by Emily Bishop
“Eric!” My voice was just a gasp. My orgasm pummeled through me, caught me by surprise, and I came beneath his lips. He pulled back, worked himself, and squirted hot cum over my belly, eyes shut, his jaw tense.
He was such a beast, so damn strong.
He cleaned me with his shirt, then we collapsed in the back seat after it was over, my head upon his chest.
Just before I drifted off to sleep, he whispered, “Baby, we have to get back. We have to take care of our worlds.”
Our worlds. Our children.
I nodded, rubbing my hand into my eye and drawing back bits of black eyeliner. I maneuvered myself into the front seat, and I watched as he dressed slowly, dotting a kiss on my lips and dragging a spare shirt out of a bag under the passenger seat.
The air was heavy with promise. We had to wait for it, now, like we’d waited for everything else. And we would have the strength to handle it.
Chapter 11
Eric
Twelve Years Earlier
Spring sunlight beamed on my shoulders. I shrugged the leather jacket from my arms and slung it across my motorbike, placing a cigarette between my lips. On the left side of my cheek, the bruise pained, a reminder of the fight two nights before: my dad storming in from the bar, his eyes hungry with anger. “Give me that fucking remote,” he’d yelled.
Such a ridiculous sentence. Fuck, he made me boil.
I’d flung it across the room, and it’d cracked against his eyebrow. Jesus, how I’d loved that little river of blood that eased down his cheek. I hadn’t been able to hurt him until I’d been fifteen, sixteen, and he’d been too drunk and fat to keep balance. It was an unfair fight. But wasn’t everything, between us?
My gaze flickered across the crowd of students as they streamed out from the doors at 3 p.m. I’d cut out of seventh period, lurking between the school and the gas station and eating crackers and chips, my stomach hollow. A few nights before, I’d ducked out beneath Olivia’s window, whispering for her. And she appeared, her eyes bright and peering down on me like double moons. “What is it, Eric?” she asked, her voice wispy with slumber. “Do you need to sleep here tonight?”
No, beautiful. I just wanted to see your face. I wanted to feel my cock throb with need for you. I wanted to imagine what it would be like to grip your cheeks with my hands, to bring your lips against mine, to love you with everything I have.
“Naw, I just thought I heard something happening over here,” I’d said instead, my eyes mock-searching behind her in the dark. “Your dad, he isn’t yelling at you, is he? You know I’ll teach him a lesson.”
Olivia chuckled slightly. “He’d only yell at me if he knew we were friends, Eric. You know that.”
“And he still hasn’t found out?” I asked. “I mean, we’ve been careful. But shit gets out in a small town like this.”
Olivia reached out, pressing her slim finger against my nose. Sometimes, it was like we’d known one another for so long our bodies recognized one another as their own. Like our cells were inclusionary.
“Get some sleep, Eric,” she’d sighed. “I know you’re gonna need it. That science test tomorrow. Promise you won’t miss it?”
No. I don’t promise that. And I also can’t promise I won’t want you. That I won’t dream sickly sweet dreams about your pussy dripping against my hand. That I won’t envision we could race off from this fucking junk town and build our own life somewhere else—away from your father and mine.
But instead, I’d said okay. I’d said. Fine.
I snapped back to the here and now, just as she appeared in the crowd. God, she was beautiful.
Olivia darted from the side door alongside a friend, a blonde twig-like thing named Cynthia. Their ponytails danced through the air, and they spoke conspiratorially, their eyes searching one another’s for clues. I puffed at my cigarette, ducking behind a pole and pretending to look at anything else. I wanted to alert Olivia. To take her away with me. Just to feel that finger on my skin again.
Conner Cook, blond, saggy cheeks—just some kid from my math class—beelined toward me in the parking lot. His shoulders were slight, like a child’s, and his belly bulged a bit over his belt, his cargo shorts looking vaguely dad-like. He dressed like an eleven-year-old and a forty-year-old at the same time. I shifted my focus away, hoping he would duck into a car.
“Hey! Hey! Eric? Hey!”
