by Brea Viragh
I watched them walk in the opposite direction and resigned myself to tagging behind like a tugboat bolted to an ocean steamer. I bobbed in their wake as my stomach sank.
On with the show.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I cannot believe you let us go through with such a stupid thing and we ended up running into the one person I wanted to avoid.”
I slammed my bag on the bed and rounded on Duncan. Sure, I was eye-level with his nipple, but I could be intimidating if I wanted to be. With a hearty batch of fury stewing on simmer for the last two hours, I figured this was a good time to let him have it.
He blinked those guileless brown eyes at me, the picture of innocence. “What did I do?”
“You know damn well what you did, Mr. Whitaker. Having sex with me in front of those people and making me stay for a double dose of mortification afterward.”
“I’m not following you.” He made a show of feigning ignorance.
“Forcing me to make polite conversation after—” I gestured lewdly. “—sliding your hot dog into my bun. In front of everyone.”
“I didn’t fuck you in front of everyone.” Duncan shook his head and argued semantics, determined to be right. “I took you into the music room which was down the hall and private enough. And might I add, I didn’t hear any complaints from you. I remember an ‘oh yes’ and an ‘oh God’ thrown in, but never a protest.”
I ended up turning away so I didn’t have to look at him. “Soundproofing doesn’t make it right. Someone saw us! Then I had to listen to Peggy Pembroke go on and on about her mastectomy. Not a pleasant experience when I’m pulsating and dripping, let me tell you. And talk about failing at life. Public intercourse and I couldn’t even orgasm. It doesn’t seem worth the hassle.”
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.” Duncan spread his hands open wide before bending to untie his shoes. “Honestly, I didn’t think about it.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” I fired back. “Men are able to tuck their dingdongs away like nothing ever happened. You aren’t left with the juicy clean-up. I had to go to the bathroom and juggle toilet paper and leg lifts while trying to keep my balance. Do you know how hard it is to do all that in a dress and not fall in the toilet?”
The small hotel room could hardly contain us and it was our first night. I already saw it playing out for the worse the longer we stayed. A tiny 325-square-foot single room versus an 1,800-square-foot house. The math didn’t add up.
We’d planned to set up shop at Hotel Heartwood while the repairmen Duncan hired—over the phone, no less—set the kitchen to rights in my parents’ old home. Mom and Dad were enjoying the comforts of retirement in an RV flitting across the United States, from Orlando to Wichita to Boise, and had left me with a charming flooded abode with ’60s décor and dry rot. Yippee.
I knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth but this small space already grated on my last nerve.
The contractor had said the pipes in the farmhouse burst some winters ago, soaking the kitchen with water and left to molder over multiple seasons. Everything down to the subfloor and beams needed to be replaced. A lengthy and costly process, although I’d been assured there was only another week to go until move-in time. My parents are the worst housekeepers in the state, and oddly enough still together despite the mess and their constant bickering.
I watched Duncan kick his dress shoes to the side and work on the rest of his attire. The shirt was one he ordered special from a tailor in our old neighborhood in Santa Barbara, custom fit for the width of his shoulders. His wardrobe had to change if he expected to fit in with the Friday night jamboree crowd ’round here. The fashion of choice in Heartwood was flannel plaid, denim, or tie-dye. Nothing else would do.
He jerked his tie to the left to loosen it. “Like I said, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking about your juicy clean-up.”
“Sorry doesn’t make up for what I felt. Especially when August…” I couldn’t finish my sentence. Living through it was bad enough. Seeing it again in my mind gave me nightmarish chills and I wrapped my arms around my torso in mortification. “He had a front row seat.”
“Yeah, his appearance was unfortunate. I should have put something up against the door, now that I think about it.” Duncan rubbed the bristles of his surfer-blond hair and sighed. “I wasn’t in my right mind.”
“Unfortunate? Try humiliating. Degrading. Of anyone in this world to catch me having sex, it had to be him.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that, but all right, you’ve made your point. It was a hell of a time, though.” Duncan smirked.
“Maybe for you.” I wore a path in the carpet before retiring to the bed. Flopping back on the orange and green floral bedspread thin enough to spread on toast, I let my arms sag and exhaled. “Stupid August. He sniffed me out among the crowd.”
I remembered the last time I saw him, before my move across country. He’d been the one to tell me my significant other had cheated on me. Like a fool I decided not to listen. Brett—my boyfriend at the time—cared about me more than anyone else, I had protested. He wanted to start a life with me, to move out of our Podunk mountain town and accomplish something great. At twenty-eight, I was one of the last women in my graduating class to find a man and I latched onto Brett with the obstinacy of a mule.
Our happiness was short-lived. Apparently, Brett also wanted to start a life with Kimberly, Ashley, and Erika as well. And those were just the ones off the top of my head.
I hadn’t believed August when he warned me. I called him a liar and vowed to end our friendship right then and there unless he apologized. He didn’t.
