by M. O’Keefe
“Sounds sweet,” I said.
“It wasn’t at the time, but looking back at it…” He shrugged.
“I’m glad you killed him. The Pastor—”
“Beth—”
“Don’t,” I whispered, though I wasn’t sure what I was saying that about. Don’t pretend like killing him wasn’t exactly right. Don’t deny this past.
He handed me another piece of orange, and I put it in my mouth, the juice running down the corner of my lips. I wiped it away with the back of my hand, feeling like the kid I’d been with him.
“Where is everyone?” I asked. “Simon and Carissa and Rosa?”
He was silent for a long time. So long it hurt.
“It’s conversation, Tommy. I’m not sucking your dick.”
He made some noise in the shadows, a noise that woke up my blood. That cleared some of the fog. Oh, how I’d dreamed of sucking his dick, and that noise… that noise told me he’d dreamed of it too.
“Simon is a journalist,” he finally said.
“That totally makes sense.”
He nodded like he agreed.
“Rosa went to jail. She gets out soon.”
“No,” I gasped. “The baby?”
“With the dad. Simon keeps tabs on them.”
That made my heart hurt.
Tommy handed me another orange, and I shook my head.
“You need to eat something,” he whispered. “Rosa will…she’ll be okay. Simon and me, we put some money aside for her. She’ll get out and she’ll get to know her kid and she’ll be okay.”
When would he stop taking care of us, I wondered.
I took the orange. “What about Carissa?”
“I think she works for Bates.”
“The guy that got you out of jail?”
He nodded, the skin on half his face glowing from the fire.
“No shit?”
He shrugged. His face didn’t change. He didn’t shift or flinch. Nothing. But I knew he was bothered by the thought of Carissa working for Bates
“I missed you,” I said, the words spilling out of my mouth bathed in the scent of an orange he peeled for me with his blunt, rough fingers. “Every day for a long time. Years, even. I missed you.”
This was where I should tell him I’d looked for his family. His grandpa, the lemon farmer outside of Santa Barbara. It was the right thing to do, but somehow I couldn’t make the words come. I knew when I told him, it would hurt him. And he’d be furious. And I didn’t want that.
In his silence I heard a lot of things, and I waited for him to say them out loud. How he missed me. How he thought about me.
Tell me. Say it. One way or another say it so I can stop feeling like this. Like I imagined what we’d meant to each other.
“More orange?” he asked. His eyes met mine in the glow of the fire.
This is all I can give you. That was what he was really saying. This is all you’ll get from me.
I took the slice, murmuring my thanks.
Like that was enough.
I shivered under the blankets.
“Cold?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“I’ll build up the fire.”
I heard him on the far side of the room. I could smell the wood burning and it was so fucking comforting.
“Better?” he asked.
I nodded, though I was still shaking. The cold was inside me, and I wasn’t sure there was a fire big enough or hot enough to change that.
And it hurt, that he so badly didn’t want to know me. Or what had happened to me. When all I wanted, all I wanted on this earth was to know what had happened to him.
“Jada?” he asked.
And then his hand cupped my shoulder, his big palm ran over my arm down to my elbow and then my wrist and back up, the calluses scraping against my freezing flesh.
“I missed you, too,” he said.
In an instant I was warm.
15
Beth
I woke up again, bright light piercing my eyelids through a set of curtains. The lingering fingers of a nightmare stroked my face, burrowed into my brain.
“Mom?” I whispered, because she’d been here in my dream. Sitting in a chair waiting for me to wake up. She’d been talking to the doctors, putting me on prescriptions. I’ve got to get out of here.
“Your mom’s not here,” Tommy said, and it all settled back around me like pieces of a puzzle.
“Well,” I said, flopping back onto the bed. “That’s good news.”
“How are you feeling?” Tommy asked. He’d pulled the chair up to the bed, and he sat close enough he could put his feet up on the end of the mattress. I imagined him watching me while I slept and did not feel bad about it.
“How am I feeling,” I said and closed my eyes. “Let me check.”
The low rumble of his chuckle went over my body like ripples through a puddle.
I held myself still and did the test. The percentage test. How much of me was…me? It took me a second, my body feeling both tiny and huge at the same time. Like I was a doll that had been pulled apart and then put together again all wrong.
But slowly I made sense of myself. Organized my body in a way I recognized. Or…would recognize, maybe. If given some time.
Sixty percent. I was sixty percent myself. And sixty percent was pretty freaking great.
Ravaged and thin and embarrassed and scared. But me. My thoughts were in my head. I could feel my body—not just in pieces but the whole thing. There was no fog. No anxiety.
“I feel…like me,” I said, which didn’t make any sense, but he had the grace not to say anything. The blankets fell from my shoulders as I struggled to get up. He reached over and helped me, his big hand and incredible strength lifting me up in the bed like it was nothing.
When he pulled back his hand, I wanted to grab it. I wanted to grab him.
But I remembered with a slight cringe of embarrassment telling him how much I missed him and him, in response, handing me an orange.
