Wild Man

by Kristen Ashley

“What?” she asked back, not buying my fake innocent for a second and I knew this when her eyebrows shot up and she kept speaking. “Girl, I walked into your house and you had a face… a face…” She shook her head. “I don’t even know what was up with your face and you still got that face.”

  Then, as if I didn’t know what a face was, she lifted a finger and jabbed it toward mine, going on as she dropped it.

  “All I know is, three months you’ve been hell on wheels, no one could keep up with you, and now you look all foggy, like you’re living in a dream world.”

  Damn.

  I really needed to remember that even as Martha lived out her ever-present drama, that didn’t mean she didn’t pay attention.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.

  “Sure you do,” Elvira stated, dumping ice into her cocktail shaker.

  “Uh…” I mumbled to Elvira, a little surprised since I’d met her an hour before and she couldn’t know anything about me, especially not about this.

  “I got the gift,” Elvira informed me, answering my unasked question. “Can read people’s faces.” She topped the cocktail shaker and started shaking. “And yours is sayin’ you know exactly what your homegirl is talkin’ about.”

  Oh crap.

  I felt all eyes on me but it was Martha who spoke next.

  “All right, Tess, I backed off because you know I did not like that Jake. But that look on your face, I’m done backing off.”

  Oh crap.

  At this point Martha looked to the beauty parade of women around the table and shared, “She got hooked up with this guy… hot and when I say hot I mean—”she licked her finger and then sliced it through the air making a sizzle noise and went on—“smokin’ hot. But bad news.”

  It was safe to say I didn’t want to talk about this at all but it was safer to say that I didn’t want to talk about this drinking clandestine cosmos on Ada’s picture-perfect back deck with a bunch of women I didn’t know during a very badly hosted baby shower I didn’t want to be at. But instead, I wanted to be home preparing for nine o’clock when Brock would be back and we would be talking.

  Therefore, I started, “Martha—”

  “No, girl,” Martha cut me off, lifting a hand in my face to which Elvira muttered, “Oh shit, this is serious. She’s givin’ the hand.”

  Martha continued, dropping her hand and looking back at the bevy of beauties. “This guy had it all. The walk, the voice, the hair, the ass. Kid you not, I’d sell my soul just to run my fingers along his forearms.” She leaned in and semi-whispered, “He’s got these veins that pop out on his hands and forearms, freaking delicious.”

  Oh jeez.

  Totally paid attention.

  “Mm-hmm, I hear you,” Elvira and Tracy muttered in unison, their eyes rapt on Martha’s face as were Gwen’s, but Camille was looking at me.

  Martha went on. “But did he take her to his pad? No. Did she know where he worked? No. Did she meet any of his friends? No. Family? Unh-unh. Always her place or some dive. Never a nice meal. Never got dressed up and took my girl on the town. He met her friends. He showed up at her bakery. But for all she knows, he’s a lone wolf livin’ off his family’s inheritance and, from what I could tell, it wasn’t a generous one. If he called, she answered. She couldn’t and he left a message, she called straight back. He wanted to meet, she asked where and what time and then she was there.”

  “Oh boy,” Gwen muttered, clearly disappointed I’d let down our side.

  “You got that right. Oh boy,” Martha agreed. “Did she listen to me when I told her to play it cool? No. Did she listen to me when I said in four months you should see your man’s pad, at the very least meet a friend, just one? No. I get it. She was into this dude. Hell, Melissa Etheridge would be into this dude. He’s the walking, talking, breathing definition of a dude you… would… be… into. But a girl’s gotta play it cool and not put herself out there.”

  I tried again. “Martha—”

  She turned her bright blue eyes to me. “Unh-unh, Tess. You put yourself out there and I know, seein’ as for the last three months there’s been no talk, no sightings, Jake Knox all of a sudden fell off the face of the earth.” She leaned into me. “I know.” Then she leaned back. “It’s ended. Because off you go, hell-bent on whatever you’re hell bent on.”

  She turned back to the girls and kept going.

