Olivia (26 page)

“Reggie, you motherfucker. You wouldn’t dare!” Olivia rushed over to him and hugged his short, porky frame and kissed his shiny, bald head.

“I know.” He sighed. “Heaven help me, I know.”

“Why does everyone always ask for heaven’s help when they’re talking about me?”

“Because when it comes to you, Sugar, we need all the help we can get.”

Olivia linked her arm in his and pretended to listen while he gave his insurance-man spiel about deductibles and property values and estimates of replacement costs and a bunch of other stuff that went over her head. George listened for real and asked the right questions and gave appropriate answers, and Olivia shifted her attention to Clete.

He was kneeling in the charred mess, moving stuff around with his pen, occasionally taking notes. When he unearthed a blackened piece of metal with a wire dangling from it, she squealed in delight and let go of Reggie’s arm.

“My iPod!” She giggled in joy as she bounced through the rubble to Clete.

“Olivia,” George called after her but she ignored him.

“Do you think it still works?” she asked Clete.

“I kind of doubt it,” he said and looked it over.

He pulled a red handkerchief from his back pocket and polished some of the soot off, and then pushed the Pause button. Olivia stuck the single remaining, heat-deformed ear bud into her ear and listened. It had issues, crackling and popping between notes, but it worked! It was stuck on one playlist, but Olivia didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything anymore as her feet started to move on their own accord, like they always did whenever she heard Cupid talk her through the “Cupid Shuffle.”

Mitch and her shitty life be damned—she got laid last night, and she got laid
real
good. That deserved a celebration.

“Olivia?” Clete laughed as he watched her go to the right, to the right, to the right...

“What?” She smiled and winked at him as she went to the left, to the left, to the left…

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked with a smile and shake of his head as she kicked, kicked, kicked, kicked.

“The Cupid Shuffle.” Her smile grew bigger as she walked it by herself.

“The cupid what?”

“Oh my god! Haven’t you ever been to a wedding? Get over here!” She laughed as she pulled him over next to her, took the ear bud out of her ear and put it in his. “Do you hear the beat?”

He nodded. “I guess.”

“Ok, now watch my feet and do what I do.”

She danced four steps to the right, and he followed along like only a sober, white man could. She danced four steps to the left. He kept up, but his body moved as stiffly as he had moved to the right.

When she kicked right, left, right, left, he laughed. “This is stupid.”

“Shut up and dance, Clete.” She closed her eyes, tipped her face to the sky and chicken-winged her legs as she danced in a quarter-turn and started the steps over again to the right.

A little girl and her even littler sister giggled and ran over to join Olivia. Unlike Clete and his two left feet, they learned the steps and danced like pros after one try. Clete moved out of the way to give them room. More kids joined Olivia, and then a handful of adults. She winked at George and he smiled back as he took the iPod away from Clete and plugged it into his truck stereo.

He started the song over and cranked the volume until the entire Valley View trailer court rang out in Olivia’s favorite wedding line-dance ditty. The handful of dancers turned into dozens and then lots of dozens. Even Mr. Turner joined in from his shady location on his porch. Clete watched Olivia from the sidelines with a smile of wonder on his face. Reggie rolled his eyes, but even he had a bit of swagger and sway to his hips as he took photos with his little digital camera.

George hopped between people until he got to Olivia, then grabbed her hips from behind and held her so tight to him they danced as one body. When the song ended, everyone cheered themselves and George’s arms wrapped around Olivia. His lips found her neck and he breathed her in slow and deep. “This is insane, you know that right? Breaking into a musical dancing score at the scene of a trailer fire is….”

She closed her eyes and whispered, “Crazy.”

“I love you, Crazy Girl.”

“Better get used to it, Georgie. My life’s nothing more than one screwed up, crazy mess after another.” Her hips started to move in his hands again as the director of her crazy life cued Mousse T. vs. The Dandy Warhols’ smashup “Horny as a Dandy” to blast through George’s truck speakers. “And it’s about to get a hell of a lot crazier. You ready for this?”

“Always,” he breathed out on a hot exhale.

“Then hang on tight.”

George pulled her close and his hands explored her front as her ass gyrated in time to the music against his fast-growing erection.

