Jedson: An Enemies-to-Lovers Small Town Romance

by Cora Brent

  “Hell yeah,” he groaned, gripping my hips. “We’re not finished by a long shot.”

  Chapter Nine

  Ryan

  I had to give this girl credit.

  Leah was a whole lot more exciting than I thought she’d be. There was nothing she didn’t want to try. And a few times the dirty phrases coming out of her mouth shocked the living shit out of me. I’d mistakenly classified her as a vanilla flavored fuck, thinking she’d turn out to be okay but probably nothing special. I was happy to be wrong.

  That didn’t mean we got all cozy and romantic. There was no cuddling or kissing or hand holding. There was just a whole lot of raw, unfiltered screwing.

  We dozed off a few times on the living room rug like a couple of naked heathens. And then we’d get right back into it. After a few hours with Leah there was one essential fact I couldn’t deny.

  I’d never been sucked off so good in my life.

  The sky was still dark but it wouldn’t stay that way for much longer. Leah yawned and wrapped herself in the scratchy wool blanket. She did that between every wild sex explosion, rewrapped herself in that stupid blanket lest I stare at her naked body or something.

  “Was that your stomach?” I asked.

  She pulled her knees up and grimaced. “I didn’t eat dinner. Usually I eat when I get home after work but last night I did something else instead.”

  “You did something else quite a few times.” I jerked my head toward the kitchen. “I’ve got some cereal in the pantry if you want to help yourself.”

  “What kind of cereal?”

  “Cornflakes or something. I don’t know, go see.”

  She tied her blanket toga-style and traveled to the kitchen. I leaned my head back on the couch and shut my eyes while Leah made all kinds of noise rummaging around in my kitchen.

  “Here.” She placed a bowl in my hands. She’d neatly fixed a bowl of cereal and milk for each of us, which was thoughtful. Even kind of cute.

  We chewed our cornflakes while sitting side by side in silence like two kids hanging out at summer camp or some shit. The second I was finished she carried both our bowls back to the kitchen.

  “Where’s your dishwasher?” she asked.

  “Leave it in the sink.” I closed my eyes again. I was worn out.

  Leah padded back over and sat beside me. I thought about asking her if she wanted to move the party to the bedroom but that seemed too intimate. This occasion wasn’t supposed to be intimate.

  She sighed softly and then, almost timidly, leaned her head against my shoulder. “I wanted to tell you something.”

  “Oh yeah?” I wondered if getting fucked the right way had loosened up her conscience. “What’s that?”

  “I brought flowers,” she said in a soft voice. “To your mother’s grave a few weeks back. It was her birthday. I drove to the valley to find tulips because I remembered they were her favorite.”

  Tulips. Yeah, they were her favorite. She was forever trying to grow them in sorry little clay pots outside the trailer, never quite giving up even though the desert climate wasn’t suitable to such delicate flowers. That was my mom though. She didn’t give up. Not on flowers. Not on people. That was her undoing.

  A memory came back to bite me. An inconvenient one. Leah banging on the door of our trailer at the crack of dawn. She couldn’t have been more than six years old and she was waving a piece of paper in the air. “Celeste, I made you a picture for your birthday!” And of course my mother ooed and ahed over the chicken scratch drawing like it was Renaissance art and then Leah noticed I was sitting at the tiny dining table and eating a bowl of cereal. “Do you like it too, Ryan?”

  “I remember,” I said, no longer talking about the tulips. If only Leah had kept the heart of that starry-eyed six year old. Instead she’d turned into a vengeful brat who couldn’t even bring herself to acknowledge what she’d done. Or ask for forgiveness.

  “And Ryan, I want to tell you something about the day she died.”

  Nope. Nope. Big fat fucking nope. I wasn’t going to sit here and listen to Leah wax poetic about how inconsolable she was over my mother’s death, not when she refused to confess how her deceit had enabled it to happen.

  “It’s not a good day to talk about dead mothers,” I said, trying to keep the tight anger out of my voice. “Not yours, not mine.” Even though Luanne’s existence should never be referred to in the same sentence as my mother’s.

