Hot in Hellcat Canyon

by Julie Anne Long

  “Britt . . .” he said sleepily, turning to kiss her tattoo again. “You gonna tell me about the guy who did this to you?”

  He said it so casually, so naturally, that it took a moment for the words to sink in.

  Her heart stopped.

  She went absolutely rigid.

  He kept his loose hold on her.

  She swallowed.

  It was a moment before she could speak.

  “How did you know what it was?”

  “I’ve seen cigarette burns before. You managed to turn it into something beautiful.”

  She inhaled a steadying breath.

  “Is it so obvious?” Her voice was frayed.

  “No, sweetheart. It’s not. It’s really not. It’s just . . . maybe it’s just I know more than a little bit about violence. It was my dad’s default way of burning off a little of his natural-­born misery. Drink, smack us around, repeat. I know what it does to a person. How you go into the world with a chip, or with something to prove, or something to hide. You kind of get to know the signs in other people. But not everyone’s going to default to what I just guessed, because not everyone has . . . I guess that kind of lens.”

  That kind of lens.

  She wanted to think about that.

  “Am I right?” he asked.

  She was quiet for a time. “Yes,” she whispered.

  And now she wanted to tell him the story she’d never told anyone, not in total, anyway, but she didn’t have any kind of narrative prepared.

  She took a deep breath. And released it. His hands moved down her back.

  “Okay. Like I said, I grew up in your basic middle-­class family. We were happy and pretty ordinary, probably, by most people’s terms, anyway. We didn’t have a lot of money, but neither did anyone else we knew. I was a cheerleader, I got great grades, got a scholarship, went to a great college, got great grades there, too. It was all hunky-­dory. I worked my butt off for all of it. And then I met this guy at college . . . he was gorgeous and charming and from a rich family and I fell head over heels. We got married, I got a job writing marketing copy and doing some illustrations; everything was really just perfect. We were both what anyone would call successful. I figured this was my reward for having a plan, and sticking to that plan, and being a good girl. For all the good grades and so forth. I thought it was cause and effect, you know?”

  “I know. I get it.”

  She took a deep breath, and released it. “He only smoked when he was stressed. Which turned out to be a lot, and easily—­he wasn’t good about handling challenges, because he’d never really had any. I didn’t really understand any of this before we got married. We had our first big fight over him smoking and lying about it, actually. Sort of dumb. I teased him about wanting to look cool at his age. But it turned into a fight about other things, and then . . . he hit me.” Even now it was astonishing to say it out loud. “Just hauled off and hit me in the face. It was so surreal, J. T. I can’t begin to describe how surreal. I’d taken plenty of falls as a cheerleader and I played other sports and so forth, so it’s not like I was a stranger to pain. But no one had ever hit me like that before.”

  J. T.’s entire body was as rigid as a board.

  Oddly, her body eased a little. Probably because she’d never said these words out loud to anyone before and carrying them around had required a very particular kind of balance from her.

  “I’m pretty quick and strong. But he was a big guy. So what happened next was . . . he . . . somehow he . . . he got hold of my wrist and just held it so hard that I couldn’t move. And then he just ground the cigarette into my shoulder. I never in a million years saw it coming. It was almost an out-­of-­body experience, like I was watching it happen to someone else. The pain was insane.”

  And her mind knew it was over but her body tensed again, as if it was happening as she spoke.

  She felt J. T.’s chest rise as he sucked in a deep breath and let it go, too. As if to steady some wave of emotion.

  And neither of them said a word. It was a lot for anyone to take in.

  But if anybody could, he could. This much she knew.

  “Did you leave him after that?” His voice was abstracted.

  She gave a soft humorless laugh. “No. I did all these rationalization gymnastics instead. Because everything else in my life had made sense, and I had to make sense of this, too, you know? I thought . . . could I love part of him and not another part? Could I fix him? Because I felt like . . . doesn’t everyone deserve to be loved even if they’re flawed? He cried and was so abject and so appalled, and I actually felt sorry for him. It was horrible. And he didn’t hit me for a long time after that. But then, he did. Again. And again.”

  She took a deep breath and he adjusted to hold her closer.

  “The fourth time he hit me I was out of there. I went to my sister’s house that night and I never looked back. I mean, it’s kind of like, you can love a beautiful house next to a nuclear waste site, but ultimately it’s a slow death sentence to live there, right? He cried and begged and apologized again but I was at least smarter than that, even if my heart was still a mess. And I’m making a long story really short, but it wasn’t easy. None of it. It took a few years to leave him. I never told my family the whole story, but I think they kind of guessed. Especially my sister. I divorced him. And he was so ashamed he never put up a fight.”

  She had never said these things aloud to anyone. Not in so many words, anyway.

  J. T. was as rigid as if he was absorbing the impact of those blows for her, right now.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “You kill ’im?”

  He said this so casually. As if it was a matter of course.

  “Car accident. Going too fast around a curve in his BMW. Rolled the car. About two years ago.”

  “That’s a pity. I would have done it for you,” he said idly. “It would have been my pleasure. I did all my own stunts, did you know? I know ways.”

