Normally, Evelyn paged him, and she was here waiting for him, dressed for their ‘date.’ Today, for the first time, he’d called her. He’d interrupted her little subdivision fantasy life, and she’d come wearing purple sweatpants and a black Mizzou sweatshirt. Her dyed blonde hair was pulled back into a thin ponytail, and she had no makeup on that he could tell.
He didn’t care. She had her big black bag. As soon as they were inside with the door closed, he dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms around her waist, pressing his face into her belly.
She combed her hand through his hair. “What happened, baby?”
He shook his head. He didn’t want to talk. That wasn’t what he needed. He needed to shut up the shit in his head, not give it a microphone.
“How’d you break your arm?” She patted his forearm, just above the new cast.
“My hand.”
“Okay, how’d you break your hand?”
He shrugged.
“Gun, baby. You have to talk. I’ve only got an hour at most.” She lifted his chin and made him meet her eyes. “You said you need me. What do you need?”
“I need…”
He didn’t say his shit out loud. He just found ways to make it happen. Like going to a Northside pool hall and starting a brawl. Or jumping in on an underground fight, facing off against the biggest, meanest motherfucker he could find.
Or being the boy toy of a forty-five-year-old woman who was a top married to another, stronger top. Usually, he got what he needed by giving her what she needed.
He hadn’t known anything the hell about tops and bottoms and that whole scene until he’d met Evvie at a bar one night and she’d brought him here. She’d taught him that lingo. Now, he understood a little bit, and he knew he wasn’t a bottom, not really. Not usually. Just with Evvie. She really got off on that.
But he didn’t say his shit out loud. Especially this shit. It made him feel gross and diseased, but it fed something hungry in his head.
“Gun. I want you to say it. Now.”
“I need to hurt.”
With a maternal sigh, Evelyn brushed her hand over his beard. “What is going on in that head of yours, sweetheart?”
He had no idea, so he shrugged again.
“Okay.” She dropped her bag to the floor. “Pick out what you want, and get naked.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Leah dropped her handbag into the desk drawer and hung her jacket over the back of her chair. It was coming up on the end of May, but this spring’s weather had been especially weird, swinging back and forth between summery hot and almost wintery cold. It had been below fifty degrees when she’d gotten up that morning, and the forecast called for rain and wind through the week.
She sat down and picked up the phone, keying in the code to access the mayor’s messages. There were always a bunch of messages; the office was only open three days a week, but people liked to complain twenty-four-seven. Grant was a small town, with a small payroll and a small staff, and Mayor Bradford had an actual job as an insurance adjuster. Nobody could live on the mayor’s stipend. Leah made almost as much as he did.
Of course, she put in more time. She was the only administrative employee who was actually sitting in the office for any kind of regular hours.
As a farmer started barking in her ear about a part of his fence that had been cut, Leah picked up a pen and pulled the pink message pad down from the top inbox. The way she was sitting, she’d had to stretch a bit to reach the inbox, and a couple of slick pages of something came with the pad.
Brochures to the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. There was a little sticky note on the OU one—Check the back for scholarship info. In the mayor’s handwriting.
Realizing that she hadn’t been listening to the message, Leah hung up the phone and pushed the pad and pen away.
Mayor Bradford was her father’s best friend. Well, friend, anyway. And the only one he really had anymore, probably. But they hadn’t been ‘best friends,’ in the way Leah thought of that idea, for a long time. Things change, people change, lives change. Her father wasn’t who he’d been. He had his game face, and he took care of his congregation, but behind that, he wasn’t the kind of man who nurtured friendships. Not anymore.
Burt was, though. He tried to stay involved and pay attention, as far as Leah’s dad would let him. When she’d graduated high school a year ago and hadn’t planned anything more for her life than to keep taking care of her father and their house, Burt had offered her this job.
He’d said he needed some help in the office, since the previous secretary was moving to New Mexico to be with her grandkids. But Leah knew that he’d also thought giving her a chance to do something of her own would give her a hunger for more independence.
He wanted her to go to college, in other words, and he wouldn’t let up about it.
He was wrong, though, to think that Leah was dependent on her father. It was the other way around.
She wasn’t sure her father had even truly noticed that she’d graduated—as valedictorian, though being top of a class of 58 students wasn’t much of an accomplishment. Her father had been at the ceremony; he’d given the benediction, and he’d taken her out for pizza afterward, but he hadn’t seemed to understand that it should have meant something for her life. They’d just kept on like they’d been going since the morning they’d woken to a missing mother.
Leah couldn’t think what else she’d be doing, anyway. She’d thought a little bit about going to a school in Tulsa, maybe at least community college, but she didn’t see the point, really. Her father needed her. She was the only thing keeping him together, and she didn’t see that ever changing. She didn’t need to learn anything new to manage the life she already had. She was an expert in that life, and it was a full-time job.
