The doorbell rings in the evening and I am tempted for a second to pretend I am already asleep. Maybe it is one of my neighbors although I doubt it, I have never seen them and they could be dead and rotting in their apartments next to mine for all I know. My friends rarely come over to my small place and they text before or, in case of emergency, call for what they know will be an extremely one-sided conversation. That leaves literally no-one who could be impatiently ringing the bell at such an odd time.
I push off
the bedpost and slowly make my way towards the entrance door, using the walls
and leaning on furniture because I have already taken off my braces and my gait
is even more unstable without them, all the time gritting my teeth at the
never-ceasing sound of the bell above my head. I wrench the door open, huffing,
ready to rip off that annoying person's head when I realize who is standing in
front of me.
„Hi, Noel.
Am I interrupting something?”
She has
dyed her blond hair jet black and pulled it into a messy bun on top of her head
and there are more piercings in her left ear than before. She is wearing a
black leather jacket and ripped jeans, both of which must be much too thin for
the cold outside since I am pretty sure it has not ceased snowing the whole
day. But she looks at me unwavering and her cheeks seem somehow fuller and less
ghostly white and the dark around her eyes mostly stems from a coal pencil and
less from lack of sleep or pain or drug abuse. In her hands she carries a big
flat and rectangular thing, wrapped in brown paper.
I open my mouth to speak although I already know it will be useless, the muscles in my chest have seized up the moment the shock of unexpectedly finding her on my doorstep after all these months has cursed through my body and my tongue feels like a slowly dying fish.
She waits
for a few seconds, watching me impatiently while I try to force a sound from my
lungs without an idea of what I am going to say in the unlikely event that I
manage to form actual words and finally she rolls her eyes. “I will just assume
you asked me to come in then,” she says, stomping past me and nearly knocking
into me with that huge wrapped thing she is carrying. I manage to grab the frame
of the open entrance door to keep my balance and turn a little, dumbfounded, to
watch her make a beeline into the bedroom, her heavy boots leaving muddy stains
all over the tiles in the corridor.
I know
exactly how long it has been since she collapsed on my kitchen floor in blood,
sweat and tears, since I nursed her back to relative health before she vanished
from my life without a word and I had been too proud, too cowardly to return to
Victoria's house once more although I had been there so many times while Rachel
recovered. Despite my surprise and still lingering anger, I catch myself
grinning as I stand there and realize I missed her, missed her aggressive
attitude that might fool some people into thinking she is tough, missed her
inability to be embarrassed on my behalf when I get stuck on words, missed her
being ignorant and rude because it makes me feel so fucking normal. I push the
door close and follow her to the bedroom, cling onto the door frame.
“Ra- Ra-
Ra-...” Yeah… not happening right now.
Rachel has
slipped out of her boots and is standing on my bed, her skinny feet sinking
into the mattress, pillows and blanket and the brown paper strewn around her as
well, and she has turned her back towards me, holding the painting that
apparently has been in the package against the white wall, craning her neck
back.
“What do
you think? Is this straight?”
I take a
few steps into the room to see past her at the painting, suddenly
self-conscious under her glance and very much aware that I am dragging my
unbraced feet a lot, trying not to think how ridiculous I must look, with my
knees bent and turned inwards and swaying precariously fighting to stand still
in the middle of the room. I quickly thank god for the lucky fact that I am
wearing my long sweatpants and knitted socks and she cannot possibly see the
ugly scars running along my legs and my feet.
I nod
carefully.
She hums
and turns back to the painting, plucking a pencil from the bun on her head and
marking the edges of the picture on the wall before sliding it down and leaning
it against the headboard. She jumps back down herself, her socked feet agile on
the sleek ground.
I grab the
bedpost, holding onto it until I am sitting on the mattress.
„I suppose
you have hammer and nails, don’t you?”
I nod
distractedly because I just got a full view on the picture. It is a silk
painting, the flimsy material stretched over some kind of frame, and the
colors, all shades of blue and green and black and white, swirling together,
fading in and out at places, mixing to new colors altogether where they flow
into each other but still forming a clear picture in the end.
“It's a
silver thistle,” Rachel explains.
I nod again
because I knew and I try to say how beautiful it is and ask if she painted it
although I guess she did and then I realize she is staring at me expectantly
with her eyebrows lifted. Right, hammer and nails. I push off the mattress and
lead the way towards the restroom, lurching from wall to furniture to wall,
finally lowering myself down on the closed toilet lid and rummaging around in
the cupboard under the sink. I hand her my tool kit and grab the sink to get up
again. I do not have any grab bars installed in my apartment, some of the rooms
are so small it is literally impossible to fall when inside them and everything
else is at least narrow and crammed, perfect for me to find support when I need
it.
Rachel
hammers the nails in with surprising vigor, hangs the painting on the wall,
adjusts it a little and then turns around to me, smiling, nails still sticking
between her lips.
I sit down
on the far corner of the bed. „W-w-why?” I manage finally, maybe not what I
wanted to be my first word but certainly something that has been burning under
my nails.
Rachel
shrugs, plops down on the bed amidst pillows and paper and spits nails into her
hand. “The wall was empty,” she simply says. “You like it?”
