Growing and Kissing

by Helena Newbury

  “How did it—” I asked weakly.

  “It’s an American Sycamore,” she said sternly. “Those things grow fast. The floor was torn up by the plumbers to get at some pipes, right down in the foundations, and there was a hole in the roof and...well, at the same time I was running a little short of money so the work ground to a stop, and the house was unoccupied for several years while I was living with my sister. A seed must have blown in. I came back and...” She waved her hand at the tree.

  The house was completely unsellable—no one in their right mind would take on such a disaster. “Can I see the rest?” I asked with growing excitement.

  The living room had a huge hole in the floor but the kitchen and two of the other reception rooms were in a good state of repair. There was even power and water. I spun around to Mrs. Baker. “I want to make you an offer,” I said.

  “To buy?”

  “To rent.”

  She shook her head.

  “Look,” I pressed, “you aren’t going to sell it. You must know that.”

  “Renting it’s not worth my while,” she sniffed.

  I was desperate. “Ten thousand dollars. For one month.” When she hesitated, I said, “Come on, it’s sitting here doing nothing. In a month we’ll be gone and you’ll have ten thousand in the bank for repairs.”

  She looked at me sternly. “Young lady, I was not born yesterday. What are you planning to do here: run a brothel? A gambling den?” But there was a gleam in her eye that hadn’t been there before, as if I was bringing back old memories. I wondered what her family had been involved with, back in the day.

  “Ten thousand,” I said levelly. “We give you back the house as we found it and you don’t ask any questions. Anything goes wrong, it’s on us and you had no idea. You’re just a nice old lady who got duped.”

  For a while, I thought she wasn’t going to go for it. Then she crossed her arms and nodded. “Cash up front.”

  My smile of relief only lasted a few seconds. I told her I’d be back with the entire amount in an hour, but then I sat in my car staring out at the night. We’d spent all of our money. We couldn’t scrape together a thousand dollars to give her, never mind ten.

  Which only left one solution.

  I pulled out my phone and stared at Sean’s number for a long time before finally putting it back in my purse. If I told him, he’d stop me. And this was our only shot.

  I took a deep breath and went to see Murray.

  Louise

  As I’d thought, Murray moved around. I had to dig out the loan papers, find his number and call him to find out where his latest temporary office was. Yes, he said, he’d see me even at this late hour. In fact, he sounded worryingly pleased to hear from me.

  This time, his place was up on the second floor of a mostly-abandoned office building. The scary thing was how much less alien it felt, going to see a loan shark. The last five months had changed me: dealing with criminals was almost normal, now.

  In his lobby, the two heavies in suits were waiting as before. This time, though, they gave me a knowing, leering grin, much more obvious than before. Was it because Sean wasn’t there? Or was it because they knew what me being back here meant?

  Murray was leaning back in his chair, his hands behind his head. His grin only got wider when I told him I needed another ten thousand.

  At first, I tried to brazen it out. “Come on,” I said. “What’s another ten thousand? Add it onto my original loan.”

  He let me have a few seconds of hope. Then, savoring the word, “No.”

  I stared at him, getting a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I could sense the power in the room shifting.

  “You’re a bad risk,” he told me, leaning forward so that our faces were only a foot apart. I could feel his excitement, almost sexual—he was thrilled to see what I’d do next.

  I got to my feet. “I’ll find someone else.”

  “You think we don’t all talk to each other? You think we don’t swap names and numbers? Ten seconds on the phone and you’re blacklisted, Louise.”

  I felt my knees go weak. After the air conditioning failure and then Malone and now the eviction, all in one day, I didn’t have any more fight to give. Now this?! I could feel the mansion, our last shot at saving the crop, slipping away from me.

  “Of course,” said Murray as if throwing me a lifebelt, “there’s always the other option. The one I offered you before.”

  I thought of Kayley, growing steadily weaker.

  “What is it?” I asked. My voice was a low croak.

