Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

Chapter 16

No Safe Thrill

OVER THE YEARS, EVA HAD TRIED TO FORGET HER TEENAGE WEEK WITHShane. And honestly, much of it was lost, due to her vodka-drenched, pill-obliterated, weed-smoked state.

This was what she remembered.

She remembered standing in front of the bathroom mirror, gingerly touching her darkened eye. Fingering her hacked-off hair. With a mournful sigh, she’d tried to pull it into a pony, but it wouldn’t reach. And then Shane had appeared behind her in the mirror.

“I look like an electrocuted poodle,” she sighed.

He fought off a smile.

“Go ahead, laugh,” she said. “I look funny.”

“No, you’re funny,” he said. “Look, you could have hair down to the floor. You could be bald. I could be blind. You’d still be pretty, Genevieve.”

He said it like his opinion was fact. Her skin flushed fever-hot, and her palms went humid.

Shane backed up and leaned against the doorway. Genevieve turned around to face him.

“You pronounced my name right,” she said.

“Been practicing.”

“Say it again.”

“John-vee-ev,” he said with a smile. “It sounds like it tastes good.”

“How can a word taste good?”

“Synesthesia. It’s when you’re overstimulated and your senses get confused. You see music. Hear colors. Taste words.”

“Oh.” Her mouth went dry. She blinked, and he was in front of her. The sink pressed against the small of her back. She held her breath. Gently, Shane cupped his good hand behind her neck, his gaze traveling from her eyes to her mouth. Then, for the first time, he kissed her—a lingering, pillowy peck. Innocent. He deepened it then, slanting his casted arm across her back and pinning her to him.

“You do taste good,” he said, drawing back a little.

“So much…thank you.” Flustered, she said the words out of order.

Shane’s eyes flickered, and he seemed both smug and charmed. Then he dipped down to kiss her some more.

She remembered her mom calling on and off for a good two days. She never answered, but she kept the bulky Nokia phone on the charger, just in case (in case of what, she wasn’t sure). On the third day, she moved it into the kitchen downstairs so she wouldn’t hear the buzzing.

She remembered her first non-self-administered orgasm. They were lying out in the grass by the pool in their underwear, roasting in the swampy DC heat. Shane was listening to her ramble about how Carrie and The Exorcist represented the male fear of female puberty.

“I secretly wanna get a period. Just once,” he said as he popped a WHORE pill on his tongue and tenderly kissed it into her mouth. “What’s up with you and horror?”

“It’s an escape.”

He trailed kisses along her jawline, down her neck. Pausing at her jugular, he murmured against her skin, “Keep talking.”

“It’s a safe way to…to feel…”

“Feel what?”

“Intensity,” she breathed. “A thrill, without being in actual danger.”

He sucked the skin above her collarbone into his mouth. Then he bit her. Hot, wet, hard. Electricity bolted through her, and she let out a quivery cry. Shane’s eyes flickered. Lightly, he cupped her throat with his hand. Ghosting his lips over hers, he said, “There is no safe thrill.”

He squeezed her throat, and she went boneless. Christ. She didn’t know this was something to need. His mouth traveled, restless, over her skin, down to where she was drenched. Then he sucked her till she shattered, tearing fistfuls of grass from the earth.

She remembered walking in Adams Morgan at sunset. When it started to rain, Shane broke into a parked Chevy Nova (using that mysterious ATM card) to wait it out. He was behind the wheel, Genevieve was shotgun, and they snorted lines of PARTY powder off Shane’s paperback copy of Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle.

Something had been weighing on her mind, and she didn’t know how to bring it up. She’d tried and failed several times. But now, feeling electric with coke confidence, she dove right in.

“Gotta ask you something,” she started.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“You a virgin?”

“Virginity is a social construct,” he said proudly.

“Seriously,” she said, rubbing her burning nose. “Are you?”

“Um…no.” He looked vaguely uncomfortable. “Are you?”

“No,” she said.

