Good Morning Heartache (8 page)
Read Good Morning Heartache Online
Authors: Audrey Dacey
“Not anymore.”
When Riley collected as much
as she could, she stood on the couch and then jumped over. She reached for the
bag and tore a hole in the plastic before Alexis could pull it away.
“Give it back to me!”
Alexis glared at her sister
before gripping the bag in both hands and walking to the sliding door that led
outside. Riley followed, but Alexis dodged her lithely several times. After she
stepped onto the deck, Alexis lifted the bag over her head and chucked it as
far as she could into the massive backyard. She watched as the tear became
wider, and working with the opening, it rained at least $2000 worth of colorful
fabric on her lawn. Her only regret was that the pond on her property wasn’t
close enough to reap any of the benefits.
“What did you just do?”
Riley stood wide-eyed at the edge of the deck, staring at her new wardrobe.
“You are a temporary guest
in my home, and your disgusting habits are not welcome. Keep your stuff in your
room and wash your dishes, or you’ll look back on today as the good old days,
you ungrateful little brat.” Alexis began walking back toward the house.
“Go pick up my clothes,”
Riley shrieked.
Alexis turned around and
looked directly into her sister’s eyes. “You’re out of your mind if you think
that’s going to happen.”
As she walked through the
doorway, Riley screamed at the top of her lungs and then ran past her sister,
shoving her as she went by. She ran up the stairs with heavy feet. Alexis
winced when she heard the door slam and the music blare from the top floor.
Her heart pounded against
her chest, and her hand shook slightly as she took a sip of her tea. This
wasn’t the best decision she had made in a slew of questionable decisions, but
it was certainly the most satisfying.
Alexis decided to go to the
basement for a while. She needed to calm down. And while it was probably not
the best place for her because she’d likely only become more frustrated, she
knew that Riley wouldn’t bother descending the stairs to a room she declared “a
waste of space.” Regardless, Alexis locked the double door behind her.
Alexis took a moment and
stared at the hundreds of “Once upon a times” in different colors, sizes, and
fonts wallpapering the east side of the room where her desk and computer sat.
Alexis tried to write every day, and the only thing she produced were those
pages on the wall.
She sat down in her rolling
desk chair and woke up her computer. She opened the word processer and typed
the four words that taunted her. For a while she stared at the black and white
on the computer screen. No story. No character.
The only thing she thought
about was the pit growing in her stomach. The one that doubled in size whenever
she looked out the floor to ceiling windows to the south and saw her sister’s
clothes littering the lawn. It was as though someone was pouring a pitcher of
regret into her body, and there was nothing she could do to stop them. She
never felt regret when her sister wasn’t here, so she just wanted her to go
away. It would be the best for both of their sanities.
Four days. It had only been
four days.
Their relationship hadn't
always been contentious. When their parents died in the car accident, Riley was
only eleven. Alexis wanted to hold her close and protect her from the world,
and for a few months she boarded the two of them up in the 15,000 square-foot
house that suddenly belonged to Alexis. She had not yet recovered from Frank
leaving her. With this on top of it, she shattered into a thousand pieces and
had no glue or will to fix herself.
She threw herself into the
job of being Riley's guardian. It wasn't easy, but Alexis didn't care. It was
her sister. The problem was that it never got easier. It only got worse. Riley
went mad with anger and sadness. At one point, she grabbed a sledge hammer from
their father’s workshop and destroyed the tree house both used as little girls.
That's when Alexis realized
she couldn't do it. She was only twenty-three and not at all cut out to be
someone's mother. She hired a nanny, tutor, and therapist. Then she avoided the
house as much as possible. Riley seemed to calm down a bit after that, at least
according to the reports from Alexis’s employees.
Alexis stood up and walked
to the bookshelves that lined the north wall. Her eyes ran along the spines of
the hundreds of books on the wall before her, but she knew exactly what she was
looking for and where it lived.
She pulled the paper back
anthology off the shelf and sat back down in her chair. She carefully opened to
page 207. The pages were yellowed a fragile from use and some pages were in the
beginning stages of falling out of the book altogether. She had more copies of
the book, but Alexis always opened this one. It was the first one printed.
