by E M Kaplan
They stood together at the sink. She handed him a paper Dixie cup to use while he examined his toothpaste choices.
“I’ve always been somewhat of an Aquafresh man,” he said picking up a sample tube that her dentist had given her. “But I see you also have Crystal Fresh Mentadent.”
“It’s tingly,” she said through a mouthful of foam. She pushed it toward him, so he tried it. She finished, and then dug out another dispenser from the drawer. “Floss?”
He rinsed his mouth using the little paper cup. “Nah, I think I’ll live on the edge and skip it for once.”
She shrugged and tossed it back in the drawer without using it either. “You’re a bad influence.” He looked around for a place to perch his toothbrush. She pointed to the lidded ceramic cup with the holes in it. “Go ahead.” It made a metallic clink as he dropped it in one of the places. He stood staring at her for a minute until she was almost embarrassed. “I’m just going to wash my face really quickly. Then, use the bathroom.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”
“So, uh. Good night.” She gave a little smile, which he returned.
“Night,” he responded and backed out of the room quickly.
She finished up in the bathroom, and then went to her bedroom where she changed into her usual tank top—but slipped on some boxer shorts, too. She clicked off her light then sat on the edge of her unmade bed in the dark, her feet on the floor. She thought about reading a book for a while, but she was too keyed up to focus.
In her mind, she went over the possibilities of what had happened. There was a small chance the Williams brothers were dead due to a weird coincidental and random act of violence. She was ready to believe that violence attracted more acts of its own kind. On the other hand, the odds were that it was not a random event at all. And a thought began to tickle the back of her mind. Something Greta Williams had said. She would call Mr. Obregon in the morning. He would know for sure.
But for now, for tonight, whether rational or not, she felt reasonably sure that she was no longer in any danger from her two predators. She was free. She was cared for. And she was not alone. Maybe it also had to do with the long-legged, broad-shouldered person stretched out on her couch. Her best friend.
#
She cracked open her door and smoothed her hands down her stomach. She heard the thump of Bert’s tail as she walked quietly down the hallway. Her eyes adjusted slowly. At the edge of the sitting room, she stopped and peered in. Her eyes focused just enough to be able to see Drew stretched out on the couch, his hands folded behind his head. She couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or not. She moved a little closer, closer, and saw him blink, just looking at her silently, a smile on his face.
“Hey,” he said, just inches away. The mint of his breath matched hers.
“Hey.”
She stood looking at him a moment longer, rubbing her hands up and down her arms, trying to stave off the shivers. Then she crept on top of his warm body. She heard the sharp intake of his gasp, then his deep groan. She sat astride him, her knees alongside his hips. Disbelief and pleasure rolled across his face. Incredulity and joy matching her own.
She searched for the hem of his shirt, finding it with her fingertips. Locking eyes with him, she helped him strip his shirt off. She took his hands and put them on her hips. Leaning forward, feeling his hands slowly slide up her back, she kissed him. It seemed strange that in the course of all the years they’d known each other, they had never kissed. Not even a friendly peck on the check. A hug now and then. A long history of casual embraces. But never a kiss.
God, what a kiss.
His lips were firm, yet gentle in their exploration. She tried to stop herself from wondering who he’d gained his skill with, who he’d practiced on, but a twinge of jealousy worked its way through her belly nonetheless. She tried to tamp down her regret for lost time as his whisker-roughened cheek chafed her jaw. She felt a twinge of dismay…and hoped she wouldn’t disappoint him.
His hands slid to the front of her shirt. Pushing her tank top over her breasts, he moved his hands over them. First one, then the other. Now she gasped. He pulled her closer so he could take her breast in his mouth. She shuddered and felt herself flush through her neck, down through the center of her torso, and between her legs.
“Oh, God.” A groan escaped her throat. Pleasure and appreciation that he was here. With her. Now.
But just for now? She pulled away, a frown wrinkling her forehead.
He was panting as she was. His chest rose and fell like a bellows under the clasp of her thighs. He reached up and smoothed a finger down the center of her forehead.
“Stop thinking,” he said.
She shook her head no, while at the same time her mouth said, “I’ll try.”
“I’ll help you,” he said, reaching for her. He cupped the back of her head and tangled his big fist in her hair, a little roughly, but not so that it caused more than a pleasant sting at her scalp. Just enough to make her gasp again and bend toward him, so her mouth fell open and onto his. His tongue slipped in and she took it, gliding hers against it, stroking and embracing it with her own. She bathed in the taste of him, in the scent of him, in the feel of the body under his smooth skin. He was intensely familiar—yet he’d never been this intense, never this overwhelmingly pervasive. Never as perfect as this. She wanted to absorb him into herself, to consume him, to eat him up.
When the slickness of her body matched the glide of their tongues, she pulled away. She slid off his boxers, and stared at him a minute taking in his body, and then meeting his eyes. She was nude from the waist down, her tank top still bunched up over her breasts. She knew she was too thin, but the appreciation on his face thrilled her almost to shyness.
He slid a hand around her waist and pulled her to him. Then he turned them so she lay under him, blanketed by his big body.
