Come on Skinny Love, Angely Mercado [i love reading .TXT] 📗

against my temple. Our eyes met, and she turned away abrubtly, as if shocked by her own tenderness.

Ivelisse left without saying a word. I didn’t hear from her for about a week and a half after that. 

***

            She stood on the corner of Union and Broadway in a black dress. THE black dress. I didn’t know whether to stand and admire or to stalk over and shake some sense into her. Why did she need other clients when she had me? Didn’t she know that I had dreamed about her coming back all week, dreamed about going to Coney Island again, dreamed about her beauty mark. Dreamed about those legs. Lord have mercy.

            My left hand was covered in writing. It’s a bad habit that I’ve had since I learned how to write. Ive, Ivelisse, Ive, Ivelisse, Ive, Ivelisse. It was written down as quickly as I had chanted out her name. Like a type of voodoo spell to make her come back. I wonder what the ladies in white behind the counters of those middle Brooklyn botanicas would think about my love-maniac juju. Maybe they’d help me have her all to myself.

            But anyways, there she was. A fire stirred in my extremities, and then it stirred in my chest when some other guy approached her. I crossed the street, was almost plowed over by a city bus, but by some miracle, I made it across.

            “Hey buddy, something I can help you with?” I told the guy as I put my arm around her shoulder.

            “Get the hell out of here.”

            She squirmed away from me.

            “I’m working, get away,” she spat at me.

            The guy gave me a once over and then continued to undress Ivelisse with his gaze.

            “So we have a deal or what?” the guy asked her.

            “Nope, no deal,” I smiled at the guy. “I tell you what; go run your pockets some other place.”

            She shoved me aside and walked up to the guy, grabbed his hand like I had always hoped she would grab mine. Jealousy is an ugly thing. I used to think that anger was, but jealousy is a hundred…no a thousand times more detrimental. It leads to anger. It leads to people saying ugly things. Well…more like it leads to people spewing ugly words to the individual that is causing all the envy. Words such as fucking hooker. Jealousy makes you go on a downward spiral of self pity. A downward spiral of I-have-not. A downward spiral of I-am-entitled-to. A downward spiral of Ivelisse stomping on my left foot with her heels and running off with that guy. He wasn’t that good looking anyway. Maybe he was rich. I hope he was rich. That’d be a good way to justify everything.

            I took the N train home, found a bottle of Bacardi in the kitchen and took a swallow. A few swigs later and the Bacardi bat and I were contemplating the meaning of life.

            “You think she just switched to become an escort to make money?”

            “I don’t think so buddy,” said the bat.

            “I mean I really liked her, don’t you think she liked me back just a little bit?”

            “Maybe, but let’s face it, you’re not rich, and you can’t dance,” he explained.

            “Why does everyone say that, they don’t even give me a chance to dance for them or to even teach me how to do anything? I will dance the freaking Macarena in a dress if it makes her like me.”

            “Woah, slow down there crazy. That won’t get her excited over you at all. And look at you all pale and stringy . Who the hell is going to try to teach you how to dance?” the bat laughed.

            “I can learn, I can so learn. Watch.”

            I danced to no music and sloshed the contents of the bottle all over my hands and down the neck of the bottle. I wiped the rum off the bat.

            “Dude that was twerking on crack, just sit down,” the bat advised.

            “Sorry buddy, I’m usually a good dancer, I swear.”

            “Sure you are, it’s alright dude, just sit down and chill. I mean plenty of ladies out there. I mean you’re stringy, but you’re not ugly.”

            “Thanks bro.”

            “No problem,” the bat smiled up at me. He paused, “Have you ever considered just getting her a gift and just telling her how you feel?”

            “She likes gifts?”

            “Have you ever asked her what she likes? Dude where the hell would you be without me?”

            “Oh my god…I am the crappiest pimp alive.”

            “You’re not a pimp, you’re a client, and pimps aren’t so uncoordinated.”

            “Oh God, no wonder she hates me. I never asked her if she likes gifts.”

            “Calm down there crazy,” the bat said, “a gift is an example. What if she likes cards?  Some people love receiving cards instead of texts, and some people think texts are better than cards, have you ever asked her what she wanted, or what she liked.”

            “Oh yeah,” I shot back, jabbing my finger at the bottle, “how come she hasn’t asked me what I’ve wanted, huh. Why is it all about her?”

            “Because you’re the one who picked her up, brought her home and then ended up liking her. How clique are you?”

            “I’m not clique, I’m just…” I paused.

            “You, my dear friend are an unromantic idiot, stop reading poetry because you certainly aren’t learning anything from it.”

            “Poetry helps me plan out things for her,” I pouted.

            “But have you read it to her, do you even know if she likes poetry and what kind of poetry she likes?”

            My shoulders slumped.

            “No.”

            “This is exactly why you don’t have a girlfriend.”

