by Reiss, CD
“Instead,” he added, saving me from myself, “I’m going to make you wait.”
“A week, then?”
“Ten days.”
“Has anyone told you you’re a domineering asshole?”
“The woman I love just did.”
Then I cried so hard I could barely say I loved him too.
Chapter 42
MANDY
The Lake Tahoe house was huge. It had electric from the grid and water right from the pipes. The roof wouldn’t have leaked even if it was raining, which it wasn’t. There was a real supermarket two miles away, and their DMZ Weeklys had the British royals on the cover.
Compared to all the wood-chopping, leak-fixing, and water-conserving I’d had to do in Cambria, our empty Lake Tahoe house was the height of American civilization. It even had a massive tub I could fill as high as I wanted.
And yet…
“Six days is plenty,” I said as I strolled the bank of supermarket freezers.
“Self-actualization in less than a week?” Dante replied through my earbuds, calling from across the ocean. “You should sell a course, amea.”
He should have sold a course in enforced distancing. We spoke once a day, and he refused to dirty talk or sext because he didn’t want to interpose. No matter how horny I was, he insisted this was my time and we’d be together soon enough.
Domineering asshole.
I stopped by the Häagen-Dazs. “Do you want caramel ice cream?”
“You pick.”
I opened the freezer door to grab a pint, but something else caught my eye. “Ohh, bitter chocolate could be interesting.” I tossed it in the cart, then grabbed a vanilla in case interesting turned out to be too much. I let the freezer door thup closed. “How much longer is it going to take to sign papers and write checks?”
“A clean break’s more complicated than that.”
“Hm.”
“Hm?” He seemed amused that I’d turned his favorite annoying word back around.
“I’m starting to think I should get on a plane.” I pulled up to the potato chip rack.
“To London?”
“No, the fruited plain,” I snapped. “Of course London.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Boats make me seasick. Kettle chips or Ruffles?” I asked. “I think I have to call them crisps when I come?”
“Whatever you want.”
Both kinds got flung on top of the pasta, cheese, broccoli, and wine. That was enough. I suddenly had the feeling I wasn’t staying in Lake Tahoe much longer, whether I had his permission to come to London or not.
“It’s time to get this thing moving,” I said. “I’m ready to start my life already.”
“Tell you what—if I’m not done by tomorrow, you get on a plane and come here.”
“Really?” I stopped the cart. I couldn’t walk and deal with this level of anticipation at the same time.
A guy in his twenties with a rock T-shirt and dark-brown scruff on his cheeks excused himself to get at a jar of salsa.
“Really,” Dante said.
“We’ll be together?” I whispered so Scruff Guy wouldn’t hear me and think I was asking him on a date, because he was hovering by the rack, inspecting every bag as if he hadn’t been on Earth long enough to find a favorite brand of fried potato.
“In the next two days,” Dante said. “On one continent or the other, you’ll be over my knee, getting the spanking you deserve.”
That was the dirtiest thing he’d said to me since we were in Los Angeles, and it wasn’t enough. I scooted the cart away from Mr. Discerning Chip Consumer.
“Then,” he said softly, “I’m going to slide my fingers inside you and make you come.”
“Day after tomorrow? You promise?”
“On one condition.”
“Tell me.”
“Beg.”
I looked around the aisle. Scruff Man was there. A woman with a little boy in the cart seat. A young couple comparing peanut butters. Bright lights. Exposure.
“Please,” I breathed. “I’ll be your dirty little slut. Please just use me how you want.”
“Not bad.”
“I can’t wait two days.”
“Yes, you can.” I heard a door open on his side. Since it was two in the morning there, he should have been inside, but it sounded like a front entrance. “Now finish up and go home, amea. Let me finish signing papers and paying lawyers.”
We said goodbye, and I headed for the checkout line with wet underwear and a pulsing throb I’d have to take care of the minute I put the ice cream in the freezer.
* * *
One bag over my shoulder, I dropped the two I had in each hand at the front door so I could dig around for the keys. I’d bagged the ice cream on top so I could easily put that in the freezer before taking care of the urgency between my legs. As I fumbled with the door lock, I wasn’t sure I’d even make it out of the kitchen.
Finally, I was in.
I swung the door open, grabbed the groceries, and kicked it closed the way I’d planned in my head. Not a beat was missed as I put the bags on the kitchen floor, threw the ice cream in the freezer, and slapped it closed.
Then I decided I could wait until I’d put the rest of the groceries away, which I did. The delay was deliciously distracting, and now I could give my needs the attention they deserved.
Pulling my jeans open, I realized I had to pee, so I went to the master bedroom to get naked before my left hand teased out the thought of him. When I stepped out of my jeans, I saw that the bathroom light was on.
I would have sworn I’d shut it off.
Wiggling out of my underwear and T-shirt, I went to the bathroom door, unhooking my bra on the way.
“Holy shit!” I gasped, grabbing the nearest weapon—a thick scented candle the diameter and height of a can of tennis balls—and held it ready to swing at the man in the tub.
