Story #3: Lost

Hey guys! So I wrote a story for both last week and this week but I decided to post the story I wrote last week because I think it applies to both prompts (a road map to misery and undeserving of his power). Here it goes:

Lost.

She stuck her head out of the passenger window as they approached the sign. The dying wind rushed past her, twirling her hair around dozens of invisible fingers. Aiden pulled the car to a complete stop at the red light and squinted at the sign as well.

“Do we want 40 west?” he asked.

Half of Laine’s upper body was outside the car now, her butt upturned toward Aiden as she propelled herself into the open air. When they were a younger couple, he might have slapped her behind, just to tease her, initiate a yelp and an affectionate round of name-calling. But they weren’t a young couple anymore, and the way the cotton of Laine’s skirt hung on her cheeks didn’t excite him the way it once had. She lowered herself back into the Honda and flipped her hair.

“I don’t know,” she said, her tone almost bored. “I guess so.”

Aiden flicked on his right blinker. The monotonous clicking noise made a vain attempt to fill the silence around them.

“Maybe you should call her again,” he said at last.

“I told you, she isn’t answering.”

“We could pull out the map.”

“You know I can’t read maps worth shit, Aiden.”

“We need a GPS.”

“You need a GPS. You’re the one driving.”

The light changed. Aiden turned onto the interstate and gradually gained speed, feeling the car start to roar softly beneath him. Laine had one of her feet on the dashboard now and was picking at a toenail, covered in chipping orange polish. The orange didn’t look good next to her pale skin and looked even worse beside the yellowed bruises along her toes that had never gone away. Beauty marks, she called them.

She flexed her toes. “I’m stiff,” she said. “Can we stop to stretch in a bit?”

“We aren’t making very good time,” Aiden said. “Can’t you wait till we get there?”

“Sure, I mean, if you really want me to suffer. It’s got to still be another two hours before we get there. And that’s if we’re not lost.”

“Okay,” he said, curling his fingers around the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. Through his clenched teeth he managed, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, Aiden. Just try to be a little more considerate.”

Aiden managed to merge into the traffic, slipping in after a Sisco truck. The silver exterior flashed the late day sun into his eyes. He groped for the visor.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Laine reached over and pulled the visor down for him, swiping his forehead with it on the way down. “There. It wasn’t that hard.”

Aiden readjusted the visor against the glare of the truck in front of him and sighed heavily in the way he knew annoyed Laine. His exasperated sigh.

They drove on.

“I don’t think this is right,” Aiden said as they passed another illuminated green exit sign.

Laine rolled her eyes. “Do you even know where we are going?”

“Yes,” Aiden snapped and then checked his tone, taking a deep breath, calming himself. “We are going to your sister’s new house. What I don’t know is how to get there.”

“Obviously.”

“Can you please just take out the map?” Aiden said. “I’m sure you’ll be able to use it.”

Laine sucked her teeth in a way Aiden had always found grotesque. But she reached into the glove compartment anyway, grabbing the Virginia map. She snapped the compartment shut again and unfolded the map. It took her a full two minutes.

No need to make a big production out of it, Aiden thought but held his tongue. Sometimes, things were better left in silence.

“Now try to find her town,” Aiden said.

“It isn’t rocket science, Aiden.”

“I was just trying to help.”

“Help me read? Yes, I think I’ve got that under control.”

Despite this assurance, a minute later Laine was crumpling the map into a paper maze and balling it back into the glove compartment. Aiden was too nervous, too scared of her reply, to ask what her conclusion was. Instead, they drove on in silence before Aiden pulled off at the next exit to ask for directions.

----

Aiden used to have to ask for directions to find Laine, back when she performed at the small playhouses in the lower class neighborhoods. Those neighborhood roads would wind in and out of each other like a tangled ball of string and finding one small, worn down theater in the middle of the thicket was near impossible.

She was a good dancer, even back then. No one denied that. But getting a start in New York wasn’t easy for anyone, not even a beautiful, upper-class young woman who went to NYU’s dance program. She was on the rise, though. That’s what everyone said. Just one more of these low-brow gigs, one more recital at a performance hall that was about to go under, a charity project or two, and then she could land the big ones.

Laine didn’t know Aiden well then. She knew he was in a couple of her classes at NYU. What she didn’t know was that he came to every one of her performances, the ones he could find anyway. He liked to watch her come onstage, under the bright lights, her dark eyes glittering like black diamonds in the white velvet of her skin. Her arms, her body, her legs, her neck, they were no longer solid, but a smooth, opaque liquid, flowing around the stage. He wouldn’t blink in case he missed something, anything, something small. A flick of the wrist, a craning of the neck, a lifting of one of her drawn, slender eyebrows.

Tonight I will meet her after the show, he thought every time. Tonight I’ll introduce myself properly.

His friends thought he was weird. It was one girl, they said. What was the big deal? But they didn’t understand what these nights meant to him. It was about how, when he watched her, she seemed so close and yet so impossibly far away. It was how she seemed easily attainable and yet just out of reach. It was how her body spoke to him, beckoned him, preformed just for him. It was the passing blurs of streetlights as he rushed through the tangle of streets, searching for her.

