I.
With the absorbing fog and neon lights, it's a wonder they found their way inside.
It isn't the most appealing place, really. The dancing is minimal at most, the drinks tainted by the aged bartender who takes pleasure in the patrons' stinging eyes and furious gulps. The drinks he says are new are old; the old, new. And of those in skirts and smudged makeup, maybe fifty percent are actually female.
In the midst of all this, some are willing to risk it for a few hours of passion.
He looks up, his eyes sharp as he tries to zoom in on someone, anyone who'll "do."
Green meets green, with a smile. They do not look away.
II.
He warns her, "My apartment is what the world will look like after the apocalypse." His keys are in the lock, his eyes on her, waiting for her smile. And she does smile, pushing past him and twisting the keys in the door. She slides it open.
"After you," he says, gesturing.
She slips under his arm and into the apartment, one-eighth as messy as April's own. "Shall we?" Roger proposes, gesturing to a door that April can only assume leads to his bedroom.
"Of course," she replies swiftly, and they enter that other, softer, harder, slower, faster, hotter, better world.
III.
Time always tumbles by in Alphabet City.
They spend their every second together, proving at last to their roommates and friends that they are capable of more than one-night stands. When their lips aren't smashed against each other's, their bodies are. It is an addiction, as much as they swear it is healthy and passionate and good.
And they kiss. Oh, of course they kiss, they're twenty-two and twenty-three, and kisses grant the feeling of being with him, with her, even when they aren't.
But they don't really kiss. It is passionate, when their lips meet, true enough, but it is three weeks into their togetherness before they can kiss and feel their hearts leap, synchronized with that spark.
IV.
She doesn't have thousands of boxes like some people do, and Roger loves that about her. When she arrives, she has two shopping bags and a backpack, nothing more. Her former apartment was of the funded-by-Daddy variety, huge but empty.
The loft is small, but it doesn't look it. There are two tiny bedrooms, a large all-purpose room, and a bathroom only large enough to see how close a toilet can be to a shower without combining the two.
For some reason, April wants to live here. Specifically, in the first bedroom on the left.
With her celery eyes, whispery voice, and strawberry hair, a girl like April is hard to refuse. Roger welcomes her inside.
V.
"You are so ungrateful. Fucking assuming. I give you everything and all you care about is what else you can get!"
"Yeah, well, you're no better, Mr. I-Don't-Care-If-She-Enjoyed-It-Or-Not! You call me a whore, but you don't even – "
"This isn't about sex, April! It's about you not trying out the bed of every guy in the fucking city!"
After April goes into their room and slams the door, Roger decides that, in retrospect, that guy who was flirting with her was probably only doing it to prove to Roger that he could.
VI.
She takes his hand, tells him they're going to meet a "friend." He lets her pull him along, because he's been dropping hints about having a threesome lately. Is that what this is about?
April leads him outside, into an alleyway.
"Hey," she whispers, and it is a moment before Roger realizes that she is talking to someone, a tall, dark someone. "What do I owe you?"
"Thirty," the man replies, slipping something out of his pocket and into April's hand. Roger recoils.
April nods, paying the guy. "C'mon," she mutters to Roger. Her hands are trembling as she crouches down on the ground in the back of the alley.
"April – "
She shushes him with a kiss.
VII.
She examines the thing in her hand, turning it over and over in disbelief. This can't be, she thinks numbly. We've been careful.
But they haven't, not really. They've tried to be, but sometimes, when it's spontaneous, there's nothing to do but do it. That's what this is.
For a wild instant, April imagines having the baby. Bringing a little boy – no, a girl – into the world. Mama, Dada, Uncles Mark, Benny and Collins, Aunt Maureen. And she wants that, somewhere deep in her heart.
But then she resignedly draws to mind the drugs, booze, sex, cigarettes.
"Hello, Doctor Evans? I'd like to make an appointment…"
IIX.
They lie next to each other, April's hair billowed out as a pillow. The fresh scars, inflamed, stand out in the darkness, almost glowing. The black, the red, the green of their eyes… Roger's head is reeling. So much color, feeling, rush… It amazes him every time.
"Roger?"
He looks over at her, barely moving his head – just his eyes.
"Roger?" she asks again.
"Mhm?"
For the first time, he notices the red of her lips, how cherry they are, almost ruby. Struck by impulse, he turns over on his side and kisses her, biting down on the soft tissue of her lip.
"Do you regret it?" she asks.
He doesn't have to ask what she means as his hands run over the scars, old and new alike.
"Not at all."
IX.
When Roger promises her a "special present, later," it is only natural that April – twenty-three years old today – thinks of sex. She imagines the perfect kind of sex where their eyes hardly close and it goes on and on all night, or until Collins throws a shoe at their door, and even then for at least another hour.
But it isn't sex after all, as demonstrated when Roger settles down on the bed with his guitar in his lap. April's heart leaps at any rate, because he could do all sorts of kinky things in the same position.
"Here you go, April baby," Roger says, giving her a chaste kiss and pulling away gently. "Happy birthday. I love you."
April's eyes fill with tears.
X.
It wasn't her idea.
It was a suggestion, just something someone slipped into conversation sometime last week. ("Have you gotten tested for STD's, guys?") And for some reason, it stuck with her. It stuck with her enough to drive her out of the apartment, onto the street, and into the clinic. And now it drives her there again, to pick up the results.
As the doors close behind her, April is blinded by white. She squints, taking it all in. "April Ericsson," she tells the woman behind the desk. "I'm here for my results."
She takes the paper, unfolding it.
Before she can so much as scan it, there is a hand on her shoulder. "I'm so sorry," a nameless someone says.
April tears away from him and runs.
XI.
She sees red, green, blue behind her eyes as she twists the faucet as far left as it will go. Steaming water pours into the bathtub, flowing and flowing like faulty blod cells through a quivering heart. Not caring about anything at all, April sticks her leg under the water, jeans and all. She barely feels the heat, the pain.
It should hurt, she thinks wildly, and strips off her jacket, tossing it on the floor, that foreign slip of paper sticking out of a pocket.
She steps into the bath, lying down with her face directly below the rushing water. It burns. She ignores it.
It is ten minute slater when April pulls the razor from a shelf, running it jaggedly across her wrists. Perversed and engrossed, she dabs her fingers in the blood and wipes them over the wall nearest her.
We've got AIDS.
I still love you.
XII.
He does not bring red roses, nor black, nor any roses at all. The flowers he buys are nothing in particular, nothing recognizable. The stems are cut directly at the bud, the petals dyed the color of April's eyes.
The color of his eyes.
He isn't entirely sure they were that color before he met her.
Now, they are.
Atop the pile of massacred flowers, Roger dumps a box of cigarettes, empty and hollow.
"I still love you."