers, ghosting across hers. I can feel every ridge and ripple of her lips; they’re chapped and cracked and rough from crying, from thirst. I moisten them with my own lips, kiss each lip individually. First the upper, caressing it with both of mine, tasting, touching. She breathes a sigh.  I think I’m okay, I think she wants this. I was honestly terrified at first she’ll wig out, slap me, scramble away. Tell me she can’t stomach a kiss from a blood-soaked monster like me. I don’t deserve her, but I’m an asshole, a selfish bastard, so I take what I can get from her, and try to make sure I give her the best I’ve got. She doesn’t kiss me back, though. She shifts on my body, and her curled fingers tighten on my chest, but her mouth? She just waits, and lets me claim her mouth with mine. I take her lower lip in my teeth, ever so gently. My palm, my rough and callused paw, is grazing her cheek, smoothing a wayward curl back behind her ear. She lets me. Foolish girl. Letting a brute like me kiss her, touch her. I’m afraid the grease under my nails will mar her skin, worried the blood that has been soaked into my bones will seep out of my pores and sully her ivory skin.  She nuzzles her face into my palm. She opens her mouth into mine, kisses me back. Oh, heaven. I mean, goddamn, the girl can kiss. My breath never really left my throat, and now it rushes out of me in disbelief that she’s letting this happen, that she’s actively taking part.  I don’t know why. It’s not like I’m a nice guy. I’m not good. I just held her when she cried. I couldn’t do anything else.  I end the kiss before it can turn into something else. She just looks at me, lips slightly parted, wet like cherries now and so, so red. Oh, fuck, I can’t resist going in for another kiss, from letting some shred of my raging hunger for her beauty show through in my kiss. She returns it with equal fervor, moving so she’s more fully on top of me, and she doesn’t stop me when my hand drifts down her scalp, down her nape, down her back, rests on the small just above the swell of her ass. I don’t dare touch her there.  This is insane. What the hell am I doing? She just bawled her eyes out, sobbed for hours. She’s seeking comfort, seeking forgetting. I can’t have her like this.  I pull away again, slide out from beneath her.  “Where are you going?” she asks. “I can’t breathe when you kiss me like that. When you let me kiss you. It’s…I’m no good. No good for you. It’d be taking advantage of you.” I shake my head and turn away from the confusion in her eyes, the disappointment. I retreat, squeezing my hands into fists, angry with myself. She needs better than me.  I grab my guitar, rip it from the soft case, and head for the rickety, creaking, outside stair to the roof, a bottle of Jameson in hand. I plop down on the busted-ass weather-beaten blue Lay-Z-Boy I lugged up here for this purpose, twist the top off the bottle, and slug it hard. I kick back with my feet up on the roof ledge and watch the gray-to-pink haze of onrushing dawn, guitar on my belly, plucking strings.  Finally, I sit forward and start working on the song I’ve been learning: “This Girl” by City & Colour. I regret it immediately, because the lyrics remind me of what I don’t deserve with Nell. But it’s an intoxicating song, so I get lost in it nonetheless, and it barely registers when I hear her on the stairs.  “You are so talented, Colton,” she says when I’m done. I roll my eyes. “Thanks.” She’s got her jeans back on and one of my spare guitars in her hand. There’s a battered orange love seat perpendicular to the Lay-Z-Boy, and she settles cross-legged onto it, cradling her guitar on her lap.  “Play something for me,” I say.  She shrugs self-consciously. “I suck. I only know a couple songs.”  I frown at her. “You sing like a fucking angel. Seriously. You have the sweetest, clearest voice I’ve ever heard.” “I can’t play the guitar for crap, though.” She’s strumming, however, even as she says this. “No,” I agree. “But that doesn’t matter once you start singing. ’Sides, keep playing, keep practicing, you’ll get better.” She rolls her eyes, much like I did, and starts hitting chords. I don’t recognize the tune at first. It takes me into the first chorus to figure out what song it is. It’s a low, haunting tune, a rolling, sad melody. The lyrics are…archaic, but I understand them. They’re sweet and longing. She’s singing “My Funny Valentine” by Ella Fitzgerald. At least, that’s the version I know. I’ve heard a dozen versions of it, but I think she was the one who made it famous.  The way Nell sings it…her voice is a little high for how low the song is written, but the strain to hit the lower notes only makes it full of that much more longing. As if the desire was a palpable thing, so thick inside her she couldn’t hit the notes right. She trails off at the end of the song, but I roll my hand in a circle, so she plucks a few strings, thinking, silent, then strikes another slow, bluesy rhythm. Oh, god, so perfect. She sings “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Louis Armstrong and Ella. God, I love that song. I doubt she realizes this. I surprise the shit out of her by coming in right on cue with Louis’s part. She smiles broad and happy and keeps singing, and holy shit we sound good together. I would never have thought of covering jazz numbers in a folksy style. It’s so hot, so fresh. I know the song, so I can weave in some fancy picking, over and around her strumming.  We finish the song, and I never want to stop making music with her. I take a risk and start up “Stormy Blues” by Billie Holiday. It’s a slow song, and Nell’s crystalline voice and my gravelly one make it into a ballad. I can hear Billie’s voice as I’m singing, though. I hear it coming out of the open window from the building next to the shop, back when I first bought it. Mrs. Henkel had a thing for jazz. She was old and lonely, and jazz made her think of long-dead Mr. Henkel, so she’d crack all the windows and play Billie and Ella and Count Basie and Benny, and she’d dance and remember. I’d help her bring her groceries up, and she’d pinch my ass and threaten me with sex, if only she was half a century younger. She’d make me tea and spike it with whiskey, and we’d listen to jazz.  