Sin With Me (Bad Habit)

by J. T. Geissinger

  I stop abruptly and pull her into my arms. Looking down into her eyes I vow, “You’ll never be homeless, Grace. Not while I’m around. You’ll always have a place to stay—with me.”

  She shakes her head a little, as if she can’t believe it. “I know,” she whispers, gazing at me. “Which is just so . . . weird. Don’t you think this is a little weird? Us—this?”

  She makes a motion with her finger, pointing between our chests.

  “No,” I answer honestly. “I think it’s amazing. To me it just feels right.”

  She nods. “That’s what I’m saying! How can this feel so right, when everything else seems to be so wrong? Kat wanting to get pregnant, A.J.’s tumor, all my worldly possessions are destroyed, and yet I’m . . . this is terrible to say, but I’m really . . .”

  “Happy,” I say softly, finishing for her.

  When she nods silently, her eyes wide and full of wonder, my heart swells so big I think it will explode.

  But I don’t want to get too sappy on her because it might scare her away, so I say matter-of-factly, “I told you, Slick—powerful spooge.”

  She groans in disgust and pushes on my chest. “You’re hopeless, you know that?”

  Hopelessly in love, I think.

  My heart stops dead.

  Grace mistakes my sudden stillness and laughs. “You make the best faces! Seriously, you look like you’re having a stroke!”

  I open my mouth to answer, but nothing comes out. I’ve lost the power of speech.

  Love has literally rendered me speechless.

  “C’mon, Kong,” says Grace, pulling at my hand. “Tuck me in and tell me a bedtime story.”

  She pulls me toward the guest house. All I can do is stumble along blindly behind her, dazed with joy, thinking, Once upon a time, a boy fell in love with a beautiful princess . . .

  Looking back, that’s the moment I should’ve known it was too good to last. Because in fairy tales with beautiful princesses, there’s always an evil wizard to contend with, a witch casting a curse, a dangerous dragon to be slain.

  But I never could have guessed that all those terrible things would turn out to be me.

  GRACE

  After showing me where everything is in the guest house, Brody brings me the bags of clothes from Kat and Chloe, runs me a bath, and opens a bottle of wine.

  “I could get used to this,” I say, contentedly up to my neck in bubbles. Brody, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the bathtub, pours me another glass of Cabernet.

  “Your wish is my command, my lady.” He lifts his glass in a toast, and we both drink.

  It turns out swallowing a mouthful of wine while grinning is pretty tricky.

  Brody laughs at the liquid dribbling down both sides of my chin. “How’s that drinking problem of yours coming along, Slick?”

  “Hole in my lip,” I say, licking all around my mouth. He watches my tongue with the focused concentration of a lion hunkering down to stalk a meal.

  “Well,” he says after a moment, his voice husky, “I should let you get to sleep.” He stands, finishes off his wine in one big gulp, leans over the tub, and kisses me brusquely on the forehead. As he turns to go, I ask bemusedly, “Is the sight of me immersed in bubbles offensive to you, Kong?”

  Halfway to the door, he stops. Over his shoulder, he says, “Yes. You’re so hideous I think I’m going to be sick.” He adjusts his crotch. “And now I need to go rub one out to make myself feel better.” Without looking back, he salutes. In a moment the front door closes, and then I’m alone.

  I’m wet, naked, slippery with bubbles, and well on my way to tipsy, and the man just walked out on me.

  Either I’m losing my mojo or Brody Scott is one hell of a gentleman.

  I soak until I’m pruned, and then dry off and wander naked into the bedroom with my glass of wine. I stand in the middle of the room, looking around at the elegant furnishings, fretting over all the to-do lists I should be making, all the things I’ll need to deal with in the morning, but finally decide that tonight there’s nothing I can do but try to get some sleep.

  So I finish my wine, crawl under the covers, turn out the lights, and lie in the dark listening to the muffled sound of waves crashing on the shore below and the wind whispering in the willows.

  Half an hour later, still wide awake, I get out of bed and retrieve my cell phone from my handbag on the dresser.

