by Averil Dean
“Yeah, it will be. But a lot of the materials will be repurposed and I can do most of the work myself. It will take a while, obviously.”
I want to know where a carpenter will find the money to build a house like this. It feels intrusive to ask, but Jack reads my mind.
“My family has some money,” he says. “My dad owns a chain of liquor stores back East. He settled me fairly well.”
“He’s still living?”
“Yeah.”
I frown, trying to get the lay of the land.
“We had a falling-out,” Jack says. “He basically shoved some money at me and told me to get the fuck out.”
“But if you have money, why do you work as a carpenter?”
“Well, it’s not Hilton money. And a man should always work, whether he needs to or not.”
“Only, not as an architect.”
He takes off his glasses, folds them and sets them aside. Then he slips one arm under my legs, the other around my shoulders, and shifts me in one fluid motion so I’m flat on my back.
“Carpentry is good for upper body strength,” he says.
He stretches out next to me. Twines our fingers together and turns them this way and that to see the effect, a herringbone pattern in brown and white. His hands are rough with calluses, wide and flat and strong. Mine seem like a child’s in comparison.
He tips my face to his and kisses me. His mouth is firm against mine, but supple, seeking. He catches my lower lip between his teeth, nuzzles into the ticklish skin under my jaw. Goose bumps blossom on my neck, and I tuck up my shoulder to make him stop. Smiling, he smooths them away with the palm of his hand and begins to unlace the neckline of my peasant blouse.
“Beautiful,” he says as he uncovers me. “Like an anime doll that fell into a rag bin.”
I can’t help laughing.
“Why does no one like my clothes? This is style.”
He draws the fabric aside and runs a finger along the lace edge of my bra. “I like your clothes just fine, so long as they’re on the floor.”
He unhooks the front of my bra and pushes the cup aside. Then he settles over me, his warm tongue curving around my nipple, his dark hair curling around my fingers. I watch his mouth, entranced by the contrast of his darker, stubbled skin against the pale swell of my breast. He takes my silver hoop in his teeth and tugs gently as he gathers slow handfuls of my skirt and finds the bare curve of my hip, grinning at my thigh-high striped socks.
“I take it all back,” he says.
I get to my knees and take off my blouse and his shirt, my skirt and underwear, run my hands over his chest and the hard slope of his shoulder. I unbutton his jeans and reach inside, wrap my fingers around the solid, dew-tipped length of his cock, and move down his body to take him in my mouth. His skin tastes clean, faintly salty, like the back of my hand before a shot of tequila. I weigh his testicles in my palm, run a thumb across their wrinkled surface and follow the fat speed-bump under his dick with my tongue as I take him to the top of my throat. We fall into a natural cadence, his hand at the back of my neck.
He leans against the cab of the truck, holding my hair aside, watching. His face is impassive, but his body begins to shift. His breathing picks up. The texture of his skin feels smoother and more taut. I want him inside me and worry that he’ll finish in my mouth, but he stops me, pulls me away with one hand tangled in my hair.
He digs a condom out of his wallet and rolls it on, motions for me with his fingers. I straddle him and ease down the length of his cock. I close my eyes. I have never had sex outdoors before, never felt the night wind on my bare breasts or felt this cool lick of air on my clitoris as I am spread apart. It’s electrifying. The heat between my legs crackles like molten lava spilling into the sea, hot meeting cold.
Jack groans and holds me in place. “Jeeeesus,” he says. “Wait, baby...”
I am still, imagining what distraction he turns to at times like this. Work, maybe. Measurements and angles, building codes and deadlines and the drying time of a slab of concrete. I wonder what this feels like to him, how wet, how tight I am around him. Already my cunt is clenched like a fist, contracting in upward ripples as if to draw him deeper inside me.
I open my eyes and he opens his. His gaze sweeps over me with dark appraisal, a fierce masculine pride, proprietary and urgent, and my body answers with an almost painful thrill from someplace low and deep inside my belly. He lifts me up and presses me down, fixated on the connection point between us, his hands splayed wide over my hips.
I lean forward to brace myself on the rim of the truck bed. The tips of my breasts graze his bare chest. He guides my nipple to his mouth, pulls me closer with one hand around the back of my neck, the other stroking my ass, sliding between my legs.
My breasts grow heavy, tingling, wet from his tongue and cold from the night air. My breath whistles past my teeth. He flexes his thumb against my clitoris and lifts me with each thrust of his hips, up and down. I feel him growing thicker inside me. I open my legs, arch back, leaning on my hands with my breasts raised like an offering to the sky. The stars seem to circle overhead. The night air moves over my skin like a cool cotton sheet, catching at my breasts, sliding across my thighs.
He turns his thumb so the tip is pressed right into the cleft of my clitoris, and that feels so good, unbearably good, as though he’s tripped a wire inside me, cut me loose and catapulted me into a rush of pleasure that shoots through my limbs and right to the top of my head. I come and he is chasing me with long hard strokes, clutching at my hips as if he can find more of me if he tries. A deep groan stutters from the back of his throat. His abdomen contracts under my hand.
