The Years Between Us

by Stephanie Vercier

  “Your son needs to learn how to treat women. He needs to learn respect.”

  “And he’s going to learn that through violence?”

  “Rhonda.” I shake my head, wishing she wasn’t so clueless when it comes to David. “He crashed right into me on the sidewalk… on purpose.”

  She snaps her head back up to her son. “David? Did you do that?”

  “Why the hell would I? More like her boyfriend was just looking for an excuse to get a punch in because I had the nerve to like Claudia… because I’m actually age appropriate—”

  “You don’t deserve someone like Claudia, you fucking prick,” Luke snarls.

  Rhonda straightens her posture and lifts her chin. “Luke, I will not have you talking to my son like that. It’s immature and cowardly and—”

  “You don’t even know your own son,” I interrupt, unwilling to let Luke take the blame for something David had started.

  “Claudia!” Rhonda is aghast. “David has been nothing but good to you. He got you this job.”

  “And he called me a slut and tried to knock me over. And he’s sleeping with Emily Wells… or at least he was. Did you know that?”

  David scowls and takes a step forward. “You fucking bitch!”

  “What?” Luke asks, confused.

  I can’t take it back—maybe I don’t want to take it back. “Emily told me herself yesterday when she was trying to atone for ratting Luke and I out. She said it’s been going on since the start of summer.”

  David’s eyes are blazing, but they aren’t focused on me… or anyone. Maybe he’s too embarrassed, too ashamed to actually look us in the eyes considering he’d been having sex with one of his mother’s friends while making a play for me.

  “Claudia, I think it best you don’t work for me anymore,” Rhonda says with such cool resolve that she almost reminds me of my mother.

  And it hurts.

  I’m not sure what I expected her to say, but I’d hoped it wouldn’t be that. I care about Rhonda, but I won’t grovel. I won’t beg in front of her son.

  “You can’t do that to her, Rhonda,” Luke tells her, trudging forward.

  “Yes, she can.” I grip his arm and turn, pulling him along with me. “Please, let’s just go.”

  Something vile comes out of David’s mouth, some parting insult, but I barely register it—I don’t want to.

  All I want is to get away from here.

  He is so angry on the ride home, slamming his hand against the steering wheel, telling me everything is his fault and how badly he wants to go back, find David, and beat him into a pulp. I don’t fall into his anger or try to pull him away from it. I am mostly silent, allowing him to get out what he needs to so that he’ll be calm when we get home, calm enough to really talk to me, unrestrained enough to tell me the truth about Isabelle and what she still is to him.

  When we get back, he heads right into the kitchen, pulls out a bottle of whisky and takes a quick shot of it. I’m half afraid he might just want to get blitzed, but he puts the bottle right back into the liquor cabinet, then stands silently gripping the edge of the counter.

  I come up behind him, slip my hands under his spread out arms, threading my fingers together around his strong chest and laying my cheek against his back. “Talk to me,” I ask of him.

  He sighs, and I can feel the breath moving out of his body, feel the tension in his muscles relax. “What do you want to know?”

  And then he turns around to face me, his hands on my arms now, his eyes red from anger but not as dark as they’d been earlier.

  “Come,” I tell him, taking his hand and leading him into the living room and to one of the couches where we both sit. “Tell me about Isabelle and why you go. Tell me why you were so angry yesterday.”

  “And today?”

  “I understand today, but yesterday… you scared me.”

  “I know I did.” He takes his hat off and drops it to his side, then puts his hand on my thigh, part of it on my dress, the other on my bare skin. “I hate myself for that, Claudia. It’s hard to explain how much I needed you… I know it didn’t seem like that, but that’s what it was. As fucked up as my actions were, I just needed you.”

  “Tell me,” I persist, putting my hand over his and wanting to get to the root of his anger. “Tell me about Isabelle. Tell me why.”

