by Jack Parker
The click of the lighter jarred me from my musings as Ashley lit a cigarette. She bumped my shoulder with her own and exhaled. "Heard you applied for a job at that mansion yesterday," she stated plainly, her tired voice dragging between her lips. I knew she hadn't slept much the night before, probably up arguing with her asshole of a husband, Daniel.
"Barb?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"Yup. It was the talk of the town yesterday." She exhaled as she spoke, and I watched her take another hit, the muscles in her neck working the smoke down her throat expertly.
"Aren't I always the talk of the town?" I tried to joke, but my voice fell flat. We both knew that my dad would not handle the news well if it fell upon his ears.
Without acknowledging my words, Ashley pulled another lungful of smoke from the cigarette and gulped the rest of the coffee with a toss of her head. Her sandy brown hair flipped over her shoulders when she leaned forward and let the cup dangle between her knees. I pushed down the urge to brush her hair away from her face, not trusting myself to pull my hand away again.
"Ash, what's wrong?" I opted for words instead of actions.
"I just don't care for your obsession with that fucking house. It don't feel right, the whole damn property. Why do you think everyone just pretends that it doesn't exist?" She inhaled another round of smoke and continued talking through the haze puffing from her lips. "Something freaky happened before me and you were old enough to remember it, and it has this whole damn town spooked. Why can't you just be good for once in your life?" She flipped the cigarette into the gravel parking lot with much more force than necessary and rubbed her now free hand across her face.
The maelstrom of emotions flickering in her eyes scared me. I'd never seen her so conflicted before, even when she'd sobbed on my shoulder after having her jaw sewn shut when the asshole had broken it a couple years ago. I clicked my tongue and rolled my neck from side to side, trying to relieve some of the tension left there by Ashley's words. I dropped my head between my knees and cupped the back of my neck in both hands, exasperated.
"To be fair, this town gets spooked if a tourist wanders into the diner a week before the season. They think it is some axe murderer who has come to bring about judgment day or some nonsense." I grumbled, sounding a bit muffled.
Ashley chuckled at the statement and wrapped an arm around my back before she leaned her head into my shoulder. Every muscle in my body tensed. Usually, I welcomed Ashley's friendly, sisterly even, touches, but after my meeting with Luci yesterday and limited sleep, I found my urges more difficult to control. She had no clue what she did to me sometimes, and I'd never tell her.
"So, how'd it go, anyway?" She asked. Her slightly scratchy voice puffed into my ear, warming it against the late April chill. I fought off a shrug for fear of jostling her head too much and making her move away again.
"Well, the place definitely looks better. They haven't started clearing the weeds properly yet, but they have replaced all of the windows on the first two floors. And the roof is being redone. The new owner is a little weird, but I think she's harmless enough. Beautiful, though. Definitely not a queen of the double wide trailer park." At the remembrance of Luci's kind blue eyes and silky voice, I slipped my arm possessively about Ashley's waist to anchor my mind in my present reality. I berated my masochistic brain for conjuring the image of the incandescent but lonely woman and nuzzled my nose into Ashley's hair.
The first few mornings Ashley and I had connected on the back steps of Barb's diner had left us shy and weary of one another, but as the years wore on, we cherished the couple of mornings a week that we shared. Most of them were passed in this exact position, with Ashley's head on my shoulder as the pinks and oranges of sunrise slowly commandeered the dark sky. We both knew that the gravy and biscuits would not make themselves, but this one moment of peace meant more than a paycheck for both of us. Sometimes a person needed to take a break for the soul and leave the world to turn as it wished.
The quiet moments on the back steps of a dusty diner slowly metamorphosed into the most precious seconds of my life. I hoped Ashley felt the same, but we'd reached an unspoken agreement that we never talked about anything shared on the back steps. She craved the comfort of a safe, friendly touch like I yearned for a spark of anything resembling human emotion, something I only found with Barb and Ashley. And yesterday with Luci. I brushed the thought away as an image of the disappointed expression on Luci's face as I walked away suddenly clawed its way into my mind. I turned my thoughts back towards the woman snuggled against my side and the little wayward family we'd created at the diner. Barb yelled at us the first few times she caught us watching the sun rise instead of preparing the day's food order. When she realized how desperately we needed a friend, she merely looked through the back door, shook her head, and went about her business.
