Black Iris (25 page)

NOVEMBER, LAST YEAR

W
e faced each other across the bedroom, me in the shadows and her in the light, like always. I could not see her face and she could not see mine.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Blythe said.

“Would you have believed me?”

“Christ.”

She walked away from the window and then back. Cast a mournful glance at me, a word forming and dying in her mouth. I took a step closer. My room smelled like her now. There was no more division between us.

“That first night,” she said. “You knew.”

“Yes.”

“You weren’t looking for Zoeller.”

“I was looking for you and Armin. Artemis and Apollo.”

I heard the breath she released. I took another step.

“You used me, Laney. Manipulated me into becoming your fucking roommate, your ‘best friend,’ your—whatever I am to you now.”

“Yes.”

She cringed like she’d taken a blow and I did, too.

“I don’t know you at all,” she said.

“I could’ve kept you in the dark. You never needed to be part of this.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Another step toward the light. “Because something changed.” I put a hand on her shoulder, soft as breath, and she didn’t flinch. Unbearable, being this close with a chasm between us.

“What?”

“I fell in love with you.”

She let me touch her face, my fingertips tracing the wishbone of her jaw, her slim throat. I lay my lips on the carotid, felt it beat against me. All the life in her gathered there against my vampire mouth.

She pulled my face up to hers. “Was he really the one you wanted to dose tonight, or was it me?”

“I never did it to you. I never had to.”

“You used me.”

“You wanted me from the start. Like I wanted you.” I brushed her hair aside, cupped her cheek. “It was always different between us. We were never just friends.”

She watched my mouth move. “How do I know any of this was real?”

“You don’t know. You feel it.”

Blue eyes met blue. Two hunters in the night, circling.

“What do you want from me?” she said.

“Everything.” My hands moved over her shoulders, down her chest. To her breasts, the caged heartbeat thrashing between them. “I want you. I want the badness in you. I want the craziness, the animal. I’m going to hurt them all, Blythe. Every single person who’s hurt me. And you’ll be there at my side.”

“You drugged me.”

“I didn’t, I promise.”

“You drugged me,” she repeated, her fingers wrapping around my neck, “with your skin, and your hands, and your mouth. You’re in my veins. My blood.” Her lips were a breath’s
width from mine, her wolf teeth bright. We teetered on the delirious brink of a kiss. “You poisoned me, and it feels so fucking good. I want more.”

My breath came fast. “Will you do it with me?”

“Yeah, I will. I’ll fuck this world up with you.”

“Good girl,” I said. “Let’s be bad.”

I tore off her clothes. I tore off every shred of resistance she still held. And I fucked her, wild and rough, animal, like the monsters we were.

———

A couple stumbled out of the bar, arm-in-arm. Drunk. It was a dive in Aurora called O’Malley’s, a low building at the edge of the woods. Winter peeled the trees clean and left them looking like charred bones. I huddled in the truck bed beneath a blanket. The text ten minutes ago had said,
Soon
.

The couple passed into a circle of streetlight and she tossed her head. He said something in a deep voice; she laughed.

My hands tightened on the rubber grip.

Blythe danced a few steps forward, coyly. “You’re trying to take advantage of me.”

“I’m a perfect gentleman.” He followed, a massive lumbering shadow.

“A perfect gentleman with a wife.”

When he caught up she disappeared into his silhouette. He murmured something I couldn’t hear. Blythe gasped and shoved him away, and he laughed and came after her.

The chase was on.

She retreated to the truck, leaned up against the bed. I kept my face swathed in the blanket, peeking through an eye slit.

“I shouldn’t do this,” she said, slurring. “I don’t fuck married men.”

“What
do
you do with married men?”

She laughed. Pushed him away playfully. He came back with force, crushed her to the truck and swallowed her face in his huge hands. Kissed her. So hard the chassis rocked and I gathered my legs to jump out, but then I noticed her hand on the rim of the bed, one finger raised.

Wait.

The longest eight seconds of my life.

Blythe tore her mouth away, moaned like a porn star. “You drive me wild, baby.”

I watched that raised finger as if it were a sword over his head.

“Get down on your knees,” she said.

He laughed, gravelly. Blythe didn’t. After a moment his mirth died.

