Anyway, that night, he was good to me, and when he gave me a ride home afterwards, I knew it wasn’t out of pity this time.

So began another mundane story of a girl gone bad while dancing at a shitty east side club and trying to act tough. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Well, you’d mostly be right. Who knew that the guy selling coke to all the dancers, the one who sometimes accepted alternatives to cash payments, that guy who everyone knew was trouble, was indeed a walking disaster? Yeah. I guess everyone already figured as much. And I let Vic’s undertow pull me right in to circle the drain along with him, didn’t I? But let me tell you, those first few trips around weren’t some of the best times of my short life.

Vic took me places in the city I’d never even thought existed. Sometimes we’d go for dinner at a hole in the wall spot without a sign on the door where all the menus were in Russian, but there were pictures, and even though nothing tasted like you thought it would, it was all delicious. Or maybe instead, we’d get burgers at a drive through and walk along a creek littered with trash and the abandoned remnants of a miniature tent city. It felt like we were explorers picking our way through the jungle, gawking innocently at the remains of an ancient civilization that once thrived along those banks. We would stop when we reached the place where the creek spilled into the Lake and find a place to sit and watch the sun setting in a burning pink sky while we ate. At night, we’d go to dark little concert clubs stuffed with oddballs and burnouts and reeking of cigarettes. We’d drink until we were stupid and then go to the bathroom, do some lines and maybe grab a quickie inside a dirty stall. Then, riding high on lust and life and love, I’d stand beside him and listen, swaying softly as beneath the distorted wail of a guitar, the city sang to me and I understood my place in its embrace.

I’d never once thought I could live like this, that I could feel so much like a child of the earth, but with Vic, there never seemed to be any real consequences. He knew people in this city, and they knew him. And even if he didn’t, people didn’t seem eager to fuck with him. For a while, it was fun to be with someone like that.

But Vic had other sides to him that started to show through after a while. Eventually, after he’d disappeared one too many times with little or no explanation, I started to suspect he had a habit he was keeping from me.

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He would go for long stretches of time in the night and slip back into bed wild, awake, and manic like he’d just snorted his weight in pure Columbian. Depending on how tired I was, I was either annoyed at how persistent he could be or charmingly seduced by it. Either way, I tolerated it because I was falling in love, and I didn’t know better. The other nights, the nights when he was low, were the ones I dreaded.

I would always wake up when he slithered back between the sheets, and I’d look at him in the dark as he stared up with that eerie emptiness at something invisible floating above us. Sometimes, I’d reach out for him and he’d jump like he hadn’t even known I was there. He’d turn to me then, and he’d tell me things, horrible things, stories of people, places, and ugly little truths.

Once, he talked about a woman named Mikayla whose friends called her Miki. She was a witch, born from a long line of mediums and spiritualists, people with one foot in this world and one in the next, he’d said. Miki could see things other people couldn’t, discern the patterns, the currents and waves that move us like the workings of a thousand secret gods just beneath the surface. But then one day, she met a monster wearing a man’s skin. He took everything from her, her gifts, her future, her power, and he left her with a rotten, black curse inside her.

Sometimes I didn’t know if the things he said were true or just strange parables, little stories that filled his head like the static between radio stations. I would ask about them, and he would tell me he saw it in a dream, or he made it up, or something like that. But when I asked him about this one, he said something different, and I believed him. He sighed heavily and rolled over. “I should know all about it, shouldn’t I?” he whispered to the night surrounding us. “Miki was my mom. And I’m the fucking curse.”

I’d never know what to say to him when he got like that, so I just laid there quiet, listening to the slow and even sound of his breathing until he fell asleep. And mumbling in a strange tongue, he would whimper and cry until I held him like a child. He didn’t seem like a curse to me. At least, not then.

Vic’s way of dealing with problems always seemed to involve a pharmaceutical approach. If I said I had a headache, he’d give me a pill. If I told him I was tired, something to snort. The day my mom called to tell me she’d seen the new billboard on highway ninety, well, there really wasn’t anything specific he could prescribe for that. He gave me something to put under my tongue that made me care a little less about the names she’d called me, and then later, a pill to grind up and snort along the edge of the bathtub while I took a long, hot soak to forget. Love sucks when it has conditions, when there’s rules. Maybe that’s why I never called Vic out on whatever it was he was doing, until one night when I came home early from my shift at Diamonds and caught him red handed in the bathroom.