by CD Reiss
Chris’s number hadn’t worked in years. Not since his mother left Barrington and the trailer they’d lived in fell to the elements. I went into the pantry and sat where I always had when I wanted a little privacy—on the root box that hadn’t stored a root in a decade. The peeling shelving paper had the same blue flowers, and the light hung dark and bald, kissing the silver ball chain.
For the first time since I’d sent Harper off with the letter, I felt its weight.
What had I done? If I’d been waiting for him all those years without realizing it, why reject him when he came? Shouldn’t I be celebrating my success? My patience? The victory of maturity over whim?
Shouldn’t I be cleaning the house and getting ready for him instead of telling him not to come? What was I supposed to do now?
I’d only done a couple of impulsive things in my life, and they all had his name on them.
It was Monday. I didn’t usually cry until bedtime, but sitting on that root box, I wanted to wail my heart out.
“Catherine Barrington,” I growled, “enough is enough.”
When I came out of the pantry, Harper was already in the kitchen, leaning into the refrigerator. She wore her yellow shirt and a ponytail.
“Morning.”
“Harper, what would you say if I went away?”
“Like what kind of went away?” She leaned her whole head into the refrigerator. “To prison or a trip?”
“A trip.”
“I’d say ‘have fun.’” She came out with yogurt, peanut butter, and jelly. “Where are you going?”
Where was I going? Anywhere.
“Paris.” I said it as if it was the closest guess in a timed game show.
“Fancy. Nearest passport office is in Springfield. Do you need me to come?”
I didn’t have a passport. If I wanted one, I would have to wait weeks to get it. I wanted to leave now. Tomorrow. Sooner. I wanted to go and get a new life before I lost my nerve.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Taylor’s staying here,” Harper said. “I hope that’s all right. He’s harmless. And I only have a half shift.”
“It’s fine.”
“I need extra cash for your birthday party.” She put the containers in a plastic bag and snapped the loaf of bread off the counter without slowing down.
“What birthday party?”
“Thursday dinner barbecue.” She kissed my cheek and headed for the door.
“Harper!”
The door slammed behind her. I’d forgotten about my birthday, but she hadn’t. She loved me. She’d come back from college to help with Dad and never went back. She’d sworn she stayed because she wanted to, not to keep me company.
She’d lied, and I’d chosen to believe it. She and I were in this prison together. We were both going to be free.
I had to stay through the week. I guessed it was just as well. I could get a passport and take my time preparing to abandon Barrington.
Upstairs, I heard a crash that rattled the walls. Then another. I ran up, pausing in the middle of the staircase. In bare feet and a robe, I was in no condition for a man to see me. Even my sister’s man.
I heard another crash. It was coming from my old room. The one after the first and before the place I slept now. The master suite Daddy gave me when he thought it would cheer me up.
The walls pounded again, vibrating top down as if they shook from fear. Taylor had asked me for tools a few days before to spackle over a mushroom growing from the bathroom ceiling. He hadn’t asked for a sledgehammer.
I took the steps two at a time in my bare feet, running down the hall in leaping bounds as another crash came from the master suite. My suite. My space. The room that had been mine after Chris left, and the room I’d abandoned after a leak soaked the walls through and a mushroom grew on the bathroom ceiling.
A cloud of dust hung like a ghost outside the door. The window at the end of the hall caught each fleck of dust in morning light as they twisted and flew when I leapt inside it.
I froze at the threshold.
Taylor was in his late twenties. He was polite to Harper. He cleaned up after himself and spoke in complete sentences. Sweaty, stripped down to his undershirt, his skin was marbled with dirt and grime already. She’d said he was visiting from California, but she hadn’t said he was a demolitions contractor or that he’d be plying his trade while she was at the distro center.
The bed was covered in a blue tarp, and the ceiling—which was a piece of tin painted over in pink roses—was dusty but intact. Thank God.
“Oh, my Lord!” I said when he noticed me there.
“Good morning.” He had a beautiful smile for a guy I wanted to scream at.
“What… what are you doing?”
“Don’t come in!”
“But—”
“There are nails.”
The room seemed darker, no doubt because the plaster walls weren’t reflecting the light from the French doors to the balcony. They were just exposed hundred-year-old wood. Yellow Xs had been marked on some of the beams where the wood had been damaged by mold.
“You won’t have the mushroom again.”
It took me a second to catch up to what he meant. The roof over the back of the house had leaked into the bathroom five years before, and since then, a long-stemmed mushroom had grown from the ceiling. We’d repaired the roof and plastered over the fungus every year, but every year it grew back stronger.
And it was gone. I was rendered speechless by his kindness.
“The mold isn’t safe to breathe,” he continued.
Safe. Funny word. My parents had put me in this room to keep me safe. And Daddy had Reggie paint the ceiling to soothe me while I was safe and miserable.
“And that?” Taylor pointed at the roses. “I looked behind it. It’s clean.”
Clean.
Another funny word. After my parents caught me with Chris, I found out what they each were obsessed with. For my mother, the issue had been cleanliness, and my lack of it. For my father, it was safety.
