“It’s a beautiful day,” John said, tilting his pointy face up at the bright-azure sky, giving me a spectacular view of his impossibly long nostrils. “Summers in Portland are getting pretty nice. I guess we can thank climate change for that.”
“I’m not buying a house, John. Just selling,” I replied, seeing through his attempt to double his commission.
His thin lips curled into a sleazy grin. “Had to try, didn’t I?”
As annoying as I found John, I didn’t have the time or patience to switch agents at this point in the process. The movers would be here later today. The photographer was booked to take pictures of the house tomorrow. I needed to get this over with as quickly as possible.
I stared at the moss-green front door, which was covered in a thick layer of dust. I fought the urge to claw at the aching in my chest, a physical manifestation of the guilt I felt for what I was about to do.
Neither Jack nor I had had the courage to enter my mother’s house since the day of the funeral. Even then, we had spent most of that miserable afternoon in my old bedroom upstairs, wrapped in the comfort of each other’s arms, while family and friends gorged on shitty supermarket hors d’ oeuvres as they reminisced about my mother downstairs.
Unfortunately, Jack Jr. was so young, that not a single one of them had known him long enough to share memories of him. It was almost as if he was a figment of my and Jack’s imaginations.
Occasionally, someone would knock on the bedroom door to check on us. They’d comment on the many photos of Junior my mother had on exhibition. But they wore their compassion and uncertainty like winter coats. Their displays of pity were warm and comforting to no one but themselves. I found it offensive that I was supposed to feel sorry for them because they had not a single clue what to say to us.
I didn’t feel sorry for them, not one bit.
As I showed John around the three-bedroom house, he tried to speak delicately while suggesting I rid the space of all “personal items” that might prevent a potential buyer from picturing themselves in my mother’s home. This was his gentle way of telling me to take down the dozens of framed pictures of Junior that cluttered the walls and the surface of every table and mantle. He assured me he would be back at nine a.m. sharp tomorrow morning with the photographer, once I had “cleaned up.”
After he left, the movers arrived. They helped me box up the photos, my mother’s vast collection of antique teapots, the gardening tools in the garage, and the storage boxes in the attic. When it came time to pack away the stuff inside the kitchen cupboards, I held back one skillet and one place setting and set of silverware.
With houses in this area only staying on the market an average of five days, I could survive the next few weeks without cooking. But with my lack of appetite on the verge of becoming a serious issue, I didn’t want to have to rely on shitty convenience food that would probably make me even sicker.
Everything we boxed up would be going into storage to be dealt with another time. Once the house was sold, I’d use the proceeds to get an apartment, and hopefully figure out my life. As I watched the movers carefully wrap my mom’s teapots and place them in boxes, I clenched my jaw to keep myself from getting emotional.
I managed to not cry all day long. But when it came time to empty out the bedrooms, I was blindsided.
As I opened the closet door, I was overcome by a ripple of air heavy with the scent of gardenia and peach. My mother’s favorite perfume. As I crumbled to my knees, I cried as much for my mother as I did for the fact that my life had become a series of depressing clichés.
The mover muttered something, then he set off down the hallway, leaving me alone with my anguish.
“You’ve been planning this for a while.”
My blood ran cold at the sound of Jack’s voice.
Chapter 5
Jack
“I told them to leave,” I spit the words out.
Wet wisps of blonde hair stuck to her pale cheeks as she looked up at me with a mixture of fury and confusion in her brown eyes. “W-what? What are you talking about?”
“I paid the movers and told them to leave the boxes in the garage,” I replied.
“Why?” she cried in disbelief. “Why are you even here? You haven’t paid me more than a passing glance for over a year, except when you’re pushing your way inside me. I’m just a hole for you to dump your hostilities.”
“What do you fucking expect? We lost our child!” I roared as she sobbed into her hands. “Did you expect this to be easy? We lost our child and you’re going to give up because I’m not grieving exactly the way you want me to?”
She shook her head as she rose from the floor, then she pointed her finger in my face. “No. You are not going to come here and try to make me feel bad for being the only person willing to do anything — anything at all to fix this marriage! I’m the one who wanted to go to counseling! You’re the one who turned me down, time and again!”
“You think I want to tell some stranger how much I fantasize about murdering another human being? Does that sound like a good fucking idea to you? Because it sounds like something only an idiot would do!”
She threw her hands up. “So now I’m an idiot?”
I stepped forward, my body taking up the entire doorway. “Don’t do that. Don’t twist my words the way you always do.”
“Get out of my way,” she said, trying to squeeze past me, but I remained solidly still. “Get out of my way! I have to tell the movers not to leave.”
I shook my head. “You can’t sell this house without divorcing me or taking me to court.”
Her jaw dropped at the mention of this hard fact. The truth was that I could take her to court to dispute her sale of the house. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, and it wasn’t a case I’d ever win, but I could do it if I wanted to tie her up in a legal battle. I would do it if it meant I could keep her from making a mistake she would surely regret later.
“Are you seriously going to fight me on this?” she replied. “This is my house! I grew up here! My mother died to give me this house!”
