by Brent, Cora
“I thought you were fucking Tina’s cousin, not her sister.”
McGraw thought about it for a moment. “I am. Fucking her sister too. They’re a family of beautifully big assed women with nipples the size of dinner plates. Want me to hook you up?”
“With your leftovers? No thanks.”
“How come? Are you being loyal to something down in, wherever the hell you were?”
“I already told you where I was. And I’ve got no loyalties there, big assed or otherwise.”
“Good. So I’ll lend you one of mine. You hardly ever come out of that pricey cave you’ve been squatting in and everyone’s starting to wonder what’s up with that. You went diving into the swamp water and you came up a millionaire. What the fuck?”
The pricey cave in question was a Mediterranean style palace constructed on a low hill on the south side of town. The California banker who built it five years ago wanted to feel like a king staring down at the common rabble. Then the market took a nosedive and it became worth a fraction of the price he’d paid to construct it. Who the hell wants to be a king in a fucking prison town anyway? The house bounced on and off the market for more than a year. I’d just received word that the matter I’d been hiding from was no longer my concern thanks to a blurted prison yard confession. There was a manslaughter charge. A guilty plea. And that was that. I was in the clear. Free to go home and reclaim my name if I chose. I placed a lowball offer on the hill house the day after receiving the news. I was not surprised when the offer was accepted without countering.
“You still thirsty?” I asked McGraw. Since returning to Emblem there was one place I’d avoided, biding my time while knowing that every day I was expected to stroll into that lousy bar and say hello to old friends. And old enemies.
“Hell yeah, I’m still thirsty,” he said.
“Let’s go see what’s going on at the Cactus. You can pick your poison on my dime.”
McGraw grinned. “Eddie’s not there. He hardly ever leaves his house since his wife died. Leah’s running the place so I guess the Cactus is pretty much hers now.”
“Interesting,” I said, even though that information had already been known to me.
McGraw was studying me from the passenger seat. “That Luanne was a tasty piece of snatch in her heyday, huh, Jedson?”
“I never noticed.”
“You lived on her fucking property.”
I said nothing, admitted nothing. McGraw was still grinning at me.
“What?” I growled.
“There was a rumor,” he said. “That you’d been getting a piece of Eddie’s wife from the time you learned how to use your dick.”
I played dumb. “Can’t account for that rumor. I hardly remember the woman.”
“Liar,” McGraw snorted. “I wonder if Leah’s ever heard that story.”
“I doubt it.”
Leah knew more than anyone. Once upon a time I felt bad about that for roughly five minutes. Until she did something she had no fucking excuse to do.
McGraw must have realized the conversation was pissing me off. He shrugged. “Hell, it’s none of my business anyway.”
“No, it’s not,” I agreed, focusing on the drive to town while McGraw started blabbing about how his girlfriend let him park his dick in the back door anytime he wanted. I tuned him out.
Six years ago I’d run off with my tail between my legs and the law in hot pursuit. Now that a certain messy matter had been laid to rest I shouldn’t hesitate to claim what’s mine. And Emblem was mine. My fucking town. From here on out that fact was going to be widely respected. But someone still needed to atone and I had a few ideas on how to settle that old score.
And if I could have some fun getting a bit of payback then so much the better.
Chapter Two
Leah
This was my least favorite chore, even less enjoyable than scrubbing the men’s room toilets that were forever encrusted with shit, urine, blood and other materials I’d rather not guess at.
I’d invested three years in an unfinished accounting degree so I should feel some satisfaction in watching the columns add up on the spreadsheet. Maybe I’d be more excited if the totals were a little more inspiring.
“Shit,” I muttered, closing my eyes and digging my knuckles into the sockets until orange spots danced. The spots were appreciated; they erased the ugly numbers that kept accusing me from the laptop.
“Something wrong, Leah?”
I stopped rubbing my eyes and blinked, although I didn’t need my vision to clear to tell me who’d decided to poke his head into the office.
Terry Kaiser looked as formidable as the Cliffs of Dover. He could crush soft metal objects between his meaty palms and startle some of the most ornery customers when they got out of line. He worked here only part time. The rest of his energy was devoted to expanding his client list at the gym in Grande where he was a personal trainer. I’d known Terry forever. He graduated from Emblem High three years before me and left for a while to play college ball in Texas, dropping out and slinking back to Emblem when he was cut from the team. I might have started messing around with him occasionally out of boredom a few months back and I might keep doing it for the same reason. But right now I kind of wanted him to stop hovering.
“Nothing’s wrong. I just came in here for a little quiet to get some paperwork done.”
Terry didn’t take the hint. He closed the door behind him and squeezed around the desk. The guy was covered in so much muscle it was almost obnoxious. There was gossip that he took steroids. He might.
“You look tense,” he said and placed his hands on my shoulders, massaging lightly in a way that managed to hurt a little because his hands were the size of cantaloupes. I wanted to shrug out of his grip and tell him to stop trying. He was good at keeping order in the bar but we never had much to talk about and our sporadic sex encounters could be generously classified as mediocre. Terry was decent and he’d probably be willing to try the boyfriend thing but I wasn’t looking for someone to blow my mind right now. I was just trying to keep my head above water and relieve the tension with an orgasm once in a while.
