The Girl On The Half Shell (37 page)

He grasps my hip firmly, eases out of me slowly, and then again, harder this time, slams into me.

“Don’t ever leave me.”

I lie panting beneath his touch, feeling his intense anger, knowing he’s going to get rougher. My femaleness courses through my veins. It is messed up, but my insides quicken, excited by my femaleness and his temper.

I’m about to surrender to the heat of my own flesh. A ragged whisper penetrates my near exploding senses.

“Did you fuck him?”

What? No!
My senses halt in their march toward climax.

“Did you fuck him?” he repeats fiercely.

He stays still.

“No,” I hiss furiously, the shock of him asking me that leaving me breathless and flashing with anger. “No.”

He closes his eyes, there is a ragged shudder through his limbs, and the feel of him is different, frenzied and possessive. He starts again, a brutal, divine rhythm. I hear his groan, a guttural thing, desperation, relief, sadness. He moans low in his throat and I can feel the tension change, as his adrenaline runs through his veins, a different type of current.

“I’ve been out of my mind since you walked out the door with him,” he breathes, his face buried in my hair. “Don’t do that again. Don’t walk away from me. Don’t make me feel like I don’t matter to you. I can stand anything, Chrissie, except not mattering to you.”

And then the words are lost. Alan is letting go, calling my name, and I surrender and explode with him. I sink to the bed. I sleep.

* * *

Alan gazes at me, assessing my expression as I stare up at him.

It’s morning and I don’t have a clue where we go from here. Last night was different. I don’t know what is happening beneath his surface, but there is something and I can feel it. I should be furious that in the cease-fire between the rounds of our fight, he decided to have an extremely rough “did you fuck him” fuck.

His anger issues. I’ve seen them, but last night I felt it in his body, in the way he had sex with me. Did I fuck him? God, Alan, how could you ask me that?

I try to rally my anger, fortification for today’s round of fighting, but I’m slightly disappointed in myself. I realize that I am less angry with him because I really got off on the angry “did you fuck him” fuck. It was weird, consuming, and a turn-on.

His anger is dark, complex and layered, just like mine. But unlike me, he lets it surface, in his music, in his impulses, and in his body when he fucks instead of making love. Maybe that was why it was a turn on? I fight my anger, I struggle to keep it contained, but last night my anger ran with his through my flesh and it was a sensory right sort of thing.

I stare at him. So what’s up today, Alan? Are we going to continue talking? Are we going to continue having angry fucks? Or are you just going to lie there staring at me as though everything is fine, perfectly normal in this alternate universe of not normal.

“Do you want to go on a date-date today?” Alan asks.

Oh crap, how did he remember that? Date-date. How lame.

He starts to move my hair from my face. “I owe you a date-date.”

So, it’s going to be door number three: act like everything is fine. What do I do? Do I roll with it? What did Jesse say?
Guys hate conflict. Act normal and so will he.
But is that what I want? To act normal and just leave it all alone?

I don’t answer.

He climbs from the bed, naked, and completely comfortable in whatever we’re doing now.

I sit up in bed against the pillows.

Alan is sorting through his clothes on the floor. “Are you hungry?”

Normal conversation in not normal context. I take a deep breath, willing myself calm.

“I’m starving. We didn’t eat yesterday.”

He gives me a look that makes me quicken all through my flesh.

“Do you have any clothes here other than the shorts and UGGs? Maybe jeans, a long sleeve shirt, and some kind of closed toe shoe?”

Why is he asking me this? “I don’t know. I’ll have to look. Rene left a lot of junk.”

He makes a face and continues to rummage through his things.

I frown. “How did you get into the apartment yesterday?”

“I have a key.”

You do, do you? I stare.

“You left the extra key on the entry table.” He is distracted and looking for something. “Not smart, Chrissie. Anyone could have just come in here, a delivery person, taken it, and then where would you be?”

It’s not worth pointing out, but just anyone did take it and look at where I am. With you, Alan, sore after a night of angry fucking.

I watch Alan disappear into the bathroom. I hear the shower turn on. He doesn’t ask, he takes my hand and pulls me into the shower with him.

As I stand beneath the warm streams, his damp body pressed against my back, his gentle hands wash me from behind. “Did you ever finish
Ivanoff
?”

