Desdemona by Tag Cavello (read e books online free .txt) 📖

the ruckus died down, and they were alone.

“Walk me to the girls’ room,” she said, still looking—looking, as if she could somehow see her adversary, glowing down at the bend.

Dante walked her. He expected to be left waiting while she fixed herself up, but instead she bade him come in. A slightly different version of the bathroom he normally used came into view. The lights were brighter. The stalls were pink instead of green. There were no urinals. Boxes of tissue paper, also pink, bordered the mirror.

Sunny gave him only a moment to notice these, for in the next, she had fallen into his arms, face streaming with tears.

“Hey,” Dante whispered, gathering her close.

“She’s right, Dante,” her voice sobbed. “She’s right.”

“No she’s not.”

Tears spilled onto his shoulder. Dante let them.

When a woman cries you have to let her. It isn’t the same as with a man. She’s not being weak, but strong. She’s purging feelings.

It was one of the few pieces of wisdom he’d gotten from his father over the years. Doubtless he’d been drunk at the time, but Dante called it up now, pulling Sunny in even closer, careful not to let her fall.

“I can’t do anything. I don’t have power at all.”

“Don’t say that.”

“She’s better than me. She’s perfect.”

“Sunny.”

“Why, Dante? Why is it like that?”

“Sunny?”

She looked up at him. Her make-up was a mess. Strands of twisted red hair hung over her eyes. The freckles on her cheeks looked ready to catch fire. She was the most beautiful, fascinating girl Dante had ever known.

“Do you know why that poem I wrote worked so well?”

“No.”

“Because it’s not about Maris. It’s about you. Every word I wrote, I was thinking of you. I thought that would make a fool out of Shaya, letting you sign his name beneath my feelings. But I’m the fool here, Sunny. I should have known love is nothing to be embarrassed about.”

“I’m not even sure I know what love is, Dante. I use the word all the time, but in my family it’s different. Physical pleasure is what drives us. We choose our partners like…plucking fruit from a tree.”

This last was spoken as if she herself couldn’t believe it was real. But it was. Looking into her eyes, Dante found evidence everywhere.

“Is that how you feel about me?”

Her answer was immediate. “Yes. But I have to be careful. We’re still evaluating you.”

“We?”

“Me. My mom. My dad. Because once you’re in, Dante, you’re in. You become my lord and master forever.”

Dante blinked. Here was an odd piece of information. “You mean you become mine? Like property?”

“That’s right.”

He looked at her for a long time, there in the bright bathroom light. The idea of claiming Sunny excited him. Hitherto this moment he’d never thought of their relationship that way. Now, suddenly, that was exactly the way he wanted it.

“Interesting,” he told her at last, giving her body a yet tighter squeeze.

Sunny gave a little mmn sound with the extra effort it now took to draw breath. “But it isn’t love, Dante. You can call it that, and it’s nice. But that isn’t what it is.”

“Okay.”

“Say you love me whenever you like.”

“But you won’t believe it when I do?”

Her head gave a tiny, reluctant shake. “I wouldn’t know how.”

He kissed her. “Don’t worry. I’ll go on loving you anyway. And hey,” he added, “if you don’t know what love is, then how do you know what it isn’t?”

That made her laugh. “Point taken, dear. May I clean up a little at the sink?”

“You may,” Dante said, releasing his hug.

He watched her wash and fix her make-up. Occasionally she would look at him through the mirror to grin, or stick out her tongue.

“You’re feeling better,” Dante observed, before sticking his own tongue out.

“I am. One hundred percent.”

“Thank you, Sunny. Now I feel better, too.”

CHAPTER TWENTY: Sunny Comes To Dinner

On the thirtieth floor of a tower stone cold, Dante fought to his spirit withhold.

 

It was midnight. The power was out. Back-up generators provided dim orange lighting in the halls and some of the meeting rooms. Otherwise, shadows prevailed. Blackness hovered at either end of the room Dante occupied. Before him stood a long table of imitation wood. It gleamed by candlelight. Empty swivel chairs, some of them pulled out as if recently vacated, circled its top.

“There’s something looking for you,” a voice whispered.

Dante squinted to make out its owner. A tall, masculine shape stood on the other side of the table. Clues to its identity lay hidden in its posture, as well as the roundness of its belly.

“Mr. Donati?”

The opera singer stepped into the candlelight. His face looked calm. A vague smile turned the corners of his lips. Yet this was not a face of happy tidings. Bad trouble lurked nearby.

“Remain calm,” Donati said.

“Where am I? What’s going on?”

“We’re on the thirtieth floor—“

He was interrupted by a long, high-pitched shriek from below. The shriek sounded female, though not necessarily human.

Dante looked at the floor. “What was that?”

“Echidna,” Donati replied.

“Who?”

“A very large, powerful creature that wants to eat you. She’s on the twenty-seventh floor. This is the thirtieth. Dante—“

Another shriek, this time from directly beneath their feet.

“Leave the building, Dante. Go straight down. Don’t stop anywhere.”

“Does the elevator still work?” Dante glanced at the door. It stood open. Beyond he could make out—just barely—dim glare on glass walls, a polished floor, a drinking fountain. He turned back to Donati.

But the opera singer had gone. Vanished. Dante was alone.

Leave the building…

He went into hallway on trembling knees. The harsh orange eye of an emergency light glared from the ceiling. To his right lay an exit—the stairs. In the other direction were doors to an elevator.

He chose the elevator. To his relief, the down arrow came on when he pressed it. A motor whirred somewhere. Cables spun. Then the doors whispered open on an empty car lit weakly by a dying bulb.

