by Gia Riley
That’s one question I’d like to ask my own parents—if I knew where they were. “I don’t know, Noelle. I really don’t.”
“Will you tell me about your sister?”
I wrap my arms a little tighter around Noelle, thankful to have her back in my arms. “I’ll tell you everything, but you need to sober up first.” Mostly because I want her to remember every word I say, and I don’t think I’d have the strength to say it to her twice.
As I sit and rub her back, thinking how close I was to losing her, her breathing evens out and her droopy lids close. She passes out on me, no doubt as exhausted as I am from being up all night.
I’ve never been in her house, but I stand with her in my arms, walking down the hallway in search of her bedroom. Even though I’ve seen parts of it through her computer screen, I couldn’t tell you about any of the details other than the ones she’s shared with me.
The two rooms I come to first have touches of Noelle on the wall and in the furnishings, but neither are where she spends her time. When I find the largest of the three bedrooms with a poster of my face hanging above the bed, I smile. There’s no mistaking this one’s hers. She wasn’t kidding when she told me she kissed my face every single night while we were apart. There’s even a bright red imprint of her lips on my cheek.
Since the whole bed’s destroyed, I don’t bother trying to lay her on her favorite side; I just pick one and set her down. She snuggles into the pillow, her arm automatically reaching out for me. Her hand comes up empty and falls onto the sheets, but as soon as I take my shoes and pants off I slide in next to her, cuddling her close.
I may have been in a hurry to get back to New York, especially since Lemon’s there, but right now, I need this. I need my girl and I need some sleep. But not before I brush her hair away from her face and say a silent thank you to whoever was watching out for her until I got here.
A couple hours later, I open my eyes and find Noelle staring back at me. Fresh from the shower, her hair’s still wet. “How long have you been awake?” I ask her.
“Long enough to wish I never drank any of that liquor.”
“Are you okay?”
She nods, looking away from me like she’s ashamed of how drunk she was when I found her. “I’m fine,” she says, barely above a whisper.
I couldn’t care less if she was on the damn roof standing on her head. All that mattered to me was that I was with her and she was okay. “Do you still want the cat?”
“Oh, shit, I didn’t.” She sits up, the sheet falling away from her chest. She doesn’t have a stitch of clothing on, and I can’t think of a better vision to wake up to than her naked body.
“You didn’t actually buy one, but you were trying pretty hard to make it happen.”
Lying back down, she closes her eyes and rests. “I can be such an idiot, but I guess we should talk.”
“Do you remember everything I said when I got here?”
Opening her eyes, she smiles a little when she says, “She’s your sister. That’s the only part I really needed to remember.”
When the urge to touch her becomes too strong, I find her smooth skin under the blankets and pull her closer. Her back arches when my fingers traces down it and over the curve of her ass until I have a handful of it. “I don’t ever want you to think I don’t want you, Noelle. You’re everything to me. Nobody can come close to what you make me feel when I’m with you—and even when I’m not.”
She grinds her hips against my leg, creating the friction she needs. Her hand snakes around her back, latching on to my fingers still holding her ass. I let go of her, linking my fingers with hers. With emotion clogging her throat, she says, “I don’t need you to hold my hand, Lane.”
“What do you need? I’ll give you anything you want, Noelle.”
“I need you to hold my heart.” She pauses as she bites her lip to keep from crying. “Because when I thought you were gone, I forgot what it was like to smile for no reason.”
Her words rip me to shreds as a tear leaks from the corner of her eye. “I’m never leaving you, baby. God, I fucking promise you I’m not going anywhere.”
“I want to believe you, because I’d rather go to Hell and back with you than be safe and warm all by myself. I didn’t know what to do without you, Lane. I can’t even remember when I stopped being me and became us.”
There’s still so much I have to tell her, things that will probably take days for me to put into words, but without a shadow of a doubt, I want to tell her my whole story. No more hiding from the one person who is capable of loving me unconditionally.
“Every piece of me is devoted to your happiness, baby.”
She nods, letting my words soak in and heal the pieces I shattered last night when I left with Lemon. “My sister’s going to love you, too. You’ll see.”
“Can I meet her? I need to put a face with the name, so it’s real.”
“I’m not lying to you.”
“I didn’t say you were. I just need this more than I realized.”
Rolling on my side, I grab her by the hips and pull her on top of me. She sits up so she’s straddling me, looking down with her hair tucked behind her ears. Her warmth against my skin ignites my dick, and I have to do everything I can to keep this from going someplace sexual. I plan to fuck her senseless, but not until I tell her about why I had to leave last night.
“Do you want me to put clothes on?”
I stare at her, thinking about how I should answer this question when my mind is at war with my body.
“Let me rephrase that,” she says knowingly. “Do you need me to put clothes on?”
“Yeah, I think I do, but I don’t want to let you go long enough for you to do it.”
She smiles, shyly—something you don’t often see from Noelle. Her confidence is usually overflowing, but I have a feeling our dynamic’s already changed a little bit. It’s not fair for me assume she’ll understand or even care to deal with my past, but I think it’s time I gave her the option. Especially if I expect her to be by my side through it all.
