Текст книги "Quarterback Bait "

Автор книги: Celia Loren

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Chapter Three

Landon

 

I woke up to lips mashed against my neck—pillowy, plump lips the texture of a deflated balloon. Zora had been injecting some chemical shit into her mouth for the past year and a half, promising after each treatment that “it was just a temporary thing.” But I'd never been a big fan of plastic surgery of any kind to begin with (sue me, I like a lady natural) and her long con was starting to get under my skin. Well the con, among other things.

I inched my neck away from her cloying touch and Z rolled over beside me, like a sleepy cat. Her eyes stayed closed. She was drifting in that fine space between sleeping and waking, which if truth be told was when I liked her best. Zora's got this long, fine, glossy, light brown hair, and her skin is this lush, tan color that's actually one of the few natural things about her. And when she sleeps, she's not self-conscious. There's no preening and pouting, there's no scanning the room for the available mirrors. It was the innocent span of her sleeping face that had done me in the first time, and it was this I still attempted to cling to—despite the fighting, and the boring conversations, and the Thing We're Not Supposed To Talk About Anymore, Cuz it's In The Past. For merely eight days before, my then ex-girlfriend had come to me Tracy Johns style, begging for another chance. And it was summer, and I was restless, and I was spineless, so I said yes.

“Stop looking at me, Landon,” she murmured, as her eyelids began to flicker. “I don't like how you watch me when I sleep.”

“I've always watched you when you sleep. You're beautiful.” She brought her perfectly manicured hands up to cover her face, emitting a groan. In response, I lifted the thin quilt above us, so I could get an eyeful of her naked body. Not that I'm shallow to excess or anything, but Zora's body is the other big one for her “PRO” column. I put an experimental hand on her taut, muscular stomach. I let my fingers graze the neat, clipped section of her pussy, where her landing strip began. It was a little intimidating to be with a woman who cared so much about her physical appearance. Sometimes it seemed like she was a mannequin. But as half of me mused this, my fingers drifted further down, to the velvety space between her legs.

“I haven't showered, you sicko!” Zora screeched, before sitting up in a way that kept the quilt clamped tight around her waist. “And don't you need to be getting ready for camp, or something?”

I kissed her sternum, hard enough so she could feel my stubble clash with her smoothness. I pressed my cheeks against the apple-sized mounds of her modest rack. Zora placed her palm on my forehead and pushed me backward, like I was a dog that needed to be muzzled.

“We have time, baby!”

“I don't, Landon. I don't have time. There's the pledge material to photocopy, and someone needs to eat shit about the dry-cleaning incident...plus, Betsy doesn't even have a deb dress yet, which we needed to take care of like three months ago.” Z climbed out of bed, smoothing her hair flat down her back in one fluid gesture. Still groggy, I swung my arms above my head and reached for the sky. A more petulant part of me had already decided this day was a scratch. What was it about these hot chicks and their hatred of morning sex?

“Do you have any idea what it's like to organize a deb ball for a completely ungrateful little shit?” Z cried, bending to crawl along the floor in a futile search for her panties. I covered a smile, before finding her lacy thong in the mess of my bedsheets, with the loop of my big toe. I pinched the garment between my feet. Hike!

“I mean, Betsy has no idea what an important Texas tradition it is she's—shirking. When I was her age, all I wanted to do was wear a long white ball gown and dance a waltz with my father.”

“She could wait till she gets married for most of that,” I said, before leaning back and assuming the diligent face stance of the boyfriend-who-cares. Meanwhile, I was really thinking, here we fucking go again.

Z whirled on me, her face endearingly red with effort and strain. She'd never liked looking for things. When we used to sleep at her house or dorm, everything was always in its exact perfect place—to the point where if I moved a toothbrush in the bathroom, I could well be flirting with a freak-out.

“I can't handle your hippie shit, Landon. Not today.”

“Who said anything about hippie shit?”

“I know you don't believe in the deb ball! You've made your thoughts on the matter perfectly clear!”

“No, I just think it's kind of a lame tradition, and if your sister doesn't want to have one then I don't get why you and your parents should spend all that money and time.” I bit my lip, but a moment too late. The shitstorm was nigh. I almost flinched in the following silence, so sure was I that she was gonna pound me. She even started slow, like a tornado.

“Umm, I didn't actually ask for your opinion. So.”

“Come on, Z. I was just talking. Just words. Come back to bed.”

“But for the fucking record, it's maybe not the best idea to go off on your girlfriend of FIVE YEARS –”

“Oh, is it five years? Are you counting the nine months where you cheated on me with that shitstain Larry Durgess?”

