distract me

so i won't turn around

you make me feel three glasses in

you say my name and my legs support a little less

my tongue becomes a little mess

my lips are longing to confess

my lungs they catch on every breath

my heart beats harder at the cage inside my chest

and i die

i die

The Beths: A Little Death

XIX

Everything is still overlapping. Black cement is steady solid under my boot steps, but inside, I feel like it's still this morning. This afternoon. Tonight right now. All at the same time.

I feel like I'm still in the bed Grim and I share, shutting off his alarm without thinking. But I can't be there because I'm at the Quileute Animal Rescue, watching his smile fall from across the yard. But I can't be there either, because I'm in mine and Alice's living room, arguing about why this is fine.

It's no different than what she does. Like she isn't seducing the chief of surgery to get what she needs? Like she doesn't play with her prey?

Isn't that what this has always been about?

Isn't that why we keep moving?

So we can keep having fun?

Halfway across a Port Angeles parking lot, the feeling of past and present swimming together deepens. In one step, I'm in a different parking lot, back in La Push. Jessica's beside me instead of Seth, talking my ear off while deep within its drum, a small siren only I can hear cries out around just the scent of Grim, invading me for the first time.

In the next step I'm back beside the shop's apprentice, approaching Unbidden - Birds' wife's windowless, one story nightclub - while the warning sound that's been silent for months, creeps back up.

It starts out small.

It always does.

Soft little whimpers of never-ending need fill my inner ear with the promise of a far louder lament if I don't get what I need soon. So I keep walking, but inside I'm sliding down, slipping into exhausted sleep in the bathtub with nothing but a towel around me.

I'm standing at my closet, wishing I was crouched in his while I pull on my lowest-riding jeans and sheerest black sweater.

I'm in an old Chevy Pick-up, riding shotgun with EKG in the driver's seat for the hour-plus it takes to get here.

It's good that he offered. After running this morning wore me out, I'm not sure how I would have made it this far otherwise.

An Uber?

How human.

With a few more steps, we draw near to the line of people waiting to get in, but it's impossible to tell if I'm truly here. If the babbling crowd, the cloud of smoke and cologne, and the low buzz of the purple neon sign are real, or if I'm half-naked between bamboo sheets, cheek pressed to a ribcage wrapped around a thunderstorm, over-slaked, bathed in shade, and dreaming.

"Wait. Shit. Shit, I didn't even think," Seth worries, stopping in his tracks.

I turn to face him.

"I wasn't thinking," he reiterates, little regrets twisting his face. "Do you have a fake?"

It takes me a minute to understand what he means.

I don't have that kind of fake ID, but I'm not going to let that or anything stop me.

"It's fine," I assure him, just like I reassured Alice a hundred times before I left.

Charming the door guy, Sam, is too easy. I turn all that I have and am up and onto him - batting lush lashes over curiously-coquettish eyes, tossing umber waves over my shoulder to expose the skin of my neck and beset him with my scent.

He laps it up like a dog.

"I won't drink. I swear." Smiling like a nymph, I touch my bottom lip and watch him watch. "I'm just here for our friend's birthday."

"Oh, you know Birds?" Door guy leans forward as he says it and Seth steps in, edging more or less between him and I. The two of them catch up briefly, and Sam unhooks the rope between me and the entrance.

Then I'm in.

And it's real.

Right now is so, so real, and every part of it glows low, lurid lavender.

nothing to see here, the sign at the end of the first tunnel of a hall says. It's so dark, the hallway to hell of my own heart beats harder. Seth points as we head forward, and there's another hall, lit by another sign. One that makes my pulse trip, catch on itself, and double up on beats.

it's all in your head

We turn another dark corner while my mind sways and dips, lost in edgeless sensory overwhelm. A syrup-thick bassline inundates my ears and sinks through my chest, throbbing all the way to my belly as we walk. The depth and volume increases with each step, amplified by the sight and sound of countless bodies, rocking together, rolling between each other.

Gleaming under pale violet lights.

All of them coated in dripping pitch darkness.

