Beautiful Savage

by Sorbe, Lisa

  Ford just stares at me.

  “What? Don’t look at me like that. I haven’t eaten in twenty-four hours. And we can order in, so it’s not like we have to leave or anything.” I sidle up to him, dip my hand under his shirt and run my fingers along the waistband of his jeans. “Because food isn’t the only thing I’m craving.”

  The seconds tick by, and Ford shakes his head. “You,” he finally says, “are the strangest person I’ve ever, ever met.”

  I slip my hand inside and give him a gentle squeeze. “I’m going to assume that’s a compliment.”

  He takes a deep breath and moans. “Baby, it absolutely is.”

  We forget about the food. Right now, cheeseburgers and chili cheese fries topped with jalapenos are the last things on my mind. Instead, we fall into bed, tearing our clothes off as we do, choosing to satisfy our hunger in another way. The sex is amazing, as sex always is with Ford. I put everything I have into it, every single bit of my body and soul, because I know it’s all about to come to an end. The control ping pongs back and forth between us, an equal rhythm of give and take. We’re rough and soft, gentle then hard, and when it’s my turn at the helm, I straddle him, hold him down, teasing with my hips, keeping his orgasm just out of reach and nearly driving him mad.

  Because no matter what happens, this is my last week with Ford. I need this, this moment, to last as long as possible.

  And I need to leave my mark on him.

  Peering down between sheets of my hair, I study his face, memorize his features, etch them into my brain, my very heart.

  I need.

  His eyes, already so dark, blacken even more with desire, and feral urges rise to the surface, take over completely, turning his face into a mixed match of ecstasy and pain.

  I need.

  His fingers press into my hips, and my nails dig into his chest, and we’re desperate, both desperate as we cling to each other, melt into each other.

  I need.

  We’re nothing but wicked lust now, tortured souls aching for relief, and our movements become frantic, demanding, and the rocking of the bed helps to quicken our pace.

  I need.

  When I finally let him go, it’s only because I can’t hold back any longer, and we come together, explode together, expanding to infinity before contracting again, falling back down, back to earth…back into a reality I can never have.

  But I’m sure that once I’m back with Hollis, in his arms and in his bed, I’ll be happy.

  I doubt I’ll even remember Ford.

  I doubt.

  • • •

  The cheeseburgers are amazing, and hunched over the kitchen table, I eat with abandon, shoving bites of burger and fries into my mouth at the same time. I’m ravenous, and the sex-a-thon Ford and I just shared has only spurred my appetite.

  I take a pull from my vanilla shake and fight a momentary brain freeze before digging back into my meal. Ford watches me with amusement as he eats, and then, when he’s had his fill, offers me the rest of his fries. Greedy, I take them, because I’m finding it difficult to fill the bottomless pit that used to be my stomach.

  “Do you know what we should make tomorrow?” I take a bite and swallow, take another, and proceed to talk with my mouth full. “Peanut butter and pickle sandwiches.”

  Ford, who’s leaning back in his chair with his bare feet crossed at his ankles, wrinkles his nose. “Peanut butter and pickle?”

  I nod, press four fries together, and swipe them through some chili.

  He watches me, tracking my movements, and laughs. “You’re beautiful and disgusting, you know that?”

  I pop the glob into my mouth and give an overexaggerated moan of pleasure. “Yet you love me.” Then, realizing what I just said, realizing I shouldn’t be enabling this infatuation between us any more than I have been, I try to think of something – anything – to steer the conversation into more neutral waters. Casting my gaze around the table, I note the newspaper he was reading earlier. I flatten my palm against it, pull it close. “What’s the deal with the newspaper?” I ask, peering down at the page it’s open to.

  Ford doesn’t respond, though I can feel the modest boy-next-door energy radiating right off him. After reading a few lines, I can see why.

  I look up at him, lick some cheese sauce from my lip. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He blushes an adorable shade of red and shrugs.

  Glancing back down at the paper, I read the article, taking giant slugs from my vanilla shake as I do.