At the top of the page, her
name was bold-faced and beneath that the title of her story: “Good Morning Heartache.”
She read through the words
she had memorized as a hot tear rolled down each of her cheeks forging a pathway
for the rest to follow.
How did her life go so
wrong? Was all this the price to publish one story?
She closed the book and
turned back to her computer. She logged on to Facebook and searched for Francis
Carello.
She clicked on the message
button and typed, “You’re a prick.” But she knew that without him, she wouldn’t
have had even that small success.
After Frank left, Alexis
knew two things to be true, she couldn’t write anything and love didn’t exist.
She tapped backspace until the message to Frank was gone. He wasn’t worth her energy,
and she didn’t need the fallout from another questionable decision while she
was still cleaning up the last.
Alexis picked up the phone
and dialed the Franklin School. She asked for the Dean of Students and was quickly
connected to him.
“Ms. Conner, what a pleasant
surprise. What can I do for you?”
“Dean Mueller, please tell
me you have a summer program available for your students.”
The old man cleared his
voice. “Yes, of course we do, but we’re already at capacity.”
Alexis groaned internally. “Is
there anything I can do to get Riley into that program? A donation? Anything?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Conner. We
just don’t have the staff or boarding to accommodate her.”
Alexis tapped her
fingernails on her desk. “You’re quite sure?”
“I’m sorry, but I am.”
She sighed, thanked him, and
then hung up.
A Google search for “delinquent
teenage girls’ summer camp” gave Alexis some interesting ideas, but as much as
she wanted to, she couldn’t bring herself to pick up the phone and call escorts
to take her sister to the Utah mountains to live in a make-shift tent and eat
beans and drink powered milk for the next eight weeks. She bookmarked the site,
knowing that a matter of four days could change her mind.
From that point on it was
Alexis’s mission to ignore and avoid her sister as much as possible. It worked
once, why not again? Alexis could work in the basement, take the dog on long
walks, and swim in the pond as though Riley weren’t there.
Alexis heard the front door
slam and the loud rumble of the clunker Riley’s boyfriend drove. If she was
lucky, he’d keep her sister occupied and out of the house.
Riley crossed her arms over
her chest after she buckled her seatbelt. “We have to go to the mall again.”
She felt Jimmy’s eyes on her, and she turned to look out the window so that he
couldn’t see that she was crying.
“Why? You just bought a ton
of clothes this morning,” he said in his smooth voiced that flowed into her
like liquid heat. He was always soft and gentle with her, never judgmental. She
was sure he wasn’t complaining about going to the mall again, even though he
didn’t seem to be a fan of the stores she liked.
“It’s a long story. I don’t
want to talk about it. I just need new clothes.”
“Did you get more money from
your sister?”
Riley wiped her face and sat
up. “I don’t need my sister’s money. I have my own in a trust fund, and I get
an allowance. I’ll have enough.”
Jimmy stared straight ahead
and pursed his lips as though he were in deep thought.
“Are you okay?” Riley asked.
She wished she knew what he was thinking. He would often get quiet and not say
anything, and she was constantly worrying that she said something wrong.
Jimmy grabbed her hand and
laced his fingers through hers and said, “Of course.” He lifted her hand to his
mouth and kissed the back of it. “I’m just trying to figure out how to get you
away from your sister, babe. I wish you could stay with me, but there isn’t
much space.”
He had three roommates, the
band members, in a two bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Franklin. She
wished he was closer.
“I know.” Riley sighed. “It’s
okay.”
“Are you coming to my show
tonight? There’s going to be a great party afterward. I’ll get you in.”
Riley smiled and warmth
radiated from her center all the way to her fingertips. “I’d like that.” She
rested her head on his shoulder.
“Do you mind chipping in 40
bucks for the keg? It would really help us out.” He turned and kissed her on
the top of the head and then squeezed the hand he was holding.
Riley looked up at her lead
guitarist boyfriend, his long hair almost completely covering one of his dark
eyes. She still couldn’t believe that he talked to her, much less that he
actually cared about her. Every time he touched her or looked into her eyes,
she melted.
