by AM Hartnett
His brusque treatment brought her close to a second climax, but Taureau got there first. He rammed hard and to the hilt, grinding out a moan so fierce it left a spray at the back of her neck, and then he was pouring into her. The torrent seemed unending, squeezing between cock and cunt to run out of her.
Even after the surge became a trickle, and his cock softened and slipped from her, Taureau held on, damp forehead pressed between her shoulder blades and desperate puffs of air sweeping down her back.
Grace worked her tongue in her mouth to wet the inside, then took a breath, but before she could say a word Taureau’s laughter broke free.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘It’s nothing, I just …’ He lifted his head and spun her around. ‘I used to be scared to death of this tree when I was small. I always thought it would come to life and smash through the window to grab me, like in that movie.’
‘And now?’
‘Over it.’
He chuckled and pushed on her knees. Grace hung her head back and let the laughter bubble out as she took flight.
Chapter Fourteen
‘This is just awful,’ Grace said as she brought her beer bottle to her lips. ‘I’m getting eaten alive.’
Taureau didn’t laugh, but his shoulders quivered a little as he jabbed the fire with the charred end of a stick. ‘This was your idea.’
‘I thought it would be nice. It’s so quiet out here.’ She lifted her face to the sky and smiled. ‘It is pretty.’
When she’d asked about the fire pit that afternoon, he’d told her it hadn’t been used in years. She’d liked the look on his face when he’d told her about sitting under the stars with a cold beer, of the crackle and smell of burning wood all around, and so she’d insisted on lighting it after supper.
Mosquitoes aside, she was perfectly content, even more so when he returned to the camping chair next to hers. It made her chuckle to watch him shift until he was comfortable. He was so big that when he’d first unfolded the chair she was worried he would crush it, but now he sagged back and stretched his legs out.
This was the version of him she loved to see. She’d first glimpsed him that first morning as he’d come down the stairs after putting drops in his eyes. A little rumpled and off-guard, he was an elusive creature she never would have guessed even existed before she came here. She uncovered him when he rolled out of bed, streaked with the indentations the bedding had left on him. He came out of nowhere after a long ride on his bike, scowling as he fluffed his hair, flattened by his helmet. He was the one who snuffled through itchy eyes and runny noses on the days when a landscaping crew came to cut the grass. He was the one who looked bored in his office when she read her notes back to him at the end of a long afternoon’s work.
He was two men. Taureau was the man who pulled the cord taut when he bound her to the foot of the bed. Jacques was the one who chuckled at his own ineptitude when he couldn’t loosen the knot afterward. She adored them both equally.
‘I used to do this with my grandfather,’ he told her, and went silent as he sipped his own beer. She’d gotten used to these habits of his. He’d say things and just leave them there. It was usually up to her to prompt them, and through this routine she’d learned about things like his stint in a boarding school before he’d been kicked out, and his visit to Jerusalem with his mother and grandfather when he was thirteen.
Grace made a happy humming sound and sank deeper into her sweater. His sweater, in fact – a university sweatshirt that didn’t fit him any longer, so when he gave it to her she claimed it for herself.
‘Grand-Père only ever spoke to me in French, but he had a funny accent. Very country, like Mike’s but thicker. It reminded me of that Cajun chef on TV, the old guy with the moustache and the red suspenders. Did you ever see him?’
Grace raised her drink to the fire. ‘I gaaa-ron-teee.’
‘That’s him, and that was my grandfather. He had an old house near Shediac that always stank like ham and cabbage no matter what he was cooking. He was retired by the time I came along, but he still had his boat and he’d take me out. I’d come back burned to a crisp – me and Simon, once I got to junior high – and slathered in cold cream, and we’d sit out here. I’d have tea or pop and Papa would have his beer. Every once in a while we’d get some –’ He paused to slap his hand against the curve of his neck, then cursed over the squished bug carcass left in his palm. ‘We’d get some hot dogs or hamburgers, but I liked the home-made molasses bread my grandmother made. Tea with milk and buttered brown toast, and I’d be snoring the second my head hit the pillow.’
