of hope his sympathy offered vanishes when Gary stands in front of me, feet shoulder-width apart. His dick is hard, pressed against the inside of his slacks. Talk is so cheap, even from a sixty-something-year-old art dealer with a serious personality disorder. I shouldn’t be disappointed.
“I’m fine,” I lie and unzip his pants.
Strange how Gary prefers me to feel, look, and smell a certain way during our time together, but the anticipation of a blow job is enough to excuse the fact that my hair is windblown and I smell like chemical roses. Sex will make the strongest person weak. Maybe if his interns start blowing him themselves, they’ll have a better work experience.
His eyes darken as I pull his slacks down and hold his dick in my hand. “Don’t disobey me again, Cara.”
“You got it,” I say, swallowing a mouthful of saliva.
The last thing I want to do is put him in my mouth, and that’s not only because I overdrank. Consciousness and remorse have crept up on me since Talent entered my life, and despite how hard I fight back against the realization that I’m unhappy, it’s not going anywhere until I face my new reality. Returning to a place where I feel nothing at all doesn’t seem possible, but I can’t continue to live in this purgatory.
Gary’s an innocent bystander, and I don’t fault him for wanting to be with a beautiful woman, but I’m not doing this.
And I don’t have to.
My stomach involuntary contracts once my body seems to make up its mind, and I don’t have time to crawl to the small trash can beside the desk before I throw up all over the beautiful marble floor. Instantly relieved, I fall on my bottom and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.
Gary’s speechless, left standing with his pants around his ankles and his dick hard.
He must take Viagra.
I keep a bottle of vodka in my freezer to feel closer to Cricket.
At the end of my work week or if I wake up in the middle of the night lonely, I’ll crack open the bottle because the bitter liquor sparks a memory of her. It’s fucked-up that the scent of vodka reminds me of my childhood and a time when I wasn’t entirely alone on this planet. But it’s all I have to hold on to. I don’t even have a picture of her.
Bringing the neck of the bottle to my nose, I inhale and close my eyes as familiarity washes over me. My memory of her is fading, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. While I see small parts of Cricket in myself, I can’t remember what her hands looked like or how tall she was. She had blonde hair, but it’s a generic description. There’s no depth or undertone, and I don’t particularly remember a time before she bleached it.
My most vivid memories of my mother are of her leaning close to the mirror, pressing her lips together after applying red lipstick. She’d scrub excess rouge from her teeth with the tip of her finger and then pucker her lips at her reflection. But the clearest memories of all were the occasions when we had a steady place to stay and we’d lie in bed together. She’d whisper to me with breath that smelled like eighty proof, brushing my hair out of my face.
“You’re all that matters, baby girl,” she’d say. “I can’t believe I made you. I can’t believe I made someone so beautiful.”
I pour the contents down the kitchen sink and drop the glass bottle into the trash.
After I disgraced Gary’s office this afternoon, I didn’t offer an explanation. I did try to clean up after myself, but Gary sent me away with a flick of his wrist and I couldn’t get home and back in the bathtub fast enough. When I woke up from a six-hour nap, the room wasn’t spinning anymore but fatigue loitered. Thoughts of my mother still haunted me, and that’s when I decided enough is enough. I’ve allowed too many distractions into my life lately—booze, coffee, Dog, Talent Ridge—and I’m suffering. The dog can stay, but everything else has to go in order to get back on track.
Pouring the vodka down the drain was only the first step. Now I need to get rid of the phone with Talent’s number and the messages he sends me every night. Without it, he won’t be able to get ahold of me, and I won’t