After Hours (InterMix)

chapter Seven


My schedule the following week was only thirty-six hours—Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. Unbelievably luxurious after my initial week, forty-eight hours in Starling plus another six completing restraint training on my so-called days off.

I dodged off-the-clock Kelly pretty effectively through our next two shifts. We saw each other in the hand-off meetings and around the ward, of course, but I ducked him during breaks and at Tuesday sign-out, dawdling in the nurses’ station with my paperwork until I knew he’d have left for the day.

Work itself was manageable. I played checkers with Lonnie no less than five times in those two shifts, and lost every game. Not on purpose, either. It was as if those thick lenses let him peer inside my brain and anticipate my every move. And the more he proved himself superior to me, the more tolerable I became. He even sat next to me at lunch on Wednesday, when he could easily have taken another seat.

At some point I’d made an interested noise at his mention of being a Vietnam vet and self-proclaimed historian of the war, and for better or worse, he’d started treating me like his one-woman lecture hall. It beat being a target for sexually charged pizza crusts, at any rate. And if the stories he told were true, it was actually proving a fairly interesting course. I took to calling him “Professor,” which seemed to please him monumentally, and he took to calling me “kid.” I’d have preferred “Ms. Coffey,” but it still beat “bitch agent.” Progress.

I couldn’t be sure what was happening with Amber and Marco. She didn’t have a restraining order, but I didn’t know if that was due to a paperwork delay or her p-ssying out with pressing charges. But he hadn’t bothered her since the afternoon I’d earned my formerly black—now yellow—eye, and she told me he’d dropped off a check. Whether that was true or not . . . The uncertainty gave me a headache, so I decided to not think too hard about it.

“Bullies tend to prey on weak people, people they perceive as worthless,” Dennis told me on Wednesday. We happened to be taking our mid-afternoon breaks at the same time, in the S3 lounge. I’d spilled the general details of what had happened at Amber’s when he asked about my eye, doing my best to make it sound like an isolated incident, not a drama that would threaten my reliability here at Larkhaven.

“Now, if some passionate party should happen to intervene,” Dennis said, nodding to mean me, “and demonstrate in no uncertain terms that the victim is indeed worthy, worthy of defending . . .”

“Yeah, I guess. I mean, I could never scare him off, physically. He’s huge, and strong. He must weigh as much as two of me.”

“But by proving that you’re willing to fight that losing battle over your sister’s honor and well-being, in turn you imbue her with an added perception of worth. You’re saying she and her son are worth putting yourself in danger for. And in turn, this Marco person is more inclined to respect her. Or at least value her.” Dennis’s amateur academic side was coming out, but I didn’t mind his turning my family nonsense into a case study. It could stand to be depersonalized.

Detach, I’d been chanting in my head, whenever the memory surfaced. Detach, detach, detach.

“We respect what others are willing to defend,” Dennis added, and drained his coffee cup. “We value what others value, or at least covet those things. But bullies don’t like conflict. Theirs is a cowardly facsimile of power, won only through sure bets. And they’ll always go after the low-hanging fruit.”

I nodded, but my thoughts had drifted from Marco.

It was Kelly I pondered, Kelly whom I’d always seen as a bit of a bully. But he didn’t want an easy target. If he was after anything, it was a challenge.

That first day I’d been at my weakest, and he hadn’t preyed on me when I was vulnerable, however possessive he’d acted at the bar. No, it was my resistance that seemed to get him salivating, like he wanted to pry me open after a good long chase. No low-hanging fruit for Kelly Robak. More a tough nut to crack, the meat surely all the more rich for the struggle.

I really needed to quit thinking of him as a predatory animal. But it was difficult not to, when all he did was prowl and pounce and leave me writhing in poorly veiled heat.

His invitation weighed heavily.

It weighed so heavily, in fact, that it often sank from my head straight through my chest and belly, settling like a restless, muscular presence between my thighs. I’d catch sight of his bare arm across the rec room, and my p-ssy would clench as though I were lounging in bed, nothing to occupy my brain but idle sexual fantasies. But this was during work. When I needed to be focused on dosages and staying alert for signs of trouble. One foolish glance at the cotton stretched taut between Kelly’s flexing shoulder blades, and I’d have to start my pill count all over again. It made me wish the nurses’ booth had blinds. But even then, the sound of his voice held the same power. He might say to a resident, “What channel you want?” but my memory echoed words from that night in my bed. That’s where I want to be, it whispered, invisible fingertips drawing a tingling line along the seam of my sex. Can’t wait to hear you beg.