  A long silence followed and eventually she shifted beside me. “What time is it?”

  My phone was wedged between the couch cushions so I reached for it. “Half past six.”

  “I should get home. If my dad wakes up and notices my car isn’t parked outside he might get worried.”

  I doubted that. Eddie had a long history of storing his head up his ass.

  Leah was already picking her clothes up off the floor. They’d landed in a variety of places. I watched her discover that her pale pink panties would need some surgery to be useful again. She smirked and slid into her shorts, shoving the panties in the back pocket.

  “Will you come by the bar later?” she asked, all the hope in the world stitched into those words.

  I swiped my sweats off the floor and stood up. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

  Leah’s hair fell over her face as she zipped up her shorts. I couldn’t see her expression but her disappointment was almost palpable. I felt guilty for being the one responsible so I changed my mind.

  “Maybe I’ll have time to stop by at some point.”

  And then I’ll let you follow me home so I can pound you until daybreak again.

  The suggestion pleased her though. “I’d like that.”

  She’d like that. Ha! As if I was offering her a cup of tea. I wondered if she realized how loud she was every time I made her come.

  Those thoughts were going to get me hard again. And I had things to do besides let Leah play with my dick.

  Leah was hanging out by the door, her keys in her hand, her ruined underwear hanging out of her shorts. She looked all shy, like she was awaiting a goodbye kiss or something.

  “So I’ll see you later?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I told her and yawned.

  She left. I collapsed on the couch and fell asleep.

  When I woke up it was nearly noon and my dreams had been shitty. I’d been dreaming about Steven Pike. He kept shouting and waving his arms but for the devil of me I couldn’t make sense out of what he was trying to say. I understood the origin of the dream. Steven Pike was the one who’d texted me about eighty times and then busted into the scene where I was smoking out in an old warehouse with a few buddies including Curtis Mulligan, older brother of Tristan Mulligan. Pike pulled me out of there all huffing and puffing like he’d run twenty miles but that’s where reality differed from the dream because in reality I’d had no trouble hearing every word he said. And the next morning, when I confronted him and demanded one more crucial detail he’d coughed it up through tears. But there were still a few pieces missing. I wanted access to those pieces, wherever they were submerged in Pike’s jumbled mind.

  While I showered and made myself presentable for exiting the house I thought about a significant errand I’d planned for today. I was still planning on it. Yet before I took the thick envelope off my dresser, the one filled with documents drawn up and overnighted by Rence Corsica, I was seized by a moment of reluctance.

  Last night with Leah should have changed nothing. There was no reason for me to do anything differently than I’d already mapped out.

  Pike’s place was my first stop. His mother answered the door in a peach colored housedress and offered me a hot dog. I turned down the hot dog but accepted a glass of milk. Pike was watching an old tube television in the trailer’s miniature living room while balancing a plate of hot dogs on a green and yellow tray. The scene could have been plucked from one of those old, grainy photo album pictures from the seventies when the world looked like it had been dipped in or
ange paint. It made me think I should really find a way to do something besides leave a few crisp bills lying around for them to find.

  “Jedson!” My old friend waved a hot dog in the air and invited me to sit down beside him and watch a bunch of really loud women screaming about the Electoral College. I wasn’t sure how much Pike got out of the program but I drank my milk and kept that thought to myself.

  Pike’s mom announced she was walking to the other side of the trailer park to play Parcheesi with her friend Donna.

  “Love you, Ma!” Pike shouted and then belched. He wasn’t wearing his typical baseball cap today. The scar marring the side of his head was curved like a grotesque grin. The door to the trailer banged shut and I waited a few minutes before starting a new conversation.

  “Hey, Pike, you’re friends with Leah, right?”

  “Leah.” He diced up a hot dog with a spoon. It was a strange process to behold. “Yeah, sure. Leah gives me all the pretzels at the bar.”

  “That’s nice of her.”

