by A. L. Woods
And then he hung up.
CHAPTER SIX
I stared at the phone in my hand until my dry eyes stung. Had I just done that? Yeah, I had. It was warranted. I was done being totted around, only for Raquel to fall into someone else’s arms every time.
From the other end of the couch, Trina cleared her throat noisily. “Don’t you think you’re being a bit harsh?” she asked, her features pinching together as she glared at me.
Harsh? Please. That was banana-flavored penicillin compared to some of the shit that Raquel had served me in the past.
“Taste of her own medicine,” I clarified without looking at her.
“Okay, maezinha.”
“Don’t,” I warned. I was not acting like our mother. I kicked my legs onto the coffee table, tossing my phone to the right of me, watching as it bounced on the cushion. I ran a palm across my face and leaned against the back of the couch. Trina and I were watching the third movie in The Fast and the Furious saga, which had been my choice and she had been agreeable, despite not caring for muscle cars or women in barely-there skirts.
I needed something mindless to absorb myself into. My thoughts were drowned out by the sounds of revving engines and Japanese hip-hop beats—the movie had done its job.
“All I’m saying,” Trina started up again after remaining silent for all of thirty-three seconds—literally; I’d counted—“is that old habits die hard.”
I looked at where she was curled up, her knees crushed to her chest with a pillow sandwiched between. Her pink hair was in a lazy bun in the back, the loose strands framing her face.
“Exactly,” I agreed. “And I’m not going to be jerked around while she figures her shit out.”
She bit her upper lip, releasing it only to speak. “I think you’re being unfair.”
“What?” I sputtered, anger slamming into me again. “How am I being unfair?”
“You approached her on what’s likely the worst day of her entire life.” She tapered her eyes at me. I’d been stupid and left one a tab open about Raquel’s sister open on my laptop, and Trina had found it. She had rightly scolded me for looking that up, reminding me that Maria was still single was because of doing shit like that. The kid wasn’t wrong.
“She’s vulnerable,” Trina continued. “She opened up to you. And then someone who obviously means something to her in some capacity showed up and instead of remaining calm, you decided to act like a caveman.”
“He started it,” I fumed, my jaw ticking. It was true, though. If Cash hadn’t shown up, this all would have gone down differently. Hell, maybe we would have wound up back here after I sent Trina an SOS message that she needed to stay in her room.
“It doesn’t fucking matter who started it,” she edged with frustration, shaking her head. “What matters is that it’s human nature to show concern for someone who is incapacitated.”
“He wasn’t.”
“Sean, you haven’t even given her the opportunity to properly explain herself,” my sister argued. “You gave her one-word answers and before that, you ignored her calls. You’re being an ass.”
Snatching my phone, I rose to my feet and all but growled at her. “Piss off.” I glowered at her as I rounded the coffee table and headed for the arched threshold of the living room. This conversation had provoked me beyond belief, the sweat breaking out across my skin. I needed a shower, and then I’d go to bed before I said something to my kid sister that I would regret.
I refused to continue to behave like Maria or my ma would, so I was ejecting myself from this conversation, because clearer heads always prevailed.
“Big man, running away from his problems,” she called after me. I picked up on the implied hypocrisy in her vitriol.
My footsteps stilled, and I turned to glare at her from over my shoulder. “Watch it, Trina.”
“Why?” she pressed, twisting her body around on the couch to stare at me. I saw the taunt in her eyes, the first signs of a challenge tease her mouth. “What are you going to do, big brother? Throw me out?”
I huffed. She wasn’t worth it. This argument wasn’t worth it.
Plodding off to my bedroom, I pulled a clean pair of pajama bottoms and a T-shirt from a drawer, before stalking to the bathroom, shutting the door behind me with more force than necessary, because apparently my kid sister had more sense and maturity than I did right now.
