by Ella James
I spend a little while with Margot, perched on her bed’s edge. I rub her hair until her eyelids are heavy, and then I hug her tight.
“I love you, sweetie.”
“Love you too,” she murmurs.
The kids’ room smells of mint and toothpaste. I can taste that mint on my tongue as I make my way into the shadowed hall and down the bare hardwood. My throat is tight and thick with grief, and still, I want him. Maybe this is why I want him. I catch my sore lip between my teeth as I move toward the living room. I bite until it stings.
Burke is at the kitchen island, leaning on it with his elbows when I crutch my way into the room. When he sees me, he stands up like I caught him in some unforgivable act. He cups a beer bottle in his hands and looks at me, all somber eyes and bare chest.
“She okay?” His voice is husky.
I nod. “Dreamed about her mama.”
He looks down, and I see his tongue move over his firm lower lip. He looks up and lets a breath out.
“Think I’m going to grab my stuff from that cabin I rented.” He starts toward the screened porch door without pausing to look over at me. “I’ll be back within the hour.”
Chapter 17
Burke
It’s a problem. She’s a problem. I shouldn’t go back. I know I shouldn’t, and those words fill up my mind until my head aches. Shouldn’t go back, but I do because I’m weak. She nipped my lip so hard at one point that it’s bleeding at the corner. Tastes bitter when I press my tongue against the spot.
The car over the road is rough and jarring, red dirt cracked open. Needs smoothing. The moon is bright tonight, no clouds. I see glowing eyes as I turn back into her driveway—something wild, maybe a coyote.
When I get inside the house, she isn’t anywhere in sight. I took two hours—on purpose—so I’m not surprised. The laundry room is filled with dogs, the big ones sleeping on linoleum and the pups in their crate.
I eat some cornbread from a Tupperware container on her counter and pour myself some sweet tea. Shawn called it Southern table wine. Then I sit at her kitchen table and pull out my laptop. The table’s a long, oak oval, with eight chairs and a fruit bowl in the center. It looks like it was hand-crafted. When I check out June’s internet, I find a network called Platform934 that doesn’t have a passcode. The Harry Potter-inspired name makes me smirk.
Little book nerd.
When midnight comes and goes, I tell myself I’m grateful that she hasn’t returned. I’ve got enough work to last until morning, easy.
I think of going into the hall and setting up shop on the floor with my back against the wall, so I can hear if one of the kids wakes up again. I’m still mulling that over when I hear footsteps behind me.
I turn around, and there she is. She’s wearing a deep blue robe, and she’s balanced on her crutches.
“Hey,” she whispers, sleepy-eyed.
Ah, shit. I stand up. “You need something?”
She shakes her head. The faintest smile plays over her lips. “What are you doing?” She smiles like we’re co-conspirators.
“Working.”
“At 2:50 in the morning?”
I shut the laptop. “Work from home work never ends.”
“Do you work from home?”
“Not really.”
She fiddles with the neck of her robe. I catch a peek of creamy skin over the gentle swell of her breasts. She yawns; clearly, she fell asleep before and is just waking up. “I brought some linens to the couch for you.”
“Uh, thanks.”
I want to fuck her. God, I’d love to take her to that couch and lay her out the way she was before and fuck her hard enough to wear myself out. I bet she’d be tight and hot. She’d be one of those that claws your back up. I grit my teeth.
“You should go to sleep,” I tell her. “Did one of them wake up?” I open my laptop again and log in so I’ve got somewhere to put my eyes.
“Just me. I nodded off and came to check on you.”
“I’m okay.”
Silence spreads itself between us. It feels thick and heavy.
“Hope you get some sleep now,” I say, tapping lightly at the keys.
“You too.” Her voice is silken.
I let her turn around and head through the living room. I let her get almost all the way down the hall before I go after her.
I stop in the open space between the hall and living room, my heart pounding.
I can hear her breathing, although I can’t see her for the hall wall.
“You better lock that door,” I murmur.
I hear something that could be a laugh. Then her soft voice says, “Try it.”
Don’t do that. You can’t do that. There are reasons why you can’t.
When I move into her room, it’s pitch black dark. I feel like a felon as I come to stand beside the bed.
That’s when the heating system clicks on. The subtle current moving from a nearby vent tosses her curtains, casting moonlight over the bed. I can see her face—cool, tinted pearly blue. Her smug, small smile that says: You wanted it. You wanted it so much you followed me into my room in the middle of the night.
“June.” My voice trembles on her name.
She blinks, her thick eyelashes casting pointy shadows over her smooth, creamy cheeks. “Yes, Burke?”
I feel my pulse drum just below my throat. I grit my teeth until it hurts and put my hand over my hard cock. And I whisper, “You win.”
“We were playing a game?” Silky smooth. If I could wrap her voice around my cock, it would explode, and cum would drip between my fingers like one of her ice pops on a summer day.
You win, I say again. In my mind, the words are loud and firm. And then I drop my mental voice down to a whisper. I would have you if you weren’t her sister. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t care how much I damage you.
Logical and restrained. I’m still on the shore.
With my real voice, I say, “Pull the covers down.”
She does that.
