Sweet Seduction

by Anthology

  Tight.

  He tasted so foreign, so forbidden, like something you know you shouldn’t sample but you can’t help yourself. Recriminations and warnings inside my head faded into a nothingness replaced by pure sensation, by the split certainty that I was violating every single norm about how I understood myself while enjoying every second of it.

  “You,” he said in a low, deep voice, his breath coming out in little pants, his cheek scraping against my jaw, “are a pain in the ass.”

  And with that he released me and walked away, leaving me wet, aroused, and ready to kill him.

  But not stupid enough to follow. What the hell was I doing? At least this time, he kissed me. What did that mean?

  “You okay?” Liam’s voice at my side made me jump. I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth, as if I could hide Tyler’s kiss.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “You don’t look okay,” he said, glaring down the hallway where Tyler had just departed. “Did Frown do something to you?”

  Oh, yes he did.

  “Um, no,” I said, sighing and running my hand through my hair. “It’s cool. I just needed to clear up a few things with him.”

  Liam has these eyes that make you think you’re on the beach in Nantucket when you look at him. Incisive and perceptive, those eyes took me in.

  He opened his mouth to say something, then looked at Charlotte. An unreadable look passed between them, and he took off down the hallway, following Tyler.

  I stayed put.

  I had to.

  My legs wouldn’t move.

  Chapter Two

  Tyler

  For the record, I was not the one found hanging out of a window, naked, with a chicken and a gerbil clinging to my ass. But I was the person they called to fix that mess. Two days later I went home to help see my dad off to prison.

  “Too late,” Johnny taunted as I walked in the apartment, my brain scrambled from being on seven different semi trucks over two and a half days. Being broke meant I couldn’t afford to fly. Hitching a ride was cheap but not easy.

  Nothing’s easy when you’re broke.

  “Too late for what?” I asked. My stomach growled. I felt like a giant grease ball. Shower first. Food second. Bed third. I dumped my backpack, my bass and my acoustic guitar on the floor near the door and stretched. My palms could rest flat on the yellowed ceiling when I did that. My calves screamed and my triceps burned from the relief of blood flow.

  I’d see Dad in the morning. I guessed he was at Shorty’s, the bar around the corner where he hung out sometimes. Two months ago he’d called and I’d bailed him out. The damn idiot did it again last week, only this time I couldn’t bail him out. No money. He got someone to get him out, but he’d violated the terms of some court agreement and now he was going back in. The plan was to take him in tomorrow.

  “He turned himself in.” Johnny walked past me, his body twitching, as he went into the kitchen and flung open the fridge door. A stench worse than the alley behind most of my bar gigs hit me like a wall of puke. Half-opened takeout containers filled the fridge shelves.

  He picked one and tossed the styrofoam thing into a microwave, pressed some buttons and picked at a scab on his arm.

  “What?” I snapped. He turned and stared me down with eyes like sandpaper.

  Johnny looked like our mom. Tall and lean, all knees and elbows. Pale skin with veins hiding under tissue paper. His eyes were a pale beige, like the shallow part of the ocean. I only know that color from living in Boston for a couple of years. You go to Castle Island a few times for free shore time and you can see it.

  The water. Growing up in St. Louis meant Johnny’d never seen the ocean. I wanted to bring him back with me. He was eighteen now and could do whatever he wanted. Two years ago, when I moved to the east coast, he begged. Pleaded. Bargained and all that shit for a chance to come with me.

  I couldn’t.

  He hated me for that. Still does. But now he’s eighteen and can do whatever the fuck he wants.

  That appeared to be drugs. And lots of them. I knew a tweaker when I saw one. So did Johnny. All we needed to do was look at our dad.

  “Too late to give Dad a hug and a kiss,” Johnny said. “What the hell do you think, Tyler? He’s gone. Turned himself in and he’s back in.”

  Back in prison.

  “Fuck.”

  “Fuck? That’s it?” He snorted, then shoved his palm up, fast, against his nose. A thin trickle of blood smeared his thumb joint.

  Scabs. Twitching. Bleeding nose. What drug was Johnny not taking?

