Delilah sat in the backseat, twirling her hair around her finger, while Chance whistled along with the radio. The last time we were together, I only saw the top of her head. Then a flash of white, as the knife entered my stomach, then the Baltimore skyline. Her aura was putting on a favorite shirt that had been borrowed by someone twenty pounds heavier. Familiar, comfortable, unsettling. Her perfume filled the car, like wind-blown jasmine and a struck match. Her mouth could make a man sterile. She pursed her lips in an air-kiss and I realized I’d been staring at her in the mirror.

“Cole, can you light me a cigarette?” she cooed.

I told her that I’d quit, but patted my pockets anyway, knowing they were empty.

“Since when?”

“When I met Amy.”

Del clucks like a mad chicken, then bursts into a giggling fit.

“Shut up, you cow,” Chance said. He tossed his case and a lighter into the backseat. “Now, when are we due?”

“Three weeks,” she said in a cloud of smoke.

“That’s unacceptable,” he said.​

“That’s life.” She handed the case and lighter to me. “We’ll meet in two to discuss final arrangements.”

I wiped my forehead. My hand shone in the sun, covered in sweat. The scent of burning insulation and pine trees smothered me.”‘I need to go. I need to get out of the car.”

Chance laid a reassuring hand on my thigh, while Delilah just cackled.

“No, really,” I said. “Stop and let me out.”

“You know, Cole, you keep saying that, but then you follow me like a duckling.”

“I need to get back to the job.”

Chance squeezed my leg. “Where else did you think we were going?”

“I’d like to see it,” Delilah said. “Is it going to be ready in time?”

“That’s a great question.” He looked at me, smiling like a mongoose. “Will you be ready, Cole?”

I tucked my hands between my legs, trying to conceal their trembling from him. A woman pushed a baby stroller down the street, trailed by one child holding a baseball bat, another skipping rope. Looking out the window as if bored, I visualized Amy’s hair cascading from the fur-trimmed hood like a blonde waterfall, her whistle on the woman’s tongue.

Breath, warm on my neck. Delilah’s voice next to me. “Remember when I tied you up with that jump rope?”

“Yes,” I said. Arctic fingers compressed my spine and a warm, familiar sensation spread through my thighs. Anticipation. “Yes, the house will be ready.”

“Good,” he said. “Now where can we get a burger around here?”

“I thought we were going back to the job!”

Something hit me on the back of the head. An orange plastic bottle with a prescription label fell into my lap.

“Jesus, take a few of those,” Del said. “You know, Cole, you used to be a lot more fun.”

Chance decided to take mercy on me and we pulled up to the site five minutes later. I hurried away from the car as quickly as I could while remaining inconspicuous, following the echo of Paddy’s voice to the kitchen like a dolphin finding a safe cove. He stood beneath a light fixture, telling one of the day laborers how to rewire it.

“You’d think red, green and yellow would translate worldwide.” He coughed, spit on the floor and covered it with his boot.

“Rojo, verde and amarillo.”

“Huh?”

“That’s how you say red, green and yellow in Spanish.”

He considered me with a long glare then invited me to give myself an enema with a kitchen implement. “How was your coffee date?”

“It wasn’t a date.”

From down the hallway, I heard Delilah’s laugh. I debated whether to slink away to the basement and wait until they were gone or jump through the plate-glass back door and sprint home to Amy. Instead, I stood and waited, as if I would’ve done anything else.

“Mrs. Miller, nice to see you again.” Paddy rushed forward and shook her hand, kissed her knuckles like a regal gentleman. “I was just about to walk through the plans with Cole here. Reckon you’d like to join us?”

“That would be lovely.” She wrapped her fingers between Chance’s and we followed them upstairs, Paddy pointing out which doors to replace, which walls to knock down, which fixtures to keep and which wires to wrap around her neck until threads of veins filled her eyes. I floated in and out of the conversation.

In the last room upstairs, Paddy and Chance were drawing theoretical blueprints in the air, their backs towards us. Delilah drifted around the room, cupping my crotch when she passed in front of me. I was less than pleased to realize I had a massive erection. Chance said something about for the kids.

“Yes, darling,” she said. “This would be the perfect room for the kids to play.” She stood behind him and gave a quick kiss on the neck. Paddy blushed. I swallowed bile. I wanted to bite off her lips.

