Magdalene

by Moriah Jovan

  But her mouth twitched and she began to snicker, then chuckle, then laugh.

  “He’d have fired me if any of his other clients had done that.”

  “He has his uses. Entertainment is one of them.”

  Her mouth dropped open in delighted amazement, her eyes suddenly sparkling with humor. “You do that on purpose.”

  He flashed her a grin. “I do. It’s fun to watch him dance around me.” He pointed out the window. “Turn left here.”

  As she turned onto Mitch’s estate, he looked at it with new eyes. Winter made it bleak, but the house—well, he hadn’t seen the house in years, and it surprised him now that he lived in something so grand. Almost alone. Trevor would be gone in a year and then what? Knocking around in a mansion all by himself? Dribbling a ball alone down the empty soccer field in the back yard because he’d have no one to play with?

  An image of Cassandra standing on the front portico to greet him when he came home from work flashed across his mind, but he instantly banished it.

  That wasn’t her style, and at this point in his life, it wasn’t something he wanted, anyway.

  “Is this a place you think you could live?” he asked quietly when she parked in the driveway and turned the car off. “Would you live with me?”

  She looked at him then, her hair rumpled and her clothes bearing the evidence of having taken care of three small children all night—spots of mustard and ketchup, other mysterious stains. The whites of her eyes were webbed in red and there were dark circles under her eyes. “Well,” she muttered, “that’s what married people do, right? Live together? Honestly, though, it’s really too French provincial for my taste.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll build you something else if you want.”

  She watched him for a long time without saying anything. Then, “What did you mean when you told Jack you needed me?”

  Mitch let that sink in, knowing there was something significant about the question, but too tired to figure it out right then. “I want to make love with you, Cassandra, but I need you in my life.”

  “You don’t love me.”

  Mitch stared at her, wondering if the fault was his because his cultural plane was that different from hers, or her fault for being deliberately obtuse. Finally he spoke.

  Slowly.

  “I don’t know why you think I’ve shown up on your doorstep every weekend for the last few weeks, but I assure you, it wasn’t because I was trying to figure out whether I do or not.”

  Her bloodshot eyes narrowed and her chest began to heave. “All you want is sex. You want it with me and I want it with you. I’ll marry you because I’m not going to get to fuck you any other way, but don’t mistake it for something deeper than that because I’ll leave you the minute I’ve had my fill.”

  Mitch snorted. “You’re already in deeper than that or you would have tried a little harder to seduce me. You’ve respected my boundaries, you’ve continued to go out with me, you came to church yesterday without my asking you to. Cassandra, we’ve been dating for weeks and last night was our first kiss. How is it not deeper than that? If it weren’t, you’d have left me at Babbo. You aren’t ever going to get your fill of me.”

  Obviously shocked, she opened the door and got out, heading for the house. He scrambled out his side and stood with the door open, looking at her over the top of the car. She had stopped about twenty feet away from him and she stood with her back to him, her arms wrapped around herself.

  “When was the last time you had sex?” Mitch called. Her back stiffened and she sucked in a breath he could hear from that far away. “I’ll bet it’s been years for you, too. What, since you retired?”

  She looked at him over her shoulder with a glare that could melt pig iron. “That’s none of your business.”

  “You’re a beautiful woman, you’re powerful, you like sex. You could have any man—or woman—you want, but you’ve been with me for weeks getting nothing. Why? I’m not that fascinating, Cassandra. I’m just a guy who works in a steel mill on the weekends and spends the rest of the week on the Lord’s Payroll, which is more trouble than it’s worth most days.”

  Her mouth tightened. “You’re a novelty to me.”

  “A novelty who needs you.”

  Her nostrils flared. “For sex,” she spat. “Because you’re a forty-four-year-old man who doesn’t know shit about it and you love bad girls and you’re curious and you want me to teach you what I know. You want to know what it’s like to really fuck a strong, healthy woman who loves sex and knows what she’s doing—and fuck her hard without all that procreation and morality bullshit getting in the way.”

