The Lover

by Forrester, Nia

  “I got food downstairs. Feel like you could eat?”

  “Yeah, I’m starving. I ordered all this great stuff at that lunch meeting I told you about?”

  “Uh huh?”

  “And then I couldn’t even eat most of it, because I was sitting there on a clump of toilet paper hoping I didn’t gush blood out onto the chair.”

  Spencer grimaced. “Don’t say ‘gush’.”

  Ryann laughed. “Boy, you have no idea,” she said.

  He stayed there for a while, massaging her feet while she made low sounds of appreciation, finally tugging them free and turning over onto her side again.

  “I just want to sleep, and sleep … and sleep some more,” she said, sounding like she was already partway there.

  “Let’s go eat first,” Spencer said, tapping her on the butt. “Then you can conk out all night if you want.”

  “No, I have an early morning meeting. I have to go home,” Ryann said dreamily.

  “Then get up. Up.” Spencer smacked her again.

  “Quit smacking my ass, Spencer!” She sat up. “You know I don’t feel good!”

  “Well you gotta get up, and have something to eat.”

  “Fine, but I’m going to shower first and change out of this …” With a wave, she indicated her abdomen. “Can you find me a shirt you don’t mind me wearing home?”

  Spencer watched her head for his bathroom, and took a deep breath. Yeah, shit was getting real alright. But the thing of it was, he didn’t hate it. In fact …

  “Spencer I need a plastic bag to throw some stuff out!” Ryann called. Then he heard the shower turn on.

  Emptying the CVS bag of its contents, he opened the bathroom door.

  “Don’t come in!” Ryann’s hand shot out to prevent him from pushing it farther, then she opened her palm until he put the crumpled plastic bag in it. Spencer waited a couple of minutes until he heard her pull open the shower door and shut it again, then he undressed.

  She was standing completely under the water when he went in, letting her hair—the hair she hadn’t wanted to put in the icky hard hat—get completely drenched, her eyes shut. At her feet, the water ran slightly pink against the cream-colored tiles of his shower floor. He had reached for his loofah and the soap, and was lathering himself before she even realized she wasn’t alone, and when she did, she let out a loud ‘whoop’ and shot him a dirty look.

  “Scared the shit outta me!” she said.

  “Sorry. I need to get clean too.”

  “You have three bathrooms.” She showed him her back.

  “But this is the only one you’re naked in,” he pointed out.

  Turning to look at him once again, Ryann shook her head in exasperation. “I’m over here with cramps, and you want a peepshow?”

  Advancing toward her, Spencer ignored the water streaming down his face and into his eyes.

  “Cramps or not, you look …” He grinned and let his eyes run over her from head to toe.

  “Well, I feel bloated and … ugh …”

  “Turn around, again,” he said. “Put your hands against the shower wall.”

  “Why?” she asked warily.

  “Just do it.”

  “Spencer, I’m not sure about all that.” She looked incredulous, but also a little intrigued.

  “Sure about what?”

  Hands at her waist, he gently turned her around and gave her a back massage, pressing his thumbs into the base of her spine, then working his way upward, alongside the valley in the center of her back. Ryann braced her arms against the shower wall and let her head fall forward as he worked on her. The water beat against her back, and Spencer felt the muscles gradually loosen, and relax. Moving his hands around to her front, he cupped her breasts. They felt full, and heavy, and her nipples were hard as pebbles when he touched, then held them between his thumbs and forefingers.

  Ryann moaned, and pushed her hips backward toward him, and twisted her neck so he could kiss her.

  “Feel a little better?” he asked, reaching forward to adjust the temperature of the water. They had been in there long enough that it was growing cooler. He turned it all the way to the left so that it was hot again.

  “Yeah, that helped,” Ryann said, nodding. She stepped out from under the stream and wiped her face. “Thank you. I thought you meant …”

  It took him a moment to realize what she was referring to, and when he did, Spencer laughed. “Well, I heard that is supposed to be good for cramps,” he said.

