by Brent, Cora
Then again, I already knew that.
I exhale slowly. “Look, I don’t know what got into Alden last night. But I just want you to know that I’m not in the habit of spending time with someone who would treat me like garbage. That was the first time he’s ever acted like that.”
“When there’s a first time there won’t be a last time, Caris.”
He’s right of course. And he obviously knows what he’s talking about. He’s seen more than his fair share of violence.
I don’t want this moment to end, not now that we’re actually talking for real. His posture has relaxed, his powerful arms no longer tensed up and crossed over his broad chest.
My god, he’s gorgeous.
I wonder how seriously messed up it is that right now I’m having all kinds of feelings about the impressive way he fills out his Ruby’s Bakery shirt.
I clear my throat and hope he hasn’t developed a talent for mind reading.
“Jay, I just wanted to say thanks again for stepping in. I really appreciate it.”
His brown eyes continue to watch me intently. “I would have done the same for anyone in trouble.”
“Well, I’m glad you were there.” I wrinkle my nose. “I do feel kind of weird about the fact that you saw me almost naked.”
“Nah, I didn’t see a thing.”
I smile. “Liar.”
He chuckles.
And because we’re being so civil and because he’s even laughing I feel brave enough to ask him a question.
“Why’d you change your name?”
He doesn’t hesitate to fire a question right back at me. “Why didn’t you become a veterinarian and open an animal sanctuary?”
I shrug. “Things change. Shit happens.”
“Same here. Things change. Shit happens.”
I think a lot more shit has happened to him than to me. I want us to keep talking. I want to ask him all of the questions. I want to tell him all of the things. I want to know him. I want my friend back.
And if he decides to take his shirt off and flex his muscles while we talk then I sure as hell won’t complain about the view.
“It turned out I wasn’t very good at science,” I explain. “I still dream of opening up an animal sanctuary someday. And if I can’t do that maybe I can at least adopt a cat or two.”
He digests this information without comment.
“And as for choosing to be a business major,” I add, “that was my dad’s suggestion. He told me to major in something practical even if it seemed boring and I can’t think of anything more simultaneously boring and practical than accounting, can you?”
Jay resists the attempt to be drawn out and simply shrugs.
“Your turn,” I gently tease. “You have a phoenix tattooed on your back. I think it’s cool, the symbolism.”
But his expression has already shuttered and he edges back toward the kitchen.
“I think that’s enough heartfelt sharing for one day,” he says once his back is already turned and I’m displeased to hear the asshole factor return to his voice.
A moment ago I was hopeful that maybe we were having a breakthrough. I was thinking about all the things I want to share with him, all the things I crave to know about him. But when he disappears into the kitchen once more I realize I was just kidding myself.
There are so many things I want from Jay Phoenix.
And I can’t have any of them.
Jay
These days Caris isn’t exactly giving me the silent treatment but she’s not making an effort either. At work we talk when we need to and at home we rarely pass one another. I get that she’s disappointed. Sometimes I even wish that weren’t the case and that I could give her what she wants. That day in the bakery when she gave Alden his permanent walking papers I thought about it.
She asked me a few shy questions and raised her eyebrows in the hopes of getting an answer. Caris was trying to open a door that I had kicked closed with all my might.
And I wavered, just for a moment.
When she shyly thanked me once again for coming to her aid I told her I would have done the same for anyone and that’s true. I have no patience for a man who mistreats a woman and I would have stepped into a situation like that no matter who she was. But I wouldn’t be walking around every day since then with the crushing agony over the fact that she’d been terrorized on my watch.
Caris is destined for something else. Someday she’ll find a nice button down kind of guy who comes from a good family and has all the confidence in the world because the road he’s traveling in life was already smoothly paved for him. He’ll know how to treat her like gold and set the world at her feet.
And I fucking hate his imaginary guts already.
I declined to answer Caris’s questions or spill my earnest guts about the shit storm my life became after I left Arcana behind that summer.
Now she’s upset. Maybe a little mad. So be it. I’m not interested in handing out history lessons highlighting all that’s happened since the night she told me she never wanted to see me again.
That was a bad time. With the cops hot on his heels, Rafe had run off but it was only a matter of time before he was caught. My mother couldn’t handle anymore whispers and scandals. Her boyfriend Wayne was moving to Phoenix and she decided it was a better option than Arcana. I was allowed to go with them as long as I promised not to cause any problems. Within months puberty caught up to me in a rage and that’s when my mother’s attitude toward me was fatally altered.
She’d never been the most loving parent and I was always her favorite son, mostly because I caused the least amount of trouble and seemed to be least inclined to take after the line of troubled and violent men who preceded me. So it wasn’t until I began to more closely resemble the strong Hempstead men that I’d catch the watchful, wary way she’d observe me and from then on she let go of what little love remained.
My mother hated the city of Phoenix upon arrival. She complained it was too hot and full of ugly concrete. I liked it fine. It was big and sprawling and nobody was at all interested in anyone else’s shit.
