Somewhere in the back of Rex’s mind, a life winked back into consciousness. He stirred in anticipation.
Kathy’s body was warm on his. He could feel the curl of her hips on his back, the ragged evenness of her breath on his neck, her arms wrapped around his shoulder. He felt her slowly stir to consciousness, as he had already known she would.
“You always wake up before I do,” she mumbled sleepily.
“It’s ’cause I can feel you waking up, baby.”
“And you’re happy to see me?”
Rex smiled into his pillow.
“Oh maybe a little,” he said contentedly.
She rabbit-punched him in the kidneys.
Rex arched in pain as Kathy rolled out of bed.
“What was that for?” he protested, sitting up and massaging his lower back while he stared at her with guilt-inducing, vulnerable eyes.
” ‘a little’?” asked Kathy contemptuously as she pulled on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, “Oh you’re the fucking sweetest thing in the world to wake up to, Masterson.”
She flopped into a chair and put her feet up on the bed. She reached for the pack of Pall Mall straights on the bedside table, tapped it once, pulled two cigarettes from it with her lips, and lit them both.
“I’m just saying,” she said, protesting his look before taking the kind of grateful drag you can only get from your first one of the day. She plucked the other cigarette from her mouth and threw it at him.
Rex caught it with a speed and precision just beyond the bounds of human possibility. Kathy’s eyes narrowed in appreciation as he took his first drag.
“Fuckin’ A give me a break,” said Rex, noticing her watching him, “Jedi reflexes - it’s the way I am. God I feel like an animal at the zoo the way you watch me sometimes.”
“Well be good and I might feed you later,” purred Kathy as she stood up and headed towards the bathroom, “and speaking of animals, you should take Ambi for walkies.”
“Why should I take him out?” protested Rex, “he’s our dog. Why don’t you take him out.”
“Since when was he ‘our’ dog?” asked Kathy disparagingly, “it’s not like we’re going out.”
“Kathy,” said Rex, exasperated in the way same way he was every morning, “of course we’re going out.”
“We’re not ‘going out’.” she said from behind the door. “Since when are we ‘going out’? We’re lovers. There’s a difference.”
“Kathy we’ve been going out since we were fifteen years old,” said Rex, tiredly repeating the argument he’d been making since he was sixteen years old. “Can’t you see that? Our dog is a pathetically transparent child surrogate.”
“He’s not ‘our’ dog, he’s ‘your’ dog,” repeated Kathy from the bathroom.
“Why? Why is he ‘my’ dog? Because he has Force Powers?”
Kathy’s head darted out from behind the bathroom door. “Don’t start that ‘force powers’ talk with me, Masterson,” she growled warningly.
“What talk? The dog has force powers. It’s as clear as day. Always has been. He can levitate shit, I’m sure of it.”
“Have you ever seen Ambi levitate anything?”
Rex was silent. Kathy sighed. The shower started.
“That’s what I thought you said,” she said menacingly, “now - why don’t you take the dog for a walk.”
“I can tell you’re naked in there,” said Rex, getting out of bed and making his way stealthily towards the bathroom door.
“Don’t you dare!” threatened Kathy.
“You’re thinking about exfoliating…”
“Masterson you bastard! Pulling that mind reading shit at this hour of the morning!” yelled Kathy.
“Search your thoughts - you know it to be true,” said Rex saucily, wedging his foot in the door before she could slam it shut, “oh my… now you’re thinking of something else entirely different altogether.”
“Rex!”
“No,” said Rex, reading her mind as he pushed at the door, “I don’t mind. I like doing that to you, you know that - especially if it makes you feel good…”
“Rex!” protested Kathy, laughing a little as he pried the door open.
“C’mon,” he said, pulling it open and stepping forward to take her now-naked body into his arms.
* * *
“Gimme,” said Rex, blissed out and lying back on the bed.
Kathy took the cigarette from her lips and put it up to his. He took a drag.
