by Cole, Kayley
It collides against his groin. As he keels over, I shove him toward the closet and sprint forward. I run out of the room, down the hall and to the front door. I burst outside, fumbling to get the keys out of my pocket. My car beeps as I unlock it and start it with the smart key. I yank open the door and jump inside. As I slam the door shut, Mr. Amberden runs out. Standing in front of the car, it looks like his body is sliced in half by the headlights— but not quite in a lethal way. It makes me think of Jekyll and Hyde.
I shift the car into reverse. I pull the car out of the driveway, trying to focus on the road, but all I can see is how a similar scenario could have played out with Mrs. Amberden— she asks for a divorce, he freaks out and starts to react violently. Maybe she tries to escape, but she's not quite as strong, and he becomes angrier that she tried to hurt him. Maybe he killed her in that room. Maybe he took her out into the lake and sank her body in the center of it.
I swallow. I have no idea what I'm marrying into. I'm just letting the headlights show three hundred feet ahead of me and hoping that nothing else lurks in the darkness, waiting to leap out in front of me.
* * *
Jake
At first, rage pours out of me. One of the plates cracks when I drop it in the sink. I nearly throw the food out before I imagine Ellie— my conscience— bawling about starving homeless people. When I'm done making the kitchen as clean as I possibly can— which still looks pitiful compared to what our housekeeper can do— I open the wine we were going to drink and pour it into a pewter tankard.
I put away the food. I washed the dishes. I did a lot of things I don't usually do, but I drank a shitload of wine and drinking excessively is practically my calling card.
Or it used to be before Ellie intoxicated me with her sensuality, her generosity, her weird habits, and her determination to care about shit even when it inconveniences her. Now, even the highest shelf alcohol seems bland compared to her— she turned liquor into a drink tamer than water, and turned love into my rising sun.
But goddamn sometimes the sun burns and sometimes the narcotic is overwhelming, and I need it too much to bear its absence. How could I not resent her a little bit for giving herself to me when I could so easily lose her?
I start a second bottle of wine. All of those times my father made jokes about how I couldn't possibly be his son because I couldn't figure out something he already knew, all those times my mother made damn sure I knew I was a burden, and all those times my parents swore hatred for each other until death do them part— they're death by a thousand cuts, and it's a thousand more now that I've dragged Ellie into it. If she leaves me, I'll just be a twisted piece of shit, and I'll know I deserved every cut.
I hear the door open and close. Ellie wanders into the living room like a moth attracted to the only light in the house. But I'm the darkness in her.
"Hey," she says. "I didn't expect you to still be awake. Um, it's late. I'm going to sleep."
"The leftovers are in the fridge," I state, taking another drink from my cup. I tip the cup a little too far, and some of the wine slithers down my jaw and onto my neck. I wipe it off.
She pauses, her eyes focused on the door frame. "Thank you. For cooking. And cleaning up. I'm sorry…that I left like that."
"Are you?" I ask, feeling the compulsion to burn this bridge before she burns it. "Because you seemed damn determined to leave."
She turns toward me. "I was concerned about your mother. And I'm even more concerned about her now."
"This isn't about my mother. This is about us."
"How is it not about your mother?" She sweeps her arms in front of her like there's a fog between us that she can't see through. "Your mother is gone. She's missing. Your parents were getting a divorce. She's the one who filed for it. And your dad freaked out when he realized I found the divorce papers. This whole thing is about your mother and for some reason, you refuse to see it."
I stand up abruptly. The wine seems to swim in my head, but I ignore it. I walk toward her. For a second, there's a flicker of fear in her eyes, but I ignore that too. When I'm less than an inch from her, I notice the dark red shade of her upper right arm.
"What happened?" I ask.
"Your father freaked out," she says, pulling her arm behind her back. I vaguely remember her saying something similar five seconds ago, but my mind is filled with all of my father's previous blowups. "It's fine. But you don't have to worry because I'm not going back there."
