1985: Careless Whisper (Love in the 80s #6)

by Misty Provencher

  “You really picked yourself a spaz,” Paul says as he walks into the kitchen. James chuckles.

  “Both of you can get bent,” I say turning now to narrow my eyes on James. “You didn’t have to act like that.”

  “Me?” James chuckles again, laying a dramatic hand on his chest. “I just saved him from having his jaw wired shut by keeping my mouth full. You shouldn’t let that guy—”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “Whatever,” James says coolly, leaning back in his chair with a sigh. “All I’m saying is that you can do better than that guy, Grace.”

  “I could say the same about you,” I half-whisper across the table.

  James’s eyes meet me dully in the middle. He doesn’t deny or agree, he just meets my gaze.

  “Almost anybody would be better than Emilio,” Paul interjects, lazily waving a mug in James’s direction. “Like my brother, here.”

  “Shut up, Paul,” James says. “I think I’ve had enough of you for a life time.”

  “I only kissed her,” Paul says, jabbing the mug in my direction now. “I told you that!”

  “You did,” James says as his eyes roll back to me.

  Oh, I see where this is going. James Stryker thinks he’s still the king of always getting his way, the scheming son of a bitch. He wanted to talk before about what happened those weeks before I left for New York and now he’s going to use what happened with Paul to push the envelope.

  No matter how uninterested Paul seems, turning to load up his coffee with cream and sugar, I would bet he’s in on James’s scheme too.

  “You want to talk about everything?” I growl, standing up from my seat.

  Paul takes his coffee and scoots toward the basement stairs. He opens the door, stepping down on the landing as the sound of Keanu’s happy squeals and Sheri’s baby talk floats up, into the kitchen as if we’re sitting on a desert island. “I’ll just be downstairs in the zoo,” he says as he closes the door behind him.

  “Well, come on then, James.” I motion to the living room. “You wanted to talk to me? Then let’s go talk.”

  “You say ‘talk’ like you’re going to rip off my head and shit down my neck,” James says with a smirk, as I shovel Paul’s crap off the couch and onto the floor.

  “You’ve been accusing me and Paul of something we didn’t do,” I say. “You deserve everything you get.”

  James sits down beside me, facing me, his knee bent toward mine and his arm reaching across the back of the couch. The full zip roars through me, jangling my nerves like alarm bells. That is what we used to have, I remind myself, but as I sit blinking at him, God, I remember it so clearly.

  There’s that thick lower lip of his that I used to pull between my teeth, and I rub my fingertips together absently, recalling the coarse feel of his hair when I threaded my hands through it. This must be what people talk about when they say someone is unforgettable. It’s not that I’m lusting after James—we’ve both found new people—it’s just that I remember every vision and touch and taste and smell and sound of him and those send me straight to the memory of how I used to feel about him. The zip burns a white-hot line through my stomach.

  Why am I doing this to myself? I’ve got a great boyfriend…who’s looked nothing but lackluster beside James in the last three days. We’ve got four more days to go, and I’m sitting here remembering how I used to pluck daisy petals for James when I should be worrying about how Emilio left

  .

  Maybe these feelings are hitting me so hard because things never got resolved with James. I found out about him and Lisa, and then I left and never looked back. That’s got to be it.

  And here he sits, trying to shift the blame of what he did to one, lousy drunken kiss I had with Paul.

  “I’m glad you’re ready to talk about what happened,” he says. “It’s been seven years and I think we can both let go of it now. I’m ready to hear it. Why did you go to Paul?” His chin is tipped back slightly, as if he’s bracing for me to deliver a punch to his gut.

  But I lean back, screwing up my face. “I didn’t go to Paul. It happened just like you already heard. But, I’m glad you’re so condescending.”

  “What do you mean?” He squints with a tip of his head. “I wasn’t trying to be—”

  “You need to hear it all over again? Fine.” I snort. “I kissed Paul while I was drunk, I guess. He gave me a ride home because he knew you would kill me, and I was drunk enough to think he was you. That’s—”

  “You thought he was me.” James voice dips to that sexy, old timbre that calls to me like a siren. I cross my arms over my chest and dig my fingernails into my ribs to battle it. James wipes a hand down his face, regaining himself. “So what happened after you kissed him?”

