by Megan Hart
Alex offered escape, if I wanted to lose myself for a little while. Yet we stood, somehow shy, like we hadn’t already tasted each other coming. He nodded toward the stove.
“It’s almost ready, if you’re hungry.”
A few minutes earlier food had been the last thing on my mind, but now my stomach rumbled. “Yes. There’s salad in the fridge, too. I’ll get that.”
“It’ll take a few minutes for the pasta to boil. Why don’t you go take a shower?”
My lips curved upward. “Do I offend?”
“No.” Alex reached out to twine a stray curl around his finger. It bounced back like a spring when he let it go. “But you look like you could use a few minutes alone.”
I gaped, astounded. The next moment I was in his arms, my face pressed to the front of his T-shirt as tears burst out of me. James’s T-shirt I realized, but it smelled of Alex now. Alex stroked my hair and put his chin to the top of my head. He said nothing, questioned nothing, made no effort to draw out my troubles. He was simply there in a way James, who’d have tried to get me to talk, wouldn’t have been.
I didn’t cry long. The emotion was too intense to maintain and quickly replaced by a different, more selfish feeling I’m a bit ashamed to admit. I tipped my face, which I was sure was red and swollen, to look at him.
“Sorry.”
“You don’t have to be.” He pushed my hair off my forehead with one fingertip.
“Don’t you want to know what’s wrong?”
Alex leaned back, his hands on my upper arms as he looked at my face. “No.”
This made me pause. “No?”
“If you want to tell me, you will.” He shrugged, then smiled. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine, too.”
It was a simple answer. I didn’t know if I wanted to talk or not, what I wanted to say. How much I wanted to share. Giving him my body was one thing. Giving him myself was something altogether different.
“It’s my sister,” I said, and the story seeped out of me in fits and starts. I didn’t share every detail, particularly the parts about how her story paralleled our mother’s. I paced while I talked, and he leaned against the counter, listening with his arms crossed.
“I’m worried about what will happen to her,” I said finally. “I want to help her, but I don’t know what I can do, really.”
“Sounds like you’re doing the best thing for her, which is to be there.”
“It doesn’t feel like it’s enough.”
“Anne,” said Alex after a moment. “You can’t fix everything.”
I’d been watching my fingers trace the swooping patterning of flecks in the countertop, but at that I looked up. “I know that.”
He had so many different smiles. This one was a small lift of lip and brow. Something like a smirk but not as smug. “No, you don’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you think you should be able to fix your sister’s life. Fix her problems. You want to fix everything, and you hate that you can’t.”
My mouth worked as denial tried to come out. “That’s not true.”
His brow lifted a bit higher. “Sure, it is.”
I shook my head. “Absolutely not. It’s just that she’s my sister and I want to—”
“Fix it.” The smile had grown vastly more smug.
“Why are you so convinced you know me?” Irritated, I grabbed up a dishcloth to wipe down the already clean counter. It gave me something to do with my hands and a place to focus my gaze so I didn’t have to look at him.
He didn’t say anything for a minute, but I refused to look up. “Maybe it’s not you,” he said at last. “Maybe it’s just me.”
He’d snared me. I threw the cloth down and gave him my gaze. “What?”
I’d thought maybe he was just playing games, but his face looked serious. “Wanting to fix things all the time. Make things better.”
“Well…is it?”
Tension unfurled again, tinged with something I couldn’t quite identify. He rolled his head on his neck, cracking his spine. This time, he was the one avoiding my eyes.
“Forget it. You’re right. I don’t know you. I’m just talking a lot of bullshit. I’m good at that. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Sometimes the picture someone else paints of us is a more accurate portrayal than a reflection. What we see in the mirror is always reversed. A portrait not only allows us to see our own faces, but how it looks to others.
“I can’t fix everything.” I said it aloud, knowing it was true.
He looked at me. “But you’d like to.”
“Wouldn’t anyone?”
