Just One Night

You got her call when you had just come back from visiting your friends. She’s frustrated, vexed, and awfully tired. She sounds like she needs you, and when she admits she does, you smile gently to yourself. It’s late at night, but at San Francisco, night and day stand together, dance together and raise their glasses to each other.

You tell her that you’ll pick her up in fifteen minutes, and when she hangs up, you frown at her brief, bemused reply.

You arrive at the door and she climbs into your car quietly, taking the back seat instead of the front. You start to worry. When was the last time had she been this distressed? You don’t ask her straight away because you know you won’t get a straight answer, so you pull into the driveway of a 24hour restaurant you know she likes and kills the engine, but not leaving the vehicle yet. At this, she looks up at you through the rear-view mirror and looks away, out the window.

“What are we waiting for?” her voice sounds scratchy, like the carpets on the floors of administration buildings or peeled wallpapers in an aged apartment.

“Did something happen?”

“I just needed time out for one night. Just one night. Let’s forget we’re sisters and that we’re idols. Let’s forget who we are tonight.”

Something definitely did happen, but you let it go unto her simple request and nod to keep things simple, and partly because you’re hungry too. When you lock the car, she pulls your closer to her and hugs your arm tightly, looking incredibly restless and edgy.

~+~

She doesn’t talk when she eats, you know that well. People misunderstand and they tell her that she’s snobby and arrogant, but she’s just not much of a multi-tasker and prefers to concentrate solely on the food. You look at her from the corners of your eyes, and push your finished plate closer to the centre and wave your hand in the air to call for the waiter. You order the ice-cream she likes and it comes as planned, just when she’s done with her water and moving on to desert. When you give her the ice-cream, she looks at you strangely, like she’s wondering how you know so much about her. Then her eyes narrow because it might be a bad thing too, a disadvantage on her part.

Well of course, it’s a Jung thing.

“How was the food?”

“Good.”

She gives you short, one-word replies and you won’t tell her you’re bored of it because you’re used to it coming from her. When she’s done with her ice-cream, you ask if she wants more and she shakes her head. You can tell she’s looking for more than steak and an ice-cream.

And maybe, you could give her that.

You gather your belongings and pay the bill. But she claws your arm and begs you to stay, or go somewhere else, because she doesn’t want to go back. That raw desperation you see in her diluted irises holds you back and you nod slowly.

“Okay, I’ll take you.”

And for the first time that night, you see her smile, even if it’s small and sore on her face.

~+~

She insists that you take her to the bar, and you decline because you don’t like the thought of allowing her sister to get drunk and puke all over San Franciscan streets, and your shoes.

But she won’t stop asking and hinting and it’s annoying your quiet drive. You roll down the windows because it’s getting hot inside and you rest your bent elbow into the cool air outside. She does the same and sighs.

“It’s just one night, Jess.”

“No,” you say flatly, but you always knew your sister isn’t the kind to give up. “Drinking is bad for you.”

She then traces her finger across the black leather of the interior, eyes averted and looking lost and lonely.

“We had seen better days, didn’t we?”

You pretend like you don’t hear the dark anger in her voice, and nod to agree.

“So you’ll forgive me if I did this,” she says as she reaches over and turns the steering wheel sharply, and you nearly screamed, grappling with the wheel to keep the car from averting into oncoming traffic on the next lane.

You call her names and scream at how stupid she’s acting but she only looks away, her face so stoic that it has become a solid mask. Maybe some hard liquor would be able to melt that mask of that indefinable powder.

You take the next left and mutter, “The bar it is, then.”

~+~

She’s on her fifth and you’re on your first martini. You look at her drink and you only sip the liquor, biting on the ice every now and then. The barstools are bumpy and uncomfortable, but she looks pretty neat drinking down her life.

You stop her when her feet start to tap uncontrollably, then stop, then start again. She’s laughing into the crook of her arm, and hiccupping till her shoulders jerk violently. You let her lean against you but she pushes you away and staggers to the bathroom by herself, her mind only half-functioning, and the other half intent on letting her uncoordinated feelings loose.

