to, I nod. Maybe I just want to be found, for it to be over.
Michael talks. Making plans. I know I reply, but I can’t be sure what I say.
Maybe it’s not self-destruction. Maybe I’m lonely for someone who knows me. Michael met me when I was Tessie, and he still fucked me. That means I wasn’t all bad, right?
Or maybe I’m overthinking it. One date shouldn't change everything—but I still take another pill when he walks away. Rules let me survive. Rules keep me safe.
Michael has already enticed me to break one of them.
A few hours later, Michael takes me to dinner at Antoine’s, the oldest French-Creole restaurant in the city. It’s far more upscale than I find comfortable these days. It makes me remember a life I won’t ever live again. But this is about Michael. He’s trying his best to figure out how to charm me.
It’s working despite his efforts, not because of them.
I shake my head at how silly it all is. It’s quite possibly the least honest date I’ve ever been on. He shoves his real motives aside and flirts with me. I hide my awareness of why he’s sought me out and my memories of being naked with him. It’s possibly the least honest date I’ve ever been on.
“What?”
I stare at my dish, weighing words as I study my pommes de terre soufflées.
Part of me wants to tell him that he’s trying to buy me with a high priced meal instead of just giving me the cash, but I settle on a softer truth than the raw words I would usually use: “Dinner and stories of your movie, your tours, your carefully dropped hints about your success . . . most women probably say yes before the main course, don’t they?”
“Maybe I don’t want sex.”
He’s not lying, but like most good mistruths, there is a lie and a truth all twisted up together in his words. Someone told him about my episodes, and he is intrigued. If you ask him, press him hard enough, I suspect he’ll claim that the curiosity is simply part of his avocation.
That, too, is not a lie.
It is, also, not the truth.
He wants to know, wants to collect stories and characters because it gives him power, but I’m not easy about parting with my truths. Some truths lead to blood. Reid taught me that, too.
I’m done bleeding for anyone.
I finish my wine, and then I lean closer. “It is a shame that you’re not interested. I had every intention of fucking you.”
He grabs my wrist, and I see a hint of darkness, telling me that he’s not as polished and civilized as he tries to be. That does more for me than any meal or story of his travels ever could. Maybe because it’s familiar, but I like that threat the way a junkie likes a fix.
This is why we break the rules, this rush, this easing up on the precipice. I can see disasters looming if I stay on the path I'm approaching.
Outside, Michael shoves me against a wall and kisses me. Crudely, carelessly, like I mean nothing and everything in that moment.
It is exactly what I need.
3
Juliana
I never wanted to be in a house that smells like death—and there is a smell. I know it. I'm proud of the work I do, but I can't ever escape the feeling that I smell like a mix of bitter coffee and too sweet flowers. Not every death is that. Sometimes, there's cologne. Sometimes, there's the bite of cigarettes from the grieving who quit years ago, but couldn’t resist the calm of nicotine during the pre-funeral days. No matter what else, though, the ceremony around death smells like flowers and coffee to me.
When I was a kid, my uncle was actually the fun one in the family. He told the silliest jokes, and he was the first to go play in the rain with me and my sister—and the last one to add new rules to our lives. Uncle Micky was happy to have a tea party with us, but when he did so, we had proper tea and scones. My sister and I loved him, but as an adult I realize that his need to play was a result of the things he saw in his job.
My job, too, these days.
I guess I realized that Uncle Micky was lonely. It was just him in his big house in Durham, and sometimes when we visited, plans changed last minute because