by Eden Butler
For me, roses reminded me of loss. They are the calling card of misery, the steady reminder of how badly I had fucked up. I know that’s what they are. I know I can expect them on Emily’s birthday and again on the day that I destroyed everything.
Today was one of those days.
It hadn’t registered that my door was ajar when I returned from practice. My head was still too consumed by the opposing thoughts of sin and satisfaction, of who I wanted, why I wanted her, and what it meant that my body was firing on its own engines, making me forget that I could never get hard. Well, except for that dancer. And for that one dance Leann had forced upon me.
With Aly.
The drills practice that day had been brutal. My father made me make up for the distraction that was still so stupidly and obviously filling up my head. He made me run longer, pushed me further than any of my teammates because he knew I expected it. Because he knew I needed it.
When I shuffled up the stairs and kicked open my door, I didn’t noticed the petals at first. Not until I crashed onto my bed with my kit and my backpack and my worn body all falling like a mass of drained weight. It was only until I exhaled, drew in another exhausted breath and inhaled their scent, then felt the petals on my bed, the sharp stems of the roses prickling against my bare arms, that I realized what this sick gift meant.
Our anniversary, she mocked. There was more bitterness, that angry contempt for me, for what I’d done, around the edges of her tone.
I didn’t bother answering her. It wasn’t our anniversary I insisted to myself. Not the one I chose to remember. The one that marked the night that I’d somehow convinced that beautiful girl to keep from letting Eddie Parker take her to his father’s camp out on False River.
I’d followed her for two weeks straight outside the downtown library like a creeper. It had been months since her father had forbidden her from speaking to me. Since the stupid naked text messages we thought would be a good idea to send one another.
But I’d grown tired of waiting. I’d missed her. Only a few months had passed since she’d followed her cousin to the lake house to meet me and already I’d been consumed by her.
We’d gotten hot and heavy real quick like, hormones taking over, curiosity egging us toward the stupid and then, those damn naked texts. Her father had stomped his foot down and ended anything I’d wanted with her.
Or so he’d thought.
And Parker had moved in fast, banking on my exit from New Orleans when the world caught wind of Kona and Keira tying the knot. I’d left for Hawaii for my parents’ wedding, but came back to New Orleans determined to win the trust of Emily’s old man.
The bastard wouldn’t let me past the front door, waved a nine millimeter handgun at me when I approached his porch, and Emily, being the obedient Catholic girl that she was, wouldn’t risk her father’s wrath to see me. And while I had been gone, Eddie Parker had made himself comfortable on the golf course with her old man while he courted her with flowers–I’d seen it myself when I got back–twice in one week.
Slick fucker.
Still, none of that was going to stop me. I stalked Emily in the library, slinking into the stack’s shadows, watching her work her way through her reading list, but that day she’d had enough of my attention.
“I know you’re there, Ransom,” she’d whispered, leaning back in her chair with her arms across that small chest.
Just the way she’d said my name—that slight roll of her tongue, the “M” sound on the end that was accented heavy with an Uptown hilt—did things to me that I’d never felt before. That twang had me willing to do just about anything for her. She knew it. I knew it.
“You gonna hide in the stacks or are you gonna come sit with me?”
I didn’t wait for another invitation and when Emily tilted her head, that beautiful ginger eyebrow arching up like she’d give me a minute when I knew I wanted five (or a lifetime), for a second I forgot I wasn’t supposed to just sit there gawking at her. “Well?”
“Eddie Parker is an asshole,” I blurted out.
Zero pride, zero tact. I had way too much of my father in me. My mom always said as much, but that day sort of proved it.
“Eddie is nice, Ransom.” She’d sounded like she was talking about a priest, not some guy who wanted into her panties.
“Eddie is a kiss-ass and you’d be bored an hour into your first date.” I didn’t buy it when she’d rolled her eyes as though she thought I was being as stupid as I sounded.
“What do you know about it?”
“I know you haven’t kissed him.”
