“Not more than I love doing the talking.”
He takes me into his arms, bringing me to his chest, and uses the mattress to leverage himself against me, driving into me hard from underneath. All the while, the egg is whirring against my clit, bringing me closer and closer to…
His finger presses on mine on top of the remote, and suddenly the rhythm changes, from a constant vibration to a staccato pattern.
And I’m absolutely blown to sky high. Whirr-whirr-whirrrrrrrrrrrrrr. “I’m going to come. Oh God, Russ. Oh God, Russ.”
“That’s right, beautiful. Get my name tangled up with His. Fuck, yeah.”
It isn’t just an orgasm. It’s a full-body implosion, and halfway through it, when I’m seeing nothing but the kaleidoscope, I find myself saying the thing I’ve been thinking for days and days. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” over and over again.
“I love you too, Penny, so much it hurts.”
51
Penny
The next morning, I wake up wrapped tightly in his arms, five minutes before my first alarm goes off. He is here, and I am here, and everything is perfect. Except for the worry that is bubbling through me like lava from a crack in the ground.
I watch the second-hand tick along, and think about the date, which makes my heart plummet. Every tick brings our goodbye closer. We told each other the biggest words last night, but not even love can stop what’s coming, barreling at us like a runaway train.
“Russ,” I whisper.
As soon as I say his name, he inhales hard against my bare shoulder. “You okay?”
I reach back and run my fingers through his thick hair. “What are we going to do?”
He’s such a sweetheart that he doesn’t say, “It’s 5:55 a.m., Penny. Can we wait until breakfast to talk about the future?” Instead he clears his throat and tucks his chin alongside my neck. “Well, what do you want to do?”
I turn to face him. “You first.”
“I want to be with you. I want to find a way.”
“Me too. More than anything. Do you have to go?”
He wipes away some sleep. “I wish I didn’t, but I've got something big happening back in Boston on Thursday. You should come with me.”
“Work? A new client?”
He traces a line down my cheek with his thumb. “Everything I tell you has to be a secret.”
“Promise.”
“An old Army buddy of mine runs a logistics firm called Darkwater. He’s hired me as head of security.”
Somewhere in the dim recesses of my memory, I know the name of that company. From the news, maybe. “That sounds… fancy.”
He laughs a little and rubs his eyes again. “I don’t know about that. But it’s steady work, no more hustle. Plenty of money.” He pulls the sheet up over me, like he’s worried the blasting AC will give me a chill. “Enough for whatever you need.”
I give him a little push on the chest. “I don’t want to be a kept woman.”
He clasps his hand around mine. “Tough.”
All the ridiculousness of that idea aside, there’s something much bigger to worry about first. I press my face into his shoulder. “Seriously. What are we going to do?”
“Look at me, Penny.”
I keep my eyes hidden. “Fly back and forth every two weeks until…what? Until something changes?”
This time he doesn’t tell me to look at him, but makes me do it, holding my face in his hands. I push down the panic, and do what he says. His eyes are wide, sincere, and his expression unflinchingly calm. “Maybe we try it, until we decide where we want to be. What do you think of that?”
Where we want to be. I turn away from him, and glance around my bedroom, at the curtains my mom made from the pattern my grandma left behind. At the walls I painted when I moved in. At the bookshelves my uncle made for my mom. Three generations of Darling women have lived in this place, and the idea of leaving it for somewhere so unknown is just so very…
“Listen,” he says, in that confident way of his, “I think we take it one step at a time. One week after another. People do make these things work. But I’m not going to lie, if you want to come back to Boston with me tomorrow, you’d make me the happiest man on the planet.”
Under the closed bedroom door, I hear Guppy snuffle, and right on cue the alarm goes off. The mayor booms, “Gooooooood morning Port Fla—” and I whack it into silence, and switch off the second alarm before it starts beeping too.
“One step at a time,” I repeat.
He nods and shifts my bangs away from my forehead. “What do you say to this: In two weeks I fly you up to see me. Then two weeks after that, I fly down here. Or we can do it every weekend if you want.”
