Dirty (13 page)

“Elle. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to. I promise.”

I nodded. After a few moments he went back to what he’d been doing before, but it took me a while to relax into his touch again. He took his time. Moved slow. Easy. He murmured sweet words into my ear and nuzzled my skin while he stroked his hands over all parts of me. He eased me toward arousal with his fingertips and lips. His tongue painted calligraphy on my collarbone until at last he urged a sigh from me. Then a gasp.

Everything went away but him. It was glory, it was joy, it was pleasure, oblivion, infinity. It was sex, but there was intimacy too, a frightening thing I shied from but couldn’t force myself to refuse.

When I came, I said his name. I sobbed a breath, and said it again. He pressed his hand against the pulse of my orgasm and held me as it flooded my body.

“What is it about you?” He whispered in my ear while my body still twitched. “I can’t get enough of it.”

My breath rattled in my throat like stones skipping on water. I had no words to give him. No explanation. I didn’t understand it, myself. It scared me, but then so do roller coasters, and I ride them anyway, too.

New habits are as easy to gain as old ones are difficult to break. Dan became a habit slowly, a tiny step at a time, inch by figurative inch. If we didn’t see each other, we talked on the phone. He sent me funny text messages and e-mails, and IM’d me late at night with inoffensively lewd innuendos that made me laugh and sigh in equal amounts.

The sex was fantastic. Varied. Eager. Exciting and slowly familiar, which was something I craved and feared at the same time. I had told him I would go as far as he would take me. It had been a bit of braggadocio, maybe, that statement. Dan took me to places I’d never been, had never allowed myself to go, and I let him take me there because, simply, he made me want to let him. I had given him my real name. I had given him my body. I could not, however, give myself. Not completely. I held back, and if he sensed there were still secrets I kept, truths I left untold, he didn’t ask me about them.

I always went to his place. Never took him to mine. I didn’t want to have to explain the stark furnishings, the lack of color, the absence of family photos. I didn’t want to risk him overhearing my mother’s messages. I didn’t want to have to reveal myself to him.

He didn’t push, and I didn’t pull away. We coasted like that, easing into comfort, and I tried to pretend there was less to it than there was. Three weeks or so passed that way, with him insinuating himself into my life so seamlessly I wished I couldn’t remember what life had been like before I met him.

I did remember, and there were days when I thought it had been better and days when I admitted it had been worse, but every time I thought I would simply stop returning his calls he said or did something that made me see how purely silly such a thing would be.

As spring became summer, I no longer took the ride home into darkness. Therefore, it was no difficult feat to spot the garbage bags scattered all over the stoop next to mine. As I fit my key into my door, the Ossleys’ flew open and Gavin stumbled out.

He wore the same oversize black jeans and gray T-shirt I was accustomed to seeing him in, though he’d left off the massive hooded sweatshirt. His hair fell in his eyes as he crouched protectively next to one of the bags.

I didn’t mean to stare. I didn’t want to. Whatever domestic drama was going on next door, I played no part in it. What happens at home stays at home. My key and the stubborn lock, however, seemed determined to block me.

“I told you! Clean your shit up or it’s going in the trash!” Mrs. Ossley appeared in the doorway. “God damn it, Gavin, I work all day, I don’t need to come home to a pigsty!”

“Then stay out of my room!”

On my other side of the tiny alley separating our houses, Mrs. Pease cracked open her door and peeked out. Mrs. Pease had lived in this neighborhood for forty years. She kept her house tidy and in decent repair, set out her garbage at the curb on trash days and had a cat I sometimes saw in the front window. Beyond that, she never bothered me. We shared a look through the crack in her door.

Mrs. Ossley looked up and saw me. She looked down at Gavin. I thought maybe she’d have been embarrassed to have been caught in such a display of belligerence. The glass she lifted to her lips a moment later showed me the reason she wasn’t.

“Dennis is coming over tonight, and I don’t need you junking up the place. Get your shit cleaned up,” she continued as though I hadn’t been there.

I wished I hadn’t. Gavin stood up. He brushed hair from his eyes. His voice had gone high and shaking.

