Monsters by Liz Kay Page B

or you headed home?”
    Daniel shakes his head. “I’ve seen this show before. And I’m guessing I’ll need to be here early to feed you ibuprofen and make sure you’re presentable.”
    â€œI’m presentable. I am always presentable.” Tommy pours two glasses and steps out from behind the bar. He carries both glasses in his left hand, the bottle in his right. He holds the glasses out toward me, and I take one.
    â€œDon’t stay up too late. Don’t open another bottle.” Daniel points his finger at Tommy and then at me.
    Tommy just smiles, and Daniel squeezes my arm and says good night.
    I turn to move toward the couch, but Tommy says, “Come this way. I want to show you something,” and he presses the hand with the wine bottle against my back and takes me through the doorway into the dining room. Beyond that is the kitchen and this enormous great room, which is where the fireplace is, and then there’s this wide hallway. The first door opens into a study that is just lined with books. I mean, there are shelves all the way around it, and then there are stacks of books on almost every surface. There’s this small loveseat at one end of the room and a desk at the other. Tommy sets the wine on the table in front of the loveseat and retrieves a laptop that’s sitting open on the desk.
    â€œSit,” he says. He sets the laptop on the table and sits next to me. His leg presses right up against my leg, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. It is bothering me. I take a big sip of the wine, a really big sip. It might be more like a swig.
    â€œOkay,” he says, “so I have all of this shit on Frederick, and I want to see what you think.”
    There are pages and pages of notes, this whole backstory on the character that I obviously never wrote, and then there are just these random lines and quotes. I only recognize a few, but there’s Eliot, Rilke, Nabokov obviously. As I’m reading through them, Tommy says, “I felt like I needed to get some male voices in my head, you know?” and I nod.
    â€œWhere did you get all of this?”
    He sort of holds his hands out like,
Look around.
“Well, it’s great,” I say. “I mean, it all feels right.”
    He lets out this tremendous sigh like he’s been holding his breath, and he puts his arm around my shoulders and leans his head against me. “Oh thank god. I was sure you were gonna fight me on this again.”
    â€œNo. I mean, if this is how you see him, you see what I see.”
    â€œOkay,” he says, and he leans forward, grabbing the laptop, balancing it on our knees. “So look at this.”
    He has all of these short video clips. Some are him, but mostly it’s other people. He’s been using them to figure out the walk, how he’ll move his hands, how he should talk, and everything he shows me has some little shadow of Frederick, and he’s trying to explain how he’ll layer them together. He wants me to look at the screen, but I keep turning my head to watch him talk, and he has to keep pointing me back. He has a lot of this to show me, so we do go through the wine, and Tommy does open another bottle, but by then I don’t even mind how close he’s sitting or the way he keeps touching my hand when he makes a point.
    When he finally closes the laptop, I pull my left leg up and hug it into me and then my right. I’m trying to unkink my hips.
    â€œFuck, no wonder you’re so tense,” he says, and I think,
What? Why? Is it obvious?
“You’ve been stuck on a plane all day, and now I’ve got you all cramped up in here.” He rests his hand on my back and rubs his thumb along the edges of my spine right between my shoulder blades. Up one side, down the other. I try not to flinch.
    â€œI should get some sleep,” I say. “It’s like three a.m. for me.” I smile. “You’re a terrible