by A. L. Woods
“I love him, Raquel,” she said, the apology in her pitch making my chest constrict with contrition, “but I can’t happily have this baby without knowing that you support us, too.”
My lids squeezed shut, my head working up and down with a nod. I got it now. “I do support you. I really am sorry, Penelope. I was a dick.”
When I opened my eyes, she parted her arms, beckoning me to her. I leaned forward, hugging her as if the future of our friendship depended on it. Penelope had always been my safety net, but now it was time for me to be hers, too. I didn’t know what the future had in store for either one of us. All I knew was that no matter what happened, we would do it together.
She kissed the top of my head, smoothing my hair, a hum vibrating through her chest that melted away all the anxiety and stress of the day.
She was going to be a fantastic mother.
By the time I settled back on my haunches, something devilish was blooming in Penelope’s face, her mouth tilting with mischief. “I accept your apology.” Then she tapped her chin. “Although, I have to say, that might be the worst one I’ve ever received in my life.”
My mind spun as I tried to come up with a logical response until I caught her chewing her bottom lip, as if she was trying to conceal a smile at her injection of levity.
“I would like you to redact that apology and try again. With more feeling this time, preferably.”
I don’t know if it had been her intention to make me smile, but I did just that. “Sorry. They didn’t teach apology etiquette at public school.”
“Oh, you bitch.” She laughed, flinging a small pillow at me. “You really piss me off sometimes, Raquel. You’re stubborn, and an asshole.” She grabbed my hand again, squeezing it painfully. “But there is no one I would rather call my best friend than you.”
“I really am so sorry. You deserve so much better from me. It won’t happen again, I swear.”
Warmth filled Penelope’s eyes, her grip on my hand loosening. “That attempt was a little better. I’d suggest you dial up the histrionics, though. I want a performance that makes DiCaprio lose his Oscar again.”
Her laugh at her own joke sounded mellifluous to my ears and made me think for just the briefest of moments that everything would be okay.
I embraced her once more, ignoring the fact that she smelled nothing like her usual Chanel No. 5. “I’ll work at being more understanding.”
“I need you to be a hell of a lot more understanding,” she said, tucking my hair behind my ears. “This kid is going to need a godmother to rely on so they don’t lose their shit every time something scary occurs. And let me tell you, kids are fucking horrifying.”
My fingers seized her shoulders, squeezing the bone as my eyes searched hers. “Godmother? Me?”
Penelope gave me a “No shit, Sherlock” look, that brow of hers shooting north. “Who else would I pick?”
I hadn’t considered that.
Me. A godmother.
To a baby.
The weight of the responsibility should have made my insides roil like churning cement, but what bloomed amongst the mounds of mud made my heart sing a tiny song that spoke to my soul.
“I need to tell you one more thing, and I would rather you didn’t have another stage five meltdown, because I am not pacifying your ass anymore on this subject.”
“Jesus, Penelope.”
Her perfunctory look told me I deserved whatever barb she tossed my way and that she expected me to eat it like it was a delicious bullshit sandwich.
“Dougie and I are moving to Eaton.”
Somebody give me some sub sauce, ’cause that BS sandwich was dry as hell. A lump formed in my throat as I considered what she had just said to me.
“More specifically,” she casually continued, twisting at her waist to primp the stack of pillows behind her, “we bought the colonial from Sean.”
The darkened room spun out before me, and I wasn’t sure if it was because my only lifeline was leaving me or because she was moving into a house that had been the start of something I wasn’t sure I could dig my way out of.
“Now would be a good time to say ‘congratulations’,” Penelope prompted.
My mouth quirked with effort, but no sound came out.
Penelope let out an exasperated sigh, but her eyes were forgiving. “I’ll still see you all the time. The house isn’t far from The Advocate. And it’ll be a lot easier for us to shuttle back and forth to Fall River to see his mother from there. The bulk of the design work I do is there, anyway.”
