Free Red Dot Irreal by Jason Erik Lundberg Page B

and we hardly spoke afterward. And then you had that heart attack and I never got to take any of it back.”
    “I’m not listening to this,” I said, and stepped toward the door. She leapt in front of me and barred my way. “Move,” I said.
    “It’s not just me, you know. You were also a prick to Mom. Cheating on her with a new student every semester. Even after her fourth suicide attempt, you couldn’t stop. Don’t you see how much you hurt the ones you love?”
    I shoved the woman aside and lunged for the door, hearing her bang against the wall but I didn’t slow down, charging out of the room, down the elevator and back to the banquet hall, ignoring those little voices telling me to go back and make sure she was okay. Part of me hoped I’d knocked her unconscious.
    I managed to get my breathing under control as I sat back down at my seat at the head table. Twenty minutes had passed. Nicole wouldn’t meet my eye.
    “Everything okay?” my mother asked.
    “Fine, no worries,” I said. I pushed around the food on my plate, no longer excited by the contents; the oatmeal prawns had gone rubbery, and the bread pudding was an unappealing grey mess.
    Later that night, as Nicole and I undressed in the room her father had paid for, she asked, “Where did you go before?”
    “It’s not important,” I said. I tossed my shirt on the plush chair next to the room’s cherrywood desk. She unbuttoned the top of her kabaya , revealing the cream-colored slip underneath.
    “And who was that woman?”
    I exhaled. Nicole had seen her after all. “No one. She’s no one.”
    In one fluid motion, Nicole’s eyes snapped up at me, she cocked back her right arm, and then slapped me hard, the shock and the impact knocking me to the floor. She towered above me, arms flung to the sides, eyes ablaze, and yelled, her Singaporean accent bursting through, “ Twenty minutes, lah! You go off with strange woman for twenty minutes, on our wedding day! Time enough for quickie, ah? Don’t dare fucking tell me she’s no one!”
    “All right! Please, stop yelling and hitting! She’s not no one, but we didn’t do what you think. She keeps popping up and being cryptic and tonight she told me she was our daughter. She’s a psycho, a stalker. I didn’t sleep with her, I swear!”
    Nicole straightened. “If you already knew she was a psycho,” she said through gritted teeth, “why the hell you go off with her in the middle of our reception?”
    “Because I wanted to make sure she wouldn’t ruin the reception. I thought that if I could just see what she wanted, maybe I could get her to leave me alone. Please believe me, sweetness. When I came back to the table, did I seem sexually satisfied to you?”
    Nicole stepped back, wiped her eyes, then sat on the king size bed. “I suppose not, lorh. Alamak , you going to kill me, you know.”
    I stood on shaky legs and joined her on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry, I should have told you before. It’s that same woman who was there the first day we met, at Mr Tea, remember? I just didn’t want to trouble you with it.” I took her trembling upper arms in my hands and stroked gently, trying to soothe away her adrenaline rage. She didn’t pull away. “ Sayang, sayang ,” I said, recalling the Peranakan words, “I’d never cheat on you, you know that.” I leaned her down prone on the bed and kissed her. “Right?”
    She didn’t answer, but the anger was slowly sublimating from her features. I knew it wasn’t completely gone, and that the sex to come would be rough and vigorous, punishing me for my presumptive guilt, and so I made sure not to mollify her too completely.
    ~
    October 2009
    The ceramic turtle shattered against the concrete wall above my head, and I threw my arms over my face to protect against the flying debris. Incoherent screaming formed a wall of sound in the vicinity of the bedroom door, and I edged off the mattress onto the floor, feeling around for my boxer-briefs