She certainly couldn’t go to a school away from home. Not even a couple of hours away.
The mayor didn’t see it that way. But then, he didn’t know the whole story, and Leah wasn’t ever going to tell him.
Irritated, she tossed the school brochures into the bottom desk drawer, with all the other college propaganda Burt had not-so-subtly left lying about, and picked the phone back up so she could do her little job and take the mayor’s messages.
~oOo~
“I can’t believe that was Max. He used to be so handsome. I thought he was just some farmhand Deb had brought over to help. I can’t believe he hit her. His own sister.”
“Well, you know, he never was right after all that happened junior year. I mean, you can look at him and see that. But I heard he’s a Brazen Bull, too. He’s probably a killer. I can’t believe Deb brought him anywhere near here. So disrespectful.”
“Marianne said she’s seen him at service once or twice. For Christmas, I think.”
“Really? Like he thinks that’ll save him? Marianne’s the one that told me about him being in the gang. I guess she’d know.”
“You think she still keeps in touch with him?”
“Gosh, I hope not. I mean, she’s married now. But she’s friends with Deb, I think.”
Leah leaned on the wall outside the choir room door and listened to the women gossip. If they’d been talking about anything else, she’d have gone straight in and shut them up, but they were talking about Max. She stood there feeling defensive and embarrassed and desperately curious all at once. It was a little nauseating, actually, all those feelings churning together.
Her ‘guy with the beard’ was Max Wesson. His family had been members of the congregation since before Leah was born. She didn’t know him well—he was a lot older than she, and he hadn’t been around for a long time—but she knew of him. Everybody at Heartland knew of him.
Just like her family had a story about a tornado, his family did, too. But the Wessons’ story wasn’t one of God coming down and wrapping his protective hands around them. Their story was…well, everything happened for a reason, and the Lord worked in mysterious ways. These were things Leah had be
en brought up to believe. But what had happened to Max’s family was one of those things where it was hard to remember that God didn’t make mistakes.
A tornado had picked up Mrs. Wesson’s car and thrown it into a tree. She and Max’s brother had been killed. Max had been in the car, too, but he’d survived. He’d been in the hospital for a while, but he’d eventually recovered completely.
Or maybe not completely.
There had been no other significant damage or injury in that storm. It hadn’t even been much of a twister. Just one of the bazillion tornadoes that blew through the state every year, spring and fall. Some people said it was like God had thrown the storm at Mrs. Wesson and her boys, but that was a terrible thing to say.
If that had happened when Max was a junior in high school, as Leslie had just implied, he’d been sixteen or so. Leah had been little, but she remembered the funeral for Mrs. Wesson and Martin; it had been the first one she’d ever attended. She’d been in second grade. Seven years old. She was nineteen now, so it had happened twelve years ago. That made Max…twenty-eight. Not that much older.
She thought about how crazy he’d been the other day at the donation drive, how terrifying in his anger—his rage. How he’d hit his sister and made her bleed. He’d gone nuts over some clothes. Little boys’ clothes. Leah hadn’t gotten very deep into that box before he’d started shouting in her face and freaking out all over the parking lot, but everything she’d seen had been kids’ stuff.
Twelve years was a long time the keep that much anger inside. But Max and his brother were twins. Identical twins. She’d heard that twins were different from regular siblings. She wouldn’t know about siblings one way or the other, but she’d heard twins were, like, telepathic or something. If that was true, it was probably hard to live without a connection like that.
Leah knew she should have been afraid of him after his meltdown at the donation drive, and she definitely had been afraid in the moment. All that shouting and punching and huge, violent anger had seemed to have no target, or to have been targeted everywhere, and she believed anybody who’d gotten close enough would have been hurt. Deb, his sister, had been the only one brave enough to try. All the men had stood back and let her.
But Leah didn’t feel afraid of him now. Instead, she felt a kind of compassionate interest.
Everybody in church was talking about the Wessons again since then, and about Max in particular. Leah had been too young for him to have made her notice much at the time, except for the tornado, but people who’d been in high school when he’d been were reminiscing about him and gossiping about who he’d become. Just by being in other people’s earshot, she’d been learning more about him than she’d ever known before.
He’d been the big star of the high school baseball team, their ace pitcher. That part, she’d known, in the back of her mind, because his name was still on plaques in the front hall of the school. Women his age, like Leslie and Krista, yakking in the choir room, were remembering how handsome he’d been, and how sweet, how jealous they’d been of Marianne Berg, who’d been his steady girlfriend since junior high.
They talked about it all in the past tense—what a shame that he wasn’t that handsome, sweet, good boyfriend guy anymore.
