The Shattered Gates Read Free Page B

on the table.
    Money was such an ugly thing. It made people consider actions that they knew they would despise themselves for later—actions like begging their friends for loans. John scowled. He hated having to ask for anything. Money was the worst, though. Just the idea of it made him feel pathetic, like a kid who couldn’t make it in the grown-up world. He’d had enough of that when he had been a kid.
    The real problem with asking his friends for a loan, though, was the fact that most of them were broke. Usually, only John earned a steady income. He couldn’t imagine many of his acquaintances amassing four hundred dollars, much less lending it out. Their universal poverty pretty much stranded John on the moral high ground, whether he liked it or not.
    Upstairs, the toilet flushed.
    John almost dropped his coffee cup. He heard the water pipes rattle, wheeze, and then subside as the pressure built. Then the sound of the shower hissing into life drifted down.
    It had to be Kyle. He must have come home in the middle of the night, and John hadn’t heard him. A rush of relief flooded through John. As strange as it was, he almost felt giddy with expectation, his trepidation about their meeting at the Steamworks vanishing with the prospect of financial relief.
    As John reached out to straighten the stack of bills, he noticed the page of creamy parchment paper lying there. He’d forgotten about the letter and the key. He reached down into the pocket of his robe and looked at the key again.
    The honest thing to do would be to give Kyle the letter and the key and apologize. He would probably be mad. He would have a right to be mad—possibly even furious.
     John didn’t think he had ever seen his roommate angry. He wondered just how mad a guy like Kyle could get. Immediately, he considered Kyle’s collection of scars and also his ever-present knives. Would Kyle actually stab him for opening his mail? John glanced at the padlocked cupboards and frowned.
    The key went back into the pocket of his bathrobe. He picked up the letter and its envelope and stuffed them into the recycling bin, beneath the underwear catalog. After he shoved the trash back under the sink, he rinsed his hands. When he turned around, Kyle was descending the stairs.
    Usually Kyle moved well, employing a fluidity of motion that sometimes seemed almost too easy. John wasn’t sure what exactly gave him that impression. It was a tiny thing, and after watching Kyle for just a few moments, the impression always faded from John’s consciousness. It was like the slightest lingering accent that could only be caught for brief instants.
    Today, Kyle’s ethereal grace had been somewhat subdued. John’s strongest impression was that Kyle seemed to have made an attempt at normalcy. His heavy coat and knives were nowhere to be seen. He wore dark gray work pants and a white sleeveless T-shirt. His long black hair hung in damp strings down his back. Even the scars covering his arms and at the edges of his mouth seemed paler and less obvious. His one disturbing feature was the thick bandage that engulfed his right shoulder.
    “I didn’t know you’d gotten back.” John decided not to ask about the bandage, where he had been for two weeks, or their near encounter at Steamworks bathhouse. Confronted with the reality of Kyle, his curiosity folded.
    “You might have been asleep.” Kyle stopped at the kitchen table. He looked down at the bills and for a minute, John had the irrational thought that Kyle could somehow tell that the letter had been sitting right there.
    John said, “I was just adding up the expenses.”
    “Nothing’s overdue yet, is it?” Kyle picked up the electricity bill and looked at it. He turned it over slowly. He didn’t appear to be reading the balance so much as studying the bill itself, as if it were an interesting artifact. After a moment, he placed it back on the pile.
    “The water bill was due last week, but I paid it...” John shoved