“Damn, Liv,” he murmured into her ear.

“Dance with me, Georgie,” she whispered into the skin of his neck. He held her hips tight to him and his body melted into hers.

The one and only thing Olivia was blessed with was rhythm, and dancing was the only thing she didn’t need alcohol to help her do well. All she needed was George. When her emotions were running high and her body moved with his, she was at her finest. When they used to dance together at Kitty’s she had always imagined she was making love to him, and she had always suspected he was doing the exact same thing. Now that their bodies knew each other intimately, their dance became an intense, spine-tingling foreplay.

Some of the Valley View residents continued to dance while others pulled out lawn chairs and passed around beers and settled in for a day of bullshitting. The rest peeled away from the crowd and headed off to their daily grind or toward wherever they spent their day hours. Reggie stuck around another five minutes to finish collecting data for his initial report then escaped back to the sanity of Northside. Clete continued to work with the police department, bagging and tagging evidence while sneaking glances at Olivia and George. And Olivia and George danced.

They danced in the ashes and rubble with the air reeking of burnt wood and overheated metal and melted plastic, but Olivia didn’t notice any of it. She only knew George’s body against hers and the beat of the music pulsing hot through her blood as they danced. Olivia’s iPod scrolled through one heavy, pounding dance track after another on her “Say F*** It & Dance” playlist as the lights on the fire truck rotated. They danced an erotic bump and grind against each other that sent her heart racing, spreading a fire through her core that was hotter than the one Mitch had used to burn up her life, and she let it consume her.

 “Take me home,” Olivia whispered into George’s ear when she finally couldn’t hold off any longer. If George didn’t send her screaming into an orgasm in the next few minutes she was certain she would surely explode.

He didn’t need any additional encouragement. He drove them home faster than he had brought them there. The front door didn’t even make it closed before Olivia had them stripped of the minimum requirements and he slammed her into the wall. He lifted her up, hooked her legs around his hips and pushed inside her with a heady moan, sending her free-falling into oblivion. He went tumbling not long after her, his fingernails digging in as he came, sending crumbs of drywall sprinkling down around them. She clutched his shoulders and quaked around him as he pulsed, avoiding the return to reality for as long as the tide was willing to keep her from shore.

“Liv?” George gasped for air. His entire body drenched in sweat, he was actually trembling from the experience.

“Yeah?” she answered as she tried to get her eyes to refocus.

“You’re gonna be the death of me.”

“It’s only been one day.”

“That’s what terrifies me the most.”

She kissed him slow then asked, “Better?”

“A little.” He kissed her again before setting her down. “Let’s go wash the stench of fire off and then go see Eugene.”

“Shower together?” she asked with a wink and wiggle of her eyebrows.

“Not this time.” He laughed and swatted her ass as she sashayed past him.

As the shower water washed over her body and she lathered her hair with George’s shampoo, her heartbeat gradually returned to normal. But as it did, her mind began to race. Her smile slipped away and the realization that she really, truly could have lost
everything
this week hit her like a bullet to the brain.

As the pain and grief engulfed her, she cried muffled sobs into her washcloth and slid down the wall of the shower, melting into a puddle on the tub floor. She wept in misery over what she had lost and in joy over what she had been spared, the confliction of the emotions seemingly ripping her into two jagged and bloody incomplete halves of a defective whole.

When George came looking for her, he found her crumpled under the ice-cold spray, struggling to regain control. He gently lifted her out and dried her off and held her against his bare chest, warming her with his heart, until she pulled enough strength from him to put one foot in front of the other, and begin again.

*  *  *

Olivia didn’t tell Eugene about the fire and neither did George. When they finally made it to the hospital in the early afternoon, Eugene was pretty worked up over the tragic events of his own life. He was finally awake enough and feeling well enough from his heart surgery to start going through withdrawal from the three C’s, and he was in excruciating, physical agony over it. The doctors refused to let him have even the Cheez Doodles, and the nurses were losing patience with him and his constant struggle to pull out his IV’s and monitors so he could go get his own.

