Black Iris (4 page)

We entered through a side door and followed concrete hallways until we emerged into a haze of noise and sweat, cool and murky, subterranean. The foyer was a massive marble-floored space carved up by stone arches. The air thrummed with voices, cologne and liquor and dry ice mingling in a heady scent. An electric chandelier hung overhead; the wrought-iron torch sconces were stuffed with glow sticks. Music came in tidal waves, swelling and ebbing.

“What do you think?” Armin said.

“Pretty sweet.”

“And the best thing,” Blythe said, turning and spreading her arms, “is that we’re fucking gods here.” Her eyes flashed at me. “Welcome to the underworld, Persephone.”

I shivered.

Armin cupped my elbow and guided me toward a spiral staircase. This time the oxy didn’t stop the burst of static at his touch. We lost Blythe on the stairs, and when I looked back for her he said, “She does her own thing.”

We stepped onto a catwalk above the dance floor. Crimson lasers swept over the crowd, oscillating, hypnotic, bass pumping so thickly from every direction it felt as if we were inside a heart, the dense sea of bodies rolling like one muscle, beating with one pulse. Lasers caught split-second cameos: a head thrown back, a hand reaching for someone. Abandon and desire.

We stood at the railing, our shoulders pressed together.

“Are you guys still in college?” I had to half yell to be heard.

“She’s an undergrad. I’m working on my master’s.”

“In what?”

“Clinical psych.”

I imitated his groan from earlier. “Psych major.”

Armin smiled, a perfect crescent of porcelain. The man had fucking dimples. Ridiculous. “Not a fan?”

“Doctors fuck your head up more than it already was.”

“That’s a somewhat biased view.”

“I’m somewhat biased.”

“Why is that?”

Nice try, doc. You’re not getting into the Chamber of Secrets that easily.

We gazed down at the dance floor. “Cold Dust Girl” by Hey Champ came on and I spotted Blythe right away, dancing alone. It was as if a spotlight shone on her, face upturned, eyes closed, swaying in slow motion while the world around her
was choppy and frantic. Her hair lifted and caught the light, floating in frozen veils of gold.

“How long have you been with her?” I said.

“We’re just friends.”

“She’s not your girlfriend?”

“No.”

I waited a beat. “Do you like girls?”

Armin winced, his eyes crinkling.

“It’s just, you’re ridiculously hot, and you have a ridiculously hot girlfriend who’s not your girlfriend, so—”

“I like girls. But I’m not with anyone right now.” He seemed amused. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you like girls?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Does it look like I do?”

“You can’t tell by looking.”

“Then how can you tell?”

“Girls who like each other have a different energy. More intense. Furtive. They’re part of a secret world. They speak in code, like spies. Everything has a hidden meaning.”

“You sound like an expert,” I said, laughing.

“You sound evasive.”

“Like a spy?”

“You tell me.”

That wire inside me gave a little twang, as if he’d plucked it. I turned away. Wrapped my palms around the railing, soaking up the coolness of the steel. But my mind hung on the warmth of his arm and the smell of pine needles, clean and spicy and green, reminding me of Christmas.

“Why aren’t you two together?” I said.

“Stick around and you’ll see.”

“Does she turn into a pumpkin at midnight?”

“Something like that.”

“So this is what you do,” I said in a too-casual voice. “You bring an underage girl to a club. Your wingman—wing-girl, whatever—conveniently wanders off. Next you’ll buy me a drink, help me into a cab—”

“I don’t take advantage of girls, Laney.”

“You wouldn’t be taking advantage.”

I’d said it in my devil-may-care way, but the words shaved sparks from the friction between us. Our eyes met. Red light traced the bold line of his brow, the striking angularity of his face. The stubble shading his jaw glimmered like iron filings. He looked at me in a way that felt like being touched, like a blind man seeing with his fingers, mapping my bones and skin in his mind. I felt weirdly exposed.
Seen.

“It’s not what you think,” he said.

“What do I think?”

“I’m not that good. I can’t read minds.”

Then read my body, I thought, but he only smiled.

“Tell me something.” He leaned closer, his voice raspy at the edges, charred. “If you hate human connection so much, why come with us?”

Because I don’t hate it. I hate how much I need it.

Because you’re the ones I was waiting for.

Because you smell like prey.

“Read any Kafka?” I said.