“Oh? So sure of yourself.”
“Yeah. I am.” I’d taken her hand then, pulling her closer to me and she didn’t fight it. “I know the first time I kissed you, you kept your eyes closed way longer than I did.”
“And?” Her tone had been soft, but the timber was off, seemed too quick and I knew she was battling herself for not telling me to piss off.
“And,” I’d said, moving from the chair across from her to kneel in front of her. “And…when you kiss someone, Em, you do it with everything inside you. You feel it all over and you wear that same smile for days after.”
“That’s not…Ransom, don’t.” But she really hadn’t been trying to push me off her. She hadn’t made great efforts to stop me when I stood up and pulled her down a row of books, Philosophy to Phonetics. No one was there.
“That’s not what? You think I’m full of shit?”
“I think you’re trouble.”
“Yeah, Em. That’s me.” And then I’d showed Emily what messing around with trouble meant. I’d showed her with my tongue against her bottom lip, my hands gripping her until there wasn’t any space between us. Until she’d given up the ghost and kissed me right back.
“You tell Eddie Parker you can’t go anywhere with him. Not the movies, not to dinner and not to his daddy’s damn bonfire on the river.” When she shook her head, looked like there might be another excuse, some bullshit reason to tell me no, I kissed her again. Hale Demon Magic always worked like a charm. “What will you tell him?” I’d asked when I needed to breathe again.
“I’ll tell him no, Ransom.”
That smile had reappeared on her face, the one she claimed she never wore. “And you’ll tell him no because…”
“Because…because I’m your girl.”
And she’d been my girl every day since then. Even when it became impossible. Even when I’d taken that beautiful, sweet girl, the same girl who’d given me her heart that day in the library and then her body months later, and ripped apart everything she’d been, anything she’d wanted to be.
“That was our anniversary,” I said to myself, resting my palm against my tattoo. “That day in the library, when you became mine.”
Later, when I walked her home—not all the way, because her father still couldn’t stand me—I bought my Emily one single, perfect red rose from a little hole in the wall market along the way. The flower couldn’t come close to her beauty, but I wanted to give her something that reminded her of what she did to me, how full and free she made me feel. A rose was a pathetic second, but it had made her smile. I didn’t care that one of the thorns slit my finger, drawing blood. She gently wrapped my finger in a tissue she had been carrying in her purse, and I thought I was the luckiest man on the planet, to have such a girl care for me.
Now, roses only meant blood to me.
They covered my bed in bunches, petals ripped from the buds, buds torn from the stems. The stems were like knives, dozens of them all over my mattress, on the floor, littered on my desk, my bedside table. Red and green everywhere. And there, right among the dark red petals and broken stems, next to my alarm clock and cell charger, was the note. It was the same as the first one I’d gotten in the mail weeks after I left the hospital.
You are heartache, it read.
The card was a heavy stock, black, lined with a deep burgundy around the edges and those three words were written in silver.
Red isn’t for love. Red is blood.
I bled for you, she told me. My virginity, my heart, all ran red for you, Ransom.
Then, just then with her taunting me in a voice harsher than she’d ever used before, pushing in that pain, that overwhelming needle of dread, I jumped from my bed, not caring that my body was so damn tired. I threw open the door and stumbled out of my room.
All around me, in the hallways, on the stairs, out in the backyard around the deck, there were people my age, my peers, laughing and drinking and loving this time in their lives. They were free and happy and teetering near lives that seemed endless, limitless.
I didn’t understand any of them. I couldn’t smile with them as though I was as carefree and young as they were. I never would be again. But I was full of need, and while I couldn’t care less about the laughter and the drinking, I was glad of the opportunity to prowl.
I moved around the party like a voyeur, looking for someone to help. Someone who looked like they needed it more than I did. Like they’d gone to this party to forget. Just like I tried to do every day.
I found her sitting in the corner of the living room, nursing a red Solo cub, pretending to drink whatever it was that Ronnie Blanchard had offered her. I’d never seen her before, not that I generally paid attention to anyone around me.
