by Jewel E. Ann
“Fisher Mann. My landlord.”
“Interesting name.” I chuckled while my mom retrieved my suitcase from the back of her car.
“It is.” She grinned, nodding toward a cobblestone path that wound around to the side of the sprawling ranch home with an unobstructed view of the mountains.
“There’s a door to the house through the screened-in porch, but I usually go in through here because there’s a locker area to put coats, shoes, purses, etcetera.”
She unlocked the door, and I followed her into the basement. It was nice—way nicer than I expected, not basement feeling at all. A wall of west-facing windows gave it depth, not that it needed any illusion. The vast family room held a mammoth sectional, big screen TV, and a pool table.
“You’ve bought a lot of stuff.”
“Pfft …” She shook her head. “No. The family room came furnished. I purchased beds for the two bedrooms and bedding. Towels. Kitchen stuff. And by me, I mean my parents loaned me the money.”
“I see.” My other grandparents. I saw them three times while my mom was incarcerated. My father wasn’t exactly accommodating.
“Let’s see if Fisher is upstairs. I want you to meet him; then we can grab food and spend the rest of the evening catching up.”
Catching up … I found that odd. The catching up would be very one-sided. There was no way she had that much to catch me up on in regard to her life.
I followed her up the split staircase. She knocked on the door and waited a full two seconds before unlocking it and opening it. It was odd that there weren’t locks on both sides like connected hotel rooms. As I followed her into a spacious kitchen with high ceilings, I glanced back and noticed there was a lock on his side. He just hadn’t locked it.
“Fisher?” she called and waited a few seconds. “I’ll check the garage. Sometimes he’s working on a project or spit-shining his motorcycle.”
I nodded, feeling nerves tighten in my stomach. Why? I wasn’t sure, but two seconds later I quickly figured it out.
“Hey.”
I turned toward the deep, male voice.
“Oh my gosh!” I made another quick turn, completing a full three-sixty in total. “I’m sorry.”
“Why? Did you break in? Or are you Rory’s daughter?”
I cleared my throat. “That … um … yeah … Rory’s daughter.”
“Ah, Reese Capshaw. It’s nice to finally meet you. Rory talks about you nonstop.”
I nodded a half dozen times, refusing to turn back toward him and his nearly naked body. My initial glance caught lots of chest and water dripping down said chest and a loosely tied navy-blue towel hanging low on his waist. Oh … yeah … his hair was messy, wet, and light brown or maybe dark blond.
“Where’s your mom?” He brushed past me. Like … physically brushed past me. His wet arm bumped mine. And he didn’t say “excuse me.” Instead, he turned a few degrees just before reaching for the garage door handle. He eyed me from head to toe, a smirk reshaping his mouth into something I didn’t trust. “You look just like your mom. Lucky girl.”
In that moment, I knew Fisher Mann was bad news.
“There you are!” Mom started to open the door at the same moment Fisher turned the handle and pulled inward.
Was it the right time to tell my mom she couldn’t go to Los Angeles because her landlord looked at me like his next meal? But more than that … I couldn’t believe she had no response to his nearly naked body on full display in front of her daughter.
“Sorry. I was in the shower,” Fisher said while he gave his towel a slight adjustment in the wrong direction! He lowered it an inch.
Heat gathered in my cheeks. I had only seen men like him on television or with my friends when no one’s parents were home. It felt forbidden then, and it didn’t feel any less forbidden with my mom standing between us.
“So you met Reese. Isn’t she beautiful? Even more stunning than her pictures. Don’t you think?”
Dear God, please make this stop. Make HIM stop.
Stop being so … everything.
My mom, too busy giving me her most adoring expression, looked on the verge of crying again, while Sin—with his disheveled hair, overexposed flesh, and hard muscles—wet his lips and nodded. “She’s perfect, Rory. Almost angelic.”