My hands folded in my lap, my shoulders shrinking. I blinked at her, wondering when she had stopped being my mosh pit, whiskey-loving best friend into a full-fledged adult with her whole life figured the fuck out. Somehow along the way, she had kept growing, while I had stood still, drowning in my guilt about the responsibility I had for my sister’s demise.
“Are you having a panic attack?” She leaned forward, eyes wide with curiosity. “’Cause if you are, I have some lorazepam under the bathroom sink.”
My head felt stiff as I shook it. I needed something a little stronger than a sedative. I drew in a sharp breath, holding it tightly in my lungs for several seconds before I released it.
She didn’t need my permission, or my judgment—she just needed my support.
And I needed to take a leap of faith, too.
“Congratulations, Pen. I’m happy for you guys.”
Her shoulders rounded, a sigh of relief leaving her lips.
“Thank you.”
I rolled onto my ass, settling against the pillows, reaching for the remote of the TV to turn up the volume. “Pen?” I said tentatively.
“Hmm?”
“Since we’re doing the whole healthy communication thing, is it okay if I practice on you some more?” My voice edged on the saccharine.
Penelope’s eyes immediately grew suspicious. “Of course,” she said with a dry laugh, looking uneasy.
My face split into a shit-eating grin. “‘I’m so sorry to tell you this, but you smell like absolute shit.’”
Penelope’s snort was an unattractive albeit welcomed reprieve, her scowl ornery as she pushed her bedsheets back and clambered to her feet. “Y’know, I think Dougie wanted to say the same thing, but didn’t,” she said as she staggered toward the bathroom. “He’s been at the edge of the bed all afternoon. When he heard your keys in the door, he all but sprinted out of here.”
“Communication is key!” I called out to her.
She responded by shooting me an eye roll over her shoulder. “I’m hitting the shower. Don’t leave.”
“Your man ordered pizza. I’m not going anywhere.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Twenty-five minutes later, we sat in bed hip-to-hip, a half-empty box of pizza settled on the floor while discussing the events of the last week. I let her lead. Penelope was diligent about not skipping any details, right down to gleefully describing her newfound anxiety surrounding placental abruption—a situation she was still at least sixteen weeks from even needing to consider as a possibility.
For someone who had been bedridden with morning sickness for the majority of the week, she had no issues getting the pizza down her gullet—in fact, she had eaten the rest of the third slice I hadn’t been able to get through, reminding me that she was “literally growing another human inside of her.” She even ate the crust, and I had never seen Penelope eat pizza crust.
“I think that’s everything on my end,” she said with a contented sigh, settling against the pillows, hand smoothing over the barely-there arch of her stomach.
“No venereal or other incurable diseases you’re dying of?”
“Not yet,” she assured, “but just you wait, soon it’ll be the edema in my ankles.” I didn’t know what that was, nor did I want to. The name alone made my stomach heave.
“I’ll call the priest,” I quipped.
“Please do.” She feigned a sniffle, dabbing under her eyes with a curled fing
er. “I fear I won’t make it through my first trimester.”
“Drama queen.”
She threw her head back with a laugh, her smile turning coy. “Speaking of drama,” she neatly maneuvered, her hands knitted together and settling demurely between her thighs. “How goes Operation Upgrade?”
I lifted my eyes skyward, as though the answers to my evasion laid hidden amongst the hardened clusters of friable material that made up the popcorn ceiling.
“I mean Sean,” she offered, as if the insinuation had gone over my head.
I pegged her with a disapproving look. “I know who you mean.”
I allowed the conversation to steer toward dangerous territory in which I caught her up to speed on my possessed cellphone fiasco, the text messages with Sean (at which time she demanded I give her my phone, because “your narration sucks”), and my less than stellar phone call with my mother before our argument.
“So that’s why your panties were in such a bunch that night.”
I blanched at her choice of words, recalling that at this very moment in time, my torn panties lay on a desk inside her new house.
