DREAMS of 18

by A. Kent, Saffron

  I mean, of course my mom drinks. But all this knowledge I have comes from something else. Something else that I can’t tell him about.

  I don’t want to tell him about.

  But it’s getting harder and harder to lie to him.

  It’s fine, Violet. You’re fine. There’s nothing to tell. It’s all in the past.

  Just focus on him.

  So that’s what I do. I focus on him.

  I don’t understand how he can be so calm and tight-lipped and un-mean to me when I know – I know – he’s suffering. I can see it in those eyes of his.

  Like for example, take the bathroom incident.

  I was taking a shower and when I was done I wrapped myself in a towel. But as soon as I walked out to go to the room I was currently occupying – which was like, three steps away from the bathroom – I came to an abrupt halt.

  Mr. Edwards was standing at the mouth of the hallway, his eyes on me. It looked like he was walking but had come to a stop, as abruptly as I had, at the sight of me.

  There was a huge frown on his forehead like he was having a headache. And his jaw was clenched so tight, like it usually does when he’s trying to stave off the pain, that I thought he was grinding his teeth into dust.

  I wanted to ask him if he was okay. If his head was bothering him again, but I couldn’t speak. Because man, he was staring at me.

  Staring and staring and burning me with it.

  My hand was on the knot of my red towel and my fingers tightened. They kept tightening as he moved his eyes. With every inch of skin he gazed at – my throat, my collarbone, my bare shoulders – my fingers tightened a little more. My pulse fluttered so much that I was sure he could see it.

  His stare, heated and slow, became too much, so that I had to clench my thighs and stop my thoughts from going to inappropriate places.

  I had to blurt out, “I-I thought you were sleeping. Or you were in your room.”

  His eyes came back to mine and I could’ve sworn they were green-ish when he started looking at me but now they were all dark and brown. And I could’ve sworn that his sharp cheeks were tanned but now they were colored in a dark flush.

  There were even a few drops of sweat beading his forehead, as if just standing there was too painful for him.

  Too much suffering.

  With a tic of his jaw, he raised his hand and showed me that he was holding a bottle. “I was thirsty,” he said in a raspy way.

  “Oh, I –”

  He didn’t wait to see what I was going to say. He whirled around and walked out of the cabin, closing the door violently.

  See? Detox is not pretty at all. The man is not doing well.

  But on day five, things change.

  He starts to look better.

  His skin glows. The dark circles under his eyes have almost disappeared. Even though it looks like he’s lost some more weight, he’s healthier.

  More awake and present.

  Most of all, he’s interested.

  Or at least, that’s what it feels like when I see him making repairs around the cabin. He starts with the front yard. He opens that padlocked garage and gets all the tools out before getting down to business.

  I watch him through the dirty living room window before walking out on the porch. I have been cleaning up around the house in my spare time. See, I had to do something while he was suffering and I couldn’t make it better for him.

  So I tried to do other things that might make his life easier. I threw out all his liquor bottles while he was throwing up in the bathroom and I did his laundry while he was shaking in his bed with the cravings.

  Oh, and I’ve been baking up a storm.

  I love to bake. A love I discovered when the Edwardses moved in next door and Brian told me that his dad sucked at baking. He could cook but he couldn’t bake. I thought it was adorable. But then, I find every little thing about Mr. Edwards adorable.

  Found. I found every little thing about Mr. Edwards adorable. Not find.

  So yeah, I took up baking because the man I used to dream about couldn’t bake. And I haven’t looked back since. Not to mention, being a hermit and living indoors 24/7 becomes a lot easier if you’ve got things to bake and things to clean up and launder around the house. I actually gave our housekeeper back in Connecticut a tough competition.

  Long story short, I’ve been doing things around the cabin to keep myself busy and not think too much about how Mr. Edwards is suffering, but this is the first time in days that he seems interested in these things.

  “What are you doing?” I ask him from the sagging top step.

  He stops in his cutting, more like hacking, the shrubs that seem to have grown to almost my height. “Making things better.”

  His voice is so low that even the wind could carry it away. But there’s no wind in this part of the world. Everything is quiet and lonely so I hear him.

  I hear him and I bite my lip, giving him a smile.

  Mr. Edwards though? His eyes go to my mouth for a second before he turns away almost violently and gets back to work.

  Oh well.

  He’s still grumpy, but at least he’s not throwing up. So for the next couple of days, we make things better. Together.

  We fix things, clean things. He clears out the entire backyard, front yard. He fixes the porch steps and I dust the furniture, mop up the floors, wipe up the dirty windows.

  And because I’m the stupidest person ever, I cut my finger on the one that was cracked and squeal like someone’s trying to kill me. It doesn’t even hurt that much but for some reason, I chant ow, ow, ow until he’s right next to me.

  Not only that, he’s holding my hand.

  Yup.

  I don’t even know how he got here so fast because he was out back, standing on a ladder, pulling out ivy and things from the roof. But now, he’s here, right next to me, clutching my wrist with his long, dirty and smudged fingers, staring down at the cut on the pad of my thumb.

  “What the fuck happened?” he asks with a frown.

