Discreet: The Discreet Duet: Book I

by French, Nicole

  24

  “Okay, you have to stop. Mama is going to think I dropped off the edge of the earth.”

  I twisted in Will’s arms at the top of my stairs, but did nothing to disengage from the kisses he was feathering over my neck and bare shoulders.

  We still couldn’t stop touching, and it had been like this for almost two weeks. Instead of sating whatever appetites we both had for each other’s bodies, a dam had been broken, and now a river of sexual tension was being released. The interlude in the studio had just been the start. Nearly every night, when Mama left or fell asleep, I’d either sneak over to his house or find him waiting for me at the shack. It was starting to turn into a game—how long could Maggie and Will last without having sex? So far our record was eight hours. Will had surprised me in the outdoor shower, in his boathouse, even the back of his pickup when he’d pulled to the side of the road halfway around the lake in order to shove his hand down my shorts and kiss me until I was practically unconscious. I was just as bad—I’d torn two separate t-shirts of his (granted, both had already had a few holes in them), and most of the time, his hair would have looked like it had been attacked by a wild animal if he didn’t have it pulled back.

  After yet another night and morning being occupied with each other, it was now well past noon, and I couldn’t ignore the guilt blooming in my stomach at the fact that Lucas’s truck was parked in the driveway, and probably had been since early that morning while I’d been getting plowed better than a cornfield since late last night. Will and I were acting like irresponsible teenagers, not two grown people of twenty-six and…

  “How old are you?” I asked suddenly as his tongue flickered in a way that made my knees grow weak. I’d have a mark there in a minute, and I couldn’t have cared less. “Thirty? Forty?”

  Will broke away, looking adorably wounded. “I look fucking forty?”

  I giggled, trying and failing to ignore the way his fingers had slipped under the waistband of my shorts. Again. “Honestly? I can’t tell. With that pelt covering your face, you could pass for twenty or fifty. So I’d appreciate being told if I’m robbing the cradle or indulging in some daddy issues.”

  “You really hate my beard, don’t you?”

  I shrugged. “No. You’re just so adamant about keeping it that it makes me want to see what’s underneath that much more.”

  Will snorted, even though he stole another kiss that left me breathless before answering. “I’m twenty-fucking-nine, woman.” His voice was practically a growl against my lips. “Fifty,” he muttered. “Jesus Christ.”

  But I couldn’t respond as he consumed me all over again, one hand twisting my t-shirt into a knot at the small of my back while the other took a solid handful of my ass and squeezed hard.

  “Mmmmm,” Will groaned just before his tongue twisted around with mine. “Fuck. Lil, I need you again. Where’s that flat rock? You think anyone would notice if I fucked you there right now?”

  “Well, considering it’s broad daylight, I think they probably would,” I said, even though my hands were already ruining his messy knot of hair all over again. The rubber band fell to the ground, and his newly trimmed locks fell about his shoulders in bedraggled waves.

  Will bit his lip. “Damn. All right, plan b: a really big tree.”

  I giggled as he attacked my neck again, though somehow, I managed to press my hand against his shoulders. “Will, we can’t. Half the day is gone. I really do need to check on my mom, and poor Lucas is probably halfway done with the demolition today.”

  “Let’s just demolition Lucas,” Will grumbled before he worried my earlobe between his teeth. I moaned lightly, and my hips pressed into his of their own accord.

  “Will,” I said, my voice breathy and unstable as he squeezed my ass harder and ground into me. “Will.”

  He groaned lightly. “Okay, okay, I’ll stop.”

  Will released my waist and lifted his mouth from my neck. He chewed on his lower lip for a moment, looking like he wanted to take another bite out of me. I couldn’t stop my blush.

  “Damn,” he murmured under his breath. “Tonight, then. I’ll be coming for you, Lil, and you won’t be able to run from me.”

  I swallowed. The words seemed meant as a joke, but his tone was fierce. “O-okay.”