He’s a true romantic, but he’s not thinking logistics—he’s not thinking about holding mail and dog care. He’s here, in love, with me. In my bed. On a Wednesday morning.
The man absolutely melts me.
So yes, I can do this. At the very least, I can try it. I don’t have to pre-worry my way right through the next year. Hopefully. “If we’re taking it one step at a time, I think maybe you should meet my mom and my stepdad.”
He breaks into a big, beautiful smile. “I’d love that.”
“Really? Seriously?”
He nods, only once. “Get used to me being serious about you, Penny. I meant everything I said last night. Every last fucking word.”
“So did I. Every last one.”
He climbs on top of me and sinks down into a kiss. He knits his fingers into mine and pins my hands onto the mattress. He smiles as he kisses me, and he is right back between my legs again. He doesn’t even have to reposition himself as he presses into me.
And as he does, all the worry flies out of my head, like embers falling from a firecracker in the sky.
52
Russ
I pull into the driveway of a gray ranch house, surrounded on all sides by barbed wire fences. It’s straight out of a federal penitentiary. The driveway is flanked and then the perimeter of the house is surrounded, too. On the porch stands a woman in a big gardening hat, wearing white shorts and hiking boots. She waves at us from way far away, like she’s bringing a ship into port.
“Penny. I don’t want to be judgmental, but I don’t think there’s any crime in this city at all. Isn’t this fence overkill?”
Penny glances around like she’s surprised to hear about a fence. “Oh, you mean the goat perimeter! That’s not for crime. That’s for Horace.” Penny points across me, and I turn to look. “That’s him. Horace is the King of the Asshole Goats.”
To my left, maybe fifty yards away, is a brownish goat, spotted with white and gray, trying to break through the fence. He yanks on the barbed wire with his teeth, trying to get some leverage by grinding his hooves into the soil. Behind him stand a clump of what I assume to be llamas, chewing on some hay. Behind those, a donkey is ambling along toward nothing in particular.
I bring the Suburban to a halt next to a minivan, which has the sanctuary logo painted on the side. A kicking donkey, with the words G.L.A.D. TO BE ALIVE SANCTUARY.
“Goats, llamas, alpacas, and donkeys,” Penny explains, counting off the acronym letters on her fingers. “Cute, right? A whole lot better than Kindergarten Portfolios Yadda Yadda Yadda.” Her sweet voice spirals down into a grumble. “That asshole.”
It occurs to me then that this mission might serve two purposes. But I better check, because I’m pretty sure it’s not on the potential son-in-law instruction manual to walk into your prospective in-laws’ home and start asking the bride’s mom about the ex she left at the altar.
Immediately, my logical brain catches up to that thought. Bride. Son-in-law. Prospective in-laws.
Holy fuck alive. Did I put all those words in the same sentence?
I look at Penny, who smiles back at me. “Ready?” she asks, reaching out to give my hand a squeeze.
“Just so we’re clear: Is Dickerson off limits, or can I ask a question or
two?”
“Pfffft!” Penny says, laughing. “She’d talk all day about him. She and Wikipedia have diagnosed him right into psychopathy. She’ll show you her spreadsheet. It’s very compelling.”
I love this woman, and I’m goddamned proud of it. Hell yes, I thought those thoughts. “I’m ready, beautiful. I sure am.”
* * *
Penny’s mom is named Alice, and the first thing she says to me is, “Well, aren’t you hunky.”
Next to me, Penny groans. “Mommmmmm!”
But Penny’s mom seems awesome, not unlike my Aunt Sharon. Maybe when women hit menopause, the fuck all y’all gene kicks in. Whatever it is, it’s badass, and this lady’s got it big-time. She gives me a conspiratorial wink. “Come on in, you two. I’ve made us some iced coffee, and I’ve got coconut popsicles for after.”
We take a seat on the back porch, Penny staying close beside me with her arm linked in mine.
