Free All Night by Alan Cumyn Page B

from the alley through our one tiny window. She looks startled, as if she can’t believe what she has just done.
    “Ow!” I say, rather late, and sit back holding my jaw, stunned.

Chapter Two
    “Sorry.” Jess’s voice is thin, and she looks down at the blankets, not at me. She has never hit me before, and I have never hit her. I never would.
    She must be twisted up about Peter.
    “I’m not in the mood,” she says.
    “Okay.” I would have been happy with just a kiss.
    “I didn’t, like, use a lot of power,” she says. Joking now, sort of. A good thing she didn’t plow me. She is not very big, but her father was a fighter, and he trained her. He made his living by keeping the books at a tai chi studio. He took in all the money from students for lessons, and he paid the bills. But tai chi was his real passion. He loved how peaceful the slow movements made him feel. Just like all the martial arts, though, tai chi is alsoabout fighting. Jess is no tai chi expert, but she is strong and fast. She might have broken my nose or something.
    “It’s all right,” I say. “I wasn’t trying to force you or anything. I’m sorry if I made you think that.”
    “No teeth loose?” She kisses me now. Lightly. “I just don’t think we should make love tonight.”
    “No,” I say. “Of course not.” I lie back down. I could try to hold her again but I turn my back instead. I just stay quiet.
    “We need to think about Peter,” she says. “We have to honour him. His death has to change things for us, doesn’t it? Life is showing us something here. Everything we know could be pulled out from under us. It’s a wake-up call.”
    I press my cheek into the pillow.
    “I don’t think we should go to sleep tonight,” Jess says. “You have to get up early anyway. What’s the point? We should stay up and really talk about things.”
    She turns on the light.
    “You mean about Peter?” I ask finally.
    “About life! What we want from it. What we’re doing here. Where we’re going. How we feel! You start.”
    My face still stings from her slap. The words spill out of me. “Okay. How I feel: I’m starving. But I don’t want to ruin my breakfast. So I’m here with you. My beautiful girlfriend. Tired but not sleeping. A bit beaten up. And we’re not making love. You’re in your mother’s pajamas anyway. Some things a man can overcome ...”
    “Is that it?” she says.
    “Pretty well.”
    “Okay,” she says. She rolls over.
    We are on a wire high above a black pit. I know this. I know. But the words keep tumbling out. “What happened to staying up all night? To honouring Peter with our blazing honesty?”
    She does not open her eyes. “Just go to sleep. Dream about Karla.” She seems to harden in front of me, becomes as still as glass.
    “What do you mean, ‘Dream about Karla?’ ”
    “You know what I mean.”
    I shake my head slowly. “I talked to many people tonight, not just Karla. I didn’t eat enough, so now I’m starving. Why do we never have any food in this house?”
    Jess leaps out of bed. She pulls a blanket to the small, sagging chair in the corner and sits verystill. “This is not a house. And we don’t have any food because it’s eighteen blocks to the grocery store. You don’t help, so I just buy what I can carry. And what we can afford, which is not a lot. And you talked to Karla for half an hour. Which I don’t mind at all. I mind the way you were looking at her.”
    This apartment is freezing. Of course I help with the shopping. Sometimes.
    I pull the rest of the blankets around me. All right. The fight has started. But, I think, one problem at a time. I say, “How was I looking at her?”
    She makes a funny, love-struck face.
    I say, “I don’t even know how to do that with my face. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
    “You used to look at me like that,” she says.
    I can’t help it, I blow out until my lips flap. “All right. Hold on. It’s late, we’re both