Axis of Aaron (56 page)

“Yes,” he said.
 

“So … should we watch it?”
 

Ebon looked at Vicky. A few locks of hair had come loose from her pony tail, so she took the rubber band out and fluffed it before beginning to retie it. But the light must have shifted, because to Ebon’s eye her hair’s color didn’t look as red as it had a moment ago. He looked toward the windows, but the sun was where it had been when he’d entered, behind the house, not yet blasting against the polarized glass.
 

“What?” she said.
 

“Your hair looks different.”
 

“Different how?”
 

“I don’t know. Did you dye it?”
 

She shook her head, gently pursing her lips. Then Ebon saw something else.
 

“Do you … ?” But he couldn’t say it. Besides, he knew the answer. Yes, she had a big zit on her chin. It was shiny, probably because she’d rubbed her makeup off in prep for her bath. Her elbows were back, hands behind her head fussing with the band. Ebon tried not to stare at her jiggling breasts. “It just looks less red,” he finished.

“Oh,” she said. “Maybe it’s the sun.”
 

“That’s what I thought, but the sun isn’t coming through the windows yet.”
 

“I meant just being
out
in the sun. I was in California all last week. I was out in the sun a lot there, and that brings out the red.”
 

Ebon looked at Vicky’s hair. The idea of her red being “brought out” was absurd. She was redder than red … except that now that he was staring at it, her hair wasn’t that red at all. It was kind of reddish brown, like burnt sienna.

“Maybe that’s it,” said Ebon.
 

“It was
haaard
coming back,” Vicky continued, her voice now dreamy, finishing with her hair and lowering her elbows. “It’s always seventy-eight and sunny there. I spent all my time on the beach.”
 

“I’ll bet you need a lot of sunscreen,” said Ebon, imagining all that exposed skin. He still had a bit of a boner, and the statement was vaguely (though clumsily) sexual.
 

Vicky shrugged.
 

“So you were there for work?”
 

“Sorta. But the best part was, my ‘client’ — and I use that term loosely —
looooves
the beach. So that’s why we were there. We met on the beach.
I got paid to be at the beach.
How cool is that?”
 

“Cool.”

“We just hung out and … ”
 

“I’ll bet you drove your clients wild, lying around in a bikini.”
 

Vicky looked amused. Her somehow-not-as-red hair whipped with a turn of her head. “Oh, I
wish
I could still wear a bikini.”
 

Ebon felt his eyebrows wrinkle. “Of course you can.”
 

Vicky smiled, disarmed. She was probably appreciating Ebon’s dutiful complement (“No, baby, you don’t look fat!”), but he seemed to be getting extra points because he’d sounded so sincere. He wasn’t acting though; he was confused because he
had been
sincere. Vicky had a belly like a drum and the tits of a goddess. He’d explored that territory in detail. Her wearing a one-piece swimsuit would be a crime.

Vicky sat back, then gently patted her stomach. “Mommy bulge. There’s really nothing you can do about it.”
 

“You must’ve done something. It sure looks amazing to me.” Perhaps he should have used the past tense, rather than the present. Her belly had been flat when he’d run his tongue across it, yes. But as his eyes fell on her loose shirt now, it seemed less so.

“Thanks.” Vicky stopped, and Ebon felt his curiosity as blue-balled as his groin. She apparently wasn’t going to explain the discrepancy. It was as if she thought he was being polite, when in fact he was annoyed that she was demurring with such false modesty, her self-effacement becoming obnoxious.

“So did you want to watch a movie?” she asked.
 

“Not really.”
 

“I hope you don’t want to play Chutes and Ladders, because the spinner is loose, and I don’t want to tax it for the few times I can get Sabrina to come up.” Her smile seemed a bit off kilter. It wasn’t at all unattractive (quite the opposite, actually), but it was different, as Aimee and Aaron had been different. Or at least Ebon
thought
it was different. But again, beyond sex, he didn’t really know Vicky at all.
 

“Do you really need to talk about your daughter?”
 

Vicky looked over, a wondering look on her face.
 

“Sorry,” he said, irritated for a reason he couldn’t understand.

“What’s wrong, Ebon?”
 

“Nothing.”
 

“Oh, come on.”
 

Ebon sighed, realizing with the release of tension that he’d been holding it in. He’d raised a kind of attitude wall, and it had made him snap at Vicky. But he didn’t need to hold that wall up, even though he really
didn’t
want to think of his hot piece of island ass as having a daughter. It was so unsexy to slam someone’s mother from behind while the headboard made a drumbeat on the wall.

“Just kind of having one of those days. And Aimee won’t let it go. About Holly, I mean.”
 

“She’s your sister. She’s allowed to be overbearing.”
 

Ebon frowned. When they’d met, it had seemed sensible to tell Vicky that Aimee was his sister — just as he’d told Holly, the time or two Aimee had come up, that she was
like
a sister. Hearing his own lie recited back now felt wrong, but it was too late and too awkward to correct things. Why had he said Aimee was his sister? There wasn’t anything between him and Aimee to hide. But the truth was too complicated, and his relationship with Vicky was simple. Lies, as needed, would suffice.

“She doesn’t have to be a bitch though,” said Ebon.
 

“Tell me about it.”
 

But Ebon didn’t want to tell Vicky about it. Telling her about it would make their relationship more complicated. Why did women do that? He’d thought they both understood what this was. This was about sex. So why was he here, if sex was off the table? And yet he couldn’t leave. Even though he sensed a patronizing tone creeping into Vicky’s voice, he couldn’t back away and go home. And besides, sometimes he didn’t mind being patronized. It was close to being lauded, vindicated, or proven correct. Or made to feel at home, as the center of another’s attention.
 

