PURSUIT by Justin Kramon
He’d been waiting for ten minutes in a persistent drizzle when she finally came up the driveway from her apartment. Even if he hadn’t seen her hurrying, fumbling with her keys and purse, he would have known she was late. He’d memorized her schedule.
It was cold for this time of year – mid-November – in Cambridge, icy rain prickling his face. His hands were numb, jammed in his pockets. He hadn’t brought gloves, having counted on a shorter wait, and in his thin nylon jacket he felt exposed, vulnerable to the cold slaps of wind.
Another thing he hadn’t planned on were the kids. Molly’s apartment was on the bottom floor of a house set off the street, tucked into a block of two-story homes across from a school. Dale had always left and arrived at odd hours because of his work – he decorated cakes, slipping out of Molly’s apartment like a robber at four in the morning – so he rarely saw the school in session. But now he could hear car doors thudding, children shouting goodbye to their parents and greeting their friends as they entered the low brick building. The children were too far away to hear anything, but the sound of them was an intrusion on the privacy he’d envisioned.
Molly had her hair in a bun, damp from her shower the night before. She slept on her back with that fist of hair pushed into the pillow, staining the fabric. So many rituals and habits and preferences, those little private resolutions you discover only when you observe someone closely, for a long time. The only other person he’d known so well in his life was his mother, who’d spent most of the last two decades in an institution. “A disturbed brain,” a social worker had once said to Dale, who had been young when his mother was sent away, and probably seemed in need of an explanation. But the phrase – a disturbed brain – had stuck with him unreasonably all these years, and always gave him the mental image of a pot of scrambled eggs. He thought that’s what you’d find if you opened up his mother’s skull. Possibly his, too, if the condition were hereditary.
Now, when Dale waved to Molly, he could see frustration pass like a shadow over her features. It squeezed his heart, how much she hated him. Or not hated. Hating would have been bearable, implying investment. She put up with him, withstood the shock of his presence, like a pothole in the street or a line at the bank, some tiresome obstacle in the way of what she needed to get done that day. The kind of thing you had to keep your cool about.
“Let me talk to you,” he said when she was close enough he didn’t have to shout. He was still concerned the children might hear.
“I’m late. Can we do it another time?” She was walking quickly, the heels of her boots clicking the pavement, as if she could dispense with him without even breaking her stride.
“When?”
“Could you back off, Dale? Could you leave me alone?”
He stepped off the curb, into the driveway, meaning to get her attention, but the motion caused her to flinch. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, her recognition of him.
“I need to tell you some things you might not realize. About what happened.”
“You don’t need to explain.”
“I do.”
“I’d prefer not to hear it.”
“You need to.”
Without realizing it, he was blocking her path. He’d never thought of himself as a menacing person, but realized he could be seen that way, large as he was, thick-armed and slope-shouldered, a shadow on his jaw. You look like a pervert, he heard a woman’s voice say in his head. It might have been his mother’s.
Molly stopped walking. Dropped her arms to her sides as if she’d given up. Water beaded on her glasses. “Okay. What? What do you want to say? Tell me everything.” He knew that voice, that flat delivery, the sarcasm. She was a thousand miles away.
A car door slammed in the school driveway, and a boy yelled, “I’ve got it, keep your shirts on!” A way Dale could never have imagined speaking to his own parents.
He’d had it all figured out. The steps he could retrace, guiding her along the path he’d taken, his reasons, so that even that last violent act would seem justifiable, unavoidable.
But he didn’t know what to do with Molly’s acquiescence. It was like a door flung open on a giant empty room, and he couldn’t imagine filling it with the cheap furnishings of his thoughts. That’s the way he’d always felt around her, inadequate. Asshole, said the voice in his head.
“You can’t do this to me,” Dale said, “put me on the spot like this. How can you expect me to explain it all in the middle of the street? I need time. We need to go somewhere. How about a wine bar?”
“A wine bar? Jesus Christ, Dale, are you kidding? It’s seven-thirty in the morning.”
She started to walk around him, and he almost thrust out his arm to stop her, but knew enough not to. Physical force would have been a mistake right now, with the children across the street.
So he just said, “You’re going to regret this.” It was something he’d heard in movies, and it sounded like the kind of thing you’d say at a moment like this.
“I already do,” she said, walking away from him, which seemed like the response you’d get in that kind of movie.