Alex ran a hand through that silky hair so it fell in rumpled smoothness over his forehead. “But not everyone blames themselves when they can’t do it. Most people understand the entire universe doesn’t rest on their shoulders. Most people, Anne, understand that just because you want to make something better doesn’t mean it’s your fault when it doesn’t happen.”
“You have sisters,” I said.
“Three, all younger.”
“And you never felt like you had to help them out? Give them a hand? Protect them, or make it better?”
He made a small noise. “Fix them? All the time.”
“And could you?”
“No.” Again, he ran his hand through his hair, then crossed his hands over his chest, tucking them under his arms like he wanted a way to keep them still. “And I feel like shit about it, too.”
We both smiled in mutual understanding. The song on the stereo moved into something slow and sweet. We stared, saying nothing. Alex untucked a hand and held it out to me.
I took it. He pulled me closer, step by careful step, until our bodies pressed against one another. His shirt was still damp from where I’d wept, and I closed my eyes to breathe in the scents of fabric softener and soap mingled with his own unique smell. He held me for a while until we started moving slowly to the music.
We danced. One song blended into the next. It didn’t matter about the lyrics or the artist, not even the beat. We found our own rhythm there in my kitchen. We moved in perfect time, one step leading to another and the next without hesitation or bumbling. The music played on as we swayed.
We danced in silence. Not because there was nothing to say, but because we didn’t have to speak aloud to understand each other. We didn’t have to talk to explain ourselves. Right then, there was nothing wrong.
We had nothing to fix.
It’s amazing how quickly things became familiar. How easy it was to adjust. The tidy little life James and I had formed melted and re-formed to include Alex.
There were benefits to it. Sex. A third set of hands to help around the house. Another bank account to draw from; for Alex was generous in his contributions to our budget. A less tangible but more appreciated benefit was the way having Alex with us kept James’s mother from dropping by as she’d been wont to do for the first six years of our marriage. She even stopped calling the house, preferring instead to reach James on his cell phone.
There were drawbacks, too. Two other bodies in my bed, both snoring. More laundry to wash and fold and put away—though Alex never asked me to wash his clothes, they had a tendency to end up strewn around in odd places, and I never knew what jeans belonged to which man until they were already in my basket. When we weren’t all tangled up together, I sometimes felt like a third wheel, not privy to their in-jokes or moronic forays back to adolescence. It was sometimes like living with Beavis and Butthead.
“Why do you do that?” This came from Alex. James wasn’t paying attention, his eyes focused on the television where their lame and loud video game was blaring. Alex had brought home the latest game system and they’d been playing nonstop for hours.
“Do what?” I stopped on my way out of the room.
“If you want us to stop playing the game, why don’t you just say so instead of getting all frowny?” He actually looked interested in my
answer, unlike his cohort who was hooting with glee at the cartoon carnage.
“I did say so, about twenty minutes ago.”
“No, you asked us if we wanted to go to dinner and a movie tonight.” Alex let go of the controller completely, which did get James’s attention, since that meant Alex’s character was no longer shooting. A monster came and ate his head. James grumbled.
“And obviously you don’t.” I folded my arms. The video game system had way underwhelmed me. I didn’t care how many bytes of memory it had or what sort of graphics card, or how hard it was to get.
“See? Why do you do that?” Alex unfolded himself from the floor in a long, lean motion. “Now you’re pissed off.”
James looked up. “Huh? What’s she pissed about?”
“Because we’re ignoring her,” Alex told him.
“Huh?” James seemed honestly stumped. “No, we’re not.”
“Yes, fucker, you are.” Alex tried to take me in his arms, a ploy I resisted without success. “We’re ignoring our Anne, and it’s pissing her off. What I want to know is, why do you walk away like that instead of telling us to get the fuck off our lazy, immature asses and take you out to dinner and a movie?”
