Commitment (62 page)

He hung up on her.
Damn.
That had
gone well.
He ignored his phone when i
t immediately started ringing.
He’d have to change that number
ASAP
.
Shawn sighed and used the la
nd line to call B’s apartment.
He wasn’t in, so he tried his mobile and got him.

“B,” he said.
“I think I just started some shit.”

g

Riley
adjusted her robe about her and glanc
ed again at the kitchen clock.
It was
6:13
in the morning
.
Tracy would be up and about, almost ready to head ou
t the door to come pick her up.
They were driving to D.C. for the Free Tibet march and rally and Tracy insisted as always when they went on road trips together, that they
leave early to avoid traffic.
Like there was ever a time in New York
City
when you could “avoid traffic
.”

The coffee’s drip into
the carafe was painfully slow.
Riley
leaned on the counter with her head in her hands, wondering what had gotten into her to make her agree to make the three-and-half
hour drive in the first place. Oh yeah, it had been her idea.
After reading some article on the Dalai Lama she’d talked Tracy into going to the rally and she’d agreed
with extreme reluctance
.
So calling her up and canceling at the last minute was probably out of the question.

The coffeemaker stopped dripping and
Riley
reached for her oversized mug, filling it almost to the brim, ad
ding a splash of milk and
sugar.
Lots of sugar.
Absolutely necessary for her to get her ass in gear.
It had taken her three weeks to figure out how to operate this machine. Like many of her things that she’d brought over from the Flushing apartment, Shawn had quietly
disappeared
her coffeemaker
and replaced it
with one made by Lamborghini. Yes, the same people who made the sports cars. She couldn’t even imagine what it had cost, but when she figured it out, she had to grudgingly admit, that the
espresso
it produced rivaled that of any upscale coffeehouse you could visit anywhere in the city.

“Baby, what’re you doing
up so early
?”

Riley
just avoided dropping
her mug, but did manage to spill coffee
down
the front of her robe.
She spun round to face Shawn.  He was standing there
with
his
boxer
briefs
low-slung on his hips
, rubbing his eyes, squinting against the light.
He looked good, really
, really
good.

When had it happened that she had to restrain herself with him? It used to be that when s
he wanted to jump him,
he beat her to it;
but over the last few days
she’d
learned that
if she made anything resembling a sexual advance,
rejection would almost certainly be the result. She looked away and focused instead on cleaning up the coffee spill.

“Getting ready,” she said.
“Why are
you
up?”

“Getting ready for what
?”

“I’m going to D.C. with Tracy this morning, remember?”

Shawn shook his head.
“You didn’t tell me you were going to D.C
.
I would’ve remembered something like that.”

“I did tell you,”
Riley
sipped her coffee.
“But even if I hadn’t
. . .
anyway it’s just for one night.”

“Now you’re spending the
night
in D.C.?”

“Yes.
I told you about this Shawn.
The night you got back, I told you about the Free Tibet rally?”

Recogniti
on entered his eyes. “Oh yeah.
Tibet.”
He shook his head.
“But you didn’t say it was overnight.”

“Oh, do I need to ge
t an overnight pass?” s
he asked
.

He opened his mouth as though he was about to answer and then seemed to think better of it. 

“Call me when you get there,” he said
finally
, turning to go back into the bedroom.

Riley
closed he
r eyes.
Now why did she have to go and say something like that?

It was
still a little chilly
out
, and
this
early in the morning,
she had to layer up, wearing jeans,
a black
cardigan over a white t-shirt and
a tank
underneath.
Riley
waited outside for Tracy instead of in the apartment where it was
warm
because she didn’t want to get into
it with Shawn before she left.
When she was tossing her toiletries, jeans, tops and a couple other outfits into her overnight bag, she could tell he was awake, eve
n though pretending not to be.

The last few days had
been
weird
.
Ever since he’d come back from Chicago they hadn’t
made love
and he always seemed to be headi
ng off somewhere with Brendan—
but not like before when he was just busy, now he al
most seemed to be avoiding her.
When she reached for him, he
kissed her almost like an uncle—
on her forehead or near but never quite on her lips. Once she’d gone in for the kill, just sticking her tongue in his mouth and he’d reacted immediately, like a man on fire. Then, just as she was certain he was about to give in to her, he rememb
e
red someplace he had to be and jumped into the shower.

