18
Landon
I thought hitting Clark Richards would make me feel better – and it did. It felt too good, if there’s such a thing as too good. Every blow I landed, and even the hits I took, numbed and transformed the pathetic freak I’d been, bringing to life an unfeeling motherf*cker in his place.
My fight with Boyce last year rattled that cage, but hammering the shit out of Richards’s face was the watershed moment. I’d found something better than combining molly and weed, better than alcohol, better than sex for smothering the voices in my head – because even when those things worked, and they sometimes did, the voice I still heard was my own, and it would never let me completely forget. Ever.
‘I’ll only be gone three days,’ Dad had said, his hands cradling her face. ‘We see Charles and Cindy this weekend, right? We’ll plan that Christmas in Rio trip you and she have been harping about for years.’
She pouted at him with a fake scowl. ‘Oh, harping, eh? Maybe you can just stay home, Mr Grinch.’
He slid his hands down her shoulders to her elbows, loosening her crossed arms and pulling her hands to his chest before towing her close and tipping her chin. ‘You can’t leave me behind, Rosie,’ he murmured. ‘Not after last night.’ He leaned down to kiss her like I wasn’t sitting twenty feet away.
‘God, you guys, get a room.’ I clutched the controller in my hand, eyes resolutely staring at the screen and my skateboarder guy doing ollies over spaces between buildings, aerials off walls and slides down escalators – stuff that would kill me in real life. I tried closing my left eye so I couldn’t see my parents, who were standing by the door, saying their long, mouth-sucking goodbyes.
‘This is why we bought you a television and game console for your room, son. So your mother and I can enjoy …’ He smiled down at her. ‘… the rest of the house.’
I hit pause and lay back into the sofa cushions, both hands over my eyes. ‘Oh, man. Seriously?’
Mom laughed. ‘Stop teasing him.’
‘I can’t. It’s too easy,’ Dad said.
Sighing, she straightened his perfectly straight tie. ‘I was actually thinking that we should visit your dad this Christmas. He’s always alone, Ray …’
My dad’s relationship with his father was the definition of complicated. ‘He chooses to be alone. He likes it.’
‘But, honey, he’s so happy when we visit. He adores Landon, and he won’t be around forever.’
My mom’s parents had been in their early forties when she came along – a surprise baby long after they’d accepted the idea of being childless. Prominent professors in analytical fields, they’d spoiled their curiously artistic daughter rotten – her words. They were both gone by the time I was five or six. Mom missed them a lot, but I barely remembered my grandmother, and couldn’t remember my grandfather at all.
Grandpa – Dad’s dad – was the only grandparent I had left.
‘He just thinks he’s finally got a sucker to take over the Maxfield family business,’ he air-quoted, ‘because Landon likes to go out on the boat with him. Plus, we just saw him a couple of months ago, in July.’ In spite of these claims, I heard the surrender in his voice, caving to whatever Mom wanted. He pretty much always did. ‘When I escaped that town, I never intended to go back at all. And here you are making me go every summer. And now Christmas?’
‘Because it’s the right thing to do. And because you aren’t a sulky eighteen-year-old boy any more – you’re a grown man.’
He kissed her again, wrapping his arms round her and growling, ‘Damned right I am.’
‘Minor in the room. Right here. On the sofa. Having his innocence corrupted. By his own parents.’
‘Go get ready for school, baby boy,’ Mom said, calling me the thing she only said in front of Dad or when we were alone. Thirteen-year-olds couldn’t have their moms saying crap like that in front of friends or the general public.
I shut down the game and my parents were still kissing.
‘Gladly.’ I made blinders with my hands as I passed them.
‘Hug your father goodbye first.’
I did a one-eighty at the base of the staircase and leaned into him for a quick hug. He patted my shoulder and looked down at me, still inches taller, though I was gaining on him.
I’d picked Mom up the other day just to prove I could and she squealed and laughed. ‘I used to change your diaper!’
I grimaced. ‘Mom, really – that’s the memory of my infancy you want to evoke?’
She poked me in the chest and slanted a brow. ‘Unless you want me to bring up how I fed you?’
