Chapter 5: The Question
1124 Words
Zara asked it on a Sunday.
Not Friday. Not Saturday when Marcus came home from Corner Tap smelling like coffee and carefully constructed calm. Sunday, which was the day Marcus had almost convinced himself he was safe.
They were grocery shopping. Perfectly ordinary. Cart, list, the produce section of Fielder's on Crestfield High. Zara was squeezing avocados with the focused intensity she brought to everything, and Marcus was standing beside her being a normal person, when she said it without looking up.
"Is everything okay with you?"
Marcus picked up a lime. "Yeah. Why?"
"You've been somewhere else all week."
"Work's been heavy."
"You always say that."
"Because it's always true."
She looked at him then. Zara had dark, unhurried eyes that had always made Marcus feel known in a way that was mostly comforting and occasionally terrifying. Right now it was the second thing.
"It's not a work face," she said. "It's a different face."
"I have one face."
"You have three. Work face, tired face, and the one you're doing now which I don't have a name for yet."
Marcus put the lime in the cart. "You're reading into nothing."
"Maybe." She put the avocado back. Picked up another. "Jade said Damon's been weird too."
Marcus went very still.
He did it for less than a second. He was almost certain. He picked up an orange and turned it over in his hands and said, with the voice of a completely innocent man: "Weird how?"
"Distracted. Quiet." She shrugged. "She thinks it's the deal he's working on. Some restructuring thing."
"Probably that," Marcus said.
"Probably." She dropped two avocados in the cart. "I thought maybe you two didn't get on as well as it seemed. That you were being polite."
"I thought he was fine."
"Just fine?"
"He was good company." Marcus kept his eyes on the fruit display. "Jade seems happy with him."
Zara smiled. The warm, uncomplicated smile of a woman whose world was intact. "She really is. I haven't seen her like that in a long time." She grabbed the cart handle and started moving. "We should do it again. The four of us."
Marcus followed her.
"Sure," he said.
The word came out clean. Steady. It landed in the air between them and made no sound at all and Marcus kept walking and thought: I am a person who just said sure to the worst possible suggestion with a completely straight face. He thought about what that meant about him. He thought about the name saved in his phone. He thought about Corner Tap and forty minutes that became ninety and Damon standing in the door saying *I think you just got lucky.*
He put a bag of rice in the cart.
"You'd tell me," Zara said. Not a question.
"Tell you what?"
"If something was wrong."
Marcus looked at her. She was not suspicious. She was not laying a trap. She was just Zara, who loved him plainly and without strategy, asking a plain question because that was how she operated. No architecture. No hidden rooms. Just a woman with avocados and an open face wanting reassurance.
He gave it to her.
"Nothing's wrong," he said. "I promise."
She nodded, satisfied, and turned to check something on her phone, and Marcus stood in the cereal aisle of Fielder's on Crestfield High and felt the specific shame of a man who has just looked someone he loves directly in the eye and lied without flinching.
He had not known he could do that.
That was the part that stayed with him.
---
He texted Damon that night at ten.
Not because he needed to. Not because anything had happened that required communication. He texted him because Zara had fallen asleep reading and the apartment was quiet and his own thoughts had become loud in a way he could not manage alone.
*Jade told Zara you've been distracted.*
Three minutes.
*I know. She mentioned it.*
*You need to be more careful.*
*I know that too.* A pause. *How did you handle it?*
*Told her work was heavy.*
*She believe you?*
Marcus looked at the ceiling. *Yes.*
*You sound like that bothers you.*
He stared at the message. It bothered him that it did not bother him more. That was the precise and uncomfortable truth. He had lied to Zara in a grocery store and the primary emotion was not guilt. It was the dull mechanical relief of having gotten away with it. That was new. He did not like it.
*She asked if we should do it again*, he typed. *The four of us.*
A longer pause this time.
*What did you say?*
*Sure.*
Nothing for a full minute.
Then: *Marcus.*
Just his name. One word sitting in a message bubble doing the work of an entire conversation.
*I know*, he typed back.
*That cannot happen.*
*I said I know.*
*The four of us in the same room right now is not something either of us can manage and you know that.*
Marcus rolled onto his back. He did know that. He had known it the moment the word left his mouth in the grocery store. He had said it anyway because saying no would have required a reason and he had no reason that was not a confession.
*So what do I tell her when she tries to plan it?*
*Tell her you're busy.*
*For how long?*
*Long enough.*
*Long enough for what, Damon.*
The three dots appeared. Stayed for a long time. Longer than usual.
Then: *I don't know.*
Marcus read it twice.
It was the first time Damon had said something he did not have an answer packed behind. Three words with nothing following them, no plan, no clean logic, just a man on the other side of a phone sitting in his own uncertainty for once without dressing it up.
Marcus found it more alarming than anything Damon had said with complete confidence.
*Get some sleep*, he typed.
*Yeah.*
*Damon.*
*What.*
Marcus started typing three different things. Deleted all of them. Settled on the only one that was completely true.
*I hate that talking to you is the only thing that made sense today.*
The three dots appeared immediately.
Stayed.
Disappeared.
The message that came was not what Marcus expected.
*Go to sleep, Marcus.*
He plugged his phone in.
Lay in the dark.
Zara shifted beside him, warm and trusting and completely unaware.
He closed his eyes and thought about sense. About the things that were supposed to make it and the things that weren't. About a man he had known for eight days who had somehow become the clearest signal in a room full of noise.
He did not sleep for a long time.
- Writer
