Miss You Mad: a psychological romance novel (2 page)

"I think of pigeons the same way," she said.

We made it to the grass line. Dark creeping in faster than I wanted.

"So how long are you staying?" Suddenly I had to get all of her information before she went up the path to the car I spotted behind the rose bushes. Just knowing I wanted that information made me want to be sick again. I'd already decided to pass quietly into non-existence; what in the Hell made me think I needed more information about anything?

Her answer came slowly, as if she had given it some thought but hadn't come to any decision.

"Not sure. For a while, I think."

She paused at the start of the path. The smell of rose was as strong as that earthy scent of her. I caught another scent too, a bakery scent, cloves, I thought. They mixed well together. I had visions of a moneymaking fragrance--'Evening with Gulls' or something like that.

"You have no plans to leave?" I asked.

She gave a kind of frown, along with a shrug. "Don't know. Right now I love it here. Might even move here." Her frown intensified. She began to fidget.

"Are you okay?" she asked again. "I could walk you home. Just to be sure."

Most of the nausea had abated. The sweats had calmed.

I rubbed my stomach anyway. "Come to think of it," I said, eyeing her from beneath shuttered lids. "I still don't feel quite right."

She traced the outline of my shoulder blade with fingers that sent tingles straight to my ball sack. "Then it's settled."

With me hunched over, struggling to pick my way through the bushes, and her holding my elbow, we walked the distance to my front porch. Moths fluttered around the coach lights. Before I knew it, I was asking her in. For tea of all things.

She stared at me for a second, suspicion traveling the breadth of her fine features..

"Not now; it makes me pee."

She headed down the path without even looking back. For just one moment, I had felt awake. I had felt the stirring of interest. Even though she had been gentle about it, she had turned down my offer.

Oh well, perhaps tomorrow would be a better time to die.

Exhausted from my ordeal, I went straight to bed. The sheets were crisp, the way I liked them, and the window was open to let in peeping noises made by bog frogs. I even had my feather pillow, the one I'd had since childhood. My six-foot frame stretched nicely across the mattress. I was geared. Not that it did any good. For some reason as I lay there, I remembered images from my childhood. Some of the memories were good, some of them bad. Most were memories that didn't make sense--that seemed to matter, but had no grounding--and floated around my head is if they were vapor.

I thought of Dad as I lay there. Well, not really Dad at first, but of Kevin, my best friend when I was six. Dad just sort of jumped in, like he often did, and I promptly pressed him straight back out. He had no business invading my thoughts. My thoughts were my own. I was a man of means now, so much cash from that ridiculously lucky lobster investment that I didn't need to work.

Which was half the trouble. I kept working. Days I played hookie and took off, Dad's unnerving criticisms kept me from enjoying my leisure. Of course, critic was his favorite role. Much like mine had been to annoy the living Hell out of him. Strange, the little things we take pleasure in.

At any rate, I struggled to keep Dad's image at bay as my thoughts show Kevin and me playing together in my parents' driveway. Early spring rains have left mud puddles in the dirt and we have our small plastic soldiers forging across the water at each other. Kevin is grinning at me because he has half of his forces already into the water and I've only managed to advance a quarter. Damn him, he's going to win. I know he's going to win and in that moment I'm as mad at him as a bear with a sore butt.

I suppose it's late afternoon, rather than the morning, because Dad comes home from fishing; he drives into the yard with his half-ton truck. Kevin and I run for the edge of the lawn. I'm still running; the crisp, salty air is moving into my lungs and I'm laughing. Laughing. I turn to Kevin because I'm no longer angry; I love to run and that has killed my brief temper. Kevin isn't behind me.

Dad, dressed in his tartan coat and fish-stained jeans, is standing over Kevin where he lies in the driveway. Some of my friend's hair, mouse brown hair that is fine and limp, is covered in muck. His arm is stretched into the mud puddle, and the tips of his fingers have just missed the mark of grabbing a handful of soldiers, twitching with the last spark of muscle firing.

