It was just a table, not much to it except that I’d oxidized and stained the wood and added some metal detailing on the legs and corners. I’d built one for our upstairs neighbor, and his girlfriend’s mom wanted one, too. The money wasn’t much but every little bit helped and I had the time. I glanced over my shoulder and wished it was more. Something worth looking at.
“It’s so good,” she said. “I can’t believe you can do all that. I knew you could make things but not that you were . . . creative.”
As I went to speak, I realized I’d been holding my breath. “I’m good with my hands, that’s all.”
Her cheeks went pinker as she tucked some hair behind her ear. “Oh. Y-yes. I . . .”
I had to look away. She was way too cute when she was flustered. “Your friends left you,” I pointed out.
“They’ll be back.”
A car pulled up behind ours, and Gary craned his neck over the top of the truck. “I think this is them. I’ll go see.”
Lake set her bike on the sidewalk and came to stand right by me. The threads of her cut-off shorts drifted against my jeans. She lifted her hair off her neck and fanned herself, showing me the delicate curves of her shoulders. She was eighteen. Fuck. Never had there been a greater test of my will.
“You’re always saying at dinner how you’re looking for work. Why don’t you just make things?” she asked.
I blinked slowly, trying to pull myself from the trance her nearness always put me in. “What kinds of things?” I asked, hearing the rasp in my voice.
She reached behind me. I could’ve stared at her all day, except that she got too close, her cheek right by my face, smelling like lemon and Coppertone. I could almost convince myself I detected watermelon on her lips. I turned to watch her small hand glide along the table’s edge.
“These things,” she said. “The wood is so cool. Smooth.”
Her short, bare nails were pale on her tan fingers. I’d never seen her bite them except her thumb sometimes when she was nervous. She had hangnails and golden hair on her knuckles and more freckles.
“Don’t you normally work today?” I asked, changing the subject for my own sanity.
She chewed her bottom lip, bringing her hand back to her side. “I ditched. Val says you don’t work on your birthday.”
If it were anyone else, I would’ve laughed and told them to suck it up. Lake not working on her birthday made me happy, though. Part of me didn’t even like the idea of her working at all. She should just have fun, shop with her friends, ride bikes along the beach, at least until college started. “So you’re getting into trouble instead.”
She smiled a little. “What trouble? I’m just talking to you.”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe you’re the one getting into trouble,” she said.
I tried to enjoy the way she blushed as she flirted with me. The way the color of her eyes deepened. But a thought nagged the back of mind. Fun as it sounded, I could never get into trouble with her. Not even little things, like sneaking in somewhere we shouldn’t be or getting caught drinking on the beach or taking off for a weekend in Vegas. All things she should be able to do. Being on parole meant playing by the rules and staying within state lines. I couldn’t go far away with her. I couldn’t soar.
Which would mean she couldn’t, either.
“Tiffany mentioned that you applied somewhere other than USC,” I said.
“Oh. Yeah. It’s supposed to be a secret so my dad doesn’t find out.”
Pissed me off how she wouldn’t even entertain other options because of her dad. He should’ve been encouraging her to look at lots of school for a decision as big as this, but instead he’d just packed on more and more pressure. “So where is it, this mysterious school?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m a Trojan now, that’s that.”
“Yeah? You never even considered this other place?”
“Why should I?” Her blue eyes shimmered like the ocean’s surface on a sunny day. “Everything I want is here.”
The look on her face said everything her words couldn’t. I was what she wanted. I was here. It should’ve made me happy, but instead, it sobered me. The last thing I wanted was for her to make such huge decisions based on me. That made me no better than her dad. If I had anything to do with her choice to stay, especially after the way she’d broken down at the restaurant, it told me all I needed to know—she might’ve been eighteen, but she still wasn’t making decisions as a grownup.
Lake reached around me to touch my hip, and my back went rigid. “What’re you doing?” I asked.
“Trying to see what you’re reading.” She stuck her tongue between her teeth, patting around my back pocket.
