Security(52)

The Killer reads his text and looks where Jules’s cries are coming from.

“Don’t,” says Tessa. She hides behind a pillow. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s embarrassing.”

“Why?” Brian says, tugging the pillow down. He’s laughing. “Tess, Jesus, that’s the most awesome thing I’ve ever heard!” He’s hugging her.

“Are you sure? You’re sure you’re not perv’d out?”

“Baby, if you knew . . .”

“Knew what?”

Brian continues confessing. One gets the feeling he has never said the following out loud: he was twelve, for the first one. He woke up on the floor, his body cold and hot at the same time. He must not have made a noise, because Tessa was still snoring, there, in his bed. Mitch, of course, stayed asleep. Brian got clean underwear and pajama pants and changed in the bathroom, not knowing what to do. Very confused. Very, very upset. Lots of head scratching. Luckily, Troy was home that weekend, and on Sunday, when Mitch left the shed to get sodas, Brian asked Troy whether he should be worried that his peener was spitting stuff all over his jockey shorts at night.

Tessa laughs, sedately, full of endorphins and petting him. “Troy was cool about it, wasn’t he?”

Brian affirms that Troy put down the five--eighths (they were rebuilding a Harley engine from scratch) and explained to Brian that no, he should not be worried. He should know, in fact, that it was a hundred percent normal. Was it a girl from his class? Yes, Brian said adamantly, yes, it was a girl from his class. Brian tells Tessa, no, it was not a girl from his class. It was Tessa. It has almost exclusively been Tessa all his life, which is weird and he knows it. He’s been with other women, a pretty solid number of them, especially after Mitch died, but he has, only on maybe a half--dozen occasions, dreamed of other women, and he has very rarely masturbated to other women, and Tessa is now laughing and hugging Brian, and I want to vomit. “Troy said to use tissues, hide the magazines, sponge the sheets if it happened at night. They didn’t know you slept with us. I never did it with you next to me. Not once. That would’ve been—no.”

Tessa’s pensive. She feathers his hair between her fingers. Her teeth worry her lower lip, until Brian puts his thumb where her teeth are biting. She licks it. Not mischievous. Docile, like a cat.

“Tell me,” says Brian.

“What?”

“What you’re thinking.”

She runs a finger over his eyebrow, which rises at this pause, this reluctance.

“Please?” he says.

“I stopped sleeping with him a week ago,” Tessa says, and swallows. “I shouldn’t have told you about him, at least that he worked here. It was only ever physical, but—”

The Killer is reentering the nondeluxe penthouse, but wild dogs couldn’t pry my attention from Tessa saying,

“I tried to keep it strictly physical.”

Brian looks at the bracelet on Tessa’s wrist. He undoes the clasp and sets it on the bedside table; then he puts her fingertips to his mouth and kisses them. To show he is quiet. To show she should go on.

Go on, go on.

Tessa says, “He loves me way more than I deserve.”

“Impossible,” Brian says, and I hate him for saying it, and I hate him for getting to say it.

Tessa huffs, turns over, away from him—and Jules begins an impressive, lengthy keening scream at the sight of the Killer climbing the last few stairs; he stops at the top step, to enjoy the sound—but Brian makes a frustrated face for all of a second before he’s furled around Tessa from behind. “Tell me,” he says again. “Because I need to know. This could be a problem. I’m a thousand percent sure I love you more than he does. So if you’ve got issues with that—”

“Have you ever felt like—like, going through what we went through, it’s too much to ever explain to somebody? And the idea of even trying—you’re tired before you start.” She’s crying again. She wipes her tears on the sheet. “What it takes to survive that when you’re so small. How it never goes away, not all the way away, not ever.” She shakes on a sob. Brian turns her, very carefully, so she’s cradled to him. Tessa fights for a full breath and says, “If I could’ve told him, if I thought in a million years I could have made him understand how hard it is, even now, especially now, to feel . . .”

Alone.

I wonder if the anger is visible in my eyes. It wouldn’t matter. The Thinker is composing a text message, which the Killer—listening to Jules’s continuing screams like a man taking in the symphony—reads, replies to, and grudgingly obeys by walking toward her.

Whereas I, behind my death mask, roil in Tessa’s self--assured, self--centered, self--fulfilling prophesy that I couldn’t possibly understand her loneliness. While Brian pats and pets and shushes and squeezes, I ask Tessa, Would I be permitted to understand now? Now that I sit alone among the dead, death behind me, death beneath me, watching it watch you and stalk you and I’m powerless to stop it?

Just as quickly, anger is punctured by Tessa’s voice in my head, asking, Are you sure I was going to say “alone”?

Brian nudges his lips to Tessa’s and says, so she’ll feel the shapes the words make on her own mouth, “You don’t have to tell me. Or make me understand. I already know.” His tongue darts out to lick a teardrop. “Don’t I.”