Chapter 12
Lia
As soon as the door closed behind Raph, I sat down to work until I had to leave for my mother’s. The impending visit came at the worst possible time. The timeline for Raph was short; I didn’t have the time to spare for my mother’s antics.
I fanned myself. That sex was hot as hell. If I put my mind to work, maybe I could avoid daydreaming about doing it again. There were no guarantees this wasn’t a one-off. I didn’t want to be a woman who was constantly thinking of her man. I was better than that.
Wait, not my man. He wasn’t my man. He was my boss. At least, he would be if he liked the plans I put together.
I booted up my desktop computer while I finished my second cup of tea. The walkthrough and deeper discussion with Raph definitely helped, but I still wanted to get up to NYC to see Experience for some firsthand inspiration. The tech needed to be top of the line, and the customer experience needed to be immersive. I could plan the variations best if I saw where Raph worked, where his expectations were born. Maybe he would be there since he said he needed to leave town.
Raphael Teresse was a gorgeous man, and my mind kept drifting away from work to his eyes. And that face. Instead of working, I indulged in reliving the afternoon on repeat. Exactly what I hoped I wouldn’t do. The way he held himself over me, the way his piercing eyes froze… I would have done anything he told me to. And the way he felt inside me. He filled and stretched me in a way so new, yet so familiar.
Fantasies about Mystery Guy didn’t come close to covering what the real thing had been like. The real man was better, hands down. Or hands up. Or hands all over me. Goosebumps sprang up on my arms, and I shivered and rubbed them.
I was really practically almost about to get back to work when I heard a key twisting in the front door. Shell. Right on time. I needed girl time stat.
“Hey, I’m home!” Shell called into the apartment a little louder than normal.
“It’s just me.” I poked my head around the corner from where I had the desktop computer set up.
“Just checking,” Shell grinned and walked over, tossing her purse and keys on the kitchen counter on her way.
“Visiting the site was great, by the way.”
“Yeah, yeah, the site. Tell me about the sight! Is he as beautiful naked as I’m imagining in my head right now?”
My face flushed scarlet. I wasn’t used to having these kinds of conversations. Really, I wasn’t used to having an answer to give. Lots of new things were happening, and all of them were wonderful. Not at all scary.
“Beautiful naked sums it right up, and so much more than I’d ever given him credit for.”
I hadn’t pictured Mystery Guy as the aggressor, only as the stereotypical cute guy next door. I thought of him as the kind of guy who would be tender, and everything would always go slow. Read hot-blooded man and real hot-blooded sex was new. It was so good, I was having a hard time distinguishing between this fresh memory and my fantasies. Well, except for the dull ache between my legs. That spoke volumes.
Shell sighed and smiled. “Even if you don’t give me all the gory details, the look on your face gives you away. I’ll get it out of you eventually.” Shell pulled her messy blonde curls up into a bun. “I have another date tonight. Let’s hope it’s better than yesterday.”
“Good luck. I hope he’s a true gent. I’m going to work out this weird energy with my project. And I have to visit Mom. The timing sucks, but she says she isn’t doing well. And it’s been a while.”
Shell whirled back around. A grimace marred her pretty face.
“Are you sure? This weekend? With everything else you have going on? Can’t she wait until your design is submitted, at least?”
I shook my head and shrugged, a frown tugging down the corners of my mouth. It really wasn’t an ideal scenario.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. Anything I can do?”
“Not really. Just wish me luck.”
“Good luck. And get her to give your car back this time. She can’t keep holding that over you.”
I groaned and eyed the ceiling. “I’ll see how she is.”
As Shell turned to head to her room, I snapped my fingers. “Oh, hey. Wait, a second. Would you want to go up to New York sometime soon to check out Experience?”
“Sure! My DJ friend Nick lives kinda close to there. Let me check with him and see if he’s going anything coming up soon. Maybe he can get us some hookups. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back. But I gotta go get ready,” Shell said as she motioned to herself.
I turned my focus back to my sleeping computer. I needed to check the train schedule, then call my mother.
