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She knew he couldn't love her. She wasn’t sure he could even really like her. Not because they didn’t understand each other—even though they didn’t; and not because they fought—even though they did. Just because he couldn’t. Anyone with half a brain could see that.
He could want her, though. He did want things, he was capable of that much. He wanted to go back to New York; he wanted to win when he rode in rodeos; he wanted to drink and smoke and shoot pool and fight. But there was more than one kind of wanting. There was the way he made her want—hard and ravenous, wanting so deep it never stopped hurting even for a second—and then there was the way she watched him want: with half an eye because he might as well, because there was nothing else better to do.
It made her sick, wanting so much of someone who couldn’t want it back. She’d believed, once, that she couldn’t feel enough. Now she wasn’t so sure. Dallas definitely felt, in his own bitter way, but she knew she could’ve washed him away in a sea of feeling if she’d had a mind to. Drowned him in it.
But instead, it was him that was always drowning her. He didn’t have to try. That made it worse, that he didn’t try. He wasn’t a bit good-looking. It didn’t matter. He looked like some kind of white-blond cat, skinny and slouchy, with too-small, too-sharp teeth and eyes like glaciers in a face too narrow to hold all that hate. Pointy-chinned and hollow-cheeked. Seventeen and so old inside he had a foot in the grave, seventeen and terrifying and magnetic and honest-to-God evil. She knew that. It didn’t matter.
She wanted him anyway. Loved him anyway. Loved him. Him, who’d jumped little kids. Fought his own friends. Mugged innocents, knifed people, robbed people, probably shot people, done things on the east side of Manhattan that made her hair about stand on end just to think about. He’d killed, too. He’d never told her that outright, but she knew he had.
It didn’t matter.
How could she love him?
“You hungry?” He propped his feet on the railing, lit a cigarette. “Want a coke or somethin’?”
She just looked at him. It was raining out, smacking loud on the tin roof, and the cigarette smoke hovered like blue mist in the wet night air. It curled around his head like a halo, or maybe some horns. If ever someone could’ve given Lucifer a run for his money, it was Dallas.
He glanced at her in the silence, raised his colorless eyebrows. “Whaddya lookin’ at?”
“You,” she said.
He was in a rare, mercifully good mood tonight. Didn’t say anything to that, just smiled an odd half-smile and offered her a cigarette. She didn’t smoke and he knew it, but lately sometimes when he’d been offering she’d take one and have a few puffs. She couldn’t breathe him in and get him in her lungs the way she wanted, but she could breathe in one of the stupid Kools he liked so much.
He lit it for her. “Atta girl.”
Don’t say that, she wanted to tell him, don’t, because she wanted him to say it again. She didn’t like the taste of the tobacco, but it smelled like him.
She took a drag and watched as he leaned back in his chair and looked out at the rain-soaked street, where the lights were streaked and blurry like running orange paint. It’d been getting warmer lately, and he didn’t have a shirt on—just a leather jacket over bare skin, near-white chest hair reflecting under the porch lantern. He’d thrown it on after they’d finished so they could come outside for a minute. She was still barefoot.
She inhaled some more smoke, coughed a little.
Dally grinned at her, eyeteeth like a vampire’s. “Need a beer to wash it down?”
She just rolled her eyes.
“C’mere.”
She stood up like she was in no big hurry, took another puff. If only he knew how that word lit her up inside. Just knowing he wanted her near, even a little bit, was so much better than anything else it was like some wires in her head had gotten crossed and blown out.
He pulled her onto his lap and put his arms around her, one hand on her waist and one on her hip. She let him. God, it made her heart pound just being this close to him, even though they’d been as close as two people could get not twenty minutes ago. Even that hadn’t been enough. She wanted to be that close again. Wanted to devour him, wanted to make him into her and her into him. Want, want, want. His thighs were warm and wiry-hard under her. It was so strange, how warm and real he was, when looking at him you’d’ve thought he’d be cold as ice.
Feeling daring, she took his blade-thin face in her hands and tilted it back so he was face-up to the light. He let her. Watched her silently with those hard eyes, letting the cigarette dangle loose from his lips, still puffing on it. Examined her as she examined him. She wondered what he saw.
“Dallas,” she said. Smoothed his eyebrows with her thumbs. Watched his white lashes move as he blinked, so light that from a distance his eyes looked lidless, reptilian.
“Yeah.”
She couldn’t help it, leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his temple, where his long hair was falling over his forehead and curling around his ears. His skin there was warm too. You’re vile. I love you. She shrugged, pulled back. His face was still tilted up. He was watching her hard.
“You got somethin’ to say, then say it.”
