“Are we doing this then?” she asked to make sure they were both on the same wavelength. With a light touch, her fingertips outlined the muscles of his tight stomach and trailed down to his waistband. As she played with the button on his jeans, her eyes and her heart begged him to say yes.
He held his breath as his gaze shifted to her hands, and then back into her eyes, and then he exhaled and said, “I guess we are.”
“You guess?” she asked with a hint of a smile.
“I never know anything for certain when it comes to you, Baby Girl.”
“You can be certain that I love you, George,” she promised. “And you can be certain that the very second you find that part of yourself that you’re missing, I’ll be right here to help make sure you never lose it again.”
“Even if it means I have to leave you behind?”
“You won’t be leaving me behind.” Her hands slowly unbuttoned his jeans and started on his zipper. “You’ll be setting me free.”
He sat up and caught her lips with his, effectively sealing their deal with a kiss.
Bit by bit, piece by piece, their clothing disappeared as they worked their way into George’s bedroom. They shut the door on common sense and the world and the oven buzzer and the burning meatloaf and slowly, carefully and lovingly, they each placed the other in the center of their own hearts and made love until the emptiness on the edges all but disappeared.
Chapter Twelve
The next morning, Olivia shuffled into George’s kitchen with her hair standing on end and deep red creases on her face from the bunched up pillow and big sleep boogers in the corners of her eyes and her breath stinking like the bowels of hell. George looked up from the burnt and crusty meatloaf pan he was scrubbing, and he was so taken by her beauty the steel wool Brillo pad fell out of his hand. He pinned her against the fridge and kissed her until her toes curled.
“Good morning.” She smiled and tried to talk without breathing in his face, which was silly because he had just run his tongue all around all that funk and hadn’t seemed to mind.
“Good morning,” he said with a smile of his own.
“Are you coming to the hospital with me again today?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t you have to run the bar?” she asked.
“No. I’d rather be with you,” he said and then kissed along her neck and trailed his hands along her body.
“What about Helen’s kids? Won’t all these days off play right into their hands?”
“I don’t care. You and Eugene are more important to me than a stupid bar.”
“When do you want to leave?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes maybe,” he said with a shrug as he tried to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear, but it preferred to stick straight out the side of her head. He let out a laugh and smoothed both of his hands down her head to try and tame the wild, but there was no taming the wild when it came to Olivia. He gave up and kissed her again, funky breath and all.
Her hands ran a course around his fine, hard body, eventually finding their way into his boxer-briefs. She was in the process of making his toes curl when the phone rang. They both groaned at once and George leaned back away from her to reach for the phone. Olivia took advantage of his angle to dip down and envelop her funky breath around something else, causing George to answer the phone with a gasp of surprised pleasure and a little moan instead of a hello.
His eyes closed and his breathing became labored as he grunted out little words of understanding to the person on the other end of the line while Olivia did her best to make him hang up faster. She was doing an outstanding job for having just woken up. He was getting a little weak in the knees when suddenly he stood at attention and George Jr. did the opposite.
“Of course,” he said into the phone. He lifted Olivia by her upper arm and kept a tight hold of her. “We’ll be there in five minutes, Officer Wade…Yes, I understand…We will, of course, sir.” George hung up the phone and cupped Olivia’s face in his hands. Very slowly and very carefully, he said, “Do not freak out, ok?”
“Why not? What happened?” Olivia asked, already disobeying George’s instructions. “Why were you talking to Clete? What happened? Is it Eugene?”
“You know Officer Wade?” he asked.
“Yes! What happened?”
“Olivia…” George ran his hands slow down her hair again and pulled her in to place a gentle kiss on her forehead. With his lips still pressed to her skin, he said, “Mitch came looking for you last night…” He lifted his lips and tipped her chin so she would meet his eyes. “He burned your trailer to the ground.”
Instantly, Olivia’s chest tightened, her face went numb, and her guts felt like they could let loose in a watershed. “What?”
“Mitch burned—”
“I heard you.” As suddenly as the fear had hit her, fury surged in and took control. She pushed George out of her way and flew into the bedroom to find some clothes. She threw on one of George’s Kitty’s Place t-shirts and her jeans from the night before, stuffed her feet into her tennis shoes sans socks and crammed a ball cap on her head. She ripped open the front door and was sitting in George’s truck waiting for him before he even got his jeans buttoned. She laid on the horn and stayed on it until he came running out the door a full minute after her.
George stabbed the key into the ignition. “Olivia—”
“Just drive.” She crossed her arms over her chest and stared out the windshield as George wove through traffic to Valley View. Of all the fucking things to happen to her when her world was already in chaos… goddamn fucking Mitch.
Embers of her 1950-something Atlas mobile home were still smoldering and the guys from the fire department were starting to wrap up their hoses when George splashed through the lakes of fire-dousing water on the narrow lane leading to her trailer. Her home was a total loss, her Buick nothing more than a charcoal briquette under the crumbling carport. Every resident of Valley View stood and pointed, staring and whispering amongst themselves, watching as Olivia climbed out of George’s truck and looked over what had once been her home-sweet-home. Mr. Turner stood in the shade of his porch overhang in his open bathrobe and boxers and waved to Olivia. She ignored him and simply took in the sight.
