“Have you put the starter back in my car?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll get over there later.”
“Lil will take you.”
“I’ll take the bus,” I said.
“No, you won’t.”
“Go to hell, Jonathan.”
“I should go to hell? I? Me? I should go to hell?”
“Yes, you. You have felony charges against you, and you spend all your time finding ways to keep me from helping you. What was your plan for dealing with her? You gonna just let her blackmail you because you have the money lying around?”
“No, Monica, I had a plan. But I spent all my time making sure you didn’t f**k it up.”
I sat back on the railing and crossed my arms, locking my feet against the vertical rails so I didn’t fall over. “You could have just told me.”
“I don’t tell people things like that. It’s not my way.”
I rocked back on my feet. The railing had held for a hundred years and would hold for a hundred more, but Jonathan didn’t know that. He stiffened when it looked like I’d fall.
“Did I f**k it up?” I asked.
“No. You just f**ked me up. I couldn’t think. I knew all the things Jessica would say to you, and I thought she would drive you away. Whatever you needed to hear, and I thought the worst, she’d say it. Then this time, you’d be gone for good.”
If touching him would have been appropriate, I would have stroked his cheek and kissed his mouth. I would have held his hands, warning them against the late November chill. I would have whispered my love in his ear in the cadence of his laughter. But we had too much of the last two days between us to make any of that meaningful.
“I am very sorry about the sleeping pills,” I said. “I didn’t think until after that you need your self-control, and I took it away. That was wrong and a breach of trust. I’m sorry.” When he didn’t answer, I continued. “I may steal your car again, though.”
“Take it.” He waved his hand as though he was giving me the last bite of dessert. “Can you tell me what she said?”
“Apparently, you killed your first love. She made it out like cold-blooded murder.”
The anger drained from his face, replaced by the flatness of fear.
“Don’t look like that,” I said. “I love you.”
“But I did it.”
“I know.”
We regarded each other for what seemed like a long time.
“That envelope, right there, she gave it to me. It’s a draft of an article written for eLA Rag. I already have a piece of it that Gabby got her hands on, don’t ask me how. They suggest that you were driving the car Rachel was in when she drowned. You saved yourself and let her die. Jessica said you’re aware that she knows all this.”
“I am.”
“Can I hear the whole story from your lips, please?”
“No, Monica. No. A thousand times, no.”
“All I got from her was the goddamn envelope before I took her phone. So I can go back and—”
“This is her phone?” He pointed to the black rectangle on top of the envelope.
“Yes.”
He picked it up. “You stole her phone.”
“I prefer the term lifted,” I said. “In any case, if she did ‘ask for it’ like you said, the raw audio might be on there.”
“You stole her phone.” He cradled in the space between his palms, as if he didn’t want too much of it touching his skin. “Did you listen?”
“No. That’s all you. Figure it out.”
“You don’t want to know how far I went with her?”
“You told me how far you went.”
“You are so strange, Monica.”
“I never made the decision to love you. But I decided to trust you. That was a choice.”
He fingered the phone, flipping it over as if contemplating a greater meaning. “If the whole scene is on this phone, its best use may be to go public.”
“Whatever you want.”
“People will know.” He looked at me with meaning, as if trying to impart a few volumes of knowledge.
I knew exactly what he meant. They’d know how we were together. They’d talk, and they’d look at me in a way I didn’t want to be seen. “Fuck people and f**k what they know. Do what you have to.”
He held out his hand, and I took it, letting him pull me onto his lap. His arms wrapped around me and pulled my legs to one side. I put my fingertips on his cheeks, letting the rough stubble scratch them. I traced his jaw, the angular line, the hardness of it, and his lips, source of so much pleasure, their softness on my fingers as I imagined them between my legs. I shuddered a little and rested my head on his chest, losing myself in his leathery scent. God, please let me not be confusing love and beauty. Let this be as real as it feels, not some imaginary thing.
“Why did you want to see her?” he whispered.
“To try to lift her phone. But if I told you that, you’d just say no. And if I failed, you would have thought I was incompetent.”
He kissed my forehead, my cheeks. “You’re not leaving me?”
“No.”
“But you haven’t heard everything.”
“I don’t want a reporter’s research. I don’t want Jessica’s lies. I want it from your mouth. I chose to trust you, and I want you to choose to talk to me.”
Chapter 24.
JONATHAN
I held her silently for a long time, wondering if she could keep her promise to stay with me. I’d become so attached to that woman that her presence, somewhere in the world, comforted me. The connection, once I’d admitted it was there, was palpable, a rope of energy between us. Knowing what she was doing at any given moment was an almost religious experience, specific to her, and almost sexual in its purity. I knew she felt too, but she was a wild card. Her reactions never fit my expectations.
If she was going to leave me because of things I’d done, she would have done it already. The effects of unburdening myself could last indefinitely and affect me the way they’d affected me with Jessica, in well-timed words and the sense that I was trapped by her knowledge. But it didn’t matter any more. As of last night, I’d done enough to alienate Monica from me and more to bring her close. The tension between the two had to break.
So I formulated a way to express the narrative. It didn’t run in a straight line. It started on a rainy December night, took a left when I was twenty-three, came around the bend a year later, switched gears the previous month, and only began the previous night, with a death.