After the funeral, Dad hires someone to strip the salmon-colored paint off our house. He pays them good money--and I know it's good money because Dad talks of it often--to paint our entire house white. He even gets them to paint the trim white. It doesn't make any sense to me, never made any sense to me, what painting our house has to do with Kevin's death.

People do strange things, I suppose.

Lying in my California King with 200 count Egyptian cotton sheets, I began to feel closed in, what with the memory and my nauseous belly. I quickly decided to change my mind's eye to something more pleasant. Hannah's figure stole into the glaring light of thought. I let her play with my mind and found myself imagining her in all sorts of ways. For a man who'd had no sexual contact for what seemed ages, I certainly could come up with some interesting fantasies. Poor Hannah, she had no idea how filthy she became in my thoughts.

I rolled to my side on the mattress and strained for the table lamp. Sleep escaped me. All the night promised was fantasies. Fantasies that would only heighten the fact that I was alone, and would force me to satisfy my arousal alone. I'd be damned if my last bit of pleasure on earth would come from self-gratification.

I heaved myself from bed. No sense thinking about her when she probably slept contentedly in whatever room she'd secured for her stay, not giving me a second thought.

So, with nothing on but my boxers, and gripping a flashlight I managed to rummage from my kitchen, I made my way out onto the lawn. In the September moonlight, I picked through the path of thickets and rose bushes onto the beach.

The heady smell of salt and seaweed clung to the air. I found a patch of sand surrounded by eelgrass. Sitting cross-legged, naked save my drawers, I filtered cool sand through my fingers. To be or not to be -- that was the question.

The juice had gone out of living. It had gone out of getting pussy, for Heaven's sake, and it truly was a sad point if you realized how so literally on a gluttonous feast of pussy I'd been that I could be a Roman tickling his throat with a feather to find that one more delectable morsel. For a man so fully sated but unsatisfied, it was a miracle I didn't
want
to live to see one more shaved and moist slit.

Celibacy wasn't my original intent; it was more of a natural progression. I had cut off ties with everyone I knew. Any and all of the bevy of girls I kept on a short, selfish tether. I'd started to believe they all flocked to my cock for the money and slowly but surely, I hacked every root that connected me to humankind. I didn't even see my mother or sister regularly, nor did I visit my one time fuck-buddy, Gina, like I used to. Work was a thing that had me there body, but not soul. I shuffled home at five every day, content to sit on my couch and torture the remote.

So there I sat in my drawers, a 28-year-old man, attractive in my way, filtering sand through my toes and wondering what the Hell this was all about. I wondered about my recent past, how I'd ever make up for my father's death and whether my family could forgive me. I thought, too, about my sister, Jesse. I thought about Mom. I worried that I'd want to come back out of my dark shell and would find nothing outside in the light that could keep me there.

Surely Hannah was the initial reason I came to the beach for the second time in one night. She'd caught my attention when for the last while nothing else could. I couldn't decide what it was about her that had pulled me out of my fog. She certainly was beautiful, but surely I'd met and dated many beautiful women. Thoughts of them couldn't disperse the haze; why did Hannah? It could have been her lack of suitable admiration for my miniature mansion, or it could have been that she seemed more interested in the shadows that stretched up the side of it. Both made her intriguing. But thoughts of her would disperse like the hazy clouds of my frequent highs. Like my desire for purpose, or love of family.

My erection had gone, so too would thoughts of Hannah.

The alarm yanked me from my dreams. The sun streamed in through the window in annoying rays. Damn its sunny disposition. Seven a.m. was not a decent hour for anything to be grinning. From my spot in bed, I surveyed the room, and wondered how Hannah would see it. Furnished completely from online purchases and high-end auctions, it oozed money. Anyone stepping in would immediately notice the mahogany and brass, they'd feel wrapped in wealth. Would she enjoy the feeling? Somehow, I doubted it.