The streets in Kendall Square were quiet, empty of pedestrians, cars just beginning to line up at the traffic lights. Most of the businesses in this neighborhood had something to do with eating or drinking, and it wasn’t a good time for that. The platform of pavement Molly crossed now was scattered with debris: beer bottles, plastic bags, even what looked like a discarded condom, crumpled and milky yellow, making her wonder briefly at the encounter that had required it. There was a feeling of censure, of penance for the night’s excesses, in the dark windows of the surrounding bars and restaurants, the chairs stacked on tables, the metal grates drawn over windows.
A couple times she thought she saw him, just as she turned a corner, a flash in her peripheral vision. But she didn’t look back, didn’t want to pay tribute to the strain he placed on her.
She knew he followed her. He’d done that intermittently since she’d broken things off. Sometimes he approached her, like today, with a pressing concern, a snatch of history he needed to revise or present to her. But he never got to the explanation, always knocked off course by some distraction, a branch fallen across the path of his intentions.
Their meetings thus far had been in public. She knew it wouldn’t always be that way.
Dale passed the Starbucks, the Store 24 where the man who smelled like urine held the door for you and then asked for change. The man begged in such a gentle voice, with such deep sadness in his eyes, you could almost cry yourself. But if you refused him, he’d berate you. He’d once told Dale he was going to find him in his bed with a box cutter and slit his trachea. Dale remembered the incident because of the word the man had used, trachea, the accuracy of it.
These were sights Molly would have seen five minutes before, on her way to the T, to which Dale was following her. How had it gotten to this? They’d started in such a golden place. That’s the word that came to mind when he thought of his time with Molly. Golden. A golden era. It was a word she sometimes used herself, with that deadpan delivery, when she meant that something was okay or just fine. It was what she’d said that time they’d met in the lab, when Dale was delivering the cake.
It had been a fluke. It wasn’t even Dale’s job to deliver the cakes, but Hank had called him at the last minute, saying he was tied up and could Dale do him a solid. The rest of Molly’s lab was out at lunch to celebrate their boss’s birthday – the reason for the cake – and Molly had stuck behind to tend an experiment. That’s the way she was, always offbeat, stepping left when everyone else stepped right. It was something Dale adored about her, though Molly despised it in herself.
“Is it okay if I leave this here?” Dale had asked about the cake, gesturing to an open surface on one of the lab benches.
Molly was replacing a mouse in its plastic cage, her gloved fingers pinching the tail.
“Golden,” Molly said, not looking up.
“Are you sure? I don’t want to mess anything up.”
Molly released the mouse, which skittered into a corner of the cage. She snapped off her gloves and came to peek inside the box. “I’ve heard about you,” she told Dale as she set the box down on the surface for him, parting the lid. “The cake guy. Wow, it’s gorgeous.”
Dale had painted a city scene on the cake, only the city was filled with mice instead of people. Mice driving cabs, in bellhop uniforms opening the doors of fancy hotels, a blind mouse playing a keyboard for tips on the street corner. It would have been unappetizing to most people, but Molly’s lab used mice all the time for their research, so they thought it would be funny. Dale was known around Boston for these elaborately detailed cake paintings, which he created by loading food coloring into spray paint canisters.
“It’s really not that difficult,” he told Molly. “It just takes patience. You’d be surprised what you could do.”
“You’d be surprised what I couldn’t do.”
“No, really. You have beautiful fingers. Long and thin. I can tell you’d be precise.”
He meant it as a statement of fact, but when he looked up he could see Molly was glancing down at her fingers. Color had risen to her cheeks, lighting her pale skin like a bulb under a sheet.
It was the way Dale always treated Molly’s body, with honest admiration. He couldn’t have imagined a body he’d love more than hers. The straight angle of her nose, where her black plastic-framed glasses sat. The dark, tightly coiled hair on her head, and the unexpected silkiness of the hair between her legs, which became tressed like a horse’s mane when they had sex. Her thin wrists and small breasts, the nipples stiffening at the slightest touch, hard as the top joint of his pinky. He never understood the obsession most men had with large breasts. To Dale they were sacks of jelly, a necessary imperfection, far less interesting than the solidness of Molly’s hips and her athletically square shoulders, the surprising power of her slender arms.
In his loneliness, all those years, what Dale had missed most was the heat of another body, the resistance. Not the yielding. Holding Molly in bed was like wrapping his arms around a tree in a windstorm, gartering him to the world.
Watching her sleep, Dale marveled at her trust, the ease with which she handed over the keys to her most precious self. I could do anything to her, he’d thought on occasion, and then chided himself, knowing it was weird, and possibly a little wrong, to be thinking things like that.