I avoided making eye contact with myself in the mirror in an effort to ignore the fact that my sister was probably right, and I was being a fucking idiot. I didn’t need to see the proof of my stupidity looking back at me right now, because I might be inclined to knock that fucker out, too.
Undressing myself methodically, I dropped my clothes into the hamper and dragged the plain opaque white shower curtain back. My annoyance was heating my body like a furnace that wouldn’t stop pumping hot air, my head spinning as I ran through the night before. Raquel and I had made so much fucking headway, had cleared a landfill of shit, and all it had taken was Cash showing up to throw that all to hell.
I couldn’t get the image of her rushing to his side to check up on him out of my mind. To me, that was the ultimate fuck you.
But what if Trina was right? What if I had misinterpreted the action entirely like Raquel was trying to tell me? If I were her, would I have left him to rot, or would I have checked up on him, too? I knew to some extent that the culture in her pocket of Boston meant that there were some bonds that couldn’t be broken. I could see it in the lengths that Raquel had gone to just to make amends with Penelope, and she wasn’t even from there. I couldn’t fathom how deep seated those roots were for two people cut from the same cloth, or for someone who’d been dealt the same hand of cards as her. Maybe that was why she had done what was intrinsic to her, second nature only to breathing. Even if I didn’t like that son of a bitch—she had done the human thing.
Fuck.
I turned the knob of the shower. Water rushed from the faucet before I pulled on the spout diverter and tested the temperature by sticking my hand into the stream. When it was hot enough, I stepped inside the tub, pulled the shower curtain forward, and sank my head under the waterfall, letting the hot water lave away the day until my hair was thoroughly soaked and sticking to my forehead.
Who the fuck was I?
I was never this overreactive about anything. I prided myself on being the sensible sibling. I didn’t get worked up about these sorts of things; I wasn’t mired in my own shit the way my sisters were. I bounced back; I overcame. I cleared the road of the debris that would have otherwise held me back. But this shit with Raquel was more than just a fucking roadblock. It was a life block, because I had started to think about what my future looked like with her in it.
And I hadn’t even fucked her yet.
I thought about her beyond the scope of her being in my bed. I saw her in my space: sprawled out on the couch with the fireplace going in the winter, sitting on the kitchen counter sampling whatever I was cooking, lounging in a chaise in the backyard in the summer with her nose buried in a book. I hadn’t gotten her first, but I wanted her only going forward. I wanted to hunt down the perfect Christmas tree. I wanted grocery shopping trips, and arguments over why maple syrup wasn’t a food group. I had thought about flipping the third bedroom into an office for her, somewhere she could write and safely explore her thoughts.
I wanted her. All of her. All of her fucking bullshit. I wanted to be the source of her smiles and her anger, her laughter and her moans of ecstasy.
Me. Just me.
I had the capacity of falling in love with her, if I wasn’t already halfway there.
My blood ran cold, my heart skipping enough beats that I should have been comatose on the ground as the thought percolated in my mind.
Love? Shit, was that what was happening here?
I knew I really liked her, why else would I jump through so many hoops for her—but could I actually be falling in love with her? Was that why I’d nearly lost it when I’d
detected a threat in my presence?
My head pressed against the cold tile, my lids pinching together. This was so damn frustrating. I had hoped the shower would help rinse away that startling realization, but it made things worse. Raquel had formed an indelible mark on my heart, and no shower, no argument, no distance would change that.
I punched the tile with the base of my palm, my free hand wrapping itself around my cock that jutted out away from my groin the way it always did when I was in the shower and she was on my mind. It wasn’t even unexpected anymore for me to get rock hard at the thought of her, regardless of the circumstances. She made me hard when she was happy, and hard when she was mad. It turned me on when she was vulnerable, when she let me look past the careful machination she had built up and portrayed to the world. She made it hard to breathe when she kissed me back with the kind of ferocity I had never expected from her when she swept into my office weeks ago, all short-tempered sarcasm. She opened up to me as the weeks rolled by, though, like the bud of a flower at the first sign of spring. When the sun broke through the haze of dense clouds, she bloomed. Cash wanted to pluck her from the ground, but me…I wanted to cherish her just as she was.
