Page 173 of Two Marlboros

“Alright, I got it. Just a minute.”

Church and Ashton got up, walked out of the room and joined Alan, and then all three of them disappeared. They left me alone with my thoughts to which I did not want to return, at least not entirely. It was true, though, that Harvey was snorting stuff and that I had rebelled against the way he had treated me. Could it be that he was tied to Ryan and his circle, that the cell phone was theirs, and that Harvey had used me as a scapegoat because I no longer wanted to submit to his games? Yet it didn’t make sense, because such a hypothesis would have implied premeditation - after all, Harvey couldn’t have known I was going to screw him that night, and certainly, if he had anything to do with it, he couldn’t have decided to retaliate on the spur of the moment. Such an idea implied that Ryan and Harvey had been planning it all along, from the very beginning, from the dayhe reappeared, and that was a crazy assumption--and one that gave me the creeps.

The three of them came back after a while, holding the usual paper where I took full responsibility for what I had stated. I signed and, after we had said our goodbyes as scripted, I left that room with an incredible lightness on one side and an unprecedented heaviness on the other.

Just before leaving the station, now almost at the entrance, I was called back by Alan. My heart lost a beat, but not out of romanticism; I was still a little tense, but there was no anxious expression on his face.

“Has something happened?” I asked.

“No, don’t worry about that. I just wanted to tell you that you are likely to be summoned again in the next few days.”

I looked up, but when I returned my eyes to Alan, I was seized by a sudden revelation. Memories crowded my mind and anger heated every inch of my body in an instant.

“Fuck,” came out of nowhere. “It was you!”

He frowned for a moment and his face became tense. “What are you talking about?”

He was trying to dissimulate, it was clear, but the look on his face spoke volumes for him. Moment by moment it all became more and more blatant, and anger began to mount in my chest as all the last memories I had with him began to taint the suspicion I had had.

“You didn’t come to me to be together,” I said, my breath getting heavier word by word. “You wanted to investigate about this fucking phone!”

“Nathan-”

“Fuck you!” I shouted.

He caught air to say something - perhaps some other excuse or bullshit of some sort - but finally grabbed me by the armand dragged me toward the exit. With a gesture of annoyance, I broke free from his grasp and went outside alone, to a semi-circular clearing with a small house in the middle manned by a guard who looked at me sideways. Alan’s quick footsteps reached me after a short time, perhaps to tell me something, but I was faster.

“You’re a fucking asshole. You set up the raid!”

“It’s not lik-”

“I trusted you!”

“Listen...”

He grazed my hips with his hands, but I pushed him away.

“Don’t touch me!” and he backed away a few steps. “You don’t give a damn about me anyway!”

“Will you knock it off?”

He had yelled. Sure, he could yell. In his eyes he had a grim expression, but mine certainly was more so. I crossed my arms, waiting. I was really curious to hear what he would come up with. His gaze fixed on me did not frighten me, and indeed I would have stared back at it to the end if necessary. He was a tenacious opponent, because he just wouldn’t take his eyes off me - as perhaps he never had since I was sousefulto his investigation. I didn’t drop the bone even when we got closer again, face to face.

“Let’s start with the basics,” he continued, excitedly. “Did I come to you about the phone? Yes. Did I come just for that? No.”

I took a deep breath. “Sure, that’s a good excuse.”

“I came to you because I wanted to prove that there was no phone in your house. But there was,” he said, and his gaze wandered to the sky. “What could I do?”

“I don’t know; for example, not to double-cross me.”

He shrugged and shook his head. “There was no way.”

“There was no way,” I mimicked him with a grimace.

A tightness in my stomach made its way in, not of anger as I thought, but of disappointment. I had been just a plaything. Alan didn’t care about me.

“Nathan...”

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