Leah believed he was still all of that. She had little evidence to support her belief, and more evidence to refute it, and yet she felt it as a truth. The guy at the rave had been sweet. He’d held her like…like she was important. Yeah, that was a dumb thing to think, but she still thought it.
He’d been sweet at the donation drive, too, until he’d freaked out. He wasn’t scary. He was broken.
And he was incredibly hot to her. The thick, dark beard and all the ink, even on his fingers, the kind of wild hair, the sly smile, the sharp blue eyes that seemed to be searching, always looking, wherever they landed, and that lean, chiseled body. She remembered every detail of his chest and back, and the steel cables that had been his arms around her.
His mouth. She remembered his mouth. And his cock. She remembered that, too.
On the other hand, he didn’t remember her at all. Not even a glimmer. She’d thought there’d been something, but all he’d managed to recall was the usual ‘Preacher’s Daughter,’ which might as well have been her name.
He didn’t remember the girl he’d fucked at the rave.
Really, why would he remember that? What was worth remembering? When she wasn’t The Preacher’s Daughter, she was a girl who fucked strangers. And got fucked by them. Any which way.
She’d lost her virginity to a stranger, the very first time she’d gone out with Ashley. And this last time, she’d lost a different kind of virginity to somebody she hadn’t even seen.
She slammed her head back against the wall as if that could dislodge the memory.
“Leah? Are you all right?”
Mrs. Schmidt, the choir director, was standing right in front of her, and Leah realized that she’d totally checked out there for a minute. Leslie and Krista weren’t gossiping anymore—or they’d been drowned out by the rest of the choir, which had filed in while she’d stood there like a post.
“Sorry, Mrs. Schmidt. I’m fine. Just a little tired, I guess.”
The old lady smiled. “Well, come on in and get the Spirit in you. That’ll perk you right up. It always makes me feel better. Have you been practicing your solo piece?”
“Yes, ma’am, I have.”
“That’s wonderful. C’mon, let’s go sing for Jesus. Joanie brought cupcakes tonight.”
Leah followed Mrs. Schmidt’s wide, grandmotherly rear end into the choir room. When she saw Leslie, she felt her brow furrow, and Leslie gave her a look of vague confusion. Leah wiped the glare from her face. She had no reason to feel defensive on Max’s behalf, and she certainly didn’t want anyone to think otherwise.
~oOo~
That night, while Leah washed up the supper dishes, her father came into the kitchen and opened the cabinet over the fridge, where he kept his booze. Leah stopped and watched, her hands immersed in water that had gone greasy as she’d scrubbed the broiler pan. He took a glass out of the dish drainer and filled it nearly full with scotch. If he was starting the night with a drink that tall, then it was going to be a bad night.
“Just something to take the edge off. Don’t look at me like that.”
A thousand rejoinders came into her head. A thousand things she could say to him, maybe should say to him, that might get him not to take the edge off. She knew from long experience that when he was done with that glass of scotch, there would be another. And another. Because the edge was never going to be off.
A thousand things she wanted to say. The one that almost came out of her mouth was Please don’t do this to me, Daddy. She stopped it before it got away, though. What her dad was doing wasn’t about her, and guilt only made things worse for him.
What she said was, “It’s okay, Daddy.”
He gave her a smile and put the scotch away. “I’m going to go up and work on this week’s sermon.”
“Okay.” On impulse, she added, “I might walk down to see Ashley for a while when I’m done here.” She had a few hours before he would need help getting to bed. Better she spend it making up with Ashley than waiting for him to pass out.
She and Ashley hadn’t spoken since the night of the rave, actually. Neither of them had tried. Leah still felt the sting of Ashley’s judgment, but she knew her friend was right. At least partially. She was doing a lot of stupid stuff in the secret dark. She didn’t even know why. It was fun in the moment, but she always felt like shit afterward, and ashamed of herself. Until she wanted to do it again.
Already halfway done with the glass, he gave her a kiss on the cheek and turned away.
Before he left the kitchen, he took the bottle of scotch back down and carried it out with him.
Yeah, it was going to be bad night.
Leah took a deep breath and got back to scrubbing the broiler pan.
~oOo~
&n
bsp; Ashley’s aunt answered the door, catching the collars of her two rambunctious mixed-breed dogs. “Hey, Leah.” She smiled and stepped back so Leah could come in.
“Hi, Mrs. Pendergast. How are you?” She ruffled each dog’s ears.
“I’m good, honey, thanks for askin’. Ashley’s out back.”
Leah walked through the house and out the sliding glass door, onto their covered deck. Ashley was sitting at the round redwood table, writing in the margins of a book.
“Hi. I thought classes were over for the semester.”
Her friend looked up and gave her a thoughtful consideration. “Hi. Are we speaking again?”
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