  “Uh huh.” He stopped abusing the hot dog and a suspicious look crossed his face, almost like he became the old Pike again for a few seconds. “Why are you asking about Leah, Jedson?”

  “Because Leah’s my friend too.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “No?”

  He glared at me. “You hate Leah.”

  Pike remembered. He didn’t know what to make of the memory but it was mixed up in the stew of his brain somewhere. That night when he found me he’d immediately blurted out a crazy story about how he’d heard some stranger from out of town talking about how I must have killed Harry Beckett and I knew right away that he wasn’t being honest. But he did say enough for me to piece some things together and realize that the details hadn’t come from any stranger. And there was someone I’d seen only hours earlier who had a good motive to seek revenge. When I mentioned Luanne’s name, Pike’s eyes widened. He shook his head back and forth wildly and denied it up and down but I was sure I was right. Luanne must have heard me talking to Leah before she came staggering out. She would have been furious when I refused to fuck her, seething when I insulted her. I’d understood what Luanne was for a long time. That was how I knew she was wicked enough to pursue vengeance if the opportunity came up. As for how Pike came by this information, he’d dated Luanne’s eldest daughter, Daisy. He still had a major thing for her and even though Daisy didn’t live here anymore maybe Daisy had heard from Luanne and then dialed Pike to tip him off.

  Or maybe it wasn’t Daisy at all. Maybe Leah learned what her mother was up to and searched out her sister’s ex because she knew we were friends. It didn’t matter. At the time I was certain Luanne was behind it all and Luanne was the one I thought I needed to confront before things got any worse.

  Pike was no longer glaring at me. He was gazing with interest at the women bickering on the television. Whatever feelings and memories had surfaced were once again lost.

  “Would you fuck any of them, Jedson?” he asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I replied.

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  I left Pike with his hot dogs and his daytime television filled with women he wasn’t interested in fucking, feeling like a snobby turd when I dropped more cash on the kitchen table. I hoped Mrs. Pike wasn’t insulted by the gesture.

  The Brandeis house was only a few blocks from the bar but seemed worlds away from the grime of Main Street. The two pecan trees framing the front walk were twice the size they had been the last time I was here. The fruit in the citrus orchard still hung, heavy and unpicked. I knew Leah wasn’t around because I’d driven past the Dirty Cactus to make sure her car was parked out there. I also knew Eddie had to be here because I had pretty reliable information that Eddie rarely went anywhere. The house appeared untended, lonely somehow. A few of the stone façade pieces had fallen off and left bare spots that were never repaired. The paint was faded and the window screens were caked with dust. It was not a house that had been taken care of for a while. Or perhaps houses eventually manifest the rotten nature of the people within.

  I couldn’t see the trailer from here but I knew it remained, out of sight behind the house like the servant’s quarters, past the overgrown orchard. It was there whether it could be seen or not.

  There was no answer when I rang the doorbell so I rang it again. Pounding on the door wouldn’t get me anywhere because it was solid iron. So I settled for standing back and shouting.

  “Eddie, answer the goddamn door!”

  Another twenty seconds passed but then the lock shifted and the door opened. An old man peered out at me. Eddie had been old as long as I’d known him. He’d been Luanne’s senior by at least a decade and had that kind of frog-shaped body that men grew into if they didn’t take care of themselves. But the guy looking at me in the doorway was a different kind of old, a sapped-of-his-life-force level of old.

  “I heard you were back,” he said and I detected no hostility, perhaps just a shade of annoyance.

  At least he didn’t seem like he was teeming with rage. This would be an easier deal to close if Eddie wasn’t waving a shotgun in my face.

  “The law agreed I’m not a murderer after all,” I said, then paused to keep my anger in check. “How are you, Eddie?”

  He was wearing a disgusting old bathrobe and compression socks. “I’m eating lunch.”

  Perhaps he’d misunderstood the question. “Can I come inside?” The envelope I’d grabbed off my dresser earlier was in my left hand. “There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

  “Is it going to take long?” he asked as if his blistering social calendar could hardly fit in one more commitment.

