I can’t read any farther. I start clicking on links, one after the other:
Citizens of sleepy Cotter’s Mill, Ohio, were shocked earlier this week when a body was found in a shallow grave on a public access trail to Green Lake. Today, police announced that the body has been identified as twenty-two-year-old Constance Marino, missing from the Detroit suburb of Birmingham.
And another:
The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is looking into the murder of Constance (Connie) Marino, a Detroit-area nursing student, found buried four hundred feet from Northern Ohio’s Green Lake on Tuesday.
Shit, Nicolette.
Right when I’ve made every excuse I can think of for you—ignoring the obvious, staring down reality and calling it bogus, ignoring the facts—my screen opens on the words “Cotter’s Mill, Ohio,” in the same sentence as Connie Marino’s body.
How can I still be this turned on when your house is 324 yards from where a hiker’s curious Newfie found the corpse?
38
Cat
We’re sitting in J’s living room, eating lemon meringue pie.
All right, I’m sitting on J’s lap on his green scratchy sofa, and I’m feeding him pie. He’s extremely appreciative.
This is what zero to sixty without taking off your clothes looks like. After nobody touches you or gets anywhere near you for what feels like forever.
“Could you at least try not to get it on my nose?” he says.
“Sit still and open your mouth.” I do the babysitter-feeding-the-kid thing, chugging as the fork circles his mouth.
“If the next step is I’m supposed to talk baby talk, it’s not happening,” he says.
“Says you. If I took off my blouse, you’d talk any way I wanted.” (Cat’s a lot more direct than the actual me.) This is when he gets another phone call. I’m pretty sure from his ex. Every time that phone buzzes, he tenses up.
He takes the phone out onto the porch. Through the front window, I watch him making angry faces as he talks.
He scrolls, and then he shoves the phone back into his pocket. Wipes his hand on his jeans, hard, like he’s trying to scrape off poison ivy.
From the doorway, he says, “Where were we?” He reaches under the tank top that’s beneath my blouse and runs his fingers up and down my spine. I tense every time he gets close to the clasp of my bra, but he ignores it and keeps going.
He’s nice.
I like this so much.
I’m like a camel binge-eating affection and physical touch at the oasis. So it can do without when it treks through the desert for months.
Enjoy the heat, binge-feel the feels, and take off for parts unknown with enough stored-up satisfaction to last until I’m someone else. In theory, if I store this up, I won’t miss it.
In theory, I won’t miss him.
In theory.
J is massaging my shoulders, one after the other, one hand under my shirt and one over.
I say, “You want some of this? I’m not completely greedy. Take off your shirt.”
Because (holy crap, Cat!) when you don’t want to get attached to someone, make him take off his shirt.
“No way. I’m not taking off my shirt until you take off your shirt.” He crosses his arms across his chest. Wads up the cotton of his T-shirt in his fists. “You’ll lose all your respect for me.”
I swat him. “Don’t tease me!”
I shove a forkful of meringue against his lips when his mouth is closed, and he pushes it in with his fingers.
“Who’s teasing whom? Besides, I have to keep you in line, or who knows what you’ll do? We know how violent you are when you don’t get your way.”
I’m pushing him down. “How violent? How violent? How violent am I? You want to find out?”
J pushes back, he’s bent over me, and I’m pinned. “I won’t be finding that out,” he says. “Don’t try.”
It feels, just for a second, like he isn’t playing. His voice is lower, and he’s not letting me up.
“This isn’t funny.”
He says, “It’s not meant to be funny. Don’t smear pie on my face. Don’t push me with a fork in your hand, got it?”
I’m not actually scared, but my body is acting scared. Highly adaptive sweating so I could slither away like a greased piglet. “I got pie on your mouth, so you’re holding me down? Asshat! Let me up, because do you see where my foot is?”
I don’t kick him. But his face looks like I did. Like I kicked him just after I caught him pulling the wings off a fly.
“Oh shit! I’m sorry! I apologize.”
At least he’s got his normal voice back.
He pulls away, lets go of my wrists in what looks like a spasm. “Sorry!”
Great, I’m getting my camel fix of romance with a scary lunatic.
“You can’t do that kind of stuff! Are you stupid?”
He says, “Don’t call me stupid!”
I swear to God, I’m going for the ice pick if he gets off the couch. Except he’d twist my hand and grab it. It would take a much better strategy than that to bring him down.
Strategy is my strong suit.
39
Jack