  Murray mockingly tilted his head to one side. “Sure you don’t want to call Sean? He was so against you taking that option.”

  “What is it?” I wanted to throw up. But I couldn’t walk out of there without the money.

  He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a printed contract. It already had my name on—all he had to do was write in the updated amount. My stomach twisted: he’d been that sure I’d come back.

  “Sign it,” he told me, pushing it and a pen across the desk.

  With shaking hands, I started to flip through the pages.

  “Fucking sign it,” he said victoriously. “Or get out.”

  He knew I had no choice, no matter what it said. A few phrases leapt out at me from the densely-printed text.

  ...provision of modeling services...

  ...understand that recordings will be adult in nature…

  ...including open leg, toys, male/female, gang—

  I stopped reading.

  She was my sister. What else could I do?

  I neatly signed my name, just below where it said that the contract would run for two years.

  Murray whipped it out of my hand and threw it into a drawer, then opened up his safe and took out ten thousand: in hundred-dollar bills, it looked like a pathetically small stack, given what I’d just signed away. He seemed to delight in handing it to me, wrapping my fingers around the bills. “Come back here tomorrow,” he told me. “I’ll take you to meet some people. I think we can set you up with your first performance right away.”

  I stumbled towards the door on legs that felt waxy. I could feel a tug in my guts—it was as if I was leaving a part of me there in Murray’s office, locked away in his desk drawer, and I’d never be whole again.

  “Get your hair done,” Murray told me as I opened the door. “Nails, too, and make-up.”

  I paused on the threshold. “What should I wear?” I croaked.

  The two heavies in the lobby heard that and laughed. Behind me, Murray laughed too. “Whatever the fuck you want,” he told me. “Thirty seconds in, those guys will have you naked anyway.”

  I tried to stalk through the lobby, to not let their leers and laughter bother me, but whatever pride and confidence I’d built up over the last five months had just been stripped away. I’d gone from civilian to criminal and now I’d changed again. Now I was meat.

  Back in my car, I took some deep breaths and forced down the tears that threatened to spill out. Then I drove straight to Mrs. Baker’s place and handed over the ten thousand dollars

  There. Now it was done, and it couldn’t be undone. But I still didn’t want Sean to know. We had too much to do and no time to argue. I forced my face into a mask and drove to meet him.

  One thing was for sure: after the things Murray would make me do, Sean wouldn’t want me anymore. No one would want me. Just as things were beginning to work out between us, I’d wrecked them for good.

  Sean

  We had less than ten hours before the realtor came around to inspect the house. But it’s amazing how fast you can move, given the right motivation.

  I hired a truck, backed it up to the garage and we started loading plants. There were two hundred to move and it had to be done carefully, without damaging them. I provided the brute force, lifting and carrying the pots, while Louise knelt in the back of the truck arranging them and packing them in tightly so they didn’t move around. I could tell something was
bothering her—she’d been almost silent, ever since she’d called me to tell me she’d found a place. But she kept telling me she was fine and I knew better than to push...for now. As soon as we got this done, I needed to find out what the hell was going on.

  The tables had to be disassembled and packed, too, and the lights. All of the wiring that controlled them and the maze of pipes Louise had set up to drip-feed water to the plants. The monitoring sensors. The mattress. The horizon started to lighten and we tried to go faster, with me carrying bigger and bigger loads and Louise frantically trying to cram stuff into the truck. By the time we reached the bags of fertilizer in the garage, I was literally throwing them up to her and she was stuffing them into any available space.

  We drove to the new place...but, as we arrived, I slowed to a stop in the street outside. “Here?” I asked, looking at the broken windows and holes in the roof. “Are you serious?”

  “We’re growing in it,” she told me, repeating what I’d told her five months ago. “Not living in it.”

  We parked the truck but didn’t unload it, yet. There was one more thing we had to do.

  Back at the grow house, dawn was creeping quickly across the sky. Inside, I started carefully pouring gasoline in trails from room to room.

