| Stay |
| by Chandrah |
| Chapter 2 |
| Part I |
| We don’t talk on our walk back to the cabin. Normally, we would have left from the house, and we would return there to eat something and work. Today we’re walking on a new path, taking our time, treading carefully and slowly in our mutual silence. Our hands are locked together, and that’s new, too, this touching.
I don’t know what I’d say if there were words at my disposal. Words are my stock in trade, but they’re simply a jumble in my head. Some stand out more than others: ‘wrong’ being chief among them. At this point, I don’t think there’s much practical knowledge I don’t have about the man holding my hand. By my own high standards I would consider myself an expert on him. The chief component of that knowledge right now, the most paramount fact, is that this man is married. With children. It was a basic bit of information that was known to me before I even took the assignment from my editor. Something in the information packet that I noted and put aside, an unimportant biographical note that seemed to have so very little to do with the original slant on the piece I’m attempting. Mine is an insider’s view of a private man and his private band and how it all comes together to make a very public performance. Married, single, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. It matters now. It matters because with each step we take David squeezes my hand and nothing but that small physical gesture means anything to me. If I’ve protested in my actions it’s all immaterial now; my mind, my thoughts, have wanted this moment and more. Unmentionable moments that only came to the fore last night, when he first said ‘stay’. The reality I’m rejecting comes into vivid relief through the palm of his hand against mine. Lost in my thoughts, the crunch of our boots on the gravel in front of the cabin disturbs them and makes me aware of how far we’ve come. At the foot of the porch, D.J. halts, hesitates, while I’m beginning the short ascent. It makes me turn to face him, and with the added inches of the stairs I am, for the first time, eye to eye with him. “I’ll understand if you pack up your car and go today,” he begins. “I truly will.” Hand on my face, thumb stroking again. “And if you do go, I hope that you’ll forgive me, but if you don’t go, you know where I am. I’ll be waitin’ for you. I’ve been waitin’ for you for a time now.” For the first time since his kiss, he smiles at me, and I can’t help myself, I do what I’ve done since I met him. I smile back. “I’m not going home today,” I tell him, making my decision in an instant. “Good.” His hand makes a slow descent down the side of my face, neck, shoulder, and arm. “Good.” It’s my turn to reach out to him, to touch his face with fingers that are steadier than I would have given them credit for. He’s warm. It’s beginning to get warm outside, as the spring seems to do here, but he’s warm on his own. Alive. I have never met a person more alive than he is. There’s been death in his life, uncalled for, unplanned for losses that he’s met with inner strength that comes through him like a light. He embraces life like a terminal patient, living it fully. That quality is a part of what draws his fans to him. They can feel that energy because it’s real. I’ve felt it, too; I’ve admired it, but kept that admiration to the side. Not now. I can’t. As soon as I come to that conclusion and accept my reactions to him, as soon as I allow it, allow for it, something lifts. A small sound escapes his lips, and his eyes go a bit wide, as if he’s seen that indefinable weight remove itself from me. Maybe he has. “What?” I ask, wanting to know what he sees, what he senses. “Nothing.” Nothing. Yes, I feel the ‘nothing’ as tangible as I feel his hand holding mine to his face. I feel the scratchy beginnings of his beard there, and a ticking pulse near his jaw. I feel the muscles there as he smiles. And I feel normal to be standing here, touching him. He kisses my palm, and lets my hand fall. “I’ll be at the house.” “I know.” “All day.” “I assumed as much.” “Come any time.” The easy drawl is back in his voice. The tension between us has shifted. It’s still there; it’s just changed its flavor. His smile turns from friendly to wickedly flirtatious in an instant, and back again. “Y’all come any time you’re ready.” “Sure,” I reply, and I hug myself without thinking, a protective gesture, yet the smile is still plastered on my face. I stay on the porch and watch him retreat to the Jeep. He gets into the vehicle with awkward grace, all legs, and arms; he’s downright goofy sometimes, particularly when he’s trying to be, but often when he’s not. “Anytime!” he reminds me over the roar of the engine igniting, and then he’s gone in a soft spray of gravel, leaving me wondering about things I had promised myself from the start that I wouldn’t let myself wonder about. **~~***~~****~~***~~** It’s dusk when I park my car at the house. I have spent the day alone, wasting it with sitting and thinking and drinking copious amounts of coffee. The caffeine is pumping through my system, making me hyper-alert to everything. When I cut the engine, I hear music. Beautiful, rhythmic music is spilling through the opened windows of the living room. It will be a surprise, the way it is every time I walk into this place, to know whether this music is something original