“Oh, yeah.” Bubba threw back a second shot. “Forgot that.”
“Be a good boy,” Vanessa said.
“Uh, okay.”
Angie narrowed her eyes at me. I resisted the urge to jump off my bar stool and run screaming from the room.
“You guys want to stay for dinner?” Vanessa asked.
Angie stood up awkwardly and knocked her bag to the floor. “No, no. We’re…We already ate. So…”
I stood. “So, yeah, we’ll be, ah…”
“Going?” Vanessa said.
“Right.” Angie picked up her bag. “Going. That’s us.”
“You didn’t touch your drinks,” Bubba said.
“You have ’em,” I said as Angie crossed the floor in five or six steps, reached the door.
“Cool.” Bubba threw back another shot.
“You have any limes?” Vanessa asked him. “I’m in a tequila mood.”
“I could scare some up.”
I reached the door, looked back over my shoulder at the two of them. Bubba’s huge frame was tilted as he leaned his shoulder into the fridge, and Vanessa’s lithe body seemed to curl toward him like smoke from the top of the bar stool.
“See ya,” she called, her eyes on Bubba.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “See ya.” And then I got the hell out of there.
Angie started laughing as soon as we left Bubba’s building. It was a helpless giggle, a stoner’s laugh almost, that bent her body and led her out through the hole in the fence and into the playground beyond.
She got control of it as she lay against the jungle gym, looked up at the thick lead glass of Bubba’s windows. She wiped her eyes and sighed through a few remaining chuckles.
“Dear, oh, dear. Your attorney and Bubba. My God. I’ve seen it all.”
I leaned back on the metal rungs beside her. “She’s not my anything.”
“Not anymore,” she said, “that’s for sure. After him, she’ll be ruined for normal men.”
“He’s borderline monosyllabic, Ange.”
“True. But the man’s hung, Patrick.” She grinned at me. “I mean, hung.”
“Firsthand info?”
She laughed. “You wish.”
“So, how do you know?”
“Men can tell a woman’s cup size if she’s wearing three sweaters and an overcoat. You think we’re any different?”
“Ah,” I said, still back at the bar area, Vanessa doing those slow swivels on the stool, Bubba watching the way the hair fell across her neck.
“Bubba and Vanessa,” Angie said, “sitting in a tree.”
“Jesus. Quit it, will ya?”
She leaned her head back on the jungle gym, turned it my way. “Jealous?”
“No.”
“Not a little bit?”
“Not even a smidgen.”
“Liar.”
I turned my head fully to the right and our noses almost touched. We didn’t say anything for a while, just lay back on the jungle gym with our cheeks pressed to the rungs, the night softening against our skin, eyes locked. Far off behind Angie, a harvest moon rose in the dark sky.
“Do you hate my hair?” Angie whispered.
“No. It’s just…”
“Short?” She smiled.
“Yeah. I don’t love you because of your hair, though.”
She shifted slightly, turned her shoulder into the holes between rungs.
“Why do you love me?”
I chuckled. “You want me to count the ways?”
She didn’t say anything, just watched me.
“I love you, Ange, because…I don’t know. Because I always have. Because you make me laugh. A lot. Because…”
“What?”
I turned my shoulder in between the rungs as she had, placed my palm on her hip. “Because since you left I have these dreams that you’re sleeping beside me. And I wake up and I can still smell you, and I’m still half dreaming, but I don’t know it, so I reach for you. I reach across to your pillow, and you’re not there. And I gotta lie there at five in the morning, with the birds waking up outside and you not there and your smell just fading away. It fades and there’s-” I cleared my throat. “There’s nothing but me left there. And white sheets. White sheets and those fucking birds and it hurts, and all I can do is close my eyes and lie there and wish I didn’t feel like dying.”
Her face was very still, but her eyes had picked up a sheen like a thin film of glass. “That’s not fair.” She dabbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“Nothing’s fair,” I said. “You say we don’t work?”
She held up a hand.
I said, “What does work, Ange?”
Her chin dropped to her chest and she stayed that way a long time before she whispered, “Nothing.”
“I know,” I said, and my voice was hoarse.
Her chuckle was wet, and she wiped her face again. “I hate five in the morning, too, Patrick.” She raised her head and smiled through trembling lips. “I hate it so, so much.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. That guy I was sleeping with?”
“Trey,” I said.
“You make it sound like a dirty word.”
“What about him?”
“I could have sex with him, but I didn’t want him holding me afterward. You know? The way I used to turn my back and you’d slide one arm under my neck and the other over my chest-I couldn’t stand anyone else doing that.”
I couldn’t think of anything else to say but “Good.”
“I’ve missed you,” she whispered.
“I’ve missed you.”
“I’m high maintenance,” she said. “I’m moody. Got the bad temper. Hate to do laundry. Don’t like to cook.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You are.”
“Hey,” she said. “You’re no walk in the park, pal.”
“But I cook,” I said.
She reached out, ran her palm over the permanent scruff-thicker than shadow, thinner than beard-that I’ve kept on my face for three years to hide the scars Gerry Glynn gave me with a straight razor.
She ran her thumb lazily back and forth through the bristles, gently fingered the ruined, rubbery flesh underneath. Not the biggest scars, necessarily, but they’re on my face, and I’m vain.
“Can I shave this off tonight?” she said.