He lets out a long, deep breath. The look in his eyes says that he’s relenting, and I can see that he’s gifting me with something important. Something he would never share with those beautiful women from church, or Sadie, or even Jeannie, who has a motherly way ofputting him at ease. Something that has lived alone in his head like a caged monster. “I’d have to show you.”
Moments later, we’re riding in silence in Edison’s green Buick. It smells like him, like sun-warmed skin and that musty sweet cologne that drives me wild.
He holds the wheel in one hand, his grip relaxed. His eyes are fixed, though, and his jaw is tight. I reach over and weave my fingers through his. Whatever it is, he won’t scare me away. I’m here. I’m with him.
Edison uses the turn signal dutifully, even though the roads are empty. We veer onto a suburban grid with manicured lawns amid the desert landscape. He pulls onto the shoulder and shuts the engine.
“You see that house?” He nods to a one-story mid-century modern across the street. It has a slanted roof, and its left side is comprised entirely of windows. Plain white curtains are drawn, but I can see a silhouette moving back and forth, stopping to clean up, perhaps after a party. Edison doesn’t wait for me to answer, and I suspect he wouldn’t hear me even if he did. He is lost in whatever storm brews inside him. “He killed my wife.”
I look at him. He’s hidden his sadness, replacing it instead with the hard set of a clenched jaw. But I feel his pain anyway. It ripples through me, a cold breeze, making me want to hold him.
“Just turned twenty this year. He comes from money. His parents pay the rent on this place for him.”
I’m impressed with the amount of research he’s done, and I want to ask him if he used his own computer for this, but I don’t speak. I barely breathe. Usually, Edison is guarded. Like me, he presents a cultivated side of himself to the world. But in this moment, he can’t restrain whatever mystery he keeps shrouded in the daylight. His fist tightens under my fingers.
“I come here,” he says. “I park right here and I watch him sometimes. I think about all the ways I could kill him.” He’s living one such fantasy right now. I see the shift in him. The focus. The cool, steady anger that he channels. Like Iris tightening the garrote. Like me dismembering the limbs and scrubbing the blood from the grout.
When he finally looks at me, my blood runs hot with desire. With desperation. “I would never do it,” he says. “I just like knowing that I could.”
The moment passes, and vulnerability takes the place of his confession. He realizes how this looks—alone in his car on a dark street, with me, a woman he’s only just met, entirely at his mercy. I must be frightened of him now, he’s thinking. He must have ruined everything.
His fist loosens under my grasp and he tries to pull away so that he can put the car back in drive and take me home. I tighten my hold on him and feel gratification at the surprise on his face when he realizes I’m the one who won’t let him go.
Softly, I ask, “What would you do to him?”
I don’t let him see my own darkness. I don’t smile, even though I want to. This moment is about him. He lives such a quiet life—work, church, AA meetings. He lives in a house filled with picture albums that gather dust, and sharp reminders of a woman he loved and a life he lost. He carries this hatred all alone.
But I’m here now. “Tell me, Edison.”
He looks away from me, to a streetlamp that flickers in the distance, swarming with moths. Foolish, emotional Sissy. I’ve gone too far again. If my sisters were here, they’d warn that my helpless romance was going to be the doom of us all, that I’m laying it on too thick, that no man will ever love me if I throw myself at him.
He turns my palm in both his hands, and he traces his fingertipdown the line that leads to my wrist. There, he presses down to feel my pulse. Alive. I’m alive. Like him. Hours ago, I was in his bed and he was making me come, and now I’m opening myself to hear his ugliest secrets. Practically begging him to tell me.
“You must think I’m fucked up,” he says.
I unbuckle my seat belt and lean over the console to take his face in my hands. “Hey,” I say. “That man in there destroyed your life. He doesn’t even have to answer for it. Gets to carry on, probably have his own family someday. You have a right to be angry.”
God, the way he looks at me. That helpless pleading, that mix of confusion and desire.Who are you?his eyes say.Who sent you to me?
His hand goes to my waist, fingers kneading softly into my skin. Exploring me, feeling the bones buried within me.
I remind myself of the burial site I’ve lovingly planned out for him, but suddenly it doesn’t seem like enough. When he’s near me like this, with his fingers teasing the inside of my thigh, a dangerous thing starts to happen to me. Love is necessary and lust is the ultimate test.Stay strong, Sissy. Follow through and he’ll be yours forever. He’ll never leave you. It has to be this way.
“My God,” he says, breathless. “What are you doing to me?”
I look at his eyes, and for one maddened, helpless moment I think he can see what I’m really thinking. That violent edge I want to test.
I lean over the console. He rakes his hands through my hair, watching heavy-lidded as I unzip his jeans. He wore them to work, new smudges of desert dust in the stitching. He wore them all day while he was thinking of me.
“Jade—”
“Shh.” His jeans are bunched below his knees. His skin is hot. He shudders when I brush my fingertips across him lightly. He holds my hair like it’s the only thing keeping him from falling. When he givesit a tug, it ignites me.Pull harder,I think.Fight me.But he doesn’t, because I’m not the object of his rage. I’m not the one who killed his wife. I am Jade, and he wants to protect me. Sweet, dulcet Jade, who just may be full of surprises yet. His eyes are on my tongue as it moves slowly across my lips. “Let me show you,” I say. “Let me show you what I can do to you.”
—
HOURS LATER, I DON’Tsleep as Edison dozes with his arms around me. He drove us back to his house, and I’d let out a shriek as he hoisted me into his arms and spirited me to his bed. We didn’t say a word to each other this time. We’d only stared into each other as we moved, frantic for each other, gasping.
He was so vulnerable, even with his arms so taut with muscle. He’s got the physique to kill a man if only he indulged that side of himself. He could kick open the door, storm that man’s living room, and be done with it in seconds. A hurricane of fists and blood and raw hatred.
