by L. D. Davis
I closed my mouth tight. His tongue flicked across my lips, but my lips were sealed.
“Open,” he whispered and pressed his tongue on my lips, trying to pry them open. “Open your fucking mouth. You want to kiss me. Open.”
He again tried to force his tongue through my two lips, but failed. I started to feel a little triumphant until his hand went up my skirt faster than I could react, and his fingers made contact with my sweet spot. I gasped and in that moment, his tongue was in my mouth. I wanted to ride his hand and suck on his tongue, but I forced his hand out of my skirt, and broke free of the kiss.
“You want me,” he whispered in my ear.
I bit my lip to the point of pain, and with an extreme amount of effort, pushed him away from me.
“I didn’t come here for this!” I cried out.
“Then what did you come here for?” he barked back. “Did you think that we could just pretend that nothing ever happened between us?” He closed the distance between us again. “I know you love me, Emmy.”
He reached out to touch me, and I almost let him, but I shoved him away. I couldn’t control how my body temperature rose in his presence, or how wet it made me when he touched me, but I could control almost everything else.
“You hurt me!” I screamed. “You put your hands on me and you hurt me.”
“I was fucked up on drugs, Emmy. I’m sorry. I don’t even remember it.”
“It’s not just the drugs and the abuse, Kyle. You weren’t strong enough to stand up to your dad and to Jessyca.”
“But I eventually did!”
“Eventually was not soon enough, Kyle,” I said bitterly. I reached into my bag and produced the bracelet. I held it out to him, but he stepped back. He looked at it like it was poisonous.
“That was a gift. I don’t want it back.”
“You need to take it back,” I said. “This is why I’m here. I’ve been holding onto it, in essence holding on to you. I have to let you go.”
“You don’t have to,” he said, and I could see the hope in his face.
“What do you expect me to do, Kyle? Tear my son away from his father and move into your shiny new apartment with you? Tear him away from his family and everything he knows? Is that what you want? It probably is, Kyle, because you don’t give two shits about the aftermath when you get what you want. You smooth talk your way into getting things your way and then when it gets too fucking hard you duck out or shove some meth up your nose. You beat me and you could have killed me and Lucas. That broke me. I will never be with you again.” I shook the bracelet at him and shrieked, “Take the fucking bracelet!”
In a stunned silence, Kyle reached out and gingerly took the bracelet.
“Thank you,” I breathed.
I opened the door and stepped onto the landing.
“I am very sorry,” Kyle said to my back.
I had nothing left to say and let the door close behind me, cutting myself off from Kyle forever.
Chapter Forty-Two
“So what’s up? What do you have to tell me?” my mom asked.
We were sitting out by the lake at the family house in Louisiana. Lucas and I drove in the Friday after Labor Day for a short visit before returning home to Chicago.
I took a deep breath and told her about what happened with Kyle. I wanted to come clean with her. I had a strange sense of obligation, like I was supposed to tell her because she’s my mom. I no longer needed her to kiss my boo boo and make it feel better and give me a cookie, but I needed her to know because it was a secret too deep to keep from your mom, I guess.
Her face didn’t change during the entire story. I wondered if she was really hearing me. When I was done, we sat in silence for a full minute, staring at one another.
Abruptly she stood up.
“What are you doing?” I stood up with her.
“I gotta go,” she said distractedly.
“Go where?”
“Kill that son of a bitch Kyle Sterling.”
“No, no killing.”
“He needs to be dead!”
“What is up with you and Donya and the death thing?”
She burst into tears and I again become the one to provide comfort. It took me awhile to convince her that she shouldn’t go cut off Kyle’s nut sac, and awhile longer to convince her not to tell my dad.
“I need a drink,” she said. “You want a drink?”
“No, I don’t want a drink.”
She was walking back toward the house but stopped and looked at me with her hands on her hips.
“Whaddya mean you don’t want a drink? What’s wrong with you? Are you in AA?”
