CHAPTER I
Early, August 1998
From the stars above bleeds a tide of purple-orange waves that sinks the anchored big dipper and the little archer's knee known as Sagittarius. The two lovers look at the stars in the sky and they can feel the steady heart of the city moving the nightlife as efficiently as blood through veins. But to Jack and Lia, Vancouver is no longer a concern—I am. Subconsciously, anyway.
I sit here in the stars, looking down upon them. I can see Lia attentively staring at my men sitting row on row in yellow lab coats. I can see that she hears all their clapping and cheering as they watch Jack slowly lower his hand to her waist. For a brief moment, I wonder what she thinks when she sees that I, the writer, do not cheer, do not clap, and do not move to the cries of my fellow men. Does she know who I am? How I, the narrator of the story, her story, plan to tell it? Does she know that she is merely my puppet? I lean forward and smile at her with my notebook in hand. I look down at the empty pages that will soon be full of her story, and as I write this very observation, I feel as if she knows everything. It almost makes me want to end the story here. It chills me to think that when she and I look eye to eye, she knows for sure I do in fact exist. But I guess it makes this ending so much easier to swallow.
To distract the two lovers and ease my fears in absurdity, I summon a summer breeze from the Vancouver skyline that smells like fresh, sweaty, first-time, teenage sex. I watch it send a force up Lia's knee-length, near-white dress, revealing pink, chaste panties seemingly an inch thick, calling for her to be laid.
Utter silence.
* * *
An hour passes.
The two lovers, standing, look down upon Vancouver before turning their attention towards each other. Jack smiles and brushes away her dark brown hair to worship her blue-gray eyes in the moonlight.
She lets out a little giggle, feeling his fingers against her blemish-free skin. She smiles back, wondering if Jack likes her neon-pink lipstick.
He does indeed like it, and he wants to kiss her; he wants to love her. In fact, with the moonlight above them looking down, he can swear it is not the moon or the stars that illuminate the night, that it is instead her presence on this earth. She glows as brightly as all the stars; she is like an angel, his angel. Overcome by Lia's beauty, he leans forward in lust, closes his eyes, and kisses her on her tiny lips.
Overcome by Jack's courage and strength, she digs her toes deeper into the dirt, presses her body against his chest, and wraps her arms and hands around his neck. They kiss.
"I love you," he says. His heart pops out of his chest, a feeling of before.
"I love you too," she says. Her chest squeezes and squirms, a sensation unknown to her.
They kiss again to love.
They smile.
For love.
Jack lifts Lia off the ground and swings her up like a swan as she wraps her legs around his waist and clenches her arms around his neck. He leans forward and dangles her above the earth like a human swing.
She finds herself giggling like a toddler.
The sensation of a clingy girl thrills him. He drops to his knees, as soft as an angel taps a baby's forehead, and as one they gracefully touch the earth, a human sandwich—a big, invisible, meaty sandwich of love, with a two-inch-thick layer of saucy lust and dirty clothes. For Jack, staring down at Lia, whose hair is covered in dirt like miniature spiders building a nest, the urge beneath his belt comes to life.
"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever laid my eyes on. You know that?"
"You tell me all the time," she says, smiling.
"I know I do," he adds. Her grip loosens as he drops his head to her stomach and closes his eyes. He wants to have this moment last forever. She plays with his hair. His tense body relaxes; his heart thumps just above her flower. The soft brush of his cheek against her skin soothes him as much as it soothes her soul.
I can tell she is happy beyond words, yet she is distraught, thinking of the past, noticing the dead ends in his soft, loving, caring hair, the dead ends of the old Jack, the dead ends she imagines all the girls before her must have touched. That little discomfort crawls up her throat—just like those dirt spiders—and it makes her want to cry.
"I love you, Lia."
"I love you too," she says, pulling the hair a little tighter. She feels the tension in him. He cracks a smile, and with two fistfuls of her dress, he hugs her.
After a minute passes, he opens his eyes, raises his head, and slowly climbs the two small mountains of her breasts outlined through the white dress, as if they were two villages on two slanted hills. In lust, he plunges his nose just above the white seam of the dress that imprisons them, craving the smell of her alluring perfume. He's floating in the clouds. This is a love like no other, and he has had many loves.
When he has finished, he rests the side of his head on her bosom for comfort and listens to her heart flutter like a butterfly.
The comfort... the beauty...
In lust...
