Know Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy - Book One) (14 page)

“
Tell him I appreciate it, but the
landlord’s knocking, and realty developers are kicking me out my
home. So, first come first serve.”

“
That old fart? Fuck ’im. You tell
him—”

“
Xavier, stay on track here.” Xavier really
knows nothing about Mr. Bernstein. Few people do.
And his constantly
blasé comments about Savva are
really
starting to piss me the fuck off!

“
Fine. Well, I’ll pass the message. But
don’t go gettin too much of a big head.
One
set you did. I’d take what Randy can throw your
way.” I tense my teeth. If Xavier wasn’t the way in for me here,
I’d be slamming the phone down. Then, on a total one-eighty, he
says, “Look, Blaze, about them haters online. Fuck ’em. Haters are
always gonna hate—goes with the territory, comprende?”

“
Yeah.”

“
Best is to ignore them.”

“
I’ll try.”

And that’s the thing that always confused
me about Xavier.
The Yin
and the Yang. One minute sweet as a rose, the other, vile as a
festering wound. Not the same as Tolek, no. Because I
do
believe it’s the chemicals
screwing with Xavier’s mind that make him this way. Doctor Jekyll’s
potion. (And, you gotta ask yourself, was Robert Stevenson really
referring to
A Certain Corn Flake from California
when
writing about a potion that “removed
inhibitions”?)

“
OK, chiquita. I gonna get me some rest. I
been up since yesterday morning. Damn, you played a fine set. Do
something for yourself tonight. Hey, you wanna grab some coffee
some time? You know, you, me, some music, some X, hmm? Like old
times?”

Urgh!
“Xavier...look, I appreciate the gig. But don’t
expect this to be more than it is.”

“
We’ll see.”

Part of me wants to jump down the phone
line, wrap my hands around him and say,
No, we won’t see, you fucking
punk!
The other part of
me tells me not to overreact, tells me that this is just the way
Xavier is.

“
Lemme know when Randy wants to
meet.”

“
Will do.” A pause. Then, Hyde goes away
again and Jekyll comes out: “Look, Blaze. I’m...I’m
sorry
. You know.
About... About everything, OK? I really am. No one expected it to
happen, or for it go so far.”

It’s as if someone just winded me with
a
whoosh
of a
punch in the gut. Trembling, I say—no, I
whisper
: “Yeah, rearview regret. But...thank—thank you,
X. I appreciate you saying that.”

He sighs. “OK, babe. We just gotta move
on, no?”

I wish I could.
“Yeah. Look, Xavier, after you
tell Randy ‘first come first serve’...uhm...also thank him for me.
From the bottom of my heart. Really. A
lot.
And, er, thank
you
again, OK?”

“
I knew
joo
was a softy underneath all that riot grrrl
bullshit.”

When I put the phone off, Declan (who is
now chilling on my beanbag with a copy of
Nineteen
Eighty-Four
) says, “That
sounded intense.”

A tear
almost cracks through as I think of Savva’s beautiful face,
marred forever in my mind by that final blue image of her. “Uhm,
yeah, lots of early stuff resurfacing.” I go to the faucet and wash
my face. Then, remembering again that I just made
two freaking
Gs
, I say with a smile,
“Deck, I think supper’s on me tonight.”

I intended to take him out
right away. I did. I intended
for us to eat, to talk, to do what...I guess...people do in these
kinds of things.

But then he grabs
me. His hands graze against my waist as I
reach for the door on our way out. And my gasp betrays that it’s
already been too long since he’s touched me.

I hear him breathe of me,
f
eel his nose by my
hair, inhaling; his hands moving up my sides.

I move my own hands over his. Logic tells
me to wait. Logic tells me to not let it get too physical before it
gets emotional.

Logic loses.

I turn on him. Slam my hands to his chest
and push him back against the
Grandmaster Flash
poster near my bookshelf. And then I dive into him
with my tongue.

My
kisses are headlong and furious. Hungry. I slide my hands
under his sweater, ease them over the granite of his body. I kiss
his neck, lick it. His own tongue goes ballistic on my ear, then my
chin.

Fire burns in me. Sounds play in my mind
but the only beat is the syncopated one of our breaths. Hot and
violent.

He cups my
cheeks. His gaze is molten lava. It burns through
me. It feels like he sees every dark secret of mine, every fear.
Every bone-gnawing worry I’ve ever felt anywhere and at any
time.
Like
he
knows
me.

I start pulling him closer, but there’s no
more space to fill. I tug, I grab. He clutches my back. Before I
know it, my top is off, then my bra. And, small as they are, I bare
my breasts proudly to him, for the first time completely
comfortable showing them to a boy. Only one thing is missing now:
“Wait,” I say. His face shows momentary shock, but I kiss him to
let him know I’m with it. I don’t know why, but I am. “I just need
music.”

I take out my phone, scroll down to
Girl with One
Eye
by
Florence and The
Machine
. I place it in
its dock and turn up the volume. Then I dim the lights so the one
or two people who actually do still live across the road, can’t
look in.

Florence
’s mellifluous—and
angry
—voice crashes into the room. I’ve set the sound to loud
and my top-quality
B&W 683s
don’t let me down.
Thanks again, Patryk.

I stand
still, close my eyes, feel my body sway. Feel the
music wrap over me like warm hands.

