As I roll into town I rehearse what I’m going to say. I have plans. Big ones, and no idea how to explain them, but I’m all out of time, because there he is.
Jody. He’s coming out of the grocery store with a single bag in his arms. He looks small and pale and – as I approach – kind of tired. I pull over and wave, and he stops and rolls his eyes.
He stands at the edge of the grocery store parking lot, feet apart, his mouth and one eyebrow at a sarcastic angle. A bunch of celery leaves protrudes from the grocery bag, putting me in mind of that one artist who painted nothing but women who bought celery and then inexplicably lost all control of their underpants. I can’t think of his name, but it hardly matters now, because the celery in Jody’s grocery bag isn’t working its pant-dropping magic. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him looking less likely to drop his drawers.
“What?” he says.
I had a whole thing rehearsed, I swear, but my mind’s a blank. And even I’m surprised by what comes out of my mouth. “Marry me.”
“Fuck off,” says Jody, and heads for his truck.
“Jody, I’m serious.”
“So am I,” he says, still walking. “Fuck off.”
“Listen to me,” I say, as he reaches for his car keys. “You want to secure your share of the house. Marry me. If you’re my husband then nobody can cut you out of the picture.”
“How romantic. I feel like I’m living in a fairy tale.”
He puts the bag in the truck, but as he steps back to close the door he catches my eye, and he can’t help it. He thaws – just a little. He looks tired and he smells strongly of smoke, but his eyes are still black and beautiful and when he looks at me I can see he still feels it, too.
“I know I have a million things I have to apologize for,” I say. “And I realize I might not have given you the faith you deserve, but I love you more than anything…”
He turns his face away and sighs.
“Jody, please. Let me make this right. Please, baby.”
He closes his eyes for a moment. “I want to,” he says, and gazes back at me. “But the house burned down.”
“What?”
“Well, not down,” he says. “Not all the way. But there was a significant amount of…burnage.”
“How bad?”
“Get in,” he says, opening the door for me. “It’s probably easier if I show you. And let me drive: you’ve gone a really strange color.”
I don’t know what to say. I have a million questions and I know I’m not going to like the answer to any of them, and my gut feels like I swallowed a box of rocks. We drive out of town in uncomfortable silence, and as the truck bumps along the narrow dirt road to the woods my heart starts to stutter against the back of my ribs. How bad? I don’t dare ask him again. We’re almost there when I see it – a blackened rectangle tossed against the trunk of a big oak. It’s the kitchen door.
Oh God. My house. Our house.
Jody pulls up outside, and I exhale. It doesn’t look so bad. The inside of the parlor window is blackened and the panes are blown out, but the living room window is intact. The front door is still on its hinges.
We step out of the truck. Jody touches the back of my hand, and when I turn he licks his lips, and my heart begins to stutter again. “It’s worse at the back,” he says.
He’s not wrong. The whole back of the house is gutted. The kitchen is all but gone and the bed, that big, carnivorous thing from the back bedroom, has plunged down on its head into the ashes.
“Turns out yellow pine is really fucking flammable,” says Jody. “So…you know. Oops.”
The entire back is just gone. It looks like a burned out dollhouse. “What happened?” I say, and I’m surprised my voice doesn’t shake a whole lot more.
“Jack happened. Basically.”
“Oh my God.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Why? Why the hell would he do this to us? To you?”
Jody sighs. “Oh, the usual reasons. Spite. Vindictiveness. We had a fight.”
“About what?”
He pulls the sleeves of his flannel shirt tight around himself and shivers. “Long story, but the short version is that he’s definitely dying this time. But he might not be if he can get a partial liver transplant.”
It takes me a moment to digest this. I’m not sure how Jody doesn’t look like a burned out shell of himself, but he simply looks exhausted. I guess he’s used to this kind of thing, which is a terrifying thought.
“And that was why he was here?” I ask.
“Yep. The whole apology tour, the whole reconnecting thing. All he really wanted was part of my liver.”
