Dangerous Women by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

for her casserole dish back.
    “I didn’t know you’d keep it so long,” she said, eyes narrowing.
    She seemed to be trying to look over his shoulder, into the living room. Lorie was watching a show, loudly, about a group of blond women with tight lacquered faces and angry mouths. She watched it all the time; it seemed to be the only show on TV anymore.
    “I didn’t know,” the woman said, taking her dish, inspecting it, “how things were going to turn out.”
    you sexy, sexy boy,
Lorie’s text said.
i want your hands on me. come home and handle me, rough as u like. rough me up.
    He swiveled at his desk chair hard, almost like he needed to cover the phone, cover his act of reading the text.
    He left the office right away, driving as fast as he could. Telling himself that something was wrong with her. That this had to be some side effect of the pills the doctor had given her, or the way sorrow and longing could twist in her complicated little body.
    But that wasn’t really why he was driving so fast, or why he nearly tripped on the dangling seat belt as he hurried from the car.
    Or why he felt, when he saw her lying on the bed, flat on her stomach and head turned, smiling, that he’d burst in two if he didn’t have her. If he didn’t have her then and there, the bed moaning beneath them and she not making a sound but, the blinds pulled down, her white teeth shining, shining from her open mouth.
    It felt wrong but he wasn’t sure why. He knew her, but he didn’t. This was her, but a Lorie from long ago. Except different.
    The reporters called all the time. And there were two that never seemed to leave their block. They had been there right at the start, but then seemed to go away, to move on to other stories.
    They came back when the footage of Lorie coming out of Magnum Tattoo Parlor began appearing. Someone shot it with their cell phone.
    Lorie was wearing those red cowboy boots again, and red lipstick, and she walked right up to the camera.
    They ran photos of it in the newspaper with the headline:
A Mother’s Grief?
    He looked at the tattoo.
    The words
Mirame quemar
written in script, wrapping itself around her hip.
    It covered just the spot where a stretch mark had been, the one she always covered with her fingers when she stood before him naked.
    He looked at the tattoo in the dark bedroom, a band of light coming from the hallway. She turned her hip, kept turning it, spinning her torso so he could feel it, all of it.
    “I needed it,” she said. “I needed something. Something to put my fingers on. To remind me of me.
    “Do you like it?” she asked, her breath in his ear. The ink looked like it was moving.
    “I like it,” he said, putting his fingers there. Feeling a little sick. He did like it. He liked it very much.
    Late, late into that night, her voice shook him from a deep sleep.
    “I never knew she was coming and then she was here,” she was saying, her face pressed in her pillow. “And I never knew she was going and now she’s gone.”
    He looked at her, her eyes shut, dappled with old makeup.
    “But,” she said, her voice grittier, strained, “she was always doing whatever she wanted.”
    That’s what he thought she said. But she was sleeping, and didn’t make any sense at all.
    “You liked it until you thought about it,” she said. “Until you looked close at it and then you decided you didn’t want it anymore. Or didn’t want to be the guy who wants it.”
    He was wearing the new shirt she had bought for him the day before. It was a deep, deep purple and beautiful and he felt good in it, like the unit manager who all the women in the office talked about. They talked about his shoes and he always wondered where people got shoes like that.
    “No,” he said. “I love it. But it’s just … expensive.”
    That wasn’t it, though. It didn’t seem right buying things, buying anything, right now. But it was also how colorful the shirt was, the sheen on it. The bright, hard