that is D.J.’s, or something from the vast, eclectic collection of music he listens to. He wasn’t born here in the south, or even in this country, another piece of information from his fact sheet I noted and discussed with him extensively. He was born in South Africa, in Pretoria. His mother is an American with ties to this general area, his father was British, and a member of the consulate that kept him and his family traveling for most of D.J.’s childhood, from one country to another. Several members of the Phillips family were killed during rioting in South Africa: his father and an older, married brother and his wife. The traveling stopped and D.J., his mother, his sister, and his brother’s surviving children settled here in the Deep South. His mother and sister are still here raising those children in another state, in a location he prefers to keep to himself. I know where, some other people do too, of course, but the general public are not privy to that information, and I’m not of a mind to divulge it. They are happy in their anonymity. The music makes me think of them and of Africa, a place I’ve never visited but feel like I know from listening to D.J.’s never ending stream of stories about the places he’s lived and traveled to there. It makes me think of D.J., too, and his love of his heritage and history and family; the good and the bad of it. I stand outside the house and feel the first few drops of rain that begin to fall from the sky. After the mist of the morning, after the cool night air warmed itself, a bank of clouds settled in and never left. It didn’t rain all day, but it appears to want to now. I look up and let it fall on my face a bit, something I would never have done in the past. I would have run for the shelter of the porch. There’s an appreciation of simple things like rain that D.J. has cultivated in me. I think of him, and he comes to the door as if he’s heard my beckoning thought. “Rainin’?” he asks as he saunters out on bare feet. “Umhmm.” “Should I come out there or would you prefer to come in here?” he asks with a smile. “I don’t know,” I tell him. A lie. I want him to come to me. I turn my face back up to the rain. It’s coming down a little harder, and instead of making a few damp spots on my clothes, it’s beginning to run in small rivulets across my cheeks. “You’ve been a tease since I met you,” he says, and I’m startled because he’s made quick work of the strip of ground between him and me. He’s standing close, towering over me. “Don’t tell me y’all ‘don’t know’; not about a damn thing. You know everything, girl. Always did, always have.” I’d come back with a retort if he didn’t pick this minute to kiss me. I’d tell him he’s a fool, and an arrogant one at that. I’d say something smart, or witty, and defuse the desire, the all over, inside out desire I have for him that’s going to take me where I shouldn’t want to go but exactly where I’m going. Instead, I kiss him back and give him an inkling of what I’m feeling, hoping that he’s feeling the same, wanting him to feel the same and more. Somewhere inside of this moment I realize something I never wanted to admit to. I’m lonely. I’m so incredibly, undeniably lonely, and it comes as a shock. This loneliness is sharp and literally painful to acknowledge. The hurt of it makes me want to be hard, to reject, and reject, and reject the sweetness of this kiss with a knee jerk reaction to desires that I’ve kept in check for so long. I want, desperately, to be invited into the imagined part of David’s world I’ve edged around since I met him. And still, I reject. “Don’t fuck with me, David,” I say, my voice trying to be harsh. “Tough girl,” he taunts gently, meeting my rudeness with his ever present brand of polite charm while pushing my wet hair out of my face. “Tough girls don’t blush, Betts.” The heat in my face rises when he says that. He won’t let me look away from him, either, won’t give me that little bit of purchase for my pride. His big hands hold my face so still I have no choice but to look at him, look him in the eye, and feel stripped down to the bone. Mine fill up and well over at the shame I feel of being read so completely. “Damn, Betsy girl, you can be that way if you want, I don’t really mind, truly, I don’t mind a damn thing about you, Betts. Not a damn thing.” Lips again, soothing, on my lips, cheeks, chin, eyelids, while the rain drenches the both of us. **~~***~~****~~***~~** Wine and blankets and worn T-shirts. D.J. offers them all to me and I take them without reservation. I’m cold to the bone from standing out in the rain. It’s turned into a veritable downpour outside, and we lingered in it for way too long, until the first streaks of lightening lit the sky. Our clothes are tumbling in the dryer, or so D.J. assured me when he handed me an oversized, faded shirt of his to wear, along with a mélange of pants and shorts and anything else he thought might suit me. Everything suits me. The soft clothing that smells like him, the rich wine, the blanket around my shoulders and his arm that holds it there, and the fire at our feet. The papers, the sheets, and reams of our mutual work, are missing from this view. Where they had been strewn about here on the carpet there is nothing but us. They’ve disappeared for the night, and D.J. won’t tell me where no matter how many times I ask. His guitar leans against