by Liora Blake
“You probably shouldn’t have let me do that, Lacey.”
Mumbling, I try to ask him what he means.
“Let me go raw inside you. Because I was already willing to fly twelve hundred miles as it is. But you, bare like that? I’ll run myself into the ground trying to get back here for another go.”
This would normally be when I would laugh. Roll my eyes. Maybe slap his chest and hide my grin. But all that happens right now is that everything in my world starts to look very confusing.
I can’t deny that the sex is beyond amazing. It’s bar none, off the charts, wicked good. He’s the best I’ve ever had, no contest. And even though I knew this was a possibility when we started, it felt like more this whole time. He was making me dinner and fixing things. He was promising to take me anywhere and claiming we would have stories to tell in a far-off land referred to as our future. It felt full of potential.
My body goes stiff, but he doesn’t notice right away. Only when I smooth down my top to cover my bare breasts and try to draw down my skirt over his hands, does he pause. I sit up and look everywhere but at him.
Jake doesn’t move from where he is still standing between my widespread thighs. I try to scoot back, hoping it will offer enough clearance between us that I can close my legs, because all of this feels totally unsexy now. And when I stand up, things are bound to get messy and sticky, and that will just serve to drive the point home. I’m merely a sad, naïve woman who got caught up in a man who wants nothing but a few rounds for old times’ sake—a stark realization worsened by my wearing a cheerleading uniform I should have thrown away years ago.
“Whoa. What just happened?” Jake cranes his head down to try to see my face.
“Nothing. Let’s go home. I’m freezing.”
He tugs his coat out from under me and draws it up over my shoulders. “Fuck that. Tell me.”
Sighing, I manage to bring my legs together and press my skirt down again. “I’m not a kid anymore, Jake. If you want to come here for a good lay and that’s it, I can’t do this anymore. I’m too damn old for that. Especially with you. With you, I can’t.”
His face falls. He steps back and zips up his pants, then pulls his hands up to grasp at handfuls of his hair.
“You think that’s what I’m doing? That I’m wasting fuel and coming back to Crowell, just to get laid?” His hands drop. Turning in place, once he’s facing away from me, I hear an exasperated snort. “I know I’m not the world’s greatest catch or anything, but I don’t think I need to leave California to get laid. I’m pretty sure I could find at least one woman, out of a state of thirty-eight million people, to sleep with me.”
“You just said you were flying here for”—dropping my voice a little, I actually point down to the space between my legs then cringe when I realize how stupid that probably looks—“for sex,” I finish lamely.
“Jesus. I was just trying to say . . . Fuck, I thought you liked it when I talk like that and say exactly what I’m thinking. That’s part of what makes us good together. The way I can talk to you without having to edit what I’m thinking, and the way you love it. And I thought you liked that I get off on how you look, that I love your body.”
Jake turns to face me and shakes his head a little, creasing his brow up in confusion. He looks so pained, I wish he were closer so I could touch him. But if we’re ending this now, then touching will be off-limits. I drop my gaze and finger the hem of my skirt.
“I do. I don’t just like it, I love the way you say things. I love the way you want me.”
“Then what the hell are we fighting about? I just finished like a chump because it feels like we’re made for each other. I can’t get enough. But let me be clear: it’s you that I can’t get enough of. You. Not just the tasty candy coating that is your body, but all of you.”
Jake takes a moment and lowers his voice. “You’re not a kid anymore? Well, here’s a headline for you. I’m a grown fucking man. I don’t chase tail across multiple states. I wouldn’t be doing all of this if I didn’t think we had something real here.”
Real. He said a million other things, but I only care about that one word. When I lift my eyes to see him, he’s staring at me. Before I can say anything, he shoves his hands in his pockets and glances away.
“I’m pretty sure I never stopped being in love with you, Lacey. Not for one damn second. This whole time, even when I was on the wrong side of the Continental Divide, my fucking heart was still here with you.”
