Losing Streak (The Lane) (4 page)

Chapter Three

He was right. Gabe’s was pretty shitty. The tables had an unfortunate shine to them, one of the florescent lights kept flickering, and the whole place had a faint burned-grease smell to it. But they were open and busy enough to suggest that no one had died from E. coli recently. I tried to pretend that I hadn’t caught sight of the line cook using his spatula to scratch his head through a window that went into the kitchen.

Ashley, our bored-looking waitress, had barely made it two steps away from our table after delivering our food before Masochist was focusing his attention on me.

“So,” he started and I held up a single finger, cutting him off.

“Hold it right there, Boy Wonder. You said no talking, remember? No talking. No eye contact. We haven’t even been here twenty minutes and you’re already reneging on that.”

“Don’t believe in letting anyone get away with anything, do you?”

“Hell, no.” I bit back a smile when he pointedly turned his head and scanned the other occupants around us, occasionally peeking back in my direction through too-long lashes. I didn’t necessarily mean to use that time to study him, to note the way his hair fell in dark, messy waves across his forehead or the way his five-o’clock shadow peppered his strong jawline. I definitely didn’t intend to notice the lean but defined muscles of his arms that his jacket had hidden.

“You’re cheating,” he accused without looking at me.

“How do you figure? This isn’t eye contact.”

“No. But it’s creepy.”

“Most guys would be honored if I went anywhere with them, let alone looked at them at all.”

“Deep, a sadist, and arrogant. You’re everything I ever wanted in a girl.” His tone was light, obviously joking, and yet I felt a wave of heat go through me, warming up bones that always felt at least a little cold.

“Moving kinda fast there, aren’t you?”

“Maybe.” He sneaked another peek at me and smirked when he caught me looking back at him. “Ah, Sadist. Now who’s trying to break the rules? Try to control yourself. It’s starting to make me uncomfortable.”

For reasons I couldn’t pinpoint, or maybe didn’t want to attempt to name, I found myself laughing in earnest. And yet an edge of something jagged hummed underneath the playful bantering, as if we sensed a darkness in the other and were weighing whether or not to engage or acknowledge it.

I wasn’t sure what it said about me as a person that it was the latter that had me crossing my legs and leaning toward him over the table as far as I dared.

“I’m not so good at control.”

Whatever response he’d been expecting that wasn’t it and certainly not in the tone I used, a little breathy, almost a purr but too hard to really be considered one, judging by the way his head jerked in my direction. My expression never changed. I didn’t wink or laugh or anything that would suggest I was joking. After a second of searching my face, a slow grin spread over his lips, the edges of it razor sharp.

“That makes two of us.” His voice came out a little thick and I’ll be damned if a shiver didn’t skate up my spine, trailing its warm fingers behind it.

I shouldn’t have been so immediately and thoroughly turned on by such a simple sentence and yet there I was, picturing myself pushing him up against a wall while he attacked my mouth with his, hands hot against my skin. You’d have thought I’d been deprived, that I hadn’t been with a guy in so long that I was taking to fantasizing about it in shitty diners across from boys whose names I hadn’t even bothered to ask for. And that wasn’t the case at all. While I might not have been interested in a relationship of any kind, I wasn’t opposed to the quick fling, a night of uncomplicated sex in order to knock the edge off. But they always ended up being nice boys. Boys who were gentle and acted like we were making memories rather than simply scratching an inch. And so I ditched them before any ideas they had turned to plans.

Masochist, though. Something told me that Masochist knew how to scratch an itch and leave it at that. Something told me that the beast I sensed he was well acquainted with made itself known when it happened.

“My mama’s dying.”

I hadn’t meant for that to come out. I hadn’t even known I was in danger of it coming out, what with my current train of thought. I’d known it was there, though. It was always there. There was never a moment when it wasn’t prowling back and forth at the end of my thoughts, a demon that danced and cackled and did its best to never let me forget.

The hum that had been between us, heavy and electric, abated some, slunk back to the edges of our little corner now that this statement was out and on the table, so solid it might as well have been something physical we could touch.

