by W E DeVore
“I just can’t handle any more. I’m so tired,” she whispered.
“Close your eyes and rest then,” he said and her eyes clamped shut on command. He settled back into the couch and rested his head against hers, murmuring a song in Hebrew under his breath. “Tov choshech nafal al harechov rak hayareach mashir et oro ha’tzahov tzartzar metzartzer tzirtzuro shar - laylah tov…”
◆◆◆
Q blinked open her eyes, her mind still clouded by slumber. The sun was setting at an odd angle and she realized she was in her downstairs guest room. A thick, sturdy arm rested under her head and her fingers were intertwined with someone’s hand. She glanced over her shoulder to find Sanger asleep behind her and she relaxed back into his body. He pulled her closer and whispered her name. She watched the sunset reflected against the white trim of the neighboring house and studied Sanger’s hand covering hers. “Thank you, cowboy.”
He inhaled suddenly, her voice waking him. He started to pull away but she held him in place.
“I miss being held,” she said. As he resumed his earlier posture, she asked, “Do you have to go back to work?”
“No. I texted Rex after you fell asleep on the couch. I put you to bed, cleaned up that glass in the kitchen. Heard you crying in your sleep. You were having a nightmare…”
“I don’t remember…” For a moment, she tried to recall her dreams, then decided that some things were probably best forgotten.
Sanger rolled onto his back and she nestled against his torso, watching the light shimmer and change color. “I laid down with you. Didn’t mean to fall asleep, but I pulled a bad case last month and it stuck with me. Makes it hard to close my eyes at night lately.” His breathing deepened and Q was tempted to go back to sleep. He asked, “You have to go to the studio?”
“No. Derek and Fi had to go out to California for a few days. Magnus thinks he’s in love.”
Sanger yawned. “Who’s Magnus?”
“Their son.”
“Derek’s got a kid?” he asked, shocked.
“He’s a law student at Stanford. Likes to be called ‘Rob.’ It must be serious with this girl… Most of the time, he pretends like Derek and Fiona are his aunt and uncle. Fi’s ex-girlfriend is the one he calls ‘mom.’ Keep that to yourself, though, will you? They try to protect him from all the crazies.”
“Too bad they can’t extend the same courtesy to you,” he said derisively.
She sat up and looked down at him. “I mean it, Aaron. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
He reached out his hand and cupped her face. “Not a word. I promise.”
An odd feeling swelled within her as she gazed into his gunmetal grey eyes. His fingers stroked his jawline and she bit her lower lip. “Aaron…”
He abruptly let her go and wiped away his remaining drowsiness with both hands. “Come on, I’m taking you out.”
“I think I might want to stay right here,” she whispered. Her mouth felt like fire and she moved closer to him, suddenly not caring about any lines that had been previously drawn between her and her best friend.
“That’s exactly why I’m taking you out.” He winked at her and sat up before she could raise an objection. “Come on. Tacos and tequila, my treat. Let’s go.”
She sat cross-legged on the bed and watched him pull on his shoes and lace them. “You could stay afterwards…”
He stopped tying his shoes and stared at the floor. “Clementine, if you need a lover, take one, but it shouldn’t be me.”
Embarrassment turned her stomach and she folded her legs into her chest. “It’s ok, Aaron…”
He interrupted, “You’re my best friend. I think you need me as much as I need you, so there’s a line that has to stay put.”
“You don’t want to cross it?”
Sanger turned around and flashed his easy smile at her. “Of course, I want to cross it. Have you gotten a good look at yourself in the mirror?”
Q blushed and he exhaled deliberately before continuing, “But we can’t. Come on. Let’s go get some heartburn and get you fixed up. I’ll be your wingman.”
She giggled. “No, thanks. I don’t want a lover. I don’t think I could handle it.”
“You’re proving my point for me,” he replied.
“I am, aren’t I.” She looked out the window and said, “If I could handle it, what would you do?”
“If you could handle what, exactly?”
She moved to the edge of the bed and rested her chin on his shoulder. “You.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Because you can’t.”
He took her hand in his and they sat in the quiet for several minutes. Q finally said, “I love you, cowboy.”
“And I love you.” He kissed the side of her head and pulled her to her feet. They walked through to the kitchen and the photograph on the kitchen table caught her eye.
“What are we going to do about Burn Bitch Burn?”
“Nothing tonight,” he replied. “You leave it with me. I’ll take care of it. I told you, I’m going to keep you safe.”
◆◆◆
They sat at the bar at Manny’s Mexican. A plate of loaded nachos stood before them and Q was feeling almost giddy. As the tequila mixed with the familiar comfort of Aaron Sanger, contentment washed through her, erasing some of the anxiety that had been keeping her on edge for days.
