Page 36

I lie in the dark with somebody else's voice going around my head and understand that I've just used a man for my selfish reasons.

He falls asleep at once, like a light going off.

After a while, I get up. I stand in his bathroom with my hand on the tap for a long time and don't turn it on. I dress in the dark. The ring goes back to its place on my finger, but it takes two tries because my hands feel so numb and useless.

I don't leave a note before heading out the door.

Back on the road, I check my mirrors three times before the bridge, then catch myself doing it. Laszlo Novak is making me paranoid.

I wonder if I’m being watched anyway, despite the fact I was candid with Laszlo. The very idea sends a cold shiver down my spine.

That's what I'm thinking about when I turn into my road at four-twenty and see him on my porch steps.

He has a coat on, sitting with his ankles crossed. His car is not here. Nor is Constantine or Daniel. He looks like a man waiting for a bus.

He doesn't look up because he knows it's me, so he slips his hands in his pockets and stares at the road. I stay behind the wheel with my heart pumping, waiting for him to turn his head.

He doesn't.

I get out.

It's thirty feet to my front steps. My knees have gone weak and my hand isn't steady on the car door, and the humiliating part is that it isn't fear. It's that I'm glad he's here. Glad. This late at night, or the early hours of the morning, after my parting fuck with Charles. My body took one look at him on my steps and lit up. I could scream.

He stands when I'm halfway up the drive. Laszlo doesn't come down to meet me. Doesn't say anything, just makes me walk to him.

Close up, he smells of cold air and clean laundry, and, underneath, formalin. Embalming fluid. It's in his hands and it doesn't wash out. I could pick it out of a hundred men in the dark, and somehow I'd know it was him. It feels like a hand slipping between my legs…

Which is a wonderful thing to learn about yourself at—I glance at my watch—twenty past four in the morning, in the street, still wet after a romp under the sheets with somebody else. God, how is it so late?

"Don't," I say.

"I haven't said anything."

"You're about to."

"Hmm, maybe." He tips his head at the door. "But I don't think you want to do this outside."

There's a woman two doors down who leaves for the bakery at four-thirty, and I've lived this long without attracting the wrong kind of attention, so why start now?

"Come inside," I say.

He waits while I get the door open, which takes longer than it should. In the hall he takes his coat off and puts it over my chair, and through the white of his shirt I can see the dressing on his left shoulder, three of my stitches under it.

He fills my kettle and puts it on the stove. I should be disturbed and angry that he knows which cabinet the mugs are in, so I ask, "When did you get a key?"

"March. Do you want to talk about the key, Manon, or shall we do the other thing?"

My coat's still on and I don't take it off, because doing that feels like agreeing to something. His stillness and calm are making me slightly paralyzed.

"Say it," he says.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you were saying to yourself on the way here."

So I tell him. Useless beating around the bush. I have suddenly no doubt he already knows.

"I slept with Charles. One last time, a goodbye."