“Jesus, Jody.”
He shrugs. “It is what it is, I guess.”
“It’s not, and you know it. My family have their faults, but at least they’ve never tried to shake me down for organs before.”
He exhales a tired little cloud into the chill, smoky air. “Well, that’s the Ohanian way. We’re very extra like that.”
I reach for his hand. He doesn’t look at me, but his fingers slip between mine. The clouds of his breath come faster. “I’m sorry,” I say.
“For what?”
“Everything. I knew all that stuff about you was some bullshit, but I didn’t trust my instincts.” I squeeze his hand tighter, but he still doesn’t make eye contact. And I don’t deserve it. I know that. And he deserves an explanation. “My dad’s law firm somehow hired the most short-sighted investigator in the entire state of New York. Most of those arrest records were your dad - Jody Ohanian Senior.”
He gives a tiny, humorless laugh. “Jack Off Jody,” he says. “You’d think someone who went through life with those initials would have the sense not to hand them onto the next generation, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think your dad is gonna be winning any parenting awards, honey.” He swallows and his eyes shine. “Jody, look at me. Please.”
He turns and looks up at me. He’s pale and there are dark shadows under his eyes, but he’s never looked so beautiful. Dark and clear, like the crisp, starry skies under which we fell in love. “I’m an idiot,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “You are.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I overreacted, and I should have had more faith in you.”
He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t need to. His eyes flash. I’ve got some more groveling to do.
“Look, I admit it’s a little strange to inherit a lover from your aunt,” I say. “But I can’t deny she did always have great taste in men. Except for that time with Martin Amis. That was gross.”
Jody presses his lips together, but I can see the laugh in his eyes.
“Please,” I say, my hands on his face. His cheeks look like red velvet, but they’re cold to the touch. “Please, baby. Give me another chance. Maybe it was what Becky meant to happen all along. Or maybe not, but whatever it was, can you really ignore the way the universe brought us together? We have this house—”
“—which is fucked,” he says, and the catch in his voice tells me he loves it every bit as much as I do. Seeing the burned kitchen door tossed against a tree was like seeing a toe tag dangling from the foot of a family member.
“It’s not,” I say. “You can work miracles if you just have the foundation. That’s what the carpenter said to me. They built this place before backhoes and trucks and cranes, and they built it to last, Jody. It’s been standing for almost a century and a half of ice storms and blizzards and all the other shit that a New Hampshire winter can throw at it, and I’ll be damned if I’m letting a…a liver grifting arsonist put an end to it.”
He looks away again. I run my hands down his arms and take his hands again. He presses his lips tight and shakes his head, and I don’t know where to start apologizing, but I’ll get to it. I will. Just as soon as he knows why I’m so damn sorry.
“Look me in the eye,” I say. “And tell me you don’t love me.”
Jody looks
up from under his lashes. “You know I can’t do that,” he says, after a short pause.
“I love you.”
He comes closer, lifts his chin and offers me his lips. I pour my whole heart into that kiss, and when his breath trembles I know I’ve won. “Say it,” I whisper, and a tear shakes loose from his eyelashes.
“I love you,” he says, and sniffs. “But I’m not fucking marrying you, okay?”
He’s so much his old self that I laugh. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to. And you have to admit you don’t have the best track record when it comes to marrying people.”
“No, I don’t. But you have to admit it would make things easier. Especially if my dad decides to push ahead and contest the will.”
Jody shakes his head. “Well, we’ll worry about that when we get to it—”
“—we? Can there be a we?”
“Depends,” he says.
“On what?”
“If you promise not to marry me.”
I kneel. At this point, I have to. I take his hand and ignore the disgusted look he’s giving me. “Jody Ohanian, will you not marry me?”
“Totally,” he says.
“Will you live in steamy sin with me and disdain all legal advantages and possible tax breaks—”
“—wait, tax breaks?”
