JEREMY STARES DOWN, watching her sleep. She is so beautiful, so peaceful when she sleeps, all of her fight gone. He’s almost forgotten how serene it makes her look—his last opportunity to see her sleep four months ago—a three-day period when exhaustion had dragged her into sleep for ten hours at a time. She’d been a stranger to him then, their lives unexpectedly colliding—the beautiful girl with the cold shoulder returning from a trip and launching herself into his arms, fully surrendering into his care. She’d let him feed her, hold and kiss her, her sleeping body trusting in its innocent press against his own.
Four months ago, he might have just been in the right place at the right time: the only source of a vehicle on that fated Thursday night of her departure, the only available warm body on the Friday night of her return. Whatever the reason, that situation had gotten them here, to a relationship. Love. He still doesn’t believe it, that he’s become this lucky. That this delicate beauty with the balls of a giant and the soul of an angel has chosen him. Accepted his love and created her own.
He watches her sleep and wonders at the nap. It’s eleven a.m.—the time in which she normally cams, her schedule very regimented and rarely deviated from. He pulls the blanket higher on her, noticing her clothes, another oddity on a woman that spends the majority of her time naked.
He straightens, his time tight. He needs to go. Doesn’t have time to linger, his minutes owned by UPS, packages impatiently waiting in the truck. Leaning over, he presses a kiss to her head before stepping to the kitchen, and setting a bag on the counter, soup inside. He gives her one final glance, her breaths even, her face tranquil as it peeks from a mess of dark brown hair. Saving the image in his mind, that of his wildcat asleep, he heads for the door, his feet pausing on the threshold, a foreign item snagging his attention. Spinning slowly, his mind questioning the sighting, his eyes lock on the gun, a 9mm lying casually atop a giant Charmin Ultra box.
A gun. He didn’t know she had a gun. Then again, he didn’t know she had a hundred grand to drop on a car that she hasn’t driven since. More questions that he is afraid to ask, terrified of the answers. He steps toward the gun, eyeing it warily, her cell phone lying next to it as if to provide indisputable evidence to its ownership. He stares at the gun as if his examination will morph it into something else. Anything else but a weapon that can kill with careless abandon.
If he knows only one thing about her with certainty, it is that she avoids weapons. Tries to cut steak with a butter knife for God’s sake. Doesn’t keep plastic grocery bags in the house because they can be used to suffocate.
Yet here, lying out as if it was used yesterday, a gun.
He stares at it, then her. It, then her. And, in the pit of his stomach, a seed of doubt grows a little larger.