Asking for Trouble (25 page)

“And you ended up in foster care.”

“Yeah. But not right away. Not until it got worse.”

It had been the spring of eighth grade, that first worst
night. He’d been trying to do his homework, and it was hard to focus, because
he was hungry. Lately, his friend Michael’s mom had been packing extra lunch
for Michael to share with Joe, which embarrassed him, though he ate it all the
same. But he was still hungry, so he worked on his Algebra homework and waited
for Dean to leave so he and Cheryl could come out of their rooms, get into
their mom’s purse and find enough to go to McDonald’s. His mom had already
crashed, but Dean was still wired, so he waited.

Instead of the sound of the front door shutting that he’d
been half-listening for, he heard something else. The thud of a fist on the
door of the room next to his. Cheryl’s room.

“Open up!” It was Dean’s voice, hard and loud and mean.

“I’m studying,” came the answer. Cheryl, and she was scared,
and Joe was, too.

“Open the goddamned door.” Dean’s fist continued to pound,
and Joe sat up on his bed, his notebook propped in his lap, frozen, listening.

“No! I’m busy!” He heard the scrape of something large and
heavy, and realized that Cheryl was trying to move her dresser. She was in
there trying to barricade herself inside while he was cowering in here, and the
shame of it flooded him, overcame the fear. He forced himself to get up, went
to his own door and opened it.

“What are you staring at?” Dean paused in his hammering to
glare at Joe. His hair was lank, his face pitted with scars, his jeans hanging
from bony hips, and Joe remembered his dad standing in this hallway, saying
goodbye before leaving for work. Big and solid and tough as iron, but he’d kiss
Cheryl goodbye, ruffle her hair so she’d complain, “Da-ad! I just
fixed
it!”

Jack Hartman hadn’t been Cheryl’s dad any more than Dean
was. But Dean wasn’t any Jack Hartman.

“What are you staring at, punk?” Dean snarled again. His
pupils were so big his eyes looked black, and Joe knew he was still riding the
high, at his most buzzed, and his most dangerous. To be avoided at all costs,
but there was no avoiding him now. “Get back in your room. Quit watching me.
You give me the creeps, the way you’re always watching me.”

“Leave her alone,” Joe said, trying to keep his voice, still
a boy’s voice, from shaking, because Dean scared him, especially like this. But
his dad wasn’t here, and he could hear Cheryl still shoving at her dresser, and
he knew she was at least as scared as he was.

Dean bared his yellowed teeth at Joe like an animal, turned
his back contemptuously on him, lifted a booted foot, and rammed it into the
door. The cheap lock burst, and Dean was in Cheryl’s room, with Joe right
behind him.

“Your mom’s taking a nap,” Dean told Cheryl. “A
long
nap, and I figure it’s time for you
to step up to the plate. Time for you to start earning your keep around here.
The two of you, fucking parasites. At least you’re good for something, not like
Robo-Boy.”

Cheryl had grabbed her lamp off the nightstand, backed away
around the bottom of the bed.

“Get away from me,” she said, and Joe could hear her voice
shake, and the hand that gripped the lamp so tightly wasn’t steady either. “I
mean it. You touch me, and I’ll kill you.”

Dean laughed. “You going to fight? Ooh, I’m so scared.”

Cheryl stood strong, waited until he got close, then swung
the lamp, connected with the side of his head, causing him to stagger, and Joe
was on him from behind, swinging wildly, punching at Dean’s kidneys, the back
of his head.

Dean didn’t even seem to feel the blows. He straightened,
breathing in a loud hiss, pulled his arm back and backhanded Cheryl hard across
the face, knocking her back in her turn, and then he was on her, pulling her
up, slapping her again and again.

It was a brawl, then. Cheryl was tall and tough, and Joe
wasn’t either of those, but there were two of them and only one of Dean. Cheryl
hadn’t let go of her lamp despite the brutal blows, and she hit Dean again, and
he went down on one knee, and Joe kicked him hard in the side, wished he
weren’t barefoot, that he was a man. That he could beat Dean up and kick him
out of his dad’s house.

“Run,” he gasped to Cheryl, hauling his foot back and
kicking again as Dean struggled to rise. “Run.”

