Gio snorted. “Maybe you are.”
“You saying she’s not?”
He gave me another look that said I was the biggest dumb ass he’d ever met.
“I guarantee you she’s not,” he said, tapping the table with his index finger for emphasis.
“How do you guarantee something like that?”
“You want names?” he asked.
That stopped me cold. I took another drink of my coffee and swallowed hard. “I don’t want any names. I don’t care.”
“You don’t care?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “So there’s others. So what? It’s not like I’ve got some kind of claim to her.”
Gio must have seen something in my face that belied my words because he shook his head again. “You better cut loose of her, Sully. There’s plenty of pussy out there and this piece is making the rounds.”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I thought hard about what he said. Her car never had been fixed, so what did she do on the mornings that I didn’t drive her home? What did she do on my days off?
I never called to find out.
I never asked.
I didn’t figure I had the right.
That morning, she asked for a ride home. I thought about lying to her about working overtime, but she asked while she was pouring coffee. Her breasts pressed against my triceps as she leaned forward to fill the cup. I changed my mind and took her home anyway.
The sex was frantic that morning. I tore at her blouse as soon as we were through the door and took her there on the linoleum floor of her small kitchen, both of us still half-clothed. Afterward, the hum of the refrigerator and her heavy breathing was all I could hear. I caught my breath, and left.
She didn’t ask me for a ride home for almost a week.
Lauren didn’t say a word for most of that next week, serving coffee and French toast and eggs and bacon, still smiling and flirting as if we’d never been together and I’d never left her lying on the kitchen floor without so much as a word or a glance.
Gio and Anthony were both off. I sat in a booth and drank coffee while I wrote my reports. I’d been there thirty minutes when she slipped into the booth across the table from me.
Her eyes were red. Not the red from being tired. Her eyes were red from crying.
She didn’t say a word for a long time. She just looked at me. I’d thought that I could be heartless when the time came, but the truth was I felt bad. It only took thirty seconds of her staring at me with her red eyes before I said I was sorry.
She waited a moment, searching my face as if to gauge my sincerity. Then she gave a little nod, stood and went back to work.
That morning, she didn’t ask for a ride, but I stopped by anyway. She was waiting for me and got into the car without a word. We drove to her apartment in silence, as if a spoken word would negate my apology or her acceptance of it.
I’d like to say that I made love to her that morning. I’d like to say that the moment was something special and tender and beyond the simple physical act that we’d been doing for weeks and weeks. But the truth was, while things were more gentle and I stayed deep into the afternoon afterward, it was still just fucking.
I didn’t love her. I wasn’t eighteen and prone to confusing lust with love. I knew it was her body and her scent and the primal way she had sex that excited me and brought me back for more. Love was when you couldn’t live without somebody. I could live without Lauren. I just didn’t want to stop fucking her.
Still, all of the small things I noticed before we slept together never left my consciousness. The stray lock of hair she brushed into place. The light brown freckles across the bridge of her nose and on her cheeks. How she smiled with such hope, talking about going over to Seattle to attend art school. The dreamy way her eyes closed and her upper lip broke out in a sweat when she came. I liked those things. I liked them a lot. But I didn’t love them.
She never stopped seeing other men. I figured that one out pretty easily. The signs were all there. The evidence at her apartment, though she tried hard to hide it. And there were the mornings she didn’t ask me to drive her home. I drove by her apartment a couple of those mornings and saw a different car parked in her stall both times.
Gio was right.
She was a whore.
But I still wanted her.
One morning, I lay in bed behind her, my fingers tracing the outline of her hip. The smell of sex hung over us like netting and I closed my eyes and drifted toward sleep.
“You ever think about the future, Connor?” she asked in a thick voice.
“Hmmmm?”
“The future,” she said. “You ever think about it?”
“You mean like if there’ll be flying cars and stuff like that?”
She was quiet for a moment and I felt a small hitch in her upper body. “No,” she answered, her voice catching. “I mean…whether you’ll be alone or not.”
A stab of fear lanced into my stomach, followed by the wallop of guilt.
“No,” I softly lied to her. “I don’t think about that at all.”
“I do,” she whispered back.
I didn’t answer. I pretended I didn’t notice her gentle crying and let myself drift to sleep instead.
“Tell you what you do,” Aaron Norris told me one morning. He’d crashed our normal three-some of Gio, Batts and me because his partner Virgil Gilliam had called in sick. I’d given up keeping Lauren a secret from either of them, but I was surprised that Norris knew it, too. I shouldn’t have been. The rumor mill works overtime at River City PD.
“What?” I asked, not caring much what he had to say.
“It’s simple,” he said. “You just talk her into letting you fuck her in the ass, right? Then once she lets you, just tell her that you can’t respect someone that would let you do something like that. And then you dump her.”
“Class act,” Batts said. He shook his head, but he was smiling, too. Easy for him to take it lightly. He had Rebecca. She was something special and he was locked into her. I figured I could look high and low and the best I’d probably end up with is something half as good.
“Hey,” Norris said, “it works.”
“So would taking a giant crap on her chest,” Batts said, “but I wouldn’t recommend that.”
“If the thing with fucking her in the ass doesn’t work, that’d be my next step,” Norris said, and we all laughed, even though Norris was an idiot. Lauren came and filled our cups. She pressed her chest into my triceps as she poured, and I felt guilty as hell. The silence while she topped off everyone’s coffee made it obvious we had been talking about her, which made me feel even worse yet. But she just smiled that mysterious, seductive smile, pushed that lock of hair behind her ear and walked away.
Norris watched her go. “Nice taste, Sully.”
I didn’t answer.
He turned to face me and said, “No, really. She’s a hot little piece of trim.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just nodded.
“Well-traveled,” he added, “but hot.”
Anger flared up in me and my hand curled into a fist under the table, but I pressed my lips together and said nothing. To avoid his eyes, I took a drink of my coffee and gave him a vague grunt.
Conversation turned to other topics, but my mind stayed on her. Eventually Norris left and Gio followed a short time later. Batts and I sat, drinking the last of our coffee and finishing reports.
“Sully?”
I looked up from my burglary report. “Yeah?”
“You getting attached to her?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
“You sure?”
“You’re the Italian,” I said. “Remember? Us Irish are much more practical.”
Batts let out a small snort. “Yeah, no romantics ever came out of Ireland, right?”
“Not this one,” I told him and after that, he left it alone.
When I finally stopped seeing her, it was nothing dramatic. I knew I’d never stop taking her home unless I stopped going to the diner. When I made the decision to break it off, that was how I did it. At my request, we started going up to Mary’s Cafe instead, and that was that. Gio never asked why and neither did Anthony. I was glad for that. I didn’t know if the real reason was that I didn’t want things to get any more serious than they were or if it was that I wanted them to but knew they couldn’t.