PMS had made me cross and weepy. I tried pulling away from him, preferring to sulk, but his hands gripped my upper arms firmly. I went stiff and unyielding, instead.
“Jamie, turn off that damn game and get up here. Anne wants to be taken out to dinner and a movie. You’re not treating her like the queen she is.”
James scrambled to his feet at once. “Why didn’t you say so, baby? We’d have turned it off.”
I managed to roll my eyes. “Just forget it. I don’t need to be treated like a queen.”
“Yes. You do.”
“Alex,” I said, less pissed off and more exasperated. “I’m not a queen.”
“You are.” He pulled me closer. “A queen. Am I right, Jamie?”
James grinned and moved behind to hold me from behind. “Yep.”
“A goddess.”
They moved closer, sandwiching me.
“The light of our lives,” said Alex. “Breath in our lungs. Mustard on our hotdogs.”
“If you say the wind beneath your wings, I will punch you both in the face.”
“See?” said Alex. “That’s what I mean. Why don’t you say stuff like that more often?”
It was hard to concentrate with James licking the back of my neck and Alex’s thigh nudging between mine. “What? That I want to punch you in the face?”
“If that’s how you feel. Hell, yes. Jesus, sometimes I want to punch the ever-loving shit out of Jamie over there, especially when he fucking farts under the covers and acts like he didn’t.”
“Hey,” James protested. “Fuck you, fucker. Sleep in your own bed.”
Alex wiggled closer, dipping to nuzzle my jaw. “My bed doesn’t have Anne in it.”
Between them I lost the anger over the video games, but I wasn’t quite ready to give up. “You’re both pains in the ass, you know that?”
He pulled away to look at me. “See? Doesn’t that feel good? Say it again.”
James snorted lightly behind me. Alex reached around to poke him. “Shut up.” He looked back to me. “Go on. Say it again.”
“You’re both pains in the ass.” I waited a second. Neither of them looked concerned. I tried again. “And if I walk into the bathroom one more time to pee in the middle of the night and find the seat up, I’m going to scream.”
A sly smile slid across Alex’s mouth. “See? Doesn’t that feel better?”
It did feel better. James wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on my shoulder. I leaned back against him, letting him take my weight.
“Are we really pains in the ass?” James asked.
“We are, man. I’m sure we are.” Alex didn’t sound upset. Just resigned. “Men are pigs.”
I laughed, finally. “You’re not that bad.”
James tugged me until I turned to face him. “You want dinner and a movie? We’ll give you dinner and a movie. Jeeves! To the limo!”
“Wait, wait, I’m not ready—” I protested around laughter as James tickled my sides.
“What do you mean, you’re not ready? You look ready to me.” James looked me up and down.
“You’re an ass,” said Alex. “Don’t you know anything about women?”
“Since when are you an expert?”
I put my hands up, one on each of their chests, pushing them apart and away from me. “Gentlemen. Enough with the banter. Give me ten minutes in the bathroom. Alone,” I said to Alex, who didn’t have the same sense of bathroom privacy as I did. “And I expect to be taken to a nice restaurant, not some burger joint.”
“What madam wishes, madam shall have.” Alex took my hand and lipped the back of it, a silly gesture that still managed to make my stomach do happy flip-flops.
Later, we came home to an empty house after an exquisite dinner and an enjoyable movie. We stumbled down the hall, hands roaming, mouths meeting, clothes strewn once more in odd places. I had two men doing their best to please me, over and over, and their best was pretty damn good. Lying between them as the chorus of snores began, I looked up at the ceiling and wondered how it was that Alex, who didn’t know me, knew me so well, and James, who should have known me better than anyone in the world, didn’t.
Chapter 13
I shouldn’t have answered the phone, but when it jangled my hand reached automatically and cradled it to my ear before I’d even opened my eyes. “’lo?”
“Anne. It’s your mother-in-law.”
As if I couldn’t guess by her voice, or wouldn’t know who she was if she called herself by her name. “Hi, Evelyn.”
