Unforgiven

by Anne Calhoun

  Her father taught her to dream. Life taught her dreams don’t always come true. Her first time with Adam fell more in the realm of fantasy fulfilled.

  Why the hell did you do that?

  Because for the first time, he clearly wasn’t going to say no.

  The flashpoint memory of his body pounding into hers sent an aftershock rippling through her.

  Her heart had stopped when he walked into the room. Alana was there not as one of Delaney’s attendants but as Marissa’s friend, and even the smooth, composed librarian faltered when Adam walked on the scene.

  Isn’t that . . . ?

  Yes.

  Oh my.

  Marissa had no response to that, because Adam wasn’t supposed to be there. He’d caught her off guard—that was a handy excuse for Why the hell did you do that?—and based on the looks ranging from raised eyebrows to dropped-jaw shock, no one else in the room was, either. Even Keith, normally so arrogantly slick and confident, looked almost panicked. No one expected him until much closer to the wedding, but there he was, wearing cargo pants and a button-down shirt, shoulders squared, jaw set, boots thunking against the hardwood. The room was massive, high ceilings, open floor plan, and Adam dominated it from the moment he strode through Brookhaven’s double front doors. Apparently you could take the man out of the Marine Corps, but you couldn’t take the Marine Corps out of the man.

  But something glinted in Adam’s eyes, something that made her heart knock hard against her throat and had her searching for an opening. Now, with her mouth numb from three shots of whiskey, her legs weak from a mighty orgasm, and her shoulders sore from getting sandwiched between oak supports and Adam’s hard body, she knew why.

  The boy she’d thought was long gone still lived in that straight-backed, broad-shouldered recruiting poster.

  The lights of Walkers Ford, twinkling through the steady rain, called her back to the present. Her life rolled out before her like the sodden prairie sloping away from Brookhaven, to the creek and beyond. Priority number one was to cover the exposed plaster and lathing around the great room’s fireplace in time for the wedding.

  It sounded so simple. Another house built by Henry Dalton Mead lay just east of Brookings, due to be demolished. All she had to do was tear off that house’s mantel and paneling, transport it to Brookhaven, and install it. She’d have her dream, for herself, for her dad, for all the Brookses who came before them.

  So why can’t you turn into the driveway, let alone walk into the house?

  She would try again. She would do this. Had to do this. Wanted to do this, even, so this time there wouldn’t be a problem. Above all, she wouldn’t show any weakness, any hint of hesitation.

  You can’t even turn into the driveway . . .

  A shiver chased up her spine. Nothing a hot bath wouldn’t cure. She locked herself in Brookhaven and went to turn on the water.

  4

  ADAM WOKE WHEN a bolt of pain shot down his arm. He rolled to shift his weight off the futon slat pinching his nerve and consequently rammed the top of his head into the oak support. The bolts holding the futon together squeaked in protest; if he wedged his shoulder against the top arm and his feet against the bottom, he could shatter the frame with one good shove, hatching himself onto the floor of his mother’s sewing room like the six-foot-two-inch, two-hundred pound, dragon-slaying Marine from the old television commercials.

  “Fuck,” he hissed.

  Task number one was to find an apartment in Brookings as soon as possible.

  With a low curse he slid down, rubbed the tender spot on top of his head, then his eyes, then scraped his palm over his stubble. Through the house’s thin walls he could hear the perky chatter of a morning news program and the sounds of eggshells cracking in brisk succession. One, two, three, four, five, a pause for a dollop of milk, then the sound of the whisk against the bowl. After two days of fast food, the last thing he wanted to do was eat, but his mother had been near highly unusual tears when he arrived out of the blue on her doorstep last night. She’d want to feed him. Therefore he would eat.

  Wearing only his boxers, he sat up, elbows on knees, and looked around the room. The house was tiny, no more than eight hundred square feet, the size of Brookhaven’s master bedroom, and when Adam had left for basic training his mother took over his room. His entire childhood, her machine and all the fabric and notions she used to make clothes, drapes, bedding, and pillows occupied most of the living room. She needed the space, and when he visited home after he left he stayed with Keith. His high school belongings were crammed onto shelves in his mother’s single-car garage. He had less of an urge to go through them than he did to eat. What would be in there? Clothes that wouldn’t fit. Posters of fast cars and faster motorcycles. He’d never cared about high school sports. The only thing he dreamed about was racing.

