The Resurrected Compendium (7 page)

“Thank God you made it into the shelter, babe,” he said, and his gaze rolled around the yard she hadn’t yet looked over. “Thank God you’re okay. And Junior…he’s okay?”

The baby. Both of her hands went to her belly. The thing swimming inside her that Tony was so convinced was a son, not a daughter, hadn’t moved since she’d woken. “Fine. The baby’s fine. I’m fine. But you, Tony…you’re…”

“I’m hurt, yeah. Hurt pretty bad.” He grimaced and shifted in the patch of flowers.
 

Every time he moved, another waft of that gorgeous smell sifted over her. Filled her up. She staggered with it, drunk on it. She laughed. Oh, how she laughed, on and on and on and on…

She laughed when she saw the wreck that had once been the barn. Tony’s Mustang, that fucking car, flipped onto its roof, three of the tires gone. The big dogwood tree had been stripped of all its leaves, the rope swing tangled in its branches, the tree itself still standing. The house looked fine.
 

All at once, everything looked mighty fine.
 

“Babe, you’re gonna have to call the hospital,” Tony told her.
 

Marnie looked at him. Inside her belly, the child turned. Not kicking, not this time. Twisting and pushing and pressing against her insides. Maybe it was…dancing.

In addition to the leaves, the big tree was also missing a limb. A big one, thick and heavy, yet with that delicious smell running all over and through her Marnie had no trouble lifting it. It felt good in her hands. Solid.
 

Tony rolled onto his side like he was trying to push himself upright.
 

She hit him in the back of the head.

The limb broke. So did his skull. There was blood, but not as much as she’d expected. Tony sagged and hit the ground, arms splayed. She’d thought he might grunt or cry out, but he fell in silence.

Well…silence except for Marnie’s constant, sobbing laughter.

She swiped her face with the back of her hand. Bark from the limb scratched her forehead, caught in her hair. Surely one hit wasn’t enough to keep him down. So she hit him again. Then another time, and once more, while the tree limb in her hand got smaller and smaller until it was nothing but scraps of bark.

He didn’t move again.

There was no way for her to move him — Tony was at least six inches taller than her and, before this pregnancy had packed on the pounds, at least forty pounds heavier. She couldn’t even drag him. Fortunately, she didn’t have to. All she had to do was lift several of the boards and broken pieces of concrete from the mess that had once been the barn. Lift them and drop them.

When she was done her back ached and her belly rippled with contractions. She stank of sweat, and her hands were bloody, the rest of the nails torn. Tony’s head had been covered in rubble.

Marnie went inside to make herself a cup of herbal tea.

7

The heart wants what the heart wants.

Sometimes, so do other parts. Marnie doesn’t want Tony with her heart, not if she’s honest with herself. Her heart’s all tangled up with Cal and has been for years, since the first time she saw him from across the room at Patty Winber’s engagement party. Probably always will be. No, the part that wants Tony is between her legs. She never believed so much in the power of lust before, but it’s struck her hard now, so hard she can’t stop thinking about him.

That smile, those white teeth all aligned so straight. The crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the shadow of his beard and the hair on his forearms. God, those forearms, and the way he wears his shirts rolled up to the elbow to show them off. Tony’s tall, at least three inches taller than Cal, and Marnie wants to know what it will be like when he kisses her. Will he bend to reach her mouth, or will she have to push up on her toes? How will he feel against her? How will he taste?

She spends her days at the pharmacy waiting for him to come in…and knowing he probably won’t. It’s not like he can stop by every day, right? How many bottles of cough syrup and new toothbrushes can a guy need in a week? Sometimes he surprises her by coming in two days in a row, and she knows it’s never because he really needs that candy bar or the magazine. He comes in to talk to her. Then other times he goes a week without so much as a saunter past on the sidewalk outside, and no matter how many times she tells herself not to wait, not to think about it…no matter how many fucking times she tells herself not to want him…

She always does.