  We tramped down to the house, Will holding my hand the entire way, like he wasn’t totally ready to let go. Not now. Maybe not ever. From above, the harsh sounds of a sledgehammer slamming through the walls echoed from the topside cabin—Lucas, hard at work.

  Guilt reappeared, like a bad penny.

  “I just want to check on Mama,” I said again. “Then we can go help Lucas.”

  But when I pulled open the sliding glass door, those plans were immediately smashed. The smell of toast snaked through the house, and as I stepped inside, I waved my hand through the light haze of smoke that filled the air. Something was burning.

  “What the…” Will’s dismay floated around me.

  He jogged immediately into the kitchen while I scampered around the house, opening windows and turning on the ceiling fans. The smoke alarm hadn’t gone off—which made me wonder if there were even batteries in the damn thing to begin with. I wouldn’t have put it beyond Mama, in one of her 2 a.m. fits, to have robbed them to replace the ones in the TV remote or something equally mundane.

  “Mama!” I called out. “Mama, where are you?”

  “It was the stove and the toaster oven.” Will returned from the kitchen. “She left bread in for too long, and there were some eggs burning in a pan.”

  I headed for the bedroom off the end of the living area, but she wasn’t in there. “Dammit!”

  “She’s, um, in here, Lil.”

  I turned toward a sound I knew very well coming from the bathroom—the throttled chokes of my mother losing her breakfast and probably last night’s dinner too.

  “Shit,” I muttered. “Will, maybe…maybe you should go up to help Lucas. I’ll be up soon.”

  Will looked at me like I was crazy. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  I sighed. Apparently all of my secrets were being laid out on the table this morning. Sure, I had already told him my mother was an alcoholic, but most people didn’t really get that until they saw it up close. If, of course, I let them at all.

  “Maggie!” Mama yelled. “Where are you? Where did you go?”

  I froze for a moment at the threshold. I hadn’t heard it for several years, not since I had stopped accepting her phone calls at certain times of day, but I knew that voice. Torn with pain, like her vocal chords themselves had been tossed into a blender, that voice was the one that told me when I was a child that I needed to keep at least a five-foot radius away from her unless I wanted to get slapped, or worse. But it was the voice that also told me if I stayed away, my heart would be paying for it for days.

  Maybe it was growing up in the church and being shunned by its members. Maybe it was never knowing if I was going to be my mother’s greatest love or greatest disappointment. But I had always had a guilty conscience when it came to the people I loved. Nothing was ever good enough to fix her, and God knew I’d tried my damnedest for a very long time.

  “Mama?” I pushed open the bathroom door.

  She sat on the edge of the bathtub with her head hanging over the rim of the toilet. The bathroom was a mess—she hadn’t quite made it in time, which meant I’d have a hell of a mess to clean up after she was done. Fuck.

  She looked up. Her eyes were ringed with smeared makeup, and half her curly brown hair was matted down to one side of her face while the other side stuck up in haphazard tufts. Her skin was pale, sickly, but shone with the peculiar sweat of vomit and the slight redness of the blood still rushing out of her head.

  “Who’s that out there?” she demanded weakly. “Who did you bring here to embarrass me?”

  “Will’s here to help with the property, Mama,” I said as I grabbed one of the faded washcloths stacked over the toilet. There was the au
dible sliding of the front door, and the sound of another pair of feet entering the house. “And Lucas.”

  “You want them to see me like this, don’t you?” she bit out, swiping ineffectually at my leg before she turned back to the toilet and lurched as her stomach emptied itself of contents that it no longer had. “Why’d you bring them here, Margaret?” she moaned. “Why’d you let them see me like this?”

  “I didn’t pour the drinks down your throat, Mama,” I argued before I could stop myself. “They are helping us. Getting the bed and breakfast ready to let, remember? So you and I can run it.” Shit. She was clearly still drunk. At noon on a Sunday. Jesus.

