Kiss Like Napalm, Part 1
He could tell just by looking at her, the girl was trouble. Dangerous, crazy trouble. His kind of trouble.
Those long brown legs vanishing into tiny denim cut-offs, torn and frayed and fading; an expanse of hard, tanned midriff showing between the low waistband and the hem of her too small vest. She stood in the doorway to the bar, dirty-blond hair all messed up by the hot, dry wind and haloed by brilliant sunshine, and her hands rested on her slim, almost boyish hips. There was a string of small turquoise beads around one ankle, but her feet were bare and dusty from the street outside.
Yes, she was the kind of girl, you went home with her, you best sleep with one eye open, ready for the inevitable moment when the screws came loose and she went at you with a pair of kitchen scissors - for kissing her wrong, or not enough, or too much.
And go home with her he would. It was one of those things. Hell, he was already half in love with her, or in lust at least. He'd always found it hard to tell the two apart. Half-cut and half in love. A few more beers and it wouldn't matter anyhow.
Sure enough, she strutted right over to where he was sitting and perched herself on the bar stool next to him. People like them had a way of finding each other: some secret sign; a beacon that you could never switch off, even if you wanted to. Life would be a whole lot easier if you could, but nothing like as interesting.
"What's that you're drinking?" she asked.
"Local beer," he answered. "Tastes like goat's piss cut with formaldehyde."
She arched an eyebrow. "Good sales pitch," she said, then to the bartender: "give me one of those."
"You want a glass with that?" the barkeep asked.
"Shit, no!" she exclaimed and laughed a deep, dirty-sounding laugh.
He handed her a bottle and she took a long, deep suck on it, the beer bubbling up inside the neck and frothing over her lips. She wiped the foam away with the back of a sun-burnished hand.
"Put it on my tab," he said.
Somewhere in the bar, someone called a name, and he looked around in case it was his. He had so many of them it was hard to keep track, but no one seemed to be talking to him.
He looked at the girl beside him. She must've been a good head shorter than him, but carried herself like she was taller. Sweat had turned parts of her vest translucent and her skin showed caramel through the cheap, flimsy fabric. She caught him staring at her high, ripe-looking tits, and she grinned at him, revealing a row of very white teeth behind lips the colour of toffee.
God, she was perfect. Beautiful trash.
No “thank you” for the beer he’d bought her, he noticed. He kind of liked that.
A rockabilly track started up on the jukebox: some tune he’d heard a hundred times but never learned the name of. From now on, it would always be their song. He smiled. That was good.
She drained the rest of the bottle’s contents in a single, effortless pull, and didn’t even grimace too much at the taste.
“Have another one?” he invited.
She screwed her face up. She shouldn’t have been able to look pretty like that, but somehow managed to.
“How about something a little stronger?” she said.
“Nelson,” he called, and the barkeep turned away from the glasses he was buffing to a shine - or at least smearing more evenly with dirt - and looked up at him with solemn, unreadable eyes. “Let me have two quarts of your finest rum and one quart of tequila.”
“And I expect you’ll be wanting credit,” Nelson replied, in his slightly sad-sounding voice that never really changed pitch.
“You know I’m good for it.” He put on his most honest and reassuring smile.
“Yes. I know,” and Nelson went out back to where the liquors were kept, returning a few moments later with two brown glass bottles and one clear.
She looked at the bottles and then at him. “So, what’s next, cowboy?” she asked, her chin cocked high and her blue eyes dancing with some secret joke.
He leant in close, and her sweet-salt smell, sweat and sunshine, was all around him, filling his head, filling his entire world. “I got a car outside, and I know a spot a couple miles from here where no one goes. We leave now, we can be there in time to watch the sun set over the ocean.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “Lead the way,” she said, and he did.
The car hunkered low to the ground: an old, beat-up Chevy, its paintwork scuffed and scratched away, and matt under a thick layer of arid dust. It had been parked up in the lot of Nelson’s bar since before it had really been early enough to start drinking, and the day’s pent-up heat poured out when the doors were opened, practically a physical force, a living thing. They waited for the interior to cool a little, so the air inside the car dragged less at the lungs, clawed less at the throat. When it became breathable, they got in, and he handed her the three bottles of liquor to hold.
She twisted in her seat, leaning across the gear stick and kissed him long and hard on the mouth, tasting of beer and salt and sweet, sweet madness. Then, as though nothing had happened, she rolled her window down, sinking back into the hot leather, pulled a cigarette from a pack of his laying open on the dash, and put it to her lips.
“Got a light?” she asked.
He reached under his seat. His fingers brushed the clamminess of the gun he kept stashed there, and his rings clanged dully against the metal barrel, before his hand closed around a box of matches which he then tossed to her.
