Going the Distance (10 page)

He unzipped her pants and pulled them down, his heart in his throat, desperate for her to let him. He kissed her knee and her thigh, massaged her foot in his big, hurtful hands.

“Have you ever killed anybody?”

He treated the other leg the same way, kissing a little bit higher, smelling her arousal, feeling so fucking exposed. “Probably. I can’t talk about it.”

“Why don’t you feel bad?”

“Because it was my job.”

He pressed a kiss to her clit and heard her sharp intake of breath. He licked her and answered her questions, easy ones, hard ones, until she was trembling. For once he didn’t try to make her come, just stood up and took off all his clothes, removed the last of hers, and kissed her really, really hard.

“Are you close with your parents?”

“My mother’s dead. My dad’s dying; we don’t talk.”

“Why not?”

“Shh. Ask me another time.”

He squeezed a hand between her legs and pushed three fingers into her pussy, forcing her to part her thighs to accept him.

“What’s your favorite movie?”

“
Alien
.”

“Ugh.” Then, “
Jarek
.” Not a sigh. An order.

“I’m going to fuck you, Olivia.”

“Good.”

“Hard.”

“Good.”

“Harder than before. As hard as I want to.”

She gripped his hair and pulled his face away, looking at him. “You’d better make me come this time, Jarek. Properly.”

He dug a shoulder into her stomach and hoisted her up, carting her into the bedroom and dropping her on her hands and knees on the bed. She shrieked in surprise but he just held her down, one hand splayed between her shoulder blades, keeping her ass in the air as he rolled on a condom. He kicked her knees apart and held her in place as he fitted his cock to her glistening folds, then rammed inside, deep and hard, making her cry out.

He didn’t ease up. He didn’t take it easy. He
fucked
her, like he hadn’t really done before. He gave her everything, rough and hard, like he’d been wanting to and worried she couldn’t handle. She groaned and moaned and clawed the mattress, writhing like she was trying to get away and get closer, but he didn’t let her go anywhere. He held her down with one hand and gripped her hip hard with the other, knowing he’d leave marks on her tan skin and not giving a fuck.

He pounded into her until she came, a wet, noisy mess, wailing into the mattress. He slapped her ass and exploded, watching his cock disappear into her, watching her accept everything he had to give.

He knew how to manipulate her body, knew the biology. But she’d wanted to know
him
. She’d known Chris for ten years, dated him for a year before she slept with him. She knew his favorite color and his recurring nightmares and what cereal he liked to eat. Jarek had kept her locked out of the most basic, simple places because the physical had always been enough for him. But it wasn’t enough for her, and when it dawned on him last night, it had scared the shit out of him.

He curled over her body, feeling her shudder as he stroked her spine, feeling the fragile, tender bumps beneath his fingers. “You okay?” he asked softly. He thought she would be; she was really fucking strong.

“I’m fine.”

He stiffened and started to pull away, but she reached back and dug her nails into his ass, holding him in place. She was laughing.

“This really isn’t a time for jokes, Olivia.”

She snorted into the mattress. “You like my jokes.”

He pried her nails out of his flesh, stripped off the condom, and lay back on the mattress. She stayed at the far end, curled on her side, eyes closed. He prodded her with his feet until she looked at him.

“Tell me if you’re okay. For real. With everything.”

“Don’t touch me with your feet, Jarek. It’s disgusting.”

“Tell me.”

“You’ll flip out and think I’m being emotional.”

He stared at the ceiling, knowing she was right. She’d convinced him to open up, but instead of crawling in like he’d feared, she was giving him his space. Showing him that just because he’d opened the door didn’t mean she’d slip in and try to take over.

“I might,” he answered eventually.

She moved up to lay beside him, touching only because the bed was so ridiculously small they had no choice. “That was the best orgasm I’ve ever had,” she admitted.

He couldn’t help but grin, smug. “Really?”

“Thanks.”

“Ha. Thanks for letting me.”

“I really didn’t think you’d follow me.”

“I’ve never followed anybody before.”

“I can imagine.”

“You can see my apartment if I want to.”

“Do you need time to hide all your porn?”

“Nah. It’s on my computer. Just don’t look in the folder called ‘Work Information.’”

“Okay.”