There were only a few trains that connected to get me to Pennsylvania. The options were to leave in about twenty minutes and get there late tonight, or to leave tomorrow morning and get there in the late afternoon.
I picked up my phone and called Mom. The phone rang all the way through until the voicemail picked up. “Hey, mom. I was just looking at the train schedules and it looks like if I come out tonight I won’t get into the station until about eleven. Can you call me back and let me know if you’ll be able to pick me up that late? If I don’t hear from you, I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”
I hung up the phone and waited. I didn’t have a lot of time if I was going to make the public transportation. A text came through from my mom a few minutes later, though.
Mom: For Christ’s sake, just rent a car. See you later.
I didn’t like car rentals. It was always so expensive when you intended to drive out of state with them, but the other option was spending a large chunk of a day on the train, so I’d have to make the exception. I headed out the door to take the train to the rental company with my laptop and two changes of clothes packed in my overnight bag.
Once I slid behind the wheel ready to make the five hour drive, everything caught up to me. I was tired and my nerves were frayed. There was so much riding on my ability to pull through. People were counting on me, both to succeed and to fail.
I wasn’t sure which category my mother fit into.
The sun had long-since set when I finally pulled into Mom’s driveway.
The house was more weathered, tired, and sagging than the last time I visited. She hadn’t kept up with the gardens out front, and they tangled together into a mass of weeds and neglect. The modest patch of grass left of the front steps was nothing but mud and a few stray weeds, and the wooden steps bowed under my feet. Paint could have saved them several years ago, but they needed to be replaced. I made a mental note.
I knocked on the door and tried the handle. The door only moved a few inches when I tried to enter. Did she have the chain on? I pushed harder, and there was some give, so I shimmied into the gap, knowing no one was coming to open up.
“Mom? I’m here,” I called into the house.
“Out here!” Mom yelled from the dining room.
What used to be the dining room…
It had become a holding zone for who-knows-what. Boxes, clothes, books, and what looked like bags upon bags of trash. A heavy layer of dust had settled its grey cast onto the stacks that hadn’t moved for a while. That wasn’t different or surprising.
“You set up a new living room.”
My mom looked smaller, more frail than she had before, dwarfed by her piles of things.
“Have you gone through anything you’re storing in the front room?” I asked after Mother didn’t acknowledge me.
“I didn’t want you to come here so I could listen to you shit all over how I keep house,” she snapped, still not meeting my eyes.
“Why did you want me to come? What’s going on?”
Eventually, she picked up the television remote and turned off the news. She situated herself on her cluttered loveseat so she faced me and at last made eye contact. Her eyes were sunken in, and it looked like she wasn’t eating well. My heart sank.
“I need to see the doctor, and don’t think I should drive myself.”
“What’s the matter, Mom?”
“I’ve been out of breath, feeling lightheaded lately, not that you care.”
I crossed my arms over my body, protecting myself from the typical lashings I got from my mother.
That Mother wanted me to take her to the doctor surprised me. She risked me overhearing what the doctor had to say. No one knew how she lived, and I was sure this house had contributed to her deteriorating health. I barely made it through the door. Plus, the smell, and the strange, suffocating heat were enough to drive me back out as quickly as I’d arrived.
“You know I care. I just don’t agree with how much stuff you have. Like why do you need this?”
I picked up an infant’s onesie that didn’t look new.
“It’s none of your damn business!”
“Right. Nothing’s ever my business. Why didn’t you call a cab or ask a neighbor to take you to the doctor? Why me? You obviously don’t want me here, or at the least, you can’t accommodate me.”
“You can sleep in your room, Amelia! I’m not telling you that you can’t!” Her voice rose.
“I’ll come by in the morning to take you to your appointment. When do you need to be there?”
“Nine-thirty. But really, just sleep in your room. Or in Henry’s if you must, but don’t mess up his things.”
