After Hours (InterMix)(45)
As I ate, I scribbled out an estimated monthly budget. That night, I spent two hours poking around the rental listings for Darren, pleased to see there were dozens of affordable one-bedroom places available. Even the two – and three-bedroom houses were semi-affordable, and I entertained a brief, masochistic fantasy about inviting Amber to live with me, us and Jack in some modest little house, an hour’s drive between us and Marco. How cozy!
How cozy and completely batshit-nutso!
Much as I loved her, I knew what would happen. Late-night drama, the thump of some meathead’s fist on my door waking me in a cold sweat, and Amber getting semi-intentionally fired from her job the second she had me secured as a rent-paying safety net. God bless the girl, she was a self-sabotaging wreck.
I switched my search filter back to one-bedrooms only, my own self-sabotage averted.
When the time came to fall asleep, my thoughts turned predictably to Kelly. Anxious thoughts and horny ones, excited ones and unnerving ones. I fell asleep after what felt like hours, candidates for my safe word flurrying around my brain like snow-globe flakes.
* * *
The next morning I did my laundry, dressed in a simple skirt and tee shirt and packed a second outfit in an overnight bag, along with bathroom essentials. Cute but comfortable underwear, freshly shaved armpits and legs but my downstairs left to its own devices, because I was no man’s personal porn star. I was Kelly’s sex slave but also a feminist, and the crooked line had to be drawn someplace. And that place was in the perfectly lovely, feminine, God-given soft curls between my legs, I decided.
At twenty of two I climbed into my car with the directions I’d scrawled after a Google Maps search and set out for Darren, stomach churning, palms clammy.
Kelly’s street was easy enough to find, maybe a mile’s drive past the main drag, on a tired-looking residential block—a familiar sight to me, having grown up in the heart of Michigan’s industrial decline, though with fewer boarded windows than I’d been expecting. Most of the homes looked inhabited.
Kelly’s house was a navy blue, one-story ranch with a tidy lawn. His truck was parked in the driveway, and as I pulled up along the cracked curb I found Kelly himself, leaning over the peeling picket fence that abutted his property, reaching for something.
I killed the engine. He craned his neck and caught my eye as I slammed my door, before going back to whatever he was doing.
What he was doing, I found out as I approached, was massaging the ears of a rapturous, slavering, brown and white pit bull.
“Hey, Sadie,” he was saying. “Hey, pretty girl.”
“Is that your dog?” Of course it was. He was so the pit bull type. This dog would probably have a front-row seat to whatever debauchery Kelly had planned for me, her baleful eyes shifting between us with canine judgment.
But he said, “No, my neighbor’s. Well, my neighbor’s ex’s, until he took off. I feed her when my neighbor’s out of town. Take her for walks, sometimes.” With a final, spirited scratching, he stood up straight, wiping his slobbery fingers on his jeans.
“So this is your place?” I pointed to the little blue house.
“This is it. C’mon in and I’ll give you the tour.” He took my bag and opened the front gate of his wrought-iron fence for me.
I followed him up the steps, noting the freshly painted trim around his windows and the shiny brass numbers nailed to his door. It wasn’t a palace, but his house seemed the most cared for on the block. The only one on the mend, as opposed to slowly going to seed with the rest of the city.
He led me inside and his front room matched the house’s exterior—simple and relatively tidy, with absolutely no frills. I envied his space, his cheerful bay window and the sliding glass doors looking out on his little backyard.
If this were my home, I’d have replaced his beige sectional and oversized recliner with something more stylish, tossed in a few potted plants, and maybe added a nice decorative screen to his fireplace. Jack could come visit and play for hours in the backyard, see what a lawn was supposed to look like. His kiddie pool had been ruined ten minutes after we’d inflated and filled it, shredded by a sneaky piece of broken bottle when Amber had tried to drag it into the shade. You could have refilled it twice over with Jack’s tears.
“It’s nice,” I told Kelly, tailing him around a breakfast bar and into his small, open kitchen. He set my bag on the counter.
“It does the job. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Beer? Wine?”