"We've narrowed down the list of prospective girls. Miaoulis is working with Isis Alexander so my options were slim, but I decided to send Oliver to work on the archai case," Madeline was explaining into a crisp BlackBerry Curve.
"Yes, I had Jill sign the papers earlier—her contract with us expires at the end of '09, but her contract with Pepper won't expire until 2011. We haven't been having her followed due to complications with Vega's security, but we know where she's been for the most part. It helped out when Marié Alcard was here, but—I know, I know. No, sir. Yes, sir. Our focus right now is on a woman that we've established is a mutual acquaintance of the two."
"She worked for MTV in the United Kingdom sector now and before that, as a journalist for the music magazine NME. For the last year, she's been in a mental institution but if she's one of the girls we're looking for we can probably change that particular situation when we need to. Apparently she grew up poor in one of the coal-mining towns near Sherwood, managed to graduate with a college scholarship so she applied for an internship for NME during her freshman year, and was accepted. Less than a year later, she dropped out of college for a permanent position."
"It took our team over a year of research, but it seems likely that she's the illegitimate daughter of a prominent man with rich fingers in the music industry. This was never brought to public attention nor discovered by the media, but he privately funded the scholarship and helped guide her career subtly from the sidelines from the looks of it. Not long after that, she started dating the man's son after they met at a corporate shindig. It's unlikely that the girl knew she was dating her half-brother as she'd been adopted by her stepfather by age two and carried his last name."
"When the son brought her home to introduce her to the family after the whirlwind courtship led to engagement, his father snapped and the truth came out—at least privately, there's been no media attention whatsoever. We have no idea where the son is though he's unimportant, and she's been in the white walls ever since. Her father pays for it."
"Lia talks to our implant sometimes. I imagine you would want to, you know, talk, at least to someone. She's been diagnosed with somnambulism—or sleepwalking—and a posttraumatic stress disorder but what I find immediately interesting is the fact that she's also taking a prescription medication that's not for the treatment of either of the diseases. It was recommended by her father, her real father, to the doctor for a more rare disorder that plagues the women in their family tree."
What's that?
"A bullshit disorder invented by his Puritan predecessors to cover up something very, very real from what the research team is telling me."
Madeline—
"Witchcraft, sir. The women in this family are witches. We can trace the lineage of this part of the family further back than the landing of the Mayflower."
Tuck those ribbons under your helmet—
be a good soldier.
First my left foot then
my right behind the other,
pantyhose running in the cold.
Mother, the car is here—
somebody leave the light on.
Black chariot for the redhead,
dancing dancing girl
and when I dance for him,
somebody leave the light on
just in case I like the dancing.
I can remember where I come from.
I walked into your dream and now
I've forgotten how to dream my own my dream.
You are the clever one, aren't you?
Brides in veils for you.
We told you all of our secrets,
all but one so don't you even try.
The phone has been disconnected,
dripping with blood
and with time
and with your advice.
Poison me against the moon.
Mother, the car is here—
somebody leave the light on.
Black chariot for the redhead,
dancing dancing girl
and when I dance for him,
somebody leave the light on
just in case I like the dancing.
I can remember where I come from.
I escape into your escape,
into our very favorite fearscape.
It's across the sky
and across my heart
and I cross my legs—
Oh, my God.
First my left foot
then my right behind the other.
Breadcrumbs lost under the snow.
Mother, mother, the car is here.
Somebody leave the light on,
somebody leave the light on
just in case I like the dancing.
Mother.
[Tori Amos]
And speak when you're spoken of,
catch up on your sleep, girl.
When you wear that body glove,
you're acting on initiative
and you're spelling out your love.
You shouldn't be alone in there.
You could be above ground.
All I want is to be the very best for you.
All I want is to do the very best by you.
Oh, this time there'll be no life of crime.
Don't rain on me tonight.
Circle around me now, baby, it'll be okay
'cause we all go downtown sometimes.
[Interpol]
__________
A life in the lap of luxury wasn't enough to conjure Jill Lockhart's stillness — she still had her constant projects, her small secrets, several of her hours spent elsewhere doing whatever it was that she was doing these days.
