I huff out probably the most defeated breath since arriving back here. “Shayla,” I greet her, and huff one more breath for good measure or to remind myself I’m still alive.
“You were never good enough for him and because of it, he’s dead.” Of course she’d say that since she thought she’d almost had him before that fateful day in front of the Whippy Dip when I met Logan. She’d never almost had him. And he left me well before I ever left him. As for the dead part, what happened to Lo was tragic. But I didn’t put the shotgun to his head. I didn’t pull the trigger, though arguing that point now is meaningless. For the rest of her life I’ll be the whore who stole and then killed her boyfriend. “We ain’t got room.”
“Clearly.”
She seems upset that I refuse to engage her in confrontation. I know it sounds bad, but she wanted to be me. She wanted the kind of relationship I had with both Logan and Beau. She wanted prom queen and head cheerleader. She wanted nights in the family cabin off the river on route eight.
Maybe there’s a small chance that eventually she might have gotten it, all of it, if I hadn’t come to town. But I did come to town and now she works the reception desk at the Daniel Boone judging me on things she really has no clue about, based solely on rumors set in motion by an unstable man who was in a bad place in his life. Period.
“You need to walk your stuck-up, whoring ass back outta town.”
“I’m leaving as soon as I bury my dad.”
“Well…you best leave Beau alone. Caused him enough heartache.”
“Wait—Beau’s in town?”
Shayla shifts on her hip, folding her arms across her chest. The look is made to intimidate me, but I can see through it. She messed up. She messed up and she knows it and she’s pissed. The glare she shoots me is supposed to make me wish I was never born. Jokes on her, I beat her to that punch years ago. Hard to get the blame from an entire town for the death of their one in a million golden boy, Logan Hollister, and all the fallout afterward, and not think everyone’s life would’ve been easier if I’d just never existed.
With the way the town talks, one would think I assassinated the president, not that my ex-boyfriend committed suicide. Though, the ex part he liked to keep under wraps. Apparently “good girl” Elise fit better with the highly cultivated façade he wanted to continue to put out for the town, then the cadre of female companionship he chose to surround himself with once he decided to be done with me. All the lies and half-truths flying around, kept in circulation by Margo and Lenore. Lenore had no idea what her son put me through, what he took from me. Then because Beau had my back, I get the reputation.
I don’t know, maybe it is my fault. Maybe if I’d seen the signs sooner?
Unfortunately my name’s not George Bailey, and my angel Clarence hasn’t come around to set me straight yet. I thought maybe he had with Mark, but what an unfair expectation to put on a man I’d just met. And the way he pushed me away earlier, I was way off base. Or should I say, way off the ‘Mark’? It probably isn’t really him that gets to me anyway, more his jokes. I’m a sucker for a sense of humor in a good-looking guy. I love a man who doesn’t take himself too seriously. And it’s hard to take yourself too seriously when telling lame jokes. Come to think of it, about the time we hit senior year, Lo had stopped telling me jokes. As his girlfriend, shouldn’t I have caught on to that?
The silence hangs between us as Shayla comes to grips with the reality that her body language does nothing to me.
I guess she couldn’t take the standoff any longer as she purses her lips and says, “He’s been back a few years now. Don’t think I’m tellin’ you where to find him.”
“Have a nice life, Shayla.” I do my best to keep my head up as I walk out the door.
If Beau’s in town, then he knows about my dad, which means he knows I’m in town. I would’ve thought with our history, he’d have reached out to me, tried to get word to me through Hadley or Mr. Delavigne. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve lived away, not in a town like this. In a town like this, everybody goes to church or graduated with you, your brother or sister, or grandmother or aunt. If he still lives here, he’d know exactly where to go to best get a message to me. Since he hasn’t reached out to me, I can only assume he still doesn’t want to see me.
That hurts.
He and I, we were so close once. Hours spent on the phone. His visits home, or mine to Lexington. When everything began to spiral with Logan, he was my shoulder to cry on. My rock. Until he wasn’t.
