For the Love of a Lush (Lush No. 2)

by Selena Laurence

  "So you boys met our new kitchen help, Tammy. Tammy, these are the guys." She proceeds to point to each guy individually and tell Tammy his name. When she gets to me and Mike, she just skates over us with, "And Mike and Walsh of course."

  Then she adds, "Now, Tammy’s going to be working every lunch and dinner Mondays through Saturdays. I expect y’all to treat her with every bit of respect you do me, and if you don’t, you’ll be answering to me." She stares down every guy in the room, including me.

  What the fuck? I’m Tammy’s damn boyfriend. I don’t need Leanne to tell me how to treat her.

  The falseness of the thought hits me hard almost before it’s complete. I’m neither Tammy’s boyfriend nor someone who’s treated her right. I need to get that through my thick skull.

  Everyone mutters things like, "Welcome aboard," and Tammy gives them all a bright smile, purposely not looking at me or Mike, who’s still clearing his throat a lot and rubbing his hand over his face in an effort to conceal his barely contained mirth.

  "All right then," Leanne continues. "Y’all give thanks and get started. Ronny said he’s catching lunch in town while he picks up some new supplies that came in, but he’ll be back in time to help y’all out with the branding this afternoon."

  With that, she heads back to the kitchen and Tammy starts plating food while the guys line up to get their servings. I wait to be last in line, and when I get up to her, I give her a hard look that she works to ignore.

  "Corn or green beans?" she asks as if she hasn’t just blown my fucking world up.

  "What the hell are you doing?" I demand under my breath as she heaps food onto my plate.

  "Just my job," she replies cheerfully in a blatant effort to ignore the subtext of my question.

  "You cannot work here, Tammy," I growl in frustration.

  "Well, Leanne doesn’t seem to see it that way." She hands me my plate and smiles tightly.

  "This is not over," I warn her as I take the plate. "I’ll get Ronny and Leanne to make other arrangements. You’re going back to Portland on the next damn plane out of Dallas if I have to haul your ass to the airport myself."

  She stares at me, and I see the defiance. I’ve never really been an alpha kind of guy, and she’s not used to me telling her what to do, but dammit, she can’t continue this crap. We’re done, and she’s only making it harder on us both by refusing to accept it.

  "You do what you think you have to, Walsh, but I can live and work wherever I want. We’re over, remember? You have no right to try to tell me what to do."

  I feel the frustration rise up inside me, and I reach out and grab her wrist a little harder than I should. I hear her suck in a quick breath, but I pull her closer to me. "If you care about me at all, you’ll stop this. I can’t have you here. I can’t have you at all. I can only fight one vice at a time, Tammy. I won’t let you ruin both of our lives. I might have never done it in the past, but I’m putting my foot down on this one. Go. Home."

  I feel a hand on my arm. "Dude," Mike whispers next to my ear. "Everyone’s staring. Just let her do her job and you’ll work this out later, okay?"

  I take a deep breath, willing myself to calm down, and slowly release Tammy’s wrist. I see her rub it with her opposite hand, and now I’m so ashamed I can hardly look at her.

  "Sorry," I mutter to Mike. "I’m sorry, Tammy. Just… Just please don’t do this. Please." I look at her and see so many things flying through her eyes—anger, shock, pity, hesitation.

  "Come on," Mike urges.

  I finally look away from the woman who’s going to put me six feet under and see a whole tableful of cowboys watching me suspiciously. Mike and I go over to our seats, and someone starts off the grace we say before meals. I follow along, and when it’s done and we sit to eat, Tammy is gone.

  WHEN LUNCH ends, I’m still so agitated I could fucking hit someone. I storm out of the house, breaking all the rules and exiting through the front door so I don’t have to see Tammy in the kitchen. Mike doesn’t even try to follow me. I think for the first time in our lives he’s scared that I’ll take a swing at him. Even though he’s kind of a beast in the muscle department, I feel certain I’d take him right now. I’m so pissed that the adrenaline alone would carry me through. Two years ago, if I even got close to feeling like this, I would have had a drink—or five—and it would have gone away, muted and fogged over by alcohol. I don’t know how to cope with these kinds of feelings. I never have.