I climb on the bed. I wade into the water.
“If you want my tongue inside you, pull your panties down.”
She pushes them down to her thighs. Soft thighs. In the cool moonlight, they look thick and round and feel like satin. I trail my tongue over her warm skin, and she spreads her legs a little wider for me.
I lean down, hovering my mouth over her curls and breathing warmly on her. Then I spread her gently with my fingers. “Oh, June.” I slip the tip of my tongue into her heat. Slick and tangy, fat and swollen, and her little bud is rising slightly from between her folds. I tongue it—just one lick—and swallow back a groan as she comes off the bed and yanks at my hair.
“Oh God.” That’s all she says, and I find I’m surprised. No wanton words or screams or grunted curses. Just this soft chant as her fingers tighten in my hair and I lap at her. Then I lift my mouth away and work my tongue into her. She yelps, and I clamp a palm over her mouth.
“Cover your face,” I tell her.
She puts a pillow over her face, and I push my tongue back into her cunt. June thrusts herself against my face.
“Damn. Oh shit.”
I know you wanna come. Her knees are pressed around my shoulders now. She’s swinging her hips up toward me and moaning. I can feel her panting. I lift my head again and push two fingers inside where she’s tight and slick.
“That’s right. Soon you’re gonna come on my hand.”
For a while, I fuck her like that. I know she’ll come apart the second that I touch her with my tongue again, and that will be the end of this. So I thrust my fingers in and drag them out, using my mouth to tease all around where she wants me till she’s moaning and her good leg is thrown over my shoulders.
“What do you want, honey?” It’s a whisper.
“Your dick in my mouth.”
I’m so surprised by her throaty, dirty answer that my arms give way. I close my mouth over her heat and taste her sweet cream. I can feel her jerk, and then s
he gives a mighty groan, and she’s lost.
I come in my pants like I’m in ninth grade, and my body trembles so hard afterward that I worry there’s something wrong with me. When I do manage to make my body move, I bring her a hot cloth and tell her, “Thank you” in a voice that’s way too rough. And then I leave her there.
It’s so dark—the whole house dark, the wild yard dark and endless. The trees are whispering shadows.
I find a ladder in her shed and fix a bent spot on her gutter that I spotted while her brother walked me around the house, pointing out pecan trees. After that, I step into the kids’ bedroom and dart my eyes over their bodies, two small bumps under the blankets.
My throat feels tight and the house is too small. I slip into the kitchen, quietly peel open the lid to the cornbread, and fill a Ziploc bag with the golden squares of manna. At first I empty the container, but then I think better of it and put one square back.
I could change my pants, but I don’t. Not until I’m at the end of her dirt road. In the dim light of an orange sky, I take my pants off, then my boxer-briefs, and roll them up and stuff them in the bottom of my suitcase. I move the driver’s seat away from the wheel and pull on clean clothes.
Then I point the Porsche back toward Atlanta, and I fly.
Chapter 18
June
April - Two Months Later
My favorite Albany country music station is all about some Taylor Swift. I don’t really get it, because she isn’t “country” anymore. But I don’t hate her songs or anything. They’re pretty catchy. There’s this one that Margot loves that comes on all the time, and it has a line that says “play stupid games you win stupid prizes.”
Every time I hear it, I think of him. Stupid game, and I got the stupid prize of his ass running off with most of my remaining cornbread, never even saying bye to me. Because he’s him, and he’s the devil.
He’s talked to Margot and Oliver once since he left, and that was one time when Oliver called by accident when he was watching YouTube on my iPhone. I was in the shower, but the kids talked to him and were off before I stepped onto the bath mat.
“What did he say? Did he say tell me hey?”
Both kids just blinked at me.
“He asked about school,” Oliver said, and I had to struggle not to roll my eyes.
Oh I just bet he did.
One way he has been communicating, I suppose, is by sending checks made out to me. I get them on the first of every month, right when SNAP benefits start over. I guess maybe he knows that, and he’d like me to stop claiming federal food benefits, but I’m not going to. I don’t want to owe him anything. And anyway, when my new venture gets more steady on its legs, I’m going to make too much to qualify—even with three mouths to feed now.
I smile to myself as I peer into the newly built pen right behind the house. It’s a school morning, a Tuesday, which means these babies are all mine.
I open the gate and smile down at my darling Nubian doelings: Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart, P. Diddy, and Ellen. Leah’s cousin Marco bought them from a milk goat breeder in Missouri, but turns out, Marco is really bad allergic to them. He had named them P. Diddy and the three bitches, illustrating just how terrifyingly unintelligent poor Marco is. Only girl goats make milk, but P. Diddy gets so excited when you call her by her insane name that so far, I can’t bear to re-name her. We may have another Hot Rocket situation on our hands.
The kids and I named the “bitches” after our favorite women, to make up for Marco’s shoddy treatment. And what that really means is, Margot did. And she’s still campaigning to re-christen P. Diddy as Taylor Swift.
“P. Diddy…” I try it just to make myself laugh, and she rushes over to me and rubs her head against my thigh.
“That’s right, sweetheart. What a good, good goatie you are.”