  Snuggled back under the covers, I dial Brody’s number. He picks up on the first ring.

  “If you’re calling for video of me stroking my cock, I’m not sending it,” he says with a smile in his voice. “You’ve had enough of that, missy.”

  “Not that I owe you an explanation, but just so you know, I deleted that.”

  His voice turns apologetic. “I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad, I was only teasing. It’s none of my business what you did before we were together.”

  We’re quiet for a minute, just breathing, until I say, “So we’re together. But not having sex. And you can’t stand to be in the same room with me when I’m naked. It’s like we’re married!”

  He exhalation is ragged. “You’re relentless, you know that?”

  “I’m relentless with everything I want badly.”

  “You want me . . . badly?”

  I smile. “I want you more than I want to survive to see another day. Oh, wait—that sounds familiar. Where’ve I heard that before?”

  His voice sours. “Har har.”

  I hear some rustling in the background. “What’re you doing?”

  “Sitting up.”

  “Are you in bed?”

  “Yep.”

  I stretch my legs beneath the covers. “Me, too. And still naked, in case you were wondering.”

  It goes quiet on the other end of the line. “You sleep naked?”

  “Always.”

  He softly groans. “Evil temptress.”

  I whisper, “Are you naked?”

  His chuckle is deep and amused. “I don’t want to ruin a beautiful fantasy for you, but I’m sitting here in my boxer briefs and socks, watching TV.”

  “Take off the socks,” I command, and he chuckles again.

  “My feet are cold.”

  “They won’t be in a minute.”

  “Why, you gonna get me so worked up my toes will be on fire?”

  “Along with every other part of you, yes.”

  “Meh. I feel lazy. What if I just tell you I’m taking them off, will that work?”

  “No! Off!”

  He grumbles, “Bossy friggin’ princess,” but there’s more rustling, and then he says, “There. Satisfied?”

  “Don’t even get me started asking if I’m satisfied, Mr. Scott. I am most definitely not satisfied. Wait—did you just call me a princess?”

  “Yeah, but not in a derogatory, you’re-so-spoiled way. Like in a you’re-a-beautiful-fairy-tale way.”

  Why that should please me so much, I have no idea. “So I suppose you’re the frog in this story?”

  Brody laughs. “Definitely.”

  “So then I need to kiss you. A lot.”

  His laughter turns into a low sigh. “Hopefully. A lot a lot.”

  The longing in that sigh makes me bite my lip. I say softly, “You’re adorable, you know that?”

  When he answers, “Yeah, I do,” I burst out laughing.

  “And also very humble.”

  “Speaking of humble, turn on channel 518.”

  “What’s on channel 518?”

  “If you turn it on you’ll find out, won’t you?”

  I roll my eyes, flick on the light on the nightstand, prop myself up against the pillows, and grab the remote. “How the fuck does this thing work? There’s about four thousand buttons on it.”

  He snorts. “In your clinical opinion, is it estrogen that makes women unable to operate a television remote? I’ve always been curious.”

  “Careful there, Kong. Those are fightin’ words.”

  “Hmm.
Probably the same hormone that makes it impossible for you people to parallel park.”

  “Ha! You’re lucky I just found the power button or I’d be headed over to your place with a shotgun, my friend.”

  “Channel 518.” He pauses. “You can get there by pushing the little buttons with the numbers—”

  “I’ve got it!” I shout into the phone.

  Muffled laughter.

  Grousing under my breath, I punch in the channel. Now I’m watching Harrison Ford and Annette Bening sharing a hug.

  I recognize the movie instantly. My heart starts thumping like mad. “It’s Regarding Henry. This is my favorite part.”

  Brody and I watch together in silence as Harrison and Annette retrieve their daughter from the elite boarding school they enlisted her in before her father’s accident. A narcissistic, unethical attorney in Manhattan, he interrupted a robbery one night and was shot, leaving him with retrograde amnesia, his entire memory wiped clean.

  He had to learn who he was all over again, who his real friends were, what his relationship with his family used to be like.