“Here.” Tommy had a glass of water and a bottle of Gatorade in his hands. His beard had grown in, and he looked good in it. “Water or Gatorade?”
“Both,” I sighed. He handed me the water first, but I reached for the Gatorade instead. Yay, sugar. “What time is it?”
“It’s about eight in the morning,” he said.
“I’ve been asleep for a day?” I asked, unable to put together all my crappy memories. I’d been sick. A lot. He’d tried to help me, but I just about bit his head off for trying. I remember taking pain medication from him every few hours, over-the-counter stuff that did nothing to soothe the beast living inside my veins.
“Pretty much.”
“Is it weird that I expected it to be worse?”
“Nothing is weird,” he said. “And don’t get cocky. Nothing is over. Drugs have a way of sticking with you.”
“Are you speaking from experience?” I asked, even though I knew. I knew because I could see it in the corners of his eyes and the way he held his shoulders and looked at me and then away so fast.
He nodded and then shrugged like it was no big deal, and I wanted to curl up in his lap like that damn dog and ask him to tell me more, tell me everything.
But he’d made it clear we weren’t going down that road.
So instead I tipped the bottle to my mouth and some of the Gatorade splashed on my neck but I just used my T-shirt to soak it up.
The sweet, orangey drink tasted like heaven. I felt, with every gulp, my body waking up.
“Careful,” he said. “Your stomach is still pretty fragile.”
I was all wrung out and flush at at the same time. I wanted to take off my clothes and stretch out in the sunshine. I imagined, for one delighted, scandalous moment, what he would do if I did that. If I just stood up and stripped.
And then I decided I wasn’t tough enough at the moment to handle his inevitable rejection. Not even Jada could do that.
Besides,
I needed a shower. For real.
“You want to tell me about your mom?” he asked.
“No,” I said. He was killing my happiness.
“You were having a nightmare and you were yelling—”
“I thought we weren’t talking.”
He nodded, though I could tell he wanted to argue.
“Have you slept?” I asked. He looked worn and tired. Fuzzy and red-eyed.
“Not much.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Some.”
“You should eat that orange and take the bed,” I said, scrambling out of the way, caught in the blankets. God, I was wrapped up like a sweaty burrito, I must have had some kind of nightmare.
“You want a shower?” he asked.
I gasped. With delight I gasped, and the rough crackle of his laugh brushed over me. Waking me up.
“I guess yes. Come on.” He held out his hand for me, like he was going to help me out of bed. He had to be so tired. He was beside me every time I woke up with a bottle of water or a slice of orange. A warm hand on my shoulder.
“I’m going to change my rating on this kidnapping,” I said. “It’s pretty five star.”
“I appreciate that,” he said, that dimple reappearing like an old friend.
I wondered—before I could stop myself, in a purely Beth frame of mind—if he treated everyone like this. Or if I was special.
It hurt how much I wanted to be special.
But that was fucking Beth, for you, wasn’t it?
I pushed the sheets off my body. My skirt was up around my waist and my shirt hung off my shoulders. I was revealed in pieces. My shoulder blade. My hip. The black satin of my underwear.
Tommy looked away so fast, and the tips of his ears burned red.
My body made him blush.
My body had—for the last few months, since the Making Waves video—just been a thing. Part of the show. Like the lights and the sound. It was the thing that wore the costume. The body paint.
It was a tool. Like my voice. And a microphone.
But with Tommy in the room, my body was my body again. Private again.
That shouldn’t be exciting. It had no business being exciting.
But it was.
It was exciting that he was looking at me. Like I was a person. A woman.
I stood up on shaky legs and pulled down my skirt. Fixed my shirt. When what I wanted to do was take it all off. Show him something super private.
After the shower, maybe.
After his nap.
I got excited about the idea, answering the question we’d been asking each other in that art room.
What would it be like between us? I remember thinking it would be perfect. That I wouldn’t be scared. I’d known enough that he would take care of me.
To a surprising degree, I still wanted that.
“Need help?” he asked, half turned away, the sunlight through the window lighting up the whiskers on his face.
He was beautiful. He always had been. And his body… the wideness of it. The thickness.
It was beautiful too.
In the stillness of my body there was a spark. Like a rusty old BIC lighter that had been found in the mud.
A flicker. Desire. Interest.
How predictable I was. How predictable my reaction. And wasn’t that a fucking relief.
There was no stopping the smile that crossed my face.
“Beth?” he asked, and I shook my head, shaking off the thoughts of Tommy’s body. Of Tommy’s body pressing me into this bed. I imagined, before I could stop it, his hand up under my skirt again, his other hand holding my wrist. I imagined his breath against my face as he whispered, I want to taste you.
I’d played a lot of games with other lovers that mirrored that scenario – but it had never come close to the feeling I’d had with Tommy.
How much longer, I wondered, would we be here? And how much effort would it take to get him to stop pretending he wasn’t thinking of me the exact same way I was thinking of him.
“Did I throw up on you?” I asked, suddenly horrified by the thought.
“No.”
“Are you lying to make me feel better?”