  “Oh, to hell with the bed and damn breakfast,” she spat against the toilet seat as she set her cheek on it. Her eyes closed in relief. “You don’t really believe we can do it, do you, Margaret? Not when the only good thing either of us has going is what we’ve got between our legs, huh? Ain’t that where you were last night? Doin’ what your mama taught you?”

  I recoiled, taking longer than necessary to wet the cloth and wring it out in the sink.

  “We should be opening a whorehouse,” Mama continued, forcing herself back up. She turned, reached out with a shaky hand, and tapped me on the nose. “You could be my number one girl. All them boys been chasing my Maggie Mae since she was little. No different now, is it? Got two of ’em out there. Who do you think would be the highest bidder?”

  “That’s enough, Ellie.”

  I looked up to find Lucas’s solid form filling the narrow bathroom doorway, watching us with a mixture of disgust and pity, while Will just stood behind him, looking confused.

  Mama laboriously pushed herself up from the toilet, flushed the remains away, then grasped roughly at my arm while she wobbled like a newborn deer out of the tiny, stinking room.

  “You think you’re so high and mighty, Lucas Forster?” she sneered as we pushed past him and Will. She practically dragged me with her toward her bedroom. Her language was slurring now, like she was almost too tired to pronounce each word. “You think I don’t know what you want from my daughter? And you, Mr. Mysterious? Don’t none of you want nothin’ more than what’s down her pants.”

  “Mama, come on.” I tugged her down to her room, but her feet dragged.

  “And you,” she said softly, turned to me. “My pretty little mini-me. Two little sluts, the both of us. One day, you’re gonna feel it, just like I do. There are two types of women on this earth—Madonnas and whores. I’ll give you one guess which one we are.”

  I didn’t meet her eyes, and definitely didn’t look back at Lucas and Will as I finished helping her to her bed. I had heard this before—heard some version of it my whole life, even when I was a child—but it had been years since I’d heard it in person. My heart fell, hating how familiar it still sounded, even after years of stepping away. How familiar…and true. I hated myself a little bit for still not being able to ignore the possibility that had sunk in when I was far too young to fight it. That maybe she was right.

  Pretty little whore, Theo would say as he forced himself in. That’s what you are, aren’t you? My pretty little slut. My pretty little flower. Pretty little whore.

  “You think they love you, Maggie Mae,” Mama said as she crawled on top of her sheets. She collapsed into her pillow, her forehead still wrinkled, like she was engaged in some other battle. “But they don’t. We don’t deserve their love, baby. It’s in our blood.”

  * * *

  I emerged about ten minutes later, after she’d fallen asleep. I’d sat at the edge of her bed for a solid five minutes, my head buried in my hands, then took another five before I could get back up, clean the bathroom, shower again, and finally leave the house. I could sink myself in the hard work on the property before the time came for an evening run. By that point, Mama would be awake, hardly aware of what had happened. And if she was, she’d be mournfully apologetic, and we could at least try to put the episode behind us, like we always did.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the sweet bliss of manual labor waiting for me when I reached the topside cabin. The sanding was finished, and Will and Lucas were both sitting outside on the porch, drinking sodas in a tense detente while they watched my approach.

  “She’s all right,” I said to Will’s wordless question. I sat down on the porch beside him, and he rubbed my shoulder.

  “Anything I can do?” he asked.

  Lucas snorted.

  Will looked up. “What?” The word suddenly had a sharp edge.

  Lucas stood up, drained his soda, then crushed it under his heel. “You’ll see, Bon Jovi. It takes more than a little pat on the back to deal with Ellie. Some of us have been doing it for a long, long time.”

  “Lucas, come on…” I started.

  But he turned to me with a glare. “You left her here all night? Maggie, you know better than that, even if you did leave the rest of us to deal with this shit for the last eight years.”

  I swallowed as guilt turned over in my stomach. “I—I was just across the lake, Lucas—”

  “Right, and you’ve been across the country. Skipped off to New York City while Barb and my mom had to hold her hair back for her.”

