Shy (28 page)

All I could manage to stutter was, “Did you say Jerry is back in my apartment?”

“That’s right, dear. He moved in this morning.”

“With all his stuff?”

“That’s right, dear. Furniture and everything. He has a cat now, but I’m sure you already knew that. Cute little thing. I hope Pedro doesn’t eat it. That dog isn’t quite normal, is he?”

“And you let him?”

“Who, dear?”

“
Jerry! You let him move back in?
”

“Yes, dear. Him and the cat. He still had his key, so I knew it was all right. Now don’t you worry about a thing. Everything is under control, and we’ll all be waiting with bated breath for your happy return. Jerry looked so pleased to have you back. I’m sure you’ve made the right decision, the two of you, although I do feel sorry for that nice Frank. I hope he’ll be all right. He seemed to love you so. But then we never know what goes on behind closed doors, do we, dear? Oh, my, Oprah’s just coming on. It’s a rerun. She’s talking about poop today. Human poop. With a doctor. Nothing is sacred anymore, is it? Well, I’ll see you when I see you. And watch out driving back from Indiana, dear, there are still serial killers lurking behind practically every tree, I saw it on
Jerry Springer
. Well, gotta run. Bye, dear!”

And with that, the phone went dead in my hand.

For three seconds.

Then it rang again. By this time I was so stunned, all I could do was flip it open and mutter a maniacal, “Who the hell is
this
?”

“Me.” This time it
was
Jerry, and he sounded a little nervous. Well, maybe more than a little. Actually he sounded like a demolitions expert who suddenly wakes up to find himself in a roomful of nitroglycerine.
Old, sweating
nitroglycerine. With a pile of lit dynamite sputtering in the corner. And a box of C4 strapped to his chest. Hooked up to an alarm clock about to go off. In a burning house. On the edge of a crumbling cliff. On a Monday. You know.
Nervous.

“Hello,
Roomy
!” I spat. “Get moved in okay?”

“I had to,” he muttered. “I want you back.”

“
You don’t need me!
”
I screamed. “
You’ve got a cat!
”

“Miss Wiggins missed me. She said so.”

“
Well, I didn’t!
”

“I got you your job back at the bank.”

“
You got me fired from that job to begin with!
”

“We were lovers once.”

“
’Til you cheated on me and broke my heart!
”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“
How can you ‘not mean’ to cheat? Did your dick just go off and cheat on its own?
”

“I’m sorry.”

“
And now you’ve stolen my apartment—
”

“My name is still on the lease.”

“
—and got a cat!”

“It’s a loaner.”

“
Fuck you, Jerry!
”

“Wow. You’re grumpy. How’s Frank?”

“You leave Frank out of this! And where did you get a key to my apartment?”

“I kept one when we broke up. Thought it might come in handy. And voilà! It did.”

I clutched my chest. Great. Now I was probably having a heart attack. Boy, some days you just shouldn’t get out of bed. I took a series of deep breaths which I learned watching yoga on TV because I was too shy to go to a
real
yoga class and learn how to do it firsthand. I began to think maybe it was working, maybe I was really calming down a little bit, but then I thought, nope, maybe not. And why the hell
should
I calm down? My blood pressure shot back up like Old Faithful, just the way I wanted it to.

“
What the fuck do you want, Jerry? Why are you calling me and what the fuck do you want?
”

“Well, babe—”

“
Don’t call me babe!
”
I took one more deep breath. A long, shaky one. This time it seemed to work. Maybe I wouldn’t die of a stroke brought on by aggravation at the tender age of twenty-seven after all. “Okay, Jerry, forget I asked that question. I don’t care what you want. You can even stay in the apartment until Frank and I decide to come home. The minute we do, I’ll let you know and you’ll have three days to get out. You and all your shit. Got it? Now then, if you can’t think of anything else to piss me off, I’m going to hang up the phone. If your loaner cat gets fleas in my carpet, I’ll hunt you down and murder you like a dog. Fleas are probably the only thing in the world that I hate more than I hate you.” (Chickens, too, but I was in no mood to go into the whole chicken thing with Jerry.)

