Darling (19 page)

A thin strand of webbing stretched from one side of the hole to the other. It was littered with the tiny desiccated carcasses of gnats. Past that was more ink, a room full of it, and his cell phone light could barely penetrate it.

Scrape.

This time he thought he recognized the sound. There

was weight behind it. It had the resonance of three, no
four
tiny scrapes occurring simultaneously to combine into one
half-discernible noise. It was a chair scooting across the
floor. An occupied chair.

He tried to wedge his phone into the hole, but found it difficult to maneuver it in such a way that he could still see. He thought he caught a glimpse of the light reflecting off of metal in the far corner. He repositioned and wiggled the phone around again.

Something passed in front of the hole.

He stood and stumbled back. Was someone in there?

“Hello?” He waited for a moment. No answer.

He knocked on the door, three loud knocks, and waited. Nothing.

A light shined into the room behind him, casting his shadow onto the wall. He turned and had to shield his eyes.

“Dennis?”

The flashlight clicked off. He heard the scrape of metal twisting into metal and then the room filled with yellow light.

Karen stood under the bulb. She wore green silk pajama pants and a light blue spaghetti strap undershirt. It hung on her crookedly and his eyes were instantly drawn to the side of a round, creamy breast that attempted an escape. Her hair was damp, darkening it to a deep shade of red, and tied behind her in a ponytail. She had a small basket of laundry tucked under one arm, the flashlight resting on top. Like usual, she took his breath away.

“What are you doing down here in the dark?” she asked.

He glanced over his shoulder, nervous. He couldn’t figure out
why
, exactly, but he felt like he was caught doing something he shouldn’t have been.

“Um, just drying some clothes.”

She laughed and sat her basket on a washing machine. “I can see that. I mean, why are you just hanging out in the corner with no light? A little Norman Bates, isn’t it?” She smiled and the room grew brighter.

“Yeah. Must look weird. I thought I heard a noise. Do you know what’s in here?” He motioned to the door with his thumb.

She shrugged. “Think it’s just a general storage area for the building. Fuse box, lawn tools, that kind of thing.”

He almost told her he had peeked into there, that all he had ever seen was a chair, but stopped. It seemed oddly confrontational, not to mention obsessive, and he didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable. Even though he was perfectly happy with Eileen, a guy’s first instinct with a beautiful woman was to impress her.

She sat her basket down and pulled out a small bottle of detergent. She glanced at him, smiled, and poured some into the machine. She slid some change into the tray and started it up. She waited for it to fill and then opened the door again. She held up a wad of blue cotton and looked to Dennis.

“You just going to stand in the corner and watch me drop my panties?”

“Oh. Sorry.”

He passed her, purposely timing his breath to inhale as he walked by, and sat back in his chair. He opened his book and tried to read, but his eyes couldn’t help traveling over the top of the book and resting on her.

When she was done loading the wash, she dropped the door and turned. “I didn’t mean you had to wait out there. The light’s back on.” She pulled a small rectangle from the basket and held it up. “
And
I’ve got a deck of cards. Always plan on playing solitaire while waiting, but never do. It’s creepy down here by yourself. So I go upstairs and forget I have laundry going.”

He slid the book back into his pocket and grabbed his chair. “You play poker?”

She sat at the table and pulled the cards out. Her hands moved quickly, her fingers dancing through the cards as she shuffled. “Five-Card or Texas Hold-’em?”

He sat. “Dealer’s call.”

She dealt the cards and they played a few hands. She was far more experienced than he was and won most of them. They talked the entire time and she explained that she used to be a cocktail waitress in Biloxi. She’d caught the eye of one of the pit bosses and they dated for a few months. She had only been nineteen at the time while he was thirty. He had taught her how to play every game in the casino.

“When we broke up, after I caught him with another waitress, I turned fifty dollars into a thousand on his watch and quit. Son of a bitch.”

“What were you in Mississippi for?”

