I’m trying? That’s what I was expected to accept? She wasn’t my troubled teenager failing a class, and I wasn’t her fucking mother. I’m trying. I could not believe that was all she had to say.

She looked scared though. She was afraid I would walk.

This both pleased and troubled me. I was glad she at least showed some concern about losing me, who wouldn’t be? It fed my ego. I thought about how hard it was to be with her, to be with anyone. But deep in my soul, in those darkest corners I had tried to drown with the blood in my own veins, she lived, tethered to me, a part of me. This is what troubled me so and often ripped me from peaceful sleep in the middle of the night. I was terrified of my desire to spend the rest of my life with Janine. At the end of each day it all came down to this one thing. Regardless of drugs, drink, her status as a famous or not famous singer, her annoying attachment to define herself as bisexual; my last vision of each night overcame all of that. I ritually looked at her face each night before I drifted off to sleep, and when I did, it was impossible to imagine my life without her in it.

If Janine were to vanish into thin air at that very moment, I would remember every single attribute of her face, every curve of her body, every tone of her beautiful voice, and every single word she had ever so much as whispered to me. There are no words to describe the terror that accompanies that kind of love.

Still, if I was going to be effective at all I had to act.

“Janine, I’m not sure if I can do this anymore. I’m going to stay somewhere for a few days and get it together. I suggest you do the same.”

Like any lover reluctant to leave, I hesitated by the door, hoping she would protest. But before she could say anything, there was a knock at the door.

112

* * * *

Kerry Washington didn’t wait for an answer. He opened the door and walked into my house as if he belonged there. He didn’t. I knew who this prick was, a dealer who scored for nearly everyone we knew, and I suspected had been Janine’s supplier both for the times I’d caught her and for the times I hadn’t.

Without warning, a rage gripped me that I probably hadn’t felt since the last woman I’d caught red-handed in another woman’s bed. Not really knowing what I was doing, I snatched the needle off the counter from Janine’s box and charged at him.

With the element of surprise on my side, I threw him up against the living room wall. With one arm I held him under his chin, and with the other I gripped the needle in a fist ready to plunge it into his throat. Never in my life had I done such a thing, like a fucking action hero in a movie, and my subconscious was frantically watching wondering if this was really me.

The punk, and he was just a punk, was terrified. He thought I was out of my mind and just crazy enough to stab him in the jugular. I stood poised and spoke clearly and slowly, “If I ever, ever catch you here or anywhere near her, I will fucking kill you.”

I let go.

“Fucking bitch! You think you’re some goddamn super dyke or something? Why, ‘cause you’re getting a piece of that?”

He jerked his head in Janine’s direction.

“Let me tell you something, baby, everybody’s had a piece of that! And as far as who’s taking who out, I’m the one who could get away with it, you don’t know who you’re fucking with!”

And that was it, he turned and left. The whole incident couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes. I wasn’t afraid of Kerry Washington, he was exactly what I said he was, a punk.

He knew a few people who introduced him to a few other people and band members of all different ranks called him by name only because he had something they wanted.