Taking It Off

by Claire Kent

  His mother didn’t respond. She looked completely unconscious, deathly pale and motionless. She looked to be in her fifties, but she was dressed like someone much younger—in a tank top and torn fishnet stockings. There were stains on her top. Maybe vomit.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Elizabeth asked, her voice shaky. “We should call 9-1-1, shouldn’t we?”

  “It’ll be quicker if we just take her to the hospital ourselves,” Matt said, staring down at his mother almost helplessly, with an expression she’d never seen on his face before.

  “Of course. My car’s closer. If you think it’s safe to move her, maybe you can carry her there.”

  He didn’t move immediately, suppressed emotion shuddering through him.

  She gently put a hand on his shoulder. “Matt, pick her up.”

  “Okay. Okay.” He shook off his stupor and leaned over to carefully pull his mother up. He had to sling her over his shoulder, but she obviously didn’t weigh very much, so she wasn’t much of a burden for him to bear.

  He laid her out on the backseat and then looked over at Elizabeth.

  “I’ll drive,” she said quickly. “St. Mary’s is only a few minutes away.”

  He nodded stiffly and climbed into the backseat beside his mother as Elizabeth turned on the car and started to back out of the parking space.

  It was like the earth had moved without their knowing about it. One minute they’d been fucking like animals and the next they were rushing to the emergency room with a woman who’d been dumped out on the pavement like trash.

  “Do you know what’s wrong with her?” Elizabeth asked, looking at Matt in the rearview mirror and hating the sight of his tense face.

  “I think she must have OD’d.”

  “Oh.” She took a shuddering breath, remembering the conversation she’d overheard on the phone a couple of weeks ago. “Well, we’ll be at the hospital in just a couple of minutes. Who dumped her out like that?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but I have an idea.” His tone was low and predatory.

  She checked his face again in the mirror, but he was looking down, so she couldn’t read any expression.

  She drove as fast as she safely could and got them to the emergency room in just over four minutes. Matt hauled his mother out of the car and carried her inside while Elizabeth went to find a parking spot.

  By the time she made it into the building, they’d already taken his mother back, jumping ahead of all the other people waiting since her case was obviously serious.

  She sat beside Matt as they waited for news, and she had no idea what she should do. She wanted to be of some help to him, some sort of comfort, since he was so tense and silent and shielded that it terrified her.

  “Who do you think dumped her out of the car like that?” she asked after several minutes without speaking.

  He was staring at the floor. “She owed money.”

  Elizabeth made a guess. “To her dealer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know who her dealer is?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why do you think they drove her over to Bare Assets?”

  “It was a message for me.”

  “For you?”

  “I won’t give her any cash, because she always spends it on drugs. I assume they know that and want to encourage me to pay up. It was a threat.”

  She gasped as she realized how ugly and dangerous the situation really was. She didn’t know anything about drug dealers except what she saw on television and in movies, but she wasn’t naive about how dangerous they could be. “Do you think they got her to OD on purpose, so they could threaten you?”

  “I think it’s likely.”

  “What will you do?”

  “What can I do?”

  “You could go to the police.” It seemed obvious to her. In her world the first stop when faced with a possible threat was the proper authorities.

  “What would they do? A junkie OD’s and a dealer dumps her at a strip club. You think that’s top priority for them?” He sounded bitter, but it clearly wasn’t aimed at her.

  She drooped. “I’m sorry. I guess you’re right. But what if something worse happens, if you don’t pay up, I mean?”

  He didn’t answer—maybe because he didn’t have an answer.

  She didn’t have an answer either. She’d never experienced anything like this before, and it was frightening and bewildering. She wanted desperately to help and encourage Matt, but she had no idea how to do it.

  “I guess you could go ahead and pay her debts this one time,” she said at last, hoping she wasn’t overstepping. “And then get her some help to try to start over as much as possible with a clean slate.”

  He let out a long exhale and leaned back in his seat, closing his eyes as if he were too tired to keep them open. “You have no idea how many times I’ve tried that before.”

  Her heart dropped into her gut at seeing him so battered.

  “You get to the point where there’s just no way to start over. You’re stuck with the mess of a life you’ve got.” His voice cracked on the last words.

  She hated the sound of that, although it rang strangely true to her.

  She’d always believed in second chances, though, and nothing that had happened had convinced her they were impossible. So she said, “Some of the bad stuff won’t go away, but I think there are always a few ways to make changes for the better.”

  He opened his eyes and focused his gaze on her face with a faint question. “How, exactly?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I guess it would start with just making the best of what you’ve got. I know that’s not very helpful.”

  He gave a soft, bitter chuckle and reached an arm out to pull her against him. “It’s not. But it’s nice of you to say anyway.”

  —

  Matt’s mother had indeed OD’d, and she would have died if she’d gone another half hour without treatment.

  Matt waited for several hours, and Elizabeth stayed with him, so they were both exhausted at three in the morning when the doctor told them his mother was stable—but she was sedated for now, so they should go home and rest for a few hours and then come back later in the morning.

