A New Leash on Life (23 page)

When Olivia walked away from Trevor and me, he winked at me and turned red. I punched his arm and told him to get his head out of the gutter.

~ ~

Later that night, back when the shelter cleared out and Olivia sat in her office at her computer, I snuck in and locked the door. I scooted up around behind her and placed my arms around her neck, dangling my hands at her breasts. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Look at how adorable Jacqueline is. She rides a motorcycle. Melanie would totally love riding along with Penny in her sidecar.”

I kissed her neck, hungry for more of her. “You are stalking her.”

She craned her neck into me, causing my lips to press even harder against her skin. She smelled like Dove soap. “Melanie’s the one who keeps asking me to dig up more.”

I traveled my lips down her neck onto her collarbone. “Why doesn’t Melanie just stalk her, then?”

“Melanie doesn’t own a computer. She doesn’t have an email address. She only knows what Facebook is now because I showed her Jacqueline’s pictures. I think she’s in love.”

“Come here.” I pulled her away from the computer and back over to her futon again. She stole position with me and pushed me down on it.

She straddled me, pressing my arms down with her delicate hands. I wriggled under her, and couldn’t budge.

“You are a class-A control freak,” I said to her.

Olivia giggled, flipped her head backwards and then landed on my lips.

“That’s sexy,” I told her.

She commanded control of me for the next hour, weaving her tongue back and forth across my skin as if creating an invisible shield that only she could penetrate. She circled my body, inside and out, sending warm tingles and surges of pleasure through me, making me her prisoner. I surrendered to her control over me, allowing her to bring me back and forth to that point where pleasure and hunger met and formed pure energy, perpetual fire, steamy bliss where all one could do was fold in on herself and cave in to the moment.

~ ~

When I arrived back home, Aunt Marie was preparing fried rice and shrimp for dinner. I sat on the stool and confessed my afternoon to her. She arched an eye, tossed some soy sauce in the fried rice mixture and said, “You need to tell her.”

“I’ll tell her in time.” Pleasure still swam through me, tickling me between my legs, around my nipples, and deep down in the farthest reaches of my tummy.

“The longer you wait, the more shocked she’ll be when you tell her.” She stirred the fried rice. It sizzled in the skillet and smelled like heaven. “She’s not going to trust you if you continue to toy with her.”

“It’s been thirteen years. What’s another couple of days or weeks?” How would I come out and say
I not only cheated on you and got pregnant, but your brother is the father?

She cracked an egg over the rice just the way we all loved it. “Ayla,” she called out. “Come and get it while it’s hot.”

Aunt Marie wiped the counter with the dirty dishrag. I hated when she did this. “That is full of germs.”

She rolled her eyes all knowing. “I’ve been doing this for years. Have you died, yet?”

Ayla appeared wearing her pink and gray sweatshirt and blue jeans. She looked adorable. “Can I go back and see General?”

I couldn’t look my teenage girl in the eye. I had just made love to her aunt, to her father’s sister, sister of the man who disowned her, sister of the man she desperately wanted to meet.

“We’ll go soon.” I smoothed her wild hair. “I figured we could eat dinner together tonight and maybe watch a movie.” I bowed down to scoop up a spoonful of rice.

“But Scott’s taking us to the basketball game, remember?”

Scott. I still hadn’t told her I’d broken it off with him the past weekend after Olivia and I bathed Bumblelina. “I won’t be going.”

“Mom. You’re never around to do anything anymore.”

Aunt Marie peeked up at me as she shoveled a spoonful of rice in her mouth. She cocked her head as if to say my little girl had a point.

“I’ve just been really busy.”

Ayla rolled her eyes. “I know you broke up with him.”

“Did he tell you?” I asked, mortified that a grown man would do that.

“Alexia told me. She heard him crying. Well, she said sobbing. So she asked him what happened and he told her.”

“Sobbing?” This annoyed me more than saddened me.

“Yes.” She squared off with me, standing not more than a foot from me. “He loved you.”

We both stood, arms folded across our chests, battling her desire for a father figure in her life. Hurt brimmed my little girl’s eyes.

“I wasn’t in love with him.”

“I know,” she said, softening.

“You know?” I smoothed her hair again, exercising my maternal right.

“You like Dr. Olivia.”

“No, I don’t.” I was ten-years-old again, brushing away rumors that I liked Amanda Hodkins.

She scoffed and hightailed out of the kitchen. “Whatever, then.”

“Hang on,” I screamed out. “You can’t talk to me like that, young lady.”

“Whatever.” she screamed back at me and stormed off.

Fifteen minutes later, with me fuming in the kitchen with Aunt Marie, Scott beeped his car horn and Ayla ran out of the front door without saying goodbye.

