Page 135 of Two Marlboros

He stared at me for a moment, during which I never looked away.

“Uhm. As you wish,princess.”

He spread my buttocks, pulled his fingers away in one swift stroke, and it hurt a lot - but I thought that was nothing compared to the harm I was about to do to myself.

I was ashamed to be naked. I looked at the strip and was also ashamed that I had thought, even for a moment, that that was the solution. I pitied myself, but not as much as I pitied Harvey.

I stood up, gathered my underwear and pants to cover myself as best I could, stepped over Harvey, and started toward the room.

“Nathan-”

“No ‘Nathan’. Go away. Please.”

He stared at me in disbelief. He was silent, but only for a moment.

“Can I call you tomorrow?”

My head was bursting. One, two, three - boom! - it would explode.

“No. Don’t call me again. And I mean never again.”

Harvey clicked his tongue and stood up slowly, circumspectly, as if he had a bomb in his hand ready to explode. I just wanted the day to end.

Suddenly something came up for me. I had finished throwing up words and now I just wanted to throw up tears again. But not in front of him, no.

I continued toward the room, hoping he would not follow me and try to hold me back, and for once my wishes were granted. I threw myself on the bed, face down, not bothering to put my head on the pillow.

A few moments of silence passed, after which I only heard him arrange the couch, clean off the coffee table with a sniff and pull the cassette tape out of the VCR to put it back in the case. Moments later he opened the door and walked out, leaving me alone with myself.

Gross.

Harvey had only played with me, as he did every time, as he always had. He had not hugged me to comfort me, only to make me more docile to obey his orders. The cocaine had been just yet another attempt to feel more powerful than me, and on top of that he had enjoyed sticking two fingers inside me just to enjoy my submission. How could I have relapsed like that? Why had I allowed him to play with me and my body like that?

A sob shook my chest. Then another, and another. But it was not sadness or shame: it was anger. Anger because the mere fact that he thought he could maneuver me drove me crazy. And the way he had tried to do it was disgusting, because he knew I was vulnerable.

I deserved more than someone like Harvey. I deserved more in general.

He could keep his cocaine and shove it up his ass - even literally.

24

Two Marlboros

(?Hooverphonic - Mad about you)

I sometimes imagined him. When I was in the car, especially. I would get home, park, and be about to turn off the engine, when the image would materialize right in front of me. Often, in the background, they would play Sasha’s latest single,If You Believe.

Sasha would ask me if I believed in love, and even though he could not hear my answer, I would always tell him that I did not know. I would look out the passenger window and catch a glimpse of him, with his back leaning against the car, but not for too long; because then he would start going up and down, asking me to roll down the window so he could hear the radio, and risk choking on that cough just to yell at me to turn up the volume. He would tell me to get out, keep him company and enjoy the fresh air, and I would tell him that he could keep to himself that stinking stench. After a while he would calm down and get back into the car, more relaxed and perhaps at the same time agitated, because his endorphin dose was already waning. Each time I wondered why I imagined such things, so I would drive out of my mind all the scenes that had formed in my head and wait.

Not that ten minutes could cure me of the illness Sasha was talking about, of course.

It was not yet dawn. The city was sleeping, but I was wide awake. Resting would have been good for me, because that was going to be a busy day, but I couldn’t do it. From the balcony I could observe my life at the pace I would have liked. There wereno interruptions in my nights, just plenty of time to think and to let Oliver’s ghost scare me.

He, in fact, had figured it out. He understood that I missed Nathan and in a way that was not normal. Finally, although I had known him for a short time, I felt that he had become part of my life. I kept his schedule in mind as if it had been mine: the plastics, the exam to give, the friend to worry about, and the cigarettes to buy becauseoh my God, I’ll get anxious without them.

I turned over in my hands a packet I found under the couch, which I had no idea how it got there. Inside, there were only two Marlboros.

Those two cigarettes, after all, looked like him and me. Two people so different, but at heart so much alike, meeting by chance and beginning to share a piece of their lives. Just like those two Marlboros, who ended up in the same pack by mere chance and were destined to stay together until someone or something separated them.

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