I nod and
she fixes her eyes on me, shifts a little to put the nails and hammer on the
nightstand and has pulled off her plain black T-shirt in one movement, faster
than I can make any sound. She is not wearing a bra underneath, her small, firm
breasts so perfectly round and symmetric it makes my heartbeat pick up in an
instant and she crawls towards me on all fours, her dark eyes fiery. There are
more tattoos on the rest of her body, the largest one is a rose, running down
the side of her torso, the blossom huge and unreal, the thorns cut off. She has
taken my hand and lifted it in both of hers, my gnarled, callused fingers – too
big, too ugly – hovering over the white, smooth, unblemished skin, only a
hair-width away from a dark, hardening nipple when I manage to come to my
senses.
“S-Stop.”
She jerks
back as if I have slapped her, my hand falling between us on the mattress, her
eyes staring at me wide and hurt, and scuttles backward, away from me. “What
the…?”
I shake my
head a little, trying to think clearly, trying not to focus on her beautiful
breasts, on her pink lips. I know what she is doing. “Ra- Rachel… p-p-please,
d-don’t.”
She pulls
her legs under her chin, wraps her slender arms around them, hiding from me,
curled into a protective ball. “Don’t you like me?” Her voice is small and raw
and in that moment I see her for what she really is, still young, and so
vulnerable.
I watch her
fondly and suppress a sigh, forcing myself to stay calm. Oh, Rachel, if only
you knew just how much I like you. That is exactly the reason why I cannot. “I
do, R… Rachel. I l-l-like y-y-you.”
She lifts
her chin, hope glimmering in her eyes, uncurling her limbs a little. “So why
won’t you-“
I close my
eyes, shivering inwardly at the desire threatening to overcome me. “N-not
l-like that.” Not when she is doing it to pay for what she did.
She frowns
and shakes her head. “But that night…”
I draw a
hand through my curly hair, trying to compose myself, trying not to think of
her hot body next to mine, the longing. The longest night in my life.
“N-nothing h-h-happened that n-n-night.”
She stares
at me, puzzled. “You mean… nothing? I slept here and… nothing?”
I smile
weakly. “Y-you were v-very drunk and… h-high? I g... guess.”
She fixes
her eyes on me, frowning. “Why?”
I shrug.
How can I explain to her that I could have never done to her what most of the
men she knows would do without batting an eye, without thinking it wrong. Sure,
I have dreamed about it, literally. Her hands on me. Her body, naked, wrapped
around mine. But I had not acted on it, not when she was barely conscious. “I…
Thank y-you. F... for the p-p-p-painting.”
She is
silent for a few minutes. Then “Are you mad at me?”
I shake my
head. I could never, not really.
“Have you
been mad?”
I shrug.
“M… maybe. I’m not a-anymore.”
Rachel
sighs, rocks a little back and forth on her heels, then rolls her eyes at me
and finally relaxes, stretching onto the mattress like a cat in the sun. I have
to force myself not to stare at her exposed breasts. “You are weird.”
I flinch
and bite my lips.
“But I like
you,” Rachel says cheerfully, hopping off the mattress and ruffling up my hair.
She slips back into her T-shirt, pulls on her boots and has grabbed her leather
jacket and left, the door to my apartment banging shut, before I have even
started speaking.
If I had
thought that was the last time I would see Rachel I was certainly wrong. From
that day on Rachel regularly drops by on weekends and on some days during the
week when she apparently cannot stand staying at the clinic any longer. I
sometimes wonder if the therapy is helping her. Sometimes it seems like it. On
other days I have my doubts. But we never talk about it. She always sleeps at
Victoria’s overnight, but because she does not like the day nurses that care
for Victoria she usually waits out till evening at my place.
Rachel
becomes a constant in my life, waiting on my doorstep for me to come home,
hovering around the kitchen while I cook, shoveling food in her slim body until
I am wondering where all the calories go. She is sitting at my side in bed
while we watch videos on my laptop, making fun of me when I cry if the movie is
sad but snuggling close afterward in the silent minutes before she leaves. I
listen to her rant about the therapists at the clinic while I watch her deft
fingers roll cigarettes on my kitchen table. She looks over my shoulder when I
study and I try teaching her to cook, with little success, and she tries
teaching me to draw, with as much success, but it does not matter. She
exchanges the broken light bulb in the bathroom that I have ignored for a long
time because it is almost impossible for me to climb onto a chair and reach
above my head without risking to lose my balance and fall down, cracking my
skull open or something, and I give her knitted gloves that I buy at the market
so that at least her hands do not get cold and nearly blue when she has been
waiting for a long time in front of the building again. I enjoy watching her,
sitting Indian style on the hastily cleaned table in the kitchen because I
still only own one chair, her sketch pad in her lap, pencil in her hand, in her
mouth and her black hair and looking at me and down on the paper periodically,
one eye squeezed shut critically sometimes, drawing me sitting down, scowling
up at her when she looks and smiling to myself when she is not, or standing at
the sink and washing the dishes, scrubbing the surfaces or putting cutlery away
into the drawers, my hands moving slowly but methodically, until I forget that
she is watching.
