The Favor (26 page)

Breathless, sweating, laughing, Janelle shimmied. She shaked. She looked across the room and she met Gabe’s gaze, and she smiled, dancing now not just for herself, but also for him. And when the music changed suddenly, becoming slow and dreamy, she took a couple steps toward him, waiting for him to meet her halfway.

Some other guy got to her first. He stepped between her and Gabe, his smile open and friendly and gap-toothed. He wore a flannel shirt unbuttoned over a T-shirt with a sports team logo on it. No baseball cap, but the line in his hair showed he wore one more often than not.

“Wanna dance?”

The blonde was wriggling in front of Gabe. They weren’t slow dancing, not quite, but she did take his hand and put it on her waist as Janelle watched. The other hand still held a beer he tipped to his lips, his gaze on Janelle.

“Okay,” she said. “Sure.”

How bad could it be? She discovered that a few minutes later as Jay, her partner, kept pulling her closer and closer. Where was that ruler the nuns had brought out at school dances? Janelle wondered, uncomfortable as Jay insisted on pulling her so close that she couldn’t even look at his face without it blurring. She turned her head, refusing to put it on his shoulder or, God forbid, go cheek-to-cheek with him. But God help him if he put his hands on her ass.

He didn’t. Jay talked, though. Asked her where she was from, said he knew she couldn’t be from around here just by the way she looked. He told her about his job working at the Sylvania plant, and his ex-wife who spent too much money and thought it grew on trees, and how his parents had named him Jay because his mom had dreamed about jaybirds when she was pregnant with him. All this in the span of one song, which seemed to last forever instead of approximately three minutes, and which, to Janelle’s horror, blended immediately into another slow number.

All around her, couples were snuggling. Betsy had gone back to the bar, her head bent close to a woman telling a story that involved a lot of hand gestures. Janelle tried to catch her attention, to call for backup, but couldn’t. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she caught sight of Gabe locked deep in a tongue-wrestling match with the blonde. It shouldn’t have made her jealous or anything; it had been years since she and Gabe had been a thing...not that they’d ever been a “thing....”

“You know that guy?” Jay had caught her staring.

“Oh. He’s my neighbor.”

Jay’s frown eased. “Oh, okay.”

Janelle put another inch or so between them, but it was almost impossible to fight Jay’s rubber-band hands. She’d inch back, he’d ease her forward again. It was a dance within a dance, and it made her laugh.

“What’s funny?” Jay asked, but all she could do was shake her head and giggle.

That’s when Jay leaned in and took a long, deep breath of her hair. She’d worn it in loose curls around her shoulders tonight, but now it hung limp and tangled from all the dancing. She startled when he took an exaggerated sniff.

“I’m getting a buzz off your hair,” he said.

The giggles got worse. She tried to bite them back, but short of clapping a hand over her mouth, couldn’t totally contain them. They’d been spinning slowly as they danced, and this last shuffle brought her facing Gabe again. His mouth was no longer fused with the blonde’s, though she’d turned around to wiggle her butt against him.

Their eyes met.

Gabe smiled.

“So, you wanna maybe see about doing something sometime?” Jay asked, dragging Janelle’s attention away from Gabe’s face, and the moment was lost while she stammered out an excuse about why she couldn’t. She wasn’t sure exactly what she said, just that it seemed to satisfy Jay without offending him, because the song ended and he backed off with a smile and a nod.

But by that time, Gabe and the blonde were already gone.

THIRTY-THREE

SHE’D TOLD HIM her name, but typically, Gabe didn’t bother to remember it. He thought she was a Hoffman, one of the younger ones. Much younger ones. Probably not a daughter of one of the Hoffmans Gabe had gone to school with...he didn’t think he was old enough for that, though she sure as hell might’ve been.

“Shh...” She put a finger to her lips, so drunk she tripped over her own feet and stumbled forward into his bedroom. “We don’t want to wake up your dad.”

His old man slept like a corpse, so Gabe wasn’t worried about that. Andy, on the other hand, was still downstairs in the kitchen and would be coming up to bed at any moment. Gabe kicked the door shut behind him. The woman’s eyes went wide.

“Privacy,” Gabe explained as he moved toward her. “Then you can make all the noise you want.”