It takes a few minutes for him to soften, for me to get my bearings and enough strength in my thighs to crawl away. He wraps the blankets around me and we share a cigarette as the moon beams down upon us and the crickets resume their song.
* * *
“Watch yourself,” Jack says.
“Watch your own self,” I tell him, picking my way across a cluster of damp rocks. “You keep watching me, you’re gonna wipe out.”
It was Jack’s idea to go hiking today, up the Chulapai Trail where the flat, loamy footpath wanders through an undergrowth of ferns, and gradually upward between slabs of mossy granite, rising like the ruins of a long-dead city in the forest. He is sure-footed as a mountain lion, graceful and swift, with an inaudible loping gait that makes it difficult to tell where he is when he follows behind me.
“Stop shaking that ass at me,” he says. “It’s distracting.”
“Go around. Problem solved.”
“Oh, hell, no.”
A few minutes later we reach the end of the path, a slender waterfall that twitches like a mare’s tail in the sunlight. The sound is soothing, steady, punctuated now and then by the squeals of a group of young children who are splashing in the cold pool below.
Jack and I set down our backpacks and settle on a low, flat rock. He digs out a bottle of water and tips his head back to take a drink. The knob of his Adam’s apple slides under his skin, framed by sleek ropes of muscle on either side. His hair is ruffled, curling around his ears, falling into the space between his eyebrows and the frame of his glasses. His hand, big and easy around the bottle, is dusted with shimmering strands of dark hair.
His attention is on the family below us. “You like kids?”
I take the water bottle. “Yeah. I like them a lot, actually.”
“Hmm. That surprises me.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. You don’t strike me as the motherly type. You said you were raised in foster homes?”
I begin to unpack our lunch.
“Yeah, but not until I was ten. I lived with my mom before that.”
“And she died?”
“Y
eah.”
“How?”
“Does it matter?”
“To me it does.”
I lay out the cherry tomatoes, the sliced-up salami, cheese and crackers. Olives and apples.
“Asthma attack.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You and me both.”
“So then—”
“So then, nothing. Fast-forward twelve years, and I’m all grown up.”
“That’s—”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Fast-forward twelve years.”
“Right.”
“And you never met your dad.”
“No. My mom was fifteen when she had me. I think he was sixteen or seventeen. He went off to college.”
“And you lived with your mom’s parents?”
“With my grandmother and my mom, yes. Nana died when I was nine.”
“What was she like?”
I pop a green olive into my mouth and bite through to the almond inside. “She was a country girl from Australia. Five feet tall, really frail-looking, but she was tough. She had all kinds of stories about things she’d survived—tornadoes and drunken husbands, things like that. She was a great storyteller. She raised me, really, my mom was way too young.”
He doesn’t say anything, but I hear a question in the silence.
“She took me to the library the day after my ninth birthday. It was rainy, middle of winter, and the sidewalks were icy. And Nana had a shortened leg, from a car accident when she was young. So at the top of the steps she’s juggling this stack of books and hurrying me along, fussing because I had my nose in a book and she thought I was going to fall on my head. She was so busy yelling at me, she missed the top step herself. And she just sailed, in slow motion, from the top of the steps all the way to the bottom without touching down. Coat, purse, books, everything flapping... I think I laughed, she looked so Mary Poppins, sailing that way. I thought it was a joke.”
He lays his chin in the palm of his hand, shakes his head.
“But she landed headfirst at the bottom of the steps with this horrible thud, and her feet on the stairs but the wrong way, like the world had turned sideways and she was walking up the risers.”
I pause, remembering the soft quivering swell of her belly where her blouse had ridden up, looking down the steps and up her skirt at the crumpled triangle of her underwear. At her face, foreshortened, slack-jawed with surprise. I still can hear the dense mechanical gurgle of her breath, breaking the silence after my laughter died away.
“As soon as I heard her breathe I knew she was gone. Her body was just catching up.”
He looks at me, squinting in the sunlight. “Jesus.”
I reach for another olive. He reaches, too, then waits for me to choose first.
“I had a friend in foster care,” he says. “He said the foster families always had some dark reason for wanting him around. To work in the family business, or watch the younger kids. Once he ended up in the hospital with a couple of broken ribs.”
“Did you think there was some altruism involved?”
“Well, no, but—”
“The foster system is completely fucked. Any kid who falls into it is fucked. There’s no fine motive, no one gives a shit. The kid is the state’s responsibility until he’s eighteen. It’s nothing more than that.”
He doesn’t look at me. “My friend said he was glad he wasn’t a girl. He—”
“You know, one of the first things I learned as a writer is the value of negative space. Some stories don’t work when you jam them with facts.”
“You think we won’t work if you fill in the blanks?”
