In Big Trouble

Then, grudgingly: 'Emmie is extraordinary.'

'Yes, she is.'

'She told me-' But she didn't know how to finish that sentence.

'About her and me? I should have seen that coming, I guess, when she asked me where you were staying. Emmie is big into confession, but always on her own terms. It hasn't occurred to her yet that it's frequently hell for other people, when you always say exactly what you're feeling.'

'Were you in love with her?'

He crunched another mouthful of ice. 'We were a comfort to one another. Sort of the way I was a comfort to you, after Jonathan. A bookmark you put in your heart to keep your place, until you remember how to love again.'

'That's not fair, Crow. I never thought about Jonathan when I was with you.'

'Keep telling yourself that. Anyway, I was a comfort to her. Then, suddenly, she didn't need to be comforted anymore, not by me. We've been not-together now longer than we were together. But I feel responsible for her.'

'Why?'

He started to say something, stopped, started over. 'I don't know. Maybe I'm just a self-interested shit, who doesn't want to see her self-destruct when we've honestly got a chance to go somewhere with our music.'

An uneasy silence fell. Tess was still smarting over his bookmark comment. It hadn't been like that, not quite.

'If you're so interested in Emmie's welfare,' she said at last, 'you might want to say something to her about her choice of men. I saw the guys she was cozying up to at Hector's. Men like that are not big on teases. She's going to get in over her head, and you're going to have to come on like Mr. Macho. I hear that got you canned at Primo's.'

'Who says we got canned, Kleinschmidt?' Again, that strange twisted smile she still couldn't get used to seeing on Crow's face. 'And who says she's teasing? Almost every Saturday night, she goes home with whatever guy has tattoos and piercings approaching the triple digits. I've tried to talk her out of it, but she assures me that she'll never get involved in anything that would make her miss Sunday breakfast at the Alamo.'

'Breakfast at the Alamo-is that some code?'

'One of Emmie's many rituals. She likes to get some tacos and coffee, then sit in the gardens there and read the paper. She told me it started when she was a teenager, and trying to cultivate a reputation for eccentricity. An affectation that metamorphosed into a routine, you know?'

'Yeah, I do actually.' Tess smiled. 'Although I went the other way. I always tried to pass as conventional- school sports, jock boyfriends, bourbon choked down in finished basements with knotty pine walls.'

'Whereas I had to do anything and everything to stand out-down to purple dreadlocks.' He noticed, for the first time, that she was wearing her Cafe Hon T-shirt. 'Or dying my T-shirt orange, because I couldn't have a Cafe Hon T-shirt like everyone else in Baltimore, oh no.'

'I always saw you as this blissed-out boy who followed his heart.'

'Was I?' Crow furrowed his brow, as if trying to remember someone they had both once known, many years ago. 'I'd like to think so. I'd like to think there was a time when I just did what I wanted to do and didn't have to run it through eighteen different filters. A time when I knew what I wanted, and was sure of what I could do.'

'What do you want right now?'

'I want-I want-' He was laughing, completely at ease for the first time.

'No thinking,' Tess said. 'Just say what you want, the first thing that comes to your mind. More pie, another cup of coffee? A Rolex, a new guitar, a chartreuse Cafe Hon T-shirt, a first edition of Poe's Eureka…'

'I want-' They were both giggling now, giddy as a couple of drunks.

'Say it, Crow.'

'I want to make love to you.'

All the other sounds of the restaurant seemed to disappear. Tess looked down at her plate. His voice had been low and sure, without a single teasing note to get them off the hook. She realized she was forking her cake in half. Not eating it, as Jackie would say, yet still obsessed with it. She didn't feel quite so tired anymore.

Crow wasn't finished. 'I want to take you back to my house and take all your clothes off and put you in my bed and keep you there until we both walk funny, as if we'd been out to sea for weeks and weeks.'

She wanted him, too, which surprised her, yet didn't surprise her. She wanted him because he had rejected her, and that left her feeling unfinished. A psychiatrist would say she only wanted the men she couldn't quite have, and she supposed her life so far supported this thesis. But now Crow was sitting here, saying she could have him. In which case, she shouldn't want him at all, right? So if she went with him, she was actually doing the right thing, right?

'What do you say, Tess?' Whatever filters Crow had learned to put up between himself and the world were gone now. He looked younger and older, very pure, as if he couldn't tell a lie to save his life. Yet he had been lying to her right and left over the past twenty-four hours. Which made him a bum, which made him her dream man, which made her-Jesus, didn't her brain have an off-switch?

'Tess?' he asked again.

'I think that could be arranged,' she said.

Earl Abel's wasn't even two miles from the duplex Crow shared with Emmie, but it took them a long time to travel those two miles. It was as if they were in such a hurry that they had to keep slowing down. First in the parking lot-Crow wouldn't even let her get her key in the door lock, he had to kiss her right there, much to the rowdy amusement of some college boys who had arrived at the restaurant after a long night of partying.

'Nail her, man,' one yelled.

'Get a room,' another called out.

'Nail her, then get a room,' a third suggested.

'What about your car?' Tess asked Crow, coming up for air.

'Leave it. Let them tow it. I don't care.'

When they were finally in her car, he kissed her at stoplights, holding her face in his hands until horns sounded behind them.

'My place is closer,' Tess said, even as La Casita's flickering neon sign flew past.

'No,' Crow said. Now he was trying to kiss her as she drove, lifting up her hair in the back, pressing his lips against her neck and her throat. 'I don't want to feel like some john you picked up in Brackenridge Park. Turn right here, onto Mulberry. Can't you drive any faster?'

She thought she was going pretty fast, but she was like a drunk who couldn't distinguish fifteen miles per hour from ninety-five. She was losing all her senses, except those Crow had engaged. His hand was under her T-shirt now, on the small of her back.

'How much farther?' she asked.

'Left here, then right on the second street, Magnolia Drive. I'm at the end of the block.'

But once the car was parked, Crow simply began kissing her again. It was as if he didn't want to risk letting go for even the moment it would take to run up the walk. She wasn't so sure she wanted to leave the car yet, anyway. The truth was, it was delicious to neck in a car again, to feel sixteen again. She could have been parked in front of her parents' house, testing the boundaries as she had done back then, wondering how far she would dare to go with her father not-sleeping just yards away. One more minute, the boy would ask. Just a little more. Can I-? Will you-? And she assented, silently, always silently, for if she spoke of what she was doing, she would betray how conscious it was, how much she craved it, how she was really the one who was setting the pace, pushing them further and further on each date. Part of her wanted to keep going. Part of her yearned for Patrick to come charging out of the house and yank her from the car, and back into the safety of her childhood. When he didn't, there was nothing to do but keep pushing forward, until she found herself on her back in the Enchanted Castle. Sixteen had really been too young, she knew that in the split-second it had taken her high school boyfriend to finish. With the loss of virginity, a girl lost her best reason for saying no. From that moment on, she had to choose, and choose carefully, there was nothing between her and her desires. That had been the terrifying part, not the sex itself.