Free Denial by Keith Ablow

across my collarbone.
    "Ahh!  Shit!"  I cursed, wriggling away.  I looked up and saw her standing over me, looking half-amused, half-annoyed.  She was wearing blue scrubs that made her eyes seem even brighter.  Her hair was damp.
    "What are you doing here?" she asked.
    "Jesus Christ."  I rubbed my shoulder.
    "What are you doing here?"
    "I was looking for you.  Alright?"
    "What for?"
    "I missed you last night."
    "Really."  She sat down on the love seat.  "Why?"
    I took a deep breath and straightened up in the chair.  "Oh, I don't know, Kathy.  You sleep with someone hundreds of nights in a row, you kind of get used to it."
    She shrugged.  "Does that put me above or below cocaine on your list of habits?"  She noticed my wrist.  "What happened to you?'
    I looked at the bandage.  Blood had seeped through.  "Nothing.  I was interviewing the man who... It happened at the jail."
    "The man who killed Sarah," she said flatly.  "You can say it.  I won't fall apart.  I hope they electrocute him.  I'd throw the switch myself."
    "Falling apart is allowed," I said.  "So is rage."
    "You would know.  Let me look at your wrist."
    "It's all set.  Nels stitched me up."
    Her expression turned to worry.  "Last night?"
    I smiled.  "Actually, Nels usually has the morning shift.  I just finished up with him.  But you're right.  He was on last night, covering for Buck Berenson. I think he felt badly interrupting you."
    "Me?"
    "You and Trevor."
    She stood up.  "You know what?  I don't appreciate being interrogated — or set up — especially by someone as trustworthy as you."
    "Did you fuck him?"
    "Did I...?"  Her eyes filled up.  "I can't believe you'd ask me that."
    "Did you?"
    She looked like a little misunderstood girl.  "No."
    "The two of you just visited?  I'm supposed to believe that?"
    "Believe what you want."
    "You didn't come home."
    "I don't have a home."
    "Where did you sleep?"
    "Your mother's."  She wiped away a tear.  "She showed me the scratches you made on her dining room table."
    "You two are getting closer and closer."
    "Maybe you'd like to know if I fucked her."
    I stood up and walked over to her.  I grabbed her scrub shirt, pulled her toward me and started to kiss her neck.
    "Let go of me!" she demanded.
    I held her tight, pulled the drawstring of her scrub pants loose and slipped my hand down between her legs.  She tried to push me away at first, but stopped struggling as I kept touching her.  Fighting me had always excited her.  I felt her getting wet.  I slipped a finger inside her, then two.  She pressed herself against me.  Her breathing quickened, and her pelvis rocked slightly toward and away from me.  But just as she began to tighten around my fingers, her whole body froze.  She dug her nails into my arm.  "Don't," she said.
    I pushed to keep my fingers inside her.
    She took a step back and yanked my hand out of her pants.
    She looked confused and needy and angry and very, very beautiful.  I brushed the hair back from her face.
    "I want to, Frank.  You know I do.  But I won't until you get help.  I'm not going to be with someone who could be gone tomorrow."
    "Any of us could be gone tomorrow."
    "See how it feels, then."  She tucked her top into her pants and took a few steps toward the door.  "I have patients waiting in the clinic.  Call me when you're off that shit.  If you start to care a little more about yourself, maybe I'll start to care again, too."
    "Where will you be?"
    "Somewhere a little safer," she said.
     
    *            *            *
     
    I left the hospital and started toward Boston, hoping the V.A. Medical Center on Huntington Avenue might have more information on Westmoreland.  Halfway there, my eyes fixed on the two-story, pink neon greyhound outside the Wonderland Dog Track.
    I knew stopping would be the wrong thing to do.  A lucky bet would be another drug — and I didn't have time to waste getting high.  But insight doesn't