But what
made it all the more confusing
was that at the same time, he went out of his way to be nice whenever they were together, not responding when she t
ried to bait him into a fight.
Like this morning.
Now, thinking about it, she was actually glad to be getting away for the night, away from the strange tension between them lurking just beneath the surface of all the
sweetness and light
.

She dropped her bag from her shoulder and stretched her
arms above her head, yawning.
Still tired.
Co
uld use another cup of coffee.
She could always try to get Tracy to stop at a Starbucks or something
but
Tracy was one of those people
obsessed
w
ith “making good time”
so she was probably better off going back upstairs and filling one of those plastic mugs she used to take to work before they started giving tickets on the s
ubway for eating and drinking.
She looke
d back at the doorman, Javier.
He was on duty
between midnight
and
eight a.m. and was not nearly as good a sport as
Ed
, especially so close to the end of his shift
.
Just as she’d decided to go for it,
Tracy pulled up honking the horn and it occurred to
Riley
that they were driving to
a human rights event in a BMW.
How
bourgeois
was that.

She got in and tossed her weekend bag on the back seat, slamming the door behind her.

“
Excuse me
,” Tracy said.
“You think you might wa
nt to be a little more careful?
If you wreck it, I can’t afford to get a new one
.
What’s your problem?”

“You’re late.”

Tracy
glanced at the dashboard clock.
“By ten m
inutes.
What’s the matter with you?”

“I need coffee.”

“We’ll stop once we’re on I-
95, but not one second sooner.
You know what traffic on the Jersey Turnpike is going to be like around nine o’clock?”

“I knew yo
u w
ere going to do this to me.
Lemme run upstairs and grab some then.”

“
Riley
, you
had all morning to get coffee.
Let’s just get going already.”

The traffic
was light as a matter of fact.
It was
smooth
sailing all through the city and ev
en through the Holl
and Tunnel.
Riley
could feel her irritability ebbing, the f
urther they got from New York.
She turned to look at Tracy who was fiddling with the dials for the radio, trying to find a station.

“Nothing but crap on,” she complained. 

“You mean nothing but rap,”
Riley
said.

“I didn’t say that
.”

“But that’s what you meant.”

Tracy looked at her.
“
What’s the matter with you this morning?
”

“
Maybe
I should just try to take a na
p.
Just tell me when we get a rest s
top so I can get some coffee.”

Riley
adjusted her seat backward and closed her eyes.

“Don’t go to sleep,”
Tracy hit her in the shoulder.
“I need someone to talk to.”

Riley rolled her eyes and resigned herself to being exhausted and testy for at least another hundred miles.

The
y
pulled into Washington D.C. a little after
ten
a.m., driving in on New York Avenue, the main drag leading into the city past rows of gas stations, fast food restaurants
, low-rent motels
and burnt-out or boarded up townhouses
and
neighborhoods that seemed to have been neglected for
long that they’d finally died.
But the townhouses themselves wer
e old and beautiful enough that—
had they been tr
ansplanted almost anyplace else—
they would have been
considered prime real estate,
worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Shawn grew up in D.C., and to hear him tell it, in a neighborh
o
od ev
ery bit as depressed as these.
Except for public charity appearances and donations to a few urban
revitalization
causes
spent very little time in the city.
H
e
seemed to have
nothing but negative memories of his early life in D.C. and never talked about it in any detail except to say that he
missed very little about living there
.
Riley
looked out the window as they drove by at the scores of young men standing on the corners, not too different from guys in New York or probably any oth
er urban center in the country.
They just seemed to be milling about with nowhere to go.

They checked in at a hotel on Thomas Circle that was a fair distance from the Washington Mall where the rally was being held, parking the car in the hotel garage and heading on foot in the dir
ection of Constitution Avenue.
Unlike New York,
downtown
D.C. was almost a ghost town on Saturdays but for
Riley
at least, it was a relief to walk through a city where there weren’t
throngs
shoving past you
in the opposite direction.

The Mall was a different story though.
Though still early, s
everal
hundred
people had already gathered, buying food from vendors, signing petitions, even beating drums and danci
ng
.
Most were sitting on towels or blankets on the grass facing the stage just in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol where later on the Dalai Lama was supposed to make an appearance along with a host of celebrities, like Richard Gere who supported his cause.

“Looks like the ‘I-wish-I-
was
-at-W
oodstock’ crowd to me,” Tracy said as they made their way past a group of young, girls wearing tie
-dye t-shirts and ripped jeans.
“Are you sure you want to hang?”