What Comes After Dessert

by Ren Benton

  “For future reference, telling a woman she’s wrong is a good way to stop her from putting out.”

  So was keeping a woman from sleeping after she worked a double shift. “I’ll keep that in mind next time one is forcing unwanted attention on me.”

  “Does that happen often?”

  “Four, five times a day.”

  Her lips curved, mimicking the dark fan of her lashes against her cheeks. “Poor baby.”

  “Life is hard.” Some lives more so than others. She looked grave-pale by the light of the dim lamp on the dresser, the pink around her eyes almost healthy in comparison to her pallor. He should have said goodnight and left, but the invitation worked like a hook in his chest, hauling him through the window in blatant disregard of his good intentions.

  He’d give her a break from molestation tonight, though. “I’m going to practice my seduction deflection on you, since I can tell I’m in imminent danger of being ravished.”

  “Mmf.”

  The twin mattress in his childhood room made him feel like a giant; she was a seam down the center of hers. Rather than hover over Sleeping Beauty like a pervert, he moved away from her bed. “You’re wrong. I was sweet on you when you were shaped like a popsicle stick.”

  “You were a jerk to me until eighth grade.”

  Maybe he’d suffered a concussion at an early age and damaged the part of his brain that perceived things the way everyone else around here did. “Huh?”

  “The only time you weren’t picking on me was when you were trying to get me in trouble.”

  He had charged headfirst into a lot of obstructions while playing football — and more than a few do-not-try-this-at-home stunts — but he trusted his memory on this. “Wrong and wrong.”

  “Wow. That sound you heard was every vagina in a fifty-mile radius slamming shut.”

  “I’ll have to bring this up at my next Men Anonymous meeting.” Did gazing wistfully at her reflection in the mirror on top of the dresser qualify as perversion? How about if the possibility didn’t stop him from doing it? “They need to know they might not have done anything to get banished to the couch. They might just be in the fallout zone of some fool who told his woman she was wrong too many times.”

  “You’re in recovery?”

  “Mannism never goes away, but it can get better.”

  “In a room full of men bitching about women? Doubt it. None of your brethren seems to have educated you that if you repeat anything a woman says in the bedroom, you and your ilk will be cursed to a season of drought.”

  “Bummer I have this congenital tact deficiency, but they’ll thank me for sharing my knowledge after they’re readmitted to the sacred gardens.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be in their thoughts while they’re plowing.”

  Since she was in no condition to thwart his curiosity about her lair, he investigated the top of her dresser. In any other woman’s bedroom, he’d expect bottles of perfume, a mirror, stray makeup, loose jewelry, some hair bands — the paraphernalia of preparing for the day and, later, taking it off.

  Tally’s was bare except for the lamp, a bottle of lotion for Extremely Dry, Damaged Skin, and a porcelain dish the size of a saucer from a child’s tea set that contained one pair of minuscule stud earrings. If they were the same ones he’d given her for her eighteenth birthday, there were real diamond chips pinched in those prongs.

  She had always been obsessively organized — her desk at school, her locker, even the other day when watching her make a salad, everything had been in its place, in order, in easy reach — but this went beyond tidy to spartan. She deserved more than this.

  He couldn’t give her the moon and stars at the moment, but he could correct her misconception about his childhood motives toward her. “When the other kids were running around on the playground, you were warning us about all the ways we could get hurt or killed. When someone got rowdy in class, you fired up your death glare before the teacher even noticed the problem.”

  “What a drag. No wonder everyone hated me.”

  “Nobody hated you.” She hadn’t had a lot of friends other than him and Julie, but hate was a strong word. “You were just so serious, you were like an adult in disguise, so they thought you were a spy and couldn’t be trusted.”

  “But nobody hated me,” she said in an arid tone. “I just didn’t want anybody to get hurt or yelled at.”

  Trying to save them from the treatment she got at home. Protecting them the way no one protected her.