Wayne didn’t last long. He didn’t like Phoenix either and decided to head to South Dakota but we weren’t invited to come along. Soon there was a new guy named Forester, which I think was just his last name. I never knew him by any other. He moved into our cruddy two bedroom apartment in south Phoenix and I knew right away we’d never get along. I was used to being smacked around by Rafe so I wasn’t surprised the first time Forester cuffed me upside the head. At least by then I was getting big enough to punch back. I’d joined the football team at school and it was a rough team, all of us spending more time fighting than playing. I passed my afternoons in the grimy weight room trying to lift my way to invincibility. Forester was still a lot stronger but he enjoyed when I fought back. He’d been an amateur boxer years before and I picked up a few things while getting my ass beat down. Those would be lessons I would later find useful.
I was shocked the day I arrived home from school and found the apartment empty. Not just empty of people but empty of furniture and things. At first I thought we’d been robbed but the old guy who lived in the neighboring apartment said he’d watched my mother and Forester move everything out during the day while I was at school. He wanted to know why I hadn’t gone with them.
My own mother had abandoned me. She didn’t even have the guts to say goodbye.
I never tried to find her. I figured there was no point. I remained in the empty apartment, sleeping on the bare floor, until the landlord finally got around to kicking me out because no one was paying the rent. After that I found odd places to stay, sometimes with the equally fucked up families of my football buddies. I earned money in ways I wasn’t proud of, by stealing what I could and selling it where I could. My mistake was that I kept going to school. Eventually someone got wise to the fact that I didn’t have a regular home and Child Protective Services was summoned.
What followed was a re
gular circus of temporary living situations. It turns out there are few people willing to invite a surly teenage boy to live in their home. It was after getting shuffled to my third foster family in four months that I started calling myself Jay Phoenix. Nobody presented an argument because what the hell did they care what I called myself? Every day I felt a little less like that skinny kid from Arcana who tried to hope for the best. No longer did I wish to be shackled to his name and all the bad history that accompanied it.
In one house there was a young female tattoo artist who lived in the garage apartment. I gave her fifty bucks that I stole from a neighbor who was dumb enough to leave a purse sitting outside on top of a car and she inked the design on my back.
After my tattoo was finished the girl flashed a wicked grin, unzipped my pants without asking and gave me my first blow job. I allowed it to happen even though I didn’t like her much, partly because she had straight blonde hair.
Just like Caris.
And Caris was not a person I dared to think about.
All memories of Caris had to be crushed if little Johnny Hempstead was going to survive as big bad Jay Phoenix.
By the time I reached the place I thought of as Hell House I was big and numb and nearly sixteen. I’d encountered cruelty before but nothing like what I saw at Hell House. There were six or seven other kids there at any one time and the pair in charge looked like an ordinary, slightly overweight middle aged couple. Even their names were full of suburban ordinariness. Mike and Beth. I got a pretty quick education on what they were about. They tormented the kids by withholding food, doling out physical punishments and getting them hopped up on cheap drugs. The first time Mike tried any shit with me I made mincemeat out of his nose. He was unwilling to give up the check the state gave him every month for letting me stay under his roof so after that he let me be.
Twice I placed anonymous phone calls to the cops and warned them to check out what was really happening at Hell House. And twice they came, sniffed around, and left without even talking to any of the kids. Mike got wise to the fact that one of us had been calling the authorities. He and Beth gathered everyone for a meeting in a second floor bedroom promised to slit someone’s throat if the cops showed up again. I started making plans to run away.
The lone bright spot of Hell House was Shane. He was the only guy there who was my age. The rest were younger. I preferred being alone and wasn’t on the hunt for friends but Shane was a crackup and we got tight pretty fast. I could tell he’d started using because I knew the signs by now, but I had no idea what else was being done to him until one night he curled up in a ball on his bed and cried after blurting out the truth.
And the truth was horrific.
They were selling him. They’d dangle drugs in front of his nose and get him to go along with the plan when they rented him out to their drug addled kid rapist buddies.
I saw red. It was the first time, though not the last, that I’ve ever wanted to kill someone.
Shane was scared but I needed his help. On my own I’d never get anyone to believe this story. At school there was a teacher who seemed all right, always went out of her way to say my English lit essays were fantastic and prodded me to consider college. I could try talking to her to see if she had any ideas about what to do next. Going straight to the cops had been a bust. My case worker already thought I was garbage and would be unlikely to believe me. Maybe that English teacher knew a reporter. It was worth a try.
I never did get to talk to that teacher.
One night Shane refused to do what Mike wanted him to do and Mike started kicking the crap out of him. I heard the commotion from upstairs and raced down. I was able to handle Mike easily enough. His gut was soft and his arms flabby. But once he was down I wanted him to bleed. And bleed he did. It’s possible I would have killed him if Shane hadn’t pulled me back.
There were a few minutes of relief even though Beth was screaming and calling 911 while Mike sprawled unconscious on the floor. I thought that now we would be believed without question.
That’s not what happened.