I ran after her, opened the front door and screamed out to her like a raving lunatic mother. “Ayla, I want you home by eight o’clock sharp.”

Ayla turned to me before getting into the backseat of Scott’s SUV and waved at me like we’d just shared a nice ice cream cone before she bolted out of the house. “Sure thing, Mom. See you at eight.” She hopped in and closed the door and smiled at me like a good daughter should.

Scott waved.

I waved back.

I turned to go back in the house and Aunt Marie shrugged and flashed me a knowing smirk.

“Too much?” I asked her.

“Overload.” Aunt Marie twisted her mouth in pain. “Screaming is bad enough to do in front of your recent ex. Not so cool in front of your daughter’s friends. She’s not one who likes to be embarrassed.”

I exhaled and dropped my shoulders in defeat. Aunt Marie swooped in and led me back into the kitchen. “I am totally in love with Olivia and she’s going to hate me when she finds out about Josh. I am screwed.” I tapped the counter with my fist. “What am I going to do?”

“You’re going to start by having a mango martini with your favorite aunt, followed up by a good game of Rummy.”

A competitive card game, alcohol, and fruit answered to everything and anything stress related with Aunt Marie. “Why do you put up with me?”

She squeezed me. “Because I love you, kiddo.”

“I can’t lose Olivia again.”

“I didn’t know you had her again.”

I smiled and flushed.

“Did you fuck her?”

I laughed at my aunt’s boldness. “I didn’t fuck her. I made love to her.”

“You don’t miss having a guy’s, you know…”

“Penis?”

“I hate that word. It’s so clinical,” she said.

“Dick?”

“Worse. That sounds dirty.”

I chuckled at my aunt’s innocence.

“Vagina has a much better ring to it,” she said. “I need to think up a good name for a man’s thing.”

“Or how about we just don’t talk about a man’s thing. Unless of course there’s a man with a thing who we need to be talking about?” My aunt would never disengage from her independent life. She loved reading books on her Kindle, watching
Dr. Oz
, polishing her cherry wood furniture and eating Doritos while playing a challenging game of Spider Solitaire.

“You’re right. No need to name it.” She bent down and took out the blender from underneath the counter. “Can you pass me the mangos in the basket?”

So ended one of the strangest, most awkward conversations I’d yet to have with my dear Auntie Marie.

~ ~

I snuck into Ayla’s room later on. She snored gently, covered up with her pink blanket and cuddling up to our two cats, Tom and Jerry. She woke when I sat down. She groaned and stretched. “What are you doing in here?”

“I missed you, that’s all.”

She plopped her head back down on her pillow and I rubbed her back until she fell back asleep.

I couldn’t deal well with people hating me. The look of disgust, the scoffing, the finger-pointing, all knotted up in my stomach and rendered me incapable of sleeping, eating, sometimes even breathing. That’s why I ran away from Olivia thirteen years ago. I couldn’t face hurting her. Back then, I thought, I’d come back when I had adopted out the baby and she’d never even have to know I hurt her. I could chalk up my disappearance to bad choices over an acting career in New York City. Back before I knew how deeply I had gotten into trouble, I thought I could play off my disappearing act like I’d spent countless months touring the city’s bohemian and theatre sections, living recklessly. I could lie and say all of the wild carousing taught me that wanderlust didn’t define life—love did—and then we’d make up for the lost time. But then, I gave birth to Ayla. I saw that beautiful face, those tiny little fingers, and perfect toes, and I couldn’t give her up. I couldn’t lie and say I’d spent the summer traveling through New York to get work as an actress. I couldn’t act for shit, so that lie would never have panned out. I could hardly get an audition, never mind a part.

I fell in love with Ayla the second I held her. How could you explain this love to someone who would ultimately be hurt by it? You couldn’t. You waited it out for the perfect moment when surely you could come back to town and all would be forgiven in a split second. At least when you’re eighteen, that’s how you thought the world operated. Then, you turned twenty, and by the time you turned twenty-five, and had dated every loser walking the face of the earth, you wished more than anything you could be standing in front of that girl you hurt and she’d take you in her safe arms and hug you and tell you she forgave you for being so silly and not trusting her. And, then you’d approach your thirties and you’d still be single, raising a teenager on your own, and you’d wonder where that lovely girl, who was way too special to litter with lies, placed her heart.

Lies sucked the life out of great moments. I couldn’t lie anymore. I couldn’t look into Olivia’s eyes and mess with her trust for one more second. This one big lie was snowballing and quickly avalanching out of control. I had to grab hold of it and smash it into pieces.