  “Yeah, but …”

  “But what?”

  “You would actually …”

  “Ryann, blood washes off.” He ran his hands over her sides, down to her hips and then back up again, over her stomach, to the underside of her breasts. “And you’re beautiful even now. Bloated … with a backache … with cramps. You’re always beautiful. So, yeah, I would. Even right now.”

  Her eyes were curious. Spencer could see her assessing whether to believe in his sincerity.

  He was curious too, but for different reasons, because he had never done that with anyone before, and had no real clue why he would consider it now. But with Ryann, there had been a lot of ‘firsts’ and every day, he was less and less freaked out by them.

  Growing up with sisters, Spencer remembered hampers with soiled underwear, stony silences, and intermittent, irrational screaming matches. He wasn’t curious beyond that, about this aspect of womanhood. And when he was twenty-one years old and fresh out of the joint, there had been a girl, just one year younger than him, named Angela. He’d fallen fast, and hard, and completely for her, the ways many guys do when they get out of prison and are drawn to anything feminine, and soft.

  They moved in together almost immediately, into a tiny, crappy apartment just over the river. They lasted six passionate and tumultuous months before going out in a blazing, inglorious fight. But even in those months before the end, Spencer couldn’t remember having shared the kind of intimacies with Angela that he already had with Ryann. If Angela had painful, crampy periods, he didn’t remember them, and doubted she would have let him in on that fact. And he was almost certain he wouldn’t have considered making love to her while she was still bleeding.

  But Ryann was the woman he was going to have a child with—he didn’t want anything about her to be a mystery, not even this. He knew there would be no sex today, nor for the next several, but his body didn’t care. It still wanted her.

  When he leaned into her, Ryann laughed when she felt him, pressed against the small of her back.

  “Don’t you dare,” she said.

  “I’m not,” he said. Leaning in, he kissed the side of her neck, as streams of water coursed over it. “But don’t sweat it, baby. I have a feeling this is the last period you’ll be having for a long, long time.”

  ~17~

  “Not over there. Here.”

  Spencer looked over to where his mother was standing at the door of what used to be called her “Sewing Room” and followed her direction about the placement of her old Singer machine. It was an old-fashioned monstrosity that occupied almost a quarter of the space, and next to it, a workstation with threads, buttons, needles and assorted embellishments for the garments his mother made. Or used to make.

  For as long as Spencer could remember, his mother had been an expert seamstress, constructing clothes from the patterns that she bought in crafts and notions stores. His sisters, when they were young, pointed out in catalogs or magazines items they wanted her to make for them. And then later, as teenagers, Spencer recalled his mother’s hurt and disappointment when they turned up their noses at just about anything that came from the reliable, old Singer.

  His mother still made her own clothes on occasion, particularly special ones. The dress she wore to May’s wedding she had made herself. And the black suit she donned for his father’s funeral as well, just five years earlier. The relegation of the sewing machine to the corner of the room, where it would be impossible to use, made Spencer’s
heart sink. Cancer was dismantling his mother, piece by piece.

  “Good,” she said once he had it where she wanted it. “When I’m ready to use it again, I’ll have you move it back.”

  Spencer nodded, not voicing his fear that the Singer’s days of active duty were over.

  “Now I can stretch out to do my reading,” she said, sounding satisfied.

  It had taken most of the morning to move some of the old things out of the room to make space for the daybed, bookshelves, and rug that his mother bought to replace her sewing accessories. She was calling it her Meditation and Prayer Room now, which should not have frightened Spencer the way it did. But he couldn’t get out of his head the way she sometimes seemed to pass out, once or twice even in the middle of a sentence. She was supposed to be in remission, but remission didn’t mean “well.” His mother may be cancer-free at the moment, but she was definitely not well.

  A Meditation and Prayer Room meant, at least to Spencer, that she would be spending even more of her time in silence, her eyes shut, as though she was already dead.