After all the crying. All the fighting. After I showered the blood off my leg and the sticky gunk off my belly, I could never be right again for my mother. But Daddy had done all he could to make it right, even if he did everything wrong.
When Chris left, this hadn’t been my room. There hadn’t been a rose-painted ceiling. Above me, two golden wings peeked out from a flare of petals, hidden cleverly by Barrington’s only artist. I’d been a different person, and this room was part of a different era.
But not really.
Who was Chris? Who was I? All those years… should I sweep them away? Pretend they didn’t happen? Take the tin down, roll it up, and toss it aside? Pack up and run away so I could be sixteen again as if the flying monkeys hidden in the flowers had never existed?
I’d sworn to leave a minute ago, and now all I wanted to do was stay in my house with my people, taking care of a town I loved.
“I want to say something,” I said to Taylor.
“Yes?”
“I own a gun.”
“Okay?”
“I know how to use it.”
He must have thought I was talking about Harper, because he went from swaggering to sincere. As if I’d threaten him over her. Anyone who knew Harper knew she could take care of herself.
“Cath—”
“Don’t let anything happen to the painting.”
He nodded slowly, as if he didn’t understand why it mattered. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And thank you,” I said. “It’ll be nice to sleep in here again.”
I ran down the hall and threw myself onto my bed.
I wanted Chris to come to me, and I’d told him not to.
I wanted to leave so badly.
And I wanted to stay.
The tug-of-war for my heart raged, and I decided I was not going to shed a tear for it.
Chapter 15
catherine - sixteenth summer
My father
kept the factory open even when seventy-five percent of the workers were gone and the skeleton crew didn’t have much to do. He’d cut their hours, their insurance, their benefits. They understood, taking their lumps like warriors. Twice a year, on Memorial Day and Labor Day, he threw a free barbecue for anyone who wanted to come. Mom hated it because it was all Barrington people. She always invited her Doverton friends, but they turned up their noses. She claimed migraines and bellyaches, but she was expected to be there, same as the rest of us.
Some of Harper’s elementary school friends were going to Montgomery High with her. She was awkward and too smart for her own good, but she was genuine. They found her tolerable because she wasn’t interested in gossip and romance. She wasn’t competition.
At the Labor Day barbecue, she abandoned her friends to their flirtations so she could run around with the litter of bloodhound puppies nipping at her heels. Reggie kept a booth with paintings of lightning bolts and rollicking planets. Juanita and Florencio had a booth with pupusas. There were more crafts and energy in that square than any other day of the year. The rock music was provided by a bunch of guys from the public high school. Bernard, who was a year older than me and worked at the lumber yard, sang in a gravelly voice that was strangely dazzling.
I wasn’t as awkward as my sister, but I didn’t find the girls in my grade tolerable. They ranged from rigid religious anger-bombs to Doverton kids who found me beneath them. Marsha and I spoke, but not much outside school.
I stood on the grass, surrounded by my neighbors, each of them too poor, too crass, too unseemly to associate with. Listening to Bernard sing and watching my sister roll on the ground with a bunch of puppies, I was trapped, and yet, somehow free.
Leaning on the bleachers, Chris cracked peanuts between his teeth and spit the shells. I hadn’t seen him in days and it seemed like years. Every time I saw the kick of his hips and the way his lips stretched across his teeth when he smiled, it seemed like the first time.
I watched him.
He watched me.
School started the next day. We’d go back into our different worlds. Would we meet again? Would we see each other at all? We’d grappled with the question by avoiding it.
A waft of smoke from the grills came between us.
We were alone. Surrounded by people, we were alone.
He pitched his peanut bag in the trash and washed it back with a bottle of off-brand cola. When he finished, he sucked in his bottom lip to catch an errant drop.
He tossed the bottle up. It spun in the air, and with a tap of his knuckle on its way down, he sent it into the trash.
I stepped toward him, and he stepped back. Not away. He stepped back toward something, flicking his finger that I should follow.
Easiest decision I’d ever made. It was barely even a decision.
I glanced around for Mom and Dad. They were in the gazebo with Badger, the new mayor, and his staff. Harper and the kids played with the puppies while Johnny and his wife watched. Lance jaunted around the perimeter, peeing on poles whenever he could, nipping back any sibling who got too big for their britches, ever the alpha.
I tilted directions slightly toward the bathrooms, then once past the bleachers, I saw Chris peeking from an alley between the hardware store and the library. I picked up my skirt and ran toward him, cutting the corner so hard I lost my balance. Out of nowhere, his hand was on my arm, keeping me from falling over.
Finger to lips, he led me to a black iron door. He clinked through his keys and opened it, stepping out of the way so I could pass through. We were in an office.
He closed the door with a loud clap, leaving the window as the only light.
“Chris?”
I barely got out the S before his lips kissed his name away. He put his hands on my jaw, keeping it still so he could invade my mouth. It felt good to give it to him. My body lost all its strength, held up only by the electrical currents between us.
“Catherine,” he said in a breath, keeping his lips an inch from my face as he spoke.
