I think I’m okay, I think she wants this. I was honestly terrified at first she’d wig out, slap me, scramble away. Tell me she couldn’t stomach a kiss from a blood-soaked monster like me. I don’t deserve her, but I’m an ass**le, a selfish bastard, so I take what I can get from her, and try to make sure I give her the best I’ve got.
She doesn’t kiss me back, though. She shifts on my body, and her curled fingers tighten on my chest, but her mouth? She just waits, and lets me claim her mouth with mine. I take her lower lip in my teeth, ever so gently. My palm, my rough and callused paw is grazing her cheek, smoothing a wayward curl back behind her ear. She lets me. Foolish girl. Letting a brute like me kiss her, touch her. I’m afraid the grease under my nails will mar her skin, worried the blood that has been soaked into my bones will seep out of my pores and sully her ivory skin.
She nuzzles her face into my palm. She opens her mouth into mine, kisses me back. Oh, heaven. I mean, goddamn, the girl can kiss. My breath never really left my throat, and now it rushes out of me in disbelief that she’s letting this happen, that she’s actively taking part.
I don’t know why. It’s not like I’m a nice guy. I’m not good. I just held her when she cried. I couldn’t do anything else.
I end the kiss before it can turn into something else. She just looks at me, lips slightly parted, wet like cherries now and so, so red. Oh, f**k, I can’t resist going in for another kiss, from letting some shred of my raging hunger for her beauty show through in my kiss. She returns it with equal fervor, moving so she’s more fully on top of me, and she doesn’t stop me when my hand drifts down her scalp, down her nape, down her back, rests on the small just above the swell of her ass. I don’t dare touch her there.
This is insane. What the hell am I doing? She just bawled her eyes out, sobbed for hours. She’s seeking comfort, seeking forgetting. I can’t have her like this.
I pull away again, slide out from beneath her.
“Where are you going?” She asks.
“I can’t breathe when you kiss me like that. When you let me kiss you. It’s…I’m no good. No good for you. It’d be taking advantage of you.” I shake my head and turn away from the confusion in her eyes, the disappointment. I retreat, squeezing my hands into fists, angry with myself. She needs better than me.
I grab my guitar, rip it from the soft case, and head for the rickety, creaking, outside stair to the roof, a bottle of Jameson in hand. I plop down on the busted-ass weather-beaten blue Lay-Z-Boy I lugged up here for this purpose, twist the top off the bottle and slug it hard. I kick back with my feet up on the roof ledge and watch the gray-to-pink haze of onrushing dawn, guitar on my belly, plucking strings.
Finally, I sit forward and start working on the song I’ve been learning: “This Girl” by City & Colour. I regret it immediately, because the lyrics remind me of what I don’t deserve with Nell. But it’s an intoxicating song, so I get lost in it nonetheless and it barely registers when I hear her on the stairs.
“You are so talented, Colton,” she says, when I’m done.
I roll my eyes. “Thanks.”
She’s got her jeans back on, and one of my spare guitars in her hand. There’s a battered orange loveseat perpendicular to the Lay-Z-Boy, and she settles cross-legged onto it, cradling her guitar on her lap.
“Play something for me,” I say.
She shrugs self-consciously. “I suck. I only know a couple songs.”
I frown at her. “You sing like a f**king angel. Seriously. You have the sweetest, clearest voice I’ve ever heard.”
“I can’t play the guitar for crap, though.” She’s strumming, though, even as she says this.
“No,” I agree. “But that doesn’t matter once you start singing. ‘Sides, keep playing, keep practicing, you’ll get better.”
She rolls her eyes, much like I did, and starts hitting chords. I don’t recognize the tune at first. It takes me into the first chorus to figure out what song it is. It’s a low, haunting tune, a rolling, sad melody. The lyrics are…archaic, but I understand them. They’re sweet and longing. She’s singing “My Funny Valentine” by Ella Fitzgerald. At least, that’s the version I know. I’ve heard a dozen versions of it, but I think she was the one who made it famous.
The way Nell sings it…her voice is a little high for how low the song is written, but the strain to hit the lower notes only makes it full of that much more longing. As if the desire was a palpable thing, so thick inside her she couldn’t hit the notes right.
She trails off at the end of the song, but I roll my hand in a circle, so she plucks a few strings, thinking, silent, then strikes another slow, bluesy rhythm. Oh, god, so perfect. She sings “Dream a Little Dream of Me”. Louis Armstrong and Ella. God I love that song. I doubt she realizes this. I surprise the shit out of her by coming in right on cue with Louis’s part. She smiles broad and happy and keeps singing, and holy shit we sound good together.
I would never have thought of covering jazz numbers in a folksy style. It’s so hot, so fresh. I know the song, so I can weave in some fancy picking, over and around her strumming.
We finish the song, and I never want to stop making music with her. I take a risk and start up “Stormy Blues” by Billie Holiday. It’s a slow song, and Nell’s crystalline voice and my gravelly one make it into a ballad. I can hear Billie’s voice as I’m singing, though. I hear it coming out of the open window from the building next to the shop, back when I first bought it. Mrs. Henkel had a thing for jazz. She was old and lonely, and jazz made her think of long-dead Mr. Henkel, so she’d crack all the windows and play Billie and Ella and Count Basie and Benny, and she’d dance and remember. I’d help her bring her groceries up, and she’d pinch my ass and threaten me with sex, if only she was half a century younger. She’d make me tea and spike it with whiskey, and we’d listen to jazz.
I found her in her bed, eyes closed, a photo of Mr. Henkel on her ample chest, a smile on her face. I went to her funeral, which shocked the shit out of her rich, ass**le grandson.
My eyes must give away some of my thoughts, because Nell asks me what I’m thinking. So I tell her about Mrs. Henkel. About the long conversations I’d have with her, slowly getting drunk on spiked Earl Grey. How she was always clucking about my tats and my baggy pants. When I went straight and stopped thugging it up, she was over the moon at my tighter jeans.