He waited another minute, then couldn’t take it any longer. He was getting antsy. His skin itched. “I’m going to go back to my place now.” She didn’t say anything as he left the room to pick up his clothes and get dressed. He reappeared fully clothed and holding up her shirt. “You know Dale was looking at your tits all night, right?”

“Were you watching Dale the whole time?”

“No. I was watching you. And your tits.”

“Don’t get sentimental, Jarek. It’s just sex.”

“Come lock up after me.”

She wrapped the comforter around herself and followed him out. He unlocked both doors and stood on the threshold as she held the keys.

“Good night, Olivia.”

She tilted her head. “Good night, Jarek.”

He hooked a finger in the blanket and tugged her forward to kiss her. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. It was the only thing he had to offer, but it was the truth.

“D
O
Y
OU
K
NOW
what time it is?”

“Six thirty-five,” Jane Clarke answered.

“Mom.”

“What time do you get up for school?”

“Eight. I don’t have to be there until just before nine.”

“Well, now you have time to talk.”

Olivia groaned and rolled over, burying her face in the pillow. She winced a little bit, sore between her legs after Jarek’s enthusiastic “apology” the night before. His refusal to spend the night sometimes bothered her, but she was grateful for his absence now. “What’s going on?” she mumbled.

“Oh, not much. The marching band’s fundraiser is going well, and Jim Carnegie plans to retire at the end of the year.”

“Mr. Carnegie? He’s not that old, is he?”

“Not really, no. He’s got it in his head that he’d like to travel the world. I think you influenced him, Olivia.”

“The blind leading the blind,” she said dryly.

Her mother laughed. “How are you liking it there? Is it warming up? We haven’t gotten any e-mails from you lately.”

She rolled onto her back and stared at the plain white ceiling. Early morning rays of sunshine were slanting through the thin, flower-patterned curtains that came with the apartment, and for the first time since she’d arrived on a blustery January night, it occurred to her that she
was
liking it there, and she told her mother as much. “It’s warmer now. No more electric blanket. The kids are just wearing one or two shirts.”

“You should send some pictures.”

Olivia yawned. “I’ll try. I told you before, it’s next to impossible to access the Internet from my apartment, and the Internet café is scary.” The closest place was dank and smoky and crowded with young men hunched over keyboards, muttering into headsets. She’d ventured in a couple of times, but always rushed out before her hour was up.

“Have you done any traveling? Gotten out of, what’s it called again? La-joo?”

“Lazhou,” she corrected. “And I haven’t been anywhere. It’s surprisingly difficult to get around. I mean, I’m sure it’s better in the bigger cities, but here hardly anyone speaks English, and I kept getting lost. I’ve been exploring Lazhou a bit, and it’s better than I thought.” She felt braver with Jarek at her side, ducking into shops and side streets she’d have otherwise avoided. He’d lead her on random routes for their runs, finding parks and statues and pagodas whose names they couldn’t read, but which she’d liked all the same.

“Well, that’s nice.”

“How’s dad? How’s the practice?”

“He’s great. You know him. Always working. There’s no shortage of sick children to see.”

“Sounds about right.”

Jane Clarke tended to sound like a doting housewife and mother, but in fact was the iron-fisted principal of the middle school Olivia had once attended. Jane and Dr. Thomas Clarke were well-respected in the small town of Candor, Michigan, and Olivia had been their glowing, beautiful daughter, popular and adored. Until she wasn’t anymore.

She tried to swallow her resentment, but it wasn’t easy, so instead she climbed out of bed and grabbed a carton of orange juice from the fridge, pouring herself a glass as she looked out the kitchen window at the already-busy street below.

“Olivia? Are you listening?”

“I’m listening.” She wasn’t, though. Jane was talking about how she and Thomas had come to the sad conclusion that the ancient oak tree in the front yard had to come down since the roots were getting too hard to control. All Olivia could picture were the signs that had been nailed to that tree in the middle of the night, the word “BITCH” spray painted across the broad trunk in neon pink, even though she hadn’t lived in her parents’ house for years.

She thought of the way everyone in town had turned on her, how her parents had been torn between loving and supporting their daughter and not wanting to upset the status quo. How they’d called her instead of visited, how they’d cleaned out the spare room so Chris could move in. How they’d chosen him.

