Lovely You

by Jamie Bennett

  He sat down on the bed, making it dip and tilting me toward him. “Did something happen tonight?”

  “Stop playing your stupid mind tricks on me.”

  He shook his head. “Scarlett, anyone could see that you’re upset.”

  “No, I’m not.” But then I reached out and took a sliver of his jeans in between my fingers. I just wanted to hold on for a second. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” He studied me, then reached over and picked me up, and tossed me to the middle of the mattress.

  “Hey! What the hell—what are you doing?” Because he had put himself on the bed next to me.

  “I’m lying on your bed,” he explained, as if I was an idiot. Then he patted the pillow. “Put your head down.”

  “With you? I’m not doing this,” I told him.

  “I’m not leaving,” he informed me. He patted again. “We’re sleeping, Scarlett. That’s all.”

  I glared at him for a moment, and then huffed out a huge sigh of frustration. I threw myself down on my side, facing away from Nate again. “Happy now?”

  He turned too, and put his arm around me, pulling my back to his chest.

  “No. No! Let me go!” I pushed off his arm and scrambled away.

  “Lie down and close your eyes. I’m holding you, and we’re sleeping.” He had his own eyes closed.

  I watched him for a moment, but he was completely calm, breathing steadily, body relaxed. It looked safe. Very, very cautiously, I lay back down, and when his arm came over me again and settled me against him, I didn’t fight. He breathed out and my hair fluttered.

  “I can feel you shaking,” he said quietly.

  “I’m mad.”

  “You are,” he agreed. “You’re so angry, all the time. I was like that too. It’s a hard way to be. It makes you very, very tired.”

  A shudder ran through me, making my body quake. I was. I was so tired.

  His arm around me tightened a little. “Can you tell me now?”

  I quaked again. No.

  “You can. It’s ok.”

  I had to fight against it, because I actually opened my mouth to let the words come pouring out. I dragged my mind away, back to now. “How was your night at your new job?” I asked him. “Tell me what you’re doing.”

  “It was good. I’m supposedly protecting a rich woman visiting here from Moscow when she goes out. Tonight I protected her by sitting outside of a restaurant for three hours while she had dinner, then stood aside and let someone else open the car door for her. It’s an easy gig.”

  “Why does she need a bodyguard?”

  “Sounds like her husband has pissed off some people along the way, but the other security guys said the hardest thing they have to do is carry the bags while she shops, and I’ll only work nights which is when she goes out to eat. She likes having us around because it makes her feel important. She’ll be here in San Francisco for a few weeks, and it’s part time, at best. She pays well. I’ll be done when she takes off.”

  It was nice to hear his voice so close to my ear, because even though it was low and kind of gravelly and rough, I found it to be very soothing. “Then you and Joey will go back home,” I said. He nodded and his stubble scratched the stiff cotton of the new pillowcase.

  “Then Joey and I will go back home,” he agreed.

  I had the urge to turn into his chest and bury my face against him, but I pushed it away. “Nate?”

  “Yes?”

  “You said you were angry, before. Why?”

  His arm tightened again. “I was angry when I got hurt during my second deployment. I was very, very angry at first.”

  “Because of your eye?” I asked.

  “My eye, my face, my arm, my chest, my brain. My friends getting hurt, my friends getting killed.”

  “You said your wife left.”

  “Yeah, but we split up after my first tour.”

  “Why?” I asked him. I really wanted to know what was wrong with her.

  “It’s hard to come back home after being gone,” he explained. “You want things to be exactly the same, but you’ve changed, and everything else has, too. I was somewhere else and she was getting on with her life, and at some point, she realized that she didn’t want me in it anymore. We tried when I came back, but,” he shook his head slightly. “No.”

  “What was her name?” I whispered.

  “Chrystal. Chrissie. Maybe we just started too young. She’s doing really well now, got married to someone else and they have a baby.” He sighed again, just a little. “It was for the best, but yeah, that made me angry, too.”

