by Cora Brent
After cutting across the back of several apartment complexes and jumping over a few cinder block walls, I was at my own door inside of ten minutes. The crappy pickup truck I shared with my brothers was nowhere in sight. In all likelihood Cord had driven it to work already.
After fishing out my keys and opening the door I heard Chase and Saylor laughing in the kitchen. I tried to go straight to my room but Chase heard me come in and called my name.
I sighed and headed out to them. Saylor had her laptop on the table and didn’t look up when I entered the room. She was a writer and sometimes used Chase’s superior brain power to help her edit her work. Cord had warned me she wouldn’t like it if I went after Truly but it shouldn’t be any of Saylor McCann’s business who the hell I fucked.
“You leave her a souvenir?” Chase laughed, referring to my missing shirt. He was shuffling a deck of cards and leaning so far back in his chair he was on the verge of toppling.
“Something like that,” I shrugged.
Saylor looked up then, her face a little pinched. “You look wrecked.”
I smiled again at the thought of last night’s workout. “I was wrecked.”
Chase let his chair fall forward with a thump. “Holy shit, Creed’s grinning and everything. Must have been better than average.”
“It was,” I said honestly. Saylor was getting red in the face so I tried to change the subject. “Your boy go to work?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she answered in a rather lifeless tone that was probably meant to show her contempt for me. I was getting irritated. This was bullshit. This was major bullshit. If it had been her buddy Chase instead of me she wouldn’t have been bothered at all. She would have showered him with fucking Trojans and winked.
Chase poked Saylor in the arm. “Can I still borrow your car?”
“Sure,” she shrugged. “Keys are in my purse.”
“Where’s your purse?”
“Somewhere in this apartment.”
Chase looked at her and nodded. “I’ll find it.”
“M’kay.”
My brother left the table. Before he wandered off to search out Saylor’s purse he slapped me on the shoulder, his eyes twinkling.
“That good, huh?” he mumbled.
“Yeah, I’d do it again,” I answered, deliberately loud enough for Saylor to hear me. She pursed her lips as I went to the fridge and began drinking milk directly from the carton. I knew it bugged the hell out of her when I did that.
“Is she okay?” Saylor asked.
I was dumbfounded. “What the hell do you think I did to that girl?”
Saylor turned and fixed her big green eyes on me. “Nothing. It’s just that you seem like you have a ‘use them and remove them’ philosophy on women.”
I fired back. “Kind of like Cord did to you once, huh?”
Shit. Shit. SHIT. What the FUCK made me bring that up?
Saylor’s mouth fell open. She knew exactly what I was talking about. There was a painful moment of silence between us. A million years ago, when we were all dumb teenagers back in Emblem, the three of us brothers had made a nasty bet. On the table was Saylor McCann’s virginity. Cord won. He felt like shit about it, especially after word got out, but I can imagine how much Say must have hated him. She must have hated all of us.
I watched Saylor’s eyes cloud over with bad memories and I felt like an evil bastard. Here was this girl who adored my brother, had given him a chance to prove he’d grown from a reckless jerk into a good man, and I was lashing out at her because I didn’t like to hear the truth.
I swallowed. “I didn’t mean it.”
She snapped her laptop shut. “Yes you did.” She stalked to her bedroom with her computer under her arm.
“Saylor!”
She ignored me and slammed the door.
Chase appeared a few seconds later, twirling a set of keys on his fingers. “What’s she all bent out of shape about?”
I sighed. “Ah, I was being a prick, that’s all.”
Chase laughed mockingly. “You? I don’t believe it.”
I shoved him. “Where are you going anyway? You don’t have class today do you?”
Chase had enrolled in a few classes at Arizona State. He’d done so after some prodding from Saylor, yet another reason I should be grateful to her.
“No,” Chase answered slowly, his face guarded. I stared at my brother. He wasn’t the secretive type, not by a long shot. Something was up.
“Just going to the mall,” he said without looking me in the eye.
