Moondogs - Alexander Yates [71]
“Hey.” His voice was coarse, soft, and so familiar. “What are you wearing?”
“Now is not the time.”
He normally didn’t pick up on tone, but that night he got the picture. “Are you all right? Would you rather skip tonight?”
“No.” She paced with the cordless, stepping on her own wet prints. “I haven’t seen you in forever. And I got the maid to go home early. I thought when we’re done, we could come back here.”
“That sounds great … but only if you want. We’ll do whatever you want.”
“We’ll come back here, then,” she said. She hung up and changed into a burgundy gown that she hadn’t worn since the Marine Ball and hastily blow-dried her hair—at the beginning of the week she’d actually thought she’d have time and energy enough to get it done at the Peninsula. She fed crickets to the gecko and grapes to the lovebird. She sat in the den and waited.
He was only a little late, a pleasant surprise. She didn’t even answer his buzz at the intercom, she just rushed out to the elevator. Avoiding the lobby with its helpful, perky staff, she turned down the concrete loading ramp to the side exit—the same one she took on weekday mornings to board the armored embassy shuttle. Reynato waited in the gloom outside, one hand on the roof of his beat-up old Honda, another deep in his pants pocket. He wore a summer suit without a tie and had some kind of product combed into his gray-black hair. The air-conditioning in his sedan had been busted for months, and his forehead and cheeks glistened with sweat.
“My love.” He kissed her neck, her jaw line, her ear. “My love.”
She slid her hands under his suit jacket, along the damp fabric of his button-down shirt. He smelled sweet, and good. He felt soft, and good. She could already feel herself relaxing. “You don’t love me.”
“I know,” Reynato toyed with a lock of her still-damp hair. “But I like you plenty. And I feel like I could love you. With time.” He pat-slapped her behind. “I missed the hell out of you.”
“I missed you, too.” She negotiated her way around the sedan, glancing nervously at the tower of lit and unlit windows above. “How’s your friend?”
“My who, now?” He got inside and leaned over to open the front passenger door for her—the outside handle stuck.
“Your friend.” She got in and buckled up. “The one in the hospital in Davao.”
“Oh him! He’s fine. Misdiagnosed. No problem at all.” Reynato smiled and had a brief fistfight with the gearshift. “In fact, there are no problems anywhere right now. It’s rare. Like an eclipse.” He got the sedan into second, pulled out of the parking lot and turned down McKinley Road with a jolt.
They were headed to ballroom night at the Shangri-La. It was sure to be packed with expats and local bureaucrats, likely a few people they each knew, but it was also the only public place they could be seen together without arousing suspicion. After all, they each had their own reasons to go. And it was natural to bump into people at Shangri-La functions. That’s how they’d first met—at a cocktail hour on the mezzanine, hosted jointly by the legal attaché and the director of the National Bureau of Investigation. The first impression hadn’t been great. Reynato watched Monique from across the room, sucking an unlit cigar that waiters kept trying to take from him. It got obvious. Joseph sulked. Jeff offered to go over and say something. She said no and stared right back at the pudgy, graying stranger. Over the course of the night she watched him drain enough tumblers to put a fat man in the hospital, but by last call he could still walk a straight line. He came right up to her and leaned in, showing off clean metal braces that made his mouth—just his mouth—look young. “Describe yourself,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Describe yourself to me. I can’t see so well.”
Monique answered in Tagalog, hoping to catch him off balance. She