“I want to show you something,” she said, opening her coat.

“Let’s go to my car.”

“I need to show you now, baby. I’m so fucking wet.”

He sank to the ground, staring up at her.

I would have, too.

“Good boy.” She touched his face. “Oh, almost forgot.”

The finger fell. I shook the blanket off, put the grip into her open palm.

“This is for hitting my girlfriend,” Blythe said.

She smashed the butt of the baseball bat into his face.

He dropped onto all fours on the asphalt. I vaulted out of the truck, landing lightly. My legs tingled from euphoria and lack of circulation. In the harsh light his blood looked oil black, a violent stripe on the ground, a dark web in his beard.

“Mr. Klein,” I said.

He looked up at me, watery-eyed, stunned.

I spat in his face.

Blythe tossed the bat in the truck and wiped her mouth.
Lifted his chin, surveyed the damage, and ripped the gold chain from his bull neck.

“Early birthday present,” she said, tossing it to me.

“You’re so sweet.”

We got in the truck, laughing cold, glassy laughs, hard as ice, high as fuck on what we’d done.

Blythe turned to me with bright eyes. “Who’s next?”

———

I’d only been gone half a year but already Naperville South looked aged and quaint, like a yellowing photo. We climbed through a window to the indoor track. Shadows stretched over the turf. I stuck to the moonlight. At night all schools are haunted. Blythe wandered from me and it was ineffably strange, her being here, where my mythologies began. We took up position in the outside lanes of the track.

“Race you,” she said.

I knew better than to hesitate. I darted off.

“Bloody cheat,” she yelled after me.

I’d run track in school before I decided my best sport was drugs. I was faster but Blythe was taller. She caught up, grabbed my shirt, spun me out, and we tumbled to the floor, loose-limbed and flushed. She held me down, her hair in my face.

“Bloody cheat,” I said.

She kissed me.

My heart seized, conditioned with fear. This was where I’d learned to hate myself. To survive in a cage. I closed my eyes and thought, Fuck you, Naperville, and lost myself in her kiss. Two girls, cherry-mouthed, glitter-lashed, our skin luminous with moonlight and sweat, making out beneath pennants that still shivered with the afternoon’s boy bravado.

If only you bastards could see me now.

“Show me what it was like,” Blythe whispered in my ear.

Our phones lit the halls spooky spectral blue. We climbed the catwalk above the auditorium, where I’d smoked weed with Donnie and colored my shoes with Sharpies and dreamed of places I’d escape to someday. Then into the underground disaster shelter where our lights fell on crumbling concrete that looked torn up with claws, rust-stained pools of water smelling weirdly like blood. I used to tell Donnie ghost stories down there, before Mom died.

“It wasn’t all bad, yeah?” Blythe said.

It felt weird being in the guidance office again, even though it was empty. They stamp that fear of authority in you with permanent ink. Blythe marched straight to the door marked
J. RADZEN
.

She burst into laughter at his selfies. “Christ, no wonder you’re so warped.”

After a dozen tries we couldn’t guess his computer password.

“It must be something simple,” I said. “He’s a dumb pedo. Look at that mustache.”

“Try something in the room.”

“This isn’t TV, Blythe. It’s not going to be right in front of our—”

We both glanced at the ceramic fish on the desk.

She typed
BIGFISH
. Access granted.

“Oh my god.” I shouldered in. “Let me do the honors.”

Insert thumb drive. Copy-paste. Mr. Radzen, please enjoy ten gigs of the finest Barely Legal Boys. Blowjobs, handjobs, anal, bondage—a fine mix. Plenty of servicemen for your pleasure.

Blythe blew a kiss at the fighter jet photo.

When the upload finished I sent an email from Jeff’s account to the entire school board (
FWD: SUPER HOT!!!!!
)
and attached a JPEG of the youngest-looking boy we’d found deep-throating a massive veiny dick.

“You are evil.” Blythe slid her hands up my ribs, cupped my breasts. “It turns me on.”

I tucked the ceramic fish into my bag. A souvenir, like the necklace I now wore.

“Ever fucked anyone in school?” she said.

“No.”

She grazed my ear with her teeth. Her hands were unzipping my hoodie. “Shame.”