  “Suddenly, after twenty-five years of me talking to her about it, she gets contacts. Suddenly, she’s at kickboxing classes three days a week. Suddenly, she’s looking at places to open a new bakery and expand her business at the same time she’s put the house she loves on the market and is waxin’ on about movin’ to Kentucky. Suddenly, she’s off to a new hairdresser, spends three hundred friggin’ dollars for a new friggin’ look. Suddenly, she’s not shopping at Nordstrom’s but scrounging through the racks of Biker Babes ’R’ Us.”

  Martha settled back on her heels and kept right on talking.

  “Now, we all know, a girl gets dumped by a serious hot guy she’s got two options. She deposits her ass at the nearest LaMar’s and steadily eats her way through the inventory until she’s gained fifty pounds and gives up on men until she finds herself a beer-bellied loser who worships the ground she walks on. Or she gets herself a new look, kickboxes her way to a new ass, and throws herself into her job. That means she’s living and breathing for that moment when she sees him again and she can say, ‘Look what you gave up, asshole.’ ”

  Martha’s eyes came back to me.

  “And that’s what you’ve been doin’.”

  That wasn’t what I was doing.

  Or not exactly.

  “Honey—” I began again only to get cut off again.

  “But today, I see it in your eyes. Something is up and my guess is that something is that guy’s back. You’re in your head again, livin’ the dream that he’s going to be all you want him to be when everything about him screams he… is… not.”

  “Tell it like it is, sister,” Elvira encouraged.

  “Um… not to be rude or anything, but…” I looked at the girl gang. “I don’t really know you all and maybe—”

  Elvira cut me off. “Nope, you don’t know us. That’s the damned truth but I’ll tell you, from what I hear your girl sayin’, it’s intervention time and we all got tits and ass—except Camille, she’s just got ass, but lucky for her, God gave her plenty ’a that—so we’re in the club and anytime a member gets herself in a situation where she needs an intervention, it’s our duty to kick in even if we don’t know the sister,” Elvira stated then her eyes scanned the table and she asked, “Am I right?”

  I stared at Elvira, not happy to admit that what she was saying was sheer lunacy but it was also right as most anything that had to do with women was. And this included her observation that Camille was light up top but she made up for it by being generous on the bottom.

  “You’re right, Elvira,” Tracy chimed in.

  “I think—” Camille started but Elvira talked over her.

  “Spill,” she ordered me. “This Jake back?”

  “Kind of,” I found my mouth saying, and Elvira’s eyebrows shot together in a scary way.

  “Kind of? How can a boy kind of be back?”

  “Um…” I muttered, avoiding Martha’s eyes since she was right. I didn’t share anything about what had happened with Brock, Damian, and being investigated by a multiagency task force that came together to dismantle my ex-husband’s drug operation and I was seeing, just then, this was probably something girlfriends shared.

  Elvira yanked off the top of the cocktail shaker and then extended her arm across the table, offering it to me. “Suck some of that back, girlfriend, and let ’er rip.”

  That was when I found my hand reaching for the cocktail shaker. Then, as told by a somewhat scary Elvira, I took it and sucked some back.

  She made good cosmos.

  I handed it off to Tracy, who was standing beside me so she co
uld partake, and I pulled in a breath and started.

  “Okay, well, see, I didn’t tell you…” I turned to Martha, “because I… well… it was messed up.”

  “Oh boy,” Gwen muttered again.

  “Keep talking,” Martha said quietly, her eyes on my face, her body braced, and I knew she was worried.

  Damn.

  “His name isn’t Jake Knox. It’s Brock Lucas,” I whispered and felt something weird and tense coming from the table but since Martha was blinking at me and looking more worried, I hurried on. “He was… okay, here it is. Damian is a drug kingpin and he called me nine months ago, lying to me that his dad was sick. I met him for lunch and he told me he wanted to reconcile.”

  I stopped talking mainly because Martha shrieked a very loud, “What?”

  I put my hand on her arm and talked quickly. “Honey, it was… it was nothing.”

  “That jackass calls you, Tess, it’s not nothing,” she snapped, her bright blue eyes flashing.