Declan
moves over to me. Snatches me toward him and presses my
tits to his. “Interesting choice of music.”

“
You should hear the mix I made of
it.”

His lips are on mine before we talk more
about it.

My arms flop to my side.

He swipes me off my feet, slides me onto the
bed.

Drums and guitars clang. And Deck kisses
my stomach, licks my belly button. Then moves onto my breasts. I
get his sweater off. He says, “How far can we take it? I mean, so
you’re comfortable...”

“
I think this is my limit,” I
confess.

“
That’s cool.” He slides on top of me,
lying above me. “This OK?”

I groan, then nod, smiling deliriously for
sure.

He rubs against me. I feel his hardness
behind his jeans.

“
Still fine?”

I hold him.
“Oh yes. I’ll tell you if it’s not.”

The kissing throws me into a whirlpool.
Florence sings about cutting a girl’s eye. Declan laughs.
“Damn fine choice of
music.”

“
It’s just so you know what you’re getting
yourself into.”

In between kisses, he says, “I don’t think
it’s really you. I think it’s a front.”

You’re right
.

I turn him around. Then I’m on top of him,
straddling him. I push down hard with my crotch until I see him
wince; I wriggle lower, slowly, in rhythm to the thumping bass drum
and crashing rock. I ride him. When he groans I tighten the grip of
my legs around him.

“
You make me crazy, Blaze. I—” He clutches
my waist.

I speed up, pressure building, the
eighth-beat loop just before the explosion.
Down There.

When it finally comes crashing
down
, for both of us,
there is no world left. The walls collapse, implode. Declan’s roar
echoes in sync to
Drumming Song
—the next track.

I break out in a sheen of relieved sweat.

And I fall on him.

Lying on his chest, I remember the call
with Mamah a few days after Savva died, telling her I was still
gonna stay here. “Because I’m American, Mamah. I was born here, and
I will die here.”

I was thinking a lot about dying
in those days.

I remember Patryk,
torn and broken, leaving for Poland.
Thereby abandoning me to fend for myself. The three musketeers now
becoming the Lone Ranger.

I remember the very first conversation
with Mama
h about me
staying in the US when she first planned on returning to Poland two
years before that. I told her I would survive. That, where there
was a will there was a way. I remember the sadness in her brown
eyes.
The
disbelief of adulthood in youth’s constant insistence on the
existence of hope and promise in a hopeless world.

Or their insistence
o
n the
existence of dreams...

That was
about three years ago.

Besides
Tolek, there had been
some
boys. Mostly when I was slammed. And none of them
serious. All of them the same. All of them wanting one thing.
Xavier being the last of them. But at least, for Xavier, there had
been
some
emotion on
my part, even if it was only that of a lingering childhood
friendship which never really bloomed into anything more for me,
even when we tried.

It’s Xavier’s Jekyll that keeps people
returning to him. The knowledge that, deep down, hidden though it
may be, is a real and caring person.

Tolek had no
Jekyll. He was all Hyde—just different shades of
him.
Two-Face
.
Black-haired and big. Rough. Angry. I wanted something from him he
couldn’t give, just as he wanted something else from me that I
couldn’t give. Ironic. Different, and yet the same.

I wanted from him what I feel I’m
getting
now from Deck.
Do I have a word for it? No. Just as a child has no word for
needing food, only an innate sense that, without it, it would
starve and die.
Declan feeds me
,
if that makes sense.

I think of the two grand I just made in
one night.
If things go
well, I might be making two grand a week not too long from now. And
then finding an apartment might not even be so bad.

And, while Declan’s hand makes it to the
shaved side of my head now, and while he kisses me silently on my
sheening forehead, most of all, I think how none of all this
fucking matters anyway. I think of how, if all I could do would be
to lie here, and breathe in his soapy scent, I’d be OK. All I’d
need would be this feeling, and my music.

And nothing else.

A
real game changer.

So
let’s play ball.

We do go for supper
, at a tiny rustic place with tables that
were probably workbenches once before. It’s dark, and a solitary
candle glows between us. Declan’s eyes look almost demonic, lit
only by the white flame.

We do talk. But mostly we stare. Or he
stares. I catch him a few times. I say,
“You there?”

He shakes his head, says, “Oh, yeah,
sorry, I was just...” Then he looks away, the candle on the table
guttering away.

He looks back at me, eases a hand to mine,
holds it, tilts his head and doesn’t let his gaze stray from
mine.

“
Why are you staring?”

“
I just...want to.”

I laugh it off,
embarrassed
.

We talk.
I find out he plays football—a
lot
of it. I find out Trev’s like his brother and that
Deck knows him and Skate from back in their school days. Skate
since High School, Trev since they were little kids.

I tell him music is my life, that I can
lose myself in it and not come out for days—no food, no sleep. The
only drug I need.

He tugs my hand toward him, starts kissing
the top of it. “What are you doing?” I look around nervously. He
says nothing, puts the tip of one of my fingers in his mouth, licks
it.

I melt. Heat rushes over me. “You’re going
to ruin me.”

“
Why?”

“
Because all I can think of is being with
you for hours and hours every day.”

“
And that’s a bad thing?”

“
Yes, because I need to mix. I need to
practice.”

“
I have to work tomorrow, so it should give
you time to focus on that.”