Ashley sniffled and leaned her face into my neck. My mind scrambled to keep up with the quickly changing moods of the morning, and I tightened my protective hold around her waist. I knew my interview the day before would not have elicited such a reaction; Daniel was the reason. He was always the reason. Hadn't he realized that half the men in this town would rip their own arms off for a woman like Ashley? Surely he knew that I'd have gladly traded my life for his, my pathetic trail of broken hearts for one night at her side. Heat flared in my cheeks, and I fought the urge to pace or break something, lash out in some way at the man who caused this kindhearted woman such pain. Instead, I pressed a kiss to the top of her head and waited. Warm tears dripped onto my neck and slipped beneath the collar of my polo. When I felt the storm pass, I begrudgingly relinquished the hold on my friend's waist and cupped her cheek, tipping her face towards mine.
"Ash?" I whispered, completely lost in the situation, searching. The only person I'd ever really comforted before Ashley was my sister, and that mostly consisted of holding her face into my chest to muffle the sound of her crying.
"I'm sorry, Lauren," she choked on the words and coughed, pulling from the embrace before I stopped her. Immediately, the cold replaced the spot on my side where her warm body had rested, and I pulled her back into me, needing to feel that warmth again.
"Don't apologize, Ash. Just tell me what the hell is going on." I floundered helplessly, caught between wanting her to know that she didn't have to tolerate this emotional burden alone and wanting to rip her husband limb from limb. How Ashley had been allowed to marry that man was a question I often pondered. Ashley's father was such a gentle and caring man, a gentleman, a cliché farmer from a storybook. Kind. Neighborly. Honest. Hardworking. He and his wife were two of only a handful of people who were genuinely content with their lives, and they loved their daughter fiercely. Why he allowed this treatment of her to continue fell beyond my understanding.
"I'm pregnant, Lauren," she whispered and then covered her face with her hands as if it were something incredibly shameful.
"Oh," I answered stupidly.
"I can't raise a child with him. I can barely live with him," she mumbled, another sob gurgling from her chest.
"Then let's get out of here. I have some money hidden away, enough for us to get by for a few months until we figure something out." I smoothed her hair back as I spoke, not sure if I actually believed everything I said or if I entertained a momentary flight of fancy that we'd have a good laugh about in a few days.
"Lauren, I can't do that. This is the only place I've ever known. I ain't even been out of the state of West Virginia. This is my home. I got no desire to leave it."
I couldn't dispute the conviction of her words, so I dropped my hands to my thighs and sighed. "Okay. Then what do you want to do?"
"I don't know." She answered honestly. "I got a couple of months to figure it out, I reckon."
I nodded slowly in agreement, but silently wished that she accepted my offer of running away together. I knew that I could have gone through with it if I wasn't alone. "You really should think about what I said, Ash," I urged after a
few moments of silence.
'Where would we go, Lauren?" I shrugged. "Are you really ready to help someone raise a child? I mean, you can't hardly take care of yourself." She held up a hand, and my protest died on my lips immediately. "What about your dad?"
"Fuck him," the words tumbled flatly from my mouth, and I knew that I meant them. They weren't angry words; they were the words of someone who had begun to let go of another person, apathetic. "He never gave me anything but grief anyway." I hated the pain that slipped into my voice and pushed it back into its little compartment in my mind slowly.
"What about Lilly?" Ashley dipped her head to meet my lowered gaze.
"I haven't seen or heard from Lilly in five years. Maybe she found Mom, maybe she didn't, but she isn't coming home. What difference does it make, Ash? Face it. Me and you, we've got each other and we got Barb and that's it. Come with me."
