Past Due by William Lashner

Author:William Lashner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-03-23T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter

38

I WAS LYING in my bed, alone, my head turned toward the photographs pinned to my wall, my mind not quite pinned to anything at all, but instead floating free with thoughts puzzled, prurient, and strangely paranoid, when the doorbell rang.

I wasn’t just then in the mood to receive visitors. I still was half drunk, half dressed, half erect, fully confused, and mortified. Let’s just say it hadn’t gone as well as I had dreamed with Chelsea.

I rolled out of bed, made my way stiffly to the living room, grunted a “What?” into the intercom.

“Is that you, Victor?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“No.”

“Do you have, like, a minute?”

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“You’re not going to invite me up?”

“Who is this?”

“Helloo? Jammy, V, who do you think?”

“I should have known,” I said, and I should have, since every sentence ended with a question mark. I looked around at my apartment in disgust, figured it didn’t matter, and then buzzed her in.

I took off my suit pants, slipped on a pair of jeans, a white T-shirt. I closed the bedroom door firmly behind me and started cleaning up the living room, putting the cushions back onto the couch, dropping the half-empty beer bottles into the blue recycling bin, tossing into the hall closet the clothes I had stripped off with hopeful abandon just a few dozen minutes before — my suit jacket, my tie and shirt, my belt.

I gave the living room a quick appraisal and, just as the first knock at my door came, I spotted something. Black and thin, like an accusing finger reaching over the edge of the couch.

I stepped over to it. It was a thin black strap. I lifted it up and with it came the whole of a lovely black bra. She had forgotten it, or couldn’t find it, when she dressed to leave. Taking it off had been the highlight of my day, my year, and yet that very act had sabotaged everything.

I had led Chelsea up the stairs by her hand. She was strangely passive, it was like when we first kissed on the stoop, like she was allowing me this. Normally that would have stopped me, I don’t like to be allowed to do anything, but in my current state, still brazened by alcohol, still sexually charged, still in thrall to the pictures of the younger Chelsea pinned to my wall, I didn’t care that she was merely allowing me. Merely allowing me was enough.

I led her up the stairs, led her into my apartment, kissed her hard and long, led her to the couch. That led, of course, to the aforementioned tender kisses, the aforementioned soft caresses. I moved my hand through her long black hair like I would move it through a basin of water and then I brought the hair to my face and smelled its freshness, its organic herbalness. I closed my eyes and I saw her body, her younger body, naked, taut and lithe, I saw it as clearly as if the photographs were pinned beneath my eyes.

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