Running From Mercy

by Terra Little

  “I had . . . there were . . .” She struggled to grab hold to the right word and came up empty. “Things I needed to straighten out.”

  “Things,” he said slowly, looking confused.

  “Yes, things,” she snapped anxiously. “Things that had nothing to do with you. Why would I need to get away from you when what we had was one of the best things going on in my life?”

  “Why couldn’t we talk about whatever those things were and still find a way to be together, Pam?”

  “By the time I was ready to talk to you, you were married to Paris. There was nothing to say after that.”

  “What are these things you’re talking about? Tell me . . .”

  She put up her hands as if the action had the power to physically stop his words and sighed disgustedly. “Come on, Chad. Could we just . . . can we just . . . do this and get it over with?”

  “Just tell me this.” He came away from the armoire and towered over her. “Did you ever really love me like you said you did? Was I the only one who felt that way, or were you there too?”

  “What’s the point of answering that question now?”

  “The point,” he hissed, “is that I’ll finally know if the last fifteen years was worth what I gave up to have them.”

  She took her eyes from his and stared at his chest, suddenly mute.

  She watched him walk out of the room, leaving her surrounded by pink, and cursed under her breath. She told herself to let him go.

  Yet . . . “Chad . . .”

  She didn’t know which room he’d disappeared into. There were four other doors off the upstairs hallway and they were all closed. She opened the first door and saw that it was a bathroom. The second door led to Nikki’s room. A jumbled full-sized bed with clothes strewn across the mattress greeted her and she closed the door on the mess. The guest bedroom was quiet as a tomb and obviously hadn’t been used in quite some time. He wasn’t there.

  Pam turned the last doorknob and stepped into the room hesitantly. The color scheme was masculine, the bed huge and neatly made. Cologne bottles were lined up on the bureau, and a wallet and spare change were tossed carelessly next to them. Chad sat on the bed, watching her take it all in.

  “What is this?” Then it began to make sense. A completely pink room, containing all of Paris’s things and none of Chad’s. She hadn’t stopped to wonder where his clothes were while she was milling through Paris’s. Hadn’t stopped to question the lack of male presence in the space down the hall. Shocked, she looked at Chad as her mouth worked to form words that wouldn’t come.

  “My room,” he said, remembering another room, in another time and place. The look on her face told him that she was fighting it and him, trying to pull her eyes away from his but unable to do it. She was remembering too.

  The curtains were pulled closed, the lights were off, and the bed was squeaking. It wasn’t the rhythmic sound sometimes heard coming from grown folks’ rooms after dark, so you knew they were inside doing something that they knew how to do, but rather the frantic dip and sway of bedsprings unused to the vigorous activity being forced upon them.

  Pam was pressed to the mattress beneath Chad’s clumsy weight. He was trying to hold his weight off of her and coax her panties down at the same time, and she was trying to see what he was doing in the darkness. Their foreheads collided and they both gasped, then giggled.

  “Leave my panties alone. Just ’cause you always want your thing hanging out don’t mean mine has to be,” she whispered.

  Months ago they had progressed past the heavy petting stage to a point where Chad now pulled out his thing for her to touch as they kissed. A few times she had let him touch her inside her panties, but she’d never taken them all the way off. That was going too far.

  “What do you have against my thing?” He shifted his weight to one side and propped his head on his hand, staring down into her face. “I thought you said you liked it?” He took her hand and brought it down to where his thing lived, thick and hard, a bead of moisture sitting on the tip.

  “I do like it. I just don’t want it anywhere near my thing. That’s how trouble starts. You heard about Iris Taylor, didn’t you?”

  Iris was a freshman, just like Pam was, and pregnant, like Pam didn’t want to be. Letting Chad put his mouth on her breasts wouldn’t make her pregnant. Letting him touch her down there and touching him the same way wouldn’t make her pregnant. But if his thing got near her thing, there was no telling what might happen.

