Moondogs - Alexander Yates [10]
But it was more complicated than that, because at the same time they really were getting much more serious—especially since his mother had died. Their relationship took on more passion, and a strange, formal weight. Benicio said “I love you” for the first time a few days after they got back from Chicago. It slipped out, embarrassingly, while they had sex. That drove Alice wild and made their first fuck after the funeral—even more embarrassingly—the best they’d ever had. And it wasn’t just a fluke. Sex became consistently more intense and more frequent. So did arguments. Actually, arguments were what they used to have—the occasional sharp-toned conversation that might end with Alice crossing her arms tight over her chest and someone leaving the room. These were knock-down, drag-out screamfests. It was as though their relationship became a kind of Hollywood sequel of its old self—built on the same premise as the original, but with a bigger effects budget. They still hadn’t gone to Ikea to replace what they’d broken during their last fight. They’d been eating dinner a week ago, plates squeezed onto the little coffee table in front of the television. Alice scanned channels until she landed on a telenovela. She turned the volume up on high. A mustachioed actor was confiding something serious to a wrinkled crone played by a young woman in heavy latex makeup, and Alice repeated everything he said, word for belabored word.
“La ot-tra no-che … tu-ve unna pesa … pesadilya. Cre-yo que Pab-lo no es mi hi-ho.”
“Hijo.” He corrected her. “Pesadilla.”
“Translation?” She watched him chew for a while. “Translation?” He kept chewing. “Hello?”
Benicio swallowed. He picked up the remote and changed the channel to something in English.
“Hey,” she said, “hey, look at me.” He looked at her. “There’s no reason to be an asshole,” she said. She looked hurt, but he knew she wasn’t. She was at bat, waiting for him, on the mound.
He set down his fork. “How are you not sick of this?” he asked.
“Sick of you?”
“Nice. No. Sick of your own bullshit. You don’t want to learn a word of Spanish. What are you, afraid I’ll forget it now? Will that make me less interesting?”
Alice stood, and on the way up her knee struck her dinner plate and sent it somersaulting off the coffee table, crashing on the floor. Both of them looked at the shattered mess. Alice made a move as though she was going to start collecting the shards of plate and rounding up stray green beans, but she seemed to decide against it midstream. She took his plate from him and threw it down on the floor as well. “Fuck you,” she said, lingering on the word, stretching it out—not wasting it the way they did when they were playing. “Don’t project your shit on me.” She went into the bathroom, slammed the door shut and locked it behind her.
They exchanged obscenities as he cleaned up the mess. When he finally cooled off he sat in front of the bathroom, concentrated on the chipped paint on the door and apologized. Alice didn’t say anything back, but after a while she slid her forefinger under the locked door and let it rest on the tile. Benicio reached down to give it a squeeze and the finger squeezed back.
THEY CAUGHT THEIR BREATH atop the tangle of dive gear. She went to the bathroom to clean up and he stayed in bed, shifting this way and that to make himself more comfortable. He began to doze off and was soon in a light sleep, dreaming about Corregidor Island—that little rock that he’d been reading about earlier in the day. It was night on the island, and very hot. Above him stretched the dark silhouettes of palm trees and the barrels of heavy artillery guns. The guns looked old, like they hadn’t been used in a lifetime. He found a path leading up a little hill and decided to follow it, picking his way through bramble that thickened into a dense jungle. Then an odd thing happened. It began to snow. Thick, angular snowflakes fell like bits of paper