  “You sure we have to do this?” Louise asked nervously, curling her hair around her finger. “There’s no other way?”

  “However much we try to clean it up, we’ll leave a trace,” I told her. “Bits of leaf between the floorboards. Soil ground into the carpets. They’ll know we were growing here. Hell, they’ll know from the smell. This way, we get rid of everything.” I pulled out a box of matches. “Get ready to move,” I told her.

  “Wait!”

  I stopped.

  She walked up beside me and held out her hand for the matches. “You’ve destroyed enough,” she said quietly. “It’s time for me to take some of this on.”

  Just when I thought she was done surprising me, she found a new way.

  I handed over the matches. She lit one and tossed it. There was a soft little wumph as the gasoline caught and then a wall of heat hit us as the flames rushed outward.

  We backed outside and hid across the street. We waited until we were sure the house was unsaveable, then called the fire department. Then we started banging on doors, making sure all the neighbors were out. The houses were spaced far enough apart that I was sure the fire wouldn’t spread, but we weren’t taking any chances.

  When the fire service arrived, I told them a story about knocking over a can of gasoline in the garage and a lit cigarette. As I’d expected, once they’d triple-checked that there was no one inside, they didn’t risk sending in guys just to save a house that was clearly finished anyway. They damped down the flames from the outside as best they could but, by the time the realtor rolled up to inspect the place, it was a smoking pile of blackened wood.

  “I can’t believe I just burned down a house,” Louise whispered.

  “Don’t feel too bad. They were going to knock it down and sell the land anyway,” I told her.

  As soon as we’d answered everyone’s questions, we headed over to the mansion. When I saw the interior for the first time, I dropped the fertilizer I was carrying.

  “What do you think?” she asked nervously.

  “It’s very...you,” I said slowly. “Especially the tree.”

  She bit her lip. “Did I screw up?”

  I grabbed her, picked her up and pulled her to my chest. After all the stress of the night, I even let myself laugh. “No! It’s great.” I shook my head, looking around. “Incredible.”

  She nodded, relieved...but she still seemed too tightly wound, considering what we’d just pulled off. “Louise…”

  She immediately hurried out to the truck. “Come on! We’ve got to get the plants back under the lights.”

  I sighed and followed her. It took us most of the morning to get all the tables set up in the undamaged rooms and rig up the lights and watering systems. I carried the mattress upstairs—I figured we might as well use it, now we had an upstairs—while Louise set up the monitoring sensors. When we were all done, I stood with her in the kitchen and looked at our relocated jungle.

  “We did it,” she said, letting out a long sigh. But her face didn’t show any relief.

  And that’s when, finally, I figured it out.

  “Louise,” I said, barely wanting to form the words, “how did you pay for this place?”

  She raised huge, scared eyes towards me.

  “Oh Jesus,” I breathed.

  “I didn’t have a choice!” she snapped, her fear coming out as anger. But her eyes were filling with tears. “We didn’t have any time left and I thought—I thought that if I told you, you’d talk me out of it and then we wouldn’t be able to afford a place and then...we’d have to abandon the whole thing and you’d walk away!”

  I let out a long, slow breath, trying to control my rage. I took her by the shoulders and pushed her up against the nearest wall. “Haven’t you fuckin’ worked it out yet? I’m not going to walk away! Not from you!”

  She sniffed and nodded and then I was covering her lips with mine, letting her know that I was there for keeps. I tasted salty tears but I kissed them away and went on kissing, wrapping my arms around her waist and holding her tight until she finally relaxed against me.

  I pulled her in tighter and kissed her neck, then the top of her head. “No more keeping shit from me,” I growled. She nodded...but I knew that it was going to swing both ways: if I wanted her to be honest with me, I was going to be honest with her about my past.

  One problem at a time.

  I gave her one last squeeze and then pulled her towards my car. “Come on,” I told her. “We’re going to see Murray.”

