Contents
Here to Stay
Dedication
Epigraph
Fiskare Family Tree
Part One: Pearls Born to Live
Madame Had Company
Alphabetical Order
Different Colors
Warrior’s Breakfast
King Cole
The Size of the Grudge
Bang the Manny
At Home
Paper Makes Noise
My Good Deed
Anxiety Travels
Your Troubled Sigh
Extraction
Part Two: Diamonds On the Ladder
Spatchcock
Emotional Slaughter
Forest Primeval
Triggers with Trust
The Third Option
Said No Woman Ever
A Weak Place
Judy’s Punching Bag
Always Stop for Coffee
The Romantic Invalid
Search and Rescue
Heir to a Fortune
A Spectacular Floor
Worth Saving
In the Bathroom
Here to Stay
Part Three: Gold Call Me Maurice
Our Little Secret
I Want the Story
The Fisher Hotel
This is Your Life
Oh Hello, Michael
Bitter
With Interest
My Best Friend
A Different Kind of Hard
Unca Fower
Reversal of Fortune
The Sweet Spot
Harvest
The Family Dynamic
A Cold Beauty
The Men I Love
Part Four: Glass Moment
Fever
Trouver Un Battement
Bring Everything
Borne
This is My Son
It’s What You Do
Ash
Milk
Your Side Warm
Every Man’s Life
A Walk
Fire
Souls
The River World
Part Five: Silver That Gun In His Hand
Salt and Pepper
Pull
Loving Your Aunt
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright © 2016 by Suanne Laqueur
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or trans-mitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
Suanne Laqueur/Cathedral Rock Press
Somers, New York
www.suannelaqueur.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Book Design by Write.Dream.Repeat Book Design
Cover Design by Tracy Kopsachilis
Here to Stay/ Suanne Laqueur. — 1st ed.
AJ,
Who always asks, “What are you writing?”
“But oh, my dear,
Our love is here to stay.
Together we’re going a long, long way…”
—George and Ira Gershwin
“Draw a line and get on one side or the other.”
—William M. Kaeger
IT’S A STRANGE THING to find a lost lover in your hands again. Like finding your childhood baseball glove in an attic box of memories. You’re sure it won’t fit. But the heat of your palm, a flex and a bend. A cautious knead of the leather and a tentative reach into the furthest recesses… It knows you. It remembers you.
It fits you.
“Do I feel the same?” Daisy asked, her voice a silken caress.
After twelve years, Erik thought, of course not. He had loved a girl. It was a woman’s body up against him now, with the heft of wisdom and the weight of experience. He ran his fingers up her backbone and felt all the bits of new fused steel, overlaid with the strong assurance in her muscles and the soft aplomb of her skin. She was a hundred times more beautiful. A thousand times more thrilling.
And as her blue-green eyes stared into his, he was keenly aware of her vulnerability.
“You feel more,” he said, his hands moving along her body, trying to remember how she felt when he last touched her. Thin. Beyond ballerina thin—she was drugged thin at the end of their days in college. Yet beautiful to him. Never anything but stunningly easy on his eyes and liquid in his embrace and sweet in his mouth.
“You feel right,” she said, her own hands gliding along his limbs, in and out of him. “Maybe a little thinner.”
“I probably am. I lost and gained weight over and over. Depending on how I was feeling at the time. When the dark came around, I’d stop eating.”
“I know, but…” Her delicate, arched eyebrows flickered in her brow. “I think over the years, in my head, I made you bigger than you were. Or maybe I beat myself down into something smaller. But now I remember your body. I remember mine with it.”
She was kissing him, pulling him to roll on top of her again. The digital clock on her bedside table read 2:06 in the morning. They had been going at it like possessed demons for hours now and no matter how tight he held or how hard he clung, Erik could not get both arms around making love to her. Too much feeling grabbed at him, clamoring for attention and precedence. Euphoria, lust, guilt and sadness were four wild stallions chained to each limb, intent on tearing him apart. Yet at the center of the jerking, pulling emotion, his heart was calm and accepting. Quietly riding out the storm, safe in the knowledge he was living his truth, living the life he was born to live.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispered under him.
“I can’t,” he said. “I’d never breathe again.”
THE SUN SHONE SOFT yellow through the frosty windows and it threw a square of light on Daisy’s skin. Propped on an elbow, Erik ran his hand over her bare back, looking for scars. One by one he found the fine, raised lines in the curve of her waist and along the hollows of her ribs. He counted them. Cataloged and memorized them. Sighed as each was tallied under his fingers.
“What,” she whispered. She lay on her stomach, arms around a pillow. One brilliant blue-green eye looking up at him.
“Nothing.”
The eye closed once and opened. It was her thirty-fourth birthday and she was no fool.
“Tell me,” she said.
“I feel like I pushed you to this.”
“I made a choice,” she said.
“I know. But I own part of this. Maybe one day I’ll feel differently. Right now, I feel responsible.”
