by Piper Lennox
His tongue laps harder. His fingers spin inside me.
For the first time in years, I reach an orgasm so vibrant and powerful, it takes all the air out of my lungs.
Eighteen
Easton bends down to kiss me as I rise. It knocks me off-balance; I sit on the brick of the alleyway and gladly let her position herself in my lap.
“Can I...?” Her hands fumble with my belt, equally excited and embarrassed. I grab them.
“There’s literally nothing on this earth I would love more,” I tell her, against every piece of animal DNA in me, “but someone will find us. We don’t need the entire town knowing you gave me head in an alley.”
Easton laughs and touches her head to mine. “I know, I know. But—”
“We got away with this because you’re quiet when you come. I am not.”
She scratches my scalp again and lifts her eyebrows when she hears the moan muffled in my chest. “That’s true,” she says, like she’d almost forgotten.
“Tonight?” I ask, and brush the dust from the brick wall off her shoulders. “I’ll even sneak through the window, if you want. Make it more exciting.”
“Already is.” She kisses me, giving the smallest, quietest noise of surprise when she tastes herself on my mouth.
The rest of the festival melts past like watercolors and static, every sense still raw from Ford’s contact. My stomach, a cluster of cells in my brain, and the pocket in my heart where all the scar tissue’s kept—the places in me that cradled that fury, all these years—pulse with the reminders of why I shouldn’t have given in. Why I shouldn’t give in again.
But he seems...different.
Oh, God, it’s the oldest cliché there is: fall for a rogue and think you can reform him.
Maybe you can’t—but something has. Six years ago, Ford would have left his father in the gutter to die. He basically did, and the guy deserved it. Now, though? He’s back to care for him, not to mention his sister. Lots of things are different now. Maybe it’s unfair to assume Ford is still who he was at eighteen. I know I’m not.
“Watermelon pops,” he points out, as we stroll through the festival. It feels like my knees are screwed on backwards; I’m positive everyone can tell, simply from my foal-like stumbling, what we just did in the alley. “Didn’t the smoothie shop stop doing those?”
“Alexis took over the smoothie shop when her dad had a stroke last year. First thing she did was bring the watermelon stuff back. Turns out tourists love it.”
Ford’s brow lowers. “I didn’t know her dad had a stroke. Is he...?”
“He’s alive. Paralyzed on the left, though, almost completely.”
“But he’s not even that old,” Ford protests, as though I’m the one to decide who in Hillford has strokes and who doesn’t. “I mean...he’s, what, forty-five? And he’s in great shape. He runs that marathon in the city every spring.”
“Six years is a long time, Ford. He wasn’t doing well for a while, there, so...everyone kind of knew something was coming.”
Everyone but Ford, of course.
“He used to give you and Caroline free smoothies.” The memory materializes out of nowhere. “I always got jealous, until I heard it was because he knew you guys didn’t have much money to spend, and me and the other kids did.”
“I worked in the back for him,” Ford corrects. “He needed someone to unload fruit from the truck and rinse it, on days Alexis couldn’t be there, so I helped out. It wasn’t free.”
The line creeps forward. I’m glad, because he can’t see the way I draw back. “Oh. I didn’t know that.”
“I know you didn’t.” He relaxes. “But…that’s rumors, for you.”
“Ford and Easton.” Alexis smiles, putting her palms on the cart. I notice she’s painted the bike attached to the front; her father kept it fire-engine red, but now it’s deep pink with flecks of black, like watermelon seeds. “Never thought I’d see you two back together.”
“We’re not....” I start, but as Ford hands me the popsicle he got me, I don’t know how to finish my sentence. We’re obviously something.
Even this is different from the Ford I remember. Back then, you’d have thought our relationship was underground, he stayed so tight-lipped about it. It was only after our birthdays that things felt more official, but he still greeted me with silence more than anything. Smiling silence, but still.