Maybe I should have had the urge to duck my head, to hide my face and drown in mortification, because who did that? Who announced such raw and ugly truths to people they’d only just met? I didn’t, though. Instead, as those seconds ticked by in the background, I held his gaze defiantly, a dare. I didn’t have much but I had my pride and no matter if I meant to say it or not, I’d said it and I’d stand by it.

Finally, he grimaced.

“That sucks.” Somehow he managed to make those two small words sound sincere. It wasn’t just a response. He wasn’t just saying something because he felt like he needed to say it while inwardly cringing back. He genuinely meant it.

And, really, could it be summed up any better?

“Yeah,” I agreed. “It does.”

So we shouldn’t be doing this
, I didn’t add.
I
shouldn’t be doing this.
Even just for a night
,
I
probably shouldn’t do this because there was always that chance that I wouldn’t want to stop after a night.
I’ve never had that urge before
, I didn’t continue.
But I have a feeling I could with you.
I
don’t know why and I don’t think I like that.

“You guys close?”

“She’s my mother. Of course we’re close.”

“Doesn’t always mean that.” He took a drink of soda I’m sure was as flat as mine. “Sometimes it just means you share DNA.”

I opened my mouth, a biting retort on my tongue, but something about the way he said it made me pause.

“Almost sound like you’re speaking from experience.”

My suspicion was confirmed when he gave a nonchalant shrug and stretched his legs out under the table just enough to be in my space but not so much it was intrusive.

“Every family has a black sheep.”

“You this cryptic naturally or are you putting in a special effort tonight?”

“Natural. It’s part of my mysterious charm. Workin’ for you?”

“Almost.”

“Good.”

He was silent for so long I thought maybe that had been his attempt to change the subject, but finally he nudged my leg with one of his boots. “If I show you mine, you gotta show me yours.”

I nudged him back. “You trying to get my story or for me to flash you?”

“Either.”

“Deal.”

He grinned at me and straightened a little bit, and I knew, I knew that when we left here tonight, I wouldn’t be going home. I think he knew it too.

“I was passed around my family. Like, I don’t know, a really ugly heirloom. Something they felt obligated to keep but no one really wanted.”

I wasn’t sure how he was able to deliver a line like that and still manage to sound so—sexual. I didn’t know how the fuck I could hear a line like that and still be turned on.

Maybe I just understood what it felt like to not be wanted in ways that mattered.

I shook my head.

“Shitty. What about your parents?”

“Just my mom. Don’t know my dad. No one does. They figure I must look like him, though. Probably why she couldn’t stand to have me around. Can’t really blame her there.”

I gave him a questioning look.

“She was raped. I was the result. She apparently tried to do the noble thing. You know, have me and shit. My aunt Cathy, that’s her older sister, said my mom had planned on keeping me. Left school, came home and everything. Couldn’t do it, though. Took one look at me in the hospital room, handed me over to a nurse and never looked at me again.”

“Damn,” I swore in a low voice, and now, at least, any sense of wanting to climb him like a tree vanished. “And that was just it?”

He shrugged.

“Yep. My grandparents kept me for a while. Being with them was the first thing I remember. But they were old and had a hard time keeping up with a kid. My great-aunt Bonnie came down and took me back upstate with her for a couple years. Mean old broad, but funny. I love the hell out of her. Eventually, though, she couldn’t do it anymore either. I was pretty wild. Constantly into trouble. Nothing serious back then. She lives in Butt-Fuck Egypt, though. Farm country and I got bored up there in the middle of nowhere. Finally Aunt Cathy and Uncle Dennis came and got me. Stayed with them until I finished school, then they basically told me to hit the bricks. They’d done their job and now it was over. So. Like I said, sometimes family just means DNA.”

“Yeah. Shit. I guess so.”

Masochist nodded at our waitress when she stopped long enough to drop off our check. He flipped it over and winced before pulling out a couple of bills from his pocket.