  Duluth’s own Ford Evans will be a feature artist at the opening of Minnesota’s newest art gallery, The Crooked Wild, located in Lost Bay. The Crooked Wild will open its doors for the first time on September 17, and the event will be catered by Xavier’s Kitchen, with coffee and dessert provided by Lost Bay’s newest bakery, Lenny’s Place. The gallery’s aim is to provide a platform for local talent, with plans to highlight photographers and artists from the north central Midwest. According to owner and sculptor Soleil Fenrir, “It’s our desire to reveal the heart of America’s Heartland.” Along with Evans, the gallery’s opening will also display works by painter Jen Malone (Cedar Hills, Iowa) and sculptor Jax Lefevre (Somerset, Wisconsin), respectively. The doors open at six o’clock sharp…

  Sandwiched in the article’s layout is a picture of Ford, containing a short blurb about his photography along with his contact information. In the photo, he’s dressed in his usual black attire, standing casually against a wall displaying one of his photographs: an up close and personal shot of one of Lake Superior’s rolling waves, caught from the inside and bespeckled by the setting sun.

  I raise my brows, shoot him a stern look. “You are too modest for your own good.” Then I smile. “Forrrrd! Seriously. This is absolutely amazing!”

  “It’s not that big of a deal, Becca. Seriously. I’ve been a feature artist before, at several galleries, in fact.” But his grin is wide, and his eyes are dancing, and I can tell he’s pleased with my reaction.

  Whoever’s running the show upstairs, It doesn’t make many like this guy, that’s for sure.

  I just make a face at him, which makes him laugh, and while I finish the rest of my meal, he pops a kiss on my head and heads off to take a shower.

  I haven’t read an actual paper in years, so I flip through a few pages, and soon my fingers are tattooed in its greasy ink. Nothing much is of interest; however, the velvety paper and smell of newsprint strike a chord of nostalgia. I’m reminded of times long gone, back when I was a kid and would spend hours in the shed behind the shack we called a house, a stack of books piled next to my hip, lost to everything but the words on the page. There, hidden away from the needy demands of my mother and siblings, I could become someone else, anyone else; slipping into a different reality was as easy as taking a breath. Sometimes, it seemed, I fell in love with the actual words more than the story itself. The rolling way they flowed was like balm to my soul, medicine for my tortured mind. It was almost hypnotic, the way I’d get caught in their rhythm, like the very sentence structure was rewiring my brain, making me better, safer.

  Nothing could touch me when my nose was buried in a book.

  My love of words was one of the reasons I developed such an affection for poetry. It was stimulating and numbing at the same time. I devoured poems like they were pain pills, popping open a book whenever I needed a fix. I was seventeen when Hollis bought me a book of poems by Emily Dickinson, a poet I’d loved since the age of nine. When I opened the package, he apologized that it was only a second edition and not a first, though I hardly cared. The date of publication was still 1892, which made it more valuable than anything I owned. Truth be told, the book could have come straight off the shelf of the local Barnes and Noble, and I would have been just as over-the-moon happy about it as I was with the edition that he gave me. It was poetry, and it was from Hollis, and it was perfect.

  When I was twenty-one, and only a few short months before I met Nicholas, I ended up selling t
hat book on Ebay for a whopping five hundred bucks (half of what it was worth) so we could make rent.

  I think about that book every now and then. Wonder if it’s stuck on some snooty collector’s shelf, maybe wrapped in plastic, untouched and unread, worshipped from afar. Does the person who owns it now only care about it because of what they think it’s worth? Or do they truly understand its words, Emily Dickenson’s prose (I felt a funeral, in my brain)?

  I wonder about this. Every now and then.

  I wish—

  Fuck.

  It’s Gus’s face, his black and white freckled mug, starting up at me from the paper. I close my eyes, but when I open them, he’s still there, grinning his dopey grin. And next to his side is a little girl, with one of those smiley face stickers propped over her head for privacy. Two pigtails stick out, though, which makes what’s supposed to be innocent seem creepy as hell. The caption below the pair reads: Lost or Stolen Dog. Sizable reward promised and no questions asked. We just want our boy home. Responds to the name Gus.