I found her in her bed, eyes closed, a photo of Mr. Henkel on her ample chest, a smile on her face. I went to her funeral, which shocked the shit out of her rich, asshole grandson.  My eyes must give away some of my thoughts, because Nell asks me what I’m thinking. So I tell her about Mrs. Henkel. About the long conversations I’d have with her, slowly getting drunk on spiked Earl Grey. How she was always clucking about my tats and my baggy pants. When I went straight and stopped thugging it up, she was over the moon at my tighter jeans.  What I don’t say is that my spending time with Mrs. Henkel was typical selfish Colt. I was lonely. I’d walked away from all my boys from the hood, all of them except Split, and I was lonely. Mrs. Henkel was a friend, a chance to be around someone who was a good influence on me. She’d probably have shit her Depends if she knew half the shit I’d done, and I think she knew that, since she never asked. Finally, I go silent, the subject of dead Mrs. Henkel exhausted. “Explain what you meant,” Nell says. “About what?” I know exactly what she means, but I can’t let on.  “Why aren’t you any good? Why would it be taking advantage of me?” I set the guitar on its side and take a pull off the bottle, hand it to her. “I’m…fucked up, Nell.” “So am I.” “But it’s different. I’m not good. I mean, I’m not evil, I have some redeeming qualities, but…” I shake my head, unable to put it into the right words. “I’ve done bad things. I’m trying to stay out of trouble these days, but that doesn’t erase what I’ve done.” “I think you’re a good person.” She says it quietly, not looking at me. “You saw what I did to dickhead Dan.” She snorts. “Dickhead Dan. Fitting. Yeah, I saw, and yeah, it scared me. But you were protecting me. Defending me. And you stopped.” “Didn’t want to, though.” “But you did.” She yawns behind her hand. “You’re selling yourself short, Colton. And you’re not giving me enough credit to know what I want.” “What do you mean?” I know what she means, but I want to hear her say it. “I kissed you back. It’s crazy, messed up, and it confuses me. But I did it eyes wide. Knowing. I wasn’t drunk.” She looks at me past long, dark lashes, eyes saying a thousand things her mouth isn’t.  My mouth goes dry. “I shouldn’t have kissed you.” “But you did.” “Yeah. I’m an asshole like that. I just can’t help it, around you.” “I don’t think you’re an asshole. I think you’re sweet. Gentle.” She says it with a little smile. I shake my head. “Nah. It’s just you. You bring that tender shit out of me. I’m a thug, Nell. Straight up.” “Ex-thug,” she counters. I laugh. “Once a thug, always a thug. I may not run the streets anymore, but it’s still part of who I am.” “And I like who you are.”  I stand up, uncomfortable with where this is going. “It’s late. We should sleep.” She glances at the sun, which is peeking between a couple of high-rises across the street. “It’s early, but yeah. I’m exhausted.” I take her guitar and hold her hand as she steps onto the stairs. I like how her hand feels in mine. I don’t want to let go, so I don’t. Neither does she. Nell stops at the bathroom, and I change into running shorts. Finally, I let myself feel the pain from the fight with Dan. I stretch, feeling my ribs twinge, and I probe my loose tooth with my tongue, wince at the dull ache. At that moment, Nell appears beside me with a washcloth. I eye her warily, then pull away when she reaches for my face. “I’m fine,” I growl. “Shut up and hold still.” I roll my eyes and bring my face back within reach. Her touch is far too gentle for a rough bastard like me. She touches my chin, turns me to the side, brushes the cuts and bruises as if frightened to hurt me further. I stop breathing from her proximity, from the drunk-making wonder of her scent, shampoo and lemons and whiskey and woman. She turns my head again, wipes the other side of my face, eyes narrowed as she focuses on wiping away the crusted blood. I’d cleaned up a bit while she was in the shower at her place, but apparently not well enough. She wipes my upper lip, my chin, my forehead, my cheekbones. Then she lowers the washcloth and runs her fingers over my face, touching each cut gently, exploring.  I hold still and let her touch me. It scares me. She’s looking at me as if seeing me for the first time, as if trying to memorize how I look. Her gaze is intense, needy. Her thumbs end up brushing over my lips, and I bite one of her thumbs, a little hard.  Her eyes widen and her nostrils flare, and she sucks in a fast breath as I run my tongue over the pad of her thumb.  What the fuck am I doing? But I can’t stop.  This time, she leans in. Pulls her thumb from my mouth and replaces it with her lips. Her tongue. This is so crazy. I shouldn’t let it happen.  But I do. My god, I do. I kiss her back with all the hunger inside me. We’re in my room, just inside the doorway, inches from the bed. It would be so easy to spin her around and lay her down, peel her clothes off, and… I pull away. She sighs as I do, and it’s a disappointed sound.  “You keep stopping,” she says.  I slip back out of her arms, reluctantly. I’m confused, messed up. I want her, but some vague voice in my head tells me it’s wrong to have her. Part of me says we belong together, tells me to cradle her close and never let go. She seems to want me, and I want her…but I know—I know—I’m not good enough for her.  “We need to sleep,” I say. “You can have the bed.”  I turn away, but her hand catches my elbow.  “I don’t want to sleep alone,” she says. “I’ve slept alone for so long. I just… I want to be held. Please?” She’s vulnerable again suddenly. I shouldn’t. It’s tempting, and I haven’t figured out what’s right or wrong. But I can’t say no. “I could do that,” I say. “I would love nothing more, if I’m being honest.”