“Not really. But you could probably make a run for it now, while I’m incapacitated.”
I laughed. “I think I’ll stay right here.” Right here, where everything felt surprisingly
simple. Where my worries faded to abstract concepts. Where our Saturday shift felt
weeks away, and life was no more complicated than the needs of our naked bodies, the
world no wider than his bed.
“I’m curious to see what round two will look like.”
“It’ll look like whatever I want it to,” Kelly said, but a yawn sucked all the ominousness
from his words.
“Don’t fall asleep. You promised me dinner.”
I wound up regretting the comment; a minute later Kelly dragged himself from the bed,
putting an end to the cuddling I was secretly enjoying.
And there he was. Kelly, just Kelly. Just a naked man rendered docile by his release,
muscles beautiful but stripped of all threats. In that instant, those once-intimidating
bruises made him seem heartbreakingly fragile.
I watched him pull on a fresh pair of shorts, his eyes catching mine as he straightened
the waistband.
“Yeah?”
“Just looking at you. While you’re still tranquilized.”
That earned me a grin. “How do you like your steak?”
“Medium.”
Kelly nodded, heavy lids blocking all the coldness from his stare. “Whatever you say.”
Chapter Ten
I woke when the first light of dawn kissed my eyelids. Was it five? Six? Later? For
a second I cared, then the weight of Kelly’s arm registered, a pleasurable anchor
draped over my ribs.
One of my hands was limp and numb and I fidgeted as gently as I could, trying not
to wake him. I thought I’d succeeded for a breath, then he let loose a low, groggy
noise.
I craned my neck, watching his eyes open to the narrowest slits.
“Mhh.”
“Good morning, Kelly.”
“Morning.”
Sleep had left me fearless, and the morning chill had me craving his heat. I grasped
his wrist and lay his arm along my waist, wriggling closer. In the back of my head,
I knew I wouldn’t be so snuggly with Kelly, were I more awake. But just now . . .
No blanket was this cozy, no comforter so warm and encapsulating.
He did as I secretly wished, tugging me close. A happy noise hummed against my neck,
chased by the lazy press of his lips. I luxuriated in the contact, knowing this sleepy,
easy Kelly wouldn’t last. This man was by turns cold and hot, controlled and crazed.
For this brief moment he was none of those things. Just warm, just calm. Just some
mysterious sliver of sedate, satisfied Kelly Robak, one I knew intuitively I was blessed
to glimpse. The most elusive of species.
After round one of sex, Kelly had cooked us steaks, and we ate them on his back patio
with bottles of beer, sipping until the sun was sinking, shooting the shit about work.
Round two had been a frenzy. No waiting, no teasing, no games. Just straight-up nasty
fucking on his bed, fast and rough and utterly exhausting. After the bare minimum
of tidying up, we’d passed out, crawling under the covers at some vague hour after
our sweat had cooled.
I could smell the sex, there in his sheets. I could feel it between my legs and in
the rawness of my hips and the carpet burn on my elbows.
Against my nape, the soft press of his mouth firmed to a true kiss. I craned my neck
so our lips could meet, breath be damned. A romantic start to the day, I thought,
my body rousing equally from pleasure and alarm.
“Morning,” he said again.
“What’s for breakfast?”
He laughed, the tiniest nasal huff. “What would you like?”
“Pancakes?”
“I don’t think I have the ingredients for that.”
“You tell me, then.” I grinned, registering my choice of words. “That’s what you like,
after all. Doing the telling. I’ll answer when asked.”
He smiled back. “I’m not awake enough to be a bossy dick yet. But I got eggs and bread,
and bacon, I think. It’s that or cereal and milk.”
“Eggs, then.” I rolled up onto my side and forearm, gazing down at that rare sight—Kelly,
declawed. His mood-ring eyes were neutral gray, summer clouds that threatened no rain.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “You’re sexy.”
I blushed, which probably just exacerbated whatever baby-faced breed of hotness he
was finding in me.
“Take a shower,” he said, tossing the covers aside. “I’ll get the coffee started.”
“As you command.”
He smirked at me as he stood, mischievous and approving. He’d slept in his shorts,
and my attention got dragged down his chest and abs and crotch and those big thighs.
The blush drained from my cheeks, seeking other parts to heat.
“Get your eyes off my dick and get your butt in the shower,” he said, sleepy Kelly
clearly punching out and handing the reins to Taskmaster Robak.
I did as I was told, warming to the idea of his domineering side returning.
Kelly’s shower nearly flayed all my skin off, and I had to turn it way down to keep
from getting bruised by the water pressure. Parts of me already felt tenderized, my
labia stinging as I soaped myself, my backside sore from his slaps. Even my eyes felt
overly sensitive to the bright bathroom lights.