“What for?”
Chase shrugged. “There’s an aquarium there I want to go see.”
“What are you talking about? There’s not an aquarium at the mall.”
“There is,” he insisted with a grin as he started backing away toward the exit. “There is an aquarium at the mall and I’m going there for research purposes.”
“Whatever,” I muttered. “Don’t get bitten by a shark.”
“I won’t. Not today. What are you getting up to? You working?”
I scratched my head. Chase and I often worked security for sporting events at the university. “I don’t know. What day is it?”
“Friday.”
“Then no. Tomorrow I’m supposed to work the first football game.”
Chase nodded. He jerked a thumb to the closed bedroom door. “Be nice to her, okay?”
“I’ll work on it.”
Once Chase was gone the apartment was unbearably silent. After hunting around in the kitchen for something to eat I found a loaf of bread that hadn’t turned green yet. I pushed a few pieces in the toaster. We were out of butter so I ate them plain.
Saylor hadn’t come out of her room. I stood in the hallway for a few minutes, wishing I knew what the hell to say to her. I liked Saylor. I really did. She was a sweet girl who had made my brother incredibly happy. We grew up in the same town for crying out loud and we should have had plenty to talk about.
Maybe that was my problem.
Talking wasn’t really my thing, especially when it came to women. There had been a number of them who had tried to fasten themselves to me on a more permanent basis but I was never interested. It wasn’t their fault. It just wasn’t the way I was built.
I sighed and backed into the living room. I wasn’t tired at all anymore. Actually I was wishing I was still in bed with Truly, doing something other than sleeping. My dick was instantly at attention as my mind recalled the sight of her in that black lacy underwear hiding under her dress. Fuck, she had just about killed me with that thing. I hadn’t been that close to coming right in my pants for years. She was definitely something special and I wasn’t going to be sorry about last night no matter how pissed Saylor decided to be about it. In fact, I’d be happy to give it another go if Truly could get over her obvious casual sex guilt.
If she did it once she’ll do it again.
That might be true. How many times had she come on my hand, around my dick and in my mouth? She’d loved every damn dirty minute.
Since I couldn’t go anywhere with those thoughts right now I breathed deep until the boner subsided. When I was in control again I spied my guitar in the corner behind the couch. I grabbed it and sank into the couch with a sigh. That thing had gotten me through more rough moments than I cared to count. I’d scored it at a pawn shop in Emblem the summer before my senior year of high school. I had never taken lessons but learned to tune it and play basic chords on my own. The boys had always begged me to do something with my voice but I couldn’t imagine getting up on a stage with lights shining on my head and a bunch of dickheads in the audience waiting for me to fuck up.
As my fingers idled along the strings a wave of peace washed over me. Most of the time I walked around feeling wired and edgy, as if the smallest push would send me into darkness. When I drank too much it took over my whole head and all I could see was a face I’d do anything to forget. I didn’t think of him as my father. As far as I was concerned the three of
us had never had a father. But in the moments when that cocksucker broke through anyway, grinning like a true villain, I had murder in me.
As I started playing I began singing the first song in my head. I lost myself in the music instead.
I’d forgotten there was anyone else even home until I let go of the last note. I looked up to see Saylor standing quietly nearby.
“Your namesake,” she said, smiling faintly.
I’d been singing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Long as I Can See the Light’. I knew their whole catalog by heart.
I put the guitar down as Saylor came around and sat on the couch. She played with a piece of her hair and seemed to be thinking.
“Sorry about earlier,” I said.
“I know,” she answered. “And I shouldn’t get into your business. It’s just, I don’t have many friends. I like Truly. I don’t want to see her get hurt.”
“You think I’d hurt her?”
She looked at me frankly. “I’m not sure you can help it, Creed.”
“It was just one night, Saylor. That’s all it’s gonna be. If you have to know, she didn’t seem too eager to have me hanging around longer than necessary.”