  “How long?” I asked. My lips began tingling. My scalp felt like bees crawled under it. My fingers wanted to do anything but stay empty. I bent down to grab the handle of my bass case.

  “How long what?”

  “How long’s he in for?”

  “Ten months.”

  I made a low whistle and looked around the place. No ceiling lights and half the lamps were out. I knew that meant the light bulbs had burnt and no one had the money to replace them. Overflowing ashtrays dotted the broken coffee table. Burns made the top look like it was a piece of sick art, the surface eroded on purpose by the heat of the cigarette cherries. But there was no purpose.

  Just Dad’s way.

  No one had vacuumed in months. I was probably the last person who bothered to clean. The apartment had a funk. More than the smell of two men sharing the place. It smelled like decay. Like hopelessness. Like agony.

  Like giving up.

  Johnny’s eyes were so hateful it hurt to look at him. He looked so much like our mom. When he glared at me it was like Mom came back from the grave and shamed me. I tore my eyes from him and took a deep breath. Cut it off right away ’cause the odor burned.

  “Shit, man, what are we gonna do?” I asked him, my fingers going half numb from too many hormones, too little sleep, and the sense that something was deeply wrong in this place. More wrong than usual, and that was saying a lot.

  “We?” He made a nasty sound in the back of his throat. “What the hell you think I’m gonna do, Tyler? Go to my fancy prep school and get a massage? I’ll be fine.” His eyes hardened, like two pieces of tree bark. “I’ve got jobs.”

  Jobs. That meant he was dealing.

  “Huh,” was all I could say. It said everything. It said nothing. Any words I could come up with would be about as useful.

  “What about you?” He smirked. “Made it big yet? Sign a contract for a record deal?” His tone of voice made him sound exactly like Dad.

  Dad wasn’t exactly an optimist.

  “Nah,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I get by.”

  “We all get by. It’s what we Gilvreys do. We get by.”

  My throat filled with angry, salty outrage. Being lumped in with Dad and Johnny made everything in me go tense. A cold flush covered my body. Words didn’t come. Just feelings. Emotions I was about as good at handling as words.

  I looked at his greasy hair, the scabs on his body, his crappy shoes and how his bones seemed like someone carved them out of his skin. I hadn’t been home in half a year. How had Johnny changed so much? I was five years older and a million miles away. His life was nothing but street running and drugs.

  “I’ll help.” Those were the only words I could think to say.

  Wrong ones.

  “Help? What the fuck kind of help do you think you can give me, Tyler? Dad’s gone. Gone. No way I can pay the rent here. Hell, I don’t even know how to pay it. Who the landlord is or how that works.”

  But you can find a meth dealer in sixty seconds flat, I thought. Saying that would have been like dropping a nuclear bomb. Good thing I know how not to say words.

  “And,” Johnny continued, “I got friends. I’m fine. I’ll live somewhere.” He gave me a hard, sarcastic grin. “You don’t have to worry about me. Oh. Yeah. You never did.” His hands balled into fists and the skin under one eye twitched.

  I knew it was an act. Or, at least, it would
have been a year ago. Now, though, he’d added an inch of height and had arms corded with ropy muscle. The tingle of danger began in the skin at the base of my neck. One thing you learn from being raised by a dad like ours: when to sense a threat.

  When had my little brother become one?

  Bzzzz. We both grabbed our asses like they were on fire.

  “Yours,” Johnny said, blasé and scratching something under his shirt. He turned away like nothing had just happened.

  It was Darla. “Yeah?” I said, wondering why she’d call me now. Here. Like this. It felt weird, so out of context, to have my Boston life intrude on my St. Louis life.

  “Change of plans,” she said, all breathy and weird. She inhaled and exhaled like some Euro technobeat was controlling her lungs.

  “What?”

  “Change.Of.Plans,” she said slowly, like that would make more sense.

  “What plans?” Layers of shit piled on layers of shit in my head made talking harder than normal. Listening, too.

  “More Than Nothing needs an opening act at their L.A. concert. Half their opening act has chicken pox.”

  “Chicken pox? Is this a joke?”

