Moondogs - Alexander Yates [166]
They hardly loosened up after dinner, sitting at either end of the couch, legs in almost perfunctory contact. When it got late, Joseph retrieved a blanket from the linen closet and tucked it under the couch cushions. He went into the bedroom and came back with his pillow. Monique realized that he meant to spend the night out there.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but I’m going to be completely, brutally honest. I’m mad at you. And I’ll need space. Maybe for quite some time.”
Mad at her? He had every right, she supposed, but he didn’t know that yet. All he could possibly have been mad about now was feeling forced to end his vacation early because she needed him. If that was enough to send him to the couch, what would coming clean about her affair do? Just thinking about it made her queasy.
“That’s all right,” she said. “Have a good night. I love you.”
They did the closed-mouth kiss again and Monique went into the master bedroom, leaving the door open behind her. She undressed and lay down in bed, trying to remember what it was about Joseph that had made Reynato seem like an appealing alternative—someone worth the risk of her life, as she knew it. It wasn’t just her wanderlust—her longing for and determination to find a connection in this city. The truth was that Reynato had lived up neatly to the cliché by being everything Joseph wasn’t. Confident, direct and singularly at home in the world. Just because she’d ended it with him, just because the thought of him now disgusted her, that didn’t make Joseph any more these things. He would still be neurotic. He would still be small and insecure and passive aggressive. Or at least he still could be. He could also be other things. He was capable of coming home early because he knew she needed him. And he was also capable of punishing her for it by sleeping on the couch.
After an hour Monique was still awake. She went into the den and saw that Joseph was, too. He didn’t protest when she squeezed onto the couch beside him and put a hand on his rising chest. His body filled itself with air, breathing deep and slow, trying to force sleep by mimicking it. She counted his gusts. She matched his rhythm and felt herself begin to drift. Together their breaths surged above them. Monique lifted her hand from Joseph’s chest and ran her fingers over it. Their lungs filled, and they emptied.
Chapter 34
REYNATO WAITS
And what of heartbroken, harried Reynato? He goes home after trying to kill Racha and finds, at bedtime, that sleep is an impossibility. It remains so for the next night, and the next. Reynato moves through the house trying different places and positions—curled up next to Lorna on an imported and as yet unpaid for Swedish foam, sprawled out on the big leather sofa in the living room, atop a pile of pillows in the kitchen, even in the enormous guest bathtub—but everywhere he goes he feels Efrem’s eyes skitter over his skin like ants. In his paranoia he’s sure that the holier-than-thou gun savant is alive, watching him lather up and shave, wipe himself on the toilet, distract himself with soft-core Internet pornography. It’s guilt, Racha writes when Reynato returns to the hospital to make a third go at it. It’s a natural thing for you to feel. You’re a lousy person. Take it from me; just put the knife down and you’ll sleep like a baby tonight. But Reynato knows guilt, and this isn’t it. This is straight-up fear—so intense it infects his blameless family. So deep it wrecks his self-control, leaving him blubbering like a baby at Howard’s funeral.
More than a week goes by without proper sleep. Reynato tries hotel rooms and foldout sofas. He tries a sleeping bag under calamansi trees in the front yard. One night he remembers, with sudden hope, the expensive