“Tell me to stop,” she said, “and I will.”
Then she kissed him.
FORTY-ONE
They’d staggered up the stairs and careened down the hallway—he bounced off a wall at least twice—and finally finally made it to his bedroom. Because life occasionally wasn’t shitty, he’d changed the sheets the morning before and was caught up on his dry cleaning.
“Oh, my God,” she panted, hands busy at his belt. “Immaculate fireplace. Gorgeous kitchen. A zillion cookbooks. More bookshelves. Mint green walls in your bedroom. Tasteful curtains and thick cream carpet. Were you Chuck Williams* in a previous life?”
“No.” Jesus. Her hands. She was divesting him of clothing like a focused, sexy octopus. His one contribution was to nearly tear her sweater getting it off her; he wanted her so badly his hands were shaking. A significant part of his brain had decided this was a fever dream. It couldn’t actually be happening. Ergo it wasn’t.
She gave him a gentle shove and his back hit the bed as she shimmied out of her black pants and made short work of her coral-colored bra and panties. Her hair was a rumpled cloud of reddish-blond waves and her breasts were small and sweet and plum-sized. He was surprised to see she was short-waisted; her long legs distracted from that, and she was speckled with freckles down her neck and across her chest.
“You are really beautiful,” he managed, perhaps the most inadequate statement in the history of language.
“You’re pretty cute, too.” She kicked her clothes away, then climbed on the bed, crawled over him, bent down to kiss him
(God her mouth, I love her mouth)
then pulled back. “Is this okay?”
Was this okay? The woman he had dated eighteen months ago had taken his occasional impotence as a personal challenge, so sex with her was a bit like being caught in a rowing machine.
This? This was hot and sweet and fumbling and wonderful. Was this okay? Was he a carbon-based life-form? Would the Cubs win the World Series again? Did Angela have a delightful constellation of freckles he wanted to count and map?
“I—I’m hard-pressed to think of anything more okay.”
“Hard-pressed,” she teased, and her hand was on his stomach and then sliding down, and then her fingers curled around his cock, the part of him that currently had no idea what dysthymia was. “Oh, my. Should have guessed. I mean, you’re tall. And you’ve got these wonderful big hands.” She leaned down to kiss him again and her grip tightened at exactly the right time and exactly the right pressure, and he gasped into the kiss.
“What do you want?” he managed, his hands coming up to settle at her waist. “Tell me. I want to touch you, tell me what you want.”
“Beard burn.”
He blinked up at her and saw she was trying—unsuccessfully—to hide her grin. The thought that this was a lurid fantasy was getting harder to shake. “Er, what?”
“It’s out there, right? But last week, when you showed up at the house all rumpled and stubbled, it really, um, did something. For me.”
She wanted stubble? He would oblige and grow stubble. He would grow anything she wanted. She could have his beard stubble, she could have the breath in his lungs, the blood in his heart. He felt his jaw. “Unfortunately, I shaved for our da—for our tombstone cleaning.”
“Just do the best you can.”
So he tightened his grip and rolled her over until he was on top, and rubbed his cheek against her neck and the tops of her breasts while she giggled and squirmed beneath him.
“I’m gonna have beard burn in the most interesting places.”
“This is already the oddest and most wonderful sexual encounter of my life.”
“Oh, please. You ain’t seen nothin’.”
She was right. Minutes later—seconds? hours? his sense of time had vanished along with his underwear—he was inside her slick heat, one hand gripping the headboard, the other fisted (carefully!) in her hair. He was using the headboard to hold himself back as well as give himself some brace. He was afraid if he let loose he might shove her through the wall.
“Jason.” She groaned, her long legs coming up and tightening around him with marvelous strength. “That’s—ah—Jeeeeeezus that’s—more.”
“Really?” Please don’t let that be an auditory hallucination.
“Yeah, c’mon, I won’t break. Fuck me. Harder. You can—oh fuck, that’s good, that’s perfect, please don’t stop—”
(oh, thank God, I’m not sure I could)
“Just—let me—I need to—almost—” He could feel her legs loosening their grip around his waist as she reached down between them, between her legs, and he took the hand out of her hair and caught her wrist.
“Show me. What you need. Put my fingers where you want them. Please, I have to touch you.”
So she did and he brushed his thumb around and over the slippery button.
“Easy-easy, light and fast, that’s nnnnnnggggggggg oh more please more like that please that’s just right ah . . . ah . . .” And then she was arching beneath him and everything got almost impossibly tighter and hotter and at the peak of her pleasure he buried his face in her neck and counted back from one thousand by sevens
(1,000, 993, 986, 979, don’t come don’t come 972, 965, 958 not yet 951)
and he took his hand away, mindful of oversensitivity, and then she shivered in his arms and was still.
“Oh, God, Jason, that was so—you.” She was looking up at him, wide-eyed. “You didn’t . . . ?”
He stroked his thumb across her lower lip and she sucked at it, then kissed the tip as he pulled his hand away and reached down between her legs. “Now,” he breathed against her mouth. “Again.”
And started to move.
