She called down to him as he wearily mounted the stairs. “I’m so glad you’re home. I was worried.”
Jasper smirked and rolled his eyes. “I thought you weren’t going to wait up.”
“I didn’t. I fell asleep and had a bad dream about you.”
“Oh?” Jasper brushed by her in the doorway, heading for the living room. He plopped down on the couch to take his shoes off.
Lacy came to sit near him. “Yeah, I dreamed some guy picked you up in a black car. He drove you to some park along the lakefront.”
Her words gave Jasper a chill, but he didn’t want it to show. “Wouldn’t be the first time.” The lakeside parks along the north side of town were notorious for cruising and had been for many years.
“He slit your throat.”
“Gah! That’s horrible!”
“I know, right? I woke up crying.”
Jasper moved down the couch and took Lacy in his arms, which is what he supposed she’d expected all along. He pulled away only long enough to say, “Want me to sleep with you tonight?”
She grinned. “You mean, like, as in sex?”
He punched her arm. “No, silly. And you know that’s not what I meant.”
She stood and held out her hand. “Come on, it’s time for platonic bedtime. My favorite.”
Jasper took her hand and followed her into her bedroom, pretending not to notice the look of sadness stamped on her doughy features.
Chapter 2
WHEN JASPERawoke on Wednesday morning, he was in his own bed. The quality of the sunlight streaming in through the slats in his partially open mini blinds told him it was late morning. He sat up and yawned, stretching. Wednesdays he didn’t need to be in at the store until after lunch. He remembered crawling into bed with Lacy last night. She’d wrapped her arms around him, spooning against his back, and he’d immediately fallen asleep.
What he didn’t recall was getting up at some point and getting in his own bed. He supposed it must have happened during a late-night run to the bathroom.
Lately, Lacy was finding more and more excuses to get him into bed with her. Even if it was just platonic, Jasper knew it probably wasn’t such a healthy thing and that he should put a stop to it, or at least curtail it. She already called him her “Will” and her “gay husband.” She didn’t need the additional encouragement of having him in her bed every night. How would she ever find a man of her own?
More importantly: How would he?
Besides, he’d made the dining room into his own bedroom—and it was only a few feet from Lacy’s room. To get to the other, they need only traverse a distance of about thirty or so steps. They were close enough that they could talk to each other from their respective beds, as long as an L train wasn’t thundering by.
As his feet hit the hardwood floor beneath his bed, he had three thoughts.
The first was coffee. He needed some desperately. When he’d moved in with Lacy, he hadn’t even liked the stuff, but she quickly made an addict out of him. Now he just couldn’t seem to get himself going without at least one good cup of dark roast in him, especially after a night of imbibing. Lacy turned up her nose at what he poured into his morning brew and called him a kid, but he still needed to “enhance” his morning joe with french vanilla creamer and not one, not two, but three teaspoons of sugar. “You’re not drinking coffee. You’re drinking a mocha shake,” Lacy would chide him, the steam rising from her own unadulterated black coffee.
The second thought wasWho’s watching me now?Their apartment was on the second floor, same level as the L tracks. The three windows in Jasper’s “bedroom” faced those tracks, and often because their building was very near the terminus of the Red Line at Howard, trains would wait for clearance into the busy final North Side station—right outside Jasper’s windows. As easily as he could look out at the passengers, they could just as easily observe him.
He didn’t worry much about exposure, standing up in only his Diesel trunks. He’d learned quickly that almost all the people on the trains weren’t particularly interested in peering out the window—or into his. No, nearly every one of them had their faces downward, looking at either a phone, an e-reader, or a tablet. The world outside, Jasper sometimes thought, had gone out of fashion. It wasn’t real unless it was posted on Facebook or Twitter.
So he didn’t bother closing his blinds tight, even though the train, like some huffing monster, stood motionless right outside, almost close enough to touch. If people wanted to look at his skinny body, let them.
Meantime, coffee. He headed toward the kitchen with his third thought, which he voiced aloud. “It’s awfully quiet in here.”
Usually, Lacy was up before him and bustling around. She’d have music playing—maybe streaming some Chopin from a Spotify playlist. She would turn on lights and, if she didn’t opt for music, turn on the TV, tuning it to the local news if she could stand it, a rerun ofI Love Lucyif she wanted to escape. He seldom had to make coffee himself. He was even a little daunted by their french press, even though Lacy told him over and over it was the easiest way to make coffee. “It’s idiotproof,” she told him, “So I’m pretty sure you can handle it.”
But Lacy must have had more to drink than he realized last night and was still sleeping it off. Save for the usual urban noises, the apartment was eerily still. Jasper felt quite alone, and it was unsettling. There were times when he pined for his own place, imagining a morning like this one when he could spread out and enjoy his solitude, but the truth was he liked having Lacy around, the noise she made, hell, the coffee she made.
After emptying his bladder, he headed back out to the kitchen to unravel the mystery of the french press. It wasn’t so much using the thing that confounded him. He never knew how much coffee to grind to put in it. He was never sure if he should grind the beans finely or coarsely. Lacy always said, “Err on the side of strong.” He set the teakettle filled with tap water on the stove to boil, ground enough coffee to fill the bottom quarter of the press, which looked like the amount Lacy would have put in, and went to check on her.
Her door was tightly shut, which made Jasper pause. This was unusual. Whether they shared a bed or not, she usually left her door partially open so if he wanted to wander in and talk to her, he could. Jasper’s brow furrowed, and he tiptoed over to her door, listening.
