William Lashner - Bitter Truth

She took a moment to take all that in before saying, “You think I’m a slut?”

“I think you are hurt and scared and don’t know what to do with your life.”

“I’m not a slut.”

“Okay, you’re not a slut.”

She was quiet for another long moment. “It’s just I don’t really believe in love anymore.”

I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say.

“I think love is a trick and when we fall for it we end up less than we were before, that’s what I think. It eats your guts out because you think it’s real and you count on it to save your life and then it turns out it’s only a trick.”

“I don’t know, Caroline.”

“True love is a myth, and if I sleep around it’s only to keep proving it to myself.”

“It’s late. We’ve been through a lot today.”

“And I do, over and over again.”

“Let’s get some sleep.”

“Hold me.”

“I’m too tired.”

“Please just hold me. Please.”

And that’s how it started, simply as my holding her, trying to quiet her so I could get some sleep in my own bed, but that’s not how it ended.

I wasn’t especially interested in sex with Caroline that night. After my meeting with Oleanna, after feeling what I had felt in Oleanna’s presence, the love and the compassion and the warm pulse beneath her skin, after all that, sex with Caroline was not what I wanted at all. I wanted to remember what it was like to be near Oleanna, to hold her hand, to rub her bronzed feet. I wanted to think of Oleanna, not of Caroline, so no, I wasn’t interested. Really. But she turned to me and kissed my unparted lips and kissed my neck and rubbed her hand across my chest. She was persistent and I am admittedly weak when it comes to the carnal in this life; I have a hard time turning down either prime rib or sex.

So that night we screwed once again. She was, as she always was, once the engine started revving, distant, passive, not really there, but I didn’t care, I barely noticed, because it wasn’t her I was thinking of as I pressed my tongue to her body and pounded out that rhythm known only by the blood. I was on top of her and I was pinning her hands above her head and I was taking her breasts into my mouth and I was pressing her legs to the bed with my own, but it wasn’t she I was thinking about. What I sensed beneath me in the darkness was not Caroline’s breast or Caroline’s lips or Caroline’s scent, but instead a halo of red hair and soft green eyes and classical features and warm pink skin and perfect feet and the exhilarating aroma of musk. I was screwing Caroline all right, but I was making love to Oleanna.

When my heart had stopped its throbbing and my breath had subsided to normal, I rolled off her and onto my back. Caroline laid her head on my chest.

“I like it here with you,” she said.

I said what I was supposed to say. “I like it too.”

“We’ll keep looking, all right?”

“All right.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For just being here with me.”

I felt just then about an inch and a half.

“I’VE BEEN TOUCHED BY IT TOO,”said Beth.

“It was fabulous,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s pretty interesting.”

“I mean really fabulous. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“That’s fine, Victor. What are you getting?”

“Anything with caffeine.” I looked up at the board and was assaulted by choices. “How does a double mocha latte sound?”

“Nauseating. Just get me a decaf, black. I’ll grab us seats.”

We were at the Starbucks on Sixteenth Street. I was waiting in a slow line for a fast cup of joe. It wasn’t too long ago when it was enough to walk right up to any street vendor in the city and pick up a coffee. It came in a blue cardboard cup and cost fifty cents and right there you could add a pack of Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets to the order and still get change back from a dollar. But that was before Starbucks came to town. Now you waited in line for steamed milk and cutely named brews from exotic lands with more all-natural flavors than nature could have imagined and after the long wait, and the deciphering of the menu, and the condescending smiles from the coffee people who were far cooler than you, what you got back was a fine cup of coffee doctored to taste like something else and maybe change back from a ten. One more reason to hate Seattle.

Beth was waiting for me at a counter which fronted a window onto Sixteenth. She sipped her coffee, a Brazilian decaf mix, while I took a gulp of my latte. Too sweet, too frothy, like a hot chocolate trying to act tough. I should have known better.

“They’re very impressed with you there,” I said. “Gaylord thinks you’re a very evolved soul.”

She didn’t smile at the compliment, she just looked out the window and drank her coffee.

“She has very beautiful feet,” I said. “Have you noticed?”

“Oleanna?”

“And hands too, but it’s the feet that most struck me. Pink and very shapely. And it’s not just me who thinks it. They bronzed them, have you seen that.”

“Yes,” she said, still looking outside. “I’ve been in that room. I think it’s creepy.”

“Is she, like, married or seeing someone?”

“Don’t think too much about Oleanna, Victor.”

“I can’t stop. The rest of your New Age friends can go jump in a lake for all I care but this Oleanna, wow. What I was feeling was very potent. And this isn’t just my normal quantum of lust. It was something else.”

“She has a power,” said Beth, “an ability to consciously project certain emotions. I don’t wholly understand it, but it has something to do with her control over her spiritual sense organs and a way of communicating directly on the spiritual level. I can’t quite tell if it’s a wonderful and advanced gift or a parlor trick.”

“It was pretty fabulous, I must say.”

“Yes, I’m sure it was. But she used it to manipulate you for nonspiritual reasons and that seems all wrong.”

“Was I manipulated?”

“You walked in with serious questions and you came out, after one session, convinced of her innocence and pledged to help her. Yes, Victor, I’d say you were manipulated. There is something very calculating about Oleanna. She is very determined to get her building built. I’m not sure how much I trust her.”

“So you have doubts about their innocence?”

She picked up a plastic stirrer and spun it lazily inside her coffee. “Not really.”

“Doubts about the church itself?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Really?”

“Some things are troubling. After I heard what happened in your meeting I confronted her. I told her I thought it was wrong of her to use her gifts to twist you around like she did.”

“What did she say?”

“She said it was none of my business, that I was still too low on the ladder to understand. I might not yet understand how she did what she did, but I think I understand her motives well enough.”

“So you’re having doubts. Doubts are good. My entire spiritual system is based on doubt. Let’s go to Morton’s tonight, we’ll each get a steak the size of third base and discuss our doubts between mouthfuls.”

“You’re a snake,” she said, smiling. “I’m just confused. It feels half right and half wrong and I don’t quite know what to do about it.”

“Kick the bastards out of your life is what I say.”

“But it feels half right, Victor. They are helping me tap into something real and powerful. At the same time I think they’re dressing it up with all kinds of crap. Those bronzed feet, those robes that they try to make us wear, the cult of personality surrounding Oleanna.”