One Last Thing Before I Go

by Jonathan Tropper

  “Hey! Casey!”

  She has reached the front of the house and now turns to see Jeremy, in jeans and an undershirt, sitting on the front-hall stairs with a bunch of guys. She says hi and smiles even as she is aware of his friends taking a quick inventory of her: Legs, check. Tits, check. Face, check. Ass, remains to be seen, but can be fairly extrapolated given the evidence at hand.

  Jeremy comes off the stairs and joins her on the landing. “I’m glad you came.”

  “I said I was coming.”

  “Yeah, sort of,” he says. “But your texts are tricky.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  He smiles. She smiles back. He has this one tooth, in the corner of his smile, that overlaps the tooth in front of it, and there’s no reason that she should find this appealing, but she does.

  “So, Paris,” she says. “You excited?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Truth is, I could use the change of scenery.”

  “You’ve been in college for two years.”

  He grins. “I know. What can I say? I get restless.” His face turns earnest. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”

  “Sure.”

  He looks around, then takes her hand and leads her through the throbbing crowd, past wildly dancing morons, girls laughing, guys high-fiving like they invented beer, kids making out on the couch like they’re the only ones here, and kids standing around waiting for something else to happen that will send the party into an even higher gear. Everything else notwithstanding, there is something thrilling about the way he has taken her hand and is moving her through this forest with purpose. She feels oddly embraced.

  The kitchen is a mess. They step over crushed plastic cups and plates and through a door to the back staircase, then upstairs to his bedroom, where he closes the door behind them and turns on his desk lamp. She hasn’t been up here in years, but it doesn’t look like anything has changed. Navy carpeting, matching bed and desk by Pottery Barn, a framed poster of Bird and Magic on the wall, a team pennant from his high school basketball glory days.

  He sits down on the bed while she politely looks over his desk, the pretentious college paperbacks—Bukowski,—some sports magazines, his Mac and assorted multimedia devices, some decorative water bongs, a few loose pictures of his college buddies, his airline ticket.

  “So,” he says. “You OK?”

  “Sure,” she says, leaning against the desk to face him.

  “How’s your dad doing?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “It’s weird, you know? I haven’t seen him around in years.”

  “I know.”

  “I think he was the drummer at my aunt’s wedding. Does he still do that?”

  Casey rolls her eyes. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  He looks up at her, suddenly ill at ease. “I know you’ve had a lot going on, with your mom getting married and your dad’s . . . situation. I just . . . I kind of thought, after that night, that we might hang out, you know? And then you didn’t answer my texts . . .” He seems lost, tripped up by his own verbiage. “I just wanted to make sure you’re OK.”

  Casey looks at him, feeling both contempt and attraction. She is almost positive that this is a uniquely female combination. “You wanted to make sure that I’m OK, or you’re OK?”

  He nods, considering. “Both, I guess. I wanted to make sure we’re OK.”

  “Because we had sex.”

  “Yeah.”

  She comes over and sits down beside him on the bed. This is her moment.

  “I’ve been going through some stuff,” she says.

  He takes her hand. “You want to tell me about it?”

  She feels his fingers laced between hers, solid and strong. It’s his too, she thinks. He has a right to make this decision with me. But she knows that’s not true. The decision is hers. She just wants someone to help her make it. And she knows what he’ll say; she could probably write the script of their conversation right now and get almost all of it right, word for word. And that’s why she came here, she realizes. Because she knew what he would say, and then she could pretend they had decided together.

  “Hey,” he says, pulling her closer. “You’re shaking.”

  “I need to tell you something,” she says.

  “OK.”

  She looks up at him, takes in his round eyes, his earnest expression. She realizes with a start that he is actually somewhat in love with her. Not in a way that matters or lasts, but just in this moment, and there’s something warming about that. She now feels herself shaking, almost shivering. He brushes the hair out of her face, and she runs her hand up his arm.

  “Casey?” he says, concerned.

  “Just . . .” she says. “Can you just kiss me?”

  He does not need to be asked twice. And even as he leans in, her hands have found their way under his shirt, sliding up the impossibly long expanse of his warm back. And one kiss becomes two, then three, then one endless kiss, and she feels herself pulling off her own shirt, even as she knocks him down on the bed with unintended force.

  She can no longer figure out what her intentions were when she came here, but now that she’s lying here, melting into him, she knows she probably never could have brought herself to tell him. The only false note comes when he leans away from her to rummage through his desk drawer for a condom, and she briefly wants to strangle him as she watches him slide it on. But then he’s kissing her again, and then he’s inside her, and for the next little while they’re just two crazy, horny kids on the brink of adulthood, practicing safe sex in his bedroom while, below them, the endless kegger rages on.