"Do you see anyone?" Seth asks, near to my ear as I blink hard and tight, shaking the illusion of liquid black as I shake my head.

"Where are they?" I ask back.

Not the myriads in front of us.

Not the party he's looking for.

Where's the fragile human that left bruises on me?

Where's the only man who can pull me under?

Where's the one, single creature that brings me to dreaming?

His scent should stand out to me from every other. If he's here, his body should be drawing mine like a magnet. I should have located him the second I walked in by the taste of him in the air, the sound of his lungs, the way his heart enthralls my own everytime we're near -

But I'm lost in a current of syncopated beats.

"Over there." EKG points to the far back left of the club, and between the crowd of shifting shoulders and tipped-back heads, I see them.

Anchor first, then he moves and I see him.

The only mortal I've ever marked for this life and every after.

The truculent insomniac with my lip-prints and tear-tracks all over him.

The copper-crowned black-cloud of a man swallowing pure murk from an old fashioned glass without so much as a flinch.

In a blink, I see that what was onyx in his cup is clear now - just water on the rocks - and the urge to lick where his mouth just was claws at my clavicles. How good it would feel to swallow the lucky little ice cubes that just slid against his lips and feel them melt down my throat. How soothing his cold tongue would feel all over my overheated skin.

He feels it too. I can tell. This persistent and pervasive warmth that's deepening suddenly within me. I know he feels it. While everyone else is dressed for the dead center of winter, he's leaned back against a button-tufted sectional sofa, wearing nothing but jeans with holes in both knees and a black tee with three white arrows where a pocket should be.

It's heavily hot in this club, but he's the only one who looks as feverish as I feel.

I spend all night trying to get closer to what's mine, but Paul - the guy with an unkindness of ravens flying over from his eyebrow to his neck, the one who founded Shoot the Moon - sits beside Grim the whole time. And since it's Birds' birthday, everyone in the place comes over to talk. Which means my lover is never left alone.

It's awful. There's no room to sit at their table, and as minutes drag into hours, I don't know what to do with myself. I don't know what I was thinking, coming here. I don't know what I expected.

I can tell by the stiffness of his posture that he knows I'm here, but I need more than his body's recognition. I need more than his unmerciful avoidance. I need -

"It's Hell, right?" A small flaxen haired stranger stands beside me, staring at the same table. "Here." She passes a bottle of wine. One of Goya's cruelest engravings - The Little Prisoner - takes up the label, and the vessel feels mostly full in my hands.

I glance at the blonde girl with black nails and pink cheeks, offering to share it.

"Be patient," she says, glancing at me out of the winged corner of her eye. "He'll come around when your age doesn't freak him out as much."

An anxious blush burns me from head to toe.

"Mine did," she continues with another half-glance and half a smile to go with it.

I notice the tiny ravens tattooed along her hairline then, and the diamond ring on her finger, and the devout way she watches the man next to mine.

"You're with Birds?" I ask, trying to mimic her nonchalant body language without being obvious.

She nods. "It took him a year to stop leaving the shop when I came in. He was such a dick. Wouldn't look at me. Made the apprentice do all the talking. Like any of that was going to discourage what I wanted. Drink, Bella."

I do it without thinking, and shiraz that's cooler than my mouth warms me all the way down. When I try to pass it back, she shakes her head.

"Have some more. It's okay. I know what you're going through. Why you keep showing up at the shop. Why you're here now. Seth is sweet, but everyone knows why you really came."

I take another drink, a full one, and stare across the club, soaking Grim's razorblade of a profile in my gaze. I want to slink over and drape myself across his lap so much my legs waver. I want to slither under the table and fill my throat with him. I want to go over there and stake my claim in front of everyone so badly it's dizzying.

"I just wanted … Maybe it's stupid. Whatever. I just remember how I felt and wanted to help. I'm Janey by the way."

"Help what?" I ask, watching the source of my torment tug at the collar of his shirt and lean back with his fingertips still hooked in it. Burning up. Ill at ease.

I chase another drink with another.

And another.

Janey cheers, reclaiming the bottle when I release it to catch my breath. She takes a long drink of her own before answering. "You. I want to help you."

