Night Prey

the dress. She took off the jeans, stripping for him again, exciting him. She picked up the dress, pulled it over her head, smoothed it down.
    “Are you going out, Sara?”
    She looked in the mirror again, one hand on her ass, then took the dress off, tossed it on the bed, and looked thoughtfully at her chest of drawers. Walked to the chest, opened the bottom drawer, and took out a pale-blue cotton sweat suit. She pulled it on, pushed up the sleeves on the sweatshirt, went back to the mirror. Pulled off the sweatshirt, took off the bra, pulled the sweatshirt back on.
    Koop frowned. Sweat suit?
    The dress had been simple but elegant. The jeans casual but passable at most places in the Cities. But the sweat suit? Maybe she’d just been trying on stuff. But if so, why all the time in the bathroom? Why the sense of urgency?
    Koop turned away, dropped behind the duct, lit a Camel, then rolled onto his knees and looked back through her window. She was standing in front of her mirror, flipping her hair with her hands. Brushing it back: breaking down its daytime structure.
    Huh.
    She stopped suddenly, then ducked back at the mirror, gave her hair a last flip, then hurried—skipped once—going out of the bedroom, into the front room, to the door. Said something, a smile on her face, then opened the door.
    Goddamn it.
    The blond guy was there. He had a chin on him, a butt-chin, with a dimple in it. He was wearing jeans and a canvas shirt, looking as tousled as she did. She stepped back from him, pulled a piece of her sweat suit out from her leg, almost as if she were about to curtsy.
    Butt-chin laughed and stepped inside and leaned forward as if he were about to peck her on the cheek, and then the peck ignited and they stood there in each other’s arms, the hallway door still open behind them. Koop rose to a half-stoop, looking across the fifty feet of air at his true love in another man’s arms. He groaned aloud and hurled his cigarette toward them, at the window. They never saw it. They were too busy.
    “Motherfuckers. . . .”
    They didn’t go out. Koop watched in pain as they moved to the couch. He realized, suddenly, why she had rejected the jeans and vacillated between the dress and the sweat suit: access.
    A guy can’t get his hands in a tight pair of jeans, boyo. Not without a lot of preliminaries. With a sweat suit, there were no barriers. No problems getting your hands in. And that’s where Blondy’s were—in Sara’s loose sweatpants, under her loose sweatshirt, Sara writhing beneath his touch—before they went to the bedroom.
     
     
     
    BLONDY STAYED THE night.
    So did Koop, huddled behind the vent on the air-conditioner housing, fading from consciousness to unconsciousness—not exactly sleep, but something else, something like a coma. Toward dawn, with just the light jacket, he got very cold. When he moved, he hurt. About four-thirty, the stars began to fade. The sun rose into a flawless blue sky and shone down on Koop, whose heart had turned to stone.
    He felt it: a rock in his chest. And no mercy at all.
     
     
     
    HE HAD TO wait more than an hour in the light before there was any movement in Sara Jensen’s apartment. She woke first, rolled over, said something to the lump on the other side. Then he said something—Koop thought he did, anyway—and she moved up behind him, both of them on their sides, talking.
    Two or three minutes later, Blondy got up, yawning, stretching. He sat naked on the bed, his back to Koop, then suddenly snatched the blankets down. Sara was there, as naked as he was, and he flopped on top of her, his head between her breasts. Koop turned away, squeezed his eyes shut. He just couldn’t watch.
    And he just couldn’t not watch. He turned back. Blondy was nibbling on one of Sara Jensen’s nipples, and Sara, back arched, her hands in his hair, was enjoying every second of it. The stone in Koop’s heart began to fragment, to be replaced by a cold, unquenchable anger. The fucking whore was taking on another man. The fucking whore . . .
    But he loved her anyway.
    He couldn’t help himself.
    And couldn’t help watching when she pushed him flat on the bed, and trailed her tongue from his chest down across his navel. . . .
     
     
     
    THE BLOND GUY finally left at seven o’clock.
    Koop had stopped thinking long before that. For an hour, he’d simply been waiting, his knife in his hand. He occasionally ran it down his face, over his beard, as if he were shaving. He was