She shook her head and smiled. “Just sowing my oats, as it were. Had this stupid idea in my head that I would travel the country, like Kerouac or something, eventually going to California. Farthest I got from here was New Orleans before deciding that I hated being a vagabond. Came back, got my degree, and here we are.”

He felt her foot against his. She didn’t move, and neither did he. Even such a small touch, felt through the confines of shoe leather, sent electric shockwaves up his leg. “What’s your degree in?”

“Promise you won’t laugh?”

“Well, I can’t
promise
, but I’ll try not to. Gimme three.” He tossed three cards onto the table.

She took them and dealt three more. “Art History.”

“Why would I laugh at that?”

“Well, what the hell do you do with it?”

He smiled. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

“I never figured it out. Two pair.” She showed her cards, two eights, two tens, and an ace. “I’m working at a home shopping network now. Doing graphic arts work, making crap products look pretty.”

He threw his cards down, an assortment of nothing worthwhile, and she snatched them up to deal again. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“No, but it’s a far cry from Caravaggio and Brunelleschi. What about you? You’re in college now, right?”

“Yeah, should have been out already, but…”

“We all got our ‘buts.’ What are you studying?”

“Classical Civilization.”

“Really? The foundation of Western Art.”

“The foundation of everything.”

She nodded and dealt their cards. They picked them up, spread them shallowly in their hands, and examined them. “What drew you to that?”

“My mom. She used to read me Greek myths growing up. It eventually led to
The Iliad
,
The Odyssey,
and
The Aeneid.
Then I got into the histories as a teen, reading everything
from Herodotus and Suetonius to Cicero.”

“Pretty geeky for a teen, huh?”

“Probably. But I stayed pretty balanced, I guess. Mostly because of wrestling, I think.”

“You wrestled?”

“Still do. I was All-State my senior year of high school. Hope to make the team this fall.”

“The Greeks invented wrestling, right?”

He laughed. “Yep. Another influence from the Classical world on my life. I’m a bit of an anachronism, I guess. I feel more comfortable on the mat or with my head in a book than I do with the rest of the world, I think.”

Why was he telling her all of this?

She smiled. There was something about it, about how she couldn’t contain the expression on just her lips, about how it spread to her cheeks and her brow and the corners of her eyes that made the hairs on his arm stand up.

That’s why he was telling her all of this
.

“The warrior-scholar, huh? Another ancient ideal.”

He shrugged.

“I think it’s admirable, especially with this self-centered world we live in.” She locked her eyes on his and he couldn’t look away. It was like staring into a sunset, the colors more beautiful than anything seen during day or night, and he was transfixed in the fragile, temporary moment of her stare.

The dryer’s buzzer went off.

He stood, shifting his legs as he became aware that more than the hair on his arms stood up. “Well, that’s me.”

She sat her cards down and stood, stretching her arms above her head. Her shirt rose, revealing her flat abdomen and the top of her hips. A tattoo was painted on her left hip, something blue and yellow that peeked out above her low waistline. He wondered what it was and how far down it went.

He bent, opened the door, and grabbed the shirt. He quickly folded it over and hugged it to his chest, suddenly self-conscious about washing another woman’s clothing.

Another woman?

When he stood, Karen was little more than a foot from him. Her scent, that heady aroma of strawberries and something else, something exotic and alluring, brushed his face.

“Well,” she said. “Thanks for playing cards with me.”

“Sure thing. Anytime. I’d stay and keep you company, but…” He trailed off, unsure of what to say.

She just nodded. “Have a good night, then.” Her eyes were still on his and, even though she had just said her goodbye, she didn’t move to sit. In fact, she shuffled slightly forward, almost imperceptibly so.

Dennis was light-headed. He felt claustrophobic, as though the room had sealed itself off behind him and he was forever confined to this small space with her. He found her emerald eyes and couldn’t look away. His mouth dried and he swallowed. Licked his lips. His stomach twisted and his groin was incredibly warm, so warm that he felt if he didn’t open his pants soon he would blister.

Before he even knew what he was doing, he took a step forward. A voice inside screamed
Stop! Eileen!
But his body refused to listen. There were instincts at work, millions of years of evolution responding to full lips and pheromones in the air, and he could fight it no more than he could fight the urge to eat when hungry or sleep when tired.