She didn’t look like Emily, and she didn’t remind me remotely of the dancer or of Aly. She was tiny, probably no more than five foot and she wore her hair in a blunt pixie cut with platinum blonde highlighting her heart-shaped face.
“Ransom,” Ronnie called, slapping my shoulder when I stood in front of the pixie. But I didn’t answer him, didn’t bother to acknowledge him at all, my eyes focused on the girl. That hand on my shoulder fell away and in my peripheral, I noticed him cursing under his breath. “Another one bites the dust.”
I didn’t know if he meant me or Pixie Cut, because I could only stare down at her, watching those small, bright eyes of her, so light blue they looked gray, widen. I figured that she knew me, or at least knew of me. I got that she’d probably heard everything about me. CPU was a small campus, private, unlike our secrets. Very little was ever allowed to stay hidden.
“I…” she stared and I thought maybe she’d protest, but then I knelt in front of her, moving my head to watch her, see if she’d tell me to leave her alone.
She didn’t say a word.
“You alone?” I wasn’t asking about a boyfriend. Didn’t care if she was there on a date. She knew what I meant. She had to.
“Yeah,” she finally said, holding my hand when I offered it. “All alone.”
One nod and I gave her a second more to consider what she was doing, giving her the yellow light I always wanted them to take. Then, when she gave no indication of stopping me, I slammed into drive. “I can make you feel good.”
She wanted me to. Followed behind me through the crowd, not saying a word, up the stairs to my room. I didn’t explain the roses, knocked the note off my bedside table before she could ask about it. And then, with that tiny, tiny body stretched naked across my bed, I set out to serve my punishment.
This was not like being with the dancer. There was no seduction. I paid Pixie Cut no compliments because my head was too clouded by guilt, that sick, constant enemy that had taken root inside me and refused to leave.
It was routine, usual, habit. I knew what to do, how to touch her so that she became no single woman. There was nothing personal in it at all. Nothing real. She was them and as I took her with my mouth, not caring that she yanked on my hair, that her moans and chants of “yes” became louder than the music rattling the windows, I served like I was meant to, doing whatever the hell I could to give something other than heartache, no matter how empty it was.
I didn’t ask her name, just like I hadn’t with any of the others. How could I? How could I let them become real to me, become more than a simple penance? What would I be if I forgot my sins? If I did that then she would be truly gone and even the memory of her, my sweet Emily, would be lost forever.
Happy anniversary, Ransom.
“You too, baby.”
7
There was music. Always. Childhood memories, dreams that reoccurred over the years, every happy and miserable moment of our lives in Nashville always included music. Like that time Bobby, my mom’s elderly boss, the closest thing to a grandmother I’d ever had, decided to throw me a tenth birthday party. The kids at my school had been scared of my size and my quick temper, so only a few of the guys from my junior high football team showed up. Mom spent a solid hour apologizing to me, trying to pretend there weren’t tears in her eyes over the apparent slight. Bobby and Mark, my mother’s gay best friend, had to drag her out of the kitchen to tell her to suck it up, that she was far more upset than I was. We spent the rest of the party camped around the piano singing songs about farting and diarrhea and other gross boy shit that Mark remembered from his times at Lacrosse camp. It had been the best birthday I remembered having, ever.
Or, when I went an entire summer in pain every single night because my limbs were growing too quickly, that damn Hale DNA hurrying to make me like my father before I was ready, and Mom lying next to me while Mark or his partner Johnny rubbed peppermint oil on my throbbing legs. She sang to me then, or hummed throaty and low. That was the summer she taught me Ava Maria in Italian. Anytime I can’t sleep, that’s the tune that calms me, makes me remember that I had a mother and two adopted fathers who cared enough about me to lose sleep, who wore themselves out to make sure I was in as little pain as possible .