Harrumphing, I kept my eyes on the TV, glad that the bedroom was darkened and that the blush flooding my cheeks couldn’t easily be identified.
“Has anything else happened since?” she probed, suspicion lacing the question while she appraised my reaction.
My heart kicked up a shitstorm. From the corner of my eye, I could feel her scanning my face, her quizzical brow quirking the longer I remained silent.
I considered not telling her, but I didn’t trust Sean not to tell Dougie, who would inevitably tell Penelope, and then I suspected I would end up groveling again, and I was sort of over having to do that.
“Define ‘happened’.” My body went rigid at the real threat of having to reveal what I had done…or had done to me.
“Raquel.” Penelope’s mascara-free lashes blinked at me the same way they did when she was about to drop an atomic bomb in my lap. “You’re sitting next to me in my bed, and every time you’ve hugged me this evening, I get a whiff of cologne that is too expensive to be Cash’s, too woody to be Dougie’s, but smells a lot like Sean’s.”
God, even the sound of his name made my body radiate with a drunken heat that imbibed my senses. I told myself to keep my expression vacuous, but I could feel the damn rupture tearing my resolve into two warring entities, the dissonance a deafening buzz in my head.
My exhale was short, recognizing it was now or never. “I want to preface by saying I went to the house before I came here.” My countenance twisted at that. “Your new house,” I amended, the words feeling strange as I said them.
“Okay?”
“I went there with the intention of apologizing to you.” My breath hitched as I started the story over. Unbidden thoughts kicked off the tightening in my core again, an intoxicating pang nestling itself with the same all-consuming feeling you get when you have a hangnail that keeps getting caught on everything that finally drives you to just rip it off.
“And…?” she probed, eyes greedy for information, her upper lip twitching with dwindling patience.
“You obviously weren’t there, but,” the words caught in my throat as my reverie sent me back hours into the past. When I heard the sound of his throat clearing and my eyes found his, I felt as if all the anxiety I felt up until that point had melted away. My wrath had tapered off, the disquiet in my soul dispelling the longer he looked at me with that mesmerizing stare of his that saw all the things I didn’t like about myself. The cracks in my armor, the parts of me that were better off broken.
He confused me. One minute, I hated how vulnerable and insecure he made me feel. The next, all I wanted was for him to see me, all of me—and help me glue those parts back together again.
When he tore his gaze away from mine, the only thing I could concentrate on was getting his attention back. I craved the warmth of his banter…the wry smiles…the boyish charm. He was indifferent and cold, confirming that he was mad at me for what occurred a week earlier. I could see that judgment in his face every time his reluctant stare landed on me, the discomfort straining his jaw whenever his unwilling eyes bounced to mine.
I imagined he had drawn his own conclusions about what had gone on with me leaving with Cash that night—all of which were wrong. But he had never asked me about it.
He had simply punished me for it instead.
“Okay, honey, I know you’re a writer,” Penelope prompted, waving a hand in my face, “but you kinda need to become an orator right now and use your words here.”
I blinked at her, catching her waning patience. Right. Words. Full sentences. There was no way for me to sugar-coat this one, so I went with the crassest analogy I could come up with while valiantly trying not to die of humiliation inside of Penelope’s palatial condo.
“He ate me out,” I said with a single perfunctory nod.
The silence swallowed me whole in that moment. Penelope’s baby blues blinked once, twice, three times.
“Sorry.” She let out a nervous titter, making a gesture like she was clearing out a blockade of wax from her ear. “I must not have heard you correctly.”
“You did.” I gulped, my throat desperately working at freeing the lump that had built its residence along the length.
Penelope was rarely dumbstruck, but this was one of those times. Her mouth hung open, her expression shell-shocked. “Well, shit,” she declared, sitting upright, her hands steepling together in front of her mouth to block the animation of what I knew was bubbling excitement. “How was it? Did you see stars?”
