Held, Pushed, and 22918 (3 Complete Novels)

by Kimberly A Bettes

  “Well I’m glad you came.”

  I glanced at her, sitting there so pretty and so innocent. “So am I.”

  “You know, you really should make time to have some fun. Life’s too short to work all the time. I get that you need money, but you’re missing out on a lot of stuff by being a slave to the time clock.”

  “You’re right. I should.”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw her smiling at me, staring in much the same way that I’d stared at her when I first noticed her in the crowd. Before Charlie started teasing me.

  “Can I get you to drive me home? I came with my friends, Joni and Rachel, but they’re going to be staying with their boyfriends tonight. I didn’t know that until we got to the race. Of course, they didn’t have boyfriends until we got to the race so it’s not like they could’ve warned me.”

  “Your friends are going home with guys they just met?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that something that they do a lot?”

  “Oh yeah. They do that kind of stuff all the time.”

  I was silent for a minute, rolling the idea around in my mind of women just meeting guys and going straight home with them. Then a thought occurred to me and I had to know.

  “Is that something you do often?”

  She laughed a light, airy laugh. “No way. That’s not my bag. Besides, if I even thought of doing something like that my mother would freak out. She’s very old-fashioned. She thinks a woman should never want sex, and should give it up only when her husband asks for it. And even then she shouldn’t enjoy it. The thought of me sleeping with some guy I just met would kill her. Especially if I did it before I was married.”

  “Does she like your boyfriend?”

  “She probably wouldn’t if I had one, but I don’t so that’s not an issue.”

  She was single. That was good to know. Not that I could ever work up the nerve to ask her out or expect her to say yes even if I did, but it was still good to know.

  “What about you? You seem like a nice guy. Surely you have a girlfriend.” She propped her elbow up on the car door and began twirling her hair again.

  “No. I don’t.” I felt my cheeks turn red.

  “Really? Why not?” It wasn’t a prying question and she didn’t ask it in a derogatory way, like she was about to pounce and make fun of me for being so weird no girl would go out with me. It still made me uncomfortable though.

  “I don’t know.”

  My silence must’ve spoken volumes to her because after a while she asked, “Have you ever had a girlfriend?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s wild. How old are you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “And you’ve never had a girlfriend? Why not?”

  “I’ve been too busy. My sister died when I was young, and then my father died a few years ago. My mother’s depressed and kind of out of it, so I work a lot to pay the bills. I don’t really have time to chase skirts.” I immediately felt bad for putting it that way. Chase skirts. Those two words made me sound like a creep, which canceled out all the words before it that made me sound like a good guy. Whether or not it was discernible I cringed in my seat, expecting at any time for her to tell me to just let her out there so she could walk the rest of the way home.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “You poor thing. That is so sweet of you to step in and help your mom like that. No other boy I know would’ve done it, that’s for sure. All they care about is girls and cars.” I didn’t need to look at her to know she rolled her eyes, but I looked anyway because she was lovely to look at.

  For the next few minutes we talked about what had happened to my sister and father and about how deeply depressed my mother had become. It was a subject I didn’t like talking about, but I had to admit it felt good to get everything off my chest. Well, everything except the truth about what happened to Cathy Ann. I would take that to my grave.

  I was happy when the conversation finally turned away from me and toward her once again. She talked about her family, her school life, what she’d been doing her first year out of high school, and what she planned to do with her life. I was mesmerized by the sweetness of her voice, the airy quality of her laugh, and the calmness of her presence. I was more at ease during the car ride to her house than I had ever been in my life. I hated for it to end.

  “This is me,” she said, pointing to the right side of the street. Her home was a large ranch style house with the porch light blazing, welcoming the beloved daughter home from her night out with friends. It was exactly how my own house would’ve looked to Cathy Ann as she arrived home from a date had she lived long enough to do such things.

  I pulled the car to the curb and killed the engine. For half a minute, we sat in silence. But it wasn’t an awkward or uncomfortable silence. We were perfectly content just sitting there with no words passing between us as we enjoyed each other’s company. I got the feeling she didn’t want the ride to be over either, but then again, I knew absolutely nothing about reading women.

  “Thanks for the ride,” she finally said.

  “No problem. I was happy to do it. To be honest with you, I was looking for a reason to leave anyway. Racing just isn’t my thing. And I prefer the quiet of a small crowd over the roar of a loud one any day.”

  She smiled. “I feel the same way.”

  Another quiet minute passed.

  “How’s your jaw?”

  I reached up and touched it. “It’s fine.” It would be sore tomorrow. Hell, it was sore now but I wasn’t going to tell her that. I didn’t know much about girls or women, but I knew that no one liked a sissy.

  Going to the race that night, driving Denise home, and walking her to the door all led to us being in a relationship. Neither of us asked the other one if we wanted to go steady, it just happened over the next couple months with regular phone calls and dates.