            “What do you know; I mean what if she doesn’t like poetry?” I tried to regain my dignity.

            “You wouldn’t know that,” the bat snapped back at me, “you never asked her. Honestly, it’s like you don’t pay attention to any of my advice.”

            I stared at my bare feet in solemn defeat.

            “If it makes you feel any better dude, my buddy got his girlfriend a puppy once,” said the bat.

            “How is your bottle bat friend capable of buying a puppy, and why is that comforting? Don’t people like cute pet gifts?”

            “She had allergies,” laughed the bat.

            My chair shook as I laughed and took another sip from the bottle. The bitter burn made me feel better. God bless the Bacardi family, wherever they are.

            The bat wasn’t so chatty the following morning. That or my headache wasn’t letting me hear him over the pounding in my head. It would have been nice to talk to someone. 

***

            She was on the corner of 6th avenue and 14th street this time. The dress this time was a deep plum. I hadn’t seen that one on her before. My Ivelisse stood on a corner and my Ivelisse smiled at another guy and my Ivelisse stood there without me.

            “Leave.”

            “No.”

            “Get the hell away from me.”

            I hoped it wasn’t an ultimatum.

            “Please, just come with me,” I begged.

            She ignored me and scoured the crowd.

            I was there the next day and the day after that. I contemplated giving up, but the bat wouldn’t let me. Either I’m a pushover or he’s going to make an awesome lawyer one day.  A week later the bat talked me into staring her down from across the street. The night after that she wasn’t there. I wanted her to be there, where I could watch her and feign to be her protector. I wanted her in my apartment, throwing snide comments and sudden tender glances. I wanted her right next to me, the one place she never seemed to be. Not sure what I did to screw it up. Maybe it was the jealous spiral. Not sure.

***

I called her phone several times a day. No response. Texts went unanswered. And then my doorbell rang. It wasn’t her, it was the delivery guy. The bat had kept me so entertained in conversation that I had forgotten about the bacalao and white rice that I ordered from the Caribbean fusion restaurant two blocks over.

***

            The bell rang and it was finally her.

Ive, Ivelisse, Ive, Ivelisse.

My…well I suppose I can’t say she’s my love, I mean I love her, but does she love me? Did she at any point love me, or did she love that I opened my wallet? Did she love the take out, the random serenades of classic Italian and Dominican songs in fluid words that my tongue stumbled over? Did she love that I actually wanted to seduce her before letting her step a foot into my bedroom…I wish I could call it our bedroom.

“Apparently you’ve been looking around for me.”

“Apparently you’ve been working overtime,” I shot back.

My bat buddy tried to feed me a mushy line, something about how I should just tell her what she means to me. But my response was better. At least I’d hoped it was.

“How the hell am I supposed to pay my bills or send money back home or even save up for stuff if I don’t work.”

“Well excuse me if I wasn’t giving you enough money,” I responded. “Pray tell me what it is that women in your line of work save up for?”

The corner of her lips turned up slightly, the movement was accompanied by a subtle twitch on her left cheek. In her head, she had probably murdered me four times. Twice by strangling me, once by decapitating me with a machete, and the last by castration.

“Oh I don’t know, maybe I’m saving up for condoms like every other woman in my line of work, or maybe I’m just saving up so that I might one day afford those tiny little dresses like all the other women in my line of work wear, or maybe I just want to do something with my life, but then again, why would women in my line of work even dream of making something of themselves,” she said.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to take the bat’s option.

“I could have bought you all those things,” I didn’t know what else to say to that.

I heard her hand connect with my face before I felt the sting and realized that I was looking at the window and not her face anymore. I wanted her to punch me, tackle me against a wall, and tear me apart. Rip me limb from limb and bite down into my flesh with her teeth.

“With your paycheck, let’s be real, you can’t buy me shit, and you know what, I don’t want anyone to buy me anything. None of you own me, you can’t own me.”

I tried to reach out to her, explain that all I’ve ever wanted was to be with her, not own her. I just wanted her to be close to me, close in an acoustic guitar- finger tips- slow dancing kind of way. I mean chick flicks made it seem that if you didn’t have that, your relationship sucked, but if it was with Ive, it wouldn’t be so bad. And maybe not as clique as a movie since she would put me in my place every five seconds. And there would probably be several nights where I’d have to sleep on the couch, or floor, or maybe even in the hallway.

“I don’t want to own you,” I tried to explain.

“Bullshit…that’s all any of you want, it’s always about ‘my bed’ and ‘my girl’ and ‘my money’ with every single one of you.”

“I never said anything about my money”.

I trailed her around, trying to get Ivelisse to look at me for 5 seconds. But she shoved me aside and raided my bedroom for any of her forgotten things, random clothing, and a small comb with parrots carved onto it.

She tried to grab a souvenir I purchased for us back when I had dragged her to Coney Island