“I think tonight might be kind of busy,” he said and I fought the urge to roll my eyes.
Of course tonight was going to be busy. This was Saturday and the Dirty Cactus was the only decent sized bar within the town limits. When I first took over managing the place six months ago I didn’t understand why the bottom line was in such sorry shape. A small town bar should have been an easy money maker. But once I got a good look at the books I learned about my father’s crappy business sense. Fifteen years of chronic mismanagement coupled with a steady need to make repairs on an old building had taken a toll. So far I’d been unable to refinance the high interest mortgage he took out five years ago. Until I made that happen there wasn’t enough cash to invest in any of the improvements that were still badly required.
I chose not to mention any of this to Terry. The financial position of the bar wasn’t his problem. It was mine. I’d have to figure something out because I doubted my father would be able to handle losing the bar so soon after losing my mother.
The Dirty Cactus had been a landmark on Emblem’s Main Street for decades, since long before I was born. My father bought out the last owner when I was a little kid. This crappy dive was like childhood and family rolled together. Sometimes I resented it. But mostly I couldn’t stop myself from feeling affection in spite of the fact that this place, this freaking dirty old dump, was more like my father’s child than I was. Eddie Brandeis had been on the precipice of a nervous breakdown during the long months my mother lay dying but I couldn’t bring myself to move back here until she was gone. Now I felt some guilt, knowing I should have swallowed my pride and buried my feelings earlier. I’d made up for my absence since then, abandoning my college plans and my career dreams to come trudging back to Emblem indefinitely. If I could somehow save the Dirty Cactus for him then I would.
While I was abs
orbed in my bleak thoughts Terry’s hands kept clumsily massaging my shoulders. I shut my eyes and tried to feel something, the smallest stir of desire, but my eyelids only displayed red dollar signs.
“We should totally hook up tonight,” he said, which was unromantic and not even especially sexy but fuck it; I needed romance less than I needed to get off.
“Or right now,” I suggested, rolling my head back in my chair in an effort to press against his crotch.
Terry giggled. That’s the only way I can describe the noise that came out of his throat. “There are customers out there.”
“So?” I arched my back in the hopes he’d make a grab for my breasts. “Maybe someone will walk in on us.”
Terry was not fond of that idea. His voice became nervous. “Aw man, that would suck.”
“It doesn’t have to.” I swung the chair around and faced him, already running my palms down his belly and then lower. He was semi hard. But he coughed with embarrassment and took a step back before I could work on him. Maybe I was going overboard. We didn’t exactly have a regular arrangement.
“We should get back out there,” he said. “Sharon’s all alone.”
Sharon Gray had worked for my dad for nearly a decade. She probably knew how to pour a few drinks on her own by now. I got the message though and stopped trying to play the temptress.
“I’ll be right out,” I said, swiveling back around and taking another look at the financial statement from hell.
Terry escaped out the door, glancing back once with a worried expression like he feared I’d be mad at him. Of course I wasn’t mad at him. I was acting manager of the Dirty Cactus while my dad tried to pull himself together. Terry was technically my employee. If he didn’t want to get busy in the dusty old office then I had no right to pout.
Anyway, who was I kidding? Before Terry I’d slept with two guys, both tame, short-lived college relationships. I couldn’t reinvent myself as some kind of seductive siren that men wanted to please.
I wasn’t my mother.
Ugly feelings, unwanted feelings, tried to break through.
I would never try to be like Luanne, moving from one absurd conquest to the next long after she’d eviscerated Ryan Jedson for spurning her. I’d tried to bury that particular memory of my mother on her knees in the dust but sometimes it prodded the edges of my mind and taunted me, especially since I’d heard he was back in town. Every day I braced myself for fate to deliver an encounter with him. Yet thus far he remained an unseen rumor. Emblem was a small town and the Cactus was the closest thing there was to a community center so I expected him to show up already but he had not. Maybe he blamed me. Or maybe Ryan didn’t like to dwell on that hideous chapter at all now that he was trying to reclaim his old life. Wherever he’d been he must have done well for himself. The conversation around the bar said he was the new owner of the one McMansion that glared from its lonely hill on the opposite side of town.
The numbers weren’t getting any friendlier so I stowed the laptop in the locked cabinet in the corner and ran a brush through my hair before returning to the bar. My long hair was the first thing people noticed about me. Sometimes their questions were ridiculous, like when they asked if there was some kind of religious reason I allowed the curtain of plain brown hair to fall nearly to my waist. There was nothing religious about my reasons and to tell the truth sometimes it was a complete pain in the ass. But I will always wear my hair long and loose. I always will because I can.
Because fuck you, Mom.
Shockingly, Terry’s sage prediction about a crowd on Saturday night had come true. Most of the stools and three quarters of the tables were already occupied and it wasn’t yet seven p.m. By eight o’clock there’d hardly be a clear path to the door. I was thankful tonight wasn’t karaoke night. Tough guys were surprisingly touchy about their shitty singing and Terry frequently needed to put all that muscle to good use when arguments broke out.
