The Lateral

Chapter 14

I t sat in the box in a nest of dark velvet and glowed, looking like a planet lit up in the night sky. It was absolutely beautiful.

“It turned out pretty good.”

I stared at Jake. “Are you kidding? It turned out…perfect. It’s perfect. I’ve never seen anything like it.” I reached out to touch it but then drew back my hand, not wanting to mess it up.

“You can take it,” he said. “It’s your ring. You should wear it.”

“I…” I hesitated again. “I will,” I told him, “when this is over.” We both turned toward the closed office door just down the hall from where we sat in his kitchen, behind which Meadow was talking with the caseworker. Christal’s arrest had thrown everything into tumult all over again, but the social services people were used to that kind of thing, used to kids in distress and parents messing up over and over. It was hard that it was Meadow, though. It was hard when it was personal.

He nodded and closed the box, then returned it to his pocket. Then he reached over and took my hand. “She’ll be ok,” he said, and I swallowed and nodded.

“She’s fine,” I agreed. “She’s probably talking about how annoying I am about everything. How I make her wash up after being in the barn, stuff like that.” I was aware that I hadn’t done everything right, but I really had tried my best. I hoped that Meadow wasn’t saying that she was sorry that I was a dancer, or that I had arranged a meeting with her mother, or that I had moved her into this house with a man without informing the authorities—almost all our personal stuff was now here, carried over bit by bit, so that only big furniture was left in our former place.

I looked down at how his fingers covered mine. “Thanks for coming back for this,” I told him.

“I said that I was going to head up here, anyway. And you don’t have to keep thanking me.”

“You don’t have to keep pretending like every nice thing you do is just some kind of coincidence or no big deal,” I told him. “I already know that you’re sweet and you do good stuff on purpose.”

Jake looked over at me, and then he smiled. I found myself smiling back but then the office door opened. The meeting was over.

“Did you really think that they were going to yank me out of here or something?” Meadow scoffed. She was self-assured now, but before the social worker had come? She’d been a nervous mess just like I was, walking around her room and talking about packing, asking if Jake could hire a lawyer to help us, and wondering if she would have to go back with the same foster family because she’d hated them. No, they hadn’t been so bad, she’d admitted a moment later. She’d just been angry about having to live there.

“I didn’t think that they were going to remove you from my care,” I answered. “I never thought that.”

“Sure,” she said, nodding. “I can tell how calm you were. You’re still shaking, and the way I know that is because you’ve hugged me six times since she left and I can feel that you’re all trembly. It’s really creepy.”

Yeah, but she was letting me hug her. And the social worker had said that everything looked good, and Jake was here and he’d both patted my shoulder and held my hand. I breathed out a sigh of…maybe it was relief, but there was a lot of happiness, too.

“She talked to me about my mom,” Meadow noted. She bent to pet the dog, who was always somewhere close to her knees. “She said that they haven’t had any contact with her. I said I haven’t, either.”

“And that’s true?” Jake asked.

“Yeah, it’s true.” She didn’t sound happy about it, though.

I was. I’d been pretty sure that Christal would show up in our lives to get money or support or both, now that she was out on bail. When I’d driven away from the jail to think more about what to do, someone else had stepped in. Her boyfriend, the man we’d seen when we had dropped her off at the horrible house after meeting her at the coffee shop, had paid for her freedom (using what money, I didn’t want to know). Anyway, since she’d been out, I hadn’t heard from her either, which had been a relief.

Meadow went to the barn and I went to the laundry room and pulled a load from the dryer, one of the appliances here which worked perfectly. I’d been busy lately. I was doing things like laundry and keeping the house going, keeping Meadow going, and going to work at B-Dzld. Things there were the same as they’d always been—at least, Calandra and all the other girls kept telling me that they were, so it must have been true. But somehow, it seemed different to me. The men were more pathetic, the drinks looked more watery, the private rooms smelled more…well, those had always been just so nauseating. I still wasn’t going into them with any of the guys, and my boss, Travis, was still mad about it.

There was another difference about my job, and it was that this time, I hadn’t told Jake about working there. Not yet. He’d come back this morning, flying in early before our home visit so that we could present a united front as the happy, soon-to-be-married, stable, parental couple, and we had also been texting over the past few days no matter that our last call had ended in a tiff. In those messages and in the hours since he’d arrived, we hadn’t mentioned the argument and I also I hadn’t disclosed how I’d gone back to the club.

I wasn’t keeping that fact from him because I was angry that he hadn’t understood the issues with Christal, though. I wasn’t angry at him at all. When I’d seen his truck pulling down the driveway as he came from the airport—and yeah, I had been waiting at the window—I had been so happy that I’d run out the back door to meet him on his way in from the garage.