  I know Ronny’s not around, but I head to the barn anyway, taking a page from his book. I pace for a while then sit down on a stool and pull J.B. onto my lap, stroking her soft fur as I struggle with the flames that are burning through my chest. Does Tammy think I’m fucking made of steel? I’m hanging on by a thread here in the war with booze. There isn’t anything else to pull from. No reserves left to resist the draw of her. It’s like a tornado looming on the horizon and she refuses to see it. Goddamn stubborn-as-shit woman.

  I lean my head back against the wood wall of the barn. I can hear the cows lowing in the load-out pens across the compound and the guys whooping at the calves as they herd them into the branding line. J.B. has lain down on my lap and she’s purring. It’s soothing. It’s about the only thing that’s soothing in my world right now.

  I close my eyes and let my thoughts go. I think about the t-shirt Tammy was wearing today. It’s from this restaurant we always went to back in Portland. Just a pizza place, but with real Sicilian-style thick-crust pizza. I took her there the night we lost our virginity.

  My mind wanders back, remembering the first time I ever had sex. It was Tammy’s sixteenth birthday, and we had been skirting around the whole sex deal for months. She’d given me blowjobs because she was scared to do the deed, and I’d been pretty damn happy with that. It was the furthest I’d ever gotten with a girl, so I figured I was lucky. But then all of our friends started to give us shit.

  Mike had been banging a different girl every week since we’d started high school. Joss had dated Lucy Madison just long enough to get laid. Then she’d dumped him. All of Tammy’s friends said that they’d done it too. Here Tammy and I were, the ones who’d been dating for a year and a half, and we hadn’t popped our respective cherries yet.

  I’m sitting across from Tammy at Mario’s on a Friday night. She’s wearing this top that has little buttons up the front and a pair of jeans she’s worn a hundred times before, but for some reason, they look so much hotter tonight. My palms are sweating and I keep clearing my throat because I’m so nervous. Mike got his uncle Max to reserve me a room at the Holiday Inn on Spinden Road, and I’m going to ask Tammy to sleep with me tonight after dinner.

  We’ve talked about it lots of times, and she’s been scared, so I haven’t pushed. Really, I’m pretty fucking scared too. I mean, I’m afraid of hurting her. If she cries afterwards like Anita Gray did with my friend Mark, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m also worried I’ll pop off in about five seconds and make a fucking fool out of myself. Sometimes when she’s giving me a blowjob, I swear I don’t think I’ll make it past the first second her lips touch me. It feels so amazing that it’s all I can do to keep myself under control.

  I’ve never made her come though. I don’t know how to ask her what she wants or likes, so I finger her and I’ve even gone down on her, but it always ends up just being foreplay for the blowjobs she gives me. I want to make her happy, but I don’t know how. I really hope sex takes care of that and isn’t just another way for me to get my rocks off. It seems to me that, if she’s the one it’s going to hurt, she ought to get something good out of it too.

  Tammy finally finishes her enormous slice of sausage-and-mushroom pizza and looks up at me with those big brown eyes. God, I love her so much that sometimes it makes my chest ache. I wonder if that’s normal? I mean, I know a lot of people think we’re too young to know what love is, but there’s no way I could feel like this about her and call it anything but love. From the first time I ever laid eyes on her, I kn
ew I loved her. There wasn’t any question. It was like my whole life had been just leading to that moment. I’d spent fourteen years waiting for that first day of freshman algebra so that I could meet Tammy DiLorenzo.

  "You okay?" she asks me because I’ve been sitting here staring at her for five minutes without talking.

  "Yeah, sweetheart. Just thinking about the rest of your birthday present."

  She smiles at me, but it’s not a shy smile like some girls might give you. It’s a smile like the cat ate the canary. She knows I’m fucking whipped, and she can’t wait to see what else I’ve planned for her. Shit, I really hope she goes for it.

  "When do I get to have it?" she asks as I reach over and grab her hand across the table.

  "Let’s, uh… Let’s go out to the car and then I’ll tell you."

  Her brow furrows but quickly smooths out as she looks toward the door. "Oh! I want to get a jawbreaker on the way out too," she says excitedly.

  Yeah, the girl loves candy. It’s fine by me, because I get to kiss her and then she tastes sugary sweet all the time.