the hearth stones, untouched with my computer that is dark, asleep beside it. Unsuitable topics of conversation drift through my mind, namely D.J.’s wife, Miranda. I want to ask him so many things. How did they meet, and where, and did he bring her here to this place, and did he kiss her in the rain and here, in front of the fire? How many times did they make love in this house? How many months did they live here together? Does she know about the small clearing in the brambles where we lingered for an hour or so? Were their children, their boy, their girl, were they conceived here, on this floor, or in one of the rooms above us? I ask none of them, and keep my mouth occupied with the wine. The answers to these questions that crowd my head are irrelevant. They won’t change a thing. They might leave me with sleepless nights and a lifetime’s worth of guilt, but they’ll do nothing to change the course I’m on. **~~***~~****~~***~~** **~~***~~****~~***~~** I was struck by Betts the moment I saw her. One of those things you just ‘know’. I’ve had those moments all my life, and just when I think I get used to ‘knowin’’ and having these little epiphanies it happens all over again and I’m surprised by it. Betts surprised me. My life is settled, and that’s the way I prefer it; settled and simple, although no one who hasn’t been walkin’ in my shoes, or at least in the general vicinity of my size elevens, wouldn’t assume that. The outside looks in at me like I’m a fish in a bowl and makes up its own mind about whom and what I am. After ten or more years of that, you get a little short about it, a little ‘put out’ as my late father might have said. So maybe I invited all this when I agreed to have a journalist come into my bowl to swim with me for a while, when I agreed to put my simple life out there for the world to understand that I’m not so different from them. Betts was sharp the first day I met her, or at least she was tryin’ to be the hard, competent, and together individual she likes to pretend she is. I liked that, that pretending, because I pretend a lot myself and recognized it, though I’ve never let on until today. I liked the way it made her shine, cold and hot all at the same time, like a blue flame. She was cool, all northern coldness and speed; not like me at all. I liked that, too, that difference. Made me want to get under it and inside her to find out if it was skin deep or soul deep. She came over as strong, but then, I always think that most women do. Women are rocks to me, and have been since I watched my mother and sister take over and pick up the pieces of their lives and mine along with them. There isn’t a person on earth who will convince me otherwise. And the fact that Betts is finally, finally leanin’ against me, that she’s showing the softest part of herself tonight that she’s ever shown me, willing or unwilling, that part that she’s kept pretty well hidden, doesn’t make me think she’s not strong, or perfectly capable of picking up and leaving any time she pleases. It simply makes me want to work harder to please her and make her want to stay. I want her to stay so bad it makes me shake. So bad that I’m willing to let it rock the foundation my life is built on. So much that I’m gonna risk everything just to see how it all turns out, out of some perverse curiosity I didn’t know existed within me, but that she’s woken out of a contented sleep. I’ve been a faithful man, a faithful husband in a business where faithfulness has no business. I’ve been faithful when all sorts of temptation were presented to me, sometimes for the sheer effect of arousal. Small sparks of possibility have happened; I’m human I suppose, and not immune to charm, beauty and availability, but I’ve kept to my path, never strayed, and am appalled, in a way, that I’m about to do just that. Only, I’m not so appalled that it’s jolted me out of my thoughts and deeds. I’m not even disappointed in myself, because I never set out to be faithful, never made it a mission in my life, or a goal to achieve. I just was. Was. I knew what I was doing when I brought Betts here to this house; even then and it seems like a lifetime ago, not just a few short months. I proposed it because no one ever comes here but me and my band and the few people who drop in and out to leave food and other necessaries and clean. No one. It’s been a man’s place, a working place that I retreat to alone to get the music out of me. It’s secluded and quiet, with no outside interruption but the phone. Got no television, no radio but for a short wave in case of emergency. No distractions comin’ in from outside, just the distraction of the natural beauty of the place. So I immediately thought to have Betts come here, rather than come to one of the other places I live at. We would be alone here, and I knew it would be easy for me to be myself, that ‘myself’ I’m more willin’ to share with the public these days, and that she was seeking. I also knew, without a doubt, that it would be the place she would like the least, the place she would feel most off balance in, and where I would have an advantage over her usual confidence. I wanted to get her off balance just to see what would happen. Now, I want to take her everywhere. I have visions of us in all the places I’ve ever been, watchin’ her as she unfolds and opens to every possibility in life. She’s scared most