by A. L. Woods
Which is a fancy way of saying that without having ever met her before, my brain knew who the strange woman in my family’s bar was well before she even opened her fucking mouth.
I had smelled her combination of citrus, vanilla, and cigarette before on the clothes of the man I was in a lovelorn relationship with some weeks ago when he slid into bed with me after a night out. I don’t know if he knew that he smelled like a woman before he pulled the sheets of my single bed back and crawled in, drawing me flush against him.
We fought about it—an onslaught of muffled, exchanged barbs that went on until sunrise. He told me nothing happened, and when he realized nothing he said would make me believe him, he got spiteful and told me I was just a piece of eighteen-year-old ass who had no right trying to tell a man what and who he could do.
He knew I wouldn’t be able to cry about it. If I cried, my older brother, Terry, his best friend, would just tell me what I already knew—I told you so.
I didn’t trust myself not to break under the pressure of the truth. The truth was, I was engaged in a relationship that should have never happened under any circumstances with a man ten years my senior. A man, not a boy.
My brother warned me.
I didn’t listen.
And I’d gotten burned–over and over again.
I wouldn’t garner Terry’s sympathy now that his warning had proved justified. As it was, my already weak relationship with my older brother never really recovered after he learned of the clandestine and lewd nature of my relationship with Dom, his best friend.
So that night, I did what I always did; I held it in.
I memorized each note of that woman’s perfume and committed it to memory so I would never forget what the pain of betrayal smelled like.
Which is how I found myself in this position, two months later.
It caught me by surprise when I entered the bar, toting our weekly alcohol inventory order to find the source of that perfume standing in the middle of the open room, her fingers curling and uncurling around the strap of her small purse that hung on her shoulder. It took everything in me to keep the crate in my hands, to not succumb to the burn in my ligaments or the rattle in my knees when the waft of her perfume got caught on a wayward breeze that passed through the bar.
I didn’t lunge for her like I always imagined I would. No, I was too nervous, too scared. Instead, all I managed was to keep the edges of my vowels and consonants hard and nasally and tell her, “We’re closed.”
The woman looked at me with weary eyes that glowed like whiskey-amber under the lighting from the ceiling. Her hair was dark, short and pin-straight, ending a little past her shoulder blades, her black Doc Martens laced tightly, just like my red. She looked mature and grown up.
I looked like a teenaged girl.
I could understand the appeal. She was pretty with a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, creating the impression of constellations across her alabaster skin. She stared at me with equal measure, like she had seen me before, like we had met. My legs got with the program and the bottles in my hands made it unscathed as I muscled deeper into the bar, the sharp chorus of glass harmonizing in perfect sync with my wild heartbeats behind my chest.
Why was she here? Did I really want to know?
“We open at six, come back then,” I offered, keeping my tone gruff through clenched teeth. I could manage a modicum of professionalism if I had to.
“Does Dom work here?” she asked.
I stopped near the bar, willing myself to keep it together.
Don’t drop the bottles now, Allegra.
My grip tightened around the handles of the crate, my insides coiling as nerves slammed into me from all corners of the room. My movements slowed, but the shrieking of the bottles clattering somehow sounded louder. I glanced at her from over my shoulder, my eyes riveting on her.
I wondered what it would be like to have her confidence. To show up unannounced in a small town where everyone knew everyone, expecting the people who lived there would just give up information freely about a man she had no right to be asking about.
“What business do you have with him?” I demanded.
My foot tapped with impatience, but it was a coverup for how I really felt. My palms were slick with sweat, but I held onto the crate tighter. I would need all the strength I had in my body to make it through this conversation without losing a thousand dollars’ worth of product because my anxiety got the better of me.
“I’m a friend of his.”
I couldn’t contain the snort. It slid out of me, sounding every bit as disdainful as I felt. I watched as her skin flushed crimson, her lips parting just enough for a breath to sneak out of her.
A friend? That was the angle she wanted to go with? My brother had raised me–a decade separating us–and I was more than aware of what being someone’s ‘friend’ entailed when they had a cunt between their legs.
“Dominic doesn’t have friends with tits,” I spat, burning a hole into her cranium with my eyes. “He has whores.” I held her stunned stare as I tilted my head to the right, relishing the recoil that slammed into her like a derailing semi-truck. “Is that what you are?”
