Quarter pounder? I hardly know her!
The comedian's most cringeworthy jokes rattled around Shep's head like pinballs as he sped down the Long Island Expressway at 2AM. He thought of Claire sleeping soundly in one of his guestrooms and anger flared in his gut, not in the usual, high place of his diaphragm, but lower, toward the pit of his stomach. She'd had hours to pad through the many rooms of his house, contemplating the stage of his daily existence. Imagining her imagining him made his jaw clench.
He wanted to seal the doors and spirit everyone away but Claire, take them down to the water's edge where they'd wait for the dawn to creep into the house and wake her. When she rose she would find herself in a prison of his making, abandoned, haunted by his memories and whatever she could divine from the entrails of this mansion where she did not belong, but could never leave. Desperate, she would throw herself at the wall of glass facing the patio and the steps leading down to the beach, where Shep would be walking into the ocean, distant, inscrutable, disappearing torso-shoulders-head beneath the waves.
Fantasy faded into dream as he let himself into his bedroom and stripped, climbing under the covers beside Robin's volcanic body. Warmth and exhaustion anesthetized him and he spent the next five hours in vivid unconsciousness, watching Claire stumble from room to room, tearing apart his bookshelves and throw pillows and Venetian glass chandelier until she was surrounded by a mulch of shredded damask and shattered crystal—and still couldn't get out.
YOU ARE READING
Clary Sage
Short StoryLife has been good to Shepard Delaney: he's got his dream job, a rich husband, and a seaside mansion in the Hamptons. But when his sister, Rachel, wants him to officiate her whirlwind wedding, a face from his past causes him to question his seemingl...