Cheryl grabbed her purse. “You come too. Come on.”

Dean was staggering to his feet, and Cheryl grabbed Joe,
pulled him to the door with her. “Come on,” she said. And they ran.

That was the long version, but it wasn’t the version he told
Alyssa. He laid it out, bare. Just the facts.

“Turned out he’d been trying to get into her room for a
while,” he said. “Rubbing up against her in the hallway.” He stopped,
swallowed. “She couldn’t stay, or it was going to happen, and I wasn’t going to
be able to stop it.”

“So what happened instead?” Alyssa asked quietly.

“She was almost done with high school, almost eighteen. She
stayed at a friend’s, graduated, joined up as soon as she could. Got out.”

“And what did you do?”

“I went back. I had to go back. Nowhere else to go. Until it
got too bad, worse. Until my mom kicked me out.”

“Kicked you
out?
When
you were thirteen?”

“Fourteen.” He looked across at her. “Do you mind if we
drive?” They were near her exit now, and he needed to drive. Normally, nights
like these, he’d have got on the bike, ridden until he was numb with cold,
until the speed and the noise had cleansed him. She was here, though, and he
wanted her here. But he still needed to drive.

“Yes,” she said. “Drive.” So he kept on, across the Golden
Gate, through Sausalito, took the exit for Stinson Beach, and drove the twists
and turns along the dark road, faster than he should have, needing the speed.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he finally said. “That last
night, when she kicked me out. She locked the door. I walked around for a long
time, not knowing where to go. Finally,” he laughed, though it wasn’t funny, “I
sneaked into the back yard and slept there. I didn’t know where else to go.”

He had cried. He had lain down on the grass, chilled despite
the warmth of Vegas in late May, wrapped his arms around himself, and cried. Cried
for his dad, wishing like the baby he’d been that he would come back, that it
wouldn’t have happened, that it wasn’t real, that things could go back to the
way they’d been before. For Cheryl, who had escaped and left him behind. For
his mom, who didn’t love him anymore, because she was gone, too. And for
himself, because he was alone, and he was so scared. It was the last time he
had cried.

“And you ended up in foster care,” Alyssa said.

“Yeah. She wouldn’t let me back in the house. She chose
Dean. Or she chose meth.”

“Didn’t you tell her what happened?”

“She didn’t believe me. She said we’d always hated Dean,
that we didn’t care whether she was happy, that we hated her too, for having
somebody besides my dad, for having a new life. She said a lot of things.
Bottom line, she chose them. The drugs, and Dean. She was sorry sometimes,
after that. She’d show up, at first, for the hearings and whatever, cry and tell
me she was trying to do better, always some story, and for a long time, I
believed her. I still hoped. But she never came through. I couldn’t do anything
about Cheryl, and I couldn’t do anything about her. Either one.”

“Yes, you did,” she said. “You just told me how you
protected your sister. She just told you how she felt about it. She doesn’t blame
you. How can you blame yourself? How could you have done any more than what you
did?”

He shrugged, the weight of it, as always, too heavy to bear.

“What happened to her? To your mother?” she went on when he
didn’t answer.

“He left her, eventually, I guess. Or he died, or somebody
killed him. I don’t know. I did my best not to know. Cheryl’s the one who found
out she was sick, hepatitis, other things too. She went and saw her. I don’t
know how she could.”

“But you’re the one who paid.”

“Yeah. I did. Not for her. For Cheryl, because she asked me
to. And for my dad. And is it all right,” he said, “if we don’t talk for a
while? I’m sorry.
 
I just need to
drive.”

“It’s all right,” she said, and he drove.

Alyssa wanted to put her hands over her ears and sing, like
a little girl who didn’t want to hear, who didn’t want to know. She’d sat
frozen as Cheryl had talked in the bar, as frozen and stiff as Joe had looked
next to her. And when he’d told her his story, that had been even worse.

She’d heard so many stories by now, every one a remorseless
saga of destruction, of family disaster, of children thrown into chaos. Her
heart had broken a little bit for every one of those children, but what she’d
heard tonight had cracked it in two. She ached for the boy Joe had been, for
the man he’d become, for the guilt she’d heard in the voice of somebody who
didn’t deserve to feel any of it.
 

