Nightcrawling(9)

“You busy tonight?”

Tony makes the move, pulls his arm around my shoulders so I’m scrunched against his chest and my mouth is muffled by his denim jacket, his body heat suffocating. Tony taps my shoulder to the beat of the track and I feel like I can’t escape, Marcus’s verses sneaking up my spine. I shift my eyes toward Tony’s and he’s looking at me, always staring.

“You think you could talk to Marcus? Try to get him to look for a job?” I ask, acutely aware of Tony’s hand slipping down my arm.

“You ain’t even answered my question.”

He smells like eggnog even though it’s past Christmas and I’m not sure if I like it or not. Tony’s had a thing for me for months, ever since he and Marcus became friends, and he’s the only guy who has ever asked me a question and wanted to hear my answer. I let him try to hold my hand when he comes over, but I still don’t understand him, why he can’t seem to let me go when I’ve never given him a reason to hold on.

“I don’t know if I’m busy, Tony, I got other shit to worry about.”

I gaze into my lap, stare at my hands. Even with Marcus’s belts gaining volume and Tony’s stare carving into my face, his fingers tracing my arm, I can’t seem to think about anything but my fingers. I used to keep my nails real long, pointed. I’d gnaw on them to make sure the tip was just right, like talons.

Now I’m itching to hide my hands or maybe sit on them, but I know that would make Tony nervous, make him think I was hiding from him, so instead I keep them in my lap. The nails are jagged, ripped along the edges. They look naked, defenseless, like the kind of nails six-year-olds have when they too busy playing cops and robbers to remember they gotta be ready for all the real cops and robbers.

“Okay,” Tony says, his mouth close enough to my cheek that I can feel his breath. “I’ll talk to Marcus if you come over tonight.”

I tilt my head to look at Tony and his eyes are doe-like, hopeful. He is a hulk of something subtle and soft and I don’t think nobody else in this room has ever listened to my breath like he does.

“I guess,” I say, dipping out from under his arm. Cole opens his eyes at my movement and lifts his headphones from his ears.

“Where you goin’, Ki? You tired of us already?” Cole shows his whole grill.

“You know I’m never tired of you.” I smile at him. “Saw the baby, she real cute.”

Cole sits up straighter against the couch, stops smiling and replaces the expression with a mellow kind of wonder, dreaming with his eyes open.

“Yeah, she beautiful.”

Marcus comes back out from the recording booth to grab another beer, snickers, his eyebrows springing up. “If only yo girl could get it together and stop complaining.”

Shauna’s face flashes in my mind, her eye hunger and her moans. Cole emerges from his daze and lets out a noise, not a sound of agreement, but not a defense either. Marcus’s tattoo is squirming again, trying to spring out of his skin. He looks toward me, the two of us the only ones standing.

“You leaving?” I’m not used to him all eyes on me like this, his lips puffing like a pre-tantrum child, like he don’t want me to leave.

“Thinkin’ about it,” I tell him.

He tilts the can back and empties it into his throat. “Come here.” He leads me back into the recording booth, turning to look at me. I watch him, my arms growing bumps, hair standing up, like they just remembered how bare they are behind the glass, without Tony’s body heat.

“You don’t gotta leave,” he says.

“Why you care?” Sometimes, when I’m with Marcus, I revert to my ten-year-old little-sister self staring up at my big brother, to who I was before all our shit got messy, before my fingernails started ripping and Marcus decided he needed a beat more than he needed my hand to hold.

Marcus grimaces, his jaw winding up so it can unleash itself and suddenly my fingerprint is moving, roaring on his neck. “What you mean? I gotta care, Ki. I’m doing this ’cause I’m gonna get us a whole different life, like Uncle Ty. You just gotta trust me, aight? Give me one month to drop the album. You can handle one month, yeah?”

Marcus is better at talking than he’s ever been at rapping and this is no different. My fingerprint has found legs and is moving quicker than his breath.

“One month.”

I let him pull me into a hug that feels more like a choke than a goodbye.

On the other side of the glass, Tony and Cole are chuckling about something, punching each other and acting like they ain’t been listening to us. Tony sees me and lights up.

“I gotta go,” I say.

“You coming over later, though?” His height contrasts with the childlike demeanor, the boy waiting for his reward. I know it ain’t right to let him keep doing this, hoping I’m ever going to lean into his chest for anything more than warmth. I start walking toward the door that leads back to Shauna, the stairs, the city.

“Maybe,” I tell him, pausing to watch Marcus inside the glass for one last verse.

He’s standing there, tilting side to side, beginning to rhyme, and I catch only one thing before I exit: My bitches don’t know nothing, don’t know nothing. I am trying to decipher the fallacies in that, the torn edges of memories that may belong to his words, but all I find is nothing, don’t know nothing. Nothing.