It ended one night when he stayed after everyone else had left, sitting in the empty auditorium seats while a single janitor came in to sweep the cracking floors. The hard seat he was in creaked when he moved so he sat completely still, watching the empty stage where she had been dancing, only a few moments earlier. The brightness of her skin and the flash of her movement stained the air there. He watched it, her, flutter before him like a dream.

“You thinking about sleeping here?” a gruff voice asked.

Aiden turned around to see a burly looking employee with a walkie talkie clutched in one hand. The man nodded toward the exit. “Come on, kid, get going.”

Aiden stumbled to his feet, slinging his bag full of economics books over his shoulder. He pushed his glasses up his noise and loped toward the exit, avoiding the security guard’s gaze. The exit took him out of the theater into a side street. He readjusted his bag and his worn, brown jacket underneath and then began to walk toward the main street, where he could see cars blaring past, all horns and lights.

A door opened behind him and the clacking of heels began to follow him down the alley, following him to the street. The steps caught up with him.

“Hey.”

He looked over and found Laine, dressed in a flowing white dress and a black pea coat, her face still punctuated by stage makeup. She could have been a porcelain doll, his porcelain doll.

“Hey,” he said, shrugging his bag further up his shoulder to hold out his hand. “I’m Aiden. I’m-”

“In my economics class,” Laine said and smiled. “Yes, I know.”

“You were great,” he said. “In the dance, I mean.”

She tucked her light hair behind her ear, clearly pleased. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ve done that dance a thousand times by now. I could do it in my sleep.”

I know, he could have said. I’ve watched you do it before. But he wouldn’t say that because he knew she wouldn’t understand. Just like his friends. She wouldn’t understand how much he loved getting lost in seeing her, in losing himself in her dance. It wasn’t precise or certain, not like he was. It was open to interpretation, it offered another option. It was a window into a different life.

“Are you going to be a dancer professionally?” he asked.

She laughed, a tinkling of tinny bells. “I’m going to try,” she said. “It’s not exactly up to me, you know.”

“Sure it is,” Aiden said. “You’re good enough.”

She lifted one of her twiggy eyebrows. “You know a lot about dance?”

He tripped a little at the curb of the sidewalk, stumbling under her assured gaze. “Oh, no,” he said. “No, I don’t know anything about dance. I’m an economics major.”

“Ah,” she said with a brief roll of her eyes. “So you are just trying to kiss my ass?”

“No, I really do think you are good. I mean, if I can appreciate it and I’m not even into this sort of thing, real dance professionals must be crazy about you.”

Laine stopped walking to face him, a wide smile smoothing over her creamy lips. He noticed again just how dark her eyes were, like staring into blackness, into eternity.

“Okay, mister,” she said, handing him her purse to carry. “You’ve got yourself a dinner date. I’m in the mood for Italian.”

----

“I don’t want to stay here too long,” Laine said, drawing her legs up to her chest. She was grimacing at the run-down gas station they’d stopped at, the car idling in a handicapped parking space.

“I won’t even turn off the car,” Aiden said. And then, added, “So we can make a quick getaway.”

It didn’t make her laugh. Instead, Laine pulled her legs tighter around herself. In the mid afternoon light spilling in through her window, the long, spider leg-thin scar cupping her kneecap seemed to glow white against her skin.

Aiden opened the car door, got out, and slammed it behind him, leaving Laine’s tiny body in the passenger seat. He went into the convenience store connected to the gas station, his entry alerted with a mechanical ‘ding-dong.’

“Hi,” Aiden said, placing the crumpled Virginia map on the water-stained counter. “Can I get some directions? We’re a little lost.”

The woman behind the counter glanced down at the map and began tapping her long fingernails on the cash register. Her fake eyelashes fluttered.

“I’m not good with directions,” she said. “But I’ll try to get you where you’re goin’.”

Aiden explained where they were headed and the woman took a blue pen from the bun in her hair, clicking it open. She began to draw a route on the map, her violet fingernails clutching the pen.

“Thanks,” Aiden said, taking the map and folding it carefully.

Without a word she clicked her pen closed again and stuck it in her hair. The same mechanic chimes marked Aiden’s exit.

----

Laine used to like to paint her finger and toenails every Friday night before a performance. She said it was good luck. When they first started to live together, Aiden would make dinner for her while she put on music, something with a fast tempo. She would get ready and emerge from their apartment bedroom like a goddess, tossing her skirt playfully as she strutted to the dinner table. Sometimes he would take picture of her with his camera. Their apartment was covered in pictures of her. Pictures of her at dinner with her dance friends, glamour shots of her taken by professionals for her portfolio, photographs of her on stage taken from articles written about a performance.

Laine would strike a pose here, a pose there. Something provocative, now something funny, now something cute. All Aiden was, was the man behind the camera.

Flushed with excitement and the joy of attention, Laine would perch herself on the edge of her seat, her feet sliding out of her heels to begin moving to the rhythm of her routine. Aiden liked to see her this happy, but he feared her moods between performances, when she had difficulty mastering a step or when she didn’t land a part. He wasn’t here, he came to realize, to be loved; he was kept around to love her.