"What happened exactly?" I say. I nearly grab her arms to compel her to tell me the truth, but I drop my arms, thinking better of it. "Tell me, Ellie."
She shakes her head. "It's just what I told you. I found the crumpled divorce paper in your mother's closet…”
"Why were you in my mother's closet?"
"Because I needed to get a sweater, so your father didn't know I was lying when I said I left my sweater in the room," she says. "I found the divorce paper. He caught me with it. He was angry. I was scared. I was going to grab a hanger to defend myself, but he grabbed me before I could. I kicked him between the legs and ran. I drove straight back here."
"He grabbed you so hard that he gave you a bruise?"
She shrugs. "I guess. It was hard enough that I couldn't use my arm. It doesn't hurt that bad— it can't hurt as bad as his balls do right now."
"Fucking piece of shit. God. Fucking. Piece. Of. Shit." I try to take deep breaths as I walk to the kitchen, pulling out some frozen peas from the freezer, but it only seems to feed oxygen to my seething mind. I whip the hand towel off its hook. I move back to her, handing her the frozen peas wrapped in the hand towel. "Put that on your arm."
"You need to calm down, Jake. I'm fine," she says, taking the peas. She places them against her arm. "We should figure out what happened to your mother."
"He's such a worthless piece of shit." I pace in front of her. "I should have dealt with him when we were over there."
"Jake," she says. "Your mother. She's missing. Your father is violent. We need to make sure she's okay."
I shake my head, still pacing. "She's fine. She's always loved to disappear. She considered it a punishment that I wasn't graced by her presence. And since she was my mother, it was. But my fucking father. You know, he forewarned me about marriage while we were there last time. I just walked away because I didn't want to deal with his bullshit, but I should have gotten in his face. I'm such a fucking coward. Goddammit."
"Are you drunk?" she asks, trying to peer at me more closely, but I'm moving too brusquely for her to risk getting close. Maybe that's always been true.
"Someone had to drink all the wine." I indicate back toward the table. Even as I gesture and rage is still building up inside me, my hand looks weirdly relaxed. "I should go see my father now. I'll fucking show him what happens when someone touches my fiancee."
As I move forward, she grabs my arm, dropping the peas and the hand towel on the floor.
"No, Jake," she says. Her grip isn't tight, but it paralyzes me all the same. "You can't go right now. You're drunk. It's late. And I don't want to stay up, worrying about you. Let's go to bed and then we have to… you have to consider calling the police about your mother. We have to do something to find her."
I lean toward her, our foreheads brushing against each other. Her arm that's gripping onto me bends at a weird angle to stop me from falling on my face. "You're such a nice girl. What makes you see all this fucked up shit in my life and makes you want to stay? Do you have Stockholm Syndrome? I know what you like in the bedroom, but this goes past that. Nobody— absolutely nobody— likes drowning in other people's bullshit."
"I'm not drowning," she says.
"Maybe you are, and you just don't realize it because you've sunk too deep. Maybe I'm just like my father, and we'll be married for thirty years before you realize it's time to run away for good."
"I won't do that."
"Why not?"
"Because if things go bad, we'll try to fix it. And if it can't be fixed
, we'll let each other go," she says. She pushes up against me, reminding me that I'm still leaning forward. She kisses my cheek. "I love you, Jake. You can be frustrating as hell, but I love you enough to deal with a fair amount of bullshit, and I love you enough to tell you when it's starting to get to be too much. I'm not drowning in your bullshit— we're wading in it together. Just like you've done for my bullshit."
"I've never heard you swear so much."
She kisses me again. "That's because you've never seen me play tennis. Let's go to sleep."