“A sacrifice I’ll always be grateful for, even if it was for nothing.”
Even as I said the words, I regretted them. It was wrong, even cruel, but clearly neither of us was thinking straight. And maybe that was the point that needed to be made.
Her eyes widened. “You unbelievable asshole. Get out of my way!”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
She pummeled her bony fists against my chest, pushing me into the hallway. I easily overpowered her, grabbing hold of her wrists to stop the assault.
I pressed her back against the bare wall. “You’re being impulsive, baby. You can’t sell this house. Your mom wanted you to have it.”
If she sold this house, that would be it. There would be nothing tying her to Oregon anymore; no legal reason for her to come back other than to divorce me. I couldn’t let her set that chain of events in motion.
Tears spilled over her cheeks, but she’d given up trying to twist her arms out of my grip. “They’re going to leave, Jack,” she whimpered, her limbs yielding to me as I crushed my body against hers. “Let me go. Please, just let me go,” her mouth begged, but her slack muscles pleaded with me to do exactly the opposite.
I pulled her arms above her head, pinning her wrists to the wall. “Never. I’ll never let you go. You’re mine,” I murmured, my mouth brushing against hers. “Now and forever. And don’t you ever fucking forget that.”
She drew in a large gasp of air as my lips landed on her mouth. Pushing my tongue inside, she responded by bucking her hips against my dick and kissing me greedily. She tasted salty and sweet, like fresh tears, vanilla lip balm, and too much white wine. She’d been day-drinking again.
I broke away from her, clenching my teeth furiously, and still unable to stop tears from welling up as I gazed into her bloodshot eyes. “What have we done to each other?”
She shook her head, but she didn
’t speak. She didn’t have to. There were no words for how messed up this was. For how royally we’d fucked everything up.
My mouth fell over hers again and she moaned as my free hand grabbed her breast. She was so fucking warm and soft, but not as soft as she used to be.
Laurel was a shapeshifter, and I loved her body in every form. When we met during our senior year in college, she was still carrying around her freshman fifteen, and it made for some slap-tastic fuck-fests. Then, she lost a few pounds for the wedding. The voluptuous curves she gained after her pregnancy, right up until… That was my favorite form.
But I still loved her like this, wispy and fragile, her body bearing the evidence of how much she ached for our son.
I looked her in the eye as I slid my hand down the front of her gray leggings and inside her panties. Her mouth fell open in a silent gasp as I easily slid two fingers inside her soaking wet pussy. Pressing my thumb against her clit, my dick twitched as her eyes rolled back when I found her G-spot.
I leaned in, my lips touching her ear as I growled, “This is mine.” I waited until her legs began to quiver before I slid my hand out of her pants and grabbed her tit again. “And this…” I bit her earlobe, dragging my teeth over the tender flesh. “And every part of you belongs to me.”
I kissed her again, hard, then I pulled away. Taking a moment to savor the greedy plea in her eyes, I kissed my way down her body until I was down on one knee before her. She eagerly assisted me as I pulled off her leggings and panties, discarding them somewhere behind me. Planting a soft kiss on her mound, I smiled as goose bumps spread over her delicate skin.
As I knelt before her, my right hand slid behind her, grabbing her ass, then skimmed along the back of her leg. Clutching the back of her knee, I lifted her leg, draping it over my shoulder as I used my left hand to spread her flesh. Her pink petals were glistening and ready for me.
Keeping my right arm wrapped around her thigh to anchor her to me, I devoured every inch of her. Drinking in every last drop of her arousal as if she were a vintage bourbon. Until finally, her body curled over mine, her hard nipples straining against the fabric of her T-shirt, brushing my forehead as she begged me to stop.
But I didn’t.
Experience had taught me that Laurel liked me to take it just a bit further, until her body began to flail uncontrollably. It didn’t take long until the knee draped over my shoulder jerked inward, slamming into my ear. I chuckled as I continued to lick her clit, until I heard a loud thunk.
Leaning my head back, I couldn’t believe it when I saw Laurel covering her mouth in horror and staring at a hole in the wall.
As soon as I started to laugh, she began to laugh with me. I let her leg slide off my shoulder, and scooped her up in my arms to carry her to her old bedroom.
She yelped as I dropped her onto the floral bedspread, then she smiled as she spread her legs for me and my dick got painfully hard. “Remind me never to fuck you in a museum.”
Chapter 6
Laurel
Jack pulled off his shirt and I couldn’t stop myself from licking my lips as I appreciated the definition of his muscles, the raw strength of his body. I vacillated between raging despair and carnal lust.
Part of me wanted to cry, because I knew how much of that muscle had been put on over the last two years, as he prepared himself for an eventual meeting with Junior’s killer. But a larger part of me just wanted to feel him on top of me, heavy and solid and real.
I pulled off my threadbare P!nk T-shirt as he stepped out of his gym shorts and settled himself between my legs. Propping himself up on his elbows, his erection twitched against my clit as he leaned down to kiss me. His kiss was slow and deep, stealing the breath from my lungs as I wrapped my legs around him.
