Take Away the Saints

Life on Mars : Ch. 16-20 || Robyn Marie

16. ROUND ONE

This is how it started:

I brought Lucky to his motel. As soon as the door opened, something hit me in the face.

17. THE KISS

Let me rewind.

The first time I stepped inside Lucky's motel room, it was dark. The lights were quiet and the curtains couldn't remember what it meant to be open. The interior was stale, cigarettes and coffee and mildew from the bathroom.

I switched on the lamp by the bedside and helped Lucky sit on the mattress. Seeing him made me simmer. His face was blistered; sore bruises too young to be purple spread across his cheekbone. There was blood on his eyebrow and a split in his lip. Shadows lived in the valleys under his eyes. I removed his jacket and lifted his shirt. A map of my dad's boot heels pointed my anger in one well-traveled direction.

I muttered to myself as I searched for a towel. I settled for an extra shirt. I wet it in the bathroom sink and returned to kneel on the carpet, carefully cleaning the cuts on his chin.

Lucky wrapped a hand around mine, "Thanks."

"This is my fault."

"No, it isn't."

I brushed his hair off his forehead. It was coarse and I liked it. "My daddy. My fault."

He shook his head and kissed me.

It wasn't a surprise. I knew he'd do it. But kissing someone who'd been bleeding wasn't how it seemed in the movies. There was a medley of tastes to get past before you could even start to enjoy.  At first, I sucked on bike handlebars. Nickels and dimes and rust. But then, I warmed to it, and it wasn't so strange, just salty and quiet. Silence dropped over the traffic in my mind like the darkness in a theater. I heard nothing. I thought nothing. I just breathed. Kissing Lucky was like seeing fall from the edge of summer. Forlorn expectancy. My heartbeat slowed, I noticed it in my chest and I realized, maybe, there really was life in me. Life on Mars.

When we stopped I said, "I'm gonna get some ice for your head," and I left. But only a piece of me. The rest of me was still inside the room.

Here's how it started:

I brought Lucky to his motel. When I went to the ice machine he was alone. When I came back, as soon as the door opened, something hit me in the face.

18. THE LADY KILLER

"Janet?"

The last person on the planet I was expecting to hold me hostage in the end room of a Motel-6 was Janet. But there she was, large as life wanted her, seated on the bed chewing a thumbnail. The coverlet slid off the mattress like half an apple peel. The lamp washed her in egg yolk light, missing the hollows in her flabby cheeks so she looked like old, breaded chicken. I was on the floor. Even sitting up, I smelled the carpet, fusty from a hundred different pairs of shoes.

My head hurt.

My neck hurt.

God, she'd hit me.

There was a phone cord wrapped around my throat. I tried to get up, my veins were on fire, but the plastic tightened around important bits of me, and I sat down again hard. My hands were tied behind my back. I couldn't touch anything except for the wood grain of the door behind me and the fusty carpet. I twisted my hands just enough to scooch them inch by inch under my backside.

"What the fuck, Janet?" I said.

She scratched at her elbow.

"Hey!"