Calico (6 page)

“
Say. It.
”

I can’t placate him and give him what he wants this time, though. I just can’t. If I utter the words he wants to hear coming from my mouth, I’m in so much trouble. For the past two years, he’s been skating toward an eventuality that I know will happen one day. I know, beyond the hair pulling and the slapping and grazing touches, there’s more to come. I’ve managed to avoid it up until now, but I see the way he looks at me. I’ve felt his eyes on me when we’ve been eating dinner. I’ve kept my head down, my eyes on my plate, and I’ve prayed so hard that today isn’t the day I find out how far he’ll go. Now, with a few beers in him and fire in his veins, I know without a doubt I’ll be signing off on something if I say the word
fuck
.

“I don’t want to have sex until I get married,” I whisper. “I don’t look at boys like that.”

My father grabs hold of my hair and yanks my head to one side, shoving his face into mine. Once upon a time, my mother looked up into his eyes and saw love and affection there, I’m sure, but all I see is hate and anger. “You should know by now that I can tell when you’re lying, Coralie. I’ve seen you grow from a baby into the beginnings of a deceptive little whore. I know exactly what’s going on in that head of yours, and it’s fucking filth. Every time you see a boy on the street, I know what you’re thinking.
You. Want. To. Fuck
.”

I shake my head. “No, no, no. I don’t. I promise I don’t.”

My father leans in so close to me that the end of his nose is touching mine. I can see the fine spider web of purple veins that spread across his cheeks, and I can smell the alcohol on his breath. “Look me in the eye and say it again. I want to believe you, okay? I want to believe you, but you make it so goddamn hard.”

I can barely see him through my tears; I blink them away, too scared to lift my hand and wipe my eyes. “I don’t ever want to have sex,” I say. “Not until I’m married.”

“Not without my blessing?”

I nod sadly. “Of course, Daddy. Never without your blessing.”

He pins me under his gaze for a minute and it’s the longest minute I’ve ever lived through. I see a succession of emotions play across his face—anger, sorrow, curiosity, desire—and it’s like I’ve just spun the wheel on some sort of game show. I don’t know which emotion he’ll land on, and my heart is beating out of my chest like a jackhammer just thinking about what will happen if he settles on lust.
 

Finally, he reels back, shaking his head as though he’s majorly disappointed in me. I’m relieved, but I’m also still very worried. Disappointed is better than turned on, but this is still my father. He still does terrible, terrible things when he’s disappointed.
 

“You may not go to a party, Coralie. You may not socialize with teenaged boys. They’re only after one thing. It makes me sick to think of them undressing you with their eyes. I’d fucking kill anyone who tried to touch you. You know that. And I know there’s always alcohol at these parties. Those little shit heads would all be wandering around with their dicks hard, their brains addled with beer, and you’re so innocent, Coralie. You’re so sweet. They would take advantage of you, okay?” He stands, running his hands back through his thinning hair. “So no. You’re going to stay here with me. Come on. Stand up.”
 

I stand, and my legs feel like they’re about to collapse right out from underneath me. I’m so full of adrenalin and panic that my vision feels like it’s narrowing, blurring around the edges. He goes from crazy to overly affectionate sometimes, and that’s what I think has happened for a moment. I think it until his fist comes flying at me out of nowhere and hits me on the side of the head. My brain feels like it rattles around the inside of my skull like a pinball, hitting every single bell on its way around. Staggering back a step, I hit the side of the bath, and there’s nowhere else for my momentum to take me but down. My back spasms with pain as I collapse into the tub, all of the air rushing out of my lungs in one agonizing grunt.
 

Overhead, the light fitting above the mirror sways, throwing crazed shadows up the walls as my father steps closer to the bath. He looms over me, his face obscured by the blazing light behind his head, and I realize that he could easily kill me. It would be so, so easy for him to end my life right now. He’s in such a dark place; he probably would regret it later, but now, here, with so much alcohol flooding his body, he wouldn’t think twice.
 

“I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry. I—I don’t want to go. I want to stay here, with you.”

