That was always the question. It was the question I’d been wrestling with for six years, and I was grateful that Will didn’t press me on it. Whatever his faults, he wasn’t nosy. I’d give him that.
“I—I don’t think so,” I said finally. “She wasn’t too bad tonight, all things considered. I helped her to bed, and she doesn’t have to work in the morning. She probably won’t even notice that I’m gone.”
Will nodded, then got up. I watched as he disappeared into the hall and then returned shortly carrying a damp cloth.
“Here,” he said, holding it out to me. “I’d suggest a shower, but it was hard enough holding myself together in the dark. You are so goddamn sexy when you come, you know that?”
“That was you holding yourself together?” I asked as I cleaned up. I handed it back to him, and Will tossed it across the room into a hamper.
“It was,” he confirmed as he got back onto the bed and pulled a blanket over us. “Pretty sure if I had you in my shower, fully lit and wet, you’d get pregnant just from me looking at you. And I sure as fuck don’t want that.”
I rolled my eyes, ignoring the pinch of pain that came with his last statement. “You’re such a man. Rut and impregnate, right? Beasts, all of you. What happened to my mouth, huh?”
Will chuckled again as he turned me toward the windows, fitting my back to his front.
“Tomorrow,” he promised as he buried his face into my hair and tucked my body against his solidity. “Tomorrow I’ll go back to being a beast and do the other half of what I promised. But now I need to sleep, Lil. And so do you.”
His hair fell over my shoulder, and he pressed a kiss to the soft spot under my ear. Several candles had gone out by this point, and the last one, a small tea light, flickered in the corner, clearly on its last legs.
“Stay,” he whispered as sleep fell over us. “For an hour. Forever. Just…stay.”
18
I woke up the next morning with light shining on my face. The sun was rising over the hill across the lake and glimmering off the water through the trees. I could barely make out the edges of the yellow house where I’d left my mother snoring last night.
A pang of guilt shot through me. I sat up.
Shit. Oh, shit, Mama. What kind of daughter was I? I had come home with the express purpose of helping my mother out of her rut, and instead I’d left her in yet another haze of alcohol and sleep. I knew better than that. I knew better…
There was a rustle in the sheets next to me, and a warm hand slid over my thigh.
“It’s okay,” Will said in a groggy voice. “She’s okay, Lil.”
I jumped slightly, then turned toward him, holding the sheets to my chest. I didn’t even bother to ask how he possibly knew what I was thinking about before he answered.
“You practically bored a hole through the window, you were staring so hard. Your mom is fine, I promise.”
“How do you know?”
I looked him over, taking note of our differences. I was still in my birthday suit, whereas Will was fully dressed in shorts and an old Rolling Stones t-shirt. He stretched atop of the bed, causing the shirt to ride up above his navel.
“Where have you been?” I wondered, tearing my gaze away with difficulty.
His mouth quirked into a crooked smile. It was half-hidden, but just as heart-stopping as it had been the night before. “I—uh—might have gone to the store,” he admitted shyly. “Sometimes I get up early. I needed something to do. I checked up on your mom on the way there.”
I frowned, disregarding for the moment that he had just confirmed my previous assumption—that Will Baker generally did not sleep well. “How did you get in?”
Will shrugged. “She was making coffee. I let her know you were here and left for the store.”
It took me a second to realize what he meant—or why he would have gone to the store this early. My eyes popped open, and immediately I swiveled around, looking for the shopping bag.
He chuckled and shook his head regretfully. “No luck, beautiful. Cathy—that’s her name, right?—was pretty interested in why I was loitering around the personal hygiene shelf, though. ‘No one is that interested in Pepto-Bismol,’ she said.” He shrugged, tucking his hands behind his head. “She’s right.”
I flopped back into the pillow and laughed, encouraged when Will chuckled again with me. I liked that sound. A lot. My thighs relaxed too—I hadn’t even realized they were clenched at the idea of continuing what we’d started.
