Running From Mercy

by Terra Little

  The back door opened and Janice poked her head out. Seeing that they were done eating, she came across the porch to collect their plates and refill their glasses. She glanced at Pam and smiled. “You’re prettier than on television.”

  “Janice!” Moira was scandalized.

  “I just meant that you’re pretty without all the makeup and stuff. Not that you don’t look pretty with it on, don’t get me wrong, but . . .” she floundered visibly.

  “Thanks,” Pam said, letting her off the hook. “I think. I was telling Moira that I wanted to send your girls an autograph before I go. If you have something I can write on, I’ll—”

  Moira cut her off with a wave of her hand. “I have an idea, Janice. Get my camera, too. We’ll take a few pictures to go along with the autographs.”

  “Oh God, not the camera again.” Growing up, Moira had always snapped pictures of her and Paris. It was from her that they had received photos of themselves as children and then as teenagers. Otherwise, they might not have had any visual proof of those times in their lives, since no one else had thought to do it. There were group photos with the other kids in the home and the requisite school pictures, but the candid shots of the two of them clowning around had come courtesy of Moira.

  “Of course, the camera,” Moira said, shooing Janice off to fetch it. “You’ve been away for eighteen years. This is a momentous occasion.”

  “I should’ve come back sooner,” Pam decided and Moira’s head whipped around on her neck in surprise. “I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed you until I saw you again and all that beautiful hair was white. I didn’t get to see it change.”

  “You didn’t miss much, believe me. I woke up one morning and this is what I saw. I cried for a week over it. I won’t even tell you how long I cried after you left me.”

  “Moira, please don’t do this,” Pam pleaded. “I told myself I wasn’t going to cry.”

  “Okay, I won’t do it,” Moira said. She rounded the table and pulled a nearby chair close to Pam’s. “But I did miss you, you know. You did good and made me proud, though. Both you and Paris did. Come on, scoot closer for the picture. This one’s mine.”

  Later, as Pam was preparing to leave, Moira studied her profile intently, committing it to memory. Pam looked up from zipping her purse and caught her staring. She looked away and cleared her throat, swallowing tears.

  “You have that faraway look in your eyes again,” she said. “When are you leaving?”

  “You could always tell when I was up to something, Moira. Am I that obvious?”

  “You forget, I’ve known you since before you were old enough to climb out of the window and make your way here, Pamela. When?”

  “You knew about the window?”

  “The window was the stuff of legends. I don’t think they ever figured out how you rigged it so the lock would never catch.”

  “I have a tour starting around the middle of next month, so I need to leave Mercy sometime around the first. I’ve been here long enough as it is.”

  “It took you a month to get around to coming to see me.” Moira reached for Pam’s hands. “Please don’t let it take another eighteen years before I see you again. Come see me before you go?”

  Pam swallowed and nodded. “All right, I will. I promise.” She was surprised when Moira tugged on her hands and brought her forward to press a kiss to her lips.

  Miles looked up from the reports he was scanning when his assistant poked her head in his office and told him he had a call holding on line three. He asked her to please close the door on her way out and snatched up the receiver the minute she was gone. He had been expecting this call.

  “Miles Dixon,” he said into the phone. He listened for a moment and then filled his office with the sound of his disgusted groan. “Did you relay the message to Mr. Woodberry?” A few more seconds of listening. “Well, did you tell him that I needed to speak with him immediately?”

  Nate’s publicist wasn’t sounding very sympathetic to Miles’s plight, which only angered him more. The man’s high pitched nasal voice grated on Miles’s nerves, especially since he wasn’t hearing what he had hoped to be hearing. Nate was still in Iraq, caught up in a story he was trying to finish, the man said. He expected to be done by the end of next month at the latest, and he would be in touch with Miles following his return to the States.