  Louise

  When we arrived, Sean took his hammer and told me to wait in the car. But I crept up the stairs behind him and waited outside Murray’s office, ears straining. I had to know what was going on. What if Murray’s heavies had guns? This wasn’t like smashing up a dealer’s operation or a grow house: sleazy as it was, Murray’s business was at least partially within the law. He could opt to call the cops.

  I heard the heavies get to their feet. “Unless you’re here with the redhead, O’Harra, fuck off.”

  I didn’t have to see their leering grins—I could hear it in their voices. “Murray said we could hang around on set. I’m looking forward to seeing her get stuffed. Maybe they’ll even need us to help, if they run out of cocks.”

  Sean’s heavy footsteps. Then a choking noise and the sound of something heavy hitting the wall. I peeked around the door frame.

  Sean had pinned the two men against the wall, the handle of his sledgehammer across both their throats. Their toes just barely touched the ground. “You ever talk about her like that again,” he said, “and I’ll knock your fuckin’ heads off.”

  The men gurgled and choked, their faces turning blue. One of them tried to reach under his jacket. Sean kneed him in the groin.

  When he finally released them, both of them fell to their knees, holding their throats. Sean snaked his hands under their jackets and my stomach tightened when he pulled out two guns. He tossed them on the floor and then swung the hammer down on both of them, reducing them to twisted lumps of metal and leaving a dent in the floor.

  I pulled back behind the door frame so that he didn’t see me. The next thing I heard was the crash as he opened Murray’s door—with his foot or the hammer, I couldn’t see.

  “That contract is legal,” I heard Murray say. “It’s fucking legal, O’Harra. You can smash all you like but she’d better come here, today, ready to meet her new boyfriends, or she owes me ten thousand.”

  There was a cracking, splintering sound and I guessed that Sean had just brought the hammer down on Murray’s desk. “It’s not about the fucking contract!” he yelled. There was rage in his voice like I’d never heard. A metallic bang echoed through the building—he must have slammed the
hammer into Murray’s safe. “It’s about her! She’s not one of your girls!” A hard thump and the crunch of plaster—I imagined him burying the hammer in the wall, right next to Murray’s head. “She’s better than that! Better than all of us!”

  For once, Murray’s voice was shaky. “I want paying,” he said. “You can have the contract but you gotta buy it out.”

  I heard Sean snarl and closed my eyes, waiting for the sound of the hammer hitting bone. That would be it: Murray dead, Sean in jail—I might never see him again.

  But the noise that came instead was tiny, the barely-audible thump of something small being tossed down on the floor. A moment later, Sean stormed out of the office. He did a double-take when he found me lurking outside, then pushed something into my hand: my contract.

  “Tear it up,” he told me, and I did—in long, loud rips that felt like freedom.

  “But how did—you don’t have any money either!” I said.

  He shrugged and kept walking towards the street, laying his hammer over his shoulder. He took out his phone and started dialing.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, frowning.

  “Calling a cab.”

  I glanced at the Mustang, confused. Then I realized what he’d done and my face fell. “Oh my God...but that car’s the only thing you care about!”

  He stopped walking and turned back to me. “No,” he said. “It’s not.” He put his finger under my chin and tilted my head up and then his lips were coming down on mine. Hard and ferocious, forcing my lips apart. I gladly opened for him, molding my body to his. Every press of his lips sent fresh ripples of pleasure through me and I gave myself up to it completely, floating on a river of pure relief. My chest was going fluttery at what he’d just said...what he’d just done.

  His tongue explored my lips and then dived inside, the kiss turning deeper and hotter. His hands slid through my hair and then clasped my shoulders, holding me in place for a second. But that wasn’t enough for him. Before I knew what was happening, his hands had slid down my body and I was being lifted like a doll, one hand on my ass and the other across my back. He growled and kissed me again and again, arms locked around me in an unbreakable hold. I moaned in pleasure—it was like nothing I’d ever experienced, even from him. He’d kissed me plenty of times but I’d never felt so...kissed.