by Ann Collins
When he felt her gasp underneath him, he immediately let her go and stepped back. But she stared up at him with wild eyes that said anything but the word ‘no.’
“Why did you stop?” she panted.
Dyson groaned. He pressed his forehead against hers and tried to calm his breathing.
“I was thinking about the couple on the balcony,” she whispered. “Ever since then I have been wishing that I had the courage to watch the whole thing. I wanted to see all of it.”
“I wanted to watch them too.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I’m a gentleman, and a gentleman doesn’t watch porn when a lady he admires is anywhere in the vicinity.”
“You admire me?”
Dyson laughed. “Honestly, Kayla, I fucking adore you. I think everything about you is amazing. The more I know, the more I want to know.”
This time she blushed scarlet, seemingly more embarrassed by his words of affection than by anything their bodies had been doing just a moment go. She seemed to think about his words for a moment, turning them over in her head, and then she grinned. “Well, now you know something else about me. I would have liked to watch the live porn show.”
Dyson took her hand firmly in his. “And on that note, I need to get you home before we both lose our better judgment and have sex on the sidewalk.”
“I’ve never done that before,” she teased, and he grinned at the visions running through his head.
“I haven’t either,” he admitted, and she squeezed his hand harder.
The final walk to her place seemed to go by within seconds. The closer they got, the less he wanted to leave her. But by the time they reached her place she had regained some sobriety, and she looked at him with regret as she pulled away from him and stood on the bottom step of her apartment building.
“I know I invited you up…” she started, and Dyson smiled and waved a hand.
“I have to get home. I have things to do.”
“No you don’t.”
“No, I don’t, but we both know it’s not a good idea for me to come up, don’t we?”
She blushed under the harsh white security lights. “No, not a good idea.”
“But if you want to give me your phone number, I will be more than happy to talk you out of bad ideas in the future.”
Kayla laughed, and Dyson smiled as she reached into her pocket for a piece of paper. Finding nothing, she looked at him helplessly. He handed her his cell phone. “Type it in here…if you are sober enough, of course.”
She fiddled with it for a moment and started to get frustrated. Dyson took it gently from her hands. “Let me. What’s your number?”
She gave it to him and he typed it into his phone and saved it with the push of a button. Then he stepped forward and looked right into her eyes. It was time to go before either one of them changed their minds. “Goodnight, Kayla,” he whispered.
“Goodnight,” she said, and then her lips were an inch away from his, and then a breath away, and then she was kissing him again. This time was even better, because Dyson knew she was sober enough to know what she was doing. She put her arms around his shoulders and Dyson swept his tongue into her mouth. Soon she was pulling on his shoulders as if she wanted him closer. Dyson broke the kiss and instead dropped his lips to her shoulder, where he drew the cotton blouse back just a bit so he could reach her soft skin.
He pressed his lips to her shoulder and waited, seeing what she would do. When she drove her hands into his hair and held him closer, he knew he had the green light. He let his tongue gently trail her collarbone to the center, then back up the other side, nipping from time to time as he went. By the time he was done he could feel the little goose bumps on her skin as he kissed his way up her neck. She sighed and pulled him closer, and he could feel the way her body seemed to melt into his, a permission to come upstairs, to do whatever he wanted, to make them both feel good.
It was harder than ever to pull away from her this time.
“I have to go,” he whispered, even as they were both breathing hard.
“I know.”
“I will call you tomorrow. I promise. I will let you sleep in some, though. You’re going to have a killer headache, you know that?”
“I think I already do,” she murmured.
“Then get inside and go to bed.”
“And dream of you?”
Dyson grinned and kissed her on the nose. “I love the way you think,” he said, and stepped away from her. He watched as she fished for the key in her jeans pocket, then stood there waiting as she opened the door and let herself in. After she waved goodbye he backed away until he stood in the street, looking up at the windows, wondering which one was hers. After a moment a light came on in the upper right, and he smiled.
“Goodnight, Kayla,” he said, and started the walk back to his car.
Chapter Eight
The sun was hell bent on torturing her. Kayla opened her eyes, was blinded by the glare, and immediately closed her eyes again. She rolled over to get away from sun, but the moment she moved, the pounding began – a deep and relentless pain that gnawed from the base of her skull. Her stomach roiled with the motion, and that made her head hurt even worse. It was the kind of feeling that meant only one thing: too much alcohol.
“Holy shit, holy smokes, holy everything,” she moaned, pushing her head hard into the pillow. The counter pressure actually felt good, so she stayed there for a while, trying not to think. Thinking about anything hurt far too much. Her mind would only stay blank for so long, and then it started moving again, whether she wanted it to or not.
She tried to remember the last time she had been drunk. Fortunately, she was the kind of drinker who remembered everything and stopped drinking before she blacked out. She counted herself lucky on that front, because she never wound up in the compromising situations that other women her age encountered. She could remember both the good feelings and the embarrassments.
