Sweetbitter(41)

“Hey,” I said.

“Hi there,” he said.

I sucked in my lips. He didn’t move to go anywhere. Not to the bar, to the bathroom, not even to remove his coat.

“Excuse me,” someone screeched and pushed him again. He braced his arms above my head. His sweat, his smell.

“Don’t say I never did anything for you,” said Ariel, shoving through and handing me a beer.

“Thank you,” I said. I put it to my forehead. “I don’t think I can be in here tonight.”

“Suit yourself, Skip. Tell me before you leave.” She looked back and forth between us. “So I know you’re safe or whatever. Vivian’s dying up there.”

I gulped the beer. Wait out the silence, that was my plan. He would say something.

“We can split this,” I said. He took the bottle, tilted it, I watched his Adam’s apple, and he handed it back to me. His eyes were asking me a question. I nodded.

“You never talk to me,” I said.

“I don’t?”

“No. You don’t seem to like me.”

“I don’t?”

His eyes colorless, cloudy, collected. His teeth wine stained. He leaned in. “You’re very affected by things. A gust of wind throws you. You take everything seriously.”

His breath like malt and violets, gripping.

“I do,” I said.

“I like that.”

“But you don’t seem to take anything seriously.”

He scanned the room and his eyes came back to me every few seconds when someone bumped into us.

“Sometimes,” I said, “I feel like we’re talking. But we’re not talking.”

He reached out and grabbed a piece of my hair. He twirled it around his finger. I was not breathing.

“How’s that bruise?”

“It’s fine,” I said. I turned my cheek away even though it had nearly faded. He dropped my hair. “I’m going to sue. Those stairs are idiotic.”

He nodded, patient. Wolfish cheekbones, angular, ascetic face. Rings on long fingers, a rose, a half skull, a gold Mason seal.

“Is that Yorick?” I asked, pointing to his skull ring.

“That’s a problem,” he said. He took the beer from me. “I don’t flirt with girls who read.”

He smiled, knowing he had me. Something expert and sadistic in him, wrapping and unwrapping me. I looked away, I looked back. I started to say something, stopped. I moved toward the bathroom but didn’t move. He passed the beer back to me and I took a gulp.

“You’re confused,” he said. “I can see it all over your face.”

What to say? Duh? “I’m just trying to do a good job.”

“In life?”

“Yes, in life.”

He took the beer back and finished it in a long pull, looking me up and down. Was it my ripped jeans and gray T-shirt? My Converse? Where was everyone else?

“I want…I mean, I want more than to do a good job. I want to take each experience on the pulse.”

“Ha!” He slammed the wall above me. “She’s quoting Keats to you? You’re too malleable to be around her.”

“I’m not a child,” I said, but felt cheated.

“You’re not a child,” he repeated. “Do you know the difference between wanting experiences and having them?”

“You don’t know me,” I said. But I wanted him to. I tried to drink the beer but there was nothing there. My hairline prickled in sweat. I pulled my scarf off, choking myself for a second. With the air on my neck I felt careless. I pushed my chin up, dropped my head back, and blinked at him.

“Your eyes. It’s unmistakable,” he said. He thumbed my cheekbone. “Veiled melancholy has her sovereign shrine.”

His hand moved up my cheek, flushing me, into my hair, where he tugged, his fingers dry, nonchalant. His other hand pressed into the bruise on my thigh, as if he could intuit the blood below the skin.

When he kissed me I said, Oh my god into his mouth but that, like everything else, was swallowed up.

—

AT THAT MOMENT there was no Jake, no restaurant, no city. Just my desires running flagrantly, power-drunk, through the streets. Merciless, all of them. Was I a monster or was this what it felt like to be a person? He didn’t just use those absurd, softly sketched lips, but his teeth, his tongue, his jaw, his hands pressing me down, eventually grabbing my wrists, compressing me. I fought back. I grunted. I hissed.

I don’t think it was pretty kissing. When it was over I felt like I had been beaten. Dazed, angry, still itching. He went into the humid crowd to get a beer and didn’t come back. I stood there staring at the boxers in the painting for I don’t know how long, until Scott asked if I was hungry and I said, “Starving.”

—

WE STREAMED THROUGH the door of the Sichuan place in lower Midtown. I looked for a clock on the wall and luckily couldn’t find one. Nothing to bear down on the plastic tablecloths, nothing to remind me that this night would end.

The restaurant was fairly full, a mixed crowd for so late in the night, some of them looking respectable, some of them looking like us, used up and nervy. None of the diners met each other’s eyes, following a law of anonymity built into brightly lit, late-night places.