But now there are more immediate concerns for me other than being ignored by Beau. Namely, I have no place to stay until the funeral.
The park across from City Hall used to bring me comfort when my mom hassled me, or Logan and I had a fight. So I head there. It only takes ten minutes to drive from the Daniel Boone, though it feels as if I’ve been transported back five years, the last time I came here with Beau. The last time I poured my heart out, and he pretended to understand. The last time Logan showed up and Beau stood behind me as I delivered him life changing news.
***
There’s a heavy pounding on my window and I become acutely aware of the hulking figure looming just outside my door. The second thing I notice which should have been the first thing I noticed is that it’s dark out now meaning I fell asleep. Without thinking I reach to the door lock. It’s locked. Then I make the mistake of looking up. Mark. Mark, the hulking figure, stands right outside my window asking me to roll it down. Then I make an even bigger mistake by doing what he asks and roll down my window.
He makes no attempt to talk but before I can register what he’s doing, his face is in my face and his lips are on mine. I tense my shoulders expecting with the way he came at me, a hard, passion-filled kiss. But that’s not what he gives me. He gives me soft, strong lips, pressing gently. He breathes in like he’s breathing me in, locking in a memory to call back up for later, maybe. I don’t want him to have to call up this kiss for later unless I’m with him and we’re reminiscing together. The thought of which scares me because we’ve known each other, what, a day? It just doesn’t make sense. Nothing about he and I makes sense. Like how it is that when I bring my hand up to cup his face, to bring us closer, to deepen the kiss, that he has the wherewithal to break the kiss?
Taking my hand in his, he brings it to his chest pressing both our hands above his heart. Only then does he speak. “I’ve been waitin’ a long time for that.”
“You have?”
“Elise, you know I have.”
“How?”
He doesn’t remove my hand from his or his heart, and doesn’t answer that question but does ask one of his own. “Why you sleepin’ in your car? Weren’t you supposed to check in at a motel?”
“No vacancy.”
“Dammit.” Mark leans his forehead against mine, closing his eyes he sighs as if making a decision, then he pulls back and gives my hand he’s holding a squeeze. “Come on. You’re stayin’ with me.”
“No Mark, you don’t need this kind of trouble knocking on your door. Despite how phenomenal that kiss, or that I’d cut off Shayla’s left nipple to experience you again, the fact is I’m not your problem.”
“Shayla’s left nipple?”
I shrug.
At first he smiles that not quite white, crooked smile at me. Then emo-boy’s mood shifts, and he pins me with his mesmerizing stare, so many things being said in his stare I can’t keep track of them all. It’s the kind of stare to make you squirm in your seat, or maybe that’s just me. I squirm.
“Darlin’. Now. Follow me.” A quick peck against the tip of my nose and he turns to walk back toward a massive Dodge Ram pickup truck. From the streetlamp illuminating the park he’s parked under, I can tell it’s black.
So this is where I make the biggest mistake so far and follow him. Two streets over from my dad’s—or I guess Hadley’s house now—I continue to follow him. And wouldn’t you know his place is located three houses down from Beau’s parents, George
and Margo, and two houses down from Dave and Lenore, Logan’s. His house, the only tiny house on the block, sits between the two massive ones to the left and right, looking like a small child compared to the big, expensive parent houses. He’s kept it up nice from what I can see, but it still looks out of place.
How many times did I walk past this place going to see Logan or Beau? Mark pulls into the drive motioning for me to turn in behind him. I do it, but I don’t want to knowing what he’ll face tomorrow from his neighbors. They may not know my car anymore but I have no doubt on who will be the first to identify the Illinois license plate as being mine.
“Pop the boot,” he tells me in his Kentucky-ese for “open the trunk.”
Mark grabs my bags.
I slowly, hesitantly climb out. The strap of my small red travel bag he shrugs over his shoulder while my matching suitcase he just picks up to carry, not bothering to extend the handle and wheel it.
