Thy Neighbor Read Online Free

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    Meanwhile, the razor-burned bucks in—what else?—business casual can get good and nasty on Jägermeister and Red Bull before they turn their guns on the girls.
    The Swan also serves something they have the hayseed pretension to call New American tapas, which means that the iceberg lettuce may have the odd pecan or pomegranate seed drowning in the usual bog of bacon-bitted blue cheese, and the pumpkin vegetable lasagna, gamely disguised with a sprig of wilted parsley and a Zorro drizzle of salad cream, came from the “healthy options” aisle of the freezer section at Kroger.
    The cuisine is septic enough that, if you have to eat something, either to soak up the swill or to keep your speech coherent for as long as it takes to get Gloria to give you what you came for, you’re well advised to go veggie. I don’t doubt that some poor portly middle manager has been paralyzed from the waist down by tainted meat he ate here and never heard from again.
    Monica stood out in this crowd at first glance, mostly because you didn’t feel you had to take her out back and hose her down to get a sense of what she really looked like. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and she was beautiful, just plainly beautiful, standing there, silent and staid, animally alert, an incongruous still point in the hustling throng.
    I don’t remember what we said to each other that night, if anything. I only remember walking to and opening the bar’s front door for us, mechanically and with complete confidence in what was to follow, as if we had been married for twenty years and were leaving a party the way couples do when the desire to go on socializing has been suddenly and powerfully outweighed by the need to be home alone.
    What a relief. What a surprising joy. Not to have to eke out the usual pleasantries to a pair of vacant Girl Scout’s eyes batting their lashes at you as furiously as they can through the resinous crud that’s been applied to them. How refreshingly cool to be just as angry as the other person, and just as loath to varnish the introductions.
    I’m almost certain she didn’t say a fucking thing, or even indicate. Not as I walked to the door, not as I opened it and looked across the room at her with all that blunt assumption that had no basis in anything but instinct. Not as I waited for her, not as she slid by me, not as I passed behind her into the parking lot, walking five paces behind, watching all her perfect lonely details expose themselves unawares.
    She would have felt my eyes on her, unsure, lingering on her scapulae, marking them in tempo, sawing back and forth beneath the skin, pushing out, announcing themselves again and again, a fair warning as she walked, arms swinging freely, hands clenching and unclenching slowly into fists.
    Her hair was boyishly short, a cap cropped close enough to show the cowlicks in back, where the soft pelt conformed to a swirl and, under the light, revealed the glints of red in it. The hairline ended in a playful point just left of her spine and a delta of pale down that spread, paler and finer down the nape, and disappeared.
    I felt nothing sexual. Except rage. That old thing, boiling up in me and breaking into a rank ammoniac sweat, reeking up to meet her own rage, which itself had been evident from the start, and smelled strongly sour, too, of cat’s piss and onions. I would have laughed at this last bit then, or even laughed at it now, but I have too little perspective to wholly scorn the inelegance of our—our what?—our little feral union, call it? Our less than poetic coming together?
    Whatever.
    The act and the emotion are both trite, even by allusion, and were then. I can’t correct that. We reeked and we fucked. What else?
    I didn’t feel desire, except the desire to do violence to myself by dint of her. I suffocated myself in her, gratifying with another what I had only half accomplished alone, in secret and with