What Comes After Dessert

by Ren Benton

  If only it could perform a similar service for her ugly attitude. “Is there dirt on it again?”

  His grin flashed. “The smudge was cute, in a sweatshop orphan kind of way.”

  “I bet they thought it was adorable at the store.”

  “Did you still, when we went—? Shit. I’m sorry. It was dark.” He rubbed her forehead with his thumb, as if he could retroactively erase the smear. “Did they give you a hard time in the store?”

  “Not about that.” They had so much other material to work with, they didn’t have the time to work it in before she bolted. “I didn’t realize until I got up this morning.”

  “I’d have said something if I knew.”

  If he wasn’t shy about telling her she looked awake forever, he wouldn’t hold back on pointing out she was a mess in another way. Ben didn’t have enough malice in him to purposely let her look like an idiot.

  She’d done that all on her own. “Okay.”

  He traced a fingertip across her forehead. “You always had this worry line, even when you were five.”

  That wrinkle had spawned a pair of offspring in the past few years, one above and one below. With a diet rich in stress, they grew up so fast.

  “You are always worried about something. Well, almost always.”

  That finger stroking back and forth made her eyelids too lazy to stay open. She kept her head shake to a minimum so as not to disrupt its work. “Always.”

  “For about a minute and a half last night, you didn’t have a coherent thought in your head.”

  The warm touch became cool against her suddenly flaming skin. “There ought to be a law against bringing up orgasms in polite conversation.”

  “You know I’ve never been good at polite, but I have a compensatory talent for apology.”

  Her eyelids remained lazy, but the corners of her mouth hauled themselves up. “Prove it.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t make you come again because your huge, protective daddy is only a flimsy wall away.”

  The sharp pain from her teeth against her lip kept her somber. “That does put a damper on the festivities.”

  “You said ‘damper.’”

  “Sh-sh-shh.” The sound came out broken with laughter.

  His voice hushed into the hypnotic range to match the motion of his finger. “I would very much like to make you the consistency of room-temperature butter again.”

  Her knees softened enough that she had to lay her hand against his hip for support, right on the spot that needed weight put on it to keep him still when he was ticklish. “That’s a lot of work for ninety seconds of incoherence.”

  “When you love what you’re doing, it’s not work.”

  He pressed a kiss to her forehead, a soft and tender gesture that had nothing to do with what they were talking about and stirred up yearnings that weren’t physical and couldn’t be helped.

  Rein it in, pardner. He’s not for you.

  She could do something to alleviate the flesh-and-blood yearning for him that had never gone away, though. She backed him into one of the posts holding up the porch and brushed her lips against his chin, waiting for him to pull away.

  He made a sound deep in his throat, gripped her ass, and pulled her up the thigh pressed between hers, creating just enough friction to frustrate. Her hip pressed against the stiffening bulge that promised to cure that frustration.

  Even as a teenager, she ached for him. Burned for him. Yearned so much her body was too restless to sleep at night. She thought, after she left Westard, she would feel that way again. But she met other men, men who wanted her just as much as Ben had — more, if aggression was any indication — and she felt nothing. She told herself the desperation Ben made her feel was only lack of relief, never mind that she still hadn’t gotten laid and should have been even more desperate for relief if that was the reason, but maybe she’d feel it again with a man’s breath on her neck and a cock in her hands.

  The first attempt was an abject failure — awkward, painful, crude — but nerves made her stiffer than the guy’s dick, so she hadn’t expected a magical extravaganza with orchestral accompaniment. She would get better with practice.

  Her subsequent efforts, increasingly frantic, failed to pull off even a card trick. She felt nothing, other than anxiety, and she never met a man who minded, as long as he had a hole to stick it in.

  Her more worldly roommate called her expectations unrealistic and advised her to eat the free food, hock any jewelry to help with the rent, and buy a good vibrator to do what men couldn’t.

  Tally practiced diligently, but her love life remained cold, empty, and lonely even when someone was touching her. Sex she wasn’t interested in left her feeling sleazy. She pursued it with the same grim determination as dancing, but this time, she couldn’t blame her grudging participation on her mother or anyone but herself.

  In one way, coming back to Westard had been a relief — there were no sexual prospects to throw herself at to prove again that she was sexually defective.

  Maybe going through the motions would have been adequate if she didn’t know what it was like to be warmed by a look, melted by a touch, incinerated by a kiss. But she knew what was missing because of this stupid boy with his tongue in her mouth and his fingers kneading her butt again after all these years, doing the same damn thing to her.

  She had to have him one time, to prove desire wasn’t a figment of her imagination, or to prove she was a sexual dud and it wasn’t worth trying anymore. Either way, she’d be able to stop daydreaming and torturing herself with what she couldn’t have. As long as she remembered he was an aberration, a temporary suspension of reality, no harm would be done. She could get back to lowering her expectations to a realistic level when he was too far away to make her feel things she had no right to.

  By this time next week, in other words.

