He Said His Name Is Tom

Although we hung up the phone, it was with the sentiment of, "But I could talk forever, Darling."  I crossed the open center of camp, and passed Clyde in the dark.  His eyes were wide and black like an animal, and he growled at me.

"When's the last time you think it snowed in New Jersey?"

He didn't slow for an reply, but pressed on as if the sentence betrayed a hopelessness he wants to hide from the world, or maybe just me.  He let a hand drift close enough to brush against the dress I wore, and it made me miss him.  I called after him that I don't know what's going to happen to me next week, but he didn't answer.

Adam left the candles burning, casting little pools of light into the recesses of the ivy that blankets my cabin.  He was slung across the bed on his stomach, wearing only gray pants, and smoking a cigarette over a glass ashtray.  He looked up when I came in, and recognizing the dress, he ground it out with malice.

"If you go to him tonight," he said, his voice low, "I'll follow you and kill him with my bare hands."

"I wore it for you," I corrected him, and I watched his face change from intellectualizing his violence to enacting it on the source of all his insecurity: me.

"I like it," he apologized, sitting up and trying to smile in a way that didn't mean he'd won something.  "You look beautiful."

How fast I become a girl in front of him, and how small, could never be measured with any instruments yet known to man (and that man is him).  I clutched at the skirt with my nervous hands, made them into small balls of gingham fabric, and stood in the center of the room while he ran his hands down my bare arms to pull me close enough to dance with him.

I wanted to tell him all these things I know, from a place far from the one in my cabin where I stood with him, our feet bare on the wood floor, swaying to music he hummed into existence for us.  I wanted to tell him, from a place in me that was dark and quiet, that girls are often seen as strong for what they might become, and not for what they are.  That my wanting to belong to him was the most dangerous thing about me; dangerous for the reason that it's the one part of me not afraid to stand in front of anyone, much less God.  That as Lucy, I really didn't know better.

We danced instead, because those thoughts didn't matter at a time like that, except in their smallest incarnations, which was to remind me that what gods really need are girls who have no concept of their dominion and want instead to be the purpose of it.  While we drift, I can feel that he's thinking about Clyde as much as I'm thinking about Bonnie, and all the paths ahead of us they marked with the blood of their sacrifices.  They made a beautiful trail for us, which we stood on and revolved slowly, like tourists following highway markers all the way to Oklahoma.

Moments like those are begotten of a strange mental inversion; that which once was small becomes not only greater, but imperative.  I could feel him becoming preoccupied with the kinds of things that pull his focus from the inevitably approaching result, to the details which establish it.  The shine of the light against surfaces in the room, and the brush of our bodies close to one another arrived paramount under his watchful eyes, dark and obsessive.

Collect Call from 212 Area Code

Adam: Eve.

Evelyn: Adam.

A: You're breaking my heart, Doll.

E: How am I doing that?

A: It seems all you have to say today is I should rest and I sound hungover.  You had a nice time, so did I.  No, I haven't looked for the stairs yet.  Is that all?  Are you alright?  Why are you crossing your arms?  Will you, at least, smile at me?

E: I don't know what to say.  You make me feel shy and quiet, and it seems like you keep misreading that as standoffish.

A: It seems standoffish.  And then defensive, when I ask about it.  That makes me some kind of idiot.  I'm sorry for it.  I don't like misreading you.

E: I want you to have me.

A: I want you.  Bad.

E: I feel things for you.  It won't sound like it should when I tell you.  I could tell you what they all mean, but I wouldn't be me anymore.

A: I have a good feeling there won't be need for that.  You just go ahead and tell me.

E: I want to be... a girl for you.

A: Just now, I have your knees in my hands.  Eve.  Can you feel it?

E: Yes, Adam.

A: You go here.

E: I never wanted to be one for anyone before, except Joshua.

A: You know what you are for me, you don't have to call it anything you don't want.  I smell leaves.  Warm.  It's you.  You're curling vines, inside me.  When I touch you, sometimes I expect you to be cool, like this.  You're warm.  Impossibly.

E: I'd be a good wife.

A: A good wife.  A good wife to lay out the right tie for this suit, and then ruin it pulling me into her bath, at the end of the day.

E: I can feel that you're soft.  You're pretending all the parts of you that are hard are actually soft.  It feels good.  Your hands always feel good.

A: I am concerned with being something on which you scrape yourself.  Whether I'd like to bruise you, or not... I... I don't know.

E: I hate when you leave in the morning.  That's when I feel bruised.

A: Everyone I meet can see you, in my eyes.  Anyone can see that all I do, I do only to be with you.

E: It feels like it might make my heart stop when you say things like that.

A: In the letters I wrote to you, I was trying to say the same thing, bigger every time, as the previous one hadn't been big enough.  The cosmos, the glittering eons all around us, it's all only built of my love, my fucking worship, of you.

E: It used to scare me that you mean it.  Nobody means things like that, but you.  I'm not scared of it, now.  I want you to push it all inside me.

A: No, no one could, possibly, mean it but me.  I want you to feel the colors, the sand, the blood, the music, the fur, all rushing against your insides... Your viridian burns... I left work.

E: Isn't it early?

A: Very.

E: Where did you go?

A: Back to camp.  I've been in your cabin.

E: I left it a mess.

A: I've been standing in the doorway, almost without exception.  Staring at your things... thinking... how impossible it seems that you exist.

E: Why impossible?

A: The fabric of my deepest secrets, made flesh.  I can't... Imagine it would be my accident.  It can't be... BY accident, even.

E: I don't know if it was an accident, but I know I'm yours.  I belong to you because you made me.

