That evening at work, we are somber. Darrell stops by at the end of his shift on the telemetry unit and congratulates me on my promotion, a nod of confidence and touch of his strong hand on my back that is joyless for both of us. My new role is the furthest thing from my mind. I can still smell funeral incense, can still taste Shane, her sex, the blood of Jesus faintly alcoholic on her lips. I think about that as I give assignments.

I think of her waiting in the big hotel down the street, and it makes the time pass quickly.

Still, I’m quick inside, raging for her, and I can’t think of anything but being back with her, to coming back here to that decadent hotel and burying my sorrow in her skin.

Finally, I slide my key card and open the door to see the lights gone out in the room, and milky TV light flickering over the messy bed. Shane sits there watching me. There is a room service tray with candles that flicker, and white wine chilling.

“Hey.”

“I got food.”

“I see that,” I say, not looking at anything but her. I peel my scrub top off, then my bra, and my pants. Shake my still-damp hair out of its ponytail. She’s watching me. Her skin is very white against the open black dress shirt, the shadow of one breast barely perceptible. A half-empty glass of wine sits on the nightstand table.

“How was work?”

“Fine. I need you to fuck me.” I squirm out of my panties and climb onto the bed.

Her eyes are dark, for a second inscrutable in the TV glare. Then she blinks, and the light shifts, and I see such depth there. She slides the dark shirt from her shoulders and reaches for me.

“Are you okay?” She murmurs, grazing my shoulder with her lips.

I will be. “Please.”

She rolls me onto my back in one swift motion, one strong hand on each of my shoulders. I forget how strong she is. I like the iron in her grip. Her eyes are intense, soft. Her face moving closer to mine.

We hover in that instant, breathing closer, just a bit. I arc up off the bed to kiss her, and she draws back with a smile. Teasing me.

Something hot and violent washes through me and I lay back, then grapple with her. She’s strong, and I almost have her on her back when she realizes what I'm doing and presses her knee to my belly, pinning me down.

“Don’t tease,” I sob, tears burning in my eyes.

She kisses me hard, her hands seeking mine out. She pins one above my head but I won’t let her get the other. I use it to dig my nails into her scalp. I bite her bottom lip and twine one leg through hers, twisting, setting her off balance. I can hear her breath and mine, overlapping cadences, both quickening.

She pushes her face into the palm of my raised hand, kisses, then bites the fleshy edge of the palm. I pull a fistful of her hair back, bite her neck.

She recoils and makes a shocked sound, sort of a whimper-gasp. I do it again and she grinds her cunt into mine. I feel the fur, the softness over the bone, the wetness coming down from within.

I grapple for her hands and try with all my strength to roll her over. When I succeed, not caring if it hurts her weak arm, I bite her nipple into my mouth. She squeaks and bucks, but I’m on top of her. Grinding myself halfway to orgasm.

If I hurt her, she doesn’t complain. It’s a new urge, a convulsion, a natural progression of my grief, and she takes it with aplomb, frigging me ferociously with two strong fingers. All the while, her gaze is steady.

After, it might have felt like we had purged the ugliness, but I just stare dazed at the ceiling. I can feel her breath, her eyes on me.

“I feel like I’m losing you,” she whispers into my skin, minutes later, so quiet I can barely hear it.

I feel all the cold of the season then, when I pull her into my arms. She frightens me. But there is no way she can ever lose me. I’m gone for her and there’s no other option. I whisper as much into the tousled hair at the top of her head.

.

She changes after that, almost imperceptibly. I can feel her fear when she is present, her eyes watching me when we are together with our friends, trailing me in the room like a light touch. A quietness has settled between us that creeps into things. Maybe we need it in order to grow. She smiles a lot, and seems surprised when I smile back.

She is still afraid of losing me, but fear has never stopped her from sabotaging herself before. Every time we’re out, I wonder, which one is Chloe? Is she the blonde with the faux-hawk and piercings? The little femme redhead?

Stop playing this game in your head, I tell myself.

Suddenly Tonya is gone, and Dana and Alice are everywhere together, grinning dopishly at each other, playing footsie under tables, groping when they think we’re not looking.

When I see Al and Dana necking on a couch at the Planet, I’m not prepared for the jealous sting that burrows into me.

I lean toward Bette, who is in line ahead of me.

“Is that what Shane and I look like?”

She smiles, amused. “No, you guys are more subtle.”