The girl who got everything she wanted turns to face me and reaches for my hand. She's small and delicate, the opposite of what I crave, but I let her tug me close, and she drapes her other arm over my shoulders, nudging the bottle back to my lips for another sip.

I sway as I swallow, and feel it warm me like a sunbeam.

"There you go," she praises, and I don't realize I've closed my eyes until she starts to walk and I move with her. "Come on," she whispers, leading the way. "Let's show him what he's missing."

In what feels like a blink, we're on the dancefloor, and the music is buried in me the way I ache for my prey to be. The throbbing rhythm makes me move with the same captivating force he does, from so deeply within it feels natural. Inevitable. As fated as stars to shine and waves to crash.

He only looks once. Quick as a gold-tipped arrow, his glance is twice as sharp and turns my pulse into a flood. My back is turned, but I know his eyes are on me by the way my whole body feels pierced. And knowing he couldn't help it, that he looked and is probably furious with himself for looking, makes my lips part and my head tip back as my hips roll freely against a helpful partner.

"He sees you." Janey moves smoothly into my flow as she says it, simulating sex with me not just for Grim's serpentine eyes, but for any and everyone who wants to watch.

I give myself to it.

The softcore illusion of mating with this girl.

The bottle every time she tips it to my needy mouth.

The surge of swiftly heartbeats barrelling through my veins when he steals a second glance.

"Make him come here." I hear myself plead under the echoing melody, but I'm not sure if I'm talking to myself or the blonde.

"Oh, sweetie." She shakes her head while she strokes the back of mine, keeping time with my helpless hips. "He's not going to come out here. But he looked. At least twice. That's a ton for one night."

She offers another drink and I take it, stopping to stand still and slightly taller than her for a second while she continues rolling against me. Wine dulls the edge of my lover's cruelty, but Janey doesn't understand.

Me and Grim aren't like her and Birds.

I already know him.

The taste and weight and hard-beating heart of him.

We're already one.

I don't have a year to play it patient.

I need him tonight.

I need him now.

Behind eyes I've closed to get a grip, fermented pomegranate and cherries swim deep and bend my bearings. Janey keeps pouring for me, and the bassline controlling my bones sinks into marrow. Everyone and everything feels surreal. My eyes trick me every time I open them.

In one blink, there's a second girl behind me, pressed close, dipping easily into my cadence. I can't see her face, but her hands are opening my undone jeans and her fingertips drip black.

In another blink, Janey and I are face to face, body to body, and Birds hovers behind her, moving with us. Seth is beside me. They're all grinning. I'm grinning. Someone's thumb traces my bottom lip and I almost come.

In another blink, we're bathed in black. Everybody. We're all drenched and writhing while Grim leans back against the Victorian sofa like a king, lit in day-glo heliotrope, watching us revel in the slippery dark.

Opening my eyes wide on the dance floor, I feel slick all over. Wet behind the ears. Wet down my neck and all over my chest. Wet under my clothes. My tongue has never felt so wet with need, and I'm so wet between my legs, I feel it every time my heart beats. I'm still rocking against Birds' wife, but he's back at the table with Anchor and EKG, some other guys, and the sullen soul I crave so badly, it feels like fangs digging into the base of my throat.

We're closer to their corner now, so close when I close my eyes again, I can hear them.

"I don't get it," Seth says. "She's eighteen. It's not -"

"You're right," Birds interrupts. "You don't get it."

"Grim, look at her. That girl is fucking wild for you."

"Yeah, but she's trouble," Anchor adds.

"She's crazy is what she is," a voice I don't recognize says.

"Girls like her can be as crazy as they want," says another.

The voice I'm sore for stays silent the whole time, deepening my torture.

I don't know how long it's been when I open my eyes again. Just that the crowd is half the size it used to be. Janey's gone, and my lover is sitting alone, smoking a joint, and I'm walking toward him on shaky-drunk legs.

I might be immortal, but I've got the metabolism of a teenage girl. With every step, I can feel every drink I've taken tonight, and it makes me reckless and brave. Trembly like a wave and twice as irresistible.