The gloves were warm, which meant that someone had gotten in to work before her. They were made of a crinkly metallic-looking material, like used aluminum foil, though they did a remarkable job of protecting Molly when she plunged her arms into the freezer, which was kept at minus 80, an unfathomable cold, frost piled on the walls. She felt the steely breath of it on her face.
After removing one of the vials from the freezer rack, she placed it on the counter to thaw. Inside was a mouse’s retina, smaller than a grain of sand, suspended in ice.
Back at her bench, Molly thought of the muffin. It was cranberry-flavored, with a crackly sugar coating, and she paused in her work at least once every morning to get one. Perhaps that respite from the tedium of the lab had something to do with why she craved it so intensely.
She looked out the window, at the trail of shops on Charles Street, wondering which he was in. She had the sense – or maybe it was an intuition – that he was looking up at her window right now.
It had been there all along, that intuition, a knowledge that something was odd, knocked off balance inside him. The way his eyes swam and fixed on the most insignificant details, a spot on her shirt cuff, a hair on her collar. On their first dinner date, he’d reached across the table and pinched that hair in his thick fingers with such tweezer-like precision she’d almost shuddered.
“That guy’s weird,” Elsa, the other lab tech, had said to Molly, the day after Molly had first brought Dale to see the lab.
And yet Molly stuck with him. Not only stuck with him, but took him to bed, where he attended to her with that same intensity, that wild fascination with the details of the world. It was breathtaking, his dedication. She couldn’t even remember if he’d gotten around to satisfying himself that first night, she was so absorbed in her own pleasure. Frightened by it, too, by the way she’d abandoned herself, what she’d allowed him to do to her.
Afterward, he talked to her, about his childhood; his father, Morris, who had two other families; his mother, Claire, whose childlike sweetness lay like the thinnest cloth over a violent outrage that would be revealed if you asked even the simplest question about her relationship with Dale’s father. Dale described how he’d witnessed his mother’s breakdown, the night Mo said he was leaving and Claire had beaten him nearly to death in their kitchen. She’d wanted Dale to see it, told him to sit on the stairs with the lights out so he could watch. After Mo was on the floor, she’d made a show of going to the drawer to get the bread knife, swaying her hips like she was dancing, which was when a neighbor knocked on the door. Dale said he knew she would have murdered him.
Hearing him tell it, a funny thing happened to Molly. It was like that last moment before an operation, when the anesthesia begins and you’re not even scared anymore and you think, Let them do anything they want to me. It’s not even me anymore. It was like that with Dale, as if she were floating above it all, observing, wondering what he’d do.
In the cafe, Dale sipped his coffee, which coated his tongue with a cottony sweetness. He always ordered the cloying drinks at coffee shops, the ones with a scum of whipped cream on the surface. From his seat by the window he had a good view of the building where Molly worked, which was connected to the main hospital by a footbridge. Funny to think of all those mice scrambling around so close to the patients, who might have been appalled to know what lived down the hall from them.
He’d waited here for Molly on other afternoons, a breeze of anticipation gusting him toward her arrival. That was during the summer, when they were together. Muggy afternoons, walking by the Charles, Molly’s damp hand in his. Bliss. Hard to believe the relationship had lasted only six weeks. It felt so much more substantial than what could be contained in that envelope of time. That it could be disrupted so easily bewildered Dale, the impulsiveness of life’s plans.
How could Molly not have understood what his intentions were? How could she have been so oblivious to what he’d meant to accomplish?
Molly had been the one to start it, that night when she’d complained to Dale about Elsa. “She’s always around,” Molly said. “She never leaves.”
Every Monday when Molly came in to work, Elsa was there, cheerful and rosy-cheeked, scribbling the results of her experiments in a notebook. There were granola bar wrappers in the waste basket, a half-drained mug of tea on the bench, even a plastic cup with a toothbrush in it. It was as if Elsa had lain claim to the space they were supposed to share, and Molly were simply stopping by for a visit.
Elsa was one of those women who was always smiling, but spoke quickly and a bit loudly, as if to charge through any response you might have had. She was polite but distracted, always nodding and grinning and saying uh-huh before Dale got halfway into his sentence.
But Molly idolized her, how diligently she worked, how intelligent she was, even the size of her breasts, which were absurd to Dale, like pumpkins stuffed beneath her shirt. It was as if Molly imagined herself as some stunted version of Elsa, an embryo that had never reached its potential. It made Dale sick, the unfairness of it, Molly’s blindness to her own superiority.
