“When I saw them last, Corinna was singing folk songs and spinning yarn, which she said she has been really missing, my mom was holding the baby, desperately trying to rock her to sleep, and Sam was in the backyard chopping wood to work through his nicotine cravings.” In spite of my pre-sex anxiety, I started cracking up. “The look on Veronica’s face was pure disgust. I don’t even think she’s ever held a baby before.”
“What about you?”
“I think we can safely assume my grandparents did most of the caretaking. She’s the most self-absorbed person I’ve ever met. Living with Sam, the second most self-absorbed, and Corinna, who is out in left field, should be an interesting experience for her.”
“My mom is like that. She never gave a shit what I did either.” He said it very calmly. I hoped that I sounded that contained and disinterested when I discussed Veronica. “She did, however, get back to me about your paintings.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I thought you were keeping a tally of my jokes. That would be eleven.”
“So you are kidding?”
“Nope.”
“Davis!”
Now he laughed. “She is interested. She wants pictures of some of your other work.”
I leaned back in the chair. “Wow. That’s…wow.”
“It doesn’t mean anything will come of it. There are other ways to go, in that case. She’ll probably forget again anyway, but I’ll remind her when she calls on the twenty-fourth.”
“She calls you on certain dates? She’s very organized.” I liked that about her.
Davis shook his head. “She only calls on one specific date.” When I stared at him, waiting, he explained. “It’s my birthday. As strange as she’s always been, she always remembers. Or her assistant does.”
“I didn’t know your birthday was coming up! What are we going to do?”
He sipped his beer. “As far as I know, no way to stop it. I’ll be a thirty-three year-old injured quarterback instead of thirty-two.”
“Oh, I don’t want you to look at it like that! How do you usually celebrate your big day?”
“I think I had a party when I was five or six.”
“For your more recent birthdays, what did you do?”
He sipped. “I went to practice. Played a game one year.”
“Well, can I plan something? A little something?” I already had an idea for a gift.
He was looking at me again, and he opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it.
“What?” I asked.
“Can’t figure out how this came about,” he told me. “How you ended up sitting at my kitchen table.”
“You invited me,” I said, a little hurt.
“Naw, that’s not what I meant. This whole thing,” he said, gesturing at the two of us.
“Maybe it’s just a checkdown.”
Davis huffed. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, maybe it’s just the easiest, most makeable play for you. Like a short pass to the tight end. A sure thing to get the yardage.”
“I’m aware of what a checkdown pass is. And what do you mean by yardage here?”
“You know what I mean!”
Davis stood up. “All right, chipmunk, let’s go.” I started to pick up the dishes but he pulled me along with him. “No, leave them. Come on outside.” He grabbed the two coats closest to the door, both of which belonged to him, and settled one around my shoulders. It draped off me like the caftans Mrs. Lusk always wore. We sat on the step at the edge of the deck and Davis put his arm around me. “What’s your deal?”
I looked up at the night sky. “Stars, hide thy fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.” What if Julian could see me now? Was Lindy right, that he wouldn’t want me to be alone? “Did I ever tell you how many times Lindy has tried to fix me up? Like, a hundred. Some of the guys were not terrible. Some of them were probably very nice. I was never able to go out a second time with any of them. I never felt, until now, that I was ever going to do this.”
“This,” he repeated.
“This, this risk! It’s risky, what we’re thinking about. Not the sex part, I don’t mean. That would be fully protected, if it comes to that. I mean that it wouldn’t be just sex for me, you know. I hope you know. And that’s the risk.”
He was quiet. I wished I could read his mind.
“I’m a little…I’m a little scared.” There, I had said it.
Davis didn’t say anything at first. He just pulled me closer to him. “Yeah,” he answered finally, “I get that. It’s a risk.”
“Julian was my checkdown.”
“What?” Davis asked me. “What do you mean?”
No one knew this, not Lindy, and I hoped not Julian himself. “I mean, we were dating for a long time, and I liked him a lot. I loved him as my best friend. He knew me better than anyone, even Lindy. It just wasn’t…it wasn’t the romance that everyone thought it was.” Romeo and Juliet. My voice dropped because I was barely able to say the words. “I was going to break up with him when he went to college. But then he got sick.”
“So you stayed.”
“I would have married him. I would have had his baby, I would have done anything to make him happy and make him better. I just couldn’t love him like that, and I think it’s because I’m afraid. I always have been.”
“Katie.” He turned my face to his. “Sometimes your best option is still the play you may not make. But even if you think you have long odds, you have to go for it. I want to take this risk with you.” He kissed me softly.
We sat and looked at the stars for a long time, until I stopped crying and it got too cold to stay out any longer. I thought the whole time about what he had said. About risks, about me taking them.
Then I slept with Davis. No, not like that! We lay on the wide, football player-sized couch, cuddled up together with him unconsciously rubbing my back. He watched game film that the offensive coordinator had sent over and made comments about it and I made noises of agreement. It wasn’t exactly how I thought the night was going to go, but really, after my Ida-inflicted sleep deprivation, it was probably for the best. At one point, Davis started nudging me awake. “I can’t carry you, chipmunk,” he was saying, “unless I hop on one leg.”