  “Is that what you want?” I asked. “To get married and have a family?”

  “Someday. It used to feel like that day would be far away.” He picked up his head and leaned it on his arm, looking down into my face. “You were going to get married. Do you still want that? Kids?”

  “No. I don’t see it for me.” There was no way I could drag someone else into this.

  “Why not? Really, no kids?”

  “No. Not for me. Some people seem just born for it, like my brother. I know Brooks will have a big family. He’ll be such a good dad, like ours was. I’m not like that.”

  “You never know.”

  I did know. “I’m not made that way. I don’t have that love in me.” There was nothing in me, nothing but a black hole. I did turn, then, and put my face against Nate’s chest, taking fistfuls of his t-shirt and holding on tightly. His other arm came around me too.

  “We’re going to stay just like this,” he told me softly. “You can sleep the whole night. Go to sleep, Scarlett.”

  To my surprise, I did.

  ∞

  I woke up much, much later than I usual. I woke up warmer, and rested, and feeling…

  Oh, shit. That was Nate behind me, seriously snuggling me. And that was Nate’s hard-on, pressed up against the crux of my legs as he spooned me. I felt a rush of heat there. His face was buried in my neck, his arms wrapped around me, his hand…oh, shit, again. His hand was cupping my breast, gently cradling it. And my nipple was as hard as he was. At first I didn’t move, in case I woke him. It just felt so good. I pressed into his hand a little and…it felt even better. I moved my hips, rubbing against him, until he made a little noise in his throat and held me closer, sighing against my neck.

  Then I stopped myself. I wiggled myself out from his arms, very slowly and carefully so I wouldn’t wake him. I wobbled as I stood, feeling discombobulated and strange. I couldn’t help looking at him in the bed asleep, his face relaxed and gentle. I had slept with him, for the whole night there. And I had really slept, too, not sat in bed and looked at my phone or had bad dreams so that any sleep I got was interrupted and scary. My body felt different this morning, and I realized that the difference was me feeling better, not like I was going to throw up, or my head pounding, or my joints aching in tiredness. And I felt…I licked my lips. I felt like I wanted to crawl back into the bed and wake him up with my hands and my mouth, and feel his on me. I stared at the sheet, at the bulge below his waist…

  No. I let myself look for another moment and then I took my phone and my running stuff and went into the bathroom to change. I developed a plan as I very quietly brushed my teeth. I would go running and pound these feelings out of myself and then sneak back in to get dressed. I would stay out for the day. There was plenty I needed to do at work…oh, no. Klere. I almost dropped the toothbrush when I remembered how I had left her in the club, how I hadn’t been able to get her to agree to make more plans with me to follow through on my boss’ “Weekend at Play” idea. I looked at her accounts. There was nothing except what had been there the day before, when she was smiling in a close-up and shilling a natural tooth-whitening kit made of pumice. Those were from before she had met up with Mary the drug dealer.

  I steeled myself against the thought of seeing Nate in the bed again, of leaving him there asleep and sneaking around for the rest of the day avoiding him. But when I
came out, he was gone and the bed was made with sharp creases and corners, and when I went into the living room, he was already waiting for me, dressed.

  “I told you we’d run together,” he announced. Then he held out his hand, and I slid off the brass knuckles and passed them over. We took the stairs and I started on the same loop. I didn’t talk while I ran this time and neither did he. I had never been on a weirder or more uncomfortable run, and it made me go very fast to make it end. When we got back, I hurried into the shower to escape.

  To check on Klere, and to escape. Last night, before I had bolted out of the club, I had sent her some pictures of her dancing with her friends and when I looked now, there they were, posted. But she hadn’t said anything about what she was wearing except one hashtag, #lovethehat, and it didn’t even mention our name.

  Fuck. I knew that Pascale was looking at this too. Before she could start messaging me, I sat down on the bed and tried again to get in touch with Klere, with texts, emails, DMs, even video chat. And to my surprise, she answered.

