I make it in three.
I’m pretty sure I was going fifty-three on Colfax and weaving like a drunk. I do know that I went through six red lights. I’m worried I might have caused one accident, but it looked like a fender bender and both of the cars were SUVs, so I’m not that concerned.
Maybe this is just the new me, but it was kind of, sort of, fun.
Thing is, I’m here walking up to Jimi’s front door, my head pounding with my pulse, and I’m running through all the different scenarios, all the different positions I might find these two in. Inside my head I’m kicking myself for letting this go down. For setting this up. Me the prognostication pimp.
I don’t pound on the door, it’s open.
I barge in and don’t see Jimi but I do see Vauxhall lying on the couch. She’s there like she was tossed aside. All laid out like a car accident. Hair in her face.
My chest lurches seeing her.
It’s like seeing my own face hit with a sledgehammer.
I run to Vauxhall. Grab her up off the couch and push the hair away. She’s okay. Makeup is smudged and her eyes are watery, but she’s okay. When she sees me, like really sees me, she smiles. Such a sweet smile. Her voice broken down, she says, “Nothing happened.”
I just hold her to me tight. Collapse her to me.
She says, over my shoulder, “I tried. It was horrible.”
My throat all lumped up, I say, “You’re okay now.”
She says, and I can feel my shoulder getting wet from her tears, “I tried and we kissed, he kissed me hard like he knew what might happen, and then I just got pulled into his past. It was like I lived it too. All the… all the horrible things, Ade.”
And Vaux picks her head up, takes my head in her hands and, through smeared eyes, says, her voice jumping, “How can people be so cruel? What sort of world is this?”
I tell her I don’t know. I tell her that whatever she saw happened a long time ago and that she’s okay now, that Jimi’s okay now. I say, “I’m so sorry I put you through that.”
Vauxhall kisses me.
“Where is Jimi?”
I look around the house, my eyes darting. I want so badly to kick Jimi’s ass right now. I want so badly to just smash him into a thousand tiny specks. Just mash him down into the ground, where he’ll never touch Vauxhall again. Where he’ll never even see her again. My temples are pounding with adrenaline.
“He left,” she says.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.” Then she says, “Nothing happened.”
“What do you mean nothing happened?”
Vaux, through these tear garden eyes, says, “After you and I were together. You know, after what happened last night, it all changed. Have you had a concussion yet today?”
“No,” I say. “How come no one remembers I quit?”
Vauxhall says, “The two of us coming together was like what happens when an unmovable object meets an irresistible force. Both get changed, though not on the outside. I didn’t need to sleep with Jimi to see his memories. No high.”
“What?”
“No high. No Buzz. Whole time I was there I was thinking about you. Needing you. And as soon as I was leaving, as soon as I said good-bye, I felt so free. I felt so unburdened, so light. Like what you feel after a massage. It was just being totally relaxed.” Then her face changes, her expression dips, and Vauxhall says, “Don’t go back to Grandpa Razor. You don’t need to go to him, you can change things without him.”
“What did you see?”
“The two of them are plotting. Grandpa Razor told Jimi at the diner that he would unravel what they’ve been working on for years if he wasn’t careful. He said it was a process. He said that Jimi couldn’t go soft now, that despite what happens next he couldn’t try and stop it.”
“Why was Jimi so mad?”
Vauxhall tells me that whatever this thing is, Jimi isn’t as into it now. She tells me that Jimi is getting cold feet and that he doesn’t want it nearly as badly as he used to. She says, “He wasn’t being his usual asshole self. He was worried about you.”
“Did you find out what they’re planning? Couldn’t you read back further, see that in his memory? Get the rest of it?”
Vaux shakes her head. “It was like he knew why I was there. Like he was blocking the rest of it. Almost, it was like he was letting me see just enough.”
“I have to see Grandpa Razor. I have to go.”
“But it’s a trap, Ade. They want to hurt you.”
“I’ll be fine.”
For the first time ever I notice a twitch in my left cheek. It’s a flutter like a flap on your heart makes. Something just under my skin waving. I put my hand up to stop it and press down on it, but it vibrates under my fingers, trapped there. I turn to Vauxhall and ask her if she can see it. She says, “Yeah. Kind of cute.”
We kiss and fall back into each other on the couch.
Me on top of her, me kissing her ears and the nape of her neck and the place where the two wishbones come together on her chest, she giggles and then, sitting up, pulling me up with her, says, “I forgot something.”
I sit back. Try to stop the twitch again.
“It’s crazy,” Vauxhall says, “but I think Jimi has your mom tattooed on his left arm. And I think he has, yeah, he totally does, he has a dragonfly as well.”
Pushing at the tremble in my cheek, I say, “I just hope this stops soon.”
CHAPTER TEN
ONE