Her most recent benefactor still resided overseas for the time being with her sick stepdaughter and presumably Marié Alcard though she felt his presence in erratic appointments kept by varied subordinates. The house on the hill in front of the salt-limned shore was maintained by a chorus of elegant white ghosts — lush ivy sprawling from the terrace and dripping from the faded latticework, white lace everywhere, flowers crowded together as if to echo the memory of a blue-eyed maiden's perfume (red, red roses; pale peonies always.) In the summer, the satin walls would sweat with the emptiness of the house, mourning the thick power of its lord and the immortal ladies in waiting of a missing pink-cheeked mistress.
Madeline Bancroft did so-called secretarial work for Nikolai Halifax. Soft blond hair in stylish yet professional upsweeps, an unbelievable Phoenician gaze that was gold-tinged emerald still wet with black paint, and a demure pink mouth a size too big that naturally frowned a little if it wasn't smiling. Her wardrobe consisted primarily of Diane Von Furstenberg dresses, flimsy pointelle cardigans, Behr schoolgirl headbands, and designer pearls in lieu of diamonds.
A disgraced patrician, her father had butchered her mother with a madly brandished cleaver until poor Ann Bancroft had been spread out in as many pieces as Christopher Bancroft's heart had shattered into on the day he discovered Ann couldn't keep her legs shut. Somewhere between there and the present, Halifax found Madeline and she spoke about him as if he were a God with an almost casual, natural reverence—a devoted priestess in his underground kingdom. At nineteen, she was barely legal and had a career most middle-aged men would make war for, an assistant to a powerful darkhaired man who was more rumor than reality.
"The girl's name is Isis Alexander—the other last name was just too Latin, they say. It has rockstar potential, don't you think?" Madeline twisted a ringleted forelock that spilled down away from her soft updo around a nonchalant middle finger, youthful and slim jawline slanted low as the messy blond ripple underlined itself with a tender shadow on the blushing porcélain white of an exquisitely sloping cheek. In her other hand, she held a menthol cigarette and even smoked it at intervals, Wolford black velvet overknees a shade more guileless than the rockstar's lingérie stockings.
"What's the motive?"
"Darling, no one needs a motive beyond being rich and fabulous—and wanting to create more rich and fabulous people to be even more rich and fabulous." Her short, short dress was a jacquard print with a corset-boned interior that shoved her small tits firmly up and together, leaving both shoulders bare and her skinny clavicle prominent; she was more of a fashion statement than a sex symbol, immaculate as a carefully selected figurine or collector's doll. She acted important—was important—and didn't take any sort of shit for doing something as simple as her job. "All we want is for you to manage this band. With your connections and experience managing two other bands in the past as well as being a successful rockstar, this should be simple for you."
"All right," admitted Madeline, ashing into a Baccarat insouciantly. "You're over-qualified even, I'll say that much, but what else are doing besides disappearing behind the Vega empire? I'm sure motherhood is absolutely precious, and Mister Halifax takes that into account—" A deliberate pause. "He is a very generous man."
"I'll think about it, Madeline."
"We're not asking. This is a project Mister Halifax insists that you oversee," she supplied softly, never once wavering from her professional tone. "We would like to remind you that our contract is still binding and will continue to be so until the end of this year. Who you live with is irrelevant. I would not like to see you do business with another employee, Miss Lockhart, if you don't sign these papers for me today."
"What's the name of the band?"
"Sign here, then here—I've marked it with red pen to indicate the places where I'll need your signature."
"So what are you doing, Jill? What is all this?"
Brooks was spread out on a chair, his legs long and his elbows hanging out over each scratchy upholstered arm. When he spoke, he angled one hand toward the ceiling without discretion, pointing. The joint had burned toward the tips of his fingers but he clamped the sticky dark end in a pair of silver clips, inhaling without making contact several times and quickly until the drug-smoke expanded in his lungs. His mouth zippered up thin, and in that dimmed down half-light of the living room, he appeared to be half in shade. Broad, sharp cheek bones cutting shadow back toward his cynical eyes.