What she had meant was No, Shane, I’m not a virgin, because I was closing my register at Marshalls last summer and the tall, dead-eyed stock guy who never acknowledged me in public asked me to chill, so we smoked a bowl in his mom’s basement and I asked him not to put it in, but he did, and afterward he high-fived me for not crying. No, Shane, I’m not a virgin. I’m the kind of girl who went back for more, ’cause I told myself he thought I was special. I’m not a virgin. I’m the queen of delusion, and boys lie but I believe, so please, oh please, be careful with me…

“…ask?” Shane was saying something.

“Sorry, what?”

“I said, why do you ask?”

Instead of answering, she bit her lip, shrugging coquettishly. And then she grabbed his face, kissing him until it escalated into a desperate make-out session. A Tipper Gore look-alike pounded on the window, shouting, “Go home!” Genevieve peered at her over Shane’s shoulder, clicked open the blade of her pocketknife, and grinned. Bra strap in his teeth, Shane gave Tipper the finger. The woman clutched her purse and hurried away.

They hated everyone who wasn’t them.

She remembered that sometimes, Shane would wake up fighting. He’d punch at the air, sweating, tangled up in the sheets. Instinctively, she’d run the tips of her fingers over his chest, arms, back, any skin she could reach—tracing the infinity sign over and over, little figure eights, till he slept.

It was the only thing that calmed him.

This memory was the faintest. It wasn’t until years later, when Shane published Eight, that it came rushing back.

She remembered lying in the fetal position on the bed, her brain shrieking, waiting for her cocktail of narcotics to kick in. Sunset bathed the room in a warm strawberry-amber glow. Shane was lying facedown in a dusty corner, playing Scrabble with himself. Brow furrowed, lips pouting, he mumbled, “Fuck. I’m just so hard to beat.”

She stared until he glanced up, face aglow with violet bruises.

“You’re beautiful,” she purred.

With a drowsy smirk, he began to croon the Christina Aguilera power ballad. She gasped and then burst into delighted laughter because, goddammit, he did sound like Ginuwine!

Groaning, Shane folded in on himself with boyish self-consciousness, tucking his face into his tee. Like it was a new thing, letting his guard down. Like his goofy side (and absurd vocal range) was for her only.

She drifted off, helplessly endeared, forgetting that she was a stolen girl stealing moments in a stolen house—and sooner or later, she’d have to pay.

She remembered going on a 7-Eleven run around 2:00 a.m. and sneaking off with a zillion Hostess treats. Together, they took the bus to the Barry Farm area of Southeast DC, the site of Shane’s court-ordered home. The Wilson Children’s Shelter was a county-owned, one-story building on a broken-down block. She couldn’t believe people lived there. It looked like an abandoned Staples.

Under the gauze of night, they snuck in through a janitor’s entrance. While Eva waited in a hallway that smelled of bleach and piss, Shane slipped into the crowded bedrooms, leaving a Twinkie under each kid’s pillow. Then they slipped out.

Afterward, they sat on a bus-stop bench a couple of blocks away. One cracked streetlamp lit the block. A siren went off endlessly.

“I wish I could protect them. They’re innocent, you know? Actually, Mike and Junior are fucking menaces. But in a pure way.”

“You’re pure.”

Chewing the inside of his cheek, he looked at her. “If you knew about me, you wouldn’t like me anymore.”

Resting her chin on his shoulder, she slipped her arms around him. “How do you know I like you?”

His smile flickered, then faded. “I had parents once,” he continued quietly. “Foster parents, from when I was a baby to about seven. I really loved them. They loved me back, too. One day, I was doing dumb shit, wearing my Superman cape and jumping off the counter. I broke my arm. My foster mom drove me to the ER. She was scared, ’cause you could see the bone and I was losing a lot of blood. She ran a red light and crashed into an intersection. She died. I didn’t.

“After that, my foster dad acted like I didn’t exist. Then he sent me away. Who wants to live with the kid who killed their wife?”

