Informed Consent (5 page)

Both boys
shook heads.

“How come
he got to stay home?” Lucas’s complaint was halfhearted. In general he enjoyed
school and today he’d had a decent day.
 
Most of the teachers had given him a wide berth. Several had laid hands
on his shoulder and shaken their heads in mute expressions of support and
sympathy.
 
Megan Marie had given
him her double chocolate chewy brownie.
 
William had given him a joint the night before and he still had a goodly
portion of it left.

“He
didn’t get to stay home, and I’m going to kill him when I get my hands on him.
I need you guys to go to school, okay?”

Lucas
shrugged.
 
“Fine.
 
No biggie.
 
Tell Will.
 
Zander and I are cool.”

“Don’t
mention this to Andrew, ok?”

Lucas
shot his sister a sharp glance.

Denise
blushed.
 

“You want
us to LIE?”
 
Zander paused, a
wizened orange half way to his mouth.

“No.
 
Don’t bring it up,” Denise snapped.

“But if
he asks?”

 
Lucas could be such a little shit.

“We tell
the truth?”

“No,”
Denise snapped.
 
“Lie thru your
teeth.
 
Just this once.”

There was
never just once.
 
She was going to
hell.

***

“You’re a
flaming dickhead.” Samantha threw the words lightly but tinged with a certain
note of rebuke toward her brother in law Andrew when she walked into her
kitchen several hours later.

Her
husband, ten years older than Andrew, lounged against the sink.
 
His long legs were stretched out,
crossed at the ankles, and he held a beer in one large hand.
 
The other hand was braced against the
kitchen counter.
 
He was laughing
when Samantha walked in and her heart pounded the way it always did when she
saw him for the first time after they’d been separated for too long.
 
Like an eight hour work day.
 

Andrew
had asked his big brother the all important question – ‘Do you think I’m
an idiot?’ Thereby eliciting Samantha’s opening comment.

Sam moved
to her husband and tilted her head up.
 
A tall woman, she still had to reach to touch his lips.
 
When she planted a kiss on his mouth
heat surged through her the way it always did, even with the briefest kiss.

“Aren’t
you going to wallop her for that?”
 
Andrew growled.

“She
didn’t call me a dick head.” Her husband laughed.
 
He did slide a hand down his wife’s butt, only to press her
more tightly against him.

“What did
I do?” Andrew had his own beer and took a long swig, never taking his eyes off
his sister in law.

“I
stopped by to see your new wife today Andrew.
 
I wanted to box your ears.”
 

Samantha
pushed herself away from her husband, but pressed her lips to his one more time
and then turned to leave.
 
Neil
caught her by one arm and hauled her back to him.
 
Andrew groaned. Neil grinned.
 
“What’s wrong, bro?
 
Little bride not taking care of your husbandly needs?”

Andrew
scowled, but wisely ignored the question.

“How’d
that come about, Sam?
 
I mean the
dropping by to see Denise part, not the wanting to box my ears part.”

“I
stopped by to meet her. I figured she might appreciate a visit.
 
The poor woman’s parents only died a
few weeks ago and you’ve forced her into a marriage she’s totally freaked
by.
 
If you ask me, she looks ready
to lose it.”

“She
probably is,” Andrew muttered.

Neil
shook his head.
 
“Well, then you
get to help her put the pieces back together.
 
I sure as hell don’t know why you decided to make this such
a hard row to hoe.”
 

Andrew
sighed.
 
“I wanted to be up
front.
 
Not manipulative.”

Neil
pushed himself off the counter and yanked a chair out before straddling it.

“Look
Andrew.
 
Think about deciding you
want to convince a wild mustang to let you ride it.”

“Oh, for
pity’s sake,” Samantha groaned.
 
“A
wild mustang?”

“It’s a
metaphor, woman,” Neil said with great dignity.

He
reached one long arm out across the table and snapped his fingers at his
brother to get his attention.
 
“Work with me here, bro.
 
You have the mustang --beautiful, intelligent, strong…”
 
He shot a look full of laughter at his
wife.

Samantha
whacked him across the back of his head.

Andrew
wondered if he would ever have the relationship with Denise that Neil had with
Samantha.

“Beautiful,
intelligent, strong…” he prompted his brother.

“But
wild,” Samantha reminded him.
 
“Don’t forget wild.”

“Here’s
my point,” Neil said. “What do you do?
 
Do you sit down on the rail of the corral and say ‘Listen here little
lady, I am going to be your master.
 
I will be in control of you.
 
You will take my direction. Do you let her starve until she has no
choice but to eat from your hand? No, dumb ass, you don’t.”
 
He pounded his fist once on the table
for emphasis.

“If
you’re smart you go out every day, a couple of times a day, and spend a few
minutes where she can see you and get used to you being around.
 
You work your way closer bit by bit.
 
You let her get to know the sound of
your voice.
 
Eventually you get her
to come to you because she’s curious, and no longer afraid.
 
Someday she’s going to take an apple or
carrot out of your hand.
 