I had one more memory to make there. The one where I sat on my guidance counselor’s desk, my bare ass on the blotter and her face between my legs.

———

The final night of our spree was so cold it felt like the sky would crack open. We huddled together in an alley behind the bar, our faces and fingers numb. The hardest part had been finding the opportunity. Until I remembered the Blackhawks hat.

The game had ended hours ago. We’d tailed him from the stadium to the Billy Goat Tavern, watched him shove cheeseburgers into his face and laugh with his meathead bros while we shivered on the street. At midnight his friends split and he continued on to the Cobra Lounge, alone.

Chicago had a quiet grandeur at night, the streetlights gold sequins pinned to a vast blackness, redbrick warehouses marching up Ashland Avenue. This late the streets were dead. Every now and then people stumbled into or out of cabs and the Green Line screeched on the elevated track, grinding sparks, filling the air with ozone.

Blythe hadn’t wanted to know details beforehand. “Surprise me,” she’d said.

I would.

No weapon this time. Nothing but this great old city to do my bidding.

“There he is,” I said.

Jeans, parka, hockey cap. Indistinguishable from a dozen other guys who’d left the bar, but you never forget someone who’s hurt you.

We rose, worked the pins and needles from our legs, watched him meander and stare at his phone. When he paused near a taxi, I swore, but he moved on. Blythe and I pulled our hoods low and followed, our shadows sliding down the street like stilettos.

He walked beneath the baroque wrought-iron lamps to the Green Line station. It was a throwback, Queen Anne style, lacy metalwork and bay windows. We waited half a minute and then padded up the steps after him. I stopped Blythe before the top.

“Borrow his phone,” I said. “Act drunk. Drop it on the tracks.”

Those cool polar-blue eyes didn’t blink.

“No fingerprints.”

She stared a moment longer and went up.

Winter air washed over the platform. Far away a siren screamed, a thin ribbon of agony fringing the edge of the night. Here it was quiet. I lurked behind the turnstile and watched.

Blythe bent to tie her shoe, her hair spilling from her hood and dangling over the tracks. No missing her tight ass in those skinny jeans.

Blackhawks Hat glanced at her, at his phone. Back at her.

I smiled.

She looked around as if only just realizing where she was. I couldn’t see her face but pictured her biting her lip, the same
way she’d bite it when my fingertips slid down the hot velvet of her belly.

“What’s up, girl?” Blackhawks Hat said.

Blythe sauntered toward him and began explaining, between flights of giggles, how she’d lost her phone at a bar.

As she closed in I mirrored her, clicking quietly through the turnstile, staying behind him. Just like Umbra. Wolves circling, moving in perfect sync.

“I only need it a minute,” she said. “I’ll give it right back.”

Blythe touched his phone, her sleeve covering her hand.

Something spooked him. He jerked away. She followed, caressing his chest, but he fended her off.

“You trying to rob me?”

“What’s your problem, mate?”

“Get your hands off.”

Blythe caught my gaze over his shoulder. I shook my head. Abort.

Something jagged glinted in her eyes.

No
, I mouthed.

She drove him backward, her hands on his coat, angling him toward the platform’s edge. At the last second he sensed it and seized her.

“Cut it out, crazy bitch.”

“Fuck you,” she said, giving him a slight shove.

He shoved her back. Hard.

I bolted forward, shouldering him aside and reaching for her, but her heel caught the edge and she tumbled onto the tracks, boneless as a rag doll.

I jumped down without a second thought.

Bare rusting rails. A shape lay in the shadows, a scrawl of dull gold.

God no.

Six hundred volts of raw electricity coursed through the
third rail. If someone touched it, there was nothing you could do. Nothing. Not unless you wanted to die, too. In the darkness I couldn’t tell if she touched it and I couldn’t touch her and I was about to fucking scream.

“Bloody hell,” she groaned.

I grabbed her under the arms, euphoric with relief. “Get up. Come on. You are so fucking crazy.”

The guy’s shadow loomed over us. “Worst thieves ever.”

Blythe’s hand closed on my wrist. Her eyes touched something above me. The security cam.

It couldn’t see us down on the tracks.

“I saw you push her,” I said, glaring up at the silhouette.

“Still trying to run your scam?”