Chapter Four
Kane
“What’s she like now? She still a dork? You two were tight back in the day, weren’t ya?”
“Fuck,” I muttered as I rolled my eyes at Shawn, glancing over my shoulder so he wouldn’t miss it. “The day? What day was that?”
I set the trowel down that I was using to mud the drywall, and I pulled my T-shirt over my head, using the fabric to wipe the sweat off the back of my neck. It was too fucking hot for early September in the Poconos. It was sure as hell too hot to be working my ass off in a house with no functioning air conditioner—one of many items on my to-do list for this place. I tucked my T-shirt into the waist of my jeans and stooped to pick the trowel up again.
Shawn snorted. “The day when you were actually cool, and she was the nerd with the remarkably great ass who challenged my ability to keep you cool. The girl was a cool wrecker.”
It was my turn to snort, and I did. “Why? Because she was smart and actually did what a decent student is supposed to do by studying and getting good grades? You know, she’s almost a doctor. Not like a doctor doctor, like the other kind.” I glanced over my shoulder again. Shawn was cracking open a beer, barely listening to me.
“Snore,” Shawn said when he finally chucked the beer cap on the floor. “Don’t know why you gave two shits about that chick.”
I swallowed, gritting my teeth as I stared at the unfinished wall in front of me. “Her family used to live about a half a mile down the road from here in that big farmhouse when we were little kids. We had no other neighbors with kids out here, so it was just Helene, her sister, and I. But her sister was older than us, and she didn’t like hanging out with us. Hell was pretty much my only friend until her family moved into town when we were in junior high.”
“Didn’t mean you had to stay friends with her after that. You think I don’t remember all the times you ditched us just so you could hang out with her, walk her home, sit with her at lunch. It was pathetic, man.” Shawn laughed.
“You just didn’t know her the way I did,” I said, my voice too quiet. No one in all the world knew her the way I did.
“So, what? You feel like you need a little doctor pussy now? Get the ex-girlfriend out of your system?”
“Jesus,” I muttered, half disgusted I’d once called this man my friend, half disgusted I still did. “I never dated Helene. We were friends.” I wasn’t quite able to disguise the irritation in my voice.
“You telling me you never fucked her?” Shawn was laughing again.
My hand paused, holding the trowel to the wall. That wasn’t a question I had any intention of answering. “You know, I got a lot of work to do. And you clearly didn’t stop by to lend a hand, so…” I nodded toward the door, hoping he’d take the fucking hint.
“Answer the question, asshole.” This was just random conversation to Shawn. He had no idea he was treading so close to a hard limit for me. It was just crude rhetoric to him—much like every other conversation I’d had with him since we were kids.
“Like I said,” I set the trowel down again, giving up for the time being. “If you’re not going to help me out, then get lost. I have too much to do.” And every last word out of Shawn’s mouth made me want to punch something.
“Your dad’s a fucking asshole, Kane. Don’t know why you give a shit about this place.”
I finally let out an annoyed huff and turned to face him, planting my hands on my hips. “Seriously?” I snapped, my voice loud and angry. “Last thing I need is the nursing home releasing him to me, so I can try to figure out how to deal with an old man with brain damage who wasn’t nice to begin with and is now an even bigger asshole than he was before his brain decided to blow up. Medicare doesn’t seem to think he’s critical enough to need long term care yet. The disability approval process is taking forever, and I have no hope of getting him on Medicaid until he’s declared disabled. The whole fucking thing is a nightmare. What that means is that selling this fucking place is the only way I can pay to keep his ass in. I’d like to actually make enough fucking money off it to do that.”
“Yeah?” Shawn muttered. “And then what?”
I shrugged. “Then…” I ran my hand through my hair, pushing it back. “I’m … going away for a while.”
“Gonna disappear for another eleven years again?”
“It really won’t be up to me,” I muttered under my breath.
Shawn scoffed, but it wasn’t humored. “What the fuck does that mean? Who the hell’s it up to?” His voice was irritated. “You ain’t been home since the day you ditched this town when you were seventeen, and you’re already planning your escape. What the fuck you even come back for, man? I mean, shit, ain’t like you and your dad ever got along.”
“Then what happens? They release him, and he becomes the crazy hobo sitting on the street corner,” I snapped. “I just need to take care of business. Make sure he’s squared away.”
Shawn drained his beer in one long gulp, burping loudly as he tossed the bottle toward the large fifty-five gallon garbage can I had in the middle of the floor for my scraps. He missed, and the bottle bounced off the side, clanking to the floor and splattering beer on the subfloor I’d only just finished repairing the week before.