Rorschach beauty: only the blood red of her lips showed color when her eyelids drooped as low as they had, the spiderweb of shadow that clung to her cheeks before slowly melting away with the lazy upward flutter of her lashes. On him, she pinned a look of cool defiance versus casual indifference, and made him lean forward to pass off the clips. It was twisted around in her fingers idly, and she didn't frown at him but every line along her face refused to be kind. "I wish you wouldn't be such an asshole. You know you don't like me when I'm cruel," flippantly, her mouth hushing off the words when closing to a tiny hole a breath away from the joint, sucking in to draw out the smoke.
He observed her queenly sprawn on the sofa just a foot away from the tip of his chair, head tilted back over a corner pillow and a knee cocked up in such a way that washed the candlelight-ethereal hem of her skirt back away from her thigh. If he had sat in the other chair, he would be at an advantage to see what lay underneath but from his current angle, he could only watch the slow rising of her breath, the pretty longness of her limbs. A black magic voodoo disguised as something less harmful, illegitimate child to streetwise legend; she had all the control, every worthless cent of it. "You're losing your head."
"I should pretend I don't know what the hell you're talking about," her tongue painting out the words in smoke, twisting pink with an outcurl of grey whisper, skin goldenly white when she angled back the crown of her head to look at him from an upside down perspective. "But I do, and I think I'm offended, so say what you have to say." Possessed by those half-lights, she could've been something beautiful and strangely remniscent of those lovely Egyptian girls (bled dry of their poison ivy), her perfectly lined thick kohl, the bruise-flowers of her irises. "It's sweet that you're concerned about him, or me," she continued, tacking on an amusingly patronizing tone, "but really, I think we can each take care of ourselves."
He snorted, kicking up his feet onto the coffee table when she finally gave him back the clips, the ashtray on his knee moved up on his lap and gravitating toward the center from atop his wide palm. After a couple of consecutive hits, he dropped the silver and smoke into its base, moving it down to the floor over the arm. It was three o'clock in the morning, the streets moving silently out the short blocky windows, the room a mess of unsheathed records and half-empty pints of Chinese dishes. "I wouldn't say concerned as much as curious. Curious to see what you think you're doing here, because I don't believe that you do."
"So let my wings break and let me crash," she answered, rolling over onto her stomach with one hand reaching back to make sure the hem of her skirt didn't twist up too high. "It's not as if it hasn't happened before. It's not as if I care what the final results are." Cigarette pack left on the floor, she pried the box-top open with her fingers and wriggled one out before taking the lighter beside it to strike up a flame. It was true, she never lived for the future; she learned once that to shove through life, to cope, she had to live in every day individually and she'd never stopped. Once the cigarette was lit, she tossed the lighter to him where he was taking out one of his own. "I'm not thinking, I'm doing, and I have no problem with that whatsoever."
The lighter had bounced into his lap and he struck flame up with a roll of his thumb, hand cupping while he puffed in hard. His chin cut ceilingward, the smoke pouring out in one long cloud before he threw the lighter to the floor in the general direction of her pack, under-handed. In that perspective, his features were tough as concrete within the lukewarm orange-red glow flickering up past his jaw every time he inhaled. "You're exposed," informatively mild. "I've known you for four years now. You could have anything you desired if you set your mind to it, if you only worked for it just enough. From what I gathered earlier, you don't do much than work with your band or hang out with this new boyfriend of yours. Where's your drive, Jill, that ambition? What of that, 'ay?"
"What exactly do you consider 'working with my band,' isn't that ambitious? It's fun, but it isn't exactly a hobby." An elbow propping up on the sofa pillow, she cradled her chin to a palm while the ringleted jungle of rioted blindly black around the coolly composed angles of her face. The caving slope from her shoulderblades to the small of her sleek back was slitherine, the skinny white blouse draping like magnolia petals peeled away from her shoulders--showing the feminine delicacies of her clavicle, the hollow of her throat where the gothic cross's silver chain sunk in. Her eyes flashing between inhales and exhales: that violet violence, that blue blood bleeding.
