Dare Me

by Stella Rhys

  The paranoia was strong. Relentless. I had nothing else to think of so I imagined all sorts of humiliating scenarios, like someone from Callum or his father’s circle having their car break down on the highway, maybe during a business trip in Virginia. They’d find a place to kill time and walk into a strip club for shits and giggles. It would be novel for them to see what Bumblefuck tits and ass looked like compared to the bodies they admired at gentleman’s clubs in Hell’s Kitchen. They’d wrinkle their noses upon walking in, declare the need for a strong drink and then laugh at the girls on the stage. And then they’d see me. I could imagine their faces when they did and it made me cringe so hard every time it felt like it had actually happened. I imagined them getting over their shock, joking that they weren’t all that surprised and then sneaking pictures till images of me undressing for sweaty men and toothless truckers had spread like wildfire to reach Callum and Caroline. And then they’d die of shame all over again.

  “Hey, sweetie. I got some news for you.”

  I was surprised to see Shanna outside when I got home that evening. She’d been in the midst of one of those weeks where she just shut herself in her trailer and didn’t come out. They happened every once in awhile and when she finally emerged from her funk, I’d be sitting there waiting for her, my figurative tail wagging like a dog whose owner went away for too long. She’d give me the forceful hugs against her giant bosom that I honestly loved and we’d pick up right where we left off, making margaritas, watching TV and acting like nothing ever happened. I never asked why she holed up sometimes because she never asked about my problems either. And I was already pretty sure that her tick had to do with her hoarding addiction. I wished I could be a truer friend and actually help one day – had spent countless nights Googling the first steps of trying to get into a hoarder’s home to clean the space. But I always chickened out. What I read was discouraging and I didn’t want to piss Shanna off. I needed the reliable joy of our friendship more than I needed to save her, which was horrible. I tried not to think of what an awful, unfeeling survivalist I’d become but sometimes, out of nowhere, the bell rang in my head and screamed that I was shit – that I was losing my good parts and becoming head-to-toe, good-for-nothing useless.

  “Baby, your momma hurt herself today,” Shanna said.

  “What? What happened?”

  “I don’t know but I heard her scream and then Hunt drove her to the hospital. I came out to see if she was okay when she came back and she seemed fine, she was walking, but she had one of these on her arm.” She bent her arm to mime a sling.

  “Oh.” I breathed out. “So she’s fine.”

  “I don’t know. I been hearing her wailing all day.”

  My mood soured further when I went into the trailer because I knew that Trish was about to be an uncontrollable nightmare for at least the night. I didn’t know how badly she was hurt but she was definitely going to milk her injury with me and Hunt till making a full recovery. The second I got in, I saw Hunt taking care of her. He turned with exhaustion to the door and shot me a look that said you should just walk back out. But I didn’t do it and soon enough, Trish was crying at me.

  “Baby!” She was on the stool in the kitchen, a sling on her right arm. “You spilled water in here before you went to work this morning!” she accused me. I didn’t argue despite the fact that I hadn’t been in the kitchen all day. “I slipped and I shattered my whole fuckin’ elbow!” I went through the motions and apologized. I asked what I could do and offered to make her dinner, get her a beer, buy some painkillers. She sniffled pathetically for ten minutes and finally moaned, “No, no, no. It doesn’t hurt that bad, baby. That’s the worst part. It doesn’t even hurt that bad.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It… it just…”

  “What? Is it Dean? You’re afraid he’ll get mad?” I came home to new holes in the wall yesterday and thanked God that he’d stormed back to his office before I even saw him.

  “No… no… I just…” Trish couldn’t speak. I was losing patience so Hunt took the reigns.

  “ER bullshit. It cost way too much money.”

  No. My heart sank. “How much?”

  Trish wailed dramatically. “We got nothin’. We’re fucked, Lake. We’re fucked, fucked, fucked!”