My hand worked back and forth across my heavy shaft in careful motions, my thumb stroking the pre-cum that had formed at the tip. Now I felt stupid for having been reserved about sleeping with her sooner; at least then she would have been somewhat out of my system. I had wanted to wait with her, regardless of what the head of my dick had wanted, because even before she told me as much, I suspected that she had never been swept off her feet before.
Except, what I had done in the past twenty-four hours was more like shoving her to the ground and ensuring she stayed there.
I squeezed myself tightly until the point of pain. I didn’t deserve this, and hell, maybe I didn’t deserve her, but my hand worked furiously over my length, my breathing ragged as it slid past my clenched teeth. I wondered if she would be a tight little thing when I finally sank myself into her. Pleasure mounted in my heavy balls and right through my shaft as images pervaded my mind. I pictured her wrapping those lean legs of hers around my hips, my cock filling her to the hilt, my pelvis grinding over her most sensitive spot. Those sounds she made in the office that drove me wild filled my head like my new favorite song. In my fantasy, she met me thrust for thrust, taking everything I drove into her with a sexy little smile on her face. I fucked her like she was mine, like Cash never existed, like I was expunging his mark on her memory with every bruising punch of the piston of my hips.
I didn’t want her out of my system. I didn’t want anyone plodding through her garden bed or ripping my flower from the ground. I wanted to savor her, protect her.
And if she let me, I wanted to love her.
My orgasm shot out of me; the fist that had been braced against the tile finding my mouth. I bit down to drown out the pleasure that swept through me in euphoric waves that made my knees buckle. After collecting myself, I directed the showerhead to where I’d ejaculated. The stream unhinging my orgasm that now swirled in an eddy that circled by the drain before disappearing. And just as quickly as the warmth of my release had filled me, it was gone. Cold settled over my skin, the pained prickle of frost for what I had done settling over me.
We were unconventional. We were unorthodox. But I didn’t want normal, and I didn’t want easy, either. I killed the water and stepped out of the shower. Wrapping a towel around my waist, I dribbled water all over the floor as my feet carried me out of the bathroom and back to my bedroom in search of my cellphone.
Finding her contact number, I hit dial. It rang and went to voicemail.
I did it again three more times, until on the fourth time the phone clicked with the sound of being answered, sparking hope inside of my chest that died as soon as the mechanical voice filled my ears.
“Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and try your call again.”
I may not have plodded the bed of soil where the flower had lived, but I had taken her sunshine and watched her wilt away.
Maybe I didn’t deserve her after all.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The small blessing of growing up perpetually disappointed is that when you’re confronted by more disappointment, you’re unfazed. Disappointment tastes the same when you’ve been drinking from the same well of contaminated water your entire life. I’m used to being in a state of numbness, of disassociating, of watching myself go through the motions of life but not really having any understanding or recollection of doing so.
But if I’m being honest, it’s been awhile since I’ve felt this numb. Numb isn’t a bad thing. Numb takes the edge off the ache in the center of your chest like three fingers of smooth whisky does the mind. Numbness is a balm on all the things that hurt—the parts that spark a smarting of pain on your insides. It’s when you recall that you’re the reason the pain exists and that the pervading ache dulls away into nothingness.
Because the pain was avoidable.
I’m not an idiot. If I looked at things through Sean’s perspective, I would have been pissed with me, too. I hadn’t accepted his calls on the night he had ended it with me because I didn’t want to hear the detachment in his voice again. It had hurt, but it had allowed that reliable detachment to creep in through the cracks. He had had every right to pull the plug on this whole song and dance we were tangoing in. I was a shit dancer with no rhythm and two left feet, and I’d had no business trying to attempt to learn the steps to begin with.