She grabs my hand, leading me upstairs to our bedroom. Halfway up the stairs, I scoop her up. Even with the wine turning my blood into liquor, I find my way to our bed, dropping her safely onto its comfort. I cover her body with mine, dressing her body with kisses, pretending that they're armor over her body. I lie down beside her, murmuring sweet nothings. I pretend I'm all the things she wants and needs me to be, but all I can think about is how badly I want to hurt my father. My heart is beating like a drum in my chest— not a wedding song, but a war chant.
* * *
Ellie
Morning in our bedroom comes through in stages. It's like I'm breaking out of a cocoon, the sunrise exposing the room with new eyes. First, I see the opposite wall, which Jake had deemed our hubris wall since there's a glass case of all our awards and a photo of the two of us in the center of it. I hadn't been enthusiastic about having it in our bedroom, but there's something naughty about making love while looking at his achievements— I managed to seduce a god and I like to imagine he feels the same way.
The sun continues to rise, and I see the end of our bed. Our comforter is a merlot red and thick enough that my feet are well-hidden under it, but I can see the small bumps where Jake's feet are slanted upward.
I turn toward him as the sunlight cuts right above our shoulders. There's a deep pain in my arm from where his father grabbed me. I know he thinks it will turn me against him, but all it does is remind me that he's a miracle-- someone who pulled himself out of a garbage pit and made himself into a better person. It's difficult to go from rags to riches, but it seems like it would be equally difficult to grow up under the roof of a cruel sociopath without also becoming a cruel sociopath. With genetics and upbringing betting against him, he's mythological in the way he overcame it.
I reach under the sheets, sliding my hand against his skin and enjoying the sleek feeling of his muscles. As my hand moves to his thigh, I feel his hamstrings shift as he slowly wakes up. His movements lower the blanket a few inches, and I can see the tattoos on his upper arm. As I press my finger on the left wing of the mosquito tattoo, I pretend I can feel the lines tracing around it and darken them with a brush of my finger. If only everything could be so easily emphasized.
I let my fingers slide up his ribs as he twists around to look at me.
"Good morning," he mumbles. He looks at me like I'm a piece of art in the Louvre. "You look like the sexiest Florence Nightingale in the world."
I look down at my lacy bra. "I don't look like Florence Nightingale."
"You're right. Florence Nightingale was an ugly broad compared to you— which is why you're the sexiest one in the world."
His hands grip my shoulders suddenly, He tugs me down toward him, my hands slipping against our silk sheets, so our heads nearly collide, but his lips stop me from falling too hard. His hands move to the center of my back, pressing me hard against him as his mouth moves against mine, famished and insatiable.
Our bodies twist together, trying to fill in any space between us, but even as I kiss him and his fingertips brush against all the spots that send shivers under my skin, there's a distance between us. I'd heard once that we can never truly touch anything because everything is surrounded by electrons and electrons are repelled from each other. So, we can't touch anything, but objects can merge. I've always been able to become part of Jake and have him become part of me, but now we're just close enough to know that we're not knocking off each other's electrons. We're not merging like two objects that wanted to become something more.
He must feel it too because he gives me one last kiss on my temple before pulling away and rolling off the bed in one motion.
"Where are you going?" I ask, pulling my pillow under my head. "Are you going to the set early?"
"No, I'm going to go talk to my father."
I sit up. "Jake. No. I'm fine. We're fine. Don't go starting a fight."
"He went after my fiancee. I can't let that slide," he says, pulling on a pair of pants.
"Why not?" I retort. "Especially when your fiancee is asking you to let it slide.
"Because it's my job to protect you, and I failed last night, but I won't make the same mistake again. I need to let him know where the line in the sand is and inform him that he crossed it."
"At least let me come with you."
"No."
"Jake, I'm a full-grown woman. I can fight my own fights."
"I know how much you're a full-grown woman." He walks back to the bed. I press my hand over his chest, falling in love with every part of his body and the tattoos that change him from a marble statue of a god to a piece of modern art. He takes my hand and kisses my knuckles. "But I have no doubt this discussion is going to get ugly. And what happened to you has nothing to do with you— it's my fault that I wasn't there and it's my fault that my father doesn't respect you. I'm going to demand that respect, and he's going to listen."