She recalled once getting so drunk at a frat party that she threw up in the bathroom, without locking or even bothering to close the door. Her shame as the whole place heard her retching had been mortifying, and Kayla had never been that intoxicated since that night. It was safe to say she didn’t get any action that evening – not that she had been looking for it, but the feeling of having made a sloppy fool of herself in front of a whole frat house was not one she had ever wanted to experience again.
She also remembered waking up at a foster home several years ago after having used her fake id to get into a redneck bar with one of her foster brothers. She’d thought they were hanging out in a companionable, brother-sister way until she’d woken up the next morning to find her foster brother taking pictures of her topless, wearing nothing but her bikini underwear. She’d felt violated and dirty, and she’d had a fuzzy recollection about the events of the night before.
That particular hangover had been worse than usual, and she realized that she didn’t remember falling asleep. She had almost all of it in her head, all the memories, but could not recall taking her clothes off and getting into bed. Kayla had always wondered what had happened to her as she slept. She suspected that she had been given some drug, something slipped into her drink, and she hated to think about what that “brother” might have done to her before he took those pictures. She tried her hardest to extinguish the memory.
Kayla groaned. These were the kind of memories that always came back in the light of day, and she hated that they did. She wished she could be like her friends, who seemed to drink the night away and even sleep around with strangers but had no problem with getting over it the next day. They just needed an aspirin and a few hours’ sleep to get it out of their system.
Kayla felt like she needed therapy every time she drank.
And last night. Wow. What was up with that? She remembered throwing herself at Dyson like a little tramp, and she couldn’t forget the chivalrous way he had stopped her advances. That wasn’t like her at all.
She wasn’t aggressive in the least, and preferred to let the man make the first move. But last night was an anomaly, a moment that she would never be able to explain. Dyson had tried not to make her feel bad, but he didn’t have to – she was feeling terrible enough that nothing he said or did could have helped. Somehow, knowing that Dyson had been concerned about how she felt made the evening not seem quite so awful.
She wondered if he would call today. She wouldn’t be surprised at all if he didn’t.
She sat up, taking her sweet time, sure that any fast movement would make her head explode. She cautiously moved to the bathroom, where she found no aspirin, but decided that the ibuprofen would do. She swallowed two of them, looked at the bottle, and swallowed another two. Counting the minutes before the ibuprofen would start to dull the pain, she went to the kitchen – avoiding the harsh sunlight by closing her eyes halfway – and poured a tall glass of water. She gulped it down, trying to remember what really caused hangovers. Dehydration plus alcohol? That sounded right. So she drank down another glass of water, and then drew a third from the tap before heading back to her bedroom and collapsing on the bed.
She lay there sprawled out, wearing nothing but a t-shirt and underwear – her typical nightclothes. It was the kind of attire she would have gone to sleep in the night she’d gone out with her foster brother, and she had never figured out where her favorite t-shirt had gone. All she knew for sure was that she’d awoken to the young man lying next to her in bed, camera flashing. She remembered trying to cover herself with her bare arms because all of the blankets had been thrown to the floor, and she remembered him telling her how good she looked and how good she would feel if she would only let him take the single piece of clothing she still had on.
Kayla’d had to fight hard to get away from him, and it wasn’t until she’d screamed so loud that her foster parents burst into the room that she’d been able to get him out of the room. The boy had sworn that he’d deleted the pictures, but Kayla had suspected that he still had them.
She had packed her bags and fled that morning, with her head still pounding from the alcohol or the roofies or whatever the hell else was in her system. Her heart hurt even worse. She had gone to the police station and asked them to call her caseworker, but hadn’t said another word to anyone about the way she’d been violated. Kayla had been transferred to another home that very day, and she’d never looked back.
After that, she took to sleeping with a knife under her mattress.
Fortunately, the last foster home had been good to her. The woman had been taking care of kids for decades, and she tolerated absolutely no bullshit and harbored no lies. She didn’t ask Kayla what had happened to her, but perhaps that was because she had been dealing with the system so long that she had already heard all the horror stories. Instead, she gave Kayla her own room and told her that if anyone messed with her, Kayla was to come right to her and let her know, and the person who did it would be “sorry.” She said it with such conviction that Kayla felt safe for the first time in a long while.
Mrs. Carole. Kayla remembered the name and smiled. Kayla still got a Christmas card from her every year. It wasn’t a trite gesture – Kayla knew that if she went back to Mrs. Carole’s house, she would be welcomed with open arms, even now.
It was one of the few bright spots in the things that had happened to her since…well, since the really terrible things had happened.
Kayla thought about her mother. The smile slowly disappeared from her face as she stared at the ceiling and thought about the gentle woman with the light brown eyes, her happy smile and her strong hands. She thought about the way her mother would sing as she went about her chores, humming her own tunes that sounded just as good as any on the radio. Her mother had once had dreams of singing for a living, but then she had met Kayla’s father. She had gotten pregnant within a few months of dating him and then chose to keep the child – she had chosen to keep Kayla.