“No, I’m not in AA. I have to stay alert for Lucas.”
“Oh. Right.”
I watched my mom drink until she mellowed out and then I went to check on Lucas. He was in the yard with my dad playing catch. It made me think of Luke and a house. If we had a house with a yard, Luke could play catch with his son. Lucas still couldn’t catch the ball, but he could throw like a pro.
I slipped away, back to the chairs by the lake and called Luke at work.
“We need a house, with a yard, so you can play catch with Lucas,” I said when he answered.
“That’s random.”
“Sometimes I’m random.”
“Sometimes?”
This was our first real conversation since I yelled at him when I was still in Belmar. We had spoken briefly when I told him that we were driving to Louisiana, and of course he spoke to Lucas daily.
“Are we still fighting?”
“Depends. Do I have to fight anyone for you?”
“You would fight for me?” I whispered.
“To the death.”
I smiled, even though in a roundabout way, Luke was also associating death with Kyle. Disturbing.
“I’m sorry I was being an ass,” he said.
“I’m sorry for giving you a reason to be an ass.”
“You don’t have to apologize, Emmy. I’ve been trying to get you to open up to me for months and I blew it the first time that you said something I didn’t like.”
“Well, I didn’t exactly make you feel secure in our relationship.”
“If I’m insecure, it’s my own fault. I trust you, one hundred percent. Listen, I have to go. I have a client waiting for me. I’ll call you tonight.”
“Okay. I love you,” I said and held my breath.
“I love you, too, babe.”
My heart flopped around happily in my chest.
Later that night, after Lucas was already in bed, Luke called. I told him about the bar, how I made arrangements to have the remains leveled and the property cleaned up so I could put it up for sale.
“I thought you were going to think about it for a while.”
“I had to let it go in order to move forward. My life isn’t in New Jersey anymore. My life is in Chicago.”
“You sound sad about it.”
“It’s a little sad,” I admitted. “But I don’t fit there anymore, not even with my friends and my family. I felt like an outsider in Belmar. Truth be told, I feel like an outsider almost anywhere.” I didn’t mean to get so deep, the words just tumbled out. To make matters worse, my throat felt tight, like I was going to cry.
Sometimes I can be so lame.
“You’re crazy. Everyone loves you. My mom loves you like a daughter and my sisters love you like a sister. Your own family…” He hesitated, because he knew he couldn’t begin to fudge that one. Emmet and I had grown close since his move to Chicago, but my other siblings remained emotionally and personally distant. Even my relationship with my father wasn’t like it was when I was a kid. I didn’t even need to elaborate on my mother.
“I have you and I have Lucas,” I said. “But…I don’t know. It’s not that you two aren’t enough…”
“We’re not, but I understand. You need to talk to your mom. Talk to her, not at her. Speak, don’t yell.”
“Blah,” I said.
> The next morning I pulled my mom outside again. I was so calm and cool when I told her about Kyle, but when I started telling her about how I felt about her and our relationship, I felt my blood boiling beneath my layers of skin. When I was done with my spiel, she sighed and slumped back in her seat.
“You’re my favorite, you know,” she said.
“Let’s not tell lies, mother.”
“I’m not lying. You’re everything I wished I could have been when I was young.”
“A weak, cheating, man-stealing, heart-breaking, under achieving, single mom?” I asked cheerfully.
“No. A strong, independent, beautiful, resourceful, successful, wonderful mother.”
“What are you talking about, Mom? You got everything you’ve ever wanted, right? A husband, children, a nice home, and a great figure.”
“Those are all very nice things,” she said with a small shrug. “But I sometimes wish that I would have waited a little while before doing all of that. Long before Lucas was even a thought, you had traveled the world, climbed mountains, swam in distant seas, had a successful career, and experienced love and sex in ways a woman who gets married at nineteen will never experience.”
Yuck!