She regarded me for a moment longer in prolonged silence. The longer the minutes seemed to stretch on, the stiffer my shoulders got, the blades protesting under the pressure.
An ingratiating smile tilted the corners of her pillowy lips north, her stare holding me in a chokehold. “Your boyfriend isn’t my type.”
I fought the urge to throw the crate at her. Licks of heat burned up my spine, crawling up the length of my neck, flushing my cheeks, and igniting an inferno in my eyes.
There was that title.
That stupid, ugly title that he would never let me use.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I hissed. The pain of that reality engulfed me like someone had dumped a box of salt all over a festering wound. My body shook, the crate winning the inward war that raged, my knuckles whitening under the pressure. Cold beads of sweat slid down my spine, landing on the edge of my denim cut-offs that were inappropriate for the frigid December temperatures of Massachusetts.
Dom never wanted to be my boyfriend. He didn’t do titles; he did understandings. The understanding was that I belonged to him like a possession—his to touch, his to kiss, his to own and control. These rules, however, were mutually exclusive to me and me alone. They didn’t apply to him and I found myself too swept up in my obsessive love for him to see that this would one day blow up in my face, just like Terry said.
And today was that day.
“She’s right,” Dom said from behind me, his chuckle a low rumble in his chest that made my entire body go rigid. I chanced a glance at him, my stomach sinking. A look of hell sprouted on his face, his jaw rocking as he observed me from where he leaned against the doorframe. He studied me as though I were a discarded toy he’d grown tired of and tossed into a box headed for Goodwill.
“She’s my fuck buddy who didn’t read the fine print.”
And there was his preferred title for me.
Callousness may as well have been another language for him. His viciousness wasn’t artificial, it was a life force inside of him. I’d always tried to see the good in him, but the picture I painted in my head was more human than the reality of him.
Dom imbued unkindness and no matter how much I loved him, that would never change. He held my stare until my bottom lip trembled, betraying me. It stilled when I sucked it between my teeth, my eyes narrowing at him. I wanted to hit him, wanted to crack one of these bottles over his head and then shank him with the pointed end of it right into his heart.
I wondered if it was black, if it existed there at all.
“You’re a piece of shit,” I said, my throat thickening with emotion.
Dom’s lips tilted laconically, smarminess a lip balm coating across his mouth. “You knew that before I fucked you, sweetheart.”
I was going to be sick.
; I had known that.
My next intake of breath was sharp, shame and heartbreak etching across my face. I fought the tremor in my kneecaps when I bent forward to settle the crate down by the foot of the bar. Terry told me to stay away from guys like Dom. Guys who would hurt me with no regard, who would treat me like I was expendable.
If only I had listened.
My auburn wavy hair fell forward, my jasmine-scented shampoo filling my nose. He had just washed my hair an hour ago. I could still feel the pads of his fingers working the lather into my long locks and the feel of his soft lips against the column of my neck. Two hours ago, we had slipped out of my family’s farmhouse across the street while everyone else slept. We’d showered together here, had rough sex in the bed above us, laid there in a tangle of limbs and breaths.
Now I found myself reduced to nothing but a warm body he had shoved his cock inside of. He was right; I hadn’t read the fine print. I’d blindly signed over what remained of my innocence and hoped that the countless warnings I received from those around me had been an exaggeration.
“I should have listened to my brother,” I murmured, breezing by him, intentionally colliding into his shoulder.
I felt Dom’s eyes on me when I burst through the swing door, heading toward the upstairs apartment. I knew it would still smell like our shower and sex, that scent waiting to slam into me and unearth all the slivered memories that housed in those four walls.
I waited until I was in the safe confines of the apartment to release the sob that ripped free from me. Why, why did he have to do this to me? Even this seemed too cruel for him after everything. I raced across the room, wrestled the windows open, willing the hybrid of the jasmine of my shampoo, the cedar wood spice of his cologne and the unmistakable primal stench of sex to leave the room. My breaths pumped out of me hard, air not quite reaching my lungs when the icy breeze filtered in, spiriting the reservoir of memories away. I kicked the edge of the chair; the legs shuddering against the hardwood, a throb setting off in my foot that I didn’t entirely register in my pain receptor.