“Of course. Anything you
need.”
Alexis pulled up to the
drugstore in the center of town. She loved her books, but if she spent too much
time with them, like she did this afternoon, the dust eventually got the best
of her allergies. She was sick of sitting around the house with Sam, so she
counted herself lucky that she was out of antihistamine.
Alexis looked at her red
nose and watery eyes in the rearview mirror of the Porsche and sighed. While
she would prefer to go to a local bar, have a drink or two, and flirt until
someone took her home, she didn’t feel like she could attract any high-quality
man-beef with snot cascading from her nostrils.
Instead she settled on
grabbing dinner from a local deli with an allergy pill kicker as her evening
plans. It would be almost as effective as going to a bar, since the chewable
tablet—Alexis always took children's medicine because she couldn't stand the
chalky taste of pills and the feel of them sliding down her throat—would knock
her out for the night. Alcohol on top of that was a wicked bad idea.
She picked up the food first
to make sure she would force herself to go home instead of hanging around a pharmacy
for several hours in an attempt to avoid Riley. It was just sandwiches, so it
wasn’t a great excuse, but it was something.
Alexis wasn't out to make an
impression, so she had pulled her long brown hair back in a ponytail, thrown on
a pair of black cheer shorts that stopped high on her thigh and had tiny slits
on either side, a
The Great Gatsby
t-shirt—she totally would have slept
with Gatsby, and probably Nick—and a pair of black and silver flip flops.
“In and out,” she said aloud
to herself. “I just need to get the drug and leave.”
Alexis stepped out the car
into the warm, humid air of the evening. It wasn’t even technically summer yet,
but the heaviness of the season weighed on her. People always became a little
crazy in the heat, and she was ready for the cool of autumn to bring back the
sanity.
She reached back into the
driver’s seat to grab her cell phone, which had fallen out of her purse, and
then turned toward the store. As she was about to take her first step, a strong
hand wrapped around her left shoulder, pulling her back and then pushing her
against her car. Alexis tripped over her feet in the swift movement and lost
one of her sandals.
“What the hell—”
A hot, wet mouth covered
hers. A rigid tongue assaulted all the corners of her mouth, and the more she
tried to fight the heavy body pinning her against her car, the tighter he
pushed against her.
Her eyes shot open, and she
stared at the familiar cheek of Richard Dunn. There wasn’t much else she could
do. His large, muscular body was immovable. He was a lot stronger than she was,
and even if she kneed him in the nuts, she wouldn’t be able to run away very
fast with one flip-flop.
Her body had gone rigid, and
her fists were in tight balls by her side. She wasn’t much of a crier, but
there was something about being completely taken over that brought a burn to
her eyes.
He licked the roof of her
mouth and one of his hands that had been pushing her shoulder down now ran the
length of her body. His breath was all mustard and onions. Alexis couldn’t help
but gag. No one in this town would help her. They all would think this was her
next conquest and would just be relieved it wasn’t one of their husbands.
Then she felt the tingle of
pressure fill her sinuses, and she knew that the inevitable would happen, and
for the first time all afternoon, she welcomed it. She took in several quick
breaths, squeezed her eyes shut tightly, and sneezed. God bless her allergies.
Richard stumbled backward,
wiping his face with his hands. Alexis could feel the tension fly out of her
body as she inhaled, but it came back almost immediately.
“What the hell, Alexis?” his
gruff voice demanded. He was always very demanding. It had been one of the
things that attracted Alexis to Richard originally, but turned out not to be an
asset.
“Excuse me?” She walked over
to her lost sandal and slipped it onto her foot. Richard stepped toward her,
and she scurried backward. “Don’t you dare.” Her voice was commanding and
steady, but she felt shaky to her bones. She lifted her hand to show her white
knuckles encasing her phone. “I know the members of the police force very well,
and I recommend that you leave before they get here.”
