Awake Page 15

  “Well at least we won’t be underdressed,” Lee said when they were out front and finished. “We still have a few hours until the show, and I want to get some rest back at the hotel, if you guys don’t mind.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Ivy said.

  “We’ll probably stay and walk around for a while,” Ben said. He looked over to Stella, who nodded in agreement.

  “Cool, well just come by our room before the show or give us a call,” Lee said.

  Neither he nor Ivy felt like making the half-hour walk back to the hotel, so Lee hailed them a cab. He started to feel exhausted on the ride back, and didn’t say much to Ivy.

  When they got back up to the room, Ivy watched TV with the volume low, while Lee tried to take a nap, assisted by one of his pills. It worked somewhat, though he only fell into a light sleep. Still, he felt a tiny bit better when a knock on the door woke him up. Ivy got up and opened it.

  It was Ben and Stella. “You ready to get changed and head down there?” Ben asked, holding up his suit bag.

  “Sounds good, we’ll meet you out in the hall in twenty minutes,” Lee replied, rubbing his eyes.

  It took longer than that for him and Ivy to get ready, but not much. Ivy could get ready to go out faster than any girl Lee had ever met, she wasn’t the problem. Indeed, it was Lee who’d taken longer to get ready, fumbling around with his bow tie and trying to figure out how to tie it with the help of his Laptop.

  Ivy looked absolutely gorgeous in a blue sleeveless grown and heels she’d bought. She had the slightest amount of makeup on, and it drove him wild. Giving himself a once over in the mirror, Lee didn’t think that he looked too bad himself, in his new suit.

  Stella and Ben were even later, Ivy and Lee walking out into the hallway to find it empty. After a few minutes of waiting and with less than thirty minutes until the show began, Lee banged on the door, thinking that they might be cutting it a bit close.

  “Stella says she needs a couple of minutes,” Ben said, stepping into the hallway to wait with them, looking dapper in his Italian-style suit. He’d left the door partially open behind him.

  “Stella, get your ass out here already! I’m not going to be late for this for you!” Ivy shouted into the room.

  “I’m coming! Quit being a bitch and just give me one minute!” Stella yelled back.

  “Fine, one minute. I’m timing you on my phone,” Ivy said.

  Stella was out in less than a minute, looking huffed but every bit as stunning as Ivy in the red evening gown she’d purchased at Armani. “I didn’t have enough time to get ready,” she complained.

  “Oh come on, you look hot as hell,” Ben said.

  “Yeah, gorgeous,” Ivy said. Lee thought she looked pretty good as well, but was damned if he was going to say so.

  “Yeah right, this dress was from the sale rack,” Stella said, smiling. “Why are we in such a rush anyway?”

  “Because the show starts in less than half an hour and we have no idea how long it will take a cab to get there,” Lee said. “Let’s go.”

  Luckily the cab ride didn’t take nearly as long as any of them had anticipated. They were at the show fifteen minutes before the start and seated five minutes later.

  “This is so awesome, I feel so cultured right now,” Ben said, sitting to Lee’s left.

  “Yeah, just remember to not talk when the show starts, chatty Cathy,” Lee said.

  A short while later the lights dimmed, and they knew it was about to start. Ivy squeezed his hand excitedly.

  The show was amazing and hilarious. Lee simply had no reference for it; he was almost overwhelmed by all of the singing, dancing, acting and jokes. He was crying with laughter for much of the show, having to wipe his eyes repeatedly. He couldn’t see Stella’s reaction as she on the other side of Ben, but he could see Ben and Ivy were laughing just as hard as him. When it was over, his face hurt from smiling so much and he clapped so hard that it hurt his hands.

  “Well that was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen, I feel like I’ve wasted my entire life now,” Ben said as they walked out.

  “You always did love singing and dancing, I saw this coming a long time ago,” Lee said, prompting laughter from the girls. “Ever since your Dirty Dancing phase in high school.” Ben joined in with the laughter at that.

  “So what do you guys want to do now, get tanked again?” Ben asked when the laughter died down.

