The Bust

by Jamie Bennett

  Kayden nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. We were quiet for a few miles down the frozen, white road. “You’re really offering your house to me? Even if I can’t pay you right away?”

  “You can pay me in driving lessons,” I told him, and he looked a little sick again. “I think I was getting a lot better at the end.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, but he laughed.

  “Was it that bad?”

  “Not great, but you actually were getting better. You finally understood the difference between the brake and the gas pedals and you only used one foot to push them, and you kept your eyes open almost the whole time.” He glanced over at me, at how I was massaging my hands together. “You were gripping the wheel pretty hard. Like a vise.” Then he reached and took my fingers in his. “Are they cold? I was going to give you my gloves to wear, but I thought it might make things…worse.”

  It certainly felt better with his big palm over my knuckles. I kept absolutely still so he’d leave it there, and he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to pull away.

  “Should we get your stuff, pack it up? How much in that apartment is actually yours? Let’s go look.” I suggested.

  “Not much is mine.” He slowed and let go of my hands to turn the wheel and head to his house. “I came back here with a suitcase. I think,” he added. “It’s kind of a blur. The last few years have been.”

  I understood that. “Mine, too, even without all the drugs. I moved around a lot. Like a Porcupine caribou.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s like a big, big deer in Canada. We had two at the sanctuary I worked at in Texas before they got rehomed. There were so many interesting animals there and I learned so much about them! Even though the job itself was more just shoveling poop, I did enjoy it. Emma didn’t as much because she didn’t like the smells of the other animals on me and also, we had to be very, very careful of where she went. There were lions. Tigers. Bears.”

  “Oh, my.”

  I nodded. “Exactly.” I told him more about the various species, including the Transvaal lion, Indochinese tigers, and Sun and Sloth bears, going on until we reached his apartment building.

  He drove to his spot in the parking lot but then didn’t get out. “Are you sure about this? Do you really want to let me live with you?” he asked me.

  “I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I didn’t mean it. If I say it, I mean it—pretty much, and in this case, definitely. I was lying when I told Roy that one time I worked in a bar and a woman got pleurisy from an old maraschino cherry and sued, so that was why he had to throw away the ancient jar he had. But I’m not lying now. Don’t you want to live with me?” As far as I could tell, he didn’t have much choice.

  Kayden didn’t answer, but did get out of the car. “I guess I don’t have much choice,” he said as we walked into the lobby, which followed my line of thinking exactly.

  And when we got to his door, we found another official letter taped to it. He stuffed it into his coat pocket without opening it. “I think that letter means you should come now,” I said.

  “Now? Like, right now?”

  I nodded. “We’ll have to be pretty fast when we pack you up,” I mentioned. “Go, ok?” He started toward his bedroom. “I have to get home because I have a date.”

  He stopped walking. “You do? With who?”

  “Dexter. Roy’s son, remember? But they’re not anything alike that I can tell yet. Of course, blood runs through families, right?” I thought of my mom, and how alike we were, but then swallowed that thought away. “Anyway, he asked me out, and I said yes.”

  “Oh.” Kayden stayed still, frozen for another moment, then seemed to jerk out of it, just like how I made left turns in the Bentley. “Ok, great. Sounds fun.”

  It did take about three seconds to pack up his apartment, and it just about filled a suitcase. I took another walk through the rooms, staring at the expensive, dusty furniture, opening the refrigerator to make sure that I got all the little packets of condiments out of the door and wondering if it was worth it to take the ice from the fancy automatic maker. Probably not. “Kayden? Do you want the ice? Technically, it’s yours. Kind of, since your name is on the lease even though you aren’t paying for the place anymore. Kayden?”

  He didn’t answer so I walked into the bedroom. “If you don’t want the ice, I think you’re all packed, unless you want to try to take the TV or something. I wouldn’t recommend it since you’re already pretty well-known here.” I stopped and stared at him. “What’s up? Why are you sitting there?”

  He looked up at me, taking his head out of his hands. “I just started thinking, how did it come to this?”

