by Averil Dean
He follows me to the door, one hand lightly on the back of my neck. I begin to turn slightly, to say goodbye, and feel his fingers tighten to keep me moving forward.
At the motorcycle, Jack hands me my helmet.
“You might want to keep that on when we get back to the motel,” he says. He buckles his helmet in place and lowers the tinted shield over his eyes. He swings his leg over the bike and starts the engine, revving it gently, and jerks his head at me.
From the bar, light bursts into the cool blue darkness as a couple opens the door and goes inside. The door eases closed, and we are alone again. Jack’s helmet frightens me. There’s no way to gauge him. I can’t tell whether he’s amused or angry.
I scoot onto the bike behind him and wrap my arms around his waist. He leaves the parking lot with a swooping curve like a big shark flicking its tail. Gravel clatters to the pavement behind us.
The streets are clear and dry. But even so, Jack is going much too fast along the unfamiliar road, which winds like a snake through the pines. He leans into the turns, hugging the center line like he’s on a rail, never deviating, never slowing down no matter how sharp the curve. The trees flash by in a blur, and I am clinging to him with both hands locked around his waist, sure he’s going to crash, that we’ll hit a pothole and sail off the bike, that a deer will leap into the road and Jack will lose control. I call his name but can hardly hear it myself over the engine and the rush of wind. I clunk my helmet against his, tug at his shirt. But he won’t slow down. Instead, he accelerates, which feels like a punishment against my protests, so I give up and hold on and pray.
At last we pull into the parking lot of the white motel. Before he can even kill the engine, my helmet is on the ground and I’m off the bike and running. My legs are trembling and weak with relief, and I have no idea where I’m going—I only know that the last thing I want is to go inside with him.
I’m on the path now, headed into the forest, where earlier today I noticed a couple of stone picnic tables nestled in the pines. The sea is churning at the bottom of the cliff and my footsteps and breath are coming fast. Then Jack is behind me, two or three heavy thuds of his boots on the ground, and his hand is around my arm.
“Where are you going?”
“Get away from me.” I shake him off. “Are you trying to kill us?”
“If I wanted to kill us, we’d be dead.”
“What the hell is your problem?” I turn to face him. My voice is shrill with fear.
“I think you know the answer to that.”
“What, I can’t have a conversation now?”
“A conversation. Is that what you call it, when you’re acting like a fucking pole dancer, letting guys hang all over you, while you stick your ass in the air and pretend you don’t know how to play pool.”
My face grows hot. “I don’t know how to play.”
“Bullshit. What you wanted was a lesson, and an excuse to piss me off.”
“That’s not tr—”
“Bullshit.” In the darkness, Jack’s face floats like a mask, his cheeks and eye sockets blotted with shadow. “You think I don’t know when I’m being played? How many times did you smile tonight. I lost count. And you never smile.”
“What, I can’t smile now? Did we enter a no-charm zone I was unaware of?”
He steps forward and slaps me once, hard across the cheek. I stumble back, disoriented. He has never hit me in anger.
“The problem here,” he says, “is that you haven’t figured this out yet. You think you know what you want, but you don’t know shit.”
He advances on me, and I’m scurrying backward, trying to get out of the way. I glance back, see I’m about to run into a metal barbecue grill and try to change course. Jack hooks my elbow and pushes me against the picnic table.
“You wanted to play a game tonight, you wanted to make me jealous.” He throws out his arms, palms up. “So I’m jealous. Now what?”
“I wasn’t—”
“Didn’t think that far ahead, did you.”
He leans forward, both hands on the table, so far that I have to arch back. I turn my face aside, gritting my teeth. Far below, the sea hisses and creams over the rocks, breaks and subsides.
“Stop, you’re—”
“Scaring you?” His voice boils at my ear. “But you like to be scared, don’t you.”
“No, not like this—”
“Yeah, just like this.”
He reaches down and unbuttons his jeans.
“Fuck you,” I tell him. My voice is small and breathless and lost in the wind.
“Oh, I will.” His hand is at my waist and he’s got my jeans undone and my zipper down.
I push hard against him, try to twist away, but he pushes back and there isn’t a contest between us. Nana’s advice echoes in my mind.
You’re a clever girl, Alice. Use what you have.
I won’t listen, though, because Jack is right about me and this gimmick. I’m full of fear, lusting for pain, and he knows it. I push so he’ll grab, I claw so he’ll hit. He won’t back off, even when my fingernails graze his cheek, even when my fist connects with his chin. He is unfazed and his power ignites me.
Take over. I don’t want to be in control. Take this, take me, take over.
I am alone with a man twice my size, in a game run amok. This is his game now and I am locked inside. A nightmare—when the normal rules don’t apply and you are trapped within your prison, still trying to make it all make sense. He could have killed me tonight and I want him. His eyes are lit with fury and I want him. With my ear still ringing from the palm of his hand and my cheek on fire and a voice of caution screaming to be heard, I want him. It’s a nightmare.
I need him, I need him, I want him. It’s a nightmare.