Defeated, I walked over to the creaky stairs as she turned the TV back on. I’d see how bad the rest of the house was, then try to find a place to settle down. I glanced into the bathroom as I moved through the narrow walkway on the second story. I flicked the switch on the wall and the overhead light flickered and snapped like something in a horror movie.
“Light off!” Mom hollered from downstairs.
I turned the light back off and pulled my phone out to use its flashlight. I looked around and created a path to the toilet, which was still in working order. The shower, however, had a lot of clothing and a large stack of magazines blocking access to it. Was Mom bathing regularly?
The house smelled the same, like rot and dust. I used to be so familiar with the smell, I thought it would never come out of my hair. But there was so much more stuff than back then. I continued down the hallway and hit the light switch in my childhood bedroom. The place was filled to the ceiling with cardboard boxes. I was not going to sleep in there without several hours of moving things, hoping to uncover a bed that was probably more grotesque than the ground outside.
The last door I opened led into my brother’s bedroom. It looked as it always had. It wasn’t even dusty. She took care of his room like it was a shrine. It smelled like the rest of the house, but everything was clean. There were a couple of sports trophies on top of his dresser, a pile of spare change, some severely faded movie stubs, and the penguin key chain I have him when we were young. ‘Chill out’, it said.
When he turned sixteen, I have him that gift to celebrate his upcoming driver’s license. He’d promised to use it, and always had until it was dirty and well-loved. I smiled at the memory through the fog of loss.
The last talk I had with him had been about Mystery Guy. Henry told me to go find him, pretending I hadn’t ignored him for weeks. I had tried, bolstered and full of hope, pursuing my first stab at human connection outside the family.
But I hadn’t found him. I had told him I was hiding. Was he hiding? Where did he go?
Was he even real?
I knew the answer now. He was so, so real. Raph had to be my guy. But back then, my thoughts ran to him when sadness overwhelmed my life. Raph, or rather, Mystery Guy, had been the escape from my miserable life.
My mother was never there. I’d been resented without a guise. My father abandoned us before I was born, and Mom made sure I knew that was my cross to bear. When Henry had his accident just off his college campus with the drunk twenty-something, that was somehow my fault, too. I never understood how or why. Or why my mother coped with it by throwing nothing away. Not even when the house was so infested with mice that I could hear them running through the walls at all hours of the day. Not even when there were roaches in the kitchen and bathroom. Not even when I threatened to leave. That hadn’t made a dent.
Besides, where could I have gone? I knew no other place. I didn’t know where Mystery Guy had disappeared to. I used to imagine he’d come and find me. I used to imagine I’d have a future that was clear, clean, and bright. With him. I dwelled in that fantasy more often than not, and it led to my interest in design.
Knowing I could have that control someday made the last of my teens bearable. I pushed and strived toward seeing Mystery Guy again and held my head above water through the most helpless moments I endured.
Being back in the house brought tears to my eyes. I missed Henry terribly, but it hurt to know his space was the only one in the house of value to my mother. It was like I never mattered, even though I was still here, alive and well.
I gave the room another sweep and decided I’d try my best to sleep. If sleep still evaded me, there was always the rental car in the driveway for a place to lay my head.
I sat down on the bed and pulled out my laptop. I connected it to my phone’s hotspot and checked my email, making sure I wasn’t missing anything crucial before I gave up on this excessive day.
Of course, I had an email from Derrick time stamped a few hours ago… perfect. I’d get the drafted plans to him as soon as they were finished.
I opened my draft files and checked what progress I’d made earlier. It was rough, but the concept was clear enough to send for Derrick’s approval. All my notes for the space were added in.
I attached the file to an email and sent it on its way, hoping Derrick wouldn’t leave me hanging until Monday. It wouldn’t surprise me, but even Derrick could kiss ass when warranted. I hoped his hatred for me was outweighed by ethics. Maybe…
I dug my phone charger out of my bed and plugged it in across the room in the open outlet. When I went back to my phone, it was dead. I plugged it into the cord, made sure it was juicing up, then trudged back to my brother’s bed. The only available place to sleep.
I hated how the house rustled in the night.