Saylor coughed once. “I feel kind of bad. I’m the one who pushed her out the door and told her to have a good time.”
I leaned back into the couch. “She did. She had a great time.”
Say laughed through her nose. She looked at me for a long moment and then her gaze fell on the tattoo scripted across my chest. “You think that’ll ever change?”
I looked down. The tattoo read ‘Concedo nulli’. Translation: ‘Yield to no one’.
“Doubt it,” I answered honestly.
I heard a buzzing noise and Say pulled her phone out of her pocket. She glanced at the screen and then looked quickly at me. I could guess who was calling.
I got off the couch and rested the guitar against the wall.
“I’ll leave you to it,” I told her, heading for the back patio. I knew she was waiting until I was out of earshot before answering her phone.
I picked up some of the free weights we kept on the patio and started pumping sets of fifty. Usually it wasn’t a problem. It was an easy way to push myself out of the funk and get focused. I would channel everything into my body’s rising strength. It pleased me to feel myself growing more powerful with every lift. It meant I had a shot at battling through whatever challenge was on the horizon. I used to beg for that power when I was a kid as my brothers and I hid in the desert darkness from the same monster. He still haunted us all, just in different ways. I always figured the stronger I became the more defeated he would be. The mind doesn’t always listen to those arguments though.
After ten minutes I set the weights down and stood. Arizona in August is a punishing place. The sweat rolled out of my pores and instantly evaporated in the searing heat. I couldn’t hear Saylor’s voice. I wondered if she was still talking to Truly, and what Truly had said about me.
Strangely enough, I would have given a lot just then to know the answer.
CHAPTER FIVE
TRULY
I jumped out of bed the moment I heard Creed close the door. For a few minutes I didn’t do anything but pace back and forth naked. Dolly crept into the room and stared at me warily from the doorway. I thought I detected a note of disapproval in her bright eyes.
“I know,” I told the cat. “There’s nothing you can say about it that I’m not already thinking so you may as well keep your rude scolding to yourself.”
The cat blinked.
With an incoherent shout I dropped back onto the bed. I leaned over my bare knees and stared at my toes.
I had fucked Creed Gentry.
Holy shit, I fucked Creed Gentry!!!
Repeatedly. In more ways than were decent. And he was so good I couldn’t even wrap my head around it.
With a groan I flopped back into the log cabin quilt I had sewn by hand when I was fifteen. I’d dragged that poor thing through my manic life until we wound up here. Now I’d forced it to suffer the indignity of hosting a big fat fuck party with a surly bad boy I scarcely knew.
Dolly jumped on the bed and curled up close to my face. I nuzzled her dark fur as she purred. She came into my life a year ago, when I was fresh out of a bad deal with a man who figured I was young enough and stupid enough to accept being a kept woman. I knew better, although it took me a little while to realize I knew better. I wasn’t about to stomach becoming something only slightly classier than a street walker. By that point I’d been in Arizona for about four months but that was a block of time mostly spent entertaining Paul Angelo. He was twice my age and absurdly possessive. He also had a wife and kids who knew nothing of my stained existence in a luxurious Phoenix loft. When I found that out I realized how much I’d been kidding myself about my own status. I told him where to get off and then I got out, refusing the pile of money he tried to throw at me.
At the time I only had enough cash to rent a tiny trailer in a crowded Mesa park. By then I was living in isolation. Friends were a myth. Family was a half remembered dream. A few of the folks ambling around the trailer park seemed sketchy, dangerous. But mostly they were just ordinary people; a little lost and yet still hopeful, kind of like me.
Dolly was a skeletal wraith who ran like the devil every time a human came within twenty yards. Something in her watchful eyes and undernourished body tore at me. I started setting out a plate of milk every evening and sitting nearby as I waited for her to find it. After the fourth night of patiently holding out my hand she finally ventured close enough to touch. Her rough little tongue gently swiped my knuckles and I casually pulled her into my lap. When I took her inside I wasn’t sure she would stay. But she did. Maybe she recognized a kindred spirit, an allied stray to face the world with. After a few months I was able to clear enough money from waitressing jobs to get out of the trailer park and into a shared apartment close to the university.