“Are you still sleeping?” Her voice insinuated that anyone still in bed at this hour was a lazy good-for-nothing.
I cracked open an eye to look at the clock radio. “It’s only eight in the morning.”
“Oh. I thought you’d be up by now. Doesn’t James have to be up early to go to work?”
“He leaves around six-thirty, yes.” I covered a yawn with my palm and rubbed my eyes, which someone had apparently filled with sand. “Was there a reason you called?”
God, I hoped there was. I wasn’t in the mood for idle chitchat, not that I ever was. But today, particularly, I felt grouchy and out of sorts, my belly bloated and threatening to cramp.
“Yes. The girls and I are going shopping today and we thought you’d like to come along. We’ll pick you up at nine-thirty.”
Fuckity fuck in a duck-colored bucket.
I sat straight up in bed. “Where are you going shopping?”
She rattled off a list of stores, outlets, the mall and some nail salon I never frequented. “Nine-thirty. You’ll be ready, won’t you?”
“Actually, Evelyn…” I rolled over to look at Alex, his face buried in James’s pillow. Heat rose off him, comfortable in the early morning coolness. I stroked a hand down the satin skin of his bare back. “I’m busy today.”
Dead silence for the time it took for me to count to five. “Really.”
“Yes. I’m sorry, but I’ve got other plans today—”
“Oh.” Her voice shifted, staying pleasant as it always did but with an undercurrent of tension. “What are you doing?”
“I’ve got some errands to run, that’s all.”
“Well, you’re going shopping, then.” She sounded pleased. “Just come along with us.”
I didn’t really have any errands, had no plans but for starting the day off with Alex’s dick in my mouth and his face buried in my pussy. That was hardly the sort of thing I could tell my mother-in-law. I tried to think of something to tell her, anything. Alex stirred, lifting a squint-eyed face and looking deliciously rumpled.
“I don’t really want to go shopping with you today. I’m sorry.” I wasn’t.
Another silence. It was easy for me to picture her expression. The slightly curling lip, the flared nostril
s like she’d scented something foul. I always wondered if, in her mind, she was smiling and somehow the signals got crossed between her intent and what actually ended up on her face.
“Well. If you don’t want to spend time with us…” She trailed off, clearly waiting for me to protest.
And, of course, I did, because it was expected. It turned my stomach to acid and forced my mouth into a tight frown, but I did it. “Of course I want to spend time with you. It’s just that I’ve made other plans today.”
“Of course you did. Well. Another time, then.”
Meeting the Queen might have been more important than going shopping with Evelyn and her daughters. Being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, perhaps took precedence. Abduction by aliens might have been excused. Anything else just didn’t cut it.
I sighed. Alex rolled onto his back, an arm behind his head and the other rubbing his sternum lightly. Up and down. Hypnotizing me. His fingers drifted lower, my gaze following them. When I looked back at his face, he was smiling.
“Can you give me until ten?”
“I don’t want to take you away from your plans.”
“I’m sure I can rearrange them, but I won’t be ready by nine-thirty. If you want to go on without me…”
“Oh, I’m sure we can all wait.”
Great. I was going to be beholden to them the entire day because they’d waited for me. “I don’t want to hold back your plans, Evelyn.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Because I’ll hold you accountable for all eternity.
I sighed again. Alex was smirking and moving his hand like a puppet’s mouth, mocking my conversation. I turned away so I didn’t laugh, and he pounced on me. He mouthed my neck and cupped my breasts from behind, tweaking my nipples to hardness. I let out an oof!
“Anne?”
“I’ll be ready by—” his hand was between my legs beneath the hem of my nightgown, finding bare skin “—ten….”
“Tell her to make it ten-thirty.” He gave a low, evil chuckle as his fingers stroked my curls.
“Is someone with you?” Mrs. Kinney asked. “I thought you said James went to work.”