Turn Me Loose (Paradise, Idaho)

by Rosalind James

  “Sorry,” he told her as she stood in the circle of his arms at her front door on Saturday morning. He’d just spent a good five minutes kissing her good-bye, and she was already missing him. “It’s going to take a couple days, this go-round. We’re talking money, and as you know, that takes time.”

  “Mm.” She had one hand on the ridge of muscle along one shoulder, the other one splayed across his chest. Now, she kissed him on the neck, bit down just to hear him suck in his breath, and smiled. “Come back to me.”

  “Oh, you know it.” One hand had drifted perilously low on her back, the fingertips resting lightly on the uppermost swell of her bottom, his sneaky thumb finding the edge of her shirt and burrowing under it to stroke the sensitive skin just above her waistband, as if he hadn’t noticed that Ken Johnson was washing his car across the street with half his attention, and watching Rochelle get kissed with the other half. Or as if he had.

  “Not like I could stay away if I tried,” Travis told her. “You could say you’ve got me hooked, and you’d be right. You want me to bring you back a present?”

  “No,” she said. “I just want you.” Then she put both hands around his head and pulled it down for another long kiss.

  He texted her from the airport an hour later. Next time, remind me not to get out of the truck. Almost missed my plane. Where’d you get that mouth?

  She smiled a secret little smile and texted him back. Same place I got that rear end you like so much. Got them both from my mama.

  He answered right away, as if he’d been watching his screen. Well, she did a real good job on both. I guess I’d better not tell her so, which made her laugh.

  She’d gone to work on Monday, and she’d gone to work on Tuesday, too, and had tried to pretend she hadn’t been waiting for him to come back. Until he’d sauntered into her office early Tuesday afternoon, all hips and grin, sat on the edge of her desk like he belonged there, and said, “Hey, pretty lady. Miss me?”

  “Unprofessional,” she said, trying to frown at him. “Not to mention cocky.”

  He lifted one dark eyebrow. “All righty, then. We playing hard to get?” He took a seat in the visitor’s chair. “Better?”

  “Well, no,” she conceded. She looked around to check that the other doors were closed. They weren’t, so she lowered her voice. “I kind of like it when you try to look down my shirt. And I think you’ve figured out that I’m not that hard for you to get. You can pretty much have it. Any way you want it.”

  He leaned his head back for a moment and let out a low groan, and she had to smile. “So,” he said. “Tonight. Dinner, or what?”

  She twirled her pen, and he watched her. “What,” she finally said. “First. And then dinner. If I get to choose, and tonight?” She lowered her voice even more, so he had to lean across the desk to hear her. “I’d better get to choose. You’ve had it all your own way up to now, and if I don’t take the reins pretty soon, we’re going to have a power imbalance. And I know you wouldn’t want that.”

  His eyes were gleaming now, and he’d just opened his mouth to say something that she devoutly hoped was going to have her crossing her legs and fighting a telltale shudder, when Dr. Olsen came out of his office.

  “Well, hello, Travis,” he said with obvious surprise. “Need something?”

  “Nope,” he said, standing up. “Just bothering Rochelle, I’m afraid. Got a class, though. See you later.”

  Dr. Olsen watched him go with a frown on his normally good-natured face, his old-fashioned gray buzz cut uncharacteristically bristling. “He pestering you?” he asked Rochelle. “Because I can do something about that.”

  She made a business of straightening the already-straight folders in her vertical file. “Nope. It’s fine. We’re going out, actually.”

  His voice gentled. “You sure?”

  She felt the unaccustomed color creeping up her neck, a rising tide of heat. She never blushed, but she was doing it now. She’d hoped he hadn’t heard about Wes. Well, it wasn’t the first hope she’d ever had dashed. “Who knows,” she said. “But at least he’s not going to be slut-shaming me to the whole College. Which will be a step up, obviously.”

  He nodded. “You have any trouble, tell me this time.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “I’ll keep it professional. But thanks.” And then she had to fight not just the blush, but a tiny bit of choking up, too.

  Travis was messing with her mind and no mistake. And that was before she got the text ten minutes later.

  Consider me ready to let you take the reins. Hope that means what I think it means.