FORTY-TWO
Angela, being Angela, broke the afterglow with, “Don’t think this was about today. I’ve been wanting this for a while.”
“I didn’t think it was a reflex,” he said mildly. “Or the sexual equivalent of a sneeze.”
They were back in the kitchen. She’d cleaned up a bit in the bathroom and gotten dressed; he’d cleaned up as well, and slipped into a pair of boxer-briefs. He’d poured her another glass of water and helped himself to a glass of milk.
“I was happy to spend the day with you. I was happy to bring you to my home. I was happy with the kissing and very, very, very happy with all that followed. I would have been happy if you’d spent the night. But we could have stopped at the napping and it would have been a day worth getting out of bed for.”
She smiled, knowing that was no small thing to someone who wrestled with dysthymia. Then remembered what she was about to do and the smile dropped right off, poof, like it had never been there. “Happy. Right. The thing is, I don’t bring happiness.”
“My penis begs to differ.” And, of course, that made her snort.
“Funny. Not in any large measure,” she clarified. “That’s what I meant. Or to put it another way: I’m no good for you, Chambers. I don’t think we should see each other after this.” She paused, adding so there would be no misunderstanding, “I won’t see you again after tonight.”
He had been setting the glass down on the counter and she heard the glass rattle when he started in surprise. He turned at once and replied, “Your uncle is a fool.”
“It’s not about him.”
“No?”
“No.” Probably. It was likely a Drake thing, but not necessarily a Dennis Drake thing. “No, it’s about me. And the thing about me, Jason, is that I always screw it up and the innocents always pay for it. You can’t get caught up in that, I won’t let you drown in that whirlpool.”
“Angela . . .”
“You know the worst of it? Even when I do everything right, call the cops, tell the truth, and do it over and over, make people hear me, fight for the ones in trouble, the innocent still get stuck with that
bill. I haven’t been able to fix it in four lifetimes.”
He held up a hand before she could continue. “But that’s what life is, Angela. It’ll never be perfect. You’ll never do everything right—that’s not a condemnation, it just is. You act as though people don’t have regrets, that they don’t remember the heinous things they’ve done, that it doesn’t tear them up. Of course it does. In that, you and I are no different from anyone else. But you can’t hide from it, Angela. And you know it.”
A lovely speech. And utter bullshit. Still, he was worth the effort. He was worth every effort. She couldn’t be with him, but perhaps she could make him see. Shouldn’t have had sex with him. But I was weak. I wanted one small part of him, one lovely memory to carry into my next life. Whatever the fuck it’ll be.
“I was never an Insighter before,” she began. “The difference—you wouldn’t believe it. Suddenly I could see it all so clearly, like I was looking through sparkling clean glass: every wrong move, every lie, every selfish act of preservation. It was like watching an expert put a big, complicated puzzle together right in front of me: Everything fell into place while I watched. So. So I thought—”
“You thought this was the one you got right. That this time, you’d somehow be flawless while simultaneously exonerating all your past selves.”
“Yes, but in my head it didn’t sound quite so silly.”
He smiled a little and a sad, horrid thought struck her: This is the last time I’ll see his dimple. “It is silly, but not for the reason you think.”
“Do tell.” She could hear the chill in her voice and told herself to ease up. You’re banging him and dumping him; you can at least listen before you leave his delightfully appointed kitchen. The gal who dated via the real-estate section might have been onto something.
“It was silly because it’s the way a child thinks,” he said, and somehow it didn’t come out at all patronizing. “The way a child whose father was violently murdered thinks. ‘I’ll figure it all out and I’ll fix everything and everyone will be happy.’ You are intelligent and gorgeous and determined and funny and sweet, but a small part of you is still the fatherless fourth-grader who got the worst news in the world and wasn’t allowed to mourn because she had to take over everything.”
Well.
Your father’s dead. Your uncle murdered your—
He wasn’t wrong.
“You’re wrong,” she insisted, because fuck him. “I chose. I’m still choosing. It’s why we won’t be seeing each other again. If we get a case update, please don’t follow up with me.” That part was hardest. She almost choked on the words. The first thing she liked about Jason (after his socks) was that he immediately included her, kept her updated, always returned her calls, and she never had to chase him. She never had to follow him to a Walgreens and yell at him while he bought his second lunch (chocolate ice cream and Coke). All that was a dim nightmare by comparison.
And here she was a month later, spitting on all of it.
Klown, if you hadn’t been so awful, I might not have fallen for Jason Chambers. This is mostly your fault.
No, not really.
“Do you know how my brother died?”
She shook her head. This, too, was shameful; she couldn’t be bothered to get her head out of the files long enough to ask, though she knew it must have been bad.
“We were kids, and he caught me with drugs. Again. And when I refused to go back to rehab, he decided to show me how destructive it was, what it was doing to our family, so he smoked it right in front of me. Which was how we found out the cook was shit. His heart stopped while he was still holding the pipe.”
It was like the muscles in her face and throat had locked; she couldn’t say anything, couldn’t swallow the sudden blockage in her throat. After a long moment, she managed, “I’m sorry.”
