Suddenly he was inside her again, slower this time, a waltz rather than a slam dance. She opened her eyes to see him above her, his torso gleaming golden in the soft light, his eyes so dark, a color with plummeting depth to it, like a nighttime well. His dark hair tap-tap-tapped the sides of his forehead as he moved within her, looking so seriously at her that she curled into him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders with a sense of fierce possession, pulling him to her, and as she did he grinned at her, dimples in both cheeks, and she came just seeing them.
“Yes,” she murmured. His lips met hers again, her back arched and her belly pressed tight to his, slick with sweat.
“Yes,” he told her back, licking her throat in gentle strokes, tasting salt and sweet, not letting himself think about anything but that taste.
1 a.m.
His back
was all muscle, his skin smooth and so very warm beneath her fingertips. She bent her head and licked him gently along his spine, the way a mama cat would. Her hair was thick and humid around her face, and she titled her head to the right and swept her hair over him, nape to tailbone, loving the way he groaned deep in his throat. She rolled her head, letting her hair glide over his body in tickling stokes, then her nipples, following the same path, up and down, desire building again between her legs, spilling onto him from where she straddled his hips.
She gasped when he moved suddenly, turning and flipping her neatly under him, then kissing her deeply. She dug her fingernails into his back as he caught her hips in both hands and tipped her up to take him again. She moaned against his neck as he pumped into her, then moved her lips back to his, where his tongue claimed her mouth with strokes that matched the movements below. The room around them was fluid black heat and when she closed her eyes colors flashed fire against the backs of her eyelids and then seemed to explode between them in the air in tiny ecstatic bursts. GunsâN'Roses thumped against the wall from Amy's party like an angry, hopped-up neighbor.
Bryce rolled back to the top again where she rode him, fast and churning, her hair a living mass that curtained them both in heat. He moaned, wrapping his wrists with thick strands of it. When he came it was like a volcano inside of her and she bent over him, exhausted, every inch of her glossy with sweat. He clutched her to his chest, impossibly still for a half minute before easing her to his right side, where he buried his face against her warm soft neck, pressing his lips and breathing deeply.
Not long after she was bonelessly asleep against his chest and he lay there for long minutes, thinking the words
Jesus Christ
and
holy shit
alternately over and over again. He was shaking a little, inside and out, his arms locked tight around a complete stranger who his body and soul, in that order, had responded to like no one he'd ever known. He was still partly inside of her, even as she slept, and he moved his hips slightly, holding himself deeper within her body.
No protection
, the rational part of his brain screeched at him, but somehow, right then and there in the dark motel room, with the sounds of a kick-ass party beating against the southern wall, he didn't care. He couldn't make it matter, couldn't think past holding her, breathing her scent. Tomorrow he would figure this out. Tomorrow he would ask her to marry him, to be his wife. The thought made his chest cave in and he thought,
What have you done, Sternhagen? Jesus Christ in heaven
.
He was almost asleep when somone tapped on the door to his room 15 minutes later, and he nearly came out of his skin. Bryce mumbled something that sounded like
panda bear
, but did not wake up, even as he eased his arm from beneath her and rasped at the door in a loud-soft whisper, “Hang on!”
He answered wearing only his jeans, expecting to see one of the people from next door, like the red-haired, sharp-eyed girl Bryce had arrived at the motel with only hours earlier. His playful smile and the excuse fell from his lips as he opened the door to a tall skinny guy wearing a motel uniform. The guy kept glancing between him and the party next door.
“You Matthew Sternhagen?” he asked. “There's a phone call for you in the lobby.”
“What do you mean, in the goddamn lobby?” he practically growled in response. “No one knows I'm here.”
“Exactly what it sounds like, buddy. Apparently your room phone isn't working,” he replied, attempting to peer over Matthew's shoulder. Matthew immediately brought the door to his side and lowered his chin and eyebrows just slightly. The motel clerk swallowed visibly and eased backward. “Long distance,” he added unnecessarily over his shoulder as he hurried away.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Matthew muttered, hastily grabbing a shirt, pulling it over his head with one hand. He hurried back to the warmth of the bed, brushed Bryce's hair away from her cheek and kissed her tenderly in the same spot. “I'll be right back, sweetheart,” he whispered.
