Brick by Brick (24 page)

“You should be. You hit like a girl. I’m going to show you how a man hits.”

What?

For a long moment I couldn’t hear anything from the kitchen but shuffling footsteps. Were they going to fight? Conduct a boxing lesson? I wished I dared to peek around the corner, but I’d promised.

A sharp snapping noise made me jump inside my skin. Did one of them drop something? A second clap quickly followed it, and a third, before I realized the sound in the kitchen was the sound I’d dreaded at Gage’s hotel that night: a paddle.

I’d thought it would be a rapid flurry, over quickly, but the reality was slow and deliberate, with long seconds between the swats. I wished I’d counted, not to know how many times James was hitting Gage but to anticipate the beating’s end. It would fall on a round number, I was sure.

The smacks finally stopped. James sounded a little winded when he said, “Now tell me you’re sorry like you mean it.”

Gage’s voice was tight, the highest I’d ever heard it when he wasn’t doing some silly character. “God, I was sorry before, and I’m sorry now. I’m really, truly sorry.”

“Right,” James said without humor. “You okay?”

“It hurts, but yeah, I’m fine. You’re not Stuart, and I asked for this. Hurt me as bad as I hurt you.”

The snapping sounds resumed, faster and perhaps harder. Different.

I flinched in Gage’s behalf at every swat. The paddle landed so quickly my shoulders never really relaxed, until Gage made a pathetic noise somewhere between his orgasmic mew and a bleat.

“Now you’re sorry.”

“I was already sorry.” Gage sounded all wrong, nasal and a decade younger. It pained me to hear him. “Can you please, please forgive me?”

“Don’t you ever take a swing at me again.”

“I won’t. I wouldn’t. I’m sorry.”

“That was when you got to tell me. Now you get to show me.”

I knew the sound of a zipper, and of gagging, and of male satisfaction. Now I dared to look.

James leaned against the counter, still cluttered from making and decorating the cake, intently watching Gage and stroking his hair. Gage knelt, his trousers puddled around his knees, his shirttail revealing the lower rounds of a backside the color of watermelon flesh. He kissed the tip of James’s penis, then took it in his mouth.

His eyes closing, James permitted himself a groan and tilted his head back in seeming ecstasy. He moved his hands through Gage’s tangled hair. It stuck out in loops between my husband’s thick fingers as James directed and guided Gage to work him with increasing vigor, essentially steering his head.

Gage did not resist, repeatedly accepting James to a depth that make him gag or cough.

He was raping Gage’s mouth. What on earth had gotten into James? I inhaled to say whatever it would take to stop it, but James released the dark locks and gripped the edges of the counter on either side of his hips.

Gage didn’t slow, just looked up with adoring eyes and paused with James deeper in his mouth than I could take him.

Like a benevolent god, James looked down on his underling, his pale eyes heavy-lidded with arousal that had once been mine alone. “You all right?”

Gage released the thick flesh slowly, smiling around it as it left his lips. “God, yes. I love you so much, Jamie.”

“I know. I love you too. Don’t stop.”

Gage’s pretty mouth opened wide.

Chapter Thirty-Two

I had the presence of mind to grab my purse before I slipped out the front door.

Damn. I’d forgotten that Gage parked his Porsche behind my car. I was blocked in.

So I went back in as silently as I’d left. Small wet sounds from the kitchen suggested the guys were not interested in my comings and goings. I found the Ford key still in its gift box.

The truck was so high it had a shiny chrome tube as a step. It purred to life immediately. I fumbled for the lights, found them, then pressed the clutch and shifted. It slid as smoothly into first gear as my husband had into Gage’s mouth.

In ten years I’d never needed a safe place to retreat to. Where to go? I started at the coffeehouse where I met Cynthia to talk books and husbands.

Through the windows I saw Crave drew a different clientele at night. The college students and twentysomethings made me feel old, unhip, and every bit as frumpy as the linen dress I still wore.

I drove aimlessly on neighborhood streets rather than thoroughfares. Near the university, I revisited my first apartment, a triplex on Eighth Street, close enough that I’d walked to classes. It had been a good place; I’d stayed after graduation, first with a new roommate, then when Mimi got a job in Chicago, alone.