  “Come let me cook lunch for you. For your trouble.”

  “What trouble?” he asked her, impatiently. “This is what you’re supposed to do. Call me when you need something like this. It doesn’t have to be Quincy all the time,” he added, referring to May’s husband.

  “His hours are more predictable than yours, that’s all.”

  “But I work for myself. Call me when you need me.”

  His mother advanced toward him and touched his cheek. “Of course, I will.”

  He wanted to tell her. About Ryann, and their plans to have a baby. Even if just to give her a reason to hold on longer, and maybe to put the Singer back to work.

  ‘Wait. Please,’ he wanted to say. ‘Just wait a while more.’

  But she wouldn’t understand the unconventional way he had gone about making a family. She would think—and might even say—that he was selling himself short. But it didn’t feel that way, especially lately.

  The night before, he had spent at Ryann’s house, and they barely talked the entire time. She was working on a proposal for a client and he was looking over estimates from a new subcontractor he was thinking of trying out on an upcoming project. They didn’t feel the need to be in each other’s faces and space the entire time, which was kind of cool. The constant demands of togetherness had always been where he fell short in the relationship department. Ryann didn’t seem to need that.

  Around eight o’clock, she stuck her head in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘Cooking, or ordering?’

  ‘Depends on what you’re planning to cook,’ Spencer had responded.

  ‘So … ordering, then,’ she said.

  Then they agreed that they were both tired of Asian food, and instead went to get takeout at a nearby New Orleans-style restaurant that didn’t deliver. The deal was, Spencer would drive if Ryann went in to pick up their order. On the drive back, she rested her hand on his leg, and he pretended not to notice it was there.

  “I made a delicious turkey chili last night,” Spencer’s mother said now. “You know it’s always much tastier the second day. And I have some cornbread as well. The kind with the little pieces of jalapeno in it?”

  “Sounds good.”

  Turkey chili. As a Southern girl, she was all about red meat, except when it came to pork. But cancer had changed that as well.

  He followed his mother into her kitchen, looking around for other signs of change before settling down at her kitchen table, and waiting while she got the food ready for them. She was old-fashioned, and never liked it when Spencer tried to serve himself from the pots on her stove.

  “So, tell me what’s going on with you,” she said as she took a large pot out of her refrigerator and put it over a flame on her gas stove.

  “Not much. Except …” There were some things she didn’t need to know, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t share anything. “I’m seeing … there’s somebody I might want you to meet.”

  At that his mother turned away from the stove to look at him full on. Cocking her head to one side, she smiled. A wide, impossible-to-repress smile that made Spencer smile as well. His mother, much-thinner now, was still beautiful to him.

  “Is that so?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Maybe soon we can …”

  As if she felt his thoughts shift in her direction, Ryann’s name lit up the face of Spencer’s phone, resting on the table in front of him. Smirking, he excused himself and went out into the living room. Maybe she missed him, though he was sure she would admit to no such thing.

  “There’s a bird trapped in my kitchen.”

  Spencer narrowed his eyes. “What?”

  “A bird, Spencer!”

  “So, open the door, and let it out,” he said slowly.

  “You don’t think I tried that? I opened the door and it’s not finding it. And the window is too small, and I saw on television that they can break their necks flying into the glass, so I pulled down the blinds so it wouldn’t be confused, and now … now it can’t find its way.”

  “Where’s the bird now?” He sighed.

  “Sitting on top of my fridge, and in between that, flying around and shitting on everything.”

  “How big a bird is it?”

  “I don’t know, Spencer. Small. Like a sparrow, or something?”

  He restrained himself from pointing out that the world would probably survive having once less sparrow, so letting it break its neck on the windowpane was as good a solution as any.

  “Okay, I got it,” he said instead. “Don’t scare it anymore so it flies around. Just … sit tight.”

  “Scare it? It’s scaring me!”

  “Ryann. It’s a bird. Not a vampire bat.”