I put her down. ‘Eww, no. Ugh.’
‘Do well at school and practise hard for that game this Sunday against those asshats from Annandale,’ Dad said. ‘I’ll be back Thursday.’ He ruffled my hair, which he knew I sorta hated – and that’s why he did it.
I twisted out from under his hand. ‘Good use of asshat, old man. Your vocab is improving.’
He smirked. ‘All right, big guy.’ He took my shoulders and looked me in the eye. ‘You’re the man of the house while I’m gone. Take care of your mother.’
‘Okay, Dad. Will do.’ I saluted and ran up the stairs, thinking about the game this weekend, and Yesenia, who I planned to ask out before the end of the day, if I could man up enough to do it.
LUCAS
The temperature at the beach was in the seventies, the average for this time of year. The Hellers dropped me off at Dad’s before heading to their vacation rental with a thawing turkey and a box full of yams, green beans, bread crumbs and cranberries. ‘We’ll see you tomorrow,’ Cindy told us. ‘We’ll eat around one o’clock. And if the turkey isn’t done yet, we’ll be drinking by one o’clock.’
Boyce: You here?
Me: Yeah. Give me a couple hours.
I dropped my duffle bag on the bed. The room had never seemed smaller. It was like a cocoon. I’d emerged from it and flown away over three years ago, and now it was just a tight, outgrown place, both familiar and odd.
The blank wall was full of thumbtack holes, and the shelves opposite were mostly empty. Dad hadn’t moved the light fixture back to the kitchen – it still hung near the ceiling, casting its indirect illumination over the space. A few old textbooks were stacked on one shelf, along with Grandpa’s Bible and a high-school directory. There was also an envelope that hadn’t been there when I visited last. It contained a dozen or so snapshots I’d never seen before.
One had been taken on my first day of eighth grade, after I got out of the car in my new uniform. I’d outgrown every item of clothing that fitted me three months before. I smirked at the camera – at my mom – as a guy on the sidewalk behind me photobombed, tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. Tyrell. Hated or loved by every teacher, he was one of the funniest guys I’d ever known. In the background, nearer the school building, a trio of girls stood talking. One of them faced the camera, dark hair in a ponytail, dark eyes on the back of my head. Yesenia. She was probably about to enter law school now, or begin an internship in accounting or apply for master’s degree programmes in film or sociology. I hadn’t known her well enough to know her interests or ambitions, beyond her interest in me. At thirteen, that was all that mattered.
I sifted through the other photos, pausing at one of Mom painting, and another of the two of us clowning in the backyard. I pressed the ache in the centre of my chest and put them all away to study later, musing that Dad must have left them in here for me. Maybe these images had been on a memory card in an old camera he’d finally checked before throwing it away.
In the kitchen, there was a bag of spinach in the fridge and a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table. I wasn’t sure if Dad had turned over a healthier leaf, or he was deferring to what I’d want to eat while I was home.
‘How’s school?’ he asked, pulling a beer from the fridge, his hair wet from a shower. He’d been out on the boat before we arrived today, of course. I assumed he would take tomorrow off completely, but was afraid to ask. It would hurt Cindy’s feelings if he didn’t.
‘Good. I netted a spot on a research team next semester. A project with one of my professors from last year. There’s a stipend.’
He sat at the small, ancient table – the varnish long since worn away, the wood scratched to hell. ‘Congratulations. So – engineering research? Race-car design?’
My mouth twisted. My interests had morphed beyond race cars since high school – not that he knew that. This exchange had to be the longest conversation about my academic goals we’d had since Mom died. ‘No – durable soft materials. Medical, sort of. Stuff to be used in tissue engineering.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘Ah. Interesting.’ He stared out the window over the table, which had the best view of the gulf, except for the view from Grandpa’s room – where no one lived. I was about to leave the room to shower and unpack the few things I’d brought when he asked, ‘Dinner plans?’
‘I’m, uh, going out with Boyce in a bit.’ I took a beer from the fridge and popped the cap off with the edge of my unopened pocketknife.
‘Got your key, still?’
‘Yeah.’