  “Come on, Pam,” he pleaded, easing his tongue in her mouth as his hand slipped inside her panties. She gasped as his fingers raked through the mound of coarse hair there, then moved lower, where she was wet. A while back he had discovered the wonders of her clitoris and now he knew what to do to make her forget to think. “Ain’t nobody gonna know. I won’t even put it in. You tell Nate or Paris you was coming here?”

  “No, did you?”

  His finger slid inside her and her thighs parted all by themselves. Her hips rocked against the palm of his hand, searching for something she couldn’t name. He’d made her come like that before, and she wanted to experience the feeling again.

  “No, so you know I ain’t gone tell nobody nothing else. You can’t get pregnant if I don’t put it in.”

  “I might,” she said, still not entirely convinced of the gospel as he told it. What did boys know?

  “You won’t. Trust me.”

  She lifted her butt and let him slide her panties down and off. Then he climbed off the bed long enough to quickly step out of his pants and his Fruit of the Looms. He settled himself on top of her in the middle of the bed and braced himself on his hands. She was warm and wet and Chad sighed as he coaxed her thing into allowing his thing to lay within its soft folds. He rocked against her and watched her face, transfixed by what he saw there.

  Pam rocked with him and came minutes later. It was like having his fingers touch her down there, only better. She didn’t know what she was feeling was called an orgasm, she just knew that whatever it was, was indescribable. Her legs shook, her mouth fell open, and her fingers tightened around Chad’s waist. During all the friction, Chad entered her and once there, he stayed. It was an accident, and he knew he should’ve immediately fixed the mistake, but he couldn’t believe how good it felt to be inside Pam.

  Pam’s eyes flew open. “Get out,” she hissed urgently, pushing at his chest. “You have to get out.”

  “It feels good, Pam.” Never in his wildest dreams had he thought it would feel this good. His hips rotated automatically, pushing forward though his mind screamed for him to stop. “Shit, it feels good. You’re squeezing me.”

  All Pam felt was pain. Every time his hips pushed forward a sound of distress filled the room. He wasn’t stopping and she scared herself by not really wanting him to. He came fully into her and sank down to rest his damp forehead against hers.

  “You okay? Does it hurt real bad?”

  “At first it was bad, but it’s not too bad now. We have to stop though, Chad. What if you get me pregnant?”

  “I won’t, Pam. I promise I won’t. Shit . . . you feel that?” The expression on her face said she didn’t, so he put his lips on hers and began kissing her deeply as he rocked against her, hoping to give her some of the pleasure he felt.

  One kiss melted into another, until they were kissing with an intensity and depth new to both of them. Now that he had discovered the feel of her, he had no intention of rushing through what they were doing. He rose and pulled his T-shirt over his head, then helped Pam shrug out of her top. When they were both completely naked, he went back up on his hands and made love to her for the first time.

  The memory still had Pam in its grip days after Chad subtly reminded her of its existence. She carried it around with her everywhere she went and it tipped up on her at the oddest moments, stealing her breath and snatching her train of thought from the present to the past. She was having lunch with Nikki when it crept into her consciousness yet a
gain, possibly for the thousandth time. Nikki couldn’t help but notice the change almost as soon as it happened.

  “Aunt Pam?”

  Nikki stared across the table curiously, wondering at the faraway look in her aunt’s eyes. A few minutes ago, she’d frozen right in the middle of spooning up shrimp bisque and now she sat there with one hand wrapped around the stem of her spoon and the other pressed to her chest, as if she had been caught off guard by something only she could see. She wondered if her aunt was having some sort of allergic reaction that she didn’t know enough to recognize.

  “Aunt Pam,” she repeated with more force. Pam still didn’t respond and she reached over and squeezed her shoulder gently. Please don’t let her start choking, Nikki prayed. She threw an appraising look around the dining room of the B&B, hoping to catch someone’s eye, but the other diners were caught up in their own meals and for once, not staring at Pam.

  Pam felt the contact on her shoulder and shook herself out of the past with a low moan. She looked at Nikki and let a smile curve her lips, though it was the last thing she felt like doing. The concerned expression on Nikki’s face turned the phony smile into a genuine one in seconds.

