The heat of his breath against my neck.
“Do you really want to go?” he asked, touching my breasts. My stomach. His fingers toyed with the edge of my belt. “Before I do what I’ve promised?”
I should have left. But I didn’t. I pushed back against him, just a little. Permission. Surrender.
“That’s my girl—”
“Stop,” I said. “Just…touch me…”
His hands were rough, his fingers speared down between my underwear and skin, and I gasped. Moaned.
He tried to be gentle but I pushed my ass against him. Denying him that.
“Harder,” I said.
His finger found my clit. “Like this?”
I was up on my tiptoes, my back arched, my head against his shoulder. “Yes,” I moaned. Over and over again as I climbed higher and higher.
“Ronnie,” he breathed into my ear.
He used me. Worked me. His teeth bit at my neck, his fingers squeezed my clit so hard.
And that was it. I was shattered. Ruined. I fell forward against the counter, my knees useless.
Clayton held me up, his fingers inside of me, the pressure of his body against me.
Oh, God. It was good. So good. That was all I could think.
“Yes,” I said, and I realized I was talking out loud. “You make me come so good. I need more.”
He touched me again, a sure, hard press of his thumb against my clit, and I was airborne one more time. I was aware, dimly, of my body, but all my edges were blurry. All my worries…gone. He was on his knees behind me, my hips in his hands, my legs spread wide.
And then his mouth. His tongue. It was wet and messy. Too intimate and ridiculous, but who could care? He tongued me and sucked me, and I came so hard my legs buckled. I screamed, pushing myself away from the counter and against his body as hard as I could.
And then it was done and the intimacy that had felt so good, felt sharp and awkward. I didn’t know him right now and I really didn’t know myself.
I blinked. Swallowed. Slowly pulled myself together. I pushed myself up from the counter and Clayton stood up, rested his hands on my hips.
“You all right?” His breath ruffled my hair and I was not sure of the answer.
Yes, I was great. I was the world after a good hard rain.
No, I was twisted and torn and as confused as I’d ever been.
I went with “Sure.”
His low chuckle told me he was on to me. But he didn’t push the no-lying thing and I was grateful.
The weight and heat of him at my back vanished and I turned to find him five steps away. The distance was on purpose.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
“I’m not going to touch you again. Not tonight.”
I was relieved and disappointed.
The power of Clayton to tear me in two with opposing emotions.
“Why?”
“Because I missed you so much. Because I can’t fuck you when I want to make love to you so bad I hurt.”
Oh. Oh, God. I didn’t know what to do with myself. My body or my hands.
The five feet that separated us was filled with barbed wire and crocodiles and everything we weren’t saying to each other. And I was painfully aware of his erection beneath his jeans. Painfully aware that I had gotten some release after five years of being alone and he was still…alone.
“I should go home,” I said and wished I sounded stronger. Surer.
Because if he asked, I would stay. If he asked to make love to me I would let him.
“Are you all right to drive?”
I nodded.
“I can call you a car.”
“You’ve done enough.” I sounded weirdly bitter. Weirdly angry. Because this wasn’t what I’d wanted when I came over. But it was what he wanted. To get us back to this place.
Clayton lifted his arms, his beautiful body under his beautiful clothes spread wide for my gaze. “This is me,” he said. “You knew what you were getting into.”
“And this is me,” I said, clear as a bell. “I am not the girl you knew. I am a woman who will fight you when you need to be fought.”
Not that I’d done much fighting tonight.
He stepped forward so fast I couldn’t do anything. I was trapped again between his body and the counter. His hands cupped my face, but instead of kissing me all he did was look at me. So hard I couldn’t look away.
I was pinned by his gaze.
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” he breathed.
13
CLAYTON
I’ve wanted two things in my life.
Veronica would call that a lie. And she wouldn’t be wrong. I want the world and everything in it.
But specifically there’d been two things.
A bicycle.
And Veronica.
“What did you do?” Dale asked. The words staggered out of his mouth, slow and impaired, like drunks. He was sitting across the chessboard from me on the porch of the old house. It was January and too cold to sit outside, but Dale insisted.
The sky was bitter and dark, making him look a little the worse for wear. His silver-white hair was too long and fluttered in the breeze.
“I didn’t tell her,” I said.
Dale made a sound in his throat, something disapproving.
“It’s too soon,” I told him and moved my pawn, knowing he was going to take it with his rook. But he’d leave his knight open and I had my eye on that knight.
“It’s been most… of your… damn life,” he said, the words plodding and careful out of his mouth. Not that he remembered. He only knew because I told him I’d been in love with Veronica since I was sixteen, working the mail room at King Industries. “The world… isn’t waiting around… to give you more chances.”
“Is that some AA wisdom?” The jab didn’t make contact. He didn’t remember his years in AA and I was the asshole for bringing it up.
He took the pawn, pushing the rook forward with the clenched fist of his right hand. He knocked over my rook and I set it back up.
“Sorry,” he said, the word long and slurred.
“It’s okay.”
“Smells.” The old man lifted his head and closed his eyes like an old hound scenting something on the wind. “Like rain.”
