Random Acts of Love (Random #5) (11 page)

That was blunt.

Darla still wouldn’t look at me.

“Not wimping out.” The cloud of hot numbness that covered me started to turn into a pounding rage. “I am asking for time. T-I-M-E—”

Sam ran a shaking hand through his hair. “I know how to spell, you asshole. Here’s another word I can spell. P-U-S-S-Y.”

“Hey!” Charlotte snapped, clearly unfazed by Sam’s anger. “Quit using a vagina as an insult.” 

That completely rattled Sam. “What?”

Charlotte spoke to him like she was a preschool teacher. “Quit using the word ‘pussy’ like it’s an insult. As if Trevor is somehow lesser for being compared to a part of the body possessed only by women. It’s insulting and degrading.”

Sam turned a shade of red I have never seen before. Maybe in old cartoons. I felt like I was watching the entire scene from five miles above us.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Sam snapped at her.

Liam stood up and came within two feet of Sam, angry and defensive. “Don’t talk to her like that.” You could see Liam’s memory of being punched by Sam in his face, his arms, the way his shoulder muscles rippled, ready for battle.

Darla looked at them in alarm, her eyes meeting Amy’s. Amy stood and yanked on Sam’s arm. He was immutable.

“Talk to her like what? She’s the one who interrupted me with some politically-correct feminist rant—”

Amy yanked hard. “Are you using the word feminist as an insult, Sam?” Her voice was deadly.

Everyone came to an abrupt halt.

Which gave me to opportunity to just walk out, grabbing my keys, wallet and phone off the little table next to the front door, papers unsigned.

I was on the pavement, the sounds of the city blasting in my ears. I stomped my way a couple of blocks, pure fury fueling me, until I heard someone calling my name from behind.

Darla.

I didn’t look. Just kept walking. What the fuck was wrong with all those people? Didn’t my needs count, too? Maybe I liked law school. Maybe I fucking
loved
law school. Maybe it turned out my parents were right and practicing law was what I really wanted out of life. A stopped clock is right twice a day. My parents could be right for once in their lives.

But no. The other three guys in the band all had shitty lives and wanted to do this because they didn’t have anything better. This was their only opportunity. They were jealous. That’s right—jealous. Trevor Connor had it all—good looks, great woman, Harvard Law student, in line for an internship at the best law firm on the country, and—

A pile of friends pissed at him.

A threesome I can’t talk about publicly.

An autistic brother I’d be completely responsible for after Mom and Dad died.

I stopped.

Maybe Trevor Connor didn’t have a whole lot of options, either.

Being the best at something always makes you hang on to it, clinging violently, unwilling to let go. When your identity hinges on the approval of others, it can feel like a kind of death to challenge that. To make a choice that will be met with firm disapproval from someone.

My legs began to move of their own accord, willed forward just as a rough hand whacked the back of my head, hard. A familiar scent filled my nostrils.

“What in the everloving fuck do you think you’re doing, Trevor?” Darla shouted.

She came to comfort me, I see.

I ignored her and kept walking.

“Silent treatment? That’s it? You’re gonna give me the fucking silent treatment? Oh, ho, no sir. No way, Ass. You ain’t going silent on me. I’ll pin you to the ground and give you a blow job right here in front of this check cashing store to make you groan if that’s how I get a sound out of you, you motherfucking idiot.”

We’d walked past a bus stop loaded with people waiting. They all gaped.

“If he don’t say yes, I’ll take that blow job,” someone called out.

Darla gave the crowd the finger and huffed to keep up with me. She reached for my arm. I kept going.

She went deadweight.

I’m a strong guy. But dragging a full-figured woman with the stubbornness of a dead donkey is beyond my feats of strength. I pulled her about ten feet before I stopped.

I shook my arm. She wouldn’t let go.

I started nudging her with the toe of my shoe.

“You’re kicking me?” she screamed, head down and muffled by all that hair. The crowd stirred, a few guys stepping forward and peering.

“You hurting her?” one of them asked in a menacing voice.

“Let go of me!” I hissed. “Stand up!” I didn’t feel like getting the shit kicked out of me by a bunch of guys on their way to work construction at a high riser. The hard hats outweighed the briefcases in this crowd.

