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Tyler is so confusing.
He’s hot then cold. He’s staring at me like I’m a million dollars then he’s fucking Marla Singer within an inch of her sad, short life.
Marla tells me one morning, after they were up all night blowing out the bed frame, that ‘fucking Tyler was like being taken to a different universe where everything was burning down.’
I ask her why. Marla stares at me smokey eyed and eyebrows drawn together. She takes a drag out of her morning cigarette, head tilting. “Can I ask you a question?”
I don’t mind her anymore, truthfully. She’s not as annoying. Marla sometimes was the only person I could stand to be with. We wallow in self pity together. Like decaying corpses in a morgue, conversing to pass the time until we’re finally buried.
“For fuck’s sake, you’re gonna do it anyways.” I sigh and retrieve a pack of Marlboro Reds that only Tyler smoked. He didn’t share with anyone but he lets me have some. Dealer to addict. It smells like his jacket. Like his fingertips. I light one.
“Are you in love with him?”
I stood still. She stood still. Everything was still. I can’t even summon surprise at the question. I take a drag from my cigarette. I imagine it tastes like him. “Why do you wanna know?”
“Setting the record straight.” She shrugs. Her hair looks soft. I imagine Tyler letting her bathe with him. I want to break something.
“With who?”
“With the one he’s…” Marla hesitates. She’s being strangely careful today. “How do you think Tyler feels about you?”
I scoff and ash my cigarette onto the floor. “Feel? Jesus, Marla, we’re not in high school.”
“Just, try to answer.” She elbows me. “Just try.”
I take a long drag. I speak through smoke. “I don’t know. Sometimes, I think I’m more his toy than anything. I guess.” The one Tyler forgets about when he’s bored.
I am Jack’s completely transparent bitterness.
Marla swears under her breath. “Fuck, Tyler…”
She leans on my shoulder and I let her. I hadn’t slept all week. I’m not sleeping anytime soon but I’m closest to it right then.
“You’re fucked up.” She exhales, putting out her cigarette. “But I like you.”
“Really.” I say flatly.
“You’re fag. I’m a fag. Sometimes at least.” Marla drags my wrist to bring the cigarette to her cracked lips. “We get along by nature.”
Tyler wanted to go for a ride. So we went for a ride.
I’m dozing against the car window, pleasantly aching. It was my night to fight and I had bashed some guy twice my size into the concrete. Blood was still dripping sluggishly inside my mouth like an IV. 10ml of blood per hour, doctor’s orders. I tongue at it.
I look to Tyler. His silhouette was framed with airplane stars. He’s tapping on the steering wheel and he looks like James Dean after his fatal crash. A walking, talking morbid wet dream.
He tips his head to my direction. His mouth moves and I almost didn’t catch what he said.
“Go to sleep.”
I blink owlishly. Tyler pats his lap. “Okay.” I’m so out of it, I didn’t even think about if I should.
I lay my head on his cool leather pants and curl a bit to fit my legs on top of the seats. One of his hands drop to my head and buries it into my hair. It felt nice and wrong and very, very good.
“Your hair’s longer.” He says. “It’s a disadvantage during a fight. Someone can rip out a chunk of it before you know it. Bleeding scalp hurts like a bitch.”
“I know, Tyler.” I mumble, limp beneath his hand.
“Are you gonna cut it?” He makes a turn and cradles my head so it doesn’t fall. I look up to see him staring straight at the road, seeing nothing out of the ordinary with me in his lap. I melt further into the seats and Tyler’s warm body.
I am Jack’s insomnia-induced impaired judgement.
“Maybe.”
“I don’t think you should.” He drives past a light. His ice blue eyes are uncharacteristically soft. One of his socket is faintly colored. This is a man who gave me a matching black eye just a week ago. This was the man who has been fucking Marla Singer for a week straight.
“You look like a dream.” Tyler murmurs. It was like a scene from a movie. Cut. Scene. Brilliant acting, Mr. Durden. The Oscars are going to eat you up like a ten course meal tainted with bodily fluids.
