Free Heaven Is Small by Emily Schultz Page B

troubling experience already. Gordon pushed the mental picture of Chloe aside and attempted to ride the elevator up to Lillian Payne’s floor, Seventy, but his pass card wouldn’t take him there. He wound up down on Six, in the gym.
    Gordon stripped down to his undershirt and boxer briefs. He hung his suit inside a vacant half-locker. It slumped upon the hook, green in the green locker. Gordon left it there alone and walked into the workout room.
    On the conveyor of the treadmill, Gordon felt everything slide away from him. It was an amazing sensation. His head felt light and clear, his body surged forward without sweat. He ran into the night, seeming never to tire. He clocked over twenty miles without losing his breath. He ran from Russet Avenue, from the Dufferin Mall, from Grenwald, from Chloe, from Dr. Black and that still-remaining box of manuscripts, from himself. He ran toward a hundred heroines in a hundred new Heaven titles.
    In the middle of the night Gordon eventually slowed to a walk and pressed Stop. He hit the weight bench. Though previously he had always felt as if his arms would tear out of their sockets if he continued very long, tonight there was an easy, dull rhythm to everything he did. The digital counter kept creeping its way to heavier decimals. Gordon attributed the lack of sensation to the adrenalin of the workout. Back in the men’s change room, he gazed at himself in the mirror. His straw hair and usual dishwater complexion stared back. Something seemed odd . . . he wasn’t sweating. Gordon placed a palm on the back of his neck — dry. Neither could he smell a thing. He headed for the showers anyway, convinced he had simply gone so far beyond stink that he had lost his senses. He let the water wash away the nothing, let his ears flood with the sigh of thrush faucet and the wind somewhere outside.
    Again in his mind he saw Chloe cross the grass. Her sleeve fell back from her wrist, exposing the delicate copper hairs of her forearm.
    “Are you supposed to be here?” The security guard pivoted away from the portable television that sat inside his desk area. Gordon couldn’t tear his eyes from the screen, where a familiar green scarf encased the ringlets that grew from a familiar head.
    “Not really.” Gordon flicked a finger in the direction of the tiny screen. “Can you turn it up?”
    “Least you’re honest.” The security guard obliged and the volume jumped. “I shouldn’t have let you in last night, then?”
    “We’re talking to Chloe Gold, author of Goodbye to the Wind , about her most recent opus, Hello Twilight .” The host, a woman with a hairdo in six different shades of blond, held the book in her lap, one hand fluttering butterfly-like above its embossed cover. “Now, Chloe, I don’t want to give too much away, but —”
    The camera zoomed and lingered on Gordon’s ex-wife’s features. A tired, practised smile played across her lips. It seemed to him that she had aged even since yesterday, when he had stood not fifteen feet away from her.
    “You didn’t forget your cellphone, did you?” asked the guard.
    Gordon batted his hand through the air as if he were swatting at flies.
    The camera hadn’t left Chloe. “Is it true that the book was inspired by the unexpected death of your ex-husband?” the host’s disembodied voice queried.
    Gordon wrapped a hand tight around the moulding that topped the guard’s station.
    Chloe gave a nod so tentative that Gordon at first did not want to believe she had.
    “I know it’s difficult,” the host went on. As the camera returned to her, she bridged the divide to touch Chloe’s hand briefly. “But try to tell us about that, if you can.”
    Without thinking, Gordon too reached out, past the lip of the security desk to the water bottle that sat there. It made its way to his mouth before he noticed the guard’s fat glare.
    “You mind?”
    “Huh?”
    The guard intercepted the bottle before Gordon could drink again. He pried