The Undoing. Averil Dean
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with her hip cocked, grinning as if she expected him to take her picture.
He put his hand between her legs. Right away she started to sigh and coo, wriggled into his hand with that eager camera-smile on her face, cupping her breasts in her hands so that the ridge of her implants stood out beneath her skin.
An easy girl. The kind of girl he used to enjoy. He’d tell her what to do and she’d go along, eager to please, those vacant, colorless eyes blinking up at him while she sucked him off like she’d seen the pretty girls do on cable TV. She might throw in some move of her own, some tease of her fingers across his balls or a knuckle to the perineum, something she’d read about in Cosmo and could claim for her own. Probably she’d swallow when he came, going mmmm like his semen was the best thing since mint chocolate chip. And it would be good for the moment. But in a week or a month, she would recede with the rest of them, who existed in his memory like the cities in a traveler’s diary, dreamlike and insubstantial but determinedly annotated:
—the dreadlocked woman whose breasts dripped like ripe fruit into his open mouth (Burning Man, milk lady)
—the French virgin with skin so dark she seemed to melt into the shadows, disembodied, her scent mingling with the briny perfume of the sea (Samudra Beach, Venus blunt—holy fuck what was in that?)
—that sloe-eyed whore who gave him head in Amsterdam, whose little-girl voice had sent him running, terrified, back to the rose-tinted sidewalks and right the hell out of town (blue pigtails, Daddy issues)
Et cetera, et cetera.
And now Emma. He searched her face for something to remember her by. A few freckles on her nose, glitter in her mascara and nail polish. He kept glancing away, then quickly back, as if he could startle her face into his memory by sneaking up on it.
After a moment she pulled away, frowning. “Are you okay?”
He tried to smile.
“I’ll be more okay if you get on your knees.”
She grinned, confidence restored. Everything would be okay, her expression implied, once he’d done her. And she might be right about that.
Assuming, of course, that he could get it up. At the moment he felt nothing, nothing at all. His body was curiously soft, vacant as Emma’s blond head, the blood floating down his arms and legs without the faintest inclination to gather and pool into a hard-on. Even when she unzipped his jeans and took him in her hand...
Nothing.
Maybe it was the Blackbird. Being in Celia’s room, with this girl who could be described on paper in similar terms but was as unlike Celia in personality as it was possible to be. The woman he remembered, eccentric as she was on the surface, was even more so underneath. There was a quiet force to Celia, a sense of the unknowable. She was real, warm, terrifyingly alive.
Only she wasn’t anymore. Now she was only bones, or maybe ash. He wished he’d thought to ask Kate what they’d done with Celia’s body. He could have visited the cemetery to see her name carved in stone. He could have learned her middle name, her birthday. He could finally have brought her flowers.
None of these ruminations was going to solve the immediate problem. He stepped back, zipped up his jeans and pulled Emma to her feet.
“Sorry,” he said.
“What happened? You were really into it yesterday.”
“Into it. Yeah.”
“We were doing good. I mean, that thing you did in the elevator...”
“Yeah, you liked that?”
“I liked that we might get caught.” She eased forward, one hand on the front of his jeans. “I wanted to, kind of. I like being watched. It feels like that here, doesn’t it? Like the ghosts might be watching...”
“Nobody’s watching,” he snapped.
“There could be. You were here then. You met them. Maybe they know you’re back—maybe they can see us. I’m pretty intuitive, my mom always said so. Maybe I can call them.”
He caught her hand and pushed it away. “You might be the least intuitive person I have ever met.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Her head tilted to one side. Though there was a fighting spirit in the words themselves, her eyes were big and soft, head tilted again in that befuddled way, as if she couldn’t quite believe he meant to insult her.
Julian felt a rush of words surge up his throat, unstoppable and bitter as bile.
“It means that I couldn’t be less ‘into it’ if you paid me. If you were swinging a dick. If yours were the last pair of plastic tits on planet Earth and if yours was the last ass I could ever grab and if you were the owner of the last hole between the last pair of legs, I still would not be ‘into it.’”
Her face crumpled, as suddenly and completely as a child’s. Tears welled up at the rims of her wide-open eyes and rolled in wavy gray lines down her cheeks, bearing specks of glitter in their wake.
Julian raised his eyes to the ceiling.
“Why did you even bring me here?” she said.
He dug his car keys from the pocket of his jeans and held them out to her.
“No idea,” he said. “Go home. You can take my car.”
“I—I can’t drive your c-car. Where would I leave—” She teetered around the room, pulling on her clothes, hopping into a boot.
“It doesn’t matter. Go home.”
“How can I—”
“Get out,” he roared, and she snatched the keys from his hand and darted out the door. He heard her feet pounding down the hallway, and she was gone.
Julian stood for a minute looking down at the bed. He smoothed the covers, straightened the pillows and tucked the bedspread underneath. This wasn’t Celia’s bed, he realized now. Her room had looked much different from this, filled with candles and books, and her mattress sat right on the floor without a frame and with only an old door for a headboard. She had a piece of fine silk hung on the wall, embroidered with brightly colored birds sporting long tails that curled like bouquets of flowers at the ends. He had asked where she found it.
“A friend gave it to me,” she said. “This nice old guy who used to come in for coffee every afternoon—black, no sugar, no nothing. He liked to talk. He told me stories about the Blackbird, people he remembered from when he was young.”
That was her. That was Celia all over. He imagined her nodding gently, encouraging the old man’s nostalgia, revealing nothing about herself.
His throat ached. He couldn’t lie here in Celia’s room, where she’d lived and fucked and wept and died. The walls still smelled like her, that peculiar warm scent of her, that smoky vanilla mixture of sex and incense and Celia’s own sweet skin.
He went out to the hallway, down the row of doors. Four on each side, counting the one he’d closed behind him. A tiny hotel by anyone’s standards, but Celia had dreamed of it since she was a little girl. She and Rory and Eric had played here as children during the years when the hotel stood vacant, and Celia had fallen in love. He imagined her wandering down this hallway, her tawny hair made dark by the shadows, fingers trailing along the walls. She would have skipped down the curved staircase, her little feet pattering on the floor. She would have been humming, craning her neck at the pine trees outside the leaded windows. Would have laid her hand on this very banister and felt the smooth wood warm to her touch.
Later, after Eric had bought the place, they had stripped the pine floors and waxed them to a lustrous amber glow. Celia brought in low couches lined with pillows and blankets in rich colors and contrasting patterns and arranged them around the river-stone fireplace with a copper-sheathed coffee table at the center—a contribution from Rory, a nod to the hotel’s mining days. Everywhere