  She texted back, Let’s say that your head’s the one that’s going to be banging tonight. OK if we don’t make it out of the truck for a while? Think I’ve got a favor to repay. Maybe we could find someplace dark and private. I might know a spot.

  She waited until the words appeared on her screen, and then the smile bloomed. Damn you, woman. I have to teach a class in 15 minutes. You had to leave me with that image?

  I have to do a lot of things, she typed. Wait and see.

  Except that he hadn’t gotten to see anything, because when she’d arrived home that evening, ready to take a long hot bath, rub her entire body with her silkiest lotion, and generally prepare to make Travis lose his mind? The duplex had been dark and quiet, but not quiet enough.

  She’d gone to the door of Stacy’s room, knocked, and said, “Stace?”

  “No,” the muffled voice said.

  More moodiness, but for some reason, the alarm bells were ringing. “What’s going on?” She tried the doorknob. Unlocked, thank goodness. She went inside and found Stacy, not in bed as she’d imagined, but on the floor, wedged into a corner, her arms wrapped around her legs and her head buried in her folded arms, rocking back and forth in distress.

  “Baby.” Rochelle was there in an instant. “What?”

  A violent shake of the head was her answer.

  “What?” Rochelle asked again. She tried to get an arm around Stacy, but her sister shrugged her off. “Shane? What?”

  “No. Go away. You can’t help.” Stacy whirled and faced the wall.

  “Sweetie, please,” Rochelle said. “Tell me. Nothing’s so bad that we can’t deal with it.”

  Stacy shook her head again. Both hands were on her head now, her elbows together, her body curled into itself like a snail going into its shell, racked with sobs that shook Rochelle as if they’d come from her own body.

  What had her sister done? Or what had somebody done to her? She’d been driving Stacy back and forth to work for her evening shifts. She hadn’t wanted her riding her bike in the dark, not anymore. But something had happened? What? And why hadn’t Rochelle done more? She should have done more.

  She looked around the room for clues, spotted Stacy’s backpack thrown into the opposite corner, went over to it, and opened it. The first thing she saw was the blue book.

  She was pulling it out when Stacy came scrambling over the floor like a crab and tried to grab it from her. “No,” her sister wailed. “That’s private!”

  Rochelle held the blue book up out of Stacy’s reach and looked at the circled number on the front. Seventy-nine. The relief weakened her knees, followed instantly by puzzlement.

  “You got a, what?” she asked. “A C-plus? In what?” She didn’t know what she’d feared. It had seemed bad. All this over a bad grade?

  “You don’t get it.” Stacy had sunk back to the ground again, and was rocking again. Like she had when she was little, when the other kids had been mean to her because she was too smart. “I can’t . . . It’s so . . .”

  “Right,” Rochelle said, keeping it matter-of-fact. “It’s just the midterm, though. One midterm. What grade do you have to have?”

  “An A.” Stacy’s voice had risen to a near-hysterical pitch. “I have to have an A. It’s my major. It’s medical school.”

  “And isn’t it possible to get an A, still? Hard, maybe, but possible? You get some tutoring, ac
e the final and the labs—you’re all good. As long as everything else is going all right.” She looked at her sister. “Is it going all right?”

  But Stacy just cried, and nothing Rochelle could say could get an answer until she said, “All right. This is past me. I don’t know what to do here. I’m calling the folks.”

  Stacy finally looked up, the black eyeliner running in twin streaks down her blotched face. “No!” She scrambled up from the floor and grabbed the blue book out of Rochelle’s hands. “No. Please. Please don’t tell them. Don’t tell . . .” She was crying hard again. “Please, Ro. Don’t tell Daddy. I can’t stand it.”

  “But, sweetie, don’t you see?” Rochelle tried to explain. “This is over the top. You’re always so good in school, and now you’re not, and you’re having some kind of . . . what, breakdown? You have to get help, and I don’t know how to help you.”

  “I’ll go to . . . to . . .” Stacy said.

  “The right answer would be, ‘I’ll go to the counseling center,’” Rochelle said. “The only thing that’s going to help here is you saying, ‘I’ll call tomorrow morning and make an appointment.’”