She continued to move
backward, hoping she would reach the automatic doors soon. There was no one in
the parking lot except her and Richard, but once she got inside the other
people would offer her some protection just by being there. Of course his
Mixed-Martial-Arts training would allow him to do whatever he wanted regardless
of anyone around, if that’s what he decided to do.
Richard narrowed his golden
eyes at her as he closed the space between them. He should have been a drill sergeant,
and she wondered if his temper was too hot even for the Army. He must have been
Other-Than-Honorably Discharged for a reason. She just wished she had known
that before she had to take out a restraining order, or, better yet, before she
decided to go back to a motel room with him.
“When are you going to come
to your senses, Ms. Conner?” He grabbed for her hand, but she pulled it back
and stepped inside the store.
“When are you going to
realize that I have?” Alexis turned around and headed straight for the allergy
medicine. She sat on the floor in front of the Benadryl and Allegra and put her
face in her hands. All her deep breaths couldn’t fill up the pit that had dug
itself into her chest.
She considered calling the
police, but there wasn’t much they could do at this point, and they probably
wouldn’t even come down right away. What the hell was the point of a
restraining order if no one was going to restrain the guy?
Richard was one of the ones
that had confused her. She had done everything right with him, followed all of
her rules, but everything went wrong. She initially enjoyed his
straightforwardness; the forcefulness had made the sex angry and spontaneous,
but satisfying. Now he was angry, spontaneous, and scary.
Alexis shuddered and held
her knees against her chest tightly. She took one more deep breath, grabbed a
box of grape flavored tablets, and stood up.
“In and out” was no longer
her motto for this trip, fearing that Richard was waiting for her outside, so
she grabbed a shopping basket and headed over to the lotion aisle to find
something relaxing. Her life had puddled into a hot mess, and she at least
wanted it to smell good.
She sat down again, crossing
her legs, and chose a bottle to sample. For a few minutes she just sat,
smelling the artificial roses in the bottle.
It wasn't until she heard
the ding of someone entering that she glanced at her watch. She hadn’t realized
just how long she had been sitting there, and the rumble of her stomach didn’t
care that it was after seven, it only knew it was past dinner time.
Alexis stood up and looked
at the doorway. She was one of those people that had to look over the
shoulder-high shelving to see who was coming and going. Upon seeing Ryan, she
bent her knees and dropped to a low squat in one smooth movement.
One stalker was enough for
one evening, and she prayed that Ryan hadn’t seen her. The vacant glare of an
obviously angry man with issues who didn't give her a kind eye when she looked
hot didn’t need to see her when she was running around in something that could
pass for PJs on a cooler night. Her nerves were still on high alert from her
last encounter with a man, and though her nerves did something very different
when Ryan was around, she couldn’t shake the feeling that his popping into her
life here and there wasn’t a good or innocent thing. She figured she could wait
there on the floor with all the wonderful smells until she heard another ding
and saw him leave.
A lemon-mint lotion, the cap
of which Alexis had clicked open, distracted her at once and she was able to
forget about Ryan for a moment. At least until his body was looming over hers.
She looked up at him with wide eyes as her heart fell into her stomach, and a
thick, coarse lump formed in her throat. She was not in the mood for another encounter
with Ryan; she didn’t want to be around men at all right now. They were too
much work, and she didn’t have the energy.
She was surprised to find a
smile on his face and in his glacier eyes when she looked up at him. Lifting
herself out of the awkward position in which she had with great effort been
holding herself and putting the lemon-mint lotion back on the shelf, she smiled
a hesitant smile back at him.
“You like lotion?” he asked,
unflinching, as though it weren't an awkward way to begin a conversation.
“I do,” she said, backing
away from him slightly. Alexis liked to be close to men when she was trying to
sleep with them. But right now she wasn't, and Ryan's tall stature, wide
shoulders, and hard chest made her uncomfortable. She couldn’t imagine what he
wanted. Okay, she could imagine, but she wasn’t in any place to oblige. She
could still taste Richard’s kiss on her lips, and she wasn’t
that
slutty.
“I'm here for toothpaste. I
forgot to pack some, and the hotel's sample ran out this morning.”
She wished she could brush
her teeth to get rid of the taste of onions.