“Just stay out of my room! Stay out!”

“Your room is in my house!”

At last my key slid into the lock, and I vowed to treat it with oil to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. I closed the door behind me. My stomach churned, though it shouldn’t have, really. Teens and their parents fought all the time about keeping their rooms clean. She hadn’t hit him, so far as I could tell. There was no reason for me to be involved. There was no reason for the scene to make my hands shake.

Aside from the glass in her hand, the slur in her voice. The way he’d cowered at first when stumbling out the door and crouched, protecting a bulging plastic trash bag.

Not everyone who drinks is an alcoholic. Not everyone who gets drunk and screams and treats their children badly is an alcoholic, either. Some people would be utter assholes without the benefit of drink to lubricate their nasty tongues. I thought Mrs. Ossley might be that sort.

In the end, did it matter? It wasn’t my business. She did have the right to expect her home to be kept neat. Teenage boys are notorious for creating mess. She had the right to demand obedience from him, her son.

But my mind kept going to the glass in her hand and the way he had cowered, though he stood taller than she by a good three inches.

It wasn’t my business. It wasn’t my concern. She wasn’t hitting him, so far as I could see, and even if I knew that his story about the cat scratches rang false, I also knew it was unlikely his mother had made them. Mothers don’t take razor blades to their children’s arms and make perfect, aligned slashes. Kids do that to themselves. But it wasn’t my business.

Not my concern.

Gavin was a good kid. Helpful. But he wasn’t my kid.

I went up the stairs and shed my clothes, tossing them into an overflowing hamper that was a sudden surprising reminder of just how off track I’d let my schedule become. It had been days since I’d thought of doing laundry. Days, too, since I’d vacuumed or bothered to do more than toss my dishes in the dishwasher. If I needed a reminder that Dan was taking up a lot of my time, that was a good one.

Thinking of Dan, I took a shower, long and hot. Relishing the steam and the scent of the special lavender soap my mother would have sniffed at because it wasn’t full of foreskins or whatever she used to keep herself from wrinkling, I washed my hair. The wet weight of it fell down to my lower back, the longest I’d ever worn it. Most of the time I kept it up or braided, so feeling it now, over my shoulders, down my back, heavy with water, surprised me, too.

It was like I was waking up after a long sleep, or maybe slipping into a dream, delicious in its surreality. The water on my skin, the heat, the scent of the soap, the feeling of my own hands moving over my body…I had felt them all before. Nothing new. Yet it felt new to me. I felt new to me.

I’ve never been much of a romantic. Facts and figures have always made more sense to me than flowers and fantasies. I love fairy tales not because I have ever believed they could be true, but because the ridiculousness of the themes they promote have always seemed to prove to me I am right in doubting them. A princess locked in a glass tower, waiting for a prince? Glass breaks. What sort of princess waits for a prince to save her, anyway? A stupid, unresourceful one. Princess Pennywhistle never waited for a man to rescue her. She did it herself.

A romantic nature had escaped me, but that didn’t mean I was immune to the appeal of it. Just because I couldn’t convince myself of its reality didn’t mean I didn’t want to believe in romance.

If there is a question about why him, why Dan, why did I want this man after so long without wanting any, I have no answer for it. Some people believe in fate or karma. Some believe in lust at first sight and others have faith there is one person in the universe for each of us, one true love we recognize immediately upon meeting.

I believe in numbers and logic, in calculations that can be proven, in results based on fact, not fate. I believe space abhors a vacuum and that we are all empty, just waiting to be filled.

I believe Dan and I were drawn together like stars whose gravity brings them closer and closer until they merge to create a sun. I believe I was empty and waiting to be filled, and Dan was there to do it. And I believe it could have been someone else, that we are not bound for one person in the universe, that another time or another man might have found the way to fill me. I believe that, but I am glad it was Dan who did. Dan had opened my eyes, but only because they were ready to open.

I stayed in the shower until the water ran cold and perked my skin into gooseflesh. The softness of my robe and the towel I wrapped around my hair added to my sense of being in a dream. So did the steam over the mirror, which I wiped away to stare at my reflection, staring for an outward sign of my inward change.