We made our way through the rest of the house, Chance and Paddy breaking off to discuss remodels, Delilah wrapping extension cords around her wrists and grinding her pelvis against my leg.

Twice I saw Chance smile and wondered if he was watching in the window reflection. She’d pull away just as Chance turned around and asked my opinion of Paddy’s plans. I’d give the answer that Amy would like, as if invoking her presence as the single light in this lurid scene and superimposing our life on the house so that it wouldn’t implode.

Eventually, they were called away for other business—to lead a bondage ceremony or roast children over a trashcan fire or file their taxes: any were just as likely—and left the house to Paddy and me. While he argued with a distributor on the phone, I worked upstairs, repeatedly sinking a 20-pound sledge into a wall, watching the asbestos and drywall burst in the air and drift down like snowflakes. This room would be a nursery. Without closing my eyes, I could see cartoon jungle creatures parading around the chair-rail, the stuffed animal mobile hanging over a bamboo crib, the blanket Amy’s grandmother sewed for her as an infant lying over our child. I could smell the baby oil, the cotton diapers, the warm musk of innocent child. I could hear Amy’s whisper-singing, tiny breathing.

I kicked out the last part of the wall, wiped the paste from my face and headed home before Chance or Delilah could make a surprise return visit.

“Assholedickwhore,” reverberated in the bathroom as I walked through the front door of our apartment.

“Everything copasetic in there?”

“Out in a second.” She could be singing a French lullaby or uttering something that would make Joe Pesci blush, yet her voice was always as soothing as an ocean breeze. I threw my shirt across the room and fell onto the bed, pressing against my eyelids until I saw circus shapes. They swirled and twisted and bled into an oblong shape that resembled Del’s head after being hit with a hammer.

“Hey you,” Amy said. My hair stood on end.

“Thank God.” I wrapped my arm around her neck and pulled her onto me. “You smell good.”

She nestled her face into my chest, stroking my nipples. Her breath made my hair flutter. “You stink,” she whispered.

“What was all the commotion about?”

“Stupid toilet.” Her voice reverberated inside me. “You know how it wobbles when you sit, and I’ve been saying we’re going to end up in the middle of the apartment downstairs?”

“But you’re not downstairs.” That got me a pinched nipple.

“We will be soon. Stupid thing broke through part of the floor.”

“Shit.”

“I was.” She bit her lip at her own pun.

“You are one sick bird.”

I draped her hair over my face, inhaled and let her fill my lungs. Feeling her body rise and fall, I patterned my breathing after hers, like ouroboros, unending. As the haze of sleep began to drift over us, she looked up, smoothed my eyebrows with her fingertips.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, why?” Her hand was a feather over my cheek, brushing the debris of the day, of Boston, down to the floor to be buried by dust.

“Just asking. You don’t seem okay.”

Chance and Delilah flashed on the back of my skull like a flare, mouths lurid and dripping.

” “Long day.” I pressed my lips on her forehead. “I’m fine.”

Her pelvis pressed against my thigh, toes caressing my calves. She brushed hair from my forehead and put her lips next to my ear. “Today’s the day,” she said.

“What?”

She started to speak, caught her words, then blushed and whispered, “I’m ovulating.”

Before I could even get pissed off, I caught myself, realizing that it couldn’t have been any other way than this. Penance and retribution. All that Catholic nonsense Chance and Del’s parents used to go on about. The inevitability almost made me laugh.

“Amy, sweetie, I—” and her finger on my lips, her thighs straddling my hips, quieted me. She leaned down, said, “Just lie there,” and pulled her shirt over her head. Shadowed ribs like xylophone bars. Hips jutting out like seashells. Neck extended like an alabaster giraffe, begging to be bitten. I closed my eyes and dissolved into the warmth of her.

After she came, after she did her alternating-knee sperm-magnet routine, after she curled against my body and was softly snoring into my neck, I lay on my back and stared at the watermark cracks in the ceiling. Faces and scenes and whispered exchanges crashed inside my skull. I saw Chance and Delilah, holding hands inside the home they were going to use as a stash-house, as Paddy gave the grand tour. I saw the look on the Russian cashier’s face in Royal Farm. The fear, the respect. I saw Amy’s smile, her golden hair swimming among the debris of Boston, the shards of a life I abandoned. I saw myself lying in an alley with ice picks stabbed in my eyes.