Neither of them talked as she drove. On Sunset, he noticed a girl, semi-obscured in a doorway, nodding in short-shorts and a tank top, and he hoped that Carrie hadn’t seen her. Carrie drove west on Third Street into a pretty neighborhood on Windsor Square, pulled up in front of a peach-colored apartment building on a corner.
“You didn’t call him first?” he asked her.
“He’s always here,” she said.
Carrie buzzed.
“Yeah?” came a guy’s voice.
“Hey, it’s Carrie!” she called breezily.
The buzzer sounded, the door clicked open. The halls of the apartment smelled like some sick orangey cleanser. Mateo heard MGMT blaring on the other side of the door, which opened. The guy was a fucking hipster with graying temples; he looked like he could be a screenwriter. The place was midcentury-thrift trendy, a big photo of topless Bardot over the teak-frame couch.
“Hey!” the guy said. He kissed Carrie and then, strangely, turned up the music so that everyone had to strain to talk over it. Oh, Mateo realized, he was afraid of clients wearing a wire. Carrie didn’t seem nervous. She just seemed sort of glazed and sad. Well, Mateo thought, too bad. The guy wanted them to hang out. Carrie looked at Mateo questioningly. Had they fucked before?
“Nah,” Mateo said, “let’s just go back and chill out.” He handed the guy $200 and asked for spikes, too.
The guy looked at him anew, impressed. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
Then the guy shrugged, going off into the bedroom. Mateo sat down on the couch next to Carrie, saying nothing. He put a hand on her neck, massaged it. She looked at him and shook her head. Oh, shit. Her eyes were welling. Time to take action. He leaned over, kissed her gently on the lips.
“We are going to have a very nice time,” he said softly, smiling.
“I know,” she said, sounding more resigned than excited.
The guy came back with a paper bag, which Mateo put in his jeans pocket. He thanked the hipster douchebag in his completely non-suspect, pretty neighborhood.
“Don’t be a stranger, Carrie,” the hipster said as they were leaving. Carrie looked back at him and smiled weakly. They drove back to her place in silence. The TV was still on — she’d forgotten to turn it off.
“I want to take a shower first,” Carrie said.
“No, no, no, come here,” Mateo said, pulling her back, taking her in his arms. He couldn’t wait. His heart was throbbing right out of his chest and he was sweating all over, so he had to make this sexy if he wanted it to happen right away. “I like you like this,” he said. “I wanna smell you.”
“Gross!” She laughed, squirming in his arms. He eased her down to the floor.
“Hold on,” she said.
She went to the kitchen and came back with stuff they needed: the spoon, the lighter, paper towels, and alcohol. They sat down on the floor together. Mateo already felt high. He’d done it; he was sitting here with everything he needed right in front of him. His heart was in his throat, a swarm of butterflies were dancing in his stomach, his arms and legs were already delicately twitching with what he’d learned in rehab was called “euphoric recall.” He pulled off his belt and took off his shirt and looked at the left inner elbow where the dim quarter-inch track mark he’d had was fading, then tied his belt loosely around his arm. Carrie was setting things up for him resignedly. He dared to look at her. She was slowly shaking her head.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’m right back there again,” she said.
Mateo couldn’t avoid a moment of shame. He said nothing, but there was a beat when their eyes met, when she had to have seen his shame, and perhaps that helped him in the end, because it reminded her that he was human and not a heartless using machine.
But he didn’t nurse the moment. In fact, he said, rather coldly, “You know how good you’re going to feel in a second. Block everything else out. That’s what I do. In a second, it won’t matter.”
“Why’d you even come to L.A.?” she asked.
He looked at her and laughed, taking the loaded spike from her. “Why are you asking me that now?”
He was ready with his needle. He looked at her one more time. She was just looking at him blankly, openly, with DJ Khaled boasting and braying out of the speakers wired to the laptop. Just a fucking anonymous, hot, sunny, blank L.A. afternoon, in an anonymous apartment, in an anonymous part of town, with a next-to-anonymous girl. He was once again off the map; he could be anywhere in the world right now — and he was about to fly away, erase himself, and that was the best feeling in the world. The moment before was almost better than the actual doing. But then in went the spike. And then: Oh, the shudders! Oh, the violence inside him! Then: the fall, the fall, the fall. She was always there during the fall, 04/14/1984, the big 1980s hair pouf, the denim miniskirt, the leggings, the studded leather jacket. Why was this the only time she came to him?
Now he was deep in the fall. He didn’t know Carrie had watched him in horror and brutish, lustful jealousy. Or that, up to this minute, she’d reserved a tiny piece of her mind to walk away — to just run to the car and drive to her sponsor’s — a drive that might have led to disaster because her heart was racing, her whole body racked with chills and shakes. But now that she’d seen him like this, getting fucked by the H god, she wasn’t going anywhere, she needed it too badly herself.
A million miles away, he could feel her taking away his spike, undoing his belt. “Can you shoot me now?” he heard her say dimly, across a stratosphere. A hundred layers inside himself, he laughed. Can I shoot you now? Do I look like I can shoot you now? Fucking shoot yourself up. You’re straight and you’ve got everything you need. He felt tremendous gratitude, though — not to Carrie, who, again, was now many miles away, but to the simple state of being high again. He was relieved that that long period of eightysomething days of pretending that he didn’t want this. . well, that was only half true. He didn’t want this up until he ran out of energy to do what he needed to do to keep from doing this when he wanted this, which was, admittedly, a good deal of the time. He was just tired from the mental back-and-forth. On the floor, leaning against the bottom of her futon, he sank orgasmically forward into the Crouch. The Crouch! God, it felt so good to be back into the Crouch! And soon. . the Rocking!
“Mateo, can you please do me?” Carrie asked again. He reached for the belt and crouched toward her. He wasn’t computing time but his arm held the belt out, frozen, for thirty seconds before she finally took it from him and began tying herself off. Thank God! He crawled toward her and buried his head between her legs, her smell there mingling with his high and plunging him deeper into bliss, in slo-mo, the same way he’d watched his blood cloud back in the spike. God, how fucking gorgeous that was!
He mustered the energy to push open her legs and rest his open mouth over the crotch of her shorts while she readied her works — it was his way of telling her what she had to look forward to if she could just, could just, get over the moral hump and get herself high. He kept falling — it was the coming-true fantasy of falling down the endless rabbit hole without fear of the thud, the impact — while she did herself up, focused on the work. Then her shudders and tickles went through him, plunging into his own. Holy shit! Again with the delectable slo-mo, he felt his dick bloom to life, as it often did after he’d shot, not that he could ever have an orgasm in that state.
Mateo knew to wait until her shudders and shocks subsided and she was falling, crumpling forward. It felt like a million hours but, lying atop her, he took off her clothes, then his own, then, with the two of them like near-corpses on her sisal rug, he worked open her pussy with his fingers, then gentled in his blood-hard dick, taking the long, slow, mind-shatteringly excellent plunge inside.