The Girl On The Half Shell (42 page)

Linda does a little
cheers!
motion with her shooter at me. “Pound it, Chrissie.”

I copy her move. I bite my lemon, down the shot and then take a fast gulp of beer. Everyone laughs. Alan is watching me quizzically.

“Two more,” Linda shouts in that confident way at the retreating waitress. She smiles at me. “We need to go shopping when we are back in New York. We’re out on the road in two weeks, Chrissie, and you’ll need to get everything.”

Out on the road. Alan is going back on tour in two weeks. I hate that Linda assumes, in her all-knowing way, that I’ll be leaving with them.

When the band breaks, the guys move to the stage. They all talk and there is a familiarity that tells me they know each other and that they’ve dropped in to play live to get the edge here before.

The waitress returns, and in a moment I have another shooter.

“Drink now, Chrissie.”

I do it simultaneously with Linda and this time the tequila doesn’t burn. I’m glad it’s rushing into my stomach and soon my veins.

I lean into Linda. “I want to dance.”

She takes a deep gulp of her beer. “The UK should be playing soon. We’ll need to go find some redneck toys.”

Redneck toys? I laugh. Linda has my hand and she is tugging me from my seat. I feel slightly wobbly as I stand. God, how could two shots of tequila make me feel this way?

At the edge of the dance floor I stare.

Linda laughs. “Don’t worry, Chrissie. The redneck toys will come to us. You look fucking hot tonight.”

Blackpoll starts to play, and we are on the packed floor dancing with two college-type guys who look as out of place here as I do. There is something boyish and pleasantly good natured about my partner. For some reason, he makes me think of Neil and that crazy night at Peppers, and Jesse Harris in the kitchen.

He can’t be more than twenty.

Linda’s college dude has that bad-boy air about him, the kind of look Rene calls “axe-murderer,” but next to Linda he looks harmless and overwhelmed. Linda doesn’t dance as if she’s married, and her young admirer is very into it and very overt in the use of his body.

I look up at my sweet-fresh-faced guy. “You come here often?”

He laughs. “No. We drove down from Cornell for the weekend. I saw you come in with the band. Which one is yours?”

I can tell by how he says it that he knows who they are. But of course, he would. This is a college age guy.

“Alan Manzone.”

He looks impressed.

“For tonight,” I add.

Shit, why did I say that? It makes me sound a little too slutty, a little too available, and to my disappointment, a little childishly petty. He’s all smiles, since I just suggested an opening that doesn’t exist. There is no opening with me for this guy. I should never have let him think it.

“Are you OK?”

I shake my head.

“Do you want some air?”

I look around the bar for Linda. She is across the dance floor, beneath the stage, and her penetrating laugh eclipses the loudness of the music.

I take my college guy’s hand and pull him with me out the front door. The cold air hits me like a blast and I feel numb, out of my body, even though every part of me is anxiously churning.

I turn, leaning against the front rail, to find my Cornell boy watching me.

“Are you OK?”

“Stop asking me that,” I snap, not at all reasonably. Shit, I don’t want to freak out right here and I don’t know what’s going on inside of me.

He is still, unsure, studying my face in that way guys do when they think there is something wrong with a girl.

“I didn’t mean to piss you off,” he says cautiously.

“I’m not pissed off at you.”

I lean into him and join my mouth with his. I don’t know why I do it. Maybe I just want to know how it will feel to kiss someone other than Alan. His mouth moves on mine, deepening the kiss, a pleasant seduction, and I can feel that he is into this. I feel nothing.

I should stop this
… the front door swings open, hitting the wall like an explosion. I hear it before I see and understand: Alan rips the boy from my arms and hits him. The guy crumples to the ground like a collapsing house of cards and, in horror, I realize this is my fault.

I try to check and see if he’s OK, but Alan harshly grabs my arm. He drags me through the parking lot to the far side where it is dark and our car is parked.

Alan takes me by both arms and holds me beneath his face. “What the fuck is the matter with you?”

