I got up off the couch, slipping into workout clothes and going into the basement to run. It would help. It would give me a surge of endorphins that my body needed. It would exhaust me. And then I could sleep.
Tomorrow I would see Hunter. I half expected to be woken up by the sound of his hammer slamming against my wall. Because that would be a fitting welcome home by him. It was exactly what I thought he would do.
I showered, slid on a different thong, this one red and pulled out my mom's letters. It was still dark out. And I was having trouble even thinking about going to sleep.
Fiona,
Not all men are bad. I want you to know that. I realize the only male presence you have had in your life is your father and that he has been your only example of manhood. And I wish I could have changed that for you. I wish there were someone else, anyone else, you could have met to show you. To prove to you that there are good men out there. There are men who are kind and sweet, full of love words instead of hate, men who would never think about raising their hands to you in anger.
Maybe you are wondering how I know that. Knowing at this point how my father treated me. Knowing how my husband treated me.
But there was a time... when I was seventeen, when I was still living at home and enduring the punishments I was convinced I deserved... I met a good man. My mother had convinced my father that I should volunteer at the church for a year. For humility. To teach me to be selfless for my future husband and children. I knew what the real plan was: to show me the world outside. To show my the town so I would be familiar with it when I eventually ran away.
The church at that time was a revolving door of volunteers. Kids from the catholic high school. Recently released convicts. Just plain good people wanting to do good.
I was there for four months. I was in the food pantry, organizing donations when I heard shuffling behind me. And in walked a man, his arms full of boxes from the truck. My teenage heart pounded at the sight of him. He was older. In his late twenties with big, kind eyes. He was a convict, Fiona. But he was a reformed man. He was sweet and gentle with me. He made me see how good a man could be.
I hope one day, darling, that you will know the touch of a man who loves you. I pray you will know how wonderful that is. How rare and beautiful. How godly. Even if it isn't within the union of marriage. It isn't wrong. Nothing is more right.
So, my precious girl, when I tell you that not all men are bad, I hope you believe me. I hope you don't close them all out. I hope you give yourself a chance to be loved.
Mom
My mother had been in love. With a convict nonetheless. So in love with him that she was willing to ignore her father's orders and sleep with him. I wanted to know more about him. What had he done to land in prison? What happened to him? Were they separated because of her marriage? The reality was... that was probably the case. One day she was there, loving him. The next, she was dragged away to live with my father. Without having the opportunity to explain to the man she loved. With no final words.
And then she was thrown into an awful loveless marriage, forced to endure the touch of a man who despised her but used her nonetheless.
That was the life my mother had lived. My heart hurt in my chest at the idea. Twenty years in a life you hated. Twenty years clinging to the memory of an old love to get you through the drudgery. Twenty years knowing that you would never, ever see him again. Twenty years of constant heartbreak.
I fell asleep a long time later, tossing and turning in fitful dreams. I woke up past ten in the morning, feeling restless and moody.
My phone rang suddenly, making my heart fly into my chest as I stumbled through the house to grab it.
“Hello?” I said into the receiver, sounding way too eager.
“Get on your knees,” a voice said. Familiar, but not who I had wanted to hear.
There was a sinking feeling in my belly as I reached for the closest phallic-shaped object I could stick in my mouth for this. Which ended up being a wine bottle I had never gotten around to recycling.
“Yes, sir,” I said, falling easily into the role. I could do this. I could throw myself into work.
“Open your mouth and stick your tongue out you dirty little slut,” he growled. This wasn't one of the doms who got me a little warmed up. This one made me think of cruelty and debasement. But he was a paying customer and a regular.
I took three calls, showered, changed into yet another thong. Pink this time. I dressed in a simple gray t-shirt dress, grabbed my keys, and went next door.
Because at this point, I was getting worried. Maybe something had happened. Maybe he was hurt or laying unconscious or god-knew what next door just waiting for someone to come by. I chose not to think of the fact that if he was hurt, he would yell.
I knocked.
And knocked.
And knocked.
I called his name. I told him to open up. I went from lighthearted and flirtatious to downright frantic in a matter of minutes. When I finally reached for the knob, I felt it turn, unlocked, in my hands.
I paused. I don't know why. Fear or nervousness. But I paused for a long time, feeling my heartbeat pound frantically in my chest, throat, wrists.
Then I stepped in and my legs gave out. Literally gave out. I dropped numbly to my knees right there in the doorway, the backs of my feet still in the hall.
Because his entire apartment was cleaned out. The dining room set he had made, the coffee table, the couch, the television. Everything. It was all gone.
Hunter was gone.
The reality of that broke through the shock like a bolt of lighting, too bright, too powerful to ignore. Hunter was gone. Not just for a couple days. Or weeks. He was gone with the intention of never coming back. He was gone forever.
I placed my hands on the floor and pushed myself up, willing myself to look. I walked toward the kitchen, looking in the cabinets and the fridge. There was nothing. Not even a leftover box of baking soda in the back of the fridge. I moved down the hallway to the bedroom. His giant bed with all its comfortable sheets and blankets was gone. His clothes and even the hangers were gone out of the closet.