I pulled my aching body from bed, wondered if I should make it up, and like every morning since the previous year, opted to do it tomorrow. I managed a shower, though, and a shave. I even slapped my jaw with a little cologne. At work, all must appear as usual.

In a fit of philanthropy-as-therapy move, I'd set up a little co-op type of money lending institution that now had become my prison of good will. I couldn't find any gracious way out, and when I thought about just letting it crash, my Dad's voice dug into my psyche, saying work built character and on the heels of that my mother's voice telling me appearances were important.

"Such a clean-shaven boy," I'd once heard an old battle-axe say to another when she thought I wasn't looking.

Boy. Well, maybe so, but not for years. Boyhood, I thought on my way to work, had been lost to an English teacher. Exciting as it might have been to lose my virginity at fifteen to a fresh twenty-four-year-old violet-thong wearing diva, I suppose now, it was just a little sick.

"Sick, Colonel, old man," I said out loud to the vintage Colonel Sanders bank that sat on the passenger seat of my BMW. It had belonged to mother back in the 70s. Her getting-out-of-this-shithole account as she'd called it. Her dreams melted when she got pregnant for me at fifteen and she ended up staying in the town. At least now I had enough money to send her to Bermuda every winter. She'd passed me the bank as a reminder of how dreams could come true.

I'd taken to throwing a token loonie in it each morning in a sick sort of ritual. It was like punching a time clock for me, and I felt a little of myself die each time I heard one coin hit another inside. Even so, I couldn't stop the routine to save my deadened soul.

I squinted at the bank out of the corner of my eye, imagining me knocking up that teacher at the same age as my Mom had. "It's just plain sick."

All too soon, work loomed before me, awaiting direction and discretion. Thoughts of virgins and beautiful women would have to be put away for another day. That niggling sense of duty rose like a wagging, nagging tongue. A man works. Doesn't matter how much money he has. He works because it builds character. Damn.

"Good morning, Daniel." Sweet-faced Gina, as always, was the first inside to greet me. I glanced at her. In a linen skirt and heels that made her short legs look half-ways long she looked more sexy than sweet. Not that Gina wanted any man to think her legs were sexy; she was more into impressing women now. Something about finally realizing what she wanted out of life. I remember guffawing at that. Who knew such things?

This morning, however, despite my thoughts on her sexual enlightening, I smiled.

"Gina. How are you this fine morning?"

My quick burst of good humour dissipated as quickly as I realized her relief. I couldn't have been so distant lately that it was that good to see me smile.

"I'm great." She passed me a stack of loans to sign off and blinked a delectably long-lashed eye. "Your Irish eyes are certainly smiling." Standing with her hand on her hip, she waited for further conversation. I looked around for an escape.

She caught my eye. "Don't get your drawers in a twist, Danny. I'm not about to bore you with friendly chit chat."

Damn her.

"Damn you," I said.

Rather than affect a dignified look of offense, she bared her teeth at me and hissed. Much like a wild cat. Then she grinned and walked away.

I've known Gina since second grade. Calling her anything but wild is as appropriate as combing your butt hair with a silver brush.

"Tell anyone who calls, I'm busy." I hollered after.

"Yeah, yeah. Busy all day, right Dan?"

I saw Hannah before I took my first peek at my agenda. There was no need to actually look at my appointment book; it was clear. I'd managed for the last week to do absolutely nothing. That meant I worked hard all day to do so little.

Before being able to scratch a long slash across the day's date, I had a terrible, wrenching urge to look up.

I peered up through the plate glass window that gave me view of the teller counter. Usually I pulled the blind so nobody could see me doodling away with magic marker on my pad of Post-It notes. Today, I'd forgotten.

Gina had taken Hannah's coat--a long Australian-type khaki duster. Damn that Gina. She was just too efficient. She'd have those long jean-clad legs crossed inside her snug office up front before I could get out there.