“Well, yeah. There’d be tax breaks.”
Jody groans. “Stop it. You know I get mad chub for tax breaks.”
I get to my feet and pull him close. “I, Chris Solomon, promise not to try to marry you, unless the tax breaks involved turn you on to the point where you can’t resist. Or unless you felt it would be super hot to bang a husband for a change. How’s that?”
“Beautiful,” he says. “Very moving.”
“Is this the part where we kiss?”
“It would be,” he says. “If we were getting married, but we’re not.”
“Okay. I’m not clear on the rules of non-weddings. What happens now?”
“This is the part of the non-service where you give me an apology blowjob in the truck,” he says. When he’s smiles it’s his old smile, that cocky, carefree grin that reminded me that there was still joy in the world, and that one day I might feel it again.
And I do. I do.
Epilogue
Jody
I could get used to the woods.
It’s cool and quiet in the early morning. I slip my feet into my boots without lacing them, and clump down the steps of the trailer just as I am. The construction crew will be here in an hour or so, but right now I’m alone, just me, the trees, the bird song and the skeleton of our house.
The frame over the front door is back in place, waiting for the salvaged stained glass that was thankfully on the other side of the house from the fire. The first thing I focused on, when I found myself here – that glass panel. I remember scrubbing it with an old toothbrush, and how the candy-apple red color made me hungry for beauty. It seems like such a long time ago, now. So much has happened since then.
Jack didn’t live out his prognosis. He barely lasted three months after he left here, and I wasn’t there at the end. I wasn’t there to forgive him or hold his hand or tell him I loved him, because I couldn’t do it. He’d wrung me dry of sympathy one time too many, and that’s something that I have to live with.
The worst part? I think I can.
There’s a rustle in the undergrowth. I freeze, suddenly conscious of being naked, but it’s only a deer. A fawn. A spotted, brand new Bambi, tippy-toeing into the clearing on his tiny hooves. I hold my breath and stand still as the stone cherub in the back yard, watching this small, tender baby sniff the air. He can’t be very old. He’s no bigger than a medium sized dog, and his thin legs are precarious as stilts. He looks like his mother only just got done licking him, and I turn my head very slowly in search of her. Mom. Where’s she at?
Chris clears his throat in the trailer. The baby doesn’t blink, but I hear another rustle and then I spot her, hiding in the dappled summer green, her head raised and her eyes wide. She’s older, wiser, and knows not to fuck with those two-legged things that rampage through the woods in orange jackets. The fawn looks right at me, and its fragile beauty takes my breath away. A tiny dot of life, innocent of all the danger in the world, and its mother standing by, scared stiff of a thing her baby hasn’t yet learned to fear. I’m nothing and everything in this moment. We three animals, standing in the summer woods, specks clinging to the edge of extinction.
The door opens. The fawn takes flight in a wobble-legged run, and catches up with Mom just in time. I exhale, thinking how close he came to being abandoned, and then my face is wet. Chris comes out to meet me, and he’s as naked as I am, brown and beautiful in the pale morning sun. When he puts his arms around me I start to howl again, my tears running down over his skin.
“Shh…it’s okay. It’s okay. What is it, baby? Is it your dad?”
I catch my breath and shake my head. “It was a deer. A tiny baby deer. And it was so beautiful and perfect and…oh God.” I wipe my eyes with the back of my arm. “What the fuck is wrong me? It’s like all my nerves are on the outside.”
“You lost your father, Jody.”
“Yeah. Darth Grifter. A real loss to humanity.”
“He was still your father.”
“I know.” And wasn’t that a last laugh, Jack? That Mother Nature could still sink her claws deep enough to make me cry for you, you feckless, selfish, manipulative son-of-a-bitch.
I wrap my arms tighter around Chris’s waist, my ear against his heart. “So,” I say, after a while of listening to it beat. “Are we going to talk about the fact that you’re naked?”
He laughs. “So are you.”
“Yeah, but I’m always naked.”
