by Paula Cox
I pick up my cell from the bedside table and shoot a text to one of the guys: Bring me a club girl. Short, petite, blonde, big breasts. Lana, basically. Bring me Lana. A text comes back straightaway telling me it’ll be done. That’s one of the benefits of being the boss. Hell, one of the benefits of being a club member. Women on demand. I lean back and place my arms behind my head and watch the door, finding myself wishing that Lana would walk in wearing her overcoat and then pull at the belt holding it together. Then I’d watch it slide to the floor and she’d step forward in that sexy fuckin’ bikini, a bikini which even now, bullet wound tugging at my raw skin, gets me rock-hard.
There’s a dainty knock at the door, I shout, “Come in,” and the woman enters. She’s wearing a skimpy dress and her breasts are big and she is blonde but her eyes are a dull green instead of Lana’s brown-golden. And as she walks across the room, eyeing me with practiced lust, I realize that this is a mistake. I don’t want this; I don’t want an imitation.
“My mistake,” I say, when she’s almost at the bed.
She stops, tilting her head at me. “Huh?”
“My mistake. You can leave now.”
“I thought—”
“You can leave now.”
“Have I done something wrong?” she asks, voice pitched a little high.
“No,” I assure her. “I was wrong to ask for you. I’ll make sure you don’t get any hassle for leavin’ early. You have my word.”
She shrugs, and then leaves.
I shoot off a text: Changed my mind. Nothing to do with the girl.
Then I sit back and close my eyes, replaying over and over again that night of passion with Lana, the hottest night of my life. Even with my best friend’s death fresh of my mind, I can picture her, on her back, breasts barely contained by that bikini top bouncing up and down, moaning into my ear, the taste of her neck on my lips.
Fuck, I need her. Goddamn it. I need her bad.
Chapter Eleven
Lana
The coffee-making process is simple here at Twin Peaks. You spin around on the stool, take a paper cup, place it in the machine, press the appropriate button, and wait. This is an in-and-out coffee joint, a drive-by-and-look-at-some-breasts coffee joint, so nothing more intricate is required. There is no mixing espresso shots with steamed milk by hand or crafting patterns in the froth with chocolate sprinkles or expertly swirling towers of cream on top of hot chocolates. We don’t even have to bother folding napkins; there’s a bin of them right by the window if anyone wants one. All of which means that the actual contact with coffee grinds or whatever is kept to a minimum, only becoming necessary when the machine needs to be refilled. Literally anyone could do this job. Nothing like working as a real, black-pants white-T barista at all.
But I’ve always loved the smell of coffee, and even in this push-a-button-pass-a-cup variation, I’ve enjoyed the smells and sounds. So why the hell can’t I stand the smell of coffee all of a sudden? I sit on my stool as usual, breasts mushed into my bikini top as usual, legs on display as usual, waiting for a chance to chat with Kelly and thinking of Kade far back in my mind as usual, and yet every time I pass a customer a cup of coffee and the smell rises up into my nostrils I feel a sharp, intense wave of nausea. I keep pressing the back of my hand against my mouth and swallowing hard, but the smell I used to love is now making me want to spew up everything I had for dinner last night and the night before that and every night since I was born.
When there is a break in the flow of customers, I almost run to the foldout table, sitting right in the middle of the booth where the scent of recently-made coffee is weakest. Saliva fills my mouth, and even the sensation of that is sickening. I can imagine what the customers would make of that: “Yeah, I went to the Twin Peaks and it was pretty good, except there was this dribbling weirdo serving me.”
Terry joins me, pulling her chair around to my side of the table and sitting next to me. She places her large hand on my back and rubs softly as I hunch over and try to steady my breathing, three seconds in, hold, three seconds out. More than anything, I don’t want to be sick. I despise being sick. The idea of being sick makes me feel sick in itself.
“You haven’t been eating rotted bacon and washing it down with expired milk, have you?” she asks, with a playful grin.
“Very—funny.” I bite down when nausea hits me, churning my stomach. “Ha, ha,” I add, as sweat slides down my almost-naked body.
“It’s been a month and a half since the night with Kade,” Terry says softly, eyes trained on my face, watching for my reaction.
A month a half.
Goddamn.
I’ve been thinking about my new friendship with Terry, and Dad in prison, and Mom sinking ever deeper into the couch, and moving to Seattle, and my studies and Kade, Kade most of all, thinking and overthinking so much that it completely slipped my mind.
My period completely slipped my mind.
“Oh,” I mutter. “Oh shit.”
Terry is about to reply when a customer appears on her side of the booth. With a sigh, she stands up and goes over to the window. “Hey, beautiful. What can I get for you today?”
I reach across the table and pull the notepad toward me, take the pencil from the ring binding. Every movement provokes a pang of pain and sickness somewhere in my body, mainly deep in my stomach but sometimes strange places like my temples and the back of my head, the top of my neck. I’ve been feeling this way for about a week now and if I know Terry, and I think I do, she would’ve documented it if she’s spotted it. I open the notepad—I’ve been too sick to participate much in it lately—and there, sure enough, is a cartoon version of me with a belly five times the size of a normal pregnant person’s belly.
