Callie
The drop of the basket is loud. It sets Alice off, who has a loud, ear-shattering cry at the best of times. But for a moment I do not hear the crash of the basket or Alice’s cries. I do not hear anything but Damien saying my name, and then I hear myself say his name in response. We look watch other over Alice’s head; I feel my mouth falling open. Damien, here, after a year . . . standing in front of me. All this time, I have fantasized about this moment, thinking about what I’d say. During childbirth, I fantasized about Damien crashing through the door and holding my hand and wiping sweat from my forehead.
Now, he is here, but he’s changed. His beard is thick, bushy, manly, and his eyes seem darker somehow. He has grown his hair out a little, too, giving him a rugged half-wild look. But it’s more than his appearance. It’s like I can sense his difference toward me, his expression more open than before. Or maybe I am just imagining that, wishing for that.
Then I remember that I am a mother, and I soothe Alice, give her the pink pacifier she loves so much. Soon, she is sucking and resting her head on my chest. Damien leans down and picks up the basket for me.
“The kid?”
“My employer’s,” I say at once, panicking, the lie coming out before I even think about it. “I am working as babysitter slash housekeeper now. The baby is my employer’s.”
“Oh,” Damien says. “For a second I thought . . .” He shakes his head, and his longish hair moves across his forehead. “This is strange, Callie. I—” He pauses, and then says, “This is strange as hell.”
We move around the store, me filling the basket as Damien holds it, and after I pay, he follows me out to my car, an old Ford that I got with a loan that Gertrude co-signed for. Damien loads the groceries into the trunk as I settle Alice into her car seat in the back, making sure she is secure, giving her a little kiss on the head.
Then Damien and I are standing in the winter cold next to my car, looking at each other. After a moment, he says, “Come here.” He leans in, and we hug. It’s as awkward as a hug can be, but there’s real warmth there, too. I want to keep on holding him, keep gripping the leather of his jacket, keep feeling the way his beard brushes up against my forehead, tickling.
“Let me drop off . . .” I pause, not saying her name. Alice—named after both our mothers. If I say her name, he might see through the lie. “Let me drop off this bundle of joy, and then—and then I guess we’ll meet for a drink or something?” I feel silly, wondering if I’m overstepping.
But Damien nods at once. “Sure. Know anywhere round here?”
“There’s a place just around the corner. I think it’s called The Jeffs, or something, because two men named Jeff own it.”
Damien nods again. “Alright. I’ll wait there for you, then?”
“Yes.”
I can see he’s about to offer to drive, but before he can, I climb into the car. I need time to think. I need time to process this all.
But I don’t have as much time as I might like. The drive back to Gertrude’s doesn’t take long, and then I’m handing Alice over to Gertrude, and Gertrude is eyeing me suspiciously. Over a year with her, and the old woman still has that youthful, azure glint in her eye.
“Something is happening,” Gertrude says. “You’re meeting someone.”
“Yeah right!” I exclaim, too loudly, protesting too much.
We stand in the inner hallway, near the front door. As I detach the papoose and hand Alice to Gertrude, Alice whimpers quietly for a few moments before settling into the old woman’s arms. Gertrude smiles, strokes the baby’s cheek, and then tilts her head at me knowingly. “Dear,” she says. “I have lived too long to not know when something is afoot. Oh, yes, yes, call me Ms. Holmes, dear. Now, I will not ask if you are meeting a man, but I will ask you this. Should we expect you back tonight?”
I swallow, wondering if this makes me a bad mother. But when I shake my head, Gertrude just giggles, and then starts oohing and aahing over Alice.
“Okay, dear. See you tomorrow.”
“Only maybe,” I say. “Only maybe to not expecting me home. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Gertrude strolls down the hallway, shaking her head and talking to Alice about all sorts of nonsense. As I watch them go, I feel a pang in my chest. Here it is: what Mom could have been, had she not been a Movement woman, had she not been killed too young. She could have one day become a strong sassy old lady with an iron glint in her eye. I turn away, and push back out into the winter cold, and in a matter of minutes I’m driving back into town toward the Jeffs. About forty-five minutes has passed since I left, and the sky is darker, the sun almost completely set. I pull a coat tightly around me as I walk down the sidewalk, and then breathe in the warmth and smell of whisky and beer when I walk into the bar.