  “No joke,” she said with a weird laugh.

  “How Angelina Jolie of them.”

  “You need to be on a plane tomorrow,” she declared.

  “What the fuck? Tomorrow? What the hell for?” I barked, the words angry. Johnny was busy with his phone but I could tell he was listening.

  “Are you high?” Darla asked. “I said, More Than Nothing had a last-minute cancellation of their opening act. In three days Random Acts of Crazy is opening for motherfucking More Than Nothing,” she added, then recited the amount of money I’d make for one show.

  “Quit fucking with me,” I said. A small headache formed behind my eye. Johnny started laughing his ass off suddenly. The tinny sound of a video playing on his phone hit me. He started wheezing about a chicken and a gerbil.

  That video was everywhere.

  “Not fucking with you. I already called in a plane ticket. Tomorrow.” Today was Sunday. She named an airline. “You have a 10:11 a.m. flight. I’m headed to L.A. the same day and Liam and Sam are following on a later flight. We couldn’t get the same one.”

  “Darla. Darla? Slow down,” I said, my brain turning into a hay bale with the string cut and tossed out of a loft. “You’re saying this is for real? I need to be on a plane that fast?”

  “Make sure you have your I.D.,” she said over my words. “And save receipts, because it’s all on the expense account.”

  My heart sped up so fast. “You mean it.” I made a mental check of my money. I didn’t have credit cards, but there was four hundred bucks in my bank account I kept from Dad and Darla was fast with reimbursements. Holy shit. This could work.

  “I don’t say things I don’t mean, Frown.” She laughed. “Congrats. You’re in the big time.”

  “Joe must be pissed.”

  “Joe’s high as a kite on legal prescription drugs. He still gets to take over when he’s recovered,” she added in a low voice.

  “I know. Promise. No problem.” By then I’d have enough money and experience to go find more gigs. “That’s cool.”

  “Ten eleven a.m. Airport. I’ll email you the hotel reservation and the other details,” she said. “Gotta go. This,” she sighed, “is some heady shit.”

  No kidding.

  She ended the call right there, leaving me dazed and spinning. I grabbed my backpack and music cases. Johnny started playing some video game on his phone and the room began to hum. My ears fought to drown out the sound but it was strong. Too strong. I ignored my brother and marched into my old room.

  Which was stripped down to a stained mattress, an old sheet I think was on the bed six months ago when I left for Boston, a ton of cigarette butts, and enough aluminum beer cans to side a house.

  Which meant it looked like I expected.

  I dumped my shit by the door and stretched out on the bed. It smelled like cigarette ashes, Axe body spray and corn chips. My eyes began to count the tiny holes in the ceiling tiles above me. I was supposed to be thinking about Johnny. About Dad and prison. About getting on a plane in two days for the big show.

  But all I could think about was a girl with purple and blue and red and orange and everything hair.

  Liam had grabbed me the other day at the hospital as I left before I did something stupid. Pulled on my arm. He wasn’t pissed, but there had been something in his eyes.

  All he’d said was, “Careful with Maggie. Google her. Last name’s Stevenson with a v. Google her name and don’t stop at the first five pages.”

  And then he’d walked away.

  Stupid me. I’d listened to him.

  Maggie Stevenson. Margaret Stevenson. First few pages I found people who weren’t her. By page five I found nothing but her. Seven years ago.

  Holy fucking shit. No kidding there was something deeper there. I had a smartphone with 4G, earbuds, and long rides with truckers. My travel reading hadn’t exactly been fun.

  But it had been informative.

  Turns out she lived in St. Louis, too. Only Maggie lived in one of those suburbs where people like me did manual labor. We were their gardeners and roofers and remodelers and junk haulers.

  I remembered her case. Who wouldn’t? If you lived in St. Louis back then it was all over the news, the grainy security camera footage of her attack shown over and over. Then the trial a year and a half later.

  She’d testified openly, and some newspaper had posted her real name and picture, a senior high school photo that showed a smiling, brown-haired girl with dark brown eyes that sparkled and clear skin. No piercings. No psychedelic rainbow hair. No fake blue eyes. She looked like a boring sorority chick. Like the National Honor Society do-gooder.