I wonder though, how others see us. Can they see the cracks? The love? Do they secretly think it’s only a matter of time before we break up?

.

A week before Thanksgiving I’m in bed answering an email from my mom. She wants me to come home for Thanksgiving, but I explain that I agreed to work on Black Friday for Louise before I got my promotion, and I don’t want to go back on it now.

She writes back almost instantly, saying that she hopes I’ll bring Shane home for Christmas. As if summoned, I hear Shane’s steps on the porch, her key turning in the lock.

She tried to give my key back to me, but I shrugged and told her not to bother. Not because I wanted to make a big deal out of the show of intimacy, nor did I see it as a huge relationship milestone, but because I like it when she comes quietly into my house like this. I like knowing that at any given moment it’s possible. I hear her footsteps on the stairs, then a gentle knock on the half-open door.

“C’min.”

“Hey.” She materializes, beautiful as ever, a beautiful boi in jeans and sneakers. When she flops beside me on the bed she smells like winter, real winter. “What’cha doin’?”

“Just emailing my mom. She wants me to come home for Thanksgiving.”

She’s quiet for a beat. “That’s nice.”

“I can’t, I told Lou I’d work for her on Friday. I’m thinking of having some people over, some folks from work, Dana and Al, if they want, Jenny... maybe make a little turkey. Would you come over for that?”

“Um, I have plans, D.” She seems to be physically uncomfortable saying it.

I envision Carmen, lifting a silver platter lid, wearing an apron and little else. I envision the mythical Chloe. God, what is it with her and C names?

“Oh. Okay.” I can still have people over, no big deal.

“You should come with me.”

She says it too quickly, a bit too forcefully. I look at her, trying to gauge her sincerity. It seems to be bottomless, and I feel myself relax.

“I should?”

She swallows. “You totally should.”

Thus, Thanksgiving day finds us in a homeless shelter in East L.A.. Shane tells me to leave my purse in the Jeep, locked into the glove compartment. We park in a garage six blocks from our destination and walk past storefronts that grow seedier with every block, past the check cashing place and the free clinic and several bodegas.

I’ve never been inside an actual homeless shelter before, and as we approach three very rough looking guys watch us. Definitely street people. I feel them staring at me and my skin starts to crawl. This is where Shane plans on spending her Thanksgiving?

“How ya doin?” One of them says to Shane, ignoring me.

“Doin’ good, how’re you?” she says politely.

“Miss, you got a light?” One of them says. I notice a nasty cut on his face. Shane digs in her pocket for a light, which is strange, because she’s almost completely quit smoking. I stop walking and take a closer look at the cut. It’s infected, and the red area is near the man’s eye.

The man lights his smoke with shaking fingers. “Thanks, miss.”

“Hey, what happened here?” I ask the guy, gesturing toward my eye.

“I cut myself.”

“You should get it looked at if you haven’t already, if that infection gets in your eye it’ll be bad.”

“Yeah,” he nods, and we continue on. I think of every nasty homeless person who has ever come into our ER, with their cellulitis and oozing sores and foul gangrene and scabies, and my skin starts to crawl.

We get to the door, and it’s locked. Shane jabs a button and we wait for someone to answer. She is shifting her wait back and forth, from one foot to the other. Is she nervous? Because I’m here? She catches me looking, and if she can read my thoughts, she grins, embarrassed.

“You’re fucking adorable,” I say.

I look back at the guy with the cut eye, who is now coughing into his hand. His buddy has a sore on his lip, either a crack pipe burn or a cold sore. I wonder when he’s last seen a doctor.

The door opens with a loud snick sound, and there is a scary-looking huge man standing there. He has prison tattoos and a jarhead haircut and he looks like a pissed off bulldog. Letting the inmates work the door, I think.

Shane turns to see him, and the impossible happens. “Baby Shane!” he yells out, chuckling, and he wraps her in a bear hug. “How you doing, girl?”

“Hey Jimmy,” she says. I watch them hug for an extra second, eyes wide. “You look great, man,” she says. I wonder what he looked like before.

“So do you girl. You look like you gained some weight.”

What! She was skinnier than this?

“Yeah, a little.”

“Happy Thanksgiving, girl, I’m glad you came.”

“Same here, man. Jimmy, this is my girlfriend Darah.” And the bulldog looking man looks at me. He shakes my hand in a firm grasp and only then do I see the ID laminate around his neck on a lanyard that says WWJD. He’s staff. I smile like an idiot, mumbling hi. Jimmy grins and I realize he’s missing two teeth in front.

