Kiss the Stars (Devon Slaughter Book 1) (8 page)

“DEVON?” I was
still reeling from the feel of him in my hand. I longed to have him in my
mouth, inside me.

But he moaned.
His skin gleamed with sweat. Drugs seemed the most likely cause of his sudden
illness. Not that I knew much about drugs, beyond the ones prescribed by my
shrink. I’d always been scared of anything harder than alcohol.

Of course, it
could be the flu, or worse, sexually transmitted. Part of me knew he was a
player and I should be careful. A bigger part of me loved the way his touch was
so sure. And demanding. I’d been about to throw caution to the wind. Maybe fate
had intervened, giving me a moment to rethink the situation, to be smarter,
even self-preserving.

And yet, taking
in the shape of his face, his sensual lips, I felt only pure, irresistible
attraction. “Do you need aspirin?” I said. “Want me to leave you alone for a
while?”

“It’s too bright
in here,” he said.

There was only
one lamp lit, across the room. I turned it off.

“Close the
curtains too,” he said.

I told myself he
had a migraine but I didn’t really believe it. I was afraid no matter what I
found out about him, whatever turned out to be the cause of his illness,
contagious or not, I would throw myself at him, as if to my own death, like a
Kamikaze fighter.

Already,
emptiness was starting to gnaw inside me. The idea of spending the rest of the
night alone, like usual, while he was in my bed, seemed especially cruel, to be
so close and yet so far. But he said, “Stay.”

I curled up
under the covers. His arm across my body was heavy. I never wanted to leave
this dark place, next to him.

I KNEW it wasn’t
the flu or a virus because I was immune to those common human ailments. I didn’t
contract them and I didn’t carry them. And yet I was still waiting for the kiss
in the bar to show side effects. I could fuck her senseless but a kiss might
turn her into a monster.

All I wanted to
do was kiss her again.

I resisted the
urge by pressing myself against her. It felt so pointless, an act I’d done too
many times, sustaining myself from one night to the next. It had never given me
what I truly wanted. Though what that might be was indefinable, showing itself
only as a desire to inhale her very being, as if I couldn’t get close enough to
her.

She tried to
turn over, to face me but I clamped my arm down tighter, so she couldn’t move. “Stay
where you are,” I said, in her ear.

It reminded me
of the night in the bar, when she pretended to be Heathcliff telling Catherine
not to look at him with her lying eyes. I didn’t want her to look at my eyes.
And I didn’t want to be tempted by the sight of her vulnerable lips.

* * *

The air was
steamy and made our skin slick
.
Overhead, a fan turned slowly
.

Zadie
.

The sun was
going down, red and pink and orange. Monkeys howled and the sound echoed
through the trees. Waves lapped on the shore, leaving tiny bubbles, like white
lace.

Damp sand
shifted beneath my bare feet. I pushed open a wooden door painted purple.

She was in the
four poster bed, naked. I pulled off my jeans and lifted the mosquito net to
crawl in next to her. The diaphanous cloth fluttered around us, moved by a fan
that hung from the beam of the thatched roof.

She turned over
to face me. Her cheeks were flushed. She had soft brown eyes and a plain face
made beautiful by something inside her. She gave off an air of enjoying secret
thoughts you longed to hear but she would never share.

She was often
kind but could be cruel. If you hurt her.

She had
naturally platinum blonde hair. Her breasts were small and perky, her legs
wouldn’t quit. She closed her eyes.

We started
kissing.

My hand went
down, between her legs. Her breathing shifted. My erection stroked along her
inner thigh. I eased my way in. She was so wet. I had to pull out, so I wouldn’t
come too fast. We did it slow and lazy with her making soft moans, until I
couldn’t stand it anymore.

I rolled her so
I was on top. My arms trembled. I took a deep breath. She tilted her hips and
opened for me. I pushed deeper, a little at a time, covering her cries with my
mouth.

We writhed and
twisted on the bed. She wrapped her long legs around me. We came together.

I saw myself
reflected in her eyes.

* * *

She was
always restless, afterward
.

“Come on, Devon.
What are you an old man? Don’t go to sleep.” She bit my shoulder.

“Ow. Okay…in a
minute,” I put the pillow over my head.