Oh, Alan, why are you so weird? I shake my head. “You could always give me the Cliff Notes really fast.”

He smiles. His chin rests on my shoulder and he continues washing me, and his voice, so sexy, makes it arousing to do this, even listening to a brief synopsis of Chekhov.

By the time we’re toweling off, I’m kind of wishing he’d just take me back to bed. Sexy Alan was a turn-on, even reciting Chekhov, but it’s probably not a good idea. I’m sorer than I thought and I could feel it when he touched me
there
, even lightly while washing me.

I make a face at him, since he used my toothbrush without asking, and I pat my face dry with a towel.

He is already fully dressed when I join him in the bedroom.

I’m pulling on my panties and bra. “You know, you can only be useful in my study of literature if you tell me how the play ends.”

Alan is sitting on the bed waiting for me, as I rummage through Rene’s clothing. I look at him, and for some reason the complete lack of emotion on his face turns me cold.

“
Ivanoff
runs off stage and shoots himself in the head.”

Oh Alan, what’s going on with you? Why did you bring up
Ivanoff
today?

* * *

After Alan makes me breakfast, I set off to try and accommodate his clothing specifications. No matter how I try, I can’t make any of Rene’s clothes work. She is a lot taller than I am and has a leaner, less curvy build. We can share tops, an occasional skirt, but that’s about it. Jeans, never an option. And shoes, not even worth trying, since Rene definitely doesn’t have any that are closed toe.

I go down the hallway to Jack’s bedroom and into my parents’ closet. Lena’s things are still hanging here, in perfect order, where they have been since that day she left New York for California permanently. A lump swells in my throat as I stare at her neatly arranged wardrobe. Twelve years and Jack hasn’t cleaned out her things. I never gave a thought to it, but it is all still here.

Alan comes into sharp focus in my mind, as I rummage through the cedar-lined drawers. I am lost in him. I have become lost in him so quickly, so quickly that he could end us in a humiliatingly public way and then I would spend the night in angry fucking wanting to please him.

I shake my head to push away my thoughts. Jeans. Closed toe shoes. I have only a few options with my mother’s clothing. Lena was not the casual type, and what she has left behind in the casual department was New York chic in 1977. The only positive is that we are nearly the same size, though Mom was taller.

I settle on a cute pair of dark, denim overalls that I can make work by rolling the cuffs. The long sleeve shirt is a baggy beach-type thermal of Jack’s. The shoes are bucks-up buckskin ankle high hiking boots that never saw a trail or dirt. They are spotless twelve years later and I wonder why Lena even has them.

A camping trip? A hike? Something planned to please Jack, but never done. Yes, that was my mother. She definitely knew how to please him without ever doing anything she didn’t want to do. Mom was highly competent at being female and in loving Jack.

I stare at myself in the mirror. Today, I look like an incompetent girl. All I need is braids. How lame is this outfit?

Crossing into my bedroom, I hold my arms wide. “Well, what do you think? Have I managed the wardrobe specifications? And what’s up with that, anyway? Who cares what I wear?”

Alan smiles. He kisses me. “You will.”

“I will, will I?” I notice he is carrying Jack’s old leather bomber jacket atop his own leather jacket that I didn’t even notice him wearing yesterday when he arrived.

“Tie back your hair,” he orders, waits, and then tosses a bandana at me. “And put this on. It will help.”

“Help what?”

“Hurry up, Chrissie. We need to roll.”

* * *

In the parking garage, I freeze and just stare at him. It took Alan three hours to go six blocks and he did it on motorcycle? These clothes now make sense.

“I am not getting on that thing,” I protest, pulling my hand free from his.

Alan ignores me. He zips up Jack’s bomber jacket, tugs my collar high and pulls up the bandana until my nostrils and mouth are tucked in.

“I am not riding on that. Where are we going?”

He swings his leg over, turns the ignition and primes the engine with gas. He points. “Get up behind me. Put your feet there. Whatever you do, don’t let go of my body.”

I hate motorcycles. I’m more afraid of them than airplanes, and jeez, he’s got me sitting on the back of one.

Alan laughs. “Don’t worry. Neither of us is twenty-seven.”