  “If you can’t help me, just say so. You don’t have to make fun of …”

  “I said hold tight, didn’t I?”

  “What’re you going to do?” she asked, her voice almost a whine now.

  “I’m sending someone.”

  “Okay, but it has to be someone who won’t kill it or anything.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Someone who won’t kill it,” he repeated.

  He hung up and looked at the phone in disbelief for a moment.

  “Everything okay?” His mother’s voice reached him from the kitchen.

  “Fine,” Spencer called back to her. “Just takin’ care of something.”

  Then he dialed Greg’s number, and took a deep breath before explaining to his friend the ridiculous mission he was sending him on.

  Greg laughed for almost half a minute before he finally responded.

  “Yeah,” he said, finally. “A’ight. I can swing by. But then you gotta tell me what the hell is up that you got appointed designated bird-catcher for Ryann Walker. Things getting’ deep between the two of you, huh?”

  “Man, just go take care of the bird before she calls me back,” Spencer said wearily.

  “Should be able to get over there in twenty minutes,” Greg said. “But you owe …”

  “Yeah, yeah. I got you. And one more thing,” Spencer added. “Don’t … she doesn’t want you to … kill the bird.”

  Spencer hung up when Greg started laughing again.

  “All taken care of?” his mother asked when he returned to the kitchen. She was cutting him off a chunk of cornbread and placing it on a plate.

  “Yeah. I think so.” He took his seat once again.

  “Sounds like I’m not the only one who needs your help around the house,” she remarked, putting the plate in front of him, and then smacking his wrist when he went to pick the cornbread up before she’d given him his bowl of chili.

  “That was … she’s … yeah,” Spencer mumbled.

  “I would love to meet her. So let’s see if we can make that happen.” His mother turned away again, attending to the pot on the stove.

  Ryann sank onto her sofa and reached for the large glass of sauvignon blanc she’d poured for herself. Her nerves we
re still jangling from the shock of having opened the back door to her house and having a mass of feathers catapult itself at her face. Shrieking, she had dropped to the floor and crawled her way back out into the hall, taking a moment to slow her heart before braving a look back into the kitchen.

  What appeared in the shock of the moment to be at least the size of an American eagle turned out to be a tiny bird, nondescript in color, and obviously in possession of a faulty navigation system. After two attempts to fly at her kitchen window, which Ryann staved off with her broom to prevent the poor thing from killing itself, she closed the blinds and shoved the backdoor open wider. But to no avail.

  And that was when she called Spencer. She had no idea why the impulse had come to her, or what she believed he would do. What he had done—and what she was still having a hard time processing—was to have Greg over at her house in less than a half hour to deal with the bird fiasco. Even though he said he would take care of it, she was confused when she heard someone pulling into her driveway and looked out to see a green truck. Having no idea who it might be, and still not associating it with the brief phone call to Spencer, Ryann stared from her front door as Greg exited the truck.

  ‘Where’s it at?’ he asked, trying not to laugh. ‘I got my rifle in the back of the truck.’

  And within ten minutes, Greg had the bird out of her kitchen, and alive. Getting back in his truck, he told her she should come to a cookout he and his wife were having on Sunday, and waved as he backed out, and pulled away. Moments later, back inside, Ryann heard her phone chime. It was a text from Spencer.

  All good?

  Smiling, Ryann responded. Yes. Thank you. All except for the bird poop.

  For that, u on ur own.

  Smiling again, Ryann set her phone aside.

  “One more drink, man. One more!”

  “You need to stop using me to stay out past your curfew,” Spencer yelled across the table to Greg.

  His partner laughed and shook his head, looking around the lounge they’d chosen for their customary Friday Happy Hour.

  It was a time when he and Greg caught up on Coalition business they didn’t get to during the week, and with each other’s lives. It was a ritual that helped keep Spencer grounded. Apart from his family members, his friendship with Greg was his longest standing relationship.