Pink Velvet Static

The first thing I noticed was the smell. Not incense, not clove cigarettes, not the patchouli oil every goth girl in a three-state radius seemed to bathe in. Vanilla. Cheap vanilla candle wax and something sharper underneath it, like nail polish remover. The whole apartment smelled like a middle school art project had exploded inside a Hot Topic.

I was bleeding on her floor.

Not a lot. A few drops, dark and fat, landing between my boots on the pale wood laminate. I'd split my knuckle open on a stubborn lug nut an hour ago and hadn't bothered with a bandage, because bandages were for people who planned their days. I hadn't planned this one. I'd planned to fix a transmission, go home, eat cold pizza standing over the sink. Instead I was standing in a stranger's living room at two in the morning, dripping on her floor, holding a bottle of her beer.

"You're gonna stain it," she said.

She was on the couch with her legs tucked under her, bare feet, black polish chipped on three toes. Pink hair falling in her face. She didn't sound upset about the stain. She sounded like she was taking notes.

"It's laminate," I said. "It wipes up."

"You'd know."

"I fix cars. I know a lot of things about fluids."

That got a laugh out of her, quick and real, and she tilted her head back to drink. Her throat moved. I watched it move. I'd been watching her for the last forty minutes, since she'd walked into the bar where I was drinking alone and sat down two stools over and ordered something pink with an umbrella in it, which takes a special kind of nerve in a place that only stocks three kinds of whiskey and a bottle of gin older than I was.

Venus. That's what she'd told me, and I'd said, "Like the planet?" and she'd said, "Like the goddess," and I'd said, "Same thing, right?" and she'd looked at me for a second and then laughed, and that was that. That was the whole courtship. Two hours and a pink drink with an umbrella and now I was in her apartment, which was painted the color of a bruised sunset, and I still wasn't sure how I'd gotten here.

Well. I knew how. I just wasn't sure why.

She had a wall of records and a dead fern and a shelf of those little glass animals, the kind you get from a gas station claw machine. A hundred of them, maybe. Glass cats and glass dolphins and one glass frog with a chipped foot. I'd counted them while she was in the bathroom. That's the kind of person I am. I count things. I take inventory. It's kept me alive more than once.

"You keep looking at my stuff," she said.

"You keep having stuff."

"Most people just stare at my tits."

"Most people are boring."

She set the beer down on the floor, which was worse for the laminate than my blood, and she looked at me. Really looked. Her eyes were green, a weird green, the color of a bottle of cheap wine held up to a porch light. I've got a thing for eyes. It's the one romantic bone in my body. I can't remember half the names of the women I've slept with but I remember every pair of eyes.

"You're not what I expected," she said.

"What'd you expect?"

"I don't know. A mechanic."

"You got a mechanic."

"I expected a mechanic with a beard and a beer gut and a wife."

"I got the beer gut," I said, and I lifted my tank top an inch to show her my stomach, which is soft over the muscle, thick at the waist, the kind of body that doesn't fold into anything. She looked. She didn't look away. That was the moment, I think, when something shifted, when the night stopped being a story I'd tell somebody later and started being a thing that was happening to me.

"You're built like a refrigerator," she said.

"Thanks."

"It's a compliment."

"I know it is."

She got up off the couch. She was tall, taller than me standing, and skinny in the way that makes a person look like they were designed on purpose, all long lines and sharp angles, hips wide enough to be a problem and a chest she'd decided to make a feature instead of a flaw. Black dress, black tights, and a silver chain around her neck with a little key on it. I wondered what the key opened. I wondered if I'd get to find out.

She crossed the room. I stayed where I was. I've learned that if you stand still, things come to you. It's true of dogs and it's true of women and it's true of most of the trouble I've ever gotten into.

She stopped a foot away. Close enough that I could smell her now, under the vanilla, something like rain and cigarettes and clean skin. She reached out and took my bleeding hand and turned it over, palm up, and looked at the split knuckle like it was a map she was trying to read.

"You should clean this," she said.

"It's fine."

"It's not fine. You're gonna get it infected and then you'll lose the hand and then who's gonna fix my car?"

"You got a car?"

"Everyone's got a car."

"Not everyone."

"Everyone I know."