What was that supposed to mean? I contemplated his wording. Did he know I went to a Christian academy? Was he making a jab at my religion? My faith? My youth? My level of experience? Maybe it wasn’t a biblical reference to an actual angel. What if he thought I was truly beautiful?
I quickly shook my head to derail that train of thought. Of course, I didn’t want Fisher to find me attractive to any degree. He was older than me by more than a few years. He didn’t look like a man of faith. Yes, I realized that was another judgment, but my mind did its own thing. Was he with my mom … as in with her in the biblical sense?
“I told Reese you might have a job for her.” She glanced back at the naked fisherman.
Ugh! Why did that have to go through my head? I would forever imagine him naked with a fishing pole in his hand … maybe naked except for a pair of those fly-fishing boots reaching his mid-thigh region.
Stop!
“Sure. I can keep her busy with lots of odds and ends. Some days you could work in the office with my secretary, Hailey. Other days you might come with me to job sites. Drop off lunches. Grab supplies.”
There was a long silence.
“Reese?” my mom said.
“Huh?” I hummed, slightly incoherently.
Fisher bent to the side like he was lowering his body to fit into the view of a camera lens. But there was no camera, just my gaze affixed to his abs and the teasing of dark hair peeking out from the top of his towel. The coveted happy trail. No not coveted. At least, not by me. Nope.
“Hello?” Fisher said, and that was when I realized he’d caught me gawking at him, just inches from his … uh … lower pelvic area.
I needed the fire department to extinguish the embarrassment from my face. “S-sorry …” I jerked my gaze away from him and folded my arms over my chest, staring down at my feet as I rocked back and forth on the balls of them several times. “A job. Yes. That would be great. Thanks.”
“Everything okay?” my mom asked.
“Yeah. It’s just been a long day of traveling. That’s all.” I shifted my focus to things around the kitchen. He kept it rather clean, unsure of what I expected from a guy who worked in construction. And he liked bananas and apples. He must have had two dozen bananas and an equal number of apples in a glass bowl by his toaster. Apples … the fruit of temptation. How appropriate.
“We’ll let you get dressed before your towel falls off, and you show Reese more than she wants to see. I haven’t had the sex talk with her yet.”
Let. Me. Die!
She really said that. To him! Prison had done things to my mom. I couldn’t remember her being so forward, so blunt, so embarrassing.
“Oh my gosh …” I covered my face with my hands. “Thanks for embarrassing me. I’m an adult now, ya know?”
I was an adult covering her flushed face. I was an adult who hadn’t had sex because I wasn’t married. I was an adult who fit in with my grandparents, my church family, and my friends from the Christian academy. Apparently, I wasn’t an adult in my mom’s eyes, and something told me I wasn’t an adult in Fisher’s eyes. Or maybe I was. That was the most terrifying thought at that moment.
Chapter Four
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.” My mom laughed as we headed back downstairs. “I’ve been stressing out over how to treat you.” She opened the fridge and plucked two sodas from the bottom shelf, handing one to me.
Orange soda. She used to give me that as a special treat. I wondered if she had those graham crackers shaped like bears as well since that used to be my favorite snack—when I was five years younger.
“I mean … the last time I saw you, you weren’t even old enough to drive
a car. You hadn’t gotten your period yet. And now you’re a grown woman. I know it in my head, but my heart still remembers the little girl. I guess I want to get back time, but I can’t.”
“Thanks.” I took the soda and sat on the U-shaped leather sectional. “I know. It’s weird for me too. I guess we’ll just have to pray about it, and God will help us through this.”
Pausing the bottle at her lips, she shook her head. “Boy … they did a fine job of indoctrinating you. Didn’t they?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the ‘we’ll just have to pray about it.’ That’s not what the average eighteen-year-old girl says. I’ve been a little isolated for a few years, but I know that much hasn’t changed. You talk like a girl who’s been reading the Bible more than romance novels. A girl who spends more time praying than watching Netflix.”
“I have a love for Christ. Is that so wrong? We went to church before you went to prison.”
She chuckled and took a sip of her orange soda. “We were Catholic.”
