That is what this is. That is what he does. No drug-dealing, no weird gangs or horrible nightmare gambling-murder-sex-show-snuff-film groups. All the things I hardly knew I was imagining way back in the worst parts of my mind fly away and are replaced by this. And though none of that should make my heart swell, it sort of does anyway. More than sort of—everything, all of it, now. I see him do this thing, this thing he was so ashamed of, this thing that I should be afraid of, and I know then beyond a shadow of a doubt.
I love him. I love him for thinking this was the worst of him; I love him for looking back at me while the crowd still crows for his attention. They holler and jump around him and wave their arms, but all he sees is me and all I see is him. Just him, waiting for me to say that maybe it’s okay. That I’m not afraid.
Though he has to know that I will never be.
Not when he goes to help the guy up.
Not when the first thing he says to me is, “You see now what kind of man I am?”
I think it might be the greatest pleasure of my life to reply the way I then do. To take his clenched fist in my hands, and kiss where it is bruised, and watch his guarded gaze shift to a sweet understanding as I say what he should know more than any other thing.
“Yeah,” I say. “You’re my man.”
—
He asks me where he should take me, and maybe it’s the dazed note to his voice or it could be the fizzing thunder still raging through my body, but somehow I don’t tell him back to campus, as I intend. Instead I say in a voice that doesn’t sound like my own—“Your place.”
Of course he balks immediately. But his balking is much less pronounced. It has this fading quality to it, like a politician trying to speak on a topic he barely understands. “That would be really not a good…not a great thing for you to maybe want to do,” he says, then seems to falter altogether. He rolls those big shoulders—still completely bare and really distracting—as though they suddenly fit him wrong. The bad self is starting to slough off and reveal the real person underneath.
And the real person is awkward as hell.
“Why did they say Redwood like that?” I ask, and he does not want to reply.
“Let’s not talk about that,” he says. “Let’s not talk about any of that.”
Unfortunately for him, though, I want to talk about it.
I want to talk about one thing in particular. “That’s you, isn’t it? You’re Redwood? That’s like…your fighting name?”
“What do you know about fighting names? What do you know about any of this? Nothing, that’s what, and that’s the way it should stay,” he tells me, and part of me thinks he might be right. I really don’t have any idea about fighting in streets. I have no idea about a lot of things—but at the very least, I understand this much…I want to be allowed the possibility of finding out.
“You know, my whole life has been ruled by shoulds. My dad had all kinds of ideas about what girls should do. How girls should behave. And I want the chance to choose for myself. I have the chance to choose now, in everything. And you just offered me more of it, didn’t you?”
“I did, but I didn’t think you’d choose wrong.”
“You know I haven’t. You know, though.”
“Yeah, maybe wait on that until after you’ve seen my place.”
“It could be a hole down to the pits of hell, and I wouldn’t care.”
“You should fucking care, Bea. This ain’t right.”
“There is that word again…should.”
“Goddamn you, girl. You know how hard you’re making it for me to draw a line? So hard I don’t want to do it. I hate being this fucking guy—probably just like your old man telling you what to do and hurting you and keeping you in the dark, and I can’t stand that, I can’t stand it,” he says, and I can tell how much he means it by his actions. He should by all rights be angry now. He should smack the wheel and shout.
But instead I hear his voice cracking like ice under a hot sun.
I see him roll those shoulders again, as the other him slides farther down.
Makes me want to do something—put my hand over his or maybe just lightly touch his too-tense right arm. Though neither one seems like enough. I doubt a full-body hug would be enough at this moment in time, which just leaves me with words.
I have words for him. Ones I think he needs to hear.
“You’re not like your father,” I say, and at first he doesn’t understand.
“I said your old man, not mine,” he tells me, tone kind of impatient.
So I just try to explain in the softest way possible.
“I know what you said. I know, love.”
I try, but I think I fail. It sounds like nothing to me—my voice is very faint, and really, the point behind it is obvious. He should probably know it already. I feel sure that he must, somewhere inside him. That when he worries about being violent, he is actually just afraid he might turn out like someone else. Like his old man.
But clearly I have no idea about anything, because when it clicks, his whole demeanor changes. I thought the ice-cracking was bad. This is bigger than that. He has to pull over for this. His breath seems to be coming in a series of short, sharp hitches, and any hope he has of controlling a ten-ton vehicle dies right there.
As does any hope I had of making him feel better.
Or even just continuing this conversation.
He looks beside himself. For a long, agonizing moment I think he might be about to have some kind of emotional breakdown, with me as the terrible, terrible cause. I pushed him to this, I think. I made him grip the wheel like that even though we’re no longer moving, and I made him shake in this scary manner, and his expression when he finally turns to me is one that I kind of helped put there.
The light behind his eyes looks like a single lit bulb in an empty room. It looks like disbelief and despair, and when he speaks it seems the same. His tone is so different from anything I’ve ever heard before—so brittle and so faint—it kind of tears me in two.
I even go to say sorry, before he gets his words out.