“What are you doing?” he asked when I pulled my purse toward me.

“Giving you the money for mine.”

He pointed at me. “We had a deal. I mean, granted, you did break it, what with the talking and the looking and I’m still extremely uncomfortable with the extent you eye-fucked me, but I’m a man of my word.”

I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“We’re close,” I said instead of trying to insist.

“Hmm?” He quirked an eyebrow and waited for me to continue.

“My mama and me. Well. Close enough. It’s always been the three of us. Her, my brother and me. Kinda had to be. There was no one else.”

“That really does suck then.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Yeah. Kinda does.”

We sat there for a minute, quiet, each lost in our respective thoughts.

“Never caught your name,” he said suddenly, as though he only just remembered. Hell. Maybe he did. Maybe we’d come up to the place where names mattered, sped past it, and now we needed to backtrack.

No earthly good could come from telling him, and yet I saw no reason not to either.

“Rosie.”

“Well, Rosie, what do you say we get out of here? I don’t know how much longer I can deal with feeling like we are imposing on Ashley with our presence. I’d say that’s why I gave her a shitty tip, but to be honest, it’s because I blew most of my money on a hot bartender earlier.”

“She sounds like a bitch.”

“Maybe,” he agreed. “But I happen to like them bitchy.”

I’d gone home with people for less.

The sky was an ashy gray when we emerged, and soon it would be streaked with the first rays of the sunrise. As if what was left of the night sensed that its time left was limited and wanted to punish those who were happy to see it go, the air had a stronger nip to it, almost stinging. Goose pimples broke out along my bare arms, and I rubbed at them briskly as we crossed the parking lot toward our vehicles, gravel crunching under our feet. I told myself that I wouldn’t look over at him, that it was flirty and dumb and I was neither of those things.

I caught his eye.

“So. Where to now?” he asked, leaning against the back of his truck when we reached it. “Night’s young, you know. Or the morning is, anyway.”

I glanced up from where I’d been digging in my purse for my keys, considering him for a moment.

“You’re going nowhere fast, aren’t you?”

“I’m going somewhere. Just taking my time getting there.” He straightened, shoving his hands deep in his jacket pockets, and took a step toward me that I didn’t back away from. “What about you, Sadist Rosie? You going nowhere?”

“I’m already there.”

He nodded, expression mostly neutral and maybe a little approving. Then he reached out and caught me by the belt loops, pausing long enough for me to resist if I was going to before dragging me forward. Again, he hesitated, his lips only a breath away from mine. It was only a moment, the barest of seconds between two heartbeats, and yet it felt as if it stretched out until it was almost unbearable.

I grabbed him by the neck with an impatient snarl and closed the last of the space between us. I felt his lips turn up against mine and for a moment that was all that existed, all that mattered. The smell of him, faint cologne and something that reminded me of an autumn night surrounded me, shoving every noise, everything that buzzed and hummed on a constant loop, from my mind. I pressed myself closer, making a noise of approval when one of his hands came up to fist in my hair and tugged.

There was something nearly angry in the way our mouths moved against each other. Something scalding in the force of it. It was almost cathartic, giving as hard and insistent as I could, gripping a little too tight and pushing a little too hard and having it matched. It was unleashing the beast and the storm that came with it, and having one meet it, just as eager. It was an outlet I could snap and claw at, and it returned, biting back just as hard. Enough to feel the blood close to the surface without it being drawn.

I was the first to pull away, reluctantly, dragging in oxygen in big, desperate gulps.

“Damn,” he swore, his hands never moving from where they held me in place “This is the part you can leave if you want to. Because if we do that again, my next question is going to be a clichéd one.”

“Yours,” I answered, pulling him toward me once more. “The answer to that question is your place. So don’t waste time asking it.”

Chapter Four

I insisted on driving, though there was something physically painful about putting that much space between us for the short drive to his apartment.