  “We don’t have to take the TV. Forget I mentioned it.”

  “No, I mean, how did I come to running out of a place I can’t pay for with a single bag containing everything I own in this world? What happened to me?”

  I sat down next to him. “You still have the car,” I comforted.

  “Yeah, I can live in it.”

  “No, it’s much too cold up here for that. And you’re living with me and Em! That’s much better.” I followed his eyes to the suitcase, which wasn’t even full. “I guess this is your rock bottom.”

  “Rock bottom was waking up with a needle in my arm in a motel room, puke and blood all over myself, not knowing where I was or how long I’d been there.”

  “Oh, lordy. Yes, that was worse than what’s happening now.”

  “That was when I went to rehab. Again. But this last time, I guess it stuck better.” He stared hard at the half-empty bag. “This time, I wanted it. I thought, maybe, I’d still be able to fix things.”

  “You are,” I told him. “You have a job again, a place to stay. You’re a responsible dog walker, too, except when you let Emma eat the pinecone.”

  “I thought she was just playing with it,” he explained again, for the tenth or so time since it had happened. “I had no idea she’d try to eat it.”

  It had been a large mess. “Even with the pinecone, you also have two friends, Em and me. So let’s go to my house and you guys can hang out tonight. You’ll sleep on the couch, because I already dragged the mattresses away this morning to get ready for you. I was pretty sure you’d come because you don’t have a lot of other options.” I sat down on the bed next to him. “Except, your brother—”

  “No, that’s not an option.” Kayden held out his hand, palm up, and I placed mine on it. “Uh, did I say thanks?”

  “No.”

  “I should have.” He paused. “Thanks for letting me stay with you.” He let go of my hand to stand up and grab his bag.

  A few hours later, Kayden was settled in for the night, sitting on the couch with Emma. He watched as I walked around looking for a lip gloss that I knew I’d left somewhere in the house. It turned out that I didn’t have a lot of date auspicable clothes and makeup but I’d done my best to look presentable, which included using the blow dryer that was mainly for after Em’s baths so she didn’t get cold (it also made her tail very fluffy, which I enjoyed). I paused and studied my face in the hall mirror and ran my fingers over my cheeks. Was that a—I shifted my gaze and caught Kayden’s eyes on me, too.

  “You look good.” He sounded shocked. Insultingly shocked.

  “That’s quite…there’s a better word than insulting, but I can’t remember it,” I said angrily.

  “No, I wasn’t trying to insult you. I’m just surprised,” he explained. “No, not surprised.”

  “I think you’ve said enough.” Headlights came up through the front window, because I’d removed the curtains due to mushrooms. “That’s Dexter, so I’ll go.” Emma started to heave herself up so I hurried over to kiss her head. “Not you this time. Stay with Kayden and eat the delicious dinner I made.” She looked at me and I knew that she suspected the word “delicious.” Kayden was also shaking his head, and I thought that was probably based on the smell from when I’d cooked it earlier.

  “Kylie, listen, I didn’t
mean…” he was saying as I opened the door, but I just grabbed my coat, waved to Emma, and walked out into the frozen night.

  Dexter was getting out of his car when I slid down the path toward him. “Hi,” I called. “Thanks for coming to get me.” I glanced back and saw Kayden at the door.

  “Sure. I would have come all the way up to the house. You look nice.” He helped me with my coat and then stared behind me. “Who’s that? It looks like—”

  “That’s my new roommate.” I walked to Dexter’s car and waved him over. “Let’s go.”

  We did, without talking too much more than that. He drove to a restaurant that I’d seen when I went by it on the bus and I admired his slow, steady speed on the icy road. I often had to tell Kayden to slow down but Dexter didn’t need the reminders, another thing to appreciate about him. Not that I was comparing them.

  “Is this ok? I haven’t been here before,” he said as we walked in. “I don’t know too many places around here.”

