by Malcom, Anne
We did not speak.
Not all morning. But there had been more sly touches. Touches that were a promise.
I had the late shift. Lance was taking Nathan to school. He kissed me when Nathan was brushing his teeth.
He kissed me goodbye and hello all at the same time.
Then, I’d stumbled down the street.
Karen had only just poured me coffee and we hadn’t even been in each other’s presence for longer than ten minutes. I had planned to tell her once I was caffeinated and the events had sunken in a little more.
I sipped my coffee while I contemplated how to answer her question. How was the sex? Were there enough words to describe how the sex was? Did any words even exist to do so?
I was pretty sure there weren’t, and I flunked English in high school, so I didn’t have it in me to even try and articulate what Lance had done to me. What I’d, in turn, done to him.
“We had sex on the floor of the living room,” I said.
Karen raised her brows and then waited.
“And?” she demanded after I took another sip of my coffee instead of expanding.
“Twice,” I said. “We had sex on the floor twice.”
She grinned knowingly. “How many orgasms?”
I grinned back. “More than two.”
She whistled. “Not that I can say I’m surprised, despite how firmly I am in the lesbian camp, that there is a man who just looks like he can fuck.”
I nodded in agreement. “Oh, he lives up to that. He fucks like a man just let out of prison.”
That was as best description as I could give it. For one, it wasn’t making love with Lance, any of the five times we did it. It was fucking. Carnal, wild, mind-blowing fucking. And I was totally okay with that. Thinking back to how much I’d been okay with that made tender parts of me ache for more.
“So,” she said, interrupting me from my thoughts. “You decided he’s worth the pain.”
I thought about it. About everything with Lance. About his cruelty. His coldness. His demons. About the way he moved inside me. The way he touched me. Looked at me. Protected me. How he took my son fishing. Helped him with his homework. Drove him to school.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s worth the pain.”
* * *
“Why do you do it?” Lance asked.
I looked up from where I was stitching Nathan’s costume for the school play. He was a tree. As lively, funny and intelligent as my kid was, he was a crappy actor. Hence him being a tree. Thankfully he was very excited about that, because he knew how important the trees were to the world.
“Do what?” I asked. “Sew his costume? Because I don’t do anything else for the school, including bake sales where I used box cake mix that contains gluten and that makes me a villain in the eyes of everyone there. I’ve gotta save face somehow. Even if I’m really crappy at sewing.” I frowned down at the mess of fabric in my lap.
Well, this would be a tree from the future, a mutant, ravaged by global warming or the radiation of a bomb dropped by some crazy dictator.
Something ticked in Lance’s jaw, his version of a smile, as I was coming to understand. A warmth spread through me. At being able to recognize that. At the fact I was sitting on the sofa, sewing my son’s costume and he was returning from doing the dishes—despite the fact he’d also cooked and refused to let me even look at the sink—beer in his hands, wearing only socks, jeans, and a tee. We were far from being figured out. From being anything resembling a normal couple.
I still didn’t know a thing about his past, his guards were still way up with me, and there was the tiny issue of my ex-husband trying to burn my house down and getting away with it, but I decided to ignore all of this and just enjoy the simplicity of this moment. Of it feeling almost domestic, knowing what Lance’s jaw tick meant. Knowing that he’d be going to bed with me tonight, giving me one of the most intense orgasms of my life and holding me in his arms until he woke me in the morning with yet another intense orgasm.
“No, though gluten is the shit and those bitches are crazy,” he said blandly.
I grinned at him, despite him calling women ‘bitches.’ Though he wasn’t wrong, the women who gave me judgmental brow raises and whispered to each other whenever I delivered my gluten-laden box brownies to the bake sale were total bitches.
“Church,” he continued, not moving to sit by me on the sofa as I so longed him to, he leaned on the doorjamb.
“Your life has been one big example of why God doesn’t exist,” he said, eyes on me with an intensity that I would never get used to. I hope I got the chance to never get used to it. “You deserved a life of ease. No way would a god on this earth or another let that shit happen to one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen.” His eyes went far away. “I’ve known the ugliest of shit in the world. Everything I’ve experienced has served as proof there is no higher being. Suffering that is needless and cruel. Most of which you’ve endured and yet you still put on a beautiful dress and take you and your son to church every Sunday.” He paused. “Why?”
I put down the sewing, mostly because I was about to stab myself in the finger if I tried to keep going after Lance laid all that on me. “Okay, so I’m going to be totally lame and quote a line from A Walk to Remember,” I said, trying to keep the tears out of my voice because everything he’d just said was beautiful.
“Even though that movie is not at all lame and actually totally beautiful.” I raised my brow at Lance in challenge for him to tease. Of course, Lance didn’t tease. “Without suffering, there is no compassion,” I whispered, never taking my eyes from his. “It would be very easy to believe in a godless world after everything I’ve been through,” I said, after a very long moment. “It would be so much more comforting to me to believe in nothing rather than believe in a higher power that let everything happen to me. To let innocent people suffer every single day. I don’t want to believe in nothing. I’m not sure if I believe in the god they preach about in our church every Sunday. I don’t think there are specific ways you should be in order for that god to love you. But I believe in what church teaches people.”