“Hi,” he’d said, and got the biggest smile I’d ever seen on his face as I’d catapulted toward him. He’d opened his good arm and hugged me there on the stone pathway, and even though it was raining again, we’d stood together for a while.

“I’m glad you’re home,” I’d said.

“I guess so. I’m glad, too.” We’d stayed like that until I’d heard Meadow call to me from inside, asking where her favorite jeans had gone. They had been dirty but I was folding them now.

He’d been great with the social worker, too, answering everything about himself and talking about Meadow like…well, it had sounded like he really, really cared about her, and maybe he even loved her. It was enough to make someone cry but I’d held myself together and the caseworker been nodding and smiling at us by the end of the interview. Although she was very professional, I thought it was also helpful that he played for the football team that was worshiped by everyone around here.

Anyway, I was going to tell him about my job. I had to, after all, since I’d need to go there soon enough, to the place that Calandra thought I was insane to return to. “You’re nutso,” she’d told me in the few days that I’d been back. “Totally. If I were Jake Koval’s fiancée? I’d be on my back—”

“Calandra!” I wasn’t thinking about that.

“I meant that I’d be lying on a table in an expensive spa getting the best bikini wax of my life instead of trying to do my own in the bathroom of my trailer. It’s a really tight space for that activity,” she’d explained, and I’d been in there and had to agree.

Anyway, I was going to tell him, and at the same time, I was going to talk about what I wanted for the future and what was important to me. I’d been thinking a lot about it and not just stuff like, “I enjoy jelly beans.” Maybe it was a good time, now. I nodded and went back to the kitchen.

Jake stood next to the door to the pantry with a big glass bottle in his hand. “Where did this come from?” he asked me.

“It’s local honey that Petrise brought over to help with my cough. It’s also good in herbal tea.”

He tilted the jar. “I like the color,” he remarked.

“I do, too,” I agreed. I watched the thick liquid roll back and forth. “It’s pretty as well as medicinal.”

“How come you didn’t tell me that you needed medicine? Why didn’t you mention the pneumonia to me?”

“I didn’t want you to worry,” I said. “You had enough going on, trying to recover from surgery and feeling anxious about your career. People get sick all the time, it’s just a normal thing. I’m fine,” I assured him.

“Just normal,” he said. “Right. You think it’s normal to walk around sick for weeks, to keep going to work while you feel like shit.”

“Not like you haven’t done that yourself,” I pointed out. “You played while you needed shoulder surgery. And speaking of my job…”

“Yeah?”

I took a breath. “I was going to talk to you about my future plans more,” I hedged.

“Sure. We could sit down together tonight.”

“Well…” I thought. We wouldn’t be able to do that because Travis would fire me again if I didn’t show up at the club. “Maybe not tonight.”

He waited for a beat but I didn’t continue, so he did. “I wanted to talk to you about something, too. I was thinking a lot about Araceli.”

“What?” I stared. “You want to discuss your ex?” Ok, here it came. I should have been ready for this—but I wasn’t. I tried to quickly prepare myself now but I was aware that I’d started to shake again.

“I was thinking about how you and Meadow showed up at the house in Ann Arbor and Araceli was there,” he continued. “I wouldn’t have liked it if I happened by your place and one of your former boyfriends was having a drink.”

“No, I didn’t like that,” I admitted. “I don’t care if you two keep in touch and stay friends or whatever, but it felt like you were hiding it. And hiding me, from her.”

“Yeah, I was a dumbass for not telling her about you and vice versa. Asking her over felt like having one of the guys, but it wasn’t.”

I shook my head and thought of how pretty she was, how much history they had, and how she’d left him and broken his heart. “It’s different.”

“I realized that I didn’t tell her about getting married and I hadn’t told anyone else either, because…” He looked at me. “I realized that, in the back of my mind, I believed that you were going to cop out.”

“What? No, I’m not,” I assured him. “I’m in.” At this point, it was a done deal. We had a ring and we were all set in the eyes of the county social services people. There was no going back.

“Good.” He reached and brushed his fingers over my hair, across a loose piece that had fallen out of the bun I’d created for the caseworker’s visit. “And I did tell people. I told my friends and my family, too, that we’re engaged. The Boones want to have a party for us.”

“Oh, well…that would be good,” I said. “The Boones seemed very nice.”

“You and Audrey could be friends,” he suggested, and I thought maybe we could. He looked at the glass jar again and held it next to my face. “This is the same color as your hair. Not all of it, just the pieces at the front around your face. That’s like honey.”