Before she moves off me, she leans down and brings her lips to mine. Working her tongue against mine, she deepens the kiss until she’s flat on her back beneath me.
“I’ll tell you everything, but here’s how it’s going to go. We’re going to get out of this bed and go back to New York. I’ll tell you as much as I can in the car and when we get back, you’ll meet Lemon. Any questions you have left, I’ll answer in bed tonight.”
“Why do I feel like there’s something you’re not saying?”
I flip her over and pull on her hips until her ass is in the air in front of my face. “Because what I have to say doesn’t need any words.”
She groans as I dive into her pussy from behind, licking and sucking on her clit until her face is pressed against the mattress and she’s clutching fistfuls of the pillow in her hands.
“Shit, Lane. Where did this come from?”
“It came from me wanting you so much I can’t stand it. It came from me needing you to know how much I love you—and how much I cherish this body. I’ll never take what you give me for granted.”
She nods, practically panting as she says, “Less talking. More doing.” After that, she starts to say something else before my mouth silences her again, our bodies continuing the conversation instead.
When I add two fingers, her legs give out and she falls to the bed, sprawled out with shaky legs. She’s so wet I could slide right into her, but this isn’t about me—it’s about her.
With my mouth on her, my fingers inside her, and my thumb pressed against her clit, giving her just the right amount of pressure, she comes undone, screaming my name over and over until there’s nothing left for her to give.
Completely spent, she rolls onto her back and looks up at me. “That was your best yet.”
I think she expects me to pull off my boxer briefs and finish myself inside her, but I surprise her again when I pinch her nipples and kiss
her neck, saying, “I need a quick shower before we go.”
“What?” she questions, as she wraps her legs around my back. Her small hand reaches for my dick and grabs hold it of tightly. “Don’t you want to?”
“I always want to, Noelle. I just don’t need to.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Entirely different. Now, get dressed before I bite your ass again.”
She sits up, her mouth hanging open in shock. “You have a twin, don’t you? There’s more to this story. Because the guy I know would be inside me right now.”
Smiling, I can’t help but laugh. Who would have thought showing a little restraint would be so foreign to her? “I’m not hiding a brother. Lemon’s the only sibling I have.”
“But if you had a twin, I’d have a better chance of that threesome.”
“Fuck, Noelle. I wouldn’t screw my brother.”
“Obviously. But I would.”
“You’re so twisted sometimes, woman. I’ll be in the shower.”
Noelle’s been quiet so far, the drive moving faster than it did on the way here when I thought the world as I knew it was over. But now that she’s expecting me to open up, I can feel the seconds passing by, and all the minutes we could be talking getting away from me.
Where do I begin when I have a lifetime of baggage?
After two more songs on the radio, I clear my throat and glance at her. She makes eye contact with me, and for the first time since I met her, it’s uncomfortable. I would do just about anything to forget about all the skeletons trying to climb their way out of my closet. It’s not that I’m hiding from her; it’s that I don’t want her to think differently of me because of what I’ve been through.
I don’t need sympathy or pity. All I need is her. She’s what makes me happier when the memories come back so strongly I have to fight through the day.
“Do you want some road head or something?” she asks me with a straight face, mostly because she’s probably not kidding. If that’s what it took to get me to smile, she’d do it.
As tempting as the offer is, she gives me what I need without realizing it—confidence that this girl isn’t going to run from me again. She wants to hear my story no matter how long it takes and how awkward I make it. “How many times have you done that before?”
“You’d be my first,” she says, proudly.
“Nice.”
“Nice? Come on, Lane. I can’t stand when you get quiet.”
Even though my head was anything but silent as I pictured her bobbing up and down on my cock, I can see how I’m driving her crazy. I can hardly stand myself right now, but this is the first time I’ve had to put all my cards on the table and hope the girl I’m in love with accepts them. This is the first time I’ve been all in. That’s why I take a couple more minutes to stall, still trying to come up with the perfect words to lead her into my darkness and down a path you can never escape from once you’ve experienced it. “I can’t believe it only took two days for me to fuck us up.”
She rests her head against the back of the and pinches the bridge of her nose. “You didn’t mess anything up. I’m going back to New York with you, aren’t I?”
“You are.”
“Then talk to me, Lane. I want to be in your world with you—good or bad.”
“It’s hard for me to talk about when it’s not my story.”
“Tell me why you don’t ever see Lemon. Or why you never mentioned her to me before. She can keep her truths and all her secrets. I don’t need them to understand you.”
Her words mean more to me than she’ll ever understand. It’s why my shoulders finally fall and I can take one hand off the wheel without feeling like I’ll crash the car if I do. Flexing my fingers, my knuckles are so tight it takes a couple seconds for the blood to flow back through them. “Until last night, it’s been ten years since I’ve seen Lemon.”
“That’s a long time. You must have missed her.”
“The night I left her, she had just turned eighteen and since she wasn’t a minor anymore, I had no hold over her. It was the first birthday she had that I felt relieved she was turning another year older.”
“Were you her guardian?”
“Not officially, but nobody ever checked on my uncle because we still had a father—even if we never saw him.”