“So? What’s that matter?”
Again, she laughed. “Oh, it matters. But I don’t want to talk religion with you. Your faith is between you and God. I want to know all the big moments you’ve experienced over the past five years. Your first boyfriend. Your first kiss. Your first heartbreak. I want you to tell me all about your friends. Did you keep in touch with your old friends? Or did you make new ones at your Christian school? Did your dad ever find another woman? Or did he die a lonely man?”
She had a lot of questions. I had only anticipated one or two of them. Maybe the boyfriend question and the one about my old friends from public school. Everything else left me a little speechless, especially the questions about Dad finding someone new after divorcing her.
“I’ve had a boyfriend. Two, actually.”
“And …” Her grin grew into something weird. A grin like my friends used to give me after I’d gone out on a date.
It was hard to separate Rory from Mom. In fact, I hadn’t used either name yet to her face because I wasn’t sure what I should call her.
“It didn’t last long either time.”
“That’s it?” She gave me a raised eyebrow. “That’s the best you can do? What about your first kiss?”
I shrugged. “It was okay.”
“You seem hesitant. Is it because I’m your mom? We used to talk about stuff all the time. You’d come home from school and tell me about your day.” She sighed with a contented smile, like her five years in prison never happened. Like we should’ve been able to pick up where we left off.
I remembered watching a show about this plane that disappeared and then returned years later. Families assumed the plane went down, and there were no survivors. So when the plane returned home, things were different. Kids were older. Spouses remarried. But the people on the plane couldn’t understand that because, for them, nothing had changed. My mom’s time in prison was like her being on that plane.
“I wanted to visit you in prison.” I changed the subject to what I had imagined we’d talk about.
Why Dad convinced me it was in my best interest to not visit her.
Why I didn’t push harder to see her after he died.
How I felt the three times I did get to see her parents.
What it felt like being in prison.
How it changed her.
Literally anything but my dating life and details of my first kiss.
“I know.” She frowned and dropped her chin. “I mean … I didn’t know, but I believed it in my heart. I knew someone had probably filled your head with reasons it was best to not visit me. And honestly, there were times that I was glad you didn’t see me in that place. But…” she glanced up and forced a smile “…that was all then. This is now. If you don’t want to relive any of that, if you don’t want to share your ‘firsts’ with me, then we don’t have to do that. We can start fresh. Well …” Her eyes rolled dramatically, like I had done to my dad a million times. “We can start fresh when I get back from L.A. I leave in two days.”
Two days.
I had two days before my mom, who was in many ways a stranger to me, left me with the naked fisherman.
That sound … that echoing siren. I didn’t have to think twice. I knew it was a tornado siren. Just my luck. My first night in Denver, first night with my mom in over five years, and the sirens went off.
“Reese, sweetie, come into the back room with us.” Rory poked her head into my room and shined a flashlight on me.
I sat up in bed and rubbed my eyes. Taking two steps, I froze. “Oh!” My hands covered my boobs. They weren’t out and about or anything crazy like that. I had on a thin white tank top, no bra. “Jeez, you …”
The naked fisherman (okay, he had shorts on) eyed me and wore a smirk that wasn’t all that comforting. “Yes, me. The basement is the safest place. Utility room. Let’s go.” He held up an actual flashlight, one of those long metal ones.
I guarded my eyes with one hand and snatched the blanket from the bed with my other hand.
“I can’t remember the last time I heard the sirens go off, aside from testing it,” Fisher said, shutting the door to the unfinished utility area.
“We should pray. I can do it.”
My mom and Fisher stared blankly at me while we huddled in a small circle, sitting atop large plastic storage containers like the ones she used to store my old clothes and sentimental things from my childhood. I wondered what happened to those.
“Sure.” Mom smiled. “Can’t hurt. Do you want us to join hands?”
Eyeing the naked fisherman, I shook my head slowly. “We don’t have to.”
