by Falon Gold
I fanned my face against the increase of heat caused by just looking at his body that was fully-clothed. What would happen if he was fully naked? I probably would spontaneously combust. You’re getting off topic, ole girl. Where was I? Oh, on the hot seat and about to explain why I was leaving.
Roland shifted his weight to the other leg. “Can I ask just one question before you go then, Anna?” No. Bad idea.
This was where I cursed him out for holding me up. “Shoot. What do you want to know?” I heard myself say that in spite of not wanting to talk to anyone about anything. Jesus, Anna! What is wrong with you? That was by far the easiest question to answer of the entire night, and Roland was not what but who that was wrong with me.
“Who did you let drag you to the bottom of pain and keep you there?” he asked plainly.
Kay uttered, “Oh shit,” under her breath. What do you want to bet that she was strangling Hayden’s hand, expecting me to explode on Roland, and ready to slide in between his bulk and me as I threatened his life? She knew that Roland had just crossed an unseen boundary by delving into my personal life.
God, he had seen too much of me under the moon. Because that was my fault and I really didn’t feel like lashing out at him for daring to ask about anything concerning me, I...
No, no matter whose fault it was or how tired I was, I always felt like lashing out. That was how taking your pain out on people who didn’t deserve the backlash worked. It just didn’t work that way with Roland. Kay had no way of knowing that while planning to do damage control, and I couldn’t bring myself to unleash curse words and promises of violence at the top of my lungs because Roland didn’t mind his own business.
My heart just wasn’t in it because deep down, I knew he truly wanted to know why I was the way I was. He genuinely cared and would try to fix what was wrong with me as he had attempted to do only half an hour ago. ‘Fixing me’ wasn’t possible, and I wouldn’t let him put himself through that hell only for me to push him away for good. That was how I worked ever since I was twelve when I decided it was hard enough to take care of myself by any means necessary without adding anyone else to the equation therefore no relationship and motherhood. Twelve-years-old was when I decided that I’d seen too many things, been through too many things to not be so damn damaged that I would never be of any good to anyone else.
“Anna,” he summoned in that deep tone that sent tiny shivers straight up my spine, “I’ll never ask you for anything else but this. I promise. Now, who hurt you?” His tone was gritty, as if he was angry on my behalf.
Only a few people did things on my behalf and they were all Jesters. Roland had no way of knowing that he was asking me to expose my soul to him, or now that a crystal-clear image of a tall blonde who resembled me was flashing through my head unbidden. She was spaced out on dope, spread eagle across an unmade bed in a dingy t-shirt and grimy two-bedroom apartment that I grew up in for the first seventeen years of my life. How cruel was it for that to be a child’s first memory of their mother?
The memories that follow were no better. I swallowed hard, despising Memory Lane and anyone who pushed me down it because I’d never go willingly. But, something about Roland cushioned the journey that I cut off as quick as my mind would allow.
“If you must know, it was my mother, Roland,” I finally answered, and now, that subject was strictly off limits. And I was out of here. “Night, guys.”
“Night, boo,” Kay murmured. “Call me when you… if you want to talk.”
I won’t. She knew that too, completely understood where my head would go whenever I thought of Shelly Harp. She knew how much space I needed to get over just thinking about Shelly Harp.
Starting my trek down the stairs, across the yard, I didn’t stop until I reached my car. Three sets of footsteps tailed mine. Of course, Hayden and Kay wouldn’t have let me walk alone. I guessed that went for Roland too.
As I drove away, my rearview mirror reflected all their forms lingering at the sidewalk until I turned off of Kay’s street. I was going to my home that was temporary as of yesterday, and I was positive that my living arrangements weren’t the only thing on the cusp of change. So was something else inside me, and I wanted no parts of that.
Chapter Six
Moving day, a month later
~Anna~
Exhausted, more mentally than physically, I tilted my head over to lay it against the rolled up window of the U-Haul in hopes of catching about two winks of sleep before the end of this short journey from one end of the city to other. I soon regretted leaning over when we drove over an uneven spot in the road and my skull bounced off the glass then back into it.
