After
the market, we cross back into town, and I spend longer than Harper
probably likes telling her about the history of the statue in the
center of the city, Grey’s
Monument, dedicated to Earl Grey (yes, the one the tea is named
after).
But
it’s as we wander
down the block from Monument that my eyes light on the storefront
I’ve been half
looking for. The suit I brought for the funeral is back at the hotel,
but it’s an old
model, grungy, the sleeves tattered. I’ve
been meaning to replace it for ages, though I never had a reason to.
Now . . . Well . . .
The
least I can do for the father I completely and utterly disappointed
in life is to show up well dressed at his send-off.
“Do
you mind?” I ask
Harper, but she’s
already tugging me inside.
“God,
I was hoping you weren’t
actually going to wear that hideous thing in the trunk,”
she mutters as we slip through the doors.
“Gee,
thanks,” I grumble.
She’s
already picking suit sets off the shelf, though, forcing tailored
product after tailored product into my arms. I have to admit, it’s
a lot more pleasant shopping for this with her than it would be by
myself, or with my sister, which was usually my default option for
unbiased and straightforward female opinions.
“Come
out and model your favorites for me,”
Harper says when she sends me off toward the dressing room with a
final jacket stacked on the pile.
“Oh
no.” I cast a quick
glance at the clerk, currently distracted by a portly older man
asking about cufflinks, then grab Harper’s
hand and drag her into the dressing room with me. “You’re
not getting off that easy,”
I tell her. “You
want me to try all this on, you need to watch.”
Her
eyebrows rise, a smirk on her lips. “Gladly.”
We
only make it to one suit. The moment I finish pulling on the jacket,
her eyes light up in a way that spells trouble. Exactly the kind of
trouble I like. I lean over her in the changing room, pressing her
back to the mirror.
“What
do you think?” I
grin at her, catching one of her wrists in my hand. I can feel her
pulse quickening, and her eyes go wide with desire.
“I’ve
got to say, I like this one.”
My
hand trails from her wrist up her arm, then down her body, over her
soft, supple curves. She’s
wearing a black dress, simple and tasteful. Less tasteful, though,
are the red panties I find underneath when I yank the dress up above
her hips.
“Ms.
Reed, were you hoping I’d
find these?” I tug
at the edges of the fabric.
Her
cheeks flush a telltale red. “I,
uh . . . Habit?”
She shrugs one shoulder.
I
bend to suck her ear into my mouth, letting my teeth dig into her
lobe. “Good habit. I
think you deserve a reward for your forethought.”
She
arches against me, her fingernails digging into my neck. “If
I tell you what else I’ve
thought about, do I get an extra hard reward?”
She grins, and I lift her against me until her feet leave the floor,
and she wraps both legs around me for support.
“Only
if you’re very
detailed.” With one
hand, I brace her against the mirror, cupping her ass tight, while my
other hand fumbles with the zipper on these suit pants.
“Well,
it starts with me, dripping wet.”
She runs a hand slowly down her body to brush against her panties,
before she slips a finger beneath to touch herself. I’m
practically panting, watching her. “And
you getting too hard to stand it . . . ”
She drops her other hand down to touch mine against my fly, which
I’ve forgotten
about. With a sharp tug from her fingers I spring free, my cock
pressed against her now-bare arse.
“And
the ending, well . . . ”
She bites her lip. “That
part is just punishing.”
I
close my mouth over hers to bite it for her instead, all while I lift
her body higher against the mirror. “You’re
a glutton for punishment, aren’t
you.” I catch her
gaze, watch her baby blues go wide with pleasure as I drive deep into
her pussy. She moans against my mouth, clenching tight around me.
Fuck,
she feels so goddamn good.
“Jack . . . ”
Especially
when she moans my name like that, helpless beneath me.
I
brace her small, deliciously curved body against the mirror and
thrust up into her, slow at first, building faster and faster, my
hands biting deep into her thighs, her ass red from slapping against
the mirror, until the whole mirror starts to rock with us. Her breath
comes hard, and I can tell she’s
about to lose control, so I press one hand over her mouth, covering
it to muffle her keening cry when she comes, her whole body
tightening around me.
