Growing and Kissing

by Helena Newbury

  ...and lowered me slowly. I drew in my breath as I felt the head of his cock nudge at the lips of my sex. “Ready for more?” he murmured, kissing my shoulder.

  I nodded. And we spent the next panting, moaning, shuddering hour watching a princess and an Irish rogue in the mirror.

  Eventually, way past noon, when we were both limp and exhausted, he left me in the bed and borrowed my car to go for food. He returned with pepperoni pizza and we devoured it sitting on the bed. I insisted on taking off the dress, not wanting to get grease on it. But as soon as he saw me naked...well, we very nearly didn’t get to the pizza at all.

  Afterward, we lay there, sated in every possible way. It was only mid-afternoon, but with the cardboard over the windows and the lights off, the room quickly darkened as the sun moved to the other side of the house. “How’d they die?” Sean asked.

  I was a little thrown. It wasn’t that I minded him asking, it was the shock of him asking anything at all. He’d avoided asking about my past and I’d always assumed it was because he thought it was unfair to ask when he was so closed off himself. So does this mean…? “Car crash,” I said. “Both at the same time.”

  He didn’t say anything, didn’t use words like sorry that would have felt inadequate. He just tightened his arms around me, his chest warm against my back, and that was enough. “Sometimes, I think it was better that way,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t have to watch one of them missing the other. But worse, too. One morning they were there and then...they never came home.”

  He was silent for a long time, just holding me. I sensed that he was working up to something. Then, “I was born in Ireland. The north.” Each word came slowly and with great difficulty, as if it was being dug up from deep underground. “Irish dad but American mum. I’ve got lots of brothers. We were happy, mostly. Moved around between Ireland and America. And then...something happened.”

  He stopped, but I could feel his chest straining with the pain. I pressed my body back against him, wondering if that was going to be it. I wanted to tell him how glad I was he’d finally told me something, that it was fine to leave it there for now if he wanted to. I opened my mouth to speak—

  “My dad killed my mum,” he said.

  Louise

  I lay there trying to process. I had no words. Even losing my own parents hadn’t in any way prepared me for something like this. I wanted to turn around and hug him, but I was worried he might not be able to get the words out, if he had to look me in the face. So I reached back with one hand and stroked his side instead, hoping I could transmit how sorry I was through my touch.

  “It’s complicated,” he said.

  I nodded. There was so much pain in his voice, I was tearing up myself.

  “My dad isn’t the bad guy,” he told me.

  I nodded again

  “My dad used to go off on these jobs, sometimes for months, and he’d leave us at home with mum. Usually in Ireland but one summer, it was in America.” He swallowed. “At the end of the summer, he comes back….”

  I closed my eyes, knowing what would come next. The lover. The discovery. The enraged husband, a crime of passion. My dad isn’t the bad guy. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Sean swallowed. “He came back to find...she’d got mixed up with a cult.”

  I twisted around and pressed close to him. “What?”

  “Not a religious one. A...personality cult, I suppose you’d call it. Mixed in with doomsday stuff. A really fucking evil one.”

  I put my head on his chest. “Go on,” I whispered.

  “We knew something was wrong. We’d known all summer, we’d seen her changing. Weird people coming to the house. But we were kids—what were we going to do? It was scary...the person she was just disappeared, within a few months. Then my dad got back and we thought, thank God, now everything’ll be okay. But she wouldn’t listen to him, treated him like a stranger. Said he was trying to take her children away from her, and she had to do what was best for us.”

  He stopped for a moment, staring off into the darkness. “She wanted to take us into the cult. They had these...camps, where followers could live. And those places...I didn’t know at the time, but I heard things later...they do things to people in there. Even to children. Bad shit.”

  “Jesus,” I breathed.