Like I'm the sea itself.

And he's the shore.

He ignores me every step of the way, but his heart hands him over as I get closer. Pounding so violently his chest must ache, his strongest muscle hauls my own into heavy harmony, and the force of it shallows my breathing. It fills my desperate mouth with desire and makes the siren in my ears keen like a kitten in heat.

Beneath skin that still feels slick, a rush of warm tenderness makes me blush bleeding heart pink. Bedroom pink. Baby between his sheets pink. I go soft all over for him. Sweet all over. Vulnerable all over around the growing aggressiveness of his pulse. Every beat deepens how soaked I feel, and when I glance down, I find myself dripping.

Stepping forward, I leave a cloven, wet-black print on the mirrored floor.

Liquid obsidian dew drops fall around it, sliding from my suddenly naked skin and slipping from my soaked hair.

Because I'm sodden black.

Everywhere.

Until I blink.

And I'm looking down at the same low hip-huggers and nearly see-through black sweater I put on to taunt him.

There's no darkness.

Just unbuttoned denim barely concealed beneath my shirt, and the explicit shape of two pierced nipples, peeking tightly against diaphanous black fabric.

Crossing what's left of the distance like a magnet being drawn, I enter Grim's line of vision and he turns his head away, shifting his eyes. Making him move thrills my instincts, and when I'm finally where he is, I pull myself up to sit down on the table. Right in front of him. So my whole left profile fills his sights.

When he still denies me his eyes, intuition that's running wild takes over.

This millstone of a man likes me on my back.

So I lie back.

Softly tossing my hair over my shoulder, I lean back to my elbows first, then down until the back of my head rests against the less than clean club table. Gazing up at the only man that makes me act so desperately human, I present myself in the most docile way. I put all of my brazen adoration on full display.

It's absurd of him not to look at this point. His refusal to stings as much as if he raised a hand and struck me physically.

More even.

As soft as he makes me, this intentional neglect hurts more than anything.

Bending a knee and arching my back, I push up tits he marked, aching for the barest slip of his attention.

When he still doesn't look, I lean back up onto one elbow and dip forward, so close the heat rolling off him drowns my senses in a haze. Before he can stop me and before I can hesitate, I tilt my head to his right hand, resting on his knee, and steal a hit from his joint.

He pulls away immediately, bringing it to his own lips with all the quickness of a reflex before switching it to his other hand, but it's too late. I inhale a little breath as I lie back down, sending a dank little cloud to my chest as I admire him with coy, batted-low eyes.

Because now -

Now he's looking.

The grey-green rings of his irises stretch wide around baleful, bottomless black pupils as they bear down on my gaze, and my mouth opens without permission. A slow silver shadow creeps out, smoke looming over me like a veil, and I swear I feel my heart go out with it.

Uncaged.

Unprotected.

Straight to him.

I swallow hard and speak because I know he won't. Because I feel suddenly like I have to hear my voice to know this is real. To make this be real.

"I asked you once," I confess, barely able to move, my gaze so fixated on his and his pressing down so heavily on all my warm, sore softness. "If you ever feel like you're dreaming when you're awake ..."

He blinks like it takes effort, and the warning on his lids sends a chill down the back of my neck as he cuts his sight from mine.

"Are you dreaming this?" I half-plead, half-pry, needful to be back in his eyes. "Or am I?"

His Adam's apple drags against his throat as he swallows, and I want my tongue on it more than I want my next breath.

Instead of answering, Grim returns his stare and leans steadily forward. Every little butterfly he's put in me flutters under the weight of sage and soot, shivering just like the fire in his hands that first night. I am a thousand tender little flames for him to play with.

Pinned still, filled with the force of his pulse, I hold onto flint-black eyes as he brings the joint to me. Pursing my lips to his dark fingertips, I draw from it like a good lovelorn girl. Slow. Sweet. Deep. I get high while he watches. I get high on him watching me get high. I get so high I don't remember where we are or what's happening or him taking the joint back.