“Guy turns into a giant bug?”

“Right.
The Metamorphosis
. He wrote a bunch of other stuff. Vignettes, really. Just descriptions of feelings.” I sketched the golden arcs of Blythe’s hair with my finger. “There’s a story where this man calls for his horse to be saddled one night. He hears a trumpet blowing in the distance, but nobody else can hear it. The servants don’t understand his urgency. They ask, ‘Where are you going?’ And the man just says, ‘Away from here.’ ” I looked up at Armin. We were closer than I thought.
“He has no supplies, no map. The servants warn him but it doesn’t matter. Every time they ask where he’s headed, he says, ‘Always away from here. It’s the only way can I reach my destination.’ ”

“Sounds like suicide.”

“That’s one way to see it. Suicide isn’t really about death, though. It’s about change. Release.”

“Release from life is a permanent change.”

“Sometimes all you know about where you’re going is that it’s away from where you are.”

Armin leaned on an elbow. “It’s you. You’re the rider, flirting with annihilation. Venturing into the night with strangers. Trying to find yourself by losing yourself completely.”

I liked that. But I didn’t tell him.

“You’re one of those scorched-earth types,” he said. “Burn it all to the ground and start over.”

“You’ve got to die to be reborn.”

“Like the phoenix.” He tapped his fingers on the railing. “Seems a bit masochistic.”

“I’m a bit masochistic.”

“Why?”

“If I’m going to feel bad all the time, I might as well enjoy it.”

“You don’t have to feel bad, Laney.”

“Let me guess. Your solution is to throw pills at people and call them cured.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “I can’t even prescribe.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re a doctor. Or will be. Someday you’ll realize you can’t fix anyone, only dull the pain.”

He didn’t respond for a minute. Then he said, “Is someone in your family mentally ill?”

I looked away.

“I won’t pry. You don’t have to answer. It runs in my family, too.”

“I don’t care what runs in your family.”

Armin fell silent and I stood there with an anger churning in me, like the bass grinding deep in my bones, rising, bubbling up into a fever in my blood.

“You think you know me after an hour,” I said. “You think a few psych classes means you know shit about real life.”

“I don’t—”

“That’s right. You don’t.” I flicked him a cold glance. “Look at you. You’re a walking Abercrombie ad. We are not even on the same planet.”

“You’re angry.”

“Wow. You really are good.”

“And guarded. You’ve been hurt, but you still crave connection. Understanding. So you throw yourself into risk in a calculated way. You’re a paradox: a careful daredevil.”

The
devil
made me shiver. I hated that he had my number so fast.

“Spare me the Psych 101,” I said. “You know who else is good at reading obvious clues? Con men.”

“It’s intuition. I didn’t learn it in school. I learned it from watching people. From listening.”

“Yeah, well, listen to this. Whatever you think you know about me, you don’t. You don’t really care, and you can’t fix me.”

“What makes you think I want to?”

My mouth dropped.

He smiled, lessening the sting. “Nothing personal, but I have selfish motivations of my own. I’m not obligated to fix everyone.” His gaze drifted to the dance floor. “Most of us can’t even fix ourselves. We’re all saddling horses in the night, trying to outrun the darkness.”

Armin was not what I expected.

In a typical college romance novel, he’d be a gorgeous but
troubled sex god who’d cure all my deep-seated psych issues with a good hard fuck. I’d smell his misogyny and abusive tendencies from miles off but my brain would turn to hormone soup because abs. That’s the formula. Broken girl + bad boy = sexual healing. All you need to fix that tragic past is a six-pack. More problems? Add abs.

It’s Magic Dick Lit.

But this was no bad boy. This was a boy who’d rather get into my head than my pants.

Most of the time romance isn’t even about love, anyway. It’s about escape. Fantasy. Salvation from the mundane. Save me from boredom, from exhaustion, from my undersexed body, from microwave dinners and reality TV, from going to bed alone or with a vibrator or a cat. Save me from my desperately ordinary life.

We’re all Kafka’s rider, trying to get away from ourselves.

Maybe I’m a little bitter.

And maybe this isn’t your typical college romance novel.

The DJ segued into a down-tempo track. Blythe had stopped dancing and was staring into the distance, waiting. A guy snaked through the crowd toward her, a hunk of silk and gel and gym-molded muscle, more product than person. She pivoted on her heel, the guy trailing in her wake. Before they disappeared she glanced straight up at us. Her face was cool and blank. In that moment I knew we were the same, me and her. Hunters.

