Misadventures of a Curvy Girl

by Sierra Simone

  That slows me down. I put my camera on the bed next to my bag and turn to face him. “Okay,” I say again, but curiously this time. I’m listening. Thinking of the way Ben kept so still this morning to avoid flinching at the booms of the thunder. Why he has trouble sleeping.

  “I think it was bad. I mean, I know it was bad. He was in so many of the places you’d see on the news, and he knew so many people who died or were seriously injured, and I think he saw a lot of fucked-up things. He was always so sensitive…”

  I make a noise at that, thinking of his cold eyes, his sneering smiles. “Ben? Sensitive?”

  Caleb sighs. “Yeah. He used to get bullied a lot, as a kid, before he filled out in high school.”

  “God. Why?”

  Caleb shrugs. “Because kids are awful? Because his sister was older than him and already out? Because he could never hide how he felt about anything?”

  I ask the obvious question. “Were you two in love as kids?”

  He rubs the back of his neck. “No…and yes. We’ve always been close. He lived with his grandma growing up, and after she had to move to a home, my parents unofficially took him in. His sister had already gone off to college at that point, but she wasn’t ready to be responsible for another person, I guess.”

  “So you lived together? Is that when you found out you wanted each other?”

  “It was complicated, you know? It didn’t—I don’t think either of us knew until the first time we had a third person. Someone between us.”

  “When was that?” I sit on the bed now, reluctantly enthralled. “High school?”

  “A cheerleader named Serena.” A faint smile blooms on Caleb’s face. “She had a crush on both of us, and we both liked her. For a while, I thought we were going to fight for her, but then we all got drunk at a field party and the three of us ended up together in the back of my truck. We did that a few more times, until she started dating a basketball player instead.”

  “And you never…” I wave with my hand to indicate what I mean. “Never just the two of you?”

  “We did,” Caleb admits softly. His ears go red, but he meets my eyes so I’ll know he’s being completely honest. “Just the two of us. The summer after graduation.”

  “And?”

  “It was still fun,” he replies, with an almost shy smile, as if even the word fun is impossibly dirty, “but there was something about being a three that fit us better than being a two.”

  I think about that for a moment. Think about how electric it felt last night to be between the two of them, because it was electric and somehow also comforting—like nothing I’ve ever felt before in bed. As if between the three of us we could handle anything, we could explore everywhere, our shared strength and energy creating a web of safety and affection all around us.

  I look out the window at the barn, where the three of us fooled around last night, wondering if maybe I fit better in a three than a two myself. Or is it just Caleb and Ben? Even if I left here and found another set of boys to play with, would it be the same?

  I sigh. How could it be the same? When it’s them I want so much, not the number?

  “So we went to college and dated around for a while,” Caleb continues. “And it was at the end of freshman year that my dad took me aside to have a chat. Turns out our little college flings had made their way through the town gossips back to him.”

  I grimace, and Caleb just laughs.

  “Don’t worry, he didn’t kill me. Instead, he told me about Mrs. Parry’s sister.”

  “What about her?” I ask, a little confused.

  “She lived with two men on the other side of Holm for fifty years.”

  “Oh,” I respond in a surprised voice. “That’s unusual.”

  “The more unusual part is that I guess the town got used to it. She and her two men were part of everything—church, Rotary club, town picnics. And my dad told me if Ben and I wanted to live that way, the town would accept us. And he said if we wanted to be a couple, just the two of us, then he’d make sure the town accepted us that way too.”

  “And did they?” I ask. “Accept you?”

  “Yeah,” Caleb says with a smile. “They did. Mackenna lived with us for four years after college, and we never had to hide it. Not here in Holm, at least. People stared a bit in the beginning, when the three of us would hold hands or share a blanket during the town parade, but they got used to it fast. Maybe even bored with it. And after she left, when it was just the two of us together, it was the same way.”