She was still holding my hand. Her fingers were cold. She didn't let go. I could feel my pulse in my knuckle, which was stupid, the body doing its dumb animal thing, blood rushing to the wound like it was trying to prove something.

"You got a first aid kit?" I said.

"Bathroom."

"Show me."

She didn't move. She was looking at my mouth now, at the little scar on my lip from a fight I'd lost when I was nineteen, and I could feel the weight of the look like a hand on my chest.

"You're the one who's supposed to take the lead," she said. "That's what I figured. From the bar. The way you sat. The way you ordered."

"How'd I order?"

"Like you already knew what you wanted and you were just waiting for the bartender to catch up."

"That's how I order everything."

"I know," she said. "That's what I'm saying."

And then she kissed me.

It wasn't a soft kiss. It wasn't a question. She leaned in and put her mouth on mine like she was testing a lock, and I stood there with my bleeding hand in hers and my other hand still holding the beer and I kissed her back, because what else was I going to do, because I'd been thinking about it since the bar and probably she had too, because the whole night had been a slow walk toward exactly this and we both knew it and neither of us had bothered to pretend otherwise.

She tasted like the pink drink. Sweet and a little bitter and something underneath that was just her. Her free hand came up and grabbed the back of my neck, fingers in my hair, and I dropped the beer. It hit the floor and rolled and didn't break, thank god, and I put both hands on her hips and pulled her in and she made a sound into my mouth, low and surprised, like she hadn't expected me to be that strong. I'm stronger than I look. That's the whole trick of me.

We broke apart. Both of us breathing hard. Her lipstick was smeared, which meant mine was too, and she looked at my face and laughed, that same real laugh from before, and I decided I liked it. I decided I wanted to hear it again.

"You're bleeding on me now," she said.

"Sorry."

"Don't be."

She took my hand again and led me down the hall. The bathroom was small and pink, pink tile, pink sink, a pink shower curtain with black roses printed on it, and I stood in the doorway while she dug through a cabinet and came up with a box of Band-Aids and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. She sat me down on the closed toilet lid and knelt in front of me, which put her face at about chest height, and she didn't look at my chest, she looked at my hand, and she cleaned the cut with the alcohol and I hissed through my teeth and she said, "Baby," in a voice that was half mocking and half not.

"You don't get to call me baby," I said.

"I'll call you whatever I want."

"You'll call me Shelly."

"Shelly," she said, like she was tasting it. "Okay. Shelly."

She put the Band-Aid on. She smoothed it down with her thumb. And then she stayed on her knees in front of me and looked up, and the bathroom light was behind her and it made a halo out of her pink hair, and I thought, this is the part where I should leave. This is the part where I say thanks for the beer and the Band-Aid and the story, and I go home, and I never see her again, and that's fine, that's how these things go.

I didn't leave.

"What now?" I said.

She stood up. She was taller than me again. She reached past me and turned off the bathroom light and the hallway went dark except for the glow from the living room, that bruised sunset light, and she took my hand, the bandaged one, and pulled me back down the hall.

"Now," she said, "you're gonna tell me why you came home with me."

"I came home with you because you asked."

"That's not a reason."

"It's the only one I got."

She stopped in the doorway of her bedroom. I couldn't see much of it. A bed, a lamp, a poster I didn't recognize, more pink, more black. She turned to face me and put her hands flat on my chest and pushed me back against the doorframe, not hard, just enough to feel it.

"Try again," she said.

And I stood there with her hands on me and the whole night pressing down on my shoulders, and I realized I didn't have an answer. Not a real one. I'd come home with her because she'd looked at me like I was a problem she wanted to solve, and I'd wanted to be solved. That was the truth and I wasn't going to say it.

"Because you looked lonely," I said instead.

She blinked. Something moved behind her face, quick, there and gone.

"So did you," she said.

"Yeah."

"We're a pair, then."

"Yeah."

She kissed me again, slower this time, and I let her, and the doorframe dug into my shoulder blades and I didn't care. Somewhere behind us the beer bottle was still on the floor, and the candle was still burning, and the glass frog with the chipped foot was still on the shelf with all its hundred brothers and sisters, and none of it mattered. What mattered was her mouth and her hands and the fact that I was still here, standing in a stranger's hallway at two in the morning, bleeding, and not leaving.

That was the thing I couldn't explain. Not then. Not for a long time after.

I didn't leave.