by Mia Carson
When the breakfast came, he abruptly stopped the business talk.
He crunched a sausage in half in one bite, laid the remains on his plate, and then rested his chin on his clasped hands. “Jess,” he said. It was the Jess which came before your mother left us or I found a cigarette in your school bag or you need to work harder at school or any number of horrible childhood moments. The tone was unmistakable. He wanted to tell me something big. Dread immediately invaded every part of me. I clasped my knees harder. My toes wriggled in my sneakers as though they wanted to crawl away. Heartbeat, that’s one word for it . . . it was like a giant was jumping up and down in my chest. Anxiety’s a bitch, I thought in the haze.
“Yes?” I asked, my voice wobbling.
Dad didn’t seem to notice. He barreled on with the air of a man repeating a well-learned speech. “As you know, I have been single now since you were four, when your mother left and moved to Australia with her lover.” There was no bitterness in his voice. Both of us had gotten over that long ago. Mom was happy in Australia. Dad was happy to let her go. And I was happy because I barely remembered her and she had never tried to take an interest in me. I had long ago stopped worrying about the woman who had once sung to me in a half-remembered dream. He took a deep breath and went on. “Since then, I have not had a girlfriend. I know it’s not something you want to hear from your dad, but I’ve been lonely. Well,” and here he paused dramatically, looking out at the bay for a moment before turning back, “I’ve found somebody!”
His face lit up, and I unclasped my knees. “Is that the news?” I dared to ask.
“Yes.” He creased his forehead in confusion. “Why?”
“Just—” My toes stopped wriggling. My heartbeat slowed. I had been a fool, I realized, to imagine that Dad could know anything about last night. I had let my anxiety get the better of me, as I had done a thousand times before and no doubt would do again. “Just, I’m so happy for you!” I laughed, half with relief that he did not know what a certain wolf and lion had done the night before, and half with genuine happiness for him. “Who is she?”
“Her name in Annabelle Finch,” Dad said. “She’s an artist—a painter. I met her last year, at a gallery where she was displaying some of her work. Excellent work. I like a bit of art here and there—you know that—but I’m no expert. But even I could see how excellent this was. And, anyway, we got to talking and kept in touch online and now that we’re here for the whole summer, we’ve decided to meet.”
“That’s great, Dad,” I said. “Really, that’s fantastic.”
“And I want you to be there,” he went on. “Tonight. Me, you, Annabelle, and her son, Eli.”
I saw no reason to refuse this. I was so happy that he had not somehow divined by activities from last night that I would have agreed to meet anybody. “Of course,” I said.
He nodded once, and then turned to his food.
It’s over, I told myself. You did what you did, but nobody will ever know. Not even the lion will know. It’s done, you silly girl. Relax! You’ll never see him again!
Eli
It was her. I saw that instantly. It was like watching an old friend make her way across the restaurant, an old friend whose face you may have forgotten, but whose mannerisms, whose gait, whose voice, you recognized. Mom and I sat at the table near the back of the restaurant, the sun just beginning to set, as the tall, balding man in the suit and the young, short, blonde woman made her way over to us. Yes, I thought madly. Yes, it was her. Jesus, it was her. I gripped the edge of the table, thinking crazy thoughts like throwing it across the room just to create a distraction. I had never been more sure of anything in my life than I was of this: that woman was the wolf I had fucked last night.
“Relax,” Mom said, looking down at my hands, still clasping the edge of the table. “There’s no reason to be that nervous.”
Not that you know, I thought. No, from your point of view this is perfectly normal. If I had any doubts about the identity of this woman (which I didn’t), they were dispelled completely when the man and the woman arrived at the table. The woman’s perfume, rain water and fresh-cut grass, danced through the air and into my nostrils. Mom rose to her feet. Without realizing it, I had, too. She walked around the table and draped her arms around the man. “Andrew,” she said. She let go of him and pointed at me. “This is Eli, my son.”