I stared at my cell for three weeks trying to figure out how to face her, how to tell her my dark secret, how to live the rest of my life without her in it. She would hate me for leaving her in the dark, but I needed time to plan how I’d convince Josh that now was the time.

Chapter Fifteen

Olivia

When Chloe hadn’t called me that whole week after we made love in my office, I blamed it on her busy schedule, being a single mom and an entrepreneur. Maybe Ayla had horse competitions. Maybe she forgot to tell me about a busy week of new business dealings she had to tend to. Her absence could’ve easily been explained, had I bothered to try and call her, too. I couldn’t bring myself to reach out for fear of rejection. The entire week, I checked my cell several dozen times a day for missed calls or messages, and each time I didn’t have one I fell deeper into an abyss where the walls slicked over in a slippery, impenetrable coating.

Melanie offered me a reiki treatment. I snapped and told her to treat Phil instead. She tried to change the subject and asked about Jacqueline again. I told her to drop it and be grateful for what she already had. When Trevor and his boyfriend invited me out for drinks at Decoupage, a trendy gay bar a few towns over, I blew them off. And poor Natalie. She suffered the brunt of my attitude as we entered week two with no call from Chloe. Natalie waltzed in and asked me to sign an adoption contract, something I did often. I tore it from her hands, crumbled it into a ball and tossed it out of the door. “I don’t have time right now,” I yelled. “Go sign it yourself.”

She ran out of my office in tears.

Halfway through week two of no Chloe, Missy, Chloe’s top pick for a receptionist, started her first day. I hated her instantly. Even Natalie, the sweetest girl in the world, agreed that Missy sucked at the front desk. Firstly, she walked in to her first day on the job wearing a Patriots football jersey and jeans with a hole in the ass pocket. Secondly, the girl flirted with every good-looking man who entered the shelter, winking, giggling, even offering her number to one.

She didn’t last two days. I tossed her out of the door.

I called the girl who failed Chloe’s test instead and invited her to come back for another interview appointment. When she asked why I changed my mind, I told her my mind had never changed in the first place. I added that Chloe, the girl who kicked her out, would not be conducting the interview and would not have a say in hiring. Chloe might’ve strangled my heart again, but she certainly didn’t control the reins.

I needed to hire this girl.

When Chloe first left for New York thirteen years back, I dove into studying hoping it would set me free from the wraths of her memory. I studied anatomy and psychology, even Spanish, hoping to find strength and a break from the empty, lonely pit that sat in my stomach until it wretched. Fellow classmates would invite me to parties, and I’d go only to return to my dormitory miserable or frustrated with the guys who would ask me out and get an attitude when I turned them down. Soon, the few friends I managed to meet took offense to my declining their offer to set me up with great guys who were friends of theirs. So, I’d end up back alone with no one to talk to who understood me or cared to.

I’d think about Chloe often during that first year of studies. Every time I’d see a cute girl with black hair, it’d take me several weeks to get back on track with my emotions, my determination, and my focus. During my second semester mid-term period, things got so bad that I flunked out. I’d lost so much control that I ended up right where I started, back in my bedroom at my parents’ house. One very bad night, I got drunk on cheap red wine and started smoking cigarettes. I sat on the rooftop outside of my bedroom window, staring up at the stars and wishing I could just die and be done with this world. Then, Floppy stuck her head out of my window and attempted to climb out onto the rooftop with me. Well, one clumsy paw after the other she managed and sat beside me letting me smoke my cigarette and wallow in a sea of red wine pity. She leaned against me, and I spoke to her about how much better life could’ve been had I just died right then and there. I could just jump, I told her. Screw school. Screw girls. Screw everything. Floppy looked up at me with her sad eyes and pleaded with me to end the silly talk and get a hold of myself. I balked and slapped the roof in some sort of crazy protest and then I slipped. I slid down the roof one slow agonizing shingle at a time, clawing for my life, clinging to an edge only to be greeted with more velocity. My arms dragged against the grainy shingles, cutting them up. Then, my chin got in on the punishment when it, too, scraped and failed to save me from falling ten feet into a holly bush. Floppy barked like a junkyard dog from the top of the roof. Next I remembered my dad carrying me out of the bush like a firefighter rescuing an innocent victim. Only I wasn’t so innocent. I caused this. My lack of control caused this. My inability to focus caused this. My weakness over another human being caused this. I broke an arm and a leg that night, suffered a concussion, and battered my skin pretty badly. My father later told me Floppy warned him with her incessant barking. My parents were fast asleep, and I would’ve frozen to death out there once the temperature dropped to its ten degrees. Thanks to Floppy I lived. She saved my life.