7 a.m.
The drawn
shade had allowed enough murky light into the room to poke Bryce in the eye, and she blinked twice, disoriented, staring up at a water-stained ceiling. She was completely naked, sore inside. Her hair was an unGodly tangled mess. She was dying of thirst. And she was utterly alone in the room.
Middleton, Oklahoma â Sunday, June 18, 1995
“B
ryce, you are fucking kidding
me. And he didn't even say good-bye.”
They were crowded on one of the two beds in Amy's room; Amy was snoring with total abandon from the other, one tanned bare leg hanging over the edge of the mattress. The shade was thrown wide, allowing harsh morning sunlight to illuminate the excesses of the previous night: smashed cans, leaking cans, dribbling bottles, abandoned swimsuits, two greasy pizza boxes, dried-out pizza crust and several torn condom wrappers. The warm smell of coffee drifted from the bathroom counter, where Stacy had a second complimenatry pot perking. The first was in two foam cups, one of which Bryce simply held to her nose, seeking refuge in the familiar smell. The crackly first sip of coffee and the joint Trish had produced from her purse made it now possible for her to talk.
She had just spent 20 minutes puking her guts out in the toilet in 214, sick at herself for being such a moron, such a complete slut. He was gone like a 50 dollar bill, a tiny used bottle of motel shampoo lying sadly on the counter the only testament that he had in fact been there hours before. The sheets were hurricane-scrambled, and Bryce had stared at the bed with both arms folded tight against her ribs, picturing them last night, her belly falling woozily again and again, as though she were on an endless mile-high roller coaster, as though she hadn't just brought up every last thing in there moments ago. She had come all over him multiple times, had let him do things to her that no one, even Wade her boyfriend of five plus years, had ever done. And worst of all, she had loved it, insanely, jealously, madly loved every second of it, would go back in time and do it all over. How could she have fallen into such a classic trap? She was nobody's fool, goddamn it. And she would have bet her last dollar last night that he wasn't that guyâ¦the kind of guy who would do that to a woman, who would hit and run like that. Something in his eyes that she felt at a bone-deep level told her that, and yet now here she was alone and second-guessing her intuition.
“I can't believe I'm so stupid,” she said to Trish, her voice gravelly from vomiting.
“Honey, you are not stupid,” Stacy told her, breezing in from the bathroom with a hot pot of coffee, which she poured into Trish's cup. “But you can't tell me you thought that guy was here to stay, can you?”
“Yeah, but he could have had the decency to say good-bye, thanks, so long, you're the best, maybe I'll call,” Trish added, scooting carefully closer to Bryce, balancing her cup and a lit cigarette.
Bryce stared into the depths of her own cup and managed another tiny sip. Her insides had calmed thanks to the weed and she sighed, curling her legs up closer to her chest. “I didn't exactly expect to marry him,” she said with an air of irony. “Butâ¦oh my God, you guys, this is so cliché I could puke all over againâ¦I didn't even get his name. We made love the entire night and I don't even know what to call him.”
“Motel Man,” Stacy supplied, giggling around the filter in her lips as she lit her own smoke.
Bryce glared blackly at her.
“The Fremont Fucker,” Trish put in, getting into the spirit, and they laughed even harder. “That one is sort of a double entendre, get it?”
“God, Amy is going to be so jealous,” Stacy told Bryce, blowing smoke at their prostrate friend. “She was all ready to go and tap on his door in her drunk-ass state of mind, offer herself up like a side of expensive beef.”
“
What?
Kevin was
here
,” Trish cried out, almost spilling her coffee she was laughing so hard. “
At the party!
What was she thinking?”
“You know how they are,” Stacy rolled her bright blue eyes affectionately, then turned her gaze pointedly at Bryce. “Speaking of that! What if, just by chance, Wade had showed his sorry ass last night?”
“Oh, Jesus,” Bryce groaned, clutching her forehead. “Okay, so it's our secret, right?”
“Hey, I won't lose any sleep over you messing around,” Trish said. “He deserves it.”
