Page 62 of Little Deaths

Something heated and dangerous flared through his eyes that was completely at odds with his smile. “Why would I want to kill you?” he asked, giving her lip a little tug. “I can come up with so many better ways to make you scream.”

She swatted his arm angrily and he laughed, picking up both wineglasses as he walked away.

Which, she couldn’t help noticing, wasn’t exactly a denial.

Chapter Eleven

The Floors Would Scream

Rafe stood next to the ugly granite counter, keeping the remainder of the wine bottle company. He’d tossed the chambray shirt to the floor in a sad heap and was now in his T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up around his biceps. The taste of Donni coated his mouth like sweet oil. Every time he breathed in, he could smell her,tasteher—the musky taste of tropical fruit laced by something bitter.Sweet poison, he thought. One he’d down willingly, if asked.

He tried to remember when his childish admiration for his stepmother had begun to fester and grow dark, like grapes left for too long on the vine. He’d never been particularly social and after his parents divorced, people had started to look at him askance. The son of a crazy woman and the heartless bastard who wanted to start over again without her. Sometimes it felt like everyone was watching him to see how he’d fuck up, too.

It had almost been a relief when his father sent him away to an all-boys’ Catholic boarding school in Mendocino County. He hadn’t been religious and still wasn’t now, but the rigid structure of the school gave form to his thoughts, letting him be more himself and less what other people—like his father—wanted him to be. If he didn’t have many friends, then it was by choice, not failure. He liked being alone, but only on his own terms. That was more than fine with the teachers, who only cared about passing marks and the paychecks that came in like clockwork every quarter.

Since Rafe only came home for the holidays, he didn’t find out that his father had started dating again until he’d already been seeing Donni for several months. She had been the kind of beautiful that made you stop and take a second look, searching for flaws that weren’t there. She had been uneasy and nervous around him, like some of the neurotic teachers at his school who never made it through the term, and with his father giving him looks that clearly said,don’t fuck this up for me, Rafe felt uneasy and nervous, as well, like he’d failed a test he didn’t know he was taking. When she had given him the prop snake from her movie as a gift, he had been so perversely relieved in the face of his father’s sternness that he had nearly cried.

After she and his father were married, though, he saw her a little more often. Donni took on a lot of the tasks that his father had previously outsourced. She drove him to see his mom at the clinic and picked him up from the Caltrain station when he came home for summers and holidays. “How is she?” she always asked, or, “How’s school?” to which he had always provided guarded, short non-answers, until one day, in a bad mood, he had ranted the whole way home about how much he had hated his stupid school and everyone in it, half-expecting her to tell him to shut up and being inexplicably surprised when she didn’t. Didn’t she know he’d fucked up?

Apparently not.

Instead, she had taken him to a frozen yogurt shop, looking the other way as he piled on so many toppings that the bowl was more sprinkles and mochi bits than it was actual yogurt. His father would have yelled at him and his mother would have just sighed, but Donni just wordlessly slid her small bowl of plain taro up next to his chaotic monstrosity and handed the clerk her card.

That, he thought, might have been the first moment that he thought he might love her.

She wasn’t his mother; he had never really been allowed to think of her that way. His father gave her little to no authority in his actual upbringing, overriding what few decisions she made like he felt the need to prove a point. And his mother refused to even hear thenameof the woman who had taken her place in what had once been her home. The one time he brought Donni up to his mother, she had ceased even to look at him for the rest of the visit, and when Donni sat in the room with them, his mother looked through her as if she were a clear pane of glass.

She couldn’t cook, unless it came in a box or a can; she was always late; and she was young enough to be his sister. But it wasn’t until he was in junior high that he really started to notice how different she was from the other mothers in Riachuelo. They didn’t wear cocktail rings or know what seaweed wraps were. They didn’t drink water out of sonically charged quartz-lined bottles to “open up the heart.” They didn’t wear bikinis with cut-outs while lounging poolside with bottles of chilled champagne, pleading with their agents. Because they didn’thaveagents, and they certainly didn’t fly out to LA for cast reunions or meet-and-greets, or brand deals with Shiseido.