  No, there was no number where Nate could be reached. No, Nate wasn’t interested in taking Miles’s contact information. And no, Nate hadn’t made any significant comment upon learning of Paris Greene’s death. Miles was no further along than when he had first tried contacting the man. With a strangled sigh, he bid the publicist a terse goodbye and slammed the receiver into the cradle.

  He was planning to return to Mercy later in the week and when he did, he decided to take a more aggressive tack with Pam. His time in Mercy was coming to an end, and there were still a few questions that needed to be addressed. He’d get the answers he sought if he had to choke them out of Pam.

  Dear Diary,

  Me and Nate are convinced that something is going on between Pam and Chad. Nate says he can tell by the way they look at each other that something is up. Plus, they are always fighting, like they like each other, but don’t want to admit it. Sometimes it really gets on my nerves. Because of them we got put out of Miss Merlene’s front room again yesterday.

  Me, I can tell by the way Pam acts that she likes Chad. I catch her watching him sometimes and the look in her eyes scares me. We haven’t talked about boys yet, and I don’t know if I’m ready to.

  Chad is cute, though.

  Paris

  Chad passed by Nikki, sitting in the family room watching television and reading at the same time, and did a double take. A quick glance at the kitchen clock told him it was after two in the morning, and he wondered what she was still doing up. His thoughts were leaning toward pouring himself a stiff drink and enjoying it in peace out on the back porch. He hadn’t counted on having a witness to his edginess, and he didn’t really want one.

  “What are you still doing up?” he asked Nikki as he splashed a healthy amount of Cognac in a glass. She looked up from the book she was engrossed in and smiled at him. He caught his breath and added another splash. The curve of her lips was all Pam.

  “I started reading Mom’s diary and I guess I got caught up,” Nikki said. A few seconds later she giggled and snapped the book closed. She came to her feet and crossed the room to enter the kitchen. She leaned a hip against the counter and watched him fix himself a glass of ice water to go with his drink. “I didn’t know you had a crush on Aunt Pam way back in the day.”

  He completely missed the teasing in her voice, and his was a little sharper than it needed to be. “What?”

  “I said,” Nikki drawled. “I didn’t know—”

  “I heard what you said. Who told you that?” He was slicing a lemon now and hoping his hands were steady.

  “Mom wrote about it in her diary. She said that her and Uncle Nate suspected something was going on between you and Aunt Pam. I think it’s kind of sweet.”

  “Her and Uncle Nate, huh?” Chad dropped a lemon wedge in his water and took a box of sandwich bags from a nearby cabinet. “So you decided to read the diary?” He wasn’t quite clear on how he felt about that yet.

  “I was just flipping through it. It’s mostly about all the running around her and Aunt Pam did when they were kids.” She took the wrapped lemon from him and carried it over to the refrigerator. “They were pretty footloose and fancy free.”

  “A lot of it was your aunt. Paris was usually the one going along for the ride and preaching a sermon the whole time.”

  “I can see Mom doing that. So . . . is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “What mom wrote about you and Aunt Pam?”

  “It’s too late at night to be subjected to the third degree, Nikki. She had to be thirteen or fourteen at the most when she wrote that, so I’d take it with a grain of s
alt, okay? You remember how you used to fantasize at that age.” He picked up his drinks and turned toward the back door. “I’m going out to the porch for a while, and you should go on up to bed. It’s late.”

  “That was pretty smooth, Dad,” Nikki told him, smiling.

  “What was?”

  “The way you answered my question without really answering it. But I guess I’ll let you off the hook this time.” She moved closer and offered her lips for a good night kiss. Chad leaned down and pecked quickly. “You coming in soon?”

  “In a while. Hit the lights on your way up.”

  He escaped to the darkness of the back porch a few seconds later and took a seat at the wrought iron table. Behind him, the kitchen light went off and he sighed with relief. Not that he didn’t enjoy his daughter’s company, but he was less than fit to be around right now. Hell, Nikki would probably be shell-shocked if she knew where his mind was wandering anyway. Nothing about his thoughts was innocent or pure.