  I don’t even hear that last question. My mind races back to how I used to think of James and what I would’ve done to any man that I thought was him. It’s the first time I’ve ever considered that anything else could’ve happened, despite what Paul told me. Maybe they didn’t talk for seven years for better reasons that I can even recall.

  James was my first—a slow shucking of my virginity that happened under the stars, in a soft sleeping bag that smelled of Marlboro’s, behind the elementary down the street. It doesn’t sound very romantic, but it was.

  James asked me if I was scared and I said, “A little.”

  “Me too,” he’d said, and his eyelids kind of pinched down as he told me, “Nobody else knows now, but you. I’m a virgin too.”

  He was so serious—I’ll never forget how his words vibrated all through me and I knew without any doubt that my neighborhood bad boy, who ran from cops and smoked Marlboro’s and drank his mother’s wine, was telling me the absolute truth. We’d been together forever and despite the girls who popped up occasionally to challenge my faith in James, I believed with all my heart that he was never anyone else’s but mine. I’d never felt closer to James—or anyone in the entire universe—including to the present date.

  “I’ll try not to hurt you,” I said and we both laughed.

  We laid down together, feeling over each other’s clothes in the darkness. The button on the waistband of his jeans was nubby, the zipper sharp. James kissed me in such a lazy way, I was convinced that he felt there was nothing else worth doing in the entire world. He peeled up my shirt and I arched my back so he could pull it over my head. I was his entire focus, with the concentrated sensation of his tongue in my mouth. I told him out loud that I loved him and even though I told him before, it meant more that night.

  He stopped kissing me then, pulling away to tell me he loved me, even if I decided I didn’t want to do what we were about to do. I said he was a liar and when he made like he was going to wiggle out of the bag, I pulled him back against me and kissed him so long and slow, I wanted it to stop the earth from spinning.

  And I knew he loved me.

  I stroked my hand down his body. He was so hard beneath his jeans then. He ran his hands over my chest and between my legs, removing my jeans and panties like it was a sacrament. Once we were both naked and warm, lying against each other’s skin, the entire length of James’s body rippled like a wave of heat against me. I finally knew the very last secret of him, of exactly how much he wanted me, and I wanted to make him mine completely.

  He fumbled with the condom and we had to throw the first one out on the ground, like a wad of gum, and start over.

  When James was finally suspended over me, leaning on his elbows, with the length of him pressing between my thighs, he whispered in my ear, I don’t want to hurt you. Tell me to stop if I’m hurting you.

  I spread wider, sure that James, of all people in the world, would never hurt me.

  I bit him when he finally pushed inside me. It was a good thing he came so fast, because although that bite still ended up leaving a half-moon scar on his left shoulder, I would’ve taken a bigger chunk out of him if he’d kept going.

  We laid there, out of breath from our fifteen-se
cond first time, and James rolled over and kissed me.

  “I’m going to marry you someday,” he said. “Promise me you’ll never marry anybody else but me.”

  Of course I promised. He was the love of my life.

  And I still lost him.

  James taps my knee and I blink back to him, beside me, facing me, on the couch.

  “You said you thought he was me, Grace,” he prompts and for the first time, I see a rawness in his eyes. I’ve avoided getting to this level with him for seven years, assuming I’d be the one with my heart stripped to the veins, but here he is, with a tidal wave of pain crashing down all around him. For the first time ever, I not only understand why James might have done what he did with Lisa, but I feel it. I destroyed him. I watch the tiniest quiver vibrate through his lips as he says, “I just want to know what happened.”

  “It was a stupid kiss,” I say. “That’s it. Paul came over the next day and told me that we kissed. Nothing else happened.”

  A dark curtain falls down inside James’s eyes and his brows knit in the center as if he’s angry or confused, I’m not sure which. I wonder if he’s going to want the details—who kissed who first, if I liked it, if I wanted more—the details that I have no recollection of.