“Stop whining. He seems like a nice guy despite his issues with timing.” Duncan slid into bed next to me. We lay like corpses side by side in the air-conditioned hum of our upgraded room for which he footed the bill. I hated when he took charge, whipping out the credit card despite my protests of going Dutch. He hushed me with a single look and asserted his status as The Man. Easier on the wallet but hell on my pride.
“You would think so.” Once upon a time, I had too. “You’re a poor judge of character.”
Duncan stroked a finger down the length of my wavy brown hair until my pulse slowed. The sustained caresses calmed me quicker than anything, and he knew it.
“Stop being pouty,” he said.
“I’m not being pouty.”
“Things will look better tomorrow. I promise.”
I wondered how anyone made those statements without the benefit of a magic eight ball to tell the future.
“You promise?” I reiterated.
“Of course. We’ll get a good night of sleep under our belts, start fresh, and we’ll be able to move into the house before you know it.”
I turned my head and stared outside as trees rustled in the breeze. Maple leaves turned their silver undersides to the sky and I wondered if the evening would bring rain.
The house should come together soon enough, and with the thought of renovation on my mind, I vowed to ignore whatever problems August presented.
**
Several mornings later, as Duncan settled into his new office, I perused the aisles of the local grocery store, making sure to keep my gaze trained on the lower shelves. To look up meant locking eyes with someone I knew, which inevitably led to conversations on how the reunion had turned out. Or why I was back in town after a five-year absence.
No, I definitely didn’t want to pursue that discussion.
Rain had come during the night to wash the land anew. This morning, from the confines of the four-paned hotel room window, I had noted the droplets on foliage, and how each drip caught the sunlight and scattered those rays in a thousand directions. The simple beauty of nature lifted my spirits and the thought of indulging in my favorite treat brought them higher.
After a sleepless night and dreams I could not remember, the whole of me decreed it Ice Cream Day. Nothing like sugar to solve a tiny identity crisis.
The grocery store had
too many choices when it came to those cold confectionary delights. A pint would do me, of course, as our room came without the added benefit of a freezer. It would become a game for me to see how much I could polish off in one sitting. I dutifully perused the offerings, but in the end Ben and Jerry’s won out, as it usually did.
“You’re the lucky one today,” I murmured to the pint container as I plucked Triple Caramel Chunk from the frozen depths. “You want to come home with me?”
“I do. Searching for anything in particular?”
Oh God, no.
I lost my footing, nearly wiping out a shelf of ice cream. I never claimed to be graceful.
Yowling like a cat with its tail caught, arms swinging in circles, I had no choice but to drop into the waiting embrace, reflected in the glass, before I broke a bone.
“Careful there. You’re gonna hurt yourself.” August shifted his weight to accommodate me.
“You can’t scare me like that.” My pulse raced and I tried to ignore the feel of his body against mine. “It puts a person that much closer to a heart attack and I don’t want to take any chances.”
The scent of him caught me off-guard. I remembered it, the Irish Spring soap his mother purchased in bulk because it was cheaper.
August stepped back as I swatted him with my free hand. “I’m sorry. I saw you pondering your choices and wanted to be friendly. Isn’t an interruption better than walking by and ignoring you?”
“That’s twice in as many days you decided to find me and be friendly.” I couldn’t help the attitude. With the pint cooling in my hand and August’s heat at my back, I straightened and returned to my shopping cart. “I can do without it.”
He didn’t take the hint. Instead he trailed the cart back down the aisle as I feigned interest in eggs. “Is it so wrong of me to want to catch up? We were best friends once.”
“Yes. Once. A long time ago.”
“Some things never change,” he told me in a matter-of-fact tone.
I pretended not to catch the echo of his smile reflected in the refrigerator glass. “And some things do,” I replied.
The tires on the buggy squealed when I wrenched it to the side, scurrying toward the cash register.
“Not between us.” August kept his gait slow, nonchalant as he followed. The picture of a man with time at his disposal. His career as a luthier, building and repairing stringed instruments by hand, allowed him the free hours to spend however he chose, no matter the time of day. One of those creative types, like me in my song lyricist days.
“We used to be as close as two peas in a pod,” he told me. “I remember the night I helped you climb out your window so we could go to the old drive-in movie theater behind where the hardware store used to be. Do you remember?”
A reluctant grin formed as I recalled the time. “We had a lot of fun. They were playing some horrible B movie that we couldn’t see clearly because of the crack in your windshield.”
“And your father caught us on the way back home. Threatened me with a shotgun until he realized who I was.”
I chuckled. “It was a great time.”
We joined the line of others waiting to check out, me focused on my purchases and August dividing his attention between me and chatting with a woman in a homemade floral-print skirt about some music function.
The cashier was another acquaintance only a few years behind me in high school. I nodded slightly in his direction as he beeped my items across the scanner.
August turned once more. “So where were we?”
“You were reminiscing without a point.”
“Sometimes reminiscing is the point, you know.”
“I’ve heard.”
“Let me take you to lunch,” August said, watching them bag my groceries as he came around to his real objective. “Consider it payback. You can continue to berate me and I’ll feed you. It’s the least I could do to make up for walking in on you at the reunion, even though you weren’t supposed to be in the music room in the first place.”