  For the next four years, we saw each other often. She came into the store during the week to see me, to talk and laugh and catch up on things. On most Saturday nights, after a day of pumping gas and running home to get cleaned up, I drove across town to pick up Denise and take her out for the evening. Our dates usually consisted of going to a movie and grabbing something to eat afterward, holding hands most of the time we were together.

  Before Ben went to college and Charlie moved off and got married and John was killed in a game of chicken which no one won, they used to tease me endlessly about Denise, about finally losing my virginity. I let them believe what they wanted, neither denying nor confirming anything. I’d never told them whether or not I was a virgin. They naturally assumed I was since I never had a girlfriend or shared any sordid stories with them. When Denise came along, they just figured that at some point during our four years together, we’d begun to have sex. They were wrong, but I never told them that in all our time together, the most Denise and I had ever done was kiss. Mostly light stuff, our lips pressed together tightly but sealed shut. I could count the number of times on one hand that our tongues had swirled around the inside of each other’s mouth, sloppy and hot. And I could do it with two fingers left over.

  During our fourth year together Denise began trying to turn our make-out sessions into full blown sex. I guess she’d had enough of the heavy petting and necking, the breast fondling and hip grinding, the through-the-jeans fingering and dry humping. Those things no longer satisfied her. She wanted more, much more than I was ready to give.

  I didn’t blame her for wanting to move on to sex. Hell, I was tired of waiting too. I was every bit as horny as she was, but I was terrified. I had no idea what I was doing and the thought of her laughing at me for making a fool of myself was enough to paralyze me with fear and make my dick go limp. You can’t have sex with a limp dick. Even I knew that.

  “Come on, Lester,” she urged one night, purring in my ear with her lusty breath hot on my skin. “Please.”

  It was so odd to hear a woman begging me for anything, especially
sex.

  “I don’t feel right about it,” I said gently. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings or make her mad at me. I really liked her. Hell, I loved her. But I just couldn’t give her what she wanted.

  “Are you sure?” She climbed up on my lap, straddling me on the couch in my living room. She pulled up her skirt, revealing smooth thighs and a nude crotch. I glanced down and saw what she was offering me. It would be a lie to say I didn’t want it. I’d have been a damn fool not to. Even the sweet smell of it wafting up to my nostrils in gentle tides was enough to drive me wild. But I looked away, looked back into her eyes.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Why not?” The frustration was evident in her tone. She’d been patient with me this far, but she was nearing her breaking point. “We’ve been together a long time. Even my prude of a mother assumes we’re having sex. Why aren’t we?”

  “I told you. I don’t feel—”

  “Right about it, yeah yeah.” She got off my lap in an angry huff, grabbed her purse and left, slamming the door behind her.

  Maybe if I’d have told her about Susan she would’ve understood why I was reluctant to embarrass myself like that again. Deep down, I knew Denise would never laugh at me and call me a baby the way Susan had, but with the sound of her mockery still ringing in my ears it was a chance I couldn’t take. At twenty-three years old, I was starting to wonder if I’d ever take that chance.

  Throughout the rest of that fourth year together, there were five more incidents similar to the one on my couch. The next three were very much like the first, ending in an argument and Denise storming out of the car or the house, whichever we happened to be in at the time. During the last two, she simply crumpled in a heap and cried, wallowing in her rejection.

  I knew that a distance was coming between us, a distance put there by me and my reluctance to have sex with her. She called me less frequently and when she did, the conversations were short and cold. She stopped coming into the store to see me at all. This gave me reason to take a look at myself, at my choices, and at what I was doing to both her and us.

  The next Saturday night rolled around, a night that would normally be reserved for a date with Denise, but she claimed she didn’t want to go out with me that night. I didn’t try to persuade her to change her mind, and I didn’t bother to ask if I could come over and be with her. I just left it as it was and hung up the phone.

  After an hour of watching my mother stare blankly at our television screen, I couldn’t take it anymore and went out by myself. I stopped at a liquor store and bought two six packs. Then I drove around, driving and drinking, drinking and thinking.

  It didn’t take long for me to realize that I’d been wrong. I remembered how sad she looked as she cried into her hands each time I’d rejected her. And then it hit me. Without meaning to, I’d made Denise feel the same way Susan had made me feel years earlier. In my attempt to keep myself from getting hurt, I’d hurt the only girl I’d ever loved. I was an ass and I intended to rectify the situation.

  A plan began forming in my mind of the perfect way to go about fixing things. It started with a romantic dinner at an actual restaurant instead of a burger joint. Then we’d take a stroll through the park or along the river bank. We’d come back to my house and listen to romantic music. We would dance together in the candlelight with our bodies pressed tightly together, slowly swaying back and forth to the rhythm of the song. It was then that I would begin to undress her. I’d make love to her wherever she wanted. On the floor, on the bed, on the couch, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was I was prepared to finally have her, to satisfy her completely.

  I was five beers into the first six-pack when I saw her standing outside the movie theater. I recognized her immediately. However I couldn’t quite place the guy whose hand she was holding.