And with that “hate you!” parting shot, feeble as it was, I finally snapped the phone shut and stuffed it in my pocket. If it rang again I was going to feed it to Samson.

I threw my gloves up through the hole in the hayloft floor so they would be there when I needed them the next time I was chucking hay and took off for the garden. I needed to talk to Frank. I needed to tell him about Jerry being in the apartment and I needed to hear him tell me how much he loved me. Somehow that seemed real important right now.

I wished I hadn’t told Jerry I hated him. I didn’t hate him. I just didn’t love him anymore. Plus, once someone has cheated on you, how do you go back to trusting them again?

The short answer? You don’t. Ever.

Maybe one day Jerry would understand that.

F
RANK
wasn’t in the garden, although it did look freshly tilled.

I circled the house, thinking Frank might be somewhere in the yard, but he wasn’t. I went through the front door of the farmhouse and checked out every room inside. I found Joe lying in bed giving Pedro a belly rub with one hand and holding a book up to his face with the other. No Frank. Joe said he didn’t know where Frank was. Just keep looking, he said, he’s bound to turn up sooner or later. He said it like a farmer says everything—as if his words were packed with wisdom. Oddly enough, usually they were. I nodded, backing out, and Joe went back to his book, squinting like he could barely see. His eyes had been failing him lately. Just one more tribulation for the man to go through. Pedro never looked up once while I was inside the room. Give him a belly rub and he was lost to the world.

Back outside, I looked toward the fields, gazed off toward the barn, and checked the driveway for Joe’s truck, which was still there, parked alongside my Toyota. Then I did a double take. Stanley’s rental car was gone, and in its place, tucked in among the other vehicles like it belonged there, was Jeff Moody’s old yellow pickup. That was strange. What the hell was he doing here?

I was about to head off toward the pasture and the chicken house and the pigpen behind the barn, figuring Frank had to be in one of those three places, maybe with Moody, since they didn’t seem to be anywhere else around, when I heard the sound of running water coming from the washhouse by the back door.

I grinned. That had to be Frank, all heated up and cooling off with a quick shower after toiling away in the garden under a burning summer sun. I stepped over a couple of sleeping dogs, who barely stirred when I straddled them, and approached the washhouse door, thinking maybe I would give Frank a little scare.

Then I thought, wait a minute. If Frank is taking a shower, then where the hell is Moody?

Then I heard the moans.

They weren’t the kind of moans you make when you’re hurting. They were the kind of moans you make when you’re
not
hurting. When you’re not hurting
at all
.

I reached out a hand to push open the washhouse door, then stopped. Suddenly I didn’t want to know what was going on behind that door. Suddenly I didn’t want to know why my heart was thudding away inside my chest, or why an ache had started up behind my rib cage that seemed to be squeezing the air right out of me. I didn’t want to know why I had this sudden urge to plop myself down in the dusty backyard beside the mangy farm dogs and the big-ass tractor tire painted white and filled with petunias, and sob like a baby.

Already blinking back tears, I shut my mind to the pain and quietly pushed open the rickety old door with a trembling hand just enough to peek inside. Suddenly the moans were a whole lot louder. I could hear the water splashing and the slap of flesh against flesh, and as my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw, standing beneath one of the showerheads, in a deluge of water, a pale naked ass, handsome and strong, pumping away at another naked ass, this one slimmer and deeply tanned. That second ass had the kind of tan that comes from the genes, not from the sun. Their four long legs were intertwined, the water sluicing down them in buckets, sharpening the outlines of their calves and thighs. The arms holding the ass in position in front were rock-hard and packed with biceps that rolled around like croquet balls when they moved. Blond hair was plastered wet to the top of the man’s head, and one brown arm from the body of the man in front was reaching around to clutch the pale ass and pull the pale body closer to his own.