There was always music. Even in the most desperate, unbearable moments. When I got tossed from my school in eighth grade for losing my temper and sending that bastard Mikee Sibley through the glass window for trying to attack a girl who was barely thirteen, my mom sat me down in front of the piano, telling me that the keys would be my therapy, that the notes would blast away the hopelessness.
Music had worked for that angry, fourteen-year-old I’d been. It had worked for me since then, but I had let the accident, my guilt, distract me from my therapy and had not played for over a year.
I’d tried it, with Mom’s insistence, when I could not silence that voice I thought was Emily, when I sank too heavy in the grief that tightened around my heart every single day since I last saw my girlfriend, Mom forced me in front of the piano, or plunked her vintage Gibson guitar in my arms, begging me to play. It had become common for me to pacify her by just doing what she said, and so I’d tried, pushing a smile onto my face, gripping the neck of that guitar tight and playing every song I knew until my mother’s expression didn’t look so tight. Until I thought her worry had eased.
But it wasn’t real. Music stopped working for me. I missed it almost as much as I missed Em.
It was not a surprise to hear music playing as I approached the lake house that Sunday. But it was not only my mother’s raspy alto singing “I Dreamed a Dream” that I heard as I walked inside. There was another voice, this one higher, wobbling, sounding scared as my mother picked up the bridge. It wasn’t bad, but nothing about those voices sounded in harmony. One was trying too hard, the other was overpowering.
And for some reason, I cared.
They didn’t stop playing when I walked through the door and leaned against the wall to watch Mom and Aly at the piano. Mom’s fingers moved effortlessly over the keys, her gaze directed at Aly’s shy face, how she stood so stiff and straight that I was surprised she didn’t complain about an aching back later.
I’d expected our usual Sunday lunch, after two weeks with Dad and the team on away games out of state. I’d missed the Little Monster and my mom’s comfort food, and I was anxious to find out if Aly had actually shown up for the job. So, seeing Aly there with her back to me, standing next to Mom at that baby grand, and realizing that she had been the one singing, had me stopped cold in my tracks. Just as shockingly, the living room was clutter free and Koa’s large assortment of toys and books that were
generally scattered around the floor and stuffed among the leather sofa cushions were neatly organized in small bins against the play room wall. And what was this? The floors had been cleaned—no shoe marks or creative kid hieroglyphics from markers, or stray smears of Play-Doh anywhere to be seen. Best of all, my mother’s skin was no longer pale, and the dark circles under her eyes, while still there, were much fainter.
Amazed, I stepped further in, right as Aly struggled through a high note that was clipped off suddenly when she noticed me standing in the entryway.
“Ransom,” my mother said, pushing back from the piano to meet me in the living room. She’d been clingy lately, behavior I’d chalked up to her pregnancy and hormones working their evil juju on her, but my practice schedule and upcoming mid-term prep had kept me in the city for longer than normal. It hadn’t just been missed Sunday dinners—it had been almost two weeks since I’d seen her at all. Still, my mother acted like she hadn’t seen me in months and I leaned down so she could wrap her arms around my neck and give me a peck on the cheek. Then she took my head between her hands and gave my face the once-over. “You look tired.” I didn’t like her frown or how she kept her open palms on my cheeks like she needed to examine me for any expression that would tell her I wasn’t okay.
“Mom, I’ve been practicing like a demon and studying hard.”
“Please,” she said, finally lowering her arms. “I know what goes on in that team house.” She cocked her eyebrow and frowned. “There was a reason I never stayed the night with your father when he lived there.”
“No,” Dad said, coming into the room carrying an armful of picture books and a half empty sippy cup of juice. “She always made me sneak into her dorm instead.” His smile was weak, but the ever-present wink told me he still perved over my mother. “I have fond memories of that dorm room.”
“You, hush.” She swatted at my father when he walked past her to slump into the sofa. He tossed the books and cup on the coffee table and Mom glared at him, then jerked her head at Aly who’d frozen at the piano, eyes avoiding my face.