  “Huh.” It goes against everything I’ve ever thought about small towns, being a city girl myself, but maybe there’s something about a tightly knit community that can absorb differences in surprising ways. “When did Mackenna leave? Why did she leave?”

  Caleb’s smile drops and drops fast. He looks out the window and rubs the back of his neck again. “She left nearly five years ago. Honest, it doesn’t keep me up at night, but for Ben—well, Ben’s the reason she left.”

  “Why? Was he a jerk to her too?” I ask a little bitterly.

  “No,” Caleb says simply. “He just…wasn’t. Wasn’t anything. When we met her in college, Ben was still that sensitive boy, but after each tour, it was like less and less of him came back. When he came back home the final time, he was sealed off so tight he could barely breathe. Mackenna always was an impatient kind of person, and it only took a few months of trying to bring him back before she gave up. She moved to the city, and that was that.”

  Even though he was a dick earlier, my heart still twists a little for Ben, the sensitive boy who went to war and came back a shell. “Has Ben…you know. Seen anyone? About what happened to him?”

  “He’s been going to a therapist weekly for five years now,” Caleb says, a touch of pride in his voice. “He sees a psychiatrist too—meds for his panic attacks and sleeping problems—and he’s in a community support group with other veterans. He’s been working on himself for years, Ireland, so he hasn’t just been lying around broken waiting for someone to fix him.”

  “I never said he was,” I shoot back, ruffled. “Just that today he seemed awfully sealed off. And a lot like an asshole.”

  I watch as a certain kind of defeat scrawls itself across Caleb’s face. “I know. I think—I think seeing the town gutted like that brought back some hard memories. And I think when that ceiling fell on you—well, fuck, Ireland, even I thought you were dead for a moment, and it hurt like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”

  I want to cling to the maybes his words raise in my mind—I want to cling to them too much, I can already feel it. Just like I can feel the tears burning at my eyelids when I ask, “If that’s true, then how can you say goodbye?”

  He rubs at his beard, his jaw tight and his eyes shining. “Because we start things together, and we finish them together. I’m sorry, Ireland, I really am, but that’s the way it has to be.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I’m in my Prius, bumping toward the interstate. In my rearview, I still see Caleb’s truck and him standing outside it. He refuses to leave until he sees me safely on my way. I know that’s what he’s doing, and it’s the final straw.

  I finally let the tears flow now. Now, when it won’t be awkward. Now, when I can save my pride.

  Everywhere there are signs of the storm and the destruction it scattered around the countryside. Branches down, big green road signs crumpled as if by a giant fist. Leaves and twigs everywhere, along with a scattering of things that are far, far from their homes. An Easy Bake oven lodged in a tree. A mattress blown against a fence.

  And yet nothing the storm has left even comes close to matching how messy and broken I feel right now.

  I think I fell in love. I think I fell in love in a single night. I think I fell in love with two people instead of one, and all of it is ridiculous, so fucking ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop it from being true.

  Doesn’t stop it one bit.

  Soon, Caleb’s truck is out of sight, and I’m turning onto t
he paved county road that will take me back to the highway. Across the junction is a grassy field, but through the plot of knee-high grass waving in the sunny breeze is a meandering swath of flattened stalks, bent and speckled with flung mud. It’s a near perfect depiction of the path of the tornado, and there’s something singularly striking about it.

  Possibly the lonely destruction matches my mood.

  I reach automatically for my camera in the bag on the passenger seat, shoving my hand through my clothes in search of its reassuring shape, its familiar heft. But even as I riffle through the bag, a vision suddenly comes to me of my camera on the bed in the farmhouse’s guest room. I put it there while Caleb was telling me about Ben and him, and I got so caught up in the story that I completely forgot to shove it into the bag before I left.

  Which means it’s still at the farmhouse.

  Fuck.

  I pointlessly and stupidly smack the steering wheel with my palm, which only hurts my hand and makes me feel childish. And childish is not something I can afford to feel right now—not when I’m already the awkward sausage who couldn’t take a hint and had to be told to leave.