“Really?” I smiled. “I have honey hair.”

“I like it a lot.” He placed the jar on the counter and reached for the bun I’d made, now hanging on for dear life on the back of my head. He pulled out a pin, and then another. “Do you care?”

“No.” I was entranced, actually. I stood very still and let him remove each one, and I closed my eyes as he ran his fingers through my hair to loosen it.

“There. I like it better down, so I can see it. But I also like it in a ponytail, especially when you have it back like that and you wear your glasses.”

I opened my eyes to look at him. “Really?” I repeated.

“I’ve been thinking about you a lot.” He kept touching my hair, brushing through it and tucking it behind my ears. “I didn’t mean to get in an argument when you called about Christal, and then I didn’t know how to bring it up again.”

“I was upset about the whole situation,” I said. “I felt like I had to help her by bailing her out and then I was thinking, now Jake really sees how we are. I’m sure that particular problem is going to recur. My family is…”

“Not Meadow,” he said. “Not you.”

“I’m a part of them,” I answered. “Even if I don’t like them or what they do, we still have ties between us.”

“That’s ok. We’ll be our own family,” he told me.

“We will?” That sounded so good that I wanted him to repeat it. “Just us?”

“The three of us. And our kids,” he added.

Right, the kids. “We need to talk a lot about the future.”

“Sure,” he told me, and bent down, far down. He was getting very close, in fact, and on instinct, I rose up on my tiptoes. I put my hands on his chest for balance as he put his arm around me to draw me against him, and he lifted me right into the air.

Then he put his lips to mine and kissed me, and I felt the sensation of that fill every inch of my body. I didn’t want it to end, not ever.

“Oh, shit!”

We broke apart. “Don’t swear,” Jake told Meadow. He lowered me carefully, watching my face and then cupping his big hand around my cheek when I was back on the ground. His thumb caressed over my lips.

I was breathless, but it wasn’t from pneumonia at this moment. I looked back at him, resting against his palm and trying not to feel dizzy.

“Um, I was just wondering when you’re going to work, Ember,” Meadow said. I finally wrenched my gaze away from Jake’s and onto her. Her eyes were huge as she stared at us, and I took a step away from him so that I could formulate some thoughts.

“Work?” he asked me. “Did you get another job?” He paused. “At night?”

“At B-Dzld,” I said. “Travis thought that the bruises…yeah, I’m back at the club.”

“I didn’t think you liked working there.”

“Did I say that?” I asked, surprised.

“No, but you always get worried before you leave,” Meadow jumped in. “Don’t open the door to anyone, ever,” she mimicked me. Why did everyone talk so high when they did my voice? “What’s the secret word we use if there’s trouble? Is your phone charged so you can call nine-one-one?” She dropped down to her normal tone. “And you also go around checking all the windows and lately, you tried to teach the dog to bark when she hears noises.”

“I spent a lot of time training her to do the opposite,” Jake told me. He seemed totally calm, not breathless at all, and as he spoke, he trailed his fingertips down my neck. I shivered and he grinned.

“The dog just looked at Ember like she was crazy,” Meadow reassured him.

“Why the hell are you working there?” he asked. “You don’t have to anymore.”

“I know you’re safe with Jake,” I told her, “and I have to do something,” I informed my fiancé. Holy applesauce, it was weird to think of him like that. “I’m looking for something else, but in the meantime, this is fine. Plenty of people have jobs that they don’t care for very much.I’ve been applying around but so much has been happening. Everything is happening, all at once.” I also hadn’t been very interested in the other things I’d applied for, which hadn’t prevented me from taking jobs in the past but was now on my mind.

“So, what time are you going?” she asked me again, and it turned out that she was hungry so we worked on prepping dinner for both of them. When I did drive away, I kept my car at a crawl down the long driveway, watching the lights in the white house in my mirrors before the little road bent and I lost sight of it.

“I have no clue,” Calandra groused. “I have no idea why you’d be here if you don’t need to be.”

“Leave me alone,” I groused back to her. I knew why she was upset; the guy she hated, the one who came specifically for private dances from her, was back at his usual table. I also knew why I was upset; I didn’t want to be here at all. I kept thinking about Jake and Meadow at home—home was how I thought about that white house. I wanted to be there with them.

This night hadn’t been going well, anyway. The crowd was sparse and they weren’t tipping like we wanted, and Travis had been in his office yelling so loudly into the phone that you could sometimes hear him above the music, furious that a deal had apparently gone wrong.

Now the door to that room burst open. “What the hell are you doing back here?” he hollered just as loudly at us. “Get out on the floor—” He froze and then he held his hands straight up above his head. “Oh, fuck!”