She did not cry. There was no way in hell she would give Mitch that satisfaction.
Clete came up behind her. “Olivia, I’m sorry about all of this.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said with her jaw set and her chin held high. “Where is the motherfucker?”
“We don’t know,” Clete said.
“But you know it was him?”
“Yes.”
Olivia nodded and looked over the entirety of her worldly possessions as they slowly burned out, their ashes set adrift in the cool, fall breeze.
“I guess I should call Reggie,” she said.
“He’s already on his way,” Clete said. “We called him while we were calling people trying to find you. We’ve been calling people… looking for you… for hours…”
Clete choked on the words and Olivia finally looked at him. Really looked at him. He was more shaken up than he should have been for a house fire, especially a house that wasn’t his. She placed her hand on his arm to comfort him. “It’s ok Clete. It’s just a house… and a car… and everything I own… But, it’s ok. I’ll figure something out… eventually.”
“I thought you were…” Clete’s chest heaved up and down and his face twisted from his struggle to control his emotion. “You didn’t answer your phone and…”
“Oh, hey, it’s ok, Big Guy.” She gave him a hug and squeezed tight to comfort him. Poor guy obviously wasn’t cut out for emergency crisis management, which sucked because he was a cop and that was kind of his job. Maybe she’d help him find a different career once her life settled down a bit. She pushed him away and smiled as best she could. “See, I’m alive and kickin’. I’ve got more lives than an alley cat. It’ll take a hell of a lot more than a f
ire to kill me.”
“Yeah.” He stepped away from her, avoiding her eyes, and cleared his throat. When he spoke again, he was all business. “So, Reggie’ll be here soon, and I’ll need to get a statement from you.”
George came up behind Olivia and placed a comforting hand on the back of her neck. She leaned into him.
“I know this is kinda sudden, but you wanna shack up?” Olivia asked.
“Sure.” George laughed. “Let’s live in your place. It’s hot.”
“Smokin’,” Olivia joked back and tipped her head to look at him. “I love you, Georgie.”
“I love you too, Baby Girl.” George kissed her forehead. “It’ll be ok.”
“I know,” she answered.
And the crazy thing was, she had a feeling it would be ok. Maybe it was merely a survival instinct, kind of like going into shock. Maybe it was the first symptom of insanity. Or maybe it was just what happened to be floating on the surface of the crazy pandemonium of emotion she had been riding like a roller coaster all week long. First Eugene dead, then not dead, then everything with George, and now her nut-job, crazy ex-fiancé trying to kill her and burning everything she owned in a fiery hell…
Maybe she shouldn’t have broken up with him via text. Looking back, it probably deserved at least a phone call.
George took her hand and they walked as close to the destruction as the fire marshal would allow. There were a few things that didn’t get burned, but of course it was nothing that she wanted. All of her clothes were gone, her CD’s, her DVD’s. Her life-size cut-out of Mr. Mark Wahlberg was burned to a crisp. She shed a bit of a tear over that one. Even her kitty cat kitchen clock was dead—his final life snuffed out by temperatures in excess of eleven hundred degrees.
The only thing that brought real tears to her eyes was the loss of her photo album. It was a fifty page album with only four pages in use, but it contained the only copies of the only six pictures of her and Eugene together, all of them taken on a Polaroid, and now all of them gone forever, except in Olivia’s memory.
“He used an accelerant,” Clete said as if to explain the extent of the damage.
“What did he use?” George asked.
“Vodka.”
Of course. Olivia always knew drinking would be the death of her. She just figured it would have been her liver to go up in flames, not her humble abode.
“Did he know she wasn’t home?” George asked.
“We believe so.” Clete turned to Olivia and added, “And that means he’s going to be looking for you.”
Olivia nodded. She knew he would be.
“He won’t get near her,” George assured Clete. “She’ll be glued to my side 24/7 until you guys find him.”
“That might not be enough,” Clete said with a concerned look in his eye.
“You are a walking disaster,” Reggie Young proclaimed as he stepped over rubble and joined the group behind the police tape. “I’m dropping your ass, Olivia. I swear, as soon as I file this claim, I’m dropping your ass. And then I’m gonna throw myself a big ol’ whoop-de-doo party in celebration.”
“Reggie, you motherfucker. You wouldn’t dare!” Olivia rushed over to him and hugged his short, porky frame and kissed his shiny, bald head.
“I know.” He sighed. “Heaven help me, I know.”
“Why does everyone always ask for heaven’s help when they’re talking about me?”
“Because when it comes to you, Sugar, we need all the help we can get.”
Olivia linked her arm in his and pretended to listen while he gave his insurance-man spiel about deductibles and property values and estimates of replacement costs and a bunch of other stuff that went over her head. George listened for real and asked the right questions and gave appropriate answers, and Olivia shifted her attention to Clete.