He was laughing, of course—and in another heartbeat, so was I.
“You—” I didn’t have another second to call him an asshole because he pulled me into the tub with him.
I went willingly, dropping my weapon so I could kiss him with my arms around his soap-slick shoulders.
“I thought you were in London,” I said between kisses.
“You begged me.”
“But you were already here.”
“I’ve always been here.” He put his hands under my ass and hitched me to straddle him. “And I always will be.”
Looking into the warmest blue eyes I’d ever seen, I believed him—but more importantly, I believed in myself enough to trust him.
Epilogue
MANDY
“Daaaadddeeeeeee…”
In the dream, Samantha was on the other side of a wall in our house. It was a wall that didn’t really exist, but the way our house had been built, there was no telling if the wall was dream logic or premonition.
“Da-da-da-daaadddeeeeeee….”
I went to the other side of the wall to look for her, but no dice. She’d moved behind another wall, but now there were doorways and windows everywhere, and I had no idea which one she was behind.
My dream self found that annoying, not scary, and I decided to stay still until she showed up.
“What time is it?”
My real self heard Dante’s question. My dream self was still standing in an empty room with her arms crossed.
“Mm,” Real Self said.
“Jesus Christ.”
Dante’s profane prayer woke me. The walls—the real ones—glowed dawn blue. Dante’s question was rhetorical. The time was irrelevant and fell inside the parameters of too damn early.
“Da-da-daaaadeeeee,” Samantha’s voice entered from outside the room.
Dante was already at the window in nothing but thin cotton sweatpants with a waistband that hung three inches below his navel, where his happy trail met its destination.
“What’s she doing out there?” I groaned. Our daughter
seemed to know the best days to wake up too early were the days after her parents were up late. I had the sore bottom to prove it.
Dante cranked open the casement window and leaned on the sill, looking down into the backyard one floor below.
“Sweetheart,” he said, voice carrying down without being raised, “it’s not wake-up time yet.”
“Dey cats.”
He turned to me for a translation, thick arms still braced on the windowsill.
“She probably wants you to read the singing cat book.”
“At five in the morning?”
I slung my feet over the edge of the bed. He’d kissed them last night, blindfolded me and tickled them before moving upward with his lips.
That was good.
“She’s three,” I said, joining him at the window.
Our daughter stood on the patio, looking up at us with blue eyes the size of saucers, black hair she insisted we cut short, and a nightgown with a truck on it. Favorite Monkey hung loose from one hand, and the other pointed at the deck her father had built with Teddy last summer.
“Dey. Baby. Cats,” she insisted, jabbing her finger at the wood-planked deck. Then she splayed her fingers apart. “Five. I count. One-two-fee-fou-fife.”
“Honey,” I said, “if they’re rats or something—”
“I’m on it.” Dante pushed himself off the sill, kissed my cheek, and grabbed the shirt he’d thrown off to fuck me only a few hours before.
* * *
In the seven years since our wedding, and seven and a half since selling off the clubs, Dante had partnered with his brother to do what he loved. Not Logan, who could crunch a number until it screamed, but Byron, the real estate developer who tore buildings down and built newer, fancier ones in their place.
Dante had sold Byron on a retrofitting idea for a piece in Mar Vista. He could have done it himself, but he needed Byron’s expertise and salesmanship. Dante asked me to marry him in Lake Tahoe, in the tub, and I said we should wait, but when he came home with a yes from his brother, I’d never seen him so happy. We were both ready.
I accepted his proposal. We went to city hall the next morning. My mother was thrilled on one hand. On the other, it took her a couple of years to get over all the steps we skipped. Dante’s mother took a little longer, and his father was still disappointed we didn’t have a big thing.
I didn’t grow my business. I didn’t want to. The company was the size and shape of my dreams, and my husband was in his element—fixing, building, making things work. There seemed no limit to the talent that had lain dormant while he managed a foreign business he didn’t really care about.
Teddy came first, with his calm control and sense of self. Then Samantha, who hated boundaries so much she fought her way out of my body three weeks early.
The house in Beverly Hills was secure, but our daughter always found a way outside. It started when Dante decided he was going to replace the footings under the porch himself. He’d had to tear off the front of the house, which left us with no front door.
One day, we woke to find our toddler kicking a soccer ball around the front lawn with the security guard who watched the front gate.
We sealed that up, but our girl was not only clever—she was persistent. She defied childproof locks, safety gates, and barriers that would have stumped Harry Houdini. Every boundary was a challenge, and all challenges were accepted.
In the end, we just left the back door open, sealed off the yard, and moved hazards to a shed with three working padlocks and—just for her—a weaker fourth at the bottom, which she almost disabled by unscrewing the hinge. Only the limitation of her tiny hands prevented its complete removal.
We both went downstairs and joined her on the patio.
“Tell me what you saw,” Dante said, crouching in front of Samantha.
Two minutes into morning light, I could see her feet were filthy and the front of her nightgown was streaked with gray dirt.
