The Arb.
Like now: like now, we aren’t thinking, I didn’t consciously plan to be lying back in the cold grass, kissing Eva as she lies back against me, she didn’t have to think to sit in my lap, lie back in my arms, Jamie isn’t thinking as she kneels again to finish what she started.
Bugger this for a lark.
I won’t lie. It hurts.
Call and response.
Unbidden, a photograph flickered before his mind’s eye: two girls sitting on a couch, long bare legs drawn up to their chests, leaning shoulder to shoulder to tentatively kiss. He blinked. No.
Giggling.
Scottie says you’re a dyke.
It’s Scottie’s freelance fluffer, sticking her head around the bathroom door. She doesn’t seem to mind that Honey’s naked and in the middle of lipsticking her mouth.
Well, says Honey. You’re going to come in, you might as well come all the way in and shut the friggin’ door.
Which is what Scottie’s fluffer does.
The sidewalks of Old New York.
“His eyes are astonishing,” Foster’d said. Too loudly. The boy on the landing above them couldn’t have missed it.
“Belladonna,” she’d said, remembering the sting of the drops, the way the world would be too bright, washed out, men’s smiles bleeding light into their light-smeared faces.
Silk and Amphetamines (Doom Patrol No. 34).
She’s standing at the edge of the crowd by the brightly lit squares of the Travolta floor, and she’s staring right at me, and there’s a smile on her face, my face, the face I’m wearing right now, like she knows she’s got my attention, like she knows I’m going to get up and walk over to her, like I’ve got no choice. Which is true, true indeed.
Somewhere (Not Here).
She kissed me, and kissed me, and burrowed her face into the hollow of my shoulder and kissed me again. “It was like,” she said, her lips against my skin, “you went away. Like you went someplace else.”
“I was,” I said, thickly. All I wanted to do–no matter that it was yet mid-afternoon–was close my eyes just for a moment. Or two. But she squeezed me and kissed me again and then she said something about what it was Ben had suggested.