I’m asleep within minutes. I remember his hand carding through my hair. I choke back bile when I woke up alone in my room.
I told Marla about the car ride the next morning and she laughed so hard she almost cracked her skull open. Later, she said that it was the saddest thing she had ever heard.
I’m laying on my shitty mattress when Marla brings it up again. “So what’s the deal between you and Tyler? And no saying you’re not in love with him because you’ll be lying straight to my face.”
She’s trying on another dollar store dress, checking herself out in the broken full length mirror in the corner. The dress is hideous, the last one was better. I tell her so.
She hums. “Yeah, I don’t like this vomit green. White’s more my color.”
It’s more gray than white, heavy with dust and dirt. But I don’t bother saying it out loud. Marla changes into the school scissor cut bridesmaid dress practically facing me and I’m not fazed. She flops down next to me gracelessly elegant. “Still didn’t answer my question.”
I bring out my pack of cigarettes and lit one. I never smoked before Tyler. Funny.
“There’s no deal, Marla.”
She looks skeptical, smoke floating around her like extensions of her own wild hair. “Try again.”
“What is there to tell?”
“Do you love him? Like for real.”
I stay quiet, smoking to the filter then lighting another one.
Tyler once gave a whole speech about the beauty of the cigarette. How it was a direct protest to living. It was dying in our own terms and with purpose. Suicide of the lesser degree. It was mostly bullshit but he was grinning like a loaded gun and I wanted him to look at me.
“Shit, I don’t fucking know.” I exhale. “I don’t even know if he thinks about me outside of orders and sermons.”
“Do you really believe that?” Marla says. I look over.
She has a sympathetic look. Unusually kind and understanding. It freaks me out.
“Uh, I guess.”
Marla takes my wrist to take a drag from the cigarette. Her bone white fingers traces Tyler’s kiss. “You’re the first one to get this?”
“He did it on himself first.”
“Doesn’t count. He’s insane.” She shrugs. “But you’re the first. The only one he did it on.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t see where she was going.
“Y’know I’ve stopped having sex with him.”
“Why?”
“It was exhausting to fuck a man clearly thinking of someone else.” She rolls her eyes, huffing a laugh. “It’s honestly kinda funny.”
I am Jack’s badly hidden, burning jealousy.
“Who do you think it is?”
Who? The hookers at Lou’s? No, he didn’t even need to pay them. They’d fuck him for free. I never see him alone with anyone else. Besides Marla. And me.
Marla groans. It was so irritated it probably broke some records. “Boys, I swear.”
“What?”
“Forget it. You’re an idiot. Still got that bad lesbian porn tape? I wanna see if you can get hard from two girls.”
“Doubling it won’t work.”
“We’ll see about that.”
It didn’t.
Tyler’s sitting on his bed, digging through his cookie box of porno clippings and occasionally bringing them up to the lamp next to him that had half the shade torn off. I’m on the floor, leaning back and trying to fall asleep. I’m itching for a fight but it’s Monday.
How did we get so domestic?
I’m not doing a good job at falling asleep.
Tyler pokes me on the shoulder and pats the empty spot on the bed. “Come.”
I only hesitated for a moment before creaking up and staggering over. This was the only bed in the house with a bed frame, let alone actual, semi-clean sheets. I start to lay on the flat pillow but Tyler tugged at my hair.
He guides my head into his lap. I’m getting intense déjà vu.
He’s stroking my hair. It’s curling at the back of the neck and the bangs are brushing my forehead. It really is getting long.
I’m in Ireland. Except Ireland is here. I’m in Tyler’s orbit. Satellite and exploding star.
“Why do you do this?” I mumble.
The spell is broken for a second. Then he went back to too softly tracing his rough hands along the lines of my crooked nose.
“Hollywood thinks beauty is million dollar smiles and perfect nose, eyes, tits, cock. People sell themselves like products and accuse whores of being morally bankrupt. Society is sick with vanity.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Huh?”
