Authors: C. K. Kelly Martin
His cock pushes
inside me and I wrap my legs around him, pushing back. Liam sucks on my nipples
as we pound together. Neither of us last two minutes. Then we’re crying out,
simultaneously letting go and grabbing for each other’s flesh.
It’s always been
good with us, except for aspects of that first time on the pier, but this is
different. I feel close to him, like how we looked in the single existing
photograph of us, and once I’ve caught my breath and am ready to speak, I lay
my hand in the dip of Liam’s waist and say, with a quietness contrary to what
we’ve just done, that I’m going to miss him.
“Me too,” he
says, rolling onto his side and trapping my left leg between his. The way the
sunlight catches the improbable blueness of his eyes makes my chest ache.
“It’s not going
to be the same here without you,” I tell him.
Liam’s head
slides closer to mine so that we’re sharing the same pillow. “We still have
time,” he whispers. He raises himself up, leaning over me to kiss my lips.
Then he tells me
he plans to book his ticket home for December nineteenth—two and a half weeks
after the play closes—and that if I want we can spend more time together once
Abigail’s returned to British Columbia. I say that would be good, knowing that
in the long run it won’t help me at all.
But this was
never about the long run.
I ask Liam if
he’s going to miss the play after it’s finished and he replies that his
character is filled with nostalgia and that, along with the inability of Gar
and his father to communicate, often leaves him feeling weighed down. “I want
to give him a kick up the backside some nights,” Liam confesses, “and tell him
just to bloody well get on with his life.”
“So it sounds
like you’re kind of sick of him then,” I surmise.
“In the sort of
way that you can get sick of yourself,” Liam says. “I don’t know…maybe it’s the
bits of myself that I can see in him that I don’t like. After I’ve put
Six
West
behind me I want to play someone decisive. A monosyllabic action hero
or a spy turned psychotic serial killer. Somebody my own dog wouldn’t
recognize.”
“I didn’t know
you had a dog.”
“I suppose I
don’t anymore.” Liam frowns. “Natalie already had her for a year when we moved
in together. It’s a shame—Jack loves that dog.” I sigh, only realizing it in
retrospect when Liam props his head up with his elbow and asks me what’s wrong.
“Nothing.” I
shake my head, but then decide not to censor myself. “My boyfriend always
wanted a dog too.”
Liam’s hand
brushes my arm. “You really do think about him all the time, don’t you?”
“Not all the
time.” As in, not when we’re in bed together, but I’ve already proven that a
lie.
“It’s okay,”
Liam says, and that feeling of closeness rushes through me again, like I really
could tell him anything. “You two must have been really something together.”
“Yeah,” I
whisper. “I think we were.”
“I remember that
feeling. But now I think…” Liam stares at the ceiling, leaving his thought
unfinished.
“What?” I ask.
Liam’s teeth
scrape slowly over his bottom lip. “For us—Natalie and me—it wasn’t right. It
couldn’t have been.”
Because
otherwise she wouldn’t have done that to him.
He’s still staring up at the
ceiling when I dare to ask, “Do you still love her, though?”
Liam sighs
lightly, his gaze flicking back to mine. “It turns out that’s not so easy to
get rid of. But I hate her as well. You think you know someone…” One of his
hands sails into the air to grasp resentfully, and in what seems to me to be a
kind of lasting shock, at nothing.
We’ve talked
about his relationship before—before we’d even slept together—but this time I
feel Liam’s pain more acutely. It bleeds into the room.
“But it’s over,”
he says with melancholy-tinged decisiveness. “I don’t want to be with her
anymore. I couldn’t.” Liam’s voice lightens as he adds, “I think there are a
few too many people in this room with us at the moment, Leah.” He touches my
hair and forces a smile. “How is it that you always make me say more than I
mean to? Right from that first time you came to sit with me in the café. You
should’ve been a secret agent yourself, wheedling people’s secrets out of them
with biscuits, sex and those beautiful brown eyes of yours.”