At some point, I
woke and she was gone. When she came back, I was awake and sitting up. She had
a pineapple. She put it on the hand-carved table, like a centerpiece. “There’s
a mean monkey out there,” she said. “He threw things at me.”

“How do you know
it’s a he?”

She giggled.

Later, when we
took the same path to the bar, something small and hard hit me in the back of
the head.

Zadie laughed.
She pointed up to a high tree branch. “That’s
him
,” she said. It was a
largish brown monkey whose eyes glimmered and whose testicles were glaring
white. “That color doesn’t seem like the best idea,” I said. “Why call
attention to your valuables?”

“Maybe the girls
like it,” she said.

There was a
party having tapas at a long table in the courtyard, mostly men, and they were
foreign, like us. You could always tell. There was one woman, sitting with her
back to us. I recognized her instantly. She sat so straight, hyper-alert, like
a cat watching a mouse. The sheen of her lustrous dark hair and the way it fell
around her shoulders was exactly the same, as if I’d seen her yesterday.

She followed the
gaze of her male companions and turned.

“Oh my God,”
Zadie said. “Enid?
Enid
…”

They squealed,
like the girls they’d been together, falling into each other’s arms and hugging
for too long.

I felt hollow,
as if everything that had been so right, was about to go all wrong.

THE NIGHTMARE
started with the sound of an approach…a key turning in the lock. I had only my
sweaty fists for weapons. But I stood by the bed, ready. I was going to kill.
With my bare hands.

Ometepe, Nicaragua

EVERYONE WANTS to
party. The bar is open-air, lit by torches. Enid’s friends think of themselves
as musicians. They have guitars and bongo drums and play
Nirvana
and
Pearl
Jam
. Music from our adolescence.

I can’t get down
any more beer and the night has just started.

Enid is dancing.
She thinks she’s sexy, in her red and orange sarong that covers her bikini in
mock modesty. At some point, someone picks out the
Flaming Lips
song,
She
Don’t Use Jelly
, on their guitar.

Naturally, Enid
sings, giggling and flirting with her eyes, like the funny lyrics about the
girl who butters her toast with Vaseline are the height of wit she made up
herself. We’re almost thirty and we’re making asses of ourselves in what seems
like an attempt to be young again.

What bothers me
is that it does take me back and it feels purposeful, like Enid has thrown a
net over me. She keeps flashing sultry looks in my direction and Zadie doesn’t
notice because she’s actually having fun. And that annoys me too.

Zadie tries to
get me to dance. I’m half tempted because she’s wearing my favorite dress. It’s
pink and very short. But I shrug her off. She puts her face next to mine, her
breath full of whisky. “Devon’s being an old fart again, wants to go home and
put on his jammies…and take out his teeth.”

It’s not like
her. When she levels you, she does it with class. “You’re drunk,” I say.

She spins away
and starts dancing with Enid and the guys drool, which is the whole point, I
think. “See you later,” I head down the path, back to our casa.

Moonlight spills
through the trees. I’m not tired but I peel off my jeans and T-shirt and get in
bed. No jammies. Jesus. As I lay there, staring up at a hole in the mosquito
net, a mosquito whines in my ear. I slap at it.

My mind conjures
unsavory images of what’s going on back at the bar. Not that I’ll go back
there. I hate that kind of knuckle-dragging shit. Besides, drunk or not, I
trust Zadie. That’s not what’s bothering me.

I suspect Enid’s
stalking us. It’s a small island in a small country, way off the beaten track.
She shows up, randomly, in a bar known only to backpackers? Where’s her damned
backpack?

I first met Enid
at camp. For spoiled rich kids. Black vans with leather seats took us into town
once a week. We played tennis on expensively maintained grass courts and swam
and canoed on a quiet lake with a cluster of summer homes at the far end. Our
camp experience didn’t come close to the rustic conditions Zadie and I had
encountered backpacking through a third world country.

Enid was cute
but didn’t reach her full beauty until later, in high school. On the last
night, during campfire, we sat by each other and she passed me a note with a
map that told me precisely where to meet her after ‘lights out’.

I guess we had a
thing that summer, an eighth grade type thing, secret glances, accidental
touching, and awkward kid stuff. I probably told one friend I liked her and she
told twelve friends she liked me. It culminated into one big make-out session
the last night.