“What the heck. If we’re asking God to spare our lives, holding hands might be the best way to show sincerity.” He grabbed my mom’s hand and then mine.
It felt small in his strong, calloused hand. Warm. Unfamiliar. And it jumbled my thoughts. It sent my mind into rewind, replaying him smirking at me, wearing nothing but a low hanging towel.
Abs.
Veiny arms.
Rivulets of water dotting his broad chest muscles.
“Is this a silent prayer?” Fisher asked, once again startling me back to reality. He squinted one eye at me like he’d just had both closed for the prayer. “Will you at least say the Amen part out loud?”
“Dear Lord …” I jumped into prayer instead of acknowledging the awkward pause. “We pray that you watch over us and keep us safe from the storm. Amen.”
“Amen,” my mom and Fisher echoed.
“So we’re good?” Fisher winked at me while releasing my hand. “Protected?”
I narrowed my eyes. “Are you being sarcastic?”
“It’s the middle of the night, Reese. He’s just tired, and it’s probably coming across like he’s a little punchy.” My mom stuck up for him. That had to have meant they were together—a thing.
How did I feel about my mom being with a younger man? Well, that was a hard question to answer at the time because it had been so long since I’d not only seen my mom, but also since I’d seen my parents together.
“I’m not being punchy, Rory. I’m being a smart-ass. You can only take fifty percent of the things I say seriously, Reese. If you’re going to work for me, you’ll need to keep that in mind.”
I twisted my lips and nodded slowly. “That’s a bit vague. Kinda feels like you’re setting me up to fail. Or did my grandparents call and ask you to ensure I fail so that I’ll go crawling off to college?”
“Is … everything okay, sweetie?”
Sweetie.
I’d wondered if my mom would call me that again. It used to be the only thing she called me. It made me feel loved and special. At eighteen, sitting next to the naked fisherman in his basement, it felt a little condescending—like everyone needed to remember that I was the youngest, least experienced one in the room. That sealed the deal. I wasn’t going to call her “Mom.”
“I’m good, Rory.”
Her eyebrows
slid toward the bridge of her nose as if I’d offended her in some way.
“Reese … I don’t think you are good. And I leave in less than forty-eight hours. I don’t want to go if you’re not okay here. I can do something else. I can tell my boss it’s not good timing.”
“Christ, Rory. She’ll be fine. Stop coddling her.” Fisher yawned and stretched his arms over his head. It made me feel like a twelve-year-old someone snuck into an R-rated movie. Was I old enough to see so much male skin in person? And why couldn’t I stop thinking about what it would be like to have sex with him? That was the truth. And I wasn’t happy that God could read my mind, but I also wasn’t happy that my mind kept going there without my permission.
That Christian academy made it easy to keep my virginity, but nearly impossible to keep my sanity. A focused mind. A clean mind.
Dear Lord, please forgive me for my thoughts. Please fill my mind and spirit with your love and all things that bring you glory.
“Do you feel coddled, Reese?” Rory asked.
Confused?
Sinful?
Anxious?
Yes.
“No. I don’t feel coddled.”
She eyed Fisher with a frown. “See?”
“You’ve been reunited for all of ten seconds. Reese wouldn’t tell you if she did feel coddled.”
The sirens stopped.
“Thank god! I have to pee.” My mom ran out of the back room.
Fisher stood and held out his hand. “We’re alive. Looks like your prayer was answered.”
I didn’t take his hand or give any more attention to his statement because I felt certain that it fell into the fifty percent category that I needed to ignore.
He waited at the door for me to exit the back room. As I squeezed past him, I shot him a quick glance and inhaled deeply, proving that God didn’t answer all my prayers.
“So …” he rubbed his lips together.
I gulped a mouthful of saliva, unable to tear my gaze away from him.
“When do you want to do it?” His voice deepened.
My heart pounded to the point of feeling it in my throat. What if my mom had heard him? I wasn’t having sex with him. And I lost all ability to speak those words because it was the boldest thing a man had ever said to me.