  “Stop looking like that. I’m fine, I promise.” She spooned up more bisque to prove her point.

  “Where did you go?”

  Pam was seriously considering the best way to answer the question and still be as truthful as possible. But, she still noticed Nikki’s hand inching across the tablecloth toward the glass of chardonnay she’d ordered for herself. She’d made the mistake of letting her have a small sip earlier, and now Nikki seemed to be taken with the light, crisp wine. She angled a look toward the offending hand. “Don’t even think about it. I’m sending you home with alcohol on your breath as it is. Any more and Chad will have me arrested. Plus, you’re underage.” On her way to moving the glass out of Nikki’s reach, she paused to take a sip. “I was just thinking about when your mom and I were kids. Not too much younger than you. We had some good times.”

  “You miss Mom a lot, don’t you?” Pam held out her hands and Nikki immediately placed hers inside them. She gave her aunt’s hands a squeeze and sighed as she felt a squeeze in return.

  “I miss her like I would miss an arm or a leg and I know you do, too. She’ll always be with us though.”

  “How? Everything she left behind is gone. It’s like her presence is being erased or something.”

  “You weren’t ready for her things to be put away?”

  “I mean, I know it had to be done, but I would’ve been happy to leave her room like it was for the next twenty years. It’s sick to want to do that, isn’t it?” She searched Pam’s face intently.

  “It’s not sick to feel that way.” A sneaky smile crept across Pam’s face. “But if you had actually done that, I would’ve had to put a sign up in the yard, advertising a vacancy at the Bates Motel and then start calling you Norman.”

  “Aunt Pam!” Nikki gasped, and then burst out laughing. She took her hands away from Pam’s to cover her mouth.

  They laughed together for a moment and then Pam was serious again. “She’s still with us, Nikki, just not physically. I don’t know about you, but I’ll never forget the way she sounded when she laughed or how she looked when she was happy about something.”

  “She was beautiful,” Nikki said softly.

  “I guess I can take that as a compliment, huh?” Pam desperately wanted to lighten the mood. If they kept going like this she’d be crying in her food in no time.

  “You can if you want to, but you and Mom kind of looked different to me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Nikki noticed the look on Pam’s face and had laughed again. “I didn’t mean it like that, Aunt Pam. You’re beautiful, too. I just meant that if you looked really closely, you could see different things about you and Mom.”

  “We were alike in a lot of ways, too. After you came along it was like we suddenly had a third twin, if that makes any sense. You got a lot of our mannerisms and personality traits. It was a little scary.”

  “Really?” She was pleased by the thought of having noticeable similarities to her mom and her glamorous aunt.

  “Really. Is that your mother’s charm bracelet I see on your wrist?” Pam reached across the table and fingered the delicate silver bracelet.

  “Yeah, I got it out of her jewelry box. She never let me wear it when I was little because she always thought I’d break it or lose it. I won’t lose it now, though.”

  “She’d want you to have it.”

  “You still wear yours?”

  “Since I was sixteen.” Pam pulled up her sleeve and held out her arm to show that she was wearing an identical bracelet.

  Nikki noticed something different about Pam’s bracelet right away. “Where’s the charm I like, the one with the little hearts next to each other and the diamond in between?” It was her favorite.

  Pam chose her words carefully, spoke slowly. “When your mom died, she took part of my heart with her, so I buried the charm with her.”

  “Oh . . . Aunt Pam. You want me to cry, don’t you? Why only part of your heart?”

  “Because you have the other part,” Pam said simply.

  Tears filled Nikki’s eyes and she rushed to wipe them away. “I love you, but please don’t say things like that. You’ll make my mascara start running.”

  “You’re wearing mascara now? When did this happen?”

  “I’m seventeen now,” Nikki said as if it should be obvious that she was now a woman. She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, thinking that a lecture was coming.