But this on the heels of having to indulge on my most dreaded day of the year almost felt like too much.
Thanksgiving.
This day—next to Christmas—was one of the most contrived holidays that deepened the fissures in the great socioeconomic divide. I hated it. Everything from the overpriced bird that people flocked to supermarkets for, to the spicy scent of pumpkin spice everything. It was a holiday for affluent yuppies who wanted to congregate around a fussy, ornate dining room table and thank some baseless God for their wealth that they masked in humble terms like “blessings” and “gratitude.” Of course, everyone with half a brain knew this was a farce that was played up so said yuppie offenders could post photos on Facebook with a saccharinely written caption that professed their unyielding adoration for their family, baby Jesus, and some pilgrims with a husk of corn wedged up their asses like a seventeenth century dildo. No one bought into their lovey-dovey drivel, and it would take less than twenty-four hours before the effects of the cinnamon and cloves they’d been snorting like an eight ball of fucking coke wore off and they were back to hating said family—at least until it was time for that fat fuck with the red suit to start ho-ho-ho-ing around and we started the bullshit cycle of peace, joy, and love all over again.
Puh-lease.
I glared at the triple-decker I had grown up in. This place hadn’t changed a bit in the thirty-odd years my family had lived here. We had outlasted landlords, watching as the deed changed from one power-tripping Napoleon-wannabe to the next. Everyone wanted to make a buck, but when they realized that they would be lucky to get their rent check on time and it was slim pickings among prospective new tenants who’d want to live on this block, they cut their losses and sold the place until the next aspiring (read: completely out of their element) real estate mogul came along and snatched the place up for a steal.
You weren’t going to see any houses on this street on one of those home flipping shows—they weren’t worth their weight in property taxes.
All the people from this stretch of South Boston were cut from the same cloth and married to the same set of guidelines. You protected your own, and you didn’t rat on anybody to the boys, even if their heat burned a hole the size of China on your dooryard. Southie loyalty ran deeper than the Charles River and stretched for just as long. It was unusual for anyone to leave—my departure a decade ago had been considered an anomaly. I had been desperate get away from these people and this fucking neighborhood as so
on as I could.
The familiar faces of the lifers stood idly under their porticos, their judgment an accessory to the lit cigarettes that jutted from their lips. Despite the forty-degree weather outside, they seemed entirely unfazed, the red flush of their cheeks a likely combination of Mother Nature’s frosty kiss and Guinness. They watched me watching them. I heard their thoughts despite their silence.
How could I abandon my grieving mother? My father woulda been ashamed.
They knew what my ma was better than they knew their own erogenous zones, but the problem with loyalty culture here was that it made everyone fucking blind. My ma could have choked me out in front of the monument at Dorchester Heights, and it wouldn’t have made a damn difference to these Catholic-fucks and their “honor thy father and thy mother” bullshit that I wasn’t interested in subjecting myself to any more than I had to. The only time I ever managed to physically come back here was Thanksgiving. I sent Ma her money via MoneyGram, despite the fees, and I’d pay a hell of a lot more to evade her on Thanksgiving if I could.
I avoided this place like the fucking bubonic plague—’cause that’s what this neighborhood and that shack of a house represented to me…a deadly cesspool of shit and contagion that would kill you if you let it.
It was time to get this over with.
I barely felt the chill of the late fall weather as I got out of the car, tucking myself into my leather jacket out of an effort to make myself scarce under the appraisal of Ma’s neighbors. The yard of the triple decker looked tired, patches of yellow peppered across the stretch of dried grass that hissed in the breeze. Overgrown shrubbery edged the dilapidated building, as if no one could be bothered to put in any effort to spruce up the place. Ma didn’t have time for that kind of shit, and I suspected she kept her landlord busy while she was on her back.
The bottom step of the porch creaked in protest under my weight. I held my hand out in a fist, preparing to knock, but before I had the chance, the door swung open.