But I’m glad, oh, I’m so glad he gets there first.
“I wish you were one-tenth as lovely as you are,” he says, and I swear my heart jumps in my chest. Then he continues, and it kind of stops beating altogether. “If you were just one-tenth as lovely, I could take it. I could leave you alone. But you have to go on and be so sweet and so kind, and I just don’t get how to deal with it. Feels as if I was wearing a suit of armor I didn’t even know about, and somehow you found a hole in it somewhere. And when I wasn’t looking, you just climbed your way in and settled against my side, so sweet I think I might take to bleeding if you ever decided to separate from me.”
I only realize I’ve been holding my breath when my lungs start to burn. But even once I do, I struggle to get them working properly again. Did he really just say all of that? Did he say that about having a hole and me being against his side? It seems as though he might have, despite how little I believe it.
So little, in fact, that I seem to have not spoken for a thousand years—which he takes as something else altogether. He takes in my probably open mouth and my frozen body and my incredulous eyes and guesses this—
“That scare you? It should. It scares me.”
To which I answer pretty much the only way I can: “How could I ever, ever be scared when you are with me?”
Chapter 9
I think he expects me to say something when we pull up outside. I think he braces himself, and I suppose in one way he has good reason to. His place is not really a place at all. It could pass for a pile of rubble. It reminds me of the house from The Wizard of Oz, about thirty years after the hurricane picked it up and chucked it around. My first instinct is to check for ruby slippers, but my second is better.
My second is to tell him all the ways in which his reasons for worrying are wrong. I am not afraid of anything here. I know I have no reason to be. The second I struggle with anything—th
e weeds and brambles and bushes are high and all over his makeshift driveway, and crossing them proves a bit beyond me—he puts his hands on my waist. He lifts me over the worst part and tells me to step carefully across the creaking porch, and then once we make it to the falling-down door he turns to me.
He gives me this look, like Now do you see what I’ve been saying?
Now do you want to turn back?
But of course the answer is no on both counts. It will always be no now, after that thing he said in the truck. And besides, the very worst he has to offer is being a kind of boxer and a run-down home in the woods—one that looks incredibly and almost bizarrely homey inside. His couch is a plump, flowery affair, like something his possible grandma might have left behind. Someone has put a kind of doily over the milk crate the TV is perched on, and everything smells like pie. What could possibly offend anyone in here?
Our home was a model of middle-class perfection, but it didn’t get that way because everyone inside was super-happy. It got that way because our lives were forever like Patrick Bergin coming home in Sleeping with the Enemy. One time I hid under my bed because I forgot to arrange the coasters correctly. He demanded daily that everything was kept just so, and it was our job to do it or we got the basement. We got a hand in our hair dragging us there for disobedience that never really happened.
But there is nothing like that here. This is all him, I know. His dad is long gone, and this is what is left behind—Serge and his desire to keep things tidy and welcoming and just a touch preserved. There are bookshelves everywhere filled with books I somehow doubt he would be all that interested in. Rooms filled with recently dusted furniture that people no longer use. In his tiny tiled bathroom I see a bottle of perfume still over the sink, and when he catches me looking, he seems to think I want an explanation. “No girl left it there, just so you know,” he says. “Just never wanted to move it after all that shit went down.”
And then he really has no need to say more. I think about my own mom, barely a memory in the back of my mind. “She choked,” he said. She choked, he told everyone, and everyone believed him. But sometimes, late at night when everything rushes over me in a big dark wave, I find myself wondering. I almost say to him, in fact, right here and now, What did he do to her?
Only his expression stops me. He looks half cracked open, just like he said on the way here. That suit of armor is starting to lose arm parts and leg parts at so rapid a rate I think he might be standing here naked soon enough. His eyes already have that sheen to them—of someone exposed in ways he is barely comfortable with. And somewhere between the kitchen and here, he seems to have pulled his overalls all the way back on. As though the emotional revelations were more than enough.
Actual nakedness would pitch him over the edge.
God, I hope actual nakedness is not going to pitch him over the edge.
Mostly because that is exactly what I plan on doing extremely soon. I even have it all organized in my head. He is going to eventually lead me to his bedroom, and I am going to start taking my clothes off, and then he will see and get comfortable with taking his clothes off, and then we have the sex. Or maybe once there, he will just be overcome and fall on me, which sounds kind of scary but is also completely acceptable to me at the same time.
In fact, I think it might be the reason I cannot stop juddering, like a washing machine filled with rocks, then set to eleven thousand. My teeth actually start to chatter when we get to his room, even though he kind of tries to stop me going in. He holds out an arm and says, “We should make our way back down,” and only allows my entry very reluctantly. But the point is: He does allow it. He lets me walk right in and look at all of his things, despite how excitedly I know I go about that.
I almost pick up stuff he probably doesn’t want me to pick up, like the Oh my God, he has a guitar in the corner, and the iPod I find attached to a really complicated-looking stereo on the floor, and the row of candles he has all along a squat little dresser—Why does he have all these candles? I pretty much know that guys are never interested in anything like this, and especially not when they smell of sweet and airy things. But apparently some of them do to such a degree I catch the scent without leaning close.
