Free Lightning People by Christopher Bollen Page A

unhappy?”
    â€œOf course,” she said and instinctively reached into her purse for her rolling papers.
    â€œAh, the slow cancer of a nine-to-five.” He put his hands on her shoulders, and she felt the heat of his palms through her shirt. “You want a drink? I still have one of your whiskey bottles around here saved just in case.”
    â€œNo, I’m fine. I’m afraid a drink might knock me out.”
    He shook his head and retreated into the kitchen to pour her a glass of water.
    The studio was still organized in Raj’s maniacally clean but dusty fashion. Photographs, contact sheets, and blunt red pencils flooded his desk. A sagging pole that hung across the ceiling created
a waterfall of sport coats, wrinkled shirtsleeves, and pant legs. His sunken mattress still lay without a frame on the floor.
    She licked the sweat from her upper lip and stared out the window at the cars, half in headlights, rushing in both directions along the West Side Highway.
    â€œCould it be any hotter in here?” she yelled. “No wonder you don’t get many visits.” She wanted to say why don’t you move , but this was an old complaint that she no longer had the right to make. One of the reasons she had broken it off with Raj was the agony of having to spend all of their time together in this tiny rented studio, as if stepping outside for dinner or a drink would have wrecked Raj’s delicate sense of reality. The entire duration of their relationship consisted of actions in this five-hundred-foot square—a cliche of a bachelor pad that she had endured to constitute coupledom. It was here that they slept and ate and mixed toiletries like warring chess pieces. Once, on an off chance, she had brought up finding a new place, something together, and Raj had turned and stared at her with those cold, blue eyes and said it would be difficult for him to live full-time with someone, even her, but he’d consider it. She knew he never would.
    The day she broke up with him, she had picked up his camera, focused the lens, and snapped three shots of Raj rubbing his hands in one of the now absent armchairs. She thought that when he developed those pictures he might recognize them as his last moments with her, right before the inevitable, before she grabbed the bras and underwear and tampons she kept in the top drawer and blew out once and for all. She wondered now if he had ever bothered to look at those pictures of himself—a thirty-five-year-old adolescent defending his own space against any intrusions.
    She pulled a rolling paper from the packet and sprinkled the tobacco grains.
    â€œYou can’t smoke in here,” he said when he returned from the kitchen, setting the glass of water on the desk.
    â€œSince when?”
    â€œNew rule. Sorry.” He smiled.
    â€œGod, you’re just like the mayor now. Can’t smoke in bars, can’t
smoke in subway stations. Can I ask, why do they even bother selling me these cigarettes if there’s no place I can smoke them?”
    â€œIt’s bad for you,” he said softly, placing his dark, calloused fingers over her own. “You should quit.”
    She placed the cigarette in her mouth, squinted defiantly at him, and went for the lighter in her pocket. Before she could free her hand, Raj snatched the cigarette from her teeth and replaced it with his lips. She let his tongue move across her own. Just for a second. His fingers reached for her bra strap, and that enormous warmth he stored inside of him hit her.
    â€œStop.” She wrestled her hands between their bodies and shoved him back. “What was that for?”
    â€œDid that bother you?” he said, spinning around to gather his balance before dropping onto the couch. “It hasn’t been that long, has it?”
    â€œYeah, it has.”
    â€œDon’t tell me you’re still dating that actor.”
    â€œRaj,” she said, and it took courage to