Season Vining: Beautiful Addictions

Two planets in close proximity to each other in the sky.

“Hey, babe, hand me my smokes.”

“I’m not your babe,” Josie replied.

“Fine. Hey, bitch, hand me my smokes.”

She laughed darkly and complied with his request. One-night stands were not afforded the privileges of pet names. Contrarily, the neatly arranged rails of white powder on the tray across the room meant he could call her anything he damn well pleased.

As the stranger lit a cigarette, Josie sat up and stretched her arms over her head. The air reeked of sweat, sex, and tobacco. The humming fan that had helped lull her to sleep a few hours ago now got on her last sober nerve.

Spotting her underwear across the room, Josie slid from between the sheets and retrieved it. She slipped on each article of clothing as she found it, eventually donning her outfit from the previous night. The young man’s eyes followed her around, seeming amused by her hunt-and-gather technique.

“You were amazing,” he said.

His voice rasped like he had cotton and sawdust in his throat. The way his slate blue eyes shined, she could see all his lust. She had no interest in dwelling there.

Josie ignored him and leaned over the tray, holding the rolled-up dollar bill to her nose. She closed her eyes and smiled as she inhaled the drug, knowing that numbing bliss would soon find her. With a final sniff, she stood and let the chemical absorb into her blood. It was soft feathers across her skin, drifting down from the sky and landing around her toes. Her body tensed and prickled with the warmth of a prolonged orgasm. In this high, she had no name, no past, and no future. All she had was now. And now was amazing.

“Can I get your number? Sam Bradley is playing the Casbah on Wednesday. My boy could get us in for free.”

His words punched holes in her buzz. Irritated, she slung her bag across her body and pasted on a smile. The morning light peeked through the vertical blinds, casting stripes of gold across his body. He smiled and she could feel his desire for her again. To Josie, he was just a guy—a guy with a warm bed, pleasurable hands, and a large supply of coke.

“It was fun. Let’s just leave it at that.”

She spun on her heel and headed for the door.

“Yeah, whatever. I’ll see you around,” he shouted.

“Not likely,” she answered, stepping out into the blinding light of another morning after.

Josie sat back in the dark corner of the familiar bar. Graffiti-riddled walls and empty chairs were her only company. A journal lay open in her lap while her charcoal-stained fingers clutched the pencil hovering above the page. Hundreds of words flashed through her mind, yet she did not possess the will to choose one and write it down. The first word of a sentence, the precipice of an idea, usually held all the power as far as she was concerned. This is why, most nights, she kept to sketching—the curved lines and shading smudges were easier to commit to.

Most bar patrons took no notice of her. They were too busy, focused on their immediate goals of sex and intoxication. Josie’s intentions were the same as every other night spent in this establishment. She’d come to see about a boy.

Routine was not something she was accustomed to, though lately she’d been devoted to him. She always arrived an hour before his shift started and slipped out when he took his last break. She’d convinced herself that her obsession was normal.

With glossy eyes, she glanced up from her blank paper, awaiting the arrival of her muse. She sighed and blew her bangs from her eyes, wishing she’d smoked a bowl before coming here, something to take off the razor-sharp edge.

Since she was fourteen years old, Josie Banks had existed this way. She floated on whatever high she could get, reluctant to touch down, afraid reality might never let her go again. There wasn’t a physical addiction to the drugs. She never used one long enough to develop a taste for it. The addiction was solely to the state it provided, a numbing blissful high of indifference. Her savior wasn’t always drugs or sex with strangers. Sometimes her pencils, along with fresh paper and a silent room, could deliver the much-needed feeling of ecstasy. The rough scratch of charcoal or the shake and rattle of paint cans calmed her in a way that no therapist ever had.

“Hello.”

Josie looked up to find a stranger staring down at her. He seemed to stand at the edge of her personal space while wearing a brittle smile. She did not respond but impatiently waited for his next line. It was delivered like a rehearsed speech.

“You’re too pretty to sit alone. Can I join you?”

Her silence answered. The man turned swiftly and retreated to where he came from. Josie didn’t watch him go. In any other place, at any other time, she would have entertained the idea. He was tall and handsome and she loved how nervous she made him. But not here.

Plenty of charmers had told her that she was attractive, but she always dismissed their words as a systematic technique to get into her pants. If only they’d known she didn’t need to be seduced. She gave it up freely and often. Shame did not exist in her bank of emotional labels; it had no place in the life she led. Fucking was always enjoyable. Even bad sex was still sex. Ever since she’d lost her virginity, she’d felt empowered by her feminine allure. No man or woman, no matter how attractive, had ever held her attention for longer than it had taken to get off.

Until him.

She leaned back in her seat, curling her fingers around the nearly empty glass, and thought back to their first and only encounter.

Clouds stretched across the moon, stealing her natural light. Josie settled herself on the fire escape, drawing by the glow from her apartment window. Dirt and dust on the glass cast a freckled pattern over her. Haunting eyes stared up from the page as she tried to recall a connection to them.

A hooded figure stormed into the alley below, catching her attention. The lead of her pencil ceased in its track, its intended path abandoned. His dark garments blended into the shadows as if she could smudge him out of one of her drawings.

“Fool!” he shouted. His voice rolled up the alley walls until being freed into the sky like thunder.

He pushed the hood back, his nails scraping through dirty hair. It wove through his fingers, staying upturned in a veritable crown of thorns. Heavy footsteps counted off his rhythm as Josie watched him rage.

“Unforgivable,” he said. He tried it again, repeating the quiet chant over and over until it mirrored the beat of Josie’s pulse.

She gasped as he ripped off his hooded sweatshirt and threw it to the ground. Brilliant inked images covered his arms, interrupted only by the white beater that molded to his body. He slammed his forehead into the wall and then landed punch after punch. His blood painted the bricks and Josie knew a part of him would die here this night.

She sat stone-faced, her gaze fixed on the raging figure below. She was envious of such a physical kind of anger. She had never unleashed her fury that way and wondered if it would do any good. His chest heaved in a quick cadence, and Josie fought hard to keep her own breath even.

In that moment, the moon broke through the clouds and cast a blanket of silvery light over the alley. He froze, mesmerized by the grid-pattern shadows created by the fire escape. His eyes traveled up the shadow as if navigating a labyrinth, until a small, solid shape obstructed the path. He looked up, catching her.