After that I cruised by every apartment I’d ever lived in, in chronological order, watching the younger Natalie, the single one who made her own way, move up in the world.

My last apartment was really pretty nice, the young junipers grown tall in the intervening years, but James’s house was home. It seemed mine as much as his now. I’d invested my efforts painting, cleaning, making curtains, and refinishing furniture I bought at estate sales, although James refused to let me replace his recliner.

I’d have to find a new place now, I supposed. Maybe James would let Gage give Mrs. Ruiz an orgasm by buying a big house out in the desert where they’d live, and I’d keep the one I’d called home for the last ten years.

No, James would never go for that. I’d helped pay the mortgage when I’d still worked, but he’d bought the house. He’d never hand over his badge of honor when we split up. If he and Gage moved out to the desert, James would rent the house to David or something. I’d be the one moving.

Working again too. Could I even get a job? My skills were outdated; I didn’t even know what some of the ads were talking about when they described the qualifications needed for job titles I used to have.

I’d have to learn all about office computers. My sister could probably teach me a lot, and would be pleased to know I’d escaped that godless heathen who’d held me under his spell for so long. Praise her Lord.

Maybe I could take a class somewhere instead and borrow time on Cynthia’s computer for practice.

Assuming I got something, work would take new clothes, a professional look I hadn’t tried to mimic. I’d given away my work clothes and couldn’t have gotten into them even if I’d kept them. What did people wear in offices these days? Should I color my gray? Cut my hair? Buy pantyhose? Did women still wear pantyhose?

My thoughts ranged as far as the new truck.

The twenty-four-hour grocery store that James called my other home had a coffee bar. I could stop, get a cup of hazelnut decaf and settle my mind, then pick up a few things.

No. I would not be the perfect little
hausfrau
who pretends she doesn’t see her husband getting oral sex in the kitchen, because she hasn’t worked in so long she’s scared to leave him.

I should just get a room someplace. I’d need a drink or ten if I expected to sleep. I could buy a bottle, but would it be so wrong to go to a place where James might look for me?

Keenan’s Boston was a neighborhood bar eerily transported to the desert, complete with patrons. It’s the bar you see in the movies, with blue-collar workers, a few old guys who were regulars and probably alcoholics, a smattering of couples, some married, some dating, and a mix of twenty- to fiftysomething men and women who came by often for a few beers, some company, or a different set of four walls.

James had brought me here before we were married. Keenan was long gone, but Red was a classic Irish bartender of about sixty who remembered everybody, knew when to talk and when to serve generous drinks silently, kept books around to settle bets, and fed a few who’d fallen on hard times. Red wore a white dress shirt, black trousers, a bow tie, and suspenders every day of his life and seemed to be behind the bar fourteen hours a day.

“Natalie, my love! You’re looking lovely. A dress! Where’s your Jimmy?”

“Jimmy.” Only Red could get away with that.

“‘Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn.’”

“Trouble in paradise? Your first is on the house. Scotch and water?”

I sighed and took a bar stool. “Neat. In the desert, we don’t waste water.”

“You drown your sorrows, sweetheart. If need be, I’ll drive you home after closing.”

“I’m not sure I can go home.” Not sure I had one. I blinked back tears.

What if I let Red drive me there? Would I find an empty house because they were out looking for me, or Gage nestled against James’s belly, the two of them sound asleep in the bed he’d bought? I wasn’t sure. “I think I’d better not.”

Red nodded solemnly. “I’ll drive you somewhere, though. If need be, I’ll call my sister Molly, ask if she’d like a guest. Her boy’s at ASU; his room’s standing empty.”

I knocked down a good part of the shot Red poured.

“Do you good,” he said. “He was in, before. Jimmy.”

“He was?”

“Indeed. Had a friend with him, both of them in shirts and ties.”

“Tall, dark, and handsome?”

Red nodded. “You’ve met him?”

I’ve slept with him
, I wanted to say,
and stood there while he took my husband away
. I could only nod back. We probably looked like bobble-heads.

Red must have seen something in my face that told him things I never would have. He patted my arm in a fatherly way and called to a beefy guy, “Tim, watch the bar?”

