“Just having a little taste to see what I’m missing. Isn’t that what you’re doing—with Adam? Because don’t tell me you’re serious—”
It had been a week since she’d moved in and if he hadn’t been around much, that was all right. He was mysterious, always out in the woods, and when he wasn’t he was lying supine on the couch in a clutter of books and notepads or just staring into the gray void of the TV, which looked as if it hadn’t worked in years. If he had anything to say at all it was about Colter—Colter this and Colter that, the same story, over and over. And the cops, the cops really lit him up. Ditto the Chinese. Colter, the cops and the Chinese, those were his themes. When he was talking, that is, which wasn’t much. He disappeared early each morning, before she was up, but he was always there for dinner and always glad to see the food dished out on the plate, whether it was meat loaf or mac and cheese or bean burritos. Glad for the sex too. She’d never known anybody like him—it was as if he’d been locked up in a cage his whole life. He wanted it. He needed it. He was hungry for it. And so was she. She’d been abstinent so long she’d forgotten what it was like to have your blood quicken just thinking about somebody, to feast on the smell of him, to find yourself getting wet even before he had his clothes off, even before he touched you.
“You want to meet him? See for yourself?” A pause. “He’s sweet. He really is.”
Christabel said something back, but it was garbled, hampered by the connection, the signal weak out here in the woods, and there was no landline—Adam had ripped it out. And why? He claimed the phone had been listening to him, spying on him, and if she doubted that—CIA, FBI, his mother, the Chinese—she couldn’t fault his paranoia. Or was it even paranoia—or just wariness, just being hip to reality? They were listening in on everybody and tracking their e-mails too, and that was a fact.
“You’re breaking up,” she said. “It’s me. Wait a minute”—and she stepped out the back door—“is this better?”
“I said, after what you’ve been telling me, he sounds pretty strange. Even if he is a stud.”
“What’s strange? Everybody’s strange. You’re strange. I’m strange.”
“You can say that again.”
“No, seriously, you want to come for dinner?”
“When?”
“I don’t know, tonight?” It was a Saturday, the day they usually got together for dinner someplace and then the whole hopeless charade of bar-hopping, singles night out, as if there’d be any male in any of those places who would be of interest to either of them, every last one too old, too young, too stupid or too married.
“Come early. We’ll have cocktails. Four-thirty? Four, even?”
A silence, as if Christabel were weighing all the stacked-up options of her glittering social life, and then she said, “I don’t even know how to get there, like what road, it’s not even marked, right? And that’s another thing—it’s just crazy what you’re doing. You can’t hide out forever—”
“A week isn’t forever.”
“What then—you going to stay the full thirty days till the dog’s out of quarantine? You think that’s going to satisfy them? You can’t just—why don’t you at least take him to the vet and have the vet give him a shot or some kind of certificate or something?”
It was as if somebody had laid a cold hand on her back—or no, an ice pack. All her fear and hate gusted through her like an Arctic wind and froze her right there in place, her boots stuck fast in the dirt, her frame as rigid as the cinder-block wall and the trees that stood motionless all around her. Christabel was right: she couldn’t stay here forever, plus Sten was closing on the place and there’d be a new owner soon. And where did that leave her? She couldn’t go back to her own house because they’d be looking for her there, at least till the quarantine was up, and Christabel’s apartment was the size of your average cell at the House of Detention and she wouldn’t have her anyway because she couldn’t risk harboring a fugitive. And that was just how she’d put it, Christabel, the coward, the wuss: harboring a fugitive. Bow down and kiss their asses, why don’t you? I could lose my job, she’d said.