Moments
later I’m finishing
too, and I dig my teeth into her shoulder to suppress my own grunt of
pleasure. When I release her legs, she keeps leaning against the
mirror for a moment, trying to regain control of her knees, while I
slide the suit pants off.
“Not
sure about this one,”
I say, trying not to enjoy her obvious shakiness too much. “I’m
going to pick another pair . . . ”
#
Before
I know it, my phone’s
going off, reminding me that if we don’t
catch the bus now, we won’t
make it to the funeral home in time. Kat told me about a hundred
times to be early, since it would be weird for guests to arrive
before the family itself.
Now
dressed in a much nicer suit than the one I’d
planned to don, and after leaving a hefty tip for the obviously
annoyed clerk at the store, I have no excuses to linger anymore. It’s
time to get this over with.
“Come
on.” I tug on
Harper’s hand to
lead her toward the bus terminal, where we shuffle into the queue.
Unfortunately, the bus takes longer than even I guessed, and I’m
used to the delays on this particular line. We listen to the
dispatcher explain to three people in a row that he’s
not sure why the bus is fifteen—no,
twenty—no, thirty
minutes late.
Well,
I listen to him. Harper mostly squints in confusion the way she’s
been doing when talking to 90 percent of the people since we arrived
here. I hadn’t
noticed how my accent was changing, melding into a more southern
British sound (or, you know, as southern as Oxford gets), until we
came back. But watching her try to understand my fellow Geordies, I
realize my voice has changed considerably since I left home ten years
ago.
That’s
also a strange feeling.
Finally,
the bus arrives and we settle in behind an elderly woman lugging
about 100 pounds of groceries, which she politely declines my offer
to help with, and an eighteen-year-old kid whose music blasts so loud
we can hear every word from our seats.
The
kid gets off first, thank god, and the old lady exits the bus a stop
before us. With every mile that we crawl closer to my hometown—my
real hometown, not the city I adopted as mine because it was the
nearest thing to better than what I had—my
stomach clenches tighter. I’ve
always hated this part. Arriving to see what’s
changed while I was away. It’s
only been a week since I was here last, but that time was a quick
one-day visit, and I barely even stopped to think. I drove straight
to the hospital, didn’t
make a pass by the house or anything.
Now,
through the trees, one stop away from the funeral home where my
father lies in wait, I catch a glimpse of our townhouse row, and I
clutch Harper’s hand
tighter, not offering her any sort of explanation.
This
time, more than I could possibly imagined has changed. Not for anyone
else in the neighborhood, but for me? Everything is different.
Even
the trees, which have shed their fall foliage just since last
weekend, it seems, have gotten worse. They look naked against the
cold, darkening gray sky, a symbol of the winter to come.
The
bus wheezes as it arrives at our stop, a lonely little corner on a
windswept side street. Just the funeral home, a hair dresser’s,
and a sad looking corner bar across the street, its windows shaded
even though it’s
dark now.
I
take a deep breath of cold, sharp air.
“You
ready?” Harper
murmurs beside me, her eyes fixed on me, not wavering once. How did
this girl get so strong? How does she always know exactly what I
need?
What
did I do to deserve her?
“Ready
as I’ll ever be,”
I reply. Hand in hand, we cross the near-empty street, and I open the
funeral home door for us both. Inside the overheated foyer, we’re
greeted by a lackluster bouquet of lilies and a sign for the
Kingston
Wake
pointing to the
main viewing room. The lobby is empty aside from that, so I figure
we’ve made it before
any of Mum and Dad’s
friends, at least. I wonder if any of mine or Kat’s
friends from primary school will stop by—Kat
keeps in touch with a few of them, though I mostly only say hello via
social media on their birthdays, if I remember to even do that much.
I
open the final door between me and the truth of my father’s
death, and I feel my guts tie into knots. But when we step inside, my
father isn’t the
reason my mouth drops open and my whole body freezes, caught between
fight or flight, trapped in utter shock.
At
the head of the room, beside the open casket, stands my family. My
mother, her sister, Dad’s
sisters, my sister . . . And
one more woman.