“I know,” he says, pressing his lips to my hair. “I’m beginning to see the appeal. It’s very liberating.”
“It is, isn’t it?”
Chris runs his hands up and down my back. “I like it,” he says. “But we should probably put our dicks away before the construction guys show up. We’re not paying them nearly enough to look at that.”
I draw back and look up at him. “Excuse me? People used to pay me to look at that.”
He turns his head to listen, and then I hear it too – the rumble of an approaching engine. “They’re here,” he says. “Get in.”
He slaps me on the butt as I hurry back to the trailer, and closes the door just in time. I hear voices outside but in here there’s only the two of us, toeing off our boots and giggling like teenagers as we stumble our way to the bedroom. I land on my back on the bed and he grabs me behind the knees and pulls me to the edge. His stubble grazes the inside of my thigh and then his mouth’s on me, his tongue on the underside of my balls and then up the length and…oh God. I cry out and cover my mouth with my hand, because the trailer walls are thin and the guys can definitely hear what we’re doing in here. Chris gives me one last lick and crawls over me, pulling my hand away so that we can kiss.
“I love the smell of the outdoors on your skin,” he whispers, grinding against me. I reach under the pillow for the lube, because I know what I want. I squeeze a cool blob of it on my dick, and when we come together again the slipperiness makes him moan in my ear.
“Be quick,” I say, rising to meet him.
I wrap my legs around him and we move faster, sliding against each other, bumping and humping. He moans again, louder this time, and I join in, realizing that the guys aren’t going to disturb us if they know we’re doing this. I picture the trailer rocking and squeeze him tighter between my knees. The bed’s squeaking and creaking, his ass is going up and down and I’m close, so close.
Someone knocks on the door, probably Declan, the foreman.
Chris’s eyes widen. “Out in a minute!” he yells, still pounding away, but the interruption shakes loose my last scrap of control and I go to him, my fingers digging into his hips, holding him close as I squirt all over him. It takes
both of us by surprise and he laughs, and he’s still half laughing as he joins me, panting in my ear – “Oh, sweet baby. Fuck, yes…oh God, yes.”
We flop down, all sticky and delinquent. Skipping out on work to squeeze in a morning quickie. He looks at me like he’s forgotten how to do anything but smile, and my belly is full of butterflies. “You’re amazing,” he says, his lips nuzzling mine. “So amazing. God, you went off like a little rocket.”
“Because it’s so good. I love it. I love you.” I love, I love, I love. I know in a couple of moments the buzz is going to wear off and the stickiness is going to feel a lot less romantic, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m nothing but a flutter of lovestruck butterflies, and he’s the most beautiful thing in the world. I trace the shape of his full lips with my fingers and he sucks on them and tells me I taste so sexy.
“How does it keep getting better?” he says, and leans to kiss my lips. “I love you so much.” Outside, someone turns on the radio, still tuned to the same buttrock station as yesterday, and the sound of Cinderella fills the summer glade. Chris sighs. “Shit. We’ve got so much to do.”
He stretches out beside me and yawns. I listen to the song – The Last Mile – and he spots my toes moving in time and laughs.
“You like this?” he says.
“Duh. I’m still a stripper. Play me hair metal and I instinctively go looking for a pole to twirl around.”
Chris kisses my shoulder. “You know, I always wanted to ask you…”
“What?”
“What’s a guy gotta do to get a private dance?”
I get up. We’ve officially reached the sticky and unromantic post coital phase. It’s crusting on my belly. “Alannah Myles,” I say. “I need an mp3 of Black Velvet and a written declaration that there is no barbeque sauce within a five mile radius.”
He props himself up on his elbows. His skin is so beautiful that it feels like a crime to put clothes over it. “Interesting,” he says. “Is this something I need to thrash out with your attorney?”
I lean over the bed and steal one last kiss. “Absolutely. Apply in writing. I’m sure we can work something out.”
The Other Half Page 24