It was Moody doing the fucking, of course. Moody with his pale ass and beautiful strong arms. Moody and—

The man in front said something I couldn’t understand, and Moody pressed his lips to the back of the man’s neck while his ass started pumping even faster. The man in front gave a loud groan. I could see him shudder. His brown legs, strong and hairy, quivered as Moody held his hips in place and drove his cock into that eager ass like a pile driver.

They were both groaning now. Things were coming to a head.

“No—” I whispered. “No—” And I quietly closed the washhouse door and leaned against it. I couldn’t look anymore, but I had to listen. I had to hear.

Frank. Oh God.

And then the tears came, hot and furious. And no sooner did they come than a hand came out of nowhere and laid itself atop my shoulder.

“Tom, what’s wrong?”

I spun around so fast I almost passed out. The day dimmed around me and stars blinked in front of my eyes.

Then my vision cleared and I saw Frank standing there. Bone-dry, except for the sweat pouring down his face. He was dirty as hell, his shirt soaked with grime, his hands still tucked into big filthy work gloves. The knees of his jeans were stained green. His shoes were two big mud clods, so coated with crap you couldn’t even see the laces. Sweet Jesus. I had never seen anything so beautiful in all my life.

I threw myself into his arms, and that’s when the tears really came. I cried like a baby, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Frank didn’t seem ashamed to see me cry either, although he did look powerfully confused. He clutched me close, patted my back, cooed sweet things in my ear that I didn’t really hear except for the loving tone in which he said them.

“Baby, what’s wrong?” Then he tensed up. “Is it Pop? Did he—”

I managed to shake my head and find my voice. “No, Frank. No. Your dad’s okay. I was just with him.”

Frank heard the shower going through the washhouse door. “Who’s taking a shower?” he asked. “Stanley?”

And that’s when I realized, yes, by God, that tanned ass and those strong hairy legs
had
belonged to Stanley. Who else could they have belonged to?

Then Frank heard the groaning coming from behind the closed door, and as if the groaning wasn’t enough, someone inside the washhouse, either the fucker or the fuckee, either Moody or Stanley, let out a wail that would have startled a dead man. It was a happy wail. An “Oh, sweet Jesus, here I come!” wail. I had made that wail myself a few times with Frank. I knew it well.

Frank removed a work glove with his teeth and squeegeed off one of my tears with his thumb. I hiccupped and said thank you.

Frank nodded toward the door. “Who’s in there?”

“Well—”

A grin started to spread across Frank’s face. His dimple deepened. A knowing light came into his green, shimmering eyes. “You thought it was me, didn’t you?”

I blinked back more tears. This time they were guilty tears. That’s what comes from having one slut for a lover. Makes you think they all are. “I’m sorry, Frank. I should have known better.”

Frank’s smile faltered when he said, “Yeah, Tom, you should have.” But then he saw the hurt look on my face, and his smile popped back in all its glory. He chucked me under the chin, for all the world like a coach sending his worst player out onto the field in the middle of the biggest game of the year. “I forgive you. It’ll take more than one isolated moment of stupidity to get me to throw you to the wolves. If the way you gather eggs hasn’t done it, this won’t. We’re still an item. I’ll prove it to you later. Just have a little more faith next time, okay? Have a little trust. And yes, I still love you, Tom. So stop looking so worried.”

I hiccupped again and said thank you very politely, like he had just passed me the potatoes or something instead of giving me my life back. My life with him. The best life I had ever known. Even if I was
working my ass off.

Frank brushed his lips against mine, knowing that was what I wanted him to do. We were still standing by the washhouse door, and there was still a whole lot of groaning happening on the other side of it. Frank listened to the groaning for a moment longer, then gave out a quiet chuckle. “I know that groan,” he said. “Jeff’s truck is out front, isn’t it?”

“Yep.”

“It’s Jeff and Stanley in the washhouse, isn’t it?”

“Yep.”

“Wasting water.”

“Yep.”

“And fucking.”

“Yep. Fucking up a storm.”

Frank shook his head in wonder, then scooped me back into his arms. “Jesus, what a slut.”

“Which one?” I asked, burying my face in his collar.

Chapter 15