"Well, why don't you come to bed?" Lani slips her hand around my bicep.
"Yeah, I'll be right in."
Lani laughs, a breathy giggle, and that's when I realize why the Rack's giggle irritated me: it was like Lani's. I push the thought away and turn to her.
"What's funny?" I ask.
She scratches her nails up my arm. "I meant, come to bed..." and the tone of her voice suggests what she's getting at.
"Don't you have to wake up for work in a few hours?"
I ask myself why I'm arguing and don't come up with an answer.
"It's only two-thirty," she says. “I don't have to be up till seven. We have time." She stands up and backs toward the bedroom.
I sit and watch her, feeling the zipper of my jeans tighten as she peels her shirt off, revealing her naked curves. I stand up and follow after her, shedding my shirt and pants as I go. I'm hard and ready, and she's crawling backward across the bed, her hair splaying across the pillow, her hand reaching for me as I climb up between her legs.
Sex with Lani never fails to be spectacular. She's passionate and vocal, crying out when she comes, moaning my name as I plunge into her, soft hands clutching my shoulders.
Her eyes, though, when I glance at her, reveal a distance as they look at me. A kind of disguised apathy. As if she's acting. The thought bothers me, and I push it away. I release with a soft grunt, my face buried in her neck.
I wish she would put her hand on my head when I bury my face against her like this. She never does, though, and I always find myself wishing she would. I never say anything, because she'd do it, but only since I asked her to. It's a little thing, insignificant, but somehow it always seems to hit me like this. She does what she thinks I want. She knows I get horny when I'm drunk, so she has sex with me when I get back from the bar. I'm not sure she wants to, though. Not really.
She's asleep again, turned away from me, still naked, beautiful, and it seems for a moment as if we're in different realities. The absurdity of the thought makes me snort. I roll over behind her and slip my arm over her hip. She's warm and soft and present here with me.
A glow of affection for Lani spreads through me, replacing my doubts. She loves me, and I love her. All is well with my world, in this moment, at least.
A tiny voice in the very bottom-most, shadowy part of my heart speaks up.
Right?
And then I fall asleep without answering that question.
* * *
The next few weeks pass somewhat awkwardly. Lani is increasingly distant. She usually is in the days and weeks prior to my shipping out, but this is different. More pronounced. We don't have sex again.
She's on her phone a lot, texting nonstop. She plugs it in next to her bed and puts in on silent. Sometimes it's under her pillow. It's always in her hand or in her purse, or in her back pocket. It's never, ever where I can see it. If I approach her while she's texting, or on call, she pauses until I go away, putting the phone against her chest.
I ignore it as best I can, but warning bells are going off. I ignore those, too. Nothing's going on, right? I mean, I'm about to ship out in a week, for Christ's sake. She would wait till I'm gone to start anything, right?
I go to the gym three days before my plane leaves Des Moines. I'm only there for about half an hour before I feel something in my shoulder pull and decide to call it a day. Usually I'm at the gym for an hour or two, which how it’s been since high school.
The gym is a couple miles away from Lani's apartment, and I walk the distance, huddled in a thick coat and sweatpants, feeling the wind bite through the cotton to freeze the sweat on my legs. As I approach the apartment complex, my heart begins to hammer in my chest. There's no reason for it, but it's a feeling I've learned to recognize. It's foreboding. Premonition, maybe. A gut feeling. I've learned to recognize these feelings and trust them. Something is wrong. I don't feel the prickling of my skin, the crawling of my flesh and the cold sweat of fear, so I don't think it's a danger situation, but something is off.
I approach Lani's front door and slip in, silently. The hinges don't squeak, and the knob doesn't scrape. My footfalls are stealthy on the carpet. I don't know why I'm doing this. I'm in a tactical crouch, and my hands are clutched in front of me automatically, as if I'm holding a rifle. It's habit, reflex. Every sense is attuned.
I shrug out of my coat and drape it across a chair back. My skin tightens with apprehension. Is Lani hurt? I don't smell blood. I smell...sweat? Bodies. I smell sex.
Then I hear it: a sigh, gentle, brief, and female. It's a sound I know all too well. It's the sound Lani makes when she comes. She doesn't scream or cry out; she clutches me close, arms around my neck, and sighs—almost a whimper—into my ear. I can almost feel her arms, hear the sigh, but I'm not in that bedroom. She’s not making that sound for me. I wait, crouched outside her door and listen, just to make sure I'm not mistaken. Maybe she's pleasuring herself. I don't like that idea much more, since why would she need to do that if she has me? But...no. I hear him. A deeper sigh. A grunt. Murmured words, her laugh, a male moan.
She’s having sex, and it’s not me.
Fuck.
Anger ripples through me, turning my sight red, making my hands shake. I breathe, hard and deep and fast. I wait, force my blood to slow, force my hands to unfist. I can't afford mistakes. I can't afford to lose my temper. I've been too careful about it for too long to mess up now. Juvie was bad enough. I'm not going to jail. I'm not going to get court-martialed.
When I'm as calm as I can get under the circumstances, I fling open the bedroom door. There she is. Naked and beautiful, underneath Douglas Pearson. Doug. Skinny little Doug, nerdy, introverted, acne-scarred, works at an insurance agency Doug motherfucking Pearson.
I resist the urge to throw him out the first-story window.
"Get the f**k out, Doug." My voice is a whisper. Calm and deadly. "Get the f**k out, now. I'll be gone in a minute, and you can have her back. I just need to talk to her."
Doug scrambles off the bed and dresses in record time. He stops in front of me, his eyes wide with terror, his nostrils flaring, reeking of fear. But he stops in front of me and faces me. I give him credit for having some balls. "You won't...you won't hurt her? If you're going to hurt someone, hurt me."
I laugh. It's not an amused sound. "Don't tempt me, pencil-dick. No. I'm not going to hurt anyone. Except you if you don't get the f**k out of my face."
He gets out. Lani clutches the bed sheet around her chest, as if I haven't seen her naked a million times before. As if we didn't lose our virginity together at fifteen. As if I didn't have a ring in my duffel bag. That act, the shielding herself from my view, tells me all I need to know.