  My stomach tightened, the beers squishing upward and threatening to spew from me like a hot and sticky gusher. I leaned forward, hunching over the steering wheel and squinting at the couple, trying to make sure it was really her but hoping like hell it wasn’t.

  It was.

  I slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car. The sound of my tires screeching as the car shuddered to a stop had captured their attention as well as that of the other moviegoers. Heads turned my way as I threw open the door and jumped out of the car. I stepped up onto the sidewalk and rushed toward her, ignoring the stares of everyone else.

  “What the fuck is this, Denise?” I shouted, not caring who heard me.

  She was shocked to see me, embarrassed that I was making a scene, but she didn’t look sorry.

  “Go home, Lester. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “No. What’s going on?” I looked from her to the man whose hand she was clutching. He looked familiar, like someone I should know.

  “Just go home. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Are you drunk?”

  “That’s none of your damn business, now is it? What do you care if I am? You lied to me, Denise. You fucking lied to me.” My voice cracked as I spoke, the pain of what was happening settling over me like a fog. I fought through it, talked around it, not wanting her or the asshole at her side to know just how hurt I was.

  “I didn’t lie to you,” she said calmly.

  “Yes. You did. You said you didn’t feel like going out with me tonight.”

  “Yeah, Lester. Exactly. I didn’t feel like going out with you tonight. And you know what? I don’t think I’m ever going to feel like going out with you again.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we’re done. It’s over. I’m tired of wasting my time on you and a relationship that isn’t going anywhere. Now go home. And don’t drink any more tonight. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  I glanced back at the man standing next to Denise. Damn it, I should know who he was. “Don’t fucking worry about me anymore, Denise,” I spat her name. “I could never hurt myself as much as you just hurt me.”

  She pulled on the man’s arm and he followed her into the theater, leaving me standing on the sidewalk with eyes full of tears and a heart full of hurt. Never had I imagined she would do something like that to me. She was so sweet and kind, so loving and understanding.

  And such a heartless bitch.

  It took me half an hour to realize who the guy holding her hand was. Truman, the cocky asshole who’d punched me in the jaw and accused me of souping up my rust bucket of a car in order to beat him that night four years earlier, the night I met Denise. I didn’t know his real name and I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. He would always be Truman to me. And now he was Truman, the asshole who stole my girlfriend.

  I drove around—alternately crying and punching the steering wheel—until both six packs were gone. My eyelids were heavy by that point, and I closed them just for a second, just long enough to blink and clear them of the fuzziness. When I opened them again, my car was in the ditch with two tires blown and a crumpled front fender. I considered getting out and walking home, assuming I could find the place in my drunken stupor, but then I thought fuck it and slumped over on the seat where I slept until morning.

  4

  With no friends left in town and no girlfriend by my side, it was just my mother and me in that house on Chelsea Avenue. As if working myself ragged and dealing with my newfound loneliness wasn’t depressing enough, coming home to my mother was even worse. Never beginning a conversation, she only spoke when she was spoken to. I would ask, “How was your day, Mom?” She would answer with something like, “The same as always.” They were flat, emotionless words that answered the question without really answering the question.

  She had recently taken a liking to jigsaw puzzles, turning the oak dining table into her puzzle headquarters. Not a day passed without hundreds and sometimes thousands of puzzle pieces spread across the surface. My mother sat hunched over the table with her reading glasses perched low on the tip of her nose, concentrating hard as she turned the pieces this way and that, testing them to see i
f they fit before either connecting them to the rest of the puzzle or returning them to the side, where all the other pieces waited for their turn. If I were a psychiatrist, I might’ve explained it as her way of trying to put the pieces of her life back together, or maybe it represented her searching for a way to fill the hole that Cathy Ann had left in her heart and her life, or some such bull shit. But I wasn’t a doctor. I was her son and I saw it as her finally finding a way to keep herself occupied other than staring mindlessly at the television. I thought it was a good thing so I never bothered her about it.

  Even though my mother had found something to do, it didn’t help in the way of bringing her out of her funk. It didn’t perk up her spirit or spark up any conversations between us. I came home from work every night to find her either asleep or hunched over her current puzzle project. Exhausted and unwilling to stew alongside her in loneliness and misery, I went to bed, sometimes praying that I wouldn’t wake up.

  By October of that year, 1967, I’d had enough of working my ass off, enough of having no one to talk to, and enough of watching my mother pine over a dead little girl. I was sick of all of it. I wanted out. Out of my mother’s house and out of Kansas City. Three times since that night at the movie theater, I’d seen Denise and Truman together. That was three more times my heart had broken. I couldn’t stand for there to be a fourth. I needed to get away from it all, go somewhere else, some place where there were no memories, no one I knew, and no one who knew me.

  Enlisting in the United States Army seemed like the right thing to do. I could go somewhere I’d never been before with people I’d never met, and I’d still be able to send my mother money to pay the bills. And the added bonus was there would be no chance whatsoever of me running into Denise and the asshole who had taken my place at her side. Maybe I’d finally be able to stop imaging the two of them having sex.