“I thought you were happy,” I said, suddenly concerned she was going to go through a mid-life crisis twenty years too late and divorce my dad and date someone a little older than Lucas.
“I am happy. I’m very happy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my regrets.”
“If I’m everything you wish you were, then why do you hassle me so much? I have daydreams about shoving you off of cliffs or drowning you in gelatin.”
Her eyes turned to the lake. The slight wrinkle in her forehead told me she was trying to find the right words to use. At least she was thinking before speaking.
“Sometimes I think you’re not being the best you can be,” she started, turning her attention back to me. “Sometimes it seems like you want to blend in with everyone else and be ordinary, but you’re not ordinary. You stand out in a crowd, you always have. It’s not that you don’t fit, honey. You’re just too dumb sometimes to see that you’re the centerpiece, and the rest of us are trying to fit around you.
“So, maybe I do hassle you sometimes. Some of it is typical mom stuff, you’ll understand when Lucas is older, but sometimes I know you are better than the things you sometimes do. And I’m just a little crazy, so I suppose I’ll always annoy the hell outta ya.”
Chapter Forty-Three
“Guess what, Lucas?” I cooed, as we walked down the hallway to our apartment. “We’re home!”
I slipped the key in and opened the door. Lucas ran in ahead of me while I struggled with our luggage.
“Daddy!” I heard him screech.
“Hey, buddy! I’m so surprised to see you!” Luke exclaimed and I heard the “Muah” of a kiss being planted somewhere on our son. A second later, Luke appeared, carrying Lucas. They were both grinning ear to ear.
“Surprise,” I said, trying to drag in a suitcase.
“I am surprised. I wasn’t expecting you guys for a few more days.” He stepped over a couple of bags to give me a quick kiss on the lips.
“We were homesick, weren’t we Lucas?”
“Homethicks,” he agreed.
Lucas and I piled into the rental we had picked up in New Jersey, and started back to Chicago a few days after my talk with my mom. I really was homesick. We had been gone for nearly three weeks. I missed the sounds and sights of Chicago, the craziness of Lorraine’s house during family functions, and of course Grace’s apple pie.
And I missed Luke.
Since our make-up phone call, I felt like a teenager again, sending love notes during the workday, but spending hours on the phone at night. I had a perpetual smile on my face and when we weren’t talking, I often found myself recalling our latest conversations and reawakening the butterflies in my stomach.
Unlike being a teenager, there was nothing stopping me from rejoining Luke in Chicago. No interference from parents or jealous friends and money wasn’t an issue. So, one night after another long, heart palpitating phone call, I packed up the rental and we left the next morning.
“I’m really glad you’re home,” Luke said later that night after Lucas was in bed.
We were in the living room, trying to organize the mess I brought from the east coast and the gulf, but after a half hour we gave up and collapsed on the couch.
“I’m glad to be home,” I smiled at him.
“Did you ever talk to your mom?”
“Yes, and it went surprisingly well.”
I told him about the conversation, including the drowning her in gelatin part.
“Why gelatin?” Luke asked.
“Why not gelatin?”
“Gelatin is tasty.”
“Gelatin is scary.”
“What? You don’t like gelatin?” He looked at me as if I had grown a third eye.
“Not even when it has vodka in it.”
“Oh. My. God. I’m in love with a gelatin hater. Not even strawberry gelatin?”
“Nope,” I smiled at his words.
“Grape?”
“No.”
“Cherry?”
“Are you deaf? I don’t like the stuff.”
“I’m insulted,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t marry you now. I can’t marry someone who doesn’t share my love of gelatin.”
“Damn. I guess I’ll have to marry Tom Cruise instead.”
“He’s crazy. He won’t let you take an aspirin if you get a headache, and he’s married to Joey from Dawson’s Creek.”
“She has a real name. It’s not Joey Potter.”
“Whatever. You can’t marry Tom Cruise.”