Damien is sitting at a table on his own, forefinger moving around the rim of a glass of whisky. He couldn’t look any cooler if he tried. His beard is wild, so wild at first it takes me a second to recognize him. He has draped his leather over the back of his chair, and he’s wearing a checkered shirt with the sleeves rolled up, showing his thorn-tattooed arms. I feel my legs becoming weak as I approach him, as though the weight of this past year, the secrets and the longing and the constant reminders, are weighing me down. Winter to winter, conception to birth, fear to almost-confidence, and here we are yet again, the rodent and the man who saved her.
But things are different now. I have his child, even if he doesn’t know it, even if he doesn’t know he has a child.
The Jeffs is one of those bars which exist somewhere between grimy and respectable, everything clean and polished, but with a decommissioned rifle above the bar, and a barman who looks messy but not like a complete waster. There are a few alcoholic types in here, old men sitting dead-eyed at the bar, but mostly it’s men and women in their thirties dancing to Britney Spears on the jukebox and looking for a good time. I navigate the dancefloor, and then make my way to the quieter end and the tables.
He glances up when I reach his table, and smiles, but he looks oddly unsure of himself. I can’t blame him. I feel unsure of myself, too. He gestures at the barman. “What do you want?” he asks.
I tell him I’ll have a coke.
“Alright.”
Damien calls over, and the barman brings it over. I take off my coat. Underneath, I’m wearing a hoodie and jeans, and my hair feels like it’s a mess; I don’t cut it myself these days, but it still somehow always ends up messy. Even wearing these clothes, Damien’s eyes are drawn to my body. His gaze lingers on my breasts, on the outline of them in the hoodie. My nipples get hard right away, as though invisible beams are travelling from his irises to the sensitive tips of my breasts. I remember the pleasure this man gave me, the pleasure we shared, the writhing, his huge cock, my pussy aching for it. I have not touched another man since we parted. I haven’t been able to stomach even the idea of it.
I sip my coke, and then Damien says, “I need to ask you about that night in the warehouse.”
“Is this business?” I respond, perhaps too sharply.
Damien nods shortly. “Yes, this is business. I need to know if you remember anything at all.”
I can tell he’s holding something back. His emotions, it seems like. It’s as if there is a wealth of emotion behind his jet-black eyes, in the curve of his lips, even in the way he strokes the rim of the glass of whisky, but he does not want to share it with me—or maybe he can’t. Or maybe, I reflect, I am just seeing emotion where there is none.
“Okay,” I say. “Fine.”
I think back for a long time, until both our drinks are gone and the barman brings another.
In the end, I can’t tell him anymore than I told him last year.
He sighs, and then nods.
“Are you leaving now, then?” If I sound bitter, it’s because I am. One year without this man, fantasizing about him, and now he treats me like a witness in a court case.
But Damien says, “No, I am not leaving. I just needed to get that out of the way, Callie.”
He offers me a small smile. The moment he smiles at me like that—cocky, and yet with genuine warmth—I feel like I have been thrown back a year into the past, and he and I are just two lost people sitting in an office drinking whisky, sharing the pain of our pasts. Damien always held back, I could sense it, but he shared with me nonetheless. About his mother, about the orphanage. I realize something else, too. I love this man. I have loved this man since the moment he saved me. And having his child has only amplified that love.
“So now what?” I ask.
Damien looks past me to the dancefloor. “Look at them,” he says. “Do you ever remember being that carefree, Callie? Most of them look like they’re around my age, and they’re dancin’ and gigglin’ like little kids.”
“Easy childhoods,” I say, with a grim smile. “But I don’t blame them for it. It’s not their fault.”
“No, it’s not.”
We watch each other for a time, and then Damien gestures to his beard. “Do you like it?”
“It makes you look mad.”
