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Dee is wiping whiskey glasses and feeling self-righteous about it. Charlie is slumped over the bar nursing a beer and tracing patterns on the countertop.
“Dee?”
His voice is loud in the silence but muted by the grimy walls.
“What?”
His hand stills. Maybe he was expecting her to ignore him.
“Do you think I’m dumb?”
She raises her eyebrows. He takes a sip of his beer, avoiding her gaze.
She’s surprised. Insecurity is radiating off of him, now that she knows to look for it. She wonders what brought him here, what made him question himself. She finds that she doesn’t really care, and that she’s ready to be cruel.
“Of course I think you’re dumb.”
Because what is she supposed to say? It’s a true statement.
But Charlie refuses to accept it.
“No, but I mean, really.”
He looks up at her, eyes pleading for a different answer. Dee wants to break eye conact but she shrugs instead.
“The answer’s still the same, Charlie.”
“But do you really think that?”
He’s desperate. He wants to be coddled.
She won’t do it. He’s not the only one with an empty feeling.
“What do you want from me?” she demands. “Do you want me to stoke your ego? Because that’s not going to happen. The other day you told me that you thought chimpanzees could talk like people.”
“That’s because they can!” Charlie says, rearing back, the picture of the righteously offended. “They have lips like people! They have teeth like people! They have tongues like people! They can talk like people, Dee!”
“When’s the last time you heard a chimpanzee talk like a person?”
“It’s not — that’s not the point,” he says feebly. “I’m right.”
“Maybe,” says Dee. “You’re also stupid.”
Her stomach lights up with satisfaction when his face falls. It’s so easy when it comes to Charlie, to manipulate him into a state of being. It makes her feel powerful, even if it’s reminiscent of taking candy from a baby.
“You don’t mean that,” he mumbles, taking a swig from his beer. “You wouldn’t bang somebody you thought was stupid.”
She barks a laugh at that. That’s ridiculous, because there are very few people in the world she wouldn’t bang. And also, the hottest people are often the stupidest.
“You believe that if you want,” she says, giving him a grin that she hopes comes across as wolfish. Dee thinks she would like to be a wolf, if only because it’s not a stupid goddamn bird. Also because it’s a hunter, and she wants to sink her teeth into something. Tear at it.
“I will.”
Charlie stares into his beer like it’ll give him answers. Dee doesn’t like him all still and solemn. It doesn't feel right.
“Do you think I could get smarter?”
He’s looking at her with a pained expression. She hates this. She hates that he’s doing so much thinking. It’s not like Charlie to think.
“Maybe,” she says. “If you want to.” He doesn’t look convinced. She really wants him to stop sulking on her bar, so she adds, “I don’t think you should want to.”
He’s taken aback. So’s she. Before he can say anything, she makes up an errand in the back office. When she returns, he’s gone.
*
Sometimes it seems like Dennis and Mac don’t care about her at all. It’s like she’s an inconvenience, a blight upon the earth.
She can remember when it wasn’t like that. She can remember when she and Dennis used to go for coffee and talk, really talk. It wasn’t all insults hurled and glares exchanged. There was laughter and singing and even if he was using her most of the time, even if his affection was manipulative, at least it existed. These days he barely ever looks at her and when he does it’s with disgust.
Like now, as he berates her for ruining the gang’s latest scheme.
“You’re a bitch,” he says haughtily. “A stupid, ugly bitch.”
“Wow, Dennis,” she says, trying to sound sarcastic and unaffected. “That’s a real original insult you got there. Never heard that one before.”
“Don’t sass me, wench!” he roars.
“Don’t tell me what to do, asshole,” she sasses. His face purples, and for a heart-pounding moment she thinks he might lunge across the bar and grab her.
“Get out of my sight,” he whispers, and it’s quiet but so jagged and seething that she flips him off and then follows his orders.
She makes it to the brick outside and sags against it. The fight flees her body, leaving her shivering. Dennis’s wrath is so big. He’s terrifying when he gets big like that, and she’s scared of him.
Shit.
She fishes for the cigarettes in her back pocket, grabs one with her teeth. She fumbles with her lighter. Her thumb is too weak, all shaky after the altercation with Dennis.
“Come on,” she mumbles around the cigarette in her mouth. She spins and spins the wheel. Nothing. She’s so cold. “Come on — ”
“Lemme do it,” says Charlie, who is beside her suddenly. He’s so gentle as he takes the lighter out of her trembling hand. She’s so hungry for gentleness. She watches him coax the flame into being.
Cigarette finally lit, she takes a long drag and holds it in her lungs for a little bit, trying to smoke out the jitters.
She exhales and turns to look at Charlie, who helps himself to one of her cigarettes and lights up himself. He closes his eyes on the inhale. She admires his lashes.
He opens his eyes, catches her staring. She wants to be embarrassed but can’t be when he smiles faintly around the cigarette. She watches his clever, capable fingers as they close around the cigarette and pull it away from his mouth.
“Dennis is a horrible person,” he says. Smoke slips out of his mouth along with the words. She nods.
“Yeah,” she says. What else is she supposed to say? They all know it, and they won’t do anything. This is just it, this life where they cringe away from him when he’s angry and lean eagerly towards him when he’s not. This is it.
