“I can’t travel with you and don’t ask me again.”
He makes a strange sound, half exhale and half growl. “God, you’re frustrating. We can both have so much more, but you won’t even talk about it. You haven’t even told me what you plan to do after you graduate. What happens, Chrissie, once you’re done with school?”
I let out a shuddering breath. “I don’t know. How’s that for an answer?”
He lifts my chin, forcing me to look at him, but his eyes are no longer angry, they are rapidly searching my face as if he’s looking something and not finding it.
“I don’t know,” I repeat, not knowing why.
He takes me with him as he sinks into the sheets, his body molding into me and his arms hold me closely.
~~~
I wake to the sound of glass hitting glass.
I ease away from Alan and gaze up at him. It’s barely morning, he’s wide awake, when Alan hardly ever wakes before noon. His posture tells me he’s been sitting there quite a while, drinking and watching me.
“You are not returning to Berkeley,” he snaps.
All drowsiness leaves my flesh in a nerve-popping jolt. I scoot away from Alan, dragging the sheets to cover me, rapidly searching face, and then my heart drops to my knees because his eyes are hooded as they burn into me.
He says, “You still talk in your sleep. Do you know that?”
No, no, no! Why did he ask me that?
“I didn’t know that,” I whisper, my voice sounding surprisingly calm even though every part of me is frantic and afraid.
He takes a long swallow of his drink. “Neil hasn’t mentioned it?”
Oh god! “I stopped seeing Neil.”
Those black eyes fix on me, unblinking. “When did you end it with him?”
My body chills and then heat rises on my cheeks. I try to stutter out a safe response and somehow manage to say nothing. His eyes lock on me again.
“When did you end it with Neil? Don’t lie to me, Chrissie.”
I sit up in the bed, struggling to meet his gaze directly, though the way he is staring at me makes it an unbearably painful thing.
“I would never lie to you. I ended it with Neil because I love you.”
He sets down his drink, running a hand through his hair. “God damn you, I ask you not to do it and you rip out my heart anyway,” he says through gritted teeth. “You won’t be straight with me even when I ask you to and yet you just answered me, Chrissie.”
The phone rings and it makes me jump and it kicks up Alan’s temper. He reaches out and grabs the receiver.
“What,” he bites off into the phone. “I’m in Malibu. I’m taking a couple days down time at the beach. No, I’m not discussing that.”
My stomach turns. I can hear Nia’s voice through the phone. I can’t make out the words, but everything inside me grows cold. I don’t know which is worse. How Nia sounds talking to Alan. Or that he let me hear them talk because he is angry with me, and in Alan-like simplicity he can get in a blow during our fight without even being focused on me.
“OK,” Alan says. “That’s fine. Tell them I’ve agreed to that.”
He hangs up the phone and I stare up at him, shaking. “You’re such an asshole. Why do you have to be so mean when you’re angry?”
I scramble from the bed, go for my bag and rapidly start packing up my things.
“That’s it, Chrissie. Run. Give you an excuse to run and not have to face anything in your life directly and you take it. That is what you do, isn’t it, love?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean,” I hiss.
Every line in his face tightens in extreme Alan anger. “You ran off in New York, and you fucked up everything for both of us. You fucked up my life, too. You don’t have a right to get angry today.”
“It didn’t sound fucked up to me on the phone.”
“I haven’t lived with Nia since six months before I came to see you in Berkeley,” he says, almost inflectionless. “We’ve been battling in divorce for four years. I gave her everything she wanted so I could finally get out. That call was her bleeding me one last time before we sign the papers. If you didn’t know what we are to me, why didn’t you ask? You are the only woman in my life, Chrissie. When was the last time you fucked Neil?”
He holds me in an unrelenting stare and his gaze is brutally intense, shards of fury and despondency and hurt. It’s too much, all at once, from everything foggy to clear in a horrible, unimaginable way.
I continue to pack, my body shaking so fiercely I can barely grab hold of my clothes and shove them in. “I’m not going to answer that. I think it’s better I don’t. I think I should leave before we both say things we’ll regret.”
His eyes harden and some still functioning part of my brain warns that I’ve just fucked up big time as Alan calmly grabs his pants and pulls them into place.
“That’s how you want to deal with this?” He shakes his head, not bothering to even look at me. “You can leave if you want to, but if you do we’re over, Chrissie. Or you can come to the patio, once you’ve thought this through, and if you are honest with me I will listen and we’ll see where we go from there.”
With that, Alan walks away. I stare at the door and sink down on the bed. He’s angrier than I have ever seen him, so angry he’s quiet. I shouldn’t even try to talk to him. The way he is now, this could spin out of control in any direction.
He wants honesty…fuck…and the voice in my head reminds of all the reasons why this is so important to him. And the voice also reminds me of other things about Alan, warning how dangerous it will be for the both of us if tell him everything about Neil; of all the times people he loved have lied to him; though I was never, not really, deliberately dishonesty. At least, I don’t think I intended to be deliberately dishonest with him. Though I’m not even sure of that now. It always felt as if the parts of me not lived in this house did not hold the feel of realness. They were just things I did. Unimportant. Not mention, because the only parts of me that mattered were the parts of me here with Alan.
The distraught look on his face as he left the bedroom shames me. I was so unkind to him in how I behaved in this…will he forgive me…will the truth be enough? I don’t know, and that I don’t scares the hell out of me and I am more afraid than I have been at any other moment in my life.
Somehow I manage to go to my duffel, pull out some sweats, and dress. I open the door. The house is quiet when I step into the hall, and oddly it surprises me that it is. I don’t know what I expected, but not this heavy, waiting silence.
I go toward the wall of glass and I find Alan on the patio just as he said he would be. Then I slide open the door and step out.
After a minute or two, Alan pushes off the wall and stomps out his cigarette on the concrete. His jaw is clenching. His gaze shifts and his eyes lock on me.
“Even after this I’m not sure I want us over,” he says, sounding frustrated with himself, but he is pulsing with anger even more strongly than he was in the bedroom. “You didn’t answer me when I asked before. When was the last time you fucked Neil?”
I stare at him, the tightly held arrangement of his long, elegant body parts, and with aching despair I know I shouldn’t have come out here to try to talk him. We will both end up bloody, hating each other before this is through.
“We should wait to talk until you’re calmer.”
Alan’s eyes flare and widen. “Not today, Chrissie. That is the worst thing you could do for either of us. Walk out that door without answering every single question I have and we are over. That is the only thing I’m positive of today.”
I stand frozen in place, searching his face. I can’t tell for certain if he means it, but I do know if I stay he will rip us to shreds. We don’t have a chance if I stay here.
“No, Alan. If we try to talk this out now, that’s when we will end up over. You’re just too angry to see it.”
~~~
By the time I reach Berkeley, I am something beyond numb. I don’t even have the sensation of having driven here. The scenery passed in a blur, unreal, as disjointed moments of my life rose in my memory, now connected, unkind and too real.