He cups my face in his hands, kissing between my eyebrows. There's a faint scent of sweat wafting off him, and I love it. There must be something in his pheromones because it makes me want to wrap my legs around him every time. Even if we can't merge right now, we can still derive pleasure from each other.
He moves away from me, grabbing a shirt off the floor.
"I might be back unless this takes too long, then I'll go straight to the set. But I'll call you," he says. He kisses me on the forehead again like a mother checking the fever of a child, but he's checking if the illness has spread from the bruise on my arm to my brain— he's testing to see if his father's violence has sickened my thoughts.
And that's our problem: he's more worried about his father's actions against me than his mother's disappearance. One of us sees the visible ramifications, and one of us sees the concealed disturbance.
As he leaves our bedroom, I tuck the pillow back under my head, pretending there's a chance I could fall back asleep. The sun has exposed the whole room now, including me. The bruise on my arm is an ugly shade of blue. I press my finger into it, testing my own resolve, but it doesn't hurt that bad.
The sound of chimes barely registers in my mind. The third time they reverberate, I grab my phone off my nightstand. It's my generic ringtone.
Robin Kerr
I press answer before it can go to voicemail.
"Hey, Robin," I say. "Sorry, I was just…I couldn't find my phone."
"It's fine," he says. "You still answered, so I didn't have to record a message for you, which is a bit strange— it's a bit like I'm talking to the future version of you. And who knows what the future version of you is going to be like? She could be like you or she could be a real bitch."
I laugh. "Yeah. You never know with me. I'm glad I saved you from the dilemma of figuring out what version of me you'd be talking to. What's going on? Did everything go okay with the hors d'oeuvres?"
"Oh, yeah. That's fine. But we need to talk about wedding favors. I got Electric Phoenix to create a few different designs. There are the chocolate guitars and video cameras that we talked about, but she made some that were dark chocolate, some milk chocolate, some white chocolate, and she made a few that were a mixture of different chocolates. She also made some chocolates with the hole part of the guitar— I don't know what it's called— but the hole in the guitar is replicated with nuts or chocolate drizzle and the same with the lens of the video camera. She also proposed the idea of tiny soaps in the shape of guitars and video cameras, and she told me that using succulents a
s party favors are huge this year. She doesn't have much of a time window for you to check it out though, so we need to get there in the next hour to check everything out and for you to decide what you want."
As he catches his breath, I recall that he never talked like this in front of Jake. Jake had that effect on other men— the other men never talked out of turn and gave him plenty of space. He was a meteoroid, crashing straight toward me and anything between us was obliterated.
And he doesn't like Robin. At all. But he can either choose to trust me and know I'd never cheat on him, or let us both be burned alive by his insecurities.
"Okay, let's go see her. Where's her shop?"
"It's on Main Street. 3744," he says. "When do you think you can get there?"
"In about half an hour."
"I'll see you there," I say. I hang up, swallowing the lump in my throat that feels a lot like guilt. When— or if— Jake comes back, I won't be here. But I'll be back, and that's all that should matter.
* * *
Jake
My father doesn't answer the door, and it's locked. I walk around to the north side with one of the stones that surround my mother's garden— or, if we're being technical, the gardener's garden. I cock my arm back and hurl the stone at their dining room picture window.
The glass shatters, becoming a hazardous waterfall inside the room. I step over it as my father comes running down the stairs.
"For fuck's sake," he spits out. "Do you know how much that will cost to replace?"
"I knocked three times and you didn't answer. For all I knew, you had fallen down the stairs or had a heart attack. What kind of son would I be if I didn't make sure you were okay? That would be downright cold-hearted of me. It would make me like you."
I walk all the way up to him. I look down at him, the inch difference between us feeling like a mile with all of the rage roaring between my ears.