Genevieve, too struck to answer, gently curled her arm through his and held his hand. She squeezed, offering absolution the only way she could.

“Anyway. The kids in there? I don’t want them to get locked up, like me. The more times you go, the harder it is to tell yourself you don’t belong there. Prison is the school of the unlearned lesson.” He paused. “I’ll probably go back a third time.”

“I won’t let it happen,” she promised. “What do you like to do? Besides fight?”

“Write.”

“Don’t fight. Write.” She cuddled closer. “There. A mantra, to keep you out of trouble.”

“Don’t fight. Write.”

“Right.” She kissed him to bless it.

She remembered that they were never sober. Shane drank to seek oblivion; she stayed high to outrun pain. They did it together—but she cut herself in private. In the bathroom, daily, she’d sterilize her blade with alcohol pads and then carve a few lines on her upper thigh or upper arm, mostly, just deep enough for beads of bright crimson to bubble up in a perfect row. She went into a dissociative trance when she did it, the world slowing, the burn slicing through her pain. A blessed relief each time.

Shane saw her cuts. I don’t judge, he’d said. But soon, his eyes started to linger over her tortured skin, clouding with concern. They both had their twisted compulsions, different corners of the same hell.

Once, though, she woke up in face-melting migraine pain and begged him to press her slashes. He didn’t want to, but he did. She doubled over, gritting her teeth—and when Shane crushed her into his arms, she felt his chest quicken. And his tears dampened her cheeks.

She remembered lying under a shady tree in Rock Creek Park, toward the end. Their cycle of highs and comedowns was beginning to fray her nerves. And her pain was getting worse. She’d just vomited behind a tree. Now her head was in Shane’s lap, and he was rubbing her temples with her lavender oil.

“Do you miss your mom?” he asked.

Yes.

“No,” she said. “It’s a relief being away from her. She tries to be good, but she…doesn’t take care of me. And she has shit taste in men.”

“Does she know how sick you are, G? If my kid was—”

“Don’t talk bad about her!” She slapped her hands over her face and burst into tears so violently it shocked them both.

“Hey. I won’t. I’m sorry—she sounds dope. Don’t cry.” Gently, he pulled her into his lap and cradled her against his chest. “Fuck it, cry.”

Eventually, the steady thrumming of his heartbeat lulled her quiet.

A few hours and Percocets later, she felt good enough to walk back to the house.

“Why do you hate your mom’s dudes?”

“They hurt her,” she said plainly.

The world was buzzing and popping. A flock of pigeons passed above them, squawking, but they sounded miles away.

“Do they hurt you?”

She shrugged. “Some of them do. The current one, her boss at the bar? He tried. I pushed him off me and he fell out, drunk. I can handle myself.”

“What’s his name?”

She told him.

“What’s the name of the bar?”

She stopped on the sidewalk. Shane did, too, peering down at her with an expression that could melt a rock. She told him.

She remembered waking up that night and seeing that Shane was gone. He didn’t come back that night or the next day. She waited for him—dusting shelves, scrubbing bathrooms, taking showers, torturing her arms, sleeping. Was he gone forever? Had he hurt himself? Jesus Christ, was he in jail again? If he was, she’d sent him there.

That night, she woke up to a thunderstorm raging outside. She’d left the terrace door open, and that side of the room was soaked. So was Shane, who was leaning against the bedroom door. He was all bone and lean muscle and sopping-wet T-shirt and soggy, broken cast, with a fresh cut across the side of his neck. She sat up in bed, and he didn’t move, just looked at her with hooded, dilated eyes, his chest rising and falling in a violent staccato.

“He won’t bother you anymore.”

And this was how she knew she was as crazy as he was. Her fear evaporated, and all she felt was a perverse, potent throb, making her squeeze her thighs together. He slayed dragons she couldn’t. He was a fucking outlaw. And she wanted that power inside her.

Good girls were supposed to want a prom kiss from the quarterback, not a face fuck from the hot psycho. But she supposed she wasn’t good, ’cause she was on Shane in seconds, ripping down his soaked jeans and boxers—draining him till he was weak, and she was full.

