Red Water: A Novel

by Kristen Mae

  “Beautiful,” Garrett says, and I don’t know if he means I’m beautiful or if my begging, my agony, is beautiful to him.

  You’re actually very pretty when you cry…

  He sinks into me, fills me, still so slow, pulling out almost all the way every time he draws back and then burying himself until he’s pressed against my clitoris again. “Keep begging until I make you come,” he says. “I want to hear you beg for it.”

  I do as he says. And by the time he is done with me, I am destroyed.

  * * *

  He lets me stay. We brush our teeth together—me with a brand-new toothbrush Garrett had stashed under the sink that makes me wonder if he’s planned the whole night in advance.

  I can’t stop shaking. I’m freezing in one of Garrett’s T-shirts and my new thong underwear he never even looked at, my nipples poking out the fabric of the white T, goose bumps covering my arms and legs. I look over at Garrett, who is brushing his teeth as thoroughly as I would expect from someone with such fresh breath, and he returns my glance with a smile in his eyes. He’s shirtless, but his skin is buttery-smooth. No goose bumps.

  We climb into bed together and I align my body with his, pressing my warmth-starved flesh against him, trying to stop shivering. My insides are buzzing again with a queer unease; I can’t tell if I’m thrilled to be in his bed or terrified of how brief my time in it will be.

  “I have to practice tomorrow,” I tell him. He’s lying on his back now, his arm under my head like a pillow, and I’m facing him on my side, finally starting to warm up. “Early. I’m meeting with that study group in the afternoon.” I wonder if Rome has invited anyone else. He said he would, but I keep forgetting to ask him about it.

  “That’s fine. I’m an early riser. Planning to do a long run tomorrow.”

  “How far is a long run?” I skate my finger up the ravine that divides his abdomen into its pretty, perfect little blocks.

  His shoulder shrugs beneath my head. “Ten to fifteen miles.”

  “Geez. I don’t think I could run one mile.” My finger skates down the ravine.

  “Of course you could. The key is to take it slow. I could easily train you.”

  I smile. Running sounds terrible, but extra time with Garrett… “Would you want to, though?” I say. My heart trips over itself because I realize I’ll be crushed if he says no. I don’t want him to know this, though; I make my finger keep skating nonchalantly along over his skin, as if a few extra hours per week with him is something I could take or leave.

  “Yes, I would.” Hallelujah. He clears his throat. “You would have to get up early, though. Otherwise the day becomes too hot and your body wastes energy trying to stay cool.”

  “Well, I guess I could get up early if it meant hanging out with you.”

  “It’s not hanging out.” His tone is sharp now, almost admonishing. “It will be grueling. You will hate me by the end of the run.”

  “I doubt I could ever hate you.” I let my hand fall to rest on his stomach.

  “Don’t stop,” he whispers. “It feels so good.”

  I snicker. “Beg.”

  “Please, please, oh, don’t stop!” He turns on his side to tickle me and suddenly we’re wrestling under the covers and I’m squealing with laughter, kicking at him and trying to push his hands away from my ticklish middle. He stops just before I’m genuinely uncomfortable, and we settle back down, slightly out of breath, so I can resume my tracing.

  He gives a deep, contented sigh, and I think, I made him sigh like that. Me. A rush of warmth begins in my abdomen, spreading outward until even my ears are ringing with the feeling. It’s that same sort of overwhelming rightness I felt when we swam with the manatees—that sense that Garrett is suturing my jagged pieces, that he’s done something to heal me. I’m smitten with him, or…in love, maybe. No, not love. This is way too fast. But oh, I can’t take it—I hug my arm around him and bury my face in the side of his chest.

  “What?” he asks, resting a hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m so…” I can’t go on. I’ve exposed myself so much already. What do I have left? How much more vulnerable can I be?

  “What is it?” he asks, his voice soft and concerned. He turns on his side so that he’s facing me, his blue eyes piercing me through, even in the dark.

  “I’m so happy. God. I don’t know if I’ve ever been this happy,” I tell him, and then I’m blushing all over, half-trembling with the awful confession. Gushing my stupid feelings like he gives a shit. I sound pathetic.

