Shred of Evidence

I stared at the darkened apartment window, waiting for the light to come on, waiting for my heart to break. Darcy sat in the passenger seat beside me, flipping through US Weekly to see who’s dating/cheating/newly anorexic this week.

“Lindsay Lohan?”

“Fake,” I said, straining my eyes to peer through the fogged window of the borrowed Camry.

“Why?”

“They came out of nowhere. One day, little A-boobs like mine, the next day two round softballs poking out of all her tank tops.”

Darcy nodded in agreement. “Jessica Simpson?”

“Real.”

“Real? Mallory, you’ve got to be kidding me. She has one-percent body fat and D-size ta-tas.”

“So do you,” I said, eyeing her skin-tight pink blouse.

“Yeah, but I’m six feet tall. My boobs are proportional. Simpson is petite like you.”

I sighed, sick of the real-or-fake-boobs game. “I still say they’re real. They sag slightly.”

Darcy snorted and flipped the page. We were best friends, though about as alike as a nun and a whore. Me being the nun, Darcy being the whore. I had spent the last year in a relationship while she hopped from bed to bed like a jackrabbit on Viagra. Men were drawn to her like moths to a flame. She was dark and mysterious, and I know she held a cavern of secrets inside. Sometimes she got this look on her face, as if she were thinking about something in her past, a memory that would chill me to the marrow if I could mind-read. Despite our differences, I loved her. She was the most loyal friend I would ever have.

Unlike my boyfriend.

The problem with Ben Remick was that he was too fucking gorgeous. His flawless skin and blue eyes and muscular chest and powerful legs, taking it all in at once hurt my eyes. Ben was a caricature of the perfect boyfriend. His exaggerated good looks blinded me to the asshole he really was. He would lean against my face and whisper he loved me into my ear so that I couldn’t see his eyes, which were on someone else. He would buy me roses with money he stole from my wallet.

I didn’t see all this at first, though, and he always had plausible excuses for the scent of perfume on his neck or the callers that would hang up when I answered. Tonight was about proof. Darcy told me I needed to see it for myself to be able to cut the cord that bound my heart to his.

The window was still dark. That probably meant my boyfriend was still fucking the blonde that lived on the second floor of the concrete slab of an apartment building we were staking out.

Darcy flipped the page, loud, jarring me from my thoughts.

“Can you please throw that trash away so we can focus?” I snapped.

“We don’t need two people to stare at a building. We can take turns.”

I rolled my eyes, and she tossed the magazine on the floor with a grunt.

“I know what I’m doing,” she said. “Staking out is in my blood. I have two cousins that are P.I.’s.”

“So, maybe we should call them.”

“And what, pay them a hundred bucks an hour to sit here and adjust their balls? We’re doing fine ourselves.”

Then light filled the window on the second floor, snapping my attention back to the job at hand. Darcy followed my eyes, and we stared out of the fogged windows of the darkened Camry we borrowed from her brother. A car that fit in anywhere. One that Ben wouldn’t recognize or notice.

Two silhouettes formed in the muted light of the apartment, behind the sheer curtains. They moved like one beast with four groping arms. Then they pulled apart, and the blonde threw back her head in laughter, her long hair cascading down the shadow of her back. My heart stopped for one long moment, then began pounding again, each one more like a painful throb than a beat, as if my heart had grown barbs that stabbed my insides with every pump.

“Who’s that?” Darcy asked, and I tore my eyes from the viscerally painful sight in the window to the sidewalk below where a man stood, his face lifted up to watch the show.

“Some pervert,” I said, my voice shaking with hurt. “He’s probably jerking off watching Ben and the blonde go at it.”

The man lowered his face and stormed off, entering a phone booth at the end of the block.

Both of my hands were on the wheel, drained of color with pale, lifeless fingers. Darcy placed one hand on mine and whispered in her husky voice, “I’m sorry, Mallory.”

I shrugged, a solitary tear carving a path down my cheek. “I knew it anyway. I just had to see it with my own eyes. I needed proof.”

“Still must hurt like a bitch.”

“Yeah.”

I glanced back up to the window in time to see Ben lean in for one last kiss as he plunged his arms into his jacket. Then the blonde stood alone in the window. I wondered how long it had been going on. I knew she probably wasn’t the first and wouldn’t have been the last. I wondered if she had a boyfriend, too. One that trusted her completely as she turned around and gave herself to other men. I wondered how he would react if he were watching right now. I wondered if he’d bother to shed a tear for her as I was for Ben.

I collected myself, clearing my throat before I spoke. “So, what’s the next step? Should I confront him right now or wait until he gets home?”

Darcy had her eyes on the guy in the phone booth. It pissed me off that this was my utmost time of need and she was ignoring me to check out another guy, probably wondering how many inches he had in his pants.

“Darcy! Are you listening to me?”

“He never made a phone call.” Her voice was distant, as if she were calculating something in her head as she spoke.

“What?”

The door of the building opened, and Ben burst onto the sidewalk, pulling his coat tight against the cold night air. I slouched slightly in my seat, though he didn’t even look at the Camry.

The guy blasted out of the phone booth and bolted down the sidewalk toward Ben, who stood still, a goofy-sexually-satisfied smile on his face. A smile I recognized so intimately that I cringed.

In seconds, the guy was in front of Ben, and his right arm pumped quickly in short movements, three, four, five times. Before I even understood what was happening, he was gone, into the darkness of the alley between the buildings, and Ben was slouching down the wall and falling to the ground, clutching his stomach where a small circle of red spread like a fire across his belly.

I blinked hard, my breath catching in my throat, my barbed-heart beating wildly. “What do we do?” I asked Darcy, panicked.

Darkness clouded her eyes in that familiar, frightening way as she turned to face me. “You start the engine and you drive away. Whoever that guy was, he’s already done the dirty work.”