‘It sounds like a good time.’
He turned to her, and shifted in his seat. ‘What about you? I talk and I talk and you never say anything about yourself.’
She opened her mouth to refute this, but he was right. She hadn’t given him much of anything since that night at the condo.
‘I grew up in the city with a single mom. The closest to this I got was a YMCA camp every summer. Nothing as good as brown bread and butter. We just had oatmeal and fruit.’ She finished off her beer and tucked the empty bottle between her thighs. ‘We didn’t have a lot of money, but I still got to do a lot of stuff. If you could get financial assistance, Mom signed me up for it.’
‘I was smoking up by the time I was eleven,’ he murmured with a hint of bitterness, and raised his hand to rub the scar under his eye. It was a nervous tic he had, one that manifested itself when he spoke of unpleasant things ‘Doing coke by the time I was fourteen, harder stuff by sixteen. It’s a wonder I made it out of my teens alive. The only time I was ever good for anything was when I was here.’
As always, Grace let the remark hang there. Pressing him would do no good. He’d simply hunch his enormous shoulders, curl his legs closer to his body and either go silent or change the subject.
He was hard to reach. Beyond these little vignettes he threw out, she didn’t know if she was connecting with him at all, at least not in any sense she could grasp. He gave up fragments of himself, of his childhood and adolescence, and of his life here at Mont Carmel. Occasionally there was a reference to the life he had lived as a young man in Montreal, but the words were barely out of his mouth before he snatched them back.
In bed, he held nothing back. Otherwise, Grace had the sense that there was something just beneath the surface of his skin that would tell her so much about him, but he only ever lifted a corner and gave her a shadowy peek at what was there.
Now, in front of the fire, she watched him from the corner of her eye. He gazed at the ground, seemingly mesmerised by a blade of grass that he twisted back and forth with his toe.
‘Jacques, are you glad I’m here?’
He curled his boot inward, a small gesture she found oddly endearing, then turned his gaze back to the fire. ‘Have I done something to make you feel unwelcome?’
‘It’s just that when you first ordered me here, I had the impression it was more about winning than wanting me here. I don’t think that any longer, but there are times when I get the sense that you’d just rather be alone.’
‘A lot of times I would rather be alone,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you personally.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. I’d hate to think that when you’re not fucking me you’d rather put me up at a hotel, though I do get that sense sometimes.’
Taureau chuckled. ‘Sometimes I do feel that. You’re exasperating when you work. I’m not used to being ruled with an iron fist.’
‘That’s the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it?’ She tucked her hands into the pockets of the hoodie. ‘That doesn’t answer my questions, though. Are you glad I’m here?’
‘I am.’
There was a grumpiness to his tone that told her he expected this to be the last word. It only made her laugh cheerlessly. ‘Is that the best I’m going to get?’
‘I don’t know what you want me to say,’ he said sharply. ‘Am I glad you’re here with me, right n
ow, sitting in front of the fire? Yes, I am. Am I glad to see you when I wake up in the morning? Yes. Do I look forward to taking you out with me on the bike and feel you squeeze down on me when I take a sharp curve? I am. I like having you here.’
‘But?’
He stood and took two steps until he was in front of the fire again, his back to her. ‘But I told you once I can’t give you what you want. That hasn’t changed now that you’re here.’
A bubble of anger swelled in her throat. She pressed her lips together and took a deep breath through her nose to keep her calm, then spoke to the back of his head.
‘I never told you what I wanted. Even back when I wanted more than just an affair with a computer screen, I never said what I wanted.’
‘And what might that be, since we’re clearly forging ahead with this subject?’