She was the
first girl whose breasts I touched, who let me put my hand down her pants. I
remember there were different types of kissing and she was also the first girl
I ‘tongued’. Christ, it’s pitiful to be that age.

In the fall,
when we ended up at the same high school, she acted like we were engaged,
trying to hold my hand, waiting at my locker, calling me, constantly. One
night, on the phone, I told her to knock it off. “Quit stalking me,” I said and
hung up.

The next morning
at school, she was holding hands with some other guy and I was relieved. I didn’t
consider how strange it was that she had, in a matter of hours, taken up with
someone else.

Zadie was in
three of my classes, Enid in none, thank God.

Zadie was quiet
but not shy. When she spoke in class, she could be scathing. She always sat on
the edge of the classroom, in an outer aisle, near a window. I found myself
watching her, noticing how she scribbled in her notebook when she got bored by
the discussion. She sketched cartoons and wrote little captions I couldn’t make
out.

What really
drove me crazy was how her uniform barely concealed her long legs. And she didn’t
notice me, so I thought about her a lot, concocting ways to capture her
attention.

We met,
officially, through Enid.

Enid was the
leader of the hot girls. Like in class, Zadie stayed on the fringes. She was a
head taller than the other girls and not nearly as pretty in the way they were,
with their long shiny hair and glossy lips. But she gave me the aches.

When I saw Enid
and Zadie exchanging notes in the hall, I went up to them. “Hey, Enid,” I said.
“How’s it going?” I guess I probably stared at Zadie because I remember locking
eyes with her. To me, it was as if only Zadie and I existed. Enid was just a
conduit.

I never dated
any other classmates, besides Zadie, but I met girls outside of school.
Sometimes I was the one who wanted a break, sometimes it was Zadie. We had an
innate understanding that the others were simply passing through our lives,
marking a phase.

We always went
back to each other and sometimes, we discussed our other lovers, revealing
intimacies and making unfair comparisons.

Meanwhile, Enid
had outgrown her status as the cutest girl in school and gone on to full-blown
beauty. She lorded it over the rest of us. Zadie and I had private jokes about
her but every once in a while, I caught Zadie gazing at her, like she would
trade places with Enid, even though we’d deemed her existence vain and vacuous.

By senior year,
I’d moved out of the house into my parent’s guest house. I started having a
recurring nightmare.

It came as
breathing, heavy in my ear, warm on my face. My eyes would snap open to another
pair of eyes watching me sleep. Always, I shot up out of bed and groped for the
light. I couldn’t quite believe there wasn’t really someone, or some
thing
there.

I never told
anyone. I was about to go out in the world on my own, for the first time, and
the dream was probably classic anxiety. Like dreaming you’re in public and
realize you’re naked, or that you’ve entirely fucked off a required class, and
now you have to take the exam.

One night, I had
the thermostat turned up too high, and I tossed and turned.

(It was winter
break. Zadie had gone skiing with her family. Hoar frost covered the trees. I
was writing a term paper on Dostoevsky’s
Demons
.)

This time, the
nightmare started with the sound of an approach.

Footsteps
crunched outside. There was the usual heavy breathing, accompanied by scuffling
on the deck.

A key turned in
the lock.

The door swung
open.

My heart
pounded. I had only my fists for weapons. But I stood by the bed, ready. I was
going to
kill
. With my bare hands.

The intruder
found a light switch.

I squinted in
the harsh glare. “What the fuck, Enid?”

She liked to
incite extreme emotion in people. I think she would have enjoyed it if I’d
punched a hole in the wall above her head, or if I’d shoved her back out the
door, hard enough to make her fall. Both ideas had gone through my mind.

She dangled a
key from a small chain, twirling it. “Did you lose this?”

It was the key I’d
given Zadie. I was rooted to the floor. “That’s Zadie’s,” I said, finally.

“I guess
she
lost it,” and Enid tossed the key onto the table. It landed on my laptop.

My mind spun.
Zadie must have misplaced the key, or maybe Enid stole it from her but it didn’t
matter. Zadie hadn’t noticed it was missing.

Wearing no
underwear, Enid was naked in the span of seconds.