I crinkled my nose slightly as I pulled into a space near his truck and climbed out. Though not nearly as sad and run-down as my looming ruin of an apartment or Mama’s sad, desperate one, his wasn’t much better. It had the air of a place that had once been nice, with its wide columns and small balconies on the upper floors. But whatever good intentions there’d once been had been abandoned and replaced with cheap, mismatched patio furniture and peeling paint.

Masochist came around the back of his truck toward me, snagging my hand in his and pulled me toward the closest building.

“Come on,” he said. “And if the guy from 1C comes out, don’t make eye contact.”

“Why?”

“By this time, he’s spent the entire night dropping acid, so there’s a chance he’ll think you’re a dragon.”

“Wonderful.” I pulled short suddenly, causing him to come to a stop just feet from the building’s entrance. “Wait. How do I know for sure you’re not gonna kill me and sell my skin on the black market?”

His mouth curled up in slow grin. “Having second thoughts, Sadist?”

“Just checking.”

“If I was going to do that, I wouldn’t have wasted the money on dinner first.”

“Perfect. Lead the way.”

The hall was dim and depressing, and as we climbed the stairs, a baby cried out from somewhere below us. The urgency I’d felt before had been doused slightly. Maybe I was having second thoughts. I’d known, of course. Or had strongly suspected. Those from this side of the tracks usually did. We recognized ours. Because that was all that existed here. This side and that side. There were always little tells, even when the other person tried to hide it. And Masochist hadn’t. Like his beast, he’d made no attempts at disguising who he was. But still I’d hoped. I don’t even know why, but I always did. It was from the girl who had sneaked her mama’s few battered romance novels, who believed in shit like white knights and true love and princes disguised as commoners. I didn’t even want that. Not me, not this girl who’d spent her whole life in the worst parts of town. But that delusional girl still existed underneath and at times like this she made herself known.

She wanted to be saved. I knew better. I was always going to have to save myself.

“Last chance,” Masochist announced, coming to a stop outside a door with as many locks on it as Mama’s. “Well, that’s not true. But it’d be nice if you left now if you were going to.”

I studied him in the dim light, noting the way he looked as if he belonged here. If I was going to back out, this would be the moment. The moment when I looked into the abyss and saw my equal looking back.

“Open the door,” I said, reaching around him to push it open and him inside. It had barely shut behind us before I was on him, attacking his mouth with mine, nearly sighing with relief when once again the white noise in my head dimmed and disappeared completely. He made a noise in the back of his throat and with it, something broke and we were yanking at clothes, shoving and pulling and coming back together before the reality could set in that we’d ever been apart. There in the tiny foyer that wasn’t a foyer at all, he grabbed me just underneath my ass, hands burning against my skin, and heaved me up against him. I didn’t want to waste any more time, didn’t want to drag it out any longer, and I reached between us to guide him into me.

“Wait,” he gasped out, attempting to pull his lower half back. “Condom? Or, fuck. I don’t know. I don’t care.”

“Birth control. I’m on birth control.”

“Good.” Then he surged forward and I was clutching at his shoulders, my head falling back as a sound between a hiss and a wail escaped my lips.

Nothing existed beyond this, beyond slick flesh and desperate grunts and the taut muscles underneath my hands. There were no worlds beyond his teeth that nipped and mine that returned it and the occasional “shit” that he muttered under his breath like a sinner’s prayer. And when he shifted one arm up to wrap around my waist and his other came up and gripped the back of my neck, his hips angled and I was soaring. It was like breaking, like splintering apart. Only this time I didn’t feel the cracks. I felt
him.
His skin pressed up against mine in a way that was almost crushing but didn’t come with that drowning sense of hopelessness I knew so well. It was shattering, but a controlled one. One where his body wrapped around mine and held the pieces together so they didn’t scatter. So maybe when I patched myself up later, the cracks wouldn’t be so noticeable. So jagged.

I was finally coming down when he gave a final thrust and I clung to his sweaty neck, eyes squeezed shut. Then he let his legs buckle beneath him and buried his face in my throat that was struggling to suck in air as hard as he was.

