there, arms braced against the doorframe, loops of black tattoos, things I wanted to remember, things I could never forget, visible over my forearms, moving as I twisted my fists on the wooden frame. I didn't care what I looked like, a tall inked black man breathing fire at her door. Not worried that this woman might see something of a threat in me, thin, wrinkled shirt over wide-shoulders, jeans slipping low on hipbones. Instead, I focused on that mean ache of messed-up calm and lack of sleep crowding in my skull. My stupid pissed off attitude amped up the longer it took her to open the door. Waiting, I envisioned that I’d yell, I’d unload on her, then get the hell away before she could react, stalk back to my apartment with my anger leeching out behind me. Then maybe Coltrane would work and I could get at least a few hours’ sleep.
The drumbeats stopped. Footsteps. The snick of a lock.
Angry breaths flared my nostrils. My eye twitched. A vein in my forehead pulsed.
With the smallest creak of a hinge, the softest slip of light, the world around me went silent. The silhouetted figure before me sent a whisper straight to my brain. But it was the light cast across her face and the good look I got of her that rattled me, really rattled me. I couldn’t shake it. I didn’t know this woman, yet she felt freakishly familiar. Like I’d dreamed about her for a year and never caught her name. Like that dream had haunted me and I was only just remembering why. Like there were details about her face that had been branded into my memory and I just uncovered them. One glance, and I stood frozen, unable to squash the rush of memory and confusion that shot at me like a wave.
Sensation overtook me and I got caught up by what felt like a whip of wind moving through the park, of plastic beads and forgotten parking tickets on Bourbon Street the second Fat Tuesday ended, of the spray of waves that had crashed against the quay. It slapped across my subconscious. A whoosh, a break of something that could have been a kiss, likely was a punch in the gut, though no one touched me. Before I finished one blink, there she stood, half a foot from me, staring as though she knew me, like she’d been waiting on me to knock on her door.
“Oh. Oh no.” The woman’s eyes—bottomless circles I wasn’t sure I could look away from even as she seemed to take in every square inch of me—got huge.
It was her.
The girl.
She’d been everywhere—outside my window, soaking up my attention like I had no control over it, and every time she brushed by me on the street, moving like a bubble floating to the deli on Henry Street or the cleaners down past Orange, some fucking specter I wasn’t sure was real that kept me standing right where I stood every damn time I spotted her.
Once, coming home, I noticed her walking a block in front of me, and followed her like a stalker, not even realizing what a freak I must have seemed liked. Every time I saw her, it was like her presence had gripped me like a crazy moth to a flame, but I’d been too wrapped up in my work and my own damned mind games to even consider that she was real, and approachable, and living nearby.
And now she stood in the open doorway, only inches from me.
“Honey… just, no.”
Her touch brought me from my gawking stupor. At least, it made me move. She touched me and a bolt of electricity coursed through my body. Fingers warm against my skin, pulling me forward like she expected me to follow. Resisting her was not an option.
Her grip tightened as I followed her inside, and a voice started screaming in my head to back up, to get away from this chick before I did something stupid or got blamed for it. But I looked at her again, and the voice quieted to a whimper.
This woman wasn’t like anyone I’d ever seen before. She was tall, heightened by the dark tights she wore and the loose, bright top with swirls of green and yellow which might have been flowers that cupped her small waist and drifted nearly to her thighs. She reminded me of a bunch of balloons, the kind that jackass clowns twist into animal shapes to