  “It won’t take long at all.”

  He allowed me to follow him into the house, which looked exactly the same. It had been a living monument to Luanne and now it was an eternal memorial to Luanne. She leered at me from every single wall.

  Eddie led me to the kitchen. I was glad he didn’t want to take a seat in the dining room. I’d done that last time I was here. I didn’t care to revisit the experience.

  He creaked his way into one of the wooden chairs and I followed his example.

  “Must be tough,” I said, intentionally digging a knife into a raw wound. “Living here in this house without Luanne.”

  “It is. She loved this house.”

  I was pretty sure Luanne loved nothing and no one except her reflection in the mirror. She was a classic wicked fairy tale queen.

  Eddie’s face remained blank when I outlined the offer. Then his bushy white eyebrows melted together when I told him why it was in his best interest to accept it. By a conservative estimate the Cactus could only be kept afloat maybe six more months before the bank elected to begin foreclosure measures. He could retire officially, perhaps discover there was life beyond the grim confines of this Luanne tomb. He could set Leah free from her obligations and fund her return to college. Hell, he didn’t seem to have much interest in managing the place anymore anyway. There was no reason for him to hold onto it. No reason except pride. And he had nothing to be proud of.

  “You know the place doesn’t have long, Eddie,” I said, faking a level of concern for him that I did not feel. “Your crappy decisions are all catching up with you. You’d need a goddamn fairy godmother to climb out of the financial pit you’ve dug for yourself. I’m offering you a way out. It’s a better deal than you’d ever get on the market. Emblem’s not exactly an up and coming location.”

  He was indignant. “You never had a penny to your name. Where the hell did you come with the kind of money you’re talking about?”

  “Never mind that. Everything is legit. You’ll find financial and legal references listed on the second page. Feel free to make some calls. I won’t be insulted.” I pushed the envelope across the table. “I’ll give you twenty four hours to look over the paperwork. You’re not going to get a better deal and you know it’s the best option. Unless you need to talk it ove
r with Leah.”

  “It’s my bar,” Eddie’s petulant voice informed me. “My decision. I don’t need to talk anything over with anyone.”

  His bar, huh? I estimated his response was about reason number six hundred and eighty four why Eddie Brandeis sucked. Leah had abandoned all her own ambitions and come back here to bust her ass at that damn bar and take care of him. While I knew it might screw up my plans if Eddie enlightened Leah on what I’d been up to behind her back, I still thought he was a dick for cutting her out of the equation.

  “That’s your call,” I said with a shrug. “I’ve included the number of a mobile notary. I’ve already paid the fee. You just need to call and ask them to come out here for the signing. Now, if you want to wait for foreclosure and bankruptcy, then by all means toss the envelope in the trash right now. But you have another choice. You could take the hand that’s being offered as you’re dangling off the cliff and sign on the dotted line.” I leaned forward to get far enough into his face he’d have no choice but to hear me. “You owe me, Eddie. You know you do.”

  Eddie stared at the Fed Ex envelope. “I heard your pitch, Jedson. I think that’s all I need to hear.”

  Luanne eyed me from the wall clock above the kitchen door. This fucking house. It was like the Church of Luanne. I just wanted to get the hell out of here.

  “My contact information is in there,” I said, rising from my chair. “Let me know if you have any questions.”

  Eddie didn’t answer. I inhaled deeply after I closed the front door behind me. The air had felt contaminated in there.

  The guilt finally hit me when I was back behind the wheel. I could have been up front with Leah. And maybe I should have been. In spite of my best efforts I couldn’t hate her like I wanted to hate her. In fact after last night I knew that if I didn’t watch it I’d end up really liking the girl who’d destroyed my life and that would be a fucked up dilemma to have.

  I had nothing to feel guilty about. Leah was in over her head. She’d end up wasting all her youth and energy trying to prop up her father’s dreams until she was exhausted and broken. The price I’d offered for that crumbling eyesore was fair, more than they’d get anywhere else. In the long run I was doing Leah a favor.