Free Pretty Girl Gone by David Housewright

beautiful, intelligent, successful woman you’ve been sleeping with doesn’t want to get married, either. Yet she still wants to sleep with you. Most guys would kill for a relationship like this.
    So why was I angry?
    Despite her protests, I insisted on walking Nina to her door. I stood back while she unlocked it and slipped inside.
    “Come in for a moment while I disarm the security system,” she said.
    A few moments later she returned. She had removed her overcoat and her red velvet dress shimmered in the light behind her.
    “Thank you for coming,” I told her.
    “Thank you for inviting me.”
    I hesitated for a moment.
    “When you played piano, tonight—that was for me, wasn’t it? You were performing for me.”
    “I just wanted to remind you that I was there.”
    “I’m sorry I left you alone for so long.”
    “It’s all right.”
    “I should have been more attentive.”
    “Yes, you should have.”
    Nina stepped forward and kissed me. The kiss was warm and moist and lasted a long time.
    “I should go,” I told her.
    She held open the door and I stepped through it and made my way to the Audi. I had just about reached it when I turned. She was watching from the door. There was considerable distance between us now and she had to shout.
    “I said I didn’t want to get married and I meant it, but . . .”
    “But what?” I shouted back.
    “You’ll never find anyone better for you than I am, Rushmore McKenzie. Never.”
     
    I lay in my bed a long time yearning for sleep that did not come. My brain was convulsed by too many thoughts and images that made me toss and turn and twist and continually flip my pillow to the cool side. The incident in the skyway.
Do the right thing.
Wasn’t that a Spike Lee film? The parking lot.
There is nowhere you can run that I can’t follow. There is nowhere you can hide that I can’t find you.
If that wasn’t a line from a movie, it should be. Jack and Lindsey Barrett, Donovan, Muehlenhaus, and the others. Nina.
Maybe I didn’t want to get married, but what the hell!
Who could sleep though noise like that?
    Eventually, I gave it up and padded in bare feet down the stairs and into my kitchen. In the freezer compartment of my refrigerator I retrieved a half-filled bottle of Stolichnaya. I poured two fingers of the icy vodka into a short, squat glass and took a sip. It was so cold it made myteeth ache, only, Lordy, it went down nice. I returned the bottle and glanced about. The kitchen appliances on my counter gleamed in the moonlight that filtered through my windows—blender, espresso machine, bread maker, ice cream churn, microwave, pasta maker, George Foreman grill. My sno-cone, mini-donut, and popcorn machines were stored in boxes on my kitchen table—I reminded myself to take them to the Dunstons.
    I took another sip of vodka and drifted to the breakfast nook. I sat at the end of the table, surrounded by eight windows arranged in a semicircle, each window with a view of my backyard. The pond had been frozen over since early December; the ducks that lived there had been gone since late September.
    Nina.
    The first year there had been seven ducks, Tracy and Hepburn and their five ducklings that I named Shelby, Bobby, Victoria, and Katie, after the Dunstons, and Maureen, after my mother. Victoria and Katie returned with their mates the next year and had nine ducklings between them that I named after an assortment of friends. Yet I had never named one after Nina.
    Why not?
    The phone rang before I could answer the question.
    “There is nowhere you can run that I can’t follow,” a voice told me. “There is nowhere you can hide that I can’t find you.”
    The voice startled me. The malice it conveyed was unmistakable and I had to remind myself that it was merely a voice on the phone.
It can’t hurt you.
Besides, I had heard it before.
    I turned on the light to read the number in my caller I. D. attachment, but the field was empty.
    “Did you hear me?” the