I walked around the table and shook his hand quickly, because I did not want him to notice how much my hands had started to sweat. For a moment I felt an out-of-place urge to laugh, laugh raucously with my head thrown back, laugh at the impossibility, at the ludicrous chances of this situation. But I fought the urge back. I didn’t want to call any attention to my prior knowledge of the woman. I didn’t want Mom to know what we had done the night before. It was partly from embarrassment. That’s the last thing you want to talk to your mom about. And, also, I felt that it would diminish the experience if I talked about it. That night had been somehow—well—magical. This woman and I had transcended who we were and became just two pleasure-seekers, losing ourselves in each other’s body.
“Hello, Eli,” Andrew said, calling me back to reality. He pointed a hand at his daughter. Her eyes had been downcast. At the mention of her name she raised them. Her face was white like her legs. Two black-ringed sky-blue eyes looked out from above a button nose. Her small mouth was red with lipstick. She was sexy, even sexier than she had been with the mask on, that night. “This is Jessica, my daughter.”
Jessica held her hand out to Mom. Mom waved it aside and hippie-hugged her, kissing both her cheeks. “I’m so pleased to meet you!” she gushed. “It is such a pleasure! You’re an English literature student, aren’t you? And a dancer?”
“Yes,” Jessica agreed quietly.
“What a funny coincidence!” she laughed. “Eli’s an English student, and he has had dancing lessons, too.”
“She knows,” I felt like saying. “Of course she knows. We danced the Lindy Hop last night before we fucked.” But of course I didn’t.
Jessica was nodding along, and then Mom pointed at me. “This is my son, Eli.”
She held out her hand. I offered her mine. She looked down at the hand, and then her eyes widened, and she made to pull her hand away as though burnt. She thought better of it, and then shook my hand quickly. “Hello, Eli,” she said, her voice a croak.
“Hello, Jessica,” I replied, my voice no better.
I tried to look into her eyes, to communicate with her silently the way really close people can, but she was staring at the ground. I was sure I could communicate with her like that, though we had never truly met. I felt close to her in a way that was completely unreasonable. This was, after all, our first time meeting.
But that didn’t seem to matter. We had had the best sex of our lives. We had shared a magical night. We had danced the Lindy Hop together and we had learned each other’s bodies. Mom didn’t seem to notice me or Jessica after that initial introduction. Neither did Andrew. They were like two teenagers, cheeks flushed red, gazing at each other hungrily, falling deeper in love right there in the restaurant, oblivious that their two children were in a silent situation of their own.
We ordered starters, drinks, and then mains. I ate my starter silently, and so did Jessica, still looking down, unwilling to look up and meet my eye. But then, when the mains came, she did look up at me. Mom and Andrew were huddle close together, fingers interlocked, whispering closely. Jessica looked straight into my eyes, and I saw pleading there. Please don’t, that look said. Please don’t say anything.
I nodded. I won’t, I promised.
And she seemed to get the message.
Jessica
The tattoo! The dagger!
This morning I had thought the wolf and the lion were behind me. I had thought that it was something I would eventually look back on and laugh about. But there wasn’t anything funny about this as far as I could tell. I had been desperate to keep what I had done from anybody, especially
Dad. And now I walk into the restaurant to meet his lover’s son and the lover’s son is the lion. When I had reached across to shake his hand, I had felt good, at ease. I had felt like, I suppose, any daughter feels when she has to attend events like this. I was mildly bored, but otherwise content. And then that dagger-painted hand had reached for me, and images had filled my head, and there he had been. He was wearing a t-shirt which showed his muscles, and I could not mistake him.
It was the lion.
I didn’t look up at him for a long time. I was nervous as hell. I kept one hand under the table and fidgeted with the hem of my dress, pinching between my fingernails and pulling loose strands out of the fabric. I ate my food at a steady pace, because if I didn’t Dad would know something was wrong, and the idea of it all coming out now, in public, in front of everybody, caused a lump like a golf ball to rise in my throat. If somebody had looked under my chair, they would’ve seen a small pile of dress fabric, torn away moment by moment.