  “I’ll take you home,” she said as they got back into her car. She was exhausted, but she was in better shape than he was. “Where do you live?”

  He opened his mouth—she thought to object—but no words came out.

  “Where do you live, Matt?” she asked, a little less gently now.

  “Off of Hanover. Oak Tree Park.”

  “I know where that is,” she said. It was an older neighborhood, but not a bad one. She had never even thought about where he lived, but he must make quite a bit of money from the profits of Bare Assets.

  She drove to the street, and he indicated a stone building made up of six apartment units. Without being invited, she walked with him to his front door, and he stared at her for a minute before he let her in.

  His apartment was neat and simple, with decent furniture and not very much clutter. It was so plain, in fact, that she wondered if he didn’t care about making his living space more pleasant or if he didn’t want to go through the trouble for just himself.

  She got him settled on the couch and poured him a glass of red wine from the opened bottle on the kitchen counter.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Not really.” He sounded torn, not at all like himself.

  “Well, I’ll make us sandwiches. You don’t have to eat yours.”

  She went to give him the glass of wine before she puttered around the kitchen, making them both some sandwiches with the bread, cheese, and turkey she found.

  Matt still didn’t say much. But he drank two glasses of wine and ate most of his sandwich. And Elizabeth had turned on some music so the silence wasn’t overwhelming—it was set to jazz, so she left that on.

  When they were done, empty plates and glasses on the coffee table, Elizabeth asked,
her voice breaking a little, “Is there anything I can do for you, Matt?”

  The question seemed to penetrate his daze. He looked at her for real and managed to shake his head. “No. Thank you.”

  With a throaty sound of sympathy, Elizabeth sat on her knees and reached over to pull him into a hug. To her relief, he responded—with more urgency than she expected. He wrapped his arms around her, clutching her, and in the awkward tangle of bodies he ended up pulling her into his lap.

  She held him as tightly as she could, and she felt him shake a few times with repressed emotion.

  “She’s going to be okay, Matt,” she whispered. “The doctor said she would recover.”

  “I don’t think she’ll ever recover,” he breathed, his face buried in her hair. “There’s nothing left to hope for with her.”

  “There might be,” she murmured, squeezing him hard, as if she could hold him together. “I don’t think you have to completely give up hope.”

  After a long, ragged silence, Matt forced out, “I do. I used to hope, but it always ended up making it worse when she went right back to the drugs. You get to the point where hope isn’t…isn’t a good thing anymore.”

  “I don’t know if I believe that.”

  “But your life has always made hope possible. Mine hasn’t.”

  She sighed, leaning her head against his shoulder. “I don’t think hope is something only people with good lives can hold on to.”

  “I guess.”

  “Was she always like this?” She didn’t know if he would answer, since he’d never wanted to talk about his mother before.

  But he seemed to have no defenses tonight. He adjusted his position, slouching down so he could rest his head back against the cushion and still hold on to her. Then he said, “Yeah. I never remember her any other way, although my dad told me she stopped using when she was pregnant with me, so at least she cared about me that much.”

  “Well, that’s something pretty big, I think. She obviously does care about you.”

  “It hasn’t made any difference, though. More than half of my memories of her are when she was high, even as far back as when I was in elementary school. I remember in first grade I was trying to take care of her, cleaning up after her and fixing my own food.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “They split up before I was even born.”

  “Why didn’t he have custody of you?”

  “He had his own problems. He was a drunk and was always with one woman or another. There was something…heartless about him. I sensed it even when I was a little kid. I wanted to stay with my mom, since at least she seemed to need me.”

  She could imagine Matt as a little boy, desperately trying to do his duty by his mother, and her heart ached in her chest. “It seems like someone should have intervened.”

  “Who would have intervened? Occasionally a social worker would stop by, if a teacher mentioned there might be a problem, but I was good at covering, even then. I didn’t want to leave my mom. Back then I was still hoping she could get better. I spent half of my life hoping.”

  “And your dad never even tried to help?”

  “I think maybe he did at first, but he gave up pretty quickly.”

  “But you spent time with him, right? You said that was how you got into stripping, to piss him off.”

  “Yeah. I spent weekends with him as a kid. I would hang out at Bare Assets, since he was always there.”

  “It doesn’t seem like an appropriate place to have a little boy.”

  “Of course it wasn’t, but everyone owed my dad, so no one said anything. Bare Assets was just a little hole in the wall then. He was running drugs and prostitutes out of the place, I think, although I didn’t understand all that then. I started stripping when I was older, since he refused to give us any money.”

  “What did he think about that?”

  “He didn’t care. He didn’t try to protect me from any of the negative consequences. He believed in trial by fire. He died and left the place to me, so I stopped performing for the most part and started working behind the scenes and cleaning it up.” He sighed. “I guess I was always cleaning up my parents’ messes.”