Brooks looked over toward the corridor that narrowed away from the living room toward the bedroom, absent-mindedly. "I've never known you to put so much focus into one person before, so that you neglect your usual routine. What about the producer's parties, all the shows and trashy venue soirees, I'm guessing you aren't taking off your dresses for bigwigs at this point? You do all the work, of course, but half of the work is the social scene. You know that. He's not one of you. He doesn't fit. It's your world, not his."
"Fuck you, I never screwed for a step up in the ladder--unless I wanted to screw them besides. And you don't know anything," she retaliated haughtily, curling her lips in show of a moment of silence around the filter of the cigarette she smoked with all the sick love of twining lips around the barrel of a gun. Letting that be absorbed, she slanted her head marginally to the side and let it siphon out. "I still attend those things; it just isn't all the time like it used to be, it isn't every single night. It shouldn't have to be, it's my career but it isn't my whole life. I'm already comfortably established, I don't need to be out there letting everyone know who I am constantly; I just make sure they don't forget." Distantly contemplative, she stopped to indicate that she needed the ashtray wherein he pulled it up from the floor to prop it between them on the edge of the coffee table. Ashing, she finished her knowing little spiel. "I think our worlds collide, beneficially. Not like it's your business."
"It's different this time, is my point. You think your friends can't tell? You think we tell you you're changing because you're cute when you're pissed off? It is cute, maybe, but in a very psychotic way; no offense."
"What's so different?" Patronizingly patient, she leveled her eyes on him with her eyebrows lifted up just far enough to be contrary.
"Your heart."
Jill snorted as if vainly amused by this, but there was something in the way her eyelids crawled low--the color of her eyes slivering off to the lashed corners discreetly.
We had only been seeing each other five months before we got married on a trip to Las Vegas. At Caesar's Palace, we blew a thousand dollars in the casino below our hotel suite, high on complimentary drinks and white rabbit pot we'd smoked in our bathroom upstairs. At a drive-through chapel with a huge roadside neon sign, we made it official and when we kissed, it was more with our tongues and our teeth than with our mouths. His hands in my hair, my hands over his shirt--a reminiscently animalistic, symbiotic pose. Now after five more months, there's nothing that can level me like his hand on the slippery skin underneath my skirt.
He hits me deep South, right above the garters and between my thighs, ripe with memory. Crawls like a buzz up and down my spinal cord, sinking his insidious fingers into all my hot spots like a disease until I'm nothing more than a marionette in my smeared eyeliner and a messily torn dress. The vicious uppercut of his hipbones, my cutthroat fingernails and nothing else but the noises we make. We leave each other bruised for days, purpled shoulderblades and blue-blackened hips, and the images we leave behind on the mirrored ceiling are slow to fade.
This is a violent union, never a tender affair. He's stapled my shape to every wall of the apartment and I've been on my knees in manipulation more times than I can count. Glasses have shattered, the dead bodies have piled up, and now we're swimming through the undertow of our sins. Watch as the skeletons in the closet shake and one by one the walls fall away like exhaled smoke.
Anything now. He's taking anything he wants.
"Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and, it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor so that nothing can hurt you -- then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life. You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness. So simple a phase like 'maybe we should just be friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."
Hemodialysis three times a week, dietary changes, and several prescriptions on top of the supplements she was recommended were the things that were supposed to keep her healthier longer--and she was banned completely from chocolate on top of her usual plethora of drugs and alcohol, which kept her drowning herself in his sex for the releases from reality that she not only craved but needed. While there was no way that she would qualify for a kidney transplant legitimately in the States in time to save her life, luckily through contacts and plenty of research, her saving grace had been discovered. The woman's name was Damini Lyngdoh and she was willing to sell one of her capable kidneys for twenty-five thousand dollars through their third-party negotiator, his fee all-inclusive. Their round-trip tickets to India had already been purchased and now all they had to do was wait impatiently for September to come around, to hope that the poverty-stricken woman didn't change her mind, that the contraband clinic where the surgery would be performed wasn't shut down in the meanwhile.