He just stands there, and I still can’t see his face, so it’s hard to know what he’s thinking. My vision is blurred, and the outline of his body seems fuzzy and distorted. He seems to flicker, like a ghost in a bad horror movie. I’d be less afraid of a ghost, though. After a dragged out minute, he slowly, slowly turns away. My heart is in my throat as he silently leaves the bathroom and closes the door behind him.
 

I cry without making a sound. I lay in the bathtub, my arms and legs tangled up, ears ringing, back in so much pain I can hardly move, and I cry for what feels like a lifetime.
 

I stay there for hours. Only when I hear the low grumble of the television kick in downstairs do I cautiously climb out of the tub, body aching, and creep back into my bedroom.
 

It seems strange that only a few hours ago I was trying on my mother’s dress and thinking about a boy. Now, Callan Cross is the furthest thing from my mind. Maybe if my life
was
a movie, he’d somehow know I was hurt and sad and he would climb up some conveniently placed tree outside my bedroom window. He’d tap on the glass and climb into my bedroom, and he’d somehow make all of this miraculously better. That’s not what happens, though. Callan doesn’t show up at my window, and I don’t go to the party. I drag my duvet off my mattress, and I slide myself underneath my bed, and I stare at the shining silver weave of wires three inches from my face, and I see how long I can go without drawing a breath.
 

I heard once that it’s impossible to kill yourself by holding your breath. It really is.

CHAPTER FIVE

CALLAN

Shane

NOW

I wake up and my dick is throbbing like crazy. It’s not normal morning wood. It’s an insistent, painful demand, courtesy of the fucked up sex dream I was just having. Coralie was on her hands and knees, looking up at me from behind tousled, dark bangs—I know for a fact that she doesn’t have bangs anymore, but in my dreams her hair is exactly as it was when we were seventeen—and she was whimpering, making soft, urgent sounds as she crawled across the hardwood flooring of my apartment in New York. Funny how my brain blends the Coralie from my past so seamlessly into my present. I dream about her often. All the time, in fact. There have been times over the years when it’s almost driven me insane. Seeing her so vividly every night when I closed my eyes, smelling her hair, feeling her skin on mine, then waking and not finding her next to me? That has been pure torture.
 

Lying in bed with the morning sun flooding through my bedroom windows, it’s even more torturous that I know she must be here by now. Wild horses couldn’t drag her back into the house next door, but she must be close. Maybe she’s staying with Friday. Maybe at a motel on the outskirts of town. Wherever she is, it’s as though I can feel her presence, like my body is a tuning fork and I’ve been struck, every molecule in my body ringing with electricity at the prospect of seeing her.
 

I lay in the bed I slept in since I was a child, barely awake, my hand squeezing my dick, and I think about what I’ll do when I do finally lay eyes on Coralie. It will be such a bittersweet moment. For those first three seconds, as our eyes lock onto one another, she’s going to be processing her shock. I’m going to be drinking her in, savoring every last inch of her before she turns angry and runs away from me.

My thoughts drift. I doze, and a part of my brain thinks I’m awake and my mother is calling me from down the hallway, asking for water. That’s all she ever seemed to do at the end. All she ever wanted. Water. Ice chips when she couldn’t really swallow properly anymore. No matter how sick she got, she never stopped laughing, though. Every day, I would hear her laughing about something.
 

Outside, someone starts up a chain saw, and all thoughts of my mother and Coralie vanish like smoke. I’m pulled out of my dream state and back into reality, and I realize I have to piss like a goddamn racehorse. As I pad naked to the bathroom and take care of that, I think about the things I need to do today.
 

Visit Shane. Visit Mom. Buy groceries. Go pay my respects to Friday. Go to the funeral home and lurk like a creepy motherfucker until I see Coralie. If I’m honest, I’d drive over there right now and sit in the parking lot until she showed up. Wouldn’t matter how much of the day I missed. It’s a supremely bad idea, though. Seeing her for the first time shouldn’t take place as she’s making arrangements for her father’s burial. It should be later, at a far sexier time of day. Right after I’ve been on an eight-mile run and I’m covered in sweat, for instance.
 

