Low Pressure

“Yes.”

“Too bad. I’m not talking about it any more tonight.”

He rolled the sheets into a ball, which he crammed into a wicker hamper in the bathroom, then moved to the closet and began rummaging through the items jammed onto the shelves above the rod. “There are some clean sheets around here somewhere.”

“Why won’t you fill in this one gap for me?”

He stepped around her carrying a set of sheets to the bed.

“What don’t you want me to remember?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Grab that corner, will you?”

Absently she fit the contour sheet over the corner of the mattress, then straightened and looked down at the bed. “What are you doing?”

“Changing the sheets so you won’t be offended when you come to bed.”

She watched him tug the top sheet into place. He held a pillow with his chin and pulled the case over it. “You think that fresh sheets will change my mind about us sleeping together?”

“I don’t know what you have in mind, A.k.a., but all I plan to do is sleep. I’m exhausted and, honestly, no longer in the mood.” He gave her a critical once-over. “Besides, you look like something out of the Thriller video. No offense.”

He patted the button fly of his jeans. “It stays done up for the rest of the night, so don’t even think about trying to cop a feel while my eyes are closed. In fact, thanks to the shithead with the snake tattoo, I’ll probably have to sleep on my stomach.” He motio

ned toward the far wall. “Catch the lights.”

He lay down on his stomach and socked the pillow until he got it the way he wanted it, then laid his head on it and closed his eyes.

Feeling helpless to do anything else, Bellamy walked over to the wall switch and killed the overhead light, then felt her way back to the bed. She toed off her shoes but lay down on her back fully clothed and tense, aware of him next to her, and mistrustful of his pledge to sleep and nothing more.

After several minutes, he mumbled, “You can relax. I’m not going to choke you with your panties while you sleep.”

“If you’d wanted to kill me, you would have done so by now.”

“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

She’d caught only a glimmer of the memory, but it had been an important one. Dent was withholding the rest of it from her, and she needed to know why. She longed to free all of it from her subconscious, to watch the scene at the boathouse in its entirety, to hear the argument between him and Susan to its conclusion.

She sensed that the quarrel between them was pivotal to the events that had come afterward, and that if she could remember it, she would remember much more.

Speaking quietly into the darkness, she said, “If it was insignificant, you would tell me what I saw or overheard.”

He lay silently.

“Which means that my memory is blocking something important.”

He didn’t say anything.

“You didn’t love Susan.”

Silence.

“Did you even like her?”

“Bellamy?”