  CHAPTER 34

  Silver undresses Denise delicately, like she might break. He pulls her blouse off and kisses her chest, inhaling her scent, reveling in the familiar topography of her body. The shape of her shoulders, the shallow pockets behind her collarbones, the small scar over her left breast from a childhood fall. It’s surreal to be here again, feeling her heat, tasting her skin, realizing that he has carried the sense memory of her inside of him all this time.

  He watches her hands undo his belt buckle, and he is suddenly conscious of how his body has changed since the last time they were naked together. He is easily twenty pounds heavier, and the pathetically minimal muscle tone he has accidentally maintained through his drumming appears as nothing more than a shadow beneath the added weight. He thinks of his erectile snafu with the college girl and wonders if he will be able to perform. He can’t really feel himself down there, and it’s only when she wraps her fingers around him that he registers, with no small measure of relief, that he is hard.

  She leads him over to his unmade bed, and he is acutely aware of his bedroom’s sparse furnishings, of the clutter on his night table and the floor beside it, of his ragged linens and the fact that he’s not sure when he last changed them. He hopes they don’t smell.

  They come together slowly in his bed. He cannot stop touching her, running his fingers up and down the length of her arms, across her shoulders, down her belly. He opens his mouth against her breasts, kissing and tasting, feeling their familiar shape in his hands, and he considers the possibility that this is all a stroke-induced hallucination, that he’ll wake up paralyzed in his bed, or not at all.

  Their rhythm starts to build and he feels the force of her beneath him, the growing urgency in her kisses. He always admired her abandon when it came to sex, the way she was able to lose herself in the pleasure. It always aroused him further, even as he wondered why it was never like that for him. He certainly enjoyed sex, but there was always a side of him that stayed grounded, observing the goings-on from a neutral corner in his brain.

  “What’s wrong?” Denise says to him, panting hard, her breath filling his mouth.

  �
��Nothing,” he says.

  “Your heart?”

  “Broken.”

  “But beating.”

  “Yes.”

  She kisses him furiously, his hands sliding down her back to find the curve of her ass.

  “Then can you please get inside me?” she whispers to him.

  And so he does.

  He wants it to last forever and to be over already so he knows what will happen next. He knows he can’t keep her, but he wonders if maybe he’s wrong. God knows he’s been wrong about things like this before. He can feel everything all at once; her fingernails digging into his skin, her chin pressing against his as she arches her back, the intoxicatingly smooth surface of her ass in the palms of his hands, the first beads of sweat forming on her neck, his heart beating furiously in his chest. Denise rolls in waves beneath him like a storm, lifting him off the bed with her hips, grunting to the beat like a tennis player, and he feels himself building, worries that he will finish too soon. He doesn’t want it to end, is terrified of the expression she will wear when they’re done. Is this a fundamental change, or is this good-bye? He was both amazed and relieved at how they arrived here in his bed without any discussion, but now he finds himself wishing he knew what the hell she was thinking, or even what the hell he was thinking, for that matter.

  Denise comes, crying out with the pleasure of it, pulling him deeper inside of her like she’s trying to squeeze the last bit of something out of him. His own orgasm comes on the heels of hers, not nearly as impressive or animated, but it rocks him nonetheless. When he’s done, he rolls off of her, closing his eyes as the room flashes like lightning. He feels her hand land on his chest, her finger tracing circles there. She says something, but he can’t hear her over the ringing in his ears.

  He stares up at the paint swirls on his ceiling and thinks about God, wonders what He might make of all of this. A wave of clarity washes over him, and he has a thought, an epiphany really. Suddenly he sees an answer, not a solution, but a truth floating above him, and he knows he needs to share it with Denise. But even as he starts to speak, the ringing in his ears becomes louder, and the thought dissolves before he can articulate it. He closes his eyes, trying to recapture it, but the darkness is soft and soothing and doesn’t lend itself to introspection. He hears a sound, as if from far away, a low rumbling that he only identifies as his own snoring in the instant before sleep consumes him.

  CHAPTER 35

  Denise lies on her back, listening to Silver snore. She feels guilty, primarily about not feeling guilty, and wonders if that’s the same thing. She isn’t quite sure when it was she knew that this was going to happen—maybe when he walked into the dress store, maybe when he showed up to dinner at his parents’ looking freshly scrubbed and strangely childlike; she suspects it might even have been as early as when he burst into her bedroom that crazy day last week, eyes blazing, looking to somehow reclaim her and Casey. She realizes now that there has been a part of her for all of these years that never stopped waiting for him to do just that.

  But whenever it was, she knows this crime was premeditated. Not by Silver, he never planned anything in advance. If he thought about his actions at all, it was always after he had committed them. That was emblematic of their differences in general. Denise considered and planned, while Silver looked back after the fact and wondered what had possessed him.

