Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

“Have you heard anything yet?” Cressida asked, as they paused at the top of the stairs leading down to the T. “From the police, I mean.”

When was it, Evelyn wondered, that she had started to believe that she had left behind the world in which such a question might ever be asked of her? How long had that particular illusion lasted? In Roslindale, her apartment awaited her, tidy and quiet; the remote placed neatly on the coffee table, her kitchen counters wiped clean.

“They have a suspect,” she said. “Just a matter of what kind of case they can make, I guess.” She spoke more to herself than Cressida. “I should care about all that, I suppose. Revenge, or what have you. Getting him off the street. But I don’t.”

Over her assistant’s shoulder, she could see onto the station’s main concourse, where the last of the day’s travelers sat at the shiny steel tables beneath the big schedule board waiting for the commuter service west.

“If there’s anything I can do …”

Evelyn shook her head. “Go on now,” she said. “You’ll miss your train.”

Later that same night, the head of data security called Doug to inform him that an e-mail had been sent to compliance referencing McTeague. Doug instructed him to erase it before it could be opened. He had just logged on to the bank’s server to pull up Evelyn Jones’s personnel file when his doorbell rang.

It would be Nate again. Over the last several weeks, he had become a regular visitor. The first time he’d appeared, at ten thirty sharp, standing on the front steps all doe-eyed and expectant, Doug had been watching a Red Sox game and he’d seen no harm in letting the kid sit on the couch beside him while he finished up his correspondence for the day. After that, Nate had turned up almost every night the Sox played, content to drink a beer and follow the score as Doug worked. When the game was over he would go on his way. Even if they didn’t say much to each other — in fact, especially if they didn’t say much — a few hours of having another person in the house felt all right. He wasn’t the kind of company you had to entertain.

Then, a week ago, while Doug was napping through the seventh-inning stretch, Nate had reached his hand over and rested it on Doug’s thigh.

A ballsy move for a kid that nervous, but then he’d had a few more beers than usual.

Years ago, down in sleeping quarters, sailors had now and then whispered come-ons or run a hand along Doug’s arm as he lay in his bunk. He’d never taken up their offers. The idea of it had done nothing for him: two guys getting each other off.

But something in the tentativeness of Nate’s gesture made him curious how it would play out and so he’d kept his eyes closed and let the kid’s hand move up over him. The mechanics were awkward at first but having someone else jack him off for a change didn’t feel half bad. Afterward, Nate had left soon enough, no reciprocation required. Which seemed reason enough to keep him around. That and his access to Charlotte Graves.

The bell rang again and Doug rose to answer it.

“You’re here,” Nate said.

“Yep,” he replied, remaining in the doorway, letting the boy wonder if he’d be let in this evening. From that first day that he’d crept into the house, something in Nate’s demeanor had goaded Doug on — his lack of defense, a vulnerability the shyest women lacked. It was a provocation of a sort, such weakness.

“Martinez is pitching,” he said, hopefully. “Are you watching?”

“I’m busy,” he said. “But go ahead. Turn it on, if you want.”

He spent the next hour reading up on Evelyn Jones. Her performance reviews were stellar. If you believed her supervisor, she was the patron saint of settlements, but given that man’s doddering liberalism Doug had no idea if he meant it or simply felt a historical obligation to praise his imagined inferiors. Doug trusted more the traders’ comments, who to a man reported that she was cleaner and faster than most anyone else who had handled their work. Around midnight, he called Sabrina and told her to do a public records search. As the game was ending, he finally closed his laptop.

Nate was sitting cross-legged beside him, the sleeves of his oxford shirt rolled up past the elbows of his slender arms.

“You’re not a baseball fan, are you?” Doug said.

“What do you mean?”

“Before you started coming over here, you didn’t follow it.”

“Sometimes I did.”

“What is your deal, anyway? Don’t you have somewhere to be? Out with your friends or something?”

Nate looked into the mouth of the bottle he’d been drinking from. “I like being here.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I just do.”

“Well, I got to get some sleep. Time for you to go.”

“Would you mind … I mean, it’s okay if you would, but would you mind if maybe … I stayed over?”

“Where? On the couch?”

“Okay,” he said, his eyes brimming with fear and longing. “If that’s what you want.”

“Jesus. Come on, then,” Doug said, leading him up the stairs to the bedroom.

What Nate wanted, and what Doug let him do once he had turned out the light, was to lay his head down on Doug’s stomach and take his dick in his mouth. He had never really touched Nate before but he palmed the top of his head now, guiding his motion. It had been a long time since he’d been given a blow job and though the boy was no professional his eagerness helped.

Afterward, he couldn’t sleep, not with Nate in the bed beside him. He tried for a while before fetching his computer from downstairs and starting in on more work. A box in the corner of his screen showed the Nikkei continuing to drop. Eventually, after nodding off for an hour or so, he got up and showered.

When he came back into the room to dress, Nate had woken and rolled over onto his back, his face blurry with sleep, his cheek marked by the creases of the pillowcase.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Quarter to six. I’m going to work. You should get up.”

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and sat upright in his frayed T-shirt and boxers, his fuzzy, unshaven jaw giving him even more of a grunge look than usual. He smelled of pot most nights and had that laconic, hangdog look that stoners wore.

“Don’t you have school?”

“It’s senior week,” he said, yawning.

A lifetime of doing only girls and now Doug had got himself into this. A hand job or two was one thing — a convenience — but now the kid was blowing him. The way he looked at Doug in the closet mirror was almost worshipful, his need clinging in a way that a girl wanting Doug to call her never had. He felt implicated somehow, and it galled him.

“Do you mind if I ask you something?”

“What?” Doug said.

“Have you ever done this before?”

“Done what?”

“Been with a guy.”

“I got an idea,” Doug said, pulling a tie off the rack and quickly knotting it. “Let’s skip the conversation part. Okay? Let’s keep it simple.”

___________

DOWNSTAIRS, he was about to open the front door when something caught his eye through the window.

“Unbelievable. Just look at that.”

Charlotte Graves and her two hounds were standing beside the garage, the woman leaning down to gather twigs which she deposited in a plastic shopping bag dangling from her wrist, while the dogs sniffed impatiently at the grass. In the gray dawn, the three of them looked like figures in a dream, a nightmare in fact, as if the world had been emptied by plague, leaving only these ragged scavengers.

“Feel like saying hello to your tutor?”

“No. She’s just walking them. She’ll keep moving.”