Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (121 page)

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

563

∑Ω∑

She returns to reality.

The food is left in the bowls before her, cold and soggy.

She is the only one in the room, and she is staring into the fire. The flames are low.

The bottom of the hearth is filled with embers.

The embers sparkle and sizzle, slowly dying.

Just like her life with Patrick.

Except there was no sizzling, no slowly dying.

There was just sparkling—and then death.

She is crying, and she feels dizzy, woozy. Drunk. She doesn’t know where the man went, but she doesn’t really care. She tries to stand from her squat between the couch and coffee table, but she loses her balance and falls back into the couch. She curls up on the sofa, bringing her knees to her chest and resting her chin on her knees. How did all of this happen? She was
so
happy. There was a time when she didn’t ever think she would find love, and then she met Patrick. They just seemed to click. They quickly became best friends, and before long they fell in love. But now she feels so scared and alone. She knows there is no one, no one other than Patrick. And Patrick is gone. The feeling is overwhelming: a dark cloud hovering over her, covering her so deeply that she feels like she will just fade into a foggy nothingness.

She leans forward, grabs the bottle of whiskey.

She raises it to her lips.

She takes another drink.

And then he is standing behind her.

V

She doesn’t know how long he has been there. Her thoughts had consumed her, riddled with memories, and even her acknowledgement of his presence doesn’t eliminate the tears. They continue to slide down her cheeks. She is hunched over on the couch, her head practically between her knees. The man moves forward from behind the couch, and leaning over the sofa’s back, he puts his hands on her shoulders. He doesn’t know want to do, but he wants to console her. She has tried to comfort him, but her words do not work. Only her touch brushes away a handful of the hurt. He tries to understand what she feels; she hasn’t told him much about Patrick, only bits and pieces, fragments of a puzzle that fail to portray the entire picture. But he misses Kira, and even though the memories of her are transforming and morphing, there are times in the quiet, in the darkness, when he can remember every part of her: her body, her laugh, her kiss, her touch, her corny jokes. He sees her weeping, feels the shuddering sobs trickling into his fingers gripping her shoulders, and he wants to cry himself. But he holds himself together, only for her. He releases her shoulders and moves around the couch, and between her and the fire, he takes a seat next to her upon the couch cushions. He puts one arm around her and looks into the fire. They sit there side-by-side. His own eyes are brimming with tears, the nightmare resurfacing amidst the peace and quiet, and Sarah’s own choking yet quieting tears are contagious.

Sarah looks over at him, shakes her head, blinking at the tears. “I’m sorry…”

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

564

“Shhh,” he says. With his thumb he wipes some of the tears from her eyes. “You don’t have to apologize.” He puts his arm around her, and she leans into him. He wishes he could take away her pain, his pain, the pain of the whole damn world.

She looks up at him again.

Their faces are inches apart.

∑Ω∑

He didn’t want to go, but Kira had insisted on it. A double date was an atrocious idea, especially on Superbowl night. But Kira always got her way, and he found himself at a RED LOBSTER down Glenway Avenue, sitting in the booth with Kira, munching on cheddar cheese biscuits and glancing at his watch.

“How long do we have to wait for them to order?” he kept asking.

“Be quiet,” she scolded him.

Eventually the other couple appeared: Justin and Jessie.

Justin was half-Korean, with a wry smile and charming wit.

Jessie looked like a scarecrow, so thin and skinny, with yellow-golden hair down past her shoulders, a narrow and bony face, wisened and compassionate eyes. They ate dinner and talked, and he ordered SEAFOOD PORTIFINO.

Kira had known Justin from high school, and while the two of them caught up over dessert, the man and Jessie talked with one another. Kira kept eyeing him, and eventually she put her hand on his knee and announced, “It was lovely, but we’d better get going.”

On the car ride home, she glared at him: “Why were you flirting with Jessie?”

He swore up and down that he wasn’t, but he dreamt of her that night. He dreamt he and Jessie had slept together.

He dreamt that Kira never found out.

He awoke ashamed—and excited.

∑Ω∑

Neither of them know how long they have been looking at one another. She stares into his eyes, and her tears have stopped flowing. There is something else there, something foreign, something felt only a few times before. Something experienced that day so long ago, that day they stood together in that store in that distant mall, when she was wearing that wedding dress. The way he had looked at her, the way she had looked at him, it has been resurrected. The tension is undeniable, the terror of anticipation, the vulnerability and the openness and the resentment…

She kisses him.

