That first kiss…oh, it goes on and on. It’s sweet, it’s sexy. It’s everything she ever dreamed it would be all those nights she waited for Cal to come home, the nights her hands crept between her legs and she imagined Tony’s hands on her while she used her own to make herself come. In fact, it’s even better because it’s real. At last, it’s all real.
Tony’s bigger than she is, but though he tries to back off, she goes after him. She climbs him like a tree so he has to hold onto her. It’s either that or let her fall. They don’t fuck that first time, there in the parking lot, even though she feels how hard he is. She does, however, almost have an orgasm when he cups her breast and thumbs the nipple. When his thigh nudges between hers. Almost, not quite, but it’s enough to make her back off with her mouth still wet from his kiss.
He tries to say something, but she shakes her head and puts her fingers to his lips. She gets in her car and drives away. She goes home and fucks her husband so fiercely she’s sure he’ll have to notice how guilty she feels, until she realizes she doesn’t feel guilty at all.
* * *
That was how it began.
Marnie thought of all those things now as she spread out in the king-sized bed that had always seemed too small with Tony in it lying diagonally. She thought of those days when her heart had leaped at the sight of him walking through the glass front doors, and of that first kiss. She thought of the late-night conversations that came after. The afternoons spent in motel rooms, smelling Tony on her skin when she left him to go home. It had all started out as lust and somehow had become something Tony’d convinced her was love.
Now he was dead in the backyard, and she’d done it. She hadn’t just left him out in the storm to die, which would’ve been bad enough. No, Marnie had actually finished the job. She’d killed him. As she’d done after that first kiss, she turned the memory over and over in her mind and waited to feel guilty about it. And, as with that first kiss and all the ones that had come after it…she didn’t.
8
There had been pain. Now there was not. There was darkness, and the smell of something bad that made him cough and cough again. Tony tried to turn his head and couldn’t. Something was holding him down.
There was an ache in his lungs that travelled up the back of his throat and in his sinuses. It pushed against the backs of his eyes with a dull throb, but it wasn’t as bad as the headaches he got every spring and fall when his allergies to pollen and mold kicked in. Another cough forced its way out his throat. The rasp pushed at his eardrums, which popped. Again, no pain. Just a dull sense of pressure.
He tried to move his hands and found he could curl his fingers against something hard and rough. Concrete? Bricks? Pieces of something heavy pinned him, but if he shifted his muscles in small, controlled motions, he could turn himself slowly from his back onto his side. Then a little more until he could push up on his hands and knees and shake away whatever had been holding him tight to the ground.
Tony shoved his way out of the rubble. He shook his head. Something wet and sticky covered him; he put his hand to the back of his head and it came away red. Blood. His blood. It made sense, sort of, even if nothing else did. Something had happened to his head. Something had made him bleed. Something had covered him in chunks of brick and board and concrete from the ruined barn in front of him.
His Mustang was destroyed.
One foot in front of the other, that’s how he’d learned to walk as a toddler and yet couldn’t seem to manage that simple action now. One foot. The other wouldn’t move unless he focused all his attention on it, and even then it dragged. He fell forward and hit the ground with his face. He’d forgotten to hold out his hands to catch his fall.
He crawled a little bit until his feet dug again into the ground and he could bend his legs, clutch at the earth with his fingers, press with his palms. Get to his feet, gain his balance. He lurched forward. When he fell again, his head hit the edge of the Mustang’s bumper.
It should’ve hurt, but it didn’t. He heard the clang of his skull on the metal, and it dimmed his vision. Made him cough again. He turned his head and spat thick, dark fluid tinged with red. It smelled bad, like spoiled meat. Tony lay in the gravel for a while as the sun rose overhead and beat down on him. It heated the metal of the car, and after awhile he could feel it on his hand and the arm pressed against it, but though when he took his hand away it had gone an angry, blistered red, it still didn’t hurt.
Slowly, the night of the storm came back to him. There’d been wind. Tornado. That explained the ruin of the barn, his beloved car flipped onto its roof. It explained the blood and broken teeth his tongue now explored.
Marnie.
He needed to make sure she was all right. The baby too. The thought of his woman and child got him back onto his feet. Balance was harder this time. He held out his hands to keep himself from toppling over, and still the ground threatened to come up and smack him in the face again. Still the sky tried to hammer him.
Somehow, he made it across the yard without stumbling over the pile of debris he’d come out of. To the back porch, each of the four steps a challenge he met by stubborn perseverance. Splinters gouged his palms as he grabbed at the railing to heave himself up. The wounds they left didn’t hurt any more than anything else had.
After everything he’d managed, the door was too much. The handle slipped through fingers that refused to curl all the way around it. He tried again. His nails left runners of white in the dark green paint he could remember buying at the hardware store. He could remember painting that door, how he’d kept his hair off his face with a red bandanna. Marnie had brought him a cold Arnold Palmer, and he’d kissed her right there until she wriggled and laughed, shooing him back to work.
Happy.
