Nightlife: A Novel

26

Nicole Davis lay on the bed, her eyes open wide, staring into the darkness. She tried closing, then opening her eyes, but the darkness looked the same. She wanted not to be here, not to be who she was. She turned and listened to Tyler asleep beside her, snoring a little in his dream. She knew what he was dreaming about.

She had foreseen exactly what would happen as soon as he had gotten his wish. She had known what his next wish would be, and that there would be no way for him to resist, and no way for her to stop him. Of course she had known, because for the first time in her life she was the one who had lived enough to know what he would feel before he felt it. So now she had become the knowing seducer and the unwilling victim, both at the same time. Ty had been all eagerness and joy at what was happening, while Nicole tried to be patient and instill patience, to teach.

She felt that time had fractured and slipped, two sides meeting in the wrong place, like a break in a fault line. She should have been with him when she was sixteen too, and they would have been a match. They would have groped their way into the same experience at the same time. She would have been the way he was now—amazed. After that, she would have been so happy with a boyfriend just like Ty all those years ago, on the other side of the chasm. It would have made everything different, every moment of her life after that.

She felt a pair of wet tears spill from her eye sockets and streak down both sides of her face to her ears. She had come a very long way from sixteen, and none of it had been the way she had imagined it.

Events seemed to be coming faster and faster now. She was being forced to make choices without warning, without having the time to consider the consequences. Whenever she made a move, the reaction to it seemed to come instantly. If she took a step, the police sirens were wailing before she could take the second step.

It was that woman cop she had talked to on the telephone: Detective Catherine Hobbes. She was probably still all the way back in Portland, but what was happening here in Flagstaff was her fault. In fact, everything that had happened since Dennis Poole had been because of Catherine Hobbes. She was the reason why there were all of these cops blocking the roads tonight.

Dennis Poole’s death had been the end of a private dispute, a contest between equals. Dennis had been getting ready to accuse Tanya of taking his money. He could have gotten her sent to prison, and that would have been the end of her. She had shot him in self-defense. All that Catherine Hobbes had needed to do then was report it as a homicide, fill out her stupid police forms, hand them in, and go home. But instead she had decided to use poor Tanya Starling to transform herself into a hero. It was disgusting.

If it had not been for Catherine Hobbes, there would have been no reason for her to protect herself from people like Bill Thayer or Mary Tilson. There would have been no reason to give in to the sexual fantasies of a sixteen-year-old boy in Arizona. She lay in the dark and closed her eyes until she fell asleep.

At daybreak she awoke and looked at the sleeping face of Tyler Gilman on the pillow. It was untroubled, almost blank. He was in absolute repose, his mouth closed and his eyes unmoving.

She slid off the bed and walked to the bathroom where she had left her clothes. They were still hanging from the hook behind the door, where she had hung them as she took them off. She carried her clothes to the living room before she quietly put them on, because she wasn’t ready to be with Tyler yet. As she sat alone, hugging her knees, her bare feet on the couch, she concluded that she had done the only thing she could possibly have done. If she had refused, he would not have done anything else for her. She needed for him to do much more, or she was going to be caught. It was that simple.

Now she needed to decide what she wanted him to do for her. She wanted to get out of Flagstaff. That required waiting several days, until the police had searched everywhere in town that they could search, and then having Ty drive her to another city. It should be outside Arizona.

Eventually she would need her own car, and she would need a suitcase full of clothes that didn’t look much like the ones she had left in the hotel. She would have to think of a way for Ty to acquire those things without drawing attention to himself. As she considered her situation, she realized that it probably wasn’t too bad. All she had to do was control Tyler Gilman.

She heard him stirring. There was a thump as he bounced off the bed to the floor. She heard him pad up the hallway toward the living room, then felt the vibration as he walked across the room to her.

He was standing in front of her, a blanket wrapped around him. “I woke up, and I was afraid that you were gone—that you had left while I was sleeping.”

She slowly lifted her head to face him. “I’m not gone. It’s just that you made me do a serious, important thing last night, when I didn’t want to. That’s why your mind did that to you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean, I’m not sorry I did it. I’m just sorry for you, that you feel bad.”

“I understand. I told you last night that I understood why you wanted that. It’s the way men are.” She stood and walked toward the kitchen. “I’ll make your breakfast. You like eggs, don’t you?”

“Are you mad at me?”

She looked at him pensively. “It’s too late for that now. You did something big and risky for me, and then in return you wanted something big from me, that’s all. So now it’s another day. What kind of eggs do you like?”

“Will you ever let me again?”

She cocked her head. “I don’t know. After we’ve had breakfast and a shower and brushed our teeth, I might think about it. Now go sit down at the table.”

He walked toward the kitchen. As he passed close to her, she noticed that he lowered his eyes. He would be fine.