Jake continues to look toward the far corner of the room. It’s almost completely dark now; the lantern died when he started talking about his heart, so all I have is the light of the full moon coming in through the bank of windows behind us. Oddly poetic, really. Him offering up words about love and his heart just as the room goes dark. As if we both need the blackness to talk about this being more. Because it might be easier if it weren’t. It would hurt when it ended, but still, if we were just using each other for sex, that would be simpler. Owning up to never letting go after all these years? That’s harder.
I slip off the worktable and walk to him. Once there, I try to curl under enough to catch his gaze, but he won’t shift his focus, so I wrap my arms around him and press my face to his chest.
“When I figured out that you left me behind, I stood there in the town square like an idiot, so confused. I thought we were going to be together. Did you not know that? “
Jake sighs and the movement presses up along where my cheek sits against his chest. “How in the hell was I supposed to know that you, perfect Lacey Mosely, would want me for good? Jake Holt, the local weirdo. You never said you loved me. Never. I’d remember that shit, trust me. It would have been the best day of my life.”
Turning my face, my forehead comes to rest against his sternum. The posture muffles my voice, but I manage to say what I never did. Even if I thought it, felt it, knew it, I never said the words.
“I loved you then. I love you now. Nothing’s changed.”
Jake swallows thickly and brings his arms around me. “There it is. Best day of my life. Done.”
I still can’t look at him. Not yet. “Take me home, Jake.”
“One more thing before we go.” His hands slip back under my skirt. “Will you leave this on a little longer? I’m not quite through living out my fantasies with you dressed like this. I’m thinking we at least need to go a round in the backseat of your car. Maybe at the house you could bend over and untie your shoes, real slow-like.”
Of course. Only Jake could delve straight into a smutty request just seconds after we owned up to loving each other. Which makes it easier to give in to seeing his face now. I lift my gaze, along with one eyebrow, before shoving on his abs and making for a getaway, but he only lets me turn in his embrace before grasping around my waist again.
“Take me home. Once you feed me and I’m not freezing to death, you can start making up for leaving me hanging. You owe me.” Shifting in the clutch of his arms, I bend forward just enough to make sure he can feel the slip of my skirt rising up. “Maybe after that I’ll let you put a rip in something. Maybe.”
Jake bumps his hips into my backside. “Don’t toy with me. It isn’t nice.”
Laughing, I shove my ass back into him harder and let him press his face into my hair. “By the way, ‘the candy coating that is your body’? Where did you possibly come up with that?”
“Oh, that’s easy. I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about licking every inch of you. Thus, the candy-coating analogy. Like M&M’s. But you melt in my mouth and my hands.”
14
In the morning, annoyingly early again, I drive Jake back to his plane. When he gets out of the car and stops just next to my car door, the rising sun is framing him in a wildly orange glow just at the edge of the mountains in the east.
One kiss is all I get as a good-bye. But it’s a good one. T
en seconds of him telling me everything without saying a word.
Once I’m back on the county road, I don’t take the right-hand turn to head into Crowell. I continue east, out of town, toward Missoula to visit Ruth Ann. Knowing Jake was scheduled to leave today, I arranged the promised visit so there would be little chance for me to dwell on his departure.
The orange glow of the rising sun is already turning toward a yellow cast, higher in the sky now, and the cold air puts tiny, hazy, frosty particles across everything. Over the trees, the wintering pastures, the barn rooftops, and the empty corrals.
The care center where Ruth Ann has lived for the last five years is like lots of other old folks’ homes. Tasteful floral wallpaper, the smell of antiseptic covered by cloying potpourri, clanking silverware, and caregivers speaking loudly and enunciating every syllable.
Down a long corridor, past the television and game rooms, I place a small knock on the half-open door to Ruth Ann’s suite. No response, so I crane my head in.
Three months was too long to go between visits. Perhaps if I had come every week, the sight of her lying there in bed, sleeping but looking terribly tiny, wouldn’t be enough to force my hand against the door frame for a little support. The change wouldn’t be so jarring if I had been here to see it take place incrementally, instead of seeing her as a mere shadow of what she used to be. Smaller. Grayer. So frail now that she might dust away if someone left the window open for too long.
