“I read your book,” she said.
And there, she saw a flicker of something human, something besides his patient, beatific, dangerous calm. Behaviorists talked about micro-expressions, emotions that jumped to the surface, revealing all, in a flicker almost too fast to catch. For the briefest instant he regarded her with uncertainty and a blanch of discomfort. It was a wonder, how much information could pass between two people in a single glance, without a word being said. He had, after all, really cheated on her with any number of their friends. That momentary look of shame was as good as a confession.
“Pretty dirty, dude,” she said. “I was getting hot flashes that don’t have anything to do with Dragonscale.”
“I asked you not to read it,” he said.
“So shoot me.”
He made a harsh barking sound. It took her a moment to identify this noise as laughter.
She exhaled again and threw her hands down and shook them, as if they were wet and she were air-drying them. “Whoo. All right. The world is going to have to burn out without us. I want something good before I go.”
He gave her a dull, hopeless look.
“Please. I’ll try,” she said. “I’ll try to make it nice.”
“I don’t know if it’ll do any good. I’m not in the mood anymore. I think maybe I just want to get it over with.”
“But I’m not ready. And you want it to feel right for me, don’t you? Besides. I’m not going without getting laid once more.” And she laughed and tried to smile. “You’ve got no one to blame but yourself, Jakob Grayson. Leaving a bored and lonely woman all alone with that pile of shameless filth.” Gesturing with her head at the manuscript on the desk.
He smiled himself, although it looked forced. “Sex means more to you than it does to me. I know that turns the stereotype on its head. You really live in your body more than I do. It’s one of the things I always found exciting about you. But now—at the moment, I suppose I regard the sexual act with a certain amount of disgust.”
She turned and crossed to the Hello Kitty boom box on the shelf. She had brought it in here the other day after discovering fresh batteries in the basement.
“What are you doing?” Jakob asked.
“Music.”
“I don’t need music. I’d rather just talk.”
“I need music. And a drink. You need a drink, too.”
Finally, something got through to him. He said, “I’d kill for a drink.” He made the harsh barking sound again, the one that seemed to stand for laughter.
He could’ve shot her already, if her death was all he wanted, but it wasn’t. Part of him wanted more: a last kiss, a last fuck, a last drink, or maybe something deeper, forgiveness, absolution. Harper wasn’t inclined to let him have any of it, but was happy to let him hope. It was keeping her alive. She turned on the FM. The classic-rock station was playing an oldie but a goodie. A lovestruck Romeo was getting ready to start the serenade, you and me, babe, how ’bout it, and for no reason at all, Harper thought of Hillary Clinton.
She stood in front of the sound box, moving her hips from side to side. She didn’t doubt that Jakob currently regarded sex with disgust, but he wasn’t the only one who had taken some psychology courses in college. She hadn’t forgotten what lay just across the border from disgust.
She kept her back to him for maybe ten seconds, pretending to be lost in the music, then cast a slow look over her shoulder. His gaze was fixed raptly upon her.
“You hurt me,” she said. “You threw me down.”
“I’m sorry. That was across the line.”
“Except in the bedroom,” she said.
He narrowed his eyes, and she knew she had pushed it too far, had strained his credulity—she never talked that way about sex—but before he could speak, she said, “Our bottle!” As if she were just remembering. “I want to have that bottle of wine we brought back from France. Remember? You said it was the best you ever had and we should save it for something important.” She gave him what she hoped was a wry look and said, “Is this important enough?”
The wines were all there in the study with them, the whites in the cooler that wasn’t keeping them cool anymore, the reds in the cupboard. Whenever they went somewhere, they bought a bottle of wine, the way other people bought fridge magnets. They hadn’t gone so many places, though, in the last few years. She grabbed for the honeymoon French Bordeaux, and her palm was so damp with sweat it almost slipped out of her grasp and flew across the room at him. She imagined him jumping in surprise and shooting her in the stomach, just out of reflex. Killing her and the baby in one shot, which, when she thought about it, would be perfectly in keeping with Jakob’s character. He was parsimonious by nature, hated waste; he had often scolded her for using too much milk in her cereal.
She pinned the bottle between her body and her right arm, and took two wine goblets from where they hung under one of the bookshelves. The deep crystal glasses clinked musically together, while her hands trembled. She got the corkscrew.
Her plan was to use it to pull the cork, then ask him to pour the wine. And while he was pouring it, she would wiggle the cork off the screw and stab him in the face. Or, if she didn’t have the stomach for that, she would at least try to impale him in the back of the hand that held the gun.
She sat down on the edge of the coffee table, facing him and the Great Egg. The gun rested on his knee, the barrel pointing at her, but without any particular intention. She had the corkscrew in her right hand, the twisted point sticking between her middle and ring fingers. He was a long way off—she would have to throw herself at him to get the corkscrew into his face. But maybe he would be closer when he poured the wine. Maybe.
Then she shifted her gaze to his eyes and saw him staring at her with icy speculation. His face was pale and still and nearly expressionless.
“Do you think if you get me drunk and fuck me, it’ll change my mind about what has to happen?” he asked her.
She said, “I thought getting drunk and making love and having a good time was the whole idea. Doing it on our terms. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“It is. But I’m still not clear that’s what you want. I don’t know if that’s what you ever wanted. Maybe in some vapid, Lifetime movie sense, you liked the idea of pulling a Romeo and Juliet, and dying side by side, but you were never really committed. You never thought it would happen. Now it’s time, and you’ll do anything to get out of it. Including whore yourself.” He rocked back and forth and then said, “I know it’s politically incorrect to say, but what the hell, we’re both about to die: I’ve never thought much of the intelligence of women. I’ve never once met a woman who had any true intellectual rigor. There’s a reason things like Facebook and airplanes and all the other great inventions of our time were made by men.”
“Yeah,” she said. “So they could get laid. Are we going to drink this wine or what?”
He made the barking sound again. “You’re not even going to deny it?”
“Which part? The part about how women are stupid, or the part about how I don’t really want to kill myself with you?”
“The part where you think you can shake your ass and make me forget what I came here to do. Because it’s getting done. If nothing else, I have a moral obligation to stop you from going out in the world and infecting someone else like you infected me.”
“Thought you said the world was going to end, so what would it matter? What would it—” But she couldn’t talk anymore. Something awful was happening.
The cork wouldn’t come out of the bottle.
It was a fat cork, sealed with dribbles of wax, and she had the bottle under her arm and was pulling at the corkscrew with the other hand, but the cork wouldn’t give in the slightest, felt fixed in place.