“Seriously, though, Maggie,” he said as he turned onto his side to face me. He moved his hand up my waist and stroked the side of my arm. “Last night was…”
“If you say that was a mistake, I will slap you,” I said. “No kidding, Baker. You don’t get to hermit up on me now.” I was holding onto enough of my own guilt over being here. I didn’t need him to add to it.
Will’s mouth dropped in surprise, and when it closed, that crooked smile returned. “I was going to say it was amazing,” he said softly. “I’d like to do it again. Soon.”
We lay there together for a few moments, just watching each other as his invitation sank in. I reached over and stroked his beard. Will remained still as I brushed the coarse hair down, then pulled at one side of the tangled dark blond waves hanging over his shoulder.
“Yeah,” I agreed finally. “It was amazing. You’re amazing.”
Will blushed. As in full-on, head-to-toe, pink-nosed blushed. It was the most adorable thing I’d ever seen, and I immediately tackled him for it with a kiss.
But what started out as a barrage of joking smacks quickly morphed into something much deeper as a steel arm slid around my waist and another one took a larger handful of my flesh. I groaned into his mouth. Will grabbed harder.
When, to my disappointment, he finally broke away and released me, Will cleared his throat. “You should probably come over again tonight. Expected, this time.”
I pushed back up on one elbow so I could look down at him clearly.
“Baker,” I teased, reaching around to play with a strand of his hair. “Are you asking me out on a date? One where you’re not jealous of my ex-boyfriend? Where it’s going to be just you and just me? If I’m here, you can’t run away again, you know.”
An expression I didn’t quite understand flashed across his face. A tightness. Maybe a little bit of fear. But the longer I looked, the more it fell away, replaced in the end by some measure of the relaxation he’d had before.
“Eight o’clock,” he said as he pushed up, beckoning me to kiss him again. “I’m counting on it.”
I drove back to my house some time later, lost slightly in the haze of the night before as I made my way down the long stairs. I felt lighter, like something had been lifted. For so long, I had always belonged to someone else. I was “Ellie Sharp’s poor kid,” and then I was “Lucas Forster’s girl,” and then “Theo del Conte’s girlfriend” in New York. But with Will, even with his grouchy, misanthropic ways, I only felt like myself. Or maybe being his felt like the same thing as being mine. He didn’t want to stifle me or judge me. He didn’t want me to be anything other than what I was. And that feeling was amazing.
It was just an added benefit—a major added benefit—that the man happened to be that talented with his tongue. I mean, damn. A girl could get seriously addicted to that kind of treatment.
So I opened the door in an uncharacteristically sunny mood that was immediately clouded when I found Mama curled up on the couch, staring out the windows toward the lake. Crying.
My mother never cried.
“Mama?”
I crossed the open room to her quickly, dropping my purse on the counter. She jumped, held her coffee close, and quickly wiped away her tears.
“Oh, Maggie. I didn’t know you were here. Don’t worry ’bout me. I just have a case of the sniffles.”
“Mama.” I sat down next to her on the couch. “What’s wrong?”
The question seemed to make her cry harder.
“It’s that damn man,” she whimpered, curling more into herself.
A photograph fell to the floor—a wrinkled picture of her and Alan, looking happy with their arms wrapped around each other. It was small, like something she might have carried around in her wallet.
“Oh, Mama,” I whispered, picking it up. “Why did you keep this?”
She sniffed, but didn’t take it back from me. “It’s hard to let go sometimes. I know I shouldn’t, but I do miss him. He took everything, but I still wake up in the mornings and wish he was here. I go to bed at night, and I stare at the little divot in the mattress he made.”
I rubbed a hand on her back. I understood more than she knew. It was like there was something wrong with us, something that went deep. Something that made us love men who were bad for us, even when they were gone.
I used to feel that way about Theo. It was why, time and time again, I’d let him come back. Even if I had bruises on my face. Even before the blood was even dry.