“Other side,” I said.
She couldn’t reach that far, so she had to go around my knees. She slipped a paperback from my back pocket and read the title. “‘Tropic of Cancer.’”
“Not going to find that on your reading list,” I said.
“Why not?”
“It’s, uh . . . not suitable for high schoolers.”
She bent back the flimsy cover with her thumb and flipped through the pages. After a few seconds, she looked up, scanning my face. “You’re still having nightmares.”
I tensed instinctively. Images I fought during the daytime flashed across my mind. Me, locked in a six-by-nine cell for eternity. Lake being pulled into the black water. Madison alone in a room with my father. Lake alone with my father. Sometimes I was in the room, too, stuck in a chair I couldn’t get up from.
I could never give Lake those images. “No, not really,” I said.
“Well, then something’s keeping you up at night. You have these . . .” She reached up to touch my face. “Dark circles . . .”
When I noticed Lake’s friends wheeling back toward us, I pulled my head away, and Lake dropped her hand. Val skated in the middle, eating a frozen banana and flanked by the other two. She stuck a foot on the sidewalk and gracefully flipped up her board. Like little green magnets, her eyes went directly to the cigarette behind my ear. “Can I bum one?” she asked me.
“No.”
“I’ll pay you for it. For a pack, even.” With hardly a look, she tossed her banana into a trashcan a few feet away. “I’m not old enough to buy them yet.”
“Don’t bother,” Lake said, her lips curling into a mischievous smile. “He’ll never give in.”
I narrowed my eyes at her ribbing. “Excuse me for trying to keep you girls pure.”
“What’s that?” Val asked, taking the book from Lake.
“It’s Manning’s.”
Val flipped it over, reading the back cover. “Holy contributing to the delinquency of minors!”
My chest rumbled with an unexpected laugh. “Did you just quote Robin from the Batman series?”
“Yes, and you get points for noticing. It says this book was originally banned in the U.S. for being obscene. Is it like a sex book?”
The other girls went wide eyed. “No,” I said, “but it’s pretty graphic.”
“How?” Lake asked.
To hell with it. She was eighteen now. “Lots of drinking, women, prostitution, and, ah, misogynistic language. Miller supposedly took a lot of it from real life.”
“Ew.” That was the gawker. She leaned over Val’s shoulder. “Henry Miller. Remind me not to read any of his books.”
“How come?” I asked.
She looked stunned I’d spoken to her. In her stupor, she fumbled her words. “Because he—well, prostitution? That’s gross. His life was so obscene that the book was banned?” she asked. “Why would I, you know, support that kind of man?”
That kind of man. Being around Lake always made me feel like that kind of man, like I might lose control and corrupt her at any turn.
“You have a point, Mona,” Val said, “but what do you think, Lake?” Val suddenly looked interested in my reaction. I didn’t quite understand their dynamic, Lake and Val. It felt a little too f
amiliar, or, familial.
“I . . . I think I disagree,” Lake said.
“Why?” Val asked.
I watched the two of them like a tennis game. Lake furrowed her brows at the gawker. “What does his personal life have to do with his work? A good book is a good book.”
“But are you then condoning his bad behavior by supporting his work?” Val asked. “If he’s demeaning to women, like Manning said, how does that make you feel as a woman?”
“It doesn’t bother me,” Lake said. “I don’t think it lessens his contribution to the literary world.”
Val seemed to have come to that conclusion on her own, but she was pushing Lake to have an opinion. Maybe she wasn’t so bad.
Lake looked to me, as if for approval. “I feel the same,” I said. “An author’s morals, or the morality of the characters for that matter, isn’t a reason not to appreciate a well-told story.”
Lake’s shoulders pulled back. “Yeah. That’s what I was trying to say.”
“You said it,” Val told her with a smile. “Anyway, we should get going.”
“Already?” Lake asked, a little breathlessly, turning to me as if I were the one breaking up the party. “Can’t you . . . we . . .”
“Go on,” I said. “Have fun.”