  “So what if I do?” he returned. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, but that’s all you want and you’re too fucking naïve not to fall in love to give yourself permission to take it.”

  “Give me one year, Cassandra. I want to prove to you it’s more than sex, and if I haven’t done that in a year, we can part company, no strings attached.”

  “What would your parishioners think?” she sneered.

  “I don’t care what they think!” he bellowed. “This is my life, not theirs. I only care what the Lord thinks.”

  “And oh, the Lord’s okay with you marrying me just to have sex with me? That’s just a new spin on the old fornication racket.”

  “Don’t you put that on me. I am not the one marrying just to have sex. Yeah, I gotta get married to have sex, but if that’s all I wanted, I wouldn’t have asked you to dinner to begin with.”

  “Then what else could you possibly need me for?”

  Her screech resonated within him, but only served to confuse him further. “Cassandra, I like you. I can talk to you. I have fun with you. I’m a loner by nature and I’ve never really been lonely. I haven’t felt truly lonely since before Mina was bedridden. But I count the days until we’re together, and I call you every day just to hear your voice because if I don’t— You taught me what lonely feels like.”

  She blinked, as if that were a foreign concept.

  “It’s not like I couldn’t have beautiful women stacked from here to Manhattan if I wanted them and every one of them willing to marry me for various and sundry reasons, none of which would include love and very few of which would include sex. And don’t think that I’m excluding members of the Church, either. There are plenty of women who’ve tried to get my attention. They have no idea I have a life outside of church, what kind of women I have to choose from and how many, and they would never think I’d remarry outside the Church.”

  She stared at him, then bowed her head and pressed her fist to her nose. He couldn’t see any tears from where he stood, but that didn’t mean anything. He forged on.

  “I have plenty of opportunity, Cassandra, and I have ever since I rebuilt the mill, even when Mina was alive. None of them interested me. You do. Why do I need you other than sexually? I can’t articulate it, but when I think of you, sex isn’t what comes to mind first and since we’re not having any, it should be the first thing that comes to mind. I said it before and I’ll say it again. I want you in bed. I need you in my life. I don’t know how else to say it; I don’t know what words you want me to use.”

  Still looking at the ground, she flung her fist through the air in resignation. “Fine,” she muttered, just loud enough so he could hear. “Lie to yourself like you lie to everybody else. I don’t give a shit. Go take a shower and get in bed before you collapse.”

  He hid his smile. “Will you be here when I wake up?”

  “Well, I can’t go back to work now,” she said with a sullen sniffle. “Jack would want to know why my indefinite service to you had been so short and definite, and I’d hate to have to tell him you have a premature ejaculation problem—which I’m sure you do.”

  Mitch burst out laughing and went around the car to approach her, but she put up a hand. “Don’t. I can smell you from here. And while you’re sleeping, I’ll make wedding plans that’ll bankrupt you.”
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  He ignored her command and dropped an arm around her shoulder to guide her into the house. She still wouldn’t look at him. “Actually,” he began benignly as he pulled her through the front door, “what you should do is take a shower because you smell like rancid cheeseburgers and baby pee.”

  * * * * *

  The Last Temptation

  Trevor was shocked to see me in the kitchen when he came in the house late that afternoon. I didn’t know if he’d gone to school today, but I didn’t suppose he would have.

  “Is that bread I smell?” he asked, sniffing the air.

  “Yes.”

  “You make bread?” I nodded hesitantly and he cocked his head at me. “No shit? That’s awesome!”

  Surely, the boy had lost his mind. My girls thought it terribly plebeian of me, but I never cared what they thought about it; I hadn’t stopped baking each day’s bread until it was no longer necessary. I didn’t know why I’d done it today, except the ingredients were there and I was bored. “Why?”

  He plunked himself down at the granite bar top of the massive kitchen island and took the fresh-baked bread I gave him with great anticipation. I handed him the butter, too, and he proceeded to inhale nearly a whole loaf with a pound of butter without bothering to answer me.