‘I don’t know. You think I know? I mean, Jesus Christ, one minute you’re telling me you’ve been watching me fucking around in the office and take my panties off for you, and now I’m sitting around the fire a thousand miles from home, watching you simmer. I have no idea how I even got here but –’
She stopped. The small tickle in her stomach warned her against continuing to speak, but the words were already sparking at the tip of her tongue.
‘I didn’t think it would be this. I figured you’d come into town and take me to some high-rise hotel or a fancy house you kept in the city, and we’d have this volcanic affair for days on end and you’d just leave me crazy for more. But here I am at this place that means so much to you. I’m spending just about every waking minute with you, and I still have no idea what I’m doing here.’
‘You’re here because I wanted you here. You’re here because I said so.’
He glanced over his shoulder at her, and Grace wondered if he had intended the dramatic effect of the firelight leaping to and fro through the shadows on his face, and if her face looked just as mad as she tipped her head back and laughed at him. ‘Is that your answer to everything? “Because I said so” and “I want, I want, I want”? Can you not have feelings?’
‘No, I can’t.’ He straightened up and spun around, taking her instantly back to that frightful and thrilling moment when he appeared in her bedroom. He took two steps towards her, leaned down and shoved his face into hers.
‘This is what you don’t seem to be getting through your thick skull. They’re my feelings. I share them when I choose to share them. The fact that I fuck you when you get wet doesn’t give you the right to question my feelings. You’re here because I wanted what’s between your legs. The fact that I happen to be enjoying your company while you’re here has nothing to do with it. If I like having you here today, it doesn’t mean I’ll want you here tomorrow.’
Before she was able to absorb the shock of his savage tone, he left her. She heard the clink of his beer bottle being thrown onto the brush alongside the guest house, and moments later the rattle of the wooden door leading to his hideaway.
* * *
Grace assumed the wine she was pouring into a plastic cup was expensive, but even if she knew the difference it wouldn’t have mattered. She was going to drink the entire bottle in front of the television and pass out.
It’s only collecting dust down there anyway.
As she took her cup through the living room, she glanced through the window at the house across the yard. Blue light flickered from the window. She wondered if he was spying, playing video games or replaying his favourite pornographic moments with his cock in his hand.
She decided she didn’t care and moved through the empty house. Leaving only the hall light on, she sank onto the sofa and turned on the television in search of something to escape to for a little while.
The time had passed for admonishing herself for not walking on eggshells around Taureau. She hadn’t made the decision when she’d asked him whether he was happy she was there, she’d merely been looking for a bit of footing, but, now that he’d pushed her back harder than ever before, she knew it was time to stop taking it from him.
Her head ached as she went from one inane channel to the next, and she finished her first glass of wine in a few gulps. She poured another, settled on a cooking competition and stretched out.
He brought me here, she told herself.
She had been the one to push him into making this strange relationship physical, but he had made the decision to bring her to Mont Carmel. He could have done just what she had told him: breeze into town, fuck her brains out and then leave her. It would have left her wrecked, but it would have been the quick-burning, crazy kind of carnage.
She already knew the time she spent at Mont Carmel was going to leave her a smoking and charred bag of bones.
And yet she knew why he had brought her there. He spat and snarled but, in the moments when he let his guard down enough to just be content in the company of another person, she felt his loneliness underneath it all. Crippled by what had happened to him on that night so long ago, he’d retreated here to this place by the sea.
Grace felt for him, more deeply than she should, but she wasn’t his therapist. She wasn’t some toy he had picked out and brought here for his amusement when it suited him.
She pulled the phone from her sweater pocket where she had tucked it. When her anger had still been so red, she’d thought of calling Reeve to just come and get her out of this place.
She opened the text application and began to type, but she didn’t finish. The house shuddered, announcing the opening and closing of the kitchen door.
She didn’t move as his footfall echoed down the hall.
She topped up her glass.
Let him pass by.
And yet he didn’t. His presence filled the dimly lit room, and his gaze on her made the hairs on her neck stand up.
