by Cole McCade
Maxi cleared her throat. Leigh snapped from staring at the ring and set it on the glass, pushing it across. The woman picked it up, turning it over, then whistled softly.
“Platinum?” she asked, eyeing it keenly. When Leigh nodded, she frowned. “What’s the stone? Aquamarine? Looks cloudy. Impure.”
“No. It’s called grandidierite.”
Maxi snorted. “Girl, don’t try to pull that on me. No such thing.”
“Look it up.”
With another skeptical look, Maxi flipped her laptop open, set the ring down on the counter, and rattled her thick short fingers over the keyboard. Her eyebrows shot up, her eyes rounding until the laptop’s light gleamed off their whites. “The fuck. It’s a real thing.”
Leigh smiled faintly. “Yeah. I thought it was bullshit at first, too.”
Maxi looked down at the ring at her elbow as if she’d just seen a unicorn, then fixed a flat look on Leigh. “You’re telling me you got a ring with stones worth that much, and you’re toting it around in the bottom of a goddamned Jansport.”
“Nowhere else to put it.”
“What if someone done stole it?”
Leigh shrugged. “Then it’d be gone.”
The woman eyed her—Leigh could almost see the what the hell is wrong with these stupid little white girls behind her eyes—before picking the ring up again. She fished a scratched jeweler’s monocle out from under the counter and pressed it up to one tawny eye, squinting through it, then clicked through her teeth. “I’ll need to get it appraised. You’ll have to sign a release.” When Leigh tensed, Maxi snorted. “Don’t worry, girl, I ain’t gonna steal your damn ring. Unless that ain’t why you’re worried.” A frown flattened her lips, and she gave Leigh a skeptical once-over. Leigh bristled.
“It’s not stolen.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“It’s mine.” She shoved her hands into her pockets as if that could stop them from fisting, and looked fixedly over Maxi’s shoulder. “Just another pretty piece of property from my wedding day.”
Maxi squinted at her, then shook her head with a sympathetic, clucking sigh and turned to rummage in a dented file cabinet. “Man must’ve done you wrong, you willing to throw this way.”
“Yeah,” Leigh said, and closed her eyes. “I guess he did.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE ONLY TIME SHE NEVER came was when Jacob was on top of her.
She didn’t think he even noticed. He hadn’t noticed since sophomore year of college; she didn’t know why she’d thought that would change on their wedding night.
From the mirrored ceiling, her reflection stared blankly at her from beyond her new husband’s sweating, grunting bulk, his back humping over and over again, like tectonic plates buckling. She stared with numb fascination at the subtle pinch of softer flesh at his hip, creasing with every wet, slapping thrust like it was winking at her. He’d stopped playing football after tearing a ligament junior year, but he still ate like he was burning thousands of calories a day on the field instead of burning millions of his clients’ dollars at the investment firm. His hard-chiseled body was starting to soften like a clay sculpture left in the rain. She liked it. She liked it because it made him look like there was warmth for someone other than himself in his eyes. Because it made him human, made him something other than the golden boy everyone had wanted—and that she’d only married because it was the easiest way to make everyone in her life happy.
Except herself.
He let out a groaning, grunting sound, spittle flying wetly against her throat, as his hips pistoned faster and that damp clammy sliding feeling in her intensified, pulling and tugging and doing absolutely nothing. She hardly even felt it save a vague slippery tickle. He was the biggest she’d ever been with, no doubt half the reason for his swagger, and she remembered the first time he’d pulled his cock from his jeans and it had slapped, half-hard, down on the mattress with a wet and meaty heaviness like a dead flopping cow tongue. For all its thickness, she felt little more than a kind of uncomfortable stickiness that rendered this down to as much of a biological function as wiping after going to the bathroom. But he was close, so she let out a dutiful moan, gasping and high as if he was tearing her up inside. She clutched her fingers against his back and lifted her hips into his and clenched herself up inside, squeezing every muscle until he let out a choking sound that said she was doing it just right.
