Twice

I’m with a person who makes me wish I had a different life. With the movement of his lips, his steady hands, his careful words, his protective hold, he makes me wish I deserved a fraction of what he gracefully gives me. We drive out toward Los Angeles at night, his hands on the steering wheel, my skin on fire from the burn of the lights reflecting off the freeway.

“Where do you want to go?”

In the rearview mirror, my eyes are black like a doll’s. He sees me as something better than what I am, as a girl who didn’t give her freedom away in exchange for shameful love. But I have. I wish I could tell him how pathetic I used to be, like a baby spider, clinging, swaying, wanting constantly. If I had a scarlet letter, I would wear it, I would let him know. Instead, I tell James to keep driving, and we wind down Mulholland onto Sunset Boulevard.

In another life, a million miles away, I once fell into a disturbing, deviated love with the man that came before James. He was nothing like the ocean-eyed marguerite tracing the outline of my hips and waist as we drive, stuck in traffic, through Hollywood. This other man didn’t even have a name. Half hypocrite, half vampire, he led me into a haze of obsession, of love unreturned. I fell for his charm, as all young girls do. No one had bothered to tell me that a fist -fight could never be romantic, that chains were ashamed of their prisoners. To say that he took everything I am would not accurately describe what I let him do. I no longer lived through myself. My lungs only accepted the air that had passed through his first.

James lays down the back seats of his car, and holds on to me. I am not used to this. I wish I could make him leave, make him realize that he could do so much better than an infectious parasite like me. But he doesn’t let go. He whispers, “I love you,” kisses my collarbone, says it again, “I love you.” I close my eyes, and when I open them, he is still breathing next to me.

I will forget the first man, the coyote that howled and cackled in the night as I tell him that I’m finally leaving. He will not follow me; I know this well. I say goodbye for the last time, and even as his yelps continue long after I am gone, I abandon him there in the desert.

A young boy sells oranges off the west of the road as we drive back home down the Pacific Coast Highway, offering to trade the clanging silver in my pockets for the Camarillo fire softly glowing within his.

“I love you too, James, darling,” I say.

Tonight, I am not that sappy, hungry, empty girl. He will never know her. I will make sure he never does.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.