Marya opened the door and nodded to the chick then she grabbed my arm, tugged me inside, and slammed the door. She held a long knife to my face. I wished she would. “This is what you’re gonna get if you say anything but yes,” she said. Her grin was greedy. She pushed me toward the black leather sling in the middle of the living room. She flogged me for a long time with a leather paddle, then fucked me with a huge black silicone cock while choking me. It was so much better than doing meth and listening to Joni Mitchell with Bianca. “You’re mine now, ” she said. Hours later, I took a taxi back to work at Crazy Horse, covered in bruises and hickeys, bloated from the maple sugar candy Marya had fed me. I made my usual lap dancing dough, which I brought home to Bianca. “I made a mistake,” I said. Bianca’s eyes were closed. Her stomach was concave and her hip bones poked out of my favorite flannel plaid boxers. It was rare to see her sleep. She was still and quiet. She had been up for three nights, swallowed a couple Zanny’s, and crashed hard for twenty-four hours. Her breath was shallow and slow. She was my favorite Bianca when crashing. “I slept with someone else,” I said. I rolled over beside her and faced her. “You slept with what?” She shot up and leapt across the room. She wouldn’t look at me. “She came into my work. I slept with her.” A fat line, the burn down my throat, to get gone. I wanted to fall inside her and fill the space between us with speed. I wanted to fix her, fix us.
“I want to stop. I’m going to AA,” I said. “You’re one of them now.” She was right. I was one of them. An addict, a coward, and an AA clone quitter. On top of that, I was a cheater. I knew how to stop all this. I grabbed a serrated knife from the drawer and held it in the air. She looked at the knife, and then me, and cried “no, no,” in a nasal voice that seemed to come from the next room. I held it up. The knife was something we could agree on. I hurled it at my left wrist. I didn’t feel the cut at first, but I knew it was there. I collapsed to the floor slowly on my knees. I felt dizzy, light-headed relief and there wasn’t pain exactly, just a floating. I stared longingly at a bottle of Jameson. I heard The Pixies CD on shuffle and imagined dancing in PVC buckle boots. My limbs buzzed. The knife was bloody and must have dropped from my hand because it was on the floor, too. Blood squirted onto the yellow tiles. My right hand drifted over to my left to cover it up like a piece of paper over a random turd. Bianca tied my wrist together with a faded blue bandanna that she had around her forehead earlier. I watched her lips say, “Don’t look down. You’ll freak out.” But I saw the inside of my arm, the veins and tendons and deep red river, paused, not flowing. The voices stopped.
88 | HONEYSUCKLE MAGAZINE
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