He nodded, eyes never leaving the window, and we lapsed into our customary silence.
Boyce and I chose a booth near a window. There was one halfway decent bar in this town, and we were in it. It was too loud and too smoky, and I missed the beach hangouts he said were overrun with high-school punks now. We had to laugh, because we were the high-school punks not that long ago.
‘Still got the Sportster?’ he asked. In the last few months before I left town, the two of us had rebuilt the badly maintained Harley his father had accepted as payment for repairs from one of his drinking buddies. When I needed to sell the truck to pay my first semester of college tuition, Boyce had somehow talked him into selling the bike to me cheap.
‘Yep. It’ll do a few more months, until I graduate.’ I thought about Jacqueline’s arms, locked round me, her hands clasped low over my abdomen. Her chest pressed to my back. Her thighs braced round my hips. ‘I’ll probably keep it, though, after I buy a car.’
The waitress brought our drinks and a basket of assorted fried stuff. Boyce picked out a beer-battered avocado slice and dipped it into the salsa. ‘Seen Pearl lately?’
I shook my head. ‘Not in a few months. She was doing well, I think – probably applying to med schools now. You’re more likely to run into her than I am, though. There’s, like, fourteen times as many students there as there are residents here, and I know she visits her parents often.’
‘True.’ He sipped his tequila.
‘So – you’ve seen her?’
His mouth kicked up on one side. ‘A few times.’
I shook my head, smirking. ‘You two have a strange relationship, Wynn. One of these days, you’re gonna have to tell me about it.’
‘Whatever, man,’ he said, dismissing the subject of Pearl Frank. ‘Any new adventures for you? Threesomes? Orgy parties? Cougar professors sexually harassing you?’ He waggled his brows, hopeful.
I ran my teeth over the ring in my lip and shook my head, laughing. ‘You know I’m studying or working all the time.’
‘Yeah, man – your hundred and one jobs. You can’t tell me you don’t take T-and-A timeouts, just to break the monotony.’ He glanced behind us at the growing crowd. ‘You’re too damned picky or I’d suggest one or two of the girls in this bar. What about that tutor job? Any hot chicks needing supply and demand demonstrated at close range?’ I stared into my beer for one second too long, and he slapped his hand on the table and leaned closer. ‘Maxfield, you son of a –’
I put my head in my hands. ‘I’m kinda getting over something. Or trying to.’
He was quiet for about five seconds. ‘One of those students you tutor?’
F*ck me – how did he know that? But Boyce always knew. I nodded.
‘Hmm. Knowing you – and I do – that sucks ass. If it was me? I’d be all over that shit. Just as well I’ll never be anyone’s tutor. Or boss.’ He tossed back the last of his tequila and signalled the waitress for another round. ‘See, me – I need to get hired by some hot chick so I can be the one being harassed.’
In one flash, I imagined Jacqueline and me swapping positions – if she were the tutor and I were the student. If I’d been a high-school-senior bass player to her college-girl bass tutor … Every muscle in my body contracted and hardened. Goddamn, I would seduce her so fast her head would spin.
The waitress thumped our second round down and Boyce laughed and clinked his shot glass to my frosted pint glass. ‘To whatever you’re thinking, dude. That’s the look of a guy who’s gonna get him some. Anything I can do to help?’
I shook my head, startled at the intensity of that one-minute fantasy.
That’s what it was, of course. A fantasy.
Two more weeks of economics classes. Two more self-defence modules. Over.
When Boyce was driving me back last night, I caught the altered sign of the Bait & Tackle, which had added ‘Coffee & Wi-Fi’ to its name. I could imagine old Joe painting the sign extension himself – which is exactly how it looked. I thought about stopping by, signing into my campus email to see if Jacqueline had written to me. To Landon.
Once I thought about her – home alone, parents skiing, dog boarded, I couldn’t stop worrying. I reminded myself that we’d travelled in opposite directions for this break. She went four hours north while I’d meandered four hours south. If she was in trouble, there was nothing I could do about it.
If she was fine, I could relax. All I had to do was check.
