10. Hell Is Other People （driving Around in All Their Cars） #5
His eyes strayed to it, then back to mine.
Despite everything, the tang of his breath, the stain of his teeth, he remained ethereal to me, like time had slowed to heighten all my senses in his presence, the psychedelic manifestation of Hollywood itself.
My head felt floaty, unmoored, oriented solely by the presence of desire, the storyline that led me straight to bliss.
I had the maniacal urge to walk toward him, to pull his heat to mine.
Behind my eyes, the evening was taken to its inevitable conclusion, spinning out across a time-lapse—a fantastical, imagined split-screen, with the ending foreshadowed in real time.
I knew the way I always know that if I took the first step, if I let the first domino fall, he’d inevitably give in to me, probably take the dominant role, flip me on my back or take me right there, standing …
But then where would I be? Even drunk and stupid, I was familiar with the math.
The young actress he slept with once didn’t stand a chance in the long run.
That character wasn’t serious, she didn’t go on to do great things.
Restraint might be dull, but it was narratively significant.
I’d watched this trajectory play itself out before.
William nodded, then took two steps backward, still facing me, before he tucked his hands into his pockets and turned for the stairs.
When he was gone, I took one last look around his room.
This was where the Juliet balcony led out from, giving a bird’s-eye view of the villa below.
From afar I could see the courtyard and its festivities, the poolside cabanas, though they were slightly obscured by the palm trees.
What I could see most clearly was the darkened corner where the greenhouse stood in the shadows of the house, a glistening flash of the moon visible from the filmy surface of the fountain.
In my head, I briefly entertained visions of waking up here, windows flung open to birdsong and natural light.
The air conditioning made it crisper than the courtyard, unfathomably cool.
Cool, that was it. Everything about him was cool, unaffected, nonplussed.
I imagined his hand on my thigh and felt the flush of reward from my internal yearnings; a second backward glance at the bed left me wondering how it would feel to recline across it, to slide a pathway down my torso, to put the ache temporarily to rest.
My head floated on undulations of desire, temptation licking at my core.
Impressively, I decided to do as I’d been told.
My jeans where they’d been spilled on were adhered to my skin—I imagined trying to clumsily divest them in all the alternate endings where I’d spent the night in bed with William de Witt and felt a distant, congratulatory pulse of relief for my presence of mind.
I set the stained washcloth on the edge of the sink before leaving, stepping back into the eerie grandiosity of the house.
There was a strange, unnerving quiet. Like someone out of sight was holding their breath.
Waiting.
I shook myself and returned to the party—I was in no state to go anywhere else.
The woman with the tattoo was similarly wasted, hardly able to stand; I caught glimpses of her stumbling twice before Dr. Hodel appeared, propping her up, guiding her somewhere quiet.
It figured that rich people simply got IV packs to deal with hangovers.
The whole courtyard was in such a state of Gilded Age bacchanalia that I felt a vague sense of superiority, self-congratulatory triumph for remaining admirably upright.
The taste of my second smoothie was strange, like swallowing wet dirt, motorboating an open grave.
It seemed Emmanuelle, who by then swayed unsteadily on her feathered kitten heels, was no longer paying much homage to culinary prowess.
Fortunately, she traded the smoothies for more champagne, which was far more welcome.
She recounted story after story to me with Atticus by her side, his cheeks jolly and flushed.
Every now and then I caught William’s eyes on mine; at one point he positioned himself near me, his back to mine.
I leaned back experimentally, the blade of my shoulder touching his. He didn’t step away.
Then a hand slid toward mine, concealed by the bodies sardined together in the courtyard, the indiscriminate secrecy of a crowd.
One finger ran idly along the waistband of my jeans, that feather-light touch enough to drive a thunderbolt of wanting up my spine.
I felt heat rising to my cheeks and stepped away, a familiar pattern in a familiar dance.
Emmanuelle took my hand, tugging me down into the sunken living room, her legs splaying casually over mine, the presence of skin on skin purring through my electrified sense of life.
I couldn’t shake the taste of the smoothie, that strange sense of petrichor.