Rubbing my head, I sniped, “Ow!” at the driver, Bo Malone, who was driving the box truck as a paid favor for me.
He snorted. “If you want to be bludgeoned to death, keep laying your head on the window, Anna.”
“Screw that.” I sat up again then began to complain some more since I couldn’t sleep in the passenger seat, “God, this thing rides like it has four flat tires.”
“Not my fault that you rented the best Dalton had to offer for the cheapest rate,” he commented, yielding at a stop sign before we breached the west side of the county limits.
Absorbing the shaking caused by the smallest of pebbles on the road seemed to be beyond the vehicle’s shocks and struts, so imagine what happened when we drove over a speed bump at the gas station. I’ll tell you what happened, the top of my head got intimately acquainted with the roof of the cab, and this wasn’t the first time today that I’d griped to Bo.
For the last few hours we spent packing and loading up my things, he bore witness to the mood I was in. I had no real name for it other than fucked-up. Someone in the medical profession may call it something else. I just knew the symptoms were mimicking a severe case of PMS, and they were a double-bitch. Like me.
Unlike me, Bo was laidback, snickering, and shaking his Caesar-haircut that I’d just given him yesterday. A straight line stretched from his temple all the way across the side of his head attached to coffee-colored skin. His thick, solid build had more meat and potatoes sticking to his six-foot frame than muscles. He looked a hell of a lot different from when he was a skinny, long-limbed kid running the block we grew up on.
In his blue uniform courtesy of the local car parts factory in Dalton, he could easily be mistaken for a genuine mover instead of one of my clients who’d had some pity on me and agreed to help with the move from my townhouse to my new home. Sadly, I couldn’t find the wherewithal to be excited about getting my slice of the ‘American dream’. I barely expended five whole minutes on a walk-through in the finished product of my two-bedroom starter home two weeks ago, before going back to the bank to sign my life away on the dotted line to purchase it.
After I handed over half of my savings for the down payment, I should’ve been twerking across the bank’s parking lot back to my car, but life just… felt… empty and just plain old mean lately. Well, much more meaner than usual lately, but I just didn’t have the drive to fight my way through the trials and tribulations life brought anymore. I couldn’t quit living either, not when it was ingrained to breathe.
Bo shifted gears on the truck effortlessly. Lucky for me, he volunteered to be a part of the two-man moving crew, eh, make that ‘one man, one woman’ moving crew. That was all that we needed to get my things boxed up and shipped fifteen and a half minutes away before my lease ran out tomorrow on the townhouse I rented.
“At least, there wasn’t much to move,” I muttered to myself.
“Yep,” Bo remarked.
Most times, ‘Yep’ was about the extent of his conversation, and it would never be described as titillating. Today, he was earning the easiest fifty bucks he’d ever make lugging around my bedroom furnishings with the aid of a hand truck. There were a few small boxes of glass knickknacks and my seventy-inch plasma television. My horde of clothing and shoes would be carried gently by myself. Anything with designer labels wer
en’t meant to be manhandled and wrinkled.
Besides my bedroom furniture, everything else had been sold. No point in filling up the new house with furniture that would be moved right back out during the decorating process. A process that would start if I ever picked up the phone and called Kay, or simply answered one of her calls.
She and several other people had been trying to reach out to me for the last month. Kay was the only one that mattered, and I didn’t even want to think about how hot under the collar she might be with me for avoiding everyone who knew Roland. I had also been avoiding the places he might go.
Kay would be even hotter after learning that I’d brought my first home without telling her. My spirits sunk a little more because I had to cut her off for a little while, for the sake of my sanity. What was left of it might be broken by her newfound friendship with Roland. It was best to keep my mind off her and him for the time being or I’d crawl under my bed and stay there with two middle fingers pointed up at life and the moving-part of getting into the new house.