of the time; something that I know would just about kill her if she knew I understood. I flatter myself in thinkin’ that, over the time we’ve been together here, she’s not so scared anymore and that I’ve had something to do with that. She’s lonely, too, but I see that in a lot of people, in those fans that follow me and want things from me that I have no ability to give. Betts has a different brand of loneliness, a multilayered kind that I know the way I know it in myself. We’re as alike in ways as we’re different, and that loneliness is somethin’ we share. Our work is lonely work, done alone. I understand that the finished product of what I do always includes many, many other people, but the start is always someplace within me, alone. Same with Betts. Same with the words, too. We both love ‘em, all these words, and we like to play with them, but in different ways. It was so easy for us to fall into the pattern we have, to come to this very spot on the floor every evening, to share some meal I’ve thrown together, to share some wine, or bourbon, and to banter or feed off each other. We can be quiet together, and to me, that says a lot. We’re quiet right now, but this is a different kind of silence tonight. There’s an edge to it that the wine we’re drinkin’ doesn’t soothe. Betts came over here all wired up, tried to work herself around it, and ended up cryin’ in the rain. I’m wired up on the mere thought of what’s gonna happen here tonight, ‘cause one way or another, somethin’s gonna happen, and it’s gonna pick us up and put us down in places we’ve never been before. I’m just not sure where those places are gonna be. She shifts. Don’t exactly know how, I just feel it, and I feel her hand on my belly, feel her turn a little toward me, instead of away. For a second, her hand just rests there, making a nice, warm spot, but as I’m about to cover it with mine to keep it there, she slips it under my shirt, and it’s skin on skin. I’m not surprised that she’s done it as much as I’m surprised how it feels. Deliberate. Natural. As if she’s always touched me. Invitational. Now I’m the one who’s a little scared. The decision’s been taken out of my hands in just about a literal way. I’m no seducer, never was. Too awkward about myself most of the time, I’ve relied on a bit of personal Russian roulette all my life, tossing myself out there like a stray bullet, happy when it hits a mark. My kissing Betts this morning was a lot like that, a shot fired that I didn’t know for sure was an empty chamber or a loaded one. I took a chance, and maybe I was hopin’, a little bit, that it was a misfired shot, and that she would be disgusted and hightail it back to where she comes from. Maybe. Right now is my last chance. I can stop this, I can even stop this nicely, make Betts feel right about not goin’ where we’re goin’, even if I’ve said and done everything to the contrary today. It’s as clear a crossroads that I’ve ever experienced in my life, with only a few options: turn back, veer to the left, and make this all a misunderstanding, veer to the right and ruin it completely, or go forward into something that’s unclear. I incline my head a bit and catch her eye. She has lovely eyes that are dark blue, sometimes violet, right now black. They reflect her mood, all the time. I’ve seen laughter in those eyes, and fear, disdain, some tears, and I’ve seen things in them that I was sure were only reflections of my own thoughts and wants. There’s a question in those eyes tonight, and an answer. I close my eyes and kiss her. ‘cause, well, it’s been my general assumption that a kiss is always a good start to things. **~~***~~****~~***~~** **~~***~~****~~***~~** Primal. Gentle. Simple. David knows. He knows how to be with me, as if it’s instinctual, and I can’t say that about other men that have been in my life. As complicated as this is, it isn’t. Hands, mouths, his easy, easy movements designed to keep us close together; it’s what I imagined him to be. What I wanted him to be. There’s no hurry, and I appreciate that. I don’t want to rush this night, I want to mark it, memorize everything about it, from the hiss of the rain slipping down the flue into the flames to the smell of David’s warm neck when I bury my face there. I want to linger with him because no matter what my eyes are telling me when I look into his, no matter how he’s touching my insides with that gaze, and the promises I see there, my head, the tiny part of it that isn’t drunk with him, tells me that this may be a singular opportunity, and I should savor it, savor him. We’re a ridiculous tangle on the floor, his long legs knotted with my shorter version, his arms up inside the short sleeves of his shirt I’m wearing, pulling the material taut as his hands stroke my back up to my neck. My own hands aren’t holding him; they’re pinned between us, under his shirt, so it’s the rhythm of his heartbeat against my fingertips that paces us. Hours of kissing. Hours like this, of getting used to each other in this new way. I become acutely aware of his physicality, of his closeness which I must have been taking for granted. I think he’s been inching this close to me over the weeks and months we’ve known each other, a little closer every day. In the middle of one of many drawn out, wine flavored kisses a mental picture of one of my walks with David blossoms on my eyelids. Bump. Nudge. The