“There are a million things I want to say to you,” he said hoarsely, staring into her eyes.
“Words aren’t good enough,” she said as she took him inside her.
He drew in a shaky breath and gripped her tightly. When she would have started a rhythm, he held them still. Then he began. Slowly at first, mindful of her bruises and of their rampant arousal. Then he quickened the pace, deepening his thrusts, meeting her as she met him. Her legs locked around his as her body tightened with escalating pleasure. She held her breath and came with a racking shudder that put starlike sparks of light in front of her eyes and an uncontrollable urge to pray, to give thanks to whatever deity might be attending her cries.
Within a minute or so, Drew followed her. “Jesus,” he said.
She moved over so he could fall on his side next to her. When she scooted away, he embraced her from behind, tangling his legs with hers again, more comfortably, wanting nothing but to keep the contact, the connection. The warmth.
Oh, God, she loved him.
Sometime later, they fell asleep, exhausted, limbs still intertwined. She wanted to tell him that she was sleeping with him not just because she needed comfort and skin-to-skin contact, but that she needed him. But she fell asleep before she remembered to say it.
#
She woke up in the morning to bright sunlight and a kiss on her cheek. She snoozed for a while longer with the sheet over her and then heard the shower running. Later, he was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper. She’d made some tea for both of them—herself mostly—and he was actually trying to drink it. He doesn’t like tea, she made a mental note. After all these years, she’d never noticed that. She started up a fresh pot of coffee. There were a lot of things that she had noticed, like how he tipped his head to the right when he was thinking about something perplexing. He was doing that now. “Will you make me some scrambled eggs?” she asked him, but stopped short when she saw his face.
He held the paper out to her. “Read this.” He pointed to a spot. She took it and the article said:
Brothers Awaiting Trial Killed in Botched Holdup<
br />
Two brothers, Peter (34) and Michael (35) Williams were killed early Saturday morning in an attempted robbery. Witnesses say that the brothers were walking to their car outside a downtown nightclub when a man approached them and demanded their wallets. When the brothers did not respond fast enough, the assailant shot Peter Williams in the neck. When Michael Williams attempted to run away, he was shot in the back of the head. Paramedics at the scene pronounced both brothers dead.
The suspect is described as being either Black or of Hispanic descent and of athletic build. Witnesses say that he was wearing dark clothing and a black knit cap. He escaped on foot.
The brothers, long-time members of the local glitterati, were awaiting their trial date on attempted murder charges in Arizona.
There was more, which Josie skimmed. There was no mention of her name in the article at all. She was grateful to the Daily for that. Then she shut her eyes and let it soak in.
“Are you okay?” Drew asked. He was leaning over the counter braced on his elbows, looking at her intently.
“It’s over then,” she said with a sigh. She put the paper down and rubbed her forehead. So Greta Williams had taken care of her own business. Josie had no doubt the woman had a hand in the death of her sons. No doubt, but no proof. The look of fury on the woman’s face that Josie had thought was directed either at herself or at Lydia Ash, was in fact, directed at herself and her own sons as she contemplated them and listened to Josie’s narrative. What was it that she had said? That all she had wanted from Josie was confirmation of the kind of creatures that she suspected her sons were. And she had listened to and believed Josie, whose story had probably been made more believable by the fact of her accidental survival of her mauling.
And as a result, Greta Williams had taken care of Josie.
It was over.
CHAPTER 36
“I’m feeling kind of nervous,” Josie admitted.
“Don’t be nervous,” Drew said.
She looked at him. “This is a date, right? I mean, a ‘date’ date?”
“I guess so. And I brought you a corsage. One for your wrist. You look really nice by the way. I think I’m supposed to say that. But I’m not saying that because I’m supposed to. You really do look nice.” The goofy look on his face left no room for doubt. But goofy was nice. In fact, goofy made her warm all over.
“Do you mind…oh, never mind,” she said.
“Mind what?”
“Can I get a kiss? You know, to boost my morale.”
“You never have to ask that again.”
When they kissed, Josie’s face flushed from forehead to throat.
“Can we be late?” she asked slipping a finger between the buttons of his dress shirt.
Mass was still in progress when they made it to the church to see Drew’s cousin get married. They slid into the back row, holding hands. She thought they had escaped detection, but Drew’s older sister immediately turned around in her pew and winked at them. She knew. How could she? How could his sister possibly know what had changed between them when her eyes had been seemingly glued on the priest the whole time? Josie made a mental note to watch his older sister more carefully in the future.
Josie leaned over to Drew. “After this favor, I have my own favor to ask of you,” she said. And he nodded when he saw the solemn look on her face.
Later, the reception was in full swing with the chaos of a large family and people who knew each other well enough to be family. The bride and groom had rented out the hall at the local Jewish community center. And although they were both practicing Catholics, they boogied ferociously to late eighty’s music under the engraved stones that said, “Teach the Torah unto Thy Children.”