Val kicked up her skateboard, and the other girls got their bikes. “We still have lots of birthday festivities to partake in,” Val called, rolling away.
I stepped down from the truck, took Lake’s bike in my hand by the frame, and carried it back to the sidewalk. I flipped out the kickstand and squatted to reset the chain.
Lake came and stood on the opposite side, putting me face to face with the frayed ends of her denim shorts, her bony knees.
I lowered my eyes back to the chain. It was a quick fix, but it took me longer than it should, her proximity distracting me. “Try that,” I said when it was secure.
She put one leg over the seat and rolled the pedals as far as they’d go with the kickstand up. “I think it’s good.”
I stared at some dried blood on the inside of her ankle. She must’ve scraped it when her foot slipped. I wet my thumb and rubbed it away, leaving a faint grease smudge on her skin in the likeness of a bruise. Goosebumps rose on her calves. It was all I could do not to slide my hand up and pull the soft-looking inside of her knee to my mouth.
I kept her ankle in my hand but didn’t look at her. If half the ache I felt in my chest showed on my face, I couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t notice. And she couldn’t notice. She needed to go on with her day, with her life, and not worry about leaving me behind.
My eyes caught on an anklet on her other leg—a brown, orange, and green wax band. The bracelet she’d made at camp, then given me to help me quit smoking. The one the guards had taken away with all my other personal effects. My bracelet.
“I’m keeping it for you,” she said. “For when you’re ready to quit again.”
She didn’t know I was in too deep to quit. Maybe there’d been a time when I could have, but smoking was a part of me now, an organ that growled when it wasn’t fed on schedule. As I stood, she followed me with her eyes, tilting back her head when I hit my full height. Her lips were dry and parted as if she’d forgotten to do anything but watch me. I forgot everything, too, except what was right in front of me. The elegant slope of her freckled nose that ended in a cute but sharp button. The hidden dimple that would appear with even a hint of a smile. That cobalt blue that ate her pupils in the direct sun. She bit her lip, and I imagined reaching up and taking that pout for myself. Between my fingers, in my mouth, my tongue tracing the lines of her lips to each corner and back. My cock throbbing as I opened her up with my fingers until she was gaping and gasping and waiting for the one thing I’d always wanted to give her.
One minute she was my innocent little girl, and overnight she started to change. You don’t know what it’s like to watch a girl become a woman.
Bile rose up my throat with my dad’s disgusting words, his self-righteous justification for the pain he’d inflicted.
I looked from Lake’s mouth to her eyes. Hope radiated from her, some kind of sweet, gentle plea for me to see her while my mind had gone straight to the gutter. She’d been eighteen less than a day. I was no better than my dad. I knew it like I knew my own hands—if I gave in, I would ruin her and everything I loved and cherished about her.
I took the cigarette from behind my ear. Knowing it was my way of telling her to go, Lake’s eyes darkened with hurt. My entire self responded, the need to take her pain away primal and strong.
Footsteps shuffled up behind us. “Wasn’t them,” Gary said. “How much longer you want to wait?”
The spell between Lake and me broke. “Happy birthday,” I told her.
She swallowed, looking like she wanted to speak, but she just got on her bike. With a final glance at me from under her lashes, she left.
I returned to the bed of the truck to wait with Gary.
“Did I tell you Lydia thinks she’s moving in with me?” he asked.
I raised my eyebrows at him. “Why’s she think that?”
“Because I didn’t say no.”
“Huh. Congrats.” I leaned my elbows on my thighs and watched the water. “Tiffany and I just had a similar conversation.”
“How’d that go?”
“She brought up marriage already, man. You were right.”
“I’m not surprised.” He raised his sunglasses, appreciating a barreling surfer with a low-whistle. “What’d you say?”
“I . . . I didn’t say anything.” I opened my hands. “My parents had this bad marriage, and I never really thought I’d want that.”
“What was bad about it?”
“They fought all the time. He was a piece of shit, but she’d forgive him, and then it would start all over.”
