“I’m sure,” I say. “I guess I’ve been sure since we were sixteen. I was just afraid.”
This means nothing, but I know it will get him hard.
I kiss him again, and then I ask him if he will take me into our bedroom.
In the bedroom, he begins undressing me slowly, kissing parts of my body that have nothing to do with sex—my shoulder, my ear—while I delicately guide him away from my wrists and ankles. Just fuck me, for Christ’s sake. Ten minutes in and I grab his hand and thrust it between my legs.
“Are you sure?” he says, pulling back from me, flushed, a loop of his hair falling over his forehead, just like in high school. We could be back in my dorm room, for all the progress Desi has made.
“Yes, darling,” I say, and I reach modestly for his cock.
Another ten minutes and he’s finally between my legs, pumping gently, slowly, slowly, making love. Pausing for kisses and caresses until I grab him by the buttocks and begin pushing him. “Fuck me,” I whisper, “fuck me hard.”
He stops. “It doesn’t have to be like that, Amy. I’m not Nick.”
Very true. “I know, darling, I just want you to … to fill me. I feel so empty.”
That gets him. I grimace over his shoulder as he thrusts a few more times and comes, me realizing it almost too late—Oh, this is his pathetic cum-sound—and faking quick oohs and ahhs, gentle kittenish noises. I try to work up some tears because I know he imagines me crying with him the first time.
“Darling, you’re crying,” he says as he slips out of me. He kisses a tear.
“I’m just happy,” I say. Because that’s what those kinds of women say.
I have mixed up some martinis, I announce—Desi loves a decadent afternoon drink—and when he makes a move to put on his shirt and fetch them, I insist he stay in bed.
“I want to do something for you for a change,” I say.
So I scamper into the kitchen and get two big martini glasses, and into mine I put gin and a single olive. Into his I put three olives, gin, olive juice, vermouth, and the last of my sleeping pills, three of them, crushed.
I bring the martinis, and there is snuggling and nuzzling, and I slurp my gin while this happens. I have an edge that must be dulled.
“Don’t you like my martini?” I ask when he has only a sip. “I always pictured being your wife and making you martinis. I know that’s silly.”
I begin a pout.
“Oh, darling, not silly at all. I was just taking my time, enjoying. But—” He guzzles the whole thing down. “If it makes you feel better!”
He is giddy, triumphant. His cock is slick with conquest. He is, basically, like all men. Soon he is sleepy, and after that he is snoring.
And I can begin.
part three
BOY GETS GIRL BACK (OR VICE VERSA)
NICK DUNNE
FORTY DAYS GONE
Out on bond, awaiting trial. I’d been processed and released—the depersonalized in-and-outing of jail, the bond hearing, the fingerprints and photos, the rotating and the shuffling and the handling; it didn’t make me feel like an animal, it made me feel like a product, something created on an assembly line. What they were creating was Nick Dunne, Killer. It would be months until we’d begin my trial (my trial: the word still threatened to undo me completely, turn me into a high-pitched giggler, a madman). I was supposed to feel privileged to be out on bond: I had stayed put even when it was clear I was going to be arrested, so I was deemed no flight risk. Boney might have put in a good word for me too. So I got to be in my own home for a few more months before I was carted off to prison and killed by the state.
Yes, I was a lucky, lucky man.
It was mid-August, which I found continually strange: It’s still summer, I’d think. How can so much have happened and it’s not even autumn? It was brutally warm. Shirtsleeve weather, was how my mom would have described it, forever more concerned with her children’s comfort than the actual Fahrenheit. Shirtsleeve weather, jacket weather, overcoat weather, parka weather—the Year in Outerwear. For me this year, it would be handcuff weather, then possibly prison-jumpsuit weather. Or funeral-suit weather, because I didn’t plan on going to prison. I’d kill myself first.
Tanner had a team of five detectives trying to track Amy down. So far, nothing. Like trying to catch water. Every day for weeks, I’d done my little shitty part: videotape a message to Amy and post it on young Rebecca’s Whodunnit blog. (Rebecca, at least, had remained loyal.) In the videos, I wore clothes Amy had bought me, and I brushed my hair the way she liked, and I tried to read her mind. My anger toward her was like heated wire.