One day
she’s going to let you touch her, slide your hand down her flank…”

Samantha
leaned over her husband and ran her hand through his hair.
 
“Want to go upstairs, my Mustang
Trainer?”

Neil
caught his wife with an arm around her hips and pulled her into his lap.

Samantha
settled there happily.
 

“Seriously,
Andrew.
 
She’s a baby.
 
A baby whose parents up and died
without warning and she suddenly finds out she’s responsible for her
brothers.
 
She has no choice but to
hand herself over to you, a guy who simply announces in no uncertain terms that
he intends to treat her in a manner society has taught her is abusive. Of
course she’ close to collapse.”

“I have
no intention of abusing her!”

“She
doesn’t know that, does she?”
 
Neil
was matter of fact. “I don’t know where you got your advice, bro, but it was
bad.
 
You made it a lot harder than
it needed to be. You should have had a bridle on before you tossed the saddle
on her back.”

Samantha
bristled.
 
“A bridle?”

Neil
groaned.
 
“This is what’s known as
a EUPHEMISM. I guess it would be more correct to say he should have had her
eating out of his hand first. Happy, Woman?”

She
kissed him.

Andrew
groaned again and lay his head down carefully on the table.

Samantha
leaned over from Neil’s lap and patted his head.

“Stop it,
woman!” Neil arched in the opposite direction, pulling his wife’s hand away
from his brother.
 
“Don’t try to
make it better for him!
 
He should
feel miserable. He’s an ass and an idiot who should listen more to his big
brother.”

Andrew
swore quietly and sat up.
 
“I
didn’t want to manipulate her.”
 
He
shoved himself away from the table.
 
“We’d been dating for quite a while.
 
I fell for her big time.
 
She said she loved me. She knew I was wild about her. So I’d
d already fed her the goddamn apples from my goddamn hand.”

“Well
when she balked, bro, you needed to back off.
 
Not get out the twitch.”

“The
twitch?”
 
Samantha shot up straight
in the Neil’s lap.

“Rope
thingy on the end of a short club.
 
You wrap it around the soft part of a horse’s nose and-”

“You
never did any such thing!”

“Well, of
course not,” Neil snapped.
 
“I’m
the ‘let her get used to the sound of your voice’ guy, remember?
 
Andrew’s the twitch man.”

“I have
never used a twitch on a horse in my life.”
 
Andrew snarled.

Neil
stood up and took his wife with him into his arms.

“Metaphor,
bro.
 
Metaphor.”
 

He paused
in the doorway to the kitchen and looked back at his little brother.

“Is the
sex good?”

Andrew
gulped and nodded, without picking his head up.

“Use
it.
 
Put your hands all over
her.
 
Whisper in her ear.
 
Tell her you’re going to suck on her… I
don’t know – choose your favorite body part, Drew.” He moved toward the
door but threw back a last piece of advice.
 
“Keep her aroused!”

***

Overall,
William’s day had been pretty damn fine.
 
He’d slept in and while he’d been startled to find himself alone in the
house, he didn’t mind one bit.
 
He
ate everything he could find in the kitchen --which wasn’t much if you didn’t
go for liver pate in a can -- and when he saw Mrs. Murphy the cleaning lady
heading up the walk from the courtyard, he escaped out the front.
 
He wasn’t afraid of Mrs. Murphy.
 
She liked to talk.
 
He didn’t.
 
At least, not to her, not today.

William
was an artist. He didn’t make a big noise out of it or anything, but he liked
to go to the old carriage house.
 
His mother used to have a studio there but she’d eventually moved into a
much bigger, much fancier one in the main house.
 
William’s father designed the new one for her as a surprise,
stocked it chock full of everything, brand new, and when he presented it to her
his mom never bothered to move any of her old supplies or even any of her
paintings out of the carriage house.
 
Being an artist was a
thing
for Moms, not a passion.

Even her
old kiln was still in working order. A small hoist stood in one corner, left
over from the short lived
Large Freestanding
Sculpture Period
. He jacked his music up loud enough to cause the ears of a
lesser mortal to bleed and started building a huge canvas, his biggest
yet.
 
When he got bored with that
he headed out to hook up with his buds.

***

 
Andrew left his
brother’s house.
 
It would not be
exaggerating to say his heart felt buoyant.
 
Neil was right about some things and wrong about
others.
 
Last night had been good,
very good and he was going to build on that.
 
He grinned and stepped on the gas.

The car shot forward and Andrew wove skillfully in and out
of traffic before ducking down an alley he knew.
 
Most people believed it dead ended.
 
What they couldn’t see, thanks to an
imposing brick and stone wall, was a sharp jog to the left that actually ran
for another half mile, dumping a person in the know one block from the freeway
entrance. Not shorter in miles, but definitely in time.

He coasted through several stop signs without a problem, his
hands beating a tattoo on the steering wheel, and then he spied a kid looking
damn all like his little brother-in-law, William. Little was kind of a
ridiculous word to use for the gangly kid.
 
William the Wild.
 
Andrew thought of the kid that way inside his head because if any of
them was going to kick over the traces soon, it would be William.