20. Marcela & Kurt

Marcela looked towards the window at Kurt’s back. He leaned in the frame of light pouring through; a silhouette, a part of the room’s darkness. He lit a cigarette and translucent smoke trails curled around his head and face.

“Look at that snow fall,” he mumbled. His eyes shifted back and forth as though reading. A circle of fog appeared when he exhaled the smoke, as if it had frozen to the glass. He noticed his reflection around it; it appeared he did not have a mouth.

She looked at the black figure, the shape of him. Muscles clung to bone. It was easy to tell which of his tattoos were old, looking at the distorted shapes. Once, he had been much heavier. The skin had moved and shrank. He'd probably always been fit. The snow drove against the window, attacking him. If he were only a step forward, he would freeze in minutes.

“Come back to me,” she said. Warm.

The room had bare walls; uneven, cracked paint with amorphous areas of bleary, yellowy colour; a ceiling with water damage to match. The bed was a twisted metal frame. Marcela waited in the warm sheets, clutching the blanket over her chest, her past-shoulder-length hair a black escarole on the white cloth.

Kurt said nothing, but turned around and put his back to the window. He breathed through his teeth as his skin touched the cold glass. Something stopped him as he raised the cigarette: a smear of red on the filter's edge, and a flap of skin, thin like an onion's. He licked his cracked lips and drew on the smoke again. Embers cast a hellish glow over the angles of his face. Dropping his jaw, the tumbling cloud fell out of his mouth, and Marcela imagined the souls of the dead. He threw the cigarette. Sparks rolled out like fingertips from an opening hand.

"Alright." He smiled wryly, his teeth like the walls and ceiling. Slowly he journeyed back towards the bed, almost tiptoeing, poised on the ball of his foot like a dancer. Close, he stopped, and bent down, his heels still raised. Marcela became anxious. Kurt reached under the bed. She listened for the click of the number wheels, and the suitcase's latch being opened. It was. He shuffled the gear around and she became excited, almost giddy, and at the same time angry that he had waited so long.

The lighter flicked and flicked and the flame reached up with a palm around the crystal ball. Vapors made the inside muddy. The flame disappeared. The light disappeared. The smoke disappeared. Marcela held it inside her until it was ready to burst out, and exhaled a glittering, crystalline cloud. She felt like an angel set on fire. She heard a soft moan and wasn't sure if she had made it or if Kurt had. Soon, he fell into the bed.

He put his hand in her hair, gripped and released it; she felt the tension in her scalp. As he moved back, he ran the long fingernail of his little digit over her ear and cheekbone, and the white line it traced raised up in redness. He slid into the envelope of open sheets and the sensation of skin contact leapt over her like a thousand fleas. She shook herself out of the reverie and they became a chaotic tangle of limbs, a harmony of tongues and lips and fingertips, hands, ribs, breasts, stomachs, and something that was real, real close to being the kind of love she had believed in when she was a child, before she knew this.

6. Tasha

Tasha liked Hayden as soon as she set eyes upon him. He always appeared disheveled, and yet composed, as though careless attractiveness were a quality he could not suppress through sheer lack of effort. His manners matched. Tasha could tell Hayden's attention was valuable by how sparingly he laid it out. Eventually she worked up the nerve to approach him, and was relieved to find herself accepted in his presence, not the target of the mysterious, sarcastic scoff he doled out frequently. She had met his unfathomable standards. She felt unique; Hayden was so often alone.

She asked him to have coffee with her and he laconically agreed. They went out. She told him all about herself and he laconically approved, of everything. She told him she found him handsome, and they returned to her dorm room where he laconically made love to her. Afterwards, he began to get dressed. She asked him why. He said something which, though he didn't know it, completely and irrevocably changed the way she perceived him. He might as well have torn off his face.

Once he'd gone, Tasha went out by herself and walked in the snow, inventing obscenities so potent that no words existed with which to express them.