She didn’t hate her parents, but something in their relationship was broken, no matter how carefully they tried to repair it. They’d turned from being the two people who loved and supported her most in the world into the two who’d had to hide their disappointment and their embarrassment. They’d both devoted their lives to helping children, but when Olivia did the right thing—the only thing—she could have done in her situation, they hadn’t understood. Not really.

“Oh, Olivia, you had no choice,” her mother had assured her, patting her hand awkwardly. “But we really feel that Chris would have done the same thing, had you given him the chance.”

Olivia wasn’t so sure. It’s why she’d done what she had done. And why her picture perfect world had come crashing down around her.

“Mom?” she interrupted. “Sorry to cut you off. I have to go, okay? I’ll try and send pictures.”

“We’ll send you some, too, honey.”

She couldn’t imagine what pictures they’d send since she’d seen everything Candor, Michigan had to offer a thousand times in her life, but she nodded absently. “Okay, great. Bye.”

“I love you.”

Olivia hung up and got in the shower, letting the hot water clear her head. She’d traveled seven thousand miles to escape these memories; she wouldn’t let them catch up now.

Alan was dressed like Spiderman.

“What’s happening?” Olivia whispered to Honor. Technically there was always a Chinese teacher lurking in her classroom, ready to help out whenever she needed it, but it was almost always one who didn’t speak English and didn’t really want to participate. Olivia was more than willing to fumble through on her own, but there were some things she couldn’t decipher.

Alan said something animated, hands waving.

“It’s his favorite movie,” Honor translated. “And now he is Spiderman.”

“I see.”

“Also, his mother would like him to be Spiderman.”

“What?”

“At the…How do you say? The…graduation. Your performance. Little
Red Riding
…”

“
Hood. Little Red Riding Hood
. And Spiderman.”

Honor was trying not to laugh. “Yes.”

“Okay. Awesome.” Olivia gave Alan the thumbs up and he gave her a flicker of acknowledgement before crossing his arms and turning away. Some of the girls in the class were laughing at his costume, but most of the boys looked envious.

The next day, four boys came in dressed as Spiderman. “We can’t have four Spidermen in the play,” Olivia told the class, trying not to look desperate. She still didn’t know how she’d fill out the cast of thirty, but she couldn’t picture Spiderman—times four—carrying a picnic basket to grandma, who hadn’t been eaten by a wolf, because there were no wolves in the forest that was not scary.

“Spider
mans
,” Rose corrected.

“I beg your pardon?”

“
Spidermans!”
the kids cried.

Olivia opened her mouth to correct them, then promptly shut it. On her fifth day at the school, she’d learned that the parents had been invited to sit in on her afternoon class. She’d barely recognized the kids at that point, didn’t know their names, and was entirely unfamiliar with the lessons. Plus, she didn’t have any materials, as no one had bothered to share their flashcards with her. So she’d plowed on desperately, reviewing the vocabulary they were supposed to have learned the previous semester, until one of the parents, a man who spoke English, stood up and yelled at her because the kids weren’t pronouncing the words properly. He was particularly upset that they weren’t pluralizing things. Embarrassed and annoyed but unable to do much about either, Olivia had dedicated herself to getting the kids to add S when pluralizing words. And now it was coming back to haunt her. She wasn’t about to get into a grammar debate with a bunch of six-year-olds, so she just gave in.

“Okay, fine. Spidermans,” she said. “We have four Spidermans. Does anybody else have a costume they’d like to wear in the play?”

They gazed at her blankly.

“You are Spiderman,” she said, pointing at Alan. “And you are Spiderman.” She repeated it for the remaining webbed crime fighters, then pointed at Davy, who was wearing three shirts. “Who are you?”

Davy blinked up at her. “My name is Davy.”

“Are you Spiderman?”

Realization dawned on his tiny, sweet face. “No. I am a butterfly.”

“I am a bird!” a little girl shouted from the back.

“I am a monkey!” someone else cried.

“Okay, okay,” Olivia said, waving her hands to silence them. “Let’s make a list of who everybody wants to be. Then…we’ll go from there.”

If only to say that she had tried, Olivia detoured to walk past the Internet café on her way home that day and the next, dragging herself inside the dim interior and paying the fee to use a computer for an hour. There were approximately sixty computers in the cramped space, lined up in rows of eight, and Olivia found a free one next to the window. The guy beside her was wearing a headset and muttering furiously as he glowered at the screen where a car was careening through town, gunfire exploding out the windows.