“Jesus,” she whispers. “What made you leave?”
“Easton and Dom were on my ass to try to get our demo together so we could find someone to back us. We’d been playing the bar scene and doing well, and they felt we should try to strike while the iron was hot. That meant I had to leave my sister if I wanted to chase the Midnight Fate dream.”
Reading me like she’s always been able to, she says, “And you felt like shit about it.”
“That’s putting it mildly, but yeah. Lemon knew it was coming, and I think she encouraged me to go for it because she didn’t want to be a burden. So before I changed my mind, I made sure she had enough money to get through a couple weeks before she got her first paycheck at the diner. After that, I packed my shit and took off. It sounds so reckless looking back on it. I mean, for fuck’s sake, she was barely eighteen and I left her. I was all she had.”
“She couldn’t stay dependent on you forever, Lane. You wouldn’t have been happy and she never would have grown up.”
“I would have gone back to get her if Midnight Fate had tanked.”
“But you succeeded, and now you feel guilty that you did and she didn’t.”
“I tried to find her, Noelle. Fuck, did I try, but she didn’t want to be found. No matter who I asked or where I looked, everyone said the same thing—they hadn’t seen her.”
“That must have hurt.”
The first few times I went home and came up empty, I couldn’t make sense of why she was hiding from me. I figured she was angry that I left in the first place. Never in a million years did I think she was on drugs and swinging around a damn pole every night of the week. “She’s the only family I have left. I haven’t heard from or seen my dad in forever. I can’t even think of the last thing I said to him, that’s how long it’s been.”
“What happened to your mom?” she asks cautiously, not wanting to stress me out more than I already am. What she doesn’t know is that Lemon is walking in our mother’s footsteps and she probably doesn’t even realize it.
I hid a lot of the shit I dealt with back then, or at least as much as I could. Whether I was hiding pills and rolled-up dollar bills so Lemon didn’t see them or I was stashing liquor bottles and beer cans so she didn’t see how much our mom drank every night of the week. I did whatever it took. I found out about that world way too young, and I didn’t want Lemon’s childhood to have those kinds of memories in it. I did a pretty good job until the night Mom took it too far. There was no coming back after that.
“Lane?”
I chew on the inside of my cheek to keep from breaking down. I’m a grown-ass man, but nothing can stop me from turning into the eight-year-old little boy I was when I realized I couldn’t protect my mom or Lemon anymore. I was the man of the house and I had failed them both. With a shaky voice, I tell Noelle, “My mom worked her nights at Lola’s and slept most of the day until the night she overdosed. I can still remember the way her room smelled when I found her. It was like diving headfirst into an ashtray.”
“Lane, Mommy won’t wake up to make me pannycakes. Will you make them for me?” Lemon asks in her sweet, sugary voice.
“Yeah, go get dressed,” I tell her when I bypass the kitchen to check on Mom. I heard her come in after three in the morning, stumbling into the walls and knocking stuff over like she does when she smells bad and can barely talk.
When I open her bedroom door, pictures of Dad are torn up and scattered on the bed around her—all ones he took and sent to her with the money I took with me to the grocery store every two weeks. There’s never anything for us in the envelope, not even an ‘I love you’ from him. Sometimes I wonder if he can’t
say it because he hates us so much.
As much as I can’t stand that he’s always gone, even if it’s quieter without him, I bet he wouldn’t let Mom stay out so late with her friends. But Mom had us young, and she likes the attention she gets when she’s not inside this stuffy house. I can’t blame her because I’d rather be at school, even if the other kids are punks because we don’t have a lot of money and live on the wrong side of the tracks. Even my paper route money isn’t enough to get Lemon the toys she wants—a Barbie with a bathing suit, and Ken who loves her. All Lemon’s ever wanted is to be loved.
“Mom,” I whisper as I shake her shoulder. She doesn’t budge, so I do it twice more before I try to roll her over. When I do, her mouth has bubbles coming out of it, and some dried white stuff is stuck to her face. But what scares me the most is how cold she is and how blue her lips are. It’s not normal, even if nothing she ever does is.
“Mom!” I scream louder, begging her to open her eyes and look at me. She doesn’t budge, her small body lying lifelessly beneath the cover, a wine bottle on the table next to the bed with a little mirror and a rolled-up dollar bill next to it.
Lemon hears me yelling and runs into the bedroom, stopping as soon as she sees how scared I am. I can usually fix things and make them better for her, but right now, there’s nothing I can do to make this go away. And to make it worse, I scare her even more when I yell, “Get out of here, Lemon.”
Even though I told her to leave, Lemon knows it’s worse than it’s ever been and starts crying, her blond curls bouncing as she finally runs away from me. I try to protect her because I never want her to know how bad we have it. The older she gets, the more she figures out on her own. Before long, I won’t be able to make her pain go away with candy and stuffed animals from the corner store.
Like it or not, this is the angry truth of what life in Sea Port is like for a lot of families like ours. If you consider a family a house with an eight-year-old and his little sister inside it. There’s never a normal mom and dad to tell us to do our homework or when to go to bed. Everything I know, I learned from watching TV.