She pitched her moans higher, more frantic, while her dead-eyed reflection laughed at her with dull indifference. Whose idea had it been to put mirrors in honeymoon suites? What newlyweds wanted to see just how their butts jiggled? Not to mention the stretchy pouch hanging between Jacob’s legs. It wobbled back and forth like a turkey’s wattle, swinging in and out of view, playing peek-a-boo between his butt cheeks before swaying back to slap damply against her ass, hard enough that the pain of bruises bloomed against her skin and she could barely hear Jacob’s labored breathing for the smack-smack-smack of flesh on flesh. God, he had too much ball-skin. When it came back for another peek, she peeled her fingers from his back and wiggled them in a little wave, mouthing hello and pretending the crease of one pucker in the wrinkled skin said hello right back.
She bit back a giggle and turned it into another moan. She was cracking; she really was. He always took so long, refusing to let up even when he was ready, because someone had told him that jackhammering away for thirty minutes was more of a sign of manhood than taking ten minutes to hit all the right spots and make it happen in that way that burst stars behind her eyes and left her fingers momentarily too limp to move, a weird lassitude making it hard to even lift a hand. She’d tried, once, to tell him. To show him. He hadn’t taken it well, any more than he’d taken it well when she’d hissed in pain and flinched away when he’d pinched her clit like he was trying to squeeze a peanut out of its shell.
He stiffened with a long series of guttural oh-oh-oh-oh sounds, his head tilting back, his eyes rolling until the whites showed and the lids twitched, his tongue caught between his teeth and poking out like a little pink teat. She wondered with some disgust how she was supposed to love that. She knew the answer: she wasn’t. If she loved him, she’d find that face endearing.
No, if she loved him her rising cries would be real enough that she wouldn’t even notice his face, the clench in her body not practice but the crash and shudder of something forbidden but oh so right, oh so much better than this flat and lifeless thing that would be hers for the rest of her days. She would be seventy and, on their fifty-year wedding anniversary, watching his liver spots jitter across his back while she made these exact same sounds and stared at her saran-wrap tightened plastic surgery wrinkles and thanked God that he was enough of a leaker that he couldn’t feel how bone dry she was. Her hands would be thin and shriveled and it would hurt to dig them into his back, but they’d still be the lily-soft hands of a kept wife who’d never done anything with them except grasp desperately at the ever-molting feathers in the wings only she could see.
And for just a moment, as he shuddered and garbled out a blubbering sound, as his quick weak spurts painted ticklish runnels inside her, as her pretty fairy-tale teal and platinum wedding ring glimmered in the mirror…she wanted to burst out crying and never stop.
She hid her rising sob behind a scream of pleasure, making sure it was just loud enough to make the adjacent rooms complain. He’d like that. Trumpeting his manhood for everyone to hear. He’d liked screaming wall-banging sex in college, and had grinned that smug grin of his when the dorm RAs had threatened them and her neighbors had cursed them out. And by senior year he’d talked her out of the condoms, because he’d said I’ll take care of you. I’ll take care of you, and it’s just a technicality. You know I’m just waiting until I graduate and Dad sets me up at work, baby. Then we’ll make it formal. I’d love to get a head start on children.
She’d said no. Her mother had been furious when she’d found out. Why did we even send you to college if you we
re just going to waste it?
I didn’t know it was a waste to want to finish my degree before I get knocked up.
You won’t need the degree. Focus, Clarissa. That boy is a van Zandt. Don’t ruin this for yourself. Make a man like that happy, and you’ll never want for anything again.
And if I don’t?
Consider yourself cut off, young lady.
Cut off. Nothing to her name, no way to support herself. The idea had a strange appeal, especially when she’d looked to him for support and he’d looked right through her, unseeing and uncaring, as distant as he’d been since she’d come home on spring break and told her mother about how Jacob van Zandt had cornered her at a kegger and spent all night dancing with her and only her. Her mother had been delighted, but he had shuttered over. When she’d curled up in the bed that felt strange after a semester on hard dorm mattresses, he was nothing but the shadow of two feet under the door, lingering before moving away with a heavy and mournful creak of the floorboards. He’d stopped calling her Rissa-Rabbit. Stopped hugging her.