What had I really expected from him?
The tears clinging to my lashes crested down my cheeks, stinging under the cold assault of the December air circulating from the open window. This was who and what he was. It was time I accepted it. Stomping across the apartment with the tenacity of a two-year-old throwing a tantrum, I stepped back into the bathroom, ignoring the droplets of water still clinging to the shower curtain.
Dominic had made a fool of me for the last time.
Bending toward the stream from the rushing faucet, I splashed cold water against my stinging face, my humiliation burning worse than a sunburn.
Never again.
I would never let him treat me like an object, a disposable thing.
I wasn’t like the rest of them, and wouldn’t be treated like I was when we had an audience, when he had something to prove to himself.
“She’s my fuck buddy who didn’t read the fine print.”
I’d fucking show him. Someday, I’d get away from this town, from him, and I’d never look back.
He’d regret the way he treated me, someday. He could count on it.
Scrubbing my face with my fingers, I swiped the smeared mascara away with the back of my knuckles. I was never wearing that shit again. There was no point. Putting in the effort for him was a waste of time, and he didn’t deserve any of it.
Not when he was downstairs with another woman. I ignored their loud voices coming through the vents, not wanting to hear him engage in a heated argument with someone else. How many times had we found ourselves in this exact situation? How many times did I need to see him with someone before I got the message? How many more times did I have to smell someone else on him? I had experienced this devastation enough times to last me a lifetime.
My panic festered my need for an escape. I wanted the brisk December air on my skin, to hear the crunch of snow beneath my boots, to surround myself in the woods I had grown up around with the trees that would swallow my cries.
Killing the water, I swiped my damp palms on a tired hand towel hanging near the sink, before stomping back toward the door I’d entered through. I pulled the apartment door open, slamming it hard behind me as I barreled down the stairs that led me back to the bar my family owned.
I was glad the apartment above the bar remained empty. It was my haven, a place to escape my nephew’s inconsolable cries in the Victorian farmhouse that had been in our family for almost a hundred years across the street. I lived there with Terry and his overly enthusiastic girlfriend, Morgan, who enjoyed getting railed from behind.
Don’t quote me. I was speculating on the latter detail. I’d overheard her by mistake on the phone—that was my brother’s preferred position—while she paraded around our house half-dressed, occupying our phone line with one of her equally irritating friends, bouncing my nephew on her hip.
T-M-fucking-I.
Dom’s voice was like steel when he spoke to the woman who had dared to come here looking for him. “Go home, Cherry. We’re done here.”
Cherry? What a stupid name. She sounded like a cheap prostitute.
Clearing the last step, I shoved the swing door open, catching sight of the woman who appeared this morning unannounced looking for him. I didn’t even want to consider her by name.
I hated her.
Still, I didn’t miss the dazed look that etched over her delicate features. It was one I was familiar with. Her stare was vacant as she studied Dom before her eyes floated to me. I barely noticed her appraisal, I was too focused on the man I desperately wanted to hurt back. It was like his body detected my emotional shift. His spine stiffened, his head turning over his shoulder, jaw flexing with menace.
God, how long had I loved him for?
How much love had I expended on a man who would never love me back the way I wanted because he didn’t know how?
All I ever wanted in my life was to love and to be loved by him. I made concessions because of it, didn’t care about the semantics or the titles. I’d just wanted to be his. What had that earned me? A million tiny fissures in my vitreous heart.
Loving him was akin to loving a Greek god–someone larger than life itself.
If Hades had a human incarnate, it was Dom. His eyes were almost onyx, harsh and cruel under the dim lighting of the bar and early morning light that streamed in from the stainless glass windows lining the walls of the bar. His shock of black hair combed back in his signature pompadour, the fade on the sides bleeding into the top. I’d watched him comb it from the warmth of the bed upstairs an hour ago. The five o’clock shadow peppering the angles of his face had tickled the inside of my thighs when he had woken me up a little after sunrise back at the farmhouse and suggested we escape here. He had looked at me with pained reverence then, as though the push and pull was too much for him to bear. We were engaged in a dangerous game. He preyed on my innocence, but I fed on his lack of self-control.
And with me, he had very little.
Wasn’t that why we were in the position we were in?
An age-gap and love triangle dark romance
Coming June 2021