continuous touch of his shoulder or arm against mine as we made our way over one of a thousand overgrown paths, keeping me steady on my feet without being obvious. Contact. Sweet contact that I didn’t even realize, and thought a measure of my own clumsiness with unfamiliar, uneven ground. I shiver with the idea that, perhaps, he had meant to be here all along, and he pulls me closer, if it’s possible. The kiss breaks and I find myself cuddled to him, head under chin, cheek to chest, wanting. My body reacts involuntarily, my thighs squeeze around the one of his they’ve been hugging, my fingers try to find purchase on his skin, my mouth opens to taste the salt of him with a delicate tickle of tongue. Does he know that there have been a hundred times that I wanted to do that? To lick the moist skin on his neck? He wears the most awful clothes at first glance; miserable, dull colored things that have been washed and washed until they have no substance to them. The more I watched him, though, the more I understood the concept of comfort, of being comfortable instead of fashionable, of being comfortable enough to know that clothes are just, well, clothes. And the more I watched him the more I liked the way paper thin fabric laid on him, how it defined, hid, revealed, presented him. So many of his shirts leave his neck bared, and I’ve looked at that neck, front and back, and wanted to touch it, but more, wanted to taste it. My tongue runs over him once more, and he pulls away, back, his hands slipping from inside the shirt I’m wearing. There must be a horrified look on my face, for my first instinct is to feel that I’ve done something wrong, distasteful; he immediately kisses me, a quick kiss, before he shucks his shirt off and tosses it aside, then another as he’s tugging off mine, freeing me. “Put that sweet mouth wherever you want to, darlin’,” he tells me, eyes heavy lidded, glazed. “I’ll do likewise, if you’ve no objection.” His words, almost formal in their politeness, make me smile; make everything feel fine in an instant. I’m comfortable once again, so ready to follow his lead. No. No objections at all. No objections to stripping down here on the floor, to his hands pushing and pulling the little clothing of his I’m wearing to the farthest reaches of my body where I can slip them off. No objections to me doing the same for him, or to our shy glances, or our bold hands that map each other. No objections to twisting and twining in every direction, greedy, curious; to making a mess of the blankets, a nest of them to find each other in. No objections to his whispered question, ‘is this all right?’ just before the moment where there’s no turning back, or to his pause while he waits for my answer, or to the sweetest moment of them all as I wrap my legs around him and feel the slow, slow push of him into me. All right. It’s all right. All. All of him is the most right anyone or anything has ever been. David eases in and out of me, using the same tempo he’s been using the entire evening. The music that’s been playing since before I got here winds around the two of us; heavy bass, the thump, thump, thump of drums and the tender, high pitched sound of a flute tie us to each other, to the moment. Easy, slow, I notice right away through a thick haze of pleasure that David isn’t awkward or fumbling the way he can sometimes be as we… we… I can’t even say it in my mind. If I do, I’ll make this what it’s not. I’ll make this something above and beyond an intense pleasure. I’ll make it into what I want it to be, what I’ve wanted, what shocks me to know I want, and then I’ll have to know and admit that my feelings are one sided. He slows, then stops, keeps himself inside of me, but stops. I feel the hard pad of his thumb on my cheek making sweeps, making me open my eyes. I hadn’t realized they were shut. “Where’d ya go, Betts?” he asks, husky voiced. How do I tell him without hurting him or ruining this? How do I tell him that somewhere along the way to the interview of my career, the byline that’s going to put me on the map, going to put him farther into the limelight than he wants to be, that I fell in love with him. Not the idea of him, or the charisma he has, or the charm that’s hooked millions of fans in. Him. I fell in love with him. Love. Him. It’s worse. I love him. Love him. The tender, very real, him. He’s even made me like him. The silly part, the serious part; all of him. “I won’t… we don’t…” he begins, then continues to stumble over words in his low, melodic voice, “If this isn’t what you want… I… we…” “I want this,” I assure him. God, I want this, even if it’s all I’ll ever have of him, at least I’ll have had it. Some bit, some piece, some joy, something. “I want this.” The second time the words come out, they sound hard and desperate to my own ears. They, apparently, sound like something different to David. He smiles. He bends his head a bit, kisses me, lets his lips play on mine like a light breeze, touching me, but almost not. His hands hold my face; hold me steady again, like he did earlier today, yesterday? How long ago? I don’t remember. They just hold me and he looks deep into me. “I do love you.” Primal. Gentle. Simple. He cracks me wide open, and I know that my life is changed. Forever. **~~***~~****~~***~~** **~~***~~****~~***~~** © 2006 Chandrah, Inc. © 2006 (*> Baby Bird Productions |