I glared at him. “Don’t say it. Don’t say another word. I prefer to think of it as a bad dream.”
“We can pretend, if you like.”
In the harsh light of day, I took in his oval face, still youthful despite a tiny shock of gray amidst the strands of auburn near his left temple. A thoughtful brow pondered my possible answer.
“I don’t know.” The ice cream would melt into liquid on the front seat of my car and then re-solidify in the cooler filled with hotel ice until the texture changed. Good thing the rest of my purchases were non-perishable.
“Aw, come on,” he said.
“I have to think about it.”
After swiping the credit card, I pushed the cart toward the car with August behind me.
“Please?”
Another word, just one, and a simple one. The little girl inside me shrugged her shoulders. What’s the harm? It’s Augie. But the woman’s mind splintered into a thousand pathways of what-if.
The words came out before I could stop them. “I guess.”
He delighted in my agreement. “That’s great. I’ll drive.”
“I’ll drink to that.” I sighed. “I have a free afternoon, anyway. Duncan is scoping out the insurance building before his start date. Getting a feel for the town so he doesn’t walk in unprepared.”
“Ah, he’s an insurance salesman.” August flashed his teeth. “How interesting.”
August’s agreeable nature extended to the point of following me as I returned to the hotel room with the groceries. I declined his offer of accompanying me up the steps and managed to climb without much hassle. Bags clattered to the floor as I ran to the bathroom mirror, alone at last.
Yes, there I was—hair shooting in every direction as I channeled my inner Mad Hatter. I’d forgone makeup earlier, which I now realized was a dreadful mistake. Dour and shabby, the shirt I’d thrown on this morning did nothing to rejuvenate my aging face or accentuate my better features.
What better features, Iz?
“Oh, what a mess. I’m a mess.” I spoke to myself, flinging the shirt aside and hastily reaching for something, anything, else. A few dabs of concealer under the eyes didn’t miraculously restore youthful exuberance but it helped. At least if I couldn’t feel perky, I would simulate it.
My reflection reminded me of Mother, and that was something almost unforgivable. All smiles on the outside and exhaustion and regret in the core. No one wanted to emulate a woman who prided herself on being cold at home. I sometimes thought she made it a sport to see how often I’d beg for those three words every child needs to hear.
I shook my head to clear it.
There was no saving me today. I scowled at the mirror. What did my appearance matter in the grand scheme of things? There was no need to impress; it was a quick bite to eat. An apology meal. What did my appearance matter in the grand scheme of things?
A knock on the door caught my attention, and then August’s voice sounded through the wood. “What are you doing in there?”
“Nothing. I’m coming out right now.”
We stepped out on the cement slab leading down to the parking lot where his car waited. The same dilapidated vehicle he’d pushed down the road since he passed driver’s ed.
“Where are we going?” I asked, pushing aside several screwdrivers on the passenger seat before sitting.
“It’s a surprise.”
“Yeah, I’ve had my fill of those in the last few days.” I wondered what kind of characterization I would get now if Leslie Gordon heard about our outing and went to town with her rumors. “Most Likely to Get It On with an Old Flame and Lie About It.” Sounded like my next reunion superlative would be a doozy.
Leslie had always been great at ferreting out information, and when her skills failed, making shit up instead. No one ever believed me when I insisted August and I were just friends.
The term friend became synonymous with fuck buddy back in those days and I doubted much had changed i
n my absence.
We rode in his old Cabriolet convertible, bright yellow with racing stripes of rust down the side. He put the pedal down and gunned it through backroads we both knew better than our own bodies. The air thickened as morning swirled toward afternoon and we zipped along at a steady 55 mph.
We did not speak over the roar of the engine and wind. Instead of thinking about the future, I found myself transported to the past. The times when I happily hopped into the same front seat knowing how safe I’d be as August had no designs on getting me into the back.
The world came alive in the country, with water and insects and birds winging their way across an endless expanse of blue above. I missed the deciduous trees and pines while living in southern California, where hills rolled toward the sea in shades of brown and tan. There were no conifers in Santa Barbara, no towering trunks shooting straight up in slender silhouettes, offering limited protection from the sun. Others adored the royal palms and eucalyptus while I yearned for a tree able to shed its leaves in the autumn.
Here, oaks and maples spread mighty limbs along both sides of the two-lane country lane, dappling the asphalt with drops of sunshine in the otherwise cool shade.
August took a fork in the road and bore left, edging close to the green gully I knew was hidden by brush. Drifting as he drove, I rested my cheek on my arm and questioned my life.
Why I left Heartwood, and why I came back.
Why I found myself back in the same car with the boy who’d never left my side.
And why I left his in the first place.
CHAPTER FIVE
“So, how long have you and Duncan been together?” August asked after a time.
Ugh, the topic I’d been dreading. The one he broached first. It figured. August always had a tendency to dive right into the subject you least wanted to discuss. There were those who enjoyed his ability to cut to the chase because he was thorough. Now I wished he’d learn to let go.
“A year and a little bit,” I answered above the roar of the wind. “He proposed last month before we decided to move. Rent was getting out of control.”