I'm still on my back when I blink, trapped against the table by hooded eyes and the hardest pulse. I'm blushing so bad I'm burning up. Too susceptible to be anywhere but where I belong. Too needy for what he's got. Too soft for anything but Grim, and more lost than I've ever been, I can't tell if I'm asleep or awake to save my life.

All I know is he's looking at me.

Laid across some dirty altar at his knees like an offering.

Watching me admire him.

Slouched back, knees wide, he breathes smoke and locks my body down with eyes that daunt the predator in me. His attention is so intimidating it feels invasive. Binding. Like something so irrefutable, so possessive can't be real.

Please, please, please let this be real.

I'm so steeped in his stare and begging the gods to let me keep it that I don't notice someone approaching.

"Shots?" A young brunette with a tattooed chest and a tray of drinks asks the man filling me with his heartbeat.

We're at the club, I remember. Unbidden. For Birds' birthday. This is real, and I watch their interaction with jealousy so real it bites the backs of my eyes. The shot-girl won't touch him. No one has tonight or ever will again. Dilated grey-greens don't even lift from me, but none of this changes the fact that she's human and so is he. I'll always envy their accessibility to each other.

I wait with her for Grim to answer, but he doesn't say a word.

A single nod, the slightest uptick of his chin in my direction is the only decree either of us need.

Steadying her tray in one hand, the brunette with a bright blue morpho taking up her throat selects a small glass while I tilt my head back. She doesn't ask if I'm ready and I don't ask her what it is as she leans over me. Holding onto the edges of the table, I open my achingly eager mouth and she pours a shot slowly inside.

It hits my tongue like liquid cotton candy and burns like a broken neon light all the way down.

In this position, it's a little difficult to swallow, even for me. I must have closed my eyes as I endeavored to, because in the next second I'm blinking them open while my chest rises and falls with jagged breaths. My fingers grip hard vinyl while the whole world spins, and Grim looms entirely over me.

Dark and light twist and blur fast behind him, glitching more and more until I make out a mirror above us both. The sterile scent of witch hazel and rubbing alcohol tickles my nose while panic swallows my pulse, making it race and strain against the barrage of his.

We're not in the club anymore.

I don't know if we ever were.

"Easy," prey I should be more careful with chides, his tone thick with derision. My already too-hot cheeks burn as he slides his unmarked thumb over my wet lips and brings it to his mouth, sucking slick pitch darkness from the tip.

Everywhere he's ever marked me throbs somewhere between warning and anticipation. My belly button, my nipples, my earlobes all ache and pang, filling my veins with ominous heat.

He's either just pierced me or he's about to.

I can't tell.

I don't know.

"What's happening?" I ask, barely able to breathe through the warmth spilling off him and the weighted flood of his pulse. The heavy sear of his breath across my lips and the coarse edge of his voice, sinking into my mouth as he whispers, dripping liquid soot onto my tongue -

"Don't move."

I don't.

But the floor does.

The whole world does.

It tilts forward then backward as he pours the dark into me, and I reach out to keep from falling.

My hands lands on Janey's shoulders and she steadies me as I blink, bringing the standing semi-circle of bodies into focus. Everyone's here and they're all talking, but I can't process anything. Everything is warped and unsteady, and I don't trust any of it.

Looking around, I find Grim just a few feet away. He's right there, turned sideways away from me, but right there, and I have no idea if any of what just happened was real. And if it wasn't, what is?

Sharp and deep voices swim through distorted surroundings and slip into my ears.

"No way, man. She's not throwing up in my car."

"Or mine. I just got that shit detailed."

In a fleetingly still frame, I watch my ruthless lover turn to the shop's apprentice. But EKG has a girl on his arm, and he shakes his head apologetically. Anchor elbows Grim's dark arm, offering some encouragement I can't make out because Janey turns to me and says, "How lucky are you."

It's a statement, not a question, and I think I understand, but I don't trust that either.

Not even as we start to walk.

Not even when we're in the parking lot, approaching the Nova.

Not even when she helps me slide down into the passenger seat like a waterfall of soft heartbeats.

Especially not then.

