The Great Escape

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  She lay on her side, the naked line of her shoulder, waist, and hip forming a golden curve, her dragon tattoo alien on the smooth column of her neck. Her small nose, mercifully free of its nostril ring, wrinkled in disdain. “Don’t ever do that again.”

  He touched her bottom lip, swollen from his kisses. “Midnight tomorrow?”

  “If I don’t have anything better to do.”

  “I hate it when a woman plays hard to get.”

  She traced a vein that ran down his arm. “Really I just want your food stash. If I have to put out to get to your Cheetos, so what?”

  “A pragmatist.”

  “Stop using big words. It depresses me.” She bent her arm beneath her head, revealing the rosy side of her breast where his beard had abraded her skin. He wouldn’t hurt her for anything, but his dark side felt a primitive satisfaction in seeing the mark he’d left on her.

  Her question shocked him out of his lethargy. “Where did the condoms come from?”

  He should have known she’d latch onto that. “My pocket. You want some more chips?”

  “You carry condoms around?”

  “Not always. Sometimes. Who needs an STD, right?”

  She pulled on one of her ratty pink dreadlocks. “So, you carry them in case you and Temple decide to add a little variety to your workouts?”

  He hit her full force with his badass sneer, hoping to shut her up. “That’s right.”

  “Bull. The two of you would eat nails before you’d screw each other.”

  “Nice talk.”

  She pinned him with those shrewd eyes. “You didn’t know I was coming down here tonight, yet you were ready for action. That leads me to believe that you actually do carry those things around.”

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but you didn’t say why.”

  Shit. He gave up. “Because you drive me out of my mind, that’s why. I never know what the hell you’re going to do next. Or what I’m going to do. Now shut up about it.”

  She smiled, lifted her arm, and tugged on a couple of his pain-in-the-ass curls, her expression tender enough to bring him back to cold reality. He was an ex-cop. She was the president’s daughter. He was scrap metal. She was pure gold. Beyond all that, he had a dead zone a mile wide inside him, while she bubbled with life. “Lucy …”

  “Oh lord …” She rolled her eyes and flopped to her back. “Here we go. The speech.” She deepened her voice in exaggerated imitation of him. “Before this goes any further, Lucy, I need to make sure you don’t get the wrong idea. I’m a cowboy, wild and free. No little filly can ever tame a man like me.” She sneered. “As if I’d want to.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say.” It was exactly what he’d intended to say—not so sarcastically, but she had the general idea.

  “Let’s get this straight, Patrick.” The tip of her finger poked his bicep. “I may be screwed up about my future right now, but I know it includes kids. That rules you out, so all the complications your paranoia is conjuring up are a waste of your limited brain power. You’re for entertainment, Mr. Shade. The missing ingredient in my lost summer. And here’s what you need to understand.” She flicked his chest. “When you cease to pleasure me, I’ll find somebody who can. Clear?”

  “Pleasure you?”

  “I like the sound of it.” Her eyes grew serious. “This is about sex. Nothing else. You’d better be clear about that, or this stops right now.”

  “Me?!” It was exactly what he wanted to hear—what he needed her to know—but he didn’t like her attitude. What had happened to the well-bred runaway bride he’d picked up? “When it comes to you, nothing can just be about sex,” he said.

  “That’s what you think. I want sex. The dirtier, the better.” Her eyes landed on his crotch. “Got any more licorice?”

  He should have flipped her to her back right then and given it to her, but her flippancy irritated him. “I’m tired,” he heard himself say, barely believing those words had come out of his mouth.

  “Figures,” she retorted. “You’re a lot older than me.”

  “Not a lot.” He sounded like a petulant asshole, but before he could decide what he wanted to do about that, she was sliding out of the berth, her bare skin squeaking against the vinyl.

  “Thirty-six and going downhill,” she chirped. “That’s okay. I’ve changed my mind.”

  He didn’t want her to change her mind, but she was already humming a happy little tune and pulling on what passed for her clothes. First, she tugged that skimpy white top over her head. The hem caught on one rosy nipple, hung there for a moment, then sprang free. Next, she took way too much time wiggling into the bottoms. When she reached the door of the cabin, she turned back to him.

  “Get some rest, lover boy. I have big plans for you. Let’s see if you’re man enough to keep up.”

  He smiled as she disappeared—happy, if only for the moment.

  LUCY SKIPPED UP THE STEPS, so full of herself she could hardly stand it. The rain had cleared, and a sliver of moonlight tried to cut through the clouds. She’d never talked to a man like she’d talked to Panda. She’d laid out her terms, said exactly what she wanted to, and hadn’t cared a bit how he felt about it.

  She dashed across the lawn, this time giving the horseshoe stake a wide berth. She couldn’t imagine Ted ever doing to her what Panda had done. Although she could imagine him doing it to Meg. Not that she wanted to. She grimaced and shook off the image.

  She and Panda … Two mismatched people … One vasectomy … This was exactly what she wanted from her lost summer. A chance to be really bad.

