“Aren’t you worried? This reporter is spreading this story, you could lose your job. Don’t you care?” Her voice pitched into a screech. He’d put their whole family at risk for a girl and a motel room. For what? What would happen to them if Nate got fired? “An affair with a student is a big deal. People get fired on the accusation alone. It’s rape, Nate.”
“Alecia!” He barked, looked around like someone could have heard her say the word. “If the story is about Lucia, she’s eighteen, it’s not rape.”
“Oh my God, that’s your thought? That makes it better?” Alecia tangled her fingers in her hair, almost laughing, and stopped. “This was almost month ago,” Alecia said. “Why now? What is this reporter talking about, then? Who else knows about your motel room?”
“It’s not my motel room, Alecia. Knock it off.” He stood up, walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge. Alecia heard the pop of a beer, the last indulgence she’d let him keep. His case-a-week habit was getting expensive, though.
“We can’t afford to buy this much beer all the time.” She stood up, followed him into the kitchen. She knew it wasn’t the time or place, but the words popped out of her mouth before she could stop them. She stopped herself from continuing, if we’re going to also be subsidizing runaways. If no one around here is going to have a job. They’d fought about her nasty fighting for years, her acerbic tongue, quick as a snake’s.
“Goddamn it, Alecia, just shut the hell up. For once.” He slammed the beer bottle down on the counter and it shattered, the glass slicing through the palm of his hand. His anger seemed so sudden, so intense, Alecia wondered if she’d said what she was thinking out loud by accident. “Fuck!” Nate grabbed a dish towel and wrapped it around his palm until it stained red. He panted hard and stared at her, his face pinched and twisted.
He’d never been mean before. Told her to shut up, called her a bitch, called her any names at all. She was the nasty one. He was mostly apathetic, intent on keeping the peace, willing to go along to get along. Didn’t he ever get sick of it? She wanted to push him; her anger flashed, hot and quick under her skin.
“Fuck you, Nate,” Alecia said quietly, something she’d never said before, either. The blood dripped on the brown linoleum. The colors blended together and she couldn’t tell where the circular, dirty-water pattern ended and his blood began.
He laughed again. “Fuck me?” He shook his head, flicked the bloody towel at her feet, and pushed past her. “Nah, that’s not a thing you do anymore.”
?????
No matter how brutal their fights, Nate always dropped off to sleep like falling off the side of a building, hard and fast. Alecia lay in bed and listened to his even breathing, her heart pounding. By the time she’d shoved the bloody towel into the garbage, collected herself, and found her way upstairs, Nate was out. It felt like a deliberate affront.
His phone blinked on the nightstand, splaying blue and green on their ceiling, waiting notifications, text messages, or emails. His phone was a constant, always buzzing and binging. It felt like a living thing in his hand, between them. She’d successfully banished it from the table, but it still blinked and beeped from its nested spot in the basket on the counter. Someone always calling him, needing him, wanting him, to make a decision, or just simply make him laugh. She’d be lucky to have so many friends. Nate’s friends were her friends by default. Even Bridget was Nate’s friend first; how could you not be?
Alecia remembered a time when Nate’s popularity was a draw. The blond boy with the smiling eyes had picked her in the hazy North Carolina sunshine. His rich, northern roots, his baseball uniform blue and shiny like the cloudless sky. He’d plucked her, like peach off a tree, right out of the baseball crowd, surrounded by her sorority sisters, friends she’d paid for because she was too angular, too type A, too held together to make friends on her own. She’d never had the nerve to ask where the good parties were. Greek life seemed easier. But she sat on the grass watching the game and he’d picked her. A lean and mean second baseman with a quick mind and an even quicker heart. She’d hardly met anyone who didn’t love Nate, even back in college. She got used to his flirtation, the way he touched other women, just a shoulder here, the tender square on the spine, the tingly place that men touch when they want to get laid. She tried to tell him women love that, be careful. He’d always laughed at her and shrugged, like it didn’t matter.
His heart was as wide open as his laughing mouth. He fed stray cats; they collected at the back door of the baseball house, meowing all hours of the night until the guys threatened to kick him out. Tucked bills into beggars’ caps. Volunteered for United Way school campaigns. He wooed her with his goodness, his round face wholesome like a chocolate chip cookie. Alecia had never known such virtue, like the universe had delivered her own private Boy Scout. Her mother and father would have never put themselves out for anyone. Not that they were unkind, they just weren’t giving people.
They went to a wedding once, for a distant cousin of Alecia’s. They were all distant. Hers was a holiday, wedding, and funeral family: polite and thin lipped. A woman at their table, maybe a cousin, Alecia couldn’t remember, held a red, angry infant, screaming and punching into the air. Beads of sweat rolled down the mother’s forehead as she longingly eyed the door. Nate had laughed, taken the infant from her arms, and walked the baby around the perimeter of the room, patting his diapered end, whispering and smiling. Alecia watched him in awe, because who takes a stranger’s baby away? The mother never even looked to see where he went.
Alecia found him outside, the baby’s eyes wide and blinking under the fluorescent parking lot lights, quiet and not quite cooing, but calm. Nate was pointing at the stars, talking, his voice low, about Orion and the Seven Sisters, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, all things Alecia had no idea about. She’d called him a good politician and he laughed, not understanding what she meant.
“Kissing babies?” she asked. “You never heard that expression? Shaking hands and kissing babies?”
“Like I’m doing it for show?” His eyes crinkled up.
“Maybe?” She traced the top of the baby’s head, the soft triangular fontanel pulsing like a heart under her fingertip. “Because you can’t be for real.”
“You think I’m trying to trick you into something?” With his free hand, he yanked on her hair softly. “Ah, you’ll marry me anyway.”
She was shocked then; they’d never talked about marriage. They’d only been dating for six months, still in college. Still spending Saturday nights at keg parties in dank basements, draped across wet plastic beanbag chairs.