“Oh...I’m not a screamer.” She managed to sound coy even through the thickness of booze in her voice. She tipped him a smile he thought she might practice in the mirror—it was that good. She kicked off her shoes and toyed with the top button of her shirt.

“Is that a challenge?”

She fit nicely enough in his arms. His hands found her hips, jarringly bony through the sleek material of her shirt and above her denim skirt. She was light enough that he could easily lift her.

She squealed, clutching at but not fighting him. Her mouth found his. She tasted like sweet liquory drinks and lip balm. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. She wrapped her legs around his waist.

It turned out she’d been lying about being a screamer.

After, Gabe pulled the sheet up over his hips and dozed, too lazy to get up and get a cigarette. Not interested in standing outside in the cold for once. The woman beside him had already started snoring lightly, and he was also too lazy to shift her awake, make her get dressed and kick her out.

He drifted into dreams.

Then

Underneath all that pale makeup, Janelle Decker still has freckles. Gabe’s sure of it. She thinks she needs all that eye liner and hair spray to make herself prettier, but he likes her best this way, with her hair wet and slicked back from her face, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. Bare feet.

“Stop bogarting.” She holds out her small hand, the nails clipped short but painted black.

Gabe draws in smoke, long and deep. It burns, but he doesn’t care. This is decent weed; he got it from his friend Steve, who lives outside of town and grows it in his parents’ greenhouse. But it’s not great weed. Gabe passes the joint.

Janelle’s eyes squint shut as she takes a drag. She holds it longer than he did before letting it stream out slowly as she tips her head back to look up at the ceiling. She tucks her bare feet underneath her as she hands him back the joint, then lets herself fall onto his pillows.

They’ll smell like her, later.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Gabe?”

“Grown-up.”

She snorts softly, on her back, pointing her toes at the ceiling. “I want to be a dancer.”

She’s a good dancer, but if he tells her that, he’ll have to admit he watches her dance. She knows he does, but he’s not going to say it, because then maybe she’ll stop. “Don’t you have to go to school for that?”

“Yeah. Well, I guess so. I don’t want to be a ballet dancer. I just think it would be great to dance in shows.”

“You want to be a stripper.” He laughs.

Janelle flips him the finger. They smoke a little more. He hasn’t answered her question, but he’s thinking about the answer. What does he want to be when he grows up, other than away from this house and this town?

“I should go home.” She curls on her side, one hand beneath her cheek, to look at him.

He won’t ask her to stay, though he thinks she wants him to. Instead, Gabe smokes. He offers her the last drag, but she waves it away. He stubs it out in an old coffee can he seals with a plastic lid, then shoves under his bed. He lies down next to her.

It’s a double bed, but not really big enough for both of them. Not when she’s got her ass stuck out like that, right up against his hip. So when he rolls onto his side, he tells himself it’s because of the bed. But it’s not. And there’s no keeping room for the Holy Spirit between them; maybe at school at one of the lame dances he doesn’t ever go to, but not here. Janelle’s butt fits neatly into the hollow of his crotch—which rapidly becomes a bulge.

His mouth finds the back of her neck. Her shoulder blade, exposed by the low neckline of her T-shirt. She moves against him when his hand slides over her hip, her belly. Between her legs.

They don’t speak. They never say a word. Sometimes she’s the one with her hand on him. Sometimes, her mouth. But tonight he moves against her, his fingertips sliding beneath the waistband of her pajamas to find her heat.

Girls have been after Gabe since the seventh grade, and the truth is, he’s gone with one or two. But he’s never made one shiver and shudder and moan this way. Janelle’s hair, soft without all the product she insists on putting in it for school, brushes his face. Gabe closes his eyes and gets lost in it. His hand moves in slow, slow circles. He pushes his crotch against her, just a little faster. When she stiffens and gasps and puts her hand over his, he knows she means him to stop moving, but he can’t. Not yet. Not until...just...a minute...more...

He becomes aware of her soft breathing just as the door slams downstairs. “My dad’s home.”

Janelle sits up, shifting his hand from under her pajamas with a casual effort. “My cue to leave.”