When we went places together, they weren’t dates. They were coincidences. We’d meet up at the river for parties, in the fields behind friends’ houses for bonfires, or in Bram’s dining room for beer pong. Our friends considered us a couple, as did I, but Ford always kept me wondering.
Now: he steps to the outer edge of the sidewalk between me and the road, even though there aren’t any cars; the entirety of Main has been blocked off for the festival. When our hands brush, he doesn’t slip his into his pocket, or check to see who’s watching before taking mine. He simply grabs it, holding fast.
The popsicles stain our lips a deeper, sweeter-looking pink and numb our tongues. I worry I won’t be able to feel it when he steers me into another alley and kisses me, but I should have known better. I can always feel it.
“Well, well, well. Pardon me.”
I jump. Ford just hangs his head and sighs.
Bram leans on the back door to Hillford Taphouse and grins, filtering cigarette smoke through his teeth. “Didn’t know you two kids were back together.”
Like before, I’m not sure how to respond. I pull away from Ford and step around the corner, calling, “Bye, Bram.”
He and Ford exchange whispers. I don’t let myself listen.
“Sorry.” Ford takes my hand again when he steps out of the alley. “You know Bram. He’s nosey as shit.”
“We did interrupt his smoke break.” I’m dying to ask if he told him we are back together, but I know better. Of course we aren’t.
Again. You can’t be “back together” if you were never “together” in the first place. I just want to know what Ford thinks we are. Same old story.
“Here we are.”
Before I can assess the nearby booths or shop windows to see what he’s talking about, he guides me into another alley and kisses me again.
Like before, it’s a wave across me and through me, the force of how much we still want each other finally set free. But it’s not laced with frustration this time, or posed as some kind of challenge.
He holds my head behind my ears, and draws trails of light behind my eyelids that barely link to lust. There’s so much more under the surface we’re sharing. Finally.
It’s not the same old story. It’s not even the rest of our story, the one he left unwritten the day he crossed Hillford limits and left me broken. It’s an entirely new one.
I used to hate this town.
I don’t mean in that daydreaming kind of way everyone feels about their hometown at some point, where the idea of What You’re Missing skates through your head as casually as most people get ideas to start their own businesses or get a gym membership.
I mean that restless, can’t-sleep, soul-scalding urge and deafening loop in your head that says, I have to get out. I have to get out, and I have to do it fast. Because you know that the longer you stay, the deeper your roots will go—and the harder it will be to leave.
Funny thing was, I didn’t feel that way about Filigree. I wasn’t old enough to wonder what I was missing, when we lived there. The rippling landscape of farms and fields, a place where kids still ran home to dinner bells and any errand required “going into town” for the day, was fine with me. I liked getting lost in rows of corn and digging the dirt out from underneath my nails before church, only to still have deep, black-brown lines under each one.
When we moved, all of us reluctantly admitted that life was easier, here: pharmacies weren’t an hour’s drive, festivals and events of some kind happened every month, and it felt like we had stuff to do, rather than stuff that needed to get done.
I
should have loved Hillford. For a little while, I did.
The older I got, though, the less wholesome and quaint it all felt. The fact I could walk in plain daylight with a shiner or split in my lip, and have my old man tell people I’d gotten it climbing trees—the fact they’d believe him—filled me with hatred for this place. It wasn’t wholesome and quaint; it just swept anything ugly under the rug and squashed it down until life tumbled onward. Most people weren’t outstandingly friendly; they just smiled long enough for you to get out of earshot, so they could gossip and talk shit to each other.
When I was twelve or so, I first heard the rumor that my dad was a drunk. I don’t remember who told me it was circulating. Probably Tanner or Bram, because Hudson and I never talked about our fathers’ drinking. Not to each other.
However the rumor got to me, I remember wondering if it could still be a rumor if it was true. Even the parts that no one could have possibly known for sure, just invented for drama and twisted through a town-wide game of Telephone, happened to be true. Like how Dad would drink Listerine, the medicinal-smelling kind that glowed amber in the bottle, if he couldn’t get anything else.