“You didn’t mess it up,” Charlie says. It takes her a minute to figure out that he’s talking about the failed scheme. “It wasn’t going to work no matter what anyone did. Mac sucks at thinking big picture. Like, if I was going to rob a bank, I wouldn’t be so focused on my makeup, you know?”
Dee nods, considering his lips and his nose and his beard. She liked kissing him that time. She wants to do it again.
She does. He gasps, a shocked little inhale against her mouth. It tastes like power and she’s ravenous for it so she licks into his mouth, listens to him whine and groan, lets him drop his cigarette and grab her ass.
“Dee,” he whimpers, and bites at her neck, which shocks her into reality.
“We can’t do this,” she says, pulling back and wiping her mouth. He looks at her, kicked-puppy eyes activated. She refuses to be swayed. “C’mon,” she says, trying not to mask the fact that she’s breathing hard. “You really want to go back in there all messy? They’d know that we were hooking up. You want that?”
Charlie wrinkles his nose. She nods.
“That’s what I thought.”
Charlie opens his mouth to say something. Dee’s foolish heart kicks in her chest. She doesn’t know why. She might want nice words, but she doesn’t need them. Especially from Charlie, who has done more than his fair share of tearing her down.
“Can I have another cig before we go in?” he asks, and the emptiness grows a little bit more, and she hates herself for it.
“Yeah,” she says.
They lean against the wall, side by side, and when they blow the smoke out of their mouths it mingles in the air.
*
The thing about Charlie’s body is that it’s compact but soft. It’s small but powerful, muscle not so much packed on as sneaked in. It’s totally gross and one of her favourite things to touch. Charlie’s body is a study in contradictions.
Dee likes kissing it.
“Dee… Dee.”
She doesn’t even try to stop sucking on his shoulder. Charlie’s hands skitter up and down her back. He’s panting. She sucks harder, trying to leave a mark.
She can do that, because he never takes his shirt off. He’s incredibly insecure, Charlie, which is fine because it means that this skin is all for her. It means that she’s special.
She scrapes her teeth in a careful nip and Charlie lets out a strangled groan.
It’s another power trip. Funny, how many of those she takes with Charlie. Sometimes she worries that she’s turning into Dennis, manipulating Charlie the way her brother manipulates Mac. Ridiculous, because Mac is in love with Dennis. Charlie just likes Dee’s hands on his skin, the way they make him feel like he’s enough.
“Dee, Dee, Dee,” he chants. It sounds like worship and it is balm to the parts of her soul that have been picked at. She should be worshiped, she thinks, she deserves this. She focuses on the feel of the words instead of the feel of him. (He's smooth and sweaty.) She flattens the palm of one hand against his hip. He writhes, as if that tiny onslaught is too much.
“What?” she teases, tracing patterns with her fingertips. He quivers. She kisses him. “Do you want something?” she asks, ignoring the good-bad-guilty-gross feeling that rears its head when they do this.
“I want — ” He closes his eyes, speechless. She twists her wrist and he throws his head back, thrusts his hips forward. “Deandra — ”
She wants to drink his desperation, toss it back like a tequila shot. Or sip it like a nice wine, maybe. She wants his want. Craves it.
Needs it, maybe.
*
And maybe, she thinks, they need each other. As much as anyone needs anyone, which is not very. She’d be fine without him. It’s not love or anything. Dee was not made to love people. She was made to use them.
He’s using her, too. At least a little bit. She knows he is. He needs to be needed, wants to be delighted in, even if it’s a twisted thing.
And twisted it is, as with everything she does. She pops the lid off a beer and tries not to think about it.
“I’m sorry, okay!” Charlie bellows. Dennis is needling him about something and he’s so worked up. She wants to run her hands over his shoulders, feel him melt into her touch like he always does. The tension drains out of him and it’s like his entire world shrinks down to the places where she is.
God, it’s intoxicating. She wishes she could bottle that feeling.
She can’t. All she has is Charlie screeching and Dennis goading.
“That’s really stupid, Charlie.”
“YOU’RE stupid!”
“I can read, so I think I’m doing fine.”
“You know what? You can, you can…. Fuck you!”
“I can fuck me?” Dennis repeats, amused. “Okay, buddy.”
Charlie gives a wordless scream of frustration and storms out of the bar.
“Do you have to say that stuff, Dennis?” she sighs.
“He’ll get over it,” Dennis scoffs. “And anyway, what do you care?”
“I don’t,” Dee says, and she starts towards the door.
“Where are you going?” Mac demands from the booth where he’s been brooding.
“I’m going for a smoke,” she says.
*
Charlie is sitting on the ground next to the door, knees drawn up to his chest. Dee doesn’t sit down beside him because that would be lame.
She offers him a cigarette, though.
“Thanks,” he mumbles.
“Yep,” she says, and shakes one out of the box for herself. She tosses him the lighter when she’s done with it and stands beside him, blowing smoke into the air and wishing that Dennis would be less of an asshole.
Charlie lets out a heavy sigh and rests his head against her thigh.
He doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t either. She just stands there, pretending that his head isn’t so warm against her leg, that the open and unsolicited act of vulnerability seeking comfort isn’t crawling up her hip and into her chest and gratifying something voracious in her chest.
Eventually he’ll raise his head and she’ll stamp her own cigarette out. They’ll go inside and Dennis will probably make them both cry before closing time.
But for now they’re here, and he’s cared for and she’s full.