I crawl back to bed, hoping not to wake Alexa, but she turns over as soon as she hears me. It’s clear that she’s been awake.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Sure, sure.”

“That’s the second time you’ve gotten up.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah, it is. You got up at two and again just now, at four-thirty.”

“So you’re keeping tabs on me?”

She puts her hand on my chest. “Don’t say it like that. I’m just wondering if you’re in pain.”

“I’m fine.” I reach over and kiss her. “Go back to sleep.”

She nestles into me and quickly drifts off. We fit together nicely in sleep. I breathe in the fruity scent of her shampoo and run my fingers over her back as she softly moans.

I jerk awake in that same cocoon, like I never slept at all save for the dream, birds feasting on the hair on my arms, grasping tiny hairs in their beaks and yanking them off. I squint at the clock. It’s seven o’clock. I sit up in bed. My shoulders are tight. My hands are shaky and itchy. My stomach is considering a revolution. I get out of bed and walk to the bathroom for another pill.

“Morning.” Alexa walks into the bathroom rubbing her eyes, the back of her hair standing up. She is wearing a gray T-shirt of mine and silk underwear. If I were in the mood, I’d enjoy the view.

“Morning.” I put away the pills and close the cabinet.

She sits on the toilet to pee. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m sure.” I splash some water on my face and look into the mirror, but quickly avert my eyes. Not good. Ghoulish and mangy.

We lie around for a while and then go downstairs to the kitchen to scrounge up breakfast. I pretty much never cook anything that doesn’t require a microwave, but I still have lots of cookware and utensils left over from when Talia was in charge of the cooking. What I lack, however, is ingredients for anything interesting like French toast or pancakes—not that I have the appetite for it, either.

“You should go back to the doctor and tell him your knee hurts,” Alexa says as she beats eggs in a pan. I do have eggs, and lots of meat, and really good coffee beans.

“My knee’s fine.”

“Okay. Whatever.” She’s doing something fancy with the eggs. I don’t want to prolong this conversation and can’t think of anything clever to say, so I walk through the great room—I actually hate that term, but that’s what they called it when I bought the place, not a living room or family room but a “great” room—and press my face against the window overlooking the street. People are walking their dogs or starting out runs. An old couple is slowly walking down the street, the man wearing a beret, the woman with her arm in a sling, casting their eyes upward at the sky, getting in their stroll before the temperatures reach sauna level.

“Okay, well, then, here,” Alexa says. I turn back. She is fiddling in her purse, which rests on the elongated breakfast bar. She produces a tin of Altoids and places it on the counter. “You left these at my house the other night. Thought you might need them.”

Need them, she said. Not want them.

“What are those, mints?” I ask, a different kind of warmth passing through me.

“Sure. Fine. They’re mints,” she hisses, turning her back to me again, going to work with a little more fury on those eggs. They aren’t going to be scrambled; they’re going to be annihilated.

Finally, after an awkward silence of I don’t know how long, my chest burning, she spins back in my direction. “Look, I like you, Jason. I really do. But I had a guy I really liked and he burned me really bad because he kept secrets. I don’t need to know your life story, okay? But if there’s something that really affects you, yeah, I’d like to know about it.

“Sooo . . . it seems to me, just sayin’,” she says, waving her hands with exaggerated caution, “that your knee still hurts you really badly, and for some reason I can’t figure out, you don’t want to admit that to me. So you’re hiding pills in an Altoids container and you’re getting out of bed every few hours at night, too.”

“So you’re checking up on me.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” She throws down the large wooden spoon she was using. It actually lands on the corner of the counter and snaps back at her. “I thought they were mints! I almost put one in my mouth! What are they? Vicodin? Something for pain.”

I look back at the window, at the treetops and the town houses across the street. I place my palm on the window and feel warmth.

“If something is hurting you that badly,” she says, “then it’s affecting you. And if we have some kind of a relationship, then that means it’s affecting me, too. And if we don’t have a relationship, then that’s fine, too, but then what the hell am I doing cooking you eggs?”

“Getting out your aggression, it looks like.” That’s me, when shoved into a corner. Start with sarcasm. If that doesn’t work, it can get uglier.

She leaves the kitchen without another word, heading upstairs. She is quiet up there, but I assume she’s gathering her things to leave. This is what they call the moment of truth. Cue the dramatic organ music.

“Okay,” she says when she comes back down the stairs, fully dressed, her purse slung over her shoulder. “You’re a nice guy, Jason. Maybe if we’d—”

“My knee hurts,” I say. “It hurts all the time. It should be better by now. It’s June. It’s been, like, six months. But it’s not. It’s not better.” The words just spill out, as if someone else were saying them. “My doctor doesn’t believe me so he stopped prescribing me OxyContin. So I have to buy these pills illegally.”

I’m looking out the window when I deliver this monologue. The fact that I ended with the truth seems, for some reason, to make the rest more palatable. There is a gentle but consistent ringing in my ears: Wrong, not right.

“He won’t give you pain medication?” she asks, her tone gentler now. Her guard still up, but not quite as high.

“What did I just fucking say?”

She doesn’t say anything. Neither of us does. Silence. The abrupt lurch of the fan, the air-conditioning kicking on. The smell of sweat on me, steamy and rancid. Then I hear her back at the stove, the wooden spoon on the pan, a cabinet closing, the freezer opening, bacon grease crackling in the pan.

Me, I don’t move, staring out the window, watching the slow movement of the elderly couple down the street, grateful that I can’t see my reflection.

27.

Jason

Wednesday, June 19

I wake up alone on Wednesday morning, unless you consider the images possessing me throughout the night. Another shipwreck of a night, flipping all around my bed, retching into the toilet, thinking of serial murders, butcher knives, young women writhing in pain, their blood-soaked bangs stuck to their foreheads and cheeks.

Thinking of Alexa, too. How we left things yesterday morning after she made me breakfast, which we ate in relative silence, sticking to ridiculously safe topics like the weather and our schedules this week—depositions she’s working, court appearances I have—ignoring the bomb I’d dropped about my “Altoids” problem. Not that I exactly gave her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. More like the partial truth with some lies mixed in. Doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as fluidly.

We said good-bye after breakfast; she didn’t even catch a ride with me downtown, walking to the train instead. A quick peck on the cheek, a curt “Bye,” and that was it. Not that I blame her. If I were Alexa, I’d run away from me like I was qualifying for the Summer Olympics.