My throat tightened and choked my voice to a hollow whisper, and I swallowed against the ache of unshed tears. She held her face so close to me, now, conspiratorially. Her breath on my cheek brushed away all of the hurt and pain talking about my sister conjured, and I bit my lip as a different type of ache filled my belly. My eyes moved unconsciously to her full pink lips before I could stop them. When I finally regained control and found her dark brown eyes again, I knew I'd messed up and knew that she'd caught me.
"Okay," she said after a long pause and leaned her head on my shoulder again. "I'll think about it, but it probably ain't gonna happen." The sound of a log truck rolling into the gravel lot, tires popping and crunching, nearly swallowed the words.
I grunted my agreement and looked into the cool blue sky of the morning hopefully. She finally figured it out and hadn't cared, not one bit. The air heated up slightly, the promise of summer just around the corner, and a bead of sweat trickled down the small of my back.
Barb bellowed from somewhere in the kitchen, and Ashley grinned against my shoulder. "Think we should save her from the truckers?"
I sighed and thought of Steve before nodding and levering myself off the steps. I offered a hand to Ashley, and she took it. Time to start another day in paradise.
CHAPTER 3
"Be right with you," I called unenthusiastically as yet another customer jingled the bell upon his or her entrance to the already packed diner to add another ticket to the lunch time rush.
Noon and six always saw the largest crowds, and I dreaded the roar of voices blending together, the constant clicking and scraping of forks and knives against thick, durable plates. I once reveled in those times during the day when I completely lost myself in the work, but now every kind word I forced from my mouth built my irritation at the world a step higher. The day approached when I'd either go insane or leave this town for good. I wasn't sure which I hoped for more.
Ashley smiled up at me from the dish tank when I sat a stack of plates at her elbow. I forced a smile and pulled my order pad from my apron as I walked back towards Barb's saloon doors. That's what I always called them anyway, because they looked like the swinging doors from a western movie. We all hid behind them to watch an arguing couple hash it out like the town folk would have watched a gun duel, and without fail, Barb always barged through them in a waft of vanilla musk and bouncing hair with some new crisis, like Miss Kitty and Marshall Dillon.
I shouldered through them without looking up and searched for a fresh sheet of carbon paper in the small order book. My hands stilled when my eyes landed on the woman on the stool closest to the cash register patiently waiting in a white loose-fitting dress shirt that must have held fifty cloth-covered buttons perfectly latched into cloth loops with four unbuttoned, exposing the front of her neck but not the sides or her chest. Lace flowed all the way down the center where the buttons met, and a black tailored vest completed the look. Her casual but stylish attire contrasted starkly with the cream-colored walls and blotches of flannel, camouflage, and denim strewn about the booths and tables occupied by the regulars. Her shiny blonde hair fell about her face and cascaded down her back, surprising me with its length. Bluntly, she appeared completely out of her element in this dusty road side diner in some Podunk town in West Virginia.
Her kind blue eyes glanced up at me when she felt my stare, and a corner of her mouth rose into a smirk at my assessment of her clothing. I realized then that she likely noticed me the second I reentered the dining area, and apprehension slipped up my spine, cautioning me against the interaction I had craved so desperately for the past twenty-four hours, another crack at figuring out Ms. Luci Pravitas.
"Ms. Pravitas, I didn't expect to see you here," I mumbled nervously and turned my eyes back to my order pad, trying in vain to ignore the slight tremor in my hand. The woman truly had no clue about how stunningly intense she was. Or maybe she had.
"Please, call me Luci," she answered when I stepped closer and leaned my hip on the edge of the island habitually.
"What can I get you?" I asked, glancing at her every few seconds. Her skin seemed less pale in the sunlight but her hair a shade lighter. If she was aware of the effect she worked on the other customers as she sat perfectly straight and spoke in that soothing, deep voice, she made no acknowledgment of the fact as she pinned me with her eyes, much like she had at her home the previous morning.
"I will have coffee to begin. Tell me, Darling," she glanced back at the menu in front of her with a slightly disgusted air. "Do you serve anything that is not positively dripping with grease or should coffee be my first and last stop?"