Molly was the child of two doctors who’d met in medical school, and whose golden-haired, ruddy-faced images stared down from the wall over Molly’s headboard, giving Dale a feeling of being observed, especially when he and Molly had sex. (He particularly disliked the thoughtful squint of Molly’s father, who seemed to be criticizing Dale’s technique.) In the photo, Molly’s parents wore college sweatshirts, Harvard and Stanford, and they were standing with their arms around each other on an empty beach, wind tousling their hair, the picture of middle-aged contentment.
Molly had two older brothers, both surgeons, and for her even the decision to pursue research was a rebellion, a way of stepping outside the family circle. She’d always been the runt, appallingly thin and dark-haired and clumsy amidst this band of sturdy Nordic blonds. They must have been befuddled by Molly, as if they’d opened the door expecting a completely different guest, someone much more like Elsa.
Both Molly’s and Elsa’s jobs at the lab involved taking care of mice that had gotten one gene or another knocked out, to see what effect it had on their eyes. In the red glare of a special light, Molly had to sacrifice these mice, holding the dull end of a scissor blade against their necks while she pulled on their tails.
“It’s easy,” she’d told Dale that time he’d watched her do it. “It takes hardly any force, and then pop – that’s it.”
Afterward, Molly had to remove their eyes with a pair of tiny curved forceps. Sometimes Molly and Elsa did this side by side, with their respective mice. They spent most of their workdays together, sharing lunches in the break room, discussing their experiments.
The idea about the missing protein – that it wasn’t really missing, but stuck to another protein – had actually been Molly’s. She’d mentioned it to Elsa during one of their lunches together, thinking it would impress her, but Elsa had appeared to hardly register the comment. “Well, I should get back,” Elsa said, leaving Molly to sweep up their crumbs.
The next morning, when Molly came in, Elsa was ordering mice for a new experiment. She was going to raise them in darkness, on the theory that the proteins wouldn’t bond in that environment. Their principle investigator, a curt Russian man named Oleg, had approved the experiment, and appeared excited about it. It was exactly the experiment Molly had described to Elsa at lunch.
“I could kill her,” Molly said, after she’d described Elsa’s betrayal to Dale. Molly and Dale were lying in bed together, the lights off, and in that setting Molly’s voice seemed to come from far away, somewhere in the dark. “She screwed me.”
“Why don’t you tell Oleg? He’d believe you if you told him the whole story.”
For a moment she said nothing, and Dale thought she was considering it. In their silence he heard a truck shifting gears on the street, squeaking over the rutted pavement.
“I don’t want to,” Molly said. “There’s no point.”
“What do you mean? You said it yourself: she stole your idea.”
“It just shows she’s smarter than me. She’s ruthless. That’s what you need to be good at this kind of work.”
That she would defend Elsa in the face of such blatant unfaithfulness; it proved her attachment ran deeper than rationality, that her adoration of Elsa was a kind of religion. It was a spell Dale had to break, for Molly’s sake, and for his own.
“What can I do to make you feel better?” he asked Molly, and she pushed him toward her thighs, where the warmth and salty taste of her convinced him of what he needed to do.
“Sir?” a voice said. “Sir.”
Dale looked up at the woman standing by his table. She couldn’t have been much older than he was – maybe late-thirties at the most. She had a wide, flat face, which reminded him of the carved images he’d once seen on a totem pole, and pale halos around her eyes, like she’d been wearing sunglasses on the beach. Not unattractive, a bit worn if anything, and for a moment Dale imagined her mottled face next to his in bed, her triangled breasts, her sheets that smelled like cigarette smoke.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Your chair.” She placed her hand on the back of the empty chair across from Dale. She had a hard mouth, Dale noticed, and pits in the skin of her cheeks.
“Take it,” he said about the chair, looking back out the window at the hospital. “I don’t need it.”
It was late morning, the sky dark, clouds gathering for a heavy rain. He’d finished his coffee, and all that remained was a wash of grinds and that slight bitterness he always tasted after something sweet.
She’d be done at four today, early because she’d arrived by eight. Dale was ready for that, for when she left. The days were getting shorter, and it would be close to dark by then, especially with the rain.