  The last I counted the money she had stashed, it was close to a thousand again. Now, apparently, it was back to zero. “How?” I demanded. “Let me see the bill! How did you even get a bill so fast?” In college, I didn’t get a bill for the stitches in my foot till at least several weeks after going to the ER. They sent it to the townhouse and Caroline called Callum in tears, asking why I hadn’t told her that I’d gone to the hospital. He said it was because we didn’t want to make her cry over nothing the way she was doing that very second. According to Callum, Caroline got quickly indignant and forced herself to swallow her sobs and brightly ask how he was doing at work, though the occasional hiccup escaped her throat since she was clearly still emotional that I’d been in some sort of pain without her knowing. Thinking about that story made me want to die as I sat in front of Trish and her frenzied bawling. I missed Caroline so much it made my chest burn.

  “Don’t,” Hunt said when I was on the couch that night crying silent, angry tears. He handed me a wad of toilet paper. “I’ll get a second job and we’ll get the money back.”

  “It’s time to sell the rings,” I said bitterly. He had agreed with Trish to hold onto some of Caroline’s jewelry because the closest pawn shops had given unsatisfactory offers. They were too lazy to drive a long way to better locations and Trish wouldn’t tell me where she hid them from Dean. “I got laid off from the liquor store. There’s going to be a nice bar next door and they’re going to take business from us. I’m going on two job interviews tomorrow but I don’t think we can just keep hoping that what little money we’re making is going to pile up to be enough soon. Especially not with all these emergencies.”

  “Why’d you say it like that?”

  “Say what?”

  “Like you don’t believe we’re having emergencies. We believed you when you came home without any money because you needed to fix the car. I didn’t see no problem with the car. All I heard was that you made it home just fine but you told Trish the car needed work. And then you were gone the next morning to fix it and took a big chunk of our cash with you.”

  “That car definitely broke down, Hunt,” I argued hotly. “I even – ” I cut off, realizing what I was about to say. I even withdrew money from my secret bank account to cover half the cost. Hunt lifted an eyebrow.

  “You even what?”

  “Nothing.”

  He sneered. “And you think she’s the one who lies,” he muttered before going into his room.

  But at night, he came back outside and sat on the edge of the couch while I stared at the ceiling.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I gave him a weird look. “Okay.” He sat there for another minute. He sighed deeply and then finally spoke again.

  “It feels bad when you’re mad at me. And I feel bad about the way Trish treats you. But I stick by her because I seen what she’s been through with my dad and I just want things to be okay. For all of us.”

  “I know. We’re trying.” We’re trying. Our go-to line when everything felt wasteful and hopeless and we had nothing else to say. Never had words felt more empty.

  “I just want to say I’m sorry, Lake.”

  “You already did, Hunt.”

  “Not just for today. For everything. In the past, the present and in the future,” he said. I frowned. Before I could ask what he meant, he ruffled my hair and left. And again, I was left with that shameful, lonely feeling of craving Hunt and wishing he would come back and say more. I sat up on the couch and watched his sunburned back walk away from me till it disappeared into the darkness. I lay there analyzing his words for twenty minutes before caving an

d knocking on his door.

  He gave the “yeah” to come in and I went in to find him standing in his boxers in front of the fan, his crazy hair blowing with a life of its own around his head. “Too hot to fuckin’ sleep,” he smirked. I barely paid attention to his words.

  “What did you mean before?”

  “What?”

  “Sorry for the past the present and the future.”

  “Exactly what it sounds like it means.”

  “There’s nothing more to it?”

  “Like what?” He turned and held his stare at me over his shoulder. He gave me a weird look and then cracked a laugh. “No, little girl. There ain’t. Now you better get out of here so I can air out my big, sweaty balls.”

  I rolled my eyes but by the time I reached the door, he came after me and caught me hand.

  “You know what, I can explain it, actually.” Hunt pulled me closer. I stiffened when he held my cheek, unfamiliar with that kind of tenderness from him. “I just meant I care for you. And even though I do bad things, I don’t mean them. I wish I never had to make you feel bad. Sometimes I wish I could change the person I was, the decisions I made. You know I like you, Lake,” he said. “A lot.”

