We Won't Feel a Thing (25 page)

Riley joined his hand with Medora’s as they walked. It felt like plastic on plastic. He pictured them tiny, on top of a wedding cake, faces painted with stiff red smiles.

“Want to sit?” he said, inventing some cheer.

“Sure.”

He picked a romantic spot with a perfect view of the wedding gazebo. The guardrail wobbled as they lowered themselves and hung their legs over the edge. Medora smiled at him, her long curls billowing in the breeze. Riley smiled back, kneading his useless fingers. He tried to think of lines, what tough guys in his father’s movies said to win girls over.

“Let’s talk ink,” said Medora.

Riley pictured the riot of words on her receipt.

“I’m not much of a writer,” he said.

“Not that kind of ink.” She gave a delicate snort. “Don’t be shy. I saw them through your shirt.”

“You—”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

She tossed her hair over her shoulder and unbuttoned her soft pink sweater. She peeled it off, revealing a white tank top. Riley broke out in prickles all over.

Medora was covered in tattoos. They crawled up her arms, spilled onto her pale chest. There was a cowboy boot with a knife through it, twisted vines with bloody thorns, a python that slithered across her sternum and disappeared into her tank top. The top was so thin he could see right through it, and Medora wasn’t wearing a bra.

“…Wow,” said Riley.

He felt a stab of desire. The SmartClings activated. It was sudden and sensational: phantom fingers roamed across his chest, over his stomach, up his thighs. His eyelids fluttered. He relaxed into ecstasy.

“God.” Medora grinned. “You look like you’ve never seen nipples before.”

I haven’t. Not in person,
he almost said. He caught himself in time. He shrugged with one shoulder, gave an Apostle Kane scoff that dripped of worldliness and hinted at mysterious old wounds.

In the reception room behind them, Tammie and the Tidals began a new song. Or Tammie began it, coaxing mournful notes from a white guitar that matched the lily in her hair, and the rest of the band was forced to follow. Riley and Medora turned and watched through the window. It wasn’t a celebration song. It was a song for a smoky bar on a crumbling city block, where everyone sipped stark amber drinks and stared straight ahead into the past.

“Do you know what it means,”
Tammie sang,
“to hurt the way I do…?”

“Do you know?” murmured Medora.

Riley nodded. Her slick pink lips parted, displaying slightly pointed canine teeth. She stroked the daddy longlegs tattooed on her wrist.

“Oh, good,” she said.

***

Rachel turned away from the window. He’d taken that Medora person out on the deck. They were sitting in the same spot where she and Riley used to huddle with binoculars, spying on teenage couples in canoes and making up backstories for them.

They looked perfect together. Like a wedding cake topper.

Under the table, Rachel’s fist tightened around the matches. She was alone with Bryan and Gussie-Lynn Garrett. Mr. and Mrs. Woodlawn had excused themselves; she could see them across the room, arguing, a funhouse blur behind the King Neptune ice sculpture.

“So what are your future plans, Rachel?” Bryan Garrett said, full of false cheer.

“Yes, tell us!” said Gussie-Lynn. “What would you like to be someday?”

Rachel glanced at the deck again. Medora had scooted closer to Riley.

“An exterminator,” she said.

“Oh, isn’t that interesting!” Gussie-Lynn chirped. “My cousin Frank works for RidCo and he says it’s never been a better time to…”

In the band’s corner, Tammie was breaking down. Her voice splintered on
love never dies.
People were starting to stare. One of the Tidals laid his pink-tipped mallets inside his drum and went to rescue her from herself. He led her away, whispering into the trumpet of her hair-lily. As soon as they vanished, Mr. Ukulele jumped into the spotlight and performed a jocular shrug.

“Well, ah,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “We’ll just forget
allllll
about that. Okay?”

He turned to his bandmates and drew a desperate smiley face in the air. They all traded looks. Then they launched into “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

Rachel jumped up so fast her chair toppled over.

***

“People leave marks on you,” Medora was saying. “You might as well be honest about it. Right?”

Her hands skated her own skin. Riley’s clings responded, replicating her touches. He felt like he was eating for the first time in days. He exhaled.
It’s working.

“Do you want me to tell you about them all?”