She looks to the night sky as my frail hands frantically scribble, and I am caught between a rock and a hard place. Her eyes stare at me. I can feel her eyes, not as they look through me, but at me. I set my pen down on the paper and wonder. Can she hear the stroke of my pen against the paper, the deep strokes engraving their limited time on this little planet known as Earth? Does she know that, as each stroke of ink falls to the page, her story is that much closer to its end? Is that why she looks at me? Smiling?
Does she know that she is nothing but a puppet on a string?
You scare me, Lia, you do. Yet I'm the one who created you.
Looking down at my paper, I read over what is written.
I see how his hands pass over her breasts, caressing them through the fabric. I see the enjoyment in it all. I can see it in her eyes, I can see blush fill her skin, I can see her lips grip her teeth as she smiles back. I can see her hands grip the grass, clenching the fresh weeds.
And in the instant that she blinks, nothing but the stars remain.
Then it ends, where my pen lies. Yet, I pick up the pen that is dangling on the page and I wonder what would happen if this pen were to fall to earth and hit her where she lies.
She lifts her head to see her dress has been rolled up above her waist, unearthing her pink panties, with a young man salivating over them like a dog. While she cannot see his arms, she can feel his callused hands, a worker's hands, on her pale hips. His crimson lips dance on the edge of her panties before settling on the soft skin of her thighs. His eyes scan up and down her legs as if they were tracing a path between Heaven and Hell.
He presses his lips to her thighs; his saliva touches her flesh. While warm and welcoming, it tickles and startles her, making her giggle and jolt repeatedly.
"Jack! That tickles!" she says.
His muffled laughter vibrates her skin. He descends the trail to her valley; she squirms beneath his lips. But before he can reach her flower—her purity—like a captain rescuing a man at sea, she pulls him up by the hair to save him from drowning in lust.
"Jack!"
From the view of her breasts that sink outward, he smiles without saying a word. An animal, she thinks. His two searchlight eyes follow her breasts' curvature, illuminate them with a soft spherical glow, and ignore the beautiful face between them. To her dismay, looking deeper inside those eyes, she finds nothing more than a dog lusting after a bone. A panting puppy, he wants her as a mere sex object. She sees not an ounce of love, just a pound of lust—of need.
"Do you love me?" she asks.
Do you love me? she wants to repeat. She wants to scream, Do you love me like you say?
"Yes, of course! I fucking adore you. I love everything about you."
Yet all she sees are his hands wrapped around her thighs, and in the middle, perched above her sex, is his face with the expression of a man about to dine on a savoury steak. All he needs is a bib and he'd fit the frame.
He can see the reflection of a wolf in her eyes, viewing her like a meal. In shock, he presses her legs together and sits up. He gazes off into the Vancouver city limits before leaning back and closing his eyes to darkness. Lia buries her doubt and believes his words instead.
He feels a body wrap around his arm. He feels the fluttering heartbeat of this body, not like a butterfly as before, but stronger, like a bird in the wind, and while he knows who it is from the very touch of her skin, the scent of her vanilla coconut perfume that dances in his nostrils for hours solidifies the reality.
"What do you love about me?" she asks, wanting to hear everything.
Ah, where does he start? Does he mention the smell of her hair, or the way she talks? The look in her eyes, or the way she walks? She wants to know that she is special, that she is his world. She wants to know that she is the last one, the best one, his only one. Forever.
But he cannot guarantee something he doesn't know, and what he says comes out very flat. "I-I don't know.
Everything, I guess."
"That's it? Just... everything?"
"Yep. Everything." He opens his eyes and sees the disconnect in Lia. He can sense the tears, the problems arising. As a cause for concern, he continues, yet he does nothing to fix her problem. "Why are you asking this?" "Because... well..." She wants to speak, but can't. She doesn't know how she feels about that answer. To be honest, she has never thought that far. But she wants to tell him the truth. Yet, do her only expectations come from what she's seen in the movie theatre? She has never really known men. Until now, it was always one man: her father. To this day, she isn't sure that he ever spoke like a true man. But that was it. She feels that true men didn't do what he did. But this is real life, and he was a man. A true man in the eyes of many, especially in Vancouver. Looking up at the stars, she sees many men.
Is her dad among them?
Where is her dad?
He is dead, isn't he?
Dad, why are you screaming at me?
Jack doesn't understand this. All he sees is how Lia shifts personalities, as if she is another person sometimes. He has gotten better at dealing with her in those moments. He places his hand on her neck and checks her eyes. They roll back into her head. Tears arise; they slide over the edge of her eyes and roll down her cheeks, clinging to the soft skin like little climbers climbing Mount Lia.
She wraps her hands around Jack's head and grabs his brown, dirty hair. Deep...