We might as well have spit into our hands and clasped them. There will be border skirmishes and small negotiations, but we have the broad strokes of a deal. One I can live with, for the short time I have left.
Or so I thought then. It was months before I understood how thoroughly I had been played. Candace would have made a hellishly good lawyer. For example, when Candace met dead-eyed Jeremy in the rec hall stairwell, she wasn’t trading sex acts for Fun Dip or SweeTarts; she wanted both, the candy and the touch. She liked him, but she made him pay with sugar to kiss her, which she wanted, to touch her budding breasts, which she wanted, so they could put their hands down each other’s pants. All things that she wanted.
I learned the rudiments of dark negotiation from Candace. She got the candy and a boyfriend. Or her idea of one. Candace didn’t come from a world where a boy might like her, sweetly and simply. Love was something furtive to be paid for or extracted; her life had given her a dim view of that animal. But she wanted it. She was starving for it, though she wouldn’t have recognized it if it had run at her and slapped her—which, of course, it would. I’d see to that.
But was I any better, even now? Deep into my thirties and still one cracked heart away from walking to a pool hall in my fuck-me pumps, looking to pull a strange. And over Birdwine—a long-botched love that should already be scar tissue. Even so, last night, this morning, now, I was feeling it. It was an itch lodged deep inside my chest, too far below my skin to scratch or soothe. I had to shut it up. Shut it down.
Some kindly reminiscence with an old friend wouldn’t do it. Removing Birdwine required something ugly and immediate, spiced with the danger that came only with the unknown.
I was going to McGwiggen’s, an old-school midtown dive that had survived gentrification with its steeze intact. It was an easy walk, even in heels, especially if I didn’t mind a cut-through between buildings. I didn’t. I put my hand inside my bag, wrapped around my mace with a finger on the trigger, and took the turn. Walking down this dim road, narrow, lined with back doors and trash cans, was like walking back into my past.
My past had no Hana, her fate hovering out of view, secreted beyond a dark horizon. The only lost girl here was me, eager for something that felt more like a fight than straight-up sex. I walked into an old, familiar darkness, into a former Paula, one reincarnated by the staccato beat of my heels against hard concrete, the faint smell of decay. I remembered this hunger. It had lived in me before William, before Nick, and definitely long before damn Birdwine. I learned it at thirteen, in love with a dead-eyed mother who smelled like an ashtray and cried when she drank wine. It deepened as Kai and all her last names, all her incarnations, died. I was left with Karen Vauss, a parolee who kept her eyes focused faintly to the right of me. She pawned her mandolin, traded her bright silk skirts and bare feet for a waitress uniform and ugly orthopedic shoes. Karen Vauss did not tell stories often, and so she didn’t tell me who to be. She could barely stand to look at me.
But boys would look. I learned that, fast. Boys would follow me and beg and yearn, and I could push them down and own them, for an hour or two. I could invent a new self under each new gaze, could be unhungry, powerful, alone.
I wanted that again. Right now. I could feel the ghosts of all the girls I’d been behind me in the alleyway, creeping in my wake. I could almost hear my own past footsteps as an echo. For a moment it was so real that I spooked myself. I stopped and turned to look. There was only silence and darkness. I walked on.
I’d had boys in the back rooms at parties, in garden sheds, in gas station bathrooms, on rooftops with their parents sleeping soundly below. I’d had one up against a wall on a dark road much like this one, his back to the bricks, his knees bent so I could get my legs around him.
Now I needed a new male body with a different shape, a different smell, to push myself against. If I pushed hard enough, I could shove myself all the way past Birdwine. I wanted a new mouth to reinvent my tastes, to scrape fresh mint over bourbon off my tongue.
The front entrance to McGwiggen’s was around the corner, but there was a smoked glass door here in the alley. It let into the hallway by the restrooms. Wes, the bartender, must have seen me come in on the security camera, because he’d already pulled a tray of balls and was popping the cap off a Corona as I came into the center room. I claimed a table by the back wall, though I knew it had dead rails and a five-inch tear in the felt near the foot spot; it gave me a good view of the bar and the front door.