I raise my eyebrows. An obscure literary reference they don’t teach in California, most probably, but I don’t get the joke.

“The great ones die at twenty-seven,” he explains glibly. “Hendrix. Joplin. If we are both around after we’re twenty-seven, we’ll both know what we are.”

I could have done without it being cryptic.
Don’t mock death, Alan, it’s not funny.
I snuggle into him closer. I press my cheek against his back and hold him tight.

“Good girl.”

“But why the motorcycle, Alan? Where’s Colin. Can’t you do something normal like drive a car?”

At the top of the garage exit, he stops, setting his feet on the ground while the metal door rolls up. He turns to look at me. “We went public, Chrissie, in a very ugly public way. I would have preferred not to do that. Ignore everything on the street. We’ll be out of the city in a couple hours.”

Everything on the street? Oh shit, and then I see it. How is it possible that there are so many of them? There are tabloid photographers blocking the exit. They are blocking the road. They are running from the front of the building, all while shouting and rapidly taking pictures.

He pushes through them, he doesn’t answer, and he speeds off really fast. It would scare the hell out of me if I wasn’t relieved to be out of there.

* * *

The traffic is thick and slow, as New York traffic is, but Alan drives like a maniac and I wonder if he really thinks he can’t die because he isn’t twenty-seven.

My rational self, trying to keep me from freaking out about all this, points out that he is only doing it because the tabloids have tried to follow. But cutting through cars at high speeds on the Washington Bridge Bronx Expressway it has given us an advantage that Colin and the car would not have.

I hold on and let him whisk me away. Still, I’d sort of like to know where we are going.

We lose the last of them by the Garden State Parkway, and he immediately eases off the speed when we enter the New York State Thruway. We are going north and away from the city.

With each mile, the tension ease out of Alan, and the feeling of soaring up roads, in the open air, is strangely liberating and soothing. I feel calmer inside and less frantic holding him. We feel good again, so connected, and so very right.

I feel a slight letdown as he turns off the highway and onto an off-ramp, gradually slowing. I lift my cheek and study the little village by the lake in front of us. I guess this is where we are going, but really Alan, couldn’t you have asked if I wanted to leave Manhattan.

He can be so highhanded at times. I add it to the rapidly growing list of adjectives about him: highhanded, brilliant, gentle, kind, sensitive, sophisticated, angry, elegant, obnoxious, and harsh. What else have I forgotten? I know that’s not the entire list.

We stop at an intersection. We haven’t spoken for hours. “Where are we?” I ask.

“Lake George. I think you’ll like it. Rural New York is very different than the city. Too many people go to New York and never leave the city. Totally different world. A good place to stay until things quiet down again.”

My gaze locks on a hokey little place with white cabins. “Well, they certainly have lodging here. I vote for the Seven Dwarfs Motel and Cabins.”

He gives me a smile that tugs at my heart. “Are you still angry?”

What’s in his voice floods my heart. “No. I should be, but I’m not.” I make one of my little playacting faces. “And heck, why fight. I’m about to be bounced in a room named after a Disney movie. How great is that?”

He laughs. “Are you hungry?”

I nod. I could eat. I point to the Papa bear statue wearing a plaid beret. “How about there?”

Alan laughs. “Really?”

I shrug. “Why not? I like A&W. I never get fast food. There doesn’t seem to be much choice here.”

He rolls us into the parking lot and turns off the bike. As I study the menu, I look at Alan and I laugh. I wonder when the last time it was he did something like this. Probably never. Somehow I don’t think many girls drag him to fast food.

I listen to him order, then take the plastic number stand and find a table. I settle in an outdoor plastic booth, but he pulls me up from the seat, until he’s eased back against the wall, slightly turned with me between his legs and sitting against him.

His chin is resting on my shoulder and he is holding me. He is quiet, troubled beneath the surface. Something is bothering him. I can feel it.

“Is this your first date-date at fast food? Something tells me you don’t go to this type of place very often.”

He pretends to give it thought. “Actually, yes.”

The food service girl comes to our table, delivering our tray. She gives Alan that look, the
I know who you are look
, but when I glare she takes off without saying anything. Back at the order window, she is rapidly talking to the others in the fast food box. I can feel their stares.