He felt his head bob. “Tell me anything.”

Medora drew invisible circles around her tattoos and named each one, making hot whorls of pleasure on Riley’s skin. “This one was Travis—cowboy, poet, cheater. Here’s Evan—landscaper, mama’s boy, pathological liar. Oh, and this one was Jake. My best friend’s ‘boyfriend.’”

Riley’s eyebrows went up.

“Oh, whatever. Like we could stop it.” Medora caressed the flaming guitar on her right shoulder. “Every one of them makes me stronger. Heartache is a freaking
gift
.”

“It is?” Riley’s clings quickened. His shoulder toasted pleasantly.

“I’m an
artist
.” Medora cocked her head. “I thought you were too.”

“I am, but—”

“Every time my heart breaks, I write a song you could hear on the radio tomorrow.” She hooked her hands on the loose guardrail and rattled it. “I’m going to be a huge success. And that’s not ego; I have to suffer for it. It’s worth it, though.” She tugged at his tie. “Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” said Riley. He shifted uncomfortably. His shoulder was starting to burn. “I don’t think you should have to suffer to—”

“Tell me about her.”

“Who?”

Medora unbuttoned two of his shirt buttons. A burst of hot flutters seared his chest.

“The girl who made you do this.”

***

Rachel stalked through the trees at the edge of the shore, head spinning from the flute of champagne she’d nicked before she left the reception. It was up to her now. Her imagination would rescue her. She would huddle here alone with her made-to-order Prince of Darkness, and he would be everything she needed. He would put his phantom hands on her and teach her how to burn for him, because burning for her own fictional character was better than hurting over Riley. Step Five would be clean and thorough and delicious. She bet she could do it in an hour.

The Prince was right where she left him, in the graveyard of old canoes and rowboats. His back was turned and his left hand ashed a half-spent cigarette. She imagined him exhaling, sending up a subtle smoke signal she knew was meant for her.

Turn around,
she instructed.

The boy turned to face her. He took a drag and the red eye of his cigarette glowed. Warmth breathed across her skin where the clings were, starting in her arms and spreading everywhere. She felt hands on her, whispery ghost-touches that scattered her thoughts and blew them away.

Through the trees, high on the faraway deck, Riley and Medora were small as dolls and just as adorable. A high sweet Medora-laugh drifted over and found her.

Let’s go somewhere,
Rachel said.
Anywhere.

The Prince of Darkness stayed silent. He pointed his cigarette downward: at the weathered red boat overturned in the dirt. A single word bored into her.

Row.

***

Riley glanced away from Medora, rubbing his burning shoulder. He spotted a flash of blue in the trees: Rachel, alone by the overturned rowboats. She bent down and grabbed the rim of a red boat, her skinny arms straining as she heaved it right side up, and then brushed her hands together as if she’d vanquished an enemy. He braced for a brilliant rush of tenderness, pride, concern. But his Rachel-feelings were paling slowly, blurring into gray. Only Medora was in color.

Riley felt ill, as if he’d eaten three slices of cake in ten minutes. Medora’s skin looked queasily edible. Fondant rolled smooth, inked with bright colored sugar. Three stories below them, danger lurked: a jumble of broken old picnic tables, the sharp points of open patio umbrellas.
What would happen,
he wondered wildly,
if I let myself fall?

He turned back to Medora. He made himself take her hand.

“She doesn’t matter,” he heard himself say. “She’s almost gone.”

***

Rachel started to row.

Her oars sliced through sludgy water, made shimmery gold by the full orange moon. The boat felt impossibly light, as if she were a bug on a floating leaf. She philosophized, dizzy with hunger and desire and cheap champagne.

The Prince was a very good listener.

I mean, love is pretty much fiction anyway, right?
she said, the silver clings swirling their ghost-touches down her arms, up her thighs.
We don’t actually know someone, no matter how long we live with them. We make up who we think they are, who we want them to be. So really, you’re like the next link in the evolutionary chain of love.
She grinned woozily, enraptured.
I think we could make each other happy. Will you come with me to New York?

He gave her an alluring blink. She took that as a yes.

Everything would be perfect. I could take you out when I needed you. Put you away while I studied.

