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“Is this ok?” I asked him.
“Lissa…” Now it sounded like he was begging so I leaned and rested my palms on his chest and rocked my own hips. This felt even better, with him caressing me inside and me caressing my clit against him, so I went faster. His hands gripped my hips and then he surged off the bed and I told him that I was going go to come. Again.
“Good Lord,” I muttered, my face against his chest, and I heard him sigh. It was a sound of satisfaction, I thought, and it was louder than most people spoke on stage.
“We didn’t use protection.”
I rested my chin on my fist so I could see him better. “It’s ok,” I answered. “I’m on birth control.”
“Oh.”
I stared at his expression, trying to read it. “Are you disappointed?”
“No, no,” he assured me. “There’s plenty of time for kids. Come here, honey, because we’re not done. I’ve been wanting to try something else.”
He did, and other things, too, and we were busy until the morning.
∞
I yawned into my fist. “Double espresso, please,” I requested, then looked over at the table where Valerie was waiting for me. She’d been the one to want to meet this time, and she looked nervous. No, more than that—she looked distraught and almost ill. There were dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there the last time I’d seen her and she was thinner, too thin.
“Hi,” I said as I sat across from her at the table. I put the piping hot drink in between us, a bitter barrier.
“Hello, Sissy.” She looked right at my finger, where I wore my wedding band. “I guess I should say congratulations to you.”
I had the urge to tell her the truth: that Bowie and I had gotten married because of the threat her son represented, that I hadn’t been cheating on Ward, et cetera, et cetera. But then I decided that she didn’t really deserve any explanation from me about my life, not anymore.
“Thank you,” I answered, as if she’d actually wished me the best. I waited and took a sip of the espresso. It was foul but I needed the jolt of caffeine to take me through the rest of today after what had happened the night before. Four times the night before.
“Where is he?”
I jerked into the present. I hadn’t been only imagining; I had been remembering, and I was breathing faster.
“What?” I asked. “Who?”
“You know what I mean,” Valerie said. “Where is my son?”
“Are you being serious?” I looked at her carefully, and obviously she was. “I have no idea where Ward is. I was the one who came to you to ask that before. How would I know?”
“You really didn’t do anything to him?”
I stared. “Do anything?” I repeated. “You mean, like, I made him disappear? What are you asking me?”
“Ward is missing,” she burst out, and I nodded.
“I know that. I asked you weeks ago if you knew where he was, and you said no. You said that you had no idea.”
She didn’t respond to me at first and as I watched her face change, I guessed at the emotions she was displaying. I was pretty sure there was guilt, but also anger. Then I thought I saw secrecy, the same way she’d looked the last time we’d spoken face-to-face about her son. In the end, it just seemed as if she was about to start crying.
“Valerie, what’s going on?” I asked her. “What’s happening?”
“I did know where he was,” she said. “At first, when everything bad happened between you two, he came to me and Kevin and explained it. He said that you’d been cheating on him and were trying to make excuses for your behavior. It made sense, especially with how you were having process servers and police go after him.”
“No, that didn’t make sense, not with what you knew about the two of us!” I retorted. “He was the one who cheated on me, and I had a—a friendship with someone that made him angry.”
“A friendship with the man you’re now married to,” Valerie said bitterly. “It doesn’t matter now,” she continued, and I shook my head because it did matter to me. “We agreed to help him. He took his grandmother’s car and went downstate and he was supposed to keep going, to Florida and then right out of the United States. We have a friend in Dania who has a charter boat business and it might have been a rough trip, but he would have been safe.”
“Are you being serious?” I asked her again. “You were helping him flee the country?”
