Within This Frame

by Zart, Lindy

  An evil grin took over his mouth. “‘Ivy, your mother is the devil. Also, remember to always eat your vegetables. Love, your fake Dad.’”

  “Okay, so not those kind of notes.”

  Lance laughed. “Would you like to watch episodes of ‘Easier Said’ with me?”

  “Really?” Maggie asked. “Why?”

  Maggie’s eyes were caught and held by his, the blueness of them exposed and genuine. “Watching us back then makes me sad and happy. Maybe it will be the same for you.”

  “I don’t want to be sad.”

  “Sometimes you have to be sad for a while before you can be happy,” he said quietly.

  LANCE—1997

  “WOW. THIS IS . . . this is like a mansion.” Wonder hugged Maggie’s words and the look she gave him was wide-eyed.

  The long-sleeved purple and black plaid dress was loose on her frame, and the black boots added inches to her otherwise unimpressive height. Lance was dressed in black from his shirt to his boots. Maggie had teased him about his depressing outfit when he met her at her apartment. Lance hadn’t replied, but damn if it didn’t feel like he was going to a funeral.

  It was four months later than the initial date that Maggie was to go to Lance’s house. His dad ended up leaving town New Year’s week and Lance spent the remainder of it at his apartment. He’d been bothered by his father’s disappearance. He guessed because he knew what he was missing, while before he hadn’t.

  Lance tried to see the stone structure through Maggie’s eyes. The rock siding and arched windows with peaked roofs made him think it looked like a mini castle. He supposed it was pretty big, but he’d seen bigger, and the size meant nothing.

  “It’s just a house.”

  She gave him a dubious look. “My house is a house. This is more than a house.”

  “It’s just a house,” Lance insisted in a harsher tone. It made him uncomfortable to think of her awestruck by what he had. It was just things. Things didn’t mean anything.

  Maggie smoothed hair from her cheek, eyes narrowing. She’d recently cut her hair and it hung around her face in a way that accentuated her prominent bone structure. “You’re right. It’s just a house. A really big, really expensive, house.”

  Lance stared at the building, the chilly April air sinking into him. “It’s empty. It’s a big house full of emptiness.” He turned to Maggie. “This was a bad idea.”

  “You don’t want me to meet your dad?” Hurt made her words thick.

  Hands around his neck, he squeezed. “It’s not that. It’s just—never mind. Let’s go.” He gave her a small smile. She’d understand soon enough.

  “Okay,” Maggie said slowly.

  He put a hand to her arm when she moved to go up the stairs. “Maggie.”

  She took in his anxious expression and smiled with a hint of exasperation, touching his rumpled eyebrow. “What is it, Lance? I know you’re trying to hide it, but you’re freaking out over something.”

  Swallowing, he dropped his hand. “It’s just . . . I’ve never brought a girl home before, and . . . you’re the first girl that I’ve dated to meet my dad.”

  “You’re nervous.”

  A frown took over his features. “I don’t get nervous.”

  Maggie framed his face with her hands and kissed him. “Only you do, and I think it’s sweet how you deny it every time it happens. I should be nervous, not you. He’s not some kind of horrible monster that shouts and breaks things, is he?”

  “No,” he answered faintly. “He’s nice. Quiet. You’ll like him.”

  “No worries then. Everything’s going to be fine. I love you.”

  Lance swallowed, averting his eyes. “Right. Time to meet Dad.”

  He pretended he didn’t see the crestfallen expression on Maggie’s face as they entered the house. For four months she’d patiently waited to hear him say it back. He would write it, he would trace it onto her skin, he would even squeeze her hand three times, but he couldn’t say the words. He’d tried, but each time he opened his mouth to say them, they choked him.

  If Lance told Maggie he loved her, that would make it real, and once it was real, it could end.

  Lance knew what his mother smelled like, because his father sprayed her perfume throughout the house once a day. That day was no different. The scent of Chanel stung his nostrils as soon as he entered the house and made his stomach turn. His hand unconsciously tightened around Maggie’s and she gave him a reassuring smile, but he saw the hint of apprehension in her eyes.

