Free Lightning People by Christopher Bollen Page B

complete the next sentence but there was no escaping it. If she didn’t tell him right now, she would never summon the nerve. “We got married.”
    â€œMarried.” He clenched his fingers on the armrest.
    â€œThings change,” she said, hating the triviality of those words as soon as she heard them leave her mouth. “You and I haven’t talked for a while.”
    Raj dug his tongue into his cheek and then brought his chin back up to face her.
    â€œYou did it for the green card. I get it. So you did find a way to quit your job.”
    â€œI figured you’d hear about it sooner or later from Madi, so I thought it would be better to hear it from me.”
    â€œGod, that was fast.”
    â€œIt wasn’t only for the green card, Raj. And I didn’t pay him, if that’s your next question. You don’t have to be insulting.”
    â€œI’m insulting?” His voice had finally caught up to his anger, but it was louder than she expected, as if in all this time alone in his studio he had forgotten the advantages of keeping his feelings close to his chest. “Is this why you came over?”

    â€œI don’t know why I came over. You called and asked me to, so I did.” But she did know why. She had come over to do what adults can do to each other: behave like children. She wanted Raj to feel the extent to which things had changed. She wanted him to understand that people can walk out one day and be lost for good. Because relationships never end, do they? All that built-up energy has to go somewhere. But now, as her presence in his apartment felt even more intrusive, she hated herself for the weakness of wanting to tell him the news face to face.
    She moved to pick up the cigarette off the floor, but it signaled a faster reaction in Raj. He lifted himself from the couch, struggling harder than a man of his age should, and stood looking at her with those two magnificent glaciers of ice on either side of his nose and his lip snarled upward. He reached his arm out and for a second she thought he might be moving to hit her. Instead he grabbed the cigarette from her mouth and snapped it in half with his thumb.
    â€œYou can’t smoke in here. How many times do I have to tell you?”
    â€œFine,” she said in a restrained tone she hoped he would copy. “What about you? Are you seeing anyone? Is there a girl hiding in the stairwell, waiting for me to go?”
    Madi had told her a few months back that Raj had gone on a few dates with an Italian translator at the U.N. with long black hair much like her own. Nothing had come of it, but Del had been touched with the thought that lovers were as compulsive as serial killers. They couldn’t help tripping over their own patterns, falling for the same type.
    â€œDon’t ask me a question like that,” he said harshly. “We all don’t have to be happy, and I’m not going stand here trying to prove to you that I am.”
    The last rays of sun were throwing him in shadow against the window, and Del resisted the urge to step closer to gauge the expression on his face.
    Instead, she walked over to Raj’s mattress resting on the floor in the far corner under the canopy of his clothes. She sat on its edge with her knees bundled against her breasts. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m sorry. I had a terrible day.”

    â€œDon’t you have a husband you should be telling this to?”
    The same faded green quilt still covered the bed. It was torn so that the patches hung from their stitching like a collection of unsealed envelopes. Raj always said the quilt smelled of gasoline because his mother had sewn it while working nights at a twenty-four-hour service station outside of Miami when he was a kid. Del leaned back and pressed her face into the thin fabric. The quilt smelled of curry, not gasoline, the bed being the closest thing to a dinner table Raj owned. When