After a year, the glossy coating of even the good times had worn off. Laine didn’t play music anymore when she got ready and she complained about Aiden’s cooking. She always spoke of looking fat in his photographs or of needing to buy new clothes on a tight budget. He didn’t want to get too angry, even though he could feel his temper rising. He knew how fragile she was, how insecure. But that was just for now. The memories of how strong she was still came back when she danced; it still reminded him that she was the entrance to a world beyond numbers and sterility and into a place where getting lost in each other was possible.

One night before a performance, Laine was in the bedroom. They’d moved into a modest condo now, a place for budding families. Laine still would not marry him, but Aiden felt like the move to the condo was a step in the right direction. He was the one who had insisted upon it.

Aiden came in and leaned against the doorway, watching with a smile as Laine painted her toenails. Violet.

“What are you staring at?” she asked, her voice caught somewhere between play and malice.

“You,” he said with a smile. She could have been a contortionist, how her arms and legs interwove. Her hair fell into her face as she stared at her toes, still petite and beautiful despite the bruises and lifelong blisters that had formed there.

“Is dinner almost ready? I don’t want us to be late.”

“It’s cooling on the stove.”

Laine sat up and capped her nail polish. Aiden came around behind her and sat on the bed, putting his long arms around her tiny body. He forced his face into her neck, smelling her scent.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Laine asked and elbowed him softly in the side. “I’m trying to get ready.”

“You have plenty of time,” he said, trying to pull her into his lap. “Can we take some time for us?”

“After the show,” she said, pulling away and flying to her feet, so graceful and nymph-like.

“We always go out with your friends after the show,” Aiden said, tumbling onto his feet with much less ease. He followed Laine to her dressing table where she was fitting earrings into her lobes. He traced her ear with his nose. “Can we just come back here after?”

“We won’t stay out with them long,” she said and twirled out of his arms. “Now, stop it! I’m trying to get ready.”

Aiden felt unrest stirring in his chest. He caught sight of the pictures on her dresser, all black and white shots of her in her stage makeup.

“Why don’t we have any pictures of us together?” he asked her, not taking his eyes off of her photographs.

She was over by the closet now, slipping her feet into strappy sandals. “We do have pictures of us,” she said.

“No we don’t.”

“Yes, we do, Aiden. Jesus, what is your problem tonight? Why are you being so needy?”

Aiden stared at the photographs and wondered how someone so pretty could say such ugly things.

Laine flitted from the room and into the kitchen. Aiden followed slowly, in a waking daze. She was looking under the couch cushions.

“Where did you put my coat last night?” she asked.

“I didn’t touch your coat,” he said, his voice raising.

Her eyes flashed at him, dark and luminous. “Don’t act like a child. You always do this. Just because I’m not putting out right now doesn’t mean you have to be a bastard.”

“I wasn’t begging for sex!” Aiden yelled.

“You fooled me!” Laine snapped back. “That’s all you’ve ever wanted anyway. Bullshit you want a family. Bullshit you like my dancing. You just think I have a nice ass!”

Aiden turned away, fuming, but was met only with Laine’s smiling face staring at him from photographs on the windowsill. He closed his eyes.

“Christ, Aiden, I don’t even want you to come tonight, okay? You are going to ruin this night for me,” she was saying now and she took turns around the room, looking under tables and in closets.

Aiden stalked toward her and met her at the top of the stairs, leading down into the entrance to the condo.

“Just shut up, Laine!” he cried, tears pricking his eyelids. “Sometimes, there are more important things to talk about than you.”

“Like you?” she countered, standing on pointe toes to get close to his face. “You, an accountant? A man who takes everyone’s shit for a living? A man who was too much of a pussy to even introduce himself to me for months and just came to watch me? What kind of man does that, Aiden?”

His eyes stared into hers for only a second, but long enough to see the malice there, the darkness of a monster, and even, perhaps, the reflection of himself. Then he hit her. All it took was that moment to realize that all along he had been mistaking. It wasn’t her that controlled him. It was him that had the power all along.

The next moment she was falling, toppling down the stairs, just as gracefully as she used to dance, as she would never dance again. She ended in her contortionist pose at the base of the stairs, her hair in her face, staring at her violet colored toenails.

----

Laine was still sitting in her curled up position in the passenger seat, looking so small, with her hands gently grasping her knees. Her thumb was stroking her scar absent-mindedly. Her wedding ring caught the glare of the sun as they drove and sent a reflection into Aiden’s eyes that he had to squint against.

“We are going to be late,” Laine said, but the fight had gone out of her voice.

“I know,” Aiden replied. “But at least we will get there.”

Laine was silent and Aiden looked over to find her looking at her feet, flexing her toes, back and forth. He watched her calf muscles tense as she adjusted her feet into a pointed position, self-guided by some rhythm he could not hear. A tinge of regret and fear settled into its usual place in his heart.

With one hand still on the wheel, Aiden reached over and took Laine’s hand in his. She looked quickly out the window again. Her feet tucked themselves under her body, like a bird folding away a wounded wing.

The highway stretched out ahead of them as they drove on, back on track again. Being lost was only exciting for a while.