  And yet here she is, lying beside the man who has failed her in every possible way, who has used up the best years of her life, feeling tenderness and . . . loss? It makes no sense, but if there is one kernel of wisdom she does possess on matters of love it is that sense rarely enters into it. Silver was the first man she ever loved, and even now, after all the anger and hatred, she still feels things shifting inside of her when he walks into a room. And that’s not healthy, or fair, or right, but there it is.

  She rolls onto her side to watch him sleep. His face loses something in slumber, and he looks unfamiliar to her, like a word repeated endlessly until its syllables disintegrate into meaningless sounds. What have I done? she thinks, then chides herself for being dramatic. She moves closer to him and presses her index finger into his shoulder, watching his skin dimple around her finger. She looks around this small, depressing bedroom, with its cracking paint and generic, shit-brown carpeting; the plywood dresser with mismatched handles on its drawers; the random, scattered laundry piles; the lone cell-phone charger plugged into a wall outlet; and the smell of masculine desperation lingering like a base coat beneath the fresh smell of their recent sex. She experiences a shameful pang of vindication, as if these shabby surroundings are incontrovertible proof that the failure in their marriage had been his. But she also feels sorry for him, for the drab and empty life he’s been living all these years, and sorry for herself for being here.

  What are you doing here? she asks herself. Do you love him at all? She does, she supposes, but it’s a love, she knows, that’s been bent and twisted beyond repair. We don’t stop loving people just because we hate them, but we don’t stop hating them either. It’s just that, ever since he developed this condition, Silver seemed to become more and more the man he was when she first fell for him, the man he still is in her saddest dreams: honest, impulsive, childishly sincere, romantic. The way he spoke to her and Casey that day in her bedroom, the way he reached for her, the way he told her she was beautiful, the way he looks at Casey. He is her Silver again, and even though she knows all of these behaviors are the result of microscopic blood clots and ministrokes, she can’t help but be drawn to him again.

  She thinks about his aorta, disintegrating inside of him, ready to come apart at a moment’s notice. He will either die very shortly or he’ll have the surgery and most likely go back to being the self-defeating, disengaged asshole he’s been for the last eight years. Either way, there’s no version in which tonight’s insane indiscretion will ever amount to anything. She knows that for certain, just as she knows that she will grieve him all over again in either scenario.

  She is so lost in these thoughts that it takes her a moment to realize that his eyes have been open for the last little while, and he’s been gazing up at her.

  “Hey,” he says drowsily.

  “Hey.”

  “You’re still here.”

  She smiles. The man really takes nothing for granted. “So it would seem.”

  They look at each other for a moment. There is no time more painfully awkward than the shaky moments after sex that should not have been had.

  “What are you thinking?” Denise says.

  “I’m thinking that that felt better than anything I can remember,” he says. “And I’d like to do it again.”

  She smiles. “Well, if once was a mistake, twice would be criminal. Besides, I think my twofer days are over.”

  “You love Rich,” he says.

  She bristles momentarily at the statement. “Why would you bring him up like that right now?”

  Silver shrugs. He meant no harm. “We just had sex, so you must be thinking of him.”

  She’s forgotten how disconcerting his new frankness can be.

  “Well, I’m not. I’m thinking of you, actually. Do you really want to die?”

  He sighs and looks away. “I really don’t like talking about that.”

  “Tough shit. You had the sex, you’re going to have to suffer through the pillow talk.”

  He smiles at her, his expression so loving that she has to quell the sudden urge to throw herself into his arms.

  “I want to have sex again,” he says.

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “For sure?”

  “For sure.”

  He ponders that sadly for a moment, then seems to accept it.

  “Silver.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re just getting to know Casey again. She needs you. Y
ou cannot check out on us again.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, I don’t know who got her pregnant, but the fact that she won’t tell us means she’s probably not seriously considering—”

  “Jeremy,” he says.

  Denise falls silent and looks at him. “What?”

  “Jeremy Lockwood. She had sex with him.”

  Denise feels her breath catching in her throat, feels a surge of anger rising up inside of her. “She told you that?”

  “We saw him at Dagmar’s and I kind of guessed it. He used to do those magic tricks, remember? He would wear this cape and—”

  “Silver!” Denise shouts. “Focus, please. Are you sure about this? Did you talk about it with Casey?”

  “Yes,” Silver says. “She said it was lovely.”

  “And you’ve known this all along.”

  “For a while, yes.”

  “And you didn’t think that was something we should talk about?”

  Silver considers the question and shrugs. “We don’t really talk so much.”

  Denise gets out of bed and starts to pull on her clothing. “You’re un-fucking-believable!”