  He strokes my hair. “I love that you told me that.”

  I squeeze him until my arms grow sore and my grip finally slackens. I’m getting hazy, slipping from consciousness, when he asks quietly, “The other day, when you said that your mom died…”

  I open my eyes, dreading the question, waiting for him to go on.

  “May I ask what happened?” His voice is polite; the aural equivalent of a tiptoe.

  But I feel my body slacken even more, wilting like a flower. “Yeah…she…uh, she committed suicide.”

  His shoulder tenses beneath my cheek, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t pry. I think he wants to know—I think he intends the silence to be the space where I can set my story. But only if I want to.

  “I feel like I should say what everyone else kept saying when it happened,” I tell him, my voice low, “which is that my mother ‘took her own life.’ But I hate that phrase, Garrett, I really do. It’s a bullshit euphemism for a cruel, horrific, irreversible act. ‘She took her own life’ implies that life is a tangible, returnable thing, something you can hold in your hands, something you can pack up in a picnic basket, mount on a bike, and ride away with, and then, after a nice picnic, you can return it.” Hot tears are rolling down my cheeks and onto Garrett’s chest, but he makes no move to wipe them away. “My mother didn’t ‘take her life.’ She fucking killed herself. She’s gone. No more picnics for her.” I brush my tears from Garrett’s chest. My face is still wet.

  “I’m so sorry you had to go through all that.” The room is so quiet it’s like even the walls pity me. “Did anyone realize she was depressed, or was it a surprise?”

  I grimace. “Suicide is never not a surprise, Garrett. Never. But yes, she had been depressed for years.”

  “My question was insensitive.” His voice is rough with contrition. “I apologize.”

  “It’s okay. It’s a difficult subject for people to talk about.”

  We’re quiet for a few minutes, and his breath deepens and becomes more even. I think he’s almost asleep. “My dad made her do it,” I hear myself whispering. They are words I have never, ever spoken aloud.

  His breath hitches, and I know he’s listening again. “How?”

  My pulse thuds thickly in my temples, heavy but faint, like a giant approaching from afar. And then I tell Garrett what I’ve never told anyone. How it started with low-level offenses—vague, passive-aggressive remarks about my mother’s parenting, her housekeeping, her intelligence. How month after month, year by year, my father upped the intensity. I tell Garrett what Liza believes: that for my father, manipulating my mother was a game. How far could he push her? He persisted until the night she locked herself in our apartment’s tiny bathroom. Liza and I had been doing our homework by lamplight, only half-focused, trading jokes about a popular girl who’d made a comment about my hand-me-down outfit. Then my father was jimmying open the bathroom door, the noise of it drawing Liza and I out into the hallway.

  “Would one of you girls dial 9-1-1?” he said, though at this point I could still see only his shirtless back, his jeans, his hairy bare feet. “Your mother has gone and killed herself.” He was blocking the bathroom door, but I could look between the cracks, between his arm and torso, between the place where his silhouette ended and the doorjamb began—and my gaze zoomed in on her like a telephoto lens, etching into permanent memory that porcelain-white tub, the top of her head, and her knees sticking up out of the red water like
mangroves. The long chopping knife bleeding onto the dingy linoleum floor as if it were she who had cut the knife and not the other way around. And then Liza threw up all over the hallway carpet, so I had to be the one to call 9-1-1 and tell them my mother was dead.

  I talk for so long that I’m sure Garrett has drifted to sleep listening to me. But I don’t care. It’s been too long since I faced it, too long since I had a good cry, and Garrett, with his uncanny ability to sew me up and pull me apart at the same time, he’s made me feel like it’s okay to let it all spill out, even if he’s fallen asleep while I do it.