This was the first look of genuine surprise I’ve ever seen on Tyler. He was faintly amused.
“You look like a fucking Playgirl cover.” I roll my eyes. Must be picking up Marla’s habits.
He snaps out of it and grins. It’s a touch maniacal. I want to punch it out of him.
Dodging a semi truck going 80 m/ph is nothing compared to fighting Tyler. It’s all hard muscles gripping your shoulder and pinning you down. Heady sweat smell and choked noises. I get in a few good hits but I end up on my back.
“You finished?” Tyler is unimpressed.
“Fuck you.” I go pliant. I can smell Marlboro Reds on him. He’s wearing a loud red shirt, half buttoned. It looks annoyingly good on him.
“You’re a pain in my ass.” Tyler smiles sharply. “That’s what I like about you, baby.”
My breath hitched. I’m practically begging already. For something to happen.
He reaches to side of the bed and produces a cigarette from nowhere. He lights it with one hand, the other trailing up my collarbone. It grabs my jaw, angling it up. I swallow dry.
“Want some?” He asks coolly.
I nod, suddenly sleepy. All the steam wrung out. I expected him to pop the cigarette into my mouth. But he leans closer.
He takes a drag and breathe smoke into my mouth. I inhale. What comes out is a gasp.
It’s almost like a kiss. Mutual poisoning.
They say you always kill the one you love. Well, it works both ways.
Tyler brings the cigarette to my lips. I smell his metallic fingertips and my eyes flutter close for a second. I blow a stream of smoke into his mouth.
We share the cigarette like this. And then the next. I’m pathetically soft under Tyler, half asleep. He’s looming over me, knees locking my hips. He’s close and warm. Tyler always ran hot, it was like being next to a furnace. The ceiling light casts an industrial halo. He buries one hand into my hair.
“You’re very pretty.” He mumbles into my shoulder. Then into my collarbone. My jaw. My cheek. The corner of my mouth. “Y’know that?”
I am Jack’s overloaded engine-heart.
I’ve never been called pretty before. It’s what you call little girls on Christmas or a puppy dog. I can hear my own heartbeat banging against my ear.
Tyler curls a hand around my throat. “You know what I’m thinkin’?”
I shake my head. I don’t know. I don’t fully know what’s going on.
He clicks his teeth, nails scratching my scalp. I’m sighing constantly now. He stops an inch from my lips. “You’re mine. I want you like I want smoke in my lungs.”
Love as in property. But I don’t care.
He kisses like he wants to get rid of all the oxygen in my lungs and replace it with just him. He kisses like he wants to bite through my lips and reach any part of my body that only he will ever touch. He kisses like he wants to eat me alive.
Tyler was like getting a broken nose. It’ll never look the same again.
I hold on to his shoulders and try to keep up.
Tyler. Tyler. Tyler. Tyler Durden. Planet Tyler. Durden Galaxy.
He bites a star system into my neck.
Marla raises her eyebrow when Tyler shoves me against a wall the next morning and we make out like teenagers right in front of her. He leaves me with a smirk and a hard press on one of the many many dull red bruises.
“You figure it out?” Marla smiles into her broken mug of bad coffee.
“Somewhat.” I wince as I sit down.
“Oh I’m sure.” She is pointedly looking at my ass. It’s weird how not weird it is.
I light a cigarette. I take a puff and pass it to Marla.
“He used to talk about you after we fucked. About how you were and what you do everyday. Not even romantic like, just as a topic. Like that’s normal.” Marla pinches the white stick between her pointer and middle finger all elegant-like. “It was hilarious.”
“Really?”
“Really.” She rolls her eyes. “He’s obsessed with you.”
“I don’t know about that.”
She snorts and reaches over to tug down my collar. “He might as well piss on you and buy you a little collar.”
Against my better judgement, I laugh. She cracks also. We laugh for a while.