#wildandfree
HARLOW SAINT JAMES
We satidle in his Chevy.
Linc rolled a blunt in his lap and left it there as we pulled away from the taco truck. It vibrated in his lap from the bass all the way down Sunset Boulevard. He didn’t light it until we got onto I-10W.
We cruised at seventy miles an hour down the highway, heading toward the coastline. Smoke spilled from his split lips and disappeared through the window, and we passed the blunt back and forth before trading it for cigarettes.
Linc’s white teeth scraped along his bottom pierced lip.Scrape, pop. Scrape, pop. He did this over and over, and I wondered what the little silver ball would feel like against my tongue.
He turned to look at me, too.
“I’m thinking of a very bad idea.” My voice was low, just under the surface of the music. A bit of an inconspicuous statement, but Linc’s forth-coming intentions made me want him more. I’d never begged for sex before, and I wasn’t starting now. I wanted him to want me, too. He would be the perfect one-night stand. We didn’t run in the same social circle, and if our world was considered a galaxy, we were lightyears apart.
Guys wanted to have meaningless sex with beautiful women, and I was told I was beautiful in the way the night was beautiful—wild and mysterious and only thought of in the moment. I wasn’t crafted to withstand anything more than a single night; perhaps the only answer was to turn every single night into carnal art. Tonight, I could be that girl for him, too.
“Ideas can’t be bad until after the fact,” he paused, reading my expression, reading my mind, until it dawned on him, “but, yeah. It’s probably bad.”
“Very bad.”
“Atrocious.” It was dark inside the cabin of his Chevy, but I still made out his aloof features. “And I’m high. Very high.”
Me, too.I remembered the look in his eyes under the night on Sunset strip. Dopey and bloodshot. I imagined them in the morning: round cobalt eyes set under long lashes, almost as if they were brand new yet worn out inside his faded blue pockets. Like Life had used him as a punching bag.
“Are youverysomething else too?” The word I was looking for washorny. I studied his profile, wanting to rush his words and taste them before the spell would wear off and I would push him away.
“Always something else.”
“Pull over.”
Those bloodshot eyes flicked over at me. Linc’s smile was so faint, one more hit, and I would have missed it. “I don’t fuck in my truck.”
“Then I suggest you step on it to your place.”
The silence swallowed us.
The engine purred like a sleeping beast down the highway.
In no hurry, Linc kept the same speed the entire way to his place, torturing me in the process.
The Chevy pulled into a parking space off Ocean Avenue.
Linc got out, keys in hand.
I got out, too.
The sky was black and went on indefinitely above us when he circled the truck, the summer night a cool breath on my face.
I went to close the door, but he grabbed the handle and waited for me to move. He didn’t say anything, just watched as I stepped aside. I stood back with my arms crossed over my braless chest, the three-in-the-morning breeze like fingers in my hair. He pushed the seat up, grabbed a guitar case, locked the door from the inside, and made his way across the parking lot, expecting me to follow.
And I did.
We entered a building and took an elevator to a studio apartment on the third floor.
Once inside, large floor-to-ceiling windows had views of the Santa Monica Pier. I envisioned the pink and blue lights from the Ferris wheel reflecting off the Pacific Ocean, but at this time, the Ferris wheel’s lights were off. All was dark.
The kitchen had minimal upgrades. Pizza boxes stacked on countertops like a drunken Jenga game, a group of guitars sat in a semi-circle beside a desk, and the worn leather couch faced a wall of shelves filled with speakers, a stereo system, and record players instead of a TV. A collection of framed records lined the wall instead of family portraits. An unmade king-sized bed in the open room.