“Don't even go there, Landon. I thought we were past that.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Anyways, yes, no, you don't tell your girlfriend—GIRLFRIEND OF FIVE YEARS!—That you don't care about traditions where women wear white ball gowns and dance with their fathers.” By that point, Z was clutching the quilt between two opposing fists, like she could rip it in two. You could practically see the steam blowing out of her slightly pointed ears. I ducked my head below the sheets, inhaled the sweet smell of what had passed for love-making the previous night, and returned, reluctantly, with her thong in my hand—an olive branch.

“Have fun at training camp,” she said, plucking her panties from my palm. “Be good.” Then her face transformed into that of a brave politician's wife, preparing to face the nation after tragedy. She kissed me chastely on the cheek before turning toward the bathroom. A second later, I heard the shower stutter on.

I leaned back against the pillows, suddenly exhausted despite the more or less full night's sleep. I let my eyes flutter open and closed, surveying the walls of my childhood bedroom. It felt strange to be home for the summer, even if it was going to be my last rodeo. Pop had kept the place fully intact after I went off to college, like some kind of altar to the kid I used to be. The Peyton and Eli posters held the places of honor, flanking the door. And above my ancient Apple E-Mac, covered by a fine layer of dust, was my main guiding light: John Elway.

At UT, I tried to keep my hero affiliations something of a secret. Coach tended to “make an example” of any Longhorn who couldn't recite on cue various factoids about the Cowboys, let alone indicate any competing allegiance. And it's not like I could explain it—I'd never lived in Colorado. We'd once gone on a family trip to Denver when my Mom was still alive, and it had been a perfectly fine hang—but I didn't want to ascribe my enduring love of the Broncos to something sentimental like that. Lately, I'd been thinking it just had to do with my need to get out of Texas. Away from the deb balls, and the crazy patriotism, and even the allegedly “funky” Austin. If I had to be a football player, I wanted to see the whole damned country.

Or something.

“Whatchoo doin, boy? Praying?” I jumped at the sound—and then the face—of my father appearing in my bedroom doorway. Cantankerous old Pastor Sterling, in all his Saturday morning glory—frayed blue robe, flannel pants, rigid Astros cap. Pop held a pristine white mug in one hand, and the stub of a cigarillo in another. I was surprised. If memory served, he needed to be at his storefront congregation in time for a two p.m. service.

“Nothing, sir.”

“Daydreaming?”

“No, sir.”

“Good, good. You should be up and at 'em, boy. Get you a good breakfast before the bus to Galveston ships out.”

In the shower, Zora began to hum something high and sweet and loud. It sounded like a hymn. Boy, was she a shapeshifter. My father smiled lecherously in the direction of the closed door, before turning to wiggle his eyebrows at me.

“Now that's what I like to see, son. That little lady is a fine specimen. Nice birthing hips. And a man of God takes what's his.”

“Jesus, Dad...”

“What'd I tell you about that?” His eyes grew black, in that sudden, shark-y way I'd come to despise throughout my childhood. You could just never tell if Pop was in the mood to “teach a lesson.” I swallowed some air, and tried to hold myself perfectly still.

Pop seemed to consider a violent course for a moment, but then he turned to take in the whole of my bedroom. I watched him find Zora's stiletto heels, positioned neatly under the desk. Then he looked at all my old jerseys pinned to the walls. The shelf of flaking trophies, with their fake-ass gold-leaf. He seemed to find peace somewhere among the junk, so when his eyes at last returned to mine it appeared his anger had flown the coop. He took a creaky step forward and put a palm on my clammy forehead. The cigarillo end, pinched between his crusty thumb and pointer finger, danced dangerously close to my ear.

“God bless you, my son,” he murmured, then repeated Zora's little proclamation in an improbably sing-song voice. “And you have fun at training camp. Give 'em hell.”

I listened to the water trickling to an end in Z's shower, the abrupt halt of her hymn. My father's heavy boots echoed down the hall. I figured this left me eight to ten blissful minutes of alone time, during which Zora would begin her elaborate daily ritual of prodding and plucking and primping the skin of her face. Staring up at the ceiling, which was still awash with glow in the dark stars from my nine year old decorator, I narrowed my eyes and thought of Doll. How the lights of Austin had swallowed her face, yet not managed to quench the strange inner light that seemed to peel off her pale skin in strips. She was like the moon. With a pang I remembered what I'd said to her on the roof, and it struck me as the speech of some other person entirely. Something Denny might say to a study-abroad from Copenhagen: “I will make you liquid with wanting me. I will suck you dry and fuck you senseless.” Had I really said that? What had she done to me, that little troublemaker?

Seemingly of its own accord, my hand had wandered to the blossoming erection in my boxers. I encircled myself slow, but started to stroke out a fast, desperate rhythm. I couldn't wait. It was like it had been in bed the night before, when I'd fucked Zora with all the lights off. In my secret, shameful mind's eye, it had been Doll's juice on my fingers. Her tongue on my shaft. Her nipples, grazing mine. I'd come harder last night than I had in any recent memory, and all the while I'd been dreaming of forbidden fruit.