  He wrapped his arms around me and pressed me in tight to him, running a hand down my back from shoulder to ass. We were both naked, but it didn’t feel sexual—we were way beyond that, now. It felt like he was stroking me for comfort, to reassure himself that there was another person there in the blackness. “So us kids: our mum’s telling us she’s going to take us all off to paradise, our dad’s trying to explain that she’s not well—because he still loved her, he loved her through all of this. And our mum’s saying he’s evil, that he’s trying to trick us. This went on for weeks.”

  I clung to him, rubbing his shoulders and upper arms, letting him know I was there for him. I thought of a young Sean, terrified and confused, and I’ve never wanted a time machine so much.

  “Eventually, my mum realizes she’s going to lose—she’s not going to get custody, if they split and it goes to court. So she takes Bradan, one of my brothers, and she delivers him—she fucking delivers him—to the cult, knowing that he’s going to be separated from her, maybe forever. She actually believes she’s doing the right thing, she thinks the cult can raise him better than she can herself. That’s how strongly they controlled her.” He started to speak again, but his voice broke on the first word and he stopped.

  He doesn’t want to cry I pressed myself as hard as I could against his chest, feeling his lungs fill and empty as he struggled for control. “It’s okay,” I whispered. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

  “Do you know why Bradan?” he asked, his voice bitter. “Why she took him first, separately?”

  I shook my head.

  “Because they asked for him. Because they’d questioned her for hours about all her kids. Seen photos. They knew his personality, his talents. They picked him out and ordered her to bring him to them. That’s the sort of people they are.”

  “Oh my God…”

  “Then she comes back home to get the rest of us. She’s going to take us all with her to one of the camps and then, most likely, the cult would gradually split us up and find...uses for all of us. Only that never happens. Because, when she arrives home, my dad’s there.”

  And now I saw it coming towards me like a freight train. I squeezed my eyes closed.

  “They have a screaming row, right in front of us. My mum’s out of her mind, by this point—she genuinely believes she’s saving us, can’t believe the cult would ever hurt us. My dad...he’s already lost one son, he knows he might never see Bradan again. Now he’s about to lose his whole family. He loves her—that never changed—but he can’t let her take us.

  So they get into a fight, us kids are trying to stop them, half of us are crying. My mum grabs a kitchen knife—” His arms tightened around me. “My dad wrestled with her. He didn’t want to do it. If it had been just him, I don’t think he would have done it—he would have let her kill him, rather than hurt her. But he knew that if he was gone, there’d be no one to save us kids. They fought and fought...and finally he slammed her down on the floor and she hit her head. And that was it. We all saw it happen.”

  I clung to him like a child...but in that moment, I wanted it to be the other way around. I wanted to be like a mom to him, to comfort him.

  “Afterwards...it was fucking chaos. They hauled my dad off for murder.”

  I tilted my head up and blinked up at him. “What? But...the cult!”

  “Turns out the cult had a lot of friends in high places, from local police all the way up to judges. At the trial, they made out that my dad was this violent, drunken Irishman—he’d had one beer, that day—and that my mum had been trying to get us away from him. The cult was barely mentioned. My dad got twenty years: he’s still in prison now.”

&
nbsp; “What about Bradan?”

  “We were trying to tell everyone the cult had taken him, but no one believed us. They split us up: I was the youngest so I got put in foster care in the US. Everyone got different treatment and it happened fast. We mostly lost touch. I know Aedan went back to Ireland and lived there for a while. Carrick was older so he managed to slip away and go on the run until he was old enough to look after himself....” Sean sighed. “It was a mess. The only one I know about for sure is Kian: he went into the military. He’s in Washington, now.”

  Jesus. I knew what it was like to lose both parents, but at least Kayley and I had had each other.

  “We were a mess, too,” Sean told me. “I mean, some of us sided with my dad, some with my mum, the whole thing just tore us apart. We loved each other but...seeing the others just reminded us. That’s why we don’t talk.”

  “What happened to you, in foster care?”