That’s what he’d been, painting this door that now wanted to keep him out of the house hiding the woman he loved. Happy he’d been, drinking the tea and lemonade, ice cubes clinking in the glass, the taste of Marnie on his tongue sweeter than the drink. Happy with her and this place and this house and his life.
Tony let the weight of himself push him to his knees. Forehead against the green paint. Left a red stain, not white. Red and brown and grey. He coughed, spitting. He tasted something rotten. He pressed his head into the wood and felt no give, not even when he let the weight of his thoughts tip his head back so he could slam it forward again against the wood. It didn’t chip or break. The door didn’t open. The paint flaked a bit, and when he put his fingertips to his forehead they came away flecked with dark green as well as red.
The sun went high. The sun dropped low. The night came with darkness, and Tony fumbled again with the doorknob until finally his fingers curled just right and tugged with just the right amount of strength.
The door opened.
He went inside.
9
When the bed dipped, Marnie woke. She knew that shift and shuffle of bedclothes, the press of a weight on the mattress. She knew that soft sigh, of a man trying hard not to wake her but not trying hard enough.
The smell was all wrong, though. Tony came to bed smelling of soap and sometimes the aftershave she’d once adored but now could barely stand. Not this time. Now her nose caught hints of copper, of turned earth. Brick dust. Sweat. And under it all, that sweet, light fragrance that had so tantalized her the day before.
It was delicious.
Her sleepy eyes wouldn’t open — was this a dream? It had to be, because for the past nine months, since the day she’d looked down at that plastic stick with its two pink lines, and truthfully even before that, everything about Tony had begun to disgust her. The way he chewed his food, the hairs he left in the bathroom sink, the clickety-snip of his toenails when he clipped them. The smile that once turned her inside out now only turned her stomach.
But this, the familiar stroke of his fingers over her thigh, the warmth of his belly and chest against her back, these sensations sent slow, curling heat all through her. When his hand moved
up to cup her breast, she breathed out a moan and pressed against him. The pillow she used between her legs to keep her back from aching became a sweet pressure against her. Her hips rocked. His hand slipped down the giant mound of her belly, found the edge of her nightgown, tugged it up. His fingers slipped inside her panties, found her heat.
Stroked.
Sex had become a cumbersome thing the bigger she grew. As if it wasn’t bad enough that his every touch felt wrong on her skin, she wasn’t even able to lie beneath him and let him pump away without doing anything else. No, she had to heave her weight around and bend herself into positions that let him push inside her without pressing on the baby. She had to deal with the constant urge to pee, Braxton-Hicks contractions, the looseness of joints that meant almost every part of her ached.
But oh, how good it felt to have him touch her now. By the time he entered her from behind, she was so ready for him she thought she might spiral into climax at the first thrust. With his arm beneath her leg to hold it up so she didn’t have to make the effort, his fingers tapped right where she needed them to. He moved, slowly, so slowly inside her. The pleasure made her shake.
And then, Marnie woke up.
All the way, eyes wide, breath catching in her throat. Her body arched, but she was like a turtle on its back. Imprisoned with him pressing against her from behind, his body linked to hers and her belly in front of her keeping her from rolling forward, all she could do was swim in the sheets and let out a startled cry.
Something was very, very wrong, but though her mind knew it, her body hadn’t yet figured it out. Even as she struggled, pushing at the pillows, the inexorable slide into orgasm had begun and wasn’t stopping. It ripped at her, left her gasping, her vision bright with stars and the hazy red edges of possible unconsciousness. He thrust harder, the bed rocking. He moaned her name, and something familiar in it sent her over the edge again even as she fought against the pleasure with a silent “no, no, oh, God…no.”
He spent himself inside her with a low shout and stopped moving. Marnie panted, frozen. Tony stroked her hair from the back of her neck; his lips pressed her there in the place that not so long ago she’d loved to have him lick and bite and kiss. Then he withdrew. The bed shifted. She heard the pad of his bare feet on the floor, down the hall and into the bathroom. She heard the shower start, the water pattering on the porcelain and the rattle of the shower curtain rings on the curved metal rod he’d installed just for her so she’d have more room in the old-fashioned shower.
She heard him start to sing.
Tony had a surprisingly sweet baritone voice, always on key though he only ever sang in the shower or along with the car radio. His voice was grit and gravel now, nothing sweet about it except when it sputtered into silence. Marnie pushed herself up from the bed, anticipating the slow, warm gush of him on her thighs, but there was nothing. She shook, her knees weak for a moment, and she gripped the nightstand.
What the holy fuck was happening?
The shower shut off. The bathroom door squeaked, then the hall. The stairs. All normal, familiar sounds made shocking and terrible by the fact she should be the only person in this house and was not.
She heard the back door open and close.
Only then could she move. Marnie went downstairs, found the orange juice carton on the counter instead of in the fridge, just as she had so many times before. It had made her angry and angrier all those other mornings when Tony had gone off to work, leaving her with the mess. This time, all she did was close the carton, open the fridge and tuck it inside. Her fingers shook; she was light-headed and woozy the way she got when she didn’t eat enough or it was time for the daily liquid shot of the heavy duty iron supplement she had to take to counter the anemia this baby’d created. She went to the cupboard to get the bottle, every movement an effort she was afraid she’d be unable to make but forced herself to do anyway because only be pretending she might possibly still be normal, that all of this was normal, could she hope to function.
