I raised my hands, trying to make a gesture that would express what I couldn’t find words for.
“No,” Aubrey said. “This is the most intense thing I’ve ever done. It’s intimidating. I keep wanting to call Eric and ask him what to do, and then I remember that he’s…”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know what you mean.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s not very good first-date chatter, is it?”
“It’s weird,” I said.
“In all kinds of ways,” Aubrey said. “Apart from all the rest of it, I keep trying to wrap my head around the idea that you’re the girl Eric talked about. You aren’t what I expected.”
“How so?” I asked. “I mean, what kinds of things did he say about me?”
Aubrey thought about that for a second.
“He wasn’t wrong about any of it. It’s just the person he was talking about was a kid, and you aren’t. He said you were smart. Mouthy. That his brother was about the worst match for you as a father that he could imagine,” Aubrey said. “I didn’t get the feeling that they particularly got along, Eric and your dad.”
“Cats. Dogs,” I said. “Our family has had its Jerry Springer moments.”
“I heard a little bit about that. There was some static when you stopped believing in God.”
“It didn’t start out that way,” I said. “It’s where it ended up. Maybe it’s where it had to end up.”
“How’d it start, then?”
“I stopped believing in hell,” I said. “I kept thinking about it, and I just couldn’t make it square up. My dad and the pastor and everyone, they kept talking about a god that loves people and wants us to be well and happy, and then they’d talk about all the terrible things that would happen to me forever if I pissed him off. It just didn’t make sense, you know? Why would someone that loves you make it so that you could be tortured forever just because you didn’t do what he said? So I figured they were wrong. I figured that there wasn’t really a hell, because God loved us and he wouldn’t do that to us.”
“How old were you?”
“About twelve, I think,” I said. “I tried to explain it to my dad, but he didn’t think much of it. Eventually, I figured out that I shouldn’t talk about it. But then I started thinking about other things that didn’t make sense. I looked at the world, and it just seemed…I don’t know…bigger than what they were telling me. And somewhere in there, I woke up and thought, you know, if Jesus died for my sins, that’s not really something I asked him to do.”
Aubrey laughed. It was a warm sound, and I relaxed a little, just hearing it.
“It sounds like you didn’t lose faith in God as much as in your church,” Aubrey said.
“When you stop believing in someone who’s been telling you stories, you stop believing in the stories too,” I said. “I wanted to believe, just for tactical reasons. It would have made my life a lot easier. But there you go.”
The food came, and it was better than I’d expected. It turned out ropa vieja meant “old clothes” but was really shredded beef with some genuinely wonderful spices. We talked a lot about my family and Eric and behavior—changing brain cysts, which should have been gross but was actually really interesting. The background fear faded if it never quite went away. I had flan for desert. Aubrey just drank coffee.
“So,” he said when I put down my fork, “you think Midian’s cleaned them out yet?”
“Probably not yet,” I said.
He smiled.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me neither.”
We went to a nightclub in an old church that played well-mixed techno. Despite my expectations, the Goth contingent was in the minority. Most of the people seemed like young-professional types and college students. I danced for a while, Aubrey near me, but not so close that we were really dancing together. Then the floor began to get crowded, the bodies of strangers pushing us closer. My anxiety about the Invisible College and Coin and the nightmare was all still there, but instead of spoiling the night, it made things sharper. More real. I could see how someone could wind up addicted to danger.
I took a break, drank a martini, and went back out determined to put the uncertainty behind me. When we started dancing again, I took Aubrey’s arms and put them around me. He went awkward and unsure for maybe two minutes, and then we were leaning into each other. The music didn’t stop, and I didn’t want it to.
The high Gothic vault above us glittered with mirror balls and glowed with blue and orange lights just bright enough to give us our shadows. Stained-glass windows looked down on us. Aubrey’s body was warm under my hands, and his face had a seriousness that suited it even more than his smiles. He was a good dancer once he relaxed, and it turned out so was I.
I had a second martini, and then another drink that I couldn’t quite identify. When I started feeling light-headed, I went up to the rooftop deck for some air. The city lay spread out before me in the darkness, glittering black and orange. The night had cooled down to comfortable, the breeze warm against my skin like Denver itself exhaling gently against me. I heard Aubrey come up behind me; I could already recognize his footsteps. When he put his hand on my shoulder, I leaned back against him.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You are too.”
I turned, lifting my mouth to his. He tasted like good whiskey and fresh coffee. He smelled like musk and spice. I rested my head against him and tried to catch my breath.
“You know,” I said softly, “you never did show me your apartment.”
It was a small place near the university. A low counter separated the kitchen from a living room hardly wide enough to hold the couch. The bedroom was smaller than either, a queen-size bed pressed into a corner to leave a path. But the floors were wood and had been polished until they glowed, and every spare surface was piled with books and unlit candles. When we got there, he started to say something, but I stopped him for fear of losing the moment.
There had been times I’d seen a naked man and thought it was exciting or funny or weird. Lying on Aubrey’s half-made bed and seeing him lit only by the soft light that filtered in from the street was the first time I’d thought a man was beautiful. My body had a warm, relaxed feeling, the bruises and cracked ribs only a seasoning on a rising tide of pleasure. Aubrey’s skin against mine was rough and sweet and perfect. His fingers were gentle, and even with stitches holding my side together, I felt beautiful. I came once before he was in me. He had a three-pack of condoms in his bedside table in an unopened box. We went through two of them.
In the aftermath, sweat drying on my back and neck, my body still twitching, I listened to his breath as he fought against sleep. The clock at the bedside said it was a little after three in the morning. I was awake and as alert as I’d ever been. I slid out from under the bunched sheet and paused in the doorway to look at Aubrey stretched out, naked and spent, his eyes closed, one arm raised over his head. He looked strong and vulnerable both. He didn’t know who I was. Not really. There were only stories that Eric had told him, a few shared days, and the fact that when I’d needed someone, I’d called him.
And when I’d called him, he’d been there. It was about as much as I knew of him too. So maybe it was enough.
My clothes were in knots on the floor, and I didn’t bother trying to untangle them. I took myself to his bathroom, had a quick shower, and wrapped myself in his robe—soft green terry cloth that smelled like him. When I went to the kitchen, I didn’t turn on the lights for fear of waking him. Between the shower and the deepest part of the night, it was cool enough that a cup of tea sounded good. I boiled some water, found a cup and a box of tea bags by the light of the gas flame, and took myself out to the couch while the tea steeped.
Aubrey’s computer was an old laptop perched on the couch’s armrest. I booted it up, found wireless service, and pulled up Firefox. I figured that if there was something in his work that had caught Eric’s attention, it would be good for me to know. Besides which, I wanted to be able to talk to Aubrey about the things that were important to him without sounding like an idiot. I Googled Toxoplasma gondii and his name.