“Aimee’s cool and all, but sometimes she won’t let up. She keeps prodding me like she’s trying to find the root of something, but it’s not like there’s a root there, and I kind of just want to get on with … ”
 

“Well, she’s your sister.”
 

“I know who she is, dammit!”
 

Again, Vicky paused. Then she made a little
come-here
gesture that happened only at her wrists, her arms flapping toward her chest as if fanning an odor. Ebon considered resisting but found himself unable. He crossed to the couch and sat beside her, leaning in, his head resting on her pillowy breasts. He found his eyes on her cleavage as her hand wrapped around him, comforting.
 

“You know me too well,” he said, his irritation draining. Being here was like a roller coaster. All of his emotions were a soup, confused in the way they always were around Vicky. What was she to him? And why was he so drawn?

“I don’t know you all that well,” said Vicky. “But I know you’re a human being, right?”
 

“I guess.”
 

Vicky chuckled. Again: patronizing. Like she was trying to rock him to sleep. He kept his eyes on her cleavage, noticing freckles he hadn’t noticed before.

“So tell me about it,” she said. “Tell Vicky what ails you.”

“I’m tired of thinking about Holly. Aren’t I allowed to just let it go?”
 

“That’s up to you. Are you still angry about what she did?”
 

“Maybe. I guess. I don’t know.”
 

“What does Aimee say?”
 

“She says … ” But again, he didn’t want to complicate this. Whereas Aimee had seen Ebon rise to highs and plummet to lows over the course of his time on Aaron (not to mention hearing the details unfold live over the Web and phone beforehand, and knowing him almost his entire life), Vicky had been given the CliffsNotes version of his story — his own approved, boiled-down version. The
correct
version. The version that made everything simple, straightforward, uncomplicated, and above all easy to accept, as it should be. As it truly was.
 

“She says I should learn to stop being angry,” he finished.

“I think that if you’re angry, you should
let
yourself be angry,” said Vicky in an Aimee-should-really-know-better tone of voice.

Ebon nodded against Vicky’s breasts. “Right?”

“Right,” agreed Vicky, her chest moving as she nodded back above his line of sight. “It’s sad that she died, but I don’t think that means you have to let her off the hook. I saw it when my bastard uncle died. He was a son of a bitch and hit his wife, but when he died everyone acted as if he’d always been a saint. They cried at his funeral. The preacher gave a touching eulogy. My mother put a framed picture of him on an end table in our house, beside a small bowl with a bit of his ashes. This is the same woman that had to stomach his abuse when she’d been younger, who’d once had her jaw shattered by the man she was mourning.”
 

“Death forgives everything.”
 

“That’s the way people act. But I think it’s bullshit. She cheated on you. She broke your heart and your trust. So you know what, Ebon? It’s okay to keep hating her even though she died. She’s at fault here, not you.”
 

“I do hate her a lot,” said Ebon, deciding to believe it.

“When Sabrina’s father cheated on me — ”
 

Ebon flinched, annoyed that Vicky kept mentioning her daughter. He wanted simple, not complicated. Hot and single, not encumbered and responsible.
 

“—
 
I felt totally destroyed. I didn’t cheat.
He
did.”
 

“Yeah,” said Ebon, his head nestled on Vicky’s chest.
 

“Just like you. You stayed true to Holly.”
 

“Right.”
 

“And after what you told me about, from before you were even married?” Vicky shook her head, and more of that not-quite-as-red-for-some-reason hair swished at Ebon’s peripheral vision. “She cheated from the start. She was
always
a cheater.”
 

“She had a high libido,” Ebon explained.

“But not for you, right?” A genuine note of anger had entered Vicky’s voice. It was as if Holly had betrayed Vicky instead of Ebon, but that was probably just Vicky being protective a few months too late. Like the sister Aimee supposedly was. “Oh no. She only had a high libido for
other men.”
 

“Well … ” The truth was that Holly had had plenty of libido for Ebon. In fact, sometimes he couldn’t keep up. His relationship with Holly was a lot like the renewal of a preexisting contract: He always got the right of first refusal. But with someone as adventurous as Holly, a mortal man had no choice but to issue a fair number of refusals. Often she took her needs out on the shower massager. She wasn’t shy, and when she spoke up about it, she just told him again that she had no filter. That meant she was supposed to be an open book, but had she ever
truly
opened? Or had she been a one-trick girl, always seeking her next stimulatory fix?
 

“You deserve better, Ebon.” Vicky’s hand went to his hair and began to stroke it, as if he were a dog. The opposite of sexy.
 

“We had our good times,” Ebon said.
 

“You’re
idealizing
the good times. Just like my mother did with my bastard uncle. Just like Sabrina does with her father.”
 

This time, the mention of Vicky’s daughter didn’t bother him. “What do you mean?”
 

“Oh, to Sabrina, her father is wonderful.”
 

“Is he?”

“He’s a cheating bastard.”
 

Ebon turned his head to look upward. Vicky’s face seemed strange from below, her red-tinged hair tickling his nose and cheeks. “Well, he doesn’t cheat on his daughter.”
 

Vicky looked down. Why had he once thought she had alabaster skin? She wasn’t tan, but her skin color definitely wasn’t porcelain. But of course, he’d known that. Just as he’d known she had
reddish
hair (bordering on brown, really), not
red-red
hair. He felt like he was snapping out of a nap, blinking into the realization of where he actually was.
 

“You don’t know him,” she said.