“Shit,” he grumbled. What he didn’t do was pick up the bottle. “I gotta go. I’ll catch ya later.”
I followed him to the front door, and as I pulled it open, relieved to finally be rid of him, I found myself face to face with another piece of my past—this one a far kinder and prettier piece known as Helene, or Hell as I liked to call her for no other reason than she hated it and I’d always loved getting under her skin in any and every way I could.
Her hand was lifted as though she were getting ready to knock, and her lips parted as our eyes met, locked on one another, and then refused to look away.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” Shawn asked me as he pushed past me and reached for the screen door.
Helene glanced at him, her eyes widening for a moment, and then she stepped away from the door, letting Shawn pass through. Shawn and Helene hadn’t been friends growing up. In fact, it was probably safer to say, very few of my friends had been Helene’s and vice versa. Shawn looked her up and down, and when he looked back to me, he smirked.
“Don’t remember you looking so good back in high school,” he commented to Helene.
She crossed her arms. “Don’t remember you looking so ugly.”
It was true. Some people fell apart after high school. Some blossomed. Hell had definitely blossomed. Shawn had definitely not thanks to a beer gut, unkempt hair, sloppy clothes, and too many cigarettes. The odd thing was, I couldn’t say seventeen-year-old Helene was any less beautiful than the statuesque version standing in front of me with more curves, thinner cheeks, and a more composed stature. She was just Helene, and regardless of the package she came in, she still felt like my Hell.
Shawn snorted rudely as he walked past her and down the rickety old wooden porch steps. “Nice, coming from a doctor,” he muttered over his shoulder. “Knew I didn’t like your uppity bitch attitude.”
Helene’s eyes that had been following Shawn over her shoulder suddenly snapped back to me. I wasn’t stupid. She’d caught it. He’d called her doctor, and she knew full well the only way he’d have known anything about that was if I’d mentioned it—which all meant I’d been talking about her—to Shawn no less.
I held the door open for her, and she stepped through, glancing sideways at me as she passed into the living room. I’d already gutted this room down to studs, re-drywalled, taped, and partially mudded the walls. The floors had been taken down to the sub, and the sound of her sandals brushing the rough exposed OSB echoed in the small space.
She was wearing a sundress that fit close to her skin and hugged her curves, and as I glanced down along her figure when her back was too me, I focused on that “remarkably great ass” Shawn had been talking about. It was round, and she still looked toned and tight under the clingy fabric of the dress.
When she turned to look at me, she seemed to suddenly realize I was shirtless. Of course my eyes were moving over the light gray cotton material of her dress, focusing entirely too much on the small swell of her tits, so clearly I’d realized she had breasts too. Her eyes wandered quickly over my chest, straying down to my stomach, and then bouncing back up to my face. She cleared her throat and looked away for a moment, swallowing visibly.
I kept my mouth shut, waiting to see where she was going to take this.
“I always loved this house,” she said as she looked around the empty room that was still very much a work in progress.
“What did you like so much about it? The dark brown carpet that reeked of my dad’s cigarette smoke, the equally dark paneling on pretty much every wall? Or maybe it’s the avocado green cupboards in the kitchen?”
She just smiled this small smile that took me back to another time. She didn’t realize it, but she was a walking memory to me—everything about her meant something. And this smile was a chastising one—not real chastisement, though. The kind that looked more like she was trying to hide a crush by playfully scorning something I said. I got this smile a lot “back in the day,” as Shawn would say. But it was unexpected now, and when I saw it, my stomach muscles clenched tight and my throat constricted.
“No?” I asked. “It must be the tan linoleum in the kitchen that’s been peeling since the last time you were in this house.”
“Bingo,” she said. “I’ve a thing for peeling linoleum.” She wandered around the room for a moment as I watched her. “It’s got good bones,” she mused.
I smirked. “Does it? Does anyone actually know what ‘good bones’ means, or is it something we’ve all just picked up from watching too much HGTV?”
She shrugged. “Maybe it means … the footings are poured deep … the studs up to code.” She shook her head as she shrugged. “Just … good bones.”
“Well it has some skeletons in the closet if that’s what you’re trying to say.” I stared at her, and the lightness in her expression faded slowly before my eyes.
She ignored my comment as she wandered again. “I didn’t realize Shawn still lived here. You two were good friends in high school.” She approached the nearby window, looking out toward the dirt parking area out front.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“Does he know?”
