“Cheeky,” I say, and open the next door. “Careful, or I may have to punish you.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” she says, seeing the white bed in the centre of the room, surrounded by view. She pries her hand from mine and backs up against it. There’s a large beveled glass floor mirror in one corner of the room, reflecting the city. Reflecting us. She glances over her shoulder at it, then me.
“You’ve thought of everything.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
She hitches up onto the bed, her fraying denimed legs dangling from crossed knees. “You know I know you like to watch.”
I reach her. Uncross those legs. “I do.”
“So”—her voice juicy with malice—“watch.”
I lean in to kiss her, and she pulls her head away and gently pushes me back. “Nope. From there.”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how could I ever love anyone else?
She slays me, slipping out of her shirt, the city lights kiss her skin but I can’t, not yet. She lies back on the bed so I can see the rise of her breasts as she lifts her hips to slide off her jeans. The clink of the button on the wood floor rings in my ears.
Down to a simple black bra and plain black boy-shorts and she’s still wearing too much. We both are. I start to pull my shirt up and over my shoulders until I hear, “No.”
I hear her breath and blood moving under her skin, a spiralling ache that matches mine, and it gives me a kick of surprise—it feels like ages since I’ve heard her last. Watching the fast rise and fall of her chest, I know she’s as tortured as I am. The power of her fizzes my blood, the lure of me burns hers.
This is not our first time, but it’s our first time here, in this place that’s ours, in this new age of us. And even though every second with Mara is different, this is different from even that. She knows it too. She takes off what she’d left on, and the swollen air between us weighs a thousand pounds. My muscles strain under the pressure of not touching her, but when she reaches up for me, I say no. I do what she did, but instead of extending that excruciating wait, I climb onto the bed. Even in the dark I can see her flushed cheeks, her berry-stained lips parted, the few scattered freckles that dust her cheeks. I don’t touch her skin, but I fill my hand with her hair, and let the strands that look like double helices fall from my fingers, the dusky city light making the few amber strands in her dark hair shine. I’m getting high on the scent of her, when she says, “We’re home.”
If I’d been standing, her words would have brought me to my knees. She touches me first, pressing her palm against the back of my neck.
Her touch throws off sparks of colours I’ve never seen and notes I’ve never heard, and I slide her beneath me and press my mouth to hers. The feel of her tongue sings high in my ears, but her body is low and purring. When she moves, I move with her. She shimmers with heat, that tortured ache rising in both of us as I get drunk on the taste of her. The sounds she’s making are dizzying, and when I hitch her long, lovely, coltish limbs around my waist, she’s shivering and— If I believed in God I would pray, beg, anything to stop time, to live in this moment with her forever. Tonight is a perfect thing in a broken world, and she is the queen of it. Her pleasure, searing white, arrows through mine, and I would let the Earth ice over to keep the sun from rising, but after hours of her, it rises anyway, sunlight staining our sheets, our skin. After, I fall asleep with Mara in my arms.
I wake up in someone else’s mind.
15
UNIMPROVED END
IT’S A BOY, THIS TIME. His longish mouse brown hair lies on the pillow, sideways, as was my view, which was slitted. His brain is clouded, heavy, and the stench of sick permeates his nostrils.
On his nightstand, among books and pictures and empty glasses, are clusters of bottles; phenobarbital, Klonopin, Benadryl, alprazolam, Vicodin, and clorazepate. Who knows how many he took? He probably doesn’t even know himself. He just recognises the feeling in his stomach, and in his head, and he’s trying not to throw up again.
I can’t hear his thoughts, but after the others, a space has opened up in my mind, and I try and cast around for something, anything, to tell me who he is. Why he’s doing this. Where he’s doing this so I can— “Noah!” Small fingers grip my shoulders, bruisingly hard. The film of his reality slips, and when I open my eyes, it’s Mara’s face that I see.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her, sitting up. I feel sluggish, hazy, but here. Normal.
Her face becomes mask of disbelief. “You were having a nightmare. You were curled up and your shoulders were heaving and I thought—I thought you were having a seizure.”
Maybe he was having a seizure. Epilepsy would explain some of those drugs . . . .
“What happened?” Her eyes narrow, search my face.
“I saw someone die.”
“How?”
“He overdosed,” I say, and hesitate just a fraction of a second before adding, “On purpose.”
Her hands round into fists in the sheets as her spine straightens. “So, that’s three now.”
I get out of bed, begin getting dressed. Technically, she’s right, but there’s something different about the boy I just saw. Or rather, not different. “This wasn’t like the other night, with that girl. Or in England.”
She’s out of bed now too, the sheet wrapped around her body. Her arms are crossed. “Tell me.”
I sit back down on the bed, staring out at the Manhattan Bridge. “I could hear their thoughts,” I begin. “The girl who jumped the tracks, her name was Beth. She played piano.”
I struggle for words to explain what it feels like to inhabit someone else. To see what they see in their worst moments, to smell what they smell, and to live their experience—it’s not a gift. It’s a curse.
“What about Sam?” Mara asks.
I itch for distraction. Could do with a cigarette. I exhale slowly. “His last thoughts were ‘Help me help me help me,’ over and over again, until his mind went black.”
Her face loses its expression. She turns quickly and reaches for her shirt from last night, pulls on jeans.
“I couldn’t help him, Mara. I wouldn’t even know Beth’s name if she hadn’t thought it before she died.”
She’s quiet still, with her back to me.
“What?” I ask her.
She looks at me over her shoulder, fakes a smile. “Nothing.”
“Liar.”
She smiles again, a real one this time. “I take offence.”
“Keep taking it,” I say, and try forcing a smile but can’t quite manage it. “I don’t know what he was thinking. I felt the way I usually do when someone like us dies.”
Mara doesn’t flinch at that, and I love her more for it. “So, still no idea who he was, then?”
I search my memory for the still frames I sweep away after each death, those collages of misery. The pill bottles on the nightstand all have different names on them, different doctors, different addresses— One of them matches the one scrawled on my arm. In imaginary fucking ink.
Fuck. Fuck.
“What?” Mara’d been watching me. Closely.
I regret saying the words before I even speak them, but it’s too late to lie. “There’s—I think I might know where he lived.”
“Really?”
“He took pills—there’s an address on one of the bottles.” I slip my wallet into my back pocket, head for the doorway. “I’m going to go.”
Mara slips something into her pocket. “No, we’re going to go.”
“All right, we’re going to go,” I say, but Mara hasn’t moved.
“All of us.”
“All of . . . whom?”
“You weren’t the only one who saw Beth die.”
“No . . .”
“We should tell everyone.”
“Everyone in the subway that night? The police, the random—”
“You know who I mean. Daniel. Jamie.”
I could talk to Daniel. He’s sort of become the brother I never had, and never knew I actually wanted, but more than that, he’s distanced from this—from me—in a way Mara isn’t. I can tell him about the suicides, and he might be able to help draw a connection without drawing a line through Mara.