Page 32 of Puck
Colbie eyed me sidelong, eyes narrowed. “Puck. You didn’t.”
I stared at her, not bothering to disguise my anger. “Fuckno! Jesus, Colbie.”
She raised both hands in a gesture of apology. “Hey, we don’t know each other very well.”
“If you can’t see by now that I’m not the type of guy to rape a blackout drunk chick, then either you’re a terrible judge of character, or I come across as a lot more of a skeezy shit-ball than I thought.”
“Or maybe I was feeling you out, seeing how you’d react to the insinuation.” She shrugged and smirked at me. “The vehemence of your response goes a lot farther in telling me about what kind of guy you are than anything else you might say.”
I blew out a calming breath. “I’m glad I passed your test, in that case.”
She reached out and trailed a finger through my beard. “So. Lonely drunk girl . . . what’d you do?”
“Took her back to my place. I couldn’t just leave her there.”
“You could have gotten her address from her purse.”
I cocked my head to the side. “I suppose. But everything life has taught me says to never ever dig in a woman’s purse. Especially one I don’t know.”
“You said you’d been talking to her most of the night.”
“Doesn’t mean I knew her well enough to go hunting in her purse.” I waved my hand. “Point is, I put her in my bed, made sure she wasn’t gonna choke on her own vomit, and then set some Gatorade and Tylenol on the bedside table.”
“What did you guys talk about?”
I waved a hand. “Just . . . random bullshit. Politics, movies, music, surface shit. Nothing deep, nothing about ourselves.” I paused. “The only reason I brought her to my place was because it seemed safest. Even if I had gotten her address, she was so clobbered she would have needed monitoring, and she’d mentioned that she lived alone. I slept on the couch and got up a few times to check on her, make sure she hadn’t upchucked in her sleep.”
“So then in the morning . . .”
I hesitated. “In the morning . . . she woke up at like eleven, and I made coffee, and we had a super awkward conversation. The first thing I told her was that, in case the fact that she’d woken up completely clothed wasn’t enough of an indication, she’d passed out in the cab, and I’d tossed her in bed and that was that. I wasn’t sure what kind of girl she was, if she’d assume we’d banged or be worried about it . . . I just wasn’t sure. Like I said, we hadn’t discussed ourselves, like at all. She seemed embarrassed, but also upset, still.”
“Not seeing where this is going, to be honest.”
“Eventually, I flat out asked her what was wrong.” I let the silence hang for a moment, thinking back. “She didn’t answer for a long time. When she did, it was to tell me that she’d planned on getting drunk, going home, and killing herself.”
“Holy shit. Why?”
“That’s verbatim what I said, actually. She told me she was twenty-one, a virgin, and had terminal cancer.”
“Oh my god,” Colbie breathed.
I nodded. “Now you see where it’s going.”
She sighed. “I think so, yeah.”
“She reached up and pulled her wig off, because I guess she could tell that I was feeling a little skeptical, maybe. She didn’t look sick, you know? When she took the wig off, she was completely bald.”
“Jeez. What did you do?”
“What does anyone do in that situation?” I laughed. “I completely blanked. Froze. Like . . . what was I supposed to say? Ask how long she has left? Seems cold, to me.”
Colbie nodded. “I can see the difficulty.”
“At that point, I experienced what still remains the longest, most tense, most awkward silence of my life. I’m not an emotionally comforting sort of guy, you know? I’m still not, and I was even less so, then. I was still pretty hurt and pissed off and fucked up over Raquel, wasn’t really in a place where I knew how to comfort a pissed off dying girl.”
“So what happened?”
“She asked if I’d take her home, so I did, and that was that, I thought.” I glanced at Colbie. “This is where it gets interesting. Two months pass, I pretty much forget about her. Then the door buzzer thing goes off at like three in the morning, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, whatever you want to call it. I answer the door in a pair of underwear, because what the fuck? Nobody I knew even knew where I lived. It was her, the girl. I never got her name, and she never offered. By the time morning came around and she was admitting to being terminal and a virgin, it seemed kind of late to be like, ‘oh hey, by the way, what’s your name?’ You know? So I never got her name. Then she shows up at my door at three in the morning. She’s crying. No wig, a lot thinner, looked sick this time.”