“Aren’t you at least a little thrilled about buying your first home, Anna?” Bo asked out of nowhere.
So surprised that he was indulging in chitchat, I didn’t even think before blurting out, “Actually, I have no thrill whatsoever. Hell, I hadn’t felt up to doing anything besides working, which I don’t have much energy for either, but…” I huffed. “Somebody has to pay the bills.”
Since I was eternally single and never had a dependable parent to mooch off, that somebody to pay the bills was always going to be me. To this day, I don’t deliberately recall a time when I wasn’t on the come up for easy money to support myself as early as twelve, back when I experimented with hairdos on myself because nobody else would comb my head. Eventually, I tried to do it myself.
An inventive assembly of braids and ponytails followed later by me attempting to cut my own hair with dull scissors drew the attention of a struggling mother in the neighborhood. She didn’t want to comb my hair though, she wanted me to comb hers. I would earn my first ten dollars followed by many more, and I’d always be grateful to her for contributing to the first day that I didn’t go hungry and thirsty.
A year later, doodling with chalk on the sidewalk in front of my childhood home drew the interest of a tattoo artist walking up to his friend’s home next door to mine. His name was Luke Valentine, who stopped and offered me an apprenticeship at his tattoo shop downtown in exchange for my sketches on paper that he’d later wet over someone’s skin before inking their body up for life.
You wouldn’t believe how fascinating the process of creating a work of art on someone was to me. When I got older, I got a college education in cosmetology and became my own boss at Nu Impressions Salon. Setting my own hours worked beautifully with moonlighting as a tattoo artist out of my home on weekends. None of my accomplishments were for the prestige but for survival.
I’d been working my ass off to eat and keep the lights on since I was old enough to connect money with creature comforts, so there was no excuse for being a lazy ass for the last month. Except, I’d had a massive case of the blues since Roland’s party. If I was unfit for company before that night, there was no name for whatever I had dwindled down to emotionally since then.
I didn’t get depressed or skipped out on engaging with the public. People were my bread and butter. So yes, I was in a funk, and couldn’t see my way out of it, which wasn’t getting better but worse as time passed. No, I didn’t talk to anyone about it, definitely not with Kay.
The last thing I wanted to do was burst her honeymoon bubble with Hayden just so my misery could have company. I was selfish, but not that damn selfish and once my current feelings toward Roland was brought to air, Kay would feel obligated to pick between who got to keep her as a friend; me or Roland.
Even I wouldn’t stoop low enough to make her choose between me and Roland or anyone else, which could possibly cause problems between her and Hayden, who was such a good guy, he’d feel obligated to choose too. That wouldn’t be any fairer to him who had been in a military unit with Roland for years before he and Kay got together.
However, I still couldn’t be around Roland, so I did everyone a favor and subtracted myself from the mutual friendships until I could be in the same room as the man. Avoiding everyone seemed the only I avenue I could take with Roland being… just… too much… of everything! It was completely over-the-hell-whelming to just think about him.
Why I felt his absence along with Kay’s like someone had cut off two of my limbs, I had no idea. No way did I want anybody speculating about why that was. I didn’t want to know why or talk about it. I just wanted this all-consuming feeling of melancholy to go away before I drowned in it.
“I hope you feel better soon, Anna,” Bo wished me well in a low drone.
“Me too, Bo. Me too.” But, who knew when that would be?
********
~Roland~
Sunrays filtered through my bedroom’s blinds and parked behind my closed eyelids, creating a red glare behind them and intruding upon my dream of screwing Anna six ways from Sunday. For a whole month, she had intruded upon my dreams as well. My head was the only place she had shown up at according to Kay, who was missing the hell out of Anna.
Kay wasn’t the only damn one missing Anna, but what could a man do when the woman his dreams were made of had dropped off the face of the earth almost? Nothing, that was what, so I learned the ropes of my new job as Master Gunnery Sergeant while training others in what I did best; shooting firearms.
