Red
Meghan Vertentes
The ring on my finger feels heavier today. I twist it left, then right. With each movement, the weight shifts, but it does not go away. Frowning, I lean back onto the motel bed’s headboard, a slight creak emerging from the bed frame. Streams of moonlight filter into the room from one of the dirt-streaked windows, speckling the floral comforter with an eerie glow. A scratched wooden nightstand, bare except for a crooked reading light and a red Gideon’s Bible we had found in its top drawer, stands beside me. “What the fuck do we need a Bible for?” she had asked, slamming the drawer shut and throwing the book at me. I caught it and flipped aimlessly through its thin white pages. Genesis. Exodus. Leviticus. “Besides, who the hell is Gideon?” “I think he was a judge or something,” I had replied, sitting on the bed. It had sagged under my weight with an exaggerated sigh. “The name sounds familiar. I think I learned about him back in Sunday school.” As I slid out of my shoes and stretched my socked feet out in front of me, I placed the book on the nightstand. “Whatever,” she had huffed, opening the door leading into the adjoining bathroom, “Reading one measly book isn’t going to purge me of my sins. But a shower might.” That was twenty minutes ago. I hear the water come to a dripping stop and her shuffling feet in the other room. I adjust the ring properly back onto my finger and cover it with my other hand just as the bathroom door opens. Wearing nothing but a pink, mid-thigh length silk robe, she picks her way across the garish gold coloured carpet, barefoot. She sits on the cracked leather chair where I had thrown my blue dress shirt earlier, seductively smiling, making a show of crossing her pale legs, à la Sharon Stone. Wet black hair streams down her back like an ink-coloured waterfall as I watch her pull a cigarette out of her robe’s pocket and place it between her lips, lighting it with the lighter in her hand. “You look good,” I say, glancing at her slender body, hidden beneath the silk. It was a body I was no stranger to. “I try,” she says with a laugh. She takes a long drag of the cigarette and breathes out a stream of smoke. I wave my right hand in front of my face. “I don’t think you’re allowed to smoke in here,” I say. “The maids will smell it when they come in here to clean tomorrow morning.” “Clean!” she chortles. “God, where the hell do you think we are? A five-star hotel?” She puffs out a smoke-filled smile, this one aimed directly at me. “God, you are so adorable. No wonder she thinks you still love her.” She. The mere word reverberates throughout my entire body. The she I see every morning when I wake up and every night when I go to sleep. The she, in desperation for something more than living a banal existence day in day out, I had begun to distance myself from. The she I had told this morning, and subsequent mornings for the past few weeks, “I have a business conference. I’ll only be gone for a few days.” A single lie. A multitude of lies.
But for what?