Tony’s dick wants something from her, she’s sure of it. The trouble is, his heart is also involved. Most of the time when he leans across the counter to talk to her, his gaze takes in her eyes, her breasts, sometimes her butt if she bends over to pick something up. But sometimes, Tony’s eyes linger on her wedding ring. Those are the days he usually leaves early and doesn’t come back for a while.
 

He always does come back, though. He buys sundries and fills his prescription for allergy meds and talks to her about her day. He pays attention to her clothes and her perfume. How she wears her hair. But he doesn’t ask her out, not for coffee or dinner or to the movies, and certainly not to the Sentinel Motel in the next town. He won’t take her in the back seat of his car or even in the alley behind the drugstore. His eyes light up when he looks at her, and he leans too close, lingers a little too long…but Tony doesn’t cross that line.

There’ve been too many nights of Cal staying out late and coming home smelling of alcohol — though never perfume and no matter how closely she looks, never lipstick on his collar. Nothing so mundane and obvious as that. When Cal says he’s working late, he usually means it. Stopping off at the bar after work is part of his job, checking things out, making sure the town’s unruly drunks and low-rent criminals see him as a presence there. He’s not cheating on her with a woman, but she sometimes thinks if he could fuck his gun he would.

There’ve been too many times when she turns to him in their bed, reaching, and finds only his back. He never tells her to let go of him when she cuddles up to him, but she can feel all of his muscles tense until she lets him go. When she whispers his name, he’ll turn to her in the dark and take her in his arms. He’ll kiss her mouth and every other part of her. He’ll fuck her long and slow until she’s melting, liquid, floating. He’ll even say he loves her, in the dark and in the light, but something in the way the words trip off his lips never convinces her he means it.

Marnie doesn’t believe her husband’s lying when he says it. She thinks Cal loves her the best he can, which ought to be enough for any woman. It’s just not enough for her.

In the end, it’s Marnie who asks Tony to go out with her for coffee at the diner. Coffee turns into dinner. Dinner becomes dessert. And in the parking lot, standing between both their cars as he shuffles his feet and looks at anything but her, it’s Marnie who pushes up on her tiptoes to find his mouth with hers.

That first kiss…oh, it goes on and on. It’s sweet, it’s sexy. It’s everything she ever dreamed it would be all those nights she waited for Cal to come home, the nights her hands crept between her legs and she imagined Tony’s hands on her while she used her own to make herself come. In fact, it’s even better because it’s real. At last, it’s all real.

Tony’s bigger than she is, but though he tries to back off, she goes after him. She climbs him like a tree so he has to hold onto her. It’s either that or let her fall. They don’t fuck that first time, there in the parking lot, even though she feels how hard he is. She does, however, almost have an orgasm when he cups her breast and thumbs the nipple. When his thigh nudges between hers. Almost, not quite, but it’s enough to make her back off with her mouth still wet from his kiss.

He tries to say something, but she shakes her head and puts her fingers to his lips. She gets in her car and drives away. She goes home and fucks her husband so fiercely she’s sure he’ll have to notice how guilty she feels, until she realizes she doesn’t feel guilty at all.

* * *

That was how it began.

Marnie thought of all those things now as she spread out in the king-sized bed that had always seemed too small with Tony in it lying diagonally. She thought of those days when her heart had leaped at the sight of him walking through the glass front doors, and of that first kiss. She thought of the late-night conversations that came after. The afternoons spent in motel rooms, smelling Tony on her skin when she left him to go home. It had all started out as lust and somehow had become something Tony’d convinced her was love.
 

Now he was dead in the backyard, and she’d done it. She hadn’t just left him out in the storm to die, which would’ve been bad enough. No, Marnie had actually finished the job. She’d killed him. As she’d done after that first kiss, she turned the memory over and over in her mind and waited to feel guilty about it. And, as with that first kiss and all the ones that had come after it…she didn’t.

8

There had been pain. Now there was not. There was darkness, and the smell of something bad that made him cough and cough again. Tony tried to turn his head and couldn’t. Something was holding him down.
 