  The opposite of her mother, in other words.

  “It was hilarious that everybody thought I was a snitch. I keep my mouth shut like a champ.”

  No one knew the full extent of her secret-keeping mastery, but Ben could name a dozen people who’d benefitted from it, and there must be more he hadn’t been present to witness.

  The earliest he could remember occurred in third grade. Jeremy Boyd had been convinced Tally told the teacher he was responsible for the colorful vocabulary lesson that appeared on the blackboard between classes and refused to consider the likelihood that the deformed way he wrote F’s identified the culprit. He chased Tally down after school, stripped her backpack from her arm, flung the contents all over Maple Street, and tore the bag apart at the seams with all the rage-fueled strength of a future all-state defensive end while Tally stood with her hands knotted in front of her and watched.

  Julie got there before Ben and chased Jeremy all the way home, teaching him a few new vocabulary words along the way.

  Why she’d gone on to marry him ten years later was a mystery. Why she’d divorced the abusive asshole was obvious.

  Ben helped Tally gather her books, then held up the tattered remnants of her backpack. “I can fix it.”

  “I don’t need it.” Her pencils slid out of the cage made by her books, her skinny torso, and her spindly arms and scattered on the asphalt like pick-up sticks.

  He dumped his things on the ground and held his empty backpack out to her. “You can have mine.”

  She stared at him with those big mosaic eyes. “Won’t your mom be mad?”

  He wasn’t as worried about that possibility as she sounded. “Nah.”

  As it turned out, his mom hadn’t been thrilled and he’d carried his books back and forth in a grocery bag the rest of the year, but it hadn’t been so bad.

  Tally kept using that backpack through sixth grade. After that, it probably turned to dust, not even her gentle handling able to prolong its life span indefinitely.

  She kept her mouth shut like a champ about Jeremy terrorizing her, that prick knew it, and he continued blaming her whenever there were consequences for his assholery through high school.

  Trish Roby came along after Tally scurried away, while Ben was picking up his books. “What are you helping her for? She’s mean.”

  Mean had been a popular adjective for Tally in elementary school. By high school, it evolved to stuck up. Neither was fair. She never hurt anyone. She never snubbed anyone. She was simply an outsider, separated by what she was going through at home, the secrets she was keeping.

  He didn’t know any of that then. He didn’t have the words for what he instinctively knew the first time he laid eyes on her: she was the most sorrowful person he’d ever met.

  She continued to hold that title.

  The first day of kindergarten, he made it his mission in life to make her smile because she was so damn sad and his simple little boy heart thought a smile meant happiness.

  He’d made her smile. He’d made her laugh. He’d made her moan. He had never been able to dispel the sorrow.

  Maybe he would have had better luck if she hadn’t interpreted his attempts as bullying before she had boobs and trying to get laid after.

  No wonder she expected him to try to put his dick in her even if she was unconscious. He’d done nothing since he’d been back in town to prove otherwise.

  Hey, nice to see you for two minutes. How about a hand job?

  Let’s fu
ck in this filthy shack.

  I’m looking forward to lots of firsts with you, all of them involving my dick.

  That wasn’t what he wanted, had never been what he wanted, but around her, every word came out of his mouth wrong. He wouldn’t be surprised if she put her tongue in his mouth to dam the river of stupidity gushing out of it.

  He should get the hell out and let her sleep, but he didn’t have the ninja stealth to get the hell out without setting off Roscoe and the chain reaction that would have every dog in town barking to outdo its nearest rival. She would lose another hour of sleep to the racket if he tried to leave.

  If he was staying, the least he could do was make letting him in worth her while. He grabbed the bottle of lotion, knelt at the foot of her bed, and peeled off one of her socks.

  She opened one eye a slit. “What are you doing?”

  He removed her other sock. “Impetuously romantic, remember?”

  The eye closed. “The entrance to the sacred garden has been sealed by the Incantation of a Thousand Wrongs, remember?”