My tongue felt rough, like a cat’s. I pressed myself in closer; Emmanuelle ran her fingers lightly over my neck and shoulders, stroking me like a pet.
Every naked touch seemed heated, augmented, electrified.
William lingered near the edge of the room, his gaze repeatedly finding mine.
Those ocean eyes. Being swallowed up by them. By then I’d developed a taste for it. For letting myself be overtaken by a wave, tumbling deeper into the bowels of possibility.
As I let myself sag boneless into the sofa, my vision kaleidoscoped and blurred, my eyelids growing heavy, my lashes spiderlike, like looking through a veil.
From afar, the mottled gray on William’s incisors began at first to warp, then drip—to reach, fingerlike, toward me, to beckon me unto the auspices of their embrace.
A sea of inky blackness began to rise from the floor, up from the depths of the villa’s waiting tendrils, the air around me suddenly alive with some unseen infestation.
Thick whorls of something, colonizing swirls, that split my lips to gather spore-like on my tongue.
The rot soon filled my mouth, my throat, my lungs.
I began to suffocate, to choke, my body seized by the swiftness of panic.
But then, slowly, as if guided by the dark, I taught myself to relax, to succumb, deeper and deeper, to the edge of an alternate state.
Like escaping into fantasy, or the space between dreaming and waking.
The more readily I yielded, the more an image of something materialized before me, like a beacon of heat to burn away the dark.
I should have been surprised, but I wasn’t, when the face that found me then was Jude’s, as if he’d just been lingering there in the back of my mind, biding his time, knowing I’d come.
The monster’s presence flickered in his eyes, a heady glint of satisfaction.
Like I’d gone to him with all the ardor of a constant, faithful dog.
The wind, I remember, was suffocating, mesmerizing, and still I could see it all so clearly, like reading pages from a script. A montage of images, ideations of what might come to pass—
A cube of ice slides slowly over the bare skin of the heroine’s waist. He traces the landscape of her, the curve of her hips, cold gliding over sweat and salt. The heat is sweltering, but she shivers. It’s the quietest corner in hell.
The scene cuts out: audio only. The sound of breaths accelerates. A tiny moan, a muffled sound, like one hand gently covering a pair of painted lips. The clink of ice cubes in a glass. A swift stream of breath hisses out from clenched teeth.
THE GOTHIC HEROINE
Don’t stop.
Then—so soft we almost miss it—the sound of an answering, keening sigh.
Dazed, I reached a hand behind my head then, two of my fingers brushing the softness of another person’s cheek.
“Jude,” I whispered.
My breath stumbled a little at the warmth of his presence, my heart flipping over in my chest in recognition of a new, evolving thing.
Thrill, that was it. That was the feeling.
The way you could thrill with fear, with want.
With anticipation. With morbid curiosity.
With a sense of heaviness, asynchronous significance.
The likelihood of a future that would have required a different set of desires to prevent.
What was it I found so tempting about the house, about the people in it? Was it just the promise of a future? Power, sex, desire? What?
Because I knew then that something about the villa and its occupants had transfixed me.
In my head was the flicker of a candle flame, the edge of a rooftop, the half-imagined presence of bodies writhing together on the floor.
My tongue felt so thick I bit it twice. Everything seemed hazy, as if through a film of proliferating lace.
A chain of something, trails of spores. Illuminated by fairy lights, flickers of fantasies I couldn’t distinguish from reality.
My head lolled back, and cool hands bracketed my temples, guiding me headlong into a dream.
I laughed and launched to my feet, unsteadily, and quickly melted, knees unlocking in a freefall toward the ground. Levitation stopped me, the skeletal arms of a waiting embrace.
Two fingers gently touched my eyelids; a cool tide crashed to swallow me whole.
THE GOTHIC HEROINE
(Mumbling, half asleep, dregs of pleasure coursing through her)
What’s the difference between seraphim and monster, anyway?
The second voice cuts through the surface of a dream.
THE DEMON
Don’t touch the fucking smoothies, Anya.
I’d slipped into the underworld and drunk its poisons, and now I would never get out.