  Two gentle taps on the door. “Honey?”

  He looked at the closed door. “Yeah, Mom?”

  “I’ve got breakfast ready to go, whenever you want it.”

  The few belongings he’d accumulated in San Diego and his Marine medals and commendations were in boxes in the back of the Charger. Sorting the old stuff would make room for the new until he found a place of his own.

  You could store an entire company of Marines at Brookhaven, not to mention a few boxes . . .

  Yeah, right. What are you going to say? Thanks for the fuck, and, oh, by the way, can I move into the house I ruined?

  She’d clung to him like his body was the only thing on her mind, like she wanted him. Only him. Right then. Then she’d all but slapped him. He guessed he deserved it.

  “Honey?”

  “Sorry, Mom,” he said hastily. “Let me get a run in first.”

  “Sure, honey,” she said.

  He got up, pulled on shorts, a T-shirt, and his running shoes, and walked through the living room to the kitchen. She’d redecorated in the year since he’d been home last. This time the theme was cherries. New slipcovers and curtains in mostly cream with tiny red sprigs of cherry blossoms, and new cushions in a dark green with bright red cherries on the chairs around the kitchen table. The banter from the national morning news trickled into the air from a small television on the table.

  His mother, tall, slim, and dressed in a blouse and pants she’d likely designed and sewed herself, looked better than she had when he was in junior high and high school, working two jobs and trying to raise a son bent on self-destruction. While she’d never said a word to him about it, over the years he’d pieced together the history. On the verge of starting at design school in New York, she’d spent a summer hanging around with a fast-talking dirt track racer with faster hands. He’d knocked her up, then moved on without a word, let alone child support. Adam's birth effectively ended her dream of making a career in design. With her custom sewing business and the money Adam sent her every month, she'd been able to quit the job at the convenience store.

  He bent to kiss her cheek. “The bathroom looks great, and so do the curtains.”

  “The jacquard was on clearance. I used most of it for Mrs. Herndon’s breakfast-nook cushions, but there was enough left over for the valance,” she said as she set the eggs back in the fridge.

  Inspiration seized him. “Don’t worry about breakfast,” he said. “I’ll get in a run, we can take a look at the garage, then hit the Heirloom for lunch after the church crowd gets out.”

  “Oh, honey, you don’t need to do that,” she started.

  A lifetime of frugality made treats a rare thing in his mother’s life. “When was the last time you had one of their caramel buns?”

  She smiled at him. “I do like those.”

  “So we’ll go, and you can eat two.” And he’d get coffee and something light, like oatmeal. Or water.

  “All right,” she conceded, but he could tell she was pleased. “Be careful, honey. Anymore those big trucks act like they own the road.”

  She’d said the exact same thing to him when he first got his lic
ense and took off in a rusted-out Charger for parts unknown. The car spewed oil and exhaust before he’d rebuilt the engine. She’d been right to worry. He’d wrecked the Charger in a single car crash two days after he got the engine purring.

  He’d used the insurance money to buy a Hayabusa with a blown head gasket. That spring, the weeks he’d spent tinkering with the bike’s engine then driving all over hell and gone with Marissa clinging to him were the closest he’d ever been to happy.

  The rain stopped overnight, but the damp chill lingered under a low, gray sky, raising goose bumps before he got to the end of the cracked driveway. He ignored them and set off at a jog down his mother’s street at the far edge of town to the county road. Run a mile. Left turn onto another county road, past the golf course where Delaney and Keith’s families both lived, pushing hard in the steady drizzle. Left turn and another two miles brought him back into town. He focused on his stride and picked up his pace to a sprint for another mile, past the post office, a few stores that stayed in business only because the nearest Wal-Mart was still forty-six miles away, and the Heirloom Cafe. When he reached the library, the new librarian was unlocking the front door. He lifted his hand in acknowledgment of her wave, but kept going. At the volunteer fire station he slowed to a jog, and turned for home.