  Humiliation and anger burn at me as I yank on the wheel of the car to make a vicious U-turn back to the farm. The humiliation is for obvious reasons, I suppose, but even I don’t entirely understand the anger. I’m not an angry person normally; in fact, I’m always the first to say sorry, the first to make peace. I usually do everything I can to avoid conflict, to keep people liking me.

  You’re done with that now. No more apologizing just because you’re scared of people walking away.

  I straighten in my seat as I drive back to the farmhouse, and I allow the anger to wash away the humiliation. I allow myself, for the first time in my life, to hang on to my anger, to feed it and embrace it. Even with Brian and my sister, I never gave myself permission to be angry. Escaping those relationships were acts of desperate survival and retreat, not blazing righteousness. But it’s like the storm—and what happened in Caleb’s bed as it raged around us—has finally unlocked some new store of pride I’ve never had before.

  I’m furious that these men made me feel any doubt or embarrassment about the night we spent together. I’m furious that the way Ben treated me made me feel like a stereotype. I’m furious that the whole thing made me feel ugly and unlovable.

  And mostly, I’m furious that I live in a world that has the power to make me feel ugly and unlovable because of my body.

  I’m very aware that Ben is still scowling and prowling his way around his wrecked business, that Caleb is off playing Farmer Do-Gooder, and that the farmhouse will be empty. All the same, I find myself rehearsing triumphant speeches and searing retorts all the way back to the Carpenter farm. For the first time in my life, I feel emboldened to defend my body. I feel proud of it, and I almost want someone to be at the house so I can tell them exactly how I feel. So I can hear my words scorching the air as I stand in my own skin and assert my right to be treated with dignity and to be loved. My right to live as everyone else lives.

  In fucking peace.

  Since the storm broke up this morning, the sun has been baking down on the prairie, and even the gloppy mud of the road has hardened enough for the Prius to wobble over it without issue. It wobbles back to the farm, and as I pull into the driveway, I see with a surge of excitement, dismay—and yes, lust—that it seems like I’ll be getting my wish.

  Ben is here.

  Chapter Twelve

  Ben

  I know it the moment it happens. Telling Ireland to go is the biggest mistake of my life.

  I know it like I know the Kansas sun on my back or the weight of body armor on my shoulders. I know it like I know the green of Caleb’s eyes.

  I know it so much it hurts.

  But even as I watched her wheel around to leave—gorgeous even covered in dust—I still couldn’t make myself go after her. She almost died because of me, and how many people were hurt and killed right in front of me in rubble-strewn hellholes just like this one? It’s sheer luck she’s alive, and the knives of terror that stabbed through me while we were digging her out drove so deep I couldn’t think straight.

  Then the soldier in me took over, because that’s what happens when I panic now. The sensitive boy who would have cowered behind Caleb at the first sign of trouble—he had no one to cower behind in Afghanistan. And so he learned to survive on his own.

  I don’t even really know what all I said to Ireland to make her leave—only that I followed her flinches to the words that would hurt the most, the ones that would drive her away. Words that would condemn me to hell, but even as I held her in my arms frantically kissing her hair, my brain wouldn’t stop shouting get her to safety, keep her safe, keep her safe, get her out—

  It was the only thing that penetrated the lingering terror and the relief she was okay—relief so deep that I knew I was already falling in love with her.

  Keep her safe.

  Keep her from harm.

  Get her out.

  “What the fuck?” Caleb demands. He’s scrubbing at his face like he does when he’s frustrated. When he’s furious. “Why the fuck would you say something like that?”

  My mind is still looping through its carousel of nightmares—the ceiling coming down over Ireland, blood-spattered dust in Helmand, yanking on debris not knowing if I’ll find a corpse underneath—and I can’t force out the right words. “She needed to leave,” I say instead, my voice harsh and shaking. “She needed to go.”

