Dark Places

48 | she loves it

❝i got way too many feels,
way too much emotion.
i don't even know what's real,
i just say fuck it, keep on going,
and i get deeper, i get deeper...❞

☽

LARINA KNEW COREY.

I tell myself it's purely business to be going out on a Wednesday night with Larina.

Admittedly, I'm grasping at straws, going solo in a Nancy Drew-esque investigation about some Blair Witch, KKK, Manson-like circle jerk, desperate enough to push sobriety to the backburner for a few answers about anything. Corey Davis, a trashy tattoo artist from Biddeford, is an enigma, a puzzle piece that must fit somewhere, but I don't know where, and Larina might know... well, something. She worked at Corey's Creations, and if what Drake said about permanence is true, it's possible that Larina knew about his new business venture into potentially giving post-mortem tattoos to the victims of a cult in Portland.

If what Drake said is true, which is... just impossible to know.

I don't know. I don't know anything.

Fuck, Drake is giving me whiplash, and I hate that I remember it. I'd always gotten a little lost in the translation of his mood swings, crashing, coming down, but I'd been burned by Drake Medina last night. His rejection stung, in ways I hadn't expected, as if severing the only relationship that had helped Portland feel a little less empty, a little less dark, a little less lonely.

It's lonely, isn't it, in a place like that? Jess had asked on a Tuesday night in July, high as fuck, trying to imagine Portland, Maine. Her dark gaze, devouring late-night musings from the frayed, worn pages of a copy of Muerte y Vida de las Grandes Ciudades that I'd found in a soggy box on the sidewalk in Harlem and brought to her in Bushwick. Jessica Montero loved to read what others had decided was trash. They say that cities are isolating, designed for loneliness, but I don't believe it. It's those small towns, mi amor, those small towns that are plagued by loneliness, secluded and sick, decaying in their own fucked up way.

Jessica Montero, smoking a cigarette slowly, always, always, always moonlighting as anyone else, a philosopher on Friday, an urban planner on Monday, determining that isolation, our existence in an era of loneliness, is the source of our misery, killing us so fucking slowly.

Maybe Jess was right.

Because I feel significantly colder, emptier, darker, even when Drake breaks his silence after my class on Tuesday night.

I'm stepping out of my bedroom, dressed down, tugging at the hem of a tight skirt, in a smoky palette of makeup, heavy lashes, flushed cheeks, and stupidly sticky lipstick, and I can feel him looking at me before I even see him. Drake Medina, leaning against the counter, in the otherwise deserted kitchen, holding a cup of steaming tea. Okay, so I'd heard the kettle, and I'd happened to just... slip out in time to catch him.

Meh. Coincidence.

His gaze is heavy, lingering in dark amusement, and I flush hot, letting him shamelessly devour me for half a heartbeat too long.

"Drake, deja de mirarme así."

"Mmm. Hazme."

"Vete al carajo," I scoff as I stride past him, swinging the apartment door open and closing it.

Thankfully, Drake doesn't try to follow, but when I reach the sidewalk, shivering in the icy breeze, heading for Cumberland, and thinking I've escaped him, I'm stopped by an obnoxious piropo. "Ay, ay, ayyyy, ¡diablo, mami!" It echoes. "¡Con tantas curvas, y yo sin frenos!"