“Baby cats.” Her speech impediment thickened the last S. “Unna da deck.”
She pointed at the deck by the pool. We had a gate, but we’d taught her how to swim rather than trust a silly cast-iron railing to keep her from drowning.
Dante looked over his shoulder at me. Under the deck. There was no more than eight inches of crawlable space under the planks, but obviously—judging from the dirt on her elbows—it was enough.
“Did you touch them?” I asked, still fearing rats or possums or a nest of adorable baby squirrels with rabies.
She shook her head vigorously, dropped Favorite Monkey, and grabbed her father’s hand, pulling him across the lawn. She was tall for her age, but Dante still had to crouch.
The oddly shaped pool was salt water, with a waterfall, and surrounded by plants and trees like a natural watering hole. The gate was open, of course. We’d check the security footage later to figure out how she did it, then apply preventative measures that would fail.
“Show me where,” Dante said, still allergic to asking a question when a command would serve the same purpose.
But though we were on the wood planks in our bare feet, Samantha was already at the side of the structure, crawling into a space where a hole had been dug under the flashing.
“Hon—!” I cried.
But Dante had already leapt into action, grabbing Samantha by the hips and yanking her out. Her dirty face crunched. She was about to melt down and needed her attention diverted.
“I see them!” I said, pointing at a random spot. “Between the planks.”
“No!” She wiggled out of her father’s arms and ran to a spot in the corner, crouching with her nose touching the wood. “Dey here!”
We followed, crouching to look between the planks. Sure enough, five sets of kitteny blue eyes stared back up at us.
* * *
“I don’t want a cat,” Teddy objected before shoving a spoonful of cereal into his mouth. The milk dripped back into the bowl except for one drop on the kitchen bar, which our son wiped away before it even settled.
“Dey five.” Samantha splayed five fingers in her brother’s face. Her other hand twisted vertical, catapulting cereal milk across the bar. She didn’t clean it up. Her age was her excuse, but I was sure that wasn’t going to change with the years.
“Personally,” Dante said, arms crossed, leaning on the counter as though he owned the joint and everyone in it, “I don’t want a cat either.”
“Why not?” I asked, leaning against him. “They’re cute, and they nuzzle up and go…” I purred into his cheek.
He put one arm around me while the other grabbed a rag from the backsplash. “They’re chaos agents. We have enough chaos in this house.”
His arms were long enough to hold me and wipe up Samantha’s mess at the same time. He missed being alone sometimes, but when he went to Cambria by himself to take care of a cracked foundation or update the solar cells, he came home early.
He needed to be alone but wanted us.
Or wanted solitude but needed our chaos.
We didn’t know. Probably all of it and something completely different.
“Just one,” I said. “How much chaos can one cat cause?”
“A lot,” Dante said.
“They poop in boxes. In the house. Gross.” Teddy crunched his face at the fine print on the cereal box. He was six but so frustrated with his inability to read he’d already started learning. “What’s high fruhc-toes corn sie-rup?”
“Poop in a box.” I took it away and folded it up so he couldn’t fill his belly with any more garbage. “Listen. They’re like an unclaimed gift. We can put four up for adoption, but we have to take one. Just o—”
“No!” Samantha pounded her fist on the bar, catching the edge of her bowl, which spun enough to make a mess before it righted itself. “Dey five.”
“We’re not taking five cats, sweetheart.” I reached around Dante to grab the rag.
“Picking one isn’t fair.” Teddy laid out his infallible logic to hi
s sister. “The others will feel bad.”
“One is—” I started to lay out my logic, but Samantha was bursting at the seams.
“Five!”
“Excuse me?” Dante said in his stern daddy voice that was a prelude to someone being in big, big trouble.
“Not one. All by himthelf and no brother. Who he nap with? Who lick him face when he dirty? Five it nithe. One it lonely.”
“They’re cats, sweetheart,” I said, rinsing the rag. “They don’t get lonely like people do.”
But as I wrung out the cloth, I saw my husband looking at his daughter with a changed expression, and I put my hand on his arm.
“Honey?”
He shook it off.
“Let’s go!” He clapped his hands once. “School, kid.” He pointed at Teddy’s bowl. “Finish up.”
* * *
We didn’t tell Samantha what we decided because anything could go wrong in the weeks between.
She stole into the shadows to watch the mother cat come home as the sun set and was there when mama crawled out in the morning. The kittens came out to eat what we left for them, then scurried back to their safe place. When a red-tailed hawk screeched above, looking for a meal, we knew the time had come. We had to lure them out and take them inside.
“Are you sure?” I asked Dante as he put on a pair of gloves to protect his hands from scratches and bites.
“You want the hawk to start picking them off?”
“I mean… no. But five cats is a lot of chaos. They’ll be in everything. They knock things over—”
“We can handle it.”
“—and there’s the poop in a box problem.”
“We can hire more help.”
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “It’s more… not people, but more activity. There won’t be peace. You won’t be alone.”
He smiled, looking down as he pressed the Velcro strap of his glove tight around his wrist.