  She was right. She didn’t know the worst of it with him but she never liked him either. Said from the beginning he was a bad seed. Told me while she was trying on maid-of-honor dresses that she was performing her duties under protest. She always hated Damian.

  Which was why I never told her he hit me and raped me. She’d lose it and I needed her breathing free air, not serving time for manslaughter.

  “You’re right,” I agreed.

  “Damn straight I am,” she shot back.

  I pulled in more breath. “Anyway, I told him, obviously, I wasn’t interested. But you know Damian.”

  She shook her head then told the girl posse around the table, “Dick never gives up. Sinks his poisonous fangs in you and doesn’t let go until he injects all the venom.”

  “Oo, lawdy, seems you don’t got good radar when it comes to pickin’ ’em,” Elvira muttered.

  “No, her radar is beyond not good. Beyond malfunctioning. It’s straight out broke,” Martha agreed and I was wondering if perhaps Elvira and Martha were not such a good match. Denver was relatively peaceful. I’d never heard of riots or sieges or militant hostile takeovers of land and I was foreseeing this if these two got together and rallied the female population of the Denver metropolitan area as a protest to shelter all women against dickhead assholes.

  “Go on, girl,” Camille prompted quietly and I looked around to see her, Gwen, and Tracy’s eyes gentle on me.

  I nodded and went on. “It gets worse.”

  “Oh boy,” Gwen whispered.

  “Shit,” Martha muttered.

  “You don’t say,” Elvira mumbled.

  I kept talking. “Like I said, Damian is a drug kingpin who’s in jail, or was. Now he’s out on bail awaiting trial.”

  Martha glared at me. She knew this. Everyone did. It had been in the papers. She’d only broached it with me once. I told her he wasn’t in my life, so I didn’t care, and she’d backed off about that too.

  I kept going. “But since he contacted me and kept contacting me, the task force investigating him thought maybe I was involved in his operation.”

  “Oh boy,” Gwen whispered.

  “Shit,” Martha muttered.

  “You don’t say,” Elvira mumbled.

  I continued, “So, they, um… well, they sent someone in undercover to get close to me and that someone they sent was Jake slash Brock.”

  “Holy fuck!” Martha shouted.

  “Honey, keep it down,” I whispered, my body getting tight.

  Martha leaned across the table, snatched the cocktail shaker out of Camille’s hand, and downed a huge gulp like it was Kool-Aid before she dropped her hand and her eyes cut to me.

  I took that as my cue to keep going.

  “Well, um… that was it, really. They did their sweep. I was caught up in it. They searched my house, my car, the bakery, did a forensic search of my computers and another of my finances, brought me into the station to talk to me and I found out who he was. We had a few words and I walked away.”

  I stopped talking, which meant Martha started.

  “I gotta tell you, Tess, I knew Damian was a bad seed. When I read that shit about him in the paper, it did not surprise me.”

  I held her eyes and settled in for the “I told you so’s.”

  I was not disappointed.

  “And I gotta tell you, I knew somethin’ was not right with that Jake slash Brock slash whoever-the-fuck.”

  I pressed my lips together.

  “And I gotta tell you, I cannot believe you did not share any of this shit with me.”

  I bit my lip.

  “Now, what I wanna know is, how is he back?”

  I released my lip only for both to slide to the side. Martha’s eyes narrowed.

  I decided, since I’d kept so much from her, and I really shouldn’t have, that it was the right thing to do to answer.

  “He stopped by today to explain,” I said quietly.

  “Yeah? And what’d he say?”

  “Um… well, he was, uh… well…”

  I petered out.

  “Oh boy,” Gwen whispered.

  I started talking again when Martha got a look like her head was about to explode.

  “He wants us to talk stuff out and see where we are.”

  “Where you are?” Martha whispered and I shrugged, even though I knew that was not my best play. “Okay, where are you?” she asked.

  “He’s coming over tonight at nine,” I informed her and she rolled her eyes to the heavens.

  “Oh boy,” Gwen and Camille said in unison.

  I took in another breath.