“You don’t have to carry me. I’m awake,” I told him, and let him lead me to a bed where I immediately curled up and fell asleep again.
It was when I woke up in the morning to the twin smells of something burning and pervasive hot grease that I realized where I was: in the guest bedroom, where Davis had been sleeping. My head whipped to look at the other pillow. Yep, definitely indented. I had slept with Davis. I had slept with Davis, and I had missed it!
After my experience getting shamed in front of the defensive line, I was very cautious entering the kitchen, but it was just Davis in there, running water over a smoking pan with all the windows open and the cold air pouring in. “The stove gets really hot,” he commented.
“Sure does.” Looked like we might need another frying pan. I had a few in my cart online just in case, as we had been down this road before when Davis tried his hand at cooking when I wasn’t there on weekends. Working together, now we pulled off a fairly nutritious and non-flaming breakfast.
“Now what?” Davis looked at me.
“What would you usually do on a Sunday? Watch football all day?”
“Sure, if I’m not playing football all day, or getting injury treatment from a mid-week game.”
“New plan. We’re going to a corn maze.” I jumped up and down a little. “Won’t that be fun?” He didn’t seem like he agreed. “And we’ll have caramel apples. And we’ll get our pumpkins! And then we can go visit my grandma, and bring her a pumpkin, even though Mrs. Lusk says pumpkin pollen irritates the lungs. She says it every year.” I paused in my planning. “Does that sound good to you? A fun day, or too hokey?”
He thought. “No, I think it’ll be good. My first time in a corn maze
.”
“A maze virgin,” I commented, and then pretended to drop something so I could duck down and hide my face. Sweet Jesus, I had a one-track mind.
I got dressed in some of the many clothes I had brought over, and my phone started to ring as we were leaving.
“Hello?”
“Is this woman Veronica really your mother? She’s a bitch and a half,” Sam complained.
“Well, now you know where I get it,” I said reasonably. “Having trouble getting along?”
Sam grumbled for a while longer, something about time in the bathroom and lack of understanding about colic, then I had to take a call from my mother.
“Hi, Veronica.”
“These people are insane,” she seethed.
“I might say, unusual. Quirky!”
“The baby never stops crying. They talk incessantly. Why are they living here, anyway, in our house?”
“They needed a place to stay. You guys are all in the same boat, really,” I said.
“What do you mean by that?” she snapped.
“The sooner you all get your finances in order, the sooner you can move somewhere else. I have to go, so have a great day.” I hung up quickly to find Davis looking at me.
“Everything ok?” he asked.
“I think so. I’ve kind of set up a cage match between Sam and my mom. I’m not really sure who’s going to come out the winner, but it sure is interesting to watch.”
“I put my money on Sam. Let’s forget about them for now.”
“Yeah. Let’s just enjoy our day.” I smiled up at him, and he rubbed his knuckles across my cheek.
And we did. We had so much fun at the corn maze, even though it wasn’t really fair because people kept giving Davis hints about which way to go. By the time we found our way out at the end he had about 20 kids following him, and he signed a bunch of autographs and talked with them for a while. Then he took pictures with the farmer who owned the maze, who also wanted to take pictures of Davis with their extra-large pumpkin, which then led to trying to give Davis a bunch of pumpkins to take home. It was funny how people wanted to give stuff to famous people. Like, he was doing ok, money-wise. No need to give him pumpkins. But I did pick out and purchase a very nice one for my grandma and Davis polished it with his shirt to wipe away any possible pollen. By that point, he was a little over the attention, and really, so was I.
Everyone at Lakeview was happy to see him again. My grandma insisted that she was feeling just fine, although I could see that she wasn’t great, and we took her out to lunch.
I could also see that she was burning to talk about my mother. Grammy had always tried never to say a bad word about her, even when my mom sent me condoms on my 13th birthday, even when Veronica suggested that it would be a better idea for me to give her the money that I had saved for college, because, well, she was the one who was going to succeed.
“Sounds like Veronica and Sam are butting heads a bit,” I remarked. I had stopped looking at the texts on my phone and turned off the notifications.
“But not coming to blows?” my grandma asked. She sounded worried.
“I’ll intervene before then,” I assured her. I started reading the texts under the table just to make sure it hadn’t yet gone that far.
We talked about more interesting topics, like Mrs. Lusk’s wayward granddaughter, the upcoming Lakeside Halloween party. Then Davis, with his eyes slightly glazed from boredom, suggested that we drive Grammy back. “You don’t look right,” he told her. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s just my hip, as always,” she explained. “The last doctor didn’t have anything new to say, except that I shouldn’t malinger.”
“He should have shut the hell up,” I mentioned, and she gave me a look so powerful that I took it right back. “Sorry. Sorry!”
Davis was frowning. “You’re not getting second opinions?”
“This was probably the fifth,” she laughed. “No one can quite figure it out, except that I’m old!”
“Why haven’t you taken her downstate?” he asked me after we dropped her off. “If people up here can’t figure it out, you need to go somewhere else. You can’t let her sit in a nursing home in pain.”