At home, I lived everyday as much as I could without the woman who’d stolen my damn heart on someone else’s deck. In the evenings, I supervised the construction of my new back deck just finished late last night. Somewhere between meeting Anna the one time and finding a reputable contractor to add to my home, I admitted to myself that I was building the deck for her.
I rolled over to my back just as my phone chimed from the nightstand near my head. Reaching for the device, I peeped at the clock. The afternoon had arrived about thirty minutes ago. If it was possible to push time back, well, I guess I go back a month. Not today, Roland. She has your nights, don’t give her your days too. She doesn’t want them.
The hole in my chest widened. I had been experiencing that phenomenon since Anna drove away never to be heard from or seen by any of us again. I palmed the ringing phone, bringing it to my blurry eyes while already knowing who was calling; Hayden.
“Yeah, man,” I answered groggily and wiped down my mouth as I yawned, then stretched.
“Get your ass up, Roland, if you want help with cutting your back yard today.” Hayden sounded too damn chipper for my liking right now. “It ain’t gon’ cut itself.”
That was true. So, though I could go for another four hours of shut eye, I sat up on the edge of the bed, throwing the simple, white cotton sheets back. “I’ll be ready by one… Hey, has Kay heard from—”
“No, Roland, she hasn’t heard from Anna!” he cut me off before I could get started on what he had declared as my favorite subject oh, about a month ago. “Anna’s still ignoring Kay’s calls, and Kay’s still not sure why. She thought it might’ve been because Anna’s mother is a real sore subject for your girl. Now, Kay’s not so sure that’s the reason.”
I loved how ‘my girl’ sounded but not the reason why she might have gone missing; because I couldn’t keep my need to fix other people’s shit to myself. “Fuck, Hayden! Why didn’t you say before now that she might be upset because I asked who hurt her? Her and Kay falling apart is my fault.” I dropped my head into my hand and groaned.
“It’s not your fault, Roland, and Kay doesn’t think you asking Anna anything is why she’s not coming around or answering her phone. First of all, Anna is rude enough to tell you where to stick your questions if she didn’t like them. She would cut you if you kept asking questions and didn’t stick them where she told you to, and she wouldn’t talk about something if she didn’t want to.
“
Kay said that even if a sensitive subject was the reason your girl was AWOL, Anna usually bounced back from not so fond memories of her mother within a day. No one knows Anna better than my girl who thinks it better to give Anna some space while trying to check in with her by phone. Anna’s just not answering, but Kay’s still getting updates on Anna’s wellbeing from the others going to the salon where she works.”
“At least, she’s still working,” I remarked. If she could work, she was okay for the most part, so that was something. “Maybe I should drop by her job and get a haircut. You know, stalk her without it being too damn obvious therefore criminal.”
Hayden snorted. “Listen, man. I feel you. I’ll even go with you if only to reassure Kay that Anna’s alive and well physically. Mentally, well, that’s always been up in the air with Anna. Trust me on that. Kay’s going through her own mental shit with worrying, which I don’t like, but she’s giving it one more day before she tracks down Anna herself. I’m going with her when she does because it’ll be confrontation, so I’ll go with you too I guess. As worried as Kay is, she’s going to give Anna the what-for, and you don’t want to be anywhere near that blowup. I know how far off the deep end both women can go. Oh, and Anna usually has a blade in her hand when she goes off. Anything else you want to know about her? Like her ring size, address, name of her workplace, and phone number so you can pester Anna about her wellbeing and not me perhaps?” He chuckled, pulling a laugh from me who was just about worried sick now and worrying the hell out of Hayden obviously.
“No, I don’t want all that from you, Hayden. If Anna wanted me to know all those things about her, she’d have told me herself.”
“And you’d have filed each bit of information about her away for safekeeping in several places immediately. A man never knows when he’s going to get amnesia or God forbid, Alzheimer.”