“Not until you see reason.”

“
I’m
being reasonable,” I shouted. “You’re the one who’s hanging on me like a cornerback trying to tackle Rob Gronkowski.”

“And you both have deflated balls, so that’s a good analogy.”

The crowd turned on her, the guys stepping back. I heard someone mutter, “bitch.” The best way to get a group of Bostonians
not
to come to your aid is to bust their deflated balls.

Bending down, I got my mouth right up against her ear. She smelled different. Like sweat and fear, a metallic scent that had a tang I couldn’t quite place. “Get up.”

“Make me.”

“No.”

“Then you’re stuck here.”

“Fuck off, Darla.”

“That doesn’t work with me.”

Even I knew her fingers had to give out eventually. So I waited. People walked by, curious about the tall blonde dude with a woman lying on the ground, arms wrapped around his forearm, but no one said a word.

It only took a minute. Her hands began to ache, I imagined, and she loosened them. I shook her off and stormed away.

“Hey!” she scrambled to stand. “Get back here. We’re not done talking.”

“Yes, we are.”

“No, we’re not. See? I got you to break your silent treatment.”

I spun around. “You’re not making me sign that contract.”

She sighed, shoulders slumping. “That’s not why I’m here.”

I snorted. “Sure.”

“It’s not. Really. I just want to talk.”

“You want to convince.”

“I want to be here.”

That made me slowly stop, the pain of blind chaos too much. “I can’t.”

“I know.”

“Not yet.”

“I can see that. But honey, I can’t be here for you if you keep walking away. And I can’t listen if you don’t open your mouth and say words that help me to understand.”

I sighed. She caught up to me. I wouldn’t look at her. She looked at me.

“This is just like the time old Doc Oglethorpe back home got his cock stuck in the pastor’s wife’s shoe.”

Huh?

That made me turn and look at her. The neon lights made her hair glow, her face drawn in concentration, lines grooved into her skin from worry and angst. I put those lines there. Me.

“My not wanting to sign the contract is like a man fucking a shoe?”

“Yes.”

“Explain.”

“Old Doc Oglethorpe has this fetish thing for women’s shoes. When the internet came around to Peters, he started going online and finding pictures of other men who search for the perfect penis shoe.”

“Penis shoe?”

“Penis shoe.” She had the exact same affect as my human rights law professor might say the words “inadequate sanitation”. It was like she was giving a lecture on UN policy. “And so he went to church one day and found a pair of Pastor Johns’s wife’s shoes in the man’s office.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Dare I ask? “Why were her shoes in the pastor’s office?”

Darla held up one finger. “Just wait. I’ll get to that.”

“I’m waiting with bated breath.”

She gave me a sour look. “And so old Doc Oglethorpe got himself the shoe, which was a strappy little thing with lots of laces, and he went home and got naked as a jaybird.”

I’ve never seen a naked jaybird, but Darla talks about them a lot.  

“And he put his cock in there, just so. Settled it in, making it look all pretty like a Martha Stewart centerpiece on a table at Christmastime.”

“And?”

“And then he watched his erection balloon up and get all nice and big, and he thought it would be a good idea to take some pictures with his new camera, back when you still had to develop film. A
long
time ago. The ’90s.”

“Where is this going?”

The finger. I got the finger again. Not the middle one, though.

“He took these pictures. No video, mercifully. And then he did whatever men with penis shoe fetishes do, and went on with his life.” She gave me a smug satisfied look.

“That’s it?” I asked, incredulous. “That story is exactly like me not wanting to quit Harvard Law and sign a concert tour contract? What the fuck, Darla? That’s nothing like this! Your analogies are getting worse and worse.”

“Let me finish.”

“There’s
more
?”

“Here’s the thing: Old Doc had spent his entire life wanting to fuck shoes. It’s all he thought about when he was a teen. It consumed him. He got married and had sex and had babies and all that, but the scent of a woman’s fine sole against the soft leather insert of her shoe mingled together to create an aphrodisiac.” 

She had this weird, slightly hypnotic look on her face.

“And then he did it all in secret. That man fucked his own wife’s shoes in their tiny little bedroom closet in the dark, his suit jackets and her party dresses all shimmering up against his naked, sweaty back all those years.”

