The Scent of Your Breath

Nine

They put us outside beneath a damp, watery sky. All we had to shelter us were a few umbrellas — gas heaters our sole source of warmth. A very bright light was angled toward our table, and the smoke from the roasting meat clung insolently to our hair.

I wanted to go, I wondered what the hell I was doing there.

“Meeting important people”—that’s what my condition requires me to do. But my mind and body mutiny.

As far as I’m concerned, the people sitting around this table, assailed by the damp and the smell of roasting meat, aren’t important. I couldn’t give a crap about that actor; that editor can go fuck himself, thank you very much; that photographer can squash herself into one of her own pictures and live inside it forever.

This is what all we humans do: we stay trapped inside our creations, our worlds…and no one can save us from our worlds, no one can drag us out of them.

While they all raise their glasses to my success and a thousand more to come, I repeat just one thing in my head: Go fuck yourselves, the lot of you, you horrible ass-licking cunts. I’d just like to see the look on your faces if I showed you my pussy.

I grip Thomas’s hand as I whisper to him, “Take me away from here, now.”