Sleepwalker Read online

  He totally got me.

  What a weight off my shoulders, to have all my cards on the table. Not like work, or most everywhere else, where I still acted like the only reason I kept a really detailed to-do list was that I was anal-retentive.

  He went to the kitchen and came back with our pop. When he sat back down on the couch, I noticed, he positioned himself so close to me our knees brushed. Either he’d figured out where the old springs pressed through the thin cushions, or he was into guys. His fingers skimmed mine when he handed me the glass. I asked, “So how’d you know what a meningioma is?”

  “I skin things for a living. You’d be amazed at what you find under there. I look it up. Guess I’m just curious that way.”

  My knuckles tingled where his fingertips had touched them. Unless I planned on being celibate for the rest of my tumor-riddled life, I needed to remember how to flirt. Now. “Did I say anything incriminating when George took over?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you don’t have to sleep on the couch?”

  “No, but that’s good. Your couch sucks.”

  Sweet relief flooded through me. “It’s better than your truck.”

  He flashed me those dimples and I had to fight back the urge to throw him down and nail him on the spot. When he stood and stretched, he flashed me a tiny sliver of skin in the gap between jeans and t-shirt, but too quick for me to notice any distinguishing marks. “Just so you know, I’ve been awake for thirty hours, I’m covered in fur dust and I’m running on fumes. I don’t imagine I’ll be very good company.”

  Good company? Heck, I’d been without any company at all so long I’d take anything, even a guy who could do nothing more than roll into bed and fall asleep. I wasn’t about to volunteer that. But it was the truth.

  We finished our donuts and he asked if he could take my shower for a spin. I sat and listened to the patter of water. He came out in boxers and a t-shirt that had a dark wet mark between the shoulders where it was wicking the water from his hair. I pointed out where the bedroom was, doing my best not to leer at his bare legs.

  He took a long look at me and smiled—an utterly exhausted smile, but a charming one—and said, “I hope we can pick up this conversation where we left off, once we’ve had a little shut-eye.”

  While I’ve heard of people falling asleep before their head hit the pillow, I’d never actually seen it in action until I watched Jesse Ray Jones collapse into my bed. I hadn’t been awake nearly as long as he had, but it was my third-shift equivalent of the middle of the night. Sleep was out of the question for me, though. Light filtered in around the edges of my blackout shades, enough to see that long brown hair of his, still wet from the shower, spread over my pillow—to drink in the fringe of his eyelashes on his cheek, the sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of his nose. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, even if all he was doing was breathing.

  George was hardly a blip on Jesse’s radar—which wasn’t to say he seemed like some kind of pig who wanted a free place to stay while he was in town, and maybe a blowjob for the road, and as long as I didn’t have a grand mal while he was here it didn’t matter to him one way or the other what was inside my skull. No, that look he’d been giving me while he tucked my hair behind my ear told me he was a decent guy. Plus, he’d brought donuts.

  5

  THE PHONE RANG. I WOKE with the sick feeling of disorientation that feels more like landing in your body than regaining awareness of it. I glanced at the screen—my cousin, Alex—then thumbed through to his voicemail. “Are you coming down for dinner tonight, or do you want Kathy to put a plate in the fridge? Lemme know.” Dinner—it was already six? The light that leaked in around the edges of the shades seemed muted, and the clock read 6:11. I never slept past five.

  Weirder still, I was all mashed over to one side of the bed. And then it hit me. I’d toned down my usual sprawl because I’d fallen asleep with Jesse in my bed. That side was empty now, but the pillow had a dent in the middle. Damn it, how did I manage to keep on sleeping while he climbed over me? I wanted to do him so bad you’d think the wanting would’ve woken me up, but no. Physiology is so disappointing. I touched the empty space on the pillow where his head had been, then snatched my hand back and felt pathetic for doing it.