  Her face popped up on the screen. “Scarlett?”

  “Uh, yes, I am.” I was so shocked that she knew my name that I could hardly respond.

  She raised her arms above her head like she had done in the picture I had taken the night before, and this time, her cropped top went high enough that she flashed me. “I’m in Cabo!” She smiled dazzlingly and lowered her arms. “That’s in Old Mexico,” she clarified.

  I stared. “How did you get there so fast? I thought you were here, in San Francisco. The California one.”

  “I was. I left,” Klere explained. “Did you need something?”

  “Well, you and I were going to work—”

  “And that was one reason why I had to leave,” she interrupted me. “I’m just so overworked! I need to de-charge.”

  “Recharge,” I corrected.

  “No, I mean relax and let all my energy out,” she told me. “De-charge.”

  Right. “That sounds super fun!” I said enthusiastically, smiling at her. “Maybe after you do that, you can come back up—”

  “No, I won’t be able to come back there for a while! Mary and I got into a fight.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “So is she, since now her jaw is fractured! Anyway, with the whole police thing, I figured that Old Mexico was my best bet.”

  My mouth hung open for a moment before I closed it. It worked well because thankfully, my own jaw was still intact. “Oh, my God…”

  “I’m still really interested in working with you, because you’re going to pay me a shit-ton of money, right?” Klere reminded me. “So yeah, let’s get together next week! But you come to me.”

  “In Mexico? Old Mexico?”

  “Oh, no, I feel like it will all cool off by then. I need to go back to LA. To recharge.”

  I wanted to scream. “Ok, great! Los Angeles it is. Do you know what day you’ll be back so I can set—”

  “Uh oh.” She looked over her shoulder. “What do they call the cops here?”

  “Um, policía,” I answered, harkening back to Spanish 4.

  “Gotta go.” The screen went black.

  I threw the phone into the pillow as hard as I could. It glanced off the headboard by mistake, too. God damn it! If Klere got arrested in Mexico, Old or any other, there was no way I was going to be able to salvage this media campaign.

  My phone made a funny noise and I picked it up off the floor where it had fallen. It had never sounded like that before, and maybe I shouldn’t have thrown it so hard this time. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hi, sweetheart. Are you free?”

  It looked like I was, if Klere was going to be in la cárcel. Shit. “Why?” I asked.

  “Let’s have lunch,” she told me briskly. “Meet me in half an hour.”

  “Mom—”

  “I’m your mother, and you have to,” she informed me. “I have something important to tell you.”

  My stomach dropped. “Are you ok? What’s the matter?”

  “Honey, of course I’m ok! I thought Archibald’s on Nob Hill. See you there?”

  I sighed. “Yes, ok.”

  “I love you, Scarlett,” she told me, and then she hung up.

  Something was weird. My mom had sounded…wrong, somehow. I ran out of the apartment, calling to whoever was there that I was leaving, but there was no answer, not even a little yip of acknowledgement from Pia. They were gone, too.

  Due to driving way, way over the speed limit and running some stop signs, I made it very quickly to the restaurant and got a table. Everything was crowded on the weekend in the city, but space opened up when you gave the hostess a fifty. I played with my phone, because the screen was kind of shimmering since its accident, like a puddle on a hot day. I waited anxiously for my mom.

  And then I saw…Brooks? What the hell was he doing here? He walked purposefully toward my table. And there was Lanie trailing after him, and I knew why my mom had been acting strangely on the phone. She had been lying to me, and I was the stooge in some dumb plot between her and my conniving brother and his patsy fiancée. I stood up to leave.

  “Scarlett, please don’t go. Please stay for just while and talk to me. To us,” my brother said. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, brat.”

  Warily, I sat back down. Lanie looked nervous and upset, so maybe there was good news, like she and Brooks weren’t getting married, or she had decided to take a job in Australia (New or regular) and he was staying. “So great to see you,” I said, and smiled at her.