I could offer a million reasons for why I haven’t been here. Needing to be there when Kate gave birth to Nic. The Beauty Barn. The winter weather. The holidays. Jake.
But the honest answer is that I didn’t want to see this. Or, I was too weak, so I couldn’t. Because death and dying and illness turn rooms so quiet, you’re forced to hear your own thoughts. Sometimes those thoughts are too hard to hear. Sometimes you learn things about yourself you never wanted to know.
When my dad was dying, Kate never left his side. She sat through every chemo treatment that didn’t work, and listened studiously to every doctor who came in the room to give more bad news. In the days just before he died, when his hospice room was too warm and silent for me to be in, Kate sat there and did nothing but wait while he lay there and slipped away. She didn’t read or watch TV. She didn’t play cards or make conversation. She actually watched him die.
Just as with my dad, I avoided Ruth Ann to save myself the discomfort. Now I have to see her this way, breathing so shallow that her chest doesn’t rise, only the occasional flare of her lips on an exhale to signal she is still with us.
Latching on to the only reprieve I can from seeing her like this, I take a survey of her room. The suite is filled with an array of personal things from her old home in Crowell. With the exception of her hospital-style bed, everything else is a part of her story. A very ugly table lamp with a large bulbous base and a yellowing shade, the piece she always said was her one foray into “mod” decor. Framed paintings cover the walls. Pretty little landscapes, a few portraits, and a still life of flowers in vases and fruit in bowls. A heavy-looking hulk of a mahogany dresser lines one entire wall, with a white doily spread across the top. The ancient rainbow-colored afghan that is currently draped across her bed used to lie atop the back of her couch in her living room at home.
Once, when I first started working at The Beauty Barn, I stopped by her house to drop off the cash from the day’s sales and when she invited me in, we drank tea and ate lemon cream gingersnap sandwich cookies together. Ruth Ann sat on the couch, her legs covered by that afghan, while I perched as gracefully as I could on the settee. I thought sitting on a settee seemed so wildly refined that I kept flaring my pinkie out when I lifted the teacup. I’m sure Ruth Ann thought I looked a little like an orphaned feral cat trying to behave, but she never let on, simply sat there looking effortlessly relaxed, never dropping a cookie crumb or feeling the need to flare anything.
Along the top of the dresser, covering the white doily, are a bunch of framed photos. Mostly black and white, taken in the early days of her and Vernon’s marriage, although there are a few with the curious coloring of Polaroids, likely from the ’60s and ’70s. Placed in the center, at the very front, is my favorite one of all.
In it, Vernon and Ruth Ann are standing on the sidewalk in front of their stores, smack in the center of the two buildings. Vernon’s arm is slung loosely over Ruth Ann’s shoulder, pulling her in just enough that her chin appears to be touching just below his shoulder. He was a tall man, towering over the diminutive Ruth Ann, who likely never cleared more than a hundred pounds in her entire life. Heads turned and faces tilted toward each other, they’re smiling. Full, wide, toothy grins. As if one of them just said the sweetest, silliest, loveliest thing to the other.
On either side of them, you can see their respective store window displays in the background. Ruth Ann’s is abundant and brimming; crepe-paper garlands and hanging honeycomb hearts hang from the ceiling, suspended above a myriad of little beauty-product towers, their perches swathed in velvety-looking drapes of fabric.
Vernon’s display is staid, as usual. Just a pair of sawhorses and a couple of tool sets sitting uniformly next to each other. His style was purely functional; he only needed to say, “Here’s what we have for sale—take it or leave it.” Her style was about making everything and everyone pretty. Yet all you really notice, the only important thing to see, is their expressions for each other.
A low, rustling cough sounds behind me and when I look over my shoulder, Ruth Ann has opened her watery eyes. Despite her obvious fatigue, I get a small smile from her. I turn a bit and gesture to the photo.