  “I was thinking about taking a night off, I’ve been feeling pretty shitty from all this vacation drinking lately,” Ivy said.

  “Me too,” Lee said. “I could use one hangover-free day, at least.”

  “Well I want to get blasted again, the best way to get rid of a hangover is to drink some more,” Stella said, putting her arm around Ben.

  “We can just meet up tomorrow morning for breakfast or something. Just don’t stay up too late,” Lee said. “Though I guess if you do we can meet up for lunch instead.”

  Lee and Ivy called over a cab while Ben and Stella walked off. Lee didn’t have any cash on him, but had realized after the second or third taxi ride on the trip that all of the taxis had credit card machines. He kicked himself for not realizing it earlier when he figured it out. So many useless trips to the ATM could have been saved.

  When they got back to the hotel they had sex, and afterwards Ivy fell asleep, as had become almost routine. She hadn’t gotten much sleep since they’d gotten to New York, between the partying and her determination to get up whenever Lee did, which was earlier and earlier, thanks to his condition.

  Lee took his medication and lay down with his book, reading to the light of the bedside lamp while he waited for it to kick in. After a few hours of reading he started to feel like he could sleep, so he turned off the light and settled down. He surprised himself by quickly falling into a deep slumber.

  In his dream he could see the demon. It was in DC, looking for him, and it was angry. He had lost it for a while, but it would find him eventually. As if sensing someone was looking at it, the creature turned and looked right at Lee. It smiled.

  He woke up drenched in cold sweat. It was five in the morning. He’d slept for four hours.

  Trying his best not to wake up Ivy, he snuck out of the bed and into the bathroom to take a shower to clean off the sweat. He managed to get through it without rousing her, so he shaved and brushed before putting on fresh clothes. He briefly considered wearing the suit as a joke, but dressed in street clothes instead.

  Refreshed, he sat on the bed and read for several hours before Ivy finally rolled over and looked up at him. She smiled and said “How long have you been up?”

  “Not long.”

  “You should have gotten me up, were you bored?”

  “I was fine, got some reading done. Don’t feel bad for resting up - we have another long day of being tourists ahead of us.”

  She smiled at him again and cocked her head. “They really don’t care for us much, do they? New Yorkers, I mean.”

  “I don’t think they actively hate us,” Lee said. “They’re just busy people. There’s no way to know for sure, but I’m almost certain the saying ‘time is money’ came from here. And it probably makes things more difficult having tourists like us who don’t know what they’re doing clogging up the sidewalks and trains.”

  “Probably. I just hate how they can take one look at you and they know you’re a tourist before you say a word. How do they know?”

  “No clue, though I bet if we lived here for long enough we’d acquire the same ability. It must just come with the territory.”

  “I just wish we could blend in for two minutes. It’s weird for me, not fitting in. I mean, in Chicago they seemed to know too, but they didn’t seem to hold it against you the way that they do here.”

  Lee thought it over. He hadn’t noticed the way the locals acted as much as Ivy did, clearly. He wasn’t sure if it was because of the daze he was in half the time, from lack of sleep, or if it was her keen feminine emotiona
l perception. “I bet it won’t be so bad after we’ve been here for a week or so.”

  “I hope. At the very least it’d be nice to stand out less,” she said, and then kissed the tip of his nose.

  While Ivy took a shower, Lee turned on the TV to the local news and caught up on the sensational goings on in the city. There was apparently a serial buttock stabber out in the city that would strike people walking alone at night, male or female. A reporter was on the scene of the latest incident, vividly describing what had transpired without even the hint of a smile. Lee found that strangely funny.

  The news moved on to a homeless man who’d been doused in gasoline and then set on fire by what witnesses described as three teens, when Ivy came out of the bathroom nude and started rummaging around in her bag for clothes. Lee stopped paying attention to the news and turned his attention to Ivy’s graceful, nude form, which was a much better show.

  “We should go to Times Square today,” Ivy said as she was putting on a bra.

  “I dunno, everything I’ve read online says the place is a cluster fuck,” Lee said. “But I do suppose we have to see it once. We might as well go to the Statue of Liberty too, try and get all of the most touristy sites done all at once.”