  Pam caught her breath. “I know exactly how old you are, Nikki. Right down to the minute. Oh, before I forget, I have something for you.” She reached under the table and pulled her Gucci tote in her lap. “And no, it’s not the bag,” she said with a smile. She lifted Paris’s diary out and handed it across the table.

  “What is it?” Nikki stared at the floral-print cover curiously.

  “Your mom’s diary. I know she’d want you to have it, and I’m hoping it’ll help you feel close to her when you need to.”

  Several minutes passed before Nikki spoke again. She spent the time staring at the book, stroking the cloth cover and fighting back tears. She swallowed and looked at Pam. “You should have this, Aunt Pam. I know how close you and Mom were. You’ll need something to help you feel close to her, too.”

  “I have other things to help me do that. Plus, I have thirty-five years of the best memories saved up. You didn’t get to have that, so you should have this. Keep it safe for me, okay?”

  “I will. I promise I will.”

  “Here.” Pam held the wineglass out to Nikki. “One more sip. You look like you need it more than I do.”

  Chad chose that moment to walk into the dining room. He hung back long enough to see his daughter take one, then two sips of wine, then he approached the table like he was outraged.

  “First, staying out all times of the night and now drinking? Nikki, I can’t believe this. I thought I taught you better?”

  Nikki’s head shot up in alarm. She was poised to offer every flimsy excuse she could think of. Then she saw the playful gleam in her dad’s eyes. She knew when to take him seriously and when he was teasing her. “It was only one sip, dad, and Aunt Pam let me have it.”

  Pam’s mouth dropped open. “Oh, now see that was just wrong. If he was the police I’d be going to jail right about now, thank you very much. In my day kids knew how to keep a secret.”

  “They sure did,” Chad seconded, catching Pam’s eye. “What is the world coming to?”

  Pam snatched her eyes from his and put them back on Nikki, where they were safe. “Well, since we’re telling on each other. Nikki went over her limit on your charge card today, Chad.” The gasp Nikki uttered was comical and Pam smiled wickedly. “By a hundred dollars, too.”

  Nikki dropped her head in her hand as if to say, no she didn’t just go there. “Aunt Pam let me driv
e ninety miles an hour on the interstate.”

  Pam nodded that everything was fine. She pushed her bowl away and downed the rest of her wine. “You got me there, Nikki. I’m so ashamed about that, it almost makes me forget I paid the three speeding tickets you already had and got them changed to non-moving violations, so your dad would never find out that you drive like a bat out of hell with or without me. God, I’m so absentminded.” She smacked her forehead dramatically.

  This time Nikki’s shocked gasp stole her breath and made her cough. Chad took it upon himself to pat her on her back none too gently. “Three tickets?” he asked softly. Too softly.

  Pam recognized the look and the tone instantly. A little clean up was definitely in order. “Actually, Chad, it was more like one ticket. Something about parking too close to a fire hydrant, I think.”

  “Thanks a lot, Aunt Pam. You probably just got me grounded.”

  “No probably to it,” Chad told her. He glanced at the shopping bags stacked next to her chair. “Why don’t you take your bags out to the car and wait for me? I’ll be out in a minute. I want to yell at your aunt a little bit.”

  Pam and Nikki got to their feet slowly, staring at each other across the table. Are we in trouble, Nikki’s eyes asked? Hell if I know, Pam’s responded. Pam shrugged and leaned in to kiss Nikki’s lips. While she was close enough, she whispered to her that she’d work on Chad and for Nikki not to worry.

  “I’ll see you later,” she said, hefting her bag and squinting meaningfully at Nikki.

  Chad watched Nikki until she was out of sight, then he turned on Pam. “You paid her tickets?” He was incredulous.

  “Only one,” she lied smoothly. “And she only drove for a split second. You know she’s exaggerating about the speed, right?” She waved a hand distractedly, on purpose. “And like, one sip of wine, just to take the edge off. I gave her Paris’s diary and we were both worked up and . . .”

  He cut in. “Pam?”

  “What?”

  “Are these your bags?” He pointed to the two bags she had as a result of her shopping excursion to Atlanta.