There was an ache in his lungs that travelled up the back of his throat and in his sinuses. It pushed against the backs of his eyes with a dull throb, but it wasn’t as bad as the headaches he got every spring and fall when his allergies to pollen and mold kicked in. Another cough forced its way out his throat. The rasp pushed at his eardrums, which popped. Again, no pain. Just a dull sense of pressure.

He tried to move his hands and found he could curl his fingers against something hard and rough. Concrete? Bricks? Pieces of something heavy pinned him, but if he shifted his muscles in small, controlled motions, he could turn himself slowly from his back onto his side. Then a little more until he could push up on his hands and knees and shake away whatever had been holding him tight to the ground.

Tony shoved his way out of the rubble. He shook his head. Something wet and sticky covered him; he put his hand to the back of his head and it came away red. Blood. His blood. It made sense, sort of, even if nothing else did. Something had happened to his head. Something had made him bleed. Something had covered him in chunks of brick and board and concrete from the ruined barn in front of him.

His Mustang was destroyed.

One foot in front of the other, that’s how he’d learned to walk as a toddler and yet couldn’t seem to manage that simple action now. One foot. The other wouldn’t move unless he focused all his attention on it, and even then it dragged. He fell forward and hit the ground with his face. He’d forgotten to hold out his hands to catch his fall.

He crawled a little bit until his feet dug again into the ground and he could bend his legs, clutch at the earth with his fingers, press with his palms. Get to his feet, gain his balance. He lurched forward. When he fell again, his head hit the edge of the Mustang’s bumper.

It should’ve hurt, but it didn’t. He heard the clang of his skull on the metal, and it dimmed his vision. Made him cough again. He turned his head and spat thick, dark fluid tinged with red. It smelled bad, like spoiled meat. Tony lay in the gravel for a while as the sun rose overhead and beat down on him. It heated the metal of the car, and after awhile he could feel it on his hand and the arm pressed against it, but though when he took his hand away it had gone an angry, blistered red, it still didn’t hurt.

Slowly, the night of the storm came back to him. There’d been wind. Tornado. That explained the ruin of the barn, his beloved car flipped onto its roof. It explained the blood and broken teeth his tongue now explored.
 

Marnie.

He needed to make sure she was all right. The baby too. The thought of his woman and child got him back onto his feet. Balance was harder this time. He held out his hands to keep himself from toppling over, and still the ground threatened to come up and smack him in the face again. Still the sky tried to hammer him.
 

Somehow, he made it across the yard without stumbling over the pile of debris he’d come out of. To the back porch, each of the four steps a challenge he met by stubborn perseverance. Splinters gouged his palms as he grabbed at the railing to heave himself up. The wounds they left didn’t hurt any more than anything else had.

After everything he’d managed, the door was too much. The handle slipped through fingers that refused to curl all the way around it. He tried again. His nails left runners of white in the dark green paint he could remember buying at the hardware store. He could remember painting that door, how he’d kept his hair off his face with a red bandanna. Marnie had brought him a cold Arnold Palmer, and he’d kissed her right there until she wriggled and laughed, shooing him back to work.

Happy.
 

That’s what he’d been, painting this door that now wanted to keep him out of the house hiding the woman he loved. Happy he’d been, drinking the tea and lemonade, ice cubes clinking in the glass, the taste of Marnie on his tongue sweeter than the drink. Happy with her and this place and this house and his life.

Tony let the weight of himself push him to his knees. Forehead against the green paint. Left a red stain, not white. Red and brown and grey. He coughed, spitting. He tasted something rotten. He pressed his head into the wood and felt no give, not even when he let the weight of his thoughts tip his head back so he could slam it forward again against the wood. It didn’t chip or break. The door didn’t open. The paint flaked a bit, and when he put his fingertips to his forehead they came away flecked with dark green as well as red.

The sun went high. The sun dropped low. The night came with darkness, and Tony fumbled again with the doorknob until finally his fingers curled just right and tugged with just the right amount of strength.
 

The door opened.

He went inside.

9