I built myself up to it, like a bungee-jumper building herself up for the plunge. You can’t avoid looking at him forever, I told myself. You can’t look down forever. If Dad and Annabelle were as close as they seemed (which was about as close as two people could be, from my judgment) then I would see this man again. I reasoned this out over the course of the starter. I was glad Dad and Annabelle were so enthralled with each other. It meant that he wasn’t asking me if something was wrong, or that he and Annabelle were not forcing me and Eli to speak. Eli—not lion.
I took a deep breath and looked up. He was gazing at me. He had a thick black beard which covered his strong jaw, but not completely. His lips were kissable in that beard, but I pushed that thought away. It was not appropriate right now. His hair was black like his beard, and cropped close to his head, styled and swept to the side. I could see the top of his chest and the blue and red tribal tattoo. His eyes were earth-brown. He was hot. I couldn’t deny that. But I also couldn’t deny that what I had done was completely out of character.
I pleaded with my eyes. And then he nodded, and I knew he understood. We ate our main courses, and then Dad leaned over. “Jess?” he said.
I turned as though struck. I had been deep in my thoughts, deep in last night, deep in the dream world with the lion, with the man sitting across the table from me. “Yes?” I asked, as I severed a particular tough strand of fabric between my thumb and fingernail.
Dad, slightly drunk on alcohol, and very drunk on love, didn’t notice my nervousness. “Annabelle and I are going to dance.” He pointed at the dance floor at the far end of the restaurant, where a few children and old couples spun around to the soft lolling music.
“Okay,” I said. “Yeah, fine.”
They rose, left us, disappeared into the outer world of the restaurant, which might as well have been a thousand miles away; whatever the distance, it left me and the lion alone. I was sure my dress was in tatters now, but when I peered under the table, it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Maybe none of it is, I thought. Maybe it’s like the dress. None of it is as bad as I think it is. But thinking that, even knowing that, rarely helps. Nerves are nerves, and when they’re raw, they’re raw.
I sighed, and forced my hand from my dress. It shook when I placed it on the table. The table was cool and hard on my hand, and when I moved it I could see a damp outline where my sweaty fingertips had pressed against the surface. I looked at this for a few moments, so I wouldn’t have to look at him, at the lion, at Eli.
Then he cleared his throat. “So, your name is Jessica,” he said. It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t offer an answer. His voice was the James Bond voice that had made me come so much last night. His hand was the dagger hand that had made me come. His body was the body that had made me come. But this was nothing like last night. Last night had been secret, in the dark, with the anonymity of the masks. Now we were out in the open.
“It is,” I said, and risked a look into his eyes. He stared at me openly, his earth-brown eyes unreadable. “And your name is Eli.”
He nodded. “It is.” He looked down at his knuckles for a moment. A crease appeared between his eyes, like a math student trying to work out some particularly hard problem. The crease deepened, and he looked up at me. “This is crazy,” he said. “This is absolutely crazy. What are the odds of this? I honestly can’t think. It must be like a billion to one.”
“Probably,” I agreed. But I still couldn’t believe I was talking to the lion, that the lion and I were out in the open together, that the lion and I were looking across the table at each other. “What I did, I—” The golf-ball lump rose higher, stopping my words. I didn’t know how to go on. Sometimes emotions are clear, easily explained. I’m sad. I’m angry. I’m anxious, etc., etc., etc. But what do you say when you’re a hundred emotions at once, and then some? What do you do when your chest feels like it’s pulling you in ten different directions? I rubbed my throat, as though I could rub the lump away. The man was as handsome without the mask as he had been with the mask. I wished he was ugly, wished I was repulsed by him. It would’ve been easier to bury this if he had been. But he wasn’t. He was perfect.
I cleared my throat, coughing once, and then looked once again into his eyes. “It wasn’t like me,” I said. “What I did, I mean. It wasn’t like me at all. I’m not the kind of girl who—who does things like that. I don’t want you to think I am.”