“Cmon in, c’mon in,” Jimmy says, leading us back through a large room full of institutional white tables and mismatched chairs, into a big industrial kitchen that smells so good it reminds my stomach it’s Thanksgiving. There are big stainless steel counters with boxes and boxes of food, and two industrial ovens with turkeys roasting inside.

“Po, I got two more volunteers,” Jimmy says to a massive black woman at one end of the kitchen who is doing something to a turkey.

“We already got more volunteers than we need,” she snaps, even though no one else is around.

What the fuck? The potatoes aren’t peeling themselves.

I look to Jimmy to defend us but he’s gone, leaving us standing there. Po regards us over her gold rimmed glasses. Her hair is nappy and gray strands cloud her dark head like fluff. “Y’all can peel those potatoes,” she glares. Shane and I look at the five boxes of potatoes stacked nearly to the ceiling.

We look around for pots, potato peelers, and Po watches us suspiciously, not once speaking up to tell us where this shit is.

“What’ll hurt your arm less, washing or peeling?” I ask.

“Peeling, I guess,” she shrugs. I lift a box of potatoes from the very top of the stack. Fucking heavy. Though the industrial stainless steel sink is sparkling clean, I find some bleach and rinse it out. I put the ones I’ve scrubbed into a big steel bowl, and Shane starts peeling. I can hear the snick snick snick of her peeler as I rub down the rough potatoes. When I’m done I sit down at a low prep table opposite her. Po is glaring at us and I turn my back on her.

I sit there, peeling, peeling until my hand starts to get sore. Po gets up in a few minutes, moving her massive body between the counters, breathing with exertion and moving slowly. A cloud of cloying sweet perfume follows her and I make a face. Shane glances up at me and smiles.

We keep going until the mountain of naked potatoes to the right exceeds the brown ones on the left. Jimmy comes in and offers us coffee. It isn’t good, but it’s hot, and Shane drinks hers black. Jimmy sits on the edge of one of the tables. His jeans are acid-washed and clean and his hair is silvery. Everything about him is harsh and silver, excepting his personality. That is loud and harmless. “So how’ve you been, kid?”

“I’ve been really good.”

“Still cutting hair?”

“Yup.” She doesn’t mention that she did Jennifer Anniston’s hair last week. Different set of rules here, but then I guess Shane’s rules are Shane’s rules wherever she is. My wrist aches and I have a tiny cut on my finger, but I’m starting to realize that this day is a gift. “You working?” she asks.

“Naw, I went on disability a year ago.” I glance covertly at him. He’s the most able-bodied person I’ve ever seen, the very embodiment of physical energy. Why is he on disability? He must be mentally ill. He doesn’t seem to be that either.

Stop looking, stop judging, I tell myself. I’ve perfected the art of peeling a potato with the minimum of strokes. My fingers are starting to get wrinkly from holding the wet potatoes in my left hand while the right skins.

He called her kid, and I wonder how old she was when she met him. The idea of her as a child in this place gives me an ache in my chest. But that’s stupid, because I’m sure this place is benign compared to whatever she saw out there, in the system, in the street. I feel naive for thinking this is so bad. This is a haven. That’s why they call it a shelter, duh.

I realize that this is the perfect Thanksgiving, here with my girl doing manual labor. Even in the harsh fluorescent light she’s beautiful. I have a million questions about how this place intersects with her history, but I am quiet.

There is a lot of loud yelling out in the common area and Jimmy goes out to investigate. Shane gets up slowly, stretching like a cat, taunting me with the long lines of her sweet body. “I’m gonna go get some air, you wanna come?”

“Naw, I’m almost finished with these. You go ahead.”

“Kay.” she looks a bit disappointed, but she kisses the top of my head. “Love you,” she says.

I stare after her, awed by the sweetness of her, how much I suddenly love her. “You too,” I blurt, in awe as she turns to me, her grin flashing and disappearing. She leaves me alone, and there is only the zen of peeling, peeling, peeling.

Po comes back in, wordlessly taking our peeled potatoes from the giant metal bowl, putting them into a huge pot, big enough to bathe a toddler. She doesn’t speak to me, and her breathing, even with this minimal exertion, is loud. Flashing a glare at me from behind her glasses. I wonder what her problem is. Beyond morbid obesity and respiratory problems, that is.

