Lust

by Leddy Harper

  I continued to arrange the food on the counter, acting as if her words hadn’t just gotten to me. “Oh yeah? Why did you want to see me?” I asked nonchalantly, not looking at her, hoping she wouldn’t notice my nervousness at her confession.

  “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

  That made me stop and look at her, freezing in place. The cocky smile slipped away from my face. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re really good at what you do, Cade, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t think you can help me,” she said the words quietly as she looked down at her clutched hands.

  “You haven’t given me a chance.”

  “I have seen you every day this week. It’s too much. I’m confused and uncomfortable.”

  Well, shit. I hadn’t expected her to say that. It made me feel worse for what I had done to her. I had pushed her too far and it had made her want to call the whole thing off. I didn’t know if I was ready for that. Why had I done it? Why had I been so desperate to see her every fucking day this week? I should have known it would freak her out.

  “I’ll back off. I understand that some people may find my methods too extreme or suffocating, but you can’t give up now. We can do this; I know we can. I will let you make the call from now on. I’ll leave it up to you when we see each other again, and I’ll follow your lead.”

  She gave me a silent nod and I felt my shoulders relax as if I had been holding my breath for her answer. Maybe it was a good thing that I back off; it seemed as though she was getting to me more than I had thought. I mean, I knew she was affecting me, I could tell that by my night with Alyssa. But I hadn’t realized the possibility of my dependence on her, and that worried me. I hadn’t been dependent on anyone since I was eight years old.

  “What are you reading?” I asked, pointing to the tablet in her hand as I busied myself in her small kitchen. I wanted to act calm and unaffected, and the only way I knew how to do that was to ask questions and keep myself moving.

  “It’s called ‘The Truth About Mack’ by Jettie Woodruff.”

  I waited for her to tell me more, but she never did. I guess I would have to work harder at getting her to talk to me. “What’s it about?” I asked, hoping she would give me more than a few words.

  “Lots of things.”

  I looked at her and raised an eyebrow, demanding she continue without speaking. I knew that books were one thing she could usually talk freely about.

  She rolled her eyes and continued after huffing out a breath of air. “I haven’t gotten very far in it, but I don’t think I can continue.”

  “Not good?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s not that. It’s very good. It just hits too close to home. I don’t know if I can finish reading it, which upsets me because it’s a really good book so far.”

  I silently finished cutting up one of the chicken breasts and turned to her. “Why do you think it is hitting so close to home?”

  She shrugged and looked to her lap. “The book is about this girl, Mack, and when she was in high school, something happened between her, her best friend, and their teacher. But the book isn’t about her in high school; it takes place seven years later.”

  “What happened to you in high school, Ivy?” My question didn’t come out in concern, it came out as a demand, commanding her to answer my question and answer it honestly.

  She looked at me with confusion spread across her face.

  “Ivy, don’t bullshit me. What happened to you in high school?” I had lost my patience with her.

  “Cade, nothing happened to me… not in high school, not at home, not by a family member or a stranger. I don’t understand why you just won’t believe me!” She jumped from the counter in a huff and began to walk away.

  I followed her around the corner to the main room.

  “You said the book hits too close to home and then you say it’s about a girl and her teacher. I don’t understand how you could have such traumatic issues regarding sex if nothing has ever happened to you. I want to believe you.” I grabbed her by her upper arm and turned her around so that she had no choice but to look at me. “I really want to believe you, but you can’t blame me for questioning it. All of the facts point to something sexual happening.”

  “I told you last night. We were standing in this same place when I told you that I hadn’t ever been sexually molested. What more do I have to do or say before you believe me? I’ve told you, I lost my virginity when I was twenty-two. Would you like for me to see if I can find him so he can attest to that? Would you believe him if he tells you the details of it? Huh, Cade? What will it take?” She was frantic as streams of tears fell from her eyes so quickly they were dripping from her chin.

  I wanted to calm her down so she would stop; I didn’t want her to cry. I wanted to make it better, to make her better. “Then why can’t you read the book? Why is it hitting too close to home? Please, I want to believe you. I want to know that you were never abused that way.” My voice was calmer as I begged her to answer with my eyes.

  She wiped her face and straightened her spine. The defiance I had gotten used to seeing small glimpses of was back in full force. Her shoulders squared as though she was preparing to fight me. “As I was saying before you rudely interrupted me, the story takes place seven years later. She’s trying to live and cope with a mental disorder. She’s crazy and can’t confide in anyone why she feels the way she does. She’s living somewhat of a double life and that is what’s hitting too close to home.”

  I wanted to ask multiple questions, but I held my tongue. I needed answers, but the last thing I wanted to do was set her off by jumping to the wrong conclusion again. I had already wondered if she, herself, was suffering from a mental disorder, but I had nothing to support that fact. It was just an educated guess because nothing else seemed to fit. I just had to bide my time and wait for her to tell me everything. I told her I’d let her lead and set the pace, and I was going to try my best to do just that.