My gaze flickered toward him, lazy. Slipping another cigarette between my lips, I lifted a single eyebrow and shrugged. “What the hell is it, Conner?”
We hadn’t spoken in months, and we certainly weren’t friends. I knew the kid had a sparse list of people who’d even look at him twice. That I’d paid attention to him maybe three times too many, which put me on a list of “good guys,” despite the anger in my fucking heart.
Wasn’t like I was a Boy Scout, like this kid. Not a jock. Not a mathlete. Jesus, I had nine toes out of high school already—was counting pennies in my piggy bank to duck the hell out of Randall as soon as I could.
“Sorry, man. I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” Conner chirped. But he took the answer as an okay to approach even further, until he was practically leaning his body against my bike. “But listen, I just heard something super weird. Something I figured you’d want to know about.”
People didn’t tend to gossip with me. I was a silent force in the back of the classroom. I’d never been to a fucking school dance, never lifted a finger to cheer for a basketball game. Once, I’d smoked pot behind the school while the gymnastics team had won state finals—a squad of onlookers parading past me, cheering, crying that Randall was the best town in the world. I’d blinked at them, bleary-eyed, like I was underwater while Randall marched on without me.
“That’s a strange thing to start with. But what the hell, Conner. I’m in a good mood today. What do you got for me?” I asked. “Waiting. Hungry and waiting.”
Conner moved his face a bit closer. “I heard from Cynthia that Olivia’s agreed to go out with someone for the carnival dance next week.”
It was as if a knife had slid through my chest. My face grew lax. I kept my voice low, not wanting to give anything away. “And what the hell makes you think I give a fuck about Olivia Thames?” I asked him. Had we not hidden our friendship well enough? How did Conner Cook know the weight of my feelings for this girl?
“Dude, I’ve seen you guys together,” Conner said, rolling his eyes slightly—with the arrogance of a much more popular kid. “I only live a few streets away, and sometimes I see you guys out on that bike after it gets dark. I know it’s her, because of that pretty ponytail flying out behind you. Where do you go, anyway?”
“It’s not like we’re a couple,” I said, hating that I was losing ground. I ducked toward him, lowering my nose. “And if you tell anyone we’re friends, I’ll fucking destroy you. If her father finds out, he’ll tear me apart. That guy has more power in this town than the mayor.”
“I know. I know,” Conner said, flailing his hands in front of his face.
Stepping back, I assessed him. “So. Who is she going with, anyway? To the carnival?”
“Oh, I’m sure she’ll tell you…” Conner said, strumming his foot against the pavement. It was clear he regretted our entire conversation.
“Out with it, Conner,” I said, billowing smoke toward his face. “Come on. Quit wasting my time.”
“Fine. Fine,” Conner sputtered. “It’s Freddy.”
The name stung my ears. A dull roar started up. I swallowed hard, anger slipping out of my grip.
I banged my fist against the top of the motorbike.
“Why the fuck would she go out with him?” I demanded, my voice low.
Freddy was the captain of the football team, the perfect, All-American jock—and the antithesis of me. He was the calendar-boy her daddy would pick out for her. The essential man to bolt a bit of all-American sperm into her body. To force her to raise his hollow-minded, meatloaf-eating sons into similar jocks.
&nb
sp; Conner shrugged, stringing his little fingers through his hair. “Dude, I don’t know. I guess Freddy thought she’d be the hardest to get, you know? And she is the hottest girl in school. I mean, she doesn’t have the tits of Tessa but she’s got this little energy to her, you know? Man, I’d do anything—”
“Stop fucking talking right now, Conner,” I said, my hands drawing into fists.
I brought my leg over the top of the motorbike, revving the engine. Across the parking lot, both Olivia and Cynthia spun toward me, their ponytails flying. Betrayal dripped into every corner of my body.
How she’d reached out and tapped her finger atop my nose. Such a tenderness to being with her. Did other people sense that in her, as well?