I rinsed the conditioner from my hair, then shrieked to find Kelly leaning against
the wall, watching me through a gap in the curtain.
“Jesus!”
He didn’t apologize, just let his gaze drop down and rise back up, looking like some
hybrid of hungry and amused, but in no hurry to pounce.
“How d’you like your eggs?”
“However. Just not runny.”
He nodded once and disappeared, drawing the curtain back in place on clacking plastic
rings.
Once dry, I pulled on yesterday’s skirt, clasped a bra and found a clean tee shirt
from my bag. I skipped underwear, liking how it felt. Like a secret, just between
me and the cool morning air, until Kelly came prowling and found me out. I dabbed
concealer under my eyes, threw on some mascara and declared myself presentable.
Following the ambrosial smell of bacon, I found Kelly in the kitchen, scrambling eggs
in a glass bowl.
“Coffee’s ready.”
I filled a mug and stood on the other side of the counter. The condom wrapper was
still there, and I picked it up and studied it, smirking.
He poured the eggs into a pan with a sizzle, then fetched glasses from a cupboard.
“Orange juice or milk?”
“Is there any champagne left? We could have mimosas.”
Kelly swapped our tumblers for stemware, and grabbed the bottle from the fridge. At
some point he’d corked it with a rubber stopper, and it came out with a limp pop.
I poured us each a measure and topped it off with OJ.
Soon enough he set plates on the breakfast bar, heaped with scrambled eggs and bacon
and toast—two Kelly-sized servings. Then again, I’d need my strength, if today’s sex-a-thon
was going to be a repeat of yesterday’s.
We pulled high stools to the counter and Kelly held up his glass. I tapped it with
mine, not bothering to ask what we were toasting.
To more nasty sex,
I thought.
Fucking cheers to that.
I sipped my mimosa. “There’s something awfully satisfying about a cocktail that’s
socially acceptable before noon. Makes me feel like I’m getting away with something.”
“You’ll love Larkhaven then, if you stick around long enough to attend any inter-ward
meetings. Anytime there’s an off-campus powwow to discuss some policy change, people
come in totally hungover the next morning.”
“I noticed everyone seemed pretty thirsty at that going-away party.”
He nodded. “It’d be exhausting doing any of our jobs for a regular eight-hour shift.
Make it twelve? That’d make a hobbyist drinker out of anybody.”
I stabbed at my eggs, thinking. “Do you ever worry about drinking? You know, because
of how your dad was.”
He shook his head. “He wasn’t my biological father.”
“Oh. Do you know who was?”
“I think so.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“Kind of.”
Kelly wasn’t normally one to be cagey, and I wasn’t normally one to pry, but curiosity
had me pressing. “Did you always know your stepdad wasn’t your real dad?”
“No. Not ’til he got real drunk and told me, when I was about thirteen.”
I waited patiently to see if he’d continue. After a few forkfuls of egg, he did.
“I remember it like it was a movie I’ve seen a hundred times. We were in the den,
watching the Lions play the Vikings in Minnesota, and they lost. Bad. My dad was wasted,
which is like saying the sun rose that day. I was just hitting my growth spurt and
I was marinating in angry hormones all the time. I’d just realized I was too big and
too quick for him to wale on, and how to detect if he was too drunk and tired to bother
trying. So I’d goad him.”
I grimaced.
“He was complaining about one of the players, saying what a bum he was, how he’d peaked
years ago. I said something like, ‘Yeah, Dad, like you’ve done anything worthwhile
in your whole miserable life.’”
“Oh dear.”
Kelly drained his glass. “He didn’t get angry. He got this glazed look in his eyes,
and just stared at the screen a long time. Then he told me, ‘I’m not your dad, you
know. Your real daddy’s some fucked-in-the-head vet your mom spread for, the summer
before she met me. Now he’s in the pen, and I’m stuck with you.’ And I just went all
numb and cold, because as much as I wanted to hit him, I kind of hoped it was true.
I wanted to believe him. I didn’t want that sloppy, alcoholic shithead’s blood in
me. I didn’t want to share anything with the guy. Not my house or my mom or my fucking
DNA.”
“Did you say anything?”
“No. And it never came up again. I doubt he even remembered he told me that, the next
day.”
“And your mom never mentioned it?”
He shook his head.
“So you don’t know anything about your real father?”
“I know some. Enough. I dug around and found my birth certificate, but it had my stepdad’s
name on it. So I went to the library and got somebody to help me search the local
records, to look for the names of any guys who got incarcerated in the months before
I was born. I found one guy’s name who it could have been, and his photograph, in
an old article about his arrest. James Mahoney, his name was.”
“Jeez, you could’ve been Kelly Mahoney?” Cue the fiddle music.
