Page 11 of Come Back To Me

I stayed to watch the last half of the show, still buzzing from my interaction with David. There had been a moment when I thought about refusing, pulling my arm out of his grip and marching straight for the door in an act of female defiance. But then we caught eyes and neither of us looked away, we just stood there and stared at each other until someone said—“Hey David, you’re up, dude.” He’d checked over me once more like he wasn’t sure if I’d be here when he came back and disappeared into the crowd. I was rendered non-thinking, a teenage boy. I wanted to know what he looked like out of his clothes, how much tongue he used when he kissed. The parts of me that he touched felt bruised, tender. Yet he had been so gentle.

“Pretty good, huh?” the bartender said, jutting his chin toward the stage.

I shrugged. His forearms were as thick as my thighs and his eyes said he hadn’t given a fuck for about ten years.Me too, buddy, me too.I considered the small hoop earring in his saggy left earlobe and sighed.

“They’re okay,” I said. “They need more heart.”

But, he hadn’t heard me, he’d moved off to someone else, probably to repeat the same line.Just a cheap trick bartender,I thought.I turned back to the band. The second half of the show was decidedly better. Or maybe I was more drunk. I wished I weren’t like this, ripping everything apart. Looking for the flaws. In any case, when it was over, David found me edging toward the door. I wondered if he rushed down from the stage knowing I’d try to slip away. He was wearing his leather jacket over his black ensemble now. He took my hand and I let him lead me out of The Crocodile, and when we stepped into the wet night, the air burned through my lungs.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

He lifted his hand to say goodbye to someone over my shoulder.

“Does it matter?”

No, I suppose it didn’t. Unless that was the gin talking. If he turned out to be a creep I had a switchblade in my bag.

“If you’re going to murder me, don’t fuck with my face,” I said. “I want an open coffin at my funeral.”

“No deal,” he said. “I want your dimples as my trophy.”

I laughed, and he looked at me warmly and said, “There they are.”

We headed north, navigating the puddles, him slightly in the lead. A group of girls stopped us and asked for a picture with David. Their boyfriends stood off to the side looking indifferent.

I didn’t tell him no when he held his car door open for me, and I realized it was twice in one night that I’d been unable to say it. An alarm went off in my head, but I silenced it.Hush, cynicism.As I climbed into the front seat of his beat-up Honda Accord I told myself that I was due some yeses. I was due. And maybe this would be different, this thing with David and me.

David played Mark Lanegan as we drove. Heat blasted from the vents until the interior of the car felt hot and crackly like a toaster. I pulled off my scarf and David cracked his window.

“It’s hot,” he said, but he didn’t turn the heat down.

I could see the beads of sweat dot above his lip. At the next light, he shrugged off his coat. At the junction between 4th and Union, I slid off my boots and socks. We didn’t speak, we undressed. The soundtrack played as we tossed our fabric in the backseat, damp from the heat of our bodies. I took off my leather jacket next, and his long sleeve black shirt followed. He was shirtless. Just his black jeans and boots remained. The car smelled of sweat and cigarettes. “Cold Molly” started to play and I tore off my sweater. It was so hot I felt like I was going to throw up. But, we were playing a game of dare.

Outside, a group of people burst from the doors of a nightclub, their breath snaked from their mouths in hazy, white clouds. I wondered briefly who they were, where they lived, and who’d sleep with whom at the end of the night. Inside the car, David’s head moved up and down with the music. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the seat. I was sitting in my bra now, my bare feet propped on the dash, toes wiggling. We were in Florida, Hawaii, Bali. We were not in Seattle in the dead of the coldest winter in twenty years. David pulled off one boot, and then the other, a cigarette balanced between his lips. His boots went flying past my head into the backseat. They were heavy with yellow stitching: Doc Martens. I laughed, but the music swallowed it, a vortex of beat and vocals. And then suddenly we were racing to take off our pants. The light was red as we struggled: lifting hips, yanking the thick wavy denim, chins bumping into the dash. When the car moved forward, our skin stuck to the leather. It was a sauna. A cleansing. I could barely stand it, but I didn’t want it to end. I didn’t know where he was driving us, and I didn’t care. For once. He pulled into a spot on the street.We’re in Fremont,I thought. I stared at the two of us: stripped naked to our underwear, sweating in an old Honda Accord, our pale skin illuminated by the neon lights of the storefronts. David was still wearing his socks, his thighs lean muscle and soft hair. His briefs were pink. As soon as he put the car in park, I was on him. An awkward business, crossing over from seat to lap. I straddled him and felt the stickiness of our bodies, the suction of sweat and skin. Outside of the car, people walked by: pink fur, North Face, scarves that covered their chins, hands deep in pockets. They were in Seattle, cold and frigid, but in this car, we were hot and sweaty—wet in all the right places. David’s fingers were inside of me, working my body into a white-hot explosion. His car windows were not tinted. We were a spectacle. A woman in a pink lace bra squirming on top of a man whose face was buried in her neck. I reached for him and took him in my hand. He felt good. I wanted to feel more of him, but there was a sharp rapping on the window—knuckles against glass. We looked up and two guys were staring, laughing. They waved and gave us a thumbs up, their goofy, drunk smiles rearranging their boring faces. David wrapped his arms around me and laughed into my neck. The spell was broken, and I was no longer hot.

“It’s cold in here,” I said.

He ran a hand up the goose bumps on my arms.

“Let’s go somewhere to get warm then,” he suggested.

I crossed over, back to my own seat. We had to fish our clothes from the backseat one item at a time. He handed me my jeans, I handed him his shirt. It went like that until we were dressed. And then the Honda was back on the road driving quickly toward another unknown destination.What a strange way to get naked with someone,I thought.

I slept terribly the week after I saw David’s show at The Crocodile. My apartment was too warm, and most nights I woke up covered in sweat. When I cracked a window, it would get unbearably cold and leave me shivering under the covers wishing for another body to warm me. Too cold to sleep, too hot to sleep. I was unsettled. It was David. He crossed my mind even when I didn’t want him to—like when I walked to work the next day slouched over with heavy bags underneath my eyes, him being the reason. And when I clocked in at the computer and forgot my server number because I was wondering if he’d show up later that day. He didn’t. In fact, I didn’t see him until two weeks after Christmas. I’d almost forgotten to care when one day there he was, sitting at the bar with a shit-eating grin on his face. How often do we lie to ourselves and say we don’t care about something when we do?

“Hey, Yara?” he said. “Want to get tacos when your shift is done?”

Who said no to tacos? Not me.

“No,” I said. “I’m busy tonight.”

“Okay, good. I’ll just wait here until you’re done then.”

“I have a date,” I told him. And it was true, one of the regulars, an accountant, was taking me out for a drink after my shift.

“He’s picking me up from here. Ah, here he is…” I pretended to be more excited than I was.

David swiveled around on his stool to watch as Brian walked through the door and waved to me.

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