  “No, asshole, she didn’t,” Caleb spits out. “I thought you liked her. I thought you understood that I liked her. That I wanted more than just a night with her.”

  I can’t reply because I do like her. I do understand. I also want more with her, lots and lots and lots more, but my head is still crowded with flashes of her trapped under the wreckage and old memories from the war, and my heart is still squeezing with panic and the desperate need to get her to someplace safe, someplace away.

  “Goddammit, Ben, answer me,” Caleb grates out. “Just fucking answer me. You don’t get to be a shell, not right fucking now. You don’t get to go cold and empty after what you just did.”

  A shell. Cold and empty.

  I hear the words like a faraway train, knowing what they are, yet they’re so distant I can’t reach them.

  “She had to go someplace away from here,” is all I can manage, and Caleb’s jaw sets. He’s so fucking handsome like this, streaked with dust, his beard setting off the perfect planes of his face. He’s so handsome…but he’s looking at me now with an expression of pure disgust.

  “We’ve always done things together, Ben, and I won’t stop now. But I also don’t know if she’ll ever forgive you for this, and I don’t know if I ever will either.”

  And with that, my best friend, lover, and essential part of any relationship I’ve ever had, walks out the door.

  It takes me almost an hour.

  I’m behind the bar, sitting with my head between my knees the way I used to sit after getting roughed up by bullies in school, and I’m trying to do all the breathing exercises they teach you in therapy. I’m trying to put all the bad memories back where they belong and pull myself back to the present.

  It’s hard.

  It’s harder than it’s been in years. It takes all the things I’ve learned plus the sedate presence of Greta-dog curled up next to me to claw my way up and out.

  At some point, I slowly surface again. I can think Real-Ben thoughts and not Shell-Ben thoughts. I realize with dawning horror what I’ve done. I’ve hurt Ireland. In my mindless need to stop the terror, I’ve hurt her, and it gouges a fresh hole in my scarred heart.

  I stumble out of the bar, my heart hammering against my ribs and anxiety crawling up the back of my neck, and there’s no sign of Ireland or Caleb anywhere. Even Caleb’s truck is gone.

  He took her back to the farmhouse. Maybe they’re still there?

  God, let them still be there.

 
; I bolt down the sidewalk, Greta at my heels, both of us dodging debris and the haggard townspeople milling around the ruined Main Street. It’s a testament to how awful the day is that no one seems to notice or care that the town barkeep and his dog are sprinting back home, not that I’d care if anyone did notice.

  My mind is full of Ireland and her blue eyes brimming with wounded hurt. Of Caleb and his disappointment.

  I have to get to the farm. Now. Because I can’t bear to lose Ireland, and if I do lose Ireland, I may also lose Caleb, and I also can’t bear that. I won’t survive losing either of them.

  I’d rather go back to war.

  The two miles home are hot and punishing, but if there’s one thing I carried over from the army, it’s the habit of going on hot and punishing runs, so I make decent time, even though I arrive a sweaty mess and Greta arrives soaked after taking her detours through farm ponds and stock tanks along the way.

  It doesn’t matter what time I make, though. No one’s here.

  I walk through the house in a numb kind of daze, set out cool water for Greta, and then wander upstairs. I don’t bother calling any names—the emptiness in the house is palpable, almost like a living thing itself.

  I go to the guestroom where Ireland would have stayed and stand at the foot of the bed, my hands dangling uselessly at my sides. I just stare in a kind of blank hurt at it. I know I don’t deserve this moment of pain, so close to self-pity, because every part of this is my fault, but I’m also not strong enough to push the hurt away. I indulge in it and let it take me because I deserve to hurt. I deserve this shame and loneliness.

  Sweat from my run here burns my eyes, and I wipe roughly at my face with an equally sweaty arm, which only makes it worse. With a sharp growl of frustration, I yank the unused guest towel that Ireland left folded neatly on the still-neatly made bed—neatly made because she slept with us last night—to dry my face.