Hollywood Nights
Part Ten
We may not have been high school sweethearts but we were damn close and true love is true love. I took you at your word and you were true to me and even more importantly, yourself. You murdered our friend/roommate/couch surfer. You finished off what remained of Howard Larkspur, son to people who never claimed him, brother to no one. You finished killing a man shot by others like he was someone else’s Chinese takeout leftovers.
You cut open Howie’s throat with a steak knife and drank what came out, but for me the proof was in the pudding. You didn’t enjoy any of it, you didn’t want to, you needed to. Doing it was misery but that misery gave you so much. The change came on even as you were begging my forgiveness for the awfulness of your new life. Color came back into your face and a weight and a sense of self came flushed back into your body. I didn’t need to wonder what you would feel like if I rushed to embrace you.
No really, I didn’t because, that’s exactly what I did. I charged at you and wrapped my hands around you.
Insane, probably. Nonsensical, you bet. Abjectly stupid, no doubt. I had felt so robbed of you. The woman I loved with every bit of my being had seemed dead since she arrived home the night before but there you suddenly were.
You were sad though too, sad most of all. I grabbed at you and pulled you into me and I breathed deep. There was the smell of your soap and your shampoo sure, but there was also the overwhelming scent of what had been missing. The life, and of course, the blood of you. I felt and smelled all of that and I couldn’t imagine letting that go, much less listening to you as you cried and objected to my sudden outpouring of love.
I needed you, so much and enough that I was completely willing to ignore your wants and needs. You needed answers, or at least you demanded answers to questions no one was going to have answers to. You needed help and I didn’t give a shit about that. You were the one bemoaning Howie and what you did in the course of finishing him off. I was busy out in the backyard digging a shallow grave under the back porch.
In hindsight, its really shitty that they didn’t dig deep enough to find him when they knocked the place down and put up those condos. Not that the idea of Christian burial means shit, headstone or no, and not that he had any people who deserved answers to the question of what happened to him, but it was a shitty thing to do all those years ago. I drug Howie out there in the middle of the night and folded him into that shallow hole only to push dirt and rocks over him to cover the ensuing stench. He should have been found so they could have made enough of a stink in the news so that people heard his name. I learned in the years since then that everyone deserves their fifteen minutes, even if its just on the back of a milk carton.
That night it was my turn to be the one who wanted to forget it all and party. I was the one hammering back the blow and the drinks while you stewed and pondered. Role reversal is fine for kinks but its shit for daily life. Neither one of us had any real fun but you weren’t outpouring your anguish over what had happened, not that night. I did my level best to clean up the kitchen and hoped the cleaning company we hired to come handle everything the next day wouldn’t gasp or groan too loudly when they arrived.
I slept like a baby as dawn came on. I was wasted and I could feel your proper weight as you rested with your head on my chest. I was so stupid and selfish, I enjoyed you more then, anguished, sad, and even terrified of yourself, than I did the night before when you were lanky, hungry, and so sure of yourself.
A healthier, melancholy apparition of who I knew woke up that next evening. The cleaners you hired were methodical and murmured no complaints as they finished up our amateur attempts to clean up multiple crime scenes. They even took care of the remains of the fancy dinner I pushed into the oven the night before. I woke up at dusk that night with a ridiculous hope for our future. The house was clean as a whistle, the shower was nice and hot. I wanted to make a run down to Naugles for myself and I noticed we could use some more booze but that was all easy to solve. The coke and pills situation were still grey territory but I shrugged at that because I knew we could put our heads together, just like we would have to put those same heads together about how to feed you from then on out.
I took a food and bodega walk that final night as I pondered that most pressing issue. Sex was the easy answer, we were both good looking and it was the 80’s. We had already experimented with trios and foursomes in the past; it wouldn’t be too hard once or twice a week to lure someone from here or there back to an appropriate place. We wouldn’t even need to lure them back to our place, cheap motels were obvious but there were also adult theaters, carpark meetups, back alley speed fucks. We could make just about anything work.