I wanted to sleep with him. Badly. Worse than I’d ever wanted anyone. And the longer I resisted the idea, the weaker my argument grew. I’ll have feelings for him, and it’ll sting when he loses interest. But it wasn’t like I was in love with him, or that I’d have a mental break and wind up stalking him, yowling naked on his front steps demanding he give me a second shot.

My disappointment, should it come, would be private. And what was the threat of a few days’ sheepish disappointment, compared to an entire weekend of theoretical pleasure?

Who does that? I’d asked him. Who f*cked all weekend?

I could. I really, really could. All I had to do was say yes.

Say yes, and spend two debauched days doing the same—saying yes to his every command. Where in the tenets of feminism did it say it was liberating to stubbornly deny yourself pleasurable sexual experiences just to spite a bossy man? No place. Feminism isn’t a zero-sum game. Choosing not to sleep with Kelly, and our scoring zippo additional orgasms off each other? That was zero-sum. Banging each other’s brains out for one memorable weekend? Win-win.

Yet even with my surrender now a firmly adopted course of action, I still couldn’t bring myself to go after him. It didn’t feel right.

After all, what kind of a chase would that be?

* * *

Kelly finally cornered me just after Wednesday’s hand-off meeting. The shift had ended on a sour note, when Lonnie goaded John B. into a major manic episode, so bad we had to settle him with lorazepam and usher him off to meet with one of the docs. I’d grown nearly fond of Lonnie the last couple of days, and now all I could do was shake my head, a matronly gesture I realized mid-lament that I’d picked up from Jenny. Jeez, that hadn’t taken long. Might as well cave and order my beige orthopedic hoof-shoes from the medical supply company. The transformation had begun.

When the meeting wrapped and people started filing down the stairs, Kelly clasped my wrist discreetly and muttered, “Talk to me after you sign out.”

The hairs rose along the back of my neck, signaling danger, but I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t just a little bit pleased. Just a gigantic bit turned-on.

He released my hand and we headed slowly for the door. “What about?”

“We both got two days off.”

I tapped my keycard to the panel. “That we do.”

“What’re you doing, tomorrow and Friday?”

I could’ve lied. Could’ve told him I’d promised to watch Jack, put off my inevitable surrender another week or more. But the end of that shift had sucked. I was exhausted and frustrated, and weirdly, turning myself over to Kelly sounded heavenly. No spa day, to be sure, but get me out of these scrubs. Get the insurance codes out of my skull and lock me in the custody of a man so solid and alert that I could quit jerking my head at every sudden noise, quit counting the paces and seconds it’d take to prep a syringe and jab a raging patient. Keep me away from Amber’s problems before I caved yet again, deciding it was my job to tackle them.

Sorry, imagined telling her. Can’t fix your life for you this week. Promised I’d f*ck this guy from work.

“I’m not doing a thing,” I told Kelly.

He paused before the keypad at the bottom of the steps, just the two of us in the stairwell. “Come over.”

“Okay.”

I had to laugh at his reaction, such obvious surprise. “Were you anticipating more of a struggle?”

“Yeah.”

“Was that no fun for you, my giving in so easily?”

“I’ll show you what fun is for me,” he said, looking me up and down. “Tomorrow, after lunch. Two o’clock. I’ll pick you up.”

“No, you won’t. I’ll drive myself.” No way I was stranding myself at Kelly’s for an entire weekend. He could talk me into bed against my better judgment. Surely he could talk his way out of giving me a lift home just as easily, prolonging my shift as his sex slave. I needed some kind of escape hatch. Some semblance of free will.

We went back to pretending to just be coworkers, waiting until everyone else from our shift signed out and exchanged good-nights. As he wiped his name from the board, Kelly muttered his address to me, then his phone number. I scribbled both on a Post-it branded with an antipsychotic drug logo, and we exited without another word.

The entire walk across campus, I thought I could sense something at my heels, stalking me. I half expected to feel Kelly’s arm lock around my waist as he toppled me to the ground like a wounded gazelle. But nothing.

A quick glance at my online bank balance told me my first check had cleared. It was literally the largest chunk of money I’d ever received at one time, and it made me giggle with relief.

At twenty-eight, I finally felt like an adult. With a steady job and a livable salary.