  And then he jerked my forehead to his lips and pushed me out the door.

  *

  “You got a little crush, don’t you?” Shanna asked me as we sat outside her trailer with the puppies. She laughed at the look I gave her. “What? It’s okay. He ain’t blood. And he’s skinny but every girl here’s crushed on Hunt at some point. He’s a man’s man. I liked the way he got in Ricky’s face for you yesterday.”

  He had finally defended me in front of one of his friends. Ricky, after drinking all day with Hunt in his room, came out of the trailer and a yard from where I was standing, started swaying as he took a piss. I reacted accordingly and he looked at me with glassy eyes, said, “You don’t like it?” and then turned enough to pee on my feet. Hunt had come out just in time to see it and sock Ricky in the face.

  “That was appreciated,” I said.

  “Mm-hm. He don’t do that for just any girl. He’s a good man for you. And he’s got those pretty eyes.”

  I winced. I found Hunt’s celery green eyes kind of terrifying. They made him look all the more like a zombie when he was high and staggering around the house in slow motion.

  “You don’t like his eyes?”

  “They’re fine,” I lied. “But I can tell you honestly I don’t have a crush,” I said, wishing I hadn’t gone on and on to Shanna about how much I hated Hunt’s drug use. She rarely heard me talk about one thing for more than a couple minutes and I was running on ten with this subject, which drew her to the conclusion that I even paid attention to Hunt because I had a crush. To my own relief, I could comfortably tell myself that it wasn’t true. I didn’t have a crush on Hunt. There wasn’t a sexual attraction. I just needed his company and his one-liners in ways I wished I didn’t. They convinced me that somewhere in there, he was good. The excuses I constantly gave Hunt for his drug use took energy and I didn’t want to believe it was given in vain. I wanted to believe he was worthy and deserving of a new start. So I adjusted my thoughts and morals and did what I mentally could. “I hope you don’t actually think that, Shanna.”

  She paused, stared into space and then suddenly burst out laughing. “Oh, Christ! Jesus Christ, of course you don’t have a crush on him,” she said, waving her hand in the air to shoo away her assumption. “Not with… you know.”

  “With what?” I didn’t know what she referred to that had her doing a one-eighty. I knew it wasn’t the fact that Hunt was my stepbrother because she’d already acknowledged that and been unfazed by it.

  Shanna shut up, looked in my eyes of pure wonder and backtracked. “What? Oh, nothing.”

  “What were you…” My question trailed off because I could see Shanna decidedly moving on, focusing her attention on a bag of dog food. So I shut up. Maybe I didn’t want to know anyway. Glancing at my face, Shanna dropped a puppy into my arms to distract me from whatever thought she could see me having.

  “Hey, you wanna make those margaritas?”

  “It’s a little early.”

  “Really? Feels like I’ve been with you all day.”

  I laughed. “You have. But that’s because I’ve been here forever.” I seemed to be the only person in the park who couldn’t sleep through dog barking. I forgave it when it was Shanna’s dogs though. She explained to neighbors that they were simply “chatty” and that made their late-night yapping a little more endearing to me. “Yeah, it’s only,” I glanced at my phone, “noon, actually.”

  “Well. It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

  “True.”

  “I got the booze. You got the fruit.” She laughed as I got right up to go next door for the watermelon I bought that week. It was one of few things I could buy and know would stay uneaten till I needed it because Trish hated watermelon and Hunt actually never touched my things.

  I’d just opened the fridge when I heard a crash, a shatter and Trish’s reedy “shiiiit!” though it was her dribbling, “fuck it” kind of laugh that made me realize she’d shot up since I’d gone over to Shanna’s. I paused in front of the fridge, trying to decide if I wanted to go take care of whatever happened or just not deal with it at all. But then I imagined her rolling around in broken glass and being a bigger mess for me to clean up later, so I heaved a sigh, closed the door and went to her room. When I opened the door, I stopped in my tracks. She was in bed with just a sweaty, stained bra on, nothing else. My eyes traveled to the man humming deliriously next to her, completely naked with a condom on his flaccid dick.