He doesn’t reject it.

It is a slow kiss, their lips grazing.

She doesn’t know why she is kissing him.

He doesn’t know why he is accepting it.

She kisses him harder, and now she opens her mouth, bites his lip. His tongue finds hers, and their tongues dance together, a ballet. She wants to be on top of him, wants to kiss his chin, his neck.

He pulls away, breaking the kiss.

She looks up at him, pain filling her eyes, glistening behind salt-laden tears. Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

565

His fingertips brush her face, and he feels the deep edged lines, the remnants of a nightmarish existence. He doesn’t know what he is doing as he lets her kiss him again, and he knows he should stop her, knows he’ll regret it. But he is enslaved, gripped by his passions, a death-grip upon his willpower. He is no longer in control. He needs this, too, just as much as she does: needs to feel someone near, to hold someone close, to kiss someone deeply and passionately and richly—even if it’s not Kira.

He kisses her softly, then harder. His hands explore the hem of her shirt. Her shirt comes off, and he is kissing her neck and her chest. She arcs her back, reaches behind her, unsnaps her bra. Her breasts hang exposed as the bra slides down and falls upon her pants. She pulls off his shirt, and she pushes him back against the couch. She straddles him, bends down, kisses his chest and stomach, licks up to his neck and then probes with her tongue his mouth once more. Her breasts rub against the hair on his chest,

just as they did with Patrick so long ago.

∑Ω∑

Kira was away for the weekend, and the man was stuck in his dorm. It was nearly midnight, and he was slowly succumbing to sleep.

His phone rang. An unidentified number. He answered: “Hello?”

He could hear tears on the other end, a girl saying his name. A familiar voice.

“Who is this?” he asked, the voice familiar but not identifiable.

“Jessie,” she said. He heard more tears.

“From RED LOBSTER?” he asked. That had been weeks ago.

“Yes.”

“Oh. Umm. You’re crying?”

A sniffle. “Yes.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Can we talk?”

Thunder boomed outside. “Yeah.”

“In person?”

Kira would
hate
that.

She didn’t have to know.

And Jessie needed help.

“Where?”

∑Ω∑

He knows this is wrong, knows it won’t deliver—it won’t bring an end to the emptiness, won’t bring an end to the pain, won’t fill that hole where Kira used to dwell. But he needs this, and it feels so good, the intimacy and the connection—a shattered memory from so long ago. Something he hasn’t experienced in so long. A lie, but a beautiful lie. He lies back and lets her crawl over him, feels the warmth of her body against his cold skin. Her hair falls around his face, and his eyes are closed, and they are kissing, and he pretends she is Kira, that they are back in their house in Cincinnati, kissing on the sofa underneath the stars and the rain rapping on the roof and the cars on the highway and the life and laughter and love not a memory but a reality that would never fade. This is crazy, but he can’t stop. He wraps his arms around her bare back and hugs her so tightly that his fingers carve ashAnthony Barnhart Dwellers of the Night

566

white lines into her skin. She pulls backwards, breaking the embrace, and something within the man hopes that it is over, that they can proceed to regret. But now she is undoing her zipper, and he watches as her pants fall, and her panties follow. She is naked now, and she is straddling his knee. She fondles with the zipper of his jeans and leans forward, continues kissing him. He is hard, and she can feel him through his pants. She wants him more than anything, and he wants her. He wants to feel anything besides the emptiness that is beside him with each passing day and night. Her fingers continue in their artsy dance, and now his zipper is down. She pulls away from him, stands between the couch and the coffee table, totally exposed; she bends over, her breasts jiggling, twin rubies in the firelight, the nipples hard and erect. She pulls down his pants, and then his boxers. They are naked together.

∑Ω∑

Fifteen minutes later the twin headlights of his JEEP swerved down the gravel drive leading to a small park in Colerain Township. The trees along the side of the road were drenched in murky shadows, darkness having settled, and a gentle rain tapped on the windshield. The JEEP’s wipers creaked back and forth. He peered forward and drove slowly, the fog clinging to the ground separating against the grill of the car. He sought out a figure in the rain, but there was nothing: only the steady drum of the rain on the roof and the gravel crunching under the tires.