  I watched his face as he ate and I thought if a teenage boy could orgasm over food, Trevor would have done so quite a few times through that loaf. I couldn’t help my smile, though I tried. Such a simple thing, to make bread, and such a disproportionate reaction to it— I felt a...something...trickle through me that both pleased and frightened me. I didn’t know what it was and I had no experience dealing with children who didn’t demand the utmost in sophistication every moment of every day.

  He licked his fingers with his eyes closed and sighed, “Cassie, marry me. Forget the sex. I’d sell my soul for this.”

  I had to laugh at that; this family’s priorities were like nothing I had ever encountered before.

  “Spoken for,” I said after a moment. He opened his eyes. “I need to get my girls out here to meet you.”

  “Uh, does that mean...”

  “Yeah,” I said wryly. “Couldn’t help myself, especially after your pointed little lecture.”

  “You asked him?” I shrugged, and he laughed. “Shit, that’s awesome. You’ll have to meet my sisters.” Oh. Them. The good girls. Some of my sudden good cheer left as fast as it had come on. “They’ll love you,” Trevor went on, apparently oblivious to my distress. “Bread. What else do you do?”

  Nothing that wouldn’t have embarrassed Gordon and my kids to death if someone figured out why I was doing it.

  “Um, well,” I ventured slowly, not knowing, not understanding—again—a culture that would breed a seventeen-year-old boy to think homemade bread was “awesome,” and I was unwilling to face even the smallest amount of ridicule for my more domestic interests. “I did it all,” I finally admitted. “I could’ve taught Martha Stewart a thing or two.”

  “I guess my mom did all that before she got so tired.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  “I miss not knowing the one my sisters knew. I miss having a mother, if that counts. My friends at church—their moms are really cool. I like going to their houses. It’s always so noisy and... I don’t know. Like a home.”

  I sighed and a dull throbbing behind my sternum started up. I cleared my throat. “How are Johnny and Kathy’s kids?”

  He broke off another piece of bread, spread it with butter, and chewed while he talked. “Don’t know. Kathy came home with the little kids right after I got the oldest ones off to school, but they wouldn’t go to sleep, all screaming and crying for their mama. Kathy wanted me to stay, but I said no way and she got pissed at me. I had to get out of there.”

  I actually agreed with Kathy’s position and my expression must have betrayed that, because he shrugged.

  “Look, Cassie, I’m seventeen, I’m a dude, I’ve just spent the night in a house full of kids, the oldest of which is a fifteen-year-old girl who decides to run around the house in her Daisy Dukes to see if I want to play. Then when that doesn’t work—I told her to go put some clothes on and go to bed—she decides she’s going to tell everybody about all these horrible rotten things I did to her and get me in trouble if I don’t have sex with her.

  “And so when that doesn’t work, she starts crying and begging forgiveness and asks me if I’ll just take her to school so she can show me off to her friends— And I’m gonna let myself get snookered right into jail for being a perv and then get my name slotted onto the sex offender registry? I think not. I called Decker and made him send someone else—someone female, ’cause I sure as hell wasn’t going to ruin my life for doing what my foreman told me to do to help someone out during their family crisis.”

  That made perfect sense and I hastily revised my disapproval of him for leaving Kathy alone. It struck me then: I had thought nothing of it when Mitch had told me Trevor had spent the night with those children.

  “So you did go to school today?”

  “Had to, ’cause Peggy—the fifteen-year-old—” I nodded “—was already starting to run her mouth about what I touched where and with what, which I knew she’d do. Passive-aggressive little bitch. I went to the principal first thing and let him know what happened and why so I didn’t have cops all over me by third hour. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my dad, it’s how to cover my ass.”

  And if that didn’t work, I was sure I could bribe Olivia to don her kickboxing gear and drop in on the girl to deliver a scolding she’d never forget.

  “And your girlfriend?”

