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Blue Moon 3.2

by Donna Lamb

Richard led Joel to her own room.

“Hey, this is m-my b-b-bed.” It didn’t look like a woman’s room: Full size bed with a wagon-wheel-motif brown coverlet, similar curtains, both donated by Joel’s mom. Ochre walls with framed photos taken from high places around the city, Joel’s sometime hobby. A political poster featuring Barry Aronhaus, Joel’s boss, state representative for a mixed district of urban non-voters and suburban conservatives. A desk holding two computers and assorted electronic detritus. A cheap chest of drawers with neat family pictures on top, a younger, male Joel in a graduation gown standing between a proud older couple who looked more like grandparents than parents. A Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar. It looked like the lair of a neat, even fussy, essentially nerdy young bachelor, which it was.

“Yup, it’s your bed, your room. Just lay down with your clothes on and I’ll throw the coverlet over you.”

She crawled carefully into the middle of the bed, still wearing the jeans and polo shirt that she’d put back on in the bathroom, her feet bare. He pulled the coverlet loose on one side and stretched it over her then kicked off his shoes and lay down beside her on the top sheet. “See? We’ll just sleep? No sex.” Not this time, he promised to himself.

They lay face to face. The kitchen light shone obliquely through the open door. Her eyes are green, thought Richard. I always thought they were blue, I guess. Maybe they changed. She sure has long eyelashes for a blonde. I wonder what she’d look like with long hair and maybe a little make-up. This is so weird, she’s Joel but she isn’t.

Joel struggled to get an arm free from the covers, wiping at her forehead with it. “If we sleep together, then am I going to be stuck — like this?”

“I think so,” he said, not sure that sleeping had anything to do with it. “Don’t worry about it, there doesn’t seem to be anything you can do. If you slept alone, you’d still be sleeping with a beautiful girl.”

She sighed then looked at him sideways. The light left his face in shadows but she knew his features very well. Dark brown curly hair, brown eyes with a hazel disk around the pupil. She’d always noticed such things, being a photographer, even if her specialty was cityscapes. “You’re kinda cute, yourself,” she said. One eye drifted slowly closed in what might have been a wink.

He raised up and looked at her. She’s more than cute, he told himself. No make-up and she’s been crying for hours and she still looks like a fashion model.

She closed the other eye and continued. “And if you tell me I said that to-tomorrow, I’ll kick you right in the b-b-b-Bullwinkles.” She rolled away from him slightly, to lie on her back.

“I’m sure you would. Now go to sleep,” he murmured. But Joel’s breath already came in the soft and low rhythms of exhausted, slightly anesthetized sleep. Richard relaxed a bit and almost drifted off.

Outside, the Blue Moon sailed down the sky toward the end of night. Richard roused himself and sat up, looking down at his suddenly beautiful—and suddenly female—roommate. He shook his head, hardly believing it. One side of her face gilded in the light from the kitchen, the other side silvered by moonlight through the window, she looked strange — like some creature fallen from the sky.

Sitting up, he murmured what might have been a prayer, “Jesus, God, help me.” He looked back at Joel. “She’s going to need someone to protect her.” Then he crossed himself the way his grandmother had taught him, adding, “Mary, help me,” since the problem involved a woman. Hardly anyone would have believed Richard to be a praying man, sometimes he didn’t believe it himself. But he’d found that in times that troubled his mind or his soul, praying helped. He didn’t have to believe in it; it just worked.

He spent more long moments contemplating the problems the new Joel might have. How would her mother react, her father had died sometime ago? How about her job doing data-entry, filing and correspondence in the office of the slightly conservative Aronhaus? Clothes, make-up, identification? She would need him, she would need a friend. He prayed again, visited the necessity and stretched out beside her on the bed once more.

Feeling better, he soon dropped off to sleep himself, and dreamed of taking his little sisters, twins named Ashley Sean and Sean Ashley, to Disneyland six years ago when they were twelve. Only this time in his dream, Joel rode the scary rides with him, screaming in his ear, his arms around her and hers around him. Both of them safe and happy.