She waited for the computer to start up and pretended to ignore the curious stares, eventually logging in to her e-mail and finding three new messages and two hundred junk e-mails. It had been weeks since she’d last come in here; she remembered the days when not an hour would pass without a text or an e-mail or some social media update. Now she had two messages from her parents—the last from a week before—and one from Willa Jetz, her college roommate, who now taught kindergarten outside of Boston.

She clicked on Willa’s message and read through, feeling guilty that she wasn’t keeping in touch more frequently. Willa was one of the few people who hadn’t shied away from her in the past year—perhaps due to the fact that she lived in another state, but maybe not—and she’d faced her own difficulties recently, though the e-mail said she was doing better.

Olivia typed out a reply, apologizing for being an absentee friend, recounting the tale of the four Spidermans and a few other events, but omitting any mention of Jarek. What would she say, exactly? He gave me the best orgasm of my life yesterday, just hours after humiliating me in front of all the people he works with? Please tell me I’m not desperate and pathetic for letting him in, even though he refuses to spend the night?

She hit send, then skimmed the messages from her parents. The usual inquiries, updates about things Olivia no longer cared about. She signed out and sighed, strumming her fingers on the desktop. Back when she’d been popular, her days had been jam-packed with things to do, people to see, and she’d liked it. She liked having friends. She liked going out and meeting new people. She’d been upset at the bar, but it was nice talking to the newcomers. Marcus, the geologist or geographer or something, had been really funny. She wanted that again. She wanted to go places and do things. She had a trip to Thailand booked for early June that she both anticipated and dreaded in equal measures. She’d bought a ticket for the week of her birthday, naïvely believing she would overcome her fear of the unknown by moving to China, then spend a week in Thailand, confident and carefree.

As she had so many times before, Olivia looked up pictures of Thailand and tried to imagine herself wandering around happily, but couldn’t. She could barely envision herself in China, and she’d been there for months. She had to get out more, learn how to get around strange places, gain confidence. A surge of inspiration hit and she typed “Shanghai” into the search engine. She hadn’t been back since her plane had landed and she’d taken the bus to the train station. She’d conquered Lazhou, surely now she was ready for a day trip to Shanghai.

“Do you want to come with me to Shanghai this weekend?”

“No.” Normally Jarek would have let the conversation end there, but Olivia looked so surprised—and so stung—that he gave in and explained. “I’ve traveled a lot. I’m over it. Too many people. Too much hassle. It’s not for me.”

“Then why’d you come to China?”

“To get my brother off my back.” At her perplexed look, he elaborated again. Too much of this and he’d become a proper conversationalist. “He’s friends with Brant, and I’ve done work for him before. Brant needed a carpenter because his usual guy couldn’t come for some reason or another, so here I am.”

Olivia shrugged and snagged a piece of shrimp from the plate between them. “Okay.”

Jarek watched her across the small table as he finished his beer. She didn’t seem upset, which was a relief. He didn’t want to go to Shanghai, but if she’d pushed him he’d have agreed. Lately he’d started feeling like she was getting him to do a lot of things he didn’t want to do, and making it seem like his idea. Apologizing when he was an asshole. Inviting her over to his apartment. She was coming over tonight for the first time, and he was dreading it. He never brought women home, no matter where home was at the time. He always went to their place, that way he could leave when he was ready, no awkward small talk, no strained excuses as to why they couldn’t spend the night.

Still, Olivia had seemed different this evening, reserved, telling him stories about her students without her usual dry humor. “Something else bothering you?” he asked. Shit. He hated being this guy. If she poured out her heart about something, he wouldn’t know what to say. He’d never been a caretaker. Jonah was the nice brother, everybody knew it.

“Not really.”

He relaxed an iota, relieved, then ate the green peppers she’d shunted to the side of the plate. “Did you accidentally eat a green pepper?”
Where had that come from?
She’d said she was fine and he was still prying? He didn’t. Want. To know.

“I talked to my mom yesterday.”

“She all right?”

“Yeah, she’s fine. Everybody’s fine.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Nothing.”

“Homesick?”

Her smile was sad. “No.”

“You want to tell me why you left Michigan? Beyond not being popular anymore?”

She shrugged and poked her bowl of steamed rice with her chopsticks. “I did something a lot of people didn’t like. It was the right thing to do, but…they didn’t think so.”