A: Of course I did.  There's a part of me that which is utterly mystified by your perfection.  That part must block out the fact I made you this way.

E: Well, you couldn't have planned for everything.  Even if you tried to.  You're very good with your hands, but you get lost in details.  I think you probably lost the big picture.

A: Whatever the case, your smell is astounding.  The way your blankets and dresses pile in these disordered, gentle folds.

E: I'm thinking about our legs touching.

A: The front of my thighs, and the backs of yours.

E: I'm blushing.  That's not what I was thinking.

A: What were you?

E: Side by side, in the car.

A: Whilst I'm driving, or are we parked?

E: Adam.

A: Eve.

E: We're parked.

A: I need to tell you something.

E: Okay.

A: Your stockings.  I made them, too.

E: You did?

A: Yes, with my hands.

E: Did you make other things?

A: Yes.  Many things.  Some which you've claimed were, specifically, to torture women.  Like garters, corsets.

E: Is that why you did?

A: Well, I... No, not for torture, necessarily.  It was for... shaping, for support, for color, texture... ornament.

E: I'm getting lightheaded.  I'm thinking about if I had those things on while we fought next, how you'd have to help me out of them.

A: I would love to.  I'm skilled at it.  Of course, we would have to pause, but I can help you back into them, as well.

E: If you were mad enough, your hand would shake.

A: Yes, but I would be gentle.  No amount of anger would make my hand uncaring.

E: I know you would be.  I've thought so much about what I might be worth, lately.  I think it's because I...  I wouldn't think a girl like me was worth much.  But I don't have to be, when you think about it.  I don't want anyone to have me but you.

A: I'd like to tell you what you're worth.  To me, you're worth every moment of my life, every word I learned to speak, all my shortcomings, all my brilliance, my tears, my children, and my whole heart.

E: I believe you because you always mean those things.

A: You're all I know.  And all I wish to know.  My Evelyn.

E: Adam, what's your voice like?

A: Heavy, breathy.  I've found the panties you wore last night and now, I'm going to wrap them around my cock.

E: I've been thinking about last night all day.

A: What, exactly, have you been thinking?

E: Your skin was cold when you got into bed.  It startled me awake, but your hands were warm, and I felt you get hard right away.

A: The sounds you made were meek enough, I worried you were having a nightmare.  Until you touched me.

E: It seemed like the world was dangerous right then.  Sometimes it seems if we move just a little bit, you're going to fall inside me.

A: I will, make no mistake.  Tell me, Eve, if you could name one mistake as "Adam's Mistake," what would it be?

E: I'm not sure.  It's the kind of thing you'd name a weapon, though.  In a game.  So maybe it's the name of you're ax.

A: Or my cock.  If... there were ever a difference.

E: It doesn't feel like a mistake.

A: I'm close.  You... Honestly don't think so?

E: No, I don't think so.  It feels like something I wished for.  A way for you to be inside my skin.

A: I'm cumming, Evelyn.

E: I love you, Adam.

A: Eve, I love you.

E: What clothes are you wearing?

A: I'm in slacks, and dress shoes, but my belt is undone.  I'm topless.  I was lighting more than 50 candles just before the sun went down.

E: For what?

A: Light.  Your cabin is more of a church, now.

E: What color are they?

A: Most are white.  Some blue, green.  The light is beautiful, glittering off of your grandmother clock.

E: Will you leave them until tonight?

A: Yes.

E: Where do you go at night?

A: The Four Winds.

E: Why?

A: To drink until I forget what it's like to be God.

E: If you stay tonight, I could make you forget.

A: The funny thing is this can't be the first time you've offered such a thing but it sure feels like the first time I ever believed you.

E: Even if you don't forget.  You only have to be God to me.

A: How does it feel to be the answer to all a man's needs?

E: Like he's the answer to all of mine.

A: I'm going to put the heart of the universe in your mouth, and if you swallow it, you'll be pregnant with always.  I've never stared this hard at anybody in my life.  Seems like everybody behind you must feel it.  Maybe that's where people get the feeling they're being watched.

E: There isn't anyone else.

The Same Color in the Cold

Today, I received my fifth mix of the New Year from the boys, to mark the anniversary of the day I came home, if time is real, and was ever a straight line to begin with.  I'm sitting here now trying to compose a reply, which was always a courtesy and never a necessity.

Mixes of music were always a secret and private affair until October of 2015, when Brad and I gingerly set up a time to meet and listen together to something I'd made for him.  We drove together in his car to the other side of town, where he stopped in the parking lot of a church and put his lipstick on me.  It was brash and confrontational and immediate.  He was so nervous, his hands shook, to be listening to something with me that before we would keep so sterile.  I in one room and he in another, synced and texting, to keep the mess of emotions from spilling into someone else.

Their yearly welcome home is sometimes loosely themed, this time done anonymously as if they were one man, or one boy, that I rapidly understood to be Peter.  A single voice of romance, echoing in intervals Joshua and Brad, then Clyde and Drama, then Matthew descending fast into Adam.  I've decided I should reply to that boy especially, before anyone on their own.  It feels important to acknowledge that I am aware of the force of that boy, and how imperative is his survival.

My first series will be the ten ways he makes me feel when he walks into a room:

Adam:  Let Me Come On Home by Otis Redding
Brad: Aurora Gone by Midlake
Clyde: Crazy Love by Chelsea Wolfe
Dean: Extinguish Me by Soap&Skin
Drama: This Magic Moment by The Drifters
Grady:  Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler
John: Bitten by Patrick Wolf
Joshua: Leviathan, Bound by Shearwater
Matthew: Me And The Devil by Soap&Skin
Nick: Cico Buff by Cocteau Twins