I couldn’t see any, of course. My eyes didn’t suddenly gleam with new light, the lines around them didn’t disappear. My mouth had not all at once begun to curve upward of its own accord.

Naked, I sat on my bed to comb through my hair, easing the tangles until the comb ran straight through from crown to ends without snagging. The motion soothed me, almost hypnotic in its repetition. Sensual. The smoothness of my bedspread against my skin, the warmth of the night air coming in my open windows, the soft hiss of the comb through my hair all created a cocoon around me. Made me aware.

I smoothed scented cream over my skin and slid into soft pajamas. I let my hair hang free around my shoulders. Every limb felt languorous, relaxed. I lay back on my bed for a few minutes, staring at the cracks in my ceiling and for once, not counting them. I made pictures from the lines. A bird. A woman’s profile. A clock.

Something had shifted inside me, something I had no words to describe. For the first time in years, I didn’t feel as though I stood behind a closed door, terrified for the moment it would open. The time had come for things to change.

My body and mind might have been content to drift along with thoughts of this new path, but my stomach grumbled its discontent, and I roused myself from my lethargy to move downstairs and feed it. Hours had passed since my return home. Night had fallen.

As I popped a frozen meal into the microwave, I heard muffled shouts through our shared kitchen wall. I had been in the Ossley house before I bought mine. It had been empty at the time, the layout a mirror image of mine. I’d chosen mine because the interior features had been in better condition, but I remembered the way it had felt to walk through both, one right after the other, creating a sense of déjà vu slightly offset by feeling like I’d walked through a mirror.

The microwave beeped. The voices next door grew louder. Something thumped against the wall so hard it rattled the picture hung over my kitchen table. A moment later, a motion in the window overlooking my postage stamp of lawn caught my eye, and I went without thinking toward the window.

The Ossleys’ back door had been flung open, and a golden rectangle of light illuminated their yard. As I watched, something flew out of the door and landed in their grass. A moment later, Gavin followed it.

“I warned you!” Mrs. Ossley shouted from the back porch. “Clean up your fucking shit or it’s getting tossed, god dammit! Dennis is gonna be here in fifteen fucking minutes, and I don’t want your shit all over the fucking house, Gavin!”

I cringed at the language and became aware, suddenly, that I was being just the sort of nosy neighbor I despised, peeking out the blinds. I stepped back from the window but could still see through it. Could still hear Mrs. Ossley’s shouts through the open screen. More thumps and thuds as more things flew out the back door to land in the grass, and then I saw what they were.

Books.

The bitch was throwing books. One of them struck Gavin on the shoulder and fell in a flutter of pages to the grass. He bent to pick it up, his arms full of them. His face had twisted.

She threw another one, and I realized she wasn’t just tossing them out the door. She was aiming for him. This one, a thick hardback, struck him in the hip hard enough to knock him back a step.

They say that people in tense situations can do things like lift cars or run into burning buildings. This wasn’t as dramatic as that, but I did move fast, without thinking, and was out my back door and into my yard before I even had time, really, to ponder it.

A waist-high chain link fence separates our patches of grass. Mindful of my privacy, I’d had it installed when I moved in. It had served to keep my neighbors from encroaching on my property, but now it kept me out of theirs as effectively.

“Gavin,” I said. “Are you all right?”

He startled, though he had to have seen me flying out of my kitchen. He opened his mouth to say something, but his mother answered for him.

“Get inside the house, Gavin.”

I looked over at her. Silhouetted in the light from her house, she was no more than a shadow. I had no trouble seeing the glass she still held. Apparently not even throwing books was enough reason to set it down.

Gavin bent to pick up the books she’d thrown.

“Leave that,” she ordered. “Get inside.”

“Mrs. Ossley. Is there a problem?” My voice sounded colder than I’d meant it to, and it must have antagonized her.

“No, Miss Kavanagh” came her retort, the words spitting out of her like they tasted of vomit. “Why don’t you go back inside and mind your own business?”

“Gavin?” I asked quietly. “Are you all right?”