  His jaw clenches, and I’m afraid he’ll resist, that he’ll just want me to accept he had a bad day. But before I can prod him again, he nods and starts to speak. “I’ve known Isabelle since I was twelve years old, when I was just going into that awkward puberty phase.” He smiles at the recollection. “She was already beautiful, three years older than me, my brother’s girlfriend.”

  “Your brother? I didn’t know.”

  “That I had one?”

  I nod. I’m almost sure I’d asked about siblings during one of our talks in his bed, but maybe I hadn’t been listening closely enough or he’d been so vague that it simply hadn’t registered with me.

  “I don’t like to talk about him,” he says like that’s an understatement. “Gabe isn’t my favorite person in the world, but that’s not how Isabelle sees him. The way that she’d look at him, like he was the last man on earth—I was so damn jealous. And it just got worse the older I got, the more hormones that were pushing through my body. I fell in love with her, right under my brother’s nose.”

  I want to take all of this in stride, to let the fact that Luke was once completely in love with another woman slide right off of my shoulders. But it hurts in a way that I know I can’t stop or try to hide from.

  “Are you sure you want to hear all of this?” Luke asks, perceiving my trepidation.

  “Yes.” I allow a small smile.

  He lifts his hand and threads his fingers through mine. “I dated other girls, wanted to see what it was all about, hoped that one of them would take my mind off of Isabelle, but nobody held a candle to her back then. I was hopeless.

  “But she barely noticed me. She’d comment on how much I’d grown of course, how I was getting taller than my older brother, but there was never any interest in her words, just acknowledgements of fact. And yet I did everything I could to try to change that. My brother was an ass, took her for granted, and I started being the guy who’d sit with her while she cried, which was often. My brother would ditch her or cheat on her or let her down in what seemed every way possible.”

  “And you fell deeper in love with her,” I say, able to picture in my mind a much younger Luke doing what he could for a woman he was desperate to have love him back.

  “Absolutely. I would have done anything for her, practically did. Her family was conservative, hard-core religious, and when she got pregnant…” He pauses, his mind seeming to focus on the distant past, like he’s re-living the moment he found out.

  “Danielle?” I ask, piecing timelines together in my mind.

  He tilts his head in affirmation.

  “Your brother must have been pissed when he found out.” Maybe that’s where the bad blood really began.

  “Pissed?”

  “That you’d fallen in love with Isabelle, that the two of you were having a child together.” Of course Isabelle had eventually succumbed to Luke. How could she not?

  He grows silent, his eyes widening and then shadowing. “She wasn’t my child, Claudia… not biologically.”

  “Wait… Danielle isn’t—” It dawns on me just then. “Gabe is Danielle’s father.” It’s a shock, but in a summer filled with secrets, this truth settles quickly. “Does she know?”

  “She always has. That’s one secret I refused to keep from her, knowing how messy it could get. When Isabelle got pregnant, my brother just ran. He left for Europe to back-pack and paint and try to be the artist he’d always believed he should have been. He didn’t even ask Isabelle to go, didn’t even talk it out with her or give her options. She was devastated, and in that devastation I asked her to marry me.”

  “When you were… sixteen?
” Three years younger than I am today.

  “Just barely.” He laughs at the craziness of it. “But me stepping up basically prevented Isabelle’s parents from sending her off to a convent. Being nineteen and pregnant and unmarried was considered a fate worse than death for that family.”

  I can’t help but think I’m in a very similar position. My parents might not send me to a convent, but being pregnant with Luke’s child would bring them shame, a shame they’d want to prevent.

  “We had a church wedding, which was kind of ridiculous, me being so young, but I’d had a non-stop growth spurt which made me about the same height I am now and also fueled my muscles and beard growth. I could have passed for a guy in his early twenties if I needed to.” He stops talking, looks at me with confused interest. “You’re smiling.”

  “Am I?” It’s then I feel the grin. “I was picturing you in a tux. I’m sure you were incredibly handsome.” The image gives me a brief reprieve in an otherwise difficult discussion.