“How’s your love life, cowboy?” she asked, draining her shot and scooping up a gooey heap of sour cream and black beans.
“I woke up next to a beautiful woman this evening, so not half bad.” Sanger winked at her and sipped his pint of beer.
She giggled. “Seriously, Sanger. Let’s talk about you for once. I’m so tired of talking about me.”
“I’ve been working. I don’t really want to date. Hasn’t been my forte anyway for the last few years.”
“You ever going to tell me why you and Yvie split?” she asked.
“Nope,” he said. “That’s between me and her. It’s the way she wanted it and I know better than to piss off your sister-in-law.”
Q sipped her own beer and signaled the bartender to refill their shot glasses. “I have to ask. Did you cheat on her?”
He closed one eye and regarded her with disdain. “You serious right now?”
“Well, why else would she end it?”
“Maybe I’m a pain in the ass,” he said.
“I could have told her that,” she joked, nudging him with her elbow. “Tell me. Come on, I won’t tell Yvie. It’ll be our secret.”
He ate a large bite of nachos and finally said, “She didn’t want to be with a man who was hung up on someone else.”
When Q pulled back and twisted her face up in confusion, he gave her a wide-eyed annoyed scowl. “I told Yvie…. about… her.”
“Who?”
“Nevermind.”
“Oh, her,” Q said, catching on. Sanger had once told her about a woman he’d loved. A woman who didn’t love him back, who could never love him back, but who he couldn’t seem to stop loving. Q would have called it an obsession if Sanger didn’t seem so determined to forget this person existed.
“I didn’t mean to,” he explained. “But she guessed.
“How?”
“She saw it.” He drained his shot glass.
“I repeat my question, Sanger.” Q pursed her lips, annoyed at his subterfuge.
He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and played with his empty shot glass with the other. “We’d been drinking. Yvie and I. It was Mardi Gras. I didn’t expect to see her. She walked into the bar where we were and Yvie saw it written all over my face.”
“I was with y’all on Mardi Gras and I didn’t see you drooling over any woman.”
Sanger cleared his throat. “It was before you surprised us.”
“Yvie didn’t say anything to me about it,” Q argued.
“She didn’t say anything to me about it, either.” He winked at her. “It was later. Midnight came. We were stil
l in the Quarter. We found some dive and sat down finally to watch the street cleaners clear away the crowds and the trash and Yvie - she turns to me and asks, ‘do you love me?’” He turned back to face Q and said, “And I told her I loved her more than anything. And she says, ‘not more than her.’”
“What did you do?” she asked.
“I tried to lie to her. When that didn’t work, I tried to tell her that it didn’t matter, but she just took my hand and told me to stop it. Told me to tell her the truth. All of it.”
“Did you?”
“Yep. I told her all of it. I’d never told anyone all of it, not even you. It was like once I started talking, I just couldn’t stop.” His eyebrows stitched together at the memory and he asked, “Has that ever happened to you?”
“Once,” she said. “I’d never told anybody about the rape, really, before Ben. And once I told him, I couldn’t stop myself from telling him everything. When you hold a secret in like that for so long, it kind of eats away at you.”
“Yeah, but you were attacked when you were barely an adult, Clementine. Me, being in love with some woman that doesn’t love me back hardly rates.”
She took his hand in hers. “It still hurts though, doesn’t it?” He nodded and she asked, “What did Yvie do after you told her?”
“She told me that she loved me, but that she loved herself more. She wanted to be with a man who wanted her the same way I want…”
“Who?” she asked.
“Her.”
“Still?”
He returned to playing with his empty shot glass, spinning it in lazy circles on the bar. “I think some people only get one. She’s mine. Everyone else is a second choice.”
“You and me both, cowboy,” she replied. “There’s only Ben for me. I’m never going to love anybody like I love him.”
Sanger shoved the tears forming in his eyes away with the palm of his hand. “That’s what I thought.”
Q reached for his face and turned it towards her. “What’s wrong, Aaron? What did I say?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. It just breaks my heart to hear you say that. I miss seeing you happy.”
“I’ll be alright.”
He screwed on a crooked grin and said, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
October: Depression
Twenty-four faces stared up at Q from the page that rested before her on her kitchen table. They were all too old. Not too old to be her killer, but too old to be their stated age; each face artificially matured by violence. She squinted down at a pair of wide eyes. The boy’s lips twisted in defiance, struggling to look tough for the camera, but looking terrified instead.
“You recognize him?” Detective Juban asked.
“No,” Q replied. “He looks scared, is all.”
She returned to studying the other faces. The detectives working her case had shown up at her house with Sanger an hour earlier, insisting that she look through dozens of mugshots. When another letter from Burn Bitch Burn had arrived last week, this time with a photograph of Q and Sanger sitting at the bar at Manny’s Mexican, Sanger had forced his way onto her case and convinced the two detectives who’d been working it from the start to reconsider the stalker as a suspect.