They ended up at his loft again. He didn’t ask her if she
wanted to go home, and she took that as a good sign, that he wanted her there,
the way he’d seemed to want her with him while he drove. She cooked them eggs
and made toast, about the limit of her skill in the kitchen, and sat with him
to eat it, and didn’t talk.

And then she comforted him in the only way she knew how.
 
She took him by the hand, led him into
his bedroom, took off his clothes the same way he had done to her so many
times, the same way he was taking hers off now. And then she pushed him down
onto the bed, came down over him. She kissed him, a soft thing, put her mouth
near his ear and whispered, “Stay there for me. Let me do this tonight.”

“Alyssa—”

“Please.” She licked into his ear, felt him shudder. “Please.
Let me do this for you. Let me light the candles and love you.”

He didn’t answer, but he stayed where he was, and she kissed
him again, then knelt beside him to put match to wick, set the heavy pillars
alight on each side of the bed, turned off the lamp so only the soft candlelight
shone. She turned back to him, saw him watching her, and smiled at him.

“Roll over,” she told him, her voice tender. He hesitated another
moment, and then he did it, and she straddled his hips, let him feel her over
him, feel her rubbing herself against him. And then, finally, she began to touch
him.

Softly, but not too softly. Slowly, just as slowly as she
could manage it. Down the bunched muscle of his shoulders, over the curve of
triceps and biceps to the veins and corded muscle of his forearms, and back up
again, as if she were exploring him, learning his body for the very first time.
She scooted down a bit further, ran her hands down his back, enjoying the
breadth of it, the firmness of him, felt him shudder under her touch, and knew
that she knew how to please him, and that no matter what else he’d felt
tonight, right now, all he was doing was anticipating being pleased even more.
And she wanted to do more. She wanted to make him feel everything, to thrill
him the same way he thrilled her.

She slowed down, focused on the small of his back, massaging
the area just above his tailbone, wanting to see if it felt as good to him as
it did to her. She smiled in satisfaction at hearing his breathing become
louder, more rapid, at seeing his fists clenching, his hands clutching at the
sheet beneath him, and she did it some more. She took her time, because they
had time. Because everything was better when you had to wait for it.

When she was sure she had him wound up tight, aching for it,
she ran her hands slowly down to his upper thighs and back up again, over every
firm surface of him, and if he’d been sensitized before, he was squirming now.
She kept it moving, kept him going, until, finally, she reached her hand
between his legs and stroked everything within her reach, reading his body’s
cues as he pushed off the bed to give her access, as the silence was broken by
the harsh sound of his breathing.

“Turn over for me,” she murmured at last. She pulled her
hand away, saw him shudder at the loss, and sat back on her knees to wait until
he rolled and looked up at her, his eyes glazed, his breath coming hard. She
smiled at him, a slow, soft, seductive thing, and saw him respond to it like he
couldn’t help it, because she could tell it was true. He was hers.

She touched his lips with her fingers, traced them as she
whispered, “Time for more?”

“Yeah,” he said, and he could barely say it. “More.”

She crawled over him, touched him everywhere, licked him and
kissed him and bit at him until he had his eyes closed, his hips moving, and
she was pulling sounds from him that she hadn’t heard before, and she knew she
had him past the point of thought, or of caring. That he could only feel this,
his body’s response to her. Then, and only then, she reached for the condom,
rolled it onto him, and lowered herself over him, and he groaned at the pleasure
of it, his hands coming up to reach for her hips, for her breasts, wanting her
so much. Wanting her with everything in him.

He wanted her, and she gave him everything she had. She went
slowly, and then she went fast, and when she could feel him getting close, she
stopped and went slowly again. She didn’t want to make him work, didn’t want
him to have to do any more than run his hands over her breasts, because she
could tell he was loving doing that as much as she was loving the feeling of him
doing it. So she used her hands on herself, too, drove herself up even as she
pushed him higher.

And she talked. She told him how much she had thought about
this, how many times she had imagined him, all the showers she had taken with
her hands on her breasts, her body, imagining it was him touching her, because
he was all she’d ever wanted.