Sometimes, she would have these horrible nightmares but the psychiatrist never understood how truly terrible they were. "That sounds disconcerting," he would say in his impressively modern office that reminded her off a checkerboard in black and white, pen tapping rhythmically. They weren't disconcerting; they were unbearable. She would dream that she was engulfed in this impenetrable darkness, a mazelike abyss, and Jett's voice would keep calling her name. Quietly, at first, as if she were hearing it from underwater and then it would start to clear up. Answering him never seemed to work because his volume would escalate angrily, demanding that she tell him where she was, and she would get pissed right back, screaming at the top of her lungs that she couldn't see anything and that he should stop playing these games with her, to quit acting like he couldn't hear her! Then he would sound desperate, this way that she'd never heard him sound before (that's what made it so terrifyingly real), and he would start screaming, so she would begin to feel scared.
Running through the blackness that felt as sterile to her as a hospital room, she was so afraid of tripping because she couldn't even see her feet or what she was standing on, and she'd start to cry only when he stopped calling for her--when it sounded like someone that couldn't have been him was crying, couldn't have been him because it sounded so weak and Jett was never weak. Would sob, and run faster, and would feel so overheated that she thought she would have a heart attack if she didn't wake up--so she'd wake up, covered in a cold sweat, shivering naked with her arms wrapped around herself. He didn't have to tell her what it meant. It meant that she was dying. It meant that she was terrified of going somewhere that Jett wouldn't be able to find her.
He had asked her one night, sitting in the stairwell of their New York City apartment building while smoking a joint of white rhino marijuana, if she could be anywhere: where would that be? Las Vegas. He had never liked their apartment anyway, and so after finding a new one, they'd spent an entire day saying goodbye to the former: smashing glassware and plates, shredding curtains with switchblades, plastered to the marble and stainless surfaces at strange angles where his cum would be left behind for someone else to clean up by the time they'd be long gone.
It was a city that honestly never slept and wallowed in sin, its neon lights glimmering like a twisted Milky Way amidst the desert. Their apartment was nice but not nearly so large, a loft space so open that secrets couldn't bear to hide. The newspapers spilled the news of her illness in bold headlines but there she could whisper to him in fierce, heart-shaped syllables, the clothes would come off, and they were perpetually locked in some slippery animalistic embrace that kept the impending threats of reality at bay. Jill was content with that: being naked and wet, her spine strapped to his chest with his palms roughly cupping the inside of her hipbones, breaths panted out from where they'd been fucking. There was nothing else.
His tongue. Her lips. His fingers. Her legs.
Diseases couldn't exist in places that beautiful.
Dear Davidé,
You keep cutting me up with this hated knife of truth. You see, the truth and I lie very far apart: every time I taste a confession on my own shivering lips, I am drowning, jerked tight by the undertow until I can barely breathe. I cannot cry, Davidé. To cry is to surrender, and that I will never do. I know, I know they only kick you when you're down -- and little do they know, one more stumble, and I think I should break completely apart, starting at the ribcage (the only thing that can hold my heart in, for otherwise, it would've surely run away from me by now).
I am as riddled with ugliness as a fire victim but I hide it under my skin. When I am touched gently, I swear to you that I have been slapped. I feel its undeniable repercussions, its sly poison. A mean screw in the middle of an alley, teeth disrespectful of a fragile-boned shoulder, hands that own another's hair. I find it far more trustworthy, this exchange between two people who do not care for each other, nor care to pretend that they do. A tender kiss, a whisper: this is the way of Judas, surely not your imagined Jesus; that is how the most dangerous murderers slip by the night, with a smile in front and a gun coming from behind. I will not be bought off with their blood money in the romance of a sweetly stolen moment. I've played that game before again, and again, and ..
Its the sword that you do not see coming that puts you down. I will stand tall proudly. I will see it coming. I will stab first, mourn you later. You will never have the best of me, or the worst of me -- I think, sometimes, they are one and the same. I cannot let you. If you have that, if you have me, then I'm left with nothing at all. Can you imagine nothing, Davidé? I can. God, do I fear it.