I leaned out so I could see around the porch post we were sitting behind. There were big black clouds rolling in from the north. “Storm coming in,” I said.
He nodded with a crooked, pleased smile on his face, like he’d gotten the question right.
I took the knight he’d left open. His rook took my bishop.
Those things I wanted, in the end I’d gotten both of them. The bike and the girl. I broke one of them.
My dad broke the bike. Ran over it with his truck.
“Your…move,” the old man said.
“Hold on,” I said and stood up from my stool, tucking my trench coat and my tie to my chest. I took a tissue out of the pack Maggie gave me when I came in an hour ago and pressed it to a corner of the old man’s lips, where there was drool pooling.
“Dammit,” he said and reached with his trembling, rigid hand for the tissue. The old guy had his pride—not that it did him any good these days.
“I got it,” I said and tucked the tissue in my pocket.
Dale’s face was red with embarrassment and I tried to understand how hard this must be. To be locked in his uncooperative body. His fragmented mind.
There were times I wanted to push. Push as hard as I could just to see what might happen.
But I stopped myself.
“Your move…kid,” Dale said.
My father had been a cowboy. A hired gun every spring and fall when ranchers needed to move herds. Apparently, he was a really good cowboy. His bosses used to say that to me when I was a boy, coming to their ranches to collect his pay.
“He’s a hell of a horseman, your daddy,” they’d say. “It’s just too bad he can’t stay sober.”
“Yes
,” I would say, polite, like my mother taught me, my eyes fixed somewhere over the rich rancher’s ear. “Too bad.”
And they’d hand me the check or the envelope of cash and I was grateful to my daddy. Sometimes so grateful I lost sight of my anger. Sometimes so grateful I convinced myself that things weren’t so bad.
Because my father was a drunk. And he could be cruel. But he did one thing right. He made sure I could pay the rent on whatever apartment or house we were renting at the moment. He made sure I could put groceries in the fridge.
It was, as they said, the very least he could do.
“Is she…pretty?” Dale asked. “Your girl?”
It was embarrassing how pleased I was by the words “your girl.”
How satisfying that was to me on a basic level. But that’s where I have always felt my connection to Veronica. Down in some primal place.
“She is,” I said and left it at that. Because I didn’t have words for how beautiful she was now. The dewy, charming promise of her early twenties had turned into a sharp-eyed reality. I’d hurt her and that had put a layer of armor over her, I couldn’t deny that. But even that was attractive to me. And I was well aware it made me an asshole to admire the scars I’d put on her.
But I was pretty comfortable being the asshole.
“She love you?” Dale asked, cutting to the heart of the matter in the way he did now. The brutal honesty came with the drooling and the chess playing. Maggie the nurse said it was all a give and take.
“No,” I said simply.
Dale tried to shift in his wheelchair and jostled the chessboard, sending a few pieces flying.
I picked up his queen from the worn wooden porch floor and set it back in its spot.
“You outta…fix that. Her not loving you.” Dale said. The words got hung up around the F and I struggled not to just say the word for him. Maggie told me not to do that.
“I’m trying,” I said.
By lying and manipulating her.
I was a crass, arrogant fool. Binding her to me with pleasure, just like I did before. Hoping it would make her blind to my lies.
But I was in love with a woman who hated me, and it made me dangerous.
“I loved a woman,” Dale said. “Nina. She was beautiful.”
This Dale remembered. The stroke hadn’t taken away memories of Nina. Or it had only taken away the bad.
“Yes, she was,” I said and left it at that.
“You’ve seen her?” Dale asked.
“You have a picture inside.”
Their wedding shot. Nina in a minidress. Dale in bell-bottoms.
When I was a kid, after I’d taken care of our threadbare existence, I’d given my father what was left from his weekly pay. A thin envelope of twenties and fives.
“This all of it?” he’d ask, and I’d nod because talking sometimes got me in trouble.
“You lying to me?”
Most of the time, yes, I was lying to him. I’d gotten in the habit of squirreling away what I could, when I could. A tiny roll of ones, held together with a green rubber band that I kept in the toe of a pair of gym shoes I’d long outgrown.
It’s how I’d gotten that bike.
But to his face I’d say, “No, Daddy. That’s all of it.”
And off he’d go, drinking his way through that envelope. He’d be gone for the weekend, usually. Sometimes longer. But I was guaranteed at least two days of freedom.
Of deep breaths. And quiet.
I’d eat till I was stuffed and then I’d lie on the kitchen floor until I was unstuffed enough to eat some more. Sometimes I fell asleep there on the floor, exhausted by being that man’s son. The endless bracing and careful watching. The long hours around midnight waiting to hear his boots in the hallway outside my door.
I didn’t know where the old man slept those nights. And I didn’t care.
“She has dogs now. Her sister’s technically. But she has them,” I said to Dale, for no reason, except that Veronica with those two ridiculous dogs was kind of the cutest thing I’d ever seen. And considering how long I’d known Veronica King, I’d seen a lot of cute things.
