I smile at him. “And I like you. No one has been allowed to sleep next to me in a long time. You just saw why.”
“I want to understand.”
“It was just a nightmare.” This part I can do. It’s easier than the truth. Lies are how the days become manageable. They’re like air sometimes, necessary. I ball my hand into a fist to keep the blood contained and add, “Everyone has nightmares sometimes.”
He looks at me, shakes his head, and steps back again. He lets the lie sit on the floor between us until the moment for calling me out has passed. For that, I’m grateful.
I glance at my hand. “Let me get this cleaned up.”
Despite the fist, blood is starting to trickle over the edge of my hand, and I don’t want to try to clean it off the hardwood floor. Blood stains too easily on old wood. Carpet is better. Tile can be good. Bleach and a good brush will get it out of most surfaces if you’re fast enough, but old wood—or porous tile—can be a real pain.
Bath tubs are best.
I push away the reasons I know those things.
By the time I wash the cut in my hand, making sure there are no tiny pieces of glass in the wound, I realize that I have no proper bandages. I grab a handful of paper towels to absorb the blood for now. Toilet tissue gets messy when it’s wet, and the last thing I want is to get anything in the wound where it’ll fester. My hand wrapped in paper towels, I walk in to see Michael sitting on the edge of the bed, exactly where I left him.
“I need to go to the Duane Reade and get some gauze.”
“That’s it?” Michael watches me with an expression I can’t interpret and don’t know if I want to. “You wake screaming like I’ve never heard anyone scream, beg some guy called Reid, telling me you have ‘their blood’ on you, and then you’re just going out for gauze?”
I hold up my hand. The paper towels already show bright red. “That was a nightmare, and I don’t want to get real blood everywhere.”
Michael shakes his head. He doesn’t speak. Reid would’ve spoken. He wouldn’t even have lied.
But Michael and I stay that way, me in the doorway bleeding and him sitting on the edge of the bed staring. He’s asking me for more than I can give. He might not be saying it aloud, but he’s asking all the same. His silence is because of questions that I can’t answer. I can let Michael manipulate me, but not as much as he wants.
He wants to touch my shadows, and that isn’t free. Not for either of us.
“I can find my own way back home. I just need to get this cleaned up first. There’s surely a bus or something . . .”
Instead of replying, Michael gets up and gets dressed. Maybe it’s easier for him if he’s the one to leave. The rental is paid, so I could stay here and sleep. I don’t want to be in New York; I need to get home where I’m steadier. It’s the middle of the night though, and I’m still woozy from the pills and the memories. Once he’s gone, I’ll tend to my hand and sleep. Tomorrow, I can go home. I might not have money, but I can sell myself for enough for a ticket home or take it if necessary. I don’t like hurting people, but if I need to make someone bleed in order to protect myself, I will. Reid taught me that too.
New Orleans keeps me steady. I need to be back in my home, back where music tethers me. New York doesn’t simmer with blues and jazz. New York doesn’t have chicory coffee and gris gris and the Mississippi. It isn’t my home.
I remain in the doorway of this strange room in this wrong city as Michael pulls on trousers and a shirt. I am motionless as he tugs on socks and shoes. Despite everything, I want to say something to keep him from leaving me, but I can’t. He just saw what I’m really like inside. He thought he wanted to know, but my reality is a bit less pretty than the stuff of his fiction.
“Are you coming to the pharmacy with me or waiting here?” He looks over at me. “If you want to stay here, it’s okay. I’ll get what you need and be right back.”
I stare at him.
“If you’re coming, though, you need to get dressed.”
“Okay.” I walk over to the dresser, careful to avoid the glass still on the floor. I’m not sure what people do in these moments. I’ve never had one. My nocturnal screams are not something that I’ve allowed others to witness. No one shares my bed for sleep.
Not since Reid.
Not until Michael.
Trying to figure out how to get dressed without getting blood on my clothes isn’t new, but it’s harder with the things I packed for this trip. Michael likes me in colors, and the best option I have is a pair of dark blue jeans and a red blouse. There’s a black cardigan I can pull over it. I concentrate on the clothes, on the minutia, as I try to figure out what I’m to do.
I no more than pull the jeans out and Michael is there, taking them from me and kneeling at my feet. In that moment, he is so much like Reid that I fear that I’d do anything he asked of me.
“Step in,” he says.
Silently, I let him help me, feeling safer now that he’s treating me like this. Reid did this, helped me dress after I was hurt. Sometimes he hurt me a little extra while he was helping me, but that was just to make sure I was going to be good again. “Good girls don’t cry,” Reid always said. “Bad girls have to cry.” If I was good enough, he didn’t make me cry when he dressed me.
Michael isn’t hurting me. He buttons my jeans and then picks up my bra from where it had been tossed earlier that night.
“I’ve never put one of these on a woman. Usually I only take them off.” His voice is light, teasing, not pushing me toward the memories.
But even as he does that, he lets me know I’m not special: plenty of women have touched him. That, too, is about power. It’s how he tells me I’m replaceable.
I’m not. There is no one in the world who can give him what I can. We both know that. I let the illusion stand though. It serves both of us well to pretend I don’t matter to him.
“Once upon I time, I was with Reid. He . . . hurt me. There was a tub. And red. And I wasn’t sure I’d survive.”
Now, Michael looks at me like I’m special.
He puts my arms through the straps and turns me around. It’s oddly non-sexual, as if he’s afraid to touch my breasts. He hooks the back, not quite as tight as it should be, but I’m not going to complain. Complaining is bad. That’s a rule.
Softly, I say, “Can you . . .”
“What?” he asks.
I turn so I can see him, reach into my bra and pull my breast upward so it’s settled in correctly. I don’t need to, not really. What I need is for him to see me sexually again. “Can you do like that, but on the other side?”
He complies, trying to be clinical, but I catch his wrist and force his hand to stay where it is. At the same time, I press closer to him so my breast is filling his hand.
“Tess . . .”
I pull his wrist tighter to me, letting him feel how hard my nipple is in his palm. “I had a nightmare, Michael. I’m not any different than I was when you were pounding me into the mattress earlier tonight.”
“Point taken.”
I release his wrist, and he keeps his hand where it is. He watches my face as he slides his palm to the side so he can pinch my nipple. This, this is what I need. I don’t want to be the woman in the memory he glimpsed. I don’t want to be the person who bled because Reid was angry and the other woman was already dead. I don’t want to be the one responsible for her death.