by CD Reiss
“There will be, my friend. If you’re not stabbing me in the back, and maybe you’re not, I still want in.”
“Noted. But don’t hold your breath.”
“Noted.”
We hung up, and I sat back down to breakfast. The eggs had gotten dark and translucent at the corners. The toast was chewy and cold.
Nobody trusted me. Lance had, but he’d never wanted anything from me but food and a little affection. He still gave more than he took.
I’d never betrayed Brian, but betraying him had never been in my best interests. If it had been, if some opportunity to fuck him over for my own benefit had shown itself, what would I have done?
It’s business.
I would’ve said that. And I would’ve meant it. It would have been its own answer to just about any question.
Leaving my breakfast, I went back outside and called my ex-wife.
“Hello? Christopher?” People chattered in the background.
“Do you have a minute?”
“Five of them. I’m about to go into a board meeting for Montano.”
The children’s charity had meetings this time of year in Italy. I’d forgotten.
“This won’t take long. Not if you answer honestly.”
“I’m intrigued,” she said in a voice laced with suspicion.
“Why did you marry me?”
“Oh, dio mio, Christopher. Now you ask this?”
“I married you because I thought you were as good as it got. There. I said the hurtful thing. Now you can just say what you have to.”
I heard the flick of a lighter and a deep inhale. She must be in Milan. She never smoked at home. “I married you because you had potential.”
“What kind of potential? Money?” I needed her to just admit it, but I knew she wouldn’t. If I’d been so sure of the answer, I wouldn’t have needed to call her.
“God, no. You had plenty of that, which was nice. You could have become a good man. But, you know, que sera.”
“I didn’t become a good man?”
“I don’t have all my life to wait.” Another long exhale.
“I thought you married me for the money.”
“Of course you did. I have to go. We can talk later, okay?”
“Sure.” I hung up.
If you wanted people to trust you, you had to make them money. You could be a nice guy, real prince, but if it didn’t make any money, who cared? That wasn’t the kind of trust I was in business for.
Some things weren’t business.
My business was going to change. I just didn’t know what it was changing into.
Chapter 31
catherine
The little playground behind the old trailer park was deserted. The plastic was cracked, colors faded, and cigarette butts littered the sand. I accidentally tipped over a beer can sitting on a bench meant for watchful parents.
The trailers had been removed after my father died, leaving stumps of rusted pipes. The good pipes and the copper had been ripped out long ago and sold for scrap. Electrical wires had been dug up with spades and snow shovels in the middle of the night.
I didn’t know my father owned this trailer park. Not until he died and his assets became mine and Harper’s. I hadn’t been able to sell the land. I would’ve sold it for anything, but nobody wanted it.
I heard him coming. He made no move to disguise his footfalls in the leaves behind me. I turned around, resting my arm over the back of the bench as he broke the tree line, hands in pockets, trying to look harmless.
He was anything but harmless to me. His posture drove forward in a way I never saw on the men in town, alienating my mind’s better judgment from my heart’s desire. He divided and conquered just by smiling.
“I didn’t see your car,” he said as soon as he saw me.
“I walked.” I turned around. It was the only way to stop myself from running into his arms.
“I don’t like you walking alone at night.” He came around the bench and sat next to me, flicking the empty beer can away. “This isn’t a good neighborhood. Trust me, I grew up here.”
I got up, picked up the can, and put it in the lone space in the cardboard six-pack that was lying a few feet away. “There are no bad neighborhoods in Barrington for me.”
I sat next to him. We sat in silence for a few minutes. Maybe it was seconds. Maybe we sat for hours, each getting used to the presence of the other again.
“I wondered if you’d come,” he said finally.
“Why?”
“We have a habit of temporary good-byes turning permanent.”
“I wanted to tell you something.”
He sat up a little straighter. It was a defensive posture. “Tell me then.”
“I admire you.”
A little laugh escaped his lungs. “Sure.”
“You wanted something. You spent years getting it. You fought hard. I admire that. And now you’re here, which is brave. And you’re looking back on what you fought for and thinking you maybe made a mistake. Maybe you fought for the wrong thing. I admire that too.”
He shook his head a little, as if he couldn’t accept my words.
“There was this woman,” he started.
A tingle of jealousy ran through me. I had no business being jealous, but did anyone?
“Before my ex-wife and after I paid capital gains for the first time, there was this woman. She was a maybe. She looked a lot like you. She was from a small town in Georgia, and she seemed as gentle as you. Of course, I didn’t realize any of that right off. I didn’t realize that she and you were cut from the same cloth. So I let myself care about her without putting it all together. And then this stupid thing happened. We were getting coffee and she got there before me, so she paid for herself. And I get there just as the guy is giving her change. It’s a dollar and some coins. She takes the dollar, and she takes a quarter out of the coins and puts the rest of the tip jar. And I said, ‘Why did you take the quarter back?’ Believe me, I could’ve asked about the dollar, but the quarter really bugged me. She said she might need it for laundry or the parking meter. She didn’t have a car. And it’s not like I didn’t have someone going over there to do her laundry and her chores for her. But she took the damn quarter back. Why? What kind of person won’t give a quarter? Give the whole thing because they might need it for something that would never happen?” He ran his finger over his forehead. “It took me a few days to realize that I broke up with her because she wasn’t like you. I mean, she really ran down my expectations. Because no matter how much they look like you or act like you… no one was going to be you.”