  “You’ve lived here your whole life?” she questioned, looking around the entryway. He avoided looking at the pictures, but Maggie stared.

  To say Max Denton was infatuated with Tammie Rose would be an understatement. Her smiling face filled the walls, the house decorated the same as she’d left it over a dozen years ago—blues and greens and grays were the theme for every room. The furniture had been replaced, but it was obvious Max had chosen what he thought Lance’s mom would have wanted.

  “Off and on.”

  Maggie moved from the foyer to the glass room directly before them, gasping at the ocean view. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured.

  “Tammie loved the ocean,” a deep, familiar voice said from the hallway.

  Maggie spun around, her face red as if she’d been caught doing something wrong. Lance instinctively moved closer to her and put his arm around her, as much to comfort her as to steady him. She twisted her fingers around his and squeezed.

  “As you can tell.” Max Denton smiled and gestured around the room. Tall and blond with intelligent features, it was striking how much Lance didn’t look like his dad. He had his height, possibly his build, but the rest of him was his mother.

  “Hello, Maggie. It’s good to see you, Lance.” The sincerity in his voice was overshadowed by his avoidance of meeting Lance’s eyes.

  “You too, Dad. It’s been a while.” Months, it had been months. No hugs exchanged, no pat on the shoulder or handshake. Cordial and distant, that was their relationship.

  Maggie unhooked her hand from his, a shy smile on her face. “Hello, Mr. Denton.”

  Lance’s father laughed and shook his head. “Please don’t call me that. I prefer Max, unless I’m in court, and let’s hope I never see you there.”

  He entered the room, looking lawyerly in his navy blue suit, and offered a large hand.

  She shook it. “I definitely hope for the same.”

  “I’d like to say I can take credit for the meal we’re about to enjoy, but that honor belongs to Hailey. She comes in once a week to clean, and when I ask really nicely, sometimes she takes pity on me and makes food,” he explained to Maggie, motioning for her to come over.

  With a look at Lance, Maggie stepped into his father’s awaiting arm and they started for the dining room with their arms linked. “It smells great. I’m sure it’s delicious.”

  “You can’t go wrong with spaghetti and meatballs,” Max said jovially.

  Lance’s face cracked in a smile when Maggie’s back tensed. She shot him an accusatory look over her shoulder and he raised his arms in apology. He hadn’t thought to mention to his dad that Maggie didn’t like spaghetti, never realizing that would be the thing Hailey, a woman in her fifties who had been an employee of his father’s since Lance was a toddler, would decide to make.

  Maggie ate a small salad and a buttered roll, saying she was full when it came time to eat the main course. Lance knew she probably was full—the salad and bread was the most he’d seen her eat at once in a long time. Max paused, his eyebrows lifting, but didn’t comment, instead asking Maggie about her life in Iowa, and what she thought of working on a television show.

  The dinner went smoothly, with most of the conversation between Maggie and Lance’s dad. He could see her getting more and more confused as the night progressed. The thoughts were clear on her face: Why doesn’t he look at you? Why doesn’t he talk to you? Lance ignored her silent questions, focusing on the meal and ticking off the
minutes to when they could depart.

  Max excused himself, saying he needed to go to his office because he had a lot of work to complete before a court appearance Monday. “It was lovely to meet you, Maggie. I hope I see you again.”

  “Me too, Mr. Den—Max.”

  He smiled, turning to Lance, and the warmth left his brown eyes. “Things are going well for you?”

  “Yes,” he answered shortly, the bite of roll he’d taken lodged in his throat. Lance took a drink of water and waited.

  “Good.” He tapped the fingers of one hand against the tabletop. “Let me know if anything changes, or if you need anything.”

  “Will do,” Lance muttered, looking at his plate of food.

  “You two have a nice time. Hailey will clean up when she comes in the morning. Good night.”

  Max Denton stood, and with a final nod, left.

  The purr of an engine sounded soon after that, faint but purposeful. Then it was gone.

  “He’s nice,” Maggie said tentatively.