“Never done that one before,” he said in a ragged voice after a few moments, still gripping me against him.

“What? Had sex?” I should have pulled away, eased back at least, but I made no moves.

“No. I mean that position. Fucking wall was too far away.”

I glanced over his shoulder at the maybe three feet between us and the closest wall and grinned at him. “Not entirely sure how I should take that.”

“It’s a compliment. Felt too damn good to stumble in that direction.” He grinned back at me and damn it, I kissed him before I realized what I was doing.

“Next time we’ll get over that way,” I promised.

“Yeah?” It was loaded, that yeah. He was asking more than one question and I didn’t hesitate like I probably should have.

“Yeah.”

* * *

“His name is Brandon.”

No matter how many times I said the words in my head, I couldn’t force them out of my mouth. Not to anyone. Especially not to Mama.

I eased open her apartment door and peeked my head in, telling myself that this would be the time I said it. “His name is Brandon Williams and I’ve been seeing him for the past three weeks.” But when that relieved sigh escaped upon seeing her lying on the couch, I swallowed the words once again before they had the chance to escape.

Oh, Mama.

Every day it all seemed to get just a little bit worse until there was no relief at all for her. The word
relief
no longer existed for us. It was erased from our vocabularies completely.

We’d been told, of course, when she’d first been diagnosed, that multiple myeloma was aggressive. Ruthless. That it was the ass-kicker of cancers and though it was incurable, it could still be treated. It wouldn’t save her life, but it’d extend it. But somehow hearing those things, knowing them, never prepared us for the decline. Because they didn’t warn us that we’d watch her waste away and it would be rapid. There would be no time to adjust or get used to what was happening. We’d know her and then we wouldn’t.

We didn’t realize that there would only ever be bad days and worse ones. There would be days she never left the bed, when nothing I said or did could convince her to eat. Days when I’d have to drag her into doctor’s appointments and off to treatments and then physically prop her up while we were there.

They never prepared us for the cold. She was always cold, always shivering, no matter how many blankets I piled on top of her. I even took over the set from my own bed, hoping the last of the stash would be enough. Of course it wasn’t. She lay beneath that soft mountain and shook so hard her teeth chattered and I was helpless to do anything more than watch, hands fluttering over her uselessly.

They didn’t tell us she’d shrink.

I didn’t even know that was possible, and yet it happened. She lost an inch here and an inch there off her height right before my eyes. What she didn’t lose, she hid, stooping like a woman twice her age, as though her body was drawing in on itself to escape the pain. As if it was so desperate to protect what little it had left that it was hiding it from the cancer’s grabby, ruthless hands.

She was disappearing on me and it terrified me down to the depths I kept my beast caged in, and my beast didn’t react well to fear. Fear only made it angrier than it already was.

So I couldn’t tell her about Brandon, about this dangerous, life-scarred boy I’d found myself sneaking off to see between work and her. I couldn’t tell her about the way he made me forget or how when I smiled with him that smile was almost genuine.

I couldn’t tell her that I stopped breaking apart when I was alone because I found another way to when I was with him. And while it was still as violent and I still got lost in it, I no longer felt like I was wrecked and bleeding when it was over. Because with him I didn’t have to
be
anything. I was just Rosie. Not a big sister or a caretaker or the poor townie girl who served up drinks in a too-small shirt. And I didn’t even know who I was beyond those things, but with Brandon I felt like maybe I could finally figure it out and even if I couldn’t, it’d be okay. Because with him, I was finally something other than those roles.

Mama wouldn’t be happy. She’d want to be happy. She’d probably even pretend to be, but it would kill her and she didn’t need anything to help with that. She certainly didn’t need it from me, the daughter she depended on to keep her alive. She had dreams for that daughter, ones that included better than she’d had, better than she could give her flesh and blood. She wanted more for me than just the love she’d known. She wanted the stability she hadn’t.

So I kept quiet. And Brandon never questioned why I talked so much and so often about my people but never made any mention of him meeting them. Maybe he recognized a poor girl’s reluctance to bring home a poor boy.