I don't trust the scent of burning trees and budding iris flowers that fills my lungs, or the thick leather underneath me. I don't trust the overwhelming instinct to rub myself all over everything and mark it all as mine. I don't even trust the need tearing through my chest like a torch or the drunk swallowtails fluttering between my ribs or the little ocean he turns me into or how deeply it aches.

The rush of all of it doubling-up as Grim slides into the driver's seat and pushes his key where it belongs.

The unrelenting proximity of him.

How brutally it softens me for him.

I can't not have him.

I can't.

But I don't trust him.

He drives fast, too fast for how bad I want this to last. Whether I trust him or myself or any of this is far secondary to how it feels. The butterflies he keeps in my rib cage don't care if he's real or not, if he's ignoring them or not - just that he's here. They're so intoxicated with his nearness they're soaring in circles. Making it hard to breathe. Hard to think. Hard to do anything but feel what he does to me.

Devastatingly delicate and heedlessly in heat, I could come just sitting here. Not even touching. Just watching the heel of his unmarked hand steer us through the dark.

The tension in his shoulders is tighter than I've ever seen it. His whole body looks even more strained than it felt last night, rocking on top of me. Making me shake against his bed. Making me beg for what I need -

We're off the highway way too soon, and he's turning like he already knows where to go. We're on my street, and I'm sitting up straight, searching for a way to draw this out.

"Which one?" He asks as we pass house after house in daze.

It doesn't matter, I almost answer. I'm not going in.

I point down the block, and my head spins. I don't realize we've stopped or care if it's the right house or not. Even if I get out of the car, I'll end up in his cabin. This is all just for show.

Because he still believes the lie.

Right?

Shutting off the car, Grim rubs his forehead and drags his hand down his face. It's killing me not to climb onto his lap and kiss him. I want to kiss him like boyfriends and girlfriends kiss. As open as the sky and as deep as the end of it. I want to kiss him like the ouroboros. Like ancient Atum and his own shadow. Like we're meant. Like mates -

The word tips my head back and my lips apart while everything I need sighs from so deep it hits me like a brick, knocking the wind out of my chest as he turns in his seat. Looking at me. He's looking at me -

"Listen," he starts, pausing to swallow as he meets my eyes.

It feels so good I could cry.

Then he says it -

"Don't come back to the shop anymore."

I almost laugh. It's so unthinkable. It's impossible to even imagine staying that far from him.

"I'm too … " He pauses again. "You're too … "

I search his struggling stare, unable to suppress the corners of my smile.

"Too what?" I whisper, lifting my head and tossing my hair, permeating the small space with my innocent scent. "Don't come back until when?"

Grim takes his eyes from mine and it feels like drowning.

"How old do you want me to be?" I offer softly, reaching over without thinking.

"Don't." He shakes his head as puts his hand up to stop mine. "Just don't."

My heart pounds in time with his.

"But what about -"

He returns me to his eyes and it cuts off my voice.

"Don't come to the shop. Don't come to the shelter -"

"But -"

"No." There's no wildfire in his voice when he says it. It's iron. Lead. Deadweight. Tombstone. "I'm drawing a line," he says, dragging unmarked fingers across the bench seat. "Right here. Right now. A line between you and me."

He draws the same line again as he says it, and I wish for black to drip from his hand.

For this to be a nightmare.

Please, please, please, let me be dreaming.

"You stay on that side of the line from here on out," Grim continues, colder than even his most professional tone.

I wait for liquid darkness to seep up from the line he drew. For it to spill down my cheeks like tears. For it to rain across the windshield and rise around the car in inky splashes.

"I'm being very clear with you," he admonishes as everything stays the same, not a single drop of black anywhere in sight. "Do you understand?"

No.

I don't.

But he wants me to.

He tells me to say it, so I do. I nod my head and tell him I understand, and the little rush I get out of heeding his demand is fleeting. Crushing. Callous.

My worthless, untouchable heart doesn't make a sound as it breaks, but the scent of it bleeding is sharply sobering.

Its only desire doesn't start the car until I'm in Alice's house with the door closed, crumbling to the floor as ruthless thunder fades away.