One hand found her cheek, the other her lower back. Touching her skin was like touching warm silk and every nerve ending in his body came alive. Her own fingers found the back of his head, her nails pressing into the skin at a delicious depth, and guided his lips onto hers. They were soft. Thick. Moist. Warm. He trembled as her tongue ran over the inside of his own lips, tracing half-whispered promises inside his mouth.

Her other hand pressed against the thick muscle in the middle of his back, drawing him closer, closer, until he melted into her, no longer aware of where he ended and she began.

She pulled away, her cheeks bursting with red. She looked to her feet and tucked her hair behind her ears. Crossed her arms across her breasts. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. You have a girlfriend and—”

“No. I should apologize. I…um…” Warmth flooded his own cheeks and nervously laughed.

“Well,” she said. “It was just one of those things. A momentary indiscretion.”

He nodded and took a step back. They locked eyes again and he knew that she was wrong, that it was something more. “Um, I should be going, I guess.”

“Yeah.” She looked like she was going to say something else, move toward him again, but she turned back to the machine. “Good night.”

He felt the urge to walk up behind her, slide his hands around her waist, kiss her neck.

He hurried back to the elevator before his willpower faded.

* * *

The light cutting through the drapes cast strange shadows across the room. Some of them looked liked snakes slithering across her walls, while others were more like long fingers reaching across her room towards her. The tiny bits of mid-afternoon light wedged between them stung her eyes.

Peggy crawled out of bed, still weak from the morning’s treatments, and stumbled to the window. She squinted hard as she approached to pull the drapes tighter, and then returned to the soft, cool space between her mattress and her “Justin Bieber” sheets. Her computer speakers crackled next to her, faintly playing some iTunes selection about boys and horses, and she rolled back onto her side.

The treatments were awful. She felt worse after every one. Sicker, really, even though the doctors and her mother claimed it made her better. She had a vague idea of what was wrong with her, but had heard so many new words tossed around recently, words like “chemo” and “cancer” and “remission,” (that last whispered with the same wishful tones that she sometimes spoke of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny), that she couldn’t decide how sick she really was.

Her door was cracked and she could see dark blue shadows dance in the hallway. She tried to listen to what her mother watched on television, but only heard dull murmuring. Her head throbbed, her stomach felt twisted and abused. She prayed she wouldn’t vomit again. She hated the way it tasted and how her mouth burned after. Her eyes were heavy and they fluttered closed.

The phone rang, pulling her back. The blue shadows clicked off and she heard her mother say, “Hello?”

A pause, and then: “No, she’s sleeping.”

Peggy rolled over and exited iTunes. She rolled back and listened.

“As good as can be expected, I guess. Hmmm? I’ve lost count, really. Yes, yes it is. It’s just…hard, you know?”

She heard her mother sniff and recognized it as the forerunner to a wave of tears. Peggy had become very familiar with her mother’s sounds lately.

“I mean, after Derrick left I…yeah. Well, Charlie isn’t even out of diapers yet, and it’s just me, and my insurance doesn’t cover all of Peggy’s…oh, Mom, I can’t ask you to do that.”

Peggy had to bite her lip to keep from yelling
Let her do it, Mommy! Please!
But she knew how it would go. Her grandmother lived in Florida and her mother had too much pride to ask for help. It was killing her. Peggy hated to see her mother’s face so pale and puffy and the dark circles that lined her eyes. The worst part of it all was that Peggy knew it was her fault and the guilt kept her up at nights.

“Yes, Mom. I know.” Her voice quivered. Another sniff. “Thank you. Yeah. I love you, too. Tell Dad I said ‘hi.’ Later.”

A click, then silence. It was long and drawn out and Peggy wondered what her mother was doing. Then she heard the soft shuffle of feet moving through carpet and the bathroom door closed. A few moments later the metallic hum of water moving through pipes passed through her room. Her mother always did her best crying in the tub.