He laughs, and I laugh with him. The pleasure rushes to my head all at once. I suddenly feel lightheaded. I’ve laughed plenty of times with Gertrude over the past year, but with Damien there’s more to it. Our laughter clashes in the air, sparks of feeling flying back at us. Our laughter starts a fire under the table, heating our legs. Our laughter is a fan blowing away the dust of the past year: the dust that has coated lust and love and affection and attraction and any interest in the opposite sex. Of course, maybe Damien has been with other women, but I don’t think he has—I hope he hasn’t, anyway.
“I guess I’ve always been mad,” Damien says. He orders a water.
“Water?” I raise my eyebrow.
“Gotta stay sharp,” he says, the depths of his sea-black eyes shifting. When it arrives, he asks, “So, what’ve you been up to this past year?”
I’ve been pregnant with your baby, given birth to your baby, and now I am focused on housekeeping and raising your baby. I want to tell him, badly. I really do. But part of me worries that if I just come out and tell him now, he’ll get up and leave, just like that. Maybe I assume that because that’s how I might’ve reacted in my stealing, lying days, or maybe because it’s the truth, or maybe because you can never expect a man to react warmly to a sudden revelation like that. Whatever the reason, I will not tell him, not tonight.
“Cleaning and cooking, mostly,” I say.
I tell him as much as I can without admitting either Gertrude’s age or who’s baby Alice is. If he learns that Gertrude is seventy years old, it’ll be obvious the baby he saw isn’t hers. I tell him a widow hired me and lets me live in the house rent free in exchange for me keeping house and caring for the child.
“Sounds like a decent gig,” he says, nodding. “You seem changed, Callie.”
“Changed how?”
“I don’t know. Less . . . less skittish. Let me ask you this. This woman—you stealin’ from her?”
I blush, remembering the day with the plastic bag and the jewels. That day has become a turning point in my life: I could’ve walked down the road and solidified my status as a rodent, but instead I turned back and became something new.
“No,” I say. “I am not. I am done with that.”
Damien smiles. “That’s great.”
“What about you? Anything exciting happen in the past three-hundred and sixty-five days, give or take a few dozen?”
He scoffs. “Nah, just the same old, same old.”
I swallow, and then force myself to ask, “And any . . . uh, any . . . any romantic attachments?”
I look down at the table. I know it is not my place to ask him. As far as he is concerned, I ran out on him. He has every right to—
“No,” he says at once. “And let me tell you, Callie, that’s damn strange for me. Before you, I had plenty of women, and now, no one, in an entire year. Do you see how odd that is?”
“I thought you’d be angry,” I say, “after I ran out.”
Damien shakes his head. “I was awake, Callie. I could’ve stopped you. I listened to you leave.”
That hits me in the chest. “Oh.”
He leans forward, resting his forearms on the table. My hands are resting on the table, and all it would take is for me to reach out with my fingers to touch those muscular arms. “I was scared, Callie,” he says. Looking into his hard, bearded face, it’s difficult to believe he would ever be scared of anything. “I was scared shitless, is the truth. You were scratching away pieces of me. It’s like—I kept thinkin’ that you were ripping my ribcage apart and prodding at my heart.” He laughs, gruff. “That sounds damn strange when I say it out loud, but it’s how I felt.”
“Is that why you started being distant, and snappy?” I ask, staring into his eyes. These eyes have stared at me every night in my dreams this past year, but my dreams can never compare to the real thing. “Is that why you started being cold?”
“Yes,” he says. “I reckon so.”
“And that’s why you didn’t stop me leaving.”
“Yes.”
“So what’s changed? Aren’t you still afraid I’m going to—to prod your heart, or whatever you called it?”
Damien nods, leans back. “Yeah, I guess I am. But I guess I’m more afraid of going another year without seeing you. Listen, I thought you were too young, too vulnerable, too similar to what I might have—” All at once, he stops, seizing up, clenching his fists, temples pulsing. He shakes his head briskly, drinks his water. I watch, bemused, wondering what the hell happened.
“Damien,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
He shakes his head again. “It’s nothing.”
“Nothing?” I say. “Something is clearly wrong.”
“It’s just—I’ve never talked about this, to anybody, ever.”