Little bungalows like his are rare in this neighborhood anymore. Although they used to be plentiful, peppering every street in town, now buyers would be hard pressed to find one outside River Street, which is basically the poorest section of the town proper. Where the new subdivisions started going in back in the eighties, homeowners abandon tiny with character for cookie cutter HOAs.
He has a porch when no other house on the block has a porch. Somehow it makes me respect Mark even more for choosing the Charlie Brown Christmas tree of houses.
“What’s earnin’ me that smile?”
“I like your house.”
“Yeah?”
He grabs my hand right as I answer him. “Yeah.”
Outside has nothing on the inside. Most guys his age would gut the inside of an old house like this. New. New. New. Dark woods. Granite countertops. Stainless steel appliances. But not Mark. The first thing I see are the built-ins. That is, great built-in shelves filled with books and knick-knacks. The carved arches. The refinished hardwood floors. He hasn’t gutted, he’s restored.
“I take it back, I’m in love with your house.” I fawn.
And I think I hear him say, “Well that’s a start.” But my heart is still beating so wildly loud in my chest that I probably didn’t hear him correctly.
When he drops my bags next to the sofa it just makes it real that I’m in Mark’s house. That I’m staying in Mark’s house. I could picture myself spending a lot of time here, despite being in the land of Hollister.
Two steps, his hand falls gently on my hip while the other tilts my chin using his thumb and forefinger until I’m looking in his eyes. I guess he’s decided against denying me more kisses. I guess this when he leans his face close to mine. Then we’re touching mouth to mouth, harder than before but not more urgent. No, he kisses me as if we have all the time in the world. That there isn’t a town full of people wanting to run me out or that in a couple of days they’ll get just that. And right now, wearing his lips, it’s hard to imagine how fast that day will get here.
“I’m gonna be good,” he tells me with his lips still pressed against mine. “Don’t wanna confuse you.”
“Think I’m okay with confusion.” I offer back through my dizzy, fallen under his spell, lust pants when his mouth slides from my lips slowly up my jaw.
Apparently I’ve given the wrong response here as he stops the kissing all together to hold me away from him.
“Not now. Not with this,” he says firmly.
I wish my body would listen. Undaunted by rejection, his voice, his touch, the memory of that kiss shoots chills over my now much fevered skin.
I know he feels it. I know he feels it when his eyes drop from my face to my arms. Neither his voice nor his look dampen my libido. They just up my embarrassment.
“You don’t want me,” I say really to myself. I mean, I just threw myself at this man. “I’m so sorry.”
Though I can’t look at him. I just can’t, and stoop to pick up my bag, ready to change into my pajamas and sleep the rest of this humiliating night away.
Luck’s never on my side. But luck’s really not on my side as I try to pull away to make my grand escape, he grips my shirt with both hands keeping me rooted to the spot.
“Look at me.” Not a soft request, he’s outright ordered me.
But I can’t. I’m humiliated. The man is practically a stranger. A stranger. Yet I threw myself at him again, like some attention-starved hussy.
“Elise. Please look at me.”
What could I do? He said please. So I look. And wait. He keeps me waiting for a beat contemplating something. With his eyes so intense on me I’m kind of freaking out on the inside.
“I want you.” He finally lets me off the hook. “I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. But I can’t let myself have you ‘til you know everything. And it ain’t time for you know everything. Couple more days.”
“I’ll be gone in a couple of days.” I remind him.
“Not if this thing growin’ between us is meant to be. And I think it’s meant to be. Only reason you found yourself in my bar of all places.”
“I don’t believe in fate, Mark.”
“Not talkin’ fate. I’m talkin’ somethin’ which started brewin’ between us years ago. You don’t remember now, but you will. We got sidetracked back then by Logan Hollister. Not gonna happen again. No more sidetracking. So we gotta wait.”
He had no right to bring Logan into this and frankly, that ticks me off. Yet I don’t get to argue this point. Not when he kisses my forehead, shoving toward the bathroom, which I can clearly make as the bathroom because the door is open. With a pat on my behind he tells me, “Now go change for bed.”