  The most direct route to his mother’s house lay down Oak Street, but without consciously thinking about it, his feet took him on a detour. Right to Elm, a block down Elm, then back left to Oak, neatly avoiding the block housing 84 Oak Street. For the last twelve years he couldn’t bring himself to run past 84 Oak Street.

  His mother opened the garage and backed her ten-year-old Buick down the driveway while Adam showered quickly and pulled on cargo pants and a T-shirt, then joined his mother outside. She flicked on the bare bulb overhead, revealing the shelves set into the garage’s framing, boxes on those shelves, stacks of sewing and fashion magazines, and a large object hulking in the corner, under a protective cotton cover.

  He froze, then covered the instinctive reaction by setting the nearest box on the floor and hunkering down to open the flaps.

  “Honey?” his mother said.

  Inside the box lay clothes he’d never wear again, flannel shirts smelling of damp, faded jeans ripped at the knees, frayed at the hems. He let his hands dangle from his knees, but didn’t look at her.

  When he saw Josh Wilmont wipe out, sending his brand-new Honda spinning back down the road toward Brookhaven while Josh flew in a monstrous, cartwheeling arc into the ditch, he’d skidded to a halt in the middle of the dirt road and left his bike where it landed to sprint to Josh.

  No! No! Jesus God, no!

  Josh’s death was the end of the destruction he caused that night. And after the ambulance came and went, after the sheriff and the deputies and the fire department and the parents of his classmates and friends came and went, after only he and Marissa remained in Brookhaven’s dilapidated great room, the missing paneling around the fireplace as wide and empty as her eyes, he walked away. He left the bike and Marissa, hitched a ride into Brookings, waited until the Marine Corps recruiting station opened, and signed his enlistment papers that day. He was done with bikes, with racing, with his half-baked dream of opening a garage after his racing career was done.

  “You should have sold it.”

  “My name wasn’t on the title,” she reminded him.

  Air huffed from his lungs in dark amusement. He’d bought the bike against her orders, and hidden it in Brookhaven’s barn. He owned that bike, and he owned the havoc he’d wreaked with it. Whoever said you can’t go home again was wrong, he thought. You can, as long as you can face the demons that live there.

  So why can’t you run past 84 Oak Street, where Josh used to live?

  Add selling the bike to his list of things to do. Find an apartment. Write a speech for the wedding. Sell the last reminder of the boy he was.

  But that boy would never completely disappear, not as long as Marissa was in his life.

  You can do whatever you want, Adam.

  The whisper eddied from the depths of his memory to deposit him on the smooth planks forming the hayloft floor in Brookhaven’s barn, dust motes dancing in the rectangle of sunlight the same length and width as a bed.

  I want you to do whatever you want.

  In a moment she was bared to his gaze, her T-shirt tugged over her head and discarded, his already sacrificed to protect her from the dirty hayloft floor. Her hair, her mouth, her tongue, and now her pink-tipped nipples drawn to taut nubs on her small breasts. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, but he could drive iron nails with his dick. But when he fumbled open the button on her jeans and stripped them down her legs, pounding nails wasn’t what he wanted to do. His gaze held hers as he hesitantly laid his hand on the mysterious territory at the crux of her thighs. She looked up at him, open, vulnerable. Willing. His touch grew bolder. Steamy. Slick. What was left of his rational brain reminded him that guys said it felt so, so good, to get a girl under you, to get inside her.

  His animal body already knew that, a hundred thousand years of biology imprinted on heart and nerves, muscle and bone.

  Please. Adam, please.

  He kissed her. Touched her. Pinched her nipples, held her jaw for his kiss, gripped her nape to hold her face to his neck while he wrestled with demon-spurred temptation. She unzipped his jeans and shoved them low on his hips. He rolled onto his back, taking her with him. In the tumble their legs wove together and his cock slid in the sweat-and-precome slick between his belly and hers. With a hot little whimper she gripped his shoulders with both hands and ground against his thigh, but it was the rhythm that sent him over the edge. A minute, maybe two, of them moving together, perfect slide and grip and swivel, her nipples searing into his chest, her mouth open and panting against his. The orgasm blew all his circuits, the sunlight blinding him behind tightly closed eyes as he clenched his hands on her hips and ground into her belly.