There was nothing she could say to him. “I just wanted to say your name.”
“Shoot, baby, we can go back upstairs for that.” He blew his smoke out the side of his mouth so it wouldn’t go in her face, which shouldn’t have mattered to her at all, but it did. “I see your ears turnin’ red. You’re as bad as Ponyboy.”
“He told me one time you always get what you want.”
Dally smiled, thin and hard. “Smart kid.”
Quiet again, rain slapping on the roof. Her looking at him and him looking back. Her heart was beating too fast, and she could only hope he didn’t tell her to spit it out again, because she had no idea what she was thinking or what she’d say. None of it felt like a choice.
“Listen.” He blew some more smoke out the side of his mouth. “I’ve been doin’ some thinkin’ lately.”
“Impressive.”
He ignored her. “Been thinkin’ ’bout gettin’ outta here.”
She stopped with the cigarette half-raised. “Out?”
“Yeah, out,” he said. “Go ride the rodeo circuit for a few months. Maybe longer.”
Her heart plummeted, lead weight.
“Why?”
“Why not?” he shrugged. “Wouldn’t hurt to lay low for a while, at that. I got the Shepards and the bastards down at the station both comin’ after me at the moment.”
“What’s that matter? You’ll find ways to make people come after you wherever you go.”
That just made him grin, like he was proud or something. “You dig okay.”
She put her cigarette out. Her mouth had gone dry and fuzzy. You’re such a fool, Sherri Valance.
Once was all it’d taken. Just once. When they’d been upstairs, she’d thought, well, he doesn’t love me. He can’t love me. But he does want me. She’d seen it, felt it in undeniable animal terms. And she’d hoped that maybe, maybe he’d keep on wanting her for a while. For a long while, if she was lucky.
Once had been enough for him.
It hadn’t been enough for her. She didn’t think a thousand times would be enough.
She swallowed. “When are you going to go?”
“Depends.” He still had his head tilted back, was still watching her hard.
She swallowed again, trying to get past the hard lump that’d formed. She half-wanted to leap up, yell at him, ask how he could do this to her, but what would be the point of that? It was Dallas. Of course he could do this to her. He could do a lot worse and probably still sleep fine at night.
So she swallowed her anger and lifted her hands to his hair instead. Combed her fingers through the long wispy strands, marveling at how real it was, the way it was attached to him who was also real, the way it grew out of his head as he existed and breathed and bled and walked around with a pumping heart. It hardly seemed rational.
“You’d better have an ace up your sleeve I haven’t seen yet, Mister Winston, else nowhere will take you.” She was proud her voice didn’t waver.
He ignored that too, unfazed and unapologetic. “Ain’t you almost done with school?”
“In two weeks. It can’t come soon enough.”
“You goin’ to college or what?”
“I don’t know,” she said, resenting it. She’d heard a lot on this subject recently. “My father wants me to, but I think I need a break from it all.”
“You need more time to drive that Stingray and screw around on the river bottom?” Pure disdain.
She frowned at him. “Not what I had in mind.”
He didn’t say anything to that right away. Took his hand off her hip to light another cigarette, but when he was done he put it back right where it’d been. That made her glow inside. He couldn’t be too mad if he was doing that.
“What’d you have in mind, then?”
She shrugged. Even if she’d known what she was thinking, she wouldn’t have told him.
“Lotta shruggin’ tonight,” Dallas observed. “Thought you’d’ve had it all planned out.”
“You and everybody else,” she snapped. “Maybe I should, but I don’t. I’m sick of it.”
It was his turn to shrug. “Don’t matter to me,” he said, and she knew he meant it. “I was just wonderin’. Don’t see why your old man gives a damn in the first place.”
He cares about my education, she might’ve said, or, he just wants what’s best for me. Instead, she scowled. “Because girls like me go to college. He doesn’t need a better reason.”
“That ain’t a reason at all.”
It was raining harder now, pounding down in sheets all around them, and she wanted to draw closer to Dally, wanted to crawl into him and stop thinking altogether. Instead, she gazed over his shoulder, where fat drops were pockmarking the dirt of Buck Merrill's yard and shattering over the hood of his T-Bird like dark marbles. She wondered if she would’ve done anything differently upstairs if she’d known it was just a last-minute cash-in. He’d know all along; he’d been planning to go; he’d seen she wanted him, so at the last second he’d taken her, because why not?
And now he was leaving.
She found it didn’t change anything. Couldn’t even bring herself to hate the fact that it didn’t change anything.
“Listen,” he said again, and pulled hard on his cigarette. He sounded on-edge now. “Go off to college, if that’s what you wanna do, or stay here and pop out kids for one of them flat-topped schmucks I always see moonin’ after you. But I’m gonna go ride, and there ain’t no reason you couldn’t come and do the same thing.”