“Drop the blankets on the couch.” I need him to hear my anger. “And just so you know, I will be gone in a couple of days.”
I stomp away.
He laughs.
Jerk.
4.
Mark
I can hear her leave the bathroom. Just as she asked, I left the blankets on the sofa. What she can’t know is how fast I had to be to get them out there before she finished dressing for bed because I had to be in here, in my room, before I ran into her again.
Don’t want her? What I wouldn’t give to have her lying next to me tonight. But my thoughts turned nefarious the minute, no, the second my lips touched hers through that car window.
And it shouldn’t matter. We’re both consenting adults. But as she’s really the only woman I’ve thought about for the past seven years, there can be no mistakes. No jumping the gun. The only way to keep her seems to be keepin’ her at arm’s length for now.
She needs to fall for me, but more than that, she needs to trust me again. Five years ago, I let her down. And it ain’t like I don’t know the shit the townsfolk say. A hundred and one reasons we shouldn’t be together, and they all have to do with Logan. When she finds out our truth, her love for me, her trust in me, will be the only thing standing between her and me and heartache.
The hardest part, lying awake listening to the squeaking sofa springs as she no doubt flips and shuffles front to back, trying to get comfortable. And I know that has to do with me too. I’ve slept on that sofa. It’s more than comfortable, it’s a brown chenille cloud.
I’ll get no sleep until she gets sleep and in order to expedite the process, I totally slap my plan in the face and go out to the living room to tuck her in.
When she opens her eyes pinning me with all the emotion building between us which at the moment consists of lust, along with maybe something a bit stronger, coupled with a healthy dose of confusion and sadness, well, I shove my plan down the stairs and climb in behind her to press my back against the back of the sofa so I’m resting on my side. One arm tucked under her neck, the other draped around her waist tucking her in so snug against me, I might actually be breathing for her. Both our heads rest on the pillow.
She uses no words, but the ‘What are we doing?’ look showing all over her face has me kick my plan when it’s down, kissing her temple.
Her nose. Each cheek. Then lightly brush my lips against hers. Yep. I’m a glutton for damn punishment.
When she opens her mouth about ready to break the quiet, I use my eyes to shush her and let her know, ‘It’ll be alright.’
A slight head nod, and her eyes close. It’s startin’. She trusts me enough to sleep. Hell yeah, she does. I call that a small victory, and I’ll take all ‘a those I can get.
I know I followed her in sleep for a few hours, but no matter how comfortable she had me, snuggled so closely together, the fact is my couch ain’t made for two adult bodies to sleep on. My back rests against the back cushion. My hand, my arm and even leg have kept her from spillin’ onto the floor.
So as hard as it is, I extract myself from her warmth and roll her so she lays safely, rolling onto her side. Elise, she’s something else to watch in her sleep. So beautiful. So innocent. Knees tucked up to her chest. Hands tucked under her chin.
I sit on the arm of the recliner next to the sofa just watchin’ her breathe. There are two choices here. The one where I climb on top of her, bringing us both some needed comfort for a while or go for what’s behind door number two. As I’ve told myself so many times why the first choice can’t happen yet, I extract myself further this time from the painful situation, opting for a shower to escape every thought and feeling rearing to explode from me.
When I leave the bathroom showered and dressed for the day, just tying my damp hair back, a noise catches my ear from outside. More than a noise, a couple ‘a noises. First, glass shatters and second, tires squeal.
I’m out the door barefoot and seeing red. The car and people are gone when I get out to the driveway and stop, pressing my palms against my forehead. What the hell? Who the hell?
Then there’s a soft gasp behind me, and I know it’s Elise. I know she sees what I see, her car—tires slashed, windshield shattered and disgusting words spray painted in choppy yellow lettering so the whole neighborhood can see them set against the midnight blue of her coupe: Slut. Whore. Traitor.
Lady Sings the Blues Page 4