“I know. Man could shit shamrocks with a name like that. Anyhow, I thought he could’ve
been my father, maybe. Tough to tell, from an old black-and-white newspaper head shot,
but the dates made sense, and he was a vet, like my stepdad had said.”
“Did you ask your mom?”
“Nah. She had enough crap to deal with. Let the poor woman have her secrets.”
“Did you do
any
thing?”
“Fixated on him for a while, then just kinda let it go, for a long time. ’Til I was
in my mid-twenties and heard about that job in prison security.”
A chill closed over me. “Where he was locked up? Or was he out already?”
“He was inside. Still is. And yeah, you guessed it—same place.”
“Did you see him, while you were there?”
“Yeah. Every fucking day.”
“So . . . did you take the job because of him being there?”
Kelly sipped his coffee. “I told myself I didn’t, that it was just a job, but I’m
sure it factored. I’d spent more than a decade wondering about the guy by then.”
“Did you ever ask him if he’d known your mom?”
“Nah. I never said shit to him, outside of what I had to, as a guard. I didn’t treat
him any nicer or any worse than any other inmate there.”
“What was he like?”
“Quiet. Not too much trouble. If Vietnam fucked him up, he kept his wounds way under
his skin. And if he knew my mom had married a guy named Robak, he never let on. He
was just this tall, quiet guy, with weird eyes. Real pale hazel, like ginger ale.
Kinda like mine, kinda not. But I’m pretty sure he was the one.”
“Wow.” I realized I hadn’t touched my food in several minutes, and took a couple bites
of cold toast, ruminating. “Did it change things, to meet him? Or to see him, anyhow?”
“I guess. Mainly it just confused me. Now I had two men I had no clue how to feel
about. One complete asshole, but who’d at least been man enough to step up and pretend
he was my dad. He sucked, but he stuck around. And this other one, some war-fucked
con who probably had no clue his son was standing on the other side of the bars, telling
him it’s lights-out on Cell Block C.”
“What did he get sent away for?”
Kelly looked down at his hands. “Doesn’t matter. Just something real bad.”
Indeed, to get locked up for so long. And to make Kelly, the brashest man I’d ever
met, go silent this way.
I decided not to push it any further. My thoughts had drifted to Jack. Jack, with
his unconfirmed lineage. Jack, with a dad who showed up when it suited him, a dad
who could do something worthy of a sentence next week and not shock a soul. With a
mom who loved him but couldn’t seem to get her life on track. So many strikes against
him, yet he wouldn’t even realize what they were for another eight or ten years.
“What do you think it was, that kept you from screwing up?” I asked Kelly. “Both your
father figures were lousy, but you ended up a pretty good guy.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“You didn’t turn into either of those men.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Was it your mom, who kept you on the straight and narrow?”
He shook his head. “She was real weak. My dad—my stepdad—beat her down. Sometimes
physically, mostly mentally. If anybody kept me straight, it was my grandfather, but
I only got to see him a few times a year. And I never turned into him. He lived out
in the boonies, and as fun as it was, staying with him and fishing and hunting and
all that shit, it was like visiting another universe. Trying to live his life would’ve
been like a junkyard dog trying to go off and live on a farm. All happy, frolicking
in the meadow with butterflies, when all I wanted was a fight.”
“Huh.”
He shrugged and stole a slice of my bacon. “So I dunno why am I how I am. Why I didn’t
go rotten. I should’ve, probably. Any subconscious choices I made to be this way,
though, I made them out of anger. And spite. Like I refused to turn into either of
those guys. Just don’t go telling yourself I’m some saint. Just a stubborn son of
a bitch with real shitty role models.”
“Noted.”
“What about you?” he asked, forking eggs onto a slice of toast. “Who made you the
way your are?”
“The way I am?”
“Yeah. How’d you end up like a rabid raccoon, scrapping with your sister’s loser boyfriend?”
“I don’t know. I basically raised her. It must be some maternal-type instinct.”
“What’s your mom like? She still around?”
“She’s around, back near Dearborn. I don’t talk to her very often. She was never built
for motherhood, but she kept food in the fridge and a roof over our heads. She worked
really hard. I can’t fault her for that.”
“Bet you can fault her a few other things, though.”
Yes, yes I could. “Doesn’t help anything, dwelling too much.”
“What about your dad?”
“He was never really in the picture. They reconciled when I was little, for maybe
a year. Long enough for Amber to show up, then he took off again. Like a kid who begs
for a pet and promises to take care of it, then changes their mind the second it stops
being adorable. The whole family thing was a passing novelty to him.” My throat felt
tight and sore, talking about it, and I had to work to swallow a bite of toast. The
sensation surprised me. I’d thought I was numb to that old resentment.