A shudder work up my spine, pulsing a tingle all the way to my elbows. Blue silk. Certain words sounded British, like she'd spent time in England but had not grown up there, but most of them were completely devoid of any accent and filled to the brim with something that was uniquely Luci Pravitas.
"You could, um, try the grilled chicken salad," I replied, averting my eyes to avoid the stutter I felt clenching at my throat awkwardly. I took another step closer, directly across from her now and leaned my right hip into the counter again. Somehow the foot across the island felt like too much distance between us, even as I fought the urge to flee to the kitchen and demand that Barb toss her out the door immediately.
"Perfect," she purred, seemingly unaware of my inner turmoil at seeing her again. She offered me a small smile of thanks as she slowly slid the menu across the counter until a corner poked my stomach gently. I jerked backwards at the contact and elbowed a pitcher of sweat tea on the waitress counter behind me, knocking it to the floor. Luci held her head down as conversation ceased and all eyes turned in our direction. Blush burned the tips of my ears, worsened by the silence of the room. Barb's dinner was never quiet.
I stepped over the puddle and fled to the kitchen for a mop. Slapping Luci's order ticket on the center island beside Barb's chubby hip, I blatantly ignored her glare and returned to the dining area. Luci had already rounded the counter and thrown a rag that I'd left there earlier over the creeping sticky liquid while every other eye in the diner watched by the time I had returned.
"Luci," I hissed quietly. "You don't have to do that." I squatted beside her and snatched the rag from her grasp, one hand steadying the mop upright.
"I was only helping, Darling," Luci sat back on her heels, amusement evident in her deep sensuous voice.
I shook my head at the ridiculous scene when I realized that Luci wore black stilettos and form-fitting black dress pants. All of the men and probably half of the women stared at her long legs and well formed ass, not the mess that I had made. Eager to save the poor woman from the unwanted advances of the single redneck boys, I leveled my hand under her elbow and pulled her upright swiftly. I leaned the mop on the doorframe before escorting her back to the blue leather-upholstered stool.
She obediently tucked one ankle behind the other and hooked her heel on the round metal ring near the bottom of the stool. Her hands stayed poised for action but unmoving in her lap, and her eyes tracked me as I finished cleaning the tea. Her scrutiny hadn't unnerve me the
way I figured it should have. It actually flattered me in an odd way. Of all the people in the room, Luci Pravitas chose to watch me complete such a mundane task.
"Lauren?" She called as I moved towards the kitchen, and I stopped.
"Yes?" I asked hopefully, ready and waiting to enthusiastically fulfill any desire of this kind and gorgeous creature.
"My coffee, Darling," she gestured in the direction of the coffee pot with her graceful hand aimlessly.
"Oh," my chest deflated with the sound. I snatched a cup from beneath the counter and eased the black liquid into it, not interested in making another mess, and placed the mug on the counter before her. My eyes avoided hers against my will as I turned towards the kitchen once more.
"Lauren?" I turned with my hand pressed against one of Barb's saloon doors, aware of the multiple sets of eyes watching the interaction peripherally.
Those glacier blue eyes, however, bore directly into me, seeing through my body and into my very soul, uncannily but naturally for Luci. They drew me closer before I realized that I had moved and placed my hands flat on the cool counter across from her once more. The entire room crackled with electric tension when Luci leaned slightly over the island and covered my right hand with her left. I jerked at the unexpected contact, but she waited for me to relax into the warmth of her hand reluctantly. I'm not certain that I relaxed, but I ceased my struggle and stared at our joined hands and then glanced around the diner. Every ear strained to hear our conversation, and every eye pretended to stare at half-eaten meals on the plates before them. I ignored their barely restrained stares as my gaze ventured to the newly exposed skin visible through the slit at the top of Luci dress shirt. It parted at her throat, revealing the smooth skin of her collarbones and chest, and I nearly gasped when I saw more scars marking the otherwise perfect flesh there. These seemed thinner than the jagged lines near her neck and on the backs and sides of her wrists, emaciated, almost like a surgical incision made by a very sharp scalpel.