It took a second for that to register. Her eyes shot back to his face. He was scowling like she was provoking him.
“You mean—?”
He scowled harder. “You speak English, don’t ya? You heard me.” And as she watched, to her utter amazement, he clamped his cigarette between his lips, lifted both hands off her, and twisted his ring off his finger, palming it. It glittered like a silver scarab beneath the porch light.
“I’m leavin’ Monday,” he said, “or I’m waitin’ and leavin’ in two weeks. You want this or not?”
There was no please take it, or if you would. Just the question, just his scowl, just his ring. His ring that he’d rolled a drunk senior to get.
She felt suddenly like she was floating, or like she’d pounded back several beers too fast. The smell of the rainy night was sharp in her nose, the colors oversaturated.
Did she want it? Did she want it? The moment only lasted a second or two, but so much went through her mind in that time, it felt like much longer. She saw her life unspooling away in two opposite directions, like runaway skeins of thread. On one side, college and boys with short hair and friends who didn’t really know her, a diamond sliding onto her finger the same day as graduation; a two-story house ten minutes from her parents, with children and high school reunions and a diploma collecting dust on the bookshelf. On the other side, state roads and rodeos and dusty red dirt on everything, living out of a suitcase amongst drunken crowds of people, and through it all, Dallas: tow-headed, shifty-eyed, jockeying and drinking and fighting and in bed with her, saying things silently he’d never say out loud. Dallas, who couldn’t love her, who would only ever take a small part of what she would willingly give him, who could only know a corner of her mind and her soul when she felt sometimes they stretched miles-wide. They’d fight, he’d get into those dangerous moods where his eyes burned, she’d get frustrated eventually, wanting him to see her. Who knew if he’d be faithful. She’d be a plug with only one prong in the socket, happy just to get sparked and shocked without ever lighting up all the way.
She’d be with him. She’d be there to watch him ride, watch him make allies, watch him make enemies, watch him get hauled into the police stations wherever they went, like as not. She’d be with him. His ring on her finger. Boil it down, and that was what was left. She wanted to be with him. Wanted it more than she cared about any of the rest of it. Halfway with him was stronger than all ways without him.
“I want it,” she said.
His eyebrows shot up. She smiled. She’d managed to surprise him. That happened seldom enough.
He didn’t say anything, just smoothed his face out fast and took her hand, the one that’d been holding the cigarette. She watched his pale eyes in the porch light as he sized up her fingers; then his ring was sliding onto her thumb, the only one big enough to fit it. She stared down at it, heart pounding, feeling the visceral weight of the skin-warmed silver like a tiny, shining shackle.
“I’ll get you some yarn to make it fit better,” he said, “or a chain, if you’d rather wear it ’round your neck.”
She looked up and smiled at him. Every time he came out and said something like that, something normal, almost sweet, she felt like she’d up and float away. I love you.
“What?” he asked, defensive. He was still smoking that same cigarette.
She reached up, plucked it out of his mouth, and kissed him hard. Kissed him long and deep, one hand holding the Kool and one hand in his long, unruly hair, kissed him trying to say everything she was thinking and feeling so she didn’t explode from the pressure inside. If she’d been a man, she might’ve hit him just to get the feelings out.
When she finally pulled away, they were both a little breathless and he was hard again beneath her. She put the cigarette back in his mouth, fingertips brushing his lips, and their eyes locked: his were blazing in that way that made her feel turned inside-out, like the bottom might drop and she’d start falling upwards.
“You’re my girl now," he said, fierce. "Don’t forget it.”
Then he pitched the cigarette, grabbed her to him, and kissed her, slid his hands over her body as hers slipped under his jacket. When he stood abruptly, lifting her in his arms, his chair fell back with a clatter.
Much later, back in bed with sweat cooling on her skin, she watched as he dozed off, his hard face young and smooth against the sheets. It was still raining outside, and occasional flashes of lightning sliced blue-white through the darkness. The black handle of his switchblade was just peeking out from beneath the pillow.
“Two weeks,” he slurred, half-asleep already. “Be ready to go, y’hear?”
“Aye, captain,” she whispered. Ghosted her fingers over his sharp cheekbone. “I’ll be ready.”
Her parents would be wondering where she was tonight, why she wasn’t coming home. Let them wonder, she thought drowsily. I don’t care. And when she finally fell asleep, lying beside a hood in the house of a bootlegging cowboy on the east side of town, she dreamed of thread unspooling: unfurling from the bobbin up and up and up, rolling out slowly all across the wide, wide sky.