  Martha rolled her eyes back to me. “Don’t do this,” she said softly.

  “Martha—”

  She shook her head. “I’m tellin’ you, Tess. Do not do this.”

  “I—”

  She grabbed my arm. “Listen to me, okay, seriously, open your ears for once and listen to me. This guy is bad news. Bad news. Okay, so he’s not up-his-own-ass-dickhead bad news like I thought. Instead, he’s a coplike, up-his-own-ass dickhead who played you. Just because he’s on the right side of the law even though I thought he was on the wrong side doesn’t mean he’s right for you.”

  “Honey—”

  She shook my arm and shook her head.

  “Listen to me, Tess,” she hissed. “I do not get why you live your life with your head buried in the sand but I love you and that’s you, so okay, you do. But because you do it’s my job to look out for you when you’re buried, and right now, I’m looking out for you.”

  She moved closer to me and her eyes got intense before she kept talking.

  “You are beautiful. You are so sweet, damn, honey, too sweet. I love that about you. Everyone loves that about you. You’re forty-three years old, you had a rotten marriage to the king of all assholes who’s finally proven he’s truly the king of all assholes, and you’re still naïve and innocent and that’s cute. It is. Trust me. Guys think so too. But that makes you a mark for players out there and you’ve managed to steer clear because life scares the fuckin’ beejeezus out of you and now when you take the leap it’s with someone who is not good for you. Someone who any woman who’s not got her head in the sand would take one look at, know was fun to play with, and then move the fuck on.”

  She shook her head and her hand on my arm gave me a squeeze.

  “Not you. You have visions of white picket fences and making him extravagant birthday cakes until he dies. He started this shit with you as his mark and I know why he’s back, because you’re naïve and innocent and he thinks it’s cute. But he’s going to chew you up, Tess. Chew you up and spit you out. He already has, and girl, my sweet girl, you gotta pull your head outta the sand and see him for what he is and that he’s gonna do it again.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Elvira muttered.

  I turned my eyes to her.

  Then I said what I knew to this group would sound stupid. “You all don’t know him.”

  “Uh… sorry to say, but we do,”
Gwen said quietly and I turned surprised eyes to her.

  “You do?” I asked.

  “Well I do. It was a while ago but… uh…” She looked at Elvira then back at me. “He was… my man is in the business and there was a situation where I got involved and Lucas was also involved. He was undercover then too and…” She paused, pulled in a soft breath and finished softly. “Sorry, Tess, he was also with a girl during that operation. Her name was Darla and she was a skank, total skank, total bad-news skank, but he was pretending to be with her while actually being with her in order to take down the bad guy. It’s cool he’s committed to his job. But Brock Lucas is known by all to be seriously committed to his job.”

  I stared at her and I knew what she was saying.

  I knew exactly what she was saying.

  That thing tight in my belly started unfurling again, hissing, bearing its fangs, preparing to strike.

  Damn.

  I had to get out of there and get it under control before it choked me, or worse, poisoned me.

  “I’ve gotta go,” I whispered, stepping away from the table.

  Martha’s hand still on me tightened. “No, honey.”

  I pulled carefully free and took another step back as I felt all their eyes soft on me.

  “I’ve gotta go,” I repeated.

  “Not thinkin’ that’s a good idea, hon,” Elvira said gently.

  I looked to Martha and whispered, “I’ll call you later.”

  “Tess, honey—” she started to whisper back but I turned and hightailed it through the door.

  I caught Ada and told her I had a headache.

  Then I grabbed my purse and went out to my car.

  I hoped Elvira, Gwen, Camille, or Tracy would drop Martha at my place to pick up her car.

  And I stupid, stupid, stupidly stopped by the store and bought a six-pack of Bud in bottles, Brock’s preference, on the way home.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Light of a Warm, Sunny Day

  I STARED AT myself in the mirror of my bathroom.

  I now did this a lot. Ever since I came back from the police station after catching sight of myself in the one-way mirror, I did it. Looking at myself for the first time… no… actually examining myself for the first time in my whole life.