“Oh yeah?”I snort, wanting to run from that admission.“Then what was I wearing that night?”
“A pretty dress made out of some kind of clingy, shiny stuff,” he shoots back at once.“Spindly high heels.”A rasping edge comes into his voice.“My hoodie.”
He really does remember.
And isn’t it true that he recognized me at once?Just as quickly as I had recognized him?
“That was a long time ago,” I say, sitting down on the bed.
“So you don’t wander your way through abandoned buildings anymore?”
“No.”I don’t tell him that so many of those times – times spent picking through old, dark houses that seemed to have been forgotten by everything – I was looking for something.
It was only after seeing him in Montreal that I realized just what it was.I was wading through the abandoned rooms of other people’s pasts, searching for my own.
I was looking for Curse.
I stopped searching – for him, for all of it – after that night.
“What about poetry?Still write that?”
I cringe.Of course he remembers that, too.
“No,” I reply.I scoot backwards and get myself under the duvet, like I can use it to shield me from this entire conversation.“I’m pretty sure I told you that it wasn’t any good, anyway.”
“Is that even the point of poetry?”he asks.“To be good?”
“I…” I’m so stunned by the question that words fail me.Why the hell is Curse Titone, the coldest and most mercenary man I’ve ever met, asking me about the point of poetry right now?
“I don’t know,” I finally say.“But I wasn’t even close to good.Like, those poems were awful.”
I’m not being falsely modest.They really were bad.Riddled with teenage angst and mixed metaphors.There’s a reason I kept them in a little notebook and never showed them to anyone.The only reason I even kept that notebook into adulthood was because Curse had written his phone number in it.
The bed sinks down beside me as Curse lays his considerable weight down upon it.
“What do you even know about poetry, anyway?”I whisper into the duvet.
“I don’t know shit,” he replies.
My heavy eyelids fall shut as he rolls towards me.Cold metal kisses my wrist.
“I just think,” he says quietly, “that a bad poem that exists has to be better than a good one that doesn’t.”
The click of the handcuffs follows his words.
The echoing sound becomes a poem of its own.
Chapter12
Curse
Iwake around 3am to the sound of my phone vibrating on the bedside table.I consider ignoring it.Aurora’s doing her usual sleepy clingy thing, wrapping her free arm and a leg around me.I remain still beneath the slight, warm weight of her.
The phone keeps going.
It might be Elio.I’d better answer now, since I won’t have a phone for the next month.
I slip out from the silk of Aurora’s limbs and undo the cuff around my wrist, leaving it in the bed, still bound to her.I steal the phone from the table and stand.
