“Is the blond his girl?” I pressed. I didn’t really give a shit either way; I just wanted to know why he’d acted like I had a target on my back from the moment I first saw him.
“Yeah,” she confirmed. “Brenda got here about a month after him, and there was an immediate spark between them,” she said with a sly grin.
“Were they both abused?” I lifted my chin slightly to blow the smoke upward as Megan chewed on her lower lip. My eyes caught on her plush mouth.
I sometimes thought that, if she weren’t the girl with whom I shared my traumatic history, I would have tried to get her into bed. I had alwaysbeen extremely curious about how she experienced sexuality and sexual encounters. I wondered if she also tried to reclaim a controlling role in bed by pretending that the man was Ryan or if she simply gave herself over to the pleasure of a passionate moment.
I wanted to know if I was the only one for whom sex was such a sick experience or if everyone else who was like me had the same thing happen.
“Yeah. They both have pretty horrific backstories. They’re kind of like you and me…” She took a pause, and I stared at her, unsure what she was implying. She sensed my confusion and went on, “They fight all the time, but they are really very similar, and sometimes it seems like they can’t stand each other, but then…” She paused and gave me a cheeky little smirk, like she knew she was about to say something that would bother me.
“But then?” I prompted her, though I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to hear any more.
“But then they have this intense emotional connection. Chemistry. They have a lot of sex and work out their problems between the sheets.” She gave me a suggestive smile, but I just kept staring gravely at her.
Unexpectedly, I thought of Selene.
That was also the way we resolved our issues.
Babygirl would ask me to tell her something about myself, and in return I took what I wanted from her: on a bed, over a desk, or against a wall…wherever I felt like it. We didn’t make love, and, in fact, the idea of that horrified me, and we weren’t a couple because I had no idea what it meant to reciprocate affection. For me, sex was set apart from all human emotions. It was just an act of want and perversion. Though, with Selene, it had also become an irregular beat of my heart, warmth, kissing, holding, and a longing to learn more of her unblemished world.
Every time Tinkerbell sprinkled a little bit of her fairy dust on me, it set off a giant clusterfuck in my head.
“You’re thinking about Selene.” Megan’s voice called me back to the present moment. She was not asking me a question but making a clear, precise statement. I realized that I had been standing there in a stupor with my cigarette dangling from my lips until it had accumulated a long wormof ash. Before it could fall onto my jacket, I pinched the filter between my fingers and tapped it away with my index finger.
“No,” I lied.
Never would I admit to her that I was long dead but felt alive when I kissed my Babygirl, that I was caged up but felt free when I touched her soft skin. I would never tell her that I became a blazing fire when I moved between Selene’s thighs or that, though I was broken, I felt a little more whole when I looked into her ocean eyes.
“She’s very beautiful, very sweet. I only needed one night to see what kind of girl she is,” Megan noted with a small smile.
“Sickeningly sweet,” I corrected.
Sometimes her sweetness was too much, and it really got under my skin. On the subject of her loveliness, however, I agreed with Head Case. Selene was very different from my other women but no less beautiful. She was compelling in her own way, sensual and feminine without excess.
She was sexy as fuck, too…even when she was wearing her childish pj’s.
Before Selene, I’d never fantasized about someone like her.
“But you enjoy it,” Megan prompted me.
“Sure, I enjoy fucking her,” I clarified. There was no way I was going to confess the strange things I sometimes felt about Selene. They were undefined and rare but intense, nonetheless.
Maybe my attraction to Selene was particularly powerful, and so my body allowed me to lose control more easily with her than with the others.
It was the only plausible explanation.
“She’s not like the others, Miller.”
“She’s not like me, either,” I agreed firmly. “Not like us…” I added, reminding her of the vile history we shared, the obvious scars, the deep problems to overcome, and the future full of nightmares instead of dreams.
Selene was my woman, my girl, and also my lover.
She was everything to me and nothing at the same time, because I could never really let her into my arid heart. I didn’t want to condemn her to a disastrous life by my side. I was going to continue to savor what we had for as long as I could, right up until I left for Chicago. Then, I would let her go, just like I’d promised her mother.
“You should trust her, open up to her. I think she’d accept you. You do have a soul, Miller, and it’s not as rotten as you’d like her to believe,” she told me, her voice softening. “I mean, you’re definitely a perv, and I wouldn’t approve of the shit you get up to with the Krew either…” she added, looking into the middle distance.
“What do you know about that?” I asked her with a frown.