  He didn’t like what he found.

  “You were watching this before I called?”

  Brody pauses for a moment before he answers. “This is the third time I’ve watched it in the past three days.”

  My eyes sting. “Because?”

  “Because it’s the closest I can get to understanding what it might’ve been like for you. I’ve been doing web searches about memory loss, too. And I ordered some books from Amazon.”

  I close my eyes and release the breath I didn’t know I was holding.

  “I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I shouldn’t have mentioned anything.”

  “No. I’m not upset with you, I’m just . . . a little blown away, to be honest.”

  “I know you probably don’t want to talk about it—”

  “You can ask me anything, Brody.”

  He must hear the raw emotion in my voice, because he says gently, “Not if it hurts you. I’d rather stab out my own eyes than do anything to hurt you. And radical honesty, that’s like ninety-nine point nine percent true.”

  My hands are trembling. I swallow around the lump in my throat. “I want you to know me,” I whisper, my voice quaking.

  His slow exhalation is full of deliberation. Then he says, “This accident you were in.”

  I wait, staring at the ceiling, my stomach in knots.

  As he wrestles to find the right words, I suffer a pang of empathy for how hard this must be for him, dealing with a woman who may or may not remember him in the morning.

  Quite frankly, I wouldn’t be up for it if the situation were reversed. Why expose yourself to that kind of possible trauma? Why volunteer to have your heart ripped out?

  “I don’t know where to start,” he says finally, sounding miserable, so I take pity on him and help him out.

  “I can’t remember the actual accident itself. I dream about it—well, you know. The dreams are always violent. Dark. But when I wake up there are only snippets left. Fractured pieces, like a puzzle, different parts but nothing fits into a whole that makes sense. Mainly what I remember are the feelings the dream evokes. The terror.”

  I pause to moisten my lips, allow my heartbeat to find a slower, more even rhythm.

  “When I woke up in the hospital, no one knew who I was. My parents . . . their remains . . . there was a fire. A bad fire. It took a while for their bodies to be identified. Even the license plates on the car were melted beyond recognition. For three days I laid in a hospital bed wondering what my name was. I didn’t recognize my own face in the mirror. I didn’t know my age or where I lived, if I had siblings or a boyfriend or a dog or allergies or was a virgin or knew how to drive. It was like waking up on an alien planet in a body that wasn’t mine, with no knowledge of how I ended up there. I was just . . . blank.”

  Brody breathes out. “Fuck.”

  I produce a shaky laugh. “Yeah, fuck is right. It scares me now to think of it. But the brain is a funny thing. I thought I was blank, but I did have knowledge. It was just locked away. The pathways to access things had changed. Kind of like Jason Bourne in the Bourne Identity movies.”

  Brody makes a joke. “So you can kill people with your bare hands and make bombs out of toilet paper rolls but you’re not sure how you know how to do it?”

  “Maybe. I haven’t tried either of those things, now that you mention it. But the idea is the same. For instance, math.”

  “Math?”

  “Yeah, math. That’s how the doctors first started testing my memory. If certain areas of your brain are destroyed or affected by severe trauma, your ability to problem solve, like long division as an example, can be destroyed. In my case, I could easily complete an algebraic equation, I just didn’t know how I knew how to do it. The memory of learning math was gone, the knowledge of understanding math was gone, but the ability itself remained. Put a piece of paper with a mathematical formula in front of me, I could correctly solve it. Ask me to describe what I’d solved, I’d have no clue.”

  Brody’s “Dude” sounds so deeply impressed I have to chuckle.

  “I know, it’s a little esoteric. But that’s how it was for me with a lot of things. As it turned out, I did know how to do math, and drive, and most other things I’d learned by rote or with muscle memory, like swimming. I just couldn’t remember what I knew and didn’t know! It was so frustrating I can’t even describe it. Everything had to be relearned, rediscovered, reintroduced. But some things refused to come back. Some parts of my brain are still locked away to me, even now. Most likely they always will be.”