You check your watch and wait, but she doesn’t come out even after half-an-hour later. You decide to look for her, and you see a series of closed and half-closed cubicles. It has become like a horror movies you’ve seen in movies. But you see her sitting on the floor, legs sprawled with bright red rashes on them and scrawled words of random written on her thighs by some eyeliner.

Her head is against the sink and she’s drooling, heavy-lidded. When you kneel down on the peed-on floors and the haven of so many girls before, you push her fringe to the side, but her eyes snap open, startlingly clear and alert. You rear back and end up sitting before her, looking like a fool.

“It’s only fun if we’re both drunk,” she says unashamedly, heavily, and drags you out of there.

She sits you onto the barstool and makes a nearly incomprehensible order to the confused bartender, who’s attracted to her thick irises and hardened, opaque eyes. You know because you’re attracted to them too.

The bartender gives her the drink and she comes to you with it, holding it for you to drink, sitting closely on your lap to make sure you do drink it. The bartender is looking at the both of you really weirdly now, but you thank God for your not-so-obvious resemblances and let her stay there.

She gives you more and more to drink and you find yourself slipping into a place you’ve promised not to venture.

And then from there, you take her on car-rides and make phone calls to people you don’t know. You’re not drunk enough to drive like insanity itself, but you go on road-rages and she laughs till she’s crying on the passenger seat next to you. She leans over and kisses your cheek. She leaves a trace of lipstick and alcohol-tinted saliva on your cheek, but you grin like a fool.

“Let’s get married, Jess, like we had wanted to when we were kids.”

“That was a play-thing, a fake.”

Her eyes sharpen and you almost thought she had sobered up until she speaks again in a slurred, lowered tone.

“Let’s do it for real this time.”

~+~

You put in a coin into the toy-machine, and push the flaps of the machine to retrieve the item of purchase. It’s encased in a poke-ball kind of contraption and you press it with both your palms till the ball breaks open. She’s behind you, leaning against your back and pointing at the different rings through the smeared transparent acrylic.

“That one, Jessi…I want that one…”

You nod but you’re not really listening to her. You stuff the ring into your back pocket and take her hand, leading her through the small neighbourhood that’s dissolving in the night quiet.

You recognise the small chapel there, the painted glass and the greyed steps she’s always imagined herself to be standing on one day. She has found a fishnet-thingy in the trunk of your car and has designed it to be a veil. You pick a rose along the way and realise that you have no pocket to put it in, so you let it hang from your jeans pocket.

“Stand here,” you position her in front of you, two steps above the pavement and you hold both her hands and look into her eyes solidly.

She’s not smiling so widely anymore, but she’s quiet and looking at you like she means it. It would have scared you, but you’re sufficiently drunk because of her and it goes unnoticed.

You move in closer and she does too, holding a cluster of roses you’ve picked earlier along the way. You sing the wedding march with unnecessary adlibs and noises of people crying in joy and clapping for you. You slip the ring on her finger and you think that that a dollar well-spent, and that you’ll never be any more satisfied in spending a dollar on anything else. She laughs at you, but when you lean in, and she leans in, you know it’s anything but funny anymore.

It’s a random string of events, and you have both hers and your drunken mind to justify it.

“Just a night. I think I can love you for just a night,” she whispers into your shoulder and you are surprised at the clarity and articulation of her words.

She sounds amazingly sober, but if you’re not drunk on alcohol, then you’re drunk on her beauty, in the weathered fishnet, smelling like a sewer, but she’s got the night in her, you can see that.      

The kiss is to press your lips gently against hers, all while humming the wedding march till the end. And you’ve parked your car so that you’d have to descend down the steps divinely with her by your side, and her hand to hold as you open the door for her. But she pauses and looks at you curiously, like you’ve forgotten something important.

“My favourite part,” she says and throws the cluster of roses over her head.

But it’s not a bouquet and the flowers scatter all over the pavement. It’s still beautiful, and she climbs into your car, falling asleep nearly immediately, with the fishnet still resting on the crown of her head.

You look at her as you sober down yourself, buy yourself a cup of coffee on the way home and notice the sun rising.

You decide to stop at the road shoulder and let the office workers drive past you. You play with the strands of hair that has come undone and slipped from the rest of her combs of hair. Then you slide your finger down her cheek and draw over her cheekbones.

Just for one night could you love her like this.

—ジュリエット