He blinked again. Rachel decided she disliked his hair; it was too self-consciously villainous. She made it shorter and tidier, like the hair of a debonair ad man from the 1960s.

Fictional boyfriends,
she thought,
are the best.

As the boat skimmed past the gazebo, the wave mosaic glinted at the edge of her vision. Rachel trained her eyes straight ahead. She rowed faster, faster, until the distance from shore felt safe.

When she glanced back at the deck, Riley was gone.

***

“Take me somewhere,” Medora said. So he took her two floors down, behind the deserted counter that used to be a kite stand. He’d passed his parents by the door when he’d exited the deck, but they’d been locked in an argument and didn’t notice. The fight looked bad. Bad in a real way, not bad in a DERT way.

He couldn’t think about them now.

Medora pulled him down on a pile of dusty rent-a-kites. She tore his jacket off, ripped his shirt open. She took a shiny foil packet out of her tiny purse and slipped it in his shirt pocket.

“Just in case,” she said.

“Okay.” Riley gulped. Then he lowered his voice an octave. “I mean—
yeah
.”

Medora seized his shoulders and rolled him onto a gaudy silk phoenix kite. He felt the wooden spine snap under his weight. She didn’t kiss him. Not yet. She straddled his hips and traced the network of SmartClings on his chest.

“Whoa,” she said. “They’re like…dimensional. Who did these?”

“Some guy,” he said gruffly. “Back of a van.”

“Are they permanent?”

“Nothing’s permanent.”

“They’re beautiful,” she cooed. “Like all your nerves are
right there.”

Riley started to shake. He hadn’t planned on being touched for real tonight. Medora’s fingers confused the clings; it felt like eight, ten, twenty hands were on him at once.

“I love touching people with broken hearts,” said Medora. “They’re so powerful.”

He set his jaw like Apostle Kane.
“Hearts don’t break. Just bones,”
he quoted.

“A dark side,” said Medora. “I like.”

She traced his lips with her finger. Her nails were tipped with white and filed into points. Her pink smile stretched wider. She filled up his vision, ensnared all his senses.
This is what it’s like to lose yourself in someone else.
He trembled.
This is good. This is right.

That was his last thought, before things started going wrong.

***

The boat bobbed in the lake’s dead center. Soft strokes danced up and down Rachel’s arms, legs, chest. She was dazed with artificial longing, lost in the glamour of the woodsy cologne she imagined for the Prince.

She took a deep breath.

“Are you ready?” she said.

He nodded.

“Help me get rid of this,” she said.

She instructed the Prince to stand, brought him over and knelt him in front of her. She made his bottom lip a bit fuller, changed his eyes from blue to an imperious green. He was perfectly new, perfectly kissable. She stopped tweaking him, curled her hands into fists, asked him to lean in and tilt his head fifteen degrees to the right.

When he did, Rachel understood why Step Five came with disclaimers.

***

The SmartClings attacked. They tightened all at once, squeezing Riley’s arms and chest and thighs. Bitter cold ripped through his body. Rachel was going. He was losing how it felt when she smiled at him, when she laughed at his jokes, when they thumb-wrestled on her bed and she snarled
You’re going down.
His Rachel feelings were freezing, cracking, falling away. The only heat was the girl right in front of him.

“Wow,” said Medora. “And we haven’t even kissed yet.”

She leaned in.

***

The clings constricted. Cold shot through Rachel’s body and she arched in pain, her nails digging into the boat’s wooden seat.
This is it,
she thought. Riley was going. The clings were freezing him out, numbing her everywhere. She was losing how it felt to want their hugs to last longer, to trim his hair so she could touch it, to pull on his sweater and feel him so close that if she opened her mouth, she was certain his voice would come out.

Rachel gasped in a breath.

“Stop,”
she said.

***

“Stop!” said Riley.

Medora pulled away with an archly puzzled expression, the look of a girl who was not accustomed to boys backing out on her three centimeters from a kiss. Riley sat up, buttoned his shirt.

“What the hell?” said Medora.

“Look, you seem like a really—nice person,” said Riley. The clings loosened a bit. “I just—I don’t think I can make out with you. Or anything.”