I even know what it is.
That same one he has all the time. He must like it, I think, then get this big surge of ridiculous giddiness as though giddiness is really what I need right now. The washing machine is already enough to contend with. He is enough to contend with. Through my entire inspection he just stands there in the doorway, breathing too long and slow, clenching his hands tightly at his sides. And whenever I go near I almost feel him tense. It makes this kind of crackle between us, so big and sharp it should probably hurt.
But hurt is not the way I would describe the resulting sensation. Like an enormous gushing tingle would be a better way to put it. The whole thing makes me go all hot, and I know my nipples stiffen in the exact way he pointed out that first time. Then once they do, all I can think about is the thing he did. That little lick, just barely making contact, but all the better for it.
Will he do that again, if I ask?
I hope so. I think so. He just took a step into the room, which seems like a start. I maybe just have to give him a sign so he knows for sure that this is cool—but the problem is in coming up with one. If he was shorter or I was taller I would probably just kiss him, but I am nearly five foot four and he is six foot times a million. Unless I get a box, that is never going to work, which leaves me with the clothes-off thing.
Even though the clothes-off thing now seems stupid. People in movies do not just suddenly start unbuttoning their cardigans—not even the ones in the sex movies Sam has. Or if they do, their hands are not shaking too wildly to actually achieve it. They are cool and seductive, and maybe have music on while they peel items off, and absolutely no one says What are you doing? before they even start.
But that is exactly what Serge does. And his voice sounds dark and hoarse when he asks, too, like I just crossed some major line. It makes me want to stop completely, until I remember all the things he said about wanting to but being so bad for me. He needs a push, I think. He needs me to say that this is one hundred percent okay—so that is exactly what I do.
I think of the filthiest, naughtiest, most direct word I can.
And then I just force it right out of me, like squeezing around a splinter.
“I want you to fuck me now,” I tell him.
Though I wish I’d thought that through a little harder first. It feels fierce and heart-thuddingly good coming out, but once it hits him I can see I might have made a miscalculation. The fuck was too much, I know it was. I can feel it before he even raises an eyebrow or says another word. It practically bristles between us.
And then he speaks and makes it worse.
“Did you just say fuck?”
“I might have said fuck.”
“And you’re taking off your clothes. That’s what you’re doing right now, you’re taking off that little woolly thing and then maybe those corduroy pants until you have basically nothing on. That’s the idea here?”
“Yes, that was probably the plan,” I say, but it’s a strain to do it.
His incredulity is giving me freezer burn—and it only gets worse from here.
“Nothing first? Nothing before that?”
“I think it would be better if we just got it over with.”
“Man, that sounds romantic as fuck. I can hardly wait.”
“You want it to be romantic?”
“I have no idea what I want. I barely remember the last time I had sex. But I do know that get it over with was not something I had in mind. Sounds like something you say to yourself while clearing a drain,” he says, and though I try to focus on the matter at hand, I find myself going back to that completely irrelevant point in the middle of his words. The one that gets ahold of my arm and shakes me a little.
He barely remembers, I think.
He hardly ev
er has sex.
Is it weird that it excites me that he hardly ever has sex? That it takes down even more barriers inside me, and pushes my will far past the point I thought it could go? I think about him here alone instead of here with lots of lovely and pretty women, and somehow I am pressing on. I am really, really pressing on.
“I just meant that I really want to,” I say, and maybe he hears the note of frustration because he moves a little closer then. He even stoops a bit, in a way that sort of makes me nervous and sort of makes my body try to open like some disobedient flower. My inner thighs feel the same way they did when Sam took me out for my first drink. That heavy feeling is now a dull pulsing, which sounds horrible, I know, but is so unbelievably divine.
This is what people talk about all the time, I realize.
This is what poets write about—if said poets were really fucking filthy.
“So no kissing, then? You don’t want to just start with kissing?”
“I guess it would depend on what kind of kissing,” I say, though I swear I don’t expect a demonstration after doing so. I only wanted to stress to him that a peck on the lips probably isn’t going to cut it, so when he tells me This kind, my mind prepares for something else altogether. More discussion, maybe. More negotiation.
And instead I get one enormous hand on the nape of my neck. I get his mouth on mine, only without the surprise he seemed to wallow in before or the hesitation I know he usually feels. This is really hot and really wet and sort of like sliding through syrup really slowly. I get some of his tongue for sure. I get so much of it and in such a rude way that I think I might make a noise into his mouth.
One that does not put him off in the slightest.
He pulls away, only to tell me Or this, before going right back in for more.
And it is more, too. He is hungrier, and everything seems firmer. His hand comes to rest on my hip, which is at least twice as suggestive as any of his other kiss-touches. Sparks spiral outward from that one place. Everything tightens the second he does it, and again when he pulls away just long enough to ask, “How about that?”
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