“He didn’t like it when I drank, did you know that?” Mama asked.
I kept staring at the picture. “No, I didn’t know.”
She nodded. “He—he said he liked me better without it. Said I was more beautiful without it.”
It was the first thing I’d heard about the guy that made me like him. I looked back at her. “Well, it’s the truth. I like you better that way too.”
For a moment, the truth of what we were doing hit me. There was so much work still to do on the property to get it ready to be let out. But after that, what? Was it really reasonable to expect someone like Mama, who had a hard enough time holding down her part-time job as a hairdresser, to run a bed and breakfast? What was I going to do—run it with her?
“You could do it, Mama,” I offered as hopefully as I could. “I could help you stop.”
Mama cradled her head in her hands for a moment, sniffling back a few more tears.
“Oh, Maggie Mae,” she murmured as she squeezed my hand. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? Baby, you remember. I been to those AA meetings or church groups. They don’t work. And besides, it’s only a problem if you can’t pick yourself up after. I can deal with a bitty headache from time to time. A few drinks never killed anyone, much less me.”
I opened my mouth to tell her she was wrong. That her drinking had hurt me and alienated me most of my life. That a ten-year-old girl shouldn’t know how to check her mother’s pulse or to turn her on her side when she slept. That she shouldn’t know the best way to remove vomit from upholstery or have an armory of excuses prepared every time her mother missed yet another parent-teacher meeting. She shouldn’t go most of her life without sleeping through the night, knowing she needed to check on her mother to make sure she was still breathing. Or with the fear that one day again, her temper might turn worse than a quick slap on the cheek or a rough grab of the wrist.
I feared the kitchen implements for a long time, considering how often, under a haze of gin or vodka, they were yanked from their drawers and hurled across the room in my general direction.
“It just hurts,” Mama whispered. “I had a man. I had a home. Everything was finally right, until he left and took damn near everything with him.” Her eyes were wide, and her voice took on that crazed tone I recognized immediately—the one that made her reach for the bottle, even at 8 a.m. “Can you blame me for needing something to take the edge off, baby? All my life, I’ve been alone. No one, not even my own daughter, wants to stay around me.”
I opened my mouth to argue. But she wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t stayed. I hadn’t even been back since I was twenty, when I’d laid down the choice for her. Her drinking and the people that came with it, or me. She chose the drink.
And I couldn’t promise I would stay either. While I was no closer to figuring out my own future, at least I was helping with hers. But that was all I could promise at this point. I had come home to lick my own wounds, figure out what was next for my life, and help Mama get hers together too. There was a reason I had yet to apply for a job, content to live off the very last of my savings and Glinda’s eggs for as long as I could. A job meant I was here for good.
“He didn’t take everything,” I said as I rubbed her shoulder. “You have the property. And me. And…Lucas and W-Will.” I shook away the stutter. I hadn’t even started to process what had happened last night, and if she were in a better mood, Mama would have jumped on that like a bear on honey. “In a few more weeks,” I continued, “everything will be up to code, and you’ll be able to start running the place the way you want.”
Mama leaned into me, still wiping tears from her eyes. I rocked her slowly, a perverse inversion of what mothers and daughters were supposed to do. But it was natural, because I had done it my whole life.
In my pocket, my phone buzzed. I pulled it out, one half of me hoping it was Calliope, calling to find out how my date went last night. But the other part knew who it was before I ever looked.
You might as well tell me, Flower. I’ll find out where you are anyway.
I stared at the message for a long time before I tucked the phone away without answering. While my mother cried about her ghosts, I ignored one of my own. They were only as real as we allowed, I told myself. Only as powerful as we let them be.
“Shhhh,” I said as I stroked her hair. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.”
And, God help us, she believed me.