“I don’t know,” I snap, and I really don’t know.

I just stare and he becomes more pissed off. He drags me to the car, opens the door and shoves me into my seat. He collapses into the driver’s side and every part of him is alive with extreme anger. He is breathing heavily.

“Chrissie, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

I hit him. It feels unexpectedly good. I hit him again and again and again. Alan’s entire body freezes, his face stripped of emotion. I hit him and he just lets me. I hit him harder and I start to cry.

He hauls me across the center console until I’m straddling him. His features are tense and unreadable. “Calm down, baby. Whatever it is just talk to me,” he demands roughly.

Those black eyes are fixed on me, warm with compassionate and so giving. I hit him again. “I hate you,” I hiss into face.

I lean in, kiss him, and I start freeing him from his pants. Suddenly, the only thing I want is to fuck him. Like a tramp in a car, fuck him hard and angry, right here. I feel my panties jerked aside and his flesh there, seeking. He gently starts to ease into me and I jam him into me roughly.

My fingers curl in his hair like claws and I move my body up and down frantically on his. I devour him with my lips.

I ease out of him and I slam down. I pause at the tip and then I swallow him. I bite his lower lip. I nip at that pulse in his neck. I push him deep into his seat, using my body to control and consume him.

I start fucking him even harder. He’s gentle with me. I get rougher. He tries to kiss me softly. I move my mouth harder and more demanding. He caresses me, lovingly. I resist and twist away from his touch.

I want him angry and he is not. But I am angry and that is all I am sharing with him in this frantic joining of my body to his. My anger and my sorrow and my pain.

I move hard and fast, and I can feel that he is holding back, waiting for me to climax. But I can’t climax, I can’t quiet, I just rage, and I want to rage until there is nothing left in me.

He pulls down my dress and my breasts are in his face, a nipple held in his teeth. He does those little bites and tugs that usually drive me crazy, but it is not enough. For some reason, I can’t release that part of me where pleasure is.

I join his mouth back with mine and I kiss him in a wild way, more tongue, deeper, harder than ever. I take his tongue and give it a tug, a hard suck. All my muscles below clench tightly, yet don’t release, and Alan lets go, finishing in me.

I feel a strange sense of triumph, even though I didn’t climax. I pushed Alan to cum, and I realize that, for some reason, that was part of what I needed.

I slowly collapse against him, my breathing ragged, and the pulse of my body still alive and awake
there
.

The earth quiets and the car stills. The windows are steamed. The only sound is that of our breathing. I’m still straddling Alan. I am quiet in the flesh. I am not quiet within me.

He doesn’t separate us. He doesn’t move.

After what seems a monumental amount of time, he lifts his face from the tuck against my neck, beneath my hair.

He stares at me and the gentleness of his expression makes me want to cry. I fight the tears.

His long fingers stroke my bare back in a calming way. “Chrissie, I don’t understand what’s happening to you,” he whispers, frustrated and urgent. “What were you trying to do? What is it you want?”

I shake my head. He folds me in his arms and holds me. Our bodies are both sweaty and damp. Our pulses are racing. “What is it you need me to do for you? Baby, just tell me. Tell me what you need.”

I ease back almost to the steering wheel. I can’t speak through the spurts of my breathing. The tears are burning tracks on my cheeks. “You are leaving,” I choke out.

I start to sob out of control and curl into Alan’s chest. His arms are warm and strong and his hands a velvet comfort on my back.

“Why, Alan, does everyone I love leave me?”

Chapter Seventeen

Alan carries me into the farmhouse. He sets me on the bed. He undresses me. He eases me down beneath the covers and tucks me in.

We say nothing, as I watch him move around the room. For some reason, he wants the harshness of incandescent light out of the room, because he takes a Coleman lantern, puts it on a table and then sets it ablaze.

He undresses in the warm glow, and the sight of him naked and perfect and at ease with himself takes my breath away. I love to look at Alan. But tonight it is not a sexual thing, because the fucking in the car I think has left us both depleted.

What’s in the room is a quiet, a closeness without touching, and love.