He was kneeling in the charred mess, moving stuff around with his pen, occasionally taking notes. When he unearthed a blackened piece of metal with a wire dangling from it, she squealed in delight and let go of Reggie’s arm.
“My iPod!” She giggled in joy as she bounced through the rubble to Clete.
“Olivia,” George called after her but she ignored him.
“Do you think it still works?” she asked Clete.
“I kind of doubt it,” he said and looked it over.
He pulled a red handkerchief from his back pocket and polished some of the soot off, and then pushed the Pause button. Olivia stuck the single remaining, heat-deformed ear bud into her ear and listened. It had issues, crackling and popping between notes, but it worked! It was stuck on one playlist, but Olivia didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything anymore as her feet started to move on their own accord, like they always did whenever she heard Cupid talk her through the “Cupid Shuffle.”
Mitch and her shitty life be damned—she got laid last night, and she got laid real good. That deserved a celebration.
“Olivia?” Clete laughed as he watched her go to the right, to the right, to the right...
“What?” She smiled and winked at him as she went to the left, to the left, to the left…
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked with a smile and shake of his head as she kicked, kicked, kicked, kicked.
“The Cupid Shuffle.” Her smile grew bigger as she walked it by herself.
“The cupid what?”
“Oh my god! Haven’t you ever been to a wedding? Get over here!” She laughed as she pulled him over next to her, took the ear bud out of her ear and put it in his. “Do you hear the beat?”
He nodded. “I guess.”
“Ok, now watch my feet and do what I do.”
She danced four steps to the right, and he followed along like only a sober, white man could. She danced four steps to the left. He kept up, but his body moved as stiffly as he had moved to the right.
When she kicked right, left, right, left, he laughed. “This is stupid.”
“Shut up and dance, Clete.” She closed her eyes, tipped her face to the sky and chicken-winged her legs as she danced in a quarter-turn and started the steps over again to the right.
A little girl and her even littler sister giggled and ran over to join Olivia. Unlike Clete and his two left feet, they learned the steps and danced like pros after one try. Clete moved out of the way to give them room. More kids joined Olivia, and then a handful of adults. She winked at George and he smiled back as he took the iPod away from Clete and plugged it into his truck stereo.
He started the song over and cranked the volume until the entire Valley View trailer court rang out in Olivia’s favorite wedding line-dance ditty. The handful of dancers turned into dozens and then lots of dozens. Even Mr. Turner joined in from his shady location on his porch. Clete watched Olivia from the sidelines with a smile of wonder on his face. Reggie rolled his eyes, but even he had a bit of swagger and sway to his hips as he took photos with his little digital camera.
George hopped between people until he got to Olivia, then grabbed her hips from behind and held her so tight to him they danced as one body. When the song ended, everyone cheered themselves and George’s arms wrapped around Olivia. His lips found her neck and he breathed her in slow and deep. “This is insane, you know that right? Breaking into a musical dancing score at the scene of a trailer fire is….”
She closed her eyes and whispered, “Crazy.”
“I love you, Crazy Girl.”
“Better get used to it, Georgie. My life’s nothing more than one screwed up, crazy mess after another.” Her hips started to move in his hands again as the director of her crazy life cued Mousse T. vs. The Dandy Warhols’ smashup “Horny as a Dandy” to blast through George’s truck speakers. “And it’s about to get a hell of a lot crazier. You ready for this?”
“Always,” he breathed out on a hot exhale.
“Then hang on tight.”
George pulled her close and his hands explored her front as her ass gyrated in time to the music against his fast-growing erection.
> “Damn, Liv,” he murmured into her ear.
“Dance with me, Georgie,” she whispered into the skin of his neck. He held her hips tight to him and his body melted into hers.
The one and only thing Olivia was blessed with was rhythm, and dancing was the only thing she didn’t need alcohol to help her do well. All she needed was George. When her emotions were running high and her body moved with his, she was at her finest. When they used to dance together at Kitty’s she had always imagined she was making love to him, and she had always suspected he was doing the exact same thing. Now that their bodies knew each other intimately, their dance became an intense, spine-tingling foreplay.
Some of the Valley View residents continued to dance while others pulled out lawn chairs and passed around beers and settled in for a day of bullshitting. The rest peeled away from the crowd and headed off to their daily grind or toward wherever they spent their day hours. Reggie stuck around another five minutes to finish collecting data for his initial report then escaped back to the sanity of Northside. Clete continued to work with the police department, bagging and tagging evidence while sneaking glances at Olivia and George. And Olivia and George danced.
They danced in the ashes and rubble with the air reeking of burnt wood and overheated metal and melted plastic, but Olivia didn’t notice any of it. She only knew George’s body against hers and the beat of the music pulsing hot through her blood as they danced. Olivia’s iPod scrolled through one heavy, pounding dance track after another on her “Say F*** It & Dance” playlist as the lights on the fire truck rotated. They danced an erotic bump and grind against each other that sent her heart racing, spreading a fire through her core that was hotter than the one Mitch had used to burn up her life, and she let it consume her.
Olivia Page 20