I stood there for a long time in the empty space the bed used to occupy. I missed it. I missed the softness and the memories. I missed the sex I had learned I could enjoy there. I missed the nights I was able to sleep there.
I took a long, slow deep breath and walked back into the living room. And that's when I saw it. Sitting right in front of the sliding balcony doors so it could get light and heat. The cactus I had bought him. I walked over to it, getting on the floor beside it, touching the skull planter it was in.
Then I was crying. The kind of crying you only do when you know you are going to be unobserved: loud, ugly sobbing. I pulled my knees to my chest and rested my forehead against them, my body shaking more with each passing moment. It was a violent kind of breakdown that was almost scary. Because I couldn't stop it. I couldn't fight it. I just had to sit there and let it wash over me.
A long time later, I uncurled from myself, scrubbing furiously at my face with my hands. The urge to cry was still there, but the tears weren't coming. I felt dry. Like all of the moisture had seeped out and I was brittle inside.
It hurt. Oh, god how it hurt. And, what's worse was, I didn't expect it to. I hadn't realized just how much he had started to mean to me in such a short amount of time. He shouldn't have. I mean... with how closed off and distant I am... he shouldn't have been able to mean so much. But he did.
The absence of him was like a black hole inside, constantly turning and pulling everything good into its hollow depths.
Would I be able to sleep through the nights anymore? Would the lure of sharp objects come back with the same intensity that it used to? Would I ever again feel the way I felt around him... fully naked and completely comfortable?
Or was security something I buried in him?
Taking a deep breath, I looked out onto his b
alcony. He even took his goddamn ashtray. But he left my cactus. Which, the more I thought about it, felt like a fucking slap in the face. Was it a pointed move? What else could it have been?
So... what? He wanted me to know he wanted literally everything else in the world except something that was from me?
Well... fuck him. Fuck him seven ways to Sunday. And then once more for good measure.
I stooped down, grabbed the cactus and stormed out of his apartment, slamming the door and making it rattle in the jamb. I turned and went down the elevator, outside and down the street. Right back to the same store I bought the damn thing to begin with. The woman at the counter watched me storm up to the closest, most girly freaking planter I could find which was hot pink with purple hearts all over, turn the skull upside down and swiftly stick the cactus into the new pot. I handed her a twenty, headed right outside and into the closest empty alley, taking the skull and hurling it with everything I had at the wall.
Watching it splinter all around was the best feeling I had felt in days.
He didn't want me? No big deal. I don't want someone who doesn't want me back. I was better than that. I deserved better than that. He could rot in hell for all I cared.
I would be fine. Eventually. Once the betrayal dulled. Once the anger died down. Once I had a few nights under my belt... I would be fine.
I went back into my apartment, putting the cactus on my coffee table and sitting down on the couch. I kept trying to breathe deep, to suck air into the hole inside. I had a sneaking suspicion that despite all my convictions, all my intentions to be a good scorned woman, that there would always be that feeling. And, with it, the fear to ever let myself open up enough to be put in the position to feel it again.
I thought of the tattoo he had done on me. My pretty heart with its chains. And I swear I could feel them tightening, wrapping around, keeping it even further out of reach.
Not all men are bad.
My mother may not have led a life of greatness. She might not have broken out of the shackles of her prison and built a life on the other side. She might not have been an idol.
But she was all I had. And I owed it to her to take whatever lessons she had for me and trust in them. Put my faith to rest in them.
So, no... not all men are bad. But Hunter was a particular kind of asshole.
How do you treat a person, so obviously, painfully damaged, like that? How do you kiss their scars and tell them you want to know everything? Every sordid detail of their damage?
Maybe I was just a sucker for a sweet talker after all.
And maybe that whole scene in my kitchen before I left, about remembering him and whatnot, maybe that was because he knew something I didn't. Maybe that was because he was planning all along to leave.
I ran a hand underneath my breasts, thinking of my scars, thinking about his plans for them. He had spent hours working on those sketches, getting them just how I wanted them. The bastard couldn't at least leave the final product so I could go get it done by someone else?
Well, fuck him. Again. He wasn't the only tattoo artist in the city. Hell, he probably wasn't even one of the best. I got up from the couch and grabbed a stack of printer paper and a pen. I could try to recreate it. I could get it as close as possible and bring it to a professional. It would give me something to focus on.
Because I knew that if I let myself slip for a second, if I let myself think of anything other than the bitterness, if I allowed even a drop of the good that had been between us get in... I would fall face forward into the grief. I would wrap it around myself like an old favorite sweater. I would sink into it and settle. I would never get better.
Because the truth of it all was, I loved the jackass.
So what other option did I have but to deny, deny, deny?
I absolutely, positively, did not in any way shape or form love Hunter from apartment fourteen.
Twenty
I'm such a fucking asshole. There was really no other way to put it. That was what I was. I grabbed my last box off the floor and put it on the kitchen counter. The cactus was sitting on top in its absurd skull planter.