“Same for me, Bryster, you little slut,” Stacy teased, then wriggled her eyebrows. “So it was fucking amazing, right?”
Bryce felt her insides go weightless again and closed her eyes for a second. Trish set her cup on the bedside table and grabbed Bryce's knee.
“You're actually blushing, Bryce,” she observed. “It was the Special X, wasn't it?”
“No!” she snapped, surprising everyone in the room. “It wasn't the goddamn drugs. I was way down by then.”
“Shit, I knew it. I knew he was a stud horse from the second I saw him,” Trish said, raising her eyebrows at Stacy as Bryce sipped coffee obliviously.
“A stud horse with no morals, go figure,” Stacy said.
“This is a lesson, right?” Bryce asked rhetorically, doing her best to ignore the fact that the bed they were sitting upon was exactly like the one next door, down to the teal-blue and rust patterning on the spread. “A very strict lesson. I know better now.”
“Better than what? If I ever see him again, I'll knee him in the nuts,” Trish said helpfully, tucking wayward bangs behind her left ear. Her dark mascara, like Bryce and Stacy's, had journeyed down her cheeks during the night.
“I think we can rest assured we'll never see him again,” Stacy said, as Amy muttered something that sounded like
banana pancakes
.
“He's long gone,” Bryce agreed, and something in her heart twisted a little, but she forced the feeling away and asked, “So, did you two have fun?”
***
Michelle was
having her breakfast smoke when Bryce stepped into the sunlit kitchen an hour later, her body and hair thoroughly scrubbed in the motel showerâ¦all the better to erase any traces of his cut-grass scent. Too bad a memory couldn't be likewise treatedâ¦
“Morning,” she mumbled to her mother without looking too hard, opening the fridge in the vain hope that something edible might have materialized since the night before last. No luck. She winced at the sight of the beer and settled for a cigarette too. Damn it, one more thing she needed to quit doing, but it was tough. She dared any of those kindly Planned Parenthood nurses or high school counselors to live with Michelle and
not
smoke.
“Your bus leaves today,” Michelle said in a completely normal voice, the way someone would announce that it had started sprinkling outside. In the vacuum of silence that followed, Bryce stood in the chill of the open refridgerator, not sure whether to pitch the biggest fit her mother had ever seen or simply walk out of the room. She settled for the simple walk away. After all, Michelle couldn't make her go. When it came down to it, Michelle was smaller than her, and Wade's mother would surely take her in for a little while. Torrie liked her, thought she was good for her son. But the thought of living in the Thompsons' basement with Wade and having him expect sex on a nightly basis made her stomach instantly nauseous. She didn't want anyone else touching her ever againâ¦
Michelle had followed her, trailing smoke, and Bryce did her best to ignore her mother even as Michelle plopped down on the twin bed in the tiny space Bryce claimed as her own. The bedspread was an afghan Trish's mother had made for her, white with yellow flowers and edged in thick fringe; Bryce was certain her mother would have had no clue where the beloved blanket had come from, nor cared. She fought the urge to shove Michelle off the bed and pretended to be preoccupied with choosing an outfit from her two-by-two closet.
“Elizabeth, you are going up there, goddamn it,” Michelle said. Bryce chose not to reply, but Michelle carried on as though she didn't notice anyway. Her voice was too loud in the stuffy room. “Wilder wants you to be there, and wants to meet you again. I told him you would be there. One of us needs to be there. I can't, Bryce, not yet. Maybe not ever. Do you understand?”
Fury rose in her throat, hot and with claws. But she swallowed it away like always and throttled the emotion in her voice down to a second-gear level.
“I don't understand any of this,
Mother
,” she said, purposely emphasizing the word, which felt raw and unnatural on her tongue. “You tell me nothing.”
Michelle had the grace to look slightly ashamed, and smoked mutely for a few moments. When she finally pulled the cigarette, a stupid skinny long one, from her lips, she said, “Because it wouldn't make you feel any better about your life, believe me. None of it really matters now, anyway. I hated Lydia. I ran away from them years ago. But you know that.”
Bryce leaped off the high dive and sat down beside her mother, giving up the pretense of rummaging in her closet. “Mom, I don't know anything. I don't even know what state these people live in.”