  I laugh and dig a quarter out of my pocket as we stand and head toward the door. "Here you go, birthday girl," I say as I lean down to her ear.

  She gives a little shiver and a giggle. I stand behind her and put my hands on her waist when she stops in front of the candy dispenser and concentrates on getting the quarter in the slot. I put my chin on her shoulder and watch her long, pretty fingers as they work the mechanism to dispense the golf-ball-sized chunk of sugar.

  "You have beautiful hands," I whisper into her ear as she reaches into the machine and extracts the jawbreaker.

  She leans her head back against me and looks at me out of the side of her eye. "How can someone have beautiful hands?" she asks, laughing.

  I kiss the side of her neck, relishing the scent of her shampoo—it’s apple, I think. "Some people—you for instance—just do," I answer before I reach down for her hand and lead her to the door.

  We drive to the Holiday Inn, and I don’t tell Tammy what we’re doing. I try to play it off like I’ve got some big surprise for her, but really, I’m terrified that she’ll shoot me down.

  When we finally pull up in the parking lot, she says, "Walsh, what are we doing here?" I can hear the tremor in her voice. She knows what’s up.

  I turn to face her and take her soft hand in mine. "Look, I know we’ve talked about it before, and I don’t want you to feel like I’m putting pressure on you. I swear, if you don’t ever want to do it, I’m okay with that. I just, um…" I take a deep breath. "I love you, Tammy, and I want to show you."

  Tammy’s eyes are shining with tears now, and I just know I’ve fucked it all up. "I love you too, Walsh. I’m scared, but I know I want my first time to be with you. I want to feel that way together."

  "Okay. Well, Mike’s uncle got us a room. I’ve already got the key, so all we have to do is go on in."

  She nods. "But do you promise we aren’t just doing this because Mike and Joss make fun of you?"

  I think for a minute. Yeah, that’s a lot of what got us here, but I mean it when I say I love Tammy, and we’ve come damn close several times already.

  "Here’s what I think," I tell her. "The guys’ teasing may have gotten me to get the room tonight, but I think we’ve both wanted this for a while. I think it’s better for us to plan it and do it right than to have an accident and do something stupid. Don’t you?"

  "Yeah, I do." She reaches out and digs her fingers into my hair. "I love you so much, Walsh."

  We kiss, and when our breath gets that fast, stuttery pace to it, I pull away and open my door. "Let’s go," I tell her, my voice kind of rough.

  When we get inside the room, I reach for the light switch. "No," she says quietly as she touches me on the hand. "It’ll be easier for me if it’s dark. Do you have stuff? I mean, you know, the rubbers?"

  "Yeah," I say as she leads me toward the bed, which I can just make out from the crack in the curtains where the parking lot light seeps in. "Right here in my wallet." I get it from my pocket and pull out the foil square. She reaches over and takes my wallet, and the condom, gently placing them on the nightstand.

  Then she does something so Tammy, so my girl. She begins unbuttoning her top. She lets it slide off her arms and onto the floor. I swallow, just watching her. Next, she reaches around behind her and unsnaps her bra, letting it join the blouse on the floor. Her long hair brushes the tops of her breasts, and I think I might have died and gone to heaven. I’ve had Tammy’s top off plenty of times, but it’s always been in the back seat of a dark car or someone’s bedroom at a party where a bunch of my drunk friends could come in any old time.

  "God, you’re so pretty, Tammy. You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known," I tell her as I softly run a finger along her breast, circling the nipple and eliciting a shaky sigh from her.

  "Your turn," she says so quietly that I almost don’t hear her.

  I draw my hand back and reach for the hem of my t-shirt, pulling it off in one motion and dropping it in the floor.

  My dick is totally swollen and I can feel it pressing against the button fly of my jeans. It fucking hurts like crazy, but I don’t move a muscle as Tammy skims her fingers down my chest, stopping at my waist, where she strokes the hairs that disappear below the denim.

  She starts to undo the top button, but I put my hand over hers. I have to clear my throat before I can talk. "Um, just a sec, okay?"