  “I ended up with this pretty well-off couple who couldn’t have kids of their own. The woman was okay, but the man...he wanted his own kids. Called me a little Irish shit when she wasn’t around. Then, when he’d had a bad day, he’d take it out on me. Punching me, hitting me. I was a clumsy kid, worse when I was scared, so I’d break stuff. He hated that.” He nodded over his shoulder. “Those scars are cigarette burns. He used to get me to take my shirt off and kneel down facing away from him while he sat in his armchair. I used to think it was so I couldn’t see the cigarette coming, to make it worse. But now I think it was because he couldn’t look me in the face while he did it. The fuckin’ coward. He told me over and over I wasn’t good for anything apart from wrecking stuff—that’s what I’d done, he said, wrecked his life. You hear that enough times, you start to believe it.”

  He went quiet for a while, reliving it in his head. “I started building myself up, learned how to fight, so I could fight back. And I did, eventually—he got scared of me and left me alone. I thought I’d won…” He sighed. “But the fucker had messed me up. By then, I thought all I was good for was destroying. Smashing stuff up started to feel good: it let out some anger. At school, I didn’t trust anyone and no one wants to be friends with the scary Irish kid who gets into fights all the time and breaks stuff.” He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I moved out of their house as soon as I could. Then I just kept scaring people and smashing stuff...only this time, people paid me for it. My foster mum eventually left the bastard. She lives across town.”

  I hugged him for long minutes before I asked, “What about Bradan?”

  “Some of us tried to track him down—I know I did. But the cult’s fucking impenetrable unless you’re a member. We don’t know if he’s alive or dead.”

  “And Kian...you don’t want to see him?”

  He ran his hands over my back, massaging the muscles, using the feel of me to calm himself. “I do, but...Jesus, you don’t know what it’s like—seeing any of them just makes it all come back.”

  I nodded sadly. “When did you get the shamrock tattoo?” I asked quietly.

  He reached back between his shoulder blades and fingered it. “Just before we got split up, all us brothers got them. We found a guy who wasn’t bothered that some of us were kids, as long as he got paid, and we all lined up and had it done, one after the other. It was supposed to be a sign that, one day, we’d get what was left of our family back together.”

  I closed my eyes, wrapped him tight into my arms and held him there.

  Louise

  I got back to the apartment by mid-afternoon. I walked into the kitchen, expecting to find stacks of dishes waiting to be loaded into the washer. But every surface was spotless.

  “Good, huh?” Kayley said from behind me. She stifled a yawn. “Stacey helped.”

  I spun around. And tried not to let my smile falter as I saw how thin she was getting. I’d seen her only the previous morning but now, under the harsh kitchen lights, her cheeks looked hollow. And she looked so small, in her clothes, like she’d lost even more weight. Had she looked that ill yesterday?

  Or had I just been so focused on the plan that I hadn’t noticed?

  I grabbed her and pulled her into my chest, wrapping my arms around her and wanting to keep them there forever. Kayley gave an exaggerated “Ulp!” and then, after a few seconds, started to wriggle. “Must...escape...crushing...ribs…”

  I let her go, a little relieved. The old Kayley was still in there. “Thank you for cleaning up,” I told her. “But no more. That’s my job.”

  Kayley rolled her eyes. “I’m fourteen,” she reminded me. “I can take care of myself.”

  But you shouldn’t have to. Especially not when she was ill.

  “Anyway, how’d it go last night?”

  That caught me off guard. “Last night?” She’d been dozing in her room when I’d dressed for the jazz club...hadn’t she?

  “I heard you and Stacey talking. And then I got the details out of her when you were gone.” She grinned. “You slept over at his place last night?”

  “No!” I swallowed. “It’s not like that!”

  “Louise, it’s okay. I’m glad you’re seeing someone.” She grinned. “Is he hot? When can I meet him?”

  “Never!” My head was spinning. I’d only just wrapped my head around being with Sean. He was still caught up in crime—that was his life. Maybe I could learn to accept that, but I couldn’t have a guy like that around Kayley. “Look...things are complicated right now.”