  The only trace left of Jesse was a shower that was cleaner than it had been when he’d found it and a couple of damp towels. Nothing more to see in my apartment, so I figured I should go downstairs and grab something to eat. I ran a comb through my hair, pulled on some jeans, clomped downstairs without lacing my sneakers and let myself in through the kitchen door. Kathy and Alex were already at the table.

  “Did I wake you up?” Alex said around a mouthful of pasta. He chewed it a few more times so he could swallow it. “You never sleep this late.”

  “Yeah, no, I...I didn’t get to bed on time.”

  Kathy dropped her fork. It bounced off the plate, hit the side of the table and clattered to the hardwood floor. She grabbed it, then ducked out to the kitchen to get another one.

  Alex said, “They’re in a tiz over at the Center about this grant guy, huh? Who’s more insufferable, Bridget or Luke?”

  “Luke’s fine. He’s a little too slick, but you can at least talk to him like a human being. Bridget was in full control-freak mode last night. She must’ve stayed ’til midnight, at least.”

  “She’s used to her nine-to-five. She’ll run out of gas before Thursday. I’ll bet she skips out right after the big shot leaves.”

  Kathy sat back down at the table and started spearing rigatoni. I almost looked past her, then realized that her lips were pressed together so tight they were white around the edges. “Kath? You okay?”

  My asking her that made Alex focus in on her too, and her mouth practically disappeared. “What?” Alex said.

  “It’s nothing.” Jab. Jab. Jab.

  Alex looked up at me and cocked a questioning eyebrow. I shrugged my ignorance.

  We each took a forkful of pasta at the same time and chewed them carefully, darting glances at Kathy, at each other. And just as Alex drew a breath to talk, maybe switch gears into some safe topic like what he’d had for lunch today or the state of the lawn, Kathy said, “I saw a boy coming out of your apartment.”

  I shut off like she’d tripped a circuit breaker—because what was that supposed to mean? That I couldn’t have people over because I lived in their two-flat like some kind of charity case? Who’d been the ones to insist on me moving in after George—them, that’s who. Or would it have been different if it were girls up there? And besides, it wasn’t like we’d done anything but sleep.

  “Way to go,” Alex said. In a sincere way, even. Kathy gave him a look. “What? He’s twenty-four. He shouldn’t have to be alone.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “We had the whole coming out thing when he was in high school—”

  “Come on,” she said, “you know it’s not that.”

  Really? What else could it be?

  “Web’s a grown-up,” Alex said. “He’s older than we were when we got married, and it’s his apartment up there. He brings home a date, that’s his business.”

  Wow. It was awesome having him step up to the plate for me, don’t get me wrong. He’d been so mad about the tumor I’d nearly forgotten how close we used to be before, back when we were the terror of touch football. Back before George.

  But Kathy hadn’t been trying to pick a fight, and now I saw tears shimmering in the corners of her eyes. “Everything’s cool,” I said. “It’s all good.”

  Kathy focused hard on her plate and speared even more rigatoni.

  “It wasn’t even, you know...nothing happened. He’s just the taxidermist they hired to clean up the displays.”

  Kathy sighed hard and put down her loaded fork. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. It’s fine.”

  She grabbed me by the wrist and stroked my forearm with her thumb, and when she spoke her voice was
all high-pitched and funny as she strained to get words out without actually crying. “It’s just, I’m so worried you’ll end up getting hurt.”

  6

  “ALLS I KNOW IS, I CAN’T wait ’til the guy from that foundation place is here and gone.” It was the most Theresa had ever spoken to me in one stretch, I think. We’d been passing each other in the first-floor atrium, and she didn’t stop, didn’t even slow. I turned and watched her pear-shaped body disappear past the sycamore with a mag light slapping one hip and an eight-ounce pepper spray tapping the other. “If it ain’t one o’ them high-and-mighties here when they don’t belong, it’s the other. Getting real sick of it. Or maybe I’m coming down with something. Y’know, I think there might be somethin’ going around.” She fake-coughed into her hand, turned and gave me a meaningful look, then rounded the corner that led to the exit.