When Po has filled the pot three quarters of the way she tries to lift it, and it doesn’t budge. “Here,” I say, getting up. “You get that end.” She grabs the handle on one end, glaring at me. It’s hard, but together we manage to get the giant pot across the room to the stove.

“You start some water boiling in another pot and I’ll bring these over when I’m done,” I say. Po nods wordlessly, no longer glaring, and I sit back down to finish the rest.

Once all the potatoes are peeled and boiling, I walk outside to see Shane in the courtyard hanging out with some guys. They range from teenagers to one elderly wisp of a man, all in street clothes with layers.

There is a man of indeterminate age smoking at the far end of one of the picnic tables, his face obscured by a beard, head wrapped in a filthy turban, out of convenience rather than religion or culture. His eyes are brown and his skin so filthy it’s impossible to tell his race. I can smell him from over here. He mutters to himself. My heart goes out to him at the same time my nostrils twitch to avoid his stench.

“Hey,” Shane calls.

“Hey. Miss Thing has all the potatoes cooking.”

“Wow, we kicked ass.”

“How’s your shoulder?”

“It’ll be okay,” she shrugs. “D, this is Anthony, and Jordan, and Tyson.”

“Hey guys,” I say. “Happy thanksgiving.”

All are painfully young, wearing too little for the weather, and too thin. Anthony is wearing eyeliner and he is disturbingly beautiful and dirty. I picture her, too thin and too pretty, dirty like this. Looking at him, I understand, and my heart aches for Shane. How much she must love me, to bring me into this world, to show me this.

They answer in kind and for a moment we all stand there, quiet.

They eye me with the curiousity of teenagers. “Where do you live?” one of them asks. He has a crucifix dangling from his ear and jeans a size too tight.

“I live in West Hollywood.”

“Fag town. That’s cool.” He smiles nervously.

“Man, you are a fag.” Tyson says, without malice, laughing.

“I know I’m a fag, chill, man,” he shakes out his fingers as if shaking off the annoyance. I wonder how many of these kids are really gay. I wonder if you are looking at the business end of a cock for your sustenance, if “really gay” has any meaning after a while. “I’m just saying, that’s cool, I wanna live there.” He shakes his hand again, embarrassed, reddening. His sudden insecurity is palpable.

“Maybe you can go cut hair with Shane,” Anthony says, laughing.

“Hey, he could totally do what I do,” she says.

“You don’t cut hair, I don’t believe it.”

“She totally does,” I say, smiling.

She gives that lopsided grin and grabs his long mane like he’s her little brother, yanking it back. “I could cut off this pretty mess, pretty boy.”

“I dare you,” Jordan laughs. He sounds like he has a raging lower respiratory infection, in addition to smoking too much. He has the lungs of a sixty year old coal miner.

“Why don’t you guys believe that Shane does hair?”

The kids look at their boots, their fingers, the asphalt, anything but me. I get it. To believe she got out is to believe they could get out. And that kind of hope is too much, too heavy for this everyday place.

I suddenly feel the weight of it, that this precious universe I take for granted is one of many possible ones, ones in which Shane is like them, but dying of AIDS, or dead on a morgue slab, or rotting in jail on drug charges.

I have to look at her, ground myself on the healthy light in her eyes and the heady salve of her beauty. So close to being any of those things, a million contingencies that could have happened differently and sent her spiraling into any of those fates.

So, that’s how it starts, a random cross section of homeless people watching while Shane razor-cuts Anthony’s hair into a trendy shag with a pair of box-cutters used to cut open boxes of bulk food shipment. The end result is that he is striking, but not so girlish or pretty, he has a tough masculinity to offset the beauty that will make him less vulnerable on the street. Then Jordan wants done, then Tyson. Jimmy pops his head out, the smell of home cooking wafting out as he stands in the open door. “You giving free haircuts out here, Baby Shane?” he asks, amused.

She shrugs, and I’m wondering if her shoulder hurts. “Whatever,” she shrugs. And that’s the end of it. She cuts a little girl and her emaciated mother, she cuts an the ghostlike elderly man who smiles and pats his head in the window reflection.

The filthy mumbling man is still rearranging peanut shells at the far end of the cement courtyard all this time, and now he comes up and hands one to Shane. “The satellites,” he says.

Shane looks confused, as does everyone standing around watching. Someone has brought her a pair of real scissors from the director’s office, and she’s holding them. “Excuse me?” She is all big-eyed politeness.

“Havva vacka nut. They’re using sattelite waves,” he says.

