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What does he do? He lies in his big bed and smokes the blunts that keep him calm and he prays that it will all fade soon. What makes it even worse is his honest-to-God happiness for Z: There is tremendous relief in Phury’s special hell because he knows that Z has a future now.

Relief . . . yes, relief. But there are times that that pales. Phury looks down at his missing leg and feels unwhole and unworthy and weak and lame, and it’s not really all about the amputation, because he has no regrets there. What stings during the days when the house is quiet and Bella and Z are sleeping entwined in their mated bed . . . what stings Phury is the fact that he is sexually clueless and inept, and there is no way out of that desert. Even if he gave up the celibacy, even if he found a female and put her on her back and rode her out, what would that cure exactly? A graceless, uncaring sex act wouldn’t make him feel any better. If anything, that would cut him deeper . . . because he knows that isn’t what’s doing between Z and Bella.

No . . . Phury’s on the far side of the riverbank, watching a sunset. Unable to touch. Only able to look. And Never Have.

So in his ineptness and his pathetic yearning, in his despicable weakness, in his deplorable swill of emotion . . . he watches Bella’s hands as she eats. Because that’s all he can do.

He waits for some relief. Knowing it’s not coming anytime soon.

And he hates himself.

The descent he is on seems bottomless, and he has no rope to cast out for purchase, no net to fall into, nothing to break his fall. All he can do is anticipate a hard impact, a shattering body blow whenever the bottom finds him.

For Phury, the nature of the Do Not Have, the Cannot Have, the Never Possible, the Unfulfilled, is taking him into darker places than he could have predicted. I think he assumed that if Z ever healed a little, that his own suffering would be over.

Wrong. Because the flavor of Z’s healing is a taste Phury would kill to have.

Anyway . . . that was what I found out by the Ohio River the other night in the summer air . . . in the bass-ridden solitude . . . where all there was was myself and the headlights of oncoming cars and the wet breeze of the air.

Some distances will never ever be closed.

The interview That Never Happened

posted October 6, 2007

This was done right after Lover Unbound was released:

Last night I showed up at the Brotherhood’s compound for a scheduled interview with Butch and Vishous. They kept me waiting—which shouldn’t have been a surprise and wasn’t. And the interview didn’t happen, either. Also not a surprise . . .

Fritz is the one who lets me into the Pit, and he fusses over me as he usually does. I swear, nothing makes a doggen more agitated than if they can’t do anything for you. He’s getting so worked up, I actually hand him my purse—a move marked with the kind of desperation usually associated with folks who perform the Heimlich on a choking person.

Now, I’m not in the habit of turning over my day bag to other people—even a butler who’s suffering from a terminal case of the need-to-pleases. But here’s the thing: My purse has a lot of pale-ish leather detailing, and the strap that runs over the top and down the front has a streak of blue pen ink on it. No one notices this relatively tiny mess-up except me, but it’s bugged me since I did it, and I’ve wanted to get rid of the imperfection like you read about. (Hell, I even went back to LV and asked them if they could take it out. They said no, they couldn’t, because the leather is porous and has absorbed the ink into its fibers. I assuaged my depression with sundry purchases, needless to say.)

As I hand the bag over to Fritz and ask him if there’s any way he could get the pen ink out, he glows like I’ve given him a birthday present and beats feet out the front door. Just as the Pit’s huge eight-paneled, fortress-worthy, portal-from-a-dungeon-movie slams shut, I realize my only pen, the one that made the mark, is in the damn bag.

Fortunately,