I almost risked it all on a gamble placed desperately on a nameless man. Congo heat lover, brief friend, betrayer. There was something nearly intangible between us: it rose like thunder suspended in a flatland sky, a crackle of lightning, his sex the cool rain on my skin. A drink of dementia, this man to me. I could not wrap myself around the concept of it. I wanted him, fiercely and without any other woman's soft apologies. I wanted it all: his hands to drag across the small of my back, his worship at my temple, his wild love -- until I remembered love. It is a conditional emotion that makes no exception for fear.
My need and he conspired until it was him that I would need. I said selfishly, "I love you," but withheld that with I could never put to words. I love you is fleeting, it can be said and just as easily torn away. I need you is forever, something you cannot take away no matter how hard you try. "I need you," and sweet Lucifer, how I did and would have him never know.
I need you was for all the nights I made hate instead of love in bed, left them while they slept and throbbed hollow in the hallways of my soul, hollowed out and wet and so damn cold. I need you was for all the times I was alone, whether willing or unwilling. I need you when I was so frightened, I wanted to slip out from this awful, pale body that would not move for him and beg for mercy. I need you was when I loved him and died over (and over for) it. I need you was for when I pushed him away and he went without a fight, because I was shrieking inside, "Come back!" and somehow believed he would until he did not. I need you was when he was my hope, and I did not want to lose hope.
I need you was when I slid into the bed of another man, not because I could not resist but because he did not need my broken, lonely love like I needed him. He brought flowers and poetry to my feet, not knowing I care little for cheap symbols of something lesser than this suddenly clumsy longing. Took my body to the floor and used its knowledge, starting a fire on the surface while I slowly froze inside knowing that he would never yearn for what I did.
He could not understand that my hands were trying to tell him something my lips could not. "Please stay," or "There is a vacancy inside I can't mend," or even "I need you to help me; I'm sinking here, I am rarely the strength you see me to be." Or...
"You cannot take away this light of yours. If you do, I will know nothing but the irreparable absence of you. You cannot leave me here alone with me."
And this little masochist,
she's ready to confess
all the things that I never thought
that she could feel and—
Hey, Jupiter, nothing's been the same.
So are you gay, are you blue?
Thought we both could use a friend to run to,
and I thought I wouldn't have to be with you
as something new.
Sometimes I breathe you in,
and I know you know
and sometimes you take a swim;
found your writing on my wall.
If my heart's soaking wet—
Boy, your boots can leave a mess.
Thought I knew myself so well,
(all the dolls I had.)
Took my leather off the shelf.
Your apocalypse was fab
for a girl who couldn't choose between
the shower or a bath
And I thought I wouldn't have to be
with you
a magazine.
No one's picking up the phone.
Guess it's clear he's gone.
And this little masochist
is lifting up her dress—
[Tori Amos, Hey Jupiter]
Lancelot's Guinevere, not Arthur's — not pristine, not pure-white, not this wild child whore with the supermodel legs and these great small bones, wild with all the wanting of the world. She had an unintentional sort of innocence (or it was a perfect little make-believe scene), a duality that insists her knees are made for splitting violently apart even while her dark, dark blue eyes glisten cathedral-lit underneath an endless, ethereal-black flutter of full girl lashes. Apollo loved the soft dimensions of her skin, coin-copper bronzed velvet paling against the decadent dark silt of brown-black hair, the adorably distinctive cheekbones; gentle L-shape of jaw, sinner's faint pink mouth—that mouth, her mouth, curved petal-like lips and the tiny triangular shadow just under the lower protrusion that indicates vulnerability where there is such poise. Catherine Miaoulis woke up from childhood nightmares in expensive hotel rooms, her mirrors were powdered white over razorblades and she had the curtains drawn shut, just tight enough to hold all the shame together.