  Bridget would shit a brick if Theresa called in sick on Thursday. That would be worth seeing. Then Alex would need to act like he actually knew what he was doing, and that’d be good for a couple of laughs, too.

  I took the atrium stairs up to the second floor, and Luke rushed out of the Admin door and up to me before I’d even reached the top of the staircase. “Thank God you’re here.”

  “Yeah?” I said. I was even ten minutes early, but I probably would’ve sounded like a prick if I pointed that out.

  “There’s mildew on the buffalo hides. Mildew. You’ve got the key to the case, right?”

  “We all do.”

  Luke had me by the arm, and he hauled me straight past Admin without letting me hang up my overcoat or stash my lunch in the fridge. I squeezed the paper bag so that it rustled, but he was too keyed up to do subtlety.

  “Mildew. Do you realize this HVAC system was state-of-the art when it was installed? Humidity is controlled within three percent of ideal. And then someone takes it in their head to move an open-topped display case underneath a duct that connects to a men’s room on the other side of the wall, and there you go. Mildew.”

  We stepped into the elevator and I reclaimed my arm while Luke was busy pushing the third-floor button. “I thought you were gonna dim the lights on three and hope the Mid-America guy doesn’t go there.”

  “I made a few calls, tried to sniff around, see what he focused on when he gave the MAHPS Grant to the Mississippi River Museum last year, but you know how it is over there.” He made his voice a mocking singsong: “Ooh, look at the cute otters—touch the coral, pet the ray.” The elevator door whispered open and I spotted Jesse among the People of the Plains, combing the Kickapoo woman’s eyelashes with a tiny brush. His plaid flannel shirt looked exotic among all the buckskin and feathers. Luke was so deep into his head trip that he didn’t even seem to see the diorama. “It’s so easy when you’ve got live displays.”

  Right, like the Denizens of the Sky. Once upon a time, when I was still a kid, they hadn’t been taxidermy. I kept my mouth shut about the dozens of bird casualties. Jesse locked eyes with me as if maybe he’d heard me say it telepathically, and he smiled—the tiniest smile. A tightening around the eyes and a shadow of a dimple. And, my God, I wanted him in the worst way. Right there by the cellophane campfire.

  So here’s the thing—I used to feel that way all the time. Faris isn’t exactly a Mecca for alternative lifestyles, but with U of I down the road, there were at least a couple dozen other guys to meet, to sleep with, to break up with and start all over again with a new face, a new story, a new set of melodramas.

  Then George came along, and those melodramas were nowhere near as compelling. George set the bar so high that all the other stuff couldn’t even touch it, and suddenly everyone I knew seemed so shallow I couldn’t imagine why I’d crushed on any of them before.

  Jesse met my gaze again. Serious, now—telepathic for sure. “You found the mildew?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Shame. I could swap it out with a bison hide from my old man’s shop for the visit if I had time to drive to Ames and back. Four hours each way, though, and too much to clean up around here.”

  “Can’t you fold it or something so the mildew doesn’t show?” Luke sounded panicky, and it was only Tuesday—for another hour, at least.

  Jesse stepped down from the Kickapoo campsite. “What you need for that is a conservator.”

  “Are you looking for a bonus? I’m paying you double-rates as it is—”

  “No disrespect, sir, but the money’s between you and my dad. What I’m telling you is, best practices say I’d need to be supervised by an AIC-certified conservator to alter that artifact. But if I’m the best you got and you’re in a bind, I’ll figure out a non-destructive way to hide the damage. Folding’s out of the question on a stretched hide that old. A proper cleaning would help, some. I’ll see if I can find something to hang over the worst of the damage and make it look like part of the display.”

  He took my key from me and opened the case with the mildewed hides. Best practices—ha. He looked like a skatepunk and talked like a grad student. He couldn’t have possibly known that combination was a total wet dream for me.

  “Can’t clean it here,” he said. “I’ll need your word that if anything happens to that pelt from me taking it down to the workroom, you don’t file any claims on our insurance. We lose our liability coverage, that could sink us.”