  His mouth broke away from hers, and she redirected her lips to his neck while he caught his breath. He smelled like smoke and tasty things to bite. When his thumb dug into the crease between her hip and thigh, telegraphing a hot pulse along that line, she succumbed to temptation and scraped her teeth against his skin.

  He made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a whimper. “One minute, I’m patting myself on the back for being a gentleman. Next minute, to hell with your nosy neighbors, let’s get naked on the front porch.”

  The neighbors were nosy, and juicy gossip about the town jezebel would earn them free drinks at the bar for at least a week. Pictures would ensure their popularity for a month.

  She eased off his thigh and put a few inches of air between them. “I’d hate to tarnish your reputation.”

  He tipped his head back against the post. “Tarnish reminds me of polishing silver that summer at the lodge. All day, rubbing, rubbing, so much rubbing. Why is everything dirty all of a sudden?”

  Good to know she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. “I really do like my meat rock hard, but in the right hands, it can be good raw, too.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You were lucky. You got to escape. Your hulking father wanted to know what was so funny. I almost had to stick my hand in the coals to get him off the subject.”

  The hand she sealed over her mouth didn’t quite smother her hysterical giggle.

  “Think my life being in danger is funny, do you?”

  She shook her head and kept on smothering.

  “I’m glad you’re treating the threat with the seriousness it deserves.” He kissed the fingers covering her lips. “Sleep tight, Tal.”

  He bounded from the porch and headed toward his mother’s house with a little spring in his step.

  Her hand fell to rest over her heart. “Where’s your car, Fielder?”

  Calling out provoked a burst of barking from the neighbor’s dog. Ben had to raise his voice to be heard over the racket. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come home if you thought you’d have to entertain company, so I left it at Mom’s.”

  She might have driven past
if she’d seen a car in the drive. Parked down the road. Taken a nap and dreamed of grilled meat until the coast cleared.

  It was bad enough she would allow herself to be exiled from her own home by unwillingness to face whatever crap she expected people to bring into her life.

  It was worse that Ben knew it and adjusted to accommodate her craziness.

  They’d made all sorts of adjustments like that for her mother.

  She wrapped her arms around herself as if eighty-five degrees was chilly and went back into the house in search of warmth.

  From his recliner, her father said, “Would have been a shame to miss that steak.”

  “Yeah, Dad. The steak was perfect.”

  Sure would have been a shame to miss it.

  Chapter 17

  Ben awoke early for a guy on vacation but, once again, not early enough to catch his mother before she left for work.

  If she thought she could avoid him two days in a row, she’d be disappointed. He was becoming a pro at insinuating himself with evasive women.

  His mother kept house the way she liked, but she had always graciously permitted him to do anything filthy, up on a ladder, involving heavy lifting, or that otherwise fell under the heading of man stuff because the woman hated doing it herself. He sweated away the morning cleaning gutters, mowing grass, and trimming hedges. He didn’t touch anything he’d have liked to address inside the house — no matter how tempted he was to throw her ratty slippers in the trash.

  He entered the house through the back door and stripped at the washing machine rather than track dirt all over floors he didn’t dare clean. He did dare do a load of his laundry to keep the grime from proliferating and to avert the awkward questions about what he’d gotten on the shirt he wore the night Tally drove him to Sterling that would surely arise in the event his mother decided to throw his clothes in the washer and demanded to know the nature of the stains for pretreatment purposes.

  He ate the last of Tally’s ginger cookies for lunch while the water heater recovered and then showered another five pounds of dirt down the drain.

  He arrived at the school just after two. The walk from the steps to the front office transported him back in time. The art displayed on the walls was the same primary-colored, glittery collection of rainbows, rockets, and stick bodies with balloon heads. The odor of poster paint and sour mop water hadn’t changed, either.

  What he remembered most about the main corridor was huddling along the walls for tornado drills. After a sadistic fifth grade teacher made the class estimate the weight of the three-story brick building and its contents, including humans, Ben started referring to the first-floor hall as the Murder Chute.

  He’d spent more time waiting in the front office for an appointment with the principal than huddling in the hall with his hands covering his head. The face behind the reception desk hadn’t changed since his first disciplinary holiday. Once a certain level of ancient had been achieved, the aging process ran out of things to wrinkle, apparently. “Mrs. Hagen?”

  She didn’t miss a beat in the rhythm of stapling sheaves of bulletins. “Don’t sound so surprised I’m still alive, Benjamin Fielder.”

  It wasn’t surprise so much as wonder at the source of her immortality. Horcrux? Bathing in the blood of innocents? A strange accident involving an irrational particle accelerator? “You look exactly the same.”

  She banged out three more packets while she divulged her secret. “Two strips of bacon every morning, two cigarettes every afternoon, and two shots of whiskey every night.”

  “You are a monument to moderation.”

  She snorted. “You filled out all right, boy.”

  “I ate my weight in macaroni last night just to impress you with my size.”

  The horror-movie corner of his mind screamed. Mrs. Hagen was the last person he wanted to play the everything-is-unintentionally-dirty game with.