She looks at him over her shoulder at the window. “Remember when we used to have those tin-can phones?”

“Yeah.” Gabe props himself up on his elbow. His heartbeat’s slowing, but the heat low in his belly is taking longer to go away. He won’t get up to go to the bathroom until she’s gone.

“We were stupid little kids, weren’t we?”

“Yeah. Total assholes.”

She smiles at him, almost as if she means to say more. Gabe hopes she does, though he’s not sure what, exactly, he hopes she’ll say. Instead, Janelle pushes aside his curtains and slides the window up. With one leg over the sill, she makes a show of looking down.

“If I ever break my neck doing this...”

He sits up straighter, thinking there’s something important she means to say. He’s a little too high for it, whatever it is. He should be more serious, he thinks. Though she isn’t.

If she ever broke her neck doing that, if she ever fell when she tried to jump...what would he do? Would he jump after her? Would he pretend he didn’t know what she was doing? Would he lie and say he pushed her, just to keep everyone from knowing the truth?

The next morning, not high, in fact, so deathly sober it’s like someone put a stack of encyclopedias on his head, Gabe is late for the bus and has to run. Everyone’s laughing at him when he gets on the bus, even Janelle. She sits in the middle, her mask of makeup turning her into a stranger. She doesn’t look at him until he pauses at her seat, thinking this once he’ll ask if he can sit with her. Wondering what she’d do if he leaned down right this minute and kissed her for the first time in front of everyone.

“Sit down back there!” hollers the bus driver, and Gabe moves to the back, his usual seat.

From there he can watch Janelle’s head and see her profile when she turns, as she always does, to look out the window. So he watches. She never looks back.

* * *

Gabe woke to morning light so pale it might’ve been the moon. He blinked against it for a few seconds before remembering he wasn’t alone in his bed. The blonde beside him sprawled out, her mouth slack. Her makeup had smeared. He nudged her.

“Get up.”

She smacked her lips together and snuggled deeper into the pillows. He pushed her again, harder this time. Then again, until she looked at him.

“The hell?” she said. “What time is it?”

“Time for you to leave. It’s early. Get your shit and go before my brother gets up.”

She stared at him, uncomprehending. “What difference does that make?”

“I don’t want him seeing you, that’s all.” Gabe swung his legs over the edge of the bed. The floor was cold. His stomach was sour; the craving for a cigarette had become a physical burn. He wanted to light up more than he wanted anything else, even to pee. Even the “breakfast BJ” this chick-without-a-clue offered.

“Jesus...” she muttered.

“Hey. I didn’t promise you eggs and toast in the morning.” Gabe shrugged and got up to pad across the cold bare floor to find a pair of pants and a pullover shirt. He looked over his shoulder at her, still tangled in his sheets. He remembered her name now. Gina Hoffman. Definitely related to the Hoffmans he went to school with, and definitely a younger sibling, not a kid. The light of morning showed off the crow’s-feet and lines around her mouth that proved she wasn’t as young as he’d thought last night.

“No, I guess you didn’t.” She ran a hand through her hair and got out of bed. She found her clothes, moving slowly but steadily enough. “I didn’t know you were going to kick me out before the sun was barely even up, though. I’d have left last night.”

Gabe shrugged again, showing her it wouldn’t have made a difference to him, one way or another. Gina frowned. She pulled her shirt on without her bra, which she shoved in her purse. She hooked her fingers into the impractical stiletto heels and carried them with her out the door, where she paused.

“Should I bother giving you my number?”

Gabe looked up from the dresser, where he’d been sorting through his top drawer, searching for cigarettes and finding none. “I’ll probably just see you around.”

She sucked in her lower lip. Then nodded. “Yeah. I guess so. See you around.”

Gabe let one hand lift, but didn’t look in her direction again until he heard the creaking of her footsteps on the steps. When he heard the front door open and close, he went downstairs. The living room smelled faintly of body odor, a little like urine, a little like onions and grease. He looked at the litter of fast-food wrappers and empty cola bottles on the dining room table and muttered a curse.

“Watch your mouth.”

Gabe should’ve known the old man would already be awake. He hardly left the recliner anymore and probably had even slept there last night. “You’re not supposed to eat this crap. You know that.”