I was afraid to say a word.

“But that wasn’t enough.”

I jolted. “Huh?”

“After a coupla decades, he needed more.”

How did she know this?

“He started needing other women’s shoes. Now, Peters ain’t no metropolitan city like Boston.”

“That’s an understatement.”

She glared at me. “You wanna hear the story or you wanna be a smartass?”

I sighed. Damn her. I actually wanted to hear the fucking story.

I gave her a look that managed to be half encouraging, half smartass.

“We didn’t have all these thrift stores and vintage clothing stores like you have in Boston and Cambridge until fairly recently in and near Peters. Shit, if Old Doc’d had those back then, I wouldn’t be telling this story and the pastor wouldn’a done a stint in the drunk tank for trying to strangle the poor doc.”

She made a scrunched up face. “And Old Doc would still have his foreskin.”

I curled into myself a little at that. I didn’t have one, either, and I had no memory of its removal, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t involve ladies’ footwear.

“Old Doc wouldn’t just go out into the world and get what he needed. His restricted little world of his wife’s shoes—and that woman was nice, but only wore maybe five pairs of shoes—needed to be expanded. No thrift shops, so he resorted to stealing.”

“Why didn’t he buy them on eBay?” Trevor asked.

“Wasn’t no eBay back then. And did you know you can sell used panties on Craigslist for a lot of money?” she added in a non sequitur. “And breast milk.”

“I’ll keep that in mind if the band doesn’t work out and my law career falls through.”

She whapped me.

“So Old Doc,” she continued, “started stealing the shoes of the wives of his friends.”

“How am I like a shoe stealer?”

She held up her palm. Now it was the palm. “I’m getting to that part.”

I started to get cold. “Hurry it up.”

“I’ll let you get back to your self-righteous outrage in just a second, Trevor Connor. I got me a fetish story to tell.”

I started to walk away, even though I really did want to hear the rest of Old Doc’s story. Darla rushed to catch up to me.

“Let me buy you a coffee,” I said. We got to a favorite coffeehouse and I held the door open for her. She was shaking, too. April in Boston was a fickle beast. Could have been seventy, could have been thirty degrees. Tonight it was on the colder side. 

We ordered our respective coffees, mine a triple Americano and hers a macchiato, and found a tiny two-person table crammed in the front of the store, right up against the cold window.

“Continue,” I said as I took a sip. She gave me a lopsided grin.

“He started off by stealing one of the nurse’s shoes at his practice. She had a spare there in the winter when she’d wear her boots. But the boring white nurse shoes were too sterile. Made him feel all shame-filled and like he was doing something wrong.”

“I wonder why.”

“Smartass or story?”

I didn’t answer. Just gave her a hard look.

“Then, he realized it was high heels that got him off. He waited until his wife had Bridge Club night. Doc Oglethorpe and his family were some of the richest in town, on account of his being a doctor and all. Those wives all did bridge and the men did poker. But the men met at Jerry’s Bar, in one of the back rooms, so he couldn’t steal a pair of ladies shoes then.”

She took an infuriatingly long sip of her drink before continuing.

“He appeared about halfway through the bridge games and begged everyone’s pardon. Pulled his wife aside and made up something. A reason you find your wife. Then he pretended he needed to use the bathroom, snuck in and stole a pair of the hostess’s high heels.”

“Jesus,” I muttered. “What happened?” 

“Nothing,” Darla shrugged. “No one guessed it was him. The lady just thought she misplaced them, I guess. And Old Doc humped those shoes like nobody’s business.” She sat back with a smile.

“What the fuck does that have to do with me?” I asked.

“It wasn’t enough, secretly shoe fucking. He needed more. It was too constraining. He kept stealing more and more shoes, hiding them in a secret stash eventually. He couldn’t return them, you see. And then one day he stole the pastor’s wife’s high heels from the church office. She’d come to church to do some yard work, changed into sneakers, and left them.”

I grunted. What else are you supposed to say to a story like this?

“Old Doc was so jazzed he couldn’t help himself. He went too far. He took the shoes and went and hid in the craft supply closet at the church right then and there. When he fucked a shoe, he did it like he was making love. Long and slow, like a seduction. Not up hard against a wall in an alley where you just want a quickie.”