“I-I’m so
b-boring to sketch,” I protest one day. “You should draw s-something more
interesting.”
“You are
not boring,” she simply answers with such conviction as if it is a fact
chiseled in stone somewhere, not even looking up and I feel a warm fire
kindling in my chest.
One night
she shows me her scars, countless tiny bright dots from needles on the inside
of her arms, on her thighs, calves and even her feet and as many countless
small white lines where she has cut herself on the insides of her thighs, the
outside of her upper arms, all old and nearly faded although I never ask to see
the fresh ones that I know are there, somewhere. And I show her mine,
carefully, in small portions, afraid she might shy away, repulsed, disgusted at
the thick bulges of skin attached to skin, accompanied in regular distances by
the marks caused by the stitches, from where the bones in my body were broken
and sometimes fused together and tight muscles and shortened tendons cut to
make it easier for me to walk. Our clothes always stay mostly on, always cover
the essential parts and although I enjoy seeing her comfortable with me and I
start feeling that way with her, I still regret sometimes that I told her to stop
that one day.
It feels
like we hit a streak of luck, Rachel and I, and I want nothing more than this
to continue as it is. Not all days are good, though. On some I can sense she is
really being somewhere else, fidgety, and she usually leaves early and comes
back days later, calmer again.
One of
these days however she stays, pushing the food around on her plate, staring at
the table top after I have cleared it, rubbing a fingertip into the spaces
where the wood has been chipped away from overuse, frowning. I do not address
it, I never do, not anymore, she seldom speaks about it and if pressured she is
gone faster than I can tell her that I am sorry and it usually takes her days
to return.
“Can I
borrow your laptop?” she asks and I startle, nearly letting my book drop, a
reading assignment for tomorrow.
I carefully
place a bookmark between the pages before I close the book, put it on the
nightstand and push more upright against the headboard. “W-w-w-what do you need
it for?”
She sits
across from me on the mattress and rubs her left arm, then grabs the sleeve of
her hoodie as if trying to refrain from moving. “Some design project in
therapy,” she says, her face half turned away, her eyelashes catching the
light.
I frown and
hesitate but then I nod. “I need it back till M…Monday.”
***
It is late
that same night as I drowsily blink at the number flashing on the screen and I
need a second to realize that Rachel is calling me instead of texting. She
never calls. Least so in the middle of the night.
“Ra- Ra-…” It is hopeless.
“Noel?”
I try
answering but her voice, shrill and desperate, cuts into my bones and makes it
impossible for me to force out any sound, my mouth opening and closing
silently, my chest contracting painfully.
“Noel,
please, I need your help, you need to go to Victoria, she-”
I hear people in the background, rattling sounds, a harsh voice bellowing something.
I hear people in the background, rattling sounds, a harsh voice bellowing something.
“W-w-w…”
God damn it! Panic starts creeping up my spine as my lungs try to inflate
without success and I force it down, knowing I will be completely useless to
Rachel if I lose it now. “W… where?”
Fortunately
she understands at once. “I am at the police station. I cannot go, they are
keeping me. Please Noel!” She is begging, words rushed, as if the conversation
could be shut down any moment.
Keeping
her? “I-I-I… I’m coming,” I manage.
“No, Noel,
no! You have to go to Victoria, please, I tried calling her, I tried so many
times, I know something is wrong, please, I know it!”
Cold dread
grabs me, fills my lungs, making me pant for breath. What happened to Victoria?
What did Rachel do? “’kay…” I gasp.
“Will you,
Noel? Will you go?”
I nod,
fully aware she has no chance of seeing it but hoping it somehow transfers to
her.
--> Christmas Special
--> Jump to Part V
--> Christmas Special
--> Jump to Part V
No.... you can't just stop it there, please. What a cliffhanger. How can I wait one week for the next chapter?!
ReplyDeleteYou are such an amazing writer. I wish one day you will publish a book and I can read it in one go without having to wait one week between every chapter!
I'm sorry! (I guess I'm going to say that a few times in the future)
DeleteOh, that's so sweet of you to say! I would love to write a book but I would need someone to transform my writing into decent English =)
Awesome chapter. I love his POV.
ReplyDeleteThank you!! *hugs*
DeleteIncredibly great writing.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Pepper! Makes me very happy to hear that you are still hooked.
DeleteSo amazingly great. On the edge of my seat. You are such a wonderful writer and this is so intense, dark and kinda sad but its grabbed me and can't wait for more.
ReplyDeleteThanks blueskye! Makes me smile :)
DeleteAmazing! And noooo... I want to know what happens. Please tell me you will update next week?
ReplyDeleteHaha, thanks! Uh, right, I did not think about that. But I guess I'll manage to set up something.
DeleteI know I sound pathetic but your story gives me life (among other things).
ReplyDeleteI can read the chapters over and over again and they don't lose their novelty (although I must be honest - I can hardly read the parts of Rachel's sexual abuse). Love the characters and the storyline and you.
Thanks for the update! :)
I don't think it sounds pathetic at all. It's a great honor for me (and a huge pressure...). Thank you, ano!
Delete