Nicola Griffith - Stay

I felt tired and sick and didn’t really want it.

Let the woman apologize. Take the beer , Julia said, and for the first time, I wished she would go away. I tried to call the wish back, but it was too late. She disappeared.

“Aud?”

I shook my head, and accepted the beer. I took one swallow and set it aside. “Dornan,” I said. “What are you going to do about that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, think about it.”

“Sure.” Her eyes cut sideways, the way a street dealer’s would if you rousted him on the street with a dime bag in his pocket.

“I mean think about it now. At some point you’re going to have to face him, face yourself. At some point you’ll have to leave here.”

“Oh, right. I’ll just leave, go back to Atlanta, and pick up where I left off. No problem. Only I can’t. Not while that prick is out there with that tape. He could send it to anyone, anytime. He could already have sent it to Dornan. All he has to do is threaten to do that, to make me do anything he wants.”

“Only if you let him. If you call Dornan, tell him everything, Karp has no power over you.”

“Could you do that?” Her voice was intense. “Could you have picked up the phone and told your girlfriend, ‘Sorry, honey, yes that’s me screwing some guy, but why don’t we pretend it didn’t happen? Why don’t you just never, ever let it cross your mind again?’ ”

I wanted to smash her lush, filthy mouth with my bottle.

She changed tack. “I have some money. I could give it to you, if you helped me, if you fixed him for me. Geordie.”

It was an effort to speak politely. “I’m not in the revenge business.” But I remembered what I had done after Julia’s death.

“Please, Aud.”

“No.” If I hit her I wouldn’t feel any better. I breathed as evenly as I could. “We could both do with some food.”

This time we ate inside, and neither of us spoke.

I woke when Tammy slid naked into my bed. It felt good, her mouth at my throat, her hand on my breast then my stomach then my thigh, and my breath went ragged, the muscles in my belly tight, and I got hot and swollen and wet, before I realized what was happening and held her away from me.

“Please, Aud. I need this. Please, please. I need someone to hold, someone.” And her waist was so warm and soft under my arm, her thigh so smooth, and it had been so long I wanted to let her.

She kissed my cheek. “I saw you looking at me tonight, the way your eyes followed me. Here.” She took my right hand, put it on her breast, where the nipple puckered and tightened under my palm, and despite myself I groaned. “Yes, you want me, don’t you?” and she rolled on top of me, belly against my vulva, face between my breasts, “Oh, yes, come on, come on,” and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to just give in, push myself wet and slick against the warm rounded skin, I wanted to, but I heaved her off and raised myself up on one elbow. It took a moment of groping to find the light switch.

She lay on her back, hair tousled, cheeks touched with sharp red. Her eyes glittered. “Turn it off.” Her voice quavered. “What’s the matter? What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it because you don’t like me? Not even enough to fuck? How hard would it be, Aud? A half hour of your life. Is it so much to ask?” Short, angry movements as she wiped her cheeks with her hands.

I wanted to turn to her, cradle her head against my shoulder, let her feel her tears dropping on another human being’s skin, not a sheet, but I knew if my body came close enough to touch hers I might not be able to stop a second time. “It’s not me you want.”

“Everyone is always telling me what I want! Like my own opinion doesn’t count!” She grabbed my hand, thrust it between her legs. “There, does that feel like I don’t want you? Does it? Does it matter, does it really matter what else is real except that we could have sex here, just two people, giving each other back something good? But it does to you.” She thrust my hand away. My fingers were wet and sticky. The small trailer was thick with the smell of sex. “Well, maybe you’re right, maybe I wouldn’t fuck you if you were the last person on earth, except that I want something. That’s what you think, isn’t it? Well, I do want something. I want you to get that man for me. Fix him. That’s something you’re good at, isn’t it? Hurting people. It would be easy for you. Fix him. Oh god, Aud, please! Get the tape. Please.”

“He won’t use the tape now.” I didn’t know why my voice didn’t shake, didn’t know how I kept it so flat, why I didn’t just kiss her and tear her apart. “Think about it. There’s no point. It was to control you, but you’ve already left. He doesn’t sound like the type to waste time on a lost cause. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Nothing to worry about.” Her voice was thick with anger. “You have no fucking idea, do you? Look at you. You’ve always done what you want, got what you want—you just reach out and take it. You have no fucking idea. You’ve never been paralyzed with fear, never had to wonder if you did the right thing, or wish you were different. Always so self-confident, so fucking controlled. You have no idea even what it’s like to make a mistake.”

I had made bigger mistakes than this woman even knew existed. To her a mistake was something that made you feel bad, something embarrassing on tape. My mistakes had led to that white room, to those machines, that dead husk. Tammy’s mistakes were her own. Mine had dug a hole in two lives and annihilated a third. And here Tammy lay, so smug in her assumptions, still healthy, still breathing, still alive.

I put my hand on her throat. She went very still. It wasn’t a small throat, it was smoothly muscled, young and strong, but I could rip out her trachea or crush her larynx in a second, or I could just squeeze. Some harsh noise began to irritate me, and I realized it was my breath, tearing in and out, and Tammy was terrified, and I lifted my hand. “Go away,” I said. “Just go away.”

She scuttled away to her own bed at the other end of the trailer and I turned off the light.

Rage and sex and grief bubbled like magma below my breastbone. I wanted to fuck, to kill, to hurl myself from a cliff. Julia was dead, she’d gone away and left me, naked and raw and uncertain in a world where people who called themselves my friend kept pulling off the scab and making me do things for them. Dornan had assumed I could just go find Tammy. Tammy assumed I could get on a plane to New York and fix her problems for her. Just like that, as though they were asking me to pass the salt at dinner. Thank you, they’d say, and think no more about it. And Julia hadn’t even stayed behind to help me with this, she hadn’t even tried. She had just gone away, given up, because it hurt. But I was still here, and now I was cursed to see that what I did in the world mattered.

No. Tammy’s mistake, her mess to clean up.

But, Please, she had said, Get that man for me, and she couldn’t do it for herself. But she had tried to manipulate me. She had slid her warm, smooth body on top of mine, belly between my legs, and her eyes had been wide, watching as the flush hit my cheeks, smiling as her pulse and mine ratcheted up and synchronized, as we came within a hairsbreadth of moving together in a dance that meant nothing to her, nothing. So close. But it had meant something to her. Her smell, the slipperiness between her legs, the way her nipples puckered and grew. Unmistakable. Her smell was on my fingers, mine on her belly. She had wanted sex, maybe even needed it, and I’d said no. It would have cost me nothing to pretend, to give her, as she said, half an hour of my life.