The night after Molly had told him the story about Elsa’s betrayal had been the opposite, clear and warm. It was a night when people could have been out on the streets, walking home from a bar, or looking for excitement. But none of that concerned Dale. He’d planned so carefully that in a way it seemed the act had already been accomplished, even before he slipped Molly’s keys and security card into his pocket, saying he was leaving for work, kissing her and listening to her groggy goodbye.
In the lab, Elsa’s mice scurried at the sight of his flashlight. It would have been enough just to do that, shine a light in their eyes, ruin her experiment. But Dale didn’t want to leave it at that. He wanted Molly to know what he’d done, to make a point.
The act itself was nothing, like snapping a matchstick. They went limp, one by one, though it wasn’t exactly like sleeping, as he’d heard. Their faces were frozen more deeply than sleep could have managed.
Once, he heard something knock against the wall and his chest burned for fear he’d been caught. But it was just a maintenance person vacuuming the lab next door.
Only when he was finished did he wonder where to put them. He hadn’t thought of that. He considered throwing them in the trash, but decided that would have shown some guilt, or at least misgiving. So he put them all back in the cage.
When he left, he checked the door twice to make sure it was locked.
Eating by herself was pleasant, the quiet not entirely unwelcome. Molly had never enjoyed Elsa’s company, had always borne her discussions of flirtations with men and gossip about promotions, but she had no attachment to them. In fact, she felt better without all the chatter, her thoughts lighter, free to roam in the new silence.
The muffin was good, tart and doughy, and she liked cracking the sugar against the roof of her mouth with her tongue. These small pleasures were hard to enjoy with someone as pretty and earnest as Elsa in the room.
It was a surprise to Molly that Elsa had reacted so strongly when she found the mice, calling the police, threatening charges. She said she was being stalked, before she even thought about who had done it.
Molly knew immediately it was Dale. There was no question in her mind. Where did that certainty come from? She couldn’t say. But it was unshakable.
That night she made a promise to Dale, to keep his secret, as long as he left her alone, never spoke to her again. It was the collateral she held against his advances. He’d agreed to that, with more equanimity than she’d expected, though of course he hadn’t kept his side of the bargain. She threatened him every now and then, saying she’d tell the police what he’d done if he didn’t stay away, and it always did the trick of getting Dale to back off temporarily, until the next time he felt compelled to explain himself.
Elsa had left the lab. She’d moved back to Minneapolis, gotten work in a lab there. She never shook the idea that “the attack,” as she called it, was about her, that the maniac who’d done it would somehow, someday, force his way into her bed and rape her.
A janitor was fired, an elderly man named Frank who’d talked to himself in the halls. He’d always been kind to Molly, greeted her with a smile and remembered her name. Afterward, people said he’d made other transgressions, stolen a phone, watched men in the bathroom, but Molly knew he’d never done any of those things.
Ten minutes to six, and she still hadn’t left the building. Dale couldn’t imagine what she was doing in there. She never left after five, especially when she got to work early. It was Friday, and everyone else in the lab had gone home, except for the new lab tech, Kim. Dale knew what they all looked like, and he’d counted them as they’d exited the front door.
The weather report had called for rain, but the storm had never broken. Just an intermittent drizzle all afternoon. The pavement shined under the street lights, and cars hissed as they passed on the street.
He had a good space picked out, recessed in the shadows of the fire door. It was cold, with all the cement, which could be a problem when he went to use his hands, but it had the advantage of being completely concealed. He could look out at the brightly lit plaza where the lab workers emerged, and not a single one had noticed him there.
It reminded him of a hiding place he’d had in his mother’s house, in the stairway off the kitchen, from the privacy of which he’d seen her try to hang herself. He’d watched her take out the rope from an unused cabinet over the oven, string it across the ceiling beam, and only when she’d gotten on the chair did he scream for her to stop. He’d wanted to see as much of the act as possible, and in that time he’d learned a lot about the importance of precision, and of preparation.
He’d told Molly a different story about what had happened in that kitchen, one he’d made up about his mother trying to kill his father with a bread knife. In truth, he’d never met his father, who was said to be dead. Dale didn’t know why he’d lied about it. It just felt natural, to toss a gaudy quilt over the kind of mundane event he’d actually witnessed.
He would stay until six, he’d decided. If she didn’t come out by then, he’d go home, try all of this another day. Long ago he’d learned it was best not to stretch your plans, to be steady and wait for the right opportunity. It’s when you got eager that things went wrong.
Then someone came out of the building. At first he thought it was Molly, the dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, legs swishing in the narrow tubes of her jeans. But Molly didn’t wear her hair that way. It was just his expectation, a hopefulness that had made him think that.