  I try to ease it, that frown, I mean. “It’s nothing. Really. I was just being a drama queen.”

  He lifts his eyes, his fingers flex and move, almost caressing the delicate skin of my wrist. “You’re bleeding.”

  I swallow.

  I so want to look down where he’s holding my hand and see if those fingers of his are leaving dirty prints on my pale skin. God, I hope they are.

  Instead, I do the appropriate thing.

  I wave my other hand and tell him, “It’s…”

  And then, I trail off.

  Because man, he’s close to me. So close that I just got the whiff of his thick smell: musky and outdoorsy. The scent I’ve been living with for the past few days. I get a waft of it here and there. I smell it in the hallway, the living room, the kitchen, the room that I sleep in, which is right next to his.

  But this is the first time that it’s so strong that I’m drowning in it.

  I don’t want to come up for air.

  “It’s what?” he asks when I don’t complete my sentence.

  But then, I complete it and I wonder what the fuck I’m thinking.

  “It hurts,” I breathe out.

  He frowns and tugs on my wrist. “Come on.”

  But I resist moving. “I, uh, it’s…”

  I leave my thought hanging again because it doesn’t make sense. Nothing about this is making sense. I’m not supposed to act this way. I’m not supposed to lie to him when it’s not hurting at all. Or at least, not very much.

  “Violet,” he warns.

  I raise my hand – the one he’s holding – between us and almost whisper, “Will you make it better?”

  “What?”

  Oh God, I’m crazy but whatever. He’s close to me and I can’t breathe without breathing him into my lungs and he’s touching me – only the second time he’s touched my skin – and I want more.

  A
little bit more.

  “I… I read it somewhere that when you’re bleeding from a cut and it hurts a lot, it’s always good to suck off that blood with your mouth. It stops the pain and the blood right away.”

  By the end of my stupid, transparent lie, I’m all heated. I bet I’m red and the pulse at my neck is jittering so much that he can see it.

  He can see everything.

  He can see that I’m lying and I’m making things up. It’s in his eyes that are curious and narrowed and that are circling over my features.

  Circling and circling until I’m convinced that he can decipher all my thoughts and my emotions. The entire history of them. The entire history of my crush and obsession.

  “Is that what you read?” he rumbles, at last.

  I glance at his lips, the ones I got to kiss for about ten seconds, ten months ago. So soft looking against the backdrop of the beard. The beard I’ve never even gotten a chance to touch. Probably never will.

  That somehow helps me keep up with the charade. The fact that everything is so complicated and impossible between us. Not that I want things to be possible – I don’t have a crush on him anymore.

  Right?

  Right. But still.

  “I did, yeah.” I nod as I stare at him, pretending to be innocent. “So, uh, will you make it better?”

  “You want me to make it better?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Because it hurts.”

  “It does. So much.”

  My heart’s booming in my chest, thundering as I stare at him. As I dare to imagine… As I dare to imagine those lips wrapped around my slightly bleeding thumb and sucking the hurt away.

  It probably won’t happen, of course. He’s not crazy. He’s not buying this but what if?

  What if he puts it in his mouth and I feel the heat of it? I feel the flick of his tongue.

  Slowly, he raises my arm further. He brings it close to his mouth and I stop breathing. He looks at the blood, a tiny drop oozing out of the cut, and grazes his thumb over the pulse on my wrist.

  My own mouth parts as if I’m the one who’s going to suck on my wounded digit.

  Turns out though, I am.

  Because his eyelids flicker up and he murmurs, “I think you’re better at sucking, don’t you?”

  He pushes the thumb in my mouth then, and my lips close over it.

  “Suck.”

  As soon as he says it, I do. I suck on my thumb because he asked me to. The metallic taste of blood spreads over my tongue and I almost close my eyes. I bet it wouldn’t feel this erotic, that taste, if he wasn’t watching me like he is.

  If he wasn’t so focused on my mouth and the little sucks I’m taking. This wasn’t what I wanted, my own mouth on me. But somehow, this is beyond anything I could’ve imagined.

  His eyes, all dark and dilated. My mouth.

  His rough fingers on my wrist that he’s still clutching on to.

  The flutters in my belly. The clenching of my thighs. The throbbing that I feel between them.

  This is surreal, isn’t it? The way he’s watching me.

  I think I’ll explode. His eyes will make me fall apart and break open my body because I’m swelling and swelling with feelings when he rasps, “I think you got all of it.”

  Only then, he steps away and lets go of my wrist, before leaving me there, all crazy and horny still drowning in his scent and wondering about his eyes.

  I wonder about them the next day too.

  I wonder about them and debate what to do about groceries. We’re running out and I’ve been thinking if I should have them delivered to the cabin or if I should don my disguise, drive into town, wait for the bar to close so I can slip in the list for my pen pal, Billy.

  At some point, I might have to ask him for his phone number though. I can’t keep slipping him notes like we’re in middle school.

  I need to be more mature about this.

  I’m debating it and mixing the wet ingredients for the muffins I’m baking, while listening to “You Give Love a Bad Name” by Bon Jovi and singing along, when I hear a noise from behind me.