“Thanks for pointing that out. I’m not trying to neglect her, Davis.”
“She needs to see someone who can help her. If not here, then in Detroit, Ann Arbor, wherever. She has to go.”
“First of all, she doesn’t want to go. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to hunker down, and she’s never been that comfortable leaving northern Michigan, anyway. My grandpa was the one with the travel bug. Second, do you know how much all that costs? All these doctors? After her second fall, and the trip to the ER, and then the three surgeries, I had to get a mortgage on the house. But I would happily spend it, and get another job, or do whatever I needed to, if she would go.” I realized that was driving fast in my anger so I slowed us down.
“All right.”
“I’m not neglecting her.”
“I know, chipmunk. I wasn’t trying to say you are. I don’t want her to be in pain with no solution,” he said. Yeah. Me neither.
When we got home he disappeared into his office and I went to paint for a while. I planned to ask Corinna and Ida to come by at one point to sit for me, as soon as the memory of the crying had faded a bit so that I didn’t start getting a headache every time I thought of them.
I lost track of time while I worked, but the fading light made me start cleaning my brushes. It was almost night. What would happen? Another tepid sleepover? Was that all I really wanted?
And then I saw Davis, leaning against the frame of the door, watching me.
“How long have you been there?” I asked him. The man could be stealthy when he wanted to be.
“Not too long. I made dinner.”
I sniffed the air, but couldn’t detect any smoke.
“It’s not burned,” he commented blandly. “Come on.”
But when I walked past him, I found myself back against the wall. “One second,” he said. Then Davis was kissing me, hungrily, endlessly. He held my head in his palm and wrapped his other arm around me, pinning me to him and kissing me until I felt dizzy. “Katie, I was trying to go slow.” He started doing something with his tongue on my neck and my fingers convulsively gripped his arms.
“No need,” I panted.
“Let’s go to bed. Now.”
“Yes,” I murmured, trying to find his mouth again. He took me with him down the hallway, palms on my shoulders to guide me. We made it about three steps before he pulled me back against his chest and slipped his rough hands under my shirt, sliding up to my breasts. I leaned against him and closed my eyes as he massaged, and a moan left my lips as his fingers found my nipples. He twisted a little and I shook. “Oh…Davis.” He pulled my shirt over my head and walked me further down the hall. I wanted his hands back on me. I wanted them everywhere.
He took off his own shirt as we came into the bedroom and then started kissing me again, now skin to skin with me. His hands were busy unbuttoning my jeans, sliding off my bra straps, leaving me naked before him. Davis stepped away for a moment and his eyes swept up and down my body. His stare was so hot I thought I might melt, and I made a little sound in my throat, a little sound of need. He stepped again to me, kissing me, divesting himself of the rest of his clothes.
We lay down on the bed together and his hands went back to my breasts. “You in your bikini,” he murmured. “The water was cold, and these got hard…” He put his mouth around my nipple and sucked gently, flicking his tongue. I pushed myself against him. “Your ass, your sweet peach of an ass…” His hands kneaded it and his mouth moved to my other breast. He rolled me on my back, laying heavy and warm over me. I wrapped my legs around him, moving my hips. I could feel him between my legs, rubbing against my clitoris. He felt so good. My head turned back and forth on the pillow. So good.
“You like that, Katie?” he asked me, watching my face. I was holding h
is hips, trying to make him move faster, and he took my wrists and imprisoned them over my head. “Nice and slow,” he said, still rocking. My breath caught. His other hand came back to my breast and he bent to kiss my neck and then bite it. “Nice and slow,” he repeated against my skin, his teeth grazing up to my ear. He rubbed his thumb across my nipple.
I felt pressure building, the pleasure swelling. “More, please,” I asked him, but he kept up his steady pace. He was breathing hard along with me. “Davis, please…” I didn’t know what I wanted him to do, but then he pinched my nipple and I bowed up off the bed as I came, a long moan of satisfaction welling from my throat. He kept moving and I went from my orgasm to feeling nearly frantic, wanting him. It was like an ache.
When Davis put on the condom, and guided himself into me, he swore and made a deep, guttural groan that vibrated through him. “Fuck, Katie, that’s good.” He drew out and filled me again, harder. He rolled onto his back and reached for my breasts. I circled my hips on top of him. I loved this feeling, him huge and hard inside me. He held my hip with his fingers as I moved up and down and he put his thumb on my clit, smoothing back and forth across it, making tiny circles with increasing pressure until I was frantically riding him, calling his name. Davis flipped me back over as I started to orgasm again and drove once, twice inside me, holding me against him with his hand gripping my butt as he came, too. He stayed on top of me, panting, and I lay gasping beneath him. It had never felt like this before. I didn’t even…my thoughts couldn’t even form.
Davis studied me, smoothing his calloused hand across my forehead. “Damn, Katie.”
“Damn,” I agreed.
He kissed me and I felt excitement start to build again. He picked up his head, grinning. “I had a feeling it would be like that. Hot.”
“Hot,” I repeated.
“Fire,” Davis said.
“Uh huh,” I concurred.
“No, I think the dinner I made is on fire.”
The Checkdown Page 21