Drew’s mother kissed Josie on the cheek and embraced her with thick arms that smelled clean like talc. “We haven’t seen you in a long time, Josie,” she said. And then added, “Too long.” She smiled, and her eyes lingered Drew’s hand resting lightly on her shoulder where it met her neck. Then his mother added, “You look so thin. You see that buffet line over there? You go put yourself in it.”
The food was homemade Italian. Three of Drew’s aunts were the forces of nature behind it, he explained. They’d recruited their husbands and whoever else they could get their hands on to serve up steaming mounds of lasagna, pasta, and canolis from industrial-sized hot lunch line metal bins. As Josie made her way through the line, each person serving met her eye to eye, seemed to recognize her, appraise her, and then serve her a helping. She figured that she passed inspection by the way her plate was teetering by the time she and Drew found places to sit.
A man whistled when he saw her overloaded plate. “You going to eat all that?”
“Back off, mister. Just try to take it away from me. You might lose a finger,” she said. He laughed. And she proceeded to stuff herself like a hog.
CHAPTER 37
“When you lose something, the best way to find it is to go back and retrace your steps.” Josie said to herself. Days later, she laid out the ingredients on her freshly cleaned countertop. It was easy to think of nothing while she worked—nothing immediate other than the dull pain in her collarbone, which was still achy even after a few weeks of having been pronounced “healthy.” Instead, memories flooded her, and she let them come as she worked. She followed the steps that she’d been taught many years ago, from watching her mother work in their restaurant.
The work table in the restaurant had been worn smooth from scrubbing, much of which she had done herself in the final years that they’d still had the restaurant. The table was made of wood—probably a no-no now because of health standards. But back then, they’d used it for rolling out dough, for assembling spring rolls, as she was doing now, and for making carrot or turnip flowers, as long as she did the chopping elsewhere. No knife touched that tabletop.
On her own countertop in her now-tidy apartment kitchen, Josie lay down a single rice paper wrapper. Crosswise on top of it, she placed a small bundle of rice noodles. Then, some bean sprouts, mushrooms, thin slices of roasted chicken. Very, very sparingly with all of them. From a bundle of greens, she selected some basil leaves. From another, some mint. Then, she laid some clean, cooked shrimp—wonderfully orange striped—down across the top of this little stack. With her fingertips, she compressed the pile without crushing the herbs. With her thumbs, she rolled the rice wrapper around it all and created a simple envelope.
She did this whole process again. And again until she had a small pyramid of spring rolls packed in a wooden lunch box. In another container, one with a plastic snap-on lid, she had already made a tawny peanut sauce spiced with tiny flecks of red chili.
There was a quick knock at the door, and it opened. Drew looked in. Bert ran over to him, full of love and wonder at his reappearance.
“Hi,” he said. “Am I early?”
“Almost finished,” she said. She packed the containers in a shopping bag for their visit with her mother in the resident care home.
#
Still more days later, Josie recruited Drew to accompany her on a midnight run to another part of town. “Dress in dark colors,” she told him. The weather had turned into a true, crisp autumn. Fortunately, the late summer heat hadn’t affected the New England crops that badly. Apples, in particular.
Josie provided the address, and Drew drove. Mr. Obregon’s house was blue, a little clapboard house with a six-foot chain link fence all around it. The yard was meticulously weeded, a tree off to the side. The street was nearly deserted when they got there, but it was well-lit, so Josie had him drive past the house and park around the corner.
“What the hell are we doing here?”
“Sending a little thank you note,” she told him.
“Can’t you just buy a Hallmark like a normal person?”
“Shut up and give me a boost,” she said getting ready to hoist herself over the fence.
“The gate’s a whole lot easier,” he said, pushing it open.
“Sure,
take all the fun out of it,” she said, secretly relieved.
They slunk over to Mr. Obregon’s apple tree and collected about a dozen apples.
“I’m dating a felon,” Drew complained as they closed the gate behind them and walked back to the car.
She froze. “Are we dating?”
In the darkness, Drew shrugged, “It makes it pretty convenient since we’re in love with each other.”
“Okay, then,” she said and smiled.
He leaned in for a kiss. “Now tell me again why we’re stealing apples?”
“We’re just borrowing them for a couple of hours. We’ll bring them back.”
And true to her word, they returned a few hours later with a sealed box of apple pie, which they left outside his door. She was pretty sure she saw Mr. Obregon lurking in one of his windows, but if he recognized her, he didn’t spoil the fun. Loyal through his silence, that man.
CHAPTER 38
Eventually, Josie met with Greta Williams again. One morning, she received a phone call that she would be picked up by private car. In true Greta Williams fashion, a long black limo—not Mr. Obregon this time—appeared in the street in front of Josie’s building and she was taken to a country club out in the suburbs. She felt a little silly wearing jeans and tennis shoes, rolling around in the back of a stretch limo by herself, but that’s what Greta got at an hour’s notice. An overly armed young man in uniform met them at the front gate, checked her driver’s license, and then let them pass. The limo rolled along a wide, unpainted road past part of a golf course with impressive fountains worked into it, and eventually pulled up to the door of what looked like a Tudor-style mansion.
