Miss You Mad: a psychological romance novel (13 page)

I choked. Loved? Who'd said anything about love? Had I? I rummaged through the index cards stored in my banker's brain. Nope. I'd said nothing. But perhaps I'd thought it. Perhaps she had heard those thoughts.

"I'll walk you to your room." I did my best to sound nonchalant and was rewarded with the tip of her tongue poking through the gap between her teeth.

She linked her arm through mine. It felt right. Good sweet lord, it felt nice. I decided I was going to like this return to humanity.

Just on the inside of her room, a large easel was propped up a wide canvas. Paints and brushes lay scattered across a spread garbage bag atop the desk next to the mirror.

"You're painting yourself." I touched the edge, amazed that anyone would be so vain.

She shrugged. "In the early morning, there are some interesting shadows reflected against the mirror."

So much for my vanity theory. Ever the eclectic artist, it seemed everything had interest.

It felt like a good time to ask the perfect introductory question. "Why do you paint nude, anyway?"

"Tough question, Dan."

"Is it?"

"Yes. Tougher than you know."

I inspected a tin can full of brushes. "Okay then, how about an easier one. What is it about me that you like?"

"You believe I'm interesting, even though I haven't done anything to make you think it."

"Are you kidding? What about the Internet nudity?" I smiled, pleased at how I'd managed to return to the original subject.

"Just a way to get people to buy my work."

"Your paintings?"

"Ordinary."

"Are you trying to say you're just a regular gal?"

She swallowed. I watched the movement of her throat keenly. I'd touched a nerve.

"I'm like an apple pie. Flaky on the outside; regular old mush on the inside." She turned away and faced the mirror. Picking up a brush, she traced her outline with white oil paint. Then she stepped away. The mirror held her outline, but the inside reflected the standard floral wallpaper.

I protested. "You've got a weird fascination with light."

"No different than any other artist."

"You're kind?"

"And you find that odd?"

I shrugged. I trusted so few people now after the money came that I couldn't truly say anyone was kind It was all colored with paint I couldn't see through.

She sat on the bed. "Tell me more about your father."

Sighing, I took my place next to her on the bed. We both lay back, staring at the ceiling. She took my hand; I almost thought I felt electricity buzz through the thin layer of skin that separated our bodies. It gave me the nerve to speak. My leg started twitching.

"I loved my dad." My tone sounded like I protested too much.

"I'm sure you did," she said.

I found myself nodding although it made no difference; she wasn't looking at me. "I love my mom, too. And it really bothered me that she could love him. Not that I felt, you know, that way about my mother."

"No Oedipus for you, eh?" She laughed.

"My mom could easily have found someone else. Someone who deserved her. He cheated on her, you know. Over and over and over. When I was a kid, I remember her lying on the sofa crying her heart out. It scared me. I didn't know what was going on."

Hannah draped one leg over mine. That one stopped twitching.

I kept talking. "I guess I didn't know then, that womanizing can be as much a sickness as alcoholism. And he had it bad. But I suppose all that doesn't matter. I did love him. How couldn't I? He was my father."

She frowned. "Sounds pretty normal."

I stuck my finger into the corner of her frown.

"That's me. Normal." I remembered the night on the beach when I'd taken all those pills. Normal as could be. I grinned at her, all high school kidish.

Hannah pulled my finger into her mouth with her tongue. It was hot in there, wet.

"Let's not talk about this anymore," I said.

She pulled away from me and stripped off her shirt.

Her breasts were heavy, much heavier-looking bare than they appeared beneath her shirt or online. Her nipples were little round pebbles the color of a pale pink rose bud. I wanted to roll them between my fingers. The videos did not do her skin justice. It was the color of a conche shell, and as she wriggled out of her jeans I had a terrible urge to smooth my cheek straight up from her calf to her forehead. She twined her fingers together and stretched her arms overhead, turning a bit sideways and taunting me with her replica of the old shanty's waistline. I had the irrepressible urge to cast a shadow on her, one that would grow thin and fat alternately as I lifted and lowered.

She crooked a finger at me. "What's wrong," she said, grinning. "Do you prefer the video version?"

I could have been the Green Hornet, I took my clothes off so quickly. This was going to be good. This was going to be great. This was going to be the best time she'd had in years.

I pounced.

With a practiced ease, she rolled from beneath to top. She licked my eyebrows, she tasted my tongue, she brushed her teeth across my nipples. I groaned.

"Too rough?" She joked.

I couldn't speak. She had her tongue in my mouth before I could answer. She tasted of peppermint and a hot, musky smell, that individual smell of arousal, wrapped around us in a blanket as thick as wool.
Good sweet God.

"I'm not God, but thank you for the complement," she whispered and her breath moved from my ear to my neck to my chest.

I was barely aware that I was moaning like a 14-year-old virgin. The part of me that was aware didn't care. Just wait until I got my turn. I'd handle her with such care she'd beg me to fuck her.

"You just wait," I moaned. Then she had her hand on the base of my cock and I let go a series of filthy instructions. I thought that somewhere in the middle of those lurid details I told her where the rubber was, and I must have because before I knew it, she was unrolling the thing snugly down my length and following it with her mouth.

It wasn't my fault. Not really. I should have realized that if I felt like a 14 year old virgin, I'd end up behaving like a 14 year old virgin. Seconds later, her mouth was gone, her hand lay on her lap, and we both sat staring at the traitorous third member of our party.

"I didn't even get a chance to enjoy it," I mumbled without thinking.

"Me neither," she murmured.

I looked at her. She didn't seem upset. Her thick lips curved on either side. She touched the head of my penis and it gave a final shudder before it nestled sleepily on a cushion of hair.