He pulled his head back, looking down at me as he brushed away a tear from my temple with his thumb. “You took your pill today?”
My heart sunk as I nodded. He slid into me slowly at first, then he grabbed my leg, resting my ankle on his shoulder as he picked up the pace, slamming into me viciously. As my head bumped against the headboard, I closed my eyes, unable to look at him.
I’d practically begged Jack to try for another child, but it was never the right time for him. He finally admitted to me recently that, until he found the person who took Junior from us, he didn’t know if he could love another child.
I knew it wasn’t the answer to fixing our broken marriage, but I was willing to try anything. With every passing day, I was more convinced that Jack was willing to try nothing. Well, nothing other than sex.
We spent the rest of the waning sunlight fucking, showering, and picking at slices of delivery pizza in the living room, which was now devoid of all decor and photos.
I didn’t ask Jack what he meant when, in the middle of chewing his slice of pizza, he said he was “this close” to finding Junior’s killer. I’d heard those exact words before. And Jack never asked me how I’d felt while packing away my mother’s things today.
It was almost as if our feelings didn’t matter to each other anymore. Only, we were too lost in our own grief to recognize the moment we’d stopped caring.
We went to bed earlier than usual in my old full-sized bed, which seemed almost claustrophobic compared to the king-sized bed we slept in at home — the one I’d been sleeping in alone for most of the last few months. We normally slept in the guest bedroom when visiting my mother, but somehow we had ended up in here. And now, with my mother gone and all our personal items packed away, I felt like a squatter, taking refuge in a history I’d long abandoned.
“I promise I’ll fix that wall tomorrow,” Jack said as I settled myself in his arms while he spooned me. “I’ll run to the hardware store before you wake up and I’ll have it done before you take your first sip of coffee.”
I made an mmm sound to indicate my approval, because I’d heard these kinds of promises before. Like the time he told me he would take the boxes of Junior’s stuff in the guest room to a storage facility. Or a few months ago, when he promised we would spend our anniversary together today, only for him to back out last night, claiming he was slammed at work. When I saw him leaving this morning in his gym clothes instead of a suit, I knew our marriage was over.
Jack continued. “Remember when we went to that party at Kent’s in-laws and his mother-in-law flipped her shit when she saw you breastfeeding Junior on the sofa?”
I sighed as I adjusted the position of my head on his bicep. “She was such a bitch.”
“Do you remember what you said to her?”
I shook my head, though I did remember. I just wanted to hear him say the words, to know that his memories of Junior were still as traumatically fresh as mine.
“You said, ‘What’s wrong? Never seen tits bigger than your husband’s?’” He chuckled as he squeezed me tightly against him, burying his face in my neck. “I miss watching him fall asleep in your arms.”
I closed my eyes and took deep breaths as the muscles in my chest tightened. I wished we could lie here forever, talking about Junior and the good times. But I knew the only reason Jack was talking about Junior this way, without getting angry or bringing up the case, was because he thought this is what I needed to hear in order to stay.
“I love you, pixie,” he murmured in my ear, using the nickname I’d once told him was my favorite. “I know we’ll get through this. I just need some more time... more time to figure this out. I’m almost there. I can feel it.”
My stomach tightened into painful knots as tears streamed out of my eyes, down my temple, disappearing into my hairline. Jack was never going to let this go. He would never stop searching for a murderer who, at this point, almost felt like a fictional monster.
The murder case started out two years ago with a few promising leads. But with no witnesses, and my mother abandoning her phone to get to Junior before she could make a 9-1-1 call, there was nothing to go on except for our home surveillance footage.
Unfortunately, with the mur
derer wearing a mask, the only thing that separated him from anyone else was his stature and gait. The killer had seemed to slightly favor his right leg, as if he had a very old injury on his left leg.
Jack had been obsessed with the security video for a while. He would watch it every night and compare it to surveillance footage of other crimes committed in the area. He was convinced he would see something important that no one else could see, something more significant than a bum leg or whether the killer was right- or left-handed.
None of the leads or persons of interest they interviewed fit this description. Today, we were no closer to knowing who killed Junior and my mother than we were the night it happened.
I would lie here tonight and bask in the warmth of Jack’s skin against mine, and the comfort of his solid arms holding me together. I would inhale his woodsy scent and wrap myself in the familiarity of it, until it lulled me to sleep.
But come morning, I would text John Miller and tell him I needed to postpone the sale of the house for a while, at least until I could bear the thought of engaging in a legal battle with Jack. Then, I would do what needed to be done to save my marriage.
I hardly slept, waking almost instantly every time I dozed off, I squinted at the alarm clock on the nightstand. As soon as the red numbers flashed seven a.m., my eyes clicked wide open and remained so as I waited for Jack to wake up.
He was usually a restless sleeper, yet somehow — probably because of the size of the bed — he’d managed to stay in the exact position in which we’d fallen asleep. Even in his deepest slumber, he wouldn’t let go.
I wanted to take it as a sign that I should go home with him. This time it would work. This time, he was right. We would get through this.
Then I thought of the vile words he spoke about my mother and the sacrifice she made by trying to protect Junior the night they died.