  “There’s more to romance than plowing.”

  She yawned. “Absurd fairy tales make the best bedtime stories.”

  He pumped some lotion into his palm and warmed it by scrubbing his hands together.

  Her toes curled at the press of his thumbs into her soles. “Oh, is that what you were lubing up?”

  “Shh.”

  “I was worried you’d snap off the equipment, being so rough with it.”

  “I have some experience handling the equipment.”

  “Mm. So do I.”

  Warmth pooled in his groin at the reminder. She spent months studying him, learning his response to every kind of touch, asking questions when his whimpering and writhing were too ambiguous to be enlightening.

  It made him uneasy sometimes, being under her microscope. Not the first time, when he was lost in a haze of lust and disbelief that the girl of his dreams was acting out his dreams. But other times, when he felt completely out of control, inside out, destroyed, and caught her watching him, assessing.

  Not feeling the same way.

  His ego thrived on being the subject of all that interest, but she wouldn’t let him touch her, not the way she touched him. She held herself at a distance, every part of her that wasn’t touching him fenced off behind a big NO TRESPASSING sign.

  It had been easy to attribute her quirks to what he thought he knew about her home life, but maybe he shared the blame. Maybe if he hadn’t taken everything she offered — and taken and taken and taken — she would have let her guard down a little bit. What had he ever done for her to let her know she was special? Given her a backpack and some cheap earrings. Carved initials she didn’t recognize as hers into a dead tree.

  He told her he loved her, and she gave him a wry look that said, What kind of idiot do you take me for?

  He hated that look as much as he hated her fake smile — one accusing him of lies, the other full of hers.

  The year he spent every possible minute with her had been the best year of his life, but she probably remembered it as a year of getting humped and grunted over in parked cars and dark corners because he’d hoarded every moment of her time for himself and never took her anywhere he might have to share her attention.

  Hell, twelve years later, she was The Mystery Woman to his best friends because he was jealous of her memory.

  No one knew she was the great love of his life.

  Not even her.

  Maybe his mother wasn’t the only one who believed he was embarrassed to be seen with her.

  Tally said something at the bakery he hadn’t understood at the time: Your secret has always been safe with me. Did she think she was his secret?

  Before he could ask her to confirm his suspicion, her feet went slack in his hands as she forfeited the battle against exhaustion.

  She’d napped on him once in his car. Some slight shift while settling into his role as her pillow jolted her to full alert, a guilty look on her face, as if it was a crime to drop her shield and rest.

  This time, she didn’t wake while he massaged lotion into her crooked little toes. Or when he turned his attention to the hands she must wash a hundred times a day, devoting extra attention to her roughened knuckles and ragged cuticles. Or when he brushed the hair from her forehead and whispered, “Poor baby.” Or when he stretched out beside her and the mattress creaked and dipped and rolled her closer to him than he meant to impose.

  He draped his arm over the warm body nestled against him and shut his eyes.

  And was immediately jangled awake by the hellish bleat of the alarm clock. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  Tally was already on her feet, silencing the alarm. “Go back to sleep.”

  She flipped the light off on her way out of the bedroom.

  The luminous face of the clock claimed the hour was four. He’d been out just long enough for some demon to replace the inside of his eyelids with sandpaper. He pressed his face into Tally’s pillow and fought being lulled back to sleep by the whisper of the shower.

  A few minutes later, distant noises from the direction of the kitchen made it clear she wasn’t coming back to the bedroom. The narrow mattress held zero appeal without a narrow woman pressed against his chest, so he followed her example and abandoned it, too.

  One lamp in the living room guided him down the hall.

  She emerged from the dark kitchen with a piece of toast clenched between her teeth, which she removed to say, still in hush mode, “You didn’t have to get up.”

  He rubbed a smudge of peanut butter off her upper lip and sucked it off his thumb. “If your father caught me coming out of your bedroom, you’d never find my body.”

