Moondogs - Alexander Yates [116]
Alice wiped her cheeks and wrote this all down in her pad. When Reynato finished talking she asked for a copy of the map he’d marked up. He peeled it right off the wall, rolled it up and handed it over. He shook hands with everybody and walked them to the station door. Outside it had begun to drizzle—a sunshower—and everything was incongruously beautiful. Reynato stood in the doorway, waving as they made for the shuttle, like a homeowner would with departing guests. Despite the rain, Benicio cracked his window open, sure that he’d be sick. Then, when he wasn’t sick, he felt guilty. Like maybe he still wasn’t sad enough. A good son, a son who loved his father unreservedly, would be vomiting his guts up right now.
IT WAS ALMOST DARK by the time he and Alice got to the Shangri-La. They ate a quick, quiet meal in the hotel restaurant and took the elevator up to his suite. Edilberto had left Alice’s bag sitting at the foot of the bed and she squatted down to open it. “Where should I put these things?” she asked, holding up a stack of poorly folded blouses.
“Let me.” He took the clothes from her and laid them in the dresser. She sat on the edge of the bed, watching as he slung pants and dresses over dark wooden hangers. He lined her toiletries up beneath the bathroom mirror. He placed her shoes beside the door.
They fucked. She initiated. It was filthy, and good, the way filthy sex is good. He thought about his dive instructor, and about Solita, a little bit. He wondered what Alice was thinking of, because she was going wild. Upon finishing they were rendered messy and embarrassed. The same thing had happened, he remembered, when his mother died. Sex was excellent after his mother was dead. Now, with his father kidnapped, sex was super-excellent. He was a lousy person.
Alice slept and Benicio took a shower. Steam filled the bathroom. It was velvety in his throat and lungs, and when he got out the towels were damp with it. Alice’s toiletries sat where he’d lined them up below the big mirror. He began going through them. He unzipped little pouches, wheedling through face cream, generic painkillers, some cheapo perfumes and foundation a shade darker than she could pull off. It didn’t take long to find—a blue envelope with slots for twenty-eight little pills, most of them custard-yellow but the last seven pure white. He popped each pill out of the packet and dropped them, one by one, into the toilet. Then, using a small pair of scissors, he cut the packet into tiny pieces and dropped those into the toilet as well. This wasn’t sabotage. It’s not like he wanted children—God, he wanted the opposite of children. He just wanted—needed—some space to think. And he couldn’t find that space in the dirty routine they’d settled into; the fucking, the rough play. It was getting corrosive and had to stop. It was a way of moving farther apart, not closer together. And he didn’t want them to move apart. He was so afraid of moving apart that his fingers shook as he flushed her birth control pills.
Back in the bedroom, Alice snored. It was totally dark outside and the moon hung in the top corner of his picture window like the head of a hammered nail. He stood naked in the middle of the room, his body still steaming, his pores drinking the chill of the air-conditioning. He lifted a corner of the heavy blankets and began to slide in. Then he heard a noise, and stopped. Something—a door? a drawer?—opened and slammed closed again. Footsteps smacked with the sound of sandal flapping against heel, and a moment later came the bang of something