“My parents did their best, but Pat’s death was shattering. They both fell off the wagon—I hail from a long and distinguished line of substance abusers—and were killed when Dad mistook an oak tree for the turnoff. My grandmother took care of me while I finished high school. And then she . . .” He gestured to his beautiful home.
“I’m sorry.” Stupid, worthless phrase. How was it that you could use the exact same phrase for when you spilled juice?
“I live with it every day. As you live with your burdens. But, Angela: This life is so, so hard. There’s no guarantee the next one will be any easier, no matter what the Insighters or the priests or the therapists promise. Why not grab any bit of happiness you can? You’re entitled to love. And on my good days, I think I might be, too.”
“You are,” she said thickly. “Jeez. Of course you are. Teenagers are dumb, right? Crack-addicted ones especially. They make stupid decisions and it’s a miracle any of us lived through it. It wasn’t your— I know if you could do it over again, you wouldn’t buy the drugs.”
“But you’ve got it wrong, Angela. Again.” He said this to her in a gentle tone devoid of the smallest bit of pity for himself or condemnation for her. “I’d buy them and take them myself. With no hesitation. Because my brother was the one who deserved the fulfilling life with the beautiful home and the wonderful girlfriend and the challenging work. Not me. Never me.” He gestured to his beautiful home. “I am living a stolen life, my brother’s life. None of this should be mine. Most days, I know it, I believe it. Days like today? I wonder.”
“No-no-no. I’m leaving for my own reasons, it’s not a punishment I’m handing down to you because you were bad. My decision has nothing to do with your brother. We’re both reading too much into this, because we’re not breaking up. We weren’t even dating, really.”
“I suppose not,” he said quietly. “Just hoping to. Or perhaps that was one-sided.”
“No,” she whispered. She cleared her throat and forced her voice to rise. “No, it wasn’t, but it’s just as well that our whatever-it-is ends now. Thank you for a lovely day, which got weird and unpleasant and then briefly lovely, and then I wrecked it again and where the hell are my shoes?”
He went to the living room and brought them to her without a word. Said nothing while she slipped them on, found her purse and slung it over one shoulder, made sure she had her phone. He just looked at her with that intense blue-eyed stare. Looked at her while he was standing there all brazenly gorgeous and lightly tanned and flat-stomached and big-dicked and a revelation in bed, that hour between the sheets had been the best sex of her life and if she kept thinking about it she’d go and do something really stupid like strip and spend the night and then possibly linger in the morning and maybe stay forever.
“I don’t need a ride,” she said before he could offer. If he was going to offer. “I’d like to— I’m going to take a cab.”
He nodded.
“Okay.” It was nice meeting you? Thanks for all your hard work? Sorry about my fucked-up family life? Sorry about yours? You have a lovely home and no matter what anyone says, you deserve a nice life? Nope. None of it would work, and almost all of it would make things worse. “See ya.” Really? That’s the platitude you went with?
“One thing I don’t understand.”
She turned back, almost relieved. It wasn’t over until she crossed the threshold.
“You indicated you’ve wanted me for a while.”
“Yes.” The minute I saw the socks. And the dimple.
“But not for a relationship.”
“Right.”
“And decided to have me regardless.”
She cringed internally. “Yes.”
“Despite knowing that you would make your feelings plain when we were finished.”
“Yes.”
“Cold.”
“Warned you.”
She left before he could see her tears. He didn’t demand she stay. Or call after her to come back. Or rush dramatically after her.
It
wasn’t a movie. It was real life. Which was awful. And that was the point. Both their points.
FORTY-THREE
“Archer.”
“Nnnnnn.”
“Archer.”
“Pigeon ate my burger.”
“Archer!” This last was hissed right into his ear, which was a tactical error as Archer mistook her for a bug and swiped at her hard enough to make her ears throb.
“Friggin’ mosquitos . . . nuh?” He rubbed his eyes hard enough to make her own water with sympathy. “Cuz, whassup?”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, already regretting the insane impulse that led her here. Fortunately, Leah was still deeply asleep. Loudly, deeply asleep. My God. She sounds like a blender wrapped in a towel trying to blend a brick.
“F’r what? Y’okay?” He was trying to prop himself up on his elbows, staring at her in the low light from the partially open bedroom doorway.
“I’m fine.” Lie. “I’m just really sorry for all those times I was mean to you and said being mind-blind was like being developmentally disabled and that not remembering your past lives was like flunking a standard IQ test.”
He gawped at her and rubbed his eyes again.
She rushed on. “I know we talked all that out before you brought Leah to visit, but I’m not just apologizing for that. I’m apologizing for waiting so long to apologize.”
“If this isn’t some bizarre dream I’m going to fart on your face.”
By now she was kneeling beside the bed. “It’s because of Leah that I was so mean. Wait, I said that wrong—it wasn’t Leah’s fault I was so horrible. I was horrible because I felt inadequate beside her and took it out on you.”
“I will fart. On your face.”
“Does that make sense? How it’s about Leah but not really?”
“Hell no it doesn’t make sense.”
“Listen, this all goes back to our childhood and I know that’s a cliché and maybe not worth waking you up for—”