Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [105]
Outside, it was nearly as dark as my heart.
My girls and Morgan had left a note. Although I’d given her the keys and told Morgan she could use my truck for whatever came up, I was surprised when she took me up on it. They’d gone to a movie I’d seen with them already, one they knew I didn’t care to sit through again.
After we decided to go to the store to pick up groceries for supper, Stephanie, instead of turning left off Ballarat and heading toward the QFC, had turned west on North Bend Way, swinging into the parking lot at the Sunset Motel. When the motor stopped, she gave me a long look.
“What?” I said.
Without a word, she went into the office, got a key, and proceeded to a room off the second-floor balcony. Suspecting I was soon to become the recipient of what my army buddies used to call a mercy fuck, I followed with the aimless hankering of a stray dog trailing a garbage truck. Not that Stephanie was anything like a garbage truck, even if I was exactly like the stray dog.
It might have been my imagination, but I thought she’d been looking at me differently all day. It was even possible we’d had a few tender moments of the kind you get with someone you’re beginning to fall in love with.
Despite my reputation as a womanizer, I was always confused when it came to women. I never knew what they were thinking, not unless they told me, and most of the time even then I didn’t really know.
As I followed her up the open stairs and along the walkway, she turned back and ambushed me with a kiss. Right out there for the birds to see, and the three Hispanic kids kicking a soccer ball against the wall of a nearby garage door. Ridiculous and dewy-eyed as it sounds, it was the kind of kiss you always want to be your first with a woman, the kind you never get except once in a blue moon, when one of you is just a tad drunk or a lot exhausted and you know the relationship is not going to extend past the exchange of phone numbers.
We weren’t drunk, but we both knew the relationship had two days, three at the most, and that must have added spice to it.
Stephanie resumed her ardor as soon as we were in the room, her body small and slender and taut in my hands, her arms twined around my neck, her lithe stomach pressed against mine, as she stood on tiptoes clinging to me. Every part of her body felt hot against my cool skin. She kissed the tips of two fingers and pressed them to my nose, then turned and disappeared into the bathroom.
I closed the door with my foot and reached out and flicked on a dim light. The drapes were already closed. The room had a queen-size bed, a vanity, one chair, and a cheesy painting of a moose in a swamp.
I lay on the bed without a thought in my head except . . .
Mercy fuck.
I was about to get one.
Joel McCain once told me my crimes against women were a control issue, that I needed to be in control of every little aspect of every relationship. I only half wondered how he knew that about me. He hadn’t endeared himself to me by calling my relationships with women crimes. I’d bridled at the thought. Hell, I was still friends with all of my ex-girlfriends.
But he was right about control. As a child I’d had zero control over my life or even the hours in my day. At Six Points every waking minute was accounted for, booked in advance by the church, by my father, by William P. Markham, and by the Lord Jesus Christ. If you were a kid, there was no time for riding a bike or flying a kite or painting by numbers. Nobody played cards or read fiction. These activities were all blueprints offered up by the devil to take your mind off God’s work. Since birth I’d had the principles of austerity and compliance pounded into my brain. Okay. So I had control issues.
I suppose I must have been a control freak with Lorie as well, though specific examples escape me. Lord. Maybe I had driven her away! Maybe her parents were right about me. Maybe I’d turned my ex-wife into a lesbian.
Now I was in a motel with Stephanie Riggs.
And she was in control.
And you know what?
I kind of liked it.
My life