“I think this is simultaneously the most ridiculous and most serious conversation we’ve ever had,” I said. “I don’t like Jell-O and you wear stripes, and I think that is far more offensive, but I’ll still marry you despite the stripes.”
I pushed myself off of the couch and went to bed.
As I lay there, listening to Luke moving around the kitchen, I had to cover my mouth to keep from giggling. We just had a conversation about marriage using stripes and gelatin as a cover up for the fact that we were talking about marriage. Luke proposed through Jell-O and I accepted through stripes. The idiocy of it all had me shaking with excited, silent laughter.
When the bedroom door opened, I covered my head with a pillow to hide the stupid grin on my face and took deep breaths to quell my laughter. After a moment, the pillow was ripped away from me and I could see Luke’s face over mine clearly thanks to moonlight shining through the spaces in the blinds.
“What’s so funny?” he whispered.
“We are,” I said and then pulled him into a kiss.
Again, I felt young, as we made love with giggling, laughter, and absolute delight. And when it was over and Luke was nearly asleep, I whispered a secret into his ear that I had been holding onto for days.
Epilogue
A year has passed, and life is good, most of the time. My father had a heart attack, but is recovering well. My mom spends most of her time in Louisiana now, happily caring for the love of her life. She still invokes my most violent tendencies when I have the pleasure of her company, or when I’m stupid enough to answer her phone calls.
Lucas is giving us the true meaning of Terrible Twos, with tantrums, disobedient behavior and his inability to sit still for even two minutes. I never knew that I had so much patience. My mother tells me that I was horrible at Lucas’s age, and on a really crazy day, I can almost forgive her for being the person she is today. Almost.
We bought a house in a Chicago suburb a few weeks after I returned. It has five bedrooms, two and a half baths, a family room, a formal dining room, a huge back yard, and all of the other normal parts of a house. The travel time to the firm isn’t horrible and we’re near Lorraine, Lena, Emmet, and Grace. Now our home is used just as much as Lorraine’s. It’s often ful
l of family and friends, children and good food and drink.
I’ve made new friends, and though none of them can replace my old friends, they are good, reliable, and fun women. Donya, Mayson, and Tabitha keep in touch regularly with the occasional visit, and I’ve accepted that they’re all able to be good friends without me.
After three months on the market, the property my bar was on was sold. Kyle bought it. He didn’t contact me directly, but contacted Luke. Apparently, he ran into my old barmaid, Lily and they decided to open a sports bar. Together.
By the time Kyle called, Luke had already known about what had happened that New Year’s morning. I imagine that it took an unfathomable amount of self-control for Luke to remain professional and civilized. He dealt with his anger alone, because I wasn’t made aware about any of their meetings until the deal was about to close. The way Luke handled the situation made me love him that much more.
I was curious about a lot of things, like if Kyle was going to quit Sterling Corp, if he was still clean, and especially if he and Lily were dating. She isn’t really his type, but stranger things have happened.
Maybe later, I’ll make a phone call and find out. Then again, maybe not. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter.
For the record, the money that I took from Jessbitch and Walter Sterling was donated to shelters across the country that catered to women and children that are victims of domestic violence. Luke said the money was dirty, and using it for our own personal needs and entertainment would be equally dirty. I, personally, have no problem getting dirty. I feel that I deserve the money, but I really didn’t need it, and I didn’t want to fight about it.
Only less than two weeks after the gelatin and stripes proposal, the proposal became real, with a diamond ring. Of course I said yes. We were married four months later, in front of all of our family and friends. We skipped a honeymoon for the time being. Luke was very busy at the firm and we were still trying to get settled into our new home.
The secret I had whispered into Luke’s ear that long ago night bloomed into a beautiful baby girl named Kaitlyn. She, too, looks exactly like Luke. Lucas is in love with his baby sister. He calls her Kaywen. It’s the best he can do for a two year old. He watches her sleep, he watches her eat, but he runs away screaming whenever there is a poopy diaper.