  “Yep.” He nodded. “The nicest. Best uninvolved dad I could have hoped for. Want a tour of the place? You can’t get the full effect of the atmosphere unless you do.” Lance’s voice was hard, and he shot to his feet before Maggie could respond. He roughly stacked the dishes, the piercing clank of them against one another the only sound in the room.

  “Sure,” Maggie responded hesitantly, slowly getting to her feet.

  “Well, this is the dining room.” He waved a hand behind him, and then lifted the haphazardly stacked dinnerware into his arms. “Light blue walls, because, well, that was my mom’s favorite color. Made her think of water. Ugly pictures of birds on the walls, because, yep, you guessed it, she liked birds,” Lance said nastily, striding from the room.

  He angrily rinsed and stacked dishes in the dishwasher. Maggie silently set dishes on the counter next to him.

  “Gray walls. Made her think of an approaching storm, which, incidentally, also has to do with the ocean. You know she died in the ocean, right?” Lance swung around to glare at Maggie, his chest tight, a wildness inside him pushing to be unleashed.

  Eyes large and filled with pain, Maggie shook her head.

  “Yeah.” He smiled darkly. “Took too many drugs, decided to go for a swim in the middle of the night. Smart lady, that Tammie. I was left alone in the house. I guess it was late and I was supposed to be sleeping, but I woke up. My dad found me in the living room, staring out the windows, screaming my head off. I don’t know, maybe I watched her drown.” Chills cascaded down his spine like the icy fingers of a ghost.

  Lance grabbed Maggie’s wrist and pulled her from the room and into another. “This is the bathroom in which she used to make herself pretty, and take her baths. There’s the bottle of perfume my dad sprays every day, and restocks each time it empties, because that’s not seriously messed up or creepy.”

  He turned to Maggie, not really seeing her, seeing his past instead. Remembering the fear, the tears. “Do you know how traumatized I was as a kid, being forced to use a bathtub my dead mother once used? I kept imagining her in the bathtub drowning, face turning blue, reaching out to a rescuer that never came. My dad couldn’t understand it, because she’d died in the ocean and not in the house. I was a kid, like it had to make sense.”

  Maggie reached for him, her face streaked with tears, mouth trembling. Lance shook her off, needing her and denying himself.

  He strode down the hall.

  “I hate this house. I hate everything inside it. It’s a shrine to a woman who should never have been a mother, to a kid that never should have been born. My own dad can’t stand the sight of me. I look too much like her. I look like the dead woman he could never stop loving, but he can’t love me enough.”

  Lance stopped in front of a closed door and looked at her. “How is that for irony?”

  Hands over her mouth, she watched him with her pretty, shattered eyes.

  Taking a shaky breath, he lowered his hand to the doorknob, head bowed, and swung open the door. Lance forced himself to enter the room, his skin crawling with unease. Her scent seemed to be the strongest in his bedroom, but he knew he imagined it.

  “Lance.”

  Lance looked at Maggie. The pain he felt radiated in her.

  “You don’t have to do this. I understand now.”

  “I do have to do this. I do,” he told her. “I’m going to give you every part of me, and you’re either going to hold on tighter to me, or you’re going to let me go.”

  She took a step toward him and he turned from her. Lance couldn’t let her touch him.

  The room was painted in stripes of blue and gray and housed a bed and a dresser. It was his bedroom, but it was bare of anything that marked it as such. He used to sleep in the room as little as possible, and when he was old enough, he asked to stay somewhere else, anywhere else. His father had looked appallingly relieved, and Lance felt the pain all the way to his soul. Max was glad when his son left.

  “It isn’t your fault—that your mom died, that your dad can’t be what you need,” Maggie said quietly, pleadingly. “It isn’t your fault.”

  Instead of looking at the walls of framed photographs, he stared at Maggie. “I know that. It doesn’t change how I feel. Look at the pictures. Lies. Every last one of them. Look at her holding me like she loved me, looking at me like I was her world. What a joke. I grew up looking at these bullshit pictures. My dad thought they would make me feel closer to her. All they did was remind me that a dead woman lived more in this house than me or my dad.”