  “It sounds like it. It was too much responsibility for a boy to have to take on.” When he didn’t reply, she added, “So why didn’t you just sell the place? It sounds like you weren’t all that crazy about stripping, so why not just get rid of it and start over?”

  “I don’t know. It was the only thing I’d ever done that made me any amount of money at all. And it seemed like…I don’t know…like I was destined for nothing more, so that’s all I did.”

  “And you never thought of doing something else?”

  “Of course I did. But I never thought there was anything else I could do. This was my life.”

  Her stomach twisted in sympathy, and she tightened her arms around him. “Do you…do you even like it?”

  “Like what?”

  “Spending your life at Bare Assets.”

  He let out another long breath. “I like a lot of the people I work with.”

  “That didn’t answer my question.”

  “It’s not bad. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s bad. It just keeps feeling…emptier every day.”

  She knew exactly how he felt, exactly what he meant. Strangely, she’d experienced it herself—feeling like the way she spent her life and all the dreams she’d poured herself into were only a pretty surface without any substance underlying them. “If you could do something else, what would you do?”

  There was a pause before he turned his head to the side and answered softly, “I don’t know.”

  “What can you picture yourself doing?”

  He looked over at her briefly. “I can’t picture myself doing anything else.”

  The words were almost heartbreaking. “Why not?”

  He didn’t respond immediately. Then he finally said, “To do anything else, I’d have to have to be able to look beyond my life now. And…I just can’t.”

  “Oh.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. She understood him now in a way she never had before, but she didn’t know if talking had really helped him. His body was still so tense and stiff and angsty.

  Matt held her in his lap for a really long time as she comforted him as best she could. They didn’t speak anymore, but they didn’t seem to need to.

  And eventually, finally, Elizabeth felt Matt’s body start to soften. His breathing evened out, and the palpable tension in his muscles, his embrace, began to relax. She didn’t pull away, and neither did he, but she was able to start enjoying his warmth, his strength, his hardness, his tangible need of her.

  He was a powerful, masculine, deeply attractive man, and she’d wanted him for a month now. She couldn’t even imagine wanting anyone else.

  She heard him release a long, rough exhale. Her head was leaning against his shoulder now, and one of her hands had settled over his heart, feeling it beat beneath her palm.

  He’d seemed to want her too. A lot.

  She hoped he still did.

  He was idly rubbing her lower back, his caress occasionally slipping down to the curve of her bottom. She knew it wasn’t a sexual advance and he was probably only half conscious of it, but the touch triggered ripples of pleasure all through her.

  She sighed, feeling her body soften like his, and she brushed her hand up to his head, gently stroking his hair.

  His breath hitched when she first touched him gently, and as she continued he closed his eyes and released a long, thick moan.

  Her body clenched with interest at the textured sound.

  She raised her head and leaned forward to give him a soft, wet kiss on the jaw. And she kept caressing his hair as she kissed him again on the side of the mouth and then again, catching his lower lip between both of hers.

  His muscles tightened and he gasped, “Elizabeth,” just before she kissed him for real.

  He responded
immediately, taking her face in his hands and kissing her hungrily, deeply. She wound her arms around his neck and opened her mouth to the advance of his tongue. And she moaned—a low, guttural sound at the back of her throat—when his tongue eagerly stroked the inside of her mouth, sliding deliciously against hers.

  She’d closed her eyes when their lips had first connected, but her vision seemed to have gone white as she was washed with waves of hot and cold, of pleasure, excitement, and emotion.

  She gasped desperately for air, just as he did, when Matt pulled his mouth away and leaned his forehead against hers, his fingers twining possessively in her hair.

  “Elizabeth,” he murmured, his breath blowing against her hot skin. “Elizabeth.”

  “Take me to bed, Matt.”

  He groaned and his hips gave a little jerk. She realized for the first time that he’d gotten hard improbably soon, a tight bulge in the front of his trousers as it pressed up against her weight. This evidence of how much he wanted her, needed her, made something inside her want to howl in satisfied possession.

  She wanted this man, with all of his hot tension and fierce sexuality and deep need. She wanted him. And he was hers.

  He groaned again—a helpless sound in his throat—and hauled her into another kiss, this one even deeper, even hungrier. They were still kissing when he managed to stand and picked her up into his arms. And they were still kissing when he carried her into his bedroom and laid her down on top of the covers, letting her pull him down on top of him.

  They were both so eager they were clumsy, fumbling with their clothes until they were tangled together naked. And despite the urgent, unpracticed foreplay, Elizabeth couldn’t remember ever having been as aroused as she was when she rocked beneath Matt’s weight, trying to suck his tongue into her mouth and tangling her fingers in his hair.

  He was fully aroused too, his hard cock pressed up against her hip, trapped between them.

  When she felt him start to shift, moving lower down her body with what she knew was the intention of going down on her, bringing her to climax with his mouth, she grabbed his shoulders and pulled him up. “No, Matt,” she said. “Not tonight.”