7. Amelie
AMELIE
PLAYLIST: GLITTER & GOLD – HENRI WERNER, EHLE
As I walk out of Jane’s office, I feel like I’m burning. Not just burning, but as if I incited an uncontrollable fire behind me whose flames will swallow everything whole.
I walk with flat breaths, almost stumble. Everything is heightened and yet so distant.
It must be the drugs, the alcohol. El and I partied until morning came, and I didn’t sleep a single minute.
My hands are shaking.
Sweat runs down my temples.
I don’t know what is happening to me, why I am even here. I was ready to walk away yesterday. But I couldn’t. It is like I am drawn to her like a moth to flame. A flame that will evaporate me into ashes.
Why did I even open my mouth? I should have shut the fuck up. Should have—
My heart is racing.
So fast it stumbles over itself.
I press myself against a wall because everything in me feels like I am about to faint.
You gotta get your shit together, I tell myself. You can’t crash out like this.
I close my eyes and breathe.
Slow, controlled breaths.
In and out.
Mind over matter.
But the jittery sensation in me doesn’t go away.
I take my phone and call El.
Please, please answer.
“Yeah?” says El with a croaky and very sleepy voice when she answers.
“Something’s wrong,” I say with a shaky voice.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, immediately awake.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m shaking, my heart is stumbling and racing, I’m sweating, my vision is blurry.”
“You’re coming down,” she says. “Two choices, you either pull through, get back here, and sleep it off. Or you do another small one. It’ll get you back on track, and when you come back here, we’re sitting it out together.”
“I—I don’t think my body can do more,” I say as I press myself even closer against the wall. “I’m not feeling well.”
“You will be fine,” she says. “Are you on campus? I can tell Alex to get you.”
“Is he still there?”
“Yeah, didn’t I tell you? My dad bailed, just like you said.”
Somehow, talking to El takes my mind off my racing heart.
“Keep talking,” I tell her.
And she does keep talking. About her life, about the world she grew up in.
My heart rate slows down.
She talks about her ex-best friend who betrayed her, about all the foolish things she has done. One of the stories involves her father’s Bugatti and crashing it into a McDonald’s to piss him off at the sweet age of sixteen.
My shoulders relax, and I can breathe properly again.
“You should have seen me back then,” she says. “You would’ve liked me.”
“I like you now,” I say, and she laughs. She has this rich laughter, so self-assured, so secure, so warm and consuming that it vibrates through my chest.
“You sound better,” she says.
“I do. Coming home now.”
“I’ll be waiting in bed for you. Do you want ice cream or tea?”
“Ice cream,” I say.
“Alrighty. Are you taking the sub?”
“Yeah,” I say as I push my body off the wall and put one foot in front of the other.
El stays on the phone with me the entire time. We don’t talk most of the time, but she’s just there, and it calms me. With her, I am not alone.
And when I reach home, I crawl into bed with her, where she waits with my favorite ice cream for me.
I feel so safe that my body can finally relax.
I lie down sideways with my head on her belly and pull the blanket over me.
A shudder runs through me here and there, accompanied by a sensation of falling down.
I twitch every time. It’s like when I try to fall asleep sometimes and suddenly fall down.
Every time it happens, I am wide awake again.
“You’re safe,” she says as she brushes over my hair and then steals a spoonful of the ice cream. “I promise you, I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“You can’t promise something like that,” I say dryly, because I’m a realist, and if I have learned one thing in my life, it is that shit always happens. Usually, to me.
“I can,” she says, and I suddenly realize what is happening, what we’re doing here, and my body stiffens.
“El,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “But still.”
No words come out of my mouth, so I close my eyes.
“I’m here,” says El. “I’m here with you.”
She is here.
She got you.
She is here while everyone else left you.
And eventually, my body allows me to drift away.
When I wake, it is dark outside, and El is cuddled up in my arms.
I really shouldn’t.
We shouldn’t.
I know exactly where this will end.
A broken promise to myself.
Hurt feelings.
Tears.
Pain.
And another identity crisis.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling, my head throbbing.
Instead of exploring who I am, I am becoming someone else.
Someone for everyone.
There’s the version I am for Jane, the pretend-interested student.
The loaded party girl I pretend to be with El.
After years of being a pretend friend for a girl who knew nothing about her real life and how important she was.
I don’t even know why I do it.
All I ever do is pretend.
But maybe that’s me?
Maybe that’s all I can do, pretend.
But those moments with El?
I feel so alive with her.
I feel like I don’t have to pretend.
That I can just have a life.
I could just be.
And with that, I turn back with my arm wandering around El as I pull myself close to her.
El moves and turns around. She looks at me with her beautiful eyes. Sleepy, but those eyes are beautiful in any form.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you,” I say. She says nothing and pulls herself into me, curling up in my arms, and the fruity, yet salty scent of her hair washes over me.
We lie there for endless moments.
“What happened with the professor?” she asks at some point without looking at me, when I was just about to fall asleep.
“I dunno,” I say.
“Do you?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Doesn’t sound like you don’t know.”
“It’s—“ I hesitate.
“You can tell me,” she says. “Whatever it is. You murder someone, I’ll be your alibi.”
I smile weakly because I didn’t murder someone, but it feels like I’m killing myself.
“She offered me a research position,” I say. “And she somehow figured out I was high. And I kinda ranted at her and—I don’t know. She got under my skin, I believe.”
I somehow feel strange discussing what happened with the girl I’m hooking up with while being in bed with her.
“Is she hot?” asks El in her typical straightforward manner.