“I was here the whole time. But I’m afraid I would have disappointed you anyway. You had me on some kind of pedestal.”
“I’m here now, at the base, looking up.”
“I’m a different person now.”
He smirked a little, relaxing his shoulders. “You’re not the girl I took up the top of that slide, but you’re the culmination of her.”
He leapt off of the bench and held out his hand. I took it, and he pulled me up to the play structure. We clattered up the ladder, and I found myself laughing.
The space we had occupied as young lovers was so much smaller than I remembered, and it was littered with dead leaves and human detritus. Cigarette butts, broken glass, an empty bag of chips; none of it bothered me. There was only him, with his eyes glinting in the moonlight and the fresh smell of aftershave.
His kiss was gentle and sweet, a request for more. A door he held open for me. I could walk through or I could walk away.
My arms were bent at my sides as he embraced me, running his hands down my forearms to my wrists until he lifted them and put my hands around his waist. Only then did I yield completely, tightening the coiled springs of my muscles around his body until he was as close to me as I was to him.
We kissed as though we couldn’t let go, like adolescents, afraid that if we broke for a second to speak or touch we would break some kind of sp
ell and shame or realization of the consequences would flood us and we would have to make some kind of adult choice. We kissed as though any bond between us was between our mouths. Fighting to keep our tongues together as he ran his hands over me, I wished for more. Everything. I wanted to leave him there, spent, to take every drop from him.
His hands got under my shirt, down my waistband, and still we kissed. We kissed as he reached down so far he had to bend his knees. I lifted myself onto my toes to help him get under my underwear, his finger reaching toward where my desire had collected.
I gasped so hard when he touched me that I almost stopped kissing him. That was not allowed. The kiss must be maintained. That was the rule. He knew it. He held my head to his with one hand and his fingers dug deeper, but the other reached into me.
When he broke the kiss, my first reaction was not disappointment but the fear that he was stopping, that he was breaking his bond.
He kept his mouth close to mine and said, “I want you. I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want you.”
He kissed me again and touched my swollen nub, stroking it just a bit. My back arched like a cat’s and he had to work harder to reach me. As we bent together, angling until we were kneeling before each other, kissing, his fingers flicked me as if he could read me like a book.
“Come for me, Catherine. Give it to me.”
I was confused for a moment about who was giving what to whom, but I didn’t have time to sort it out, because I was giving him what he wanted and I was taking what I wanted, exploding in his hand, breaking the kiss with my cries, letting it flood me so slowly, so powerfully, that I laid my entire weight on him, flying back, reaching through his jacket to scratch through his shirt.
He finished me, letting me come down gently, and pulled his hand out of my pants.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I’m supposed to be thanking you.”
“When we were kids, all I wanted to do was taste you.” He held up his fingers. They were shiny and slick, and I was a little embarrassed by my body. He put his finger on his tongue and licked it off. I was shocked and turned on at the same time. “You’ve fulfilled an adolescent dream. It’s as sweet as I imagined.” He stuck his middle finger in his mouth and sucked it clean. I hoped this wasn’t finished, because the way his lips curved around his finger made me want to experience that mouth so much more. “Thank you.”
He reveled in my shame and embarrassment, and it was exactly those things that made me want him even more. He wanted me to give him everything, and I wanted him to have it.
I was seized with fear. He would take everything from me. He would leave me a husk, a molted skin in the sun, and go away with my heart. My mother had been right—he was dangerous. Not to my standing in society, not to my finances, he was dangerous for my soul. I didn’t want to be a husk. I didn’t want to be left with a shell of a life.
I stood up hurriedly as if I had an appointment. I didn’t know how else to act. I couldn’t tell him my fear because my fear didn’t have words. My fear came through my mouth, and he had already proven he owned my mouth.
A rustle came from behind the trees. The laugher of adolescents. Through the branches and trunks, flashlights bounced. Cigarette smoke stung my nostrils.
“We’re about to be invaded,” I said.
“We were here first.” He straightened my shirt.
“Tell them that.” I jumped off the play structure, landing well.
“I’ll walk you.” He jumped down with me as four teens broke the tree line.
I recognized Zack and Lily. The other two were in darkness. They all fell into silence. I waved. Zack waved back.
“Come on.” Chris put his hand on my back and we left in the other direction, leaving the playground to the children.
Chapter 32
CHRIS
I could feel her arousal drying in the creases of my fingers as she sat next to me on the way-too-short drive to her house.