  But he’s not asleep. He turns so he’s on his side facing me now and pushes my hair back from my face. Some of the strands are wet from my tears. He kisses me, slow and soft and deep, like he’s drawing the pain right up out of me. Then his hands slide down my torso, to my waist, around to my backside, pulling me closer, and I wrap a leg around him and pull him to me, my heart swelling at his compassion. He takes me again, as skillfully as before, but this time he does not ask me to beg.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Hey, wasn’t sure you were gonna make it.” Rome looks up from the book he’s reading as I walk into the room. He’s lounging in one of two cushioned armchairs positioned in front of a low table. Similar study pods dot the lounge, which is empty but for a trio of students at the far end, huddled over open laptops and debating in hushed tones. Floor-to-ceiling windows on one side of the room usher in the golden light of late afternoon.

  “Am I late?” I reach into my bag for my phone to check the time.

  “Nah, I just didn’t think you’d—well, never mind. Ready to start?”

  I plop down into the chair beside him and pull out my books. “So…Nazi Germany? Hitler’s rise to power? That’s what’s happening today, right?”

  I’m trying to focus, but my thoughts are still with Garrett. I would have done almost anything to stay in bed with him, which was all the more reason to stick to my original plans. Each stroke of my bow this morning was a conscious rebellion against my own mind (manatees, countertops, Give me your cock, please), proof that I could handle the distraction—the rather impressive distraction—that is Garrett Vines. Did he really not run screaming after I told him the insanity of my childhood? Maybe he still will.

  Rome flips through a few pages in his book. “I’ve been reading this chapter about the interim years, the years between the two wars. It’s actually pretty interesting how the end of one war ultimately led to the beginning of the other. The disenchantment created by the forced acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles was what enabled the new party’s rise to power.”

  I’m fumbling with my own book, trying to find where he is—he’s already making me feel a bit stupid. Also, since when does he talk like this? I’d give him a weird look but I’m too busy trying to get my shit together to address his sudden intellectualism. “Okay, wait, you are definitely way ahead of me here. No wonder you got an A and I didn’t.”

  He lays his book face down over one knee. “Tell me what you know about the end of World War I. Just talk it out.”

  “Well…um, I read about the Treaty of Versailles, and I know it formed a new republic in Germany and that the reparations Germany was expected to pay was some outrageous amount, but…”

  “Did you get to the hyperinflation yet?”

  “Ugh. No. How am I so behind? I’m reading every night.” Except last night.

  “You’re not behind, I’m ahead. I love this shit.”

  “You’re fucking weird.”

  “And you’re just jealous I got an A on my quiz.” His eyes are gleaming playfully.

  I smile and roll my eyes. “You got me there.”

  I find the chapter on hyperinflation, and he picks up where he left off.

  After an hour and a half of alternating reading, talking, and taking notes, I think I’m starting to wrap my brain around the material. Rome asks if I’ll look at his essay for his Music Appreciation class, and I do, but aside from suggesting he elaborates in a few spots, I don’t have much to offer him. The essay is obviously thoroughly researched, and he writes very well—efficiently, and with proper grammar.

  “You’ll need citations,” I tell him. “Just find a few corroborating points in an online music journal or a book in the library or whatever.”

  “I can do that. Thanks, Malory.”

  “No, thank you.” It’s good to feel like I’m finally getting a grip on this history stuff. “I’ve always done well in history classes…I think maybe my classes in high school were just bullshit, way too easy. Everything was multiple choice.”

  It’s not that you’re smart; it’s just that you have no competition here. I shake my father’s voice from my head.

  “The history they teach in schools is bullshit in more ways than one,” Rome says. “In middle school I got into an argument with the teacher about Christopher Columbus and how they say he founded America and had a happy jolly party and ignore that he helped decimate entire civilizations.”

  I’m blushing because I’m white and he’s black and I feel like I’ve done something wrong. “Yeah, I’ve…heard that.”

  He laughs and adjusts the brim of his hat. “My bad, I get carried away.”

  “No worries.” I begin stuffing my books back into my backpack. “I’m just a little ashamed of my ancestors.”

  “Why? You’re not your ancestors.” He zips his own backpack and hikes it over his shoulder. “Wanna head to the food court? I’m starving.”

  “Um, well…” I don’t want him to think we’re on a date.

  “As friends,” he says, raising his hands up as if in surrender.

