Falls (Pt. 18): Trying

44.

After five days of hiding in the attic, sending begging messages to Marie's phone, a laundry list of embarrassing things, I renewed the lease. The house was mine until May. I couldn't stand the thought of going home. Of going to the apartment and finding it empty, or emptier.

I took bottles of whiskey and boxes of wine to the attic and I built walls of them around me and I typed and I typed all day and all night and it was nothing, but it came. My back ached and burned and my eyes were dry and itched and my chest was split in two and fits of weeping would creep over me and then it was back to it. Words. Words to Marie. Words to the world. Words to myself. It didn't matter.

A small stack of paper next to me. Unpublishable, barely readable. My best work.

I stood, with creaks and aches and held my hand against the wall and balanced myself and walked to the ladder and went downstairs.

In the living room Bev was lying on the couch in her underwear with a cigarette in her hand and listening to the radio.

"It's cold out," she said.

"Put some fucking clothes on, Bev."

I went to the kitchen and poured a glass of gin and threw it back and poured another and went to the living room.

"Move your legs."

She lifted her legs and I sat at the far end of the couch and she laid her legs across me. I took a sip of the gin and she took a drag off her cigarette.

"How're you doing?" she asked.

"Fine. Just writing."

"Yeah. I got that. You know what I mean."

I nodded and raised my eyebrow a bit.

"We can talk, you know."

"I know."

"Okay."

The radio buzzed out Otis Reading and I wanted nothing more than to throw it in the fucking street.

"When did you start smoking inside?" I asked.

"I don't know. Am I not supposed to?"

She wasn't, it was in the lease, and a week ago I would have bitched. I shrugged and chuckled to myself about how that must mean I was in a dark period.

"What?"

"Nothing."

She pulled her legs off me and sat up and came close to me. Her bra was too big for her and she smelled vaguely of sweat and old perfume.

"You're a good dude. She's an idiot."

I drank from the gin.

"I'm sorry I got so mad at you before. I know it was fucked up of me."

"It's fine. Doesn't matter now."

"I guess."

"Do you wanna make out?"

"Not really."

"You want me to go down on you?"

"I'm pretty sure my dick is dead, Bev. I mean, I appreciate it, but I want gin and I want to rot in this fucking place and that's all."

"I'm going to try any way."

"Fine."

She pulled my cut off sweat-shorts down and mouthed around for nothing and I stared at the radio and kept drinking from the gin and I had to give her credit. She was trying.

45.

The leaves were mostly turned and the town was dead. Too cold to swim. Too empty to wander. Bev and I were laying around the attic nude and smoking a bowl and looking out the small portal at the end of the room and I was reading her some of the things I had written.

"It's not easy to follow. Like, at all," she said.

"I know. I feel like I 'm getting something here, though. I mean, I can follow it. So, maybe I just need to focus it down?"

"Maybe. Maybe I'm just fucking stoned though, you know?"

I laughed. "Yeah."

"Kiss me."

"Okay." I layed next to her and ran my hand gentle against the side of her face and into her hair and kissed her and gripped at the back of her head, the base of her skull and she tasted like pot and the strawberries she had eaten earlier and I enjoyed her kiss and I wanted her kiss because it was a kiss and because it was a touch and because it was going to have to do. My chest ached as the tide and she reached to me and I wrapped an arm around her waste and pulled her on top of me and her hair fell onto my face and I gripped at her hips. It would have to do.