Read Online Red Dot Irreal by Jason Erik Lundberg - Free Book Online Page B

favorite choice, although they would never say so to my face. The idea of getting caught in flagrante delicto was an unbelievable turn-on, and our lovemaking in these cases, as it was today, was intense and passionate. We’d both be sore later.
    Afterward, we spooned and I stroked the curve of Nicole’s hip, breathed in her musky post-coital scent. Her full frizzy hair formed a halo on the pillow. I told her about my meeting with Sunita, and the fact that I may not have a job next month, and might even have to move back to the US. She was still for several moments, and I counted the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed shallowly. Then she turned to face me.
    “Is this definite?”
    “She’s going to look and see if she can find anything for me, but it doesn’t look good.”
    “You’d leave me?”
    “Not by choice, sweetness. But they’re making it very difficult for me to stay.”
    “What if—” she started, then closed her eyes, placed a hand on my chest. “What if we got married?”
    “What?” What?
    “If you were married to a Singaporean citizen, you could become a permanent resident. They wouldn’t want to deport you, even if you didn’t have a job right away.”
    “I don’t know, Nic. It’s a big move, and I wouldn’t want to do it for the wrong reasons.”
    She grabbed my chin and looked directly into my eyes. “Do you love me?”
    “You know I do.”
    “Say it. Please.”
    I exhaled. “I love you, Nicole Tan.”
    “Then you’d be doing it for the right reasons. Correct?”
    My heart was performing some fluttery motion within my chest, and the world seemed to ripple, as if I was looking up from underwater. Was I really considering this?
    “Correct,” I said.
    “Good,” Nicole said. “Then will you marry me?”
    Later, after we’d made love a second time, riding the high of our nascent engagement, I left by the back gate, and followed the drainage canal down to the main road and the nearby bus stop. I should have been cavorting and yawping and all those things people do in moments of extreme happiness, but I couldn’t stop the dissenting thoughts from swirling, from telling me it was too soon, she was too young, questioning whether I’d really meant it when I said that I loved her.
    A breeze swept across the canal, bringing a touch of saline carried all the way from the sea. My head and heart felt light and expansive, as if I might float away on that salt-water breeze. At the unoccupied bus stop, I sat down on the orange plastic bench and tried to breathe deeply. After several minutes, another person sat down next to me. All I noticed at first were the khaki-colored capri pants and the purple Chuck Taylors, but then the metal anklet of turquoise orchid petals glinted and caught the sunlight, and I looked up. The biracial woman, half-Chinese half-Caucasian, also wore a white linen blouse, a pair of striped earth-tone suspenders, and a giant purple ring on her left index finger in the shape of the Tibetan Om symbol, and all at once it hit me that I’d seen her before, walking away, middle finger extended.
    “You,” I said.
    “Me,” she said.
    “Should I know you? You seemed angry at me before, at the tea shop.”
    “Look, I don’t have much time to answer that, and I don’t know if I could since that event hasn’t happened to me yet. But I do know a lot of things about you. For example, how you proposed to your girlfriend just now.”
    I edged away from the Eurasian woman, but the bench was short, so I stood up. “How could you possibly ... Who are you? We haven’t told anyone yet. I just, just , got engaged for Christ’s sake!”
    “To you. To me, you’ve been married a long time. To me, you proposed twenty-six years ago.”
    I looked frantically up the street but not a single bus was in sight.
    “Just stop it, okay? It didn’t even happen like that.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “She proposed. Not me.”
    “Are you sure?” The woman sat calmly on the bench