  After staring at me, presumably waiting for me to question her, she finally spoke again. “No, I’m not crazy. My mom was crazy. There was something wrong with her, but I never knew what it was. I don’t think she even knew what was wrong with her. I remember one of her boyfriends arguing with her after she accused him of looking at me. He told her she needed help, and if she didn’t go on her own to get it he would intervene. I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but social services came a few weeks later and took me away.”

  “Did your mom have a lot of boyfriends?” I finally asked.

  She shrugged. “Kind of. I mean, I thought she did, but it was over the span of eleven years so I guess it wasn’t that many. I obviously don’t know how many she dated when I was really young, but I remember most of them once I reached the age to remember.”

  “And they were good to you?”

  “Yes. Some of them didn’t have much to do with me, but the ones that did were always really good to me, treated me like I was their own kid. Two of them even ended up moving in with us. I remember those two the most. It was the last one that told her she needed to get help. He was the one that ended up getting me out of there.” She was soft spoken and had a hard time keeping eye contact with me while she explained her life while living with her mom.

  I reached out for her hand and she reluctantly gave it to me. I pulled her gently with me until we were back in the kitchen so that I could finish making dinner while she watched. The last thing we needed was to burn the place down. I waited for her to resume her place on the kitchen counter as I went back to cutting up the chicken for the frying pan.

  “Okay, so the book is good but you’re having a hard time reading it because of your mom. Do you think that maybe reading it could help you learn more about the things she struggled with?” I needed to put my work hat back on and think more like her therapist and not her friend or something more.

  “I guess. Mack doesn’t really remind me of my mom, though. I mean, aside from being crazy. The things
she does in the book aren’t the things my mom did, which makes it easier to read, but I still can’t help but think about the things I had to grow up around. The thoughts Mack experiences trigger the things I actually lived through. I’ll finish the book, it’s really good and it’s about way more than her mental disorder, but it’s just bringing up a lot of things I had thought were buried long ago.”

  “That’s not always a bad thing, Ivy. You can’t expect to compress things and be okay. All it does is fester and grow and you never know it until it smacks you in the face. You have to deal with it head on. Face it and move on. Have you ever talked to your mom about it?”

  “I can’t—she’s dead.”

  Why the fuck didn’t I know that?

  “She killed herself a few weeks after social services took me away.”

  “Where did you go? What happened to you?”

  The room was silent aside from the chicken sizzling in the frying pan. The silence affected me—her silence ate me alive. I was desperate for something other than the sounds of dinner, anything to make the internal suffering go away. I knew once she started talking the pain wouldn’t go away. She would more than likely tell me a slightly different version of my own life. I wasn’t prepared for that. I was conflicted. I wanted to yell at her to stop talking while at the same time beg her to continue.

  “You already know that; I was sent to live with foster families.”

  I took a deep breath, fighting with myself on whether or not I wanted to dig deeper. Ultimately, the therapist in me won out. No matter what she said or how it was going to affect me, I needed to know more. If not then I would never be able to fully understand her. And I needed to know everything about Ivy Jaymes.

  “What about your family? What about your dad?” I asked; now I was the one avoiding eye contact.

  “I never had a dad. I don’t even know who he is. There was never a name listed on my birth certificate. And at first, I had gone to live with relatives, but they said they couldn’t handle me so that’s when I went into the system.”

  My gut clenched as I heard the sound of her voice when explaining that her family couldn’t handle her. That’s never something easy for a child to hear; it’s incomprehensible at that age… at any age, really. I knew exactly what that felt like and could feel her pain throughout my entire body. The abandonment she must have experienced couldn’t have been easy for her to handle, first from her mom and then the rest of her family.

  “How old were you?”

  “I was eleven when I was taken from my mom and sent to live with an aunt I really didn’t know for six months before I was shuttled off to another family member. I only lasted a few months there before they said they couldn’t care for me the way I needed. That was their words. Translation—they didn’t want me, either.”

  “Did you have anyone at all that you trusted?”

  “The second foster family I was placed with was a very good family. They didn’t baby me and the woman was really understanding with my episodes. I was there until I was fifteen. She didn’t do long-term placement and needed the space for younger children. I think that was just an excuse. I’m sure she tired of me as well.”

  “Episodes? What kind of episodes?” I felt like I was learning more about her in that one conversation than I had the entire week we had been talking.

  “My mom never let me go to school; she always kept me at home. So when the state came in to take me away, I didn’t have any kind of formal education. I was really far behind the other kids my age and had difficulties catching up. The first foster family I was placed with didn’t work out because her kids went to the same school that I had been enrolled in and they teased me a lot. In fact, the whole school teased me. I hated going there so I didn’t go most of the time. When I went to live with the Kellys, she worked with me a lot at home in the evenings and on weekends. It took the rest of the school year and all summer, working every single day for me to finally be able to survive with kids my own age. Well, not my own age, I ended up a year behind where I should have been. But still, that was a lot closer than I had been when I first started.