I smile back at
Liam, because that’s what he seems to want, and when it’s time to go he follows
me to the front door, wraps his arms around me and holds on to me there for a
long minute as though maybe it doesn’t matter so much anymore about keeping
things uncomplicated. Then he says, “I almost forgot—I was going to ask if you
had any interest in seeing the play before it closes on Friday week. I know I
haven’t exactly made it sound dazzlingly brilliant, but that’s completely down
to me feeling whingey about my own situation. It really is a very solid
production.”
“That would be
cool,” I tell him, not as surprised as I would have been to hear the suggestion
from his mouth two weeks ago. “I’d love to check it out. Thanks.”
“Just say when
and I’ll have them put a couple of seats aside for you at the box office.”
“How about a
week today?”
“Done,” Liam
says with a bob of his head. “I reckon after the crime I committed against
music on the piano earlier it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to see me do
something right.”
I’ve already
seen him do something right today and my cheeks bursts into a sly smile at the
thought of it. Liam breaks into a mirror-image grin, as though he can read my mind,
and in those final seconds before I open the door and go, I’m certain there’s
no one in the room but us.
I say goodbye to Abigail before I
leave for my shift at O’Keefe’s on Friday afternoon. Her return flight to
Vancouver is scheduled to leave later that evening and while I ring up
purchases for things like Bovril, golden syrup and
Monarch of the Glen
,
I feel glad to have my freedom back and even more relieved that Abigail didn’t
find out about Liam and me. But I miss her when I come home to an empty house
at eight-thirty that night. The next time I see her, surrounded, as she’ll be,
with the rest of Bastien’s family, will undoubtedly be more difficult.
I pop the second
season of
Spooks
(courtesy of Simon and Louise) into Abigail’s DVD
player, call Katie to give her an abbreviated account of my relationship with
Liam and ask her whether she wants to see
Philadelphia, Here I Come.
Katie
reacts with a similar surprise to Yunhee’s but is excited about the idea of
coming to see Liam’s play with me on Wednesday night. We arrange to meet at the
theater, which is right in the heart of the Distillery district, an hour and a
half before the show so we can pop into dinner somewhere first.
Liam and I make
plans for Sunday but determine that we shouldn’t return to The Rose and Crown
in case whoever snapped our photo is a regular hoping to get lucky a second
time. After I get off work at five, we decide on takeout fish and chips from a
spot only five minutes’ drive down the road. As I’m the one who’s never been on
television
anywhere
I tell Liam to sit in the car while I go order the
food. This extreme level of discretion would seem ludicrously paranoid to me if
I hadn’t seen a photo of us on the Internet, but now only seems prudent.
Having recently
rediscovered my jewelry box, I’m wearing the dangly chandelier-style Swarovski
crystal earrings my grandmother indulged me by buying me for my sixteenth
birthday, despite my mother’s protest that they were too expensive. They’re not
the sort of thing I’d normally wear out casually but it’s been too long since I
wore them last and I couldn’t resist putting them on this morning.
Liam loves them
and says that he feels like he’s about to sleep with Jackie Kennedy. Once we’ve
finished our food, he can’t keep his fingers away from their shine, and though
they glitter like a million dollars they only get in the way when we’re having
sex. I take them off and leave them on Liam’s bedside table to retrieve later.
Afterwards we
play videogames and then begin watching a
Terminator
marathon. I fall
asleep during the end credits for
Terminator 2
and wake up again during
the final moments of
Terminator 3
. Liam’s awake next to me, but barely.
Yawning and heavy-lidded, he asks me whether I want him to drive me home or if
there’s any possibility that I can stay the night. It means Armstrong will run
wild all night long, but one night of marathon passion with the wheel won’t
kill him.
I tell Liam I
can stay but that I’ll have to be home early tomorrow morning. Since we’ve
technically slept together before I’m not prepared for how strange it feels to
be climbing into bed with him for something other than sex. As far as I can
tell, Liam sleeps like a log over on his side of the bed, while I toss and turn
and eventually raid his refrigerator, finishing off the bag of green grapes he
has in his crisper.
When I get back
under the covers with him, Liam folds his arms around me and sleepily kisses my
neck. “All right?” he murmurs.