“Your hair’s still wet.” he said.
“Mmmm.” said Kathy, eyes closed, lying besides him.
“There’s shampoo everywhere.”
“Mmmm.”
“Is that good for the sheets?”
“Shut up and lay back.” said Kathy, putting out her cigarette, rolling on top of him, and pinning his arms to the bed.
* * *
Three hours later they awoke again, a massive intertwined tumble of bedclothes and bodies. A foot away from the bed a lanky brown greyhound-looking dog with oversized ears watched them wide-eyed with a leash in its mouth.
“Whoof!” whoofed Ambi.
“Ugh,” growled Kathy, extricating herself from the Rex/sheet amalgam in which she was entangled and rubbing her hands with her eyes.
“Oh Ambi,” she said pityingly, “God, what time is it? Oh Christ, it’s noon and you still haven’t had your walkies.”
At the sound of the word ‘walkies’ Ambi’s ears turned back and he began shifting in place with an uneasy eagerness.
“See - See!” exclaimed Rex excitedly, “the dog has super-canine powers! Look at this, how it brought the leash to us, as if trying to say - despite it’s lack of a human articulatory mechanism - that it wants to go out for a walk. He’s trying to communicate with us, Kat.”
“Whoof!” repeated Ambi insistently.
“Rex, the dog associates leashes with getting walked,” said Kathy tiredly, “that doesn’t mean that it reads the Atlantic Monthly.”
“Well he doesn’t read the Atlantic Monthly because you refused to renew our subscription,” said Rex vehemently. He was about to continue, but Kathy’s withering glance told him that now was not the time to run through that argument again.
“Just take the fucking dog out, Rex, ok?”
He stood up and stretched. She softened slightly and let her fingers fall across his back as he stood.
“What do you think you’ll be up to today?”
Rex took the leash from Ambi’s mouth, and scratched his head warmly. The dog whined happily in reply.
“I don’t know,” said Rex, with an abstracted glance in his eye as if someone had asked him to do the square root of a four digit number, “I kinda feel like going out to a late breakfast with Nelson.”
Rex’s inability to plan more than five minutes into the future was combined with a Jedi foresight that Kathy found simultaneously irresistable and frightening. His ability to know when she would wake, what she needed to hear, where she wanted to be touched - it was something that she’d never fully learned to deal with despite all their time together. One day he would get lost buying smokes at the corner store, the next he’d know whether she’d won dance competitions she’d not yet entered. And, worst of all, he couldn’t tell the difference between when he was on and when he was off.
“I think he’s going to order eggs,” said Rex, standing up and searcing around the pile of hastily-removed clothes from the night before for his Jedi robes, “which is weird, because he almost always ordered waffles when I was studying with him.”
A shiver ran down the back of Kathy’s spine.
“Is he going to tell you something important?”
“How should I know?” shrugged Rex, picking Kathy’s bra off the floor and throwing it aside in other to pick up the lightsaber underneath.
“Rex, you just predicted what he was going to order for breakfast.”
Rex looked up at her quizzically, “Did I? Really, Kat, I’ve just got an ‘egg’ feeling, ok? Christ, everyone has hunches.”
Now it was Kathy’s turn to sigh over a fight she couldn’t win.
“I don’t like it when you talk to them,” she said, meaning the Jedi Council, of which Nelson Rockefeller was one of the most prominent members, “they don’t like me.”
“Kathy, they’re Jedi,” said Rex, crossing the room and hugging her, “they don’t like anybody. They don’t hate anybody. They don’t feel. The just walk around being calm and solving shit.”
“They hate me because of us, Rex,” said Kathy quietly, “because of us being together. What I do to you.”
“Don’t worry babe,” said Rex, kissing her on the head before snapping Ambi’s leash around his collar. “I got it covered.”
“So you’ll be back in a bit, then?” asked Kathy anxiously.
“Yeah. Take care.”