  Lance lifted his head and studied the last picture taken of him with his mom. They were on the beach, the sun outlining them. A green toy bucket and shovel sat in the sand beside them. Her hair was dark and wild, that unruliness duplicated in the blue eyes smiling at the camera lens, her arms around a grinning toddler with matching hair and eyes.

  Tears burned his eyes when he turned his gaze to Maggie. “Do you know who hugged me when I was scared, or had bad dreams, or got hurt, or just—just needed to be shown I was loved? A ghost. Not my dad. Not my mom. A ghost.”

  A broken sound left him and he lost the fight against tears. He went to his knees on the carpeted floor, and Maggie was there, holding him. Hugging him. His throat closed, heart tight with years of grief welling up and crashing over him. Lance’s arms shook around her frame, clutching her to him, needing her. Needing Maggie’s love.

  She stroked his hair, and kissed his face, crying along with him, and imbedded herself more into his being. He lifted his head, staring at a face that was molded right to his heart. The face he saw when he dreamed, the face he saw when he pictured his future. He didn’t know if anyone had ever cried for him before. Because of him, definitely, but for him?

  Lance kissed her, his mouth hard on hers. He tasted her tears, mixed with his own. Maggie fell onto his lap as his back hit the dresser. He straightened and she straddled him, the warmth and feel of her body making him crazy. The kiss went from sweet to urgent, her hands under his shirt, his fingers gripping her hips. It wasn’t enough. He craved more, ached for it, especially then, when he felt the most vulnerable.

  He’d gone years without feeling loved, and Maggie gave him all of hers, and he wanted to take it, and take it, and take it. Until he was filled with it. Until it was all he knew. Until he believed he had a right to have it.

  Maggie pulled back, eyes dilated, face flushed. She said one word.

  “Please.”

  Lance struggled to speak. His chest and throat were tight, clenched so hard it hurt to speak or breathe. “This isn’t how it should be your first time. I need you too much right now.”

  She tugged at his shirt, shaking her head before he finished speaking. Lance rocked forward to get ahold of his shirt, his body constricting at the sound of her moan and the feel of her pressed against him, and tore off the garment. Her palms went up and down his chest, air hissing through his teeth at Maggie’s touch.

  “It’s going to hurt,�
� he said in a voice like gravel, wanting to be inside her so badly.

  “I don’t care.” Maggie moved to stand, grabbing the hem of her dress and removing it.

  He got to his feet, noting the sea green bra and panties before he helped remove them. Blinded by desire, fragmented in a way nothing could heal, Lance took what he could from Maggie. The motions were fast, not enough thought put toward what they were doing. It was instinctual, and primal, and trying to fill the emptiness inside with the use of bodies. It was wrong, and right.

  She was naked, then he was naked. Lance turned off the light, put on a condom, and took Maggie’s virginity. She felt so good, smelled like Maggie but more intensely. Better. Her first time, his first time with someone he loved. It didn’t last long, desperation and incontrollable hunger turning Lance into something that was a slave to sensation. He knew he hurt her, her sharp intake of air as he entered her evidence of that. She never pushed him away, she never told him to stop. Maggie pressed her tear-stained face against his and let him take what he needed from her.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  When it was over, shame had him quiet and unreachable. On his back, he stared at the ceiling, pulse wild, body sated but not satisfied. Maggie shifted, intent on leaving the bed, and Lance reached for her, pulling her to his side.

  “I hurt you.”

  She was stiff beside him, closed off to him in a way that made him ache.

  “I’m sorry I hurt you.”

  Angrily shoving at him, Maggie twisted away to sit up on his bed. Moonlight cast her naked body under its eerie spotlight and he truly looked at her for the first time. She was beautiful, body fine-boned and slender, breasts round and full. Lance’s body responded and he swallowed, feeling like the biggest of asses for being turned on again so soon after having sex—sex she didn’t even enjoy.

  “What is it?” Lance sat up, moving for her. “What’s wrong? Are you in a lot of pain?”

  Maggie shrugged off his touch and crossed her arms over her breasts. He could sense her glare through the dark. “I don’t care that it hurt! I knew it was going to hurt. I knew what was happening the whole time.”