Dale was the only person I told this stuff to. The only person to whom I talked about Veronica. And my feelings. He was the void I could shout into because he didn’t know who I was. Or who she was. He didn’t remember it half the time anyway.
Ironically, Dale was my only safe place.
“You like dogs?” he asked, and I looked at his face. His watery, blue, bloodshot eyes. He smiled at me and the drool gathered again.
Yes. I liked dogs. I’d had one when I was a boy. Cupid, a hound mix that had been personally affronted by squirrels. My father shot him one night when Cupid wouldn’t stop barking.
“Here,” I said and wiped Dale’s mouth again.
“Thank you,” Dale said, and I looked away from his blushing face, offering him what dignity and privacy I could.
Everything changed when I was about sixteen. Hank King offered me a job. Not on his ranch. In his office downtown.
I didn’t do much at first. Mail room stuff. I spent a terrible Christmas break answering phones. But I worked hard and Hank noticed. The man was an asshole of the highest order, but he had an eye for people who could make him money.
And I made him a lot of money.
You think this makes you something? My father had asked when I was a teenager and he found out about the King job. It doesn’t. It don’t change nothing. You’re my son. Mine.
He spent a few nights trying to beat that into me. And the few pockets of peace I’d found were obliterated. Dad didn’t let me pick up the paychecks anymore and there wasn’t money for rent. Or utilities. Or for much at the grocery store other than canned beans. I did what I could, but I was only making minimum wage in that mail room.
Hank King let us stay in this house free of charge. He said it was ours for as long as I worked for him.
And that made this house the only thing that had been ours. Ever.
I’d thought about quitting. Letting things go back to normal.
But one day I was delivering mail to the top floor of King Industries when two girls walked out of Hank King’s office. One a tiny little thing with huge eyes and short hair. The other just on the edge of womanhood, with laughing brown eyes and straight hair that fell over her shoulders like a cape. She smiled at the receptionist and then at me as she walked by.
I watched her go because she was glittery and pink and warm.
“You want to stop looking at her like that,” the receptionist had said. “That’s Veronica King and she is not for you.”
After that, all my thoughts of leaving were gone. I could handle anything at home if it gave me a shot at seeing Veronica again.
And that next spring Hank King hadn’t hired the old man. No one had. His drinking had caused too many problems.
No one hired him the next fall, either.
So he made drinking his job. Drinking and hating me.
As an adult I sometimes looked out my penthouse windows, or at the view from my office at King Industries, and tried to imagine what my father would say if he saw me. If he saw my world. My power.
I imagined him sometimes, covered in dust and smelling like old beer, walking in behind me as I made my way from reception to my office. I imagined him seeing the way a dozen employees stood up from their desks and said, “Good morning, sir.”
The sir made me cringe every time. But I didn’t ask any of them not to say it.
Because I had fucking earned sir.
“You should bring that girl of yours,” Dale said. “Veronica. I’d like to meet her.”
I looked at the old man long and hard and he looked at me right back.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked. The doctors had told me to stop doing this. To stop trying to pressure the memories back. It had been almost seven years; they weren’t going to come back. And why would I want them to?
Dale was better without them.
&n
bsp; I was supposed to be better without them.
But I was a product of what my father and my childhood had made me. And now I was alone in that cold, bitter past because I remembered what the rest of the world didn’t. What the old man didn’t even remember.
“Your name is Clayton,” Dale said, smiling with half his mouth. “You’re a shit chess player.”
I forced myself to take a deep breath. To turn my face away from the old man and my old anger. It was worthless. Pointless.
But I couldn’t sit there anymore.
“Goodbye, Dale,” I said and stood up from the stool.
“We’re not done with our game,” he said slowly.
“I want to leave before the weather turns.” He nodded as if that made sense, and it would to him.
He held out his hand, frozen in a fist, and I shook the fist, trying not to think about what that fist used to do to me.
I pushed open the front door and found Maggie sitting at the table finishing some chart work.
I paid a crew of nurses and caregivers a small fortune to keep Dale in good shape, and Maggie was in charge of it all. She was a pretty woman, with black curls and a kind and patient smile. But she took no bullshit and I appreciated both those things.
“Good night, Maggie,” I said.
“Good night, Clayton,” she said. “Will we see you again next weekend?”
I wanted to say no. I didn’t know, really, why I said yes. Why I kept coming back. With the chess and the drool and the memories only I had.
But I nodded.
“Your father really does love it,” Maggie said.
There was some combination of those words that put my back up.
“He’s not my father,” I said.
“I know it may seem that way because of the effects of the stroke—”
I shook my head, swallowing a bitter laugh.
Dale was a sweetheart and a surprisingly great chess player.
My father had been a mean son of a bitch who shot my dog.
“Dale is not my father,” I said.
I just wished with all my heart that he had been.
14
VERONICA
Sunday night I was in the process of connecting some of my clients with another accountant in Austin so any pressing matters could be handled. Other clients preferred to wait for me, and I made promises about being in Austin in the next few weeks for meetings.
The Tycoon Page 12
