But before she could dial, she heard a key in her front door. She got to her feet quickly and moved toward the front hall, cursing herself for not putting the dead bolt on yet. She had to get that key back from him. The chain kept the door from opening all the way.
“We both know that chain is useless. I could easily ram my way in there if I wanted to,” he said with a smile. She leaned against the wall and looked at him. He pressed his face up against the opening between the door and the jamb. Those ice blue eyes had caused her to betray herself too many times. He’d shaved his black hair down to the skull as he sometimes did when he wanted to look tough, and he had about two days of stubble on his face.
“But then I’d be within my legal rights to kill you,” she said pleasantly. He reached his hand through the door and playfully grabbed for her tee-shirt. She moved just out of his reach.
“The father of your child. I don’t think so.”
“He’s young. He’ll get over it.”
He gave her the smile. The smile that said, “I’m so sexy, so lovable, and you can’t resist me no matter what I’ve done.”
“Come on, Jez. I haven’t seen the kid in three days. I know he’s sleeping; I just want to poke my head in.”
She stared at him. Over the years, the effect that his smile once had on her had greatly diminished. But she’d just be lying to herself if she said it didn’t still ignite something within her. She considered her visceral sexual attraction to him a mutinous physical impulse to be quashed at all costs.
“I’ll let you in,” she said. “But I want that key before you leave. Otherwise, I’m changing the locks. I also want your word that you won’t come again without calling.”
“What about when I pick up Ben and bring him home from school?” he said.
“I’ll give the key to Ben. He’s old enough now.”
His smile faded a little bit and she thought she saw genuine sadness in his eyes. But with Dylan it was impossible to tell the difference between sincere feeling and calculated manipulation.
“Okay,” he said, softly. “Okay.”
She unlatched the door and he gave her a quick, hard embrace and a kiss on the cheek. “You’re the best,” he told her. “You really are.”
She followed him through the apartment and stood in the doorway and watched him watch Ben. She didn’t trust him not to wake Ben up. And once he was awake and knew that his dad was here, forget it. They’d all be up all night. But Dylan was good; he was quiet as he sat in the small wooden chair beside Ben’s bed. A night-light that looked like an aquarium rotated, casting the shadows of fish in a dim blue light on the walls. For a second she remembered what it was like when they all lived here together, when they were a family. There had been plenty of quiet, happy times that looked just like this moment.
Dylan turned to her and pointed at the baby monitor beside Ben’s bed, gave her a disapproving shake of his head. She crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows in a dare: What are you going to do about it? She didn’t stalk out of the room, which was her impulse. He was antagonizing her to get her to leave so that he could “accidentally” wake up Ben. She knew most of his techniques and had developed countertechniques to block them.
After another moment, he rose and walked past her and out of the room. She closed the door behind her. In the kitchen, she noticed that he looked tired. He’d taken off his leather jacket and hung it over one of the chairs. He reached into the refrigerator and grabbed a Corona.
“Make yourself at home,” she said, sitting down at the table.
“It used to be my home,” he said without heat.
It was an invitation to rumble. But she didn’t have it in her tonight. Besides arguing was a kind of intimacy for them, like if they could make each other mad it meant they still cared. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. In the light the refrigerator cast on him, she could see that he looked tense and strained. She hadn’t noticed at the door.
“What’s up, Dylan? What’s going on?”
She did care about him. He had been her husband for four years. He was the father of her child. And in the three years since their divorce, they’d been slowly and haltingly approaching friendship. They’d both done a lot of growing up.
He took the opener from the drawer by the sink and popped the top off his bottle.
“I killed someone last night,” he said, his jaw tensing. He closed the refrigerator and they were in semi-darkness with only the light from the living room shining.
“Our buyer got made and we had to go in fast. I killed a sixteen-year-old kid. He turned a MAC M10 on us, I guess thinking he’d shoot his way out; he could have killed us all.”
“I didn’t hear about it,” she said, standing and moving toward him. She could see the weight of it on him.
“It was a good shooting,” he said, taking a long draw on the beer and leaning against the counter. She moved near him and put a hand on his arm.
“I’m being investigated, of course,” he said with a slow shrug. “But I know I had no choice. Still… when I fired, I only saw that gun. When he was down, all I could see was this skinny kid lying there, bleeding out. He didn’t even have any hair on his face.”
She didn’t say anything, just waited for him to go on.
“He knew he was going to die,” said Dylan quietly. “He was scared.”
He stared at the kitchen wall as if it were all playing out for him there. His face was expressionless and pale but she could see the hand that held his beer shaking just slightly. In her years on the job, Jesamyn had only drawn her weapon twice and never fired it in the line of duty. Dylan worked buy-and-bust up in the South Bronx. It was one of the riskiest possible details. A cop goes undercover to buy drugs from dealers and once the purchase is made, a team moves in and makes the collar. Two cops had died last year in his precinct. But if you did your time, it was two years to a gold shield, something Dylan wanted badly. He envied Jesamyn’s quick rise to detective and it was one of the things that had contributed to the end of their marriage.
“I just thought about Ben and you all night last night,” he said, lowering his eyes to her face. “While I was in the station, waiting for my PBA rep-I just had a lot of time to think. I watched the life drain from someone. It just left him so easily and when he was dead, there was like this shuddering and he was just gone. There was no mistaking it, you know, that life had left.”
He rubbed his eyes like he was trying to wipe the memory from them. Jesamyn stayed silent; she was stunned. She’d never heard him talk the way he was talking or look the way he looked. So sad and lost.
“I looked around and there were all these drugs on the table. And this gun in his hand. He had all this jewelry on and these expensive sneakers and leather coat. And it all just seemed so pointless. Like I’d taken this life because of all this stuff.”
He didn’t say anything else but searched her face like he was looking for something he needed there. She moved into him, wrapped her arms around him. He put the beer down and held onto her as tightly as he ever had in their years together. She felt the magnetic draw of their sexual chemistry and the pull of his connection to her heart.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up at him. “Are you okay?”
“I will be. I just needed to see him, you know? And you. I needed to remember what was real.”
She pulled away from him and walked into the living room. She needed to get away from him. She wanted to comfort him but it was too easy to get pulled into his universe, to let that familiarity and desire draw her back into his thrall. She sat on the couch and curled her legs up. He sat across from her.