“I don’t drink caffeine.”
She tells me that she did drink caffeine, for a long time, but it made her agitated and jittery. She couldn’t sit still. Eventually the caffeine high would fade, only to be replaced by extreme fatigue. So she’d have another cup of coffee. A vicious circle. “And when I tried to avoid caffeine,” she says, “I’d succumb to debilitating headaches, only to be soothed with Mountain Dew.”
But I pour her a cup anyway. She takes the warm mug into her hands and presses her face to the rim. The steam rises up to meet her. She knows she shouldn’t but she does it anyway. She raises the mug to her lips and allows it to sit there. Then she takes a sip, burning every bit of her esophagus on the way down.
She chokes. “Be careful,” I say too late. “It’s hot.”
There isn’t a damn thing to do but sit and stare at each other. So when she said she wanted to draw me I said okay. There isn’t anything else to do.
To be straight, I don’t want to do it. At first it’s not a big deal, but then she wants me to hold still and look straight and smile.
“Forget it,” I say. “I’m done.” I stand up. I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here and smile at her for the next half hour.
“Okay,” she concedes, “don’t smile. Don’t even look at me. Just sit still.”
She places me beside the fire. She presses her frigid hands to my chest. She lowers me into place, on the floor. My back all but touches the stove. The flame nearly burns a hole in my shirt and I begin to sweat.
I think of the last time she touched me. The desperation of her hands as she tried to undress me. And the last time I touched her, smacking her across the face.
The room is gloomy, the dark pine logs of the walls and ceiling blocking any light. I count the log walls, stacked fifteen high. There is no sun to pass through the small windows.
I look at her. She isn’t all that bad to look at.
She was beautiful that first night, in my apartment. She watched me with these unsuspecting blue eyes, never thinking for a minute that I had it in me to do this.
She sits on the floor and leans against the couch. She pulls her legs into her and rests the notebook on her knees. She takes a pencil from the pack, extracts the lead. She tilts her head and her hair falls clumsily to one side. Her eyes trace the shape of my face, the curve of my nose.
I don’t know why, but I feel the urge to knock the guy who was with her before me.
“I paid him off,” I confess. “Your boyfriend. I gave him a hundred bucks to make himself busy for the night.”
He didn’t ask why and I didn’t say. The coward just grabbed the money from my hand and disappeared into thin air. I don’t tell her I confronted him in the john with my gun.
A hundred bucks can buy a lot these days.
“He had to work,” she says.
“That’s what he told you.”
“Jason works late all the time.”
“Or so he says.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Sometimes. Maybe.”
“He’s very successful.”
“At lying.”
“So you paid him off. So what?” she snaps.
“Why’d you come home with me?” I ask.
“What?”
“Why did you come home with me that night?” She forces a swallow and doesn’t respond. She pretends to be lost in her work, the fury of her lines as she sketches manically across the page. “I didn’t realize it was a hard question,” I say.
Her eyes well up. A vein in her forehead protrudes through the skin. Her skin becomes clammy and her hands shake. She’s mad.
“I was drunk.”
“Drunk.”
“Yes. I was drunk.”
“Because that’s the only reason someone like you would come home with someone like me, right?”
“Because that’s the only reason I would go home with you.”
She’s watching me and I wonder what it is she sees. What she believes she sees. She thinks I’m numb to her indifference, but she’s wrong.
I take off my sweatshirt and drop it to the floor beside my clamorous boots. I’ve got on an undershirt and jeans that she’s probably never seen me without. She scribbles my face on the page, delirious lines and shadows to describe the demon she sees before the fire.
She had a few drinks that night, but she was lucid enough to know what she was doing, to welcome my hands on her. Of course, that was long before she knew who I really was.
I don’t know how long we’re silent. I hear her breathe, the sound of lead striking the paper’s surface. I can almost hear her thoughts in my mind. The hostility and anger.
“It’s like cigarettes or smoking pot,” I finally say to her.
The words startle her and she tries to catch her breath. “What is?”