She's missing (somewhere out there in the spring's cool rain, erringly childlike, doll-like in her ruffled silk mini-dress), missed, a wayward child-mother. Underneath the setting sun that turns the sky with colors that herald the memory of fire, all the weeping willows by the stream are sighing, and the two cast shadows that are far too long behind them as if to measure the insidious depth of the secrets they both keep.
It's like a dream: the two of them there wet under the tender spring shower, blackhaired children that have been forfeited to some silent cause, so lost that neither can find themselves; irreclaimable souls. Jill is in a drug-addled haze — her mirrors are powdered white, framed with razorblades and rolled up hundred dollar bills, and she's been drinking expensive vodka for weeks to dampen the viper's bite of stress. But she's beautiful, so beautiful, too beautiful; her triumph is her disgrace.
"I sent him far away; he's looking in the deserts for you, Medina this time. He won't buy this circle game for too much longer and I don't even want to think about the repercussions," she whispers, just loud enough to be heard above the pelting of the gentle downpour, and he closes his eyes at the sound of her voice—slowly, slowly for it's spellbinding, as pleasurable to the ears as the milksilk white of her unsullied skin is to the touch, pure silver twining in the ether. "I shouldn't be lying to him after everything that's happened. I'm a stupid girl."
"He's a fucking dumbass and I'm a fast mover, he'd never know the difference," he dismisses, leaning long against the tree where they have taken shelter. It's her cigarette that he smells first, but below that, the sudden headiness of her perfume. Vera Wang's Rock Princess instead of Cinéma or Obsession now—the succulent meat of white peach, hypnotic heliotrope, night-blooming jasmine, delicate lily, a chorus of spice that his senses cannot quite place but it's sultry, unique, almost poetic. "Why then? Why lie for me, Jill? How does this serve you?"
He regrets the last question almost immediately because he knows her, and he knows her better than that, knows she can be better than that. When he slits one eye, he sees her under that half-shadow of the drooping tree and her face reveals a few of her secrets to him one cracked diamond at a time—it's a little sad, blended with an innocent confusion that borders on helplessness, some personal shame. It's a shapeless dress, nearly, but small enough that he can see where she curves or hollows out now that she's wet, and her bible-black hair is everywhere, beginning to lose its curl under the newfound weight of the moisture it carries.
One hand, she holds furled up against the breastbone, and the other is folded over a cigarette to keep the fire hot by her lavish, lush-soft mouth that glistens pale red from where she was stroking her little pink tongue nervously over it. "Why did you do it? Why did you kill all those people? Children and women, so indiscriminately? I try not to think about what you did out there, Zion, and I can't breathe when I do."
At first, he says nothing—it's hard for him when he sees the unshed tears, tears that she would never allow to completely break through, and he can see that it is difficult for her to not judge him, condemn him, for the savage wolf that he is. Jill is unintentionally doe-eyed, the kohl shadow smudged and trickling down in not-tears, but how wounded she is when she looks at him like that makes him ache hard in places he forgot that he had.
"I didn't— I thought— I didn't know for sure that I wouldn't be able to control it when it came into me," he bites out with some difficulty for he knows how easy it would be to lie to her, but he doesn't want to anymore (unless he feels he has absolutely has to.) "But I murdered a slew of men before that, I was driven and I did what I needed to do in order to get to him, Jill. You don't understand. You don't know him like I do. It's been coming to this for years, you can't stop him and you can't stop me, you can't stop us. One of us has to die, me or him, and this doesn't end until—"
"If you could just— if you could change your mind, maybe I could convince him to stop this, you could both just live and— why can't—"
"No. It's him or me, Jill, why can't you understand that?"
"I can't choose— you can't— this hurts me, don't you care that this hurts me, I know you care that this hurts me, why can't that be enough?"
And she is crying now, silent and slow the darksmear dribble down the high, delicate bones of her cheeks, tries to smoke though her deceptively diminutive fingers quiver from the emotion. Turns halfway so that he can't watch her do it, but still he comes to fold his hands moistly around her shoulders, attempts to comfort her even while his words sharpen themselves like knives.
"Me or him. Why is that so hard for you?"
"Because the world needs someone like him, but I can't let you go—I can't let go."