  It was fine with me, and the dinner was fine, too. The food was good and we seemed to get along when we talked. Mostly, Dexter told me his life downstate, which he obviously missed. “I have a great condo,” he said, nodding with his eyebrows raised. “No roommates, just me in my own place.” Was he trying to impress me? I wasn’t sure. He also told me about his job, the things he had designed, which mostly seemed to be parts of houses, like stairs and porches and decks, instead of the whole thing.

  “That must be…interesting?” I asked doubtfully. “You said you were between projects. Like, you don’t have any stairs to design right now?”

  He frowned. “I don’t just design stairs!”

  “I didn’t mean it like that—”

  “Anyway, yes, I’m between projects. Like I’m between, uh, positions,” he said, which seemed to me to be a large difference. Between projects: having a job. Between positions: out of work.

  “Huh,” I said as I thought this through. “So you’re unemployed.”

  “Temporarily. My company downsized me,” he explained.

  “But you’re definitely not interested in working at the tavern,” I went on.

  Dexter made a face. “Definitely not. First of all, living up here…no. And I can’t imagine myself in that bar, day after day, night after night. It’s the most depressing place I’ve ever been inside. Roy tried to say something about me taking it over, but there’s just no way.” He shook his head. “No way.”

  That was too bad for Roy, then. I nodded. “Looks like you’ll have to find a new job so you can keep your condo,” I mentioned, thinking of Kayden getting booted from his apartment, and Dexter frowned again, annoyed. “I’ll probably be looking for another bar job when I leave here and go to my new town, since that’s my area of experity, but I have a lot of other interests. I love to read. Like, my great-aunt wrote a lot of letters…” I trailed off and watched him chew, his eyes moving around the restaurant. “She wrote a lot of letters from prison, where she was put on death row after going on an eight-murder crime spree. They say that mania runs in families. Dexter? Are you listening?”

  His eyes lit on me. “Sorry, what?”

  I sighed. “Nothing.”

  After that, he told me about restaurants and bars he liked to go to, and I listened and ate a lot of dinner, including dessert, then another dessert. There was enough left over to bring food home to Kayden, too, especially when I put the rest of the bread basket into my purse at the end of the meal.

  “Where do you want to go?” Dexter asked me as we got back into his car. I was freezing, but he didn’t turn the heat up very much. I helped myself to the dial to crank it.

  “Go?” I repeated.

  “Yeah, I’m staying with Roy, but he’s over at Sal’s for the night. Would that bother you to be at his place?”

  “Bother me?” I still wasn’t understanding him.

  “We could go to your house instead if your roommate won’t be in the way,” Dexter said. “You know, I thought I recognized him but I must have been mistaken.”

  “Oh?” I answered vaguely, but then realized that I really didn’t want to go back to my house with Dexter. Not with Kayden sitting on the couch. “No, we can go to Roy’s,” I said. On the way there, he talked about a vacation he’d taken skiing last year, to Utah.

  “I lived there for a while,” I mentioned, but he just said, “Huh,” and kept telling me about the quality of the snow, how it was different from his other ski vacations to other places I hadn’t been.

  I’d never been inside my boss’s house before either, never even seen it from the outside, so I was extremely curious to find out if it was as dingy and dark as the bar. But Roy lived in a perfectly normal place, with furniture that you wouldn’t mind sitting on and a floor that released your shoes when you walked across it. I was shocked to note that he even had ceiling lights, and the whole set-up was very impressive to me.

  “Is this you?” I asked Dexter, picking up a framed photo. There were a few of them on the mantel.

  “Yeah. I guess my mom used to send him pictures or something. I didn’t visit much when I was a kid. Do you want something to drink? Roy doesn’t keep any booze in the house but I bought some cognac for us.”

  “Oh, ok.” He brought me a big glass, way more than I’d ever poured at my various bar jobs, and I took a sip as he watched me.

  “You’re really pretty,” he said, and sounded surprised.

  Both he and Kayden really knew how to warm a woman’s heart. “Thank you. I guess.”

  “I mean, at the bar you always have your hair up in a thing on the top of your head, and you wear that garbage bag sometimes—”

  “Not so much anymore,” I corrected, “not since I’m getting rides to work from my roommate.”