I’d had a rough childhood, and grown up quicker than most. I’d earned a certificate and nursed my grandma through her final years, tackled her funeral arrangements. Those occasions had brought relief, too—proud relief and guilty relief, respectively—but I’d not arrived at those moments feeling like I’d had much control over my journey. I’d bumbled my way across the finish lines, exhausted and reeling. I’d survived them. But looking at the number in my deposits column . . . I’d fought for this. I’d done the best job I could and been compensated fairly. This, I’d earned.

To celebrate, I drove to the grocery store and bought some proper food, plus a minifridge, since we weren’t allowed to keep alcohol in the common kitchen, what with so many of the residents being in recovery. Sitting at my desk with a can of beer and a turkey sandwich, I glanced around my little room, thinking this wouldn’t cut it for long.

As I ate, I scribbled out an estimated monthly budget. That night, I spent two hours poking around the rental listings for Darren, pleased to see there were dozens of affordable one-bedroom places available. Even the two – and three-bedroom houses were semi-affordable, and I entertained a brief, masochistic fantasy about inviting Amber to live with me, us and Jack in some modest little house, an hour’s drive between us and Marco. How cozy!

How cozy and completely batshit-nutso!

Much as I loved her, I knew what would happen. Late-night drama, the thump of some meathead’s fist on my door waking me in a cold sweat, and Amber getting semi-intentionally fired from her job the second she had me secured as a rent-paying safety net. God bless the girl, she was a self-sabotaging wreck.

I switched my search filter back to one-bedrooms only, my own self-sabotage averted.

When the time came to fall asleep, my thoughts turned predictably to Kelly. Anxious thoughts and horny ones, excited ones and unnerving ones. I fell asleep after what felt like hours, candidates for my safe word flurrying around my brain like snow-globe flakes.

* * *

The next morning I did my laundry, dressed in a simple skirt and tee shirt and packed a second outfit in an overnight bag, along with bathroom essentials. Cute but comfortable underwear, freshly shaved armpits and legs but my downstairs left to its own devices, because I was no man’s personal porn star. I was Kelly’s sex slave but also a feminist, and the crooked line had to be drawn someplace. And that place was in the perfectly lovely, feminine, God-given soft curls between my legs, I decided.

At twenty of two I climbed into my car with the directions I’d scrawled after a Google Maps search and set out for Darren, stomach churning, palms clammy.

Kelly’s street was easy enough to find, maybe a mile’s drive past the main drag, on a tired-looking residential block—a familiar sight to me, having grown up in the heart of Michigan’s industrial decline, though with fewer boarded windows than I’d been expecting. Most of the homes looked inhabited.

Kelly’s house was a navy blue, one-story ranch with a tidy lawn. His truck was parked in the driveway, and as I pulled up along the cracked curb I found Kelly himself, leaning over the peeling picket fence that abutted his property, reaching for something.

I killed the engine. He craned his neck and caught my eye as I slammed my door, before going back to whatever he was doing.

What he was doing, I found out as I approached, was massaging the ears of a rapturous, slavering, brown and white pit bull.

“Hey, Sadie,” he was saying. “Hey, pretty girl.”

“Is that your dog?” Of course it was. He was so the pit bull type. This dog would probably have a front-row seat to whatever debauchery Kelly had planned for me, her baleful eyes shifting between us with canine judgment.

But he said, “No, my neighbor’s. Well, my neighbor’s ex’s, until he took off. I feed her when my neighbor’s out of town. Take her for walks, sometimes.” With a final, spirited scratching, he stood up straight, wiping his slobbery fingers on his jeans.

“So this is your place?” I pointed to the little blue house.

“This is it. C’mon in and I’ll give you the tour.” He took my bag and opened the front gate of his wrought-iron fence for me.

I followed him up the steps, noting the freshly painted trim around his windows and the shiny brass numbers nailed to his door. It wasn’t a palace, but his house seemed the most cared for on the block. The only one on the mend, as opposed to slowly going to seed with the rest of the city.

He led me inside and his front room matched the house’s exterior—simple and relatively tidy, with absolutely no frills. I envied his space, his cheerful bay window and the sliding glass doors looking out on his little backyard.

If this were my home, I’d have replaced his beige sectional and oversized recliner with something more stylish, tossed in a few potted plants, and maybe added a nice decorative screen to his fireplace. Jack could come visit and play for hours in the backyard, see what a lawn was supposed to look like. His kiddie pool had been ruined ten minutes after we’d inflated and filled it, shredded by a sneaky piece of broken bottle when Amber had tried to drag it into the shade. You could have refilled it twice over with Jack’s tears.

