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V A L E R I E
VALERIE ISABELLA BIANCHI has the faint idea she is being watched.
She hopes they are watching how her legs look in this new skirt, elongated, slimmer in a black velvet that shows her fresh Mediterranean tan, the cluster of freckles that trail up to her upper thigh before they are lost to questions, madness. She hopes they see her sitting in this swaying, lamplight-induced misery like an old photograph negative that stood the test of oceans of holy water, every inch of her God-given skin still in high-definition, from the slope of her pale forehead to the fingernails trailing her collarbones to her bare ankles, still as life. She hopes they are watching her sip this latte, watching how smooth her lips remain when she purses them, how her eyebrows raise, how the edge of her mouth curves upwards, just the slightest, at the surge of cinnamon heat on her tongue.
She hopes they catch her reflection in the glisten of the white ceramic mug, right under its tainted rim, right by her mark of cherry lipstick.
Can they see her thirst, her satisfaction in knowing this mug will be a nuisance to clean? She always chooses the whitest cups and the shiniest cutlery, so these kisses she leaves look like blood smeared on innocence. She killed that a long time ago, tearing its ivory feathers with her teeth and twisting its throat with her claws and taking the niceties out from its final, praying breath. The moment she killed it in herself, she discovered she could kill it in a different person every day.
Valerie Bianchi is not godless, but she prays she looks it. Valerie Bianchi knows she is waiting, but wishes it looks like she is preying.
The prey, she suspects, has canceled on her again. Here, then, is the innocence she would kill if he had any left himself. With this habit of 'forgetting' their dates (two, three times a week?) and 'forgetting' to text back (eight, nine times a day?) and never having an apology, only satin-wrapped bouquets of excuses, he is the only person in the world who has managed to bring her innocence back to life just to murder it where she can't bid it farewell. She pictures how he does it today: caressing it with one fingertip, whispering into it scalp to lower lip, before snapping its neck with his sculpted hands.
This vision of hers, she has long since forced the pain of it into arousal.
Shifting in her assigned spot at the Secret Gallery, she takes a sip of the latte and imagines it burning her, imagines loving it. Her Louboutins mirror the murky yellow light drooping above them. He studies a lot, to an obsessive degree that worries even his father. Maybe that's why he hasn't seen her texts. Maybe his phone is off, or dead.
She isn't going to check. She lifts the mug to eye level again. Unblemished. They can't see the zit on her nose bridge if they watch her through this. Her phone is sitting on the couch cushion beside her, a lazy grasp away, alive with all that she can send. Her fingers itch.
He does a lot of extra-credit homework. He thinks there is such a thing as 'pre' pre-law. The Parks usually have an abominable taste in music, all banjos and bearded ginger men strumming some garbage about mountains. They've switched it up today, thank God, to something with an actual beat; sultry, feminine vocals cling to the walls. The French actresses plastered on the opposite wall come to life in this limited illumination. Maybe he's at the firm. When he isn't studying, he's writing reports, or sorting reports, or making history that requires report writing.