People who lived in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and people from the wrong side of the tracks shouldn’t date in their neighborhood. You were supposed to get out, escape this side of the tracks and make a life on the other side. You weren’t supposed to stay.

It was easy, though, so easy, to forget that with him. What he lacked in a plan, he made up for in bed. Not my bed, though. Never in my bed. I didn’t want to risk bringing him around Jackson, who I couldn’t be sure wouldn’t say something in front of Mama. Not that I even had a bed anymore to bring Jackson home to. I’d had to sell it to the guy who’d moved in to the apartment below mine. Twenty-five dollars didn’t buy a lot, but it paid part of a prescription.

But it wasn’t just the sex with Brandon and the fact that he had a bed to sleep in when I didn’t. It was more than that. It was those quiet moments afterward, before I drifted off to sleep, when his rough fingers danced along the side of my neck and his breath was heavy in my ear and everything else faded away. I couldn’t hear his neighbors or feel the weight of tomorrow pressing down on me. The only thing that existed was that moment. There was only him and me, and the only weight I felt was his pressed against my back. And his weight never threatened to bury me.

* * *

Mama was sick again.

She tried to hide it when she heard Jackson and me come in. Well, she tried to hide it from Jackson. But there was no mistaking the painful retching sounds we could hear through the thin walls seconds after she excused herself on shaky legs. At first, Jackson attempted to act as though he hadn’t noticed. But after the fourth or fifth time, even he had a hard time pretending. After the sixth go, he started to shift uncomfortably in his seat, as if he wanted to get up and flee.

He wasn’t good with this, didn’t know how to handle a mama who huddled over a dingy toilet as she fought to keep down the little food she could mostly stomach. It was why I always came alone on the days when the one thing that was supposed to make her better raged war on her already frail body. Jackson couldn’t handle it and Mama didn’t want him to. Not her baby. Not the boy who looked so much like the daddy he’d never gotten a chance to know. Jackson had to be protected, whereas I couldn’t be. And that was all well and fine until Mama got sick unexpectedly and Jackson came over all jittery and disturbed.

He leaned slightly in my direction and though bitterness coated the tender flesh along the inside of my cheeks, I took the hand that stretched out desperately toward me. I was rewarded with a slight squeeze to my fingers, the rough palm as familiar as my own. I’d felt each of those calluses develop over time, smooth baby skin that had gradually roughened over the years. Sometimes I felt guilty over them, as though they were my fault, as if I should have prevented them. Mostly I was envious that he only had them on his hands.

“How long will she be like this?” he whispered, as though he was afraid to voice his discomfort with the situation too loudly.

I wanted to snap at him, tell him that if he showed up when she got back from her appointments more often, he’d know. That just because Mama wanted him to do something didn’t mean he had to. I bit my scarred tongue instead. It wasn’t Jackson’s fault. He was, as always, just doing what he was told.

“It varies. Sometimes a few hours. Sometimes a few days.”

“I’ve never heard it. Is it always so...” He trailed off and I could feel his pleading eyes watching me, begging me to reassure him. He wanted me to finish his thought for him so that he wouldn’t have to. He wanted me to protect him from even giving his worries a voice, even if he didn’t know that was what he wanted.

The beast in me thrashed and screamed, bloodied the cage I locked it in around Mama and Jackson.

“Sometimes.”
This is nothing
, I didn’t add.
Usually it’s worse.
But you’re here and she’s protecting you
,
even now.
Even in the state she’s in.

“How do you do it?”

That angry, wild part of me stilled at the sound of his anguish. Even it was protective of Jackson, despite its constant desire to lash out.

I squeezed his fingers and shot him what I hoped was a reassuring smile. He returned it, hesitantly.

“I just do,” I told him before turning back toward the wall we’d been staring at. He followed suit and together we sat, still clutching hands, the sound of Mama’s retching background noise. We were her “precious book-end babies” with matching hair and eyes. One dark and angry, the other light and whole.