“Where are we?”
“Back of the hardware store. I open on Thursdays.”
“What are we going to do? I’m scared.”
“Of me?”
“Of not seeing you anymore.”
“I’ll find you.”
I clutched his shirt as if I’d be swept away without him. “I don’t fit in anywhere. Harper is so smart she tolerates me. The only time I feel right, like I’m part of something, like I belong, is when I’m with you.”
“One more year. Then you can go to college and I’ll come after. We’ll be so far away, we’ll forget our names. When people ask where we’re from, we won’t even know.”
“I don’t know if we’ll make it a year. I feel like they see us. Even now.”
I must have been shaking, because he put his arms around me so tightly it hurt. I loved the pain of his attention. It was the pain of safety, of care, of being broken just enough for release.
“Harder,” I said into his shoulder.
He squeezed me so tightly I could just barely breathe, and the tension rolled off me like water.
He let his arms go slack enough to look me in the face. “We’ll make it. Then I’ll follow you anywhere. I’ll be your puppy dog.”
“Oh, Chris, don’t be silly.”
“Don’t deny me. I’m yours.” He said the last word with a gusto I’d never associated with myself. As if life was something to grab with both hands and free like a bird that could carry us into the sky.
Together, we were freedom.
The bird launched from my chest and flew to my lips when we kissed again. Not a kiss of relief this time, but a kiss of passion. Ours was a kiss that began a string of thoughtless acts.
His hands slid down my body, grazing my breasts, landing at my waist. I felt the hardness under his jeans. I should have been scared, or freaked out, or ashamed, but I wasn’t. I was free.
He broke the kiss and stroked my bottom lip with his thumb. “Should we go back?”
“No.” I took his wrist and put his hand on the triangle below my belly.
He gasped and his lashes fluttered. Seeing that he liked it sent my body to the edge of common sense. This was crazy and I didn’t care. Being the good girl hurt, and this felt good.
“My parents have to stay at the barbecue,” I said. “That’s their job.”
He hesitated. Swallowed hard. Pinched a bit of my skirt fabric.
I nodded.
He pulled my skirt up until my cotton underwear was exposed. I ran my hand over his jeans, feeling his erection. He seemed harder and bigger than humanly possible.
When he kissed me again, I backed into the desk, leaning on it. Chris twisted his finger around my underpants leg. His touch was pure magic, and in the milliseconds before his finger hit home, it gathered enough electricity between my legs to power the entire factory.
I didn’t realize how wet I was until he touched me.
“Oh, shit.” His face contorted.
I could barely breathe. Standing up straight seemed impossible, so I let the desk bear my weight.
“Rin,” he said, looking down between my legs.
My skirt was around my waist and my underwear was printed with roses. Old lady roses. My underpants looked like a dinner plate and his finger was stuck under them, ready to unleash otherworldly pleasure.
“Please, don’t stop.”
“I’ve never done this before.”
“Me neither.” I lifted his shirt just enough to see the line of light brown hair that disappeared under his waistband.
“I don’t know how to make it good. And I don’t have a condom.”
“My period finished yesterday.” I unbuttoned his jeans. “And it’s going to be good. I know it.”
Was I convincing him? Did that make me a whore?
As if the sound of my mother’s voice in my head was audible to him, he took his hand out of my underwear. “I love you, Rin.”
I melt
ed and relaxed. You weren’t a whore if it was love. Rushing things, maybe. But not a whore. Everyone knew that.
“I love you too.”
With that, I unzipped his jeans. He kissed me, wrestling my underwear off while I got my hands on the stretched skin of his shaft.
Was I even real anymore?
Was I made of skin and bone or was it all just thick liquids vibrating in his direction?
Shifting my bottom back onto the desk, he wedged himself between my legs and slid his length along me. It felt so good—better than when I did it myself. Better than anything I’d ever felt in my life. I understood why adults wanted to keep us away from this. I’d beg and steal for it. I’d break walls and set the town on fire for what he made me feel. I was weak from it, and powerful inside it.
He ran it along the hard nub at the top again and again. I came, and when he kept on rubbing, I came harder, pressing my lips together to keep from screaming.
I didn’t know if I’d broken some rule of sex etiquette by having an orgasm, but when he smiled at me, I knew it was all right by him.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. “I’m never going to forget what you look like right now.”
He’d seen me. Watched it. Shame was like a snake in the basement, ready to slink up the steps and under the door. I felt it coming. I could hold it at bay, but I knew it was there. The only way to block it was with more sex. More vibrations. More Chris.
I still wanted him. The orgasm hadn’t made me want it less.
His bare head slid up to my opening as if drawn by the force of my desire. We were a gasping, sore-lipped, sweaty mess. I pushed my hips against him. Now. I wanted him to enter me immediately.
“Here goes,” he whispered.
“Here goes.”
He forced himself inside me. I bit back the pain. It wasn’t too bad, but he stopped.
“Are you—”
“I’m fine. Go.”
He didn’t go. He looked confused, unsure.
“Please,” I said. “If you love me, then make love to me.”