I paused. “Well, some of it, at least,” I corrected. “It promotes kindness, patience, generosity. I want to instill all of that into Nathan. I want him to have somewhere to go once a week where he is reminded of all the things that are important in life. I want that for myself too. When he’s old enough to decide, I will give Nathan the choice whether he wants to continue going or not. To explore his faith. But I never want my son to lose faith. Because that’s what’s got me through. Knowing that somehow, I’m not alone. That there’s a reason, a plan. That there’s something tying everyone in the world together. That there’s something after this.”
I stopped speaking, feeling strangely vulnerable, naked. I didn’t mean to share that much. Lance had a way about him, to make me naked, and not just by ripping my clothes off—though he was really frickin’ good at that—but stripping me down to the bare nerve.
I shouldn’t have felt so comfortable baring my soul to someone who was yet to do the same with me. But I did. I felt safe with Lance. In every way a person could. Despite my past, which should have given me pause in doing things like blindly trusting a man, I was doing it.
“Don’t you?” I asked, my voice little more than a whisper. “Believe in something more than just suffering and ugliness? Don’t you want to know that there is something in this world that is more powerful than us?”
He didn’t answer.
So stupid, stupid me decided to keep on going. Because I wasn’t done letting this silent, dangerous man into my life, into my heart.
“If anything, what’s happened to me in my life has only made my belief stronger. Things have been bad. I don’t think I deserved anything that happened to me either. But everything that happened to me in my life, what my parents did to me, made it possible for me to be vulnerable enough to a man like Robert.”
I fiddled with the fabric besi
de me.
“I would like to think if I had a better, healthier upbringing and a family that gave a crap about me, I’d have seen right through Robert. But that’s a far too dangerous of a game to play. I’m just going to say that I was given parents like I was in order to stay with a man like Robert long enough for him to give me a son. A child that I would go through insurmountable suffering for. I’d go through my life, the nightmare it was, over and over again in order to see my son smile. To smell his hair. To have him curl up against me at night when he’s too stubborn to say he’s tired. For the kid that loves Brussel sprouts but hates fries. He is the entire reason I believe in something bigger than myself.”
Now, Lance was no longer leaning. There was no pile of sewing beside me. I wasn’t even sitting on the sofa anymore. I was sitting on Lance. Straddling him, his hands on my hips, eyes on my soul.
“Who taught you how to love like that?” he asked, voice thick.
I jerked, not just because he spoke but because of the words. The gentle way they hit the air. I wasn’t even sure that his mouth had been able to form anything but a rough growl.
“No one taught me how to love,” I said, moving my hand to trace his jaw. It was smooth. As always. “No one needs to teach anyone how to love.”
His brows furrowed, a fraction, barely visible. “You never got it, before this, how did you know how?”
I smiled, even though my insides were quaking like the San Andreas fault was rupturing. “You just do,” I replied. “You don’t have to be shown love to know how to give it. It’s in us, all of us, even big scary badasses who talk in grunts and don’t use verbs,” I teased. “I think you just have to find something that’s worth loving. Nature does the rest.”
It was then that I figured out what nature had done for me. It had given me someone else to love.
I loved Lance.
And I was about to open my big, stupid mouth and say it, but he kissed me instead.
Then he fucked me. On the sofa.
Fucked. Not made love.
It’s important to make that distinction.
* * *
“You need to quit,” Lance said from behind me.
I paused throwing all my crap into my purse. But I didn’t look around. “Excuse me?”
Lance obviously didn’t like that I wasn’t making eye contact with him, or maybe he didn’t like the cold bite in my tone. Whatever it was, he grabbed my hips and turned me so I was facing him.
We were in a fight.
Because I had to work. For the seventh day in a row. Lance, apparently, had counted since my foot was healed enough to walk around on all day.
I had too. But not for the same reason.
Esther and Logan were not forcing me to work seven days straight. In fact, they were arguing about it every single day I turned up. Esther did not send me home, though. Merely grumbled about stubborn women under her breath.
“Takes one to know one!” I shouted at her back.
She flipped me the bird.
I did not want to work seven days straight. I did not want to miss weekends with Nathan. Time with him. But I also did not want Nathan to live on the street.
The insurance was going through. Somehow they were covering almost everything. Somehow, the landlord was covering the difference. Lance had something to do with this, I was sure.
I didn’t know how long insurance would take to come through. I also needed money, a lot of it, to pay Keltan, who continued to brush me off every time I mentioned starting a direct debit every time we spoke.
His receptionist even made excuses when I tried to do it through her.
I would do it.
Somehow.
Hence the seven days working.
Hence Lance and I being angry with each other.
He didn’t want me working seven days straight. I didn’t want him telling me when I should and shouldn’t work.
So I’d gotten ready in a huff, ignoring him, until this moment where I’d been about to walk out the door and he’d informed me I needed to quit and then manhandled me so I would face him.
