Averil Dean - The Undoing

She had hardly recognized Julian today, he’d changed so much. Even his voice, once smooth and self-assured, now had climbed in pitch and developed a petulant whine like a child’s. And his face, though still tanned as it was in the photograph, seemed sallow and pinched, with a furrow between his brows and a strange new habit of dragging his gaze around the room as if the sight of it exhausted him.

She wondered what Julian had been doing over the past five years. The last time she saw him was the night of the murders, when he had taken her home with some vague promise to check on her the next day. But he never did that. Like the others, he was simply gone.

She had heard about him from time to time: Julian was in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia. Hot places, sunny and flat. An odd itinerary for a skier.

She had nearly forgotten him until last winter, when she’d run into Zig Campanelli at a bar in Telluride. Zig was Julian’s best friend—if Julian had one of those. They had known each other since they were teenagers. It would have seemed strange not to ask after him, and after a few minutes she did. But even Zig seemed puzzled by the changes in Julian.

“He’s not skiing anymore,” Zig said. “Hasn’t for years. I don’t know whether he busted something important or got bored or what. Last time I heard from him, he was in Bali, said he was sick of the snow. That’s all I could get out of him. He sounded...”

“What?”

But Zig only shook his head.

* * *

“This is it,” Emma said. She shut the door behind them and leaned back with an ecstatic sigh. “This is where she died. I can feel it.”

The buzz in Julian’s ears had built to a dull roar. Who was this girl to say she felt something from Celia? As if she knew anything at all about what had happened, had even a sliver of an idea what it was all about. He ground his teeth in anger.

Shut up. Stupid girl.

What had he been thinking to bring her here? Here, of all places. She was nobody special, a friend of a friend, the tail end of a long chain of acquaintances that had started, as far as he could remember, with his buddy Zig Campanelli. The two of them had worked together for a time at ESPN and maintained a sporadic friendship over the years, which was built more on a mutual need for points of contact than true affection.

Zig had a way of introducing Julian that set them both up for admirers.

“This is my good friend Julian Moss,” he’d say. “Used to make a living carving up the ski slopes, kicking my ass most of the time. Swept the championships more than once, went to the Games and came home with a bronze in downhill. Then somebody noticed he’s not all that bad-looking, under the helmet.” Here he’d give Julian a friendly little clap on the shoulder. “My boss gave him a job anchoring the championships at ESPN. And the rest, as they say, is history.”

And he’d saunter off, drink in hand, leaving Julian with another chance to parlay that biography into something truly worthwhile.

Julian hadn’t seen Zig in years, but, like the Olympic medal, he was the gift that kept on giving. When Julian had surfaced again in Colorado three weeks before, there wasn’t a scene in which he wouldn’t have known someone who knew someone else.

In fact it was Emma, her girlfriends giggling and clutching at each other in the background, who had approached him. They must have talked at some point, to some end, but if so the conversation had been so perfunctory that he couldn’t remember a word of it. She was in his bed the next morning. He had fucked her and she was willing to be fucked again and was not inclined to complain about the fact that his head was not with her for a moment. He was a status lay for her. The thrill, if there was one, was in his name.

It was a fair trade. When he asked her later that day to come up here with him, she agreed happily, possibly imagining herself as Julian Moss’s girlfriend, a further bump in status. She could write about it on Facebook, or send a Tweet, or whatever was the latest venue for the humblebrag: Driving up to Telluride with Julian. First time in an F-Type, OMG!!!

She was entitled to that. It was his end of the trade. He was aware that the ache in his jaw was not Emma’s fault. She couldn’t help the nasal drone of her voice or the fact that it bored into his ear like a hungry beetle. It was irrational to blame her when she was clearly doing her best. But every time he looked at her vapid face—features so like Celia’s but put together all wrong—he wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake until something came loose.

He set down the suitcases and walked slowly back to her. Emma gazed up with a fatuous smile as if she thought she was too goddamned irresistible for words. He unbuttoned her shirt. She was wearing some sort of push-up bra, with a hard lace-encrusted pad that scratched his palm.

Celia had never worn anything under her shirt. The shallow swell of her breast made barely a ripple in her clothing, so he supposed she didn’t need one. But he’d once caught a peek through the armhole of a loose-fitting blouse, where her ribs laddered up the side of her bare chest, and he’d sprung so fast he had to leave the room.

“Take your pants off,” he said to Emma. She wriggled out of her jeans and stood against the wall with her hip cocked, grinning as if she expected him to take her picture.

He put his hand between her legs. Right away she started to sigh and coo, wriggled into his hand with that eager camera-smile on her face, cupping her breasts in her hands so that the ridge of her implants stood out beneath her skin.

An easy girl. The kind of girl he used to enjoy. He’d tell her what to do and she’d go along, eager to please, those vacant, colorless eyes blinking up at him while she sucked him off like she’d seen the pretty girls do on cable TV. She might throw in some move of her own, some tease of her fingers across his balls or a knuckle to the perineum, something she’d read about in Cosmo and could claim for her own. Probably she’d swallow when he came, going mmmm like his semen was the best thing since mint chocolate chip. And it would be good for the moment. But in a week or a month, she would recede with the rest of them, who existed in his memory like the cities in a traveler’s diary, dreamlike and insubstantial but determinedly annotated:

—the dreadlocked woman whose breasts dripped like ripe fruit into his open mouth (Burning Man, milk lady)

—the French virgin with skin so dark she seemed to melt into the shadows, disembodied, her scent mingling with the briny perfume of the sea (Samudra Beach, Venus blunt—holy fuck what was in that?)

—that sloe-eyed whore who gave him head in Amsterdam, whose little-girl voice had sent him running, terrified, back to the rose-tinted sidewalks and right the hell out of town (blue pigtails, Daddy issues)

Et cetera, et cetera.

And now Emma. He searched her face for something to remember her by. A few freckles on her nose, glitter in her mascara and nail polish. He kept glancing away, then quickly back, as if he could startle her face into his memory by sneaking up on it.

After a moment she pulled away, frowning. “Are you okay?”

He tried to smile.

“I’ll be more okay if you get on your knees.”

She grinned, confidence restored. Everything would be okay, her expression implied, once he’d done her. And she might be right about that.

Assuming, of course, that he could get it up. At the moment he felt nothing, nothing at all. His body was curiously soft, vacant as Emma’s blond head, the blood floating down his arms and legs without the faintest inclination to gather and pool into a hard-on. Even when she unzipped his jeans and took him in her hand...

Nothing.