As I’m on top of her, my hands running up the inside of her thighs, driving the satin chemise over her bare hips, I stop.
She says, breathless, “Why are you stopping?”
And I almost say, I can’t do this, you’re not my wife, but that isn’t even true.
This is Daniela, the only human being in this insane world who has helped me, and, yes, maybe I am trying to justify it, but I’m so turned around, upside down, terrified, desperate, that I don’t just want it, I need this, and I think she does too.
I stare down into her eyes, smoky and glistening in the light stealing through the window.
Eyes you can fall into and keep falling.
She isn’t the mother of my son, she isn’t my wife, we haven’t made a life together, but I love her all the same, and not just the version of Daniela that exists in my head, in my history. I love the physical woman underneath me in this bed here and now, wherever this is, because it’s the same arrangement of matter—same eyes, same voice, same smell, same taste….
It isn’t married-people lovemaking that follows.
We have fumbling, groping, backseat-of-the-car, unprotected-because-who-gives-a-fuck, protons-smashing-together sex.
—
Moments after, sweaty and shaky, we lie intertwined and gazing out at the lights of our city.
Daniela’s heart is banging away in her chest, and I can feel the bump-bump of it against my side, decelerating now.
Slower.
Slower.
“Everything okay?” she whispers. “I can hear the wheels turning up there.”
“I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t found you.”
“Well, you did. And whatever’s happening, I’m here for you. You know that, right?”
She runs her fingers across my hands.
They stop at the piece of thread tied around my ring finger.
“What’s this?” she asks.
“Proof,” I say.
“Proof?”
“That I’m not crazy.”
It becomes quiet again.
I’m not sure of the time, but it’s definitely past two in the morning.
The bars will be closed now.
The streets as quiet and subdued as they get with the exception of snowstorm nights.
The air creeping through the crack in the window is the coldest of the season.
It trickles across our sweat-glazed bodies.
“I need to get back to my house,” I say.
“Your place in Logan Square?”
“Yeah.”
“What for?”
“I apparently have a home office. I want to get on the computer, see exactly what I’ve been working on. Maybe I’ll find papers, notes, something that will shed some light on what’s happening to me.”
“I can drive you over first thing in the morning.”
“You probably shouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Might not be safe.”
“Why wouldn’t it—”
Out in the living room, a loud bang rattles the door, like someone pounding on it with their fist. The way I imagine cops knock.
I ask, “Who the hell is that at this hour?”
Daniela climbs out of bed and walks naked out of the room.
It takes me a minute to find my boxer shorts in the twisted-up comforter, and by the time I pull them on, Daniela is emerging from her bedroom in a terrycloth robe.
We head out into the living room.
The pounding on the door continues as Daniela approaches.
“Don’t open it,” I whisper.
“Obviously.”
As she leans into the peephole, the phone rings.
We both startle.
Daniela crosses the living room toward the cordless lying on the coffee table.
I glance through the peephole, see a man standing in the hallway, his back to the door.
He’s on a cell phone.
Daniela answers, “Hello?”
The man is dressed in black—Doc Martens, jeans, a leather jacket.
Daniela says into the phone, “Who is this?”
I move toward her and point to the door, mouthing, It’s him?
She nods.
“What does he want?”
She points at me.
Now I can hear the man’s voice coming simultaneously through the door and through the speaker on her cordless.
She says into the phone, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s just me here, and I live alone, and I’m not letting a strange man into my home at two in the—”
The door explodes open, the chain snaps and flies across the room, and the man steps in raising a pistol with a long black tube screwed into the barrel.
He aims it at both of us, and as he kicks the door closed I smell old and recent cigarette smoke wafting into the loft.
“You’re here for me,” I say. “She has nothing to do with any of this.”
He’s an inch or two shorter than I am, but sturdier. His head is shaved and his eyes are gray and not so much cold as remote, as if they don’t see me as a human being, but rather as information. Ones and zeroes. The way a machine might.
My mouth has gone dry.
There’s a strange distance between what’s happening and my processing of it. A disconnect. A delay. I should do something, say something, but I feel paralyzed by the suddenness of the man’s presence.
“I’ll go with you,” I say. “Just—”
His aim shifts slightly away from me and up.