He let go of me so he could fold his arms over his chest, I supposed to intimidate me with his badass stance, or distract me with the way his muscles moved with the motion.
The latter worked for a second.
Until he spoke.
“That diner, you need to turn in your notice.”
I straightened my spine and moved my eyes from his distracting and beautiful muscles. “You see, Lance. For all your ability to read people, to know things about people just by noticing a few tiny things, you didn’t hear the warning in my tone that told you to rethink that statement.”
His jaw twitched. “Oh, I heard it,” he clipped. “Just don’t give a shit about it. ‘Cause we both know that you’re better than that place. You’re worth so much more.”
I skipped over the sweet part of that sentence because it was sandwiched between things that made me raging mad. And it was spoken in a cold and harsh tone, even for Lance.
“I’m better than a place that gave me a job without references or any waitressing experience?” I asked. “For the people who helped me get out of a shitty pay by the hour motel room I was renting with my infant son? A place that has made it possible for me to feed, clothe, and house that son? I don’t care if you have a fancy shiny office or fancy shiny SUVs that you think add up to something more. But I’m not better than all of that. I’m not worth more than that. Because that diner, the people, what it gave me, it’s fucking priceless,” I hissed. “Furthermore, the very fact that you think you have the authority to do things like tell me to quit my job because it doesn’t measure up to your standards, or maybe because you’re too embarrassed to have a...” I trailed off, snatching the word ‘girlfriend’ off my tongue before I uttered it. Because it felt wrong. Presumptuous. Also lacking. “A whatever I am as a waitress, that’s your problem. Not mine.”
His eyes went scary dark at the last part, even with me being used to his glares and silent violence, I stepped back, just a little.
And then a lot more when he advanced on me.
My back hit the wall and he boxed me in with the arms I’d been admiring a handful of minutes ago.
“I am not embarrassed to call a woman of mine who worked her fuckin’ ass off to provide for her son,” he hissed, anger frightening and invigorating all at the same time.
“Who starved herself so her son could eat.” His hand trailed down the side of my body, brushing my breast so I let out a rough gasp.
“Who deprived herself of the life she was meant to have so her son could have his,” he continued, lips almost brushing mine. “Who constantly smiled and laughed even though she had every fucking reason in the world to break down.” He leaned back so my eyes met his. “No, Elena, I’m not ashamed to call you mine.” He stroked my face, in a stark juxtaposition of the violence etched in the rest of his body.
“I don’t give a fuck about what you do for a job. You’ll always be so much more honest, so much cleaner than me with everything you do. Everything you are. Being mine doesn’t define you. But it defines me. It’s everything to me. You’re my woman.”
I was his woman.
His woman.
That was so much better than girlfriend. It was weightier. More substantial.
“You’re talented as fuck with your furniture shit,” Lance continued, not realizing it was the first time he’d really called me his. “I’m not just sayin’ that. You’ve got talent. Everyone knows you do. Just like everyone knows you’re wasting that talent servin’ people.” His eyes hardened. “So you’re gonna quit. And you’re gonna do your furniture stuff.” His voice was firm. Commanding. Like all of this was a foregone conclusion.
I took a breath. A long, fractured, painful one. Full of Lance’s scent, his words, both bitter and sweet. “Okay, a lot of what you just said was beautiful. Like, put it in a script, a novel, a song kind of beautiful,” I told him, my voice breathy and dreamy to
bring home my point. “So beautiful that I don’t feel like I’m in reality right now kind of stuff. Stuff that makes me want to forget everything else you just said to piss me off, rip all your clothes off and do beautiful filthy things to you right here on the living room floor.”
Lance’s eyes darkened at my words and his body moved to press against mine to show me just how much he liked that idea.
My nipples hardened. Knees weakened. My entire body started to betray me. But my mind somehow regained control and I blinked away the near animal desire I had for Lance.
“But the stuff you said pissed me off enough to not do that,” I said, hardening my gaze. “And looking at you, remembering just how good you are at sex, shows that what you said to piss me off is really frickin’ bad. It’s all well and good for you to tell me I’m talented, that I’m better than being a waitress, but how do you propose I feed, clothe, and house my son in the months or years it takes for me to start a business?” I asked him. “How do you expect me to take a risk like that that has no promises of success? Of a steady paycheck. The words are pretty, Lance, no matter how manly your voice is when you say them, but I don’t work in pretty. I work in reality. And reality is me having very limited choices to make sure I keep my son and me out of the gutter.”
Lance’s eyes flickered with his residual desire that the hardness at my stomach told me was not completely gone. But there was also a hardness to his jaw that he didn’t like much of what I was saying and that I wasn’t jiving with the whole ‘my word is law’ thing that I was sure he’d worked off in the past.
“You’re mine,” he clipped out by answer.
I stared at him. Counted to ten like I did when Nathan spilled paint on our hardwood floor. Then I breathed in and out. “I am aware that you’re not fond of speaking in complete sentences, or speaking at all for that matter, but at this juncture of the conversation, you cannot just grunt out two words as an explanation,” I snapped.
