Chapter 23
The shine of the streetlamp coming through the storeroom window gave them just enough light to see by.
As Cal pushed the silk robe from her shoulders and let it fall to the floor, then lifted the hem of her nightgown to her hips, Fern half-wished for total darkness.
However, after he’d pulled the nightgown over her head and tossed it aside, she was glad for the dim light.
Without it, she would not have seen the heated desire in his eyes as they roved over her.
She’d never believed any man would ever look at her in such a way.
Fern knew in that moment she would not forget it.
She would relive it again and again until the day she died.
Cal shrugged off his shoulder holster and laid it carefully on a pantry shelf.
He devoured her with his eyes as he gripped her waist with one hand and scrabbled to free the buttons on his shirt with his other.
Fern tried to help make quicker work of it, but in their rush, their tangling fingers tore the thread securing a few buttons.
They plinked off the floor before he finally shed his shirt fully.
Cal released her for a half breath, long enough to yank his cotton undershirt over his head, and then he brought her against him again.
The collision of their naked skin, of her breasts rasping against the dusting of coarse dark hair on his chest, exploded through her like stars shooting across the night sky.
His kisses pushed harder as he shed his pants and kicked them aside. Fern gasped at the heat of his skin and the hard ridges of his body wrapping around her.
The light, dizzying sensation of his touch, his mouth, and his desire prodding her soft belly blinded her even as he murmured against her lips, “You’ve gotta be kidding me with this cot.”
Fern laughed until he captured her lips again.
The cot was far too small for them to fit comfortably together.
Smaller even than the bed at Hazel’s roadside motel.
Still, Cal eased her down onto the thin mattress, the springs complaining as he lowered himself next.
Braced on his elbows, he guided her and positioned them both with slow, tender movements.
As frenzied as he’d been to undress, he now moved languidly, taking time to explore her body with his mouth and tongue and hands, until she thought she might burn up.
“Cal,” she pleaded, gulping a breath as once again, his teeth nipped her throat.
“There’ll be pain,” he whispered. “Only for a few seconds.”
Fern nodded. She wanted him too much to worry about pain.
The promised sting came, and Cal’s mouth lowered over hers to swallow her gasp.
The smarting ebbed, as promised, and soon, blissful pressure and friction overwhelmed her.
Fern couldn’t breathe, and she didn’t care to, so long as Cal stayed a part of her forever.
His heartbeat slowed. It thrummed between Fern’s shoulder blades, which were pressed up against Cal’s bare chest. The two of them barely fit on the army surplus cot on their sides, lengthwise, but they weren’t ready to move yet.
For it to end. Her head rested on his arm, his other arm thrown over her hip, holding her close—either because he wanted to feel his skin against hers, or to keep her from slipping straight over the edge of the cot.
Fern laughed at that image, and Cal, nuzzling her neck, pulled back.
“What’s so funny?” He gently clamped his teeth around her earlobe, and Fern quivered.
“This cot,” she said. He slid his warm leg over hers, and the springs under the mattress squealed. They’d tried to be quiet while making love, but Fern was afraid they hadn’t been successful.
“It’s not all that romantic, is it?”
She laughed quietly again. “It’s perfect.” She pressed her lips against his biceps.
He wanted to say something, and she thought she knew what it might be. After a few more minutes of reveling in the feel of him, Fern grimaced. “You have to go, don’t you?”
He exhaled, his breath gusting against her neck. “Not yet.”
She twisted her shoulders around as far as the cot would allow, though she couldn’t see him well.
The small, high window only let a shaft of light into the storeroom.
It fell on a few shelves of dried beans, condensed milk, and Spam.
Fern had suspected something since he’d arrived an hour or so ago.
“Rod doesn’t know I’m here, does he?”
Cal’s chest expanded against her body, then released. “No.”
“What have you told him?”
“That we got separated after the shoot-out.”
He’d lied to his brother. Something he’d never done before. The cot squeaked as she shifted, awkwardly, so she could face him. Cal turned onto his back, and she rested, half-sprawled atop him.
“You don’t think he believes you,” she said.
He readjusted the pillow, then lay still again. “I shouldn’t have lied to him. He sniffed it out.”