  Damn it. His slack-ass owners took out an ad. The dumbasses splurged for ad space in the Duluth News Tribune, yet they couldn’t spring for an actual fucking fence?

  People! Unbelievable.

  I rip out the incriminating page and crumple it between my fists. Once it’s nothing but a compact ball, I hop up, pace for a bit, and finally toss it in the trash. Then, looking around the kitchen, my eyes settle on the coffee maker. Lifting the lid, I grab the filter full of mushy grinds and dump it on top of the garbage. The moist, pulpy mess melds with the rumpled piece of newsprint, making it unreadable.

  Gus pads into the room, senses my mood, and whimpers in concern.

  “That,” I say, reaching into the cookie jar that Ford bought specifically for my canine charge, “was a close one.” Pulling out a peanut butter biscuit, I toss it in the air. The dog catches it, swallowing the entire thing in one bite.

  When he looks at me for another, I slap the lid closed and brush by him.

  “Jesus, Gus. Don’t be such an animal.”

  The house is quiet. Lonely. So I pull the kid’s panda out from behind my pillow and curl up with it, press my nose into its fur.

  It’s losing its Hollis smell.

  I really need to fix that.

  Marla’s texts keep coming in, one after another after another, and with each one, my irritation flares just a bit more. Despite my efforts to ignore them, the constant notifications vibrate through my phone and, as a result, through me, buzzing in my brain like a hornet’s nest.

  I didn’t talk to her much after the incident yesterday. The one where I caved to a stupid higher power and rescued her sorry ass from drowning. I mean, the bitch lost me a kayak. And while that doesn’t seem like much (I can always buy another one) it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. Granted, she did serve a purpose; from the few texts I did read, she’s beside herself with worry. Not about me, though. No, not about me or my kayak or the fact that she frolics around like she’s the only goddamn person in the world, constantly making messes that others have to clean up.

  Nope. None of that.

  Marla is stressed about her marriage. Because, unsurprisingly, Hollis is pissed the fuck off.

  And no longer is she a wishy-washy rag with no backbone. This Marla, the Marla of the past twenty-four hours, is demanding. Accusing. Downright bitchy. She wants to know what Hollis and I talked about that night on the phone, wants to know exactly what I told her husband word-for-word.

  Because she’s upset, for crying out loud. And her life is falling apart.

  Well, cry me a fucking river.

  And I couldn’t care less. I’m done with her, have taken everything I needed from our so-called friendship. All that’s left to do now is take back what’s mine.

  And realizing this, I pick up my phone and type:

  You got caught in a lie, bitch. Your time’s up.

  There. That should do it.

  I drop the phone on the nightstand and curl back up with the bear. As much as I’m ready to reveal myself to Hollis (I am, I am, I swear I am) there’s a part of me that’s…scared.

  Scared of what he’ll say, of what he’ll do.

  I mean, I doubt very much he’ll respond to me the way Andy did to Marla. But what…what if he does? It’s a fear that keeps needling away at my confidence, at my image of our picture-perfect reunion. That night has been stuck in my head since it happened: the way Andy’s face shifted when he saw Marla, the undiluted hate that flared in his eyes, flooded his gaze. And actually, now that I think about it, it wasn’t hate…or it wasn’t just hate. It was worse than that; it was outright disgust. Whatever love the man felt for Marla in the past, it couldn’t break through the unfiltered abhorrence he felt for her now.

  But that’s not me and Hollis.

  It’s not.

  It’s not.

  It’s—

  A shrill jingle at my back interrupts my childish chant, makes my muscles jerk in shock. Flipping over, I groan, annoyed that Marla has stepped up her game and is now harassing me with phone calls instead of mere texts. I don’t even look at the screen before I answer, because there are only three people in the world who could be calling, and with Ford up north for a shoot and Nicholas’s preferred means of communicating short and to-the-point texts, Marla’s the only one left.

  I hit speaker, roll on to my back, and let loose. “Look, Marla. You made this mess, and whatever you’re dealing with now is not my problem. So leave me the fuck alone.”

