Olivia

by Donna Sturgeon

  “I’ll be right back,” George muttered when his search for paper towels came up empty.

  He opened the office door and Olivia jumped up to follow him, but he stilled her with one finger and another deathly glare. He closed the door behind him, leaving Olivia all alone in the empty office.

  The lights were low, the shadows long, and something was making a noise in the walls. As the minutes slowly ticked by, Olivia pulled her knees up to her chest, and whimpered. Time slowed down even more and she wrapped her arms around her legs, pulling them in tighter. When the theme music to Jaws began to play through the speakers of George’s stereo, her eyes bugged out and the little hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Time stood still and Olivia tucked her head down into her arms and closed her eyes tight. All the while, her heart kept thumping away and her imagination kept churning.

  “Here,” George said right by her ear.

  She screamed.

  When she managed to scrape herself off the ceiling, George handed her a beer. “Now, tell me what you smoked, snorted or shot up tonight.”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you high?”

  “No!”

  “Then what the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know!” she cried.

  And then she started to cry.

  And George started to laugh.

  “Damn, Liv. What the hell am I going to do with you?” he asked, his voice laced with amused love instead of the anger Mitch tended to dole out.

  He pulled her into his arms and held her while she sniffed and sniveled and soaked his t-shirt with tears. He rubbed her back and stroked her hair, and whispered words of comfort. His arms were her security, his love her anchor. She curled up against him and listened to the soothing cadence of his heartbeat. Slowly, the fear washed away. Humiliation took its place. She shifted to pull away, but he only held her closer.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he said softly as his lips brushed against her ear. “Not until you tell me what happened.”

  “Mitch took me to the movies,” she said on a whimper.

  “And?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Mitch took you to the movies?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Was it a scary movie?” he guessed.

  “Uh-huh.” She nodded, feeling like the biggest fool on the face of the planet. “I get freaked out easy. It wasn’t even a bad one and it still scared the crap out of me.”

  “Are you still scared?”

  She shrugged. “No.” Yes.

  “Liar.”

  “Can I stay here awhile?”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked up at him, at the skin around his eyes already darkening into purple bruises. She ran a light touch over the sensitive area. “I’m sorry about your nose.”

  “It’s fine,” he assured her.

  “Liar.”

  He smiled. “If you tell anyone I got this from you, I’ll have to kill you. I’m sure you understand why.”

  “Unfortunately, I do.” She smiled back.

  He let out a light laugh and leaned down to place a soft kiss on her lips. Instead of pulling away, his lips hovered over hers as he drew in a deep breath of her air, and then he kissed her again—slowly, gently—in a way that sent a shiver up her spine. It wasn’t their usual fast, hot, frantic, “I want you so bad” kind of kissing. His kiss was a leisurely yet intensely erotic kind of kiss—the kind of kiss she had always imagined would precede the kind of love making that would create the first of her two-point-five kids in Northside.

  His hand slipped under her t-shirt and skimmed across her stomach until it reached the base of her bare breast, and then stopped. He pulled away from her the slightest bit. The conflicted look on his face as his eyes roamed her features confused Olivia. Everything about the kiss confused Olivia—the speed, the heat, the purposeful intensity of it—but the look in his eyes was most unsettling.

  “George?” she whispered.

  “Yeah?” He breathed the word from deep inside as his eyes stayed on her lips and he took slow, deep breaths that gradually sped up as his eyes darkened in desire.

  She didn’t know how to ask what she wanted to ask. She didn’t know if she even knew what she wanted to ask him, and she didn’t know what she would do with the information once she got it. She didn’t want to offend him in case she was wrong. And she felt like it would be cheating on Mitch even to hope for it.

  “Never mind,” she said with a little shake of her head.

  His hand traveled around to her back and that shiver went up her spine again, electric fire.

  “Baby Girl?” he asked in a whisper. His eyes were still focused on her lips, his body temperature a feverish high. His fingers slowly skimmed along the waistband of her panties then traveled up, tracing her spine.