All the lights came on and suddenly things went in a different direction at B-Dzld. It was a while later, several hours, that I stood with Calandra again, this time in the parking lot as we watched the state police sedans and SUVs pulling in and out. There were a lot of them.

“Unbelievable,” she said to me.

“You always thought he smelled like death,” I reminded her. “He freaked you out.”

“Yeah.” She shivered. “But I never thought…” She looked at her phone, at the picture of her son on her lock screen. “I don’t know if I can do this job anymore.”

“I don’t think we’re going to have a choice,” I answered. Because, right at that moment, Travis was getting escorted to the back seat of a patrol car.

I checked my phone as well, for the first time in a while. There were several missed calls from Jake and a few texts telling me to get back to him if I could. But the last one just stated, “All good. I got it.” I wrote back now that I was coming home soon and was it really all good? He told me yes, but I still felt the need to hurry.

We were finally allowed to leave and all the girls who worked at B-Dzld hightailed it out of the parking lot.But after the extended contact with the police, I didn’t want any more.So despite my desire to arrive as fast as I could, I drove extremely slowly and carefully and it took forever before I finally made the last turn in the driveway and saw the house.

Then I got nervous again when I also saw that the kitchen was totally illuminated, and Jake was sitting at the table under those lights. “What’s wrong?” I asked immediately as I entered. “What happened?”

“Why are you home early?” he asked in return.

“We had an issue at the club. Tell me what’s going on here.” I went to the sink and washed my hands, my face, and all the way up my arms. Then I wiped a damp towel over my neck and clothes to clean off everything that had gone on at B-Dzld.

He watched me perform that ritual. “It’s ok now, but Meadow got her period,” he said. “It sounded like it was the first time.”

“What?” I put my hand over my mouth. “Dagnabbit! I never even talked to her about it. Why didn’t I do that? Where is she? Is she upset?”

“She’s ok. She knew what was going on but she came to tell me—”

“Oh, that must have been awful for her!”

“I took it in stride,” he answered, “but she was embarrassed. She didn’t have the shit to take care of it, so I looked in your stuff. Sorry for that.”

“No, it’s ok, but I only have tampons. I don’t know…”

“Yeah, she didn’t feel up to those. I cut up some hand wraps I had in the gym for boxing, as a temporary thing, and I went to the store. Meadow was fine here,” he assured me. “I turned on the alarms and she had the dog, even if your bark training didn’t take.”

“Belle is a good girl.”

“I got a few things at the drugstore that she could try,” he went on. “Five, maybe ten options of pads, cups, shit like that. I found a video about tampons but she wasn’t interested in watching it with me.”

“No, probably not.”

“She took the stuff I bought and found one that worked for her and I was reading about cramps, bloating, other symptoms. I’m not sure that’s the right word, but she said it ached. I made her tea with that honey and got her some pills. Just over the counter, not the real stuff,” he explained. “I don’t keep any of that in the house.”

“And she’s ok?” I asked anxiously.

“We watched some really, really shitty show about teenage girls solving a mystery that didn’t make any sense and she put a heat wrap on her stomach. Then she said something sassy and went to bed, so I guess she was feeling better. She’ll probably want to talk to you about it tomorrow, because I didn’t have any personal experience to share. Obviously.”

“Thank you,” I told him. “Thank you for doing that.”

“I didn’t mind. Isn’t that how you’re supposed to act when someone needs you?”

Yeah, but not everyone followed through like Jake had.

“Put down that dish towel and come over here,” he ordered, and I did. He meant for me to sit on his lap, so I settled across the hard muscle there and leaned against him when his arm adjusted me that way. “What happened at the club?”

I nuzzled my face into his neck. “One of the patrons got arrested. The police ran in and dragged him out.”

“Drugs?”

“No, it turns out he had committed more than a few murders,” I answered, and Jake surged up off the chair, bringing me with him.

“Mother of all fucks! A serial killer?”

“We’re all ok,” I said. “He didn’t kill anyone at B-Dzld. But he was Calandra’s regular, so she was really upset, and we had to stay to be questioned even though we didn’t know anything. Can you sit back down? I’m just hanging here.”

He did. “A fucking serial killer?” He was still holding me very tightly.

“We all thought he was weird, and Calandra always said that he smelled like death.” I shivered. “I guess he really did. But the bigger problem—”

“A bigger problem than that?”

“I meant, in terms of the club,” I said. “When the police came in, they looked around a little and they saw what Travis was up to in his office. They discovered a lot of illegal guns that he’s been dealing, so he was arrested, too. I know he has a bunch of priors and I’m not going to be the one bonding him out. I don’t know when the club will reopen, if ever, so we’re probably all out of work.”