  Chad was horny and wanting Pam so badly he’d been driven to fixing himself a drink to calm his nerves. His yearning for her had started the day he realized she was in Mercy, and it had only gotten worse since then. Suddenly, he was remembering all the time they’d spent together, the ways they’d made love, the techniques they had discovered together and perfected with each other. After the first time, when their coupling was strictly an accident, both he and Pam were curious and comfortable enough with each other to seek answers to their questions. Over time, they had found and mastered sensuality in its purest form, been so damn good together that it gave him a headache just thinking about it.

  He closed his eyes and pressed stiff fingers to his eyelids as an image of their bodies naked and slick with sweat flashed through his mind without his consent. He chased the image away with a mouthful of cognac and gritted his teeth as it snaked down his throat. He saw like it was just yesterday the first time he’d brought Pam to orgasm. And then again for the first time with his lips and tongue. Thought about how she’d run her fingers all over his body and make him desperate to have her and then torture him with those sultry lips of hers. For a long time after she’d left, he was unable to think of anything else.

  Life had eventually crept in, though, and he’d tried to push Pam to the back of his mind. But the intensity of what they’d shared was always with him. Once he’d believed she was the woman he would marry and have a family with, but she had proved him wrong, yet again. He ended up marrying the twin he liked and respected, but had never loved in a romantic way. Life had a funny way of kicking you in the ass when you least expected it.

  Chad rolled his head around on his neck and rotated stiff shoulders to release some of his pent-up tension. In fifteen years, he’d slept with his wife a handful of times and then only in the very beginning, when he was still convinced he’d done the right thing by marrying Paris and had told himself that they could make a happy life together. Pam was always there though, hovering between them and he had imagined her eyes on him every time he went near Paris, until eventually he’d had no choice but to admit the truth to himself. Pam was the one he wanted. It would’ve been criminal to go on misleading Paris and worse, using her body to satisfy his physical needs when he couldn’t even look her in the face while he was doing it, couldn’t even sustain an erection long enough to give either of them any real pleasure.

  Turning to other women seemed the lesser of two evils, and it was the route he had opted to take. His first affair was with a woman he’d met while attending a teaching conference in Atlanta, and theirs was a week-long, mutually satisfying fling. After that, he had carried on a three-year affair with a woman from East Point and then she’d decided she wanted more than he was willing to give and they had parted ways. The last woman he’d been involved with was a recent transplant to the area, a teacher at the high school he was inexplicably drawn to. She lived forty miles away in Juilienne, was single, and had gone out of her way to let him know she was interested. He was seven months into an affair with her before it dawned on him that he was drawn to her because of the way her hair flowed down her back when it was loose and because of her lips. They were large and plump. Like Pam’s.

  She hadn’t demanded any more of Chad than he could or would give and, just six months ago, she told him she’d met someone and wanted to see where the relationship might go. Chad had wished her well and backed off.

  He swallowed another mouthful of liquor as he thought of the woman now, recalled that she had approached him after Paris’s funeral and suggested he call her sometime. But by then he knew that Pam was nearby, and all thoughts of other women had gone flying right out of his mind. They were all nice women and he’d cared about each of them in his own way, but he was reasonable enough to admit that having them had been a means to an end. For him, Pam was always the beginning, the middle, and the end. And now she was back and just as unreachable as she’d been for the last eighteen years. Close enough to touch, see, and smell, but still so far away.

  Lust was eating at him when he rolled out of bed this morning, was sinking its teeth in his flesh as he went to work and tried to concentrate on deciding which extracurricular activities he would approve and which ones would have to be cut from the budget. It was wriggling around in his gut by the time he returned home and debated with Nikki over what to have for dinner. Finally he’d narrowed his options down to either locking himself in his room and relieving himself, driving out to the B&B and throwing himself at Pam’s mercy, or fixing himself a drink and drowning his lust until it went away. He’d finally settled on the drink.