“And it has something to do with why you became cold, and why you let me leave?”
“Callie, it has everything to do with that.”
I lean across the table and place my hand on his arm, gripping the thorns. Heat blooms between my palm and his skin. I can see it in his face. He looks up, seeming more awake, calmer, but also steeling himself for something.
“I shared my life in the Movement with you,” I said. “That was the most tender part of myself, Damien. And I shared it with you. And look, I am still here, better than I was before, even.”
Damien places his free hand atop mind, pressing my hand into his arm.
“I know,” he says. “But it’s different for a man, especially the President of a club. Callie, a man has to be strong every second of every day, ’cause if he’s not, soon he’ll be on his back with blood seeping from his skull. Give an inch, one single inch, and every fucker in a ten-mile radius will be on you.”
“I am not a fucker,” I say, and we both laugh. “And I am not going to make your skull seep blood, Damien.”
He takes a deep breath, letting it out slowly.
And then he tells me.
He tells me about waking up, groggy, tied to a bed. He tells me about an old man and he tells me about the needles. He mentions the man’s wormlike hands, and the deep crevices of his face, almost like a child mentioning some detail which has grown massive in their mind. And then he tells me about how he worked himself free and killed the old man: his first kill.
As he talks, I squeeze his arm with more passion. Then I stand up and walk around to his side of the table, sitting next to him, hands on his shoulders, massaging the muscle. He talks quickly, wanting to get it all out, and finally, when he’s done and the old perverted man is dead, he turns to face me.
I think he might be crying, but he’s not, though his expression is more open than I’ve ever seen it before. “Do you see? You were a constant reminder of that.”
“I see,” I say.
“Don’t you think any less of me?” he asks.
“Why would I think any less of you?”
He pauses, and then shrugs. “Just guess I thought people’d think less of me.”
“I’m not people, not to you.”
“No,” he says. “You’re not, are you?”
I have to tell him about Alice, about his child; he’s shared this with me, and now I have to do the right thing, too. But before I can, he reaches under the table and places his hand on my leg, up high on my thigh, near my pussy. When you’ve gone over a year without a man’s touch—without your man’s touch—feeling it once again drives you wild straightaway. My pussy gets hot, my thighs tingling, my body responding at once.
“What are you doing?” I say, voice breathy.
“It’s been too long, Callie,” he says. “For both of us, I reckon.” He leans forwards and whispers in my ear, his breath warm on my neck, tickling me: “I remember that first night, how you opened for me when I pushed my cock into your tight pussy. I remember fucking you hard until you came all over my cock. I remember listening to you scream and thinkin’ it was the sweetest sound I ever heard. And I remember the nights after that, when I’d flip you over and pound you into the bed, pound you so hard you started to shake with the pleasure of it. Do you remember, Callie?”
He moves his hand up my thigh, right here in the bar.
“Yes,” I whisper, struggling to contain my lust, one year’s worth of pent-up lust. “I remember.”
But I need to tell him before anything happens. I need to!
“Have you touched yourself, thinking about it, Callie?”
I shiver as his breath moves down my neck and across my shoulders like warm breathy fingers.
Have I touched myself? Every night when I was pregnant, and every night since I recovered from the birth, I have touched myself replaying scenes of my time with Damien in my head.
“Yes.”
He inches his hand up my thigh.
“I think it’s time I took you somewhere, Callie. Don’t you think?”
I bite my lip, telling myself to blurt it out now. But that would stop him. If I told him now, we wouldn’t carry on. And, oh god, but I need to carry on. Badly. I need this. My body is burning with anticipation for it. My mind is filled with a thousand scenes, all dirtier than the last.
But I have to do the right thing. I have to!
“Damien, I need to—”
He kisses me on the lips, hard, pressing pleasure into my mouth, a million nerves sending a million long-waiting signals of pleasures throughout my body.
All thoughts of doing the right thing dissipate when he slides his hand another inch up my leg, his fingers so tantalizingly close to my pussy now that if we were not in public, I would grab him by the wrist and make him close the gap.
He breaks off the kiss and says, “Let’s go.”
I don’t hesitate.