I sped out from the parking lot, pushing my bike toward the little dive bar just a mile or so from my dad’s house. The bar was no more than a little shack, with Budweiser signs tagged on the outside of the crooked fence out back. I ducked into the shadow of the front porch, where the bartender, Marty, chugged beer and watched European soccer games. His cheeks sagged just beneath his ears, and his eyes were dead and grey, void of any emotion.
“The hell you want, kid?” he asked me, sizing me up.
He knew I wasn’t twenty-one. Had served me just once or twice before, when he’d seen a shiner my dad had given me. His question—why I didn’t just leave, get the fuck out of Randall already, before Isaac killed me—hadn’t been one I’d been able to answer outright. Not without talking about Olivia.
“I want a beer,” I told him, my lips drawing a thin, no-nonsense line across my face.
Marty shrugged toward the cooler near the television, grunting. “You know we don’t open till six. But sure, what the hell. They’re a dollar-fifty each. Take whatever you want. Just don’t fucking block the television.”
I drank one beer, forcing the chilly liquid down my throat, and then popped another one. Fumbling around the backyard, I kicked at the edges of picnic tables, my head spinning with questions about Olivia. What could I do? Tear over there, demand what the hell she thought we were to one another? Demand to know if she really saw herself with some scumbag like Freddy, the quarterback? Ask if she was going to have the life her daddy wanted for her?
Marty ducked out from the back porch, eyeing me as I seared through my fourth beer. The bar was growing crowded, inside, with assholes guzzling brews and telling one another stories about their old ladies, the ones they’d left back home alone.
“What the hell is wrong with you, kid?” Marty called to me.
I scrunched the empty can of beer in my fist and strutted toward him, eyeing the fifty-and sixty-and seventy-something men throughout the interior. Two greying, straggly men played a somber game of chess in the corner, their shoulders hunched. “Maybe I’m already like them,” I told Marty, my nostrils flared. “And what the hell is there to live for, if I’m already them?”
Marty brought his head toward me. When he spoke, his throat was heavy with the smell of cigarettes and unbrushed teeth. I made peace, inwardly, with becoming him. With rotting out from the inside.
“Man, if you can think of anything you can do not to become one of us, you gotta fucking do it,” Marty said. “Just fucking do it, man.”
One of the chess players turned his sagging face toward me, opening his mouth wide with a yawn. Again, I could count the clean teeth in his mouth on a single hand. I drew my tongue along the interior of my own, marveling at the weight of time—how we were given so much, and we squandered it.
“I gotta go,” I muttered, tapping a ten-dollar bill on the counter. “I gotta, just, I have to fucking go.”
I darted toward my motorbike, smelling the fresh grass beneath my feet. Spring always brought that heavy dew, as the night crested over. I steered the bike across the dirt roads, making my way slowly back toward my house. I wanted to dive beneath my comforter, lock my door. Think. Really think about what to do next.
But when I arrived back at the old homestead, the driveway was alight with red, blue, and white. The police hurried up the steps, and one brought his arm across the neck of my father. My father strained under the weight of that arm, trying to draw breath. I pulsed with strange emotions: of happiness—maybe, God, maybe they were finally taking him away—combined with a bizarre, animal instinct to protect him.
To the right, Olivia’s entire family stood in a line on their front porch, looking at my father like he was a carnival attraction. Anthony Thames’s face seemed alight with glee, eyes reflecting the lights form the police cars. He whispered into Olivia’s ear, surely telling here something like, “This is what that Eric Holzman would grow up into, don’t you see it? Don’t you understand why you can’t know him?”
Inner rage brewed in my chest. Striding forward, I screamed. “Get your hands off him!” My voice cut through the alarms and the screaming police car, until I was face-to-face with the three police officers. I was familiar with them. They were mainstays at our house, consistently steaming past to ensure my father hadn’t killed me or my mother. Not yet. But they looked at me like an enemy.
My hands clenched into fists.
“Son, you’d better get the hell back.” A cop pointed a finger at me, his arm still latched around my father’s neck. “If you know what’s good for you.”