“Very,” I say. “Thirty-something, green eyes, full lips and a booty to kill for.”
“Why don’t you try her?”
“El,” I say as another shudder runs down my spine. “She’s a prof. She’s like what? Fifteen years older than me? It would be stupid.”
“You should really give it a try,” she says.
I didn’t answer for a while.
“Why are you pushing me to her?” I ask.
“Because you said you have no idea who you are. And if you don’t know who you are, what better way is there than to try out everything the world has to offer?”
“Hm,” I say silently, because I have nothing better to say to it. It didn’t even occur to me that I could try myself out while I was in bed regularly with someone.
“Wouldn’t you be mad?” I then ask.
El laughs and uncurls to lean her head on her hand.
“Hun, we’re hooking up, I don’t own you. Do what the fuck you want.”
“Are we just hooking up?” I ask because to me, cuddling and practically living together aren’t part of it.
“Sure, we are,” says El. “I don’t do feelings.”
“Why aren’t you?” I ask.
“Have you seen the world? Everyone just gives a fuck about themselves.”
While I do understand her, I narrow my eyes because somehow I feel it’s not everything.
“And the real reason?” I ask.
She sighs and closes her eyes for a brief moment.
“Everyone knows my name,” she says. “I can’t just date anyone. I’ll either be slaughtered by the press or the person. And if I survive that, let’s be real, 99% just want my money and status.”
“That sucks,” I say, but I still feel this is not the real reason.
“Yeah. You count yourself lucky to have money, but being invisible to the public eye. I was accused of being impregnated by someone on campus because I have a belly in a photo.”
“You don’t have a belly,” I say, stupidly, because my mind wanders off.
If she’s in that sort of light, what if I’m photographed with her?
What if I make the headlines with her at some point?
I mean, I did change my face to some extent with fillers and a nose job, but I couldn’t change everything.
I couldn’t change much about my body. What if—I freeze from the thought of it and my body tenses.
“My point exactly. You don’t get the world I’m in,” she says coldly.
“I do,” I begin. “But El. Give me the real reason.”
El’s eyes harden.
“El, come on,” I say. I doon’t know why I am pushing her that much, but I need to hear it. I want to hear I am not the only messed up person in the room.
She grasps my face rather harshly.
“I went through hell,” she says in an equally harsh tone, “And that hell will haunt me forever. I don’t feel, because if I allow me to feel, I will break.
So no, I will never have feelings or date or love.
We fuck, we’re friends, but I will never have any feelings for you.
I don’t do love. Love sucks. It makes you an idiot, and it’s a lie people tell themselves to be miserable together. ”
Her words almost hurt. Almost. Because I see what’s really behind it. Because I can relate. Because denying yourself feelings it what keeps one safe from getting hurt. From being alone.
So I don’t care if she will never have feelings for me, because I don’t have feelings for her. It’s fine.
Everything is fine.
Right?
El and I stayed in bed all weekend, and when we leave for our University writing course together, it almost feels like we have done so forever.
We are mixed in the same group, which none of us knew because we didn’t attend the first week.
I’m quite certain it’s El’s first time she sets foot on campus after the Convocation.
I’m still not used to having a bodyguard shadow our every movement at a distance.
“He sucks,” I say, because it’s not just that I am watched all the time, but that everyone else is staring at us.
“You just gotta see him as a cute lapdog who does whatever you tell him to do,” she says.
“Not whatever,” I say. “He won’t jump off a bridge or leave you alone.”
El groans as she says, “You are such a mid-core NPC, oh my god. And that means something because I went to Boarding School.”
I don’t understand a single thing of what she said, but I can’t ask, so I laugh it away.
“You were so much more fun when you were up to level,” she says. “Let’s find a bathroom, I won’t survive that class.”
And because I feel the very same, who am I to argue?
We get to a bathroom, Alex, the bodyguard waiting in front of the door, not letting anyone in, is actually a convenient use of his presence because we don’t have to use a filthy toilet lid and can do our business in the open.
Five minutes later, I’m back to the feeling I craved. The invincibility. All the messy thoughts stored away, replaced by that sensation of being limitless.
El comes up after doing two lines, and let’s her head circle back in the sensation. She bites her bottom lip, and fuck me, the view is so hot that I grab her by the throat and push her back into the wall.
My lips find hers in a wild embrace, my tongue entering her mouth as I press my body into hers. It is the first time I lead the action, and it feels fucking amazing.
She grins against my lips as we end the kiss and I bite my way down her neck to her collarbone.
My hands wander over her slim form with the soft skin. I massage her breasts for a moment, but then decide I want more. I am hungry. Fucking hungry for her.
So I trail my lips over the fabric of her dress down until I kneel between her legs.
I nibble her inner thigh as I slide with my hands first under her dress to push it up. I pull the string to the side and hold it with the dress with one hand. I look up at her, a devilish smirk on her face as I brush with my fingers over her labia.
I gaze at her the entire time, and with every single one of my movements, her eyes flicker a bit more.
Then, I lean in, kiss her pubic, and trail further down with my tongue. I let it circle around the clit, just a little bit, before I enter her with two fingers. She throws her head back, and I growl in desire as I watch her from down on my knees.
I fuck her with my finger slightly bent up, suck her clit, and trail around it with my tongue until she rolls her hips and gasps.
I just continue with what I do until she grabs my head and presses it into her. I stop and let her ride out the pulsating orgasm.
I slip my fingers out of her, and she pulls me up and into a kiss.
“See,” she says, “That was the least mid-core you have ever done.”