She stopped in front of the electric calendar that had been on the kitchen counter since her grandparents had owned the house. Like an old clock radio, it had flipping numbers, black on white, to keep track of the month and date. She looked at it every day.
Yesterday had been the eighth, she was sure of it because that was bill-paying day and she’d spent the morning at her desk, calculating the bank balance. It had put her in a bad mood, which had led to the frank-n-beans argument, and that had led to her throwing them on the floor…and then the storm had come. Yesterday had been the eighth, the day after had been the ninth, today should be the tenth, that’s how time fucking worked, it went forward twenty-four hours at a time, but the calendar said it was the twelfth.
Marnie gripped the counter, her breath short. The baby moved and squirmed, kicked once and settled. She looked at the microwave clock, which should be blinking if the power went out, but it was the same steady green as always. Besides, if the power’d gone out the calendar would be showing a date from the past, not the future.
The fuck?
She looked out the window over the sink, across the yard, toward the wreckage of the Mustang. A man stood there, his back to her, but she knew the slope of those shoulders, the length of those legs, the tilt of that head, even though part of that skull appeared to be missing. Gone. Dented on one side so deeply the difference in his profile was clear even from this distance.
Inside out. Upside down. That’s how she felt, her stomach all at once gnawingly hungry and red clouds threatening the corners of her vision. She knew that feeling; she’d passed out a number of times before the midwife she was seeing had figured out Marnie needed to be on the high extra doses of iron.
She was not going to pass out. No. She refused. Her fingers gripped the counter hard enough to dent the remaining pieces of her fingernails back, but she fought off the urge to slowly crumple to the ground.
She’d been asleep for three days. She’d killed her lover, the father of her child, and he was out there walking around. He’d fucked her in their bed an hour ago.
She went outside and found the place where she’d put him to what had apparently not been any sort of rest. The debris was there, some spattered with blood and bits of hair. The sight pushed bile into her throat, but she forced herself to keep looking.
From his place inspecting the Mustang, Tony turned. His voice was thick and rough, but his words were soft. “Babe? You okay?”
Shit and damn and fuck, he was crossing the yard to her. She backed up, going in the house, closing the door, but he wouldn’t be kept out. He couldn’t be. She’d invited him into her body, her life and her house, and he was there to stay.
She watched him through the four panes of glass, hoping he’d stop. Turn around. Tinker with his car. Leave her alone. Oh God, if only he’d leave her alone. At the counter, her shaking hands slipped a knife from the block.
Inside her, the child stirred.
10
Abbie had fallen asleep in one of the hard plastic chairs in the nurse’s lounge, her dark hair swept to cover her face and one hand curled under her chin. She looked softer in sleep. Or maybe it was just that his eyes gone blurred and out-of-focus from exhaustion.
They’d spent the last three days at the hospital, which had been overrun with the dead and injured after the series of tornados that had swept the region. Four different twisters had been confirmed, and though he hadn’t heard this himself, Cal’d overheard two of the doctors talking about how yesterday another part of the state had been hit along with several other towns. Cal could never’ve claimed to be a doctor, but he’d had emergency medical training. Both of them had found themselves helping out in the emergency room, him mostly doing triage while she took care of the more practical things, the food and drink. They hadn’t left even to eat or sleep, but things had started to get back under control and it was time for Cal to get out of here.
He considered leaving Abbie there, if only so he didn’t have to wake
her. Probably would’ve if he’d had his own car and didn’t need to use hers. Might even have left her there anyway, except something about her wouldn’t let him. It wasn’t the way she’d fucked him — Cal had been with lots of women for one-night stands. Preferred it that way, mostly, since Marnie had up and left him for that fella with the dopey grin and the piece-of-shit Mustang. No, there was something else about Abbie that had spoken to him in some crazy kind of whisper. Something like a secret, only Cal thought she didn’t even know it.
Hell. He wasn’t sure what that even meant, just that he didn’t leave her sleeping when he could’ve. Instead, he reached over to shake her gently awake, murmuring her name.
She came awake suddenly, without startling, but her body went instantly tense beneath his touch. Her eyes came open, hands fisted. She was on her feet before he even had time to get out of the way. It took her a few seconds to know who he was, but when she did, her smile was rueful.
“Dreaming,” she said in explanation, then looked around the lounge. “Guess it wasn’t a nightmare.”
“No. Sorry.”
She tilted her head and her smile softened. “It’s okay. You want to go see your wife now?”
“Ex-wife,” he made sure to emphasize. “We’ve been divorced for over a year. I just —”
She held up a hand. “I told you before. You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
He hadn’t wondered before if she had a family. Husband, kids. She didn’t wear a ring, but there’d been signs of a family in her car. A few of those plastic toys kids got from fast-food meals, a package of infant wipes that told him she was used to cleaning up messes.
“You still want to come along?”
She blinked slowly. “Yeah. Sure. Let’s go.”