The Running Girls(7)

“I’m just not in the mood.”

“Not in the mood? I wanted to kiss you, not fuck you.”

David met her eyes. It had been over a year since they’d last had sex. The first few months had slipped by unnoticed, both of them too engulfed in grief for it to even be a consideration, and soon, unwittingly, it became a thing. It wasn’t just the sex. Laurie missed the intimacy. Before, they would spend every evening on the sofa watching junk TV, limbs entwined. They would take walks to the shore, hand in hand. Now they sat in separate armchairs and rarely went out together. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d even kissed beyond a perfunctory goodbye peck on the cheek.

Milly had died fourteen months ago. She’d been stillborn, Laurie having to endure an induced labor with the knowledge that her baby had died. She’d experienced so many horrors in her working life, but nothing had prepared her for that. And although David had tried as hard as he could to be supportive, something had cracked inside him.

Not that she’d remained the strong one. She’d joined the abyss David entered that day and she still wasn’t clear of it. Neither of them had been great at talking about it. Although David had suggested counseling a number of times, Laurie would have preferred it if he’d ranted and raved. He had every right to feel the world was against him. His father had murdered his mother and now his little baby had died before she’d taken her first breath. It was the insular behavior she found hardest to deal with, mainly because it so much mirrored her own. David carried Milly’s death like an invisible burden within him, as if it was his and his alone. She didn’t begrudge him his grief, but she couldn’t help resent his refusal to share it with her. Last night’s argument wasn’t the first and Laurie feared the same result every time she opened her mouth.

A group of young men drinking from brown paper bags appraised her as she ran up the beach toward the promenade. Laurie came close to stopping, to ask the sneering idiots what they thought gave them the right to look at her that way, but her legs kept pumping.

She should have felt good about her appearance. Every ounce of baby fat had disappeared and her body was a hard slab of muscle, but still she hated her reflection. Even now, David always made her feel good about herself and wouldn’t accept her negative self-appraisal, but she couldn’t see what he saw. Whereas he claimed to see perfection, she saw the same short, stocky schoolgirl she’d seen throughout her teenage years, only now with added bulges of muscle that made her feel even less feminine. She worried that her body’s new shape was a factor in David’s lack of interest in her.

Reaching the east jetty, she turned for home. The wind had picked up and whistled through her ears as she upped her pace for the final stretch. She loved these moments, her heart racing as her body began to fatigue. She wondered how long she could keep going at this pace before her heart snapped, and although she was so breathless she couldn’t speak, she pulled up outside her apartment block with a smile on her face.

In the apartment, David was on his laptop, a fresh coffee on the table in front of him. “Good run?” he asked.

Laurie nodded, still breathless.

“Grab a shower and I’ll fix you some lunch,” said David.

She appreciated the gesture and although it was his subtle way of apologizing, it was also his way of ending the discussion. If Laurie brought up the argument, she would be the bad guy. “I’m not hungry,” she said, heading toward the bathroom.

She heard the front door shut as she was drying. She hated prolonging the quarrel, but she couldn’t let him off this time. How long did he think they could go on like this?

Some day off, she thought, as she prepared herself a sandwich. Sitting on the chair vacated by her husband, she tried to recall a time she’d felt less lonely and came up blank. She would have preferred to have been at work at that moment and was already looking forward to going back tomorrow.

David had left the laptop on and Laurie glanced at the local news site to see if she’d missed anything exciting that day. With a stab of regret, she took a quick look at his browsing history. David had been looking at articles about his mother’s death. He’d been in his twenties back then, and Laurie wished she’d known him before that time. He’d always been a kind, sweet and funny soul, but she would have loved to see him when everything had been normal in his world.

She clicked on the link to The Galveston Star from years ago. The headline read: “Mutilated Body Found on Beach.” Below was a picture of the ambulance that had taken Annie Randall from the place her body had been discovered.

Laurie had been a junior detective then, recently transferred in from Houston PD. After viewing the twisted remains of Annie Randall, she’d then accompanied Frank Randall to the hospital, where she’d endured watching him identify the bloody remains of his wife. She’d been surprised when the arrest finally came. It hadn’t crossed her mind that Randall could be responsible for his wife’s death. It had been a hard lesson to learn. A lesson that became harder three days later when she finally tracked down David at the offshore refinery where he’d been working.

It was a peculiarity that they never discussed: their first shared words had been when Laurie told David his mother had died, and that his father had been arrested on suspicion of murder. One of her first interactions with her now husband was to console him as he broke down in tears. Not an ideal start for a relationship, she supposed, though she had to concede she’d love to see something even distantly approaching that level of emotion from him now. She would do anything to see tears in his doleful blue eyes, for him to fall to his knees and nestle into her as he’d done back then. Now he was a shell. He was hurting, but he was either unwilling or unable to share that hurt with her. And, yes, she resented him for it. He made her feel like she was to blame, both for his sadness and for what had happened to Milly.