  “I could show you pictures,” he tells me, gripping my shoulder with his other hand. “Isabelle didn’t care about keeping the wedding album when she divorced me. Not that I was all that interested in keeping it by then either—it’s buried in storage at the moment.”

  “Another time,” I say, my belly pinching and my grin falling at the idea of seeing Isabelle—who I’m sure is beautiful—in a wedding dress. In my imagination, I’d only pictured Luke.

  “Of course. Should I go on?” He must know none of this is easy for me to hear.

  “Please do. I want to know.”

  He takes a moment, his eyes losing a bit of sparkle. “My parents were good at handing out money, so we had our own apartment while I finished out high school.” He laughs softly at that. “It seemed like that took forever, and then I was in college, and Dani was growing like a weed, and my brother, Gabe, was still nowhere to be found. Isabelle hadn’t been happy at first, but it seemed like she grew into us, and I thought maybe she’d even started to forget Gabe and love me.

  “And when she got pregnant after I graduated college and started up my own business, I thought…” His voice breaks then quiets.

  Pregnant.

  A baby?

  He’s hurting, and I move my body closer to his and grip his hand a little tighter. I want him to know that I’m not going anywhere. I’m desperately curious, but I don’t prod him to go on until he’s ready.

  “We had a child,” he says, clearing his throat that has obviously begun to clog with emotion. “Dani loved her little brother… Brandon.”

  “A boy?” Emotion begins to strangle me too at the idea of a little Luke. “So, Danielle has a younger brother? Where is—” I stop speaking as soon as the brief smile that had so obviously been reflecting his thoughts about his son fades.

  “He’s gone,” he says in a low, pained voice. “He died… in a car accident before he could even turn six.”

  I’m not prepared for how that hits me, and I pull my hand out of his and cover my mouth, then barely manage to say, “God, I’m so sorry,” before I break down in tears. I should be the one comforting Luke, but I lean against his chest and cry while he holds me, the sorrow I feel at Luke losing a son so strong that it’s almost as if he were my own.

  “I loved him so much.” Luke’s voice breaks. He’s crying too.

  And the two of us hold one another and let our sadness come through together.

  After some time, after the tears have stopped coming, I think maybe I’ll just lie here in Luke’s arms and consider I’d heard enough, that maybe Brandon, even dead, remains the connection to his ex-wife.

  But then Luke clears his throat and begins to speak again. “It took me years to get over the anger I felt about that… but maybe you never get over it. That’s part of why I was so angry yesterday… because Gabe showed up, like he always does when Isabelle is showing signs of improvement. He’d shown up right after she had Brandon, when I think she was really happy. She tried to stay away from him, but she didn’t have it in her. She’d go to him and then come back to me. I stuck it out with her for the kids, even though I knew I shouldn’t have. The night of the accident, she’d been good for over a month, hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol as far as I knew and had been staying away from Gabe. I trusted her, enough so that I left him alone with her while Danielle was at a sleep-over. I had work that needed to be done, work I couldn’t do from home.”

  He takes another deep breath, and I keep holding him. “It’s not your fault,” I say, understanding that he must blame himself for what happened to his son.

  “But I should have known how fragile she was, should have known I couldn’t just leave her. And then Gabe apparently called her that night, riled her up, and she started drinking. Brandon must have been so scared—she didn’t even buckle him in. She caused the accident, trying to get to Gabe… she killed him.”

  I feel his pain as if it were my own. “I… Luke, all I can say is how sorry I am for you, but if Isabelle caused your son’s death, why do you still go and see her? I’m not sure I could ever forgive what you have.” And then that fear returns, that even after everything she’d done, he found a way to love her again. This is why he’s forgiven her. This is why he continues to care for her.

  “Everyone has questioned it.” His voice steadies. “Even I have. I stayed with her through the funeral and the grieving, during days I couldn’t bare to look at her. I told myself—and I still do—it’s because she’s the only mother Dani has. It would be nice if she could be alive and healthy to see her daughter get married, maybe even have kids. It’s not just the alcohol—she’s lost her mind over the years. Sometimes she remembers the past, and other times it’s all a blur. She’ll forget about Brandon and then remember him all at once and go into hysterics. It’s worse if Gabe leaves her, if he goes on one of his own benders. She’s married to him now, you know?”