Way in the distance, I see a man hurling hay bales off the back of a truck. “That’s my stepdad,” Penny explains. From every direction flock assorted awkward animals. Galloping, scurrying, loping along. “Is that a camel?” I squint hard. Can’t be. No way. Only… I think… Jesus Christ. It is.
“Oh yes. That’s Omar. He’s our star.” Alice beams. “When the elementary school kids come to visit, he takes them for rides around the property. Horace won’t come near him.”
Omar trundles along the horizon, like something straight out of Lawrence of Arabia. The whole thing is both surreal and fucking awesome.
Alice adds cream to our iced coffees. “But Omar is also part of our problem.” As she says it, Penny’s grip on my hand tightens, same as it did on the roller coaster. Her big eyes dart over to mine, as if to say, Buckle up.
And then her mom is off, letting fly with one long sentence, each word spewed into the air like BBs from a pellet gun: “Because that sorry excuse for a human being Adolf Dickerson has filed an injunction accusing us of having exotic animals without a license, and we can’t afford the goddamned license which means that if we can’t get this thing straightened out, all of us—including Horace the goat, Omar the camel, and Sweet Pea the miniature donkey—are hosed.”
Well, that at least explains where Penny got her tendency to babble. It also makes me dislike Dick Dickerson that much more. Seeing this place puts it all into perspective. All these animals, where would they go? Not on the back nine of a Dickerson International Golf Course, that’s for damned sure. Knowing Dickerson, he’s probably got stock in a glue factory already.
“Mom. It’s okay. Have a calming pastille,” Penny says, digging through her purse. “Maisie made them. They only give you a tiny headache. Tiny.”
But Alice isn’t having it. She slugs back a few gulps of her iced coffee and stares at me. “Sorry.”
I wave off that apology. “I’ll get straight to the point.”
“My kind of man!”
“I did some background research. He’s pretty well protected. Shell companies, holding companies, that sort of thing.”
“Anagrams,” Penny adds, adorably, but not particularly helpfully. Still though. So cute.
“It’s very typical of his disorder,” Alice says. “His ego is damaged by the very smallest insult.” She parts her fingers by a millimeter and peers through the gap. “Which would explain why he is still trying to ruin me thirty years after I told him to take his kinks elsewhere.”
Penny glances at me, her face bright red.
But my son-in-law mode takes a backseat to my PI mode. That is the shit of information brokering. Secrets, fetishes, proclivities. The weirder the better. “Kinks…”
“I don’t think I can have this conversation,” Penny mutters, dumping more cream into her coffee. “Maybe I’ll go see Horace. It’s been a while since he’s bitten me in the shins.”
But I squeeze her hand to tell her to stay right here, by my side. I might have the know-how to dig up dirt, but she knows this town and the people in it. She’s key to all this. Also, I’ve got one more day with her, and no fucking way am I losing one second of that to some maniac goat that eats barbed wire for fun.
“Kinks!” Alice says, flinging herself back into her chair and tipping back her hat. “I’m a pretty open-minded person. I mean, I like a spanking as much as the next girl.”
Penny winces as if Horace actually did just bite her in the shins, and I’ve got to swallow my laugh. I cough into my glass and keep my cool somehow. How fucking weird and awesome is this? I love this place. I love these people. Fucking love it.
“But that man.” Alice lowers her chin, like it’s time to get serious. “I didn’t know there was a word for it, not back in the eighties. Hell, there probably wasn’t a word for it, not then. But I was willing to try it, just the once. I’ll try anything once. Dennis and I have recently gotten very interested in…”
“Mom!” Penny barks.
“Right. Sorry, honey,” Alice says. “What I meant to say was that one time he asked me to dress up in fur for him, and he was never, ever the same.”
Penny chokes into her glass, making her creamy coffee bubble. But from where I’m sitting, the golf course visit from the tailor starts to make a lot more sense. “Fur, like fur coats? He’s got a fetish for fur coats?”
Penny squeezes my hand so hard that my fingers start to go numb. I look over at her and see her blush has migrated from her cheeks down her throat like a rash.
