Imperial Bedrooms - By Bret Easton Ellis Page 0,18

in bed, lifting a glass filled with champagne to my lips, her face hovering above mine - that maybe she isn't acting with me.

We're shopping at the Bristol Farms on Doheny for another case of champagne in the last week of December when I lose her in one of the aisles and I become dazed when I realize that the market used to be Chasen's, the restaurant I came to with my parents on various Christmas Eves, when I was a teenager, and I try to reconfigure the restaurant's layout while standing in the produce section, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" playing throughout the store, and when nothing comes it's a sad relief. And then I notice Rain's gone and I'm moving through the aisles and I'm thinking about pictures of her naked on a yacht, my hand between her legs, my tongue on her cunt while she comes and then I find her outside, leaning against my BMW talking to a handsome guy I don't recognize, his arm in a sling, and he walks away as I wheel my cart toward them and when I ask her who he was she smiles reassuringly and says "Graham" and then "No one" and then "He's a magician." I kiss her on the mouth. She looks nervously around. I watch her reflection in the window of the BMW. "What's wrong?" I ask. "Not here," she says, but as if "not here" is a promise of somewhere better. The deserted parking lot is suddenly freezing, the icy air so cold it shimmers.

During that week we spend together things aren't completely tracking - there are lapses - but she acts like it doesn't matter, which helps cause the fear to fade away. Rain replaces it with something else that's easy to lose yourself in, despite, for example, the fact that a few of my friends still in town wanted to get together for dinner at Sona but the invitation caused a low-level anxiety in Rain that seemed alien to her nature and this became briefly revealing. ("I don't want to be with anyone else but you" is her excuse.) But the lapses and evasions aren't loud - Rain is still soothing enough for the texts from the blocked numbers to stop arriving and for the blue Jeep to disappear along with my desire to start work again on any number of projects I'm involved with and the long brooding silences are gone and the bottle of Viagra in the nightstand drawer is left untouched and the ghosts rearranging things in the condo have taken flight and Rain makes me believe this is something with a future. Rain convinces me that this is really happening. Meghan Reynolds fades into a blur because Rain demands that the focus be on her, and because everything about her works for me I don't even realize it when it slips into something beyond simply working and for the first time since Meghan Reynolds I make the mistake of starting to care. But there's one dark fact humming loudly over everything that I keep trying to ignore but can't because it's the only thing that keeps the balance in place. It's the thing that doesn't let me fall completely away. It's the thing that saves me from collapsing: she's too old for the part she thinks she's going to get.

So when will you help me?" she asks while we're sitting in the cafe down the street from the Doheny Plaza, idling over a late breakfast, both of us floating away from hangovers with the dope we smoked and Xanax. "I think you should make the calls as soon as possible," she says, looking at herself in a mirror. "Right when everybody comes back, okay?" I'm smiling at her serenely and nodding. I ignore the creases of suspicion on her face even after I remove my sunglasses, and then I assure her with a "Yes" followed by a warm kiss.

This assumed peace lasts only about a week. There's always the possibility of something frightening happening, and then it usually does. Two days before Kelly Montrose's body is found, Rain wakes up and mentions she had a dream that night. I'm already up, taking pictures of her while she sleeps, and now that she's awake she flinches when I take another one and she says that in her dream she saw a young man in my kitchen, a boy, really, but old enough to be desirable, and he was staring at her