Page 20 of Come Back To Me

“Yeah.”

“How do you know that?” he asked.

He wasn’t being snarky. It was a genuine question from a genuine man. A naked man. He never seemed to notice that he was naked, not even now as he leaned against the doorframe, half erect.

“I’m not an artist, but I’ve been with artists.” I glanced down at his dick and cleared my throat. “The real ones and the fakes. I’ve seen them succeed and fail, and the ones who fail always had something to prove. It became about the proof rather than the art. The purity was lost.”

He stared at me for a long time. “I get the impression that you think I’m deeper than I actually am. I’m sorry if I gave you that impression.”

I laughed. Maybe he was right. The last man I’d slept with read books on philosophy as wide as my face, and took trips to places like India and the Congo to discover himself. He’d bored me to death with his self-exploration, never taking a moment to step outside of his own head and explore what was inside of everyone else’s. David was his opposite.

“I’ll tone it down,” I said. “I’m just so hungry for information.”

“Don’t change,” he said softly. “I sort of like it. I know myself better with you around. I also get more headaches…”

“Because I’m too much all the time?”

“Because you’re so beautiful you make my eyes hurt.”

That was enough to woo an already lovesick girl. I pulled off my pants, took off my shirt, and climbed back into bed.

“Are we together, Yara?” he asked. “Are we in something?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want a relationship. You know that.”

“Okay.” He nodded.

“Now come here,” I said, patting the bed. “You’re naked.”

I woke up one morning with one of David’s songs stuck in my head. It was a song called “Five Dollars,” and it made no sense even when he’d tried to explain it to me. After he left my apartment for rehearsal, I made myself coffee and played the song, listening carefully to the message he insisted was there. It was catchy and I couldn’t shake it even when I put on a Cat Stevens record and tried to listen to something else. And if his song was in my head it meant that he was in my head.

I got dressed in my sweats, deciding to take a walk down to Pike for breakfast. The fresh air, and crepes, and the hustle of the Market would cleanse my mind of David Lisey. My favorite crepe place was buried under the Market. The locals knew where it was, but the tourists had to stumble across it, and then it was hard to find the next time they tried to go back. My hair was pulled up in a greasy ponytail and the only thing I was wearing on my face was a little Chapstick. Pike Place Market was my favorite thing about Seattle. Its off-kilter shops and weird shop owners reminded me of Camden Town back home. Not in an obvious way—if you held the two together they’d look and smell nothing alike. There was a subversive quality to it, an overthrow of pretentiousness. I passed Rachel the golden pig everyone loved to pose with and turned left. Someone was straddling her back, lifting their arms in the air for a photo. I turned my head at the last minute and pulled a tongue to photobomb them. I was having deep thoughts about tourists when I rounded the corner and spotted David. He was standing right in front of me, the donut shop behind him. At first, I smiled because just a few hours ago he was inside of me. But, then I saw that he wasn’t alone and my emotions deflated like a balloon. There was no ducking away, no hiding.

“Oh hi,” I said, flustered.

I tried not to look at the girl he was with but there was the fact that I knew her. Nya was clinging to his arm holding a plastic bag in her free hand.They could have just run into each other,I thought.Wait to react.

“What are you guys doing here?”

The drummer and the bass player from his band were also with them. They all came to an abrupt stop when they saw me.

“We just had breakfast,” Nya informed me. “And now we’re going for a walk.”

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t look at him. I looked over his shoulder at the colorful pepper displays hanging from a market stall.

“You remember Ferdinand and Brick,” he said, motioning to the two guys flanking them. “They’re in the band.”

Everything about Ferdinand was large. I had to tilt my neck back to look into his face. He nodded at me, amused. Brick, the most solidly built of the three, had sleepy eyes and dreadlocks wound into a hive on his head. He looked bored despite the building drama.

“Where are you off to?” David said it so softly I almost didn’t hear him.

“Breakfast,” I said. “Crepe De France.”

“That’s where we came from,” Nya said, matter-of-factly. Was it just me or was her voice aggressive?

You’re not allowed to feel anything about this,I told myself. And it was true. No emotional contracts had been drafted. I’d rejected his request for a relationship at least a dozen times. We weren’t officially anything, but we liked each other and we liked to fuck. Still, you’d think he’d wait a couple hours before going on his next date. I wondered how long he’d been seeing Nya. And then I felt it, oh yuck…jealousy.

Suddenly I didn’t feel like eating.

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