“That’s one fucked-up movie,” she says.
“I don’t know why I picked it.”
“Yeah, why would you possibly pick Alice in Wonderland?”
“Oh. Right.”
She pulls me closer.
“You know I love you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you need to stop goddamn obsessing all the time. I’m dead. Boo-hoo. You’re Sandman Slim. Boo-hoo. The universe is a lot bigger than us.”
I shake my head. Reach for a cigarette. She lets go so I can lean forward and grab the lighter.
“I know all that. But a lot of little stuff still hurts like Hell.”>We fall out of bed and onto the floor. Candy is on her hands and knees and I’m in her from behind. She doesn’t hold the Jade inside anymore. Her body starts its transformation but she holds it halfway. Not quite girl and not quite beast. She moans and snarls as one clawed hand rips the stuffing and springs out of the sofa next to us.
The mirror on the dresser falls and shatters on the floor. I’m not really sure which one of us did that.
We crawl back onto the bed. Candy crawls back on top and thrusts down on me hard enough to crack the San Andreas Fault. I swear I hear plaster falling from the ceiling in the room below us. I don’t care. All that matters is the girl and the monster thrusting down against me.
In the dim distant parts of our brains that can still form thoughts, I know we’re both thinking the same thing.
This has been a long goddamn time coming.
LATER WE LIE in the ruins of the room. We push some debris out of the way and move the bed so it’s at least flat on the floor. We lie down, wrapping ourselves in torn sheets and what’s left of the bedspread.
“I like this hotel. The rooms are simple, but kind of pretty,” says Candy.
“I think we broke this one.”
“Want to do it again?”
“Sure.”
Later, when Candy falls asleep, I put on my pants and boots and go back to the other room to get a new shirt. Kasabian hasn’t moved from the computer. Beer cans are piled under his table.
“Your shoulder is bleeding,” he says. “Let me guess. On the way over you ran into a midget with an armful of razor blades and barbed wire.”
“I don’t kiss and tell.”
“You don’t have to. I could hear you all the way over here. The whole hotel could hear you. Everyone was out of their rooms. They thought it was a gang fight. The hoe sight. Ttel manager called 911.”
I find a clean Max Overdrive T-shirt and put it on.
“Cops are coming?”
Kasabian shakes his head.
“Relax. I routed the call to a phone-company all-circuits-are-busy message.”
“You know how to do that?”
“I’m on this computer all day. Making it do bad things is the only fun I have. Did you really think I spent all my time looking at video catalogs and porn?”
“Yeah. I sort of did.”