But I’d left her standing in front of the language arts building three days ago, when I’d made the decision to suspend this craving, at least for the break. If I texted her now, everything would start all over. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us.
Then Caleb fell asleep on my bed after eating at least two pounds of turkey and double helpings of everything else. Dad, Charles and Cindy were all glued to a closely contended football game I couldn’t focus on at all, and Carlie whined, twice, ‘I’m so boooorrrred.’
My convictions vaporized and I volunteered to accompany Carlie on an exploratory drive around town. Her father happily surrendered the keys to his SUV. We rolled down the windows and I submitted to a pop station in exchange for stopping at the Bait & Tackle & Coffee & Wi-Fi.
‘That’s a mouthful,’ Carlie said, one brow angling with the sort of superiority only a sixteen-year-old girl can deliver. Once inside, she observed, ‘This place is like a stage set. Are they for real with these flowery chairs?’ Her opinion of the coffee: ‘Blech. It tastes like fish.’
She checked out the souvenir shelves while I signed on and encountered a dozen useless emails, but nothing from Jacqueline. Landon had no plausible excuse to write to her. There was no worksheet to send. No upcoming quiz. So I described the new-and-improved Bait & Tackle, and above my usual signature, LM, I added a casual: You’re locking and alarming your house every night, right? I don’t mean to be insulting, but you said you were going to be home alone.
I stalled for fifteen minutes, but she didn’t answer.
Carlie, all out of pithy observations on the décor, purchased a bright pink T-shirt with bait written across the chest – which her mother would probably confiscate immediately – and a snow globe containing sand-coloured ‘snow’ and a tiny replica of the original Bait & Tackle, sans coffee and Wi-Fi.
‘C’mon, Lucas, let’s go sit on the beach,’ she said. ‘If there are cute boys my age in this town, they are definitely not in here.’ I decided not to inform her that cute boys her age would be unlikely to come anywhere near her if I was there.
Six hours later, my phone’s screen cast a greenish light in my pantry cocoon. My willpower was depleted.
Me: When will you be back on campus?
Jacqueline answered seconds later: Probably Sunday. You? I took a breath, relieved. She was okay. I told her I’d be back Saturday, and out of nowhere I added: I need to sketch you again, and told her to text me when she got back.
Friday, Dad and I took Charles and Caleb out on the boat while Carlie and Cindy sat on their rental’s porch, drinking virgin daiquiris and reading. After we got back, I borrowed Dad’s truck and headed to the Bait & Tackle. Jacqueline had replied to Landon’s email minutes after we’d texted. My smile over the fact that she was engaging the security system every night didn’t last long.
I spent the day at my ex’s, she wrote. He wanted to see her Saturday to talk. I could guess what kind of talking he wanted to do. I shut the laptop without replying.
When Caleb announced that he had a science-fair project outline due Monday – and he hadn’t chosen a subject yet, the Hellers decided to head back Saturday morning. Dad had booked an all-day fishing tour anyway, so we said our goodbyes before dawn, and I was back home by noon.
I pulled up Jacqueline’s email again, imagining that she might spend the evening – if not the night – with Kennedy Moore. He’d treated her like she was expendable, replaceable, when she was so far from either. She was stronger than she knew, but her relationship with him had made her weaker. She’d accepted his view of her. She’d followed his dreams, and not her own. She’d let him change her name, and who knew what else about her.
I hit reply, and told her it sounded like he wanted her back. Then I asked: what do you want? I wondered if anyone ever asked her that.
The Hellers went out to dinner and a movie, followed by a holiday-lights procession through gated neighbourhoods in the hills on the south end of town that were filled with grandiose mansions decorated by professionals. Bowing out to do laundry, I told myself I wanted to be alone. I made a cilantro lime marinade for the red snapper I’d caught yesterday, stuck it in the fridge and went for a run. Jacqueline Wallace was on a perpetual loop in my mind. The thought of her with Moore woke a violent part of me I thought buried and gone. It made sense to fight to protect her, but I couldn’t kick someone’s ass because she chose him over me. F*ck if I didn’t want to.
Joseph: Survive T-day? How bout them Cowboys!?
