SCENE SIXTEEN (XIV)

“Глаза боятся, а руки делают” 

Pronunciation: GlaZAH baYATsa, a RUki DYElayut

Translation: The eyes are afraid but the hands are still doing it

Meaning: Feel the fear and do it anyway

“BLACK-BLACK HEARTS”

In Battery Park, Isle of Mann, Kawa Zivistan is wearing a rough cut-up gray leather jacket and Daria is wearing a red one. Against her better judgment, they met in early Fructidor at the fountains and hanging gardens near the downtown City Hall, just immediately north of the District Financial. Daria dresses glamorously as always. Perhaps just a little too colorfully appropriate to have come from university, as per Sergei. That was just her look, her way of conducting business.

The fall came up on them all suddenly.The leather jackets came right out. The first real kiss had to occur properly. There was so much dynamic tension, well only for Kawa. Our two scar-crossed, tumultuous near lovers meet to have a drink off at the Weather Up Spirits Bar. The place is sort of old school, dimly lit with gas lamps. Master craft of a sixteen to twenty four dollar cocktail short menu. They try everything at least once. The fog of lust and cocktail takes hold pleasantly by the third round since they’re stronger than the average hooch.

Kawa pays. As is completely expected. He is a man after all. He’s always expected to pay in her culture. Even though she has a black card in her inner thigh pocket. The bill just about empties his checking account. That’s how liquid he is.

Buzzed and in fine spirits, they go for a walk in the Hudson River park where the creepy anti-capitalist Tom Ottorness statues haunt this haunt. Kawa used to try and use the sculpture park by the Hudson to explain his quasi-socialist views. He prepares to make up a yarn for her amusement.

Climbing on one small statue and pontificating, he falls somehow. He twists his ankle and falls, and she catches him with a hard kiss. A real one planted right to stop him from ruining anything with his chatter. She blows hope down his lips, gives him so much reason not to feel pain.

He falls before he can tell a long, old soul story. He has just begun to craft her tale when in his big leather cowboy boots balancing himself on the back of a large copper turtle pedestal he tripped himself up coming down hard on his right foot as it twisted making wet crunching noise in his mind.

He’s now in terrible pain and thinking something in him is torn. And then came her opportune kiss. It was quite opportune. She keeps kissing him, upside down while putting on a song from her phone somehow ‘Black-Black Heart’, but not until she uses her tongue to never let him utter a cry or a yelp even.

She swallows his entire tongue. Upside down. ‘I only kiss you because you are in pain’, she thinks without thinking too hard about it. ‘Please, please Dasha; just keep kissing me’ he thinks actively.

But eventually the time for kissing has to end, it’s running late on a Wednesday. She recalls her warning, “Are you a jealous man?” She has a bed to return to in Brighton and he buys her a cab with the very last of his money. He presses green notes into her hand.

I am a jealous man when it comes to you, he thinks. Cuddled just twice, kissed just once. That’s all it took to own him.

“I belong to another man. I do owe him quite a lot,” she warns him.

“I’m not in trouble, or even ever abused. I am a mostly happy girl. My future though uncertain is not tarnished by one ounce of an immediate need.”

“Kiss me again.”

“I will. But don’t get used to it happening forever.”

The cabby shuttles her off into the night and he curses his ongoing unrequited love life. He asks the heavens which are blotted out by the district; “Why me! Why must I always go after something which I can’t claim, even her.”

But the first kiss was a true kiss and Daria who has sworn off affairs as of lately likes the way he felt on her lips and she therefore swears that she will see him yet again because he is passionate and she has read long Russian tales of men and what they do when they open their hearts and then close their eyes so it seems this Kawa has.

“I’ll call you a good distraction and will keep you from wanting me to have your last name,” she vows to the moon as she crosses the old bridge back to Breuklyn. 

“But you do distract me, and this may end so terribly. What have I done this time,” she wonders. Then she yanks him into the cab and off toward Brighton Beach they go via the Tunnel which is the only way in, the only way through the blockades and street fighting lawless tumult. Her tits in his palms, her tongue working his mouth the cap driver as if non-existent. Making love on the move as if they had only hours, maybe just days left to reunite with someone they had thought lost forever and had almost deleted the very painful memory of losing, having lost.

This transaction would go on indefinitely for many more moons unbound by human time. It was hot and desperado. It was as though for now, the two of them time revolved around each other purely.

Sometime a bit past midnight. Watson and one of his female accomplices take the police informant Joshua Hunter into an alleyway and they shoot him in the back of the head.