  She kind of looked like Amy. Nothing wrong with that, but what a difference now.

  So why was she, of all people, hitting on me? How did someone who went through that—a gang rape, a trial, three college guys sentenced to prison until they’re in their fifties—end up propositioning me on a rooftop in Boston one spring night?

  Why me?

  Too much. Life was too much right now. Maggie. Dad’s return to prison. Johnny’s tweaking. My plane ride to L.A. tomorrow...it all swirled in me until sleep just claimed me, like wave after wave eating a sand castle on the beach until you never knew anything had been there.

  I barely registered Johnny coming into the room, standing on tiptoes, and slowly unscrewing the lightbulb from the lamp. By the time he left I was sound asleep, anywhere but here.

  Which was fine by me.

  Maggie

  The flight home was memorable only because half the passengers on the plane appeared to be watching the infamous chicken and gerbil video on their phones and laptops. That stupid video went viral like a nerdy Asian dance video of a Jedi panda on nitrous oxide, brilliantly playing the piano upside down.

  The cab brought me home. As we pulled up and I paid the driver, I looked at the house. Really looked. Nothing had changed in the five months since I’d been home for the holidays. The bushes were still neat and trimmed like a mustache around the front door. The white siding had been power-washed and the black shutters were, well...black. Red impatiens peeked out from hanging baskets along the guttered front of the house, spaced about five feet apart. Mom had stone bunnies placed strategically throughout the mulch beds alongside the concrete sidewalk.

  The house looked like the stage set for any standard family sitcom. My trusty old piano was a sentinel at the front door, in the tiny alcove off to the side. Daddy was gone, I knew. Mom said he had business in New York. He worked in corporate law, doing something so boring that I didn’t understand it even now, at twenty-nine and counting. His business trips took him to New York all the time, and he’d be home in three days. I’d see him then.

  “Maggie!” Lena shouted, flinging open the door and rushing down the walkway to give me a huge hug. Younge
r than me by three years, yet playing the part of the older sister, Lena was as boring as I was colorful, as reserved as I was wild, and was the only person in the world who worried about me more than our mother.

  She smelled like warm cinnamon and butter as she hugged me. Her hair was the color of a freshly-baked cookie. That was my normal color, too. Hadn’t seen that in seven years. We shared dark brown eyes, but that was where the similarities ended. Where she was a round, squat earth mother with a sweet, plump face I was tall, big-assed and filtered the word through color, holes in my skin, and constant surveillance.

  “That’s it? Just the two bags?” she said, grabbing the heaviest.

  “I’m only home for three weeks.”

  “I thought school was over?”

  We’d had this same conversation last year. “It is. Summer session and all the high school camps start soon.”

  “They pay you extra for that, right?” Lena was a labor law lawyer.

  “Of course.” And they did, but not much. I wouldn’t get into that with my bulldog sister, though.

  “Dad’s gone on business and Mom’s having some weekend thing with her book group.”

  “You mean her wine group.” For nearly two decades mom and five friends met once a month to discuss a book. “Book” meant to drink wine and gossip.

  Lena waved her hand and smiled so tightly her dimples had dimples. “Whatever they do is their business. As long as Mom’s having fun.”

  And that was the end of that conversation. We reached the house and a wall of freshly-baked cookie assaulted me. I began to drool.

  “Some of them have pecans, some have crushed toffee. I’m experimenting,” Lena explained as she shimmied a spatula to unstick a cookie from parchment paper. She nodded her chin toward the cooling rack. “Enjoy.”

  I patted my hip. “I hate you.”

  She smiled, showing teeth, and patted her wider hip. “You’ve got a long way to go to match me.”

  I laughed my way upstairs, mouth full of gooey goodness and mirth. My room was a sanctuary and a tomb. Frozen in time, I hadn’t changed a thing since I graduated high school twelve years ago. The entire house had been brand new when Mom and Dad moved us in here when I was in fourth grade, and aside from the occasional replaced appliance, nothing had changed in twenty years.