  “I’ll do it,” Stacy said. “I promise.” But her eyes were sliding away even as she said it.

  “I’m going to ask you for proof,” Rochelle said. “And you need to get tutoring if you’re having trouble. I’m going to ask you for proof of that, too. I know you can do this. But you need help. Everybody needs help sometimes. This is your time, that’s all.”

  Why? she wondered. The classes were hard, sure. But Stacy had always aced them. Especially in her major.

  “If I don’t see proof of an appointment,” she said, “it’s the folks.” Who could do . . . what? Not much. They didn’t know much about college. Rochelle’s mother hadn’t even graduated from high school, because by the time graduation had come around, she’d already had Rochelle. Which was why it mattered so much to both of them that Stacy do this.

  “I promise,” Stacy said again.

  “All right, then,” Rochelle smoothed Stacy’s matted hair back from her wet face. “Go take a shower, and we’ll have some soup. Because have you eaten?”

  Stacy shrugged miserably and shook her head.

  “Right,” Rochelle said. “Shower. Change. Soup. And then we sit with this test book, and you tell me what went wrong. You can’t fix things if you don’t look straight at them. So that’s what we’re going to do. Look straight at it, and then once you know what’s wrong, you’re going to fix it.”

  She wasn’t sure how much she’d helped, but at least she’d gotten Stacy out of the corner. But she couldn’t leave her alone and risk her ending up there again. Not even for Travis.

  SURPRISE APPEARANCE

  Rochelle was writing up the minutes from the Jackson Foundation’s latest meeting the next day, her gaze somewhere in the distance as she tried to distill ten minutes of academic-speak into a few cogent sentences, when the woman breezed into the office.

  Not an engineering student, because Rochelle would have remembered her. Long and lean as a racehorse, her dark hair cut short and choppy, three piercings in each ear, plus one in a nostril displaying a tiny piece of turquoise. No makeup, but then, her strong, dark features didn’t require any. A short-sleeved, embroidered blouse revealing a tattoo in some sort of swirling tribal design on one upper arm, skinny indigo jeans tucked into low boots, and a canvas backpack slung over one shoulder.

  Not a kid, either. Midtwenties, maybe, and with a life force that radiated out of her. More interesting than almost anybody who’d showed up in this office lately. Besides Travis, of course.

  “Can I help you?” Rochelle asked.

  “Yeah, thanks.” As if Rochelle’s thought had conjured it up, the woman asked, “Can you tell me how to find Travis Cochran? He works here, doesn’t he? Is he around today, do you know? I tried him earlier, but I couldn’t reach him. Or maybe you can give me his address. I came up kind of impulsively,” she explained, without explaining at all.

  “I’m sorry,” Rochelle said. “No, I can’t give out his address.” Her heart had started to pound, a steady thud that somehow spelled doom. Because the woman hadn’t said Wayne. She’d said Travis. And that meant something. “I believe he will have just gotten out of class,” she added. She didn’t believe, actually. She knew. “He may be back in his office now. That’s down on the third floor.”

  “Could I call him from your phone and see?” The woman glanced out the window. “My phone’s dead, and I need to get in touch with him and get back out there. The light’s going to be perfect in half an hour.”

  The light? Rochelle picked up the phone and prepared to dial Travis’s extension. She didn’t have to look that up, either. “I’ll call down there for you,” she said. “Can I tell him who’s asking?”

  The red lips curved into a smile. “Sure. Tell him it’s his wife.”

  Rochelle sat without moving for a couple long seconds. Without breathing. The sickness rose, and she forced it back. And then she set the phone into its cradle with exaggerated care and stood up. She might not be able to feel her legs, but that didn’t matter one bit. “You know what?” she told the woman, keeping her voice absolutely, positively steady. “I’ll take you down there myself. Come on. Let’s go find him.”

  Some women ran away from things that hurt—and from people who hurt them. Rochelle ran straight at them. Did it hurt just as much? You bet it did. That didn’t mean she had to lie down and take it.

  Travis took the stairs to the third floor two at a time, swinging his laptop case. He’d dump it in the office and go check out Rochelle, that was the plan. Was it stupid to need to see her face again before tonight? Yeah, it was. And he had to do it anyway.