  “Glad to see you’re not the same knobby twig who flung himself through those doors his first day of kindergarten.”

  “I’m flattered you remember.” My knobs and twig.

  “I’m supposed to say I remember all of you, but I’m not a liar. I remember the ones who give me trouble and worry. That year, it was you and Crystal Castle.”

  He wouldn’t argue that Tally was memorable. She’d left an impression on him, too. “Which one of us was trouble?”

  As if he didn’t know.

  Her lips pursed so hard, her face found a way to produce more and deeper fissures. “The trouble was her mother. ‘Tally can’t be expected to work on her letters at night because she’s going to be a famous dancer.’ That woman didn’t care if her child was illiterate as long as she got to be famous by association.”

  Ben first heard about the dancing in fourth grade during one of those interminable morning announcements that only caught his interest because Tally’s name was mentioned for winning a competition. He turned around in his seat and asked her to show him some moves. She wrapped her arms around herself, shook her head, and turtled up as if under siege.

  He never had seen her dance. She won a new contest every week, but she never showed up at a school dance, never had a spontaneous joyful boogie outburst. He’d thought she was saving it for when it mattered, the practices and competitions that brought home the trophies. Now, he wondered if it had been no more than a chore she’d performed at the command of the woman who beat her, like a circus animal under the whip. She might have hated every minute of it.

  Her mother hadn’t been able to repress her academically, though. “Tally was always the smartest person in every class. I wouldn’t have made it through high school without her help.”

  “Hmph. Then shame on her twice for not doing something useful with her brains.”

  The muscles in his face hardened. Was everybody in this town going to dump on the woman taking care of her injured father and running one of the few businesses surviving on Main Street? She didn’t need any help being unreasonably hard on herself. “Can— may I go back to see my mom?”

  He took the visitor’s pass provided and continued down the chute to the cafeteria. The noon meal long over, the lunch ladies were wrapping up the mysterious business of what happened afterward. Sheila and Norma, who had worked with his mother as long as Ben could remember, stopped sanitizing the tables to hug and coo over him. Norma called him a sweet boy when he offered his condolences on Doug’s passing, and Sheila fussed at him about needing a haircut before giving him a push toward the boss’s office.

  He tapped on the frame of the open door.

  His mom looked up from the computer on the desk that practically filled the closet-sized room. “Hi, honey.”

  She looked exhausted and strained. He wondered how much of that he was responsible for. “What’s wrong?”

  “Politicians, as usual. They shipped me an extra busload of kids to alleviate crowding up north, so now instead of stretching a budget to feed ninety to cover one-twenty, I have to find a way to feed one-sixty, and contrary to popular belief, I don’t know any witchcraft.”

  She made doing the impossible look too easy. She probably had something to do with Mrs. Hagen’s longevity, too. “How do you do it?”

  “I’m looking into counterfeiting. Meanwhile, we do peanut butter sandwiches once a week, and we accept charity. And when we manage to scrape by, some jackass who eats prime rib and lobster whenever he wants decides these kids could make do with even less and cuts deeper. I haven’t gotten an inflation adjustment in ten years. All they do is cut.” She pressed her fingers against her eyelids. “But you didn’t come here to listen to me rant.”

  “I don’t mind.” She was usually too busy dealing with whatever hand life dealt her to complain about the stacked deck. While she was steaming probably wasn’t the best time to remind her that he could take her away from all this so she never had to figure out how to transform pennies into dollars again, but he added it to his arsenal to use later. “I came to ask if I could steal some Internet t
o check my email, but it can wait.”

  “Can’t you do that on your fancy phone?”

  “Only where there’s fancy-phone service.”

  “You should ask if they’ll give you a discount since you can only use it for a paperweight.”

  “I tried that last time I was here, and they said it still made me look cool and important, so it functioned as intended.”

  That got something that could almost be described as a smile out of her. She flapped her hand at the computer. “Help yourself.”

  He stepped away from the doorway to give her room to exit the closet.

  “I don’t want any pictures from your slutty friend on my computer.”

  He exhaled slowly. “Don’t start that again, Mother.”

  “I mean it, Benjamin.”

  He exercised caution lowering himself into her chair because it was low to the floor and he worried whatever she had up her ass might be contagious.

  He skipped the work email because he was supposed to be on vacation and if Will really had sold out to the competition, he wanted it to be like a surprise party Monday morning when he walked into the office and everybody jumped up to shout at him.

  He junked the spam in his personal inbox before clicking on the email from Liz. The promised photo rendered about nine million pixels wide, so he had to piece together the image in his mind one grainy black-and-white square at a time.

  When he figured out the puzzle, his heart rattled his rib cage. “Oh my god.”

  His mother put her head around the edge of the door. “Everything okay?”

  He turned the monitor toward her rather than try to explain around the clog in his throat.

  She peered at the visible portion of the picture, tipping her head to match the orientation of the image. “Is that a hand?”

  “Considering the father, it might be a flipper.”

  Her brows shot up. “Yours, then?”

  A big, stupid grin stretched across his face. “Liz and Will’s.”