  I suppress a smile. “Sure, but let me run my books up to my room first.”

  “Meet you back here in a minute.”

  Outside, the sun is low—we’ve studied for just over two hours—and I feel accomplished, confident that I can handle my obligations despite the occasional distraction of Garrett’s soft mouth on my body. I can stand to be away from him. I can get all my practicing and homework done. I won’t lose myself in him, no matter how many times he makes me beg.

  Rome and I walk toward the student commons. The evening is humid and warm, peaceful but for the whine of cicadas. Rome keeps glancing over at me like he wants to say something but can’t decide whether to come out with it or not.

  After his fourth indecisive peek I finally say, “What? Something on my face?”

  His head dips so that I lose sight of his eyes under the brim of his hat, but I can see his nose crinkling. “I’m not so bad, am I?” he asks. Now he lifts his eyes to me.

  Ouch. My stomach flips with guilt. “Okay, I misjudged. Sorry. You have to admit, though, you were pretty forward. What was I supposed to think?”

  He narrows his eyes at me. “What exactly did you think?”

  We side-step a group of students heading away from the food court. They’re laughing and talking and don’t make room for us to pass.

  “Geez, rude, much?” I roll my eyes. “So, this is going to sound so bad, but you reminded me of these guys that lived down the, uh…row. From where I lived. Like…in a trailer park. They were troublemakers.”

  He’s quiet for a minute, then says, “What, like thugs? You thought I was a thug?”

  My face and ears are burning now—I’m glad it’s dark. “Okay, fine, so I’m judgmental. But you have to know you project a certain…image. Why not dress different? Or pull up your fucking pants?”

  He laughs like he’s not insulted, and maybe he really isn’t with the way he’s grinning. “It’s a social experiment, I guess. Or, wait…that’s not right.” He waves his hands in the air like he’s erasing what he just said. “It’s a test. If you wanna judge me and make assumptions based on my clothes, then maybe I don’t really wanna know you anyway. My mom called it ‘shaking the tree.’”

  “Shaking the tree?” I cut my eyes at him. I don’t think I’ve heard that one before.

  “Life is all about connect
ion, right? We’re branching out all the time, like a tree does, and everybody we connect with is a leaf on the tree—healthy leaves, deeply rooted trees, all that. But sometimes you gotta shake shit up, make the dead leaves fall away. Shaking the tree is getting real, showing people who you are and letting them decide whether they want to hang around, you know?”

  “Come on, Rome. You are your baggy pants?”

  “Nah, but do I really need to change my fucking clothes to be likable? I mean, I’m not faking. I’m not trying to get a rise out of anybody. But fuck you if you don’t like my saggy ass. Ya feel me?”

  “Okay, okay, yeah, I feel you, but you know, you press people.” I think of how pushy he was that first day of class, how he blocked the way to get my attention. “It’s not like you just accept every time a leaf falls out of your tree. Case in point: me. Why didn’t you just let me blow away on the wind?”

  We’ve arrived at the food court. Rome pulls open the glass door and lets me go first into the brightly lit hall. The cacophony of raised voices and forks clattering against plastic meal trays is so jarring after the comparative peace of cicada song that it makes me want to turn around and go back outside. “You got me there. Some leaves…” He glances at me and falters. “Ah, never mind. Pizza?”

  “Sounds great.” I’m glad he didn’t finish whatever he was going to say about leaves. We head toward the Domino’s on the far end of the food court. “So,” I say, “a judgy white girl like me makes assumptions about you based on how you dress and speak. So don’t actual thugs make assumptions about you too? Don’t you attract a certain kind of crowd?”

  “Personal pan, just pepperoni, and a medium drink.” He turns back from the pizza guy and looks at me pointedly. “‘Certain kind of crowd’?”

  “Same for me,” I tell the pizza guy. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean, Rome. You never got yourself into trouble? The guys who lived down the row from me didn’t give a shit about education or whether they were going anywhere in life. All they cared about was selling dope and claiming their territory. They’d have considered you a sellout.” And kicked your ass.