Page 91 of Make Me Sin (Bad Habit 2)
It can’t be. I can’t be hearing this right. I whisper, “You said you belonged to me.”
When she nods, it feels like a light blinks on inside me. Somewhere in the blackest, loneliest pit of my soul, someone has flipped a switch, and there is light.
I’m staring down at that someone.
She’s staring back at me, and she’s smiling.
I swallow around the rock in my throat. “And you said . . . you said . . .”
“Hmm?” She gently pushes my hair off my face, calmly waiting for me to get my shit together and speak.
“You said you loved me.” It’s a gasp, like I’m out of air. Because I am out of air. I’m breathing underwater. None of this is real.
Chloe winds my hair around her wrist and uses it like a leash to pull me down, until my body is fully against hers. Her breasts are so soft against my chest. I want to bury my face between them.
Against my lips, she murmurs, “Not loved, A.J. Love. Present tense.”
She kisses me. That light inside me gets brighter and brighter. It gets so blindingly bright it blocks out everything else, even the clock in my head that’s been steadily ticking down to zero all along, and still is.
We make love again. A.J. handles me like I’m made of the most fragile porcelain: breakable, irreplaceable, and rare. All his walls have crumbled, all his defenses are stripped bare. He’s totally open to me, vulnerable and emotional, and the feelings I see in his eyes as he gently thrusts into me are blowing my mind.
He looks at me like I’m a miracle. Like I’m his savior. But it’s really he who’s saved me.
Every breath I’ve ever taken has been leading me to this.
We spend the rest of the afternoon talking. I make the spaghetti, we eat it in bed, sitting cross-legged on the mattress, and then talk far into the night.
He tells me about the train he took from Saint Petersburg to the Netherlands, two days of rocking cars and clattering tracks and nightmares so bad he’d wake screaming. From Rotterdam he took a cruise ship to New York—on the train, he’d stolen the passport of a man who looked like him—and arrived in the US with the cash he’d saved from his fights, rolled in fist-sized wads wrapped with a rubber band, stuffed inside a backpack. He lived for a while in a youth hostel, whose manager was a drummer in a local band. When the manager was killed crossing the street by a taxi driver, A.J. asked his widow if he could buy the drum set. She gave it to him with a “good riddance,” convinced the drums had brought her husband nothing but bad luck.
“A toy drum was the last thing my mother ever gave me,” A.J. says, staring out the windows at the midnight sky. It’s clear now; the rain clouds have disappeared, and the sky twinkles with stars. “I loved the sound it made, the harshness of it. The colors it made when I banged on it were so raw. Is it the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ that goes, ‘And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air’?”
I nod.
“Its colors were like that. And the kit I got from the hostel manager’s widow was the same, all angry and brassy and loud. I loved it. I’d thrash on those drums all night sometimes.” He laughs. “And nobody ever had the balls to tell me to stop.”
“Why New York?”
He looks at me. He’s lying on his back with his arms under his head, his feet crossed at the ankles. I’m sitting up beside him with my arms wrapped around my knees, listening raptly to every word.
“Sayori once told me there are only two cities in the world where a person can really disappear. Where someone can go and become anyone else he wants to be, arrive invisible and stay that way, no matter how long he lives there. New York and Las Vegas.” He looks out the windows again. “At least New York has a soul. It’s a tough soul, pretty unforgiving, but it has one. Vegas is where souls go to die. It’s a fucking graveyard of souls, that city.”
I remember all those “facts” I read about him on Wikipedia. “So all that stuff about you on the
internet, your bio and everything, that’s all made up.”
He glances at me, amusement in his eyes. “You Googled me?”
I blush. “Don’t judge. I had to know who I was dealing with. The internet’s the best place to start.”
“The internet’s full of shit,” he says, holding my gaze.
He has a point. Perfect example: anyone with a computer can edit a Wikipedia entry. For many pages, you don’t even need a user account to do it.
He reaches out and grasps my ankle, as if he just needs to be touching me somewhere, and continues to talk. “I was in New York for less than a year. The winter reminded me too much of Saint Petersburg, that fucking merciless cold that ices your bones. So I moved to sunny, soulless Vegas. Pretty soon after, I ran out of money. I couldn’t get a real job because I didn’t have a Social Security card, plus I was paranoid about anyone finding out about my past, so I washed dishes at a restaurant for cash under the table, then got a job as a bouncer at a strip club. That paid a lot better than dish washing. I was sixteen, but I was big, and rough-looking, and could get away with saying I was anywhere from twenty-one to twenty-five.”
As he speaks, he rubs his thumb absentmindedly over my anklebone. I find it comforting.
“Then one night I got into a fight. In Saint Petersburg, we fought with our fists, sometimes with knives, but the hardware was usually only if you were in a gang. And there were rarely guns. They were just too expensive. But in Vegas, everybody had money. And guns were cheap. So everybody had a gun.”
