We Live Inside You (26 page)

You were coming back from the hills via Burnside that night, as you often did, maneuvering lightly around the sleeping bag bum-clusters near the river. An old toothless alky with a piece of corn in his beard gave you a one handed wave and slurred out, “Hey, runner guy.” You returned the greeting with a head nod and a “Good evening.”

You were fucking high out of your mind off a twenty minute break-in session. All the jewels had been on lock down, but you scored a homemade mix CD with a bow wrapped around the case. It had just called to you. The entire house smelled like summer lilac and you wondered if they’d paid to have that piped in at all hours.

That sweet smell is what you were thinking about at the moment the little black car took a no-look right turn at 10
^th
and Burnside, just past Union Jack’s. You saw a bright flash out of your left peripheral, heard a thump that you later ID’d as your body hitting the hood of the ride, and within seconds you were rolling on the pavement.

The car came to a rapid stop about ten feet later. The brake lights made the scene run red. You were able to figure out the model of the car but couldn’t get your eyes to focus on the license plate. Shit.

This is one of the many dangers of running on a major street after all the last-call closeout boozers hit the road. You’d accepted that and tried to watch for it. You just couldn’t accept the fact that you might have had your life ended by a fucking Jetta with a butterfly sticker on the rear window.

You saw a pair of gorgeous legs in camouflage fishnets emerge from the driver’s side. The girl stood, giraffe-tall in five inch heels. She was crouched by your side in a second, and though you couldn’t quite focus on her face, you caught her wide hazel eyes, tiny flecks of gold floating in the green.

You mark—you might have been in love before you even lost consciousness.

She danced under the name Avarice, and said that when she told a guy he could call her Ava it guaranteed extra tips. Up the false intimacy, amplify the fantasy. When boys pointed out the fitting nature of her name she called them clever. That pulled more tips, too.

She was irresponsible, taking you to her apartment instead of the hospital, but her license was already suspended for another offense (she had a drinking habit, passed down from her dad). Ava had freaked out at the idea of real jail time and was strong enough to get you into her back seat and then her first floor apartment. She had watched you sleep on her couch for a few hours, making sure you kept breathing, and gave you an ice compress for your head. You asked for some Advil and she came back with two Valium and a Xanax, delivered by shaking hands with chipped black polish on the fingernails. The pills were what she had at the moment, though she hinted she could get you some better stuff if you really needed it. Like morphine better.

She asked you why you were running so late at night, with a slight tone of accusation. You told her you worked a day job and preferred to run when it was cooler out. She asked what you did. You said roofing. It seemed tough.

She asked you running questions and caught your excitement about the topic. Played up to it. You could see her game—ingratiate until she knew any charges would be dropped—but you didn’t want to stop playing. You liked the way she was tending to you. It stirred something you hadn’t felt in years.

It also didn’t hurt that she was, as your Uncle would say in grinning understatement, easy on the eyes. Heart-shaped pale face framed with short black hair. Decent lips made more charming by a crooked smile. Legs that seemed to be two thirds of her frame. She was wearing grey shorts with pink trim piping and a thin green cotton t-shirt that showed off the curves on each side of her small breasts.

You knew most men didn’t get to see her like this, so casual and relaxed and gracious. She knew you knew it and rode the vibe. She showed you her tattoos—two thin stripes, one running up the back of each leg, meant to mimic the back seam of a pair of pin-up stockings. As she got closer you saw that each seam was actually composed of slender cursive words.

She bent forward and touched her toes so you could see the entirety of each line. You did your best to conceal a burgeoning hard-on.

The right leg said: …I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him

The left leg continued: yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

“It’s from Ulysses,” she said. “James Joyce.”

She admitted that every time she read that last chapter she felt like “rubbing one out.” She made a circling motion in the sky with her index finger and closed her eyes. Then she smiled at you, full blaze.

You were already prepared to die for this girl and she hadn’t even kissed you.

You never had a chance. It all happened so quickly.

If you had a concussion it was minor and never really manifested itself. More disconcerting was the new gimpy sensation in your right leg. When you tried to run the IT band next to your knee felt tight and sharp, like a white-hot poker was being dragged across the tissue.

