I find my lipstick at the bottom of my bag, untwist its cap, screw up the waxy red bullet, and smear it on my mouth. Lipstick and Eros and Thanatos, all in one slim gold tube.
It rains again, off and on, the kind of rain that just makes everything wet and soft, not the kind that pounds against the ground; the kind that makes the world quieter, not the kind that thrums like bullets against the car.
I turn off my headlights. I turn off the engine. I set my keys in the cup holder and lean my seat back. I cross my arms over my chest. When I close my eyes, the dog is there. When I open my eyes, the dog is there.
I’m not here for Apollonia. I am here for Seth.
I don’t know what I want to say to him. I don’t want to say anything to him. I want him to know, I want him to feel what I need him to feel. I want him to wrap his arms around me and I want him to hold me, so tight, until it’s hard to breathe.
I want the buttons of his fine white shirt to press into my cheek and mark me there. I want his chin atop my head, his breath warm in my hair, the angle of his hipbones just where they used to fit, in the softest part of my stomach. I want to tell him all my secrets, everything.
I want him to kiss me, but not to do anything more than that. Just to want me, and to hold me, and to kiss me in the soft evening rain.
???
It’s after midnight when the party breaks up. Louise is among the first to leave, tottering down the walkway in heels too high for her to manage, following Selena, who must be her ride, all the way to the sidewalk where they climb into Selena’s beat-up wagon. I’ve been in Selena’s wagon a few times; she’s a surfer, hopes to go pro, and her car is always sandy and smells like surf wax.
I roll down my window so I can hear what they’re saying.
“It was so beautiful,” Louise says, her voice slurred. “Such a beautiful party.”
Selena’s in training, so she never drinks, not even one beer, but Louise has always been a nervous drinker and tonight must have made her even more nervous than usual because she stumbles and almost falls when she’s getting into the passenger seat.
“You’d better not puke in my car,” Selena says. The doors slam shut and her engine turns over and her headlights illuminate two orbs of finely falling rain.
They pull away from the curb. Selena’s eyes are on the street, but Louise’s gaze falls on me slouched in the front seat of my car. Her mouth widens to a surprised “O” that makes her look ridiculous.
I lift my index finger to my lips. Shhh.
The house empties quickly after that, and I count the departing guests as they leave one by one and in pairs.
Louise and Selena. Two.
Dante and Tisha. Four.
Cassie. Five.
Carver, whose dad was an idiot to let him borrow the Audi because he’s clearly had more than a few drinks. Six.
Then comes a group of three, two girls and a guy, one of the girls carrying her heels and walking on tiptoes down the driveway, trying not to get too wet, the other girl screeching loudly as the guy swings her up into his arms and carries her to his car. Nine.
Loren and Hector make eleven.
Then it’s just Seth’s car in the driveway. Just Seth’s black Acura.
Minutes more pass, many minutes that clump together to form an hour. At long last the front door opens again. Out comes Seth. He’s wearing a black jacket, one I’ve never seen, but his shirt is white, just as I’d imagined. Apollonia appears next to him in the doorway. She is wearing a dress that could have been bought at Lavish—black, knee length, a little shorter in the front, with ruffles along the edge. Sleeveless. Her hair is up with long wavy tendrils framing her face.
They stand and talk and I am too far away to hear what they are saying, but I don’t need to hear them to understand the way Seth leans toward her, the way her chin tilts up, the way his hand cups her cheek then slides into the hair at the nape of her neck, the way they kiss.
At last, Seth climbs in his car. His headlights turn on, casting twin spotlights onto the porch, onto Apollonia. She looks so beautiful that I can hardly breathe. She looks like a picture, or a mannequin, or a doll.
Finally, Seth backs out of the driveway. His car passes mine, and then I follow.
???
There was this woman named Catherine of Siena. She loved Jesus Christ the way that I love Seth: unquestioningly, unflaggingly, completely.
Jesus came to her in a vision and placed a wedding ring—made of his own circumcised foreskin—on her finger. She saw it there on her hand for the rest of her life, even though it was invisible to everyone else.
When she was twenty-three years old, Jesus visited Catherine and answered her prayer that he take her heart and leave her with his in its place, a wound in her side proof of his divine intervention.
Catherine of Siena’s asceticism was unparalleled. She slept barely at all. She wore an iron chain tight around her waist. She ate almost nothing. She vomited regularly the little food she swallowed. She drank pus from the sores of lepers. She suffered stigmata that only she could see. She starved and starved in the name of Christ until she died. Now she is a saint. Catholics revere her and pray to her.
If she could love her lover so completely, if she could lose herself in her dream of him and be a hero for it, then why should I stop loving Seth just because of the simple fact that he no longer loves me—that he most likely never loved me?
Is reciprocity a condition for love? I have always accepted that my mother is right—no one will love me without conditions. But I reject the idea that I must set conditions for loving Seth. I want to love someone no matter what. I want to love someone even if it hurts me. Am I a saint? A broken dog in a cardboard box?
I am a girl in a car in the middle of the night. And I follow.
???
Seth drives home. I don’t know at what point he notices that I am following him, but after he’s turned off his headlights and his engine, after he’s unfolded himself from his car, he walks over to mine.
I’ve parked just across from his house, where Louise and I used to stop and stare up at his window, wondering about where he might be, what he might be doing. I’ve turned off the engine of my car, and I emerge, closing the door behind me. And then we’re there, as I wanted, the misty rain that floats around us lit up like fireflies by the streetlamps, the night air heavy and quiet like a shroud.
“Hey, Nina,” Seth says. There’s a moment when I can hope that nothing has changed, not really, and in my head I do the sorting—I will pretend that nothing has happened, that I have not been pregnant, that I did not bleed and bleed, that he has not just kissed Apollonia. I will say it never happened, and it never will have happened, exactly as when my mother denied that she had ever told me bedtime stories about the saints, exactly as how she denied in Rome that she had gotten me drunk and how, in spite of my knowledge of these stories, in spite of the massive hangover, part of me believed her.