I stared at her across the breakfast table. Yvette. She was beautiful. She was a model. That was kind of a cliché, a rock star dating a model. Well, I don't know how accurate rock star is. Whatever. On a good day I feel like a rock star.
"Craig," she said in her sultry voice, taking my pale hand in her dark one. I liked to see the contrast of our skin tones. I liked her to touch me, her long fingers playing over the veins under my skin. She would trace them and I'd shiver.
But I looked away. She had a tendency to stare deeply into my eyes, she wanted to know my secrets. I was living a kind of play life with her, pretending to be a rock star who dated a California model who flew to Europe for fashion shows. I'd been to Europe before.
I knew it wasn't quite real with her. Not like with Ashley, her mascara all smudged as we trudged across the stages of central Europe. Not like Ashley, her voice a high pitched scream as she told me that it wasn't working, again. How many times did one girl have to say that? How many different ways? In Europe I got it. I wouldn't take the meds, wouldn't or couldn't, and the hypomanic phase had pissed Ashley off. And what had I ended up feeling? What did I think she was rejecting? Is that why I hit her? Maybe I didn't mean to, I didn't know.
"Where are you?" Yvette said in her bright and puzzled way, and I turned to her and smiled, my wide, everything is cool smile.
"Right here," I said. And she smiled her relieved smile, her smile that said she thought she knew me. I knew she didn't. I kept everything wrapped up tight, and I didn't know her. I knew she was a model, I knew she had lived in the poor sections of Los Angeles. I knew kids used to make fun of her for being too tall and too skinny and that she didn't talk to any of them now.
Her eyes were big and dark bright, and the already thick long lashes were thicker and longer with the mascara she wore, expensive model makeup that cost hundreds of dollars for little jars and tubes. But she could afford it. It was, in fact, her condo. She made more than I did, and I was okay with that. I played clubs here and there, I went on little tours of the L.A. area once in awhile, playing half filled clubs, empty clubs. She was on the cover of magazines.
With Yvette I could pretend I was different. She didn't know about my mental illness. I hid the pills when she was here, when she wasn't doing a photo shoot on a beach in Hawaii or a castle in Scotland. I could pretend my parents were alive and perfect, supportive parents. I could pretend my friends from high school were happy to see me when they came here, caught up in the smog fog mess of Hollywood.
It wasn't like Manny and Ashley and Ellie who knew everything, every shameful thing that had ever happened. It wasn't like trying to always live down my past and overcome all those broken pieces. Yvette hadn't seen me fall apart at my father's funeral. She hadn't seen me almost catatonic on the wrong doses of psych meds. She hadn't seen me bleeding on stage from a cocaine overdose. I loved what she didn't know about me.
I was on my best behavior with her. I wouldn't lose it, not like I always had before, not like I always did with Ashley. What was it about Ashley that made me lose my mind? I wanted to devour that girl. I could still see her standing in the rain in some German town, telling me to go. I could hear the clipped German of everyone around us. I couldn't understand them, but I knew a lot of them could understand us. I begged her to let me stay, I begged her to let me make amends. I caught the looks of embarrassment and sympathy of busy Germans passing by, and I could feel the weight of the history in the buildings all around us. I asked her not to do this, and she turned away. Ashley.
Yvette let go of my hand and I let her. I could see how the sun shone on her face. Her innocent smile. Or maybe not. I didn't know what demons lurked in her past, didn't want to know. I could hear her swallow.
"What are you thinking about?" she said, glancing at me. I looked out the window at the ocean as it rolled by, bright blue waves lapping the shore. But it was the wrong ocean. It didn't lead to her so I turned away.
"Nothing,"