“I wouldn’t lie about you throwing up on me. But you called me some incredibly interesting names.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
The dimple in his cheek made a sudden and quick appearance, and in my weakened state I was reduced to being sixteen again, transfixed by this man’s smile. Immobilized by his attention.
“You meant a few of them,” he said.
I shuffled my way over to the bathroom. The rustic floorboards were smooth and cool beneath my feet.
“I don’t have any clothes,” I said.
“I picked up a few things. There weren’t a whole lot of choices, but I got you the basics.”
“That’s…nice.”
“Well, wait until you see the shirt.”
He grinned and I felt warm all over.
That delicious tickle in the back of my mind. The sudden awareness between my legs. The heady thrum in my blood.
“While you shower,” he said, “I’ll take Pest for a walk, if that’s okay? She hasn’t had much of a chance, and she’s getting a little restless.”
“Yeah. Of course. Please. I’ll be fine.”
He turned the water on for me, testing it to make sure it wasn’t too hot, and I held on to the pedestal sink.
The bathroom was small with him in it. Maybe the world was small with him in it. I’d been around big guys. The last few months had been a never-ending parade of bodyguards and security. Men who wore their muscles like a suit of clothes that didn’t always fit great.
Tommy was big in a body he was born in.
Did that make sense? I couldn’t tell. But his hands were big. His arms and thighs. He wasn’t fat—not in any way, but his waist was big. He was just thick. Solid. He wore a gray T-shirt, and he filled out every inch of it with himself. His jeans too. His boots.
Steam started to spill out of the shower, and my skin was flushed from the heat. Every breath I pulled in tasted like the beginning of something.
His presence was big. It always had been. I wondered if he knew that. If he understood that’s why all us kids in that foster home had gravitated toward him. It was because he was a huge light in a terrifying darkness.
“Jada?” He hadn’t called me by name, my real name. Not this entire time. It was a little amazing how much I wasn’t Beth to him.
Even more amazing was how—at this moment—I wanted to remind him of who I was. Who I’d been.
Who we’d been.
“You know why I liked sitting next to you?” I asked, the words spilling from cracked, dry lips. “When we were kids?”
He shook his head, looking as if I’d stunned the words right out of him.
“Because I felt like no one could see me if I was beside you. Like I was perfectly hidden in the shadow of your body.”
“Not hidden enough,” he said, but I didn’t want to talk about that. About that night and what had happened to all of us.
“I also liked sitting next to you because you were warm. Sitting next to you was like sitting in the sun. It felt so good.”
He glanced away, fidgeting with the water. I watched him swallow. “Your clothes are over there,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the three big baskets in the corner. A small stack of clothes sat on top of one.
I touched his hand, the bone of his wrist, the vein just under his skin. I wanted to put my body next to his and let him warm me up again. I expected him to jerk his hand away, but instead he grabbed on to mine. Holding my fingers carefully in his grip, and just that touch, that little thing turned me on.
“It’s not real, what you’re feeling,” he told me. I didn’t play dumb or ask him what he meant; I knew what he meant.
“How do you know?”
He was silent. Right…because he’d come down off his own highs. Recalibrated
his own system after weeks of trying to destroy it.
“It feels real.” I squeezed his hand. I slipped my fingers between his, the calluses so rough it was like getting scraped by a scrub brush. “It feels familiar.”
He shook his head.
“You don’t remember how good it felt? You don’t want to feel that way again, just…for a little while?”
He left without another word.
“Was it something I said?” I asked the scarecrow in the mirror.
16
Beth
The shower was a revelation. I stayed until the water went cold, and even then I stayed a little bit longer. I felt both completely restored and totally drained coming out of it. I wrapped a towel around my hair and grabbed my new clothes from the baskets.
Good God, where did he find fuzzy socks covered in smiling face emoticons—and did he remember Mr. Mendoza’s socks from that day in the art room. They’d been eerily similar.
Did he remember? was becoming a refrain in my head.
Black cotton underwear. A cotton sports bra thing. Black leggings, a little big, but everything was going to be big on me – I needed about twenty cheeseburgers.
And a T-shirt with a wolf howling at the moon on the front of it.
There was a tag that claimed it glowed in the dark.
That’s why he’d been smiling. Well, jokes on him. I loved wolf-howling-at-moon T-shirts. I slipped it over my head, gathered the bottom hem in a knot in the back and grabbed the plastic comb I’d found on the edge of the sink.
I opened the door of the bathroom into the chill of the bigger main room only to find Tommy passed out on the chair. Pest, covered in leaves and having tracked in dirt, was sleeping again by the fire.
Tommy filled the chair. His hands hung loose by his side. His head was turned away toward the window like he was giving me privacy and room even in his sleep.
Such deference.
It was weird. Or maybe what was weird was how used to not having privacy I’d gotten.
He’d taken off his boots and one of his socks hung off his toes and it…it was adorable. Before I realized entirely what I was doing, I’d reached over and pulled it back onto his foot. His toes where they should be. His heel.
His long foot snug in a nondescript white athletic sock. The arch warm in my hand.