  Some functioning part of his mind knew girls could come and she hadn’t. He had, God, had he ever, but it wasn’t enough. He had Marissa in his arms, naked and slick, trembling with the force of longing unrelieved, and it was not-fucking-enough. It would never be enough, because what they had to give each other wasn’t what the other wanted. Needed. Dreamed.

  Maybe if you’d given in and let yourself have what you wanted and she wanted, spun the roulette wheel of birth control options available to horny teenagers in conservative rural areas, the wildness you couldn’t control would have bled off. Maybe Josh would be alive.

  Maybe you would have figured out how to love someone.

  “I’ll deal with it,” he said, then pawed quickly through the contents of the box. But later. He couldn’t bear to look under the cover and see the bike on rotting tires, or hear the click of the ignition when it wouldn’t start. “This one’s for the Salvation Army, unless you want the fabric for quilts.”

  She peeked inside. “I’ll keep the material,” she said. He shoved the box to the side and hauled down three more. All the while, the bike loomed in the corner.

  “You were at Brookhaven last night?” his mother asked as she sorted school paperwork into the recycling bin.

  “The interior looks just like it did in Marissa’s pictures, without the furniture. Except for the paneling in the great room, the house is finished,” Adam said. A check of his watch told him the Heirloom would be emptying out from the church rush. “Ready for that caramel bun?” he asked.

  She got her coat while he restacked the boxes, shelved the ones from the back of his car in the space they’d made, and pulled her aging Buick into the garage. The gossip mill had done its work, because his appearance at the Heirloom didn’t surprise anyone. They entertained a steady stream of townspeople at their booth, all asking about his plans. He repeated the same story over and over. Yes, he was out. Yes, he was enrolled in the architecture master’s program at SDSU. Yes, he planned to stay in the region after he graduated.

  Yes,
he was home. For good.

  A couple of his mother’s friends clustered around the booth. He greeted everyone, and when the conversation turned to grandkids, he touched his mother’s shoulder. “Stay and catch up for a while. I’m going to take a walk,” he said.

  He paid the check and stepped outside. The damp air settled against his flushed skin as he looked up and down Main Street. The business district had an abandoned air to it, compounded by the town’s unspoken agreement that businesses would remain closed on Sundays. Still ignoring the rain, he walked to the corner of Main and Maple. The police station stood across from him. The next block down held one of the town’s two gas stations, across the street from Gina’s Diner. When he was in high school the local construction guys hung out in the parking lot before starting their day, and that hadn’t changed, either. The current generation of roofers, well-diggers, haulers, builders, and jacks-of-all-trade, identifiable by their Dickies and brown Carhartt pants, stained with paint and caulk, clustered around a crew-cab pickup truck parked at the far end of the dirt lot. Hands on his hips, breathing steady and deep but not hard, he kept on walking.

  Red flashed among the gray sweatshirts and fleece-lined denim jackets as he crossed the entrance to the parking lot. Marissa leaned against the tailgate, a silver travel mug in one hand, the other tucked into the pocket of a red fleece jacket, zipped to her chin for warmth. She wore army green cargo pants and scuffed, stained Cat boots, her long hair in braids under a red fleece watch cap. Smiling easily, she studied the dirt parking lot while the cluster of men around her laughed and joked; but when she looked up from her boots and saw him, she froze.

  All conversation stopped as the group of guys turned to look at him. He recognized a couple. Billy Olson, a year ahead of them in school, stood between Marissa and Zach Lansing, from their grade. A couple of older guys were vaguely familiar, and younger guys whose older siblings he probably knew by name, if not by face. There was no getting out of this now. He crossed the lot to join the group and nodded at Marissa. She gave him a noncommittal smile over the rim of her travel mug. The coffee smelled like it had started out weak and simmered on the element for three days.