Maybe that’s why Kayla and her mother were so often the focus of her father’s wrath. It was the only way that Kayla could make sense of his anger. He saw Kayla as a trap, an anchor that weighed him down and kept him from living as he pleased. He saw Kayla’s mother as an evil harlot who had set out to ensnare him by purposely getting pregnant. Never mind that her mother had given up every one of her dreams when she realized she was pregnant. Never mind that her mother had settled for a man who she would have sworn was a mistake, if she hadn’t been so kind and kept her thoughts to herself. What her father never seemed to realize was that her mother could have done so much better, and would have, if it hadn’t been for her father’s deliberate, systematic campaign to keep Kayla’s mother under his thumb, scared and meek.
Despite her father’s temper and his insults when he was drunk, Kayla and her mother had made a pretty good team. They had done all sorts of things together, Kayla’s mother determined to give her child a good life even on a shoestring budget. They went to the theater on the cheap matinee tickets, spent time at the library, and jumped at every affordable opportunity to immerse themselves in culture. By the time Kayla was old enough to talk she knew the library as well as she knew her own house. One of her earliest memories was of standing on the broad, gleaming marble floor of the natural history museum, bathed in the sunlight that poured in through the impossibly high windows, staring at the skeleton of a creature that her mother called a dinosaur. It was only the first of many moments of awe. The greatest gift the Kayla had ever received was her thirst for knowledge, and that gift had come from her mother.
As Kayla got older, she realized that another reason for their outings was to avoid being home with Kayla’s father, especially when he had been drinking. There were nights, though, when he came home drunk, mean, and determined to pick a fight. Kayla remembered all those nights when her mother had desperately tried to protect Kayla from his fury, even deliberately provoking her husband to keep him from turning his anger on their daughter. Most of those nights ended in tears, bruises, and tearful apologies followed by promises to get sober. Kayla’s mother could usually keep the fight from escalating into violence against Kayla, but the nights when the money was short and the bills mounted too high, there was no defusing him. Kayla wondered why her mother never left, and she liked to think that eventually, she would have taken her daughter and put her bitter, abusive husband behind her.
She never had the chance.
The night that changed everything had started out better than usual. They’d sat down to dinner as a family – Kayla remembered that it was tuna casserole with peas, just the way her father liked it. Even though her father had kept pouring a steady stream of vodka throughout dinner, Kayla could remember wishing that every evening could be so peaceful.
She remembered her mother in her favorite red and white striped dress cheerfully bringing up that she’d talked to one of the neighbors who was willing to help Kayla’s dad fix the clutch on the old car that had been sitting in front of their apartment for months. The mood of the room changed in a flash, and in a flurry of angry words about nosy neighbors and shattered glass from the bottle of vodka, Kayla’s dad stood up from the table and ordered his wife outside.
His irrational jealousy had taken hold, and there was no way to stop it. He dragged Kayla’s mother to the car while she fought him, put her in the passenger seat and said he would show her that there was nothing wrong with the car, that he’d fixed it just as he’d told her he would. He shrugged off her suggestion that he’d had too much to drink, and he insisted that he could drive just as well drunk as he could stone cold sober. Kayla had tried to get in the backseat, to help her mother, but her mother had ordered her back to the house.
Kayla obeyed her mother, and her dad set off with squealing tires, Kayla left behind in the doorway begging them not to go. She began to cough from the dust left behind as they roared away from the curb, and somehow…
“I knew,” Kayla whispered softly. “I knew what would happen next.”
Maybe it was
the look in her mother’s eyes when she told Kayla to get back to the house. Perhaps it was the way her father acted, this time even more belligerent and angry than usual. Maybe it was because their fight this time had drawn the attention of the neighbors, and there was an element of embarrassment to what he was doing, something that even got through the haze of the alcohol. Something was different, and Kayla felt it that night just as surely as she felt her own heart beating.
The rest of the night was a blur, her memories a swirling set of random impressions. She remembered the scratchy warmth of the blanket that someone put around her shoulders and the words “she’s in shock” echoing from the tall ceilings of the foyer. She remembered yelling at someone, an adult who was trying to talk to her, and then she felt ashamed, because her mother would have been appalled and told her to mind her manners. She remembered the sound of a computer keyboard clicking away as the police officer asked her questions. But mostly she remembered her father repeating, “I’m sorry” and wondered how many times she would hear that for the rest of her life, and did the police know that he was just running his mouth, spewing empty promises like always?
Kayla’s mother had died in the car crash. Her father, like many other drunks before him, had walked away with hardly a scratch.
To add insult to injury, he was charged with several crimes and bailed out by a woman, a woman Kayla had never met. She was the last in the string of women he had been sleeping with, though Kayla had known nothing about his infidelities until the days following the crash. The flood of information that had come out in the endless interviews with social workers hadn’t made Kayla’s plight any more manageable.
Her father had attended the funeral, made a big show of sobbing over his dead wife, and climbed into his girlfriend’s car at the end of the ceremony. It was the last time that Kayla had seen him. The legal wheels had turned, and in the end, her father was sentenced to two years in a state facility. He had been released in less than a year.