Shane was sick from drug withdrawal and no one listened to a word he said. The other kids were scared out of their minds. And Beth told anyone who would listen that I was a violent psychopath.
A judge ordered me to go to a juvenile detention center. The fact that Shane got sent there with me was complete bullshit but he said he didn’t mind because it sounded like a better option than rolling the dice to possibly wind up with another Mike and Beth.
For the most part the teenage jail wasn’t awful. Sometimes people would fuck with you so you’d have to fuck with them worse. Shane was my roommate and we looked out for each other and made all kinds of plans. After a year of living in a prison we decided the experience was no longer charming. Security was minimal so it was no big deal to bust out. And since we were closing in on our eighteenth birthdays when we were scheduled for release anyway, the law did not waste much energy chasing us down.
I was able to buy the documents I needed that identified me as a man named Jay Phoenix. A kindly construction crew foreman took a chance and gave me a job. I was strong and worked hard so he gave me another one. Before long I was making decent money.
Shane was less reliable. He bounced around between jobs and his old demons kept returning to haunt him. He’d get clean, stay that way for a little while, and then inevitably relapse. Drugs were plentiful on the streets of Phoenix and he tried every goddamn one of them in an effort to chase the nightmares away.
He’d been clean for nearly six months when some Texas attorney called him to report Ruby’s death and ask when he could claim his inheritance.
And when I agreed to join him here in Hutton for the summer it never once crossed my mind that I might run into her.
“Jay.”
Caris has appeared in the kitchen. Her hands are on her hips and her lips are slightly pursed as she pointedly looks around.
“Where are the banana muffins?” she asks.
“In the trash can.”
“Why?”
“Because I messed up and forgot the eggs. I’ll make more.”
She sighs and practically starts tapping her foot. “The bin up front is empty.”
“Are you expecting a horde of starving people demanding banana muffins?”
“You never know.” She begins pulling out ingredients and hijacking the work space.
“What are you doing?” I have to force myself not to stare at her ass, which is cutely wrapped in a pair of white jeans beneath her tucked in shirt. “I said I’d make another batch.”
“I’ll get it started,” she declares as if she’s in charge. She begins measuring out ingredients with mathematical precision. “I can hear the bell if someone comes in but you can go out front and watch the counter if you want.”
“If I want,” I mutter as she nearly runs into me while grabbing for a large spoon.
I should move away from this spot.
I should stop staring at her ass.
I should stop picturing twisting her blonde ponytail around my hand while I ride her from behind like a motherfucking stallion.
I do none of these things.
Caris’s head swivels and she peers over her shoulder at me. “You look bored, Jay.”
“I am bored. You just barged in here and took my job away.”
The urge to rub my hard dick against her tight pants is insane. Fortunately I’m good at being stone faced. She has no clue.
Caris rolls her eyes. “Then why don’t you go out front, like I suggested?”
“Are you the new manager?”
She seems surprised that I’m arguing. Ordinarily it’s my policy to exchange as few words with her as possible. Otherwise it leads to circumstances like the present one, when my blood starts pumping and my dick begs for attention.
“Oh god, I’m sorry,” she mutters, dropping the spoon in the bowl and pivoting around. She sets her palms on the counter and rolls her neck around like i
t hurts. She’s got a hot figure. She’s slight but not too thin. I can imagine my hands circling the curve of her waist.
“I didn’t mean to be overbearing,” she says. “It’s just that I promised Shane I’d make sure all the product bins were full because we always get a rush of customers when that afternoon hot yoga class lets out across the street.”
“Where is Shane anyway?”
“He seemed kind of agitated and said he had to run out for something.”
I lower my head. A suspicion that began blossoming days ago sprouts a dozen new leaves.
“Is Shane okay?” Caris asks and when I look up I see her mouth twisted with concern.
My internal alarm bell goes off and I’m no longer thinking about how sweet her skin would taste. “What do you mean?”
Caris listens for a second to confirm we’re alone and then shifts her weight, looking uncomfortable. “Lana’s getting worried about him. He hasn’t been sleeping, seems keyed up all the time. She saw him pop a pill the other morning and when she asked about it he told her they were the multivitamins she gave him but she found a bag of them in his pants later. They’re not vitamins.”
“No,” I sigh miserably. “I’m sure they’re not.”
“Look, I know it’s none of my business but I also know he’s had, um, problems in the past.”
“Yeah.” I feel defensive all of a sudden and I don’t mean to snap at her but that’s the way it comes across anyway. “Everyone’s got fucking problems in their past, don’t they, Caris?”
A long moment passes while she just stares at me.
An apology is on the tip of my tongue. I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. I’m just worried about Shane. And obviously so is she. And so is Lana.
“Listen…” I start to say but she cuts me off.
“You can finish the goddamn muffins yourself,” she bites back and stalks out of the kitchen.
With a sigh I pick up the spoon she left in the bowl.
“Shit,” I mumble to myself.
Right now it’s the most fitting sentiment. On so many levels.
