AT 5 A.M. ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, Valka and Paul McCartney were making out in the other room. I could hear the low laughter and sometimes there was a loud smack of the lips. Britney Spears had been the last one at the party, and they had finally booted her out. (“Y’all are gonna miss me when I’m gone,” she screeched.) It was dark in the bedroom except for light coming through the curtain on the French doors. Prince crawled across the bed toward me like a cat and when he got to me he let out a meow and we both laughed.
“I wanna lap you up,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know.” I was dizzy, and then there was that clenching-up feeling inside.
“Come on,” he said. “Just let me love you for a little while.” He put his face close to mine. He smelled spicy.
I blurted it out: I have a hard time feeling. It was so nice to say it out loud, even though I felt humiliated at the same time. I hoped it would get better as time went on. I could not go back to not saying it again. I knew that much.
“I know, baby,” he said. “It’s a rough world. People have a hard time letting go.” He ran his hand down the side of my face, a fingertip down my neck, a full hand again on the top of my chest, and the side of my breast, and finally down to my hip. A warm trail followed his hand on the outside, but on the inside I was chilled. “You just have to relax.” He moved his hand to my hip.
“I can’t.” I started to cry and choke a bit. He is going to do it anyway, that is what I was thinking.
I know now it makes no sense to think that way. But that was just what I had always believed. That thought was stuck deep inside me.
“Okay, okay, baby,” said Prince. “You calm down now.” Prince pulled his hand away from my stomach. Of course, I was freaking him out. Of course. I am a freak. But then he put his hand in mine, and lay down next to me.
“You want to know about not feeling?” he said. “I got that covered.”
Prince started talking and told me stories from when he was still living his life as a girl in Memphis. Tough enough being mixed race, let alone feeling like she was supposed to be someone else entirely. Girls looking away in locker rooms, when she got caught staring. Boys treating her rough in the hallways and after school.
The story ended with her mother catching her making out with her lab partner and kicking her out of the house.
“It was actually a relief,” Prince told me. She cut off her hair. She bound her breasts. She changed her clothes. There were a lot more lab partners out there, just waiting for a girl like her. A man like him.
When she was done talking, I said, “You win.” He had been through the wringer, just like me. Thrown out into the world by his mother. He had turned into something new though. All I had done was steal a bunch of money.
“What do I win? Do I win you?”
I took a deep breath. “Okay.” I shifted and then started to unbutton my shirt.
Prince laughed. He was not being mean, but still it stung. Then he pushed my hands away gently from my shirt. “What kind of man do you think I am? I don’t want to make you do anything. We can just talk. Come on, you tell me. Tell me your hard-luck story. I promise not to laugh at you or judge you or say anything to make it worse. We’re just two strangers meeting for a night. You can trust me.”
Our faces were so close.
“It is not my story,” I said. “It is my mother’s. The bedtime story she used to tell me.”
“If she told it to you, it’s yours, too.”
I turned up toward the ceiling. I sucked in some air and held it and then burst it out when I could not stand it for a second longer.
HOW DID THAT STORY go again? The one she was always whispering in my ear before bedtime. Hovering with that wine breath. Watery eyes. Fingers that pinched. Sometimes there were stories about my father, about what a waste of time he was. In bed, in life. And when I wake up in the morning, he is still there. She made that sound like a bad thing, but I always knew it was good. That someone would be there in the morning. She rattled off her complaints. Her voice swerving. I knew she was just complaining, but it made me sad anyway. I could handle sad. But then there was the one story that scared me.