  “Yeah? How would you have done it?”

  “Well . . . let’s say he was strolling down the street. I would swing down from a ladder . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “. . . that was dangling from a helicopter . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “. . . . and get his neck in a scissor lock with my powerful thighs. And just twist it until I heard a crunch.”

  “Wow. That is bloodthirsty. I like it. Although that’s much flashier than he deserved.”

  They were quiet for quite some time, and just listened to a bird singing outside the window.

  “Did you stop loving him?”

  The question kind of surprised her. Given that he was allegedly allergic to that word.

  “Eventually. Yeah. Well before I divorced him, anyway.”

  They were quiet for a long time. They heard the scritch, scritch, scritch of Phillip in his litter box. A homey sound.

  She got the sense that J. T. was deciding what to say.

  “There was a period of time when I thought my career was tanking. And I didn’t . . . er, handle . . . it all that well. To put it mildly.”

  “Swatting photographers, stuff like that?” she asked. “Asking cops who pull you over if they know who you are?”

  He winced. “Yeah. The odds are really not in anyone’s favor when it comes to a long, glorious acting career. Kind of like you, I thought at one time my own success had been kind of cause and effect. Like I’d had something to do with it, when really, it was down mostly to luck and timing. Finally I thought . . . What if I never act again? Who will I be? Because that’s the guy I’ll have to live with the rest of my life. Whoever you are without all the window dressing, all the ego, all the stuff you think you need and that you think defines you . . . Well, that’s who we really are. I didn’t much like myself f
or a while. I had to figure out who I was in order to tolerate being alone. I would say that’s the one benefit of at least a little failure,” he said dryly.

  “That’s exactly it,” she said, amazed. “That’s the word. I felt like a failure. My whole life, I was so invested in being that good girl and I guess I kind of felt I earned all my successes that way. I felt like I let my entire family down, in a way, because I’d fucked up and made a bad choice that I thought was a good choice, and brought that darkness into our happiness. So I ended up questioning everything I’d ever done or thought or felt in light of that one decision to marry Jeff, and in the process it was like I completely lost my moorings. I stopped going to work and I lost my job. And everything fell apart from there.”

  “And that’s how you ended up here, in Hellcat Canyon,” he guessed.

  She looked up at him then, eyes wide, because it was so on the nose. “One day I put things in my car and packed up Phillip and just drove and drove. I ended up here. I thought for a while it would be just until I figured things out. But the figuring-­things-­out part of life never seems to end. And I love it here, anyway.”

  He was quiet a moment.

  “Bastard’s name was Jeff?” he murmured.

  It was, peculiarly, a relief to hear him say it that way: sleepy-­voiced, idly. It utterly de-­fanged the memory of him.

  “Yeah.”

  She could hear Jet the dog in the throes of his first bark of the morning off in the distance.

  “I was doing a stunt one day on a movie set,” he said finally. “And it went wrong—­there was some miscalculation, and the car hit a ramp at the wrong angle, and it went flying through the air, and it could have been the end of me. And you’d think you’d be scared under those circumstances, right?”

  She nodded. She was scared just thinking about it.

  “Thing was, while it was happening, I was more surprised than anything else. I felt like a doll being tossed across a room, just that consequential. That two seconds or so up there between the time where there was absolutely nothing I could do and the time my fate would be decided for me, I just had to kind of surrender. But you know, that moment was kind of freeing.”

  She took this in, and she felt a sort of epiphany trying to break through. “So what you’re saying is . . .”

  “What I’m saying is, maybe our triumphs and tragedies are not as profound as we think they are, and maybe we’re not as important as we think we are, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe we don’t have as much control as we think, and that’s okay. Or maybe life is just like . . . say you were traveling a road, and you took a scary wrong turn. Or hit a pothole that trashed your alignment and gave you whiplash. And it’s taken you a while to find your way back. So maybe the guy you married doesn’t say anything fundamental about you. Or even if it does . . . maybe it’s something you needed to learn to keep going down the road that was right for you. Maybe it doesn’t have to tarnish everything about your past. And maybe it doesn’t have to affect your future.”

  Every bit of this rang so true to her, it was like a light being switched on in a dark place.

  And it wasn’t like J. T. was the Buddha or some sage. He was just another human who was trying to figure it all out, the same as she was. But he’d just said all the right words in a row. He’d said what she’d thirsted to hear for so long and just didn’t know it.

  They lay in silence. She listened to his breathing, as soothing as the wind in the leaves outside.

  “The worst part was . . .” she whispered. Then she cleared her throat. “I always felt like there must be something fundamentally wrong with me, something soul-­deep wrong, if I chose a man like Jeff. I thought only a damaged person would choose another damaged person. I’ve done my fair share of self-­help reading. But I never could shake that feeling.”

  It was the bone-­deep shame that had dogged her for years.

  “Well . . .” he said easily. “What kind of man am I?”

  She propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at him for some time, studying him like a map.

  “Racking up the superlatives?” he guessed dryly.

  “You’re a good one,” she said softly. Definitively.