Olivia sent George down to the vending machines to get Eugene a Coke, and then she made him stand guard at the door while she let Eugene take tiny sips through a straw, giving him a little hit of the caffeine and caramel-colored fizz. What he really needed was a Camel, but even Olivia refused him that. There was no way in hell she would unhook him from the monitors for even the ten minutes it would take to wheel him outside for a few little puffs.

At suppertime, the nurses tried to convince Eugene to eat some mashed carrots and applesauce. When he refused, Olivia lost it. Not at Eugene—at the nurses. Especially the fat one who had spent the day noshing on King-Size Snickers bars and Doritos, and then had the audacity to lecture Eugene about
his
diet. Olivia unleashed every single one of her colorful words on the big, fat fatty-fatty. In the middle of her tirade, she knocked the tray off of Eugene’s bed stand so hard the dish of applesauce flew across the room and splattered on the opposite wall.

Security came and escorted a kicking and screaming Olivia outside. George was forced to plead her case with the hospital director, and beg for her to be allowed to return in the morning once she had calmed down. She paced the sidewalk outside the hospital entrance, smoking and muttering left-over curses under her breath, and damn near jumped out of her skin when a voice behind her said, “Olivia?”

Nightmares of Mitch danced through her head, and she whipped around swinging. Clete caught her in his arms and held her by her wrists while she struggled to cage her rage.

“Shit, Clete! Don’t sneak up on me like that!” Her heart slammed against her ribcage like a battering ram. It was a good thing she was in the hospital parking lot because she was certain she was having her very own heart attack. She clutched her chest and bent over, and tried not to hyperventilate. “Shit.”

“I’m so sorry, Olivia.” Clete rubbed a tight circle on her back as he bent down with her. “Where’s George?”

“Inside, fighting with the hospital director. They kicked me out and won’t let me back in,” she said through her heavy breathing.

Clete’s face turned crimson and he yanked her by the arm, dragging her back into the hospital. The security guard assigned door-duty jumped to his feet to stop Olivia from entering, but as soon as he saw Clete’s uniform, the gun in his hand, and the fire in his eyes, he stepped aside.

Clete dragged Olivia down the hallway, past the serenity fountain and lounge area, and into the suite of executive offices. He plunked her into a cushy chair and barged into the director’s office without knocking. The door slammed behind him. George came out a few moments later, looking a wee bit bewildered, and sat next to Olivia. She asked him what was going on, but all he could do was shrug.

After what felt like an eternity, the director came out and shook Olivia’s hand, and apologized profusely for the behavior of the staff. While he couldn’t promise Eugene a Camel, he approved a small dose of Cheez Doodles and Coke daily, as long as Eugene made an effort to at least try the rest of his food. He apologized again for forcing Olivia out of the hospital and also assured her that had he known about her ordeal it never would have happened.

They assigned a security guard to watch over Eugene. Olivia accepted even though she knew it wasn’t needed. Mitch was pissed at her, not Eugene, and even he wasn’t deranged enough to take his anger out on Eugene. At least she hoped he wasn’t.

Once the director shut himself back in his office, clicking the lock solidly in place as soon as he did, George looked at Olivia and asked, “You want to go to Kitty’s for awhile before we go home?”

“Yeah,” Olivia agreed with a sigh of surrender. It had been almost a week since she’d had a beer, and boy did she need one.

“Come with us,” George offered to Clete.

“I…”

“Yeah, come with us, Clete,” Olivia pleaded. “Call in one of those 10-17’s and come to Kitty’s.”

“A request for gasoline?” Clete asked with a smile.

“Yeah.” Olivia laughed at her own mistake. “Let’s go get some gas for your dance machine and teach your hips how to groove.”

George drove Olivia to Kitty’s. Clete followed in his cruiser somewhat reluctantly. When they walked in, Lonnie was the only customer in the bar, and he was staggering his way to the door. George said good-bye to him, and to his lone employee, then locked the door behind them to keep the public away.

While he grabbed a handful of beers, Olivia looked around the bar, noticing all of the little changes he had made since she’d been there last. Almost a year had passed since she had quit making her nightly stops to chug as many beers as she could in an hour and try to talk George into sleeping with her. She kissed him in apology for her absence and stupidity, he kissed her back in acceptance, and then she skipped over to the jukebox.