  “George?” she managed to exhale on a whimper. Her mind clouded, she could barely think past the way his touch made her body feel.

  “If I tell you something, do you promise not to freak out on me?”

  “No.”

  “You know how Izzie set me up with her friend, Yvette?” His eyes finally moved away from her lips and met her eyes. She didn’t like what she saw in them.

  “Yeah.” She choked on the word and her blood turned to ice.

  “I…” His eyes closed. “We…”

  Her heart slammed in her chest, knowing what he was about to say. Her entire body tensed in his arms and the room started to spin.

  “Liv…”

  “George?” she gasped and pushed away from him. His hand fell out of her t-shirt, and she felt frozen without it. “Please tell me you didn’t…”

  “Just hear me out, Liv,” he pleaded, and grabbed for her as she struggled to get away from him.

  “You bastard!” She hit his chest, and his arm, and then hit him again. And again. The tears came back in a flood. “Damn you, George!”

  “Liv! It’s not what you think. Give me a minute to explain—”

  “Explain what? That you’re not gay? That you lied to me? That you knew how much I wanted you—how much I love you—but you’re so appalled by me that you had to pretend to be gay?”

  She jumped off the sofa and started to pace, her mind racing in fury and humiliation.

  “I’m not pretending,” he stated simply. His eyes remained adverted from hers, his shoulders slumped.

  “What is so disgusting about me that you had to make up such a massive lie?”

  “Let me explain,” he repeated. He scrubbed his face with his hands in frustration and pushed up off of the sofa. He reached for her, but she backed away.

  “No,” she said, and shook her head.

  “Please, Liv.”

  “No!”

  “Just listen to me!”

  “No!” Hot tears poured down her face. She closed her eyes tight and covered her ears with her hands. “No! No! No!”

  He grabbed her hands, ripping them away from her ears. “Damn it, Liv! Let me explain!”

  “You don’t get to explain.” She stood straight and tall, her face setting into stone as she sealed her heart to his betrayal. “You get to go to hell.”

  She turned on her heel and slammed out of the office. She left the bar as fast as she had come in, but this time she was fueled by anger instead of fear. Her car door was still open, the engine still running when she went outside. She slid in and pulled the door shut behind her. Before she could put it into gear, George burst through the doorway.

  “Liv!”

  “Leave me alone!” Her hand closed around the shifter.

  “Liv!” he yelled out again, but she didn’t hear him.

  She was already gone.

  Chapter Four

  Olivia avoided George like the plague. She quit going to Kitty’s cold turkey. She blocked his number on her cell phone. She deleted him from her friends list on Facebook. If she caught sight of him around town, she went the opposite direction. Izzie tried to get Olivia to tell her what hap
pened, but she refused to talk about it. She gave Izzie the twenty dollars to make good on their bet, then told Izzie if she mentioned his name again she would delete her like she did George. Kenny was more persistent about trying to get the gory details, but after a month or so, he gave up as well.

  Mitch made no effort to hide his delight over the dissolution of Olivia and George’s friendship. He was practically giddy over it. It was a relationship he had barely tolerated in the first place. Once Olivia stopped talking about George, he felt it gave him free rein to bad-mouth George whenever he wanted. Olivia quickly squashed the habit with a pop to his jaw.

  As April crept up on May, Melanie became obsessed with her upcoming wedding. She poured over bridal magazines while she was supposed to be quality checking at Garretson. Sam threatened to fire her, but Olivia picked up Melanie’s slack so he quit bitching. She needed a distraction anyway because Yvette transferred from third shift to second with Olivia’s crew. It took everything Olivia had not to fly through the vinyl strips that separated Quality from Shipping and Receiving and kick the little whore right in her bubbly ass.

