Sinner

Eyeliner in a white dress.

We were so little, when you took away all our sins.

As I linked my arms around his neck, I was crying.

What an idiot I was. This perfect moment, this perfect kiss, and I was crying. There was so much wrong with me. I was so incredibly messed up that I couldn’t cry when everything was wrong and I couldn’t not when everything was fine.

Our lips were salty with it. Cole didn’t stop or pause, but his hands crept up my back to hold me tighter. After a moment, he pressed his forehead against mine and I put my hands on his face and we just stayed like that, breathing each other’s breaths.

It was so much us and so little him and me. Us, us, us. The opposite of lonely was this.

Cole said, “You’re the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

I replied, “I’m sorry I’m such a wreck.”

He kissed me again. My mouth, my throat, under my ear.

He hesitated. Pulling back, he said, “Tell me this means something to you.”

It was a strange thing to be asked. It seemed like it should have been the other way around. He was the one who had been the touring rock star with countless girls on countless nights.

He was the one with the cavalier smile and the easy laugh.

But that wasn’t the truth. Not really. Not now. Now the truth was that I was the one with the heart of metal. I was the one always walking away.

A tear dripped off my chin and onto my leg. It was gray with my eyeliner.

I said, “Don’t let me leave you.”

Then, in our secret bit of Los Angeles, we kissed and slid from our clothing. His hands adored my body and my mouth explored his and in the end it was this: us us us.

Chapter Forty-Fi v e

· cole ·

This place, this place. Dry Venice, invented Eden, glowing New Age hipster palace where people come to believe in fate and destiny and karma and all of the things that are only true here and only if you make them true.

I was dead in Los Angeles once.

Chapter Forty-Six

· isabel ·

I opened my eyes and didn’t know where I was. And then, even after waking more fully, I suddenly knew, but I didn’t understand.

My brain was a tangle of images and sensations. My own bare legs on top of a comforter, a streetlight moon outside a cracked window, a spidery shadow cast on the wall from a pitcher of dried baby’s breath. Cole’s stubbled chin in the curve of my breastbone, his side, tan and even and endless, his belly button, his hips, his legs, one of his ankles hooked over one of mine, one of his hands carelessly sprawled up against my neck, the other curled in the silky space below my br**sts.

My mind took the images, finally, and put them all together into thoughts and memory. Finally, I understood: I was so, so naked.

We were in one of the bedrooms of the rental. Drunk with each other, existing in a sweaty place outside of logic, we’d stumbled in here last night and fallen asleep on top of the comforter here. Now it was some ungodly time of the morning and — What was I even doing? Who was this other person? What was I thinking?

I extricated myself from Cole and found my clothing on the floor. I reached past it to where my phone was tucked into my purse. Two a.m. My mother would still be at work; she wouldn’t be worried. But of course Sofia had been watching and waiting with sleepless owl eyes, anxious for my welfare. I had four missed calls from her.

“Hey,” Cole said. He looked young and uncomplicated and half asleep. He lifted just his fingers from the comforter in my direction. Sleepily, he said again, “Hey.”

I was suddenly petrified that he would say a name other than mine. I knew in a bruising, truthful way that if he said another girl’s name right now, it would break my heart.

“Isabel,” he said, “what are you doing?”

I didn’t know. I felt unsteady on my legs. I started putting on clothing.

“I have to go,” I said. My voice sounded a lot more awake than his in this room. In the light from the streetlight, I could clearly see the dresser, the mirror, the glass sculpture in the corner of the room. It seemed like it was never dark in any place in this city. I longed suddenly and fiercely for actual night, for a perfect blackness to hide me more completely.

“No,” he replied simply. He lifted his entire arm now, and stretched it toward me. “Stay.”

“I can’t. People are — no one knows where I am. I need to go.”

“They’ll be okay till morning. Come back. Come sleep.”

“I’m not going to sleep. I need to —” I couldn’t seem to work out how to get my dress back on. No part of it was right side out. It was all wrong sides, and my fingers were clumsy.

Cole pushed himself up on an elbow to watch me struggle angrily with the garment. Finally, I aggressively zipped it; the zipper wasn’t even. Who was going to see it this time of night anyway? No one. I couldn’t remember where I’d put my car keys. Maybe they were still out in the conservatory. I couldn’t find them on the side table or in my purse or on the floor or — no, no, I’d come in Cole’s car, I needed a cab, I’d have to call one, I couldn’t even think of — “Isabel,” Cole said from right behind me. He took my elbows and turned me around to him. I resisted, body stiff. I couldn’t look him in the eye. “If you have to go, I’ll drive you.

You’re out of your mind.”

“Please let go,” I said, and it was the meanest thing I’d ever said, and I didn’t even want what I was asking for.

He let go. I expected his face to be blank, the real Cole gone someplace where I couldn’t poke at him, but he was still there.

“Don’t do this to me.”

The emphasis, somehow, was on the word me. That he didn’t expect me to be able to stop from doing the this, whatever it was, but I could at least stop aiming it at him.

I wanted my hands to stop shaking. I wanted my brain to regain control of my body.

“I have to go,” I said. “I’m going to go. Don’t be an ass**le about it.”

I didn’t even know what I was saying. I just knew that I was going. I had everything together. I would call a cab. I would walk to Abbot Kinney and get into it.

Cole’s voice was raw. “Fine, Isabel. Just — I get it. You get to call the shots. Call me when it’s good for you, right? It doesn’t matter what I need. It doesn’t matter how much I . . . I get it.

Whatever. I’ll play your game.”

I didn’t reply. I was already gone.