“It’s nice,” I told Kelly, tailing him around a breakfast bar and into his small, open kitchen. He set my bag on the counter.

“It does the job. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Beer? Wine?”

Normally I’d have been a temperate gal and proclaimed it too early to drink, but my nerves told me to make an exception. “I’ll have a beer, thanks.” Kelly’s home, Kelly’s beverage of choice.

He grabbed two bottles from the fridge and shut the door with his hip, twisting off each cap and handing mine over. We clinked and drank.

He showed me the would-be guest room next, which he’d turned into a minimalist home gym, with a weight bench and barbells and a treadmill. It was pretty stark, one step up from what I imagine you’d find in the shadiest corner of the penitentiary exercise yard. Which seemed fitting, considering Kelly possessed the physique of a violent convict serving a very long sentence, meditating on visions of vengeance as he worked through his thousand daily chin-ups.

Next he pointed out the bathroom, then we reached the end of the short tour—his bedroom. There were no surprises, not of the pink satin heart-shaped pillow variety, nor the f*ck-swing and bondage props variety. Just a queen-sized bed, made up with a black-and-gray-striped comforter. No shackles or straps to speak of. I released a held breath. Wooden blinds on the windows, and simple red curtains. Hardwood floors bare save for a red throw rug that matched the drapes, walnut dresser and side tables and a chest, and little else. I eyed the chest, wondering if it was full of winter’s wool clothes or crazy sexcessories.

“It looks very normal,” I said.

“The invite was strictly B.Y.O. gimp mask, if that’s what you mean.”

I laughed.

“I’m not much for theatrics.”

“No, only directing.”

“More like dictating.”

“So,” I said, looking around the room. “When does my domestic slavery begin?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Looking forward to it, then?”

“I’m here, aren’t I? I’m looking forward to finding out what I’ve gotten myself into.”

Kelly led me back through the living room and out the sliding doors, and he dragged two patio chairs together on the slate tiles, facing the backyard. Struck by a thought, he gave me his beer to hold, and trotted across the grass, whistling.

A flurry of barks answered him, and Kelly leaned over his neighbor’s fence a moment, then straightened with the dog hugged to his chest like a sixty-pound baby. He let her free, and grabbed an old tennis ball from a corner of the yard. He tossed it for the dog, and it was neatly returned just as Kelly took his seat and accepted his beer. Another toss, the dog shooting off in hot pursuit, tongue fairly flapping in the wind with bliss. Clearly, this was the highlight of her life.

“So,” I said. “What’s the agenda?”

“We hang out. You get comfortable. We mess around a bit, then you tell me when you’re ready for the good stuff.”

“The good stuff?”

He smiled, whipping the ball again. His eyes looked pale green this afternoon, the color of corroded copper. “Trust me.”

“I must, if I came this far.”

We chatted for a little while, about what we’d done that morning, about the repairs he’d made to the house since he’d moved in four years earlier and found the attic full of squirrels and two decades’ worth of moldy Hustler issues stacked behind the boiler. Kelly told me he wished he had a dog of his own, or could take Sadie off his neighbor’s hands, but the twelve-hour shifts would make a neglectful owner of him.

As self-interested as Kelly was, I decided he’d be a stellar pet owner. Patient, protective, reliable. He’d probably make just as good a father, if he went down that road. Kids today could use more Kelly Robaks in their parental dugouts. He might not let his daughters date until they were twenty, but they sure as shit wouldn’t come home after curfew, tattooed, carrying the baby of some burner they’d let finger them behind the gym in exchange for a cigarette.

“You think you ever want kids?” I asked casually, as Sadie returned the tennis ball for the fiftieth time.

“Hell if I know. Not unless I got married, and I don’t think I’m cut out for that.”

“I bet you are. With the right woman. One who’d put up with your bossy ass and go in for all your old-school man-of-the-house patriarchy bull.”

He laughed. “That ain’t you, I take it.”

I felt my cheeks warming. “No, that ain’t me.” What did it make me, then? Some good-time girl, an equally antiquated notion. Still, I’d rather be Rizzo than Sandy, no question. Rizzo found love without changing a thing about herself. Sandy had to dress like a skank and get that horrible perm and take up smoking.

“I’m not such a monster,” Kelly said mildly. “And I don’t want some little sunshiny housewife, vacuuming in heels, packing my lunch, starching my shirts and making cheerful small talk. Where’s the fight in that?”