Though it made you anxious, you decided to drop running for a week of so. If something in your leg was on the verge of tearing it was better to let it rest.

Ava had been an Olympic-level tease. When she dropped you off at your Uncle’s house, after you seemed properly enraptured, she leaned in close to your face and said she wanted to look at your pupils to be sure you didn’t have any brain damage. She locked you in at the eyes and let her lips float a hair’s-breadth from yours, the heat from her face mixing nicely with your Valium/brain damage buzz.

She whispered in your ear, “I think you’ll be just fine.” Then she told you what nights she worked at which clubs and invited you to come.

She didn’t seem surprised that you were there every night. You dipped into the box in your closet and swapped jewels for cash at pawn shops out on 82
^nd
. You loved the idea of spending your ill-gotten gains on Ava.

You bought every lap dance you reasonably could, and when anyone else got too close to her they looked like Mikey Vinson. You boiled but tried to stay cool in case she looked your way.

You turned creepazoid one night and crawled her apartment when you knew she was at the beginning of her dance shifts down at Sassy’s. You were pro at climbing in through windows, and the summer heat had everyone’s open. It seemed she barely lived there aside from her disheveled futon and the explosion of clothes scattered throughout the house. You threw two pairs of her underwear in your CamelBak and bailed home for an epic stroke-fest. You tied off her lacy yellow G-string around the base of your cock and huffed the blue cotton pair and pounded yourself into exhaustion. You never ran short on fantasies about her, though your favorites involved her sneaking into houses with you and violating every room.

If it wasn’t obsession, it was pretty damn close.

Things seemed fine, spectacular really, until the night she invited you over for coffee at her place. You accepted, secretly ecstatic of course, but caught the heebie jeebies when you noticed she kept looking over her shoulder and wasn’t talking to you on the way back to her place.

Once you were at her apartment she brought you into the loop—She liked you, more than she expected to, but she already had a man, on the low, and he was insanely jealous, sometimes to the point where he got rough with her. She didn’t know how to leave him, and she didn’t want to endanger you. The guy never came down to her clubs, but his friends sometimes did, and they’d noticed you. How could they not?

You puffed up your chest. “Who is this guy?” you asked.

“Have you ever heard of Stump Lo?”

Shit. You had. You un-puffed your chest.

Stump Lo was a Portland rapper who’d been struggling for years to try and pimp his pseudo-Cali-gangster-style hip hop to a general populace more interested in commercial hits or backpacker rap. He was the dude that you always had to sit through while you waited for the good rappers to come on—tolerated but not truly loved, and you could feel his resentment on stage. Word was he’d shifted to coke sales a year or two back—he wanted the cred and his album sales weren’t churning out the royalties—and had worked his way to the upper echelons of Snortland suppliers.

This moment, right here, is where you should have made a run for it, gimped leg and all.

Instead you looked into Ava’s eyes and decided to tell her about who you really thought you were. It was the best sales pitch you had to try and keep her in your life. You had to give her an alternative to this Stump Lo dude, somebody just as bad-ass that wouldn’t trap her in a web of jealousy.

You told her you weren’t a roofer, you were a fucking roughneck criminal, and at the top of your game you were probably Portland’s best cat burglar. You also broke your code and exploited your parents’ death, saying you’d even had to see their bodies. You told her you hadn’t felt fear since that day. If she didn’t want to stay with this guy, she could roll with you and things would be just fine.

All of this shit just came flying out of your mouth, and as you escalated your bravado with each detail you noticed a spark in her eyes.

She wanted to hear more about your break-ins. You told her about all but one of them. She called you crazy.

She loved your runner’s scheme for evading the law. She called you clever, and you believed you really were.

You did feel more powerful. You’d averted an awkward break-off from the most dazzling girl you’d ever met.

You realized that you were really, at last, taking control of your life. She leaned over, put her hand on your face, and told you that she thought she had an idea.

You were all ears. You sorry Rescue Ronnie Captain Save-a-Ho motherfucker.