  “Although, it didn’t stop some of the kids from teasing me. I had really short hair when I left my mom and it had started growing it out. Mrs. Kelly did her best to make it look stylish as it was growing, but it still looked ridiculous. I was teased about that. I was also teased about my clothes. We didn’t have much money so I wore things from secondhand stores. I can remember going in there with Mrs. Kelly and she let me pick out whatever I wanted. I had never been shopping before so I was in heaven. It was the first time I felt truly loved by someone. I picked stuff out only to learn later by some of the kids in school that it was what poor people wore. I was called all kinds of names but I couldn’t tell Mrs. Kelly that. It would have broken her heart after she spent all that money on me. She really did love me and was the first person that showed me she did.

  “But even with all of that, with all of the love she gave me, the protection she made me feel, I still had an internal struggle that I didn’t know how to deal with. I tried my best but no matter what I did, I felt like a failure. I could make good grades, wear better clothes, grow my hair out to what was considered appropriate for a girl, but it didn’t make the voices go away or the discomfort I felt in my own body disappear.”

  I listened intently to every word as she spoke, absorbing them as if they were water droplets during a drought. I could literally feel her pain as she told me things I was pretty sure she had never told anyone else before. That meant the most to me—that she felt comfortable enough to open up and trust me with her inner demons.

  “What voices, Ivy? Explain that to me. Like you really hear voices in your head?”

  “No, Cade. I’m not crazy. I know I’m fucked up and have a list of issues a mile long, but I’m not crazy. I’m nothing like my mother—”

  “I know.” I cut her off in a soothing voice as I stood in front of her and took her hands in mine. “I know you’re not crazy. That’s not what I was implying. I’m just trying to figure out what you mean by hearing voices.”

  “It didn’t matter how long I went without my mother and the things she had put me through, I still heard her hateful words or the angry fights she had with her boyfriends in my head. I could still hear the things she said to me, the lies she told me. It was as if my mind didn’t want to let it go. It just played things over and over again as if someone had hit repeat. She was long gone but yet she still lived on in my head, filling it with hate and lies and vile things. Tormenting me.”

  I swallowed hard, hoping she didn’t notice the rigidness that had consumed me.

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she whispered into the air between us.

  “I understand. But if it makes you feel any better, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I know exactly what you’ve been through. You don’t need to be scared to talk to me about those things. I know better than anyone what it’s like to go through that.” I will never know why I divulged that information to her. I had never mentioned that to anyone other than my own therapist. But something inside me felt the need to comfort her, to confide in her that I understood her more than she thought.

  “You were in foster care?” she asked, surprised.

  I nodded, carefully deciding what information I wanted to spare. “I went to live with my aunt as well, but that didn’t work out. I lasted longer than six months, but I think that was only because of my cousin. She’s always been very protective over me, still is to this day. But after that, I bounced around a bit from foster home to foster home. They had tried to place me with other relatives but that didn’t work out, either. My mom’s side of the family hated my dad and vice versa, and in the end, their hatred for one another was taken out on me.”

  “What happened to your parents? Why were you taken away?”

  “They died.” And I left it at that. I couldn’t go further into it than that. “Looks like dinner is ready,” I s
aid to change the subject and put everything together so that we could eat.

  We ate at the tiny bar that separated the kitchen from the other room. It was odd to eat a few feet from where she slept, but it was either that or on the floor in the space she called her living room; even that was only a few feet from where she slept. I wondered again how someone could live in such a tiny space.

  I should have left once we finished eating. Not much was said during dinner, but I was content just watching her eat. It calmed down my fears of her having an eating disorder and made it clear that she was simply a picky eater and nothing more. Like I said, I should have left after that, but I didn’t. Instead, I helped her clean the kitchen. I was probably stalling for time, not ready to leave her just yet. I had told her that I would leave her sessions up to her and I meant that. But that meant I didn’t know when the next time was that I would see her again. So, I waited around as long as I could, stalling for just one more minute and then another. Her presence was intoxicating and I couldn’t get enough.

  The kitchen was so small that we were constantly in each other’s way as we tried to clean everything up. She insisted numerous times that she could handle it and that I didn’t need to hang around, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. For I enjoyed every time her body brushed up against mine, the close proximity making it seem normal. I just wanted to be near her.

  At one point, we were literally face-to-face. That had happened several times, but that one specific time, we didn’t bother dodging one another. Instead, we stood in each other’s space, locking eyes without moving. I could feel her breath on my chin and found that I, too, had a hard time controlling my own breathing.

  “What are you doing?” she asked breathlessly.

  I wanted to say, “cleaning the kitchen,” but the words wouldn’t come out. The truth poured out instead. “Trying to stop myself from doing something I know I shouldn’t.” I kept my eyes trained on her face, roaming from her eyes to her lips and fighting my inner demons.