Still: I hated that people were saying these things. Not because I cared about his reputation, but because nothing changed. If they knew, why was it still happening? What was the point of shoving your nose into somebody else’s life, if you never did anything to better it?
Besides all that, I hated feeling stuck. There was nowhere in this town I could get away from him. Even if I got away physically, now rumors followed me like tar fumes. I was sick of getting pitying looks from people and no actual help.
Everything good about this town was tainted, colored in the same desaturated brown I thought of when I saw my house, or when I heard bottles clinking downstairs in the late night, all the way through dawn.
There was nothing good about this place. There would never be anything good about it, as long as he was here.
Then Easton turned me on the tire swing, seeing the rumors for herself. Then Easton cried for me.
I felt my roots spreading farther, reaching deeper into the ground, every day that I knew her.
“Do you still hate it here?”
Easton’s hand is slick in mine. I can’t tell if it’s the humidity or nervous sweat. “Kind of. I don’t know, honestly.”
“Did you miss it at all?”
“I missed some people who happened to be here—but that’s not really the same as missing the town.”
Easton looks like she has something to add to this, or maybe counter it, but she doesn’t. She just nods.
We find Caroline buying a slice of Mrs. Barringer’s peach-and-blueberry pie from a fundraising table, while her friends wheel Bentley’s stroller back and forth between them.
“Hey,” she smiles. “I’m almost ready to go, if you guys are. Just getting some pie for Dad.”
“I don’t know why you’re bothering. He won’t eat it.”
“Of course he will. It’s his favorite.”
“Since when?”
“Since always.” She sets the box in the net of the stroller and laughs at me, like I’m naïve. Excuse me for not giving one shit about Dad’s favorite anything. I’ve only known him to prefer his fruit distilled into bottles, not baked lovingly into a fucking pastry.
No—take a breath. This is an old habit, one I’ve been trying to break ever since I moved back. Caroline’s kindness towards him used to infuriate me. But I know their relationship, and how nicely she does or doesn’t treat him, has nothing to do with me. If she wants to pretend he’s always been a good guy, who am I to stop her?
Caroline hugs her friends goodbye. They promise to come visit soon, and I have to check my eye-roll. Maybe they mean it with all their hearts, even if they never follow through. I should try and break this habit, too: getting bitter at all the friends that left Caroline when she needed them most. They are just kids, after all. Younger than I was, when I did the same damn thing.
“Did you have fun?” Easton takes the boutique bags from her and glances inside. “Oh, my God, this is gorgeous.”
“Isn’t it? I’m so excited to wear, like, real shirts and dresses again, instead of my maternity stuff.”
I walk a little ahead with the stroller, letting them talk. My mind is focused entirely on tonight and what I’ve got planned for Easton, but it’s nice to hear Caroline being...well, herself, again. Interacting with humans outside of her pediatrician and our nearly invalid father. Having fun, shopping—being a kid.
She falls asleep during the drive home. I nudge her awake and tell her to hit the hay; I’ll get Bentley settled in his nursery.
“He needs a bottle,” she mumbles, and doesn’t go inside until Easton and I each promise her we’ll take care of it.
“Poor thing,” Easton sighs, when Caroline’s in the house. “She looks exhausted.”
“She is.” I pass her the diaper bag and Caroline’s shopping bags, then get Bentley in his carrier in one arm, the stroller in the other. We clang our way inside.
“It’s been years since I’ve been in here.” Her fingers brush the embroidery art on the wall near the stairs. It’s one my grandmother made: FORD ELIJAH MCLEAN, with a stitched outline of my handprint from when I was two. There’s a photo somewhere of her tracing my hand for it. I wish I could remember doing it, or at least remember her.
“Probably looks exactly the same. We haven’t redecorated since Mom died. Or dusted, for that matter.” I swipe my hand across the console table and wave it at her; she laughs and shoves it away.