  Chad found himself chuckling over his predicament. He swallowed more cognac, chased it with water, and threw his head back as the liquid slid down his throat. He rocked back on the hind legs of his chair and stayed that way for several seconds, studying the slatted porch ceiling and noticing a crack that he needed to repair.

  Then he came forward in his chair, set his glass down with a soft thump and saw her standing on the steps outside the storm door, staring at him. In the here and now, his senses went on full alert, but his mind took him back in time. He stared at her and remembered . . .

  “Come on, come on, come on,” a twenty-year-old Chad chanted impatiently. He was yanking at the hem of Pam’s halter-top, anxious to have it up and over her head. “Hurry up, Pam. Damn, I think I’m dying here.”

  Pam giggled as she shimmied out of her skirt and kicked it out of the way. She slipped her fingers inside the rim of her panties and lowered them slowly. “You act like you’re starving.” She gasped as he dropped to his haunches and took her panties with him. His mouth fastened on her crotch, her head slammed back against the wall, and a long hiss escaped her lips. He knew just what to do to make her come quickly and violently.

  Chad stood and pulled his T-shirt over his head. His jeans were barely unfastened and out of his way when he pressed Pam against the wall and lifted her for his entry. As she sank onto him, his mouth fell open in ecstasy. He held himself still and helped her out of her halter-top and then he palmed her breasts to bring to his mouth.

  “I am starving,” he growled, then sucked her breast deep in his mouth. “All damn week I’ve been thinking about this. I missed you, baby. You miss me?” He was a freshman in college and she was a junior in high school, so he made the drive from Atlanta back to Mercy at least twice a week to see her. This week he’d had finals and could only come on the weekend.

  “Yes,” Pam shrieked as he began moving inside her.

  She lifted a leg and hooked it high on his waist, rocked forward to meet his powerful thrusts. “Oh, that feels so good. Don’t stop.”

  “I’m never stopping,” Chad vowed hoarsely. Sweat beaded on his brow, a signal to Pam that his release was near. She reached up and smoothed it away with the palms of her hands, then gripped his shoulders to steady herself. “You hear me, Pam? I’m never stopping.”

  Pam took his tongue in her mouth when he offered it to her and went with the orgasm as it smacke
d into her and left her breathless. Seconds later, Chad was shouting into her mouth, telling her that he had arrived, too.

  They were spread out on the couch with Pam straddling Chad’s lap, making love again, when Jasper entered his apartment and caught them in the act. He came up short, looked from Chad to Pam, and then averted his eyes as he walked across the living room and into his bedroom.

  “Oh my God,” Pam cried, covering her breasts with her hands, though she was a day late and a dollar short. She hopped up and raced around the room, gathering her clothes and trying to pull them on at the same time.

  “Okay, so, I’ll go in there and talk to him.” Slightly irritated at being interrupted, Chad stood and stepped into his jeans. He was still hard and it took a few seconds of shifting around before he was able to situate himself and yank the zipper up. He hustled Pam toward the door. “Go downstairs and find something to do. I’ll be down in a minute.”

  “He said he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow morning.” She paced in a small circle and pushed her hands through her hair. “I can’t believe he saw my tits. God, Chad. Shit. I’m probably fired now.”

  Chad cupped a hand around her neck, brought her mouth to his and kissed her softly. “I know, and his timing is really fucked up on top of that. I was just about to come.” He opened the door and nudged her out of it. “Fix your hair. Go downstairs and wait for me.”

  Twenty minutes later, Chad came jogging down the steps and met Pam in the hallway. She hopped up from the bench she was sitting on and damn near knocked him over. “What did he say?”

  “He said you’re not fired, but that he is getting his locks changed first thing in the morning,” Chad said and burst out laughing.

  Back from his trip down memory lane, Chad was chuckling to himself as he rose from his chair in slow motion and went to unlock the storm door. Pam heard the lock slide free and hesitated before pulling the door open and stepping onto the porch. She’d been out driving around and had somehow found herself here.