I let him lift me to the cold cement table and press his tongue into my mouth. His hand closes over my breast, a shock of cold against my skin, and he bites my lip as his warm cock plunges inside me, easy and slick.
He groans, puts his mouth to my ear and insults me even as I open myself and let him in. “Knew you’d be wet...fucking whore, aren’t you...aren’t you...”
I’m ashamed but I don’t care—not with his mouth over mine, not with his hand tearing at my shirt and the hard, unforgiving stone holding me fast beneath him. My breasts tighten under his fingers and then under his tongue, and the abrasive pain of the table and of Jack’s anger seem to feed my frenzied desire to take all of him, to make it hurt from the inside.
He pushes me down, rips again at my shirt and pulls my breast to his mouth. He finds a rhythm, a long, fast stroke, and strikes hard to the depths of me. He clutches my wrists with one hand and slides his fingers into the space between us, unerringly to the center of my clitoris.
“How’s this game,” he says against my lips. “Let’s finish it baby, come on.”
He kisses me again, with deep strokes of his tongue against my teeth, his mouth angled over mine, and I know he has won because I can’t stop now. His dick has torn me open and his hand is on my wrists and I am naked under him, helpless under him, and there’s nothing I want more than to stay here and do exactly what he says. He pinches my clitoris between his two fingers, forcing words down my throat, and I am crying, begging, apologizing, coming again and again. The waves of pain and pleasure collide against him but I am trapped inside my climax, inside my body, too tightly bound even to rise to him. He comes then, too, with savage glee and insults, as full of his triumph as I am full of him.
He shudders. His hips snap against me like the slamming of a door.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Late at night I can sometimes see the patterns. I see myself standing still and Death rushing past me to claim someone else. I understand my self-inflicted pain as a spike in the ground, a means of holding myself in place.
In the shadows on the wall I see the ghost-faces of my mother and grandmother, of an eyeless girl with hair like cobwebs and a boy whose face dissolves into mist before it’s ever fully formed.
I see myself at a distance as a child of thirteen, and the door opening with a particular creak, a strange dry creak that pinches my eyes and draws my body tight as a bow, a tiny screaming creak of the door and the bed beside me sinking, heavy.
* * *
By the time I was sixteen, the state of Washington had all but given up on me. After leaving the PNC, I was placed in four or five different foster homes with stops between at the Center, which had come to feel like an airport or a train station. I knew the routine, the cloying smell of the place. I had figured out how to avoid attention by sitting quietly aside and casting my eyes down, by keeping my hair short and my clothes baggy and my voice out of the conversation. I strived for invisibility and for the most part I succeeded.
I was nobody, a ghost in the machine.
Carla had exhausted most of her options in trying to place me. She was exhausted in general, always with an armful of folders and her hair like a bird’s nest, wanting so much to do some good. When she came to me with Verity Cruz, I knew she was scraping the bottom of the barrel and I felt for her.
“She’s a little eccentric,” Carla said. “An artist or something. I think she does pottery. That might be fun, right? She could teach you about it.”
I hesitated. Nana used to say that most choices were between the devil you knew and the devil you didn’t, and longevity favored those who kept to the former. But I was young and still hopeful that the next devil might prove to be one of my own.
“Sure,” I said. “Pottery.”
Carla closed her folders and laid her hands side by side over the top.
“Just try, honey. She lives out in the country where it’s nice and quiet. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
I shrugged. “Where exactly?”
“One of the islands. Vashon, I think.”
She drove me out there a few days later, along a narrow road through whiskery fields and thick stands of pine trees, to the north end of the island where the homes were scattered and the tourist money never seemed to penetrate.
The house itself had a threadbare appearance, with small gaps in the siding and a peeling front porch that listed slightly to the left and seemed to be the repository for an overflowing collection of potted plants. The windows were covered with printed dish towels, and there was a chicken coop in the front yard and a soft chorus of clucking, which I would grow used to as part of the sound of the place.
As we got out of the car, a young man came out the front door and down the steps.
“Michael,” said Carla. “I didn’t know you were still here.”
He had a rag in his hands and was working it around each long finger, drying them off.
“Verity’s letting me stay until I get some money saved for a place of my own.”
Carla frowned. “She should have mentioned it.”
“Maybe she thought you already knew.”
Carla looked as if she had something else to say, but at that moment there was a cry from the side of the house, and a woman came around the corner with her arms open wide. She was short, olive-skinned, with hair as black as mine but long and curly and threaded with gray. She came immediately at me and enfolded me in a damp, solid hug. She smelled of clay and her hair scratched my cheek.
“Alice,” she said. She put one arm around my shoulders and steered me up the front porch steps as if we were alone, as if I were her long-lost sister. “Be careful now, this old place is near to falling down.”