“Who, then?”

He shrugged and took a deep drink. “I dunno. If I meet her, I’ll know.”

“And you won’t take no for an answer, until you’ve shuttled her down the aisle.”

“I might never meet her, and that’s okay, too. What about you? Who’s your Mr. Right?”

It occurred to me then that Kelly and I were friends. Actual friends who were genuinely interested in each other’s lives. A perfectly platonic scene . . . if not for the fact that we wanted desperately to f*ck each other.

“My Mr. Right . . . I only know what kinds of guys I don’t want, so far.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Guys like me, you said. Your sister’s type.”

“You’re not so bad. I was wrong, assuming you had anything in common with her ex aside from totally superficial stuff.”

“He’s the one who gave you that bruise?” Kelly asked, pausing with the tennis ball in his hand, Sadie antsy with mounting impatience for the next hunt.

“Yeah. He’s a real shithead. You . . . You’re kind of an ass, but you know it. He’s just a big, spoiled toddler with a loud truck and a drinking problem. And absolutely no self-awareness. No respect for anyone else’s needs or feelings. I don’t think it registers, that other people even have feelings.”

“Sounds like a sociopath.”

“Just a dumb kid who never had to mature past the age of eight.”

Sadie whined.

“Even worse. Few things out there more dangerous than a bored kid who thinks he’s a man, just ’cause he’s jacked up on testosterone. If he can’t find something to f*ck, he’ll find something to f*ck with.”

I nodded and sipped my beer, watching as the dog finally got her wish and went rocketing off toward the far fence after the ball.

“Where’s this man-child live?” he asked.

I shot him a glare, not so easily tricked.

“What’s his name?”

“I’m not tossing out any balls for you to chase, Kelly. Suppress your inner pit bull.”

“Tell me who he is, and I promise he won’t be bothering your sister anytime soon.”

I sighed. “You make it sound so simple.”

“It is simple.”

“This is my nephew’s dad. He’s probably going to stay in my sister’s life, whether I like it or not. And I don’t need him taking out his bruised ego on her, after your threats or beatings or whatever wear off.”

“Toddlers’ll keep throwing tantrums until somebody shows them they don’t always get their way.”

I stared out over the lawn, not really feeling like talking about Amber and Marco anymore. “That’s funny.” I shot Kelly a little smile, ready for the flirtation to begin, and for him to do what he promised—take me out of my head for a couple days. “I thought you were all in favor of a guy getting his way.”

“I’m in favor of me getting my way. There’s a major difference.”

I shifted my chair to face Kelly more directly, pushing off my shoes so I could rest my bare feet on his knee. He set down his beer and fiddled with my toes with his damp, cold fingers. Better those than the dog-spitty ones. We stared at each other for a long moment, the exchange as loaded as it was companionable and easy.

“Am I making you dinner?” I asked, curious about exactly how all-encompassing my role as his servant might be.

He shook his head. “I’ll grill. You can make the salad, if you want. But what I’ve got in mind for you . . . Don’t picture dusting or dishes.”

“No scrubbing your floors wearing a kerchief, then?”

“Nah. Though you’ll probably spend some time on your knees.” He smirked and took a deep pull of his beer.

“Charming.”

He set the bottle down and handed me the mangy ball that Sadie had deposited at his feet. I accepted it with a grossed-out face, but chucked it all the same. She shot across the grass, and brought it back to me. I tossed it again, thinking that despite my being the obedient one for the next couple days, Kelly was my pit bull, poised to protect and attack, at my command. One word from me, and Marco might wake up in the hospital with far worse than a bitten tongue.

One word from me, and Kelly would be officially in charge.

Was the promise of wild, animalistic mating keeping him docile, or riling him up? I guessed I’d find out, whenever I found the sac to cut his tether and sic him snarling on my body. Then those few minutes in my bed flashed across my mind, and I could just about hear his panting in my ear, hot and hungry. Not snarling. Moaning. And not attacking—consuming.

“You eat lunch?” he asked, cold eyes on the sky.

“Yup.”

He met my gaze. “Let’s go inside, then. See if I can’t meet some of your other basic human needs.”

I mustered a skeptical expression to cover up my real reaction—a rush of excitement and nerves like you feel with each ratcheting ka-chunk, ka-chunk up the roller coaster’s highest ramp. I drained my bottle.

“Whatever you say.”