She returns from serving the customer and winces when she sees it. “I just doodled that,” she says. “I didn’t mean any offence, hon.”
“No, it’s fine.” I try and smile, but even smiling is difficult when you feel this ill. Slowly, with a shaky, sweaty hand, I write the caption: I feel like my belly is full of Kade. “What do you think?” I ask, sliding it to her.
She winces again. “Look at you. You can barely even sit up straight.” She watches me for a few moments, glances around the booth, and then mutters, “Fuck it.” She paces to me and hooks an arm underneath my armpit.
“Woah, what’re you doing?”
She hauls me up and marches me to the lockers, takes out my overcoat, and wraps it around my shoulders. “Put your arms in,” she commands, the voice of a mother who isn’t in the mood for any nonsense, the growl of a lioness somewhere in her voice.
I do as she says, mostly because I feel too ill to do anything else. Terry slips on a T-shirt and some shorts and tells me do get my comfortable shoes on. I do it, and then she hauls me up toward the big oval entrance, past the Twin Peaks Man, and toward the side of the road where her car is parked. She stops for a second to lock the door to the Twin Peaks, and then marches across the road with me.
“You know we shouldn’t be doing this,” I point out. “If David finds out—”
But then the sickness hits me again and I can’t tell about what will happen if David finds out, but judging by the way she looks at me, she knows already. She’s risking her job for me. Risking my job for me, too. But hell, I can’t sit in that booth for another eight hours and pretend that everything’s okay. Sooner or later I’m going to be sick. I’m going to be sick and maybe I’ll be sick right out the booth window onto a customer’s car. That wouldn’t be good for business, would it? So in a way we have to leave and get this seen to. I reflect to myself, as I sit in the passenger-side seat in Kelly’s car, that all I am doing is justifying.
Kelly screeches down the lane. On the way, we pass a couple of cars, most likely on their way to the Twin Peaks.
But Kelly pays them no mind. As I lay my head against the glass, thankful for its relative coolness, Kelly presses the pedal down and drives us straight to the nearest convenience store, a block of pu
blic bathrooms sitting next to it.
“Go and wait in the ladies’ bathroom,” she tells me. “I’ll go and get—get it.”
“It’s not Voldemort,” I say. “You can say pregnancy test.”
She laughs gruffly. “Yeah, I know. It’s just . . . damn. Go and wait for me.”
She climbs out the car and paces across the lot to the store. I climb out and walk to the bathrooms, each step feeling like a struggle now. Kade is in me. The cartoon wasn’t a joke. Kade may very well be inside of me. I tell myself to calm down; we don’t know anything yet. But we didn’t use a condom and now that I’m counting, I’m at least two weeks late. I haven’t slept with anybody else, so I think we know a hell of a lot even before Terry returns with the test.
The toilet is surprisingly clean for a public toilet, with minimal graffiti and only a couple of waterlogged bowls. I go to the cleanest one, close the seat, and sit down hunched over with my chest to my knees, dragging in breaths now rather than simply breathing, every moment picturing what it’d be like if I just vomited all over the floor. Don’t vomit, I tell myself. Don’t you dare. “Don’t you dare,” I mutter. My voice is shaky, weak. In a way, I hope I’m pregnant. It’s either that or I’ve somehow contracted malaria.
I jump up from the seat when Terry enters. Enters being a flattering word for the way she barges into the toilet holding a box of pregnancy tests—why the hell do they come in two packs?—in one of her hands, a liter bottle of water in the other.
“Overkill, maybe?” I say.
She shrugs. “The water will help you not puke. Or make it easier to puke. Whichever’s gonna happen, it’ll make it easier. Here.” She passes me the box of tests and then starts pacing, like she’s the one who might be about to have her life turned upside down.
“I think I can manage that,” I say, taking a sip of water. It’s incredibly cold, and eases some of the tightness in my throat.
Terry paces and I sip and pee. I pee on one stick, and then another, and then I make Kelly go buy two more, because I don’t like the answer I’m getting. But all four show the exact same answer, in different colors and patterns. There’s no question. We stare at each other in the mirror, and I’m sweaty and tired-looking, but Terry looks like she’s already picking out nursery furniture.
Positive, positive, positive, positive.
“Oh,” I mumble, taking a step backward.
Of course I am pregnant. You do not miss a period and suddenly find the scent of coffee sickening if you are not pregnant, and yet when I see the positives staring up at me it’s like I’ve just been slapped in the face. I lean down, bracing my hands on my knees, struggling to make the information really sink into my head.
“What,” I mutter.
Kelly puts her hand on my shoulder. “You’re pregnant, hon,” she says.
“What,” I repeat.
I am pregnant with Kade’s baby. With Kade’s baby. Kade the biker, the leader of the Tidal Knights, the man I had one passionate night with—his child is inside my body. Okay, the beginnings of a baby, at this point I know it’s just a clump of stuff, but. But.