All three detectives were talking around her head and standing too close for her comfort. A panic attack began to swirl behind her left eye and a thousand screaming voices roared in steadily increasing volume inside her head. A choking, gurgling noise emanated from the coffee maker brewing on the counter and Ben’s frantic eyes flashed in front of her as the room turned red.
She finally shoved the photographs away and said, “I don’t know. None of them. All of them. What does it matter? Ben’s dead.”
Detective Juban, the lead detective on the case, was a woman about ten years older and even more world-weary than Q. She sat across from her at the table and said, “Ms. Toledano, the photographs that your stalker took of you in the hospital and at the restaurant change things. They’re still watching you. Detective Sanger has a point…”
“There were two of them,” Q argued, fighting her urgent impulse to gasp for air.
“Maybe they have a partner,” Juban countered. “Found a friend flying the same freak flag…”
Q folded her arms and tried to ignore the shrieking voices talking all at once inside her skull. “You know a lot of young black men who are obsessed with Derek Sharp? Because I don’t.”
“Maybe he hired a professional crew. Could be why we couldn’t trace the car back to the doers,” Detective Myers replied from behind his partner. He smoothed his hand over his grey mustache as he observed Q’s reaction. “Or maybe this is all just a publicity stunt.”
“Maybe your first idea was the right one and you're a shitty cop looking for an excuse,” Q snapped. She stood up and pushed away from Sanger’s worried face, walking to the cupboard to pull down a mug. Filling it with coffee and pouring in some cream, she sipped the warm liquid for several seconds as the detectives resumed their ongoing debate.
“Just get out,” she whimpered, but nobody heard her. She raised her voice and yelled, “Get the fuck out of my house!”
The room fell silent except for the shrieking echo of her own voice rattling its way through her brain, mocking her like a myna bird, saying, “Get-out-get-out-get-out…”
She took another drink of coffee, attempting to deepen her shallow panting into a full breath. Leveling her eyes on Myers, she said in a more measured voice, “Burn Bitch Burn isn’t a publicity stunt. They’re a fucking psychopath. Which you would know if you were a halfway decent cop.”
Myers flinched and Juban shot him an angry glare. Their good cop, bad cop play to get her to cooperate had clearly fallen flat. Q rolled her eyes and continued, “I’m supposed to be recording an album. I can’t deal with this right now.”
Sanger caught her elbow in his hand and peered at her face. “You have to deal with it sometime.”
Q rubbed her forehead. “I really don’t have time for this today, Aaron. I’m supposed to pick up Derek for the studio in a couple hours.”
“What’s wrong with his Porsche?”
“It wouldn’t start. You know, you spend a hundred thousand dollars on a car, you have to spend extra for it to run.”
He laughed at her joke and her breathing started to calm, she begged him with her eyes and mouthed, “Please.”
His hand slid down to her wrist and his worried eyes locked on hers as he measured her pulse. Glancing back at the detectives, he said, “She’s having a panic attack. We need to give her a minute.”
Betrayal filled her body and replaced her panic with outrage. She slammed down her coffee mug, spilling a third of it onto the counter, and left the room without saying a word, heading to the back porch to lock herself inside the bathroom. She sat on the toilet and whispered to herself, “Five things I can see. The tile, towels, the door, my Converse, mildew…” She looked around the room. “Christ, this place is dirty. Four things I can touch. My leg, the counter, the towel, my hair. Three things I can hear. The A/C, Sanger’s voice, the front door. Two things I can smell. Coffee. Soap. One thing I can taste.”
Standing up, she splashed cold water on her face and drank a swallow, breathing out determination into her reflection.
You’ve got this. Keep it together. It’s just the insomnia. You’re ok. Breathe in. One. Two. Hold it. Three. Four. Let it go. One. Two. Hold it. Three. Four.
When she came out of the bathroom, she found Sanger sitting alone at her kitchen table drinking his own cup of coffee.
“They’re gone,” he said. “You ok?”
She sat down across from him. As she regarded his serene expression, anger replaced her anxiety. “Don’t you ever do that again.”
“What?” he asked.
“Show up here. Push your way into my home with a couple of strangers like you fucking live here. You don’t live here. I have a life, Aaron. I have things to do. And I certainly don’t need you to explain away my p
anic attacks to your colleagues. Especially when they’re the ones that gave it to me.”
He stared at her, studying her face. “Have you been sleeping?”
“What the fuck do you think?” she asked. “Do I look like I’ve been sleeping?”
“Calm down, Clementine.”
“Fuck you, Sanger.”
They sat in an uncomfortable silence until he finally asked, “You hungry?”