Brian Freeman - Stripped

The party began to disperse. The show was over. Curtain down.

Stride took a last look at the tower of debris and saw that a little piece of the hotel sign had somehow wound up on the top of the heap, a bent fragment of neon. He couldn’t even identify the letters. Something made him think of the old days, of the faded newspapers he had read, of the photographs of young people back then who had since lived their lives and died. Of 1967. The sun glinted on the lost fragment, and for an instant, it was as if the neon flashed one last time, giving up a burst of color that came and went, winking at him.

They left the demolition site along with thousands of other people, struggling through the crowded streets. Haze lingered in the air. Serena suggested that they take the afternoon off-go back home, relax, swim, make love, and then lie in the shadows of their bedroom and talk through the evening and the night. About nothing. About everything. She seemed aglow with his presence, and he felt it right down to the bottom of his soul.

He turned right on Las Vegas Boulevard, along with half the city, heading north. The Stratosphere tower loomed ahead of them. There were only two types of traffic jams on the Strip, bad and worse. Today was worse. They crawled forward, watching pedestrians make faster progress on the sidewalks. The street was a ribbon of steel, stretching through the stoplights. Horns blared, accomplishing nothing. When they reached the Stratosphere after what seemed like endless time, he looked up through the windshield, seeing the saucer of the tower more than a thousand feet above them.

When he had come back here from Minnesota in the summer, he had found Serena there in the middle of the night, staring at the city. The cool wind had enveloped them, and the neon everywhere had been dazzling. They had embraced. Kissed. He had thought then how their relationship was homeless, how it could never survive in this place, how sooner or later they would be forced to choose. At that moment, it hadn’t mattered. The future held no sway over them. Nothing had been real then except how they felt for each other.

This was a different moment.

Real and dirty and crowded, with no escape. The future wasn’t the future anymore; it was the present. It was here and now.

He left the Stratosphere behind them. The traffic eased a bit. He drove another block and then swung the car into the vacant driveway of a motel, shutting off the motor. His hands lingered on the steering wheel. He didn’t look at Serena, but he felt her looking at him. Felt her anxiety grow the longer they sat there in silence.

How to begin. Just say it.

“They’ve asked me to come back to Minnesota.”

He heard her sharp intake of breath. Then, calmly, slowly: “You want to go, don’t you?”

He turned and looked at her finally, and the pain in her face made him feel as if the weight of the Sheherezade were falling on him. “Yes.”

She got out of the car. Just like that, she was gone, slamming the door behind her, hurrying down the sidewalk with her arms tightly folded across her chest. He got out, too, and chased after her.

“Serena, wait!”

She didn’t want him to catch up with her, but he did, and he spun her around and saw the river of tears on her face. Her black hair stuck to her skin. She was angry at herself. Blaming herself.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I cheated on you. What the hell did I expect?”

“You didn’t let me finish,” Stride said.

“I always knew you would leave. That you would wake up one day and say you were going away. Don’t you think I know you’re not happy here?”

“You’re right. I’m not.”

“I knew you’d wind up going home.”

He shook his head. “Minnesota isn’t home. When I lived there, home was Cindy. I was restless for years after I lost her.”

He reached out and took her hands.

“Until I found you. Home is you now.”

“But you still want to go back to Duluth,” she said softly.

“That’s true. I’m a snowman here. I melt.”

She summoned up her courage, ready to set him free. “I don’t want to keep you where you don’t want to be. Not even forme.”

He said the words he had been longing to say for days. “Come with me.”

“To Minnesota?” she said. She looked down at herself, as if she were taking stock of who she was. She looked around at the Vegas street, the traffic flowing back and forth, the big sky, the lights. “Jonny, you know that would never work. I’d be as much a fish out of water there as you are here.”

“I don’t think so. Claire said it, too. You’re deeper than Vegas.”

“But this is my-” Serena began, but then she stopped. He knew she had been about to say home. Maybe she was thinking about what he had said. Or maybe she had begun to realize the depth of what he was asking her to do: to uproot herself, to commit.

People were passing by them on the sidewalk, but they were alone.

“What do you want us to be, Jonny? Partners? Lovers?” She had a quiet intensity in her face, feeling her way, as he was. “Or something else?”

He was afraid of saying the wrong thing. Every word felt like a land mine. “I’ve been married twice,” he reflected. “One was a perfect match. The other was a terrible mistake. I’m not scared of trying again, but I want us to be ready.”

“I have a long way to go,” Serena said. “Not because of you, but because of me.”

“I know that.”

“And you still want me to come with you?”

“That’s what I want.”

He watched the emotions battling behind her eyes and knew he had thrown her into a deep pool and asked her to swim. He knew what he was asking her to give up, the chance he was asking her to take.

It had been easy for him. At the moment he had chosen to leave Duluth a few months ago, his life had been in transition. His identity had been spirited away. In his short time in this electrified city, he had been forced to reexamine everything that had made him who he was-and who he was not.

Suddenly, he had a chance to rebuild what had been stolen from him. To go home again and make it something new.

Serena wandered away from him, back toward his truck. She stood there, with her hands jammed in her pockets, staring southward at the chaos on the Strip. He wished he could be inside her mind. He wondered if, as she absorbed the madness of the city through her green eyes, she was staring at her past or her future.

She shook her head, as if laughing at an old joke. Then she opened the truck door, got in, and leaned back out the window. “Hey, Jonny,” she called to him. “You coming or what?”

Stride smiled and went to join her. He took a glance at the warm blue sky and thought that on the shores of the great lake in Minnesota, the colored leaves had already fallen. Winter would be shouldering down from the north. Soon, the snow would fly.

My thanks as always go to the five amazing women who have been so instrumental in my career: my agents, Ali Gunn in London and Deborah Schneider in New York; my editors, Marion Donaldson in London and Jennifer Weis in New York; and my wife, Marcia.

There are many others, too, who have made this journey possible: Carol Jackson, Diana Mackay, Kate Cooper, Stephanie Thwaites, and the entire team at Curtis Brown; Beth Goehring, Gary Jansen, Victoria Skurnick, Carole Baron, and their colleagues at Bookspan; Brigitte Weeks; Sally Richardson; Peter Newsom; the tremendous sales and publicity staff at both Headline and St. Martin’s; and the creative Web team at Designstein (Nathan, Rob, Cat, Ed, and Mark).

I have also worked with many wonderful overseas editors and salespeople at publishers around the world. Thank you all for being early and enthusiastic supporters.