And when she’d realized she wasn’t Daddy’s little girl anymore, she’d clutched her pillow to her chest and sobbed, and felt a little piece of herself break—a crack as jagged as lightning down her heart, a crack that bled out all the things she was supposed to be able to feel for a boy like Jacob, but couldn’t.
She’d been so stupid. So naïve. And she’d gone through the motions like a robot while her mother had put her through the whirlwind of wedding planning. She was the excited bride. The lucky girl. She had everything anyone could ever want, and still…
Still, she felt hollow.
She’d broken, last night. The night before the wedding. Curled up in her little-girl room still full of little-girl things, she’d listened for her mother to leave. Always another emergency, another fire to put out, even at midnight when good wives should be waiting dutifully in bed for their husbands. Mama wanted this wedding to be flawless. Wanted Leigh out of the house, and would do anything to make that happen. And when the front door had slammed, cutting off the sound of Mama snapping into her phone, Leigh had pried herself from her room and slipped out to find him sitting in his heavy battered chair. The one he loved, the one Mama always swore she’d throw out when it was so cheap and ugly and didn’t fit with her million-dollar brocade rugs. He’d looked like he was trying to sink into the chair, and the only thing anchoring him was his white-knuckled grip on his tumbler of scotch.
He hadn’t looked at her when she’d pried the tumbler gently from his unresisting fingers and set it on the side table. Hadn’t moved when she’d slid into his lap, perching across his strong thighs, her ass against the thick rise in his slacks, and her breaths had caught as she’d felt a pulse of hardening heat pressing up against her, igniting an ache of longing Jacob had never been able to fulfill.
Daddy? She’d smiled and pressed up close against him, with her candy-pink painted lips pursed, her arms sliding around his neck. Under his thin shirt he’d gone hard, a man of petrified stone staring fixedly straight ahead with a blank and sightless desperation.
What is it, Clarissa? he’d rasped thickly.
I…I don’t want to get married. Not to him.
He’d said nothing, unmoving beneath her even while that thickness swelled and grew and pushed up insistently against her. She’d had to fight the urge to wrap her legs around him and tell him how much she’d missed him, tell him to take her right now like he used to do, holding her down with his hand over her mouth and making her scream against his fingers. She’d searched his face.
Daddy…?
Go to bed, baby girl. Baby girl. He’d only started calling her that recently, and she hated it. She hated it because it was what Jacob called her. I’m waiting up for your mother.
No. No, I don’t—please. Please, I don’t want to get married. I miss you. You haven’t…not in years, but…but I know it’s just because I’ve been away. And Mama was watching, but she’s not watching now. It’s just us. She’d curled her fingers desperately against the back of his neck. Let’s run away. You’ve got money. We can go somewhere where no one will never know, where no one will care—
He’d finally looked at her. Her had voice fled, crawling down deep inside her in that cracked vessel where a few of her feelings still clung in stubborn droplets. He’d looked at her with a father’s kindly indulgence, patient and tired; looked at her with eyes that didn’t belong to the rough grasping hands she’d missed, didn’t belong to the hard cock jutting up against the undersides of her thighs.
Don’t be silly. You’re just getting cold feet. It happens to everyone. Jacob’s a good man, and he’ll take good care of you.
Daddy…?
He’d kissed the top of her head. Chaste. Paternal. He loves you. Don’t you love him?
No. No, I love you! Don’t…don’t you love me?
Of course I love you, Clarissa.
But he’d said it the wrong way. He’d said it like she was a little girl who didn’t know how his body fit to hers, said it like he’d never parted her thighs and slid into her and gasped Daddy’s dirty little girl, come for Daddy, God little girl you’re so fucking tight. She’d thrust back from him, staring at the stranger she called Daddy, sick with herself and suddenly understanding with a painful clarity that sat on her tongue with a taste as shockingly, mouth-twistingly bitter as sour gumball candy:
What they’d done was wrong. It was wrong, she was wrong, and he was ashamed of it.