But he knew this face, the pouched cheeks, the nose turned up just where you’d expect it to end, as if someone were pinching the tip of it. It was Kim, the woman who’d replaced Elsa. Dale had looked up her picture on the lab’s website, just in case he’d ever need to know what she looked like.
He watched her walk off, clutching her purse, beyond the reach of the plaza lamps. This wasn’t the way he’d imagined it, but his patience had paid off. He walked out of the shadows, into the building.
They needed buffering solutions for next morning’s experiment, and Molly didn’t want to get up early on a Saturday to make them, so she’d decided to stay on to finish them this evening. She wasn’t in any rush to leave. It was gusty outside, and she hadn’t brought an umbrella. Far better to stay here, in the baked potato blandness of the lab, under the humming fluorescent lights.
She took one of the long beakers out of the tray in the cabinet, set it under the spigot of the cooler, and pressed the button to release the water. She loved times like these, when she was alone, performing mindless tasks. This exact activity would have been unbearable, boring beyond comprehension, when the lab was full of people. But without them it became lustrous, a delicious freedom. It wouldn’t have mattered what she was doing. She could have been making lemonade or lining up bottle caps in a row. It was the absence of thought she craved, the possibility of losing herself.
It’s true that Elsa had held a certain power over her. That kind of simple beauty always does, perhaps because it’s so sure of itself, unquestioning in precisely the areas Molly questioned herself most. But Elsa’s hold was never as strong as Dale believed it to be. Partly, that was a story Molly had created, all that roiling jealousy, those stabs of inferiority. To be competitive with Elsa would have required caring much more about the lab, and about herself, to be honest. Even at the time she’d said all those things, Molly had recognized them as a kind of bait, a test of Dale’s sympathies, of what he’d do for her.
She’d filled it too high. Letting her thoughts drift, she’d forgotten which line the water should come up to, and now she had too much. She walked to the sink and began to pour it out, listening to it slosh in the metal basin.
That was when she felt it, the pressure. She knew what it was immediately, had even counted on it in a way. All of it seemed so familiar, his hand on her shoulder, the buzzing lights, the quiet outside. She felt as if she’d experienced this moment before, in a dream, or maybe some other life.
“I was waiting for you,” he said.
“I know.” She closed her eyes, absorbing the feeling of his fingers at the base of her throat.
It was stunning, this moment of expectation. To be so close to it, pressed against it like a child at a store window; the anticipation stopped her breath, washed her limbs in a lazy warmth. She felt a tingling spread out from his touch, sharper than any excitement she’d experienced before, even in bed with him.
And then, before she had a chance to look at him, the door to the lab rattled open. Kim was standing there, holding a large paper bag, a look of surprise and distant comprehension on her face.
“Oh,” Kim said. “I’m sorry. Do you want me to go?”
“It’s okay,” Molly said. Dale removed his hand from her shoulder. Molly caught a glimpse of him then, knowing what it must have looked like to Kim. A boyfriend, she would be thinking, feeling as if she’d walked in on an intimate moment, which wasn’t untrue.
But it was too much right now for Molly to invent an explanation for Kim, whom she’d sent out for the Chinese food, with only the faintest hope that Dale could still be waiting for her, that he might try something. He would have taken his time, Molly knew, savored every moment of it. Molly was too light-headed to speak, her senses clouded by the thrill of what had happened to her, the pleasure so sharp you could have called it pain.
And it wasn’t over. For the rest of her time on earth she would listen for him in any silence, any dark place, those faintest footsteps trailing her own. There was an allegiance in his pursuit of her, more steadfast than any love she’d known.
So it was left to Dale to make his excuses, about how he’d already planned for dinner, how he should probably get going. It wasn’t so disappointing to have to do this. Nothing much had been lost today, and now he had it to look forward to again. There would be something more conclusive at the end of this, Dale saw, being familiar with the rewards of a measured persistence.
But why hadn’t she screamed when he’d touched her? Why hadn’t she told Kim to call the police? That calmness; it was what would haunt Dale later when he thought back about it, the feeling that, more than his own wishes, it had been Molly who had brought him here, who had known him all along.
For now, though, he relished the tease of it, the delayed gratification, the joy of holding it off just a little while longer.
Justin Kramon is the author of the novel Finny (Random House, 2010). His short stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, StoryQuarterly, Boulevard, Fence, and TriQuarterly.