Bed Scenes

Anne owned six white Hanes undershirts with the necks cut out. She liked the way they freed her spotted collarbone and billowed easily around her waist.

That night, her wet hair felt cool and confident as it flirted with her neck and brushed the frayed edges of the shirt.

"I think you're crazy... maybe," Thom told her. And she agreed.

But she felt happy to stretch out her bare legs and tuck her red toenails under the blankets at the end of her bed.

The spider on her ceiling made perfect figure eights without exhaustion.

She imagined that he was there with his smile that turned up one side of his lips. For there would be much to explore if he was. On his shoulder, resting beneath the angel's mandolin. She could draw circles with her middle finger and then travel down the riverbed of his arm and come to rest at the vulnerable pooling patch of his wrist. She would raise that vulnerability to her lips and restore strength with tenderness. If she dared.

Oh, but where was this going?

She looked back up at the ceiling, and the spider was gone.

Gatsby

Daisy


Daisy


Daisy.




The heat of the impending thunderstorm was oppressive.

Barely. Breathable.

4am

Anne's phone lit up, "Meeting you has become pure torture. I'm ready to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge."

Sigh.

"Can I come lay eyes on you? Please?"

Halfway through a response, she flung her phone under her pillow. No.

"My heart is ailing so much right now..."

How his heart could be ailing after spending only one night with her, she did not know. Absurdly histrionic!

After a voicemail of incomprehensible whimpers, Anne's heart softened and she cast off her pretense of having gone to bed.

She let him upstairs.

Sam sprawled his long body across the foot of her bed while she folded her legginged legs amongst the pillows at the head. He watched as she rubbed lavender lotion on her hands.

"Now, what is it I can do for you, my dear?" she asked with a wry smile.

Sam's eyes filled up with tears as he mumbled something about drinking her breath...

He asked if he could have something that belonged to her, and Anne told him to choose a novel from her shelves. Without knowing the theme, he tugged down her ancient copy of The Great Gatsby. The book was filled with purple scrawl and the answers as to how Anne would cast off her infatuated Jay.

Daisy Buchanan shuddered at her guilt as Jay Gatsby flipped through her pages.

* * *

There was something frightening about him. Something volatile and dangerous humming beneath his surface. She could feel the anger emanating from his body.

Sam was frightening, but there was something incredibly tender in his touch. In a scummy Lower East Side bar, she cupped her palm over a shot of tequila and asked him not to take it. He placed his hand over hers for the first time. It was the gentlest caress she had ever felt; it was as if nothing was touching her at all as he softly turned over her palm and cradled her fingers. She placed the tips of her fingers on his cheekbone. The skin on his face was unrealistically soft and flecked with infinite, infinitesimal freckles.

"I'm a bad person. But you're so good. There is an aura of goodness around you! I'd do anything you asked me to."

She wasn't good, though. She didn't feel good. She thought of the bizarre, awful things that came out of her mouth sometimes. Of how angry she could feel.

"When I saw you across the street, I wanted to pick you up and take you away from that place. You didn't belong."

She was so small in his adoring hands, and for the evening, she would let him say what he liked. She would let him believe that he could take her away. From the way he touched the back of her head, she could tell what a wonderful lover he would be... if she allowed him to love her. And for only a split second, her shoulders trembled.

She would not tell him that she was a fettered and immovable Buchanan. She did not tell him that he would spend his nights gazing at the green light across the water.

He stood in her doorway and pressed his nose into the binding of her book. She pretended to sleep.

Gatsby Gatsby Gatsby.