  “That sounds fun! I hadn’t thought about the Statue of Liberty for some reason,” she said, slipping into matching black panties she’d gotten from American Apparel. “There’s just so much here.”

  When Ivy had finished dressing, she said “Do you think that Ben and Stella will be up to go to breakfast?”

  “I doubt it, but we can try. I was up pretty late and they still hadn’t come in when I passed out.”

  They went out and tried banging on Ben and Stella’s door, but sure enough there was no answer. They were surely passed out in drunken stupor, Lee and Ivy agreed.

  Since it had been so good the day before, and because it was so close, they went back to the Tick Tock Diner at the base of the tower. Ivy got the vegetarian omelet she’d had the day before, while Lee ordered crepes with a side of eggs.

  The food was just as good as it had been the previous day, though Lee made a note to look up some more places on his laptop when he got the chance. He wanted to try more of the good restaurants the city had to offer.

  “So should we try and wake them up again before we head to Times Square?” Ivy said as they walked out of the restaurant after paying.

  “I don’t think they’re going to wake up; Ben’s a heavy sleeper. It’s amazing that he’s been as good of a sport as he has so far, we might as well give him and Stella a break,” Lee said.

  “Sounds good to me,” she said, putting her arm around his waist. “It’ll be great to have a little more time to ourselves.”

  Ivy looked up the distance on her phone and found that Times Square was less than a mile from the hotel, so they decided to walk. As they trekked towards it, Lee found himself amazed all over again with the speed that New Yorkers moved at. He had never moved at what he would consider a leisurely pace, but it was definitely that by New York standards. He and Ivy had to struggle to keep up and not delay everyone behind them.

  They arrived at Times Square to find it was a complete mess, just as Lee had predicted it would be. The normal orderly flow of foot traffic completely broke down as tourists from all over the world stopped to take pictures wherever and whenever they pleased. He and Ivy almost ran smack into an Asian family that stopped abruptly to take a group photo, taking up an enormous part of the walkway. As they struggled to make their way through the crowd, Lee thought he was starting to see why New Yorkers weren’t overly fond of tourists.

  “Wow, it’s crazy to see the enormous billboards up close after seeing them every New Year’s Eve on TV,” Ivy said, pointing up at the billboards. They were so bright and flashy that they made Lee’s eyes hurt. He also found that looking up made the claustrophobic feeling of the city amplify tenfold, so he averted his eyes.

  “It’s quite something.”

  Ivy’s attention had already turned though. There was just too much to take in. “Look over there, it’s that naked cowboy dude!” she said, pointing over to a man clad only in underwear and a cowboy hat that was playing his guitar in the middle of the square. A large crowd was gathered around him.

  “Oh joy, I was hoping I’d get to see him sometime,” Lee said.

  “Do you think I should go over and tuck a ten in his underwear band?” Ivy asked, turning to Lee and grinning deviously.

  “I will leave you here,” Lee said, laughing.

  “Aw, buzz kill,” she said, pouting.

  As they weaved their way further into the circus, a skinny young white kid, dressed as if he thought he was a gangster, came up and practically forced a crappy looking, clearly homemade cd into Lee’s hands. “That’ll be fifteen bucks bro,” the man said after Lee had reluctantly taken it, planning on throwing it away at the nearest trash bin he found.

  “What? I’m not buying this, you can have it back,” Lee said, and tried to hand the cd back.

  “You took it, now give me the money before I get mad,” the kid said, brushing away Lee’s hand and puffing up his chest.

  Without breaking eye contact with the kid, Lee snapped the cd case in half and dropped it at the man’s feet. “I may be a tourist but I’m not fucking stupid. You really shouldn’t threaten guys who outweigh you by fifty pounds.”

  The kid’s face turned red and it looked for a moment like he was going to do something, but just then two cop cars drove by. Noticing them, the kid seemed to think better of it, said “Fuck you,” and walked off.

  “What the hell was that about?” Ivy asked, having missed most of the exchange over the sound of the crowd.