  It was Hunt.

  My stomach reeled as the smell of sex wafted up my nose. There was a broken bong on the floor. No other paraphernalia but I knew they were both in other worlds, sprawled on the sheets, fingers intertwined as they laughed and moaned at the ceiling. I was nauseous, ready to heave bile on the floor. When Trish finally saw me, she lifted her head an inch off the pillow and gave me a big, lazy grin with those little, worn down teeth. “Hi, baby, hi,” she cooed excitedly. She was in another galaxy but still processed the blood-drained look on my face with delight. Her laugh crackled in my ears. “See it? Like mother, like daughter, baby girl. You and me, baby girl. Two peas in a pod.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Callum

  It was closing in on 8AM and I was sitting in the lounge that Lake had run from this morning. Yesterday morning, really, but it all felt like the same day because I hadn’t slept yet and neither had Oz, Ana or the crew that sat with me, all of us downing some early morning Scotch. The sun was up but we drank like the night was young. Apparently, there was no such thing as last call. Not here. The bar stayed open till everyone left, and I had no place to go. I had no idea where Lake was. I had no hint, clue or lead. Not a single direction. I rarely felt helpless and I detested the feeling so I drank it away and considered a move to Scotland. Some American bars had the audacity to last call at midnight. That was grounds for abandoning my country. At least it was tonight. Rather, this morning.

  “Anything I can do to make you feel better?” I lifted my heavy stare from my drink to Ana. Her hair was everywhere now and there was booze or water or something spilled all over her chest. I didn’t have the capacity to laugh but she read my amusement. “I know I look like a hot mess.”

  “Yeah.”

  She giggled. “That’s the key. Look it sometimes. Never be it.”

  “Cheers to that.”

  It was sarcastic but she touched her glass to mine. “So this is finally it, right? You’re calling it? Giving up the futile fight?” she smirked. “Oh, don’t make that face, Callum. You’re insanely fucking sexy when you’re mad but I like it so much better when those pretty lips are smiling.” She pushed my hand off the armrest and sat her ass on it. “Though what I prefer most,” she sipped slowly on her drink, “is when those lips are somewhere on my body. Preferably starting here.�� She fingered a line across her tits. “And then moving down to… oh, I think right around here.” Her hand trailed to her stomach and then down to her lap, settling between her thighs.

  I said nothing. I’d hoped that drinking this much would erase the furious tornado spinning in my brain. Of course, all it did was give it the energy to bounce off the walls of my head like an inmate in an asylum, raving incoherently in his straitjacket. My mind still spun with activity – it was just completely fucking useless aside from driving me quietly insane.

  Ana swung her long legs over and rested them onto my lap. “Someone needs to relax.”

  “You’re observant.”

  “I am. And I’m actually not sure why I asked if there was anything I could do to make you feel better. I know there are lots of things I could do.” The rest of the guys were too hammered to pay attention to us. Probably a good thing because Ana’s skirt was hiking all the way up as she crossed one leg over the other. The bartender caught my heavy-lidded gaze from across the room. He raised his eyebrows, gave me two thumbs up and then went on with his business.

  I was slow to respond to Ana. “Yeah?”

  “Oh yeah.” She took my hand and ran it up her naked thigh. She held it there, took my glass and drank from it. “Mm.” She sighed. Half-moaned. “You know, hotel bars are always my favorite.”

  “And why’s that.”

  Her hand slid mine up her skirt till I was far enough to feel nothing underneath. She whispered in my ear. “Because it’s so easy to get a room the second you need it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Lake

  The same nausea that churned my stomach the day I found Trish and Hunt was making its return years later, across the ocean, with new life. It asked me what Callum would think about the fact that I cared and sometimes ached for a man who had sex with his stepmom, my mother. How Callum would feel about the fact that the relationship with Trish, it turned out, was the very least of Hunt’s faults. Just the tip of the iceberg. I’d been merely too stupid to see it.

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