I appreciated that she hadn’t cared to ask just how I found myself bent over naked from the waist down on the desk she had eaten lunch off of more times than she could count…nor did I volunteer that information. She wanted the good part; the rest were just minor details.
Truthfully, I did see stars—hot, brilliant specks of light—briefly, anyway. It had the potential of being catastrophically good, like an eruption that overtook my senses. For a minute there, I didn’t think I could have recalled my own middle name. My vision had been on the fritz, the room darkening as if someone had dropped a veil over my eyes the more he worked at me. I had been amenable, pliant, and willing to agree to his every whim on the condition that he didn’t stop. My body had spasmed in the throes of mounting pleasure that had me forgetting how to breathe. For those few minutes, I had felt alive.
“Raquel,” Penelope snapped, clapping her hands together. “Words. Use them.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek, contemplation making me dizzy. “It had the potential to be amazing if…”
“If…?” she pressed.
I blew out a breath. “If he hadn’t turned it into some sort of punishment.”
“Ooh, kinky.” She grinned, that salacious smile faltering at the sight of my expression. “But you weren’t down with that?”
“No,” I sputtered, shaking my head. “I don’t need be punished by him for shit that doesn’t concern him.” And there I went putting my foot in my mouth, and of course she didn’t miss it.
“Like what?” Penelope’s eyes narrowed, giving me the distinct impression that she knew what was about to come out of my mouth was going to seriously piss her off.
I had skirted around one small detail when recounting what had occurred because I knew she wouldn’t like it. I almost considered playing it off because of how well the evening had been going, but we were on a new trajectory where we told the truth…no lies.
“I stupidly had Cash pick me up the night of the bar fiasco, and it was a whole damn thing.” I hesitated, pausing to find my footing before I could get the rest of it out. “And he brought Terry and Dom with him.”
Penelope’s face was tight, but not as tight as the unsympathetic hand she perched on my shoulder, the tips of her fingers curling into curve of my skin like the talons of a falcon. “I’m not going to say I told you so about Cash or his band of goons for the thousand
th time, but…”
“Yeah, I know. I get it,” I said with a sigh, shrugging out of her abrasive hold, a pulse forming where she had gripped me as blood rushed back to the surface.
“You know there’s only one way to fix this,” she said as she relaxed against the pillows again, head tilting, looking owlish. “You let Sean fuck you, and then you start over on a fresh slate.”
I resented the ease and simplicity of her sage advice. My heart thundered in my chest at the very idea that this situation could be remedied with the dropping of undergarments and joining of genitals. “No, absolutely not.”
“Should have thought about that before you dropped your panties.”
“He tore them off!” I corrected.
A suggestive smile sprouted on her smug mouth while my cheeks flushed, heat creeping up my neck and settling through every strand of hair on my fucking head.
I dropped my voice, suddenly aware of Dougie’s presence in the apartment, hearing his footsteps in the hall through the closed bedroom door and then the bathroom door creaking shut. “I’m not sleeping with him. Things would get too complicated.”
“For whom?”
“All of us.” Dougie might have been honest with me when he said Sean wouldn’t hurt me, but that didn’t change the fact that there was a massive risk associated with this whole… “thing” if it didn’t work out. “Not when you and Dougie are now–”
“Oh, no you don’t.” She wagged a corrective finger at me. “You don’t get to use Dougie and I as your cop-out at your opportunity for happiness, Raquel Marie.”
Her use of my middle name and the serious undertone of her admonishment made me breathlessly guffaw. “Are you practicing your mean mommy voice?” I arched an eyebrow at her, watching as she practically preened under my observation.
“I sounded like a badass, huh?” I managed a weak half-smile. Sure, she sounded as badass as a broad from Connecticut could get. She was more Stepford Wife than South Boston mom screaming for her kids when the streetlights came on, but it was a start. I didn’t have the heart to knock her down a peg.