She brought me up short with that question for a moment, or rather, her willingness to ask it so bluntly right out of the gate. Of course I’m the one who referenced the skeletons, so should I be surprised she’d bait me as well? Instead of dealing with the weight of that question, I smirked. “No, Hell. He doesn’t know how much you used to have a crush on me.”
She stared at me expressionlessly. “I didn’t… That’s not what I meant,” she finally said quietly.
“I know.” My sarcasm was gone, and I stared at the floor between us for a moment, taking a deep breath. “No, he doesn’t.”
She nodded, but her focus shifted out the window again for a moment, and when she looked back, her eyes glanced down along my torso, quickly flitting over my skin. She couldn’t seem to let go of the fact I didn’t have a shirt on, or maybe her eyes just didn’t want to cooperate, because she kept glancing away as though embarrassed she couldn’t stop looking at me.
“How is he … Shawn?” she asked nervously. “I didn’t realize you two were still friends.”
“We’re not. He’s just still here, and seeing as I am too now…”
“So does that make us friends?” Her lips pulled up slightly, but just as quickly as the small smile appeared it fell.
“BFFs til the day we die,” I remarked, letting my lips pull up too. “So what’s with the social visit? Didn’t think professors were supposed to fraternize with their students.”
“Just getting your attention,” she repeated my line from class a few days before.
I laughed and crossed my arms on my chest. “Well, you did. You always did.”
Her cheeks instantly blushed. “So where’ve you been all these years? What have you been up to?” Her expression was cool. She may have nothing at all in common with Shawn, but they certainly both had a shared resentment for my abrupt departure from Hazleton eleven years before.
“Not much,” I responded. I wasn’t one to fall into verbal traps easily, and rather than let her resentment drive the conversation, I decided to shake her up a bit. “I bounced around here and there. Drank some drinks, did some drugs, ate some … pussy.” I smirked at her. “Fucked some too… Among other things.”
“Oh…” She looked around awkwardly for a moment. “Well, that’s…” She nodded.
“How about you?”
“I … uh … had some drinks,” she said awkwardly. “I didn’t—”
“Eat any pussy?” I asked.
She smiled nervously. “It was on my shortlist. But I was busy.”
I hummed in response to her sarcasm.
“I should… I should go,” she said abruptly as she turned toward the door.
But I grabbed her by the elbow, stopping her as she passed me. I wasn’t sure why I did it, but I needed something more than that. If she walked out now it would leave nothing but question marks in my mind that would eat at me. I needed a period, something definitive, something that would give me some measure of peace with her—if that was even possible.
“How’s this going to go?” I asked the question, staring at the side of her face. She’d not yet managed to look at me. She seemed to be avoiding it.
When she finally looked sideways at me, her big blue eyes were wide and terrified. She shook her head subtly.
“Do you want me to ignore you? Pretend you’re nothing more than some long lost acquaintance? Good to see you, but not much more than that…” I stared at her, refusing to look away.
Her lips were parted, and her chest rose and fell deeply as her breathing became pronounced. But she said nothing.
“Do you want to see me? Be my friend? Get close again? Rehash our darkest secrets?”
Her eyelids fluttered, and the blue of the irises suddenly shimmered in glossiness. I had no idea if they were tearing because she couldn’t seem to fully blink or if they were tearing for some other reason entirely.
“Do you want me to come onto you? Seduce you? Let you fuck me? Use my body? Hurt it?”
Her breath left her in a rush, and I could feel her trembling as I held her elbow. She licked her lips, looking at my mouth for a moment. But she glanced back at my eyes, and her jaw tightened. When she turned toward me, facing me full on, I was almost shocked. She reached for my stomach, letting her palm cover the four inch scar that ran from my navel off to the left side of my abdomen. It was her scar as much as mine, and she damn well knew she didn’t need permission to touch it.
She held her hand over the gnarled tissue, and when she dropped her forehead to the center of my chest, I exhaled. I ran my hand over her long auburn hair, smoothing it as I went. And when my hand traveled back up, it settled on the back of her neck.
“What do you need from me?” I asked.
She lifted her head from my chest, staring up at my eyes as her tears pooled on her lower eyelids. I waited, hoping she’d rise to the challenge and give me something. Instead, she walked toward the door, and my heart fell.
I suddenly felt self-conscious and grabbed my T-shirt that was still tucked into the waist of my jeans. I tossed it quickly over my head. I held my breath as my throat burned and my chest tightened. I needed her not to walk away from this, but she was.