She linked my arm in hers and led me into the house, from room to room without stopping, except to call back over her shoulder, “Michael, give Miss Carla something to drink while I show Alice to her room.” And the tour continued: kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedrooms, with Verity’s voice beside me and her hand gripping my shoulder as if to keep me facing forward. “It ain’t the Ritz, but—watch your step—but then you know what they say about beggars and choosers. And we’re pretty comfortable. Got a couple of buckets here and there ’cause the roof leaks—we’re gonna see to that next year—so if you see a bucket’s getting full, go on ahead and empty it. All hands on deck, right, sugar?”
We had come to my room. Verity opened the door with a flourish and gave me a little push inside.
“Miss Carla says you like to write,” she said, “so me and Michael fixed up a place for you, what do you think?”
I set down my duffel bag and looked around. The closet was full of boxes, but the bed had a flowery sheet and a scarlet blanket over the top, and there was a small desk with a lamp on it and a chair. The window was hung with one leaf-green curtain and one yellow, but they sort of matched, and the sun was spilling through them and right across the surface of the desk. I traced a circle with my finger where someone’s coffee cup had left a mark. On the desk were a spiral notebook still in its wrapper and a plastic Hello Kitty tumbler full of pens.
“It’s great,” I said.
Verity beamed.
“Well, now, that’s fine. I’m going downstairs to talk to Miss Carla, and you go on ahead and get settled in.”
She bustled out the door, then stopped and put her head back through.
“You ain’t vegetarian, are you?”
I shook my head.
“Good,” she said. “One of them hens has stopped laying.” She grinned and drew one finger across her throat.
Then she was gone. I heard her down the hall, still talking, the stairs squeaking under her feet.
I pushed the curtains aside and looked out over the small square of backyard and the fields beyond. It had been six years since I lived on Vashon Island, but I remembered the smell of the place and the lay of the land; on the way here from the ferry dock, I’d noticed some familiar landmarks—stores where I used to go with Nana, the empty lot where they held the weekend farmers’ market, the turnoff to the cemetery where she and my mother were buried. I felt as if they had been waiting for me.
I turned back to the room and started to unpack. There were two empty drawers and some hangers in the closet, more than enough space for me. An image flickered in my mind, of myself in two years’ time, eighteen and out, repacking my bag and going...somewhere. The fantasy always broke apart at this point. Where I would go when there was no place left to go was unclear. But if I could make this one last, if I could get my feet under me in Verity’s house, there might still be a chance for my future.
“Hey.” A voice spoke from the door. “Can I come in?”
I waved my hand and sat down on the edge of the bed. My duffel bag was open to a small jumble of underwear and bras. I tossed a pair of jeans over the top to hide them.
“So I’m Michael Keeling.”
“Alice. Croft.”
He shoved his hands into his front pockets.
“Weird, huh? Coming into a new place?”
“Always.”
He looked out the window, at his feet, back at me. He was tall and thin, but had a gentle stoop like a professor, a posture I’d come to associate with the boys from my background; it was a way to appear smaller, an attempt to disappear.
“So, what’s the story?” I said.
“With what?”
“Verity. What’s the deal? Why’s she fostering?” I felt it was better always to know the score from the outset, the better to stay the fuck out of the game.
“Oh, she’s...” He seemed to think it over. “I think she’s just lonely.”
Lonely. I should have known then that this would end badly. Anyone looking for emotional fulfillment from a collection of broken teenagers was clearly misguided.
“Foster kids,” I said. “A laugh a minute.”
&nbs
p; “She was a prison pen pal for a while. I’d call us an improvement.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was serious. But right away I knew I would like Michael Keeling.
“Hey, I can give you a ride to school if you want.” He had a way of looking around me, past me, addressing his conversation to the objects around the room. Now he seemed to be talking to the lamp. “The bus is late half the time, you can be standing in the rain awhile.”
I got up and started refolding my T-shirts, laying them in a drawer. “I don’t go to school.”
He looked surprised. “Oh, I thought you were like sixteen, or—”
“I got tired of switching schools all the time, so I signed up for online classes a while back. Graduated two months ago.”
“Huh. So what are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to write.”
That night I sat at the rickety desk and listened to the raindrops on the roof, stared up from that smeary window to the soft, shrouded glow of the moon and thought for the first time, Would you kill for me?
But Michael Keeling was a gentle boy. I knew without asking that the answer would always be no.
The notebook he left me is the one I’m sitting with now, at another table by a different window, the same question running through my mind.
In the bed next to me, Jack grumbles in his sleep. His fingers twitch and curl inward. Jack always sleeps lightly and seems even when dreaming to be uncannily aware. He turns over as I watch him. His shoulder rolls forward and the line of his muscled arm forms an undulating pattern against the wall.
I touch my cheek. We came back to the room a few hours ago, bringing the struggle from outside with us. He slapped me again, twice.
Go on. Go ahead.
I lifted my chin, willing myself to face him.
Instead, he pulled off my clothes and shoved me to the floor. But this time as he moved inside me, I saw fear begin to take hold. He’s afraid of hurting me. Afraid, really, of how much he wants to.
For the second time that day, he backed us away from the ledge. His orgasm was tender. His hands cradled my face as he checked for damage. Sorry, I’m so sorry....