“Okay,” she replied slowly.
Then she added, “Do you need me to point you in the direction of the
toothpaste? ‘Cause they have people here who can do that.” A strand of hair had
come loose at her temple, and she tucked it behind her ear.
Ryan was making her feel
small and delicate. Those were things she didn't like feeling, and she was
suddenly wishing that she was at home with her sister.
Ryan stood in a defensive
position, his hands in his pockets. His thumbs were looped through the belt
holes of his neatly pressed charcoal dress pants, and the violet button up he
wore brightened his blue eyes. The shirt was tucked, but the collar was
unbuttoned and the wrinkles around his neck let her know that a tie had been
removed. He looked less severe than when she saw him at Caitlyn’s. It didn’t
put her at ease. It was like she was seeing something she shouldn’t. As his
eyes took her in, she felt pin pricks along the length of her body.
“No, I don't need anything
from you. I just thought I would say 'hi.'“
“Okay…hi, then.” Could this
be the same guy with whom she exchanged witty banter last weekend? Why was he
saying anything to her? Alexis was unsure of what was happening here, but she
knew that she couldn't escape. Again. When she glanced behind her, she saw that
a woman had parked her cart perpendicular to the aisle. Her only exit was
blocked completely, and there was no way she could get past the figure in front
of her if he didn’t want her to. She regretted leaving home that evening and
wished she had just ordered a pizza and had a glass of wine.
“Are you okay, Alexis?” he
asked as though he cared. He raised his hand to comfort her, but she rolled her
shoulder back, avoiding his touch. She could still feel the pressure of
Richard’s grasp.
“I should be getting home to
my sister. The food is in the car.” It wasn't a lie. Though her sister probably
wasn't there, and wouldn't be for several hours, and the food was cold cuts
that would survive a few more minutes while she had an awkward conversation
with Ryan. Still, she didn’t feel like it was necessary to share all of this
information. In fact, she didn’t want to share anything with him. She glanced
out through the glass doors at the front. She didn’t see Richard, but it didn’t
mean he wasn’t there. She looked back up into Ryan’s cool eyes.
“Okay.” He paused and still
didn’t move. “But before you go, I also wanted to apologize for Monday. I was
really into my work. When I get like that, in the planning zone, I can come off
as a…”
“An ass. You were an ass.”
She finished for him, crossing her arms over her chest. She bit her lip hard,
waiting for his reaction. She needed to stop pissing off people who were bigger
than her.
But Ryan didn’t look angry.
He gave a half smile and looked away. “Yeah. Anyway. It wasn't anything
personal. I'm just not great with people when I'm working.” Ryan stuffed his
hands into his pockets and stared at his feet as he spoke the last sentence.
She was suddenly disarmed by
his sheepish body language, and what he was saying wasn’t creeping her out.
Even though he was almost a foot taller than her and could body check her in
one quick movement, she was pretty sure he was too tame to do it. “Don't you
work with a lot of people as an architect?”
“When they talk about work,
it's not a big deal. It's when other things come up. I'm just not in the social
mood when I’m working. I'm better outside of the job.”
Alexis made a twisted faced
as she battled with herself. He now seemed more delicate than she was, and she
didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Before she could really consider it, she
said, “You were creeping me out. You came over here asking about lotion,
trapping me in this aisle, and it was awkward, and sudden, and unpleasant. It
was a weird combination of a come on and the freaky guy who talks to bushes.”
Ryan stared into her eyes
without any expression and then sighed. “Really?”
Alexis nodded, a little
peeved that he hadn’t taken her less-than-subtle hint and moved out of her way.
“Last weekend you weren’t this bad, and of course, I don't know how you are at
work,” she added, trying to be encouraging.
“I have reason to believe
that I am actually not that much better.” He tilted his head back and focused
on the ceiling. Alexis couldn’t help but notice the long, lean lines of his
body, the clean trim of his beard, and the tightness of his tense forearms. It
was a shame that a man as good looking as Ryan was unable to strike up casual
conversation in a drugstore with someone who wasn’t altogether a stranger.
