Bentley Little - The House

Laurie was crying. She didn't want to, wanted to wait until after they were gone, wanted to appear only mad, not hurt, but she couldn't help it and she was sobbing as she screamed, "Fuck you, Matt! Fuck you, you pervert!

Fuck you!"

Still only half-dressed, the two of them ran down the hallway, through the living room, out the front door.

They did not bother to close the door behind them, and Laurie caught a glimpse of Matt scrambling into his car, fumbling with his keys, before she slammed the door shut and dead-bolted it.

She slumped to the floor, leaning against the hard cold wood. It had all happened so fast. One minute she'd been happy, excited, ready to relax with Matt and begin her weekend; the next, her entire life had been turned upside down and it felt as though her guts had been scooped out as she realized that the man she loved had betrayed her. She hadn't had time to think, to absorb the shock, she'd simply been thrown in the water and forced to swim.

She sat there, crying, and after a while the tears stopped. The hurt had not lessened, but it had stabilized.

It was no longer an intruder but a part of her, and she could deal with it. She stood, wiped her eyes, wiped her face, and went back down the hall to the bathroom.

Walking over to the toilet, she grimaced with distaste and flushed, almost gagging.

She washed her hands in the sink, scrubbing hard, then walked into the bedroom, slumping onto the bed.

She was still shaking with anger, but beneath the anger she felt hollow, empty. Her thoughts were rushing a mile a minute, scenes from the past months with Matt running through her head as she tried to determine whether she should have seen this coming.

She sometimes thought it would be easier if she were a lesbian. At least she understood the female mind set.

And she wouldn't have to put up with asshole men who tried to tell her what to think and how to act and then betrayed her.

She leaned back onto the mattress.

Lesbian.

She remembered when she was little, promising to marry a girl who lived . . . where? Next door? Down the street? She couldn't remember. She couldn't recall the girl's name either, but she remembered the way she'd looked, dirty and thin, pretty in a natural, unaware, unself-conscious way. Even now, the memory stirred her, and Laurie sat up again, shaking her head.

What was wrong with her?

Maybe she was attracted to women. Maybe she'd been repressing her true feelings all these years and that was why she'd consistently picked losers, why she'd failed in her relationships with men each and every time.

No. She thought of Matt's blond bimbo, naked, frantically putting on her clothes, and there was no interest whatsoever, not even a subliminal attraction, only a white-hot anger and a burning core of hate. She'd always considered herself a nonviolent person, a pacifist, but she understood now how people could kill.

If there'd been a gun in the house, she probably would've shot both of them.

She sighed, thought for a moment, then stood and began rummaging through the closet and the drawers of the dresser, taking everything of Matt's and tossing it onto the floor. She gathered it all up, took it out to the living room, threw it on the couch, then went systematically through the rest of the house until she'd found everything he owned.

She threw it all out into the yard, everything, even his art, heaving his camera as hard as she could on the ground, stomping on his precious videotapes before tossing the shattered cassettes onto the grass. The driveway, the yard, the sidewalk were all covered with clothes and books, electronic equipment and CD's, and a group of kids playing baseball in the street had stopped to stare at her, but she didn't care, and she slammed the door again and locked it, already feeling better.

She'd leave it overnight, give him a chance to come back for it. But if his shit was still there in the morning, she'd call the Children's Hospital or some other charity and have them haul it away.

It was a morning without fog, a morning without clouds, and Laurie stood on the stoop staring up at the sky. It was rare in San Francisco that the sun shone this early in the day, that blue showed through before noon, and despite everything that had happened recently, the uncharacteristically good weather brightened her spirits, made her feel, for the first time in over a week, slightly hopeful.

Tia Guiterrez , the young woman next door, waved from her porch. "Beautiful day, huh?"

Laurie nodded. "For once."

"You should call in sick, take the day off."

"You should, too."

Tia smiled. "I am."

Laurie smiled back. It had been a long time since she'd taken a day off. And she had accumulated plenty of vacation hours. But, no, she couldn't. There was too much work to do. There was theMieger account to go over: the customized software that the manufacturer had ordered had apparently not been satisfactory, and now Mieger was pushing for upgrades that he wanted for free and done yesterday. And she was supposed to chair a meeting on flexible benefits packages at three o'clock.

She couldn't take off today.

But she could walk to work. She went back inside, checked her hair in the mirror, popped a few vitamin C's, and picked up her purse and briefcase. Stepping out of the house and locking the door behind her, she waved to Tia, still on the porch, and started off. The day was indeed beautiful, and the sun felt good on her skin, warm and fresh and invigorating. People seemed friendlier on a day like this, and she said more hellos to strangers in the next hour than she had in the past six months.

She was twenty minutes late by the time she reached the office, but no one noticed and no one cared, and she told Mara to hold all of her calls for the next hour while she reviewed the Mieger file.

She didn't review the file, though. She seemed to be having difficulty concentrating, and after reading and rereading the same memo four or five times, Laurie finally gave it up and walked over to the window, looking between the buildings at the bay.

What was she doing here?

It was a question she asked herself periodically but for which she could not seem to find a satisfactory answer.

There comes a point, she thought, when what you do as a temporary stopgap until you "find" yourself hardens into your actual personality. The person you pretended to be, while waiting to discover who you are, becomes the real you.

Was that what had happened to her?

Yes.

She'd been the responsible one, and she'd tried to take care of Josh after their parents had died, to provide for him, to give him as stable a life as she could under the circumstances. She'd always intended to move on at some point, to abandon this job and this lifestyle once her brother settled down and got himself established, but Josh never had settled down, never had gotten himself established, and she'd been promoted onward and upward and at some point it had just not made sense to think about quitting and doing something else.

So here she was.

To top it off, she was now all alone. The foundation of the stable loving relationship in which she'd thought she'd been involved had turned out to be built on quicksand, and she was going to have to start over from scratch--although, after all this time, she was not sure that she still knew how.

Laurie sighed, stared once again out the window, looking down at the street and its tiny toy cars below. Her period was two days late. That's what she was really concerned about, that's what was really on her mind.

And while a baby would certainly force a change in her life, she did not want to be carrying Matt's child. She wanted nothing more to do with that sick loser, and despite the fact that her biological clock was winding down, she was not sure that she wanted to be a mother at all. She didn't have any burning desire to reproduce, no deep-seated need to cuddle with something small and cute and fetchingly defenseless, no inclination toward spending the next eighteen years of her life catering to the material needs and overseeing the intellectual and emotional development of another human being.