  “And what part of you tells you that?”

  She paused again.

  “Every part of me.”

  He smiled a slow smile. “There you go, then,” he murmured. “And I haven’t known a single part of you to lie yet.”

  She sighed contentedly and sank back down on her pillow next to him, and stared up at the ceiling of her beloved little cottage. It suddenly seemed brand-­new.

  He yawned and stretched and slid his arm gently out from beneath her. “I’ll go make coffee. Or do you want tea?”

  “Coffee today, I think. It’s in the freezer. I ground up the beans. You’ll see it. French press is on the counter.”

  He slid out of bed and utterly unselfconsciously and nudely strode toward the kitchen.

  And as she drowsily listened to the homey sounds of him clinking around in the kitchen, she thought about what he’d said about lenses.

  She was beginning to understand that J. T. was more like her than she ever dreamed: that his early life may have toughened him up, but it had also sort of shaved a fine layer away from whatever protective coating humans usually wore out into the world. So that he saw everything a little more acutely. Felt things that much more strongly.

  This, too, was part of why he was a brilliant actor.

  And she was now someone who saw beauty and poignance in beat-­up chairs and dying plants. Who physically suffered when she witnessed someone being hurt and bullied. After Jeff, all the painful poignant things were going to hurt a little bit more from now on. Because she’d been extra tenderized. But the good things, the beautiful things, would feel that much better, too.

  She had the kind of lens that allowed her to see J. T. as a person—­a real person, with hurts and flaws and vulnerabilities—­and not just a series of Google results, right from the beginning.

  Maybe that’s why she’d been so squirrelly to begin with.

  Maybe she’d sensed he’d be able to see her clearly.

  When she hadn’t yet been really ready to look at herself. She wasn’t sure how ready she was now.

  “I think your mountain lion wants something to eat,” he called.

  “His food is in the little cans in the cupboard next to the fridge. His dishes are up next to it.”

  She listened, lulled, to cupboard doors opening and closing, then heard the little “pop” of a tin being opened.

  “Oh, wow, buddy, this stuff is rank,” he said frankly to her cat. “You really going to eat that?”

  She smiled.

  And then she luxuriously stretched all of her limbs at once, as if testing to see whether the sides of her box had really been kicked down.

  They had toast and coffee and each other for breakfast, all in the kitchen. Britt had never done it in a chair before, but J. T. couldn’t resist untying her robe the same way he’d untied her halter top a few days ago, and he was pleased with the naked woman he found inside, and one thing led to another, and she did get to be on top. Like a cowgirl. Scandalous and thoroughly satisfying.

  “Let’s go swimming. I know a place,” J. T. murmured suddenly. Against her sweaty neck.

  “You seem to know a lot of places.”

  He laughed. “Sweetheart, we’ve only just begun. But this one kind of came with my new house.”

  So she got into her bikini, a faded red-­and-­white Hawaiian print number, and they chucked her Kindle and towels and a thermos of iced tea into a big tote, and then he drove them to his new house.

  They were quiet on the way. They listened to Wilco on the stereo instead of talking.

  He wasn’t quite sure why he’d asked for the truth about her husband, one that he’d al
ready pretty much guessed. Only that he’d somehow known she’d needed to be divested of that secret before she could allow herself to be fully known.

  And he wanted to know her. With the same sense of restless hunger and promise he’d felt when he’d looked up at the hills of Hellcat Canyon. The sensation felt oddly like . . . freedom, maybe? When in his experience women had been anything but.

  He knew what it was to have your world shattered. It happened when he was eight, when his mom left and at ten, when she died. And he got used to living out various trials and embarrassments in the public eye. It gave a person a sense of perspective. Acting was how he’d escaped or soothed himself from all of that. Becoming a different person for a time was pretty liberating.

  Britt was indomitable, he was pretty sure. But she was just beginning to reassemble her life and its new form wasn’t entirely ready for the light of day, like her drawings.

  He parked his truck in front of his house, dashed inside to collect his things, and rejoined her.

  “OK, the trail down can be pretty precarious, but I’m a great navigator. Trust me.”

  She hesitated. She opened her mouth, about to say, “I can do it on my own,” he was pretty sure. Then she clapped it closed. And she finally gave him her hand, and he accepted it like she’d just handed him an Emmy.

  He smiled and gripped it fast.

  And she allowed him to be her rudder as he led her down the crooked path that traced the river and opened up into the swimming hole a hundred or so yards down.

  The pool was bound by a few huge granite rocks, and a nice, big flat one near the narrow beach.

  “Ta-­da!” he said.

  She was gratifyingly impressed. “What a find, J. T.! I’ve never seen this pool before.”

  “Found it first day I was here. Followed the sound of the water. Pretty sure I’m hardly Ponce de Leon, but I bet it’s ours at least just for today.”

  They whipped out their towels and flapped them down over the big flat granite rocks that flanked the pool, deposited their tote, then splashed on in.

  The chill sucked the air out of him at first. But then it was exhilarating, and they got used to it. And then they frolicked like otters.