‘Are you coming to bed?’
Grace took a sip and reached for the remote. ‘No, I’m not. I’m sleeping here. You can sleep in hell for all I care.’
A small, frustrated sigh reached out and rubbed her the wrong way, and she turned the television up and waited for him to move along.
Her pulse beat out the seconds in her ears and she prepared her next bitchy response as he entered the room. She could still smell on him the smoky outdoors that she’d showered off when she came inside. It suited him so much better, and she was gnawed by unwanted regret that the peaceful moment had been ruined.
Taureau turned on the lamp next to the sofa, then walked around to block the television.
‘Look, I’m not …’ she began, but clammed up as Taureau started to strip off.
As his heavy sweater hit the floor and he reached to tug his shirt from his jeans, she was overcome by a temptation to just keep quiet and burn off the tension on her knees, her back or however he wanted her.
But once the shirt was gone and the expanse of his chest was unveiled to her, he stopped and dropped to his knees in front of her. He took her hand and placed it over his tattoo.
‘Do these initials mean anything to you?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t understand.’
‘Dole,’ he said. He grasped her finger and traced the letter D at the end of the upper initials.’
‘There were cheques upstairs I signed, made out to Edwin and Christina Dole,’ he explained. ‘Parents of Gregory Kevin Dole.’
‘G. K. D.,’ she murmured, and ran her finger over the other letters, then trailed down to the crown. ‘Who is Gregory Dole?’
‘His parents don’t make much money. I help them when they’ll take the help. I give them money for his soccer and hockey registration, Christmas gifts, new school clothes. Edwin hurt himself a few years ago and couldn’t work, and Christina only makes a little more than he does each year. Everything costs so much and they’re proud, but for Gregory they’ll take my money.’
‘So, he’s like a foster child?’ she asked. She wasn’t quite sure why he was telling her this. To prove that he’s not as bad as she might think he is after his outburst?<
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Taureau pressed his lips together, then pulled her hand lower to the other initials.
‘My grandfather’s name was Shane Werner,’ he said, and Grace shook her head in puzzlement. His fingers closed around her wrist and his breathing quickened. ‘When he was born, the name on Gregory’s birth certificate was Shane Michel Taureau.’
Grace’s fingers stilled over the letters: S. M. T.
‘The family pulled out all the stops to hide it. The adoption was private, obviously. My father wanted to forge the birth and adoption records so the boy could never find out who he is, and pay the Doles to lie and say he was their natural-born child. For the first time in my life, I didn’t roll over. It was my decision, I told him, and nothing was going to change my mind. It was Bette who insisted that Shane –’
‘Bette?’ Shock turned her cold. ‘You’re saying that Bette is this boy’s mother?’
He looked up at her with surprise. ‘Who did you think was the mother?’
‘Anyone. Just … some woman, but not Bette.’
She itched to curl her fingers around his wrist, or take his hand in hers, but during his revelation his shoulders had tensed and it was clear he was now only tolerating her touch. She withdrew and leaned forward, not touching him but her mouth intimately close to his.
‘How were you able to keep it a secret?’
‘My father pulled a lot of strings. Her bond was paid and she was sent to rehab. She was there officially for nine months. In reality, she was there for five months and another two in Winnipeg, where Shane – Gregory – was born. A few months later, she went to jail for what she did to me.’
A sort of reverence had come over him when he first spoke of Bette, but now he had returned to scorn. She could practically see the two sides of him at war beneath the surface: the one who loathed the woman who had nearly killed him, and the one who was eternally joined to her through this boy.
‘She didn’t want him to ever know she was his mother,’ he went on. ‘She’d stopped giving a damn about anyone, not me, not herself, no one, and when that baby was born she didn’t even want to see him, but she was adamant that he grow up so far removed from his origins that his entire identity was erased. I went along with it until she died, and then I got in touch with Christina Dole. I only give them money. I don’t interfere.’
