by Paula Cox
“I never asked you to,” I say.
“You haven’t looked at me once since you got in,” he says.
My hand on the handle, I squeeze my fingers, the metal digging into my palm. I close my eyes and take a deep breath and let it out slow and long. “Thanks for the ride,” I say, and then climb out of the car as quickly as I can.
I feel Dad’s eyes on me the entire time as I pace to the door, unlock it, and disappear up the stairs. Then the Mustang growls and screeches away. I walk up the stairs to my apartment, heart thudding madly as it always does after seeing Dad. He thinks the years after my mother’s death can just be washed away. Like some chalk scrawl on a toilet wall, he thinks they can just be scrubbed off. But it doesn’t work like that. Everything leaves a mark, a permanent mark, no matter how much it might one day fade.
When I get into the apartment, I go straight into the shower and wash off the stress of tonight’s events. Jeff dead, Jeff dead in my trunk, the police, Dad . . .
I scrub myself clean and then climb from the shower, standing near the radiator and letting the heat move through me.
***
After about half an hour, I manage to push Dad from my mind. It’s not an easy feat, but I’m practiced. I’ve been practicing since I was a child.
I pick up one of my college books, sit on the couch in shorts and a t-shirt, and begin reading. Soon, I’m lost in the world of animals. I’ll be back at the veterinary center soon; the thought gives me strength. Animals are simpler than people, much simpler. They don’t change, not as drastically as we do. If you get a dog, that dog will be much the same as it was when you first got him. Older, more tired, more prone to illness, but inside it will still be the dog it’s always been. There’s no such guarantee with people.
I’m thinking this when there’s a knock at my door.
I place the book on the table and creep over to it. Not the apartment’s buzzer, but a knock. Which must mean it’s either one of the neighbors or Dad has returned, pressed another buzzer, and haggled his way in. I chain the door so that it can only open a few inches, and then open it.
The words, I’m tired, Dad, are already on my lips. But it’s not Dad.
It’s the handsome man from the game, the man who was talking with Jeff, the man who was laughing with him.
He’s holding a bottle of wine and a cardboard pizza box.
“Can I come in?” he says. “We need to talk.”
He’s wearing the same expensive gray suit and when he smiles at me, I feel like I’m being smiled at by a movie star. The situation is surreal, standing here in shorts whilst this handsome stranger shows up, unannounced and uninvited, to my door. I’m painfully aware of my t-shirt hugging close to my large breasts. I shift so that only my head is peering around the door.
“Talk? What do we need to talk about?”
He smiles easily. “It will make sense if you let me in. And look.” He holds up the wine and pizza. “I bring gifts.”
He smiles into my eyes, and despite myself I feel a small smile lift my lips, too. There’s something penetrating about his smile, and especially the way it touches his eyes. Glimmering. I know eyes don’t really glimmer, but when I look at him, they seem to—seem to so strongly that I can’t help but believe they really are. But I can’t just go and let some strange man into my apartment because his eyes glimmer, can I?
“You were talking with Jeff,” I say. “Laughing with him. And you’re here. So I’ll assume you know who I am. His ex-wife. What would you want with Jeff’s ex-wife?”
“Like I said. To talk.”
His smile falters for a second, and I see something beneath it, a flicker. Not of fear, but of uncertainty. Uncertainty about what, though? What exactly does this man want with me? I ask him, and he forces the smile back onto his face. I see that clearly. It isn’t an easy smile. He pushes it onto his face.
“Who are you and why the hell do we need to talk?” I demand.
He drops the smile and looks at me with his real expression: icy eyes, straight lips, clenched jaw. Not angry, no; I sense that this man, for whatever reason, is beyond anger. He seems more dormant, like something which could explode any moment but will not, because he has control. “I don’t want to scare you,” he says. “That’s the last thing I want, Stella. The last thing.”
“You know my name, so Jeff talked about me. Did he tell you what sort of husband he was?”
“Yes,” the man says. “He told me a lot of things.”
“And you were still friends with him.”
“I was not his friend.”
“You were laughing with him.”
The man sighs, tilts his head back, and lets out a laugh. A convincing laugh. I know it’s fake because there’s nothing to be laughing about, but when he laughs, I almost believe it despite that. It’s the laugh of a man having the most carefree and fun time of his life. Then it abruptly cuts short and he meets my gaze with a shrug. “See? I wasn’t really laughing with him.”
I look the man up and down. Tall, much taller than me, maybe two heads, and ripped with muscle. It’s not often you can tell that when a man is wearing a suit, but this man’s suit is close-fitting and it outlines his muscles clearly. His arms bulge at the seams of his suit jacket. The jacket is open and his chest muscles are outlined by his shirt. His hands are large, strong. I notice that some of the knuckles are grazed. A fighter, then.
“Why do you want to come inside?” I ask again.
“I won’t discuss it out here,” he says. “I had a plan, you know, Stella. To charm you.”
“You probably could, under different circumstances.”
“Let me in,” he says simply. He takes a step forward so that I have to crane my head to look up at him. He seems huge, towering over me like that, huge and strong. A thousand voices scream at me to shut the door in his face, and only one screams at me to throw it open. But that one voice is hungry, starving; the one voice is captivated with his muscles and his bright blue eyes and the aura of danger that surrounds him. The one voice overpowers the others, and without deciding I close the door, unlatch the chain, and open it once again.
His eyes rove down my body, linger on my breasts, squashed in the t-shirt, and then to my pale milky legs.
Then his gaze snaps back up to my face. “So, where’s the kitchen?”
I gesture into the apartment, and the grazed-knuckled man steps forward.
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