  He waved a hand. “Eh, she’s twenty, junior at Lehigh Univer—” His eyes narrowed at me. “Oh. I bet you know about that.”

  I bit my lip to keep from cracking a smile.

  “Har. Har. Har.”

  “I’d think Peggy would be more concerned about her dad than her Daisy Dukes.”

  He sighed. “They don’t know yet. They think he’s in the hospital for observation.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I sure as shit wasn’t going to tell them.”

  “I hear excessive cursing leads to premarital sex.”

  Trevor stared at me for a split second before he began to laugh, then choked on his bread.

  “I told him that,” drawled the deeper version of Trevor’s voice from the door of the kitchen. I turned and saw Mitch in a green bathrobe, leaning against the threshold of the kitchen with his arms folded across his chest. I wondered what he’d do if I went to him and untied it, pushed it off his shoulders, and put my mouth to his throat. Got on my knees in front of him. My heart thumped hard behind my breast. “But he didn’t buy it. His idol trained him too well.”

  That pulled me from my salacious thoughts and made me chuckle. The idea of Sebastian Taight and Mitch Hollander being best friends had never been more oxymoronic to me than now, now that I knew Mitch, had watched him tend his flock and his employees.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “You going out tonight, Son?”

  “Damn straight. It’s my day off, it’s Valentine’s Day, and I have a hot date with a hot twenty-year-old. Don’t wait up or anything.” Mitch growled in response as Trevor stood and brushed the crumbs off his hands.

  “I feel obliged to ask,” I said. “You are using condoms, no?”

  Trevor gaped at me, thoroughly offended. “Uh, yeah.”

  “I gave him the lecture,” Mitch grumbled so disconsolately I had to laugh. “The last thing he needs at this age is a child. Or a disease.”

  “Oh, hell no,” Trevor agreed. “Okay, I’m going to bed. Night, Dad.”

  “Night. Love you, Kid.”

  “Love you, too, Dad. Thanks for the bread, Cassie,” he called as he strode out of the room.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, but he’d gone by then, his long legs eating up the floor between the kitchen and the massive foyer, then to the staircase. The sound of his footsteps recede
d and I looked Mitch square in the eye and said, “I suggest you go put some other clothes on before I forget you’re a nice boy and test the limits of your self-control. And since we are both clean and I’m spayed, we don’t need condoms.”

  He smirked but turned to do as I said, which was just as well. I hadn’t been joking.

  I set two places for us at the island bar then went to the stove and stirred the perfect cold-weather soup, one I love, but hadn’t made once I no longer needed to.

  Shit, Cassie, poor people food again?

  I didn’t know why I’d made it today, but Trevor’s reaction to my bread had bolstered my courage to actually serve it instead of throwing it out. Still, I could feel the minuscule trembles as I awaited Mitch, awaited his reaction.

  What I got was not what I expected. He came back in tight worn jeans that showed every ridge of his musculature and emphasized his cock—although I didn’t know if he’d done that on purpose. Over that, he wore a white sweatshirt that made his hair lighter blond and downplayed the faint reddish tones, but made his eyes a deeper blue. Looking at him was all it took to make me tingle, and now he came at me with a determined stride.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day, Cassandra,” he murmured just before his lips touched mine.

  I sighed into his mouth when he kissed me, his right arm around me so his big hand could span my buttocks and pull my body into him. He cupped my jaw with his left hand then slid his fingers into my hair.

  And oh, the man could kiss. Whatever deficiencies he might yet reveal in bed, this was not one of them. He kissed with the passion of a man long denied, waiting for someone special to bestow it upon, and the thought made me melt into him, wrap my arms around his waist. I slid one hand up under his sweatshirt and tee shirt, and one down into his jeans and boxers. His skin was warm, taut, and velvety.

  His kiss deepened as I caressed him, and his arousal pressed between us, hard and urgent. Somewhere in the middle of wondering how he could be that disciplined, I stopped thinking about anything but what he did to me with just a kiss, the simple connection of mouth to mouth and the slide of tongue on tongue.