about him?” he whispered.
Laura went utterly still, and her arms fell away. “No,” she said, her cheeks bright and hot.
Between them on the floor, the quilt was now a heap. Daniel saw a stain on it that he hadn't noticed before. He bent down and gathered it into his arms. “Well, I am.”
Laura's eyes filled with tears, and a moment later she walked out of his office. When he heard the door close, Daniel sank down into his chair again. He kept brushing up against the fact that his wife had cheated on him. It was a little like a scar on a polished wooden table - you'd try to see the rest of the gleaming surface, but your eyes and your fingers would be drawn to the pitted part, the one thing that kept it from being perfect. It was two-fifteen; only another half hour until he picked up Trixie at school. Only a half hour until she could serve as the cushion that kept him and Laura from rubbing each other raw. But in a half hour, lightning could strike. Wives could fall in love with men who weren't their husbands. Girls could be raped. Daniel buried his face in his hands. Between his splayed fingers, he could see the figure he'd sketched. Half of a demon, she was wrapped in her own single wing. She was the spitting image of Laura. And she was reaching for a heart Daniel couldn't draw, because he'd forgotten its dimensions years ago.
The Tenth Circle
* * *
Jason was missing practice. He sat in the swanky law offices of Yargrove, Bratt & Oosterhaus, wondering what drills Coach was putting the team through. They had a game tomorrow against Gray-New Gloucester, and he was on the starting line. Trixie had come back to school today. Jason hadn't seen her someone had made damn sure of that - but Moss and Zephyr and a dozen other friends had run into her. Apparently, she'd practically shaved her head. He'd wondered, on the drive down to Portland, what it would have been like if he had crossed paths with Trixie. The judge at the arraignment had said that was enough cause to have Jason sent to a juvy prison, but he must have meant Jason would be in trouble if he sought Trixie out. . . not if Fate tossed her in his path.
Which is sort of what had happened in the first place. He still couldn't believe that this was real, that he was sitting in a
lawyers office, that he had been charged with rape. He kept expecting his alarm clock to go off any minute now. He'd drive to school and catch Moss in the hallway and say, Man, you wouldn't believe the nightmare I had.
Dutch Oosterhaus was talking to his parents, who were wearing their church clothes and were looking at Dutch as if he were Jesus incarnate. Jason knew his parents were paying the lawyer with money they'd scrimped together to send him for a PG year at a prep school, so that he'd have a better chance of making a Division I college hockey team. Gould Academy scouts had already come to watch him play; they'd said he was as good as in.
“She was crying,” Dutch said, rolling a fancy pen between his fingers. “She was begging you to get back together with her.”
“Yeah,” Jason replied. “She didn't. . . she didn't take the breakup very well. There were times I thought she was losing it. You know.”
“Do you know if Trixie was seeing a psychiatrist?” Dutch made a note to himself. “She might even have talked to a rape crisis counselor. We can subpoena those records for evidence of mental instability.”
Jason didn't know what Trixie was up to, but he'd never thought she was crazy. Until Friday night's party, Trixie had been so easy to read that it set her apart from the dozens of girls he'd hooked up with who were in it for the status or the sex or the head games. It was nuts - and this wasn't something he'd ever admit to his friends - but the best part about being with Trixie had not been the fact that she was, well, hot. It had been knowing that even if he'd never been an athlete or an upperclassman or popular, she still would have wanted to be with him.
He'd liked her, but he hadn't really loved her. At least he didn't think he had. There were no lightning bolts across his vision when he saw her across a room, and his general feeling when he was with her was one of comfort, not of blood boiling and fire and brimstone. The reason he'd broken up with her was, ironically, for her own
good. He knew that if he'd asked Trixie to drop everything and follow him across the earth, she'd do it; if the roles were reversed, though, he wouldn't. They were at different places in that same relationship, and like anything that's out of alignment, they were destined to crash sooner or later. By taking care of it early - gently, Jason liked to think - he was only trying to keep Trixie from getting her heart broken even harder.
He certainly felt bad about doing it, though. Just because he didn't love Trixie didn't mean he didn't like her.
And as for the other, well. He was a seventeen-year-old guy, and you didn't throw away something that was handed to you on a silver platter.
“Walk me through what happened after you found her in Zephyr's bathroom?”
Jason scrubbed his hands over his head, making his hair stand on end. “I offered her a ride home, and she said yes. But then she started crying. I felt bad for her, so I kind of hugged her.”
“Hugged her? How?”
Jason lifted up his arms and folded them awkwardly around himself. “Like that.”
“What happened next?”
“She came on to me. She kissed me.”
“What did you do?” Dutch asked.
Jason stole a glance at his mother, whose cheeks were candyapple red with embarrassment. He couldn't believe that he had to say these things in front of her. She'd be saying Rosaries for a week straight on his behalf. “I kissed her back. I mean, it was like falling into an old habit, you know? And she clearly was interested . . .”
“Define that,” Dutch interrupted.
“She took off her own shirt,” Jason said, and his mother winced. “She unbuckled my belt and went down on me.” Dutch wrote another note on his pad. “She initiated oral sex?”
