“Stay with me,” she whispered, touching his cheek, his jaw, until his dark eyes lifted to meet hers.
“I’m here.”
“With me,” she said, the emphasis clear, feeling her heart beating hard in her chest, how it expanded to include this boy/man, every man, everything, from the inside out. “This, Brian… this is what we’re alive for.”
“You were right.” He lifted his head, his eyes no longer searching. “I’ll never be the same.”
She pulled him close and held on. “I know.”
Orion’s Belt
Middy was waiting. She’d spent her life waiting-waiting to be old enough, to earn enough, to get enough, to get out. She sat like a perpetually hopeful Linus in the Great Pumpkin Patch, waiting for something that would never come, hoping for the arrival of someone who would never appear, leaving her always, just…waiting.
The field was dark, the air warm over her bare arms and legs. She was dressed for work-short skirt, halter top-although she’d carried her four inch heels when she left the pavement and walked barefoot through the grass to this spot. There were no lights out here, no street lights, no city lights. She could only see one faint square glow of a house window and it seemed miles away.
She lifted her face to the sky, scanning the stars, millions of them out there in the darkness, the patterns unfamiliar and undecipherable to her, except for the big dipper and the belt of the one called Orion. She only knew that one because her mother had pointed it out to her once. “Look, Chlamydia, there’s the belt of Orion-almost close enough you could reach out and hang onto it, isn’t it? I bet he could take you anywhere.”
Her mother had been a prostitute, too, always waiting and looking for a way out.