During his senior year, he had missed prom to go with Donni down to LA. He had just turned eighteen, and was disillusioned with Ariel, and all of his classmates, who could talk of nothing but where they were going to college in the fall, or what they planned to do during their gap year. His father was supposed to go with Donni but he had cancelled on her, as he often did. As much as he loved to brag about his glamorous younger wife, he hated the trappings that came with it, and how much older and unattractive he looked when he was with her friends.

Something had happened at one of his father’s winery events, and they had had one of their fights that ended in the bedroom, but usually had Donni coming down afterwards, wearing one of her silk robes as she morosely sipped her wine in the dark. That time, though, his father hadn’t been appeased. “Why don’t you take Rafael? He’s young enough that he’d probably get off on that MTV Hollywood bullshit.”

He'd just had his tux tailored for the prom he didn’t want to go to, since he’d grown another two inches since his junior year. But he knew better than to point that out. If he indicated how much he wanted to go, his father might change his mind purely for spite. So he’d sighed and said, “Yeah, I could go.” And Donni had given his father another searing look of annoyance before saying, “Okay. Pack for a whole weekend. Business casual, casual, and a swimsuit—and bring your tux,” she added, ticking off on her fingers. “The limo comes at seven.”

With his height and the beginnings of a beard that added at least five years, several people mistakenly assumed that he was Donni’s new husband. For some reason, he hadn’t corrected them. The words stuck in his throat, burning like hot coals. He liked the jealousy and respect of the men who saw her on his arm, and how genuinely happy she looked when she spoke with her fans.Radiant, he had thought, watching her. Like she’d been coated in stardust.

The only people in Riachuelo who had seen her movies had mostly done so because of his father’s bragging. They were halfway to being bygone products of the direct-to-video boom, lost in a sea of other pulp. But these were people who loved those movies, and loved who she was inside of them, and in her burgundy cocktail gown and vampy makeup, she looked every inch the dark queen of horror that they would have happily worshipped her as.

She doesn’t look like this when she’s with Dad, he had thought, watching her sign a tattered-looking comic book with panels crammed full of occult-looking symbols.

When she tilted her head towards him and smiled, he felt it like an arrow.

I want her to look at me like this all the time.

The thought seared through his mind like an infected wound, throbbing with wrongness. But once it was there, he couldn’t get rid of it.

Maybe he’d been feeling this way for a while, and just hadn’t realized until now.

Maybe she was the reason no other girl felt right.

After a whirlwind of flashing nights and a reception dinner where he’d said nothing, they rode back to the airport in another limo. Donni had fallen asleep. Her curly hair was coming loose from its updo, framing her peaceful face. She had drunk too much. He could always tell, because her laughter would get brassy and loud and she’d lose that edge of his restraint his father had tried to smooth over her like varnish. She’d sayfuckand make jokes—two things she rarely did around his father—and a bit of an accent would slip into her voice. New York, by way of something else.

Rafe had pressed the button to raise the partition and breathed in the smell of Daisy and alcohol and incense. And then, after an aching moment of hesitation, he leaned over and kissed her—softly at first, and then harder, like she was a ripe fruit he was trying to bruise. He kissed her until his mouth was sticky with gloss and the red glitter on her body was staining his hands like scarlet mistakes, and he felt like he’d surrendered a part of his soul to whatever existed in lieu of hell.

And still, it had not been enough.

He had traced the gothic necklace around her throat, wanting to move lower to where her full breasts threatened to spill out of her gown, but he didn’t quite dare. Need tightened his belly, urgent enough that he felt like he might go mad with desire. But the betrayal of it made him shy from her; he dusted the glitter from his hands and wiped her black lipstick from his mouth and held a cold bottle of water from the fridge between his legs until the icy shock of it wilted his erection and he felt like he could finally breathe again. But when he got himself off that night, he was thinking of her in one of her little lace nightgowns, on her knees in front of him.

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