I couldn’t stand
her. But I was instantly hard. She had the body of a
Playboy
centerfold,
soft and curvy, while Zadie was all long limbs and sharp angles.

She did things
Zadie wouldn’t. She was hungry and dirty and beautiful.

We lost track of
time with the days almost as dark as the nights.

We drank mineral
water and imported beer and went back to bed. We soaped each other in the
Jacuzzi and talked about Dostoevsky and put on
Smashing Pumpkins
and
went back to bed.

I had the
nightmare again. When my eyes opened, Enid was sucking me off.

I figured she
would tell Zadie and braced myself for the fall-out. She never did.

I don’t know why
but the whole episode made me more possessive of Zadie, to the point my mother
declared our relationship unhealthy.

We were both
headed for the same college back east. At the last minute, Zadie changed her
mind. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t waste four years of my life. I’m going to
California.” And that was it. Not a single email, voicemail nor ‘drink and dial’
marred what seemed like a clean break.

I was surprised
to feel nothing. I didn’t even care my mother may have been right about us.

Enid was the one
who brought us together again, though it’s not what she intended.

Enid had a way
of showing up all the time, for years after high school. A few months into my
first term at college, we met at a house party. Then we ran into each other in
Sun Valley. The summer I interned in the city, she dated my roommate and found
her way into my bed.

Our random
hook-ups were becoming more and more frequent. They were starting to interfere
with my other relationships. It seemed like whenever I got serious with someone,
I’d cross paths with Enid.

When I was
teaching upstate, after I got my PhD, she showed up on my doorstep every
weekend. Years were slipping by and she never expressed wanting anything other
than sex. I hated myself for not being able to say no to her.

I mentioned that
maybe we were screwing up our lives by
screwing
so much. She said maybe
we were just destined and if we fought against our fate, we could end up
clawing our eyes out. Which made me want to claw my eyes out.

Without warning,
without leaving any trace she could follow, not even telling my parents, I cut
out of New York and headed for California.

I’d heard bits
and pieces about Zadie. She’d tried acting, she’d signed with an agency and had
done a few commercials…she was writing a screen play. I honestly doubt we would
have seen each other again, until our fifty year high school reunion, if it
wasn’t for Enid.

Having sex with
Enid opened a cavernous hole inside me only Zadie could fill.

By then, Zadie
was living in Venice Beach. I caught up to her at a party. She was in the short
pink dress and I saw her all the way across the room with her white blonde
hair.
Head On
by the
The Jesus and Mary Chain
blared from a
stereo.

Our eyes met.
Her surprised smile lit the room and I wondered why we had ever parted.

* * *

I toss and turn,
looking for a cool spot on the sheets.

A nightmare has
me in its grip.
I’m running and the monkeys are screaming and swinging from
the branches above me.
Red smoke billows and rises into the sky.

I wake with a
gasp and lurch out of bed. My eyes are hot coals, my muscles throb. Sunshine
streams through the window.

Zadie isn’t
here.

The act of
dressing in cut-off jeans and a T-shirt is so nauseating; I run to the bathroom
to vomit in the toilet. I stand up on shaky legs. When I wipe my mouth, there
is blood. It’s coming from my nose. I splash cold water on my face, and hold a
towel to my nostrils, until the bleeding stops.

By now, I’m
shivering. This isn’t a hang-over. I want to crawl back into bed but I have to
find Zadie.

I force myself
to drink water. It sloshes in my stomach. I hold it down and slip into
flip-flops and head out. It’s hard to think straight. Mist hovers on the snaky
path. Monkeys throw things at me.

At the bar, I
force down a shot of Nescafe, like it’s medicine. The guy, who is always there
in the morning, making scrambled eggs and cutting fruit for people hiking the
volcanoes, is an ex-pat from the States. He’s slightly grizzled, forty-ish. “You
look rough,” he says.

I drain my glass
and wince. “You know my girlfriend, blonde, tall—”

He waves his
hand. “Yeah, man.”

“She didn’t come
back last night.”

He grimaces.

“We were here…with
friends,” I say. “I took off early.”

“Shii-
it
.”

I’m afraid I’m
going to puke again, so I stagger away, stumbling off the wooden steps and into
the courtyard, where I brace myself against the wall.

He follows me. “Dude,
you’re in bad shape. Could be Dengue.”