  As she stepped up on the deck, she thought about how people made bucket lists—everything they wanted to accomplish before they died. It occurred to her that she was working her way through a kind of reverse bucket list, doing things she would already have gotten out of her system if she’d been part of another family. Crazy hair, unsuitable clothes, tattoos. She’d dumped the perfect boyfriend, dropped out, and now she’d taken an unacceptable lover. She’d thought she didn’t believe in meaningless hookups, but had she only convinced herself of that because meaningless hookups were unrealistic for the president’s daughter? No wild monkey sex for Lucy Jorik.

  Until now.

  Could this be the key? What if doing all the things she’d missed was precisely what she needed before she could move on with the next part of her life?

  She locked the sliding doors behind her, changed into dry clothes, and climbed into bed, but she was too worked up to sleep. A reverse bucket list …

  She got out of bed and grabbed her yellow pad. This time she had no trouble finding the right words, and before she was done, she had a perfect list. This was exactly what she needed.

  She flipped off the light and smiled to herself. Then she thought of the licorice whip and shivered. She turned into the pillow, got out of bed again, and unlocked the sliders.

  No doubt about it. She’d gone bad. And it felt so good.

  “READING TIME,” BREE SAID, OPENING the door to the cottage’s small front porch just as she’d been doing for the past two weeks, ever since she’d made up her mind about this.

  “It’s summer,” Toby protested. “I’m not supposed to read books in the summer.” But even as he complained, he got off the living room carpet and followed her outside.

  The porch was only big enough for a pair of ancient brown wicker chairs and a small wooden table. She’d set up a lamp from her bedroom so she could read after Toby went to bed, but she was so tired by the end of the day that she generally dozed off first. She had better luck keeping up with her new adult reading list between breaks from molding candles, painting note cards, or experimenting with a new beeswax furniture polish.

  As she opened the book they’d been reading, she asked herself once again why she was putting herself through all this. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have enough to worry about. It was mid-July. She wouldn’t be able to begin harvesting this year�
�s honey until early August, if she was lucky, and as always, she was frantic about money. She’d been trying to create new products, but that took a financial investment for materials, and how many of her products would actually sell? At least she’d begun to see tiny cracks in Toby’s dislike of her, the same cracks that had formed in her own resentment toward him.

  The wicker armchair creaked as he pulled his grubby bare feet up on the edge of the cushion. “I can read good. You don’t have to read to me like I’m a kid.”

  “I like reading aloud,” she said. “That way, I can learn at the same time as you.”

  “I already know all this stuff.”

  That was total crap. He knew even less than she did, although she was learning more every day.

  With the help of the island librarian, she’d located a few books on transracial child rearing only to discover they focused primarily on whether or not it was right for white families to adopt black children. Hardly helpful. Most of the rest of what she’d been able to discover didn’t go much further than an explanation of hair care, something Toby was handling just fine for himself. Not one of them answered her most fundamental question—how was a pale white woman like herself supposed to instill a sense of racial pride and identity in this golden-brown child?

  She was working on instinct.

  He slung one leg over the chair arm, waiting for her to begin. So far, he’d finished short, kid-friendly biographies of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, along with the story of the Negro Baseball League. He’d rebelled when she’d found a book about the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, so she’d begun reading it aloud to herself. Within a few pages, he’d forgotten his prejudice against “books about girls,” and when she’d reached the end of the first chapter, he’d pestered her to keep going.

  Even though she was tired from a day that had begun too early, she read for nearly an hour. When she finally closed the book, Toby started picking at his big toe. “Did you get another movie for us to watch this weekend?”

  “When We Were Kings.” She made a face. “It’s about boxing, a famous match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.”

  He forgot about his toe as his face lit up. “Really?”

  “I know. Disgusting. Let’s watch The Princess Diaries instead.”

  “No way!”

  He grinned at her—a real grin—and one more loop in the snarl of negative feelings that resided inside her loosened its grip. Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—he smiled at her the same way he did at Lucy.

  “Don’t take any crap from him,” Lucy had advised. “At the same time, look for chances to touch him. He’ll pull away. Do it, anyway.”

  Bree had tried resting her hand on his shoulder when he was sitting at the kitchen table, but it felt forced, and as Lucy had predicted, he wiggled away, so she’d stopped. She wasn’t giving up the rest, however. An uncharacteristic stubbornness had taken hold of her. He was going to learn about the heritage he’d received from his father whether he wanted to or not.

  He dropped his feet to the floor and scratched his ankle with his toe. “You don’t have to watch the movie with me. You can go work on your painting or something.”

  Right now, that “something” included waiting for a dozen nonreturnable glass bumblebee Christmas ornaments to arrive. Every time she thought about the Internet order she’d placed over the library computer she felt sick. She was getting more customers every day, but who knew if any of them would want to buy Christmas ornaments in the summer?

  “We always watch movies together,” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess you should probably watch. Being white and everything, you’ve got a lot to learn.”

  She did her best to imitate Lucy’s sarcastic looks. “Like you know so much, Mr. Brown Man.”

  He liked being called a man, and he grinned. She smiled back at him, and he kept smiling until he realized what he was doing and exchanged the smile for a scowl. “Me and Big Mike are going horseback riding tomorrow.”

