Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,52
circles to a slow, throbbing song in a dark room, but the more she clung to me, limp and happy, the more I lost all interest. The sad fact was that I didn’t know what to do with a docile female. That made me sound like a fucking rapist, but I was married to a prizefighter who used to beat the shit out of me every night, bruising me until I begged for more. I didn’t understand desire without pain.
I’d been married to Logan for twenty years and I’d been committed the entire time, even after she lost any interest in bruising me and started spending all her time with a man half her age. Strike was the only thing keeping us together now. It was the child neither of us could abandon.
And now, in another gym on the other side of the country, here was a woman who seemed like the opposite of Logan—tightly wrapped, so perfectly contained her beauty was almost invisible—blazing into a hard-breathing, laser-eyed, rose-cheeked boss. Every word she spoke was stripped, flayed, and measured. She wasted nothing. With any other woman I would assume this text game was all a taunt, some trap designed to make me fall flat on my would-be-cheating face, but I’d bet everything in my wallet that wasn’t the case. She was utterly sincere.
“What’s your name?” I had to know.
“Nora.” She turned her phone off and picked up the magazine, getting ready to leave.
A name meant to be moaned. I repeated it and held out a hand, waiting for her to shake it. When she did, I noticed a faint purple shadow cresting her knuckles. I paused, staring at the mark, before remembering my manners.
“I’m—”
She pulled her hand quickly out of mine.
“Your name”—she placed a single finger over my mouth, and it took every ounce of my willpower not to bite down on it—“is Atticus.”
She brushed my lip, examining it, and smiled.
“I’m in room 412. Give me a half an hour and bring your glasses.”
Four months later, crossing the Mississippi, I wondered if I’d had the slightest effect on her. I’d relived that morning so many times, but what had I been to her? A placeholder. A pair of glasses and a smile. Maybe I’d never been in bed with this woman. I’d only imagined I was there because of the mundane fact of our bodies unraveling inside each other.
She didn’t answer my question, but as we reached the end of the bridge asked one of her own. “Have you talked to Logan?”
“About Atlanta?”
“No.” For the first time, she looked unsure. “I saw … something … last night.” Her next question caught me by surprise. “Does Logan know any of my partners at Parrish?”
“I don’t think so. Why? What did you see?”
“An explosion.”
We were back in time again, but now with the present superimposed. Nora and I stood in front of Logan’s old apartment building, the place she’d refused to give up after we’d bought the penthouse. The neighborhood had changed, gentrified by an influx of artisans, craft brewers, and endless baby boomers downsizing on the north bank, but the brick twelve-plex looked as dirty and neglected as I remembered it.
“What are we doing here?”
“Following an email. Can you let us in?”
I pulled out my keys and found the one Logan had given me twenty years ago, after I’d moved here from Chicago, our young selves bursting with plans for a future people had called delusional, impossible. That future seemed almost quaint now. Inside, the entryway had the musty odor of disuse. I started up the stairs, but Nora stopped me and made me check the mailbox. Dozens of letters fell out when I opened it, all of them identical. I caught one before it spilled to the floor and stared at the envelope. The return address said Magers Construction, the company contracted to build all our new clubs, and the letter was addressed to Strike.
“What the hell?”
GREGG
I UNLOCKED LOGAN’S old apartment door and went straight to the table, dropping the pile of letters on it. Nora reached for the top one.
“Who is Magers Construction?”
“They’re a premier architectural, engineering, and construction firm, specializing in historical preservation of existing buildings. They’ve built every Strike club across North America.”
Nora showed no reaction to this information and I got the feeling she already knew the answer. She must have known about the letters, too, since she brought me here. Did she already know what was inside of them?
As if on cue, she set her