  Dexter poured himself another large snort of cognac. “Your roommate looks exactly like a guy who used to play pro football. It’s crazy how similar they are.” He reached for my glass again.

  “I don’t want any,” I said as he started to tip the bottle, but he filled it.

  “Drink up fast.” He put down the brimming glass in front of me. “Then we’ll get going.” He smiled.

  “Go?” I asked, confused. “We just got here.”

  “I mean to my room. It’s a twin bed, but we can make it work.” He finished his cognac in one big swallow.

  “What?” I shook my head. “Your bed?” He nodded and I shook my head harder.

  “Dexter, I didn’t come here to sleep with you. Is that what you thought?”

  “It’s what we said. I’m not looking for anything long-term and neither are you, and you wanted this. You said so.” He stared at me as I kept up the head shake. “No? Seriously?”

  “No, seriously,” I answered. “I didn’t know that you meant that. I like you some, but I don’t want to have sex with you.”

  He didn’t look pleased. More like, he looked pissed. “Fine. Then I’ll drive you home.”

  “Ok, fine.” And those were the last words we said to each other. I wasn’t going to apologize for him reading the situation wrong and I wasn’t sorry that I didn’t want to sleep with him. He was obviously angry about not getting any action and thinking that I’d led him on. Well, it was too bad, because as I said, I liked him some, even though he tried too hard to impress me and hadn’t bothered to get to know me at all. It made sense, if he was just thinking we’d have sex and move on. I was surprised he’d bothered with dinner, but maybe he’d thought it was obligitial.

  Kayden sat up when I came in and Em thumped her tail. “You’re home early,” he mentioned.

  “Yeah.” I walked into the kitchen to put away my not-for-the-doggie-bag and the bread from my purse. Then I plunked down next to them on the couch, squeezing in the small space left since Emma was fully stretched and Kayden was a large person. I found him to be very nice and solid, squished up against my side as he currently was. “I brought you some leftovers. It was a good meal, but I was pretty bored.”

  For some reason, t
his made Kayden smile. “That guy did look boring,” he told me.

  “It was more that he just talked about himself. He wasn’t interested in me.” Except for the parts of me that would be involved in sex, maybe. I remembered how both of them had been surprised by how I’d cleaned up for the evening. “I guess even if I looked shockingly good, it wasn’t enough,” I commented.

  “I didn’t mean to say that. The way it came out was wrong,” he told me. “You looked great, but it wasn’t shocking. I was just surprised that you made an effort for that douche.”

  “How do you know that Dexter is a douche?” I asked, but Kayden just shrugged. “I accept your apology even though you didn’t say the actual words.”

  “I feel very sorry, and I apologize,” he told me formally, and I nodded my consent to that.

  “Accepted again.”

  “What do you mean that how you looked ‘wasn’t enough?’” Kayden asked me.

  “It wasn’t enough to make him interested for real. Which is fine, because I wasn’t either, but still, it would have been nice for someone to go nuts for me. It would have felt very gratiating,” I answered, and sighed. “I got a good dinner, but Dexter was boring. He didn’t even have a good line.”

  “Line?”

  “Remember Captain Blackthorne in The Lady Desires a Pirate?” I reminded him. “He finds Lady Lorna hiding in the galley of his ship and says, ‘I came in here hungry, but I hardly expected to find a morsel such as yourself.’” And she had of course been terrified, but then had found her heart fluttering. “It was also the way he looked at her,” I remembered. “Dexter didn’t have any of that. Did you have a thing that you did with women that made them fall for you?”

  “Do you mean, did I have a pickup line? Or something like this?” he asked, and he turned and looked at me, and his brown eyes seemed to smolder. One side of his lips turned up in a smile that asked me a question.

  The answer was yes. A big, fat yes! My heart fluttered harder than Lady Lorna’s had. “Oh,” I said, and tried to make myself settle. “That’s what you did in bars or whatever?”