“Yeah,” I
whisper. “I ate all your grapes.”
“S’okay,” Liam
says, and I curl my body around him and kiss his hair. His forehead’s sweaty
and he says something too drowsily indistinct for me to comprehend. I wonder,
as I close my eyes, if I’m fighting sleep because I don’t want to miss
anything. Our time’s running down and I can’t be sorry any longer about the way
any of this has happened. It’s just not going to be as easy as I’d originally
imagined letting him go.
Did I ever
really think it would be? I can’t tell anymore, but that’s the last thought
prowling around my head before, at last, I give in and join Liam in sleep.
***
When I first moved to Oakville
days and days would pass without me speaking to anyone aside from my parents.
Near the lake and huddled in front of the TV were the two places I felt most comfortable.
It’s too cold now to spend time down by the water and the majority of the
television I watch, when I’m not at O’Keefe’s or working on
Johnny Yang,
Merman at Large
, is British.
I still often
carry Bastien’s copy of
The Handmaid’s Tale
with me, but I hardly ever
drop into the corner store anymore. Their prices are exorbitant and all the
real food is over at the fruit market and grocery store. These days I’m even
known to spend time at the local library.
On Wednesday I
wrap up warm and walk to downtown Oakville early in the afternoon with the
intention of stocking up on graphic novels and fresh produce. Liam’s offered to
swing by my place on his way to the theater later and pick me up, which means
Katie will have an opportunity to meet him before the play. He’s supposed to
bring my earrings with him when he comes because, although I made a point on
Monday morning of reminding myself to put them on before I left, by the time
Liam and I had finished our coffees they’d entirely slipped my mind.
Turning my cell
phone on is another thing I’ve failed to remember. I haven’t become entirely
accustomed to having one again yet and often forget about it while I’m out.
Having just remembered its existence, I dig around in my purse and switch it on
in case anyone wants to get a hold of me. There’s a text message from my
father. He does that sometimes now that he knows I have my own phone again.
This particular message says he ran into Bastien’s father in the Chapters at
the Metropolis mall. I briefly wonder what the two of them said about me and
then notice I missed a call from Liam twenty minutes ago. The plan I’m on
doesn’t allow anyone to leave audio messages but there’s a text message from
him five minutes after that which reads:
“Something
I can’t put off needs to be sorted out. I’m sorry I won’t be able to drive you
to the theater tonight or see you afterwards. The tickets will still be at the
box office for you but I probably won’t be able to be in touch for a few days.
Again, I’m sorry. I’ll explain everything later. Please just give me some time.
I’ll ring when I can.”
My mind shifts
immediately into overdrive, imagining what could be going on. It can’t be a
family emergency if Liam’s still doing the play tonight. I know that he said to
give him time but I’m on Lakeshore Road, only five minutes from his apartment.
I could pretend I never saw the message and use the earrings as an excuse, say
that I just happened to be in the neighborhood and wanted to wear them tonight
but was worried he’d forget them…
I scan Liam’s
messages again as I hurry towards his apartment, a bad feeling settling like
silt at the bottom of my stomach. He’s never canceled before, and what could be
so consuming that he doesn’t even have the time to explain it?
In his lobby I
punch in the buzz code for his suite. The phone rings for so long that I’ve
nearly decided he’s either left already or is planning to ignore it.
“Hello?” a
woman’s voice says sharply.
I must have
entered the wrong code. I disconnect and immediately try again. This time Liam
buzzes me inside the building without a word.
I tug open the
security door and slip into the elevator. Then I’m knocking nervously on Liam’s
front door and a fine-boned woman with long dark hair and steely eyes jerks it
open. I stare past her form, searching out Liam as she says, in an angry Irish
accent, “Are you the latest plaything then?”
My eyes zoom
back to the woman in front of me. She’s in her early thirties, a little shorter
than average but strikingly attractive. “Excuse me,” I snap. “Who are you?”
The woman, who’s
wearing a gray blazer with matching pants, looks as though she’s ready for a
day at the office. We’re still standing on opposite sides of the open doorway
as she says, “I think you know who I am.”