His fingers traced and his mind pulled back through the years, imagining her alone in her dark apartment. In the darker dark of her mind. Her fingers curling around pieces of broken glass. His name in her mouth as she cut into her skin.
“You’re not responsible for all of it,” she said. “Pick one. You can have one. You can own it and hate it or heal it or touch it however you want.”
He leaned his head closer to her back. He touched the thick ridge of healed skin that curved at the bottom edge of her right shoulder blade. He thought of the twisted courage it took to push past the revulsion of self-harm and lean on a sharp edge. Lean hard until it sank into the layers of skin and sinew.
He almost did. Once. On his darkest day, he sat on the floor of his lonely apartment with the phone in one hand and his Swiss army knife in the other. He started dialing and stopped a half-dozen times. Opened and closed the blade a half-dozen times, pressing it to his left wrist where the daisy was tattooed. Then stopped and closed the bl
ade. Over and over, he dialed and stopped, opened the blade and stopped. Feeling he had to cut Daisy out of him or he would die. Feeling he’d rather die than cut her out of him.
Somehow his fingers had dialed one last time and not stopped. Help came and the knife was taken away from him.
“I never got it back,” he said.
Daisy’s eyebrows flickered. “What?”
“Nothing.” He touched the scar beneath her shoulder blade again. “I pick this one. It’s mine.”
“All right, then.” She rolled beneath his hand, turning to face him. “Hold me.”
He wrapped his arms around her. Their legs wove and twined and they yanked tight like a knot. Soon their mouths touched and they were melting together. Soft and hard. Vicious and tender.
“It will never be enough,” he whispered against her mouth, his hands coming up to cup her breasts. Pinky to thumb, he pulled his hands to their widest span, the most square inches he could lay on her skin, and he still couldn’t feel her. Skin to brain and back, the message was garbled with a surreal static. After twelve years of estrangement, she was live flesh and blood to be touched and held again.
“Never enough, ever again,” he said. “I’ll never be able to touch you enough.”
Her arms went up around his neck, her back arching. “Try,” she whispered.
The square of sun crept across the mattress and the frost on the window panes melted as they made love, frenetic and sloppy. And fast, because Daisy had to get to a rehearsal. Not even a reconciled love affair could stop the tide of Nutcracker crashing onto December’s shores.
He listened as Daisy splashed around in the bathroom. The scrub and spit of teeth being brushed. Faucets run, toilet flushed, towel rack rattling. Hating how she was wiping him off her skin and out of her mouth and he’d have to start all over again.
He watched with a tired arousal as she dressed. The flex of her leg muscles as she balanced on one foot and pulled a pant leg over the other. How she still hooked a bra backward around her waist then swiveled and pulled it into proper place. Drawing her hair back into a loose bun, she crouched by the edge of the bed and kissed him. Her sugar smell filled his head.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” she said.
“Hurry,” he mumbled against her neck, already getting sucked back down into sleep.
He woke again when the jingle bells on the front door rang out. Conditioned as a Pavlov dog, his erection stirred. The radiators were clinking and hissing and the room was warm. He moved the sheets and quilt off him, ready for another round. He felt the bit of desire settle between his teeth and a smug, itching need to prove himself.
Come and get it, woman.
She seemed to be puttering around downstairs. She was teasing him. Fine. He waited twelve years. He could wait another five minutes. Still…
“You’re killing me,” he said against the pillows.
Now she was coming up the stairs. Slowly. His toes curled.
The bedroom door creaked open, accompanied by a strange, mechanical-sounding roll.
“Oh. Bonjour, monsieur.”
Erik yanked the covers over his skin and rolled in a panic. A woman stood at the foot of the bed, grey and bosomy in leggings, T-shirt and a long apron, her hand on the handle of the vacuum cleaner. One of her eyebrows went up and the opposite corner of her mouth went down as they regarded each other and their place in the situation.
“Bonjour,” he said.
She set her bucket of cleaning supplies down and walked through the tossed and flung clothing on the floor, over to the windows to open the drapes.
“I regret,” she said through a thick French accent. “I not know Madame had company.”
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll just…”
“No, no,” she said, picking up a pair of jeans by the waist and giving the legs a brisk thwack in the air. “I begin downstairs today.”
She set the jeans on the dresser, sniffing deeply as she looked around the rest of the wardrobe on the floor. She brushed one hand against the other, then took her vacuum and her bucket and retreated.
His heart pounding, Erik reached for his phone and texted Daisy.
I believe Madame’s cleaning lady is here.
She replied a minute later. FUCK. I switched her day. I totally forgot. I’m so sorry…
No worries, he typed. A little embarrassing when I met her at the door naked. But I think she’s laughing about it now.
Don’t even…
She brought me breakfast in bed. Nice lady.
She’s fired.