“You’ll be ok.”

“I’m worried about Calandra,” I confessed. “Very worried.” I nuzzled more against his neck, since it was so comforting.

“We could give her some money to tide her over.”

“We,” he’d said. He’d really meant it, apparently, when he’d written that what was his was also mine. “Thank you. I’d also like to help her figure out what to do for the long-term. Dancing isn’t it for either of us.”

“Not with that kind of clientele. Jesus.” We sat for a while and he asked me more questions about the whole serial killer thing, and then switched to another topic. “B-Dzld is done. What are you interested in? What do you want to do besides dancing?”

We talked for a while longer as we cuddled at the kitchen table. I explained how I wanted to get my GED, at a minimum. “I don’t know if I can,” I confessed.

“Kellen Karma, our receiver, is the smartest person I know. He’s a little weird, but he’s a good guy. I was talking to him about helping Meadow with her schoolwork and I bet he could do the same for you.”

“Really?You did?He would?”

“Or I could,” he said. “I’m not the brightest bulb—”

“Yeah, you are.” I kissed his neck. “You’re so smart and capable. And trustworthy, and nice.”

“Keep going,” he directed, and we both laughed quietly. “You know what I think you might like? This physical therapy stuff. You can talk to anyone and you’re positive, upbeat about shit. You’re patient with people, too. I think you’d be good at it.”

“Really?”

“Sure. It’s a lot of schooling but you could do it. Maybe Calandra would want in on something like that.”

“I could ask her. She did other stuff before B-Dzld but the club paid better, and she has her family to take care of. That’s why she danced.”

“You don’t need to explain it to me. It’s just a job,” Jake stated. “It doesn’t say anything about her as a person, good or bad. It’s like being a football player doesn’t make me evil or anybody’s hero, either.”

It made him a hero to the population of this area, but I understood what he meant. “I was afraid to tell you that I was working there again,” I confessed. “I didn’t want you to think less of me, like Seyram did about Calandra.”

“I can talk to him about that.”

“Can you tell him what you said before, about how it’s only a job and not an indication of someone’s character?”

“Maybe I’ll just call him a dumbass. Kiss me again right there.” He pointed to the spot on his neck, and I did. Then I kept kissing him, all around his jaw.

“I’m so glad you don’t have a beard,” I murmured.

“It would scratch you.”

“Maybe, but I wouldn’t like how it would cover your face. You’re so handsome.” I kissed his cheeks, which were a bit scratchy right now.

Jake shook his head. “You’re the only one who thinks it.”

“No, but I don’t care if everyone else is wrong, either.”

He held my jaw to kiss my lips, and his tongue swept gently between them. He didn’t grip me too tightly—there was no way I would bruise—and he wasn’t gagging me, either. Just like before, this felt wonderful. I would have kissed him forever, but he pulled back.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he suggested.

“Ok.” It was time and I could deal. If he banged like he kissed, it would be fine. I took the hand he offered and we walked up the stairs together. I paused in front of Meadow’s door but it was quiet, except for the thumping of the dog’s tail when she heard us.

Jake led me to the room at the end of the hall. “You’re not going to need a sweatshirt,” he told me, referencing what I usually liked to sleep in. “I’m warm enough to heat you. Here.” He opened a drawer in his closet and handed me a t-shirt. “That will be good.”

“Oh. Ok,” I agreed, wondering why I would bother to dress in something that he would want to remove. Or maybe he preferred me to be covered up? I turned my back to take off my shirt and slid his quickly over my head, and then I removed my bra and jeans. Yeah, I had already been naked tonight in front of other men but this…it was different. It was personal.

He stripped down, too, but without any embarrassment. I helped with the sling and then retreated, trying not to gape as he stood there in his underwear. “I got another blanket, a thicker one. It’ll be delivered tomorrow,” he mentioned.

“For me?”

“You’re always so damn cold,” he noted. “It’s because you’re small. Come on.” He got into the giant bed and adjusted around carefully, not jostling his shoulder. He held his arm open to me.

Ok, I would be on top. That was fine, too. I crawled across the covers and when I got close enough, he held around my waist and tugged me the rest of the way. Then he moved me against his body so that my cheek rested on his chest and I was cuddled against his side. He pulled the covers up, tucking them carefully.

“Your feet are like fucking ice cubes. Damn!” he swore.

I didn’t quite get what we were doing. “Want me to put on socks?” I suggested.

“No, tuck them under my calf…there you go. They’ll get warm there.” He sighed, like he was content. “Good night, Ember.”

“Um…” What? “Good night,” I echoed.

It was.