A few of the customers occupying stools nodded at me when I appeared. They were the types who’d been coming here since before my father was the owner, just some lonely locals looking for something to do besides age on the living room couch while watching a television show where strangers buy a house. A few months ago my former college roommate Felicity drove down to visit with some of her sorority sisters. They were disappointed that they did not find a roomful of dangerously sexy Sons-of-Anarchy-caliber men trying to paw them. Those guys were around for sure, the bikers who could tell you stories that would haunt your dreams. But no pampered suburban girl in her right mind wanted to catch their attention and if she did there was likely some biker’s old lady nearby waiting for a motive to carve the competition’s eyes out. Felicity and her friends did not like Emblem. They did not stay long.
Terry nudged me when I was filling some glasses from the tap.
“Did you see your friends?” he asked.
“What?” I looked up and noticed the hand waving at me from across the room. I waved back, grinning. Cadence Gentry was powerful; she could make me smile just by appearing. I didn’t have much time for friends lately but I always made time for Cadence so I delivered the drafts to my waiting customers and headed to their table against the far wall.
Cadence wasn’t alone. Her boyfriend Tristan Mulligan sat across from her and beside him sat Steven Pike. Initially I’d been surprised when Tristan and Cadence got together. Cadence was a newcomer to town. Her parents had grown up here but she’d rarely set foot inside of Emblem before accepting a teaching job at the beginning of the term. She was full of bright ideas and happy energy and so pretty anyone might expect her to be a snob. She was the opposite. Cadence was sunshine.
Tristan on the other hand was an Emblem boy, a year ahead of me in high school, at least when he bothered to show up at school at all. We didn’t run with the same packs. I kept to the honors track student government crowd while Tristan was a punk, an arrogant player who was used to getting all the attention in the world because of his good looks. He cared nothing for academics and never graduated. Honestly I never liked Tristan much but when Cadence fell for him and I saw firsthand how smitten he was with my friend I couldn’t help but reconsider. Now I could admit that for all Tristan Mulligan’s rough edges he wasn’t a bad guy.
Cadence pulled on my arm, urging me to sit down in the one empty chair at the table. This wasn’t really a good time for socializing. Yet I could guarantee I’d be on my feet until closing so this relative calm before the storm would be my one chance for a short break.
Steven Pike had been stirring pretzels into his beer and he looked up with a smile when I settled down across from him. “Hi, Leah.”
“Hey, Pike. What’s new in your world?”
“I got a new watch.” He plunked another pretzel into his beer. He did weird stuff like that sometimes. He often smiles at me these days but that’s only because he doesn’t remember things anymore. Last year he was brutally assaulted and the blow to the head that came close to ending his life succeeded in leaving him with a permanently scrambled brain. That’s the reason I receive a hopeful, goofy grin every time we run into each other. He remembers who I am but does not remember that he despises me.
I looked at his hands. Neither wrist wore a watch.
“That’s really awesome, Steven,” I said and the condescension in my voice was ridiculous.
“You left your watch at home, remember?” Cadence asked him gently. “Your mother said she was going to keep it safe for you.”
“I remember,” said Pike, seeming hurt that anyone might doubt his memory. He shoved the bowl of pretzels across the table toward me. “You want any?”
The pretzels we served here were cheap, excessively salted and gross. The ones in this particular bowl looked as if they had all been individually handled by Pike already. I popped a few in my mouth anyway.
“Thanks,” I said, chewing. “These are great.”
Tristan smirked at me. I gave him credit for hanging around with Pike and looking after
him when everyone else in Pike’s circle had walked away, unwilling to deal with a traumatic brain injury victim who forgot people’s names sometimes and then demanded to hear about their sex lives.
“You guys are fucking tonight, right?” Pike asked Tristan and Cadence. He sounded simply curious, like someone might ask if spaghetti was on the menu for dinner.
“Sure,” Tristan assured him.
“Definitely more than once,” Cadence confirmed with a straight face.
“In a variety of positions,” Tristan added.
“We get the picture,” I snorted and then happened to glance over to where Terry was fiddling with the jukebox, a refurbished vintage replacement for the cranky old machine that never worked half the time. My father had poured money into fixing it for years because he felt sentimental about the thing but I disagreed with throwing good money after bad. A bar had to have music so I’d invested in a new one. Terry turned up the volume and Joe Cocker’s raspy yesteryear voice filled the room.
“What picture?” Pike wanted to know.
Tristan stole another bowl of pretzels from a neighboring table to distract him. “No picture. Have a snack.”
Cadence poked me. “Let’s have lunch tomorrow. We can drive to Grande.” Before I could say a word she forged ahead to make her argument. “You have the right to escape Emblem for a few hours and I’ll need a break from unpacking.”
“I thought you guys weren’t moving until next week?” Tristan and Cadence had rented a house together in one of the few good neighborhoods still standing.
“We ended up getting the keys early. So now we are officially shacking up,” Cadence said, winking at her boyfriend.