  There’s a moment of fraught silence as Brody digests what I’ve said. Then he asks, “Which parts?”

  I chew a little piece of skin on the inside of my cheek. “My parents. I don’t remember them at all. Or my childhood. School. Friends. Growing up in San Francisco. The life I remember started when I was eighteen, when I opened my eyes in a strange bed in a strange room wearing an ugly blue gown that tied in the back, hooked up to beeping machines, with an old nurse with kind brown eyes leaning over me and asking if I could hear her.”

  “Don’t move,” says Brody, his voice tight. “I’m coming over.”

  He hangs up before I can say another word. In two minutes, the front door flies open. I’m already sitting up in bed.

  “You didn’t even put a shirt on,” I manage to get out before he’s on me.

  He takes me flat to the mattress and crushes me to his chest, the covers smashed between our bodies. “Baby,” he says, choked, his face pressed to my neck. “Oh God, baby.”

  He’s called me Slick. He’s called me sweetheart. He’s called me sunshine and princess and witch face and who knows what else, but hearing him call me “baby” in that wrecked tone of voice, his big, strong body trembling with emotion, rips down any barrier I might have tried to erect between us.

  I cling to him and let the tears come, hot and silent on my cheeks.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” He keeps saying it over and over, a litany of regret that seems so genuine it’s almost like he feels at fault.

  I press my cheek to his and whisper into his ear, “It’s better now. You make it better.” I hug him hard, my arms thrown around his shoulders. “This makes it better.”

  When he lifts his head and gazes down at me, his eyes are wet.

  Seeing his emotion moves me so much it hurts my chest. I skim a fingertip over the fringe of his lower lashes. He squeezes his eyes shut, almost as if he’s hiding.

  “What is it?” I ask, because I know it’s something more.

  He rests his forehead against mine. It’s hot, like he has a fever.

  His voice a cracking whisper, he says, “You don’t believe in confessions, remember?”

  “But I do believe in radical honesty.”

  He blinks open his eyes. They’re dark and full of pain. Tortured.

  My heart beats faster. “Brody, what is it?
”

  His lips part. Staring down at me with an anguished expression, he blurts, “I’m crazy about you, Grace. I’m just . . . fucking . . . gone.”

  Heat suffuses me, flushing my face, my chest, the tips of my fingers. I stare at him, knowing he’s telling me the truth, knowing, too, that this unexpected admission is tied inextricably to what I’ve told him about the accident, that somehow the two things are bound together, a knot I can sense but don’t understand.

  “Please don’t let that turn you off, but I can’t not say it. It’s what’s in my heart. I know it’s fast—”

  “Someone I love once told me that when these things are real, they happen fast,” I interrupt softly, stroking his face.

  He inhales a ragged breath. “Really? Who?”

  I smile. “Kat. And besides, it’s not that fast. We’ve known each other for a year and a half, as you keep reminding me. Honestly I’m surprised you didn’t tell me this like seventeen months ago, you’ve been making moon eyes at me the whole time. You big sap.”

  He threads his fingers into my hair and kisses me, a deep, hot kiss that leaves us both panting softly. His erection is trapped between us, insistently poking into my hip.

  “I am a sap,” he says huskily. “I’m a big, drippy ball of goo—for you.”

  I smile. “That sounds unhygienic.”

  He doesn’t smile back at my joke. Nuzzling my neck he whispers, “If I said I wanted to spend the night over here, would you be able to keep your hands to yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Well, tough. ’Cause I’m staying. I don’t want you to have to sleep by yourself tonight.”

  I exhale a ragged breath. “I always spend the night alone, Brody.”

  He kisses my neck, my shoulder, my jaw. Then he softly kisses me on the lips again, but this time it’s tender instead of passionate. “There’s a first time for everything, Slick.”

  He reaches across me and turns out the light. Then he rolls to his side, taking me with him. Lying on top of the covers, he pulls me to his chest so we’re back to front with the sheets between us, spooning, his legs drawn up behind mine, his arm under my head, the other arm wrapped around my middle.