Chapter Four

Ash

 

Carson, with her nose like a bloodhound, picked up a long pink caftan and held it up to the dusty thrift shop light. The fabric looked to me like something a piano teacher in Santa Fe might find “fetching,” but in another moment, my sister had draped the thing around her like a scarf. “Picture this decked out with like, little glass baubles on the ends,” she said. I dutifully imagined. “It'd beat all.”

I rolled my eyes, and pushed a hand through my sweaty hair. Everywhere was so sweaty in Austin. This city had nothing on Denver.

“I didn't notice the red,” Carson said, dropping her muumuu to pick up a limp lock of my hair. “Very Riot grrrl.”

“I'm trying a bunch of colors until I find the one that's just right.”

“So you're like Goldilocks of Love?”

“Exactamundo.”

We continued to paw through the cavernous brown bins lining the self-proclaimed “best thrift shop on Baylor Street,” but Carson's mind seemed to have hopscotched away with the discovery of her...garment. Back on the sidewalk, in the city's humid embrace, I leaned against the steaming bricks and sighed dramatically.

“Okay, kid. Give it up.” Carson drew a pack of Virginia Slims from a corner of her clutch (made from a license plate) and furrowed her brow. Wrinkles were forming on my half-sister—which wasn't so crazy, given that she was twelve years my senior. But perhaps because I'd always felt better kicking it with Carson and her slightly mad bohemian friends, I didn't like to concede the age difference.

In fact, I never liked to concede the age difference.

“Is it a boy?” she puffed, sending an elegant plume of smoke in the direction of the setting sun. “Because you know I'm not great at that kind of advice.”

“It's not a boy.” It's a man, I didn't say. Well, more like I barely prevented myself from saying. As hard as it was to keep secrets from Carson, I'd had to get good at secret-keeping years before—sometime after stepfather number three.

The women in my family were good at few things, and self-preservation above all things was one of them. We were the flee-in-the-night type. We could dodge bill collectors, and all manner of responsibilities. If men we loved were cruel to us, we could forget them. Ditto to the cities.

My mother was also a master at the art of selective memory—not in part because she'd spent half of Carson's childhood failing to kick a heroin addiction. Anya Bennett was what some called a “high functioning addict.” It had taken her co-workers at several State Farms across the Bible Belt years to realize that they were sharing a break room with a dope fiend. This was because my mother was likable, in spite of everything. It was easier to believe that Anya was sleepy, that Anya was depressed, that Anya was in an abusive relationship—than the fact that Anya had brought doom entirely to herself. And to her two kids, of course.

Carson, reading my face, scrunched up her mouth in a decidedly kid-like way.

“Is it Anya?” she asked, her voice already tired. Which was fair. I'd gotten the best of our mother. She'd muscled into sobriety when I was nine, with the help of her since deceased Aunt Shelly. Carson, however, had endured years of absentee and downright abusive parenting. She and Mom only spoke when it was unavoidable.

“Can I rant to you for like three minutes? Pretty please?” Carson stubbed out her cigarette, and tuned her attention to the caftan in its pale plastic bag. She held up three fingers, then nodded once.

“She's started going to one of those creepy storefront churches. You know? The kind off the highway?”

“Ash, religion's a whole part of the steps. Some people get more into it than others. Most of the time, you have to embrace a higher power to get clean.”

“But this isn't like any of the churches Aunt Shelly took us to,” I protested, finally lighting my own cigarette. The sun continued its stumpy drift behind the limited skyscrapers, and for a second there was a cool breeze. “It's like a cult-y situation. She says the Pastor there has 'discovered extra books in the Bible.'”

Carson choked on an inhale.

“Don't laugh!”

“I'm sorry! It's just—even Anya? A cult? Jesus Christ.”

“I'm just worried she's going to come home with like white Nikes or something.”

My sister cocked her head. “You're pretty young for a Heaven's Gate reference, tyke.”

“You know, I'm so tired of people telling me I'm too young.” The words fell out of me in my whiniest voice, which I realized did little for my case. “I've done crazier things than so many older people. I've given our mother a bath during a relapse. I've paid the bills and balanced the checkbook since I was fifteen. I've worked since I was fourteen. I've even been taking college classes, did you know that? English Lit and American History. I'm going to UT a whole year early! This fall!”

Carson's eyes had glazed over again, but this time I didn't care. I was on a roll.

“I've been having sex—safe, consensual, adult sex—since I was thirteen! And I drive, and...”

“Okay, Ash. You know actual adults don't have to prove they're adults.”