I should have left her alone. The first week in this place, I knew she was trouble. I knew I was in trouble. She wasn't part of my plan. Which had been simple: get the fuck away, new city, new apartment, new life. I was supposed to spend my time getting my career on its feet, tinkering with my home improvement projects, and keeping to my god damn self. I had no business getting acquainted with my neighbors. If they knew what I was running from, they would want nothing to do with me anyway.
But, damn, that woman.
All it took was one look at her, drinking her coffee on her balcony, leaning on the railing with her ass sticking out in those panties. Then she opened her mouth and spit fire. I was hooked. Men like me didn't like good girls, and Sixteen was far from a good girl.
Having loud (what I thought at the time) sex several times a day, going out drinking to complete oblivion every night dressed in those crazy sexy outfits.
No, she wasn't a good girl. But good girls were overrated.
Maybe if I hadn't been so blindingly attracted to her from the first, I would have seen the damage sooner. Not that it mattered. Actually, she was all the more attractive to me when I could see she had demons of her own. There's nothing in the world like a heart that's been cut up the same.
I wasn't lying when I said that nothing, not even her scars, could make her anything other than beautiful. She was perfect and flawless.
I reached into the box and took out the cactus, looking at it. She was right, I did think about her every time I saw it. But not because she was prickly, but because she had been thoughtful enough to get it for me for being a bitch. That was what Fiona was like... she would cut you and then patch you up.
I walked over to the glass door and put the pot down. I wanted to keep it, bring it with me. I really did. I wanted a piece of her with me. I wanted a physical representation that she was a part of my life. But I couldn't bring any part of bright, perfect Fee into my fucked up past.
The door made a hollow sound as I closed it and made my way down the hall. Which was fitting. It was how I felt inside too. Like I was leaving an important part of me behind.
I hadn't meant to be such a fuck. I really meant it when I said I would call her while she was away and that I would take her to bed when she got back. I meant that. I couldn't think of spending a day in my apartment without her there. Preferable naked.
But that was before I got the knock on my door the morning after she left.
I opened the door, half expecting the super or maybe even her, having decided she didn't want to go after all. Or that she wanted me to come with her. There might have been a leap of hope as I pulled it open.
But it quickly got dashed away as I felt my stomach drop. Because there in my doorway was one of my own ghosts. All six foot three inches of unnecessary muscle and ink. “You thought you could just leave?” he asked as a greeting, his blue eyes so much like my own.
“Shane,” I nodded, knowing this was the end. I wasn't going to get away from him. From them. I was going to have to go back.
“Pack your shit,” he said, looking past me into the apartment. “or I'll have some of the guys come up and toss it all. You have eight hours to get this all handled and meet me out front. I'll drive.
And then he was gone. I closed the door, resting my forehead against the inside of it. How was that for a family reunion? But given the reputation of my family, it actually was quite fitting. Shane, my brother, was a year younger and a hell of a lot more ambitious in the eyes of our father. It was a constant bone of contrition that I was still somehow the favorite despite all Shane did for him.
I made a few calls and walked to the closest U-Haul station to pick up a truck. Without a fight. Without question. Because it was useless. I hedged my bets when I ran. There was always a chance of being found. Of being pulled back.
I guess a part of me had been holding out hope that my father would let me go. He had other sons. Four others to be exact. He didn't need me. He had his oldest and his youngest, he could just let the useless middle ones go. But, no. That couldn't happen because it wouldn't look good. It wouldn't send out a good message that he couldn't keep a handle on one of his own children.
The door opened just as I adjusted the cactus into place. “It'll die,” Shane said, completely overtaking the doorway.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “someone is going to stop by eventually and see it.”
“Shit,” Shane laughed as I turned back to him, shaking his head at me. “You went and got yourself a girl? Amateur move, bro.” And for a second, we were brothers again, familiar, teasing. But then his face settled into hard lines and he walked back into the hall. “Let's go.”
The ride back had been long and tense. Shane stared out the window, his metal blasting from the radio so he wouldn't even have to make an effort at conversation. I sat there in silent resignation, watching as my new life became a dot in the rearview. And I would never get back to it.
To her.
And if I thought living in the past was bad, being forced back into it was going to be a million times worse. Because I had gotten a taste of freedom, of a life by my own terms. I knew what it was like- infinitely better than I had imagined. I got to be the person I had always wanted to be. The man I knew I was underneath it all. I got to find a woman who didn't know who I used to be. Who liked the me I really was.
My fucking family was taking that all away from me. I had been able to forgive them for what they had done to me in the past, but I could never forgive this.
“Unclench those fists, bro,” Shane said, parking the truck. “we're here.”
From the outside, the bar looked harmless enough. Just your average everyday watering hole for bikers. As evidenced by the dozen or so black and chrome beauties parked out front. It was a long and low red brick building with a plain wooden sign saying only “Chaz's”. The windows were small, the front door black. Nothing interesting.
For A Good Time, Call... Page 16