“This is my favorite picture of you two.”
Ruth Ann tilts her head, but her vision is shot, and she gestures for me to bring it closer. A faded, but still immaculate, ivory-colored slipper chair sits just next to her bed. I settle into it and hand her the framed photo.
Another smile when she recognizes it. Faraway, but genuine nonetheless.
“You know who took this picture? Your grandfather. Duke Mosely the first.” She taps the glass with one of her still–perfectly manicured nails. “He was wandering about Main Street on Valentine’s Day, insisting every couple in town ham it up for the camera so he could have a candid shot for the front page of the next day’s newspaper. I dragged a very begrudging Vernon outside, in the middle of his meticulous weekly inventory process, and insisted he prove to everyone in town that he loved me more than Bobcat football and his Olds Rocket.”
Ruth Ann hands the picture back and I set it atop the dresser where it was. She already has her eyes closed again when I step back and sit in the chair.
“Is Matthew here yet?”
My eyes skitter around the tiny room, as if I somehow missed another person in here. No clue who Matthew is, but we’re definitely alone.
“Who’s Matthew?”
“My lawyer. I told him you were coming today. Is he here? Did you see him?”
I shake my head and look around again. “I don’t think so.”
A little chuckle from her, followed by a sharp inhale. “Oh my, there would be no question if you saw Matthew. He’s rather unforget—”
Before she can finish her statement, there’s a soft knock and without pause, a man strides in and goes to greet Ruth Ann with a “good morning” and a buss to one cheek. To be specific, a very, very, possibly not-of-this-world, beautiful man with perfectly coiffed dark chestnut hair and pretty hazel eyes does those things.
Well, top of the morning to you, Cary Grant.
Wearing a modern, trim-cut, indigo-blue suit with a red tie, he slips a vintage-style dark brown leather messenger bag off one shoulder, then slings off a dress coat and striped wool scarf. Just as Ruth Ann clears her throat and wearily offers a gesture in my direction, Matthew sees me and his eyes widen. The slipper chair I’m sitting in is quite low to the ground, so when he walked in, the guar
drails on her hospital bed nearly obscured me.
“Oh. Wow.” Matthew turns to Ruth Ann. “Is this her? This is Lacey?”
“I told you.”
“Well, yes, but I assumed you were being . . . generous. She’s practically a daughter to you. I figured you might lack a little objectivity about the whole thing.”
Hello. In the room, here. If they don’t stop talking about me like I’m invisible, I might have to remind them, loudly, that I have exceptional hearing.
Ruth Ann reaches out and pats his hand where it lies on one of the bed rails. “Lacey, I’d like you to meet Matthew, my attorney.”
He shakes his head a little and seems to regain some composure. When his gaze finally locks on mine, a little grin tugs at one corner of his mouth and then his eyes get all glittery and zingy. “I’m sorry. She said you were beautiful, but . . . I just didn’t think—”
I raise my brows a little. His face goes slack for a moment. I decide to let him off the hook. “It’s nice to meet you, Matthew.”
Ruth Ann pats his hand again and clears her throat. “I’m already fading here, my dear. Let’s carry on with this, shall we?”
“Of course. Sorry, Ruth Ann, of course.” He drops his focus to his messenger bag and starts to unlatch it, sifting through its contents, then drags out a manila legal-sized folder. “Why don’t you tell Lacey what’s going on.”
Great. Dreamy Cary Grant here, an attorney, is about to put my world into a tailspin—I can feel it. Ruth Ann must be planning to sell or close up shop, because this whole conversation suddenly reeks of finality and tying up loose ends. I, as it were, am probably a loose end. Maybe she will at least let me keep a few nail polishes before she shuts the doors. Sitting up straighter in the chair, I refuse to falter into hysterics right now. I knew this was coming, and here it is.
“Lacey . . .” Ruth Ann pauses, then reaches out toward me. I raise my hand up and rest it in hers. “I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done for me all these years. You, my dear, have been the closest thing to family I’ve had since Vernon died.”