“Please,” I begged, crossing my arms on my chest and stuffing my hands under my opposite arms as though I could somehow protect myself from all the hurt between us. I’d lost my sarcasm, I’d lost my bullshit playful attitude that could toy with her until she forgot about the things I didn’t want to deal with, because in truth I needed to deal with them desperately—even if I didn’t know how.
She stopped at the door, gripping the door frame with one hand as she paused, and I inhaled deeply in relief. She turned back slowly, and she sniffed her nose and brushed a tear from her cheek. “An apology. An explanation.” Her voice broke over the words.
The barely restrained emotion I’d been trying to suffocate broke free. My eyes teared as I watched her, but they didn’t fall.
“I needed you, and you left me. You left me in this place to deal with … everything on my own.” She cried freely, unapologetically letting her emotion show while I tried to hide mine. “I need you to let me be angry with you. I need you to let me yell at you…” She shrugged as more tears fell. “…forgive you.” Her eyelids fluttered. “Just tell me why?” she pled quietly. “Why?”
“I can’t,” I whispered, and then I lost the fight against my own emotion as a tear ran down my cheek. I brushed it away angrily, stuffing my hands under my arms again.
Her eyes closed for a moment, but when they opened, she scoffed angrily and walked out. I followed her, standing on the porch as she stalked to her car. But she didn’t climb in. She paused with her hand on the handle and she turned toward me, glaring.
“You can’t?” she asked incredulously. “We shared the worst… We share it still … every day,” she half spoke, half cried the words as her lips trembled. “And you can’t?”
I said nothing, but not because I didn’t want to. I wanted to say so many things, but it was as if they were stuck just at the base of my throat, and my body wouldn’t let them go. She yanked the car door open, and I clenched my teeth and watched, waiting for her departure to be over. But then she paused again, looking back at me once more.
“What do you need from me?” She asked me the same question I’d asked of her. “You’re the one who showed up in my class, remember? So what do you need?”
My throat tightened as I tried to swallow. “Absolution,” I whispered.
She just stared at me, her eyes swimming in tears. “For what?” she asked.
But I couldn’t answer that question, and as I stayed silent, she watched me, waiting, and then eventually shaking her head when I failed to respond. She finally climbed in the car and slammed the door shut behind her. I watched her leave, and when she was gone, I walked back inside, slamming the door shut as I cursed loudly.
“Fuck!”
I paced in the living room for a few minutes, my jaw tense as I tried to relax. When I snatched my phone up from where I’d left it on the window sill, I gripped it so tight my palm hurt. I downed half a beer standing in front of the open fridge door, and when my phone rang in my hand I just stared at it for a moment.
“Goddammit,” I muttered, swiping my thumb across the screen. “Yeah,” I said, forcing my voice to calm.
“This is Sadie Miller, head nurse over at Shady Oaks, and I just wanted to let you know of an incident that occurred shortly ago involving your father.”
I stayed silent, inhaling deeply rather than communicating.
“Mr. Thorson—?” she started to say.
“What did he do?” I cut her off.
“He… Well, he hit one of the nurses’ assistants. Broke her nose. He was very agitated, and we ended up sedating him. He’s resting fine now, but I just wanted to let you—”
“Thanks,” I mumbled. “If it makes you feel any better he broke my nose once too.”
Sadie was suddenly silent. “Uh… Umm…”
“I have to go. Thanks for calling.” And I hung up on her.
I didn’t bother setting my phone down. I closed my eyes, letting the cool air from the fridge prickle over my skin. When I closed the door, I dialed another number quickly.
“Well, hey, there. I was starting to think you’d forgotten about me,” Cassie said in way of greeting.
I had actually started to forget about her. But it had no real bearing on what I wanted now. “Sorry,” I lied. “I’ve been busy. Thought maybe you’d want to come over for a while tonight. I’m just working on the house. I could use a distraction. Maybe pick up a pizza on your way.”
“Use a distraction,” she repeated, her voice light and flirtatious. “You mean, use my pussy?”
I said nothing for a moment. “Yeah, as well as a couple other holes if you don’t mind.” My voice was oddly flirtatious considering how I felt inside.
She was silent for a moment. She should be offended. She had every right in the world to be offended, and if she was, I’d hang up the phone and call another number. It was kind of sick and twisted that I knew all of that, and yet, I was willing to do it. I needed to feel something better than what my life felt like right now. It was a very simple problem, and an even simpler solution.
“Sure,” she said, hiding her offense well or missing the fact she should feel it entirely. It didn’t really matter to me.