When I bring Bentley’s bottle up to the nursery, Easton’s already got him changed for bed, holding his pacifier in his mouth and rocking in her family’s old chair to keep him silent. We make the switch quickly, replacing the pacifier with the bottle before he can even whimper.
“Want me to take over?”
“No, I’ve got him.”
The sun has barely set, but the room’s already dark and cool. I put a quilt on her shoulders. She thanks me.
“Now this room,” she says, after Bentley’s fed, burped, and placed carefully in his crib, “looks different.”
“Yeah, can’t even tell it used to be mine.” I wind up the mobile and dim the lights. She and I creep our way out together.
“At least you’ve got the garage. I underestimated how much better living at home would be, having that privacy.”
“It does have privacy,” I agree, then trail my sentence as I pause on the stairs. She stops, too, and lets me kiss her.
“Ford? That you?”
I sigh against Easton’s mouth. “Unfortunately, to get to that privacy,” I whisper, “you’ll have to say hi to my dad.”
She laughs. “That’s fine. I haven’t seen him in a long time, either.”
I go down first. “Hey, Dad. I was just putting Bentley to bed. Did you take your meds yet?”
Dad ignores my question and looks past me to Easton in the doorway. “Who’s that?”
“Easton,” we say at the same time. I expect her to be nervous; the house may look the same, but not my father. But she smiles and shakes his hand when she enters, no hesitation.
“Hi, Mr. McLean—good to see you. How are you doing?”
“Can’t complain,” he says roughly, and I want to laugh; all he does is complain. “How are your parents? I’ve been meaning to call them up, but, you know....”
I duck into the kitchen while they chat. Not only is small talk sheer misery, but I can’t stand the way Dad’s voice changes when he talks to anyone that isn’t me. I’ve never been able to mimic the “Hillford tone,” but there definitely is one: that drawling, cheery voice people use when they catch up with people they don’t really know, but think they do.
By the time they’ve said goodbye and Easton joins me, I’ve finished packing: paper plates, a candle, some fruit, chocolate, and cheese, along with two wine glasses we probably should have thrown out with all Dad’s flasks and bottles, on principle.<
br />
“What’s all that?”
“Date night in a box.” I wink at her, drowning in the way she bites her lip.
In my room, while she sets the food up on a card table, I arrange two crates as chairs and pour us each a beer from the six-pack stashed under my bed. Dad wouldn’t take it or anything, but it seemed rude to have it out in the open.
She taps a lighter out of the cigarette pack on my shelf and lights the candle. “I had fun with you today.”
“You say that like you’re shocked.”
“I am. I expected today to be....”
“Awkward? Me, too.” I hand her the glass and hold up mine. We toast. I watch her sip, the foam on her lip reminding me of earlier. “But I knew we’d have fun together, whether it started awkward or not.”
She takes a strawberry from the bowl. “There’s no way you ‘knew’ we’d end up in that alley, doing...that.”
“Of course I did.”
Chewing slower, she stares at me from behind the hair that’s fallen out of her ponytail. She blushes, then swallows.
We pick at the food for a while, but the beer is the only thing we really make a dent in. I don’t think either of us has an appetite. Not for food.
“On my playlist,” she says suddenly, after I’ve turned off the lights, only the candle and growing moonlight left, “there’s a song that has this line, about a couple remembering when things were so good, they didn’t need to reminisce at all.” She pauses, staring at the flame. “But then that time turned into a memory itself.”
“The playlist about me?”
She nods. “It was one of the songs that...that I didn’t associate with you when I knew you. I didn’t hear it until after you left, I mean. But as soon as I heard that line, I just thought, ‘That was us.’”
I set down my glass. “Do you have a lot of songs like that? Ones you added after I left?”
“Yeah.” She reaches into the box and finds a paper towel, wiping the corners of her mouth. “It’s not a sad song, really. Not in how it sounds. But that line—it always made me feel sad, when I heard it. The idea that, eventually, your best times with a person will be behind you. Whether good or bad, everything after that point won’t measure up, ever again.”