“You want a haircut?” she says, confused. I blink at the idea of cutting this man’s hair.

“Have a vacka,” he starts, getting frustrated now.

“Take the nut,” I whisper, and Shane takes the peanut shell from his filthy fingers. They are shaking from too much time or too much Haldol, and his nails are long and yellow. This close, his odor is a bouquet of distinct and separate notes: dirt, B.O. and urine.

“Okay,” she says, watching as the man nods and turns away. “Thanks, man.” It is quiet as we all watch the man walk out of the courtyard, back into the building. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she offers as an after thought, looking at the filthy peanut shell.

We go inside to get some turkey from the oven, washing our hands thoroughly. I scrub up like I’m going into surgery, fingertips to elbows. “Does your shoulder hurt?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“No more haircutting for you today.” I say sternly, wagging my finger at her like an old lady.

That night we come home with plates of turkey and fixings, dead tired. We climb into my shower and scrub ourselves clean. I pour shower gel into my hands and massage her back and shoulders wordlessly, and she compliantly relaxes into the tile, trusting me completely. I spend extra time on her left shoulder and arm.

Then, without a word, she does me, soaping my body up. We have barely spoken since leaving the shelter, when I asked her if she wanted to come over and crash. “Yeah,” she mumbled, and quietly drove us to my place.

We get out of the tub and I nearly slip. She catches me in her arms and smiles. “You were really cool today,” she says softly, reaching for the towel, drying me off.

“I’d like to think I’m really cool every day,” I grin. “Seriously, how did you expect me to be?”

“I expected you to be exactly how you were,” she says cryptically, but I understand. Sort of. I’m not sure exactly what it was that has her so thankful. Was it the fact that I peeled enough potatoes to feed a small army? The way I kept my mouth shut and didn’t ask her about her past?

I don’t ask for clarification, I don’t need it. I’m too busy being awed by how much she has overcome to be who she is today. “You amaze me,” I say, and I see the words register on her face. Touching her.

“I love you,” she says forcefully, quietly, holding my face in her hands.

“Me too,” I gasp as her lips come to touch mine, feel their brush, as heady as if it were first time, ever. My breath catches in something like a sob as I feel her familiar arms snaking around me, her nipples hardening into my flesh from the cool bathroom air.

Her eyes are alert, calm, unusual somehow. “I want you,” she whispers, and we stumble naked and half-wet toward the bedroom. I fall to the bed and she stands above, water dripping from her clean hair. I ache for her to come down here with me, and I reach out my hand. Trace the long curved line of her upper thigh, press my fingertips reverently to her belly. She climbs in beside me and moans softly.

I taste her skin, moving my lips up the line my fingers have already traveled. She hasn’t shaved, and the clean fresh hair at the junction of her legs is dark fluff. I lay her down on her back, feel her dove white skin pressed against me. “I love your body,” I whisper into the whorled flesh of her ear, feel the pillow soak up the shower from her hair.

“It’s all yours,” she says, eyes so serious. I hold back a sob, pack it into a whimper. Her hand is moving so slow, so leisurely up my back and she is looking up at me with such trust. Those luminous eyes. “Yours,” she murmurs emphatically, as if she’s trying to find the words to say something more.

“Is it?” I say, swallowing back tears.

“As long as you want me. All yours,” she whispers in her thick slow voice and I realize what she’s really saying. Only mine.

I can’t get enough breath inside me to feed the fire in my heart. I kiss the pink scarred mess of her shoulder and my whisper is harsh.

“I want you,” I say. All of it. The good, the bad, the ugly. The filthy, the destructive, the luminous. I swallow my grudge, my pain. The look in her eyes makes me unafraid.

And then we don’t speak at all but the connection heightens and rises and we keep looking into each other’s eyes. We just touch, fingers, all over each others bodies, not even touching breasts or genitals. Just eyes, and lips, and skin. The gentle touch of her fingertips on my cheek makes tears spring to my eyes, but she is there to anchor me with her own, holding me steady with her gaze, slowly stroking my hair. I pull her hand to my lips, press a kiss to her palm.

We continue like this, her sculpting the curve of my shoulder, of my lips, of my hairline, as if she’d never seen me before. I do the same. For minutes and minutes. And when I come crashing down on her, grinding into her, both of us carnal and sweaty, her eyelids flutter closed with the bliss of release that takes us both.

And in the morning, we wake on the other side of a line crossed.