Dream Wheels Read Online Free PDF Page A

the edge of the sofa. He smoked and she wondered what this turn of silence from him might mean.
    “No,” he said in the darkness as if the word puzzled him. “You tell me no. Funny. I thought you loved me.”
    “I do, Eric,” she said. “I do love you.”
    “Do you?” he asked the darkness. “Do you?”
    He walked over to the small lamp stand and clicked the light on. The room was bathed in a soft yellow glow. He walked to the window and drew the shades across, walked back toward her, and stopped to drain the glass before he spoke again.
    “Love says no?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yes. Sometimes it’s not nice what you do.”
    He grinned. “It’s not supposed to be nice.”
    “That’s not love then,” she said.
    “It’s called making love,” he said, stepping closer. “Making love. It’s how a man does it and you … Well, you just have to learn to like it.”
    “No,” she said. “I don’t.”
    He sat on the edge of the couch. She felt the weight of him, the bulk, the heft and girth of him and she swallowed hard. He poured another shot of whiskey and held it up to the light and gazed at it, studying its amber colour, swirling it a little. Then he tilted it back and swallowed it. All of it.
    “Nice,” he said. “Hmm.”
    He reached back and slipped one large hand around her neck, not gripping, not squeezing, just placed it there while he put the glass on the coffee table with the other. “How’s that? That nice?”
    “No,” she said.
    “There’s that word again.”
    The grip tightened. He turned as he increased the pressure, and Claire’s hands went to his thick wrist. He brushed them off with the other hand, grabbed her around the neck with both and pulled her toward him. She was small. Five foottwo, a shade above a hundred pounds, and he hauled her like a toy. He stood and dragged her across the couch backwards so that her feet slumped to the floor and he pulled her to stand in front of him, his hands still clenched about her neck. “There,” he said. “That’s nice.”
    She looked at him. Steadily. Don’t show fear, she thought, even though the tentacles of it snaked through her belly. Whatever he wanted she would do. Quietly. Wordlessly. Just to get it over with and out of the way. Just so she could move on to the zombie dance, the ritual evening, just so she could get to the sleeping part of her life, the normal part. He smiled at her and she saw the man she’d run into at Smokey’s Bar and Grill, the smooth talker with the laugh lines that punctuated his talk. The salesman that talked her into this new and better model of a life. The one who’d told her that she needed a businessman and not the run-of-the-mill tradesmen and workaday slackers she’d run with until him. The one who’d promised her and the boy a shelter and a rest from all of the endless, tiresome searches she’d been on for love and home and belonging. The one who dressed her up and moved her through her life like a doll in a fancy doll’s house, placing her here, placing her there, telling her how it was going to be until the lights went down and he threw her wherever he wanted. They weren’t laugh lines after all. She saw that now in the light and the strain of his anger. They were wrinkles. Old, tired wrinkles, and he was an old and tired man struggling to stay young through this staged life with a beautiful younger black woman. She saw that clearly right then.
    “You know what else is nice?” he asked.
    She shook her head.
    “This,” he said, sliding the shorts down and pushing her to her knees in front of him.
    She stared at his engorged need and the revulsion was thick in her.
    “Now, be nice,” he said.
    “No,” she said in a whisper.
    His fist crashed into the back of her head and drove her to the floor. She only had a moment to interpret what was happening before he kicked her in the stomach and hauled her to her feet again in front of him.
    “Be nice,” he said again,