  George and Yvette’s romance became the talk of South. Everyone thought they were adorable together. Everyone thought they were perfect for each other. Everyone loved Yvette and said what a blessing she was for George. Gag! Olivia was so sick of listening to the talking and the gushing, she went straight to Walmart and invested an entire paycheck on a brand new iPod and enough iTunes cards to fill the stupid little thing to capacity.

  She didn’t leave her trailer without plugging in and tuning out the world. Jenny Owen Youngs’s “Fuck Was I” replaced “Sick of Life” as Olivia’s theme song. She listened to it at least twenty times a day while she wallowed in sorrow and self-pity.

  Since she was no longer going to Kitty’s, and Izzie was still desperately trying to make a baby, and Mitch wouldn’t let her come over during the week so she wouldn’t make him late for work, and she had no friends other than the ones either drinking, screwing or sleeping, Eugene was the only person left for Olivia to hang out with at night. She tried it for awhile, but his incessant crunching on Cheez Doodles drove her insane. She found herself turning into a knee-bouncing, chain smoker just like him. She tried finding a new bar, but they all made her miss George. Her new hangout became the only other place in Juliette open past midnight—Walmart.

  Surprisingly, Walmart at night turned out to be a pretty fun place to be. For one thing, the night crew consisted mainly of young people with no work ethic. For another thing, the store was full of toys, snacks, alcohol, video games, and places to chill. And, probably the best thing, they had scooters. Every night after work, Olivia would drive across Juliette to the massive Supercenter on the very northern edge of Northside, hop on one of the battery-powered handicap scooters with the basket in the front, and start making her rounds.

  She’d do her daily shopping first, picking up toilet paper, Pop-Tarts, shampoo or whatever else she needed to get through the next day. Then she’d go down the aisle that housed every type of alcohol ever imagined, packaged in pretty boxes and bottles. If she’d had a hard day at Garretson, she’d go for tequila. If it was Thursday and she was short on cash, she’d stick with beer. If it was any other day, she’d get vodka.

  Once she had everything she needed, she’d drive her scooter to the self-checkout, pay for her purchases, and then scoot over to the McDonald’s restaurant in the corner of the store. She’d order a nine-piece of Chicken McNuggets and a large fountain pop. They’d hand her the box of nuggets and an empty cup, and she’d scoot over to the bank of soda fountains.

  If it was beer or tequila night, she’d fill the cup from her shopping bag when no one was looking, but if it was a vodka day, she’d put a splash of Dr Pepper in the bottom of the cup first. As she worked on her buzz, she’d scoot around the store again and chat with the employees while she ate. Usually she’d top off the night with a round or two of ‘Halo’ on the 360 in the Electronics Department.

  In the end, she discovered George was right. She’d been wasting her money buying his beer. Her dollar stretched much further at her friendly, neighborhood Walmart.

  The only downside to Walmart was Louise also favored shopping there at midnight. Olivia also discovered that Louise was quite the chatty person when she wasn’t busy trying to suck up to Sam. The first few times Olivia saw her, she was able to avoid Louise catching sight of her in return. But one night at the end of April, Olivia zipped around an end-cap display without looking first—and crashed right into Louise’s shopping cart. The cart shot out of Louise’s hands, and Olivia went flying over the handlebars and little basket on the scooter, landing face-first into a cardboard display of Doritos.

  “Olivia!” Louise cried out in surprise. “Are you ok?”

  “Yeah.” Olivia groaned. The display was totaled and Olivia’s ego was bruised, but other than that she was fine. Bags popped, and tortilla chips crushed and crumbled beneath her as she struggled to her feet amid a cloud of neon-orange cheese dust.

  “Why were you on the scooter in the first place? Did you get hurt at work?” Louise worried as she yanked Olivia upright.

  “Yeah?” Olivia sort of agreed.

  “Did you report it to Sam?”

  “No. It happened in the parking lot,” Olivia lied. “It wasn’t work-related.”

  “You poor dear.”

  “I’m fine.” Olivia dusted the cheese powder from her hands and face. “Well, see ya around.”