  She got a very excited, happy look on her face, which told me that 1) I was still good at faking it, and 2) they were still together. Australia (either one) was out.

  Fuck.

  Chapter 9

  “How have you been, Scar?” my brother asked me. He leaned in close to look at my face. “Was that your car parked next to the cathedral? Should I say, parked close enough that people were getting into it to worship?”

  “I wasn’t that close. There was plenty of room.”

  “Sure there was. I’m going to love to see you back it out. Is that what happened to your last car, the accident you had?”

  My head started to hurt so I smiled even bigger. “How are you, Brooks? How was your trip last week? Mom said you went to Texas. The original one,” I couldn’t help adding.

  He looked at me oddly. “Yes, just the one Texas. It was good, a good trip,” he answered. He started a rambling story about visiting different cities, looking for office space, meeting with potential employees. The waiter came and I asked for a drink, then considered my order as Brooks kept talking about leaving for good and starting his new life far away.

  I signaled to the waiter again. “Make it two G and Ts. Both for me. Thanks.”

  Brooks leaned forward and I definitely heard him sniff me. I pulled away and now I was done with the fake nice shit. “You know what, Brooks? Fuck off. I haven’t been drinking, and if you look at my eyes one more time to check for drugs, I’m going to stick a fork in you. Not in a metaphoric sense, like that you’re full and can’t eat anymore, but sticking a fork into your body, literally.” I turned to Lanie and smiled again. “Are you ready for Texas? To leave California and move hours away? Quit your job and give up everything you know and love, to start completely over in a new place where you have no friends, no family, no connections at all? That sounds like a good time!”

  Her face had lost the optimistic expression right around when I mentioned stabbing my brother with a utensil. “Brooks is worth it,” she said, but her voice wavered a little.

  “Scar, that’s enough,” my brother warned me.

  “You invited me!” I snapped at him. “Or should I say, you and our mother, whom I will no longer be speaking to, tricked me into coming.” The waiter brought the drinks and asked if we were ready to order. “No, but we’ll take the check,” I told him. “Give it to the big guy.”

  “We’re having lunch,” my brother said, and ordered for both himsel
f and for me, too. Lanie got something fried, of course, because she had always been a beanpole who never worried about not eating.

  “I don’t like people to order my food because I’m not a toddler. And I don’t eat meat,” I informed Brooks when the waiter left.

  “Since when? You used to live on hamburgers.”

  “When I was six,” I told him. “You don’t know me at all, not anymore.” I filled my mouth with gin, tonic, and ice to cool myself down.

  “Well, that’s why we’re here,” Lanie said. “To get to know each other again.”

  I was prevented by another large swallow of my drink from saying that I hadn’t ever wanted to know her, and I still didn’t.

  “Exactly,” Brooks said, and grinned at her. Lanie looked like she might swoon as she smiled back at him. Jesus Christ, they were annoying. “We’ll catch up,” my brother agreed, and he nodded. “So, Scar, why are you living with two men?”

  I smiled. “I’m into threesomes. Did you want to hear more? I can give you a lot of specific details. Or were you and Lanie interested in them and need their numbers?”

  My brother turned red, and started going purple.

  “Your mom said that the one guy, Joey, is here for medical tests,” Lanie broke in. “How is he doing?”

  “Fine.” He was doing well, actually. The doctors had started him on a combination of medications that they thought was working for him, but only time would tell. For now, though, surgery was off the table. And they were talking about upgrading his prosthetic leg, and they were discussing fitting him for a special one that would allow him to run like he used to. If his current mental state brought on by Nate’s new job could catch up with how happy everyone else was about his progress, then it would all work out.

  I realized my brother and Lanie were waiting for more. “He’s really fine. Perfectly fine,” I elaborated.

  “Your mom said he was injured in combat,” Lanie said.

  “Well, I’m sure you know everything she does, since you guys are best friends.”

  “Scarlett—” my brother started to say.