  There’s a pause, and in the beat of a breath, right when I’m about to hit end call, I hear, “Leave you alone? Now Becca…That’s the very last thing I want to do.”

  The voice I hear is the last one I was expecting.

  It’s deep, and rich, and I’d know it anywhere.

  Hollis.

  Stray twigs snapped underfoot like bone, and leaves crackled beneath her heels like broken cartilage. Yet still she ran for him, towards him, despite the monster he had become. Because they were eternal, and if he was going to succumb to the night, so would she.

  — November’s Night, Hollis Thatcher

  Hollis defied his parents every chance he got. He hated being rich almost as much as I hated being poor. Whenever he visited our tiny house with the leaky roof and creaky floors, he’d walked around with a weird smirk on his face. But it wasn’t arrogance (Hollis never judged me based on my superficial worth). Mostly, and strangely, it was an expression of respect. I only ever allowed him inside when my brother and sister were gone, and when my mom was too stoned to leave her bedroom. And even then, I’d keep the visit brief, hurrying through whatever task was making me late for our date: hair, makeup…cleaning up vomit from my mother or throwing in yet another load of laundry so my siblings would have clean clothes for school. (Sure, we were the poor kids, but I’d be damned if we were the dirty ones, too.)

  Hollis liked to see every side of a story, and I suppose my living conditions gave him a glimpse into another world, provided him with a perspective he didn’t have. He’d stroll through the place while I finished what needed to be finished, sometimes kicking back in the ratty recliner or popping his head into my brother’s and sister’s rooms to snoop. It was almost like he was taking notes, jotting down details on the notebook of his brain, burning the surroundings into his memory so he could write about them later.

  Which he did.

  One cold winter afternoon shortly after we began dating, I remember walking through the sliding glass door of our kitchen, a laundry basket of frozen jeans and shirts propped on my hip, to see Hollis poking around in our fridge. “If you’re hungry, you’re out of luck. Pretty sure there’s nothing edible in there.” I wasn’t embarrassed when I said this. His family had money, sure. But deep down, they were just as imperfect and trashy as mine.

  Both of us had familial scars that ran deeper than the deepest oceanic trench.

  “Not true. There’s a stick of butter, one pickle, and a container of w
hat looks to be” – I hear some clanking around – “moldy cottage cheese.” He laughed and pulled his head back just enough to peer at me over the refrigerator door. And then, he took the pickle – the one remaining, edible piece of food that we had left in our home – and ate it.

  But I didn’t care, because it was Hollis. And he could take whatever he wanted.

  Chewing, he closed the door and shot me a look of pure admiration. “You’re amazing, you know that?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but praise from him was my favorite form of praise, and I turned away so he wouldn’t see my cheesy grin. I wasn’t comfortable showing affection back then, hated giving someone the upper hand, and Hollis always had to pry my emotions out of me, draw them from me…almost as if he was luring me away from myself so I could be myself.

  I dropped the basket on the kitchen table and fiddled with the frozen clothes, and soon Hollis was by my side, flush against my side, wrapping his arms around my waist and tugging me close. “Man, Becca. You’re in it, you know? You’re so fucking in it.”

  I pushed him away, laughing, and began sorting laundry. “What are you talking about? In it. What does that even mean?”

  But Hollis answered my question with a question. “If I wasn’t taking you out to dinner tonight, what would you have eaten?”

  I snorted and tossed aside some socks. “Probably that pickle you just ate.”

  Hollis grinned and reached for a pair of my brother’s jeans. They were frozen almost solid, the pant legs stiff and shedding flecks of ice. “Why don’t you just use the dryer?”

  “We can’t afford a dryer,” I said, because it was true. I peeled off my leggings while he mulled this over and grabbed the jeans I wanted to wear on our date from the pile. Then, shaking the ice crystals from the stiff material, I proceeded to squeal in dramatic discomfort as I pulled them up and over my hips. I remember the way he watched me, almost like I was something exotic, taboo, and the sexy way his lips curled into a smile made me suddenly want to tug the jeans right back down. At that point, we hadn’t been together very long, but already most of our dates ended in hot and steamy sex.