“What d’you got under there?” she asked as she lit her cigarette - his cigarette - and dropped the still lit match out the window.
He thought about the baked, dried-out landscape around them: the bleached wood and scorched grass, the tortured, twisted thorn bushes, all shimmering in the heat-haze. It seemed only seconds from igniting all of its own, and here, his girl wanted to set the world on fire.
“Gun,” he answered as he twisted the key and the engine snarled into life.
“What kind is it?” she asked, unscrewing the cap on the quart of tequila and taking a deep pull.
“The kind that kills people.”
She turned her face to the open window, eyes part-closed, smiling lazily into the sunshine and the wind.
“So,” she said, “you got a name?”
“I got plenty,” he said. He snatched the cigarette from her fingers, half-way to her mouth, and took a deep draw. “Wanna pick one?”
She stared hard at him, corners of her mouth twisting in opposing directions. After a few moments’ pause, she said softly: “I’ll get back to you on that one.”
“And what about you, heartbreaker?” he asked, as the landscape flickered past: a slideshow in burnt oranges, ochres, russets and browns. “What’s your story?”
She sighed happily, unfolded those long, sinewy legs and rested her bare feet on the dash. Kid sure knew how to make herself at home.
“Same as anyone’s, I guess,” she said. “I was born; I’m not dead yet. And that, at the end of the day, is what matters.”
He stepped down gently on the accelerator. See if he couldn’t squeeze a few more miles per hour out of the torn-up old engine.
“Amen to that,” he replied, as the world passing by outside the car became a searing, irrelevant blur.
The dusty road wound and narrowed to a dustier trail, coming to an abrupt end where the land gave way to a rocky, vertical drop. Beyond and below was the brilliant, blinding blue of the Pacific. The sun was a throbbing, molten ball, just above the horizon, like it had been waiting up for them.
She got out of the car, and the nearly setting sun bathed her with its light, making her golden. He pulled himself out of his side, and they stood together, not quite close enough to touch. Neither of them broke the silence for a while, just stared out across the ocean as the sun shifted through shades of orange to a deep crimson bleed that leaked across sky and see alike, staining it with a colour too vivid to seem natural.
Eventually she murmured: “You know me, don’t you?” Her eyes never left the blazing waters before her.
“First time I saw you was when you walked in Nelson’s place today,” he answered, facing into the warm, salty breeze.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. Her hand reached around his waist, and she rested her head against his shoulder.
And he knew what she meant. She was late nights and hard liquor and driving too fast. She was Russian roulette and rock ‘n’ roll. She was the girl you never asked to the prom, but jacked off to each night, alone in a room sticky with longing. She was everything you'd ever wanted and been afraid of wanting.
"Yeah," he told her at last, breathing the words into her hair. "Yeah, I know you."
He pulled her to him, and his mouth crushed against hers, hers against his, as the world exploded into streaming, smouldering, scarlet craziness.
"It's just as good we found each other," she said, and he lifted her off her feet, her legs twining around his hips, and he laid her down on the hot, dented metal of the Chevy's hood.
He wasn't sure when the clothes came off. When he looked back upon it, there was little he could be sure of. He remembered the margarita taste of salt and tequila. He remembered her eyes, as blue and brilliant and wide open as the sea at his back. He remembered her stood on his car, naked and laughing and dancing to music only she could hear, like the beautiful, dangerous maniac she was. He remembered her tight, wet heat, like a clenched fist around him, and a feeling like nothing he'd known before; a feeling like coming home.
At some point, they must have left the cliff-top, because they found themselves in a tangle of anonymous white motel sheets. Gritty, rust-coloured dust had gathered in the folds of synthetic fabric: an inconsequential itch against sun-tender skin.
The air con was out, but a fan whirred noisily on the bedside table, stirring the torpid air, and his cigarettes and gun rested beside it. The light of the neon motel sign outside licked along the gun's barrel, lending the metal a strange pink-hued gleam. Through the open window came the sounds of other people, intermittent cars on the highway, the listless wind.
He lay on his side, the curve of her spine curled into his stomach. He couldn't see her face, but by the sound of her breathing, he judged her to be asleep. He ran his fingers over the tanned smoothness of her skin.
"You know this can't end well, don't you?" he murmured.
As he expected, he got no response from her. Taking care not to wake her, he reached across and pulled a cigarette from the packet on the table. He dipped his hand blindly into the bedside drawer, and found a book of matches bearing the motel's name.
The phosphorous smell lingered in the air, long after the match had been struck and the flame had died.
He smoked in the not-quite-dark not-quite-silence of the motel room.
In the morning, he decided, he really must find out her name.
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