  She still couldn’t believe Mike had befriended Toby out of the goodness of his heart. On the other hand, he’d kept his word, and the only times he’d spoken to her since they’d all gone to church two weeks earlier had been during a few brief telephone exchanges when he’d made arrangements to pick Toby up.

  Toby scowled at her. “If you weren’t so mean to him, he’d let you go with us.”

  “I can’t get away from the farm stand.”

  “You could get away if you wanted to. Lucy would watch it for you.”

  Toby had been calling Lucy by her real name ever since he’d overheard Bree call her that, but since daughters of past presidents weren’t on his twelve-year-old radar screen, he’d only commented that he’d known all along Viper couldn’t be her real name.

  Bree’s growing friendship with Lucy meant even more to her than the help Lucy offered. She watched the farm stand so Bree could have a break. Together, they’d figured out how to reattach the big wooden doors on the storage shed that jutted off the back of the farm stand. Now she could lock up at night instead of having to haul her goods back and forth from the house. Bree also appreciated Lucy’s lack of judgment as she watched Bree try to deal with Toby.

  Toby slouched farther into the wicker chair. “Mike told me to see if it was okay for him to take me to church again this week, but I don’t want to go. Church is boring.”

  Bree had loved the service at the Episcopal church and yearned to go back, but she didn’t want to run into Mike. She toyed with the cover of the Sojourner Truth book. “Maybe we need to find a church that’s not boring.”

  “All church is boring.”

  “You don’t know that for sure. I’ve been thinking we should try a new church.”

  “I don’t want to try a new church. I’ll go to the old one with Big Mike.”

  “Not this week.” Bree had been dubious when Lucy introduced the idea, but now she made up her mind. “On Sunday, we’re going to Heart of Charity.”

  His eyes widened in outrage. “We can’t do that. That’s the black people’s church!”

  So much for all the books they’d been reading. And, really, what was the point? If claiming his father’s heritage wasn’t important to Toby, why should it matter to her?

  Because it did.

  LUCY SMELLED OF THE ALMOND oil she’d used to help Bree make hand cream. It masked the scent of the fresh loaf of bread in the sack dangling from her handlebars. She visited the cottage daily to spell Bree at the farm stand and take another stab at perfecting honey-based caramels. Once she was satisfied with the results, she’d try dipping them in chocolate and topping them with sea salt. So far, her efforts weren’t going well, but she had hopes. She also baked bread in Bree’s kitchen, using the excuse that the stove at the house wouldn’t keep true temperature. She was willing to trust Bree with her own secrets, but Temple’s weren’t hers to share.

  What she hadn’t been doing was writing. She couldn’t seem to figure out where to start. Nealy was one of the most fascinating women in the world, but Lucy ended up throwing out whatever she wrote about her after a few sentences. Her father wanted a personal account, not a Wikipedia entry. Something was very wrong, but she had no idea what.

  When she wasn’t trying to write or helping out at the farm stand, she was thinking about her reverse bucket list. Just that morning she’d slept late, and before she lost her nerve, she’d prank-called two people. “This is a recording. I’m confirming your order for one hundred pounds of fresh manure. If you want it dumped anyplace except your driveway, call us back immediately. Our number is—” And she’d hung up.

  Totally juvenile. Moderately satisfying. Especially since she’d used Panda’s phone to make the calls in case they got traced.

  As she pulled up to the house, she saw Temple pass by the upstairs windows. Last week Toby had appeared unannounced and seen Temple running up and down the steps to the dock carrying ten-pound weights. Temple was predictably upset—firs
t because she’d been spotted and second because Toby had no idea who she was.

  “He’s twelve,” Lucy had told her.

  “That’s the way it starts out. First a kid doesn’t know your name. The next thing you know, it’s a forty-year-old soccer mom, and your career is over.”

  “You’re a lunatic,” Viper told her. “A fruitcake for the ages.” And then, more kindly, “You’ve already lost at least fifteen pounds, and—”

  “Barely fourteen.”

  “—and despite what you want to believe, you look fantastic.” She ignored Temple’s derisive snort. “You’re doing what you came here to do, and you should be on top of the world. Instead, you’re meaner than ever. How do you expect to handle real food once you don’t have Panda policing you?”

  “Things’ll be different. I’ll handle it.” She’d stormed off.

  Lucy knew a lot of women ate their way through breakups, and although Temple hardly ever mentioned Max, their split had to be at the root of her troubles.

  Panda’s car was just turning into the drive. He’d begun leaving Temple alone for short periods of time, generally going for a run or taking the kayak out. More recently, he’d made two brief trips into town. She climbed off her bike and watched him step from the car.

  The muscles underneath his tight-fitting gray T-shirt were out of control, and although his abs were temporarily covered up, she happened to know they were extraordinary. She, on the other hand, had gained back another five pounds. After a lifetime of never thinking about her weight, she’d been brought low by living in a house full of diet food. Once she was around the real stuff, such as her failed honey caramels, she lost control.

  Her weight gain, however, hadn’t affected her current choice of outfit, a trashy blue and black tie-dyed bra top that showed more boob-age than a bathing suit and shorts that didn’t even start until the top of her hip bones. She might as well show them off while they were still visible.