Hannah
Butler.
At
first I’m just
confused. Jack freezes a half step inside the door, and I wonder if
he’s panicking. I
would be, at the thought of seeing my father laid out in his burial
clothes. This is the last time he’ll
ever see the man who raised him. I can’t
imagine what’s going
through his head right now.
I
reach up to touch his shoulder, try to comfort him, but he jerks away
from me, still staring at the opposite end of the room.
That’s
when I notice the cluster of women there. More specifically, one
woman. My history professor.
It
takes my brain a while to catch up.
What’s
she doing here?
I
wonder. Is Jack related to her? Maybe she’s
a distant cousin. It’s
strange that he wouldn’t
mention anything.
Somewhere
deep down, though, I already guess the truth.
I’ve
dated poets,
I can
hear her saying to me just the other day, ensconced in her office,
her tone so confident, so knowing. I watch her gaze fix on Jack’s,
and his do the same on her. The history between them, the unspoken
backstory, hangs so heavy in the air I swear I can taste it.
Then
there’s his family
standing around her. Hannah Butler’s
hand still rests on an older woman’s
shoulder, a woman with Jack’s
eyes, except now they’re
filled with tears and fixed on the casket. That has to be his mother.
His mother who Hannah clearly knows well enough to comfort as though
she’s family too.
And
the other girl, the younger one, who looks only a few years older
than me, but who shares those eyes with her mother and Jack, that has
to be the sister he mentioned on the drive up. Kat, the one who
organized the whole funeral for the family. He described her as the
level-headed one, the one who always keeps her head in a crisis.
She’s standing close
to Hannah as well, though she’s
looking at her brother, then at me, back and forth and back and
forth, a frown blooming on her face that shifts from confusion to
understanding to horror all in one smooth motion.
With
a pat on Hannah’s
shoulder, Kat descends the two steps from the viewing platform and
crosses the empty room toward us.
Well,
not quite empty. I notice a couple of older men huddled in a corner,
and a younger one lingering on the fringes, a phone in hand, absorbed
in a text message.
I
still haven’t moved.
I haven’t released
Jack’s hand, either.
After he cringed away when I tried to touch his shoulder with my
other hand, I’m
holding on to this one from sheer instinct.
“Jack.”
Kat finally reaches us, and pulls him into a hug. That, at last,
makes me drop his hand. Somehow I doubt I’m
going to get it back. Not with someone else from his faculty here,
watching us.
“I’m
sorry,” Kat’s
saying. “I didn’t
know. You said you were bringing a plus one, and then Hannah showed
up earlier today, so I just assumed . . . Shit,
I’m so—”
Kat glances at me, as though startled to realize I’m
human, standing right here, and can hear everything she’s
saying. “God, talk
about horrible first impressions.”
She sticks out a hand. “I’m
Kat, Jack’s sister.
You are?”
I
swallow past the sudden lump in my throat. “Harper,”
I reply as I offer my hand, trying to ignore the sudden, sinking
realization.
He
never told her about me. He never told any of them. Not even my name.
“Well,
it’s great to meet
you, Harper.” Kat
smiles, though it’s
obvious to anyone with eyeballs that it’s
a strained-around-the-edges smile. A
what-the-hell-are-you-doing-with-this-girl smile, mostly meant for
her brother.
God,
I am so fucking stupid.
“Jack,”
says another voice. Hannah, crossing the room in Kat’s
wake. She’s forcing
a smile too, but her eyes linger on me, probably coming to the same
realization that I just did about her. She stops a few feet from us,
as her expression shifts from confusion to hurt to anger, briefly,
before settling back on hurt. “I’m
so sorry for your loss,”
she says to him, though she can’t
seem to tear her eyes from the space between me and him. The space
where just moments ago we were still holding hands.
Jack
swallows and seems to recover from whatever paralysis had him frozen
in the doorway. He steps forward to hug Hannah, one-armed, brief, but
I can see her body sink into it, and her arms tighten around him. It
makes my stomach churn, and the fish and chips we ate in the pub
earlier today threaten to make a reappearance.