He got out of bed, scratching and yawning. He picked his jeans and T-shirt off the floor, shook them out and got dressed. In the adjoining bathroom he swished some toothpaste around his teeth with an index finger, rinsed and spat, and smiled in the mirror as he dried his mouth.
“This is happening,” he said to his reflection.
HE WENT DOWNSTAIRS, skirting the cleaning lady in the living room. In the kitchen he lit a burner and pushed the kettle onto it. He found tea bags and the sugar bowl. The third drawer he tried had spoons. Opening all the cabinets to look for a mug, he found in one a pharmacy.
If you were in pain, Daisy was your girl. Tylenol, Advil, Aleve, Motrin. Various generic cousins for all. A plethora of vitamins and herbal supplements. She had a distinct preference for anything available in gummy form.
Her prescription meds were clustered together, separated in a dignified white-bottled grouping. Conscience and curiosity did a quick face-off in Erik’s head. Curiosity body-slammed conscience and he turned each bottle to the front. Zoloft. Wellbutrin. He knew the names well. Another bottle had Clonazepam. He laughed under his breath. Captain Clon. The real vitamin C. He had his own bottle in his shaving kit back at the hotel.
“Never leave home without it,” he said.
He flipped open a flat, buff disk to find birth control pills, that day’s blister empty.
He thought about last night.
“Come back to me,” she had cried over the phone. And he could deny her no more. Couldn’t deny himself another minute without her. He had no more time to throw away. He pulled jeans over his bare skin, zipped a jacket over his thin T-shirt. Without socks, gloves or a hat, he burst out of the hotel, careened into the bitter Canadian night and drove back to her house. She was waiting for him and took him upstairs to her room.
It began.
Yet it couldn’t begin.
Not until he was done with one last thing. Not until he was on his knees on her bedroom floor, untying the drawstring of her soft pants. Not until he pushed down the waistband and the flash of red letters was in his sight. Red letters spelling Svensk Fisk and forming the shape of a fish in the hollow of Daisy’s hip bone. Forming the shape of him, for he was that Swedish fish inked forever in her skin. Fiskare the fisherman. And he wasn’t done grieving the past yet. Not until he pressed his fingers to the red letters. Then wrapped his arms around the backs of her legs and pressed his mouth against her skin. Tasted the ink of himself on the canvas of her body. Found he was still there. She hadn’t erased him.
It was on him then. The dam of his heart broke. His throat dissolved. His lungs gave up the last of their poisoned misery and he sobbed.
She slid down the wall to sit and gathered him close, her hair falling down on either side of their heads. She didn’t shush him or soothe him with words. Only held him tight in the strong circle of her arms and let him dump the rest of it into her lap.
Then it was done.
Then it began.
They didn’t even get to the bed the first time. Down on the cold floor they grappled. Kissing and seizing. With all the grace of a pair of chainsaws coupling. They remembered and forgot. He zigged and she zagged. His head clocked hard on the floorboards, then rebounded into her forehead. They grabbed brows, groaning in pain, then grabbed each other again, groaning in need and tearing at their clothes. Her earring got tangled up in the neck of her shirt. His jeans got snagged on an ankle. He
was trying to get his mouth on her. She was trying to get her mouth on him. Neither seemed willing to calm down and take a minute or take turns.
They wanted everything at once, their kiss sliding around words and words smashing between their lips and tongues. Teeth and skin and tears and breath all fought for a chance. He was harder than a fifteen-year-old virgin and just as doomed: one touch and he would explode. This was not going to be his A Game. But Jesus fuck, it was Daisy in his arms. After twelve years in his head, shaping him from afar and haunting him in the night. Now she was on him, naked and crazed, crawling up the length of him. Planting her knees on either side of his hips and she had his cock in her hand—twelve fucking years and she’s putting me in her—as her mouth sank deep in his. Her hips hovered over him, rising a bit, then lowering as she held him in place and let him feel a touch of her damp heat, like another mouth to sink into.
Give it to me.
Wait a minute.
No give it to me now put me in you now I need in you want in you now.
Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute.
“Dais, wait.” He stopped her. Pushed his palms against her hip bones, held her still and asked, “Do you want me to use something?”
She drew back a little, staring. Her eyes flicked from one side to the other, mouth parted, as if thinking.
He closed his eyes.
Fuck I don’t care my cock in you now put me in you now…
Then she leaned down again. Her hand squeezed and the tip of him touched pink satin.
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
And she settled her weight into his lap.
He slid in deep, touched down in that smooth molten heat. His eyes opened and his throat unleashed a howl into the magic night. Daisy sat up on top of him, her thighs hugging his sides, her face in her palms. As she rocked her hips, her hands curled into fists and dragged down her cheeks.
“Oh my God,” she said, shaking her head.
“Dais.” His voice was a hollow shell against the jubilant screaming in his head, I’m inside you, I’m in you, it’s you, I can feel you, I got you back…
Her fists at her collarbones now, she rose up along the slick length of him and sank down again. “Erik,” she whispered. “Is this real?”
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