Stating it like that, clearly, obviously, undisputedly, still does not make it real enough.
“What,” I say a third time.
Then sickness comes, angry sickness, not-messing-around sickness.
I dive for the toilet, throw myself to my knees and vomit violently into the bowl, belly twisting, sweat pouring down me in buckets.
And even as I sit here, puking up my insides, even as Kelly holds my dank hair from my eyes, even as my belly feels like there are a hundred jugs of bilge water in there sloshing around and forcing themselves up and out of me, even as my entire worldview shifts and my entire life plan is changed—even with all that, as I’m wiping vomit from my lips with a piece of toilet towel I say:
“I am keeping this child, Kelly.”
Chapter Twelve
Kade
I sit at my desk at the Tidal Knights clubhouse, in the town of Evergreen just outside Seattle, my mind on the past. Thrown back to the past with all the fear and the shit it brings along with it. First Dad, drunken Dad, stupid fuckin’ old man, moron who danced around the trailer with a loaded revolver and eventually paid the price for it. That I understand, I reflect as I sit here, surrounded by framed pictures of club members, Duster pulling stupid jackass faces in some of them. That, at least, I can get my head around. He was a drunken idiot; he died. Fine. But this fuckin’ Duster shit. Duster wasn’t an idiot. Duster wasn’t a drunk. Neither him nor I ever drank to the point of getting shitfaced. We knew the damage it could do. A few drinks here and there, but never the race-to-the-end drinking of the trailer scum. Duster, man . . .
He was my age but I think of him as a kid, always looking to me for advice, always looking to me to help him out. And when he needed help, the fuck did I do? I was too busy misjudging a man I was meant to be dealing with to know that everything was about to go wrong.
I lean back in the chair, ignoring the jolt of pain from my gunshot wound. The wound is the least of my concerns. Now the Italians think the Tidal Knights had something to do with Manuel’s stupid death. Now they’re sending some hitters into Evergreen. Damn, but I’d give a hell of a lot right now just to see Lana. I keep wondering why that girl has made such an impression on me, and then I remember her breasts and her open, pleasure-filled face and I don’t have to wonder anymore. But I can’t get too close—can never get too close. Close gets you hurt. Being close to Duster is what’s making me feel like my world has been hacked apart with a machete. Duster was not just my friend. Duster was my brother-in-arms in escaping the trailer park and Duster was my second-in-command. That runs deeper than friendship.
I groan, curse at myself.
Lana would make me forget, but then—
Getting too close is a double-edge blade. Get too close, I might be made to feel this way. Get too close, I might turn out to be not so different to Dad, might warp and change, might become a drunk, might one day take one drink too many, lose the control I’ve sustained my whole life. Maybe everyone’s just one misstep away from becoming their parents.
I bring my thumbs to my eyes and massage my closed eyelids, groaning again.
I’m grateful when there’s a knock on the office door. A distraction.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me, Boss.”
“Come in.”
Scud walks and reaches the desk in two quick strides. He reminds me of a giraffe. All long legs and a long neck and long arms. Face all sharp edges. Eyes set deep and always watching. But he’s efficient. No Duster, but he’s efficient.
“You wanted to see me?”
I nod at the chair opposite me, making sure I show no grief. Can’t show grief in front of the men, ’cause grief is weakness. And when you start showing weakness, people start thinking you are weak, and thoughts like that are soon followed by blood.
“I’m promoting you to VP,” I say, barely listening to my own words, my mind faraway with Duster and Lana. I find myself wishing the two of them could’ve met, my best friend and my—my what? My woman I fucked once upon a time back in Bremerton?
Scud knows better than to show any sign that he’s pleased at this. He nods quickly, as if just wanting to get the nod over with, and then watches me. Waiting.
“I want you to keep an eye out for Italians around Evergreen. Don’t do anything yet, unless they come at you, obviously. Then you can go to work. But just keep an eye out. Put some of your men on it. Do you know how this works, Scud?”
“Yeah, Boss. I can handle it.”
Handle. Duster. I know it’s the grief which puts this desire in me, but when he uses that word I want to leap across the table and hook him across the jaw. I push it down.
“Alright, good.” I nod at the door. “Get to work, then.”
“Yes, Boss.”
He leaves, and I go back to leaning back in my chair and groaning and thinking about all the things me and Duster us
ed to get up to back in the day. I think about the time we made a poorly-constructed human model from junkyard scrap and draped it in clothes stolen from clotheslines and left it outside a bully’s trailer and waited for him to come out and see who was stupid enough to just stand outside looking at him like that. And then we pounced on him, a boy twice our age, and even when his friend came running out from inside we stood tall.
I shake my head and rise to my feet. I can’t deal with this shit right now. I need a woman. A woman who’ll make me forget. I need a woman and that woman has to be Lana. Even the thought of any other woman just makes me bored. I don’t know why Lana has this hold on me and I don’t need to know. It’s enough to know that she does.