“I don’t know. But if you really want to find out, you can start by filling in some of your own. This falling-out with your parents. What was that about?”
He builds a sandwich with a cracker, a slice of salami, cheddar, then another cracker. He eats the whole thing in one bite. Swallows, wipes his mouth.
“Did your dad want you to go into the liquor business or something?”
“No.”
“Your mother wanted you to marry her best friend’s daughter.”
He smiles. “No. Nothing like that.”
I peel the paper from a disc of sausage, wondering whether he’ll tell me the truth.
“I got into some trouble,” he says. “Spent eighteen months in prison.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Really.”
“When I got out, I went to see my parents. My old man had a fat check already written. Told me to take it and never come back. Said I had broken my mother’s heart.”
“Wow.”
He shrugs. “There are worse things in life. Think if he’d been a poor man.”
“So this is why you’re not working as an architect?”
“Yeah. No firm’s going to take me on with a prison record.”
“But you could work independently—”
“Yes, I could. And I will. Let’s say I’m trying to get my bearings first.”
We eat in silence for a few minutes. The children have quieted, as well. They are bundled into towels and gathered in a semicircle around a young blonde woman and a man I guess to be her husband.
“Shocked?” Jack says.
“No.”
“Concerned?”
I look at him. “Should I be?”
He doesn’t answer right away. When he finally speaks, his voice seems different and his eyes are fixed on the family below.
“Probably.”
“So what was prison like?”
“Loud. Crowded. Pretty fucking scary, if you want to know the truth.”
“Because of the other inmates?”
“Yeah, that. And also just the concept of being trapped in a room with no way out. I used to have nightmares about the prison being on fire and all of us left in there to burn.”
“A therapist would have a field day with that.”
I pop a tomato into my mouth and burst it with my tongue. The warm juice gushes over my tongue and trickles down my throat.
“Aren’t you going to ask what I did?” he says.
“I don’t need to ask. I can look it up online.”
“Yeah, I guess you can.”
I wet a napkin and wipe my hands. “But brownie points if you want to save me the trouble.”
He digs out his pocketknife and begins to peel an apple. The blade slides like a scalpel under the skin, around and around without stopping, until he holds the flayed apple in his hand and the whole peel dangling from the tip of his knife.
“Sexual battery,” he says. He hands me a slice of apple. “Now let’s talk about those brownie points.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“She deserved it, I suppose,” I say.
He tosses the apple peel to a couple of chipmunks who are squabbling over an empty peanut shell.
“Oh, she deserved it, but just to be clear, I didn’t rape her.”
“You were convicted, though.”
“I pled out.”
“I see.”
“I’m not a rapist.”
“So then why did she accuse you?”
He leans back on one elbow and lights a cigarette.
“When you get into a long-term relationship, things change. For some people, the changes are good. You have a steady job, a couple of kids, a house in the suburbs, and you settle down. That’s what I thought I was getting.”
He drags on his cigarette.
“For Rosemary, marriage was a power play. She got what she wanted—the house, the new car, me, all of it. But nothing I gave her was enough. I started working long hours to keep up with all the shit she needed. The clothes, the vacations to Paris and Costa Rica and f
ucking Amsterdam. Jewelry, salon, God knows what else—it’s all a blur at this point. Anyway, about three years into our marriage, she starts with the drugs. And I’m not talking about marijuana. I’m talking crack and heroin, whatever else her boyfriend would give her.”
“Her boyfriend?”
“Yeah. This douche bag she took up with. A friend of a friend. She was running with another crowd by that point. I didn’t know them.”
“How long did this go on?”
“About a year. Finally this dude convinces her that she’ll get a better divorce settlement if she accuses me of hitting her. He figures I’ll pay up to get her to drop the charges.”
“But she didn’t drop them.”
“No. Because I refused to pay. I told Rosemary to go fuck herself and I filed for divorce.”
“So she accused you as payback?”
“Yeah. The next thing I know, I’m under arrest and she’s telling everyone I raped her.”
“But you didn’t. What kind of proof did they have?”
“Nothing. It would have been her word against mine. But my lawyer thought it was a risk, so I took the plea.”
His eyes are level and hold mine a shade too long. He hands me the cigarette and I take a slow drag.
“What was the boyfriend like?”
Jack raises his eyebrows. “What was he like? A fucking crackhead, that’s what he was like. How the hell do I know?”
“You’ve never been curious to find out more about him?”
“Why should I?”
I shrug. “If it were me, I’d want to know who screwed me over. You’ve never wanted to investigate? How do you even know it was his idea?”
“My buddy knew him. He said this guy told him all about how he was planning to make money off Rosemary’s rich father-in-law.”
“What happened to them? Your divorce went through, I assume?”
“Yeah, it did. Rosemary was long gone by the time I got out. I heard she left the boyfriend, too, but apparently he’s still on the island.”
“You never went looking?” I’m strangely disappointed in him, that he’s allowed himself to be made a fool of this way and has done nothing about it.