Cal brushed his fingertips lazily from her hip to her thigh. At Hazel’s Motel, he’d said he couldn’t have Fern around his brother. She’d put him between a rock and a hard place.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
Concern pooled low in her stomach, where not many minutes ago, there had been nothing but heat and undiluted wonder.
“What will he do?”
“Don’t know,” Cal said with an easy shrug. “He thinks I’m the snitch.”
Fern went still. “You mean for the Jacky Boys? No. He couldn’t think that.”
But then again, there was nothing about Rodney’s mind that Fern could claim to understand.
She only hoped that being brothers, being blood, protected Cal from whatever anger Rodney might feel from being lied to.
Her finger traced the narrow valley between Cal’s pectorals, then lower, to his stomach, where she gingerly avoided his two still-healing gunshot wounds.
“Helen said she has a theory about why Rod is so different from you.”
“Oh yeah? What is it?”
“She said it was your story to tell, if you were so inclined.” Cal’s chest stopped moving in slow, even breaths. He went rigid beneath her, and Fern realized she’d said something wrong.
“You don’t need to tell me anything,” she quickly added.
He moved the pillow again, as if he couldn’t get it into a comfortable position, then hooked an arm behind his head. Fern kissed his chest and rested her head on it. She closed her eyes and listened to his heartbeat.
“We had another sister,” he said after a minute. Fern opened her eyes again. “Bethel. I was twelve, Rod was eight. Eugenia had to be five or six. But Bets—that’s what we called her—she was a year old. Barely walking around.”
Bets. It was the name he’d been murmuring incoherently after he’d been shot. At the Bluebird Diner, he’d said he didn’t want to talk about her, and Fern had assumed it was a woman. A past lover.
The muscles under his skin, along his arms, and in his chest and stomach, tightened, as if he were bracing himself against the story he was about to share. It made her nervous.
“We were playing in the front yard, me and Rod, and I was supposed to be watching Bets. It was hot, and I guess I needed a drink, or maybe Rod asked me to get him one, I don’t remember.
I just know I went inside for some water.
Our mother was ironing, and Genie, she was playing in the kitchen with some dolls.
Ma asked if I was keeping an eye on Bets, and I said sure, sure.
” His fingers rubbed agitated circles into the small of Fern’s back.
“I was back outside, coming down off the front steps. This guy, I guess he’d lost control of his Runabout. Came roaring up over the curb, onto the grass.”
Fern’s throat closed off. She’d known Bets was gone when he started the story, but this… Cal’s throat grew hoarse.
“She just disappeared under the front wheel. It was like the auto ate her up.”
She swallowed the fist in her throat. “Oh, Cal.”
The circles against her lower back slowed.
He took a breath. “There was a lot of screaming and crying. I don’t know how much time went by, but our pop was suddenly there.
He’d come home from the shop, so someone must’ve called him or gone to get him.
The thing is, they couldn’t get Bets free.
The Runabout’s wheel well got all twisted up and…
and she was still in there. Dead, but stuck. ”
Fern’s stomach roiled at the agony Cal’s family had faced. She hadn’t thought it could get any worse.
“You watched?” she whispered, horrified.
“No, our neighbor, Mrs. Gates, brought us into the house while a bunch of men, including our pop, tried to get her out. But it was worse inside. We could hear our ma wailing from the bedroom. The worst sound I’ve ever heard.”
Fern laid her cheek against his chest, overwhelmed. But he wasn’t through.
“There was this loud cracking noise. Mrs. Gates screamed and ran toward the bedroom…but I knew. Our pop kept a Colt in the drawer next to the bed.”
Fern couldn’t breathe. It was unimaginable, unbearable. She wanted to cry for him, for the young boy who’d had to live through that immense loss.
“Anyway, after that, Rod wasn’t the same. He never cried. Not for Bets or for our ma. He was just…angry.”
Their mother, in her crushing grief, had chosen to leave them—whether she’d been thinking straight or not.
It was easy to see how a young boy could become furious with the world because of her choice.
But he and Cal had suffered the same losses.
Why Rod had emerged from that wretched day as one thing, and Cal another, could only be attributed to who they each were, deep inside.
“He fell in with a gang before he was even fifteen,” he said with a heavy sigh. “I tried to get him out, I knew it would only be trouble, but it was the first time I ever saw him happy.”
“So, you fell in too?” she asked. “To protect him?”