  “Just some asshole who was trying to scam me into buying his amateur hour cd,” Lee said, bending down to pick up the pieces of the ruined disc.

  “You broke it? Seems a little harsh.”

  “He forced it into my hands and then wouldn’t take it back. Then implied that he’d kick my ass if I didn’t pay him for it.”

  “Well shit, what an asshole. Good job breaking his disc then. Fuck him if he thinks we’re stupid,” Ivy said, increasing Lee’s love for her even more in an instant. He’d always wanted a woman who would defend him even when he wasn’t completely in the right.

  “So what should we do?” Lee asked her after he’d thrown the cd fragments into a trash can, both of them stopping behind it in a spot that didn’t block the traffic.

  “Not sure, whatever sounds good to you,” Lee said, looking around. “Jesus, how many Sbarros do they have around here? If I wanted to go there I’d go back home and go to the mall.”

  “Don’t be such a downer, this is exciting! Let’s go into the M&M store.”

  “Fine, but ten bucks says that they sell the candy there for at least five times what it would cost anywhere else,” he said. Ivy’s brow furrowed, and he smiled to show he didn’t actually care. She smiled back.

  Though it was the most gimmicky tourist trap of all time, he had to admit that the M&M store was pretty impressive. There were tubs of the iconic candy separated into individual colors, including dozens of colors that weren’t sold in stores. As he’d predicted, everything was grossly overpriced, as if for some reason buying directly from the manufacturer was a bigger hassle than going through a retailer.

  “Dammit, I really want chocolate now,” Ivy said as they exited after wandering around the store for half an hour.

  “I can go back in and grab you some pastel M&Ms or something if you’d like,” Lee offered.

  “No, that’s okay. You were right, those prices were downright insulting. Plus, I wouldn’t want to be out here alone,” she said.

  “I don’t blame you, I feel like someone is going to try and pickpocket me any minute here. I’ve been keeping my wallet in my front pocket,” he said, patting the pocket for effect.

  “Oh shit, I didn’t even think of that,” Ivy said, rummaging through her purse. “Whew, looks like everything’
s there still.”

  They walked around for a while more, stopping in a few of the shops. Everything was as expensive and tacky as they had been in the candy store, and they quickly got bored with the chaotic scene after an hour of meandering about.

  “Should we head back to the hotel and see if Ben and Stella are alive enough to get some lunch before we head over to the Statue of Liberty?” Lee asked when they’d seen everything they wanted to see.

  “Sure,” she said, and they started the walk back to the hotel.

  15

  As they made their way back the hotel, they caught glimpses of the darker side of the city.

  First was a man standing by the entrance to an alley, calling Lee and Ivy back to “Come talk to me,” after they’d walked by him. Ivy looked at him for a moment, confused, but Lee gave her a light tug and they kept walking away. The man cursed at them, but didn’t follow. Whatever the man had wanted with them, Lee was sure it wasn’t good.

  The second unpleasant experience came when they had to walk by an older, stinking bum, who reeked of cheap liquor. “Got any money?” the man asked as they passed.

  Advised by several of the cab drivers that giving money to bums made one a target in the city, Lee refused, saying “No, sorry.” He quickened his pace, holding on to Ivy’s arm.

  “Fuck you, then, you stupid tourist piece of shit. I know you’re lying to me,” the man said, and started staggering after them, shouting more curses.

  They kept walking, and the man stopped following after half a block, staggering and unsteady. “Damn, I’m sticking to cabs after this,” Lee said, still walking.

  “Sounds good to me,” Ivy said.

  When they got to the hotel, Ivy had to use the restroom, so they went up to the rooms instead of calling Ben and Stella and telling them to come down. Lee banged on Ben and Stella’s door, knowing that they were up from the blare of the TV, which he could hear through the door. Ben quickly answered, showered and looking like he’d managed to sleep through his hangover.

  “Hey buddy, Ivy and I wanted to know if you guys wanted to grab lunch with us and then go see the Statue of Liberty,” Lee said. He gave a half-wave to Stella, who was sitting on the bed and watching TV.