  “I didn’t know,” I say, though I’m not entirely surprised by that.

  “He’s not the only reason we got divorced, but he and losing Brandon are the major ones. He made so many promises to her, promised to finally take care of her, but of course he hasn’t. He doesn’t have it in him just like she doesn’t have it in her to love anyone else.”

  “So you pick up the pieces.” It’s all becoming so clear to me now, as is Luke’s selflessness.

  “I haven’t even tried to have a meaningful relationship with another woman because of it. It wouldn’t have been fair because of what I still have to give to Isabelle.” He looks at me with such sad, desperate eyes. “But with you, Claudia—I had to take the risk. I couldn’t let you go. Do you know how much I love you?”

  “I have a good idea,” I say, nearing tears again.

  “I never want to hurt you or scare you again. It was a reaction to Isabelle and Gabe, to Brandon’s name being brought up. They’re two sick and selfish people, and sometimes I can’t hold back just how fucking pissed off that makes me.”

  “I understand. All you wanted in the beginning was for her to love you… to be a family.” It’s such a simple thing to want but such a hard thing to get. Until I’d met Luke, I wasn’t sure I’d ever meet someone I could really feel that connection to.

  “It’s true,” he says, like the last twenty years had all been a cruel joke. “That’s all I wanted, but it all went to hell.”

  “Come on… let’s go upstairs,” I tell him, wanting to take his hurt away.

  It doesn’t take a lot of prodding to get him to follow me to his bedroom where I sit him on the bed, peel off his sneakers and socks, then order him to stand. I lovingly undress him, first unsnapping his cargo shorts and then undoing the buttons of his shirt, one by one, before I push off his shirt and revel in the beauty of him. My eyes note the strong chest, the rippled abs, the sandy blond hair that so perfectly covers his chest, not too much, not too little, just enough to remind me he’s a man and not a boy. My eyes can see all of this, but it’s not what is seen but is felt that is so much more
important to me. Luke is a good man, a kind man, a loving man. And I desperately want to bring him pleasure, to take his pain away, even if it’s just for now.

  I follow the trail of hair that takes me to the hem of his shorts, shorts I pull down, the outline of his hardness ready to explode out of his boxer briefs.

  “You don’t have to,” he tells me, caressing my shoulders, seeming to know just what I have in mind.

  “But I want to.” I look up into his beautiful hazel eyes and across that masculine face of his that can reflect his anger but also his tenderness.

  On my knees, I pull the boxers down, grip his shaft and take it into my mouth, the way I’d seen it done on videos, the way I’d imagined I might one day do for a man that I loved and cared about. He fills my mouth with his girth and a clean, salty taste. I love the feel of him between my lips, love the way he feels against my tongue. His moans of gratification tell me he loves it too and that I must be doing something right. And when those moans increase in volume and timing, I pull my lips away from him, then jump to my feet and press my body against his. Between our bodies, he comes, wrapping me up into him.

  With one final groan, he cups my face in his hands and kisses me, long and deep. “You’re so forgiving,” he tells me when he comes up for air.

  “You’re easy enough to forgive.”

  I slip out of my dress, my heels, out of my bra and panties, putting what’s been soiled into the hamper to be washed. We take a shower together, not for sex, but for cleaning, him lovingly and delicately washing my body, body wash lathered in his own hands while I do the same for him. And then we are clean and dry and in his bed, naked and holding one another with more love and reverence now that we’ve pushed beyond our first major fight.

  “I can talk to Rhonda,” he tells me quietly, “about your job.”

  With everything else that had been going on, I hadn’t really had the time to properly mourn being fired by a woman that I respected and losing a job that I had such a penchant for. “No, I think that would make it worse. I’ll try to talk to her in a couple of days after she’s had some time to think about what I told her about David.”