I knew how to seduce women. I knew I could have her on her back if not tonight, then by tomorrow. I knew that as spooked as she was, she was also turned on. My dick stretched against my pants and my balls ached for her. She might’ve been a little freaked out when I sucked her off my fingers, but tasting her made me want her even more.
“It looks like you need the roof redone,” I said as we pulled down the long drive.
“We’ll figure it out.”
It had been clear from the beginning that she didn’t want anything from me. I wanted to give her everything, but I also wanted to take everything.
“If you need a loan…” I shut myself up as quickly as I could, but what was said was said.
“Have I mentioned that you can go to hell?” She said it with a fine layer of the sweetest saccharin. A shell of a joke over a core of gravity.
I pulled up in front and shut the car. “You have mentioned that. But the offer stands.”
I wasn’t willing to hear her tell me to go to hell again, so I got out of the car and let her out. She stood near enough to me that I could smell her. The roses. I could’ve kissed her. I couldn’t tell if she wanted me to, but I could tell that she was daring me to. And if I wanted a woman and she dared me to take action on wanting her, I usually took her up on it. There had never been a reason not to take what was given freely.
Instead, I walked toward the door, and she fell astride me. She glanced at the top floor.
“Do you think Harper’s waiting for her sandwich?” I asked.
“She never asks for one, but she always eats it.”
Two moths banged around the porch light, slapping their bodies against the hot glass. Now was the time for good night kisses and final gropes.
“How long are you staying?” she asked, looking at my car.
“As long as it takes.” I took her by the chin and turned her face toward me. “As long as it takes.” I stepped back and opened the screen door for her.
She didn’t get out her keys but turned the knob and opened the front door. “Good night, Chris.”
“Good night, Catherine. And thank you.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but she closed it and nodded instead. She gently closed the door and I was left on the porch, watching the screen door slap shut.
I sat in the car in her driveway for too long. I couldn’t move. A woman like that? A woman like that would stay beside you through lawsuits. A woman like that would wait for you while you were in jail, and she’d send letters every day. A woman like that would stand behind a man who was fucked up, using all the strength in her body to hold him straight. A woman like that forgave a sinner.
You could take everything from a woman like that. You could steal her heart, take her money, give her a life of sincerely-made broken promises.
A man could love a woman like that to death.
A man could love a woman like that forever.
A man could stand by a woman like that and watch her bloom.
Water her.
Tend her gently.
Respect the thorns. Love the rose.
A man could walk beside a woman like that the rest of his life.
I’d been at a crossroads in her front yard before. I’d made choices based on adolescent priorities, and now I felt that crossroad again. There was no tomorrow. There was no later, no taking it slow. I had now. I’d waited long enough.
The tennis ball I’d collected at the club was on the floor of the car, the yellow reduced to deep mustard in the shadows.
I grabbed it, got out of the car, and looked up at her room.
Her lights were on.
Chapter 33
CATHERINE
The crumb-dusted plate by the sink told me Harper didn’t need a sandwich. I shut the light and went upstairs, dragging dissatisfaction behind me.
What did I want? More Chris, but how? Did I want him now or wish for the past? Did I want the broken man or the beautiful boy? Did I want him now? Later? Or never? Would the reality of him break the
world I’d built for myself?
I walked right by the master suite. I didn’t want to sleep under Reggie’s mural. Didn’t want to see it or feel its weight over me. I went to the front bedroom and flicked on the light. The bed was still made, and next to it sat the boxes of unread letters. The mattress creaked when I sat on it, and the cardboard flaps coughed dust when I pulled them up.
A parallel universe sat in a crumbling pile. A universe where I’d gotten the messages and bent my life around Chris Carmichael. A universe where I was a different woman, maybe happy, maybe miserable, maybe some shade in between. But in every iteration, I was different.
I picked up the top letter and opened the flap. The glue had hardened long ago, and the letter inside was brown at the fold.
I didn’t want to be different. If I’d found the first letter or the last, I would have been a different Catherine. I liked who I was. I hadn’t thought about it until I closed the envelope flap, but I’d done much with little. That alone was worth the price of every other possible outcome.
Pock.
I dropped the envelope, freezing at the memory of that sound.
Pock. Pock.
I threw open the sash and leaned out the window. Chris was in the front yard, tossing the tennis ball and catching it in one hand. The beautiful boy was purely a man, and though I was different, I was not immune to him.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, tossing the ball up at the window.
I surprised myself and caught it. “Wait for me.” I slapped the window closed before he had a chance to answer.
When I got out the front door, he was waiting. I took his hand, put my fingers to my lips, and jerked my thumb upward, toward Harper’s room. I pulled him to the backyard, and he put his arm around me.
He pulled me closer as we walked. Strong. Secure. As real as the day we met, the thrill of his presence and his touch vibrated throughout my body. I was glad he was there because I could barely walk, but he was the reason I felt as though the earth was dissolving under my feet.