19
I spent the rest of the day working with Mama on the property, trying to cheer her up and make her forget about the photo that I “happened” to toss in the garbage. It was Saturday, so Lucas and Will were both absent—Lucas working at the inn and Will because he had said he was going for a hike today. But a giant delivery of drywall, enough to redo the walls in both outer cabins appeared sometime past noon, apparently having been ordered by a Mr. William Baker. I would have called him to protest the massive gift, or at least question how in the world he could pay for it (no matter what he said he had tucked away from his advertising business). But since he didn’t have a phone, I just grinned the entire time I signed for it, and directed the men to leave it in the cabin at the top of the hill.
“My, my,” Mama said as we watched them finish. “Well, if that’s not sweet on you, I don’t know what is.”
“I know,” I said. I felt strange, like jumping up and down for joy, but also like maybe I should run a mile.
“Be careful,” Mama said. “It’s the biggest gifts that always have the greatest costs.”
Before I could ask her what she meant, she turned around to grab the gardening tools. Today we were cleaning up the front yard. Clearly there was no more time left for that kind of talk.
The summer days were heating up. We were well into June, and the triathlon was two weeks away, during the Fourth of July weekend. I was entered to do the Olympic, not having had enough time to train properly for the full marathon portion. The recent heat wave had meant training mostly in the early mornings or the evenings, and after skipping a few days, I was desperate for a swim and a run, with or without Will.
So it wasn’t until a swim and a run that evening that I found myself in the bathroom getting ready for my second date with Will. One that was official. And at his house.
Mama was overjoyed for me, all traces of her earlier suspicions vanished with the help of a drink. She was going over to Barb’s for dinner, so thankfully I didn’t have to worry about her that night. She liked Will, which should have turned me in the opposite direction. She had always liked Lucas too, but it was a preference that had come slowly over the years, given the fact that the Forsters were powerful members of a community that had often berated the two of us. Will was like her—a bit of an outcast, with a bunch of demons he was battling. Of course, maybe that was why I liked him too. Darkness was all too familiar.
So it was somewhat fitting, as the sun was starting to set, that I drove to Will’s house, parked my Passat behind his truck, and slipped. I had actually dressed up a
little, much more than I normally would for anywhere else here. I had pulled out a short black dress I used to save for stage appearances, and tamed my hair into long waves down my back. My curls were returning again, more and more every day. Soon I wouldn’t be able to brush it without going full Diana Ross, but for now, they were still manageable.
I caught myself just before hitting the ground and chuckled as I stood back upright. His porch light was off, of course. All I needed was for Will to come out and make some smart ass comment about me breaking down again in front of his house. I laughed louder. I would actually like that.
I approached the door, smoothing out my dress and balancing precariously in my heels, more from nerves than because I wasn’t used to them. Butterflies stirred in my stomach. I hadn’t felt this way in years.
I knocked on the door. No one answered. I knocked again. Still nothing. For a moment, I stood there on the dark, unlit porch, rubbing my arms through my cardigan sweater. That was the thing about Spokane—during the day, it could be as hot as a desert, and at night, the temperatures would drop to near freezing.
Where was Will? I tapped the toes of my patent-leather pumps on the scuffed wood porch. They looked so out of place here—no one in Spokane dressed like this unless they were going to one of the few clubs downtown, and even then, not really. Suddenly I felt silly. Ridiculous even.
I didn’t know what to think. Twelve hours ago, he had asked me to come here. He knew I was planning to run around sunset to avoid the heat, and he had confirmed he would be gone today too. It was now a few minutes past eight, and his truck was in the lot. Was he not expecting me anymore?
But the house was dark. Maybe he had forgotten. A shiver traveled down my back; the butterflies turned heavy, iron wings of dread. Maybe last night hadn’t meant as much as I thought.
I turned around to go, feeling like a fool. I’d have the house to myself. I could curl up in the shack and watch a movie on my tablet, forget about this night, maybe even forget about Will. Refocus myself on the important questions about my life and my mother’s that still needed answering.
Vote Then Read: Volume I Page 189