“I’d have been fine with a fur coat,” Alice says, totally unfazed by Penny’s horror. “No, Russ. The man’s damn near obsessed with fur suits. Animal costumes. The more intricate, complicated, and authentic, the better.”
“You’re shitting me.”
Alice shakes her head, looking satisfied and delighted. “I’m not! I looked it up on FetLife, and they’re called furries.”
Penny makes a strangled croak.
“And Dick Dickerson is the king of them. Now, who’d like a coconut popsicle?”
53
Penny
When I was 13, I had the world’s most ginormous crush ever on a boy in my class. He was one of the popular ones, who wore his baseball cap low and didn’t say much and listened to Live really loud on his yellow Walkman tape player. His name was Matt Greene, and I used to draw hearts around his name in my World Geography notebook. For reasons I will never, ever, understand, he started to take a fancy to me, halfway through the school year. And it was a big fancy. Like, sometimes he would even look right at me across the lunchroom, and sometimes even asked if I wanted to be his partner in Language Arts. Big fancy.
One afternoon, in the five sacred minutes between Spanish and Biology, Matt Greene came up to me. He took his Walkman earphones off, looked me up and down, and said, “Hey.”
Just that. Just hey.
It was like every single Greek god dropped out of the sky at once, lowered their swords, fell to their knees, and kissed my feet. Hey.
“Hi,” I said, and shimmy-stumbled up against the bank of lockers, lost in his deep green eyes and his three emerging mustache hairs. His T-shirt asked If second place is the first loser, why do they get a prize? Sexiest nonsense eighth-grade motivational saying ever.
To really set the scene, Friends was in its heyday, and I was—as Jennifer Aniston taught me—wearing corduroy overalls and a white tank top underneath. Very chic. Very Rachel.
Matt said, “You want to, you know, hang out?”
Behind him, Maisie’s mouth dropped open, and she clutched her sparkly unicorn binder to her chest.
“I’d…sure, I mean, I have to be home by 4:15 but…”
“No, I mean like, hang out. At the mall.”
Oh my God, hang out at the mall. It was the mysterious pastime of the cool kids—milling around outside Lucky Jeans, drinking Orange Juliuses, doing I-didn’t-know-what. I’d only ever seen them from a distance when my mom took me underwear shopping. “Yes, anytime, whenever. I’m totally free all the time, every day, I mean, I’m even free right…” Mais
ie made a slicing motion across her throat and then fanned her face with her folder, mouthing, “Be cool!” So I tried to play it cool. “I have band practice on Saturday morning, but after that I’m free.”
Maisie bashed her face with the unicorn folder.
Cool has never been my forte.
But it was good enough for Matt and his three mustache hairs. “Sweet,” he said, and put his earphones back on. He pressed the play button on the side of his tape player and turned to go.
However.
As Matt Greene turned to go and I began to scramble for Maisie so we could debrief about what on earth had just happened, my overalls got stuck on one of the lockers behind me. Which meant that as I took one step forward, my overalls stayed put.
And tore with a long, horrible rrrrrrrrrip.
It was loud enough to silence the hallway. And loud enough to make Matt Greene turn and take off his earphones too.
Astonished, and startled by the breeze on my backside, I spun around to see what had happened. As I did, I showed my slightly pudgy thighs and my underwear to everybody who’d turned to stare.
Cue the crickets.
But it gets worse.
Because they weren’t just any underwear, oh no. They weren’t some cute little pair of polka-dotted cotton Hanes for Girls, nope. These were the ones my mom had insisted I get, and so there I stood, showing off my nude, control top, granny-cuts, in full view of Matt Greene and my entire eighth-grade class.
And until this moment…
Mom says, “It was the mooing that really got him going. And the barking. That was the special sauce.”
Russ nods and then asks, “Is there actual sex happening with these furries, or is it more of a dry humping and mingling type deal?”
…I’d never been more embarrassed in my life. But this takes it. Second place is first loser, Matt Greene. Have fun at the mall.
* * *
Just Like That Page 27