  I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to remember the words to Stairway to Heaven like Mike told me you’ve got to do if you don’t want to come too fast. He said that it gets easier, but the first few times, all you want to do is pound away and come in about five seconds flat. Joss told me he read a Playboy that said you should do math in your head or something, but I fucking hate math, so Led Zeppelin it is.

  I’m on the second verse when I feel things calming a bit down below. Tammy’s watching me with this expression that says, "What the hell is the matter with you?" and I can’t blame her. I look like an idiot standing here, telling a gorgeous girl not to touch me while I scrunch my eyes up and sing Led Zeppelin in my head. I take another deep breath.

  "Okay," I say, opening my eyes. "So here’s the thing. This isn’t just about me," I tell her softly as I take her hand away from my fly and hold it. I pull her down on the bed so we’re sitting side by side. I rub my fingers over her knuckles as I talk.

  "You’ve never, um, you know, come when we’ve been fooling around, have you?"

  I see her head drop, her chin meeting her chest. "No," she answers in a whisper.

  I run a hand through my hair. If the lights were on, I know I couldn’t do this. "I want this to be for both of us, Tam. I want to make you feel good too, but I don’t know how."

  Her chin lifts and she looks at me as she reaches a hand out and cups my cheek in her palm. "Oh, Walsh. I always feel good when I’m with you, honest. Everything you do with me feels good."

  She’s being sweet, but I want her to get this. "That’s great, but if we’re going to have sex, it’s about both of us—together. That’s the only way I’m doing it, Tammy. For both of us."

  She nods. "Okay. But what if there’s something wrong with me. What if I can’t?"

  "It’s supposed to be my job to get you there, so if you don’t, then I guess I suck." I try to laugh, but I don’t really pull it off.

  "Well, all these other people do it all the time and it works out, right?" she asks.

  "Yeah. I guess we’re proof it worked for someone, sometime."

  "Gross," she laughs.

  "Sorry," I mutter as I collapse on my back on the bed.

  She lies down next to me and softly feathers her hand over my abs, driving thoughts of parents and procreation out of my mind.

  "Walsh?" she asks as we lie in silence.

  "Yeah, sweetheart?"

  "Can we just be with each other and figure it out as we go? You know, don’t think about it too
hard?"

  "That sounds great. I love you, Tammy."

  "I love you too."

  And so, in the dark of the Holiday Inn, we found our way. There, on the delicate line between childhood and adulthood, we learned everything there was to learn about each other’s bodies. We entered a new land—together—and we felt things we’d never known existed. We did things by instinct and by touch and by whispered desires in the cool, quiet night.

  A few hours later, I drove her home and knew that everything in my world had changed. I’d loved her for months, but after that night, she was sealed in my soul. Seared onto my heart in such a way that there was no her and me anymore, just "us." And now here I am, nearly twelve years later, trying to pry her from me. Tease out the fibers of her being from the fibers of mine. And it’s fucking killing me, and she doesn’t seem to care.

  I finally place J.B. on the floor and stand up, brushing hay off of my jeans. Tammy’s always done whatever the hell Tammy wants, and I’ve never really tried to impose anything on her, but I’m going to have to find a way to make her listen this time. There’s no way the two of us can keep inflicting this pain on each other anymore. We have to be away from one another. She’s got to leave, and I’m going to make her see that, no matter what it takes.

  Tammy

  GIVEN THE intensity of Walsh’s reaction to my new job, I’m not surprised to find Mike waiting at my car in the parking lot of the ranch when I go out to run an errand for Leanne between lunch and dinner.

  He’s leaning against the driver’s door, arms crossed, big biceps and tattoos bulging all over the place, mean-ass scowl on his face. I guess he’s the enforcer now.

  "Move, Mike," I snap as I reach the car.

  "Not until you and I have a little talk."

  I know that my therapist said I need to control my anger, but it’s pretty damn hard not to be mad at the guy who told Walsh I’d cheated on him. I own the deed, but Mike sure didn’t help the situation any.

  "Talk? You want to talk? Maybe we should talk about how you told Walsh and Mel that Joss and I slept together in the middle of a hospital room while I was hooked up to IVs. Maybe we should talk about how you blew my whole fucking life up and now Walsh can’t even stand to be in the same room with me. Is that the stuff you want to talk about, Mike?"