Novelization Sunday – Chapter 34

Pieter

 

He’s ashamed, and knows that he’s lost her.  Twenty years from now, they’ll be married and living in another city, another state, another country.  They’ll be mostly happy.  But not completely.  He’s lost her.  She’ll remember the time he fucked her on the sofa.  And she’ll remember the day – the day when her son’s murderer was arrested.

Now that he’s cum, he believes it may have been a fair exchange – a scar in their relationship for the satisfaction.  He had gotten used to multiple orgasms each day.  To be robbed of that for even a week has clouded his senses.

When he returns across the hall to the apartment he shares with his wife, Ynez, Pieter debates if he should dial another woman he knows for more stimulation.  A teasing conversation over the wire.  He stopped contacting other lovers when he found Lucinda, but he has numbers and names hidden in a shoebox.

On the image pipe running across his front wall, the Media repeats details from the news conference.  Some opportunistic beat reporter has uncovered the names of the 3 dead from the home invasion.  A map glows onscreen with an ‘X’ marking ground zero of the violence.  Underneath the map runs the following:

SUSPECT’S NAME AND IMAGE NOT RELEASED.  POLICE COMMISSIONER CALLS MEETING OF FAMILIES FOR 2 PM AT CITY CONVENTION CENTER.  DETAILS TO FOLLOW.

Pieter will write the details down when they are displayed.  He will give them to Lucinda and her husband, when he returns.  They will thank him.  They will go off together to the meeting and not invite Pieter or Ynez.  Later that night, Lucinda will tell her husband that she’s been fucking the neighbor and there will be a terrible fight.  Lou Lamarche will smash three of his favorite clocks and then try to glue the pieces back together with a tube of expired micro-cement found in a drawer of scotch tape, scissors, and twine.  None of the repairs will work and he’ll instead hurl the broken clocks on his neighbor’s doorstep with a note.

I DON’T WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN EVER.

Ynez will ask her husband what’s happened, and, though Pieter can project these events in his the future, he doesn’t yet know how he’ll answer.