  She pouted. “Why are you being so mysterious? Why can’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

  I sighed. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go thank Stacey for hanging out here all day. Then we can do something fun together.”

  So we did. I took her out to a fancy ice cream place and we talked about movies and the vacation we’d take when this was all over and who we’d most like to be shipwrecked with. But she left her ice cream half eaten, her appetite worryingly poor.

  That night, after I’d tucked her in, I was just about to leave her when she grabbed my wrist. “Can you stay with me?” she asked. “Just for tonight?” Her voice had suddenly lost that teenage, all-knowing, tone.

  She hadn’t asked for that for years. I sat down on the edge of the bed, wracked with guilt. I’ve been away too much. “Of course,” I said, my voice cracking. And I stretched out next to her.

  I hated lying to her. We’d always been so close and it felt as if all the secrets had driven a wedge between us. Just hang on, I thought as I watched her sleep. Another month. That’s all I need. Then this whole thing would be over and I could end this double life.

  I didn’t know that I was about to run out of time.

  September

  Sean

  The next few weeks passed fast. There was so much that needed doing at the mansion, just to make sure the floor didn’t collapse under us or the roof didn’t come down, that I was there all day, every day. Given that, before I met Louise, I’d spent most days sleeping off a sex-and-booze-fueled hangover, it was an adjustment. But, in time, I found I kind of liked seeing mornings.

  And it was worth it, to be with Louise. We were together a lot, now, every hour she didn’t have to be at her job or looking after her sister. Most of the time, we were working, but I still managed to coax her away from the plants long enough to go up to the big four poster in the bedroom...or I’d push her down on one of the tables and slowly strip her...or I’d just catch her as she walked past and press her up against the wall….

  When she was there, it was great. When she wasn’t, though...that’s when I got to thinking. Like right now, as I hammered down a new floorboard.

  In another few weeks, it’ll all be over. Louise would bring in a great crop—I didn’t doubt that for a second. If I could keep her safe until then, we could sell it to Malone and Kayley could get her treatment.

  ...and then what?

  Against all my expectations, it felt good to have opened up to her. It felt great. But once we’d sold the crop and she’d gone back to h
er normal life...would she still want me? What the hell could I offer her? All I was good at was being a scary fucker and smashing stuff up.

  I heard a noise from the next room, where the plants were. Shit. Probably just a bird—there were enough missing slates on the roof that they got in, sometimes. But I wasn’t taking any chances: I kept the claw hammer in my hand. As I crept through the doorway, I drew it back….

  No one there. I could see right across the room, between the shifting foliage. I sighed, lowered the hammer and started walking the aisles, looking for the bird. I’d heard something....

  I was on my third aisle when I heard the rustle. I spun around, lifting up the hammer again...but there was no one.

  Not at that height.

  It wasn’t until I glanced down that I saw the intruder, sitting on the floor against a table leg.

  “Hi,” said Kayley.

  Louise

  I’d just finished my shift at the garden store. On the phone, Sean had just said you need to get over here, so I didn’t understand how bad the situation was until I glimpsed Kayley’s bandana between the plants. Oh shit.

  I skidded to a stop in front of her and Sean. He and I exchanged horrified looks.

  “This is for Switzerland, isn’t it?” Kayley said. “This is for my treatment.”

  I looked at Sean and then looked at her. I nodded.

  “Are you INSANE?” Kayley yelled. “You’re growing drugs! You...you asshat, Louise! This isn’t…” She looked at me helplessly. “This isn’t you!”

  “I know,” I said softly. “But it was the only way. We had to have the money.” I took hold of her arms. “Look, this is just a one-time thing. And it’s all over in another few weeks.”

  Kayley swallowed, turning pale. I could see her working it out in her head. This is what had terrified me all along: not just her finding out I was breaking the law, or being scared for me, but figuring out why I needed to do it. Watching the realization wash over her was the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever seen.