He turned his head and jumped in his seat.

She was standing beside his window, wearing nothing but a flannel night-gown, soaked in dripping rainwater, wild hair awash.

He put the JEEP in PARK and pushed open the door, jumped out. “Oh my God. You look sick.”

She wiped rainwater from her eyes. “Thank you for coming.”

In the wash from the headlights he could see her eyes were bloodshot and cheeks bloated. He walked around the front of the JEEP, for a moment obscuring both headlights, and he helped her inside. She pulled the door shut herself, and he walked back around, passing like a phantom before the lights, and he made his way into the vehicle, shut the door. They sat there in the car, in the middle of the park. She didn’t say anything, nothing at all. The two of them just listened to the rain on the roof, and his ears were attuned to the sounds of her broken breathing. He wanted to ask so many questions, thousands urging to be voiced, but he said nothing at all, just let her breathe. He cranked up the heat to keep her warm. She didn’t react. She kept her arms close to herself and stared out the rain-streaked window, the falling rain sparkling in front of the headlights, falling like tiny daggers from the sky.

“I just want him to stop,” she suddenly said in a coarse whisper. He looked over at her, compassion dripping from his eyes. “Stop what?”

“I want him to stop… To stop hitting me…”

And then she looked at him in the light from the dashboard, and he could see one of her eyes was swollen, and there was a thick-blooded gash across her cheek. Horror traveled through him, mingled with rage.

He didn’t know what to do.

She was hunched over in the seat, started to cry.

And she continued crying, the sobs becoming harder and more violent. He reached over and put an arm around her, could feel her ribs.

She was so skinny.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

567

She looked up at him, leaned over, buried herself into him.

He wrapped his arms around her.

She cried into his chest, her arms shaking as they gripped at his biceps. He looked up at the roof of the car, closed his eyes, felt his heart ripping for this girl.

“Why couldn’t he be like you?” she moaned into his shirt.

“Why couldn’t he be like you?”

He didn’t know what to say.

And then she pulled herself up.

She tried to kiss him.

And he let her.

A long, passionate, mesmerizing,
beautiful
kiss.

He swore to himself that Kira would never know.

∑Ω∑

She has him inside her, and she feels free, if but for a second, a fleeting moment, free from her pain and free from the reality that lies howling over the vast stretch of cornfields. She is on top of him, and he is inside her. She leans overtop of him, kisses him, takes him deeper inside her, deeper and faster. He thrusts with his hip, places one hand on her smooth butt-cheek, and the other is gripping her chocolate hair, slightly pulling. His hand on her butt slides up her spine, pulls her down harder on top of him. She closes her eyes, moans, pretends it is Patrick underneath her. He turns her over, and now he is on top. He pushes himself into her as deep and hard as he can, feels the warmth of her underneath him, her warm legs wrapped around his waist, the crackling fire spreading its heat against his side. She is trying to forget her pain, and he is trying to forget his, they’re to rid themselves of it all. He is reckless, she is reckless; he loves it, and she loves it. He lets himself go, looks down at her, at her closed eyes, feels the warmth below, lets himself get lost in the rhythm of their bodies, a sacred and sacrilegious fantasy. She grabs his butt, tells him to move faster. She leans forward, kisses his hair, and he kisses her neck, and he keeps moving inside her, faster and faster. Her lips tremble as the dawn dares to break…

∑Ω∑

He had taken Kira out to eat, then confessed to her what had happened. “I’m so sorry… I didn’t even know what was happening… It happened so fast… I’m so sorry…” She hadn’t known what to say, couldn’t formulate her words. He became aware of nothing but her, the look on her face: the way it fell, the way her eyes filled with tears, and the way she staggered away from the table, dazed, stumbling to the bathroom. He had sat alone at the table for the longest time, watching the couples about the diner, holding hands and sharing laughter, and he pondered what had happened, and he held back his tears. One of her friends showed up. She glared at him, then went to the bathroom. Kira left with her, refusing to even look at him. He tried calling her for the next three days, but she would never answer. He knew he had lost her, but he left her voicemails, pleading that she would return to him. He was confident that it was over, and that confidence tore through him like an icy sword. He wept every night.