“From what I’ve seen, it’s the opposite for you and Tiffany. Maybe this is your chance to break the cycle.”
I looked back at him. “What cycle?”
“Remember what I said about parents passing on their bad habits?” He pulled his feet up onto the tailgate to sit cross-legged. “Let me ask you something. Are you a piece of shit?”
I laughed a little, but he didn’t. Was I? At times, I’d thought so. Like now, for instance—I wasn’t sure if I loved Tiffany, but here I was, talking about marrying her. Maybe I owed it to her to walk away, knowing I could never love her completely, but I’d be good to her. I’d step up to the plate and eventually, I’d be able to take care of her. I’d find a way to love her as much as I was capable. Did that make me a piece of shit? “Sometimes I’m not sure.”
“The answer to that was supposed to be no. And do you think Tiffany would let you get away with treating her like shit? You think she’d turn around and forgive you just like that?”
I had to smile. Based on the attitude I’d seen Tiffany give her dad, she wouldn’t put up with that from a partner. “More like she’d remind me how many other men were lined up to treat her well.”
He chuckled. “Exactly. You know how I felt in the beginning. I didn’t understand your interest in her. But I think you saw something the rest of us didn’t, and what’s more . . . now I see it. You brought that out in her.”
Just like my conversation with Tiffany last month, I got a sense of pride thinking I’d helped her. I’d improved her life. I’d done good.
There were things I wanted from the depths of my soul, but I understood how loving something too much could do irreparable damage. Because whether I wanted to or not, I did love Lake. Like my cigarette craving, it lived in me. I couldn’t cut that cancer out, couldn’t quit this addiction. It would’ve been easier to swim across the ocean.
Since the age of fifteen, I’d wanted to put on a uniform and stand up for those who couldn’t for themselves the way Henry had for me. I’d lost my family, so instead, I’d decided to lead a fulfilling life protecting other people. I thought that opportunity had been taken away with my felony charg
e, but perhaps it hadn’t. Maybe I could still make a difference, and maybe there was a way I could have both things.
I could help the ones I loved, and I could have a family of my own.
18
Manning
Tiffany stood in Gary’s doorway with her purse at her side. It must’ve looked to her as though I was living the life. At four in the afternoon, Gary and I were spread out in the living room, my arms and legs hanging off the couch, Gary slumped in a neon yellow beanbag while he strummed a guitar. On the coffee table sat a bong, an open pizza box, and a dozen empty beer bottles. Gary had muted the TV on The Ren & Stimpy Show, and Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill had been on repeat for two hours.
Tiffany crossed her arms and surveyed the scene. “So this is what you’ve been doing all day?” she asked. “Getting high and eating pizza?”
“I’m not high,” I said. “But I am eating pizza.”
Gary giggled. “I don’t know why I’m laughing,” he said. “He really didn’t smoke.”
“We made another sale today,” I told her. After moving our coffee table into its new owner’s house this afternoon, a neighbor of his had asked for an armoire. I hadn’t been sure what the hell that was, but I’d said yes right away. I needed the money. “We’ve been working on it all afternoon.”
“Oh.”
“Can I get you something to drink, Tiff?” Gary asked.
“You’ve been smoking for an hour straight,” I told him. “I don’t think you could move if you tried.”
It was clear Gary wasn’t planning on doing even that. I got up from the couch. “Thanks for coming to get me.”
She shifted feet. “Sure. Can I see the new piece?”
“Not much to see, but sure.” I took Tiffany to Gary’s small backyard. The tarp he and I had laid out covered the whole patch of grass. “Don’t step on this,” I said, bending over to fold back the corners. “There are nails and shit.”
She looked over the large box we’d moved against the fence. “You already did all that?”
“It wasn’t too hard. The devil’s in the details.” I winked at her, piling wood off to one side of the lawn. When she didn’t smile, I asked, “How was work?”
Something in the Way: A Forbidden Love Saga: The Complete Collection Page 46