I listened to the swift beat of Dolly’s heart for a few minutes before sighing and rising from the bed. I was damn glad Stephanie was still out of town. We weren’t close and Stephanie Bransky struck me as someone who suffered from an excess of intensity. When she wasn’t running off to class she was holed up in front of her computer or barking into her phone. It all seemed mysterious and exhausting. I’d asked her once what the hell she was up to but her flat expression said she had no intention of talking about it. Stephanie didn’t bring men home. She probably wouldn’t have approved of Creedence Gentry.
The shower felt good after so many hours of sweaty exertion. As I pulled the worn terrycloth robe over my skin and wrung out my hair, I started to feel like less of a basket case. I’d had a one night stand. So what? People did that all the time. It’s not like Creed would think less of me. I doubted he would think of me again at all.
Even though I hadn’t slept much the night before I wasn’t tired. Hours remained until I needed to return to the restaurant. Dolly stayed under my feet while I headed to the kitchen and whipped up some scrambled eggs. I hadn’t exactly been honest when I told Creed I never cooked.
With a plate in hand I walked into the living room. It was my plan to vegetate in front of the television until the striking memory of Creed’s naked body began to fade. Dolly bumped into my ankles when I stopped cold. There, in the middle of the beige carpeted floor, was the crumpled shape of a man’s shirt. I remembered thinking last night how the blue fabric brought out the color of his eyes. I leaned over slowly and picked it up. Why the hell hadn’t he taken his shirt with him? He couldn’t have overlooked it; it was out here in plain sight. Maybe he left it behind intentionally, as a reason to come back later.
Even though I felt supremely foolish, I set my plate down and picked up the shirt, bringing it to my face. I inhaled the essence of smoke, soap, and a basic male musk that caused all my female parts to shriek with longing.
Goddamn he was good.
I shook my head and tossed the shirt on the couch.
Dolly immediately jumped on top of it and began kneading the fabric into a bed.
“You too, huh?” I grumbled as she settled comfortably in the middle of the bed she had created.
I picked up my plate full of eggs but I wasn’t really hungry anymore. After getting free of the Paul situation I had come to a long overdue epiphany; I’d keep blowing around the country like a damn tumbleweed unless I stopped clinging to men in search of something I would never have. Before Paul there’d been the minor league baseball player who I could never run fast enough to keep up with. That phase was a long string of cheap motels and drunken sex that never managed to get me satisfied.
For a while I’d also taken up space on the tour bus of an obscure band. It was a time that followed a particular low point in my life. But strangely, that rowdy environment full of colorful souls had helped heal me a little when I desperately needed some healing. I was still trying to escape the consequences of the first and most damaging chapter of my sad history with men. It was the disaster that had torn the Lee girls apart; something that destitution, despair and the constant selfishness of an irresponsible parent had failed to do. It was my mother calling me a thousand foul things. It was my screaming answers, exposing too many terrible truths. It couldn’t be taken back. On the night I left, the man who had caused all the agony was nowhere to be found.
If Laura Lee ever thought of her eldest daughter she never made it known. My sisters were beautiful in their grief the last time I hugged them goodbye. Mia. Aggie. Carrie. I missed them.
We had been the Lee girls, all taking the last name of our only known parent. Over a span of four years my mother had been a baby factory accepting donations of diverse sperm. She chose our first names based on whatever area of the South happened to be nearby when we came screaming out of her womb. I, Tallulah Rae Lee, was born when she was nineteen. Fourteen months later came Meridian, who resembled our mother the most. She had the same pale frailty and seemed even more destined to be wounded by the world. The following year brought Augusta whose dark complexion guaranteed that heartless people would be forever asking if she was really one of us. Finally my youngest sister, Carolina, came rolling out armed with willful demands that never subsided.