  But right now, there was a girl hunched up on the floor outside his office, her knees pulled up tight, one arm wrapped around them, and he sighed. Not office hours, but he wasn’t that good at saying no to students, especially not when their body language spelled “distress.” Her dark hair was falling over her face, her fingers flying over her phone.

  It wasn’t until he got there that he realized it was Stacy.

  “Well, hey,” he said, stopping a couple feet from her.

  She had her hand over the phone before she even looked up, and then it was back in her backpack and she was standing.

  “Hi,” she said, her cheeks flushed pink. “Um, you said . . . if I needed help. Do you think . . . would you have time? The midterm’s on Friday, and . . . I . . . I . . .” She stopped talking and gulped in a breath. “If you have time. If you think . . . if you could.”

  “Of course I have time,” he said, pulling out his key and unlocking the door. And abandoning Rochelle with an inward sigh of resignation. He knew where her own priorities would have been. “Come on in and tell me what the problem is.”

  He couldn’t have said if he hoped this was just about statistics, or that she’d ask him about something else. She needed help, he was surer than ever of that after the quick phone call from Rochelle the night before. He just wasn’t sure that he was the person to give it.

  It wasn’t that he wasn’t an expert on men behaving badly. It was that he probably was.

  They didn’t get into that right away, of course. In fact, he wasn’t quite sure how he was supposed to go from “analysis of variance” to “why some men enjoy being dirty lying dogs and jerking you around.” He was still trying to work that out when Rochelle came into his office.

  Well, “came in” would be one way of putting it. She’d always knocked, on the rare occasions when he’d gotten her down here. Today, she was in the door like a blast of winter wind. And she wasn’t alone, he registered a second later. She had Zora with her. What?

  Stacy had swiveled around the second Rochelle had come in. Travis was standing up, just starting to say, “Hey,” but Rochelle beat him to the punch. Just about literally. The woman who’d woken in his bed before dawn on Saturday morning, uncurling and stretching those long limbs l
ike a sleek, satisfied Siamese, was gone. This right here? This was a tiger. The kind that some fool might think he’d tamed, right up until the moment when he realized his disastrous mistake.

  “I brought you a visitor,” she said, and you could have frozen icicles on that voice. “All the way from California, I’m guessing. And here I thought I was so much smarter than Stacy. I knew better. I knew so much better, and I still fell for it.”

  Stacy had her mouth open now the same way Travis did, he registered in one tiny, unpreoccupied corner of his mind. But Rochelle didn’t give either of them a chance to speak. “What kind of guy doesn’t want to see a girl on the weekend?” she mimicked savagely. “‘A guy with another girlfriend,’ somebody once told me. Or how about this? How about a guy with a wife? A guy who’s flying off for ‘meetings’ that last for days? On the weekends. You sneaking, lying, cheating son of a bitch.”

  She wasn’t slapping him. That, he might have been able to handle. Instead, she was just standing there, the contempt and anger radiating off her. He was struck dumb, but at the same time—he was burning.

  “Wait.” That was Zora. Half laughing, half horrified. “Wait, wait, wait. My bad. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—No. I’m not his wife. I’m his sister.”

  Travis finally had his voice back. “Yes. She is. My little sister Zora, who I’m not one bit glad to see. What the hell—” He broke off, because that wasn’t the part that mattered. “But why would you . . . why would you even—” He tried to find the words, ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “OK. I see why you would. Maybe. But—no. No. Don’t you know me by now? Don’t you know me at all?”

  “Hey. Wait. Both of you.” Zora was still trying to explain herself to Rochelle, as if that were going to be possible. “I was just trying to give him a little scare. What can I say? I got a wild hair. It happens.” She lifted one slender shoulder in an extravagant shrug. “He’s always so serious, it’s like I just have to get up in there and rattle his cage, you know? I didn’t realize I was messing with his good thing. But no way.” She laughed, a sudden musical peal that was completely inappropriate under the circumstances, a sound that some people said they found infectious. Some people who weren’t Travis. “Really. Trust me. No. I’m nothing like his wife. I hope.”