I’m not allowed to say that again to Elliott, upon penalty of something called kinky boots – not my kind of kinky btw – on replay all the way home from Cleveland.
It’s a long damn drive.
Me: Survived. Home. Go Cowboys. Your bf is controlling, dude.
Joseph: Tell me about it. I’m f*cking whipped. :P
When my phone buzzed again, I assumed it was more from Joseph, but no. It was Jacqueline, saying: I’m back. So of course, I invited her over for dinner.
Preparing my own food was something I’d done for so long that it didn’t seem odd. As a child I’d played culinary assistant to my mother, to whom cooking was another art form. Once Grandpa died, I cooked for Dad and myself out of necessity. It was that or a steady diet of toast, fish and eggs. We’d have both contracted scurvy before I got out of high school.
Cooking a full meal for anyone but myself had become rare. I lived alone, and Carlie had been right a few months ago – I generally didn’t have anyone over. I didn’t have time for a circle of friends, and I didn’t do dates. I barely did hookups.
Inviting someone for a home-cooked meal boasts culinary confidence and encourages a level of expectation, but I was no chef. I bypassed gourmet recipes and anything with complex steps. I prepared simple meals in unassuming ways.
I had no idea what Jacqueline liked or didn’t.
‘I’ve never had a guy cook for me before,’ she said, leaning her elbows on the opposite side of the counter, watching me chop veggies and drizzle basil vinaigrette over them. Her inexperience with college-guy cooking boded well for the snapper and baked potatoes. Once everything was in the oven, I set the timer and led her to the sofa.
I wanted to know what conclusions she and her ex had reached, but I wouldn’t ask. She was here, and I couldn’t think about her going back to him.
Taking her magical hand in mine, I examined every millimetre of it. I traced the lines in her palm, the sensitive valleys between fingers and the arching whorls on the pads of each one. She kept her nails short so she could play her bass, pressing and plucking strings, without impediment.
Landon knows that. Lucas doesn’t.
I had to tell her. I had to tell her, soon.
Pulling her on to my lap, I leaned her into the corner cushions to tip her head back and kiss her neck, buzzing with need when she swallowed, tracing the path of those tiny quivering muscles with my tongue as her pulse and breathing sped. I unbuttoned her white blouse – one button, then two, following the path of each inch of newly gained territory with my lips, halting at the top of her bra. If I unfastened her any further, our dinner would be burned to soot.
One of her hands was trapped between us, splayed against my chest. Her free hand gripped my bicep, the thick knit bunched beneath her palm. When my tongue began to stroke the just-visible curves between her breasts, she kneaded my arm like a kitten and purred like one, too. The weight of her was just right, her rounded hip pressing into the saddle of my lap. I fought to slam the door on my rampaging contemplations – like how her soft, naked body would feel in my hands. I wanted to turn her round, feel the heat of her pressed against me –
The timer began to beep, and Francis added his eager meow to the alarm.
I’d never been so turned on and willingly ready to starve in my life.
‘Time to eat.’ Those words discharged another surge of reckless, uninhibited thoughts concerning Jacqueline’s lovely body.
Her disorientated, frustrated groan was a mind-blowing sort of music to my ears – a refrain that told me, clearly, she wanted me. What she knows of you, my brain clarified. Even possessed with lust, I couldn’t break away from my conscience.
Over dinner, I mentioned that I’d cooked for Dad and myself before leaving for college.
‘You cooked? Not your mom or dad?’ Her gaze was steady below faintly creased brows.
‘My mom died when I was thirteen.’ I tried to make light of the fact that I did the cooking after that – like I was just making sure Dad and I ate something besides toast and fish.
‘I’m sorry.’ Her genuine sympathy surfaced in the quiet concern of her voice, and I felt pulled apart by contradictory desires – follow my characteristic restraint where the subject of my mother was concerned, or tell her everything. As usual, the words roadblocked in my throat. I nodded and said nothing.
While we ate, Francis consumed his body weight in snapper and yowled to be let out after. Bolting the door behind him, I imagined he’d need a jog around the neighbourhood rather than a hunting expedition tonight.