“That’s why we’re just friends,” Armin said, so softly I barely heard. “She can’t fall in love, and I can’t fall out.”

———

We hit the dance floor after Blythe left. Armin filled in for the DJ and I joined him in the booth. “What do you want
to hear?” he said, and I remembered Donnie at home and asked for “All I Need Is a Miracle.” Our song. Armin let me do the crossfade, which felt amazing, my hands gliding over the starship controls of the mixer and filling the cosmos with sound, giving life to three hundred pounding hearts. His hand floated over mine, then pulled away. He played “Don’t Lose My Number” by Phil Collins and I thought of my half-assed garage band with Donnie, crooning eighties covers on Dad’s karaoke machine, our hair teased out with mousse. Armin caught me lip-syncing and grinned. Despite my best intentions, I was enjoying this. Too loud to talk. We spoke through songs. Me: “Everything She Wants.” Him: “Invisible Touch.” Me: “What Have I Done to Deserve This.” He laughed at that, a beautiful laugh, really, his teeth gleaming opal behind those dusty-rose lips, and I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. If I would feel anything, or if it would be vacuum and void like it always was.

The original DJ came back and we stepped down, bouncing on our toes, energized.

“Impressive,” Armin said in my ear, and my spine lit up like a strand of Christmas lights. “You know your eighties.”

“Me and my brother are total eighties nerds.”

“Younger brother?”

“Yeah.”

We waded through the crowd to the bar, where he ordered two Sprites. “I have a younger sister.”

“Is that why you decided to be my white knight?”

His shoulders stiffened. He wore a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and faded, form-fitting jeans. When he frowned his eyes nearly closed, his eyelashes so long and kohl-black they seemed almost feminine.

God. I’m describing a man’s eyelashes. Fucking shoot me.

“How was I white-knighting?” he said.

“Come on. Blythe stalked
me
. I caught her in the bathroom. You guys were watching out for the dumb pledge.”

“She has a thing for lost girls.” He handed me a tumbler. “Were we that obvious?”

“She looked super guilty when I caught her.”

“Her face doesn’t hide anything.”

I looked down into my glass, thinking, Perfect.

“It was her idea. Like I said, I don’t harbor delusions of being anyone’s savior.”

“Whatever. It was nice.”

His eyes did that crinkling thing again. “You don’t like saying thank you, do you?”

“I don’t want to get a reputation.”

“For what?”

“Being human.”

He laughed and took a swallow of his drink. I set mine on the bar. When he raised an eyebrow I said, “I don’t take drinks from strangers.”

“Are we still strangers?”

I averted my eyes, my face inexplicably hot. “Or from doctors.”

“Fair enough. You’ve made your hatred clear.”

“I don’t hate you. I can’t hate a man who shamelessly loves the eighties.”

“So what did you give her?”

This guy was good. Lull me into camaraderie, then cobra strike. “What?”

“Don’t play coy. What was it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the pills you gave Blythe in the cab.”

I shrugged one shoulder. “Just some oxy.”

Armin sighed.

“Hey,
she
wanted it—”

“You hate meds, but you’re a pillhead. I should’ve known.”

“Dude.” I gripped the counter. “Don’t judge me. You don’t know the kind of shit I have to deal with. Look, I kept my grades up and got into CU. I’m fine.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re fine.”

“It means I’m a high-functioning addict.”

Surprisingly, he shrugged, too. “Okay. Honesty. Points for that.”

“Don’t patronize me. I don’t need your approval.”

“I’m not giving it. I’ve just seen too many people ruin their lives with drugs.”

“Like your sister.”

“Like my sister.” His gaze turned shrewd. “How’d you guess?”

“I watch and listen, too.”

“You have a good sense of people.”

But I didn’t. My mother had a good sense of people.
We’re all bad
, she’d said.
The only thing we’re good at is hiding it.

Someone bumped into me from behind, and Armin slung an arm around my shoulders protectively. Whoever it was mumbled an apology, but neither of us were paying attention. I was staring at that rose-lipped mouth, then up into his eyes, a clear reddish-brown like carnelian, speckled with tiny flaws of amber and copper where the light caught.