She remembered standing on the terrace at dusk, gazing three stories down into the pool. She knew she’d taken too much of…something, ’cause she was in a state of both syrupy wonder and creeping hysteria. Plus, her pain was so vivid that she could barely follow her own thoughts.

But the thoughts were loud.

Everything felt so out of control. Her dependency on Shane suddenly terrified her. When he’d disappeared, she’d felt herself dissolving. What if he hadn’t come back? And what about after this? This house, this adventure? What was the plan? Would he want her when it was over?

She lost things. She’d lost her health. She’d lost Princeton. She’d surely lose her mom, after this. She’d lose Shane, too. Boys left after they slept with you. It was why she hadn’t slept with Shane yet.

Shane was her lighthouse. If he went dark, she’d be lost, treading black water forever.

I won’t survive this, she thought, stroking the smooth plastic encasing her pocketknife. This pain. It’s too much.

Maybe she’d just let go, then.

She climbed up on the middle horizontal bar of the railing and leaned far over, waiting for gravity to take her.

But then she felt Shane’s hard, casted arm encircle her chest, knocking the wind out of her and yanking her back into the room. He dropped her on the bed and then climbed next to her, grabbing her jaw with his good hand.

“The fuck you doing?” He shook her.

She blinked hazily. Her eye sockets hurt from knuckling them in her sleep, trying to relieve the insistent stabbing in her temples. She wondered why she bothered.

“Don’t die, baby.”

“Gimme a reason.”

“Me,” he rasped. “Stay for me.”

“Selfish.”

“I am.” He slipped his arm under her shoulders, pressing her to him. “I need you, so you can’t die.”

“Just…just let me.”

With a desperate groan, he dropped his face into the hollow of her shoulder and begged.

“Stay. I’ll make it worth it. I’ll make it so fucking good, Genevieve. You’ll be so happy, I swear. Just gimme your pain; I’ll take it all. Promise to stay, and I’ll never leave. Me and you, forever. Promise me.”

Her eyes fluttered open.

She didn’t want to promise with words.

She somehow untangled herself from Shane’s arms, pushing him backward and straddling him. She reached for her knife, flipped it open and grabbed a lighter off the nightstand. With unsteady hands, she dipped the blade in the flame.

Shane’s chest rose sharply, then froze.

Carefully, she carved a jagged, sloppy S on her forearm, right below her elbow crease. It was just deep enough to spill droplets of blood on his chest.

Shane reached for the fifth of vodka on the nightstand, downed it, then offered her his good arm. She dipped the blade in the fire again and scratched out a crooked G in the same place on his arm.

The hurt was intense, but they were so wasted, it buzzed. Just another thing to feel. With a feral growl, he flipped her over, and the rest was chaos—ravenous kissing, sucking, biting, clawing, and then Shane sinking into her, fucking her like he was giving her a reason to live. He didn’t stop till she fell apart beneath him, soaring, shaking, sobbing, and utterly, wholly his.

She remembered waking up in an airtight embrace. A familiar scent enveloped her, and she nuzzled deeper into it. As the fog of unconsciousness lifted, she recognized the scent. White Diamonds. And Black drama.

It was her mom, mascaraed tears streaming from her movie-star eyes.

In the light of day, the room looked like a crime scene. The sheets were a mess; empty bottles cluttered the floor; pills and powder dusted the nightstand. She was covered in love bites, scratches, and cuts, her S hidden behind gauze. A furious Korean American chick with a Dior saddlebag was shrieking into a cell phone. Medics and cops swarmed around the bed, and an IV needle jutted from her inner elbow, attached to a saline bag. She heard someone say she’d overdosed.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” said the disembodied voice.

Alive, yes. Lucky, no.

“Wh-where’s Shane?”

“Who is Shane?” drawled Lizette distractedly. “Oh, bé. If I can’t make them stay, you can’t. Mercier women are cursed. Cursed.”