Dante stepped inside. His finger searched duel columns of numbered buttons. He pressed the letter G. And like curtains over a stage, the doors hushed closed.

Except the show hadn’t ended. Was, in fact, only beginning. The car descended. A red digital read-out near the ceiling moved from 30 to 29. From 29 to 28. Dante held his breath. His lungs were far stronger than Sunny’s. Once he had lasted for two minutes underwater.

28…28…28…

…27.

The car jerked to a stop. Letting out his breath, Dante watched in horror as the doors slid open. The hallway beyond, silent as a buried coffin and nearly as black, seemed to reach toward him, chilling his heart. Visible though the gloom lay a trash can, tipped on its side. Garbage littered the floor in a spray. Something had hit the can hard.

From down the hall, faintly, came a slithery bump. Glass shattered.

Dante pressed the G button again. The doors vibrated on their tracks and slid closed. But the car would not move. Looking up at the display, Dante willed it with all his might. It did no good. The red number 27 refused to change. Instead, the doors slowly moved back open.

Now the can was gone. A body, female, lay in its place. Had that been what it was all along? The head was severed. Dead, horrified eyes shimmered through a thick veil of black hair.

Once more Dante pressed the G button—

And Echidna, wailing, swept into the car, seizing Dante’s throat with thorny claws. He didn’t have time to see much. A pair of yellow eyes, a hissing head of snaky hair, drooling venom. Hungry screams deafened him. Snapping teeth tore him to bits.

Dante’s eyes flew open.

He was in his bedroom. Early morning. Light from State Street’s arc-sodium lamps touched the bed, the desk. His watch read 3:27.

“Sunday,” he said to the ceiling, between deep breaths to slow the race of his pulse.

Dinner day with Sunny. Try as he might, Dante still couldn’t get his mind around how things were going to go with her at the table, munching away on bread and pasta with his parents.

No poisonous snakes, please.

His head settled on the pillow. No snakes—that didn’t seem like a tall request. But with a girl like Sunny, he had to consider whether it might already be too late to ask.

∞

Everything went fine until about half-way through the meal.

They picked Sunny up at 5:30 on the button. She was waiting on the porch, dressed in a yellow cotton skirt and soft blue sweater. A leather jacket, open, hung on her shoulders. Tiny jewels rimmed its pockets.

“Hello Mr. and Mrs. Torn!” she sang, springing down the stairs in her traditional black boots. “It’s a pleasure to meet you!”

She and Dante held hands in the back seat while Mr. Torn navigated the car between large, puffy flakes of gently falling snow. From the passenger side Mrs. Torn, cradling Dukey in her lap, smiled over and over at Sunny, until Dante felt the rear-view mirror must soon arc into a smile too.

“Dante told me you were beautiful…oh, probably a hundred times. I never doubted him, of course, but he does have a tendency to exaggerate—“

“Mom!” Dante shouted.

“Not this time, though. You really are very beautiful.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Torn.”

“Mom.”

Once home Sunny insisted on helping in the kitchen. This pleased Dante’s mother even more. Dante watched her cut garlic bread. Her tiny arms—bare now that her jacket was off, and the sweater sleeveless—moved with dainty, feminine confidence. Each cut looked precisely like the last. Not a crumb touched the plate. Nor, for that matter, did the blade of the knife, as it did so often when he or his father cut, protesting their clumsiness with glassy, jagged barks. With this same confidence she sliced onions and brushed them into the sauce. Then she helped set the table, arranging the silverware just how Mrs. Torn liked it, though she’d never been told.

“Perfect,” she said, standing back to admire her work.

Mrs. Torn had to agree. “It is, Sunny. Wow, do I love having you in the kitchen. I wish you could come over every night. Dante? You lose this girl and I’ll chuck you out your dad’s rover at full speed!”

“Speaking of Dad, where is he?”

“Where do you think? In the living room with the dog.”

A dinner of quiet, thoughtful conversation followed. Dante and Sunny sat across from one another, exchanging diagnostic glances. Occasionally the toe of her boot would give his leg a flirty brush.

“Have you lived in Norwalk all your life?” Mrs. Torn asked.

“No,” Sunny replied. “I was actually born in Ravenna. Portage County. But my dad moved us here when I was very young.”

“What does Mr. Desdemona do for a living?”

Dante’s eyebrows perked up at this. All year he’d never once asked Sunny about Brenton’s occupation. What did he do, anyway?

“He’s president of a company that services very old boilers,” Sunny said. “New boilers, too, but it’s the old ones that bring in the money. Parts for those are so hard to find. Hardly anyone makes them anymore.”

“And no wonder,” said Mrs. Torn. “Aren’t those things dangerous?”

“The old ones? Absolutely. You never want to get near one with low PSI tolerance.” Smiling, Sunny put down her fork and made a sweeping gesture with her hands. “Boom! You know?”

“Not intimately, thank goodness. But I can imagine well enough.”

“Mrs. Torn I’d just like to say that this pasta is delicious. It tastes just like my own mom’s. I love it.”

“Why thank you!”

The boot touched Dante’s leg again. How am I doing? her face asked over the table. Dante reached down to give her bare knee a gentle stroke. There were freckles on that knee, he knew. Cute ones. They would drive him crazy if he let them.

“Dante tells me your grades at school are very good,” said Mr. Torn.

“Yeah,” Sunny told him. “I keep my head above water.”

“You do better than that according to him. Straight As.”

“Reading interests me. Non-fiction. My dad says fiction is a waste of time.”

“He’s right,” came Mr. Torn’s assertive reply. “Very, very right. I’m always trying to get Dante away from his comic