  She made a break for the scooter, but Louise stopped her with, “Did you hear about Stephie and Sam getting caught in Old Man Garretson’s office last week?”

  Director cues sound of needle on record—screech!

  Olivia spun around. “No! What?”

  “I guess they were both up in his office and the cleaning crew walked in on them.” Louise smiled a conspiratorial little smile and leaned in closer to whisper, “They were having sex.”

  “Holy shit! Does the old man know about it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Louise said with a shake of her head. “But even if he did, Sam probably wouldn’t get fired. His mother-in-law is like second or third cousin to the Garretsons. He’s family. He can do whatever he wants and get away with it.”

  It was the first Olivia had ever heard that Sam was married, but she played it off as if she’d known it all along.

  “Well, yeah, but wouldn’t cheating on his wife be grounds for termination?” Olivia asked as if it were obvious, because it was. “She’s family. He’s just the prick she married.”

  Louise shrugged. “All I know is, Sam’s been manager for ten years or so and Stephie is far from his first affair, and you know she won’t be his last. This isn’t even the first time he’s been caught. Just the first time he dared go in the front offices.”

  Olivia took a slurp from her McDonald’s cup of vodka and Dr. Pepper as she thought it over. “It’s like he’s trying to get caught… Like he’s rubbing the old man’s face in it.”

  “Exactly.” Louise nodded with Olivia.

  “Huh.”

  Olivia handed the cup to Louise, and Louise took a long suck off the straw. Her eyes grew wide in surprise, but she took another drink without commenting on the contents of the cup. When she took a third pull off the straw, Olivia frowned and snatched the cup away. Lush.

  “Well, I better get moving along. See you tomorrow,” Louise said with a wave.

  “Same time, same place,” Olivia said, and waved back.

  The two women still never talked while they worked, but the next time Olivia ran into Louise at Walmart, Louise had her own scooter and cup from McDonald’s. They scooted around the store together, gossiping and giggling like school girls. While Louise wasn’t looking, Olivia stole a sip from her cup and discovered Louise preferred wine spritzers to vodka. Cool.

  * * *

  For no apparent reason, the sex between Mitch and Olivia took a sudden and unexpected slump. Mitch simply lost interest. Olivia tri
ed everything she could think of to get “Mr. Happy” happy again, but he stayed as excited as a spaghetti noodle left in a pot of water overnight.

  Mitch blamed Olivia’s slight weight gain for his condition, and started dropping not-so-subtle hints that she should start exercising and stop eating Twinkies for breakfast. Olivia flat-out told him to take his advice and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Izzie suggested they go back to the casinos to give hotel sex a shot at cheering Mr. Happy up. So, on the second weekend of May, Olivia and Mitch found themselves back on the Missouri river.

  Mitch had another commission check burning a hole in his pocket and sprang for a luxury suite, and then took Olivia shopping and picked her out a dress to wear to dinner. It was black, tight, and lifted her breasts to almost gravity-defying heights. When she dressed, she skipped the underwear, slipped on a brand-new pair of fuck-me heels, and dabbed her most-expensive Jean Nate cologne in strategic locations. After she finished spooning on her make-up, she checked herself out in the mirror one last time and decided she looked pretty damn fine. If this outfit didn’t make Mr. Happy smile, nothing would.

  They went downstairs for dinner in the hotel restaurant. Olivia was impressed to the point of being intimidated by the atmosphere. Everything was expensive-looking and gorgeous. The food was extraordinary and, according to the description on the menu, the wine was “World Class,” whatever the hell that meant. All Olivia knew was it tasted yummy and went down like water.

  A live band played quietly in the corner. They were good, but it wasn’t anything life-changing, so she paid them no mind. It wasn’t until she and Mitch were sharing a slice of cake for dessert that she even bothered to look at the stage. Once she did, she couldn’t take her eyes off the singer. He was ruggedly-handsome, in GQ kind of way, and looked so familiar she couldn’t help but gawk.