  I whip off my headphones and turn around to find Mr. Edwards standing at the island, his eyes glued to me.

  Man, his eyes.

  “Oh, hey.” I press a hand to my chest. “You scared me.”

  He looks at my hand. “I can see that.”

  “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  He looks to the headphones I haphazardly took off and threw on the counter. “I’m not surprised.”

  I tuck my hair behind my ears and duck my head down, and mutter uselessly, “I was listening to my kickass playlist.”

  “Kickass playlist.”

  I nod. “Yeah. It’s all my favorite songs from like, forever. And of course, they’re kickass so I just can’t stop singing along.”

  “Of course.”

  The way he says it with such sarcasm, I have to kinda take offense. “Why, you don’t think “You Give Love a Bad Name” is kickass?”

  His gaze flicks back and forth between mine. “You know the lake behind the cabin? Through the woods?”

  “Yeah?”

  He scratches his beard with his thumb, momentarily distracting me with his sexy gesture. “Kickass or not, I think you should stop singing if you don’t want the fish in that lake to drown themselves.”

  Fish? Drown themselves?

  My mouth gapes open. “Are you saying that I’m a bad singer?”

  Amusement flickers through his eyes. Damn him. Why does it have to be so sexy, sexier than his beard scratching?

  “I’m saying that you’re killing the fish.”

  Before I can retort, he sets something down on the island. “Here.”

  And then, he walks out.

  It’s a brown grocery bag. I dash to it and see it has everything from the list I was going to give to Billy. But it has something else too. It’s sitting right at the top and I fish it out, running after him.

  “You went grocery shopping?” I ask his back; he’s in the hallway.

  “Looks like it.”

  “You bought me lollipops?” I say, breathily but whatever.

  He bought me lollipops. No one has ever bought me lollipops that I can remember. Maybe my nanny when I was a kid and didn’t know how to buy things for myself.

  He stops at his bedroom door and looks at me. “I bought everything on the list. So call off your teenage hormones.”

  I laugh. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  I shrug, tearing open the packet of lollipops, unwrapping one and popping it into my mouth. “No can do, sorry. You’re stuck with my teenage hormones. I’m actually oozing them right now.”

  His eyelids flicker as he watches me suck on my candy like he watched me suck on my thumb yesterday. “Yeah, I can smell it.”

  With that, he enters his room and closes the door. And I beam.

  Because see, lollipops weren’t on the list.

  Nope.

  They weren’t. So that means he bought me them himself.

  Not only lollipops though. He bought me tons of other things that I never put on my list. I didn’t even think to put them on there.

  Oh wow, the things he bought me.

  He bought me my favorite juice: watermelon. He bought me packs of my favorite chips: barbecue sauce. The favorite candy bar that I eat, other than the lollipops: almond and chocolate. My second favorite fruit: again watermelon. Chocolate-covered pretzels, normal pretzels, veggie sticks, all the stuff I used to survive on back in Connecticut. In fact, I’d carry around their packets at school. It used to be my lunch.

  But how does he know that?

  He doesn’t know anything about me. He didn’t even know who I was until the night I stupidly kissed him.

  I’m the one who knows things about him. Me.

  I’m the one who was a creepy information hoarder.

  But why doe
s he appear to be the information hoarder instead?

  I can’t get over it. I think about it and think about it and think about it until I’m compelled to ask him.

  It’s night and we’ve just had dinner. After going grocery shopping, he finished clearing out the roof and started to work on the broken porch steps. Honestly, I was a little disappointed.

  I thought he’d go to his roses next.

  I thought he’d work on them, water them, or at least look at them.

  But he hasn’t and it hurts me more than I want to admit.

  So I’m distracting myself with the question I’m going to ask. We’re sitting on the old, musty couch, which is surprisingly super comfortable – him on one side and me on the other – and watching a movie on TV. I told him to stop at a channel and he did, and now we’re watching something that I’m not even paying attention to.

  I give up all pretense of watching and turn toward him.

  Propping my back against the arm of the couch and bringing my knees to my chest, I ask, “How do you know so much about me?”

  He stiffens as soon as I ask the question.

  Which makes me cringe.

  Yikes.

  Did I have to be so blunt? Maybe I should’ve eased him into it. I just made him feel like a criminal or something.

  Or did I?

  Because he glances toward me, his eyes sharp. “What?”

  He asks the question in such a lashing voice that I’m cringing for different reasons now. I’m cringing for jumping to God-knows-what conclusion.

  I wiggle my toes on the couch and he notices the gesture. “I mean… I just, was wondering that you bought all that stuff? You know, all the juices and fruits and things? I was wondering how you knew that I liked them?”

  He flicks his gaze up and thank God for that, my toes were starting to blush. “How do you think I know?”

  His words make me feel like a fool. They also fill me with all those teenage hormones he keeps talking about.

  I fight them, those hormones. I fight them because they want to fly me away in a dreamland. They want me to think that he knows all this about me because he watched me like I watched him.

  But that’s not true, is it?

  So I take a guess. I make the rational, smart choice. “Uh, Brian? Maybe. He told you.”