"Maybe if we wait awhile," I offered. "He'll only take a short nap."

Upon returning home, William kicked past the boxes that kept him from getting to the computer. Blouses and skirts spilled onto the carpet. High-heeled shoes, strapless sandals, and a rubber boot piled on top of pink rayon shirts and white wool sweaters. His vinyl bottomed sneakers stomped across his mother's clothes and booted aside musty smelling shoes.

He had to get to his desk. It was almost time.

He stopped short of the computer chair. He had to catch his breath. Once he had suspected that the painting on the cafe wall and painting on the computer were the same one, he had run as fast as he could back home. At the moment, William could barely breathe.

She's not really painting that live.

He opened his web browser and selected her site from his bookmarks. Perhaps she just hadn't had an opportunity to begin a new painting and replayed that archive video to fill time. Perhaps something happened: a sick relative, a flu bug, anything that could interrupt her normal schedule. Perhaps the bank teller didn't mean Hannah Hastings. Maybe she spoke of someone else. Some other Miss. Hastings. There had to be hundreds of them.

In his haste to get the screen loaded, he clicked on the address beneath hers and cursed when he had to click the stop button to keep that site from coming in. Delays, delays. He had to bring the menu up again. Had to concentrate to click the proper bookmark.

Doesn't matter how calm you are, William. It won't change the fact that she isn't there.

"She is there. You'll see."

The painting had come along further since his time in the cafe. Most of the trees had their faces. The virtual Hannah stretched backward, arching so that her stomach stretched toward the canvas. Such long lines her legs made. If he looked hard enough, William could see the burnt ombre curls that created a perfect V below her navel.

V is for video, William. It's for virtual, and voyeur.
Came hoarse voice, a voice that until now hadn't been heard for a very long time. It was a voice that made William cringe. He hadn't expected to hear it again. Not ever.

William clenched his fist.

What about vagina... and vulva?

William jumped from the chair. He swung to face the empty room.

How about victim?

William slapped his palms over his ears. He ran head long into one of the boxes and collapsed. The flimsy surface gave way and fell into itself, leaving him panting and twisting his head left and right, up-and-down, round and round.

He had to stop that demanding voice. Last time he'd let it have even one breath, that voice had done things no man ever should. His fingers clenched and fisted around something silky. A scarf. His mother's scarf. Pink and flimsy and soft as skin in old age. But that skin--his mother's skin--had dried up in the end. Her voice as raspy and dusty as autumn leaves.

He whimpered.. He wished he could reach inside his nostrils way up into his skull and scratch that voice quiet, but he could only get surface deep, leaving a stinging scrape alongside his hairline. But at least the voice gave in. It stopped.

He pushed himself to his feet and padded across the littered carpet, dodging tin cans, stepping over pizza boxes. The bathroom. He thought he smelled excrement, and headed for the bathroom, wondering if it was time to flush. Last week, he had forgotten to gauge the contents and the plumbing had clogged. Some liquid dribbled over the edge and onto the floor. Then, it was a bother to wipe the seat, and he had ever after been diligent about flushing twice every few days. Eventually, the floor dried and he stopped getting his socks wet. Maybe he should flush every time. Maybe twice wasn't enough.

He froze mid step, cocked his head. He almost felt the click of something locking into place in his mind. He jerked his gaze to the medicine cabinet over the sink.

It stood half open. The cracked mirror door showed a dusty interior full of empty pill bottles. Those bottles were old ones. He had never thrown them away. Couldn't bear to throw them away. There be a new one in there somewhere, right out in front. Full. Waiting for him to slip the cap off.

Except there was a better medicine: an antique pen in the middle cabinet. It had a sharp point attached to a formed and painted handle. He'd bought it online as a teenager years ago from Ebay and he'd kept it with his journals. It made him feel like a writer from old. He pretended he was Shakespeare. And every afternoon after school, by the light of the noon sun streaming through his bedroom window, he'd sat dipping the tip into the inkwell.

Then one afternoon, voices punctuated his writing sessions, growing and multiplying until they screamed all at once and William had thought he'd gone deaf from the din. He couldn't hear anything external; only the tortured moans and enraged shouts of a dozen or more internal mouths.

Within seconds, he was tearing at his arm with the tip of the pen. He'd suffered some sort of poisoning afterward, and ended up in the hospital for a while. Mother had checked him into the hospital. She had blamed the pen for his fever. But from behind the curtain around his bed, in a voice shaking and low, she asked the doctor what had given him the other sickness--the one that made him do such a thing with the pen at all. William had been given lots of pills as he lay in bed for those weeks. But when he got out, he knew the pen had a more divine purpose. It had portended a change in his life. He couldn't throw it away.

Something else had happened, too. Hadn't it? It had something to do with all those pill bottles.

Like a dutiful son, he took the pills in those bottles and the voices whispered at times, but they never truly went away.

When he'd found Hannah, he had no use for pills that didn't work.

And now she was gone. To hell with the restraining order. He could wait outside her apartment building and see if she came out or went in. He'd know for sure if she was gone.

He hated the thought of going out. He hated thinking about all the eyes that would be judging him as he strode down the car-infested street. But, like going to the bank, it would be necessary. God knows where he would have been if he'd not gone to the bank that day. He'd still be watching Hannah's site and believing she was still in the city.

Taking a deep breath, and scouring his apartment visually before opening the door and admitting himself to an uncertain future, he thought briefly of his medicine cabinet. Should there be something else, something from in there, that he packed also? He wandered mentally around inside the shelves. Empty bottles, small plastic white-covered bottles greeted him. Toothpaste stuck to the centre shelf on the left, and in the middle cabinet, on that centre shelf, waited his voice medicine, and he couldn't forget that. He needed it now more than ever.