“Only because no one ever asks them to,” I pouted. Carson shrugged. We lapsed into the kind of silence that soothes.

Soon, the city would become the color it had been when I regarded it from a roof top, at a crazy frat party in May. Perhaps even sooner, that crazy frat party in May would take on the sepia quality of a distant memory. It would be like I'd never kissed him, Mr. Tall Drink of Water. I still kept swearing to myself that that night had been different. I'd done plenty of crazy things in my life, but was still reluctant to categorize the chance meeting with the perfect stranger as just another one of Ash's “life stories.”

“You are thinking about a boy,” Carson said, grasping my hand and gently tugging me in the direction of the apartment she shared with three other singer-songwriters and one “paranormal psychology” student. “I can tell. Spill the beans, missy.”

“It's nothing. Just some stupid hook-up at a party.”

“That's how Tex and I met,” Carson muttered, wistfully. Then, she pointed a long, bony finger in the direction of the early moon, hanging high in the afternoon sky. “I believe in magic. Don't you?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It has to do with—if your world was rocked, your world was rocked. Don't downplay. Let it be a magical thing.”

By then, we'd reached my sister's house—an old clapboard painted bright blue, with two bedrooms on each floor. An algae-glazed pool held dominion in the backyard. I peered over the fence at the green water and remembered the delicious feel of those ice cubes gliding down my back. That single dramatic act had done something to my whole body. Whoever he was, he'd woken me up. I laughed darkly, to myself.

“What's his name, lady?” Carson muscled her tan shoulder against the sticky screen door. Even for half-sisters, we didn't look alike. Carson had never known her father, but Anya maintained that he'd been a member of the Choctaw nation. We had no real proof but my sister's dark, thick, straight hair, the texture of a horse's mane—and of course the dollop of extra melanin in her skin. Meanwhile, I could burn from walking around the city with shoulders uncovered for an hour.

“Wait,” she said, turning. Her paint-splattered overalls had already begun to catch early beams of moonlight. “Do you not know his name, Miss Thing?

I slapped my sister on her denim-clad ass, enjoying the peal of giggles this inspired.

“You little S-L-U-T!”

“It's not like that!” I shrieked, as she continued to taunt me. “We made a pact to not exchange names.”

“Why would you do that?”

My tongue suddenly felt dry in my mouth. The reasons why—the whole freaky map of possible reasons why—had actually never occurred to me before. Or perhaps, I'd never allowed them to occur to me.

“Because... he's probably a serial killer, and I'm an idiot.”

“Oh, Ash! Don't be so dramatic! I'm sure that's not it.” Yet Carson didn't sound fully convinced. And when she finally eked the door open, flooding the porch with warm light and the sounds and smells of her groovy roommates existing in their kitchen, she turned to deliver a pitying smile.

“Do you want to stay for dinner? Gonzo's making eggplant...something.” I caught the whiff of something sweet at the same time that I read the subtext in my sister's eyes. I was nobody's pity date. Ramen with Anya for the third night in a row would do fine for me, at least until the day I could finally escape that house.

“I'm good, babe,” I said, standing on tiptoe to kiss my sister on her rough cheek. Carson closed her eyes at the contact.

“Don't think I've forgotten that someone's got a big birthday coming up soon!” she hollered to my retreating back. I pretended to hunch with shame inside my needless black hoodie, and heard Carson laugh as her screen door slammed. If anything, the sounds of her beautiful home seemed to grow louder as soon as they were closed to me. I pictured her roommates dancing, ashing their cigarettes along the linoleum, playing games, making crafts. Carson had told me—many times before—that being an adult was in fact no picnic. But she sure had a way of making it look fun. A lot more fun, at least, than the miserable purgatory of one's junior year of high school, in a brand new town.

I picked my way through the city streets, following a Google Map until I reached the one part of the city I'd come to recognize as mine. Even though I'd been visiting Carson in Austin on short trips as soon as I was old enough to ride a bus alone (eleven, in my mother's estimate), this town had yet to feel like a cozy place to me. Besides, our mother couldn't be left alone for too long. All my life, I'd had to focus most of my energy on knowing where she was. And if she was feeding herself, and working, and going to the bathroom, etc.

As I walked the few blocks to our condo in Coppertree, more party sounds seemed to peek out from behind fences. Whole worlds, each of them locked to the outsider. It made me mad. It all made me mad. I was a tough fucking cookie, and Mr. Mystery was just some cagey college jock who couldn't handle an edge...why was I still giving him real estate in my brain? What had I even been doing, following him to that gas station in the middle of the night? So what to his brown eyes and rugged hands, that freaky speech. Though it could still make me wet, just hearing the words in my head: I will suck you dry...

I wasn't about to admit that I was lonely. But then, there was no one to admit this to.