snare

It’s the same ceiling as yesterday, but I might as well be somewhere else. I lie face up in an unfamiliar bed; the sheets are new and stiff, Egyptian cotton, disheveled as she'd been after stumbling out of them. With everything gone, replaced and impersonal, the space doesn’t feel mine anymore. When the girl leaves, so may I.

I found her browsing at Saks Fifth Avenue, snared her like a white-skinned docile little rabbit, smiled at her and overwhelmed her until she didn’t have a choice but to follow anywhere I led. She’d liked my suit—and she should, my flesh and bones wrapped in glamour that she can see and some that she can’t. She’d fixed her eyes on my face, predictably caught. I’d crooked my finger, and she’d rushed—breathlessly eager—after me.

Vanity and lust. Two birds with one stone, though I never liked the expression.

The shower’s running in the bathroom, and I picture her spindly young legs still trembling beneath the water from the way I took her, clenching bruises around her wrists, pressing marks into the delicate hollow of her throat with my mouth. But I feel empty, hollow, unfulfilled, even with the girl's worship saturating me like heroine straight into the blood. Between the Shewolf and Choire, something like this was bound to happen. At least the edge is dulled now.

And it’s another “Fuck you” to Father.

Funny. I think of Bobbi, and I have trouble picturing her like this. Maybe because she’s so pure it makes me ache: the way a child is pure, malicious and petty, defenseless and honest even when she lies. But purity's never made a difference before. Vastly more likely—the seal organically branded against the back of her neck, as much a native part of the girl as her heart and lungs. A connection between us, my name in abstract.

Irritation spikes mildly on my tongue. If not for her, for the ghost that haunts us both, I wouldn’t feel this sense of displacement. Brittle manuscripts edged in gilt leaf, hand-stitched clothing, centuries-old artwork—all gone, reduced to less than rubble, fine sand grain dust blowing on cold netherworld wind as the poltergeist came and went, destroying decades in an instant.

I’m getting sentimental. Complacent. Attached. But no—there’s Bahrain, or Turkey, or wherever the Hell the Garden hides from me. Soon, very soon: another rung on the Ladder, another link in the Golden Chain. I’ll ask Choire if she knows how to fly commercial aircraft; and thinking of Choire, the swollen juvenile smear of her mouth and the way she hates me, I consider the sound of the shower, and whether the girl will break if I have her again.