I walked back to the table and took Jacqueline’s hand. She rose and followed me to my bed, where we lay, eyes locked, like it was old habit to do so. I reached to touch her, to confirm that she was real and not a cruel fabrication of my heart. Her skin was so soft, and her face became more beautiful every time I saw her. She scared the hell out of me, but I couldn’t stay away from her.
I unbuttoned her blouse the rest of the way, slowly, eyes on hers, ready to stop the moment she signalled me to do so, regardless of what we’d done before. She swallowed thickly, nervously, as I bared the curve of her shoulder and leaned to touch my lips to it. Her warm breath in my ear, she shoved her cool hands under my shirt, palms sliding across my abdomen and wandering higher. I couldn’t tear my shirt off fast enough.
Sliding one leg between hers, I pressed my thigh against her firmly and drove my tongue into her sweet mouth when she gasped, my need for her overriding my need for oxygen. She rewarded me with a subtle moan and arched against me, her hands sliding over my skin, stroking over the poem inscribed on my side that I finally understood fully. My brain was a riot of want and fear. I’d never been so terrified of my own desires, because they went well beyond her body. I shook to my core, my soul curving round her protectively as my mind strove to determine the logical calculation that could make her mine. I wanted to be hers as much – more – than I wanted to possess her, when I knew damned well that neither was possible.
She moved above me, her hair tumbling over her shoulders, the silky tips brushing my chin, her blouse and bra sliding away with strokes of my appreciative fingers. I shoved my reservations to the side for these surrendered, short-lived moments, worshipping her with murmured supplications and whisper-soft caresses. I felt certain my skin’s nerve endings had multiplied in the prior week, because every place she touched me with her mouth or fingertips, I burned.
Since I had no plan to push past Jacqueline’s former point of resistance, the hours we spent in my bed were hotter than I’d ever imagined making out could be, and kissing her was a luxurious, sensory indulgence all its own. As my body accepted this, I lingered over every stroke of my tongue, coaxing her along with my mouth alone and pinning her hands flat to the mattress so she couldn’t touch me. She arched and twisted beneath me, winding her legs round mine, telling me with every whimper and hum that her body was the instrument I knew how to play, and play well.
When I finally released her hands, she shoved her fingers into my hair as I kissed down her chest and across her belly, swirling my tongue into her navel while gripping her tightly between her waist and hips, as if debating whether to remove her jeans. She scraped her nails across my shoulders, and I knew if I touched the button just below my chin, she would tell me yes. Every provocative touch of her fingertips, her lips, her tongue, and every sound she made built both my craving and my contentment – which made no logical sense, but I didn’t care.
I slipped back to her lips, slowly, pressing my weight into her, attending to every part of her body that demanded my notice on the way up. She trembled and held on to me when I pulled us to our sides. ‘I should get you back.’
Tucked to my chest, her fingers were entwined with mine, and though she nodded, she tightened her grip on my hand and didn’t move an inch from her position in my arms for several minutes. I felt a compelling desire to preserve the moment, as if final grains of sand were streaming through the neck of an hourglass, and all I wanted to do was tip it on to its side for a few more precious seconds.
We dressed without speaking, and I buttoned up her blouse, lingering deliberately over each button, and then leaned to kiss her one last time.
I was about to bring the Harley to life when Charles emerged from the back of the house with a kitchen trash bag. I couldn’t move, my eyes tracing his steps from the door to the bin, and back to the door. I willed him to go inside without turning round, but I knew he wouldn’t. His hand on the doorknob, he turned and looked straight at me. Straight at Jacqueline.
‘Landon? Jacqueline?’ he asked, as if he couldn’t believe his own eyes. Or just wished to God he was wrong. He sighed and told me to meet him in the kitchen when I returned. I nodded once, and he went inside.
Jacqueline said nothing at all. I didn’t know if she’d been shocked into silence or if she’d sensed this impending finale, as I had. The ten-minute journey to her dorm seemed like ten seconds, but it was long enough for me to realize one clarifying truth about my dual persona and Jacqueline: she already knew.