  “Fine, that’s fine. Do what you can.”

  Jesse tuned from the bison hides to us and held out his hand toward Luke. “Shake on it.”

  Luke stared at Jesse’s hand like he expected to find a joybuzzer, then pumped it up and down a couple of times like it was baffling that he needed to humor someone with something as archaic as a handshake.

  We watched Luke stride off to the elevator together, and when the door shut, Jesse said, “I was kinda hoping I could leave here at seven when your shift was over tomorrow morning.”

  “I was kinda hoping that too.”

  Actually, I was kinda hoping he’d slam me into those mildewed bison hides and lay one on me...but his focus had shifted to his work, and he knelt down beside his toolkit to find something to test the mildew with. “If I’m gonna try to clean this, I’ll need to stay here until the doors open again. And if I show up at your place at ten, that probably does a number on your sleeping habits.”

  It did. “No.”

  “So it’s cool if I come by?”

  “I’ll leave the door open for you.”

  He flashed me a smile that made my knees weak, then shouldered his way into the glass case. It was shallow, maybe a couple of feet deep, and his long hair and the back of his flannel shirt pressed into the plexi while he worked at unfixing the hide from the wall with a cordless screwdriver.

  I hovered at the opening of the glass in case he needed me to hand him something—and maybe to watch the way his farm boy face set itself in such serious lines as he worked. It wasn’t just my recent lack of companionship that had me so eager to get to know him better. I was turned on by the thought of a guy my age who knew an actual trade, so he didn’t have to live off student loans and checks from their grandmas.

  Awkwardly, though I was burning to connect with him so badly I didn’t care, I ventured, “So you know a lot about, uh....”

  “Why are you here, Web?”

  That stopped me in my tracks. “Huh?”

  He tucked his screwdriver into the pocket of his flannel shirt and looked at me over his shoulder, relaxing as much as the narrow confines of the display case would allow. “It’s pretty plain why I’m here, doing what I’m doing. Learned it from my old man, and maybe someday I’ll get that piece of paper and go into museum work—or maybe I’ll decide none of that really matters, that I don’t want the suits bossing me around and take over dad’s shop so he can retire—spend my time mounting fish trophies and making people happy. But what about you? You don’t strike me as the type to do the guard thing ’cause you flunked out of the police academy.”

  “Heck, no—not that I’ve got anything against cops. This isn’t a car
eer or anything. But I don’t exactly have a lot of options.”

  Jesse pulled a foil packet from his pocket, unwrapped a moistened swab, and stroked at a spot on the edge of the pelt. The swab came away black. He rolled the damp fur gently between thumb and forefinger, studied it closely, and said “There’s always options. Just gotta figure out what they are.”

  I wanted to feel sorry for myself—because, come on, it really isn’t that simple, not with a meningioma pressing into my temporal lobe.

  But what if it was?

  “D’you need help with that?” I asked him.

  “Not right now. It does need to come down, but it’s up here with a million and one screws.” He shot a look at me over his shoulder. His eyes—just this side of naughty. “I’ll call when I need you.”

  While part of me wanted to stand there and watch Jesse grapple with a bison hide, another part of me was glad that he’d not-so-subtly suggested I let him get back to work. I needed time to think.

  Luke was staggering out of the office when I made it back down to the second floor to finally put my lunch in the fridge.

  “You need me to pull your car around?” I asked him, because he looked like he could barely make it out the door, let alone to the far side of the parking lot. Funny, how easy it is to forget shredding my license after George showed up on the CAT scan—though I suspected I could trust myself to make it across the parking lot without an incident.

  “It’s that obvious?” Luke flashed me one of his dazzling smiles. Tanning booth or tooth whitening. Maybe a hint of both. His eyes looked weary around the edges, though. “I guess I’m not used to burning the midnight oil—not in the Center, anyway. Listen, that farm kid needs any help, give him a hand, okay?”

  “Okay.”