Mojave
— Short Fiction —
The morning we left for the Mojave, we danced together naked to Van Morrison in the kitchen of the Shoebox Room. He made love to me on the mattress on the floor, and as I moved over him, my body warm and wet and fast, he pushed my shoulders back. “Let me look at you,” he said, just like always. He gripped my hips hard, light washing through my skull as I cried out. I opened my eyes to a moth, clinging to the lower left corner of the screen.
Afterward, we lay on the sheet, our bodies pressed together, breathing softly, the damp wreckage of all we’d done to one another, the wrong turns and the fuck-ups of ten years. “Don’t go back on Monday, D,” he whispered, “Stay.” I turned to look at him, sure that he was joking. His eyes caught my breath, so green and darkly shining, laid open, almost free, like the clean shade of the woods he had grown up in. “Stay,” he said again. I reached out to touch his face, the raised worn scar at the edge of his left eye where his father stabbed him when he was nine.
From L.A., we take 10 East to 605 North to route 210 — then 15 North to 40 East. Exit onto Kelbaker Road. Nicky and I are in the back, Rafe drives and beside him, his girlfriend Cally, a moody knockout — 22 years old and 5 months pregnant — lithe body, dark ringlet curls, her belly sits like a ball in her lap. Rafe met her in his yard one day. She’d been out…