  Her eyes roamed down the length of him and back up. “That would be a shame.”

  That quickly, she made any danger to his well-being worthwhile, but he wasn’t going to meet his end at the hands of a protective daddy before doing at least one more thing. “Will you go on a date with me tonight?”

  She chewed a bite of toast for a nerve-straining period of time. Just when he was ready to beg her to talk with her mouth full, she said, “Yes.”

  He let out his pent-up breath. “I’ll pick you up at 6:57.”

  “I don’t know if you can handle three whole minutes of my charm. You haven’t had enough exposure to build up a tolerance.”

  He curled the tip of her braid around his finger, the damp ends of her dark hair cool against his skin. “I’ll fling myself at it and take my chances.”

  Chapter 28

  The bakery saw a lot of traffic on Thursday, if not a lot of business, from snoops looking for more intel about Ben’s vehicular misadventure and Tally’s part in it, so — unlike most days — she couldn’t leave the storefront unattended for more than a minute at a time. She’d fallen behind in starting the next day’s dough, and she hadn’t even begun cleaning, never mind getting ready for her date. When Ben showed up, she would be a wilted, grubbier version of the slob he’d seen at 4 a.m.

  Her anger had quietly croaked, time of death falling between him climbing through her window and digging his thumbs into her swollen feet. He’d been so sweet to her. Why deny herself as much of that as she could get just because the supply was limited? That would be like refusing to eat her dad’s mac and cheese out of fear she’d become too spoiled by the luxury to go back to her diet of peanut butter on toast.

  Both opportunities would expire whether she took advantage or not. She’d be no less lonely or hungry a few days from now if she deprived herself of the luxuries being offered today, so when he offered her another night, she indulged her selfishness once more.

  Her punishment for that sin was going to be missing the ball because she couldn’t make herself presentable without the intervention of a fairy godmother.

  Julie walked into the bakery at half past six and volunteered to man the counter when she learned a date with Ben Fielder was at stake. “For god’s sake, woma
n, priorities! Go fix yourself.”

  Tally emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later, nose powdered, mascara freshened, lips glossed, jeans and baggy T-shirt replaced by a swingy little black dress that had been squished in the far, dark recesses of her closet for two years and in her backpack all day. Thank god for unnatural fabrics. A quick shake exorcized the wrinkles.

  Julie gave her a quick once-over. “Is that how you’re wearing your hair?”

  Tally had unraveled her braid, rolled up the kinky mass, and stuck a plastic claw clip in it. Nothing fancy, but better than the alternative — or so she’d thought. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

  “It’s more job interview than hot date.”

  “You know how in the movies, women take their hair down after a long day toiling in the sweatshop and it cascades around their shoulders like a smooth, shiny waterfall?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This isn’t the movies.”

  “In that case, you look pretty damn good for not having a glam squad laboring over you for hours.”

  “Thanks for noticing.” Tally grabbed a paper towel and bent over to wipe off the layer of dust her strappy heels had collected since they last saw the light of day. “I should have painted my toenails.”

  Her feet were beaten up from dancing. Every toe had been broken. It was criminal to show the knobby things in public without a pop of distracting color.

  “If that’s what Ben notices, you kick him right in the balls with your unsightly naked toes. Where’s he taking you?”

  “He didn’t say.” She hadn’t asked because whatever the dress code at their destination, her one dress was her one option. “I’m probably underdressed.”

  “If he wants to eat somewhere you need a dress made of diamonds, he can buy it for you on the way there.”

  Speaking of diamonds... Tally pinched her earlobes, one of which still stung. She’d brought her one remaining pair of earrings, too, forgetting that pierced ears were subject to the use-it-or-lose-it rule. She couldn’t force the post through the skin on the back of her lobe, so back in her bag they’d gone.

  No jewelry. Naked toes. Bad hair. Could it look like she’d put any less effort into her appearance for what was, technically, a first date?