“They live in Minnesota,” Michelle said, her eyes shifting up and to the left, as though seeing a picture there in the air above their seated forms. “In Rose Lake, where I grew up.” Bryce nodded and tried to look encouraging. This was more than she had ever heard in nearly 21 years. “Daniel Sternhagen was my father's name. I grew up on a farm.” Michelle drew deeply on her smoke, looking away. But to Bryce's amazement, she continued seconds later, silvery puffs wisping out of her mouth with each new word. “My mother died when I was little, in a car accident. Dad remarried years later.”
“That would be Lydia?”
“Yes,” in a whisper. “She was our housekeeper. She made our lives hell after he married her.”
Something else occurred to Bryce then, and she asked softly, “Why is our name Mitchell?”
Michelle turned watery eyes to her daughter. “That's the town where my money ran out on the way here. I decided it was as good a name as any.”
What the hell
? Bryce felt dizzy, as though her insides were drifting away from her. Too much in too little time. She was still reeling from last night, from being held and touched like thatâ¦she gulped a little, startling herself, and Michelle's gaze sharpened momentarily and came back to her daughter's face.
“Where've you been all night?” she asked.
“Amy's birthday, remember?”
“Ohâ¦yeah, you told me.”
Bryce dared to reach out to touch her mother's shoulder, bare and chilly under her fingertips. She hated how Michelle always seemed to be wearing sleeveless shirts, ones that displayed the rigid pink lines of desperation and terror that marked her pale skin.
“Why don't we both go to this thing?” she heard herself suggesting. “I'll go with you. Your brother said he would pay for us, we'll tell Connie we need a week off. We can go together and you can, I don't know, put stuff behind you.”
Michelle stared into Bryce's eyes, looking for an instant like a child who wanted comfort, who believed that Bryce might be right. But in the next instant the look was gone, and the absent, boozing mother whom Bryce had always known came back into her bloodshot eyes.
“No, Bryce. I won't go there again. But you will. I already paid for your ticket.”
***
It was
4:05 in the afternoon, and Bryce was sitting in the cab of Wade's truck, staring with dry, dry eyes at the traffic whipping along I-35, heading north and south and making her feel crazier than she already did. The air was even more dusty than normal beneath a sky that spoke of an evening thunderstorm, low and sullen and the gray of an old aluminum pan.
“Call me when you get there, okay, babe?” Wade asked again, and she looked over at him, the hazel eyes and dark-blond hair, the sunburned nose she had looked at a million times since the summer she turned 16 and he had come into Leo's after work for a beer, told her she had a great ass and eyes to die for. She had been as blown away by those words as any other 16-year-old with limited experience, and had been on her knees that very weekend, learning how to properly give head to a man who at 21 seemed worldly and sexy: he could buy beer, had his own truck, and was something to brag about to her friends. And for a few seconds of their relationship, he made her feel really special. Like she was more than just Michelle Mitchell's illegitimate daughter who wore hand-me-downs from Trish's big sisters Tammy and Tina.
“I will,” she told him. He gripped her left thigh lightly and squeezed, his way of sympathizing.
“Be careful on the bus,” he added a moment later, after her gaze had wandered back to the four-lane in search of something.
“I will, Wade, I promise,” she told him, attempting a smile, and he shook his head.
“Michelle needs a shrink,” he offered helpfully, and then nodded at the bus pulling into the station. “Here you go.”
Wade pulled her bag from the bed of the truck and shouldered it through the small crowd that had gathered for the bus with its sign reading âSt. Louis' in the upper windshield. Bryce bit down hard on her bottom lip, her bravado abruptly failing her; she felt unfairly abandoned by her friends, who had been due for work this Sunday afternoon and were therefore unavailable to see her off. It was only a week, Trish reminded her, not unkindly. “Think of it as a vacation,” her best friend had told her on the phone around 1:00.
Wade hugged her hard, kissed her forehead and then her lips with a small smacking sound.
“I'll see you on Thursday,” he said, and she nodded, then climbed onto the bus and found a seat on the opposite side. She didn't want to see if he waited around for the bus to pull away or not.