I shift some hay off my back, where I had it wrapped up against me with an old paint sheet, and watch my four girls prance around. The puppies yip somewhere behind me, and I glance over my shoulder, but they’re just playing by the back porch. My big dogs are warming to them, so this week I’ll try another front lawn playdate with all four.
I love on the goats a bit, and then walk through another gate into another pen.
“And here are my sweet piggies!” I stretch my arms out, and Peppa and George run to me like the adorable oinkers they are.
I guess my family wants me to run a zoo, because my dad gave Margot and Oliver these cuties after he got home from a trip down to Mexico, about two weeks after Burke came and left. Dad’s got a little bungalow in Tulum that he and Mom bought when she first got sick. He flew straight there from Sutton’s funeral and was kind of off the grid until he showed up one day at the house with the pigs.
“What sweet little babies…”
They are babies. Right now, these Kunekune piggies are tiny—smaller than the puppies. They’re mottled black and pink, and oh-so huggable. I play with them for a while before going back inside, grabbing my yoga mat, and heading to the senior center.
The class I lead there is eighty minutes long—on the slightly longer side for yoga classes these days—but the retirees would rather take it slow, and so would I. After yoga, I stop by the Shake & Bake, a Zumba place and tanning salon where Leah’s working, and we chat for a while. I’m home just in time to throw some chicken salad together for a late lunch and have a quick phone chat with Latrice, who’s gone to Albany to sell one of the older tractors. The money we get from it should cover planting costs for the largest peanut crop we’ve endeavored yet.
I shower, change my clothes, and hop into the truck with two juice boxes and big, shiny apples for Margot and Oliver to eat when they hop in the truck after school. The dirt road’s hazy when I reach the end of my driveway, so I figure Mrs. Manson just passed by with my mail.
I stop at the box and pull out a package. No return address. But it’s from France.
“That’s weird…” I use a key to slice it open. Inside, I find two tiny Eiffel Tower pencil sharpeners and three blue bottles of bubbles bearing a French brand sticker, along with three bags of Haribo Orangina Pik gummies. At the bottom, folded beneath a layer of tissue paper, is a soft, maroon Gryffindor T-shirt in my size and a paperback copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
I grin at the cover. It’s the original British edition. I thumb through it. Inside the cover, taped to the first page, is a pale green sticky note that says 1st Edition in familiar script.
Sure, enough, Bloomsbury is the publisher, and the publication date is 1997. I start laughing like a fool and hold the book to my chest.
“Oh my lands. Why did you do this, Burke?”
I set the paperback on the dashboard and tear through the box again. There’s no note, though. I assume he put the sticky in the book so I didn’t let Margot and Oliver run around playing with it. I assume it has some value.
A quick search on my phone’s web browser reveals it could be worth…four thousand dollars!
There is no way.
Is there?
I flip through the book again. It does look slightly old; the pages are stiff and maybe just a little yellowed.
“Well hot dog.”
I take off down the dirt road, tires spinning over stray pebbles, a dust cloud enveloping the truck as I speed toward the paved road.
He didn’t do it. But I know he did. So ostentatious. It’s his style. Didn’t even leave a note in the box, but he spent around four thousand dollars. Dipshit.
I text him from the pickup line in front of Heat Springs Primary. I’m sending this back to you.
I’m in France.
One of your people can babysit it till you get home.
The little bubble showing someone’s texting pops up and then disappears, as if he’s not sure what to say. Finally he asks, Are you anti vintage books?
I don’t want you spending money on me!
Someone gave it to me.
What? Really?!
Really,
he says.
Are you sure?
I’m pretty sure.
Oh. Well…hmmm. I still don’t like it.
You can keep it for Margot and Oliver if you want, he says. I thought you would like it.
Well now I feel like a jackass.
You’re not a jackass.
For a heady second, I can’t believe we’re really texting one another. After two months of silence. Two months I spent wondering what he was thinking about me. Does he see me as some wanton woman, throwing myself at him? So confusing, because it didn’t seem one-sided to me.
What are you doing in France?
Just had some meetings here.
I scan the school’s front lawn, but it’s still empty. I don’t know if it’s a bad idea to keep the conversation rolling, but I find I kind of can’t stop. U like it there?
Yeah. I’m a fan of France.
What do you like about it? Lord knows I’ve never been. Probably never will.
He takes so long to answer that I wonder if he gave up on the text chat. I don’t know. I like the look of it, I think. Paris. That’s where I am right now. I like the pace, the architecture. I don’t know.
What a thorough answer from the man who didn’t want to stick around and say bye to me. You don’t know much, do you, Sly?
Sorry, I’m kind of under the weather.
What kind of weather’s got you down? I smirk to myself, even as my heart is going pitter-patter like jazz dance shoes.
Idk I think the flu.
Oh, dang. You have the flu?
Nah. Idk. I’m ok tho.
I think about his big body between my legs. The sturdy warmth of him. The way he groaned as his tongue painted me. And my whole body starts to buzz again.
Someone honks, and I realize I’m holding up the pickup line by two spots. Dammit.
I’m so sorry, I text after I pull up. Are you at a hotel?
I have a place I stay when I’m here. It’s like an apartment.
What’s the address?