Shane was my best friend in high school. I find him at the hardware store his family has owned for the past thirty years, and the fucker looks like he’s gained twenty pounds. His face is obscured by the most ridiculous looking beard, too. Before I shaved mine, it was trimmed and neatly groomed, more hipster than Wildman. Shane looks like he’s fucking homeless.

I haven’t told him I’m back purely so I could swing by and surprise the shit out of him, and from the stunned look on his face as I walk toward him, I’ve succeeded in my goal.
 

“Are you frickin’ kidding me!” he yells, slamming a pricing gun down onto the counter top in front of him.
 

An old man standing a few feet away from Shane looking at Command Strips with his back to me clutches a hand to his chest, making a choking sound. “Jesus Christ, Shane Willoughby, what in god’s name is wrong with you? I have a pacemaker, damn it!” He turns and I see that it’s Mr. Harrison, my biology teacher from high school. He was old as dirt when I was enrolled at Port Royal High, and now he looks like he has one foot in the grave, poor bastard.
 

He claps eyes on me and he immediately starts shaking his head like he’s seen a ghost. “Well. I never thought I’d see the day,” he says.
 

“You mean you
hoped
you wouldn’t,” I reply, offering out my hand for him to shake. Mr. Harrison pumps my arm up and down, squinting at me through his inch thick horn-rimmed glasses.
 

“You look older,” he advises me. “Probably drinking too much.”

“Definitely.”

“Smoking too much.”

“Without a doubt.”

He casts a cloudy eye down at my crotch, one bushy gray eyebrow rising slowly. “Sleeping with too many women, I’ll bet, too.”

I love that he’s looking at my dick like it’s about to pop out of my pants and try to defend itself. “One hundred percent true,” I say, laughing. “I just can’t help myself.”

“That was always your problem, Cross. You never could.” Mr. Harrison’s head rocks back and he laughs, deep and throaty, clutching at his side with his free hand. “Never mind me. I’m just jealous I didn’t have as much fun as you boys when
I
wore a younger man’s clothes.”

He bids me farewell and leaves the store, and Shane stands there with his arms folded across his chest, glaring at me.
 

“Can I get a number one Phillips head and a pack of those screws, please?” I grin from ear to ear, trying not to laugh.

“You’re joking, right?”

I fight earnestly to sober up my expression until I look more serious. “No. Not at all. You know how I like a good screw.”

Shane picks up the pricing gun and throws it at me. He was aiming for my head, but I catch it out of the air and hold it up like a regular gun, aiming it directly at his face. “Well, you don’t seem all that happy to see me,” I say. “I was expecting more fanfare. A tickertape parade. A cold beer and a handshake in the very least.”

“You aren’t drinking any of my beer, asshole. You’re lucky I didn’t throw a hatchet just now instead of that price gun.” He looks genuinely pissed off, which is definitely not a good thing.
 

“I’m sorry man, okay?”

“You don’t know the meaning of the word.” Shane steps out from behind the counter and snatches the price gun from my hands. “You were meant to be my best man, fuck head. Best men don’t bail one month before a wedding and leave their friends to find a stand-in at such short notice. I had to ask Tina’s brother, man. That was such a dick move.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry. That was three years ago, though, Shane. I thought you’d be over that by now.” I really did think that. I didn’t for a second think he would still be pissy over the fact that I got called away for work at the last minute before his wedding. Weddings are such non-events. I’m always surprised when guys seem to enjoy them. I always assume people bear them because social etiquette demands they must. It seems Shane isn’t of the same mind as me.
 

“It was the day I promised to love and protect my wife forever. How can you think I’m over it by now? I need at least another three years. And you should probably buy me a Tesla or some shit as well. That might help.”

“If buying you a Tesla will make you feel better, I’ll make it happen.”

“You can’t afford a Tesla, you son of a bitch. You get paid peanuts. You and I both know it.”

I do get paid peanuts. When Mom died, I’d been completely stunned by the fact that she’d left me a chunk of money. A very sizeable chunk of money. Without it, I’d never have been able to live the life I do now. A photographer’s wage is pretty pathetic, even when they’re at the very top of the food chain. Unless you’re David Bailey or Ansel Adams, you can pretty much forget about making six figures. Even high five figures is impressive.