Ashamed of her.
He’d looked up at her with that bland, kindly smile, utterly blind to her hurt, her horror. Going to bed, then?
Y-yeah…yeah, I guess so…
Goodnight, sweetheart.
Yeah, she’d said, when all she’d wanted was to scream, to demand to know if she wasn’t good enough now that her age ended in something other than teen. Demand to know how he could do this to her.
Yet all she’d said was Goodnight.
She’d mumbled it with numb lips. Lips that had said I love you and gotten nothing back. Lips he’d kissed over and over again. Lips that had trembled as she’d fought back tears, and straggled back to her room to curl up and spend a sleepless night watching moonset. She’d counted the seconds until she would become Mrs. Jacob van Zandt; in that moment the ring on her finger would seal away the last of her childish hopes for more, and kill the light in a smile he’d said he’d cherish forever.
Why hadn’t she run away, last night?
Now, as Jacob collapsed atop her, the hard edges of his gold watch digging into the small of her back, she let out a choked sound and pretended it was just his heavy weight crushing her, not the shrieking sob she didn’t dare let out. She lay there, letting her breaths slow, feeling him go flaccid until his cock sagged inside her like a half-deflated water balloon. Still her reflection watched her, tears gleaming in her eyes, almost accusing, asking:
Who are you, other than Jacob van Zandt’s wife?
She used to tell stories. She’d told stories that got a big red A stamped on them in English class, and her mentoring professor for her Language Arts degree had said she had a unique and distinctive voice that showed promise of blooming with maturity. She’d studied other cultures and immersed herself in mythology from places she’d never see in her lifetime unless she was as much of a travel accessory as Jacob’s carry-on bag. She’d wanted to see everything. Wanted to visit the temples in Kyouto and walk the ruins in Machu Picchu, see the Hong Kong park where Kowloon Walled City used to be and take in the Aurora Borealis from Alaska—and write about all the things she saw in a world filled with so much she’d never find it all in her lifetime. She’d been okay with that.
She’d wanted a life that was just her own, not simply part of the support structure for someone else’s. She’d wanted a lot of things.
She was learning very quickly that you didn’t always get what you want.
You put yourself in this cage, her reflection said. You could have said no. You coul
d have had a spine. Were safety and security worth this? This slow dying, one day at a time?
I don’t know, she answered, and wondered at a life without tethers, outside her gilded bars.
Wondered if she’d put herself in this cage on purpose because she was bad, because she’d loved the wrong man, and for that she deserved to be punished.
She wanted to kick Jacob off. Wanted to scream at him not to touch her. But instead she only held her husband while he breathed deep and rough and sweated like a corpse left out too long. When he pulled out, she winced. He always left her sore and abraded in a sort of awkward jabbing way, and the pain must have shown on her face. As he collapsed next to her with that exhausted, self-satisfied smile she’d come to despise, he reached out to tuck her hair behind her ear.
“You okay, baby girl? Did I wear you out?”
“Yeah.” She smiled and gathered the sheet up to cover herself. She never liked being naked around him, when it felt like he was touching places she didn’t want to be touched every time he looked at her. He’d always thought she was just shy. Thought it was cute. She let him think that, because there were some things he just couldn’t understand. “Sore. But I’m fine, Jacob.”
“I tried to be gentler this time.”
No, he hadn’t. He liked to hurt her, liked knowing his fat veined cock could rip a girl up inside and leave her feeling him for days, whether she liked it or not. That was what got him off. Not the intimacy of it, not being able to arouse his partner, not the feeling of their bodies coming together in violent red sparks. No—for him it was thinking he was doing something no one else could do to her. Before the clothes even came off he was already convinced he’d be the best lay a girl could ever have, and Leigh had let him think that. She’d let him think it for years, and would keep letting him think it until one of them died.