“Why do you care what I think?” he said, his unreadable eyes glancing up and down me.
“I don’t!” I blurted, as though correcting a mistake. I was making a mess of this. “Just—” I sighed. My hands worried each other, fidgeting like a student who doesn’t know the answer to the lecturer’s question. “Can we forget it?” I said, unable to keep the note of pleading from my voice. I had fucked this man, but I didn’t know him. Maybe he was the vindictive type. Maybe he would get some thrill from seeing me squirm.
But he nodded, and I let out such a big sigh of relief that I swear I saw it reverberate on his beard. “We are meeting for the first time,” he said slowly. “You are an American woman I do not know. You are the daughter of my Mom’s boyfriend. That is all. Eh?”
I felt like an actor repeating my role, but it brought me comfort. “Yes,” I said. “And you are just the son of my dad’s girlfriend. That is all. Yes, that’s all.”
“See?” He raised an eyebrow. I got the sense he was trying to make me smile. He held his hands out before him, palms up, in a the-worst-is-over gesture. “We won’t speak of it ever again. We’ll pretend it never happened. Will that be enough to stop you from tearing your dress to pieces?”
I blushed. I hated to blush; it made me feel powerless and horribly young, but the blush didn’t care about that. I hadn’t realized he’d seen my dress-attacking antics. “That sounds good,” I said. “Let’s do that, Eli.”
He nodded. “Then we should probably talk about things that we would usually talk about in a situation like this. What we do at university—though I guess you call it college—what we do in our spare time, things like that.”
His tone was soothing. He wasn’t the vindictive man I’d feared he might be, the tone told me. It was the tone of a doctor, a counselor, a very kind person simply trying to make somebody feel better. The golf-ball lump went away. I felt I could breathe more freely. And even though my hands kept fidgeting, it was nowhere near as bad as it had been before. The situation became less grim, less dark, less helpless. I felt the beginnings of a small smile lift my lips.
And then the clapping started.
It came from the far end of the restaurant, from the dance floor. Eli and I turned. A crowd was gathering around something. It reminded me of a crime scene on TV, when passersby crowd around an injured person. “Shall we go and check it out?” Eli said.
“Okay.”
We paced across the restaurant until we came to the crowd. It was about three people deep, but not so deep that I couldn’t look between the tall people’s elbows (much easier for a short girl than t
rying to peek over the top) and see Annabelle clasping her hand. At first I thought she was hurt, like the crime scene, but that didn’t explain the clapping. And then her hand shifted, and the humungous, glittering diamond ring came into view. Dad stood behind her, smiling widely at the crowd.
“Well done, mate,” some man said.
Dad smiled ear-to-ear at him. “She said yes!” he beamed, cheeks flushed with wine and happiness and love. “This woman is going to be my wife!”
Eli
Mom looked happier than I had ever seen her. Her face was ten years younger. She smiled widely at the crowd, and then looked down at the ring, holding it out before her. Mom wasn’t the diamond type, usually. I could tell she was ecstatic from that fact alone. She wasn’t the jewelry type, and yet she looked down at this ring like it was the most beautiful object she had ever laid eyes on. I walked through the crowd and stood before the happy couple.
“Eli!” Mom cried, waving tears away from her face. “Eli, you’re going to have a stepdad, and a stepsister!”
“I saw,” I said. I smiled and let her smooch my cheeks. In the corner of my eye I could see Andrew and Jessica having the same conversation. Jessica was smiling, but there was dread in her eyes, dread that her dad might’ve seen had he not been floating on a cloud of glee. “I’m happy for you, Mom.” I meant it. I was happy for her. But I was also confused. I had done something with this woman not twenty-four hours ago, something a stepbrother and stepsister should never do. I wore a smile, but behind the smile the urge to scream rose, the urge to laugh, the urge to cry.
“And guess what?” Mom went on, her voice high-pitched. “He’s buying a house here, in Bristol, and we’re moving in! Oh, please say you will, Eli. I’m selling our flat.”