  “Give me a break,” I said. “Barb, maybe, but Linda has never enjoyed anything more than gossiping about Mama’s exploits with all those church bitches.”

  “Watch it,” Lucas bit out, though the guilty look on his face told me I was right. “No matter. You should have been here. She’s your responsibility now.”

  “Oh, come off it,” I snapped, standing up. “And it’s not like I went gallivanting off, hours away. I was a few miles away, for Christ’s sake.”

  “With who?” Lucas’s jaw tightened as he found Will. “With you?” He looked back at me with a gaze that could slice through granite. “Was it worth it?”

  “That is none of your goddamn business,” Will cut in, but Lucas didn’t even spare him another glance.

  I remained silent. My stomach felt like it was being eaten up. He was right, of course. I should have been here. Not just last night. But for the past eight years, instead of wasting my life on a failed music career.

  “I know,” was all I could whisper. “I know.”

  Finally, Lucas’s shoulders relaxed, though Will’s tensed instead.

  “All right, Mags,” Lucas said as he came back to sit next to me on the porch. “So what are we going to do about it?”

  I blinked. “What—what do you mean?”

  “Mags, come on. You don’t really think she can run a business like this, do you?”

  My body stilled, prickled. “Are you—are you not going to help anymore?” The property was half-finished. All our plans would be out the window without Lucas’s generosity.

  Lucas sighed. “No, I’m not going to bail. I made you a promise, and I don’t back out on that. But to be honest, Mags, I figured you could probably just let out the houses permanently. You think Ellie’s going to get up at the crack of dawn to make strangers breakfast every day? Are you going to do it?” He shook his head, not even waiting for me to answer the question. “She needs help, Maggie. Or are you going to wait for her to burn the entire house down before you get her what she needs?”

  Suddenly, I was tired of being chastised, guilted for someone else’s mistakes that I had never been responsible for. This wasn’t fair—the assumption that I needed to be chained to my mother, enabling her addiction with my presence. This right here, more than anything else, was the entire reason I had left. I was always, always going to be nothing more than Ellie Sharp’s poor daughter or else her warden. A chip off the old sad, pathetic block. The only difference between now and eight years ago was that I now knew for sure that I wasn’t good for anything else but picking up the pieces.

  “And just how am I supposed to pay for that, even if by some miracle I could convince her to go?” I asked weakly. “Huh, Lucas? She filed bankruptcy last year. And everything I own came with me in my car. I could sell a guitar, but
that wouldn’t even come close to covering it, even a state-run program.”

  Lucas sighed and rubbed the back of his head. “I know. So maybe…maybe it’s time to think about selling the property. She can’t maintain it, and honestly, Mags…well, my folks would take it off your hands in a second. We’ve been thinking about expanding the inn, you know, and this would make a great addition…” He drifted off when he caught my look of horror, then held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. Forget I mentioned it.”

  I just gaped. “Please tell me you haven’t been helping because you were planning to buy my childhood home, Lucas. Please tell me that’s not true.”

  “I… It’s not true,” he said, his big eyes were shot again with guilt. Clearly it was true.

  “Fuck,” I muttered into my hands. What was I going to do?

  “I’ll pay for it.”

  Lucas and I both jerked our heads up at the sound of Will’s voice. He had been so quiet, I’d almost forgotten he was there.

  “You’ll pay?” Lucas’s doubt was palpable. “How? Are you going to sell your little Toyota? Rehab costs more than five hundred bucks.”

  Will ignored him, turning his focus back to me. “I got this,” he said evenly. “Whatever she needs. Seriously, Lil.”

  “Why the hell does he call you Lil?” Lucas’s voice was full of animosity. Contempt. “Did you get a new name when you were gone too? New life, new name?”

  I stood up, suddenly feeling very overwhelmed. “I need to think.”

  Will watched me for a moment, clearly fighting not to step forward and do what we both craved. I wanted nothing more than to be wrapped up in his arms again, back in that sweet place where all the bitter disappointments of my life seemed to melt away.