KOREATOWN/NORTH HOLLYWOOD
One last night. It’s all Nate could ask for. Just let it be good.
Polly didn’t know he’d seen Boxer. Didn’t know the price he’d agreed to pay. Charlotte didn’t know what he had to ask of her. Neither of them knew he was leaving tonight.
He took them all out to eat Korean barbecue. They dug the grill at the center of the table, where the strips of meat sizzled. They wrapped the charred meat in lettuce leaves. They didn’t dig kimchi. Polly poked at it with a chopstick. She sniffed it. She said no thanks. She ate meat. She dipped her lettuce wraps in hot sauce. She laughed, her chin shiny with grease.
Charlotte laughed. She rubbed his leg under the table. She smiled. She leaned over and whispered, “This is nice.”
If Nate could freeze life he would have done it just then. But of course he couldn’t.
Later, long after Polly had gone to a meat-drugged sleep, Nate breathed in the scent from the sweat-soaked hair at the back of Charlotte’s head as their two sweaty bodies pressed together, moving in their unspoken rhythm. He thought about how you could care for someone and still use them at the same time. Maybe that’s the way it always was. And then she reached back and her nails clawed his neck and for a while he didn’t think anything at all.
Later, in the quiet and the dark, Nate told her what he had to do. What she had to do. She didn’t try to fight it. She leaned in to smell the sweat of him. Asked him when he was leaving.
“Tonight,” he said. “Will you do it?”
She said, “I will.”
They moved cat-quiet through the house. He packed his bag. He took a fistful of the cash. He left the rest for them. Charlotte kissed him deep.
Polly slept nose to nose with the bear. Nate stood in the shadows watching her sleep. Felt something like hooks in his flesh tearing out parts of him.
He climbed into the green monster and drove out toward the high desert.