  But instead, I’m met with his somber tone. “You can tell me the truth,” he says.

  “I know I can, and I am. I had to have thought it was you—you know I never would’ve kissed Paul on purpose.” I screw up my face just thinking of it. It still grosses me out. Paul was never anything to me but the little brother I never had, but inherited through James. Maybe that’s why it didn’t go further than a kiss. Maybe, even in my most drunk state, our kiss was revolting because I detected Paul in it. There was no sign of any other foul play the next day, so I still have to believe that, even drunk, I came to my senses immediately after the kiss. That’s what Paul had said and I have to believe it, for my own sanity.

  James’s face remains stoic and weird as the back door wafts open and slams shut.

  Whomp whomp whomp. Lisa’s bratty kid dribbles his basketball on the landing.

  “Hey!” I shout. “Don’t bounce that ball in the—”

  Crash.

  “Sweet cheezits, kid! Haven’t you guys busted up enough of my stuff?” I shout as I enter the kitchen and see the fan of ceramic shards from Gada’s Honey Bee cookie jar spreading across the counter and the cookie guts all over the kitchen floor.

  The basketball rolls lazily down the counter, its work done, and drops into the sink with a heavy plomp.

  Alabama, the little, Italian-boy version of Lisa, plants his pudgy hands on his thighs. “I didn’t mean ta do it,” he says.

  “I don’t care what you meant,” I tell him even as a herd of footsteps clomp up the basement stairs.

  Lisa pops into the kitchen first, baby on her hip, Winter attached by a fistful of her mom’s shirt, but trailing a stumbling step behind.

  First thing out of Lisa’s mouth is, “Don’t yell at my kid!”

  “Then tell your kid to quit breaking everything in my house!” I fire back.

  “Chill out, Jones. He’s just a little kid,” Paul adds with a softness that seems more James-like than Paul-like.

  “Your kids should be more respectful than to keep bouncing a basketball around somebody else’s house,” James puts in.

  Sheri pops up from the landing and slides past Lisa to skitter James’s side. Once there, she lifts his arm and squeezes herself beneath. How did he pick somebody so needy? Then again, he hardly seems to notice her as he surveys the damage.

  Lisa’s gaze hits the shards, jar contents, and remaining dust of what was the cookie jar on the counter. The basketball hit the helpless Honey Bee dead center and exploded it. I can’t even make out the bee’s head, with its thin smile stretched between two red cheek dots. The little sign the bee held that read, For my Honey! is undecipherable in the heap of tiny pieces. I can’t even make out any letters.

  Lisa’s attention moves to the floor and the sharp pieces and cookie bits, and eventually she locates the basketball in the sink. As it soaks in that the stupid cookie jar is gone forever—the best glue in the world could only make a pinch pot of it now—Lisa’s eyes well up just like mine do.

  That Honey Bee wasn’t just a cookie jar.

  That hollow bee sat in the same corner on Gada’s counter all of my life. It also held different things at different times. In the summers before Lisa, Eve, and I even had enough boobs to pour into our little bikinis, the ice cream truck would come jingling down the block, and we’d run through the house screaming for Gada, asking if she would buy us some. She did. Every single time.

  “Get three dollars from the jar!” she’d yell back. And every time, she’d remind us, “Be careful with the lid! I made that jar myself!”

  In the winter, The Band would gather at Gada’s house, after riotous snowball fights through the neighborhood. Gada would make us hot chocolate in a big pot on the stove and pass the cookie jar around the table. Usually, she had butter cookies and sometimes they even had a drop of strawberry jelly in the middle that made them all stick together. You couldn’t pull out just one—which was fine with all of us.

  When we got older, the jar reverted back, in the summer, to holding change that Gada used to pay us for washing her car, wheel barrowing something around the back yard, or dragging in her groceries. Gada always found something for each of us to do on Saturdays, so that after we were paid, we would walk up to the corner drug store and buy candy bars and cheap makeup. I got my first case of pinkeye from Evelyn’s charcoal, melt-it-with-a-hairdryer-before-applying pencil liner. James always got a pack of Reese’s peanut butter cups, one for me and one for him, and I would buy a can of Tab to share.