Red scooped up my drink and led me to an ancient wooden booth in the back corner. Moments later Tim brought Red a 7UP and both a scotch and bourbon bottle to top me off. I assumed he must work the bar often; he inhaled as he served Red with a flourish and poured the scotch unerringly and without doubt. He had the nose.

“So Jimmy’s tight with this fella?” Red’s voice was quiet, discreet. “Prefers his friend’s company to yours, tonight?”

I decided not to share everything with a kindly bartender I saw less than once a month. “Something like that.”

“That might make a pretty woman feel small.”

And an ordinary woman disappear altogether. “He feels what he feels, Red. So does his friend.”

“So do we all.”

“We do.” I smiled. He couldn’t fix a thing, but he was a sweet man. “I need to think. Weigh my options.”

“Then I’ll leave you to it. You let me know if I should call Molly. Know that I don’t mind waking her up, either. When she was a baby, she did her share of waking up.”

So had James, and I’d risen with him in the dark five days a week, often six. I was eleven years older than when we’d met. Those years had been very kind to James; he’d lost the youthful softness of blond good looks and had become more masculine.

Meanwhile, I had sprouted gray hairs, carved my laugh and worry lines deeper, and seen my body soften. Gage was flat-out gorgeous, his posters on thousands of girls’ walls. Add to that the fact that he’d serve as James’s doormat, with gratitude for the mud, and what would James need me for except as a socially acceptable front?

Hell, these days that wasn’t even necessary. Nobody cared what their mason did in bed.

Or the kitchen.

My eyes overflowed, but nobody noticed except Red. He set a faded box of tissues on the table and refilled my glass without a word, patting my hand before returning to the bar.

I’d started the third drink and the fifth or sixth Kleenex when Red said, loud enough to ensure my hearing, “She’s in the back, there.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

They walked in step, quickly, like the gestapo. James slid into the booth next to me. Gage eyed the beat-up wooden bench seat across from me, then sat suddenly, his blank expression no doubt hiding his discomfort. I was trapped, without a word being spoken.

Neither of them looked handsome now. Gage’s dark eyes were set in violet-brown circles, as if he’d missed a night’s sleep. James appeared to have a cold; the tender skin around his eyes and nostrils glowed an angry pink.

Had he been crying? Over me?

He sure didn’t act like it. “Where the
fuck
have you been?”

Several of the people in the bar looked our way.

Across the table, Gage added in a deep and phony voice, “Your mother and I have been frantic!” He laughed loudly.

For an instant I loved him for it. Then I remembered why I’d left. James frowned at him too.

Gage shrugged. “You want her to come home? Be somebody she’d want to come home to.”

“I had no idea where to find you.” James’s voice wasn’t as loud, but his anger seemed unabated. “You scared the shit out of me, Nat. I was frantic.”

“He was,” Gage said. “I was too. Also pissed, because I’m not allowed to leave when things go bad, but either one of you can just take off.”

“Things didn’t just go bad,” I said.

Red brought the scotch bottle and two more glasses, then retreated.

“Good bar.” Gage poured a half inch into the bottoms of the new glasses.

James sipped and made a face.

“This is serious,” Gage said, “and my fault. Natalie’s got a right to be as mad as she is.”

“You didn’t screw up alone,” James said. “I did too.”

Gage took a healthy sip. “I’m still the whatchamacallit. Instigator. My fault.”

“What does it matter whose fault it is?” I said. “Cocksucker.”

James’s eyes widened. “I’ve never heard her use that word.”

“Just calling them as I see them. You’re an abusive, cheating bastard, and he’s a fucking cocksucker.”

Gage rose to the occasion. “I am. I’ll take all the heat for what happened. I mean it.”

“This isn’t all about you. There’s a ten-year marriage at stake.”

That shut him up.

“James, I know you’ll want to keep the house, but to get started I’m going to need at least some of my half of what it would sell for.”

“What?” He twisted toward me and held me by both upper arms. “No. No! This is where ‘for better or worse’ kicks in. You’re not leaving, and neither am I. We’ll deal with this and come through stronger. I
love
you.”

I could feel the people in the bar watching again. Although they didn’t turn their heads, all conversation stopped.

My voice was low, guaranteeing our privacy. “I’m sure your love will make what you did just fine with me.”