My gaze flickered toward Olivia, on the porch. She’d drawn her hands over her mouth, her cheeks growing hard with panic. Something told me I had to show off for her. To tell her that I was fine, just fucking fine, in the wake of her decision to go with Freddy—that fucking muscular dead-head asshole—to the carnival.
“I’ll calm down if you get your hands off him!” I cried, yanking my elbow back behind me. I was poised to punch, now.
From the side, another officer moved toward me, his belly bouncing as he walked. He pushed me against the pole in our rickety front porch. He placed his finger against my upper chest, pressing hard. He shook his head, grunting at me.
“You fucking Holzmans. You’re all the same. Get the hell inside, or I’ll make sure you go to prison with your daddy for a very long time. I’d like to see you escape him then.”
The words were mangy. I stumbled back, took several steps toward my bike before whipping my leg over the side and looking toward Olivia on the porch. Tears screamed down her cheeks.
I’d wanted her to come with me. To become whatever my life could be, outside of Randall. But I’d have to wage this war alone. Revving the engine, I drove toward the far end of town, gasping for air and the wind drying out my teeth, my tongue. Only when I’d reached the outskirts of town, near the sour-smelling gas station that sold the apple pies, did I realize I’d been screaming the entire time.
Chapter 12
Olivia
Present Day
The letter arrived in the porch mailbox before I awoke at eight. The metal squeaked as it closed, as whoever had delivered it rushed from the porch and back into their vehicle. My eyes popped open, and my feet found the chill of the ground, gearing me toward the porch.
The letter had been scrawled in his handwriting, and the paper still smelled of him—a scent that still lingered on my skin after our lovemaking in his car the night before. I inhaled it, smiling.
Meet me at the barn today. Noon. The old one, between the trees. Our place. And bring our son.
That was all it read. I sighed.
This was our path to finding a route through this chaos. This would be how it started, at least.
Easing up the steps toward Max’s room, I nodded to myself. We hadn’t talked much last night, Eric and I, but it was clear he was determined to make this work and figure it out. And Max was desperate to meet his father and actually get to know him for real.
It was time.
I lifted my fist, rapped my knuckles against his door, calling in for him. “Max? Baby? Can you wake up, please?”
But the door opened far quicker than I expected. Black eyes peered from the crack, hopeful. When I’d arrived home from the date with Eric, Ma
x had stayed up for me, and he’d peppered me with questions I hadn’t been able to answer. “When am I going to see him again, Mom? When can we be a family?” Already, he’d latched his expectations onto this, and that made this even more difficult.
“What is it?” he asked, his voice raspy with sleep.
“Just get dressed, okay?” I told him, lifting my hand and rustling it against his hair. “We’re going to go for a drive.”
“We’re going to see him. Aren’t we?” Max asked, his eyes alight.
“Yes, baby. Get dressed.”
I returned to my room, my skin growing red with excitement.
I opened the closet doors, strummed my fingers along my line of dresses, of pretty items I hadn’t bothered to wear in my many years of being a single mother. “You never dress like you used to, Olivia,” my mother had often told me, throughout the past decade. “You never dress like that pretty little cheerleader you were, all those years ago. Don’t you remember how you spent forty-five minutes in the bathroom before school? Took you ten minutes to brush through your ponytail. And now you look…”
Like no woman who’d ever been wanted by a man? Was that what she was trying to say? The truth had always been that Max came first. I was in this situation because of the decision I’d made as a young woman, and I would own that. Focus all my heart and soul on the little boy I loved.
I lifted a light blue dress from the hanger and strung it over my head and shifted into it, gazing into the mirror. With a few light dashes, I brought makeup over my cheeks and lined my eyes with black.
In the hallway, Max cried out, “When are we leaving?”
“We aren’t going for a little while. Why don’t you go down and grab yourself a bowl of cereal, huh?”
A groan escaped his lips. But seconds later, his feet pattered over the stairs, and the familiar shuffling of the cereal box came. Cartoons blared from the television.
I buttoned up the dress and paced the bedroom, hungry for the day. It had been a long time since I’d felt such apprehension. I’d spent the past twelve years raising Max and working in the local library. Everything was about to change. It was on the fucking air.