  We were all sentimental about that jar, which really, represented what Gada was and what she thought of all of us.

  “Alabama, you say you’re sorry right now,” Lisa tells her son.

  He gapes at her. “I didn’t do it on purpose!”

  “Say you are sorry, right now, Alabama Ulysses Russo.” Lisa’s glare breaks him down like a soggy box which is bad enough, but then she went and pulled out his whole name. I think we’re all sorry for him now.

  But, to his credit, Alabama Ulysses Russo drops his hands to his sides and mutters his tight-lipped apology from the corner of his mouth. Oh, this kid is as feisty as his mama always was, and with a name like his, somebody’s got to go easy on him. His olive skin turns three shades darker and my heart melts a little. I don’t want to see that raging little spirit of his broken.

  “Accidents happen,” I say. He glances up at me.

  “It wasn’t on purpose,” he mumbles again and I can’t help but think, good for you, kid.

  “You’re going to help me clean this up,” Lisa tells him.

  It’s the first time Sheri untangles from James, clapping like a seal for baby Keanu, but with one quick motion, Lisa pushes the baby into Paul’s arms. And he’s every bit as awkward as he was the first time, the baby staring at him, and him staring at the baby, as if neither of them sure about this situation that Lisa’s put them in.

  “You’re a really…wet baby, aren’t you?” Paul says, bouncing Keanu in his arms. The baby’s face is slick with spit and snot, but his eyes are rooted on Paul’s face like he’s memorizing him for a police line-up. After a few minutes of the relentless bouncing, however, the baby actually relaxes into the crook of Paul’s arm and stuffs the better part of his fist into his mouth as he wholly dismisses the oaf that is holding him. Paul grins at me, like look what I did.

  “Hey, Winter,” Sheri coaxes, the pitch of her voice enough to make dogs howl, “wanna come paint your nails with me while they clean up?”

  Sheri slaps the side of her own thigh as if she’s calling a puppy as she hops out of the kitchen toward the den. Winter shakes her head so violently, all three pigtails dance. Lisa ignores the whole exchange, but the way she gets the dustpan, with Winter tripping her up on
every step, I can tell that Lisa doesn’t really like Sheri either. I guess we’re still on the same page about some things.

  I rip a couple sheets of paper towel off the roll hanging beneath the cupboard and use it to sweep the tiny shards into a pile. Alabama, on his knees, is trying to separate out the cookies and coins and bits of paper from the broken jar pieces.

  “Watch your fingers,” Lisa warns. “The pieces are sharp. And, by the way, you are not eating any of those cookies.”

  “Maaaahhhmm,” Alabama whines, but I can’t tell if he’s upset that Lisa feels she needs to warn him, or because he’s not getting the ruined cookies.

  “Be careful,” James says, standing at the sink now, and handing me a damp wash rag. “Use this instead. Those pieces are sharp.”

  I take the rag from him and our hands touch, the water seeming to conduct the old electricity between us. I glance out the back window guiltily, as if Emilio’s going to catch me brushing knuckles with James.

  This is ridiculous.

  Eve finally turns up in the kitchen. “Oh no,” she sighs sadly, “not Gada’s Honey Bee.”

  “Yup. Implosion,” I say in a coroner’s voice. “Total phenomena. Ripley’s Believe It or Not is already on the way with cameras ready.”

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” Alabama grumbles, squatting over the forbidden pile of cookie jar treasures. He smoothes out a strip of paper, holding it up for Lisa to read. “What’s this say?”

  Lisa squints at it. “It’s Gada’s writing,” she says.

  I squat down beside Doctor Destructo and try to read the scrawl from over his shoulder. Gada’s handwriting had gotten worse and worse over the years, but on this little folded paper, the beautiful loopy letters she used to make were completely jagged and nearly illegible.

  “Does that say, I can’t remember?” Lisa asks me.

  “I think so.” I squint a little harder. “Is it, I can’t remember where I put the King Dings? And that word…is it funeral?”