He settles on the bed, fluffing up his pillow against the foot rest, and reclines with an easy grace so we are lying side by side, facing each other. It is an arrangement of our bodies that silently conveys
talk to me.

I lower my gaze. I finger the pattern of the quilt. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what he knows, but I know he feels it. It’s in me, he feels it, he is unafraid of it, and I am unafraid of it with Alan.

I crawl down to the foot of the bed, and he surrounds me with his body, and the feel of him is warm and safe.

I start to cry, I don’t want to, but the tears are not something I can hold back. “What I want, Alan, is to talk about my brother.”

* * *

When I am done telling Alan all the things that haunt me, even the things I remember that I didn’t share with Linda, I stare up at Alan and cover his mouth with my hand. I don’t want him to say anything. He held me while I cried. Through some parts he cried with me, and in the end I told him everything. I held back not a single part, and that is enough for one day.

I stare up at him. “Can I ask you something?”

Alan laughs. He runs a hand through his hair. “Really, Chrissie? You’re worried about asking me something after all that? You can ask me anything, baby. You should know that by now.”

I laugh. It does seem silly to worry. “How long can we stay at The Farm?”

He takes me in his arms and rolls until I am on him. “As long as you want.”

“It’s just, everyone leaves tomorrow. I don’t want to leave just yet.”

“Then we won’t leave.”

“Tomorrow is Sunday.”

“So?”

“Rene comes back to New York. I want Rene here. I want to stay at The Farm and have Rene here.”

Alan frowns, that “Rene not my favorite girl” expression.

“That’s no big deal. I’ll drive into the village early tomorrow. Call Colin. Arrange to bring her here.”

I curl into his chest. I feel much better. I’ve given more parts of me to Alan and it feels so very right. I trace the ink on his stomach. “I think The Farm will be good for Rene.”

* * *

The next morning, we leave early for the village. Alan doesn’t have a car at The Farm so we take the rust bucket Jeep and that’s OK with me. All the dysfunctional will be gone, except for the Rowans, when we return from calling Colin and making the arrangements for bringing Rene upstate.

I sit beside Alan, fighting with my hair as we whiz down the narrow country lane. He is a maniac when he drives. There is something about him always on the edge, even in his quiet moments, a certain sense that he silently rages against living and that he isn’t fully at peace within himself.

I smile and I watch him and I say nothing. There is no radio in the rust bucket. He starts to hum quietly. I don’t think he realizes it, or what the artful lines of his face betray. He is thinking of his own regrets today. My heart squeezes and twists. When does the pain of our mistakes leave us? Maybe never. Maybe that is life, living with the pain of our mistakes.

I stare out the window. Tears prickle my eyes. I’ve lived with my mistake for ten years and the pain hasn’t left me yet. Perhaps Alan can feel it today. Perhaps that is why he’s thinking of Molly. Perhaps that is why we are together when we really don’t make sense in any way.

I lean into him across the center console and lay my head against his shoulder. It is in this comfortable quiet when we make the most sense to me. This beautiful guy, gifted and brilliant, too often lost inside himself. Just like me, his not so beautiful, gifted or brilliant girlfriend. Too often lost inside myself. Simultaneously opposite from and totally right with one another.

It can be a hopeful thing to find the other perfect half of yourself, someone who gets you, someone to love and be loved by. I never expected the other perfect half of me to be Alan Manzone. He’s such a weirdo, but then I’m strange too.

Alan stops singing in mid-verse and looks at me. “Why are you laughing?”

I make a face. “Sometimes I just think funny thoughts. Where are we going?”

“To use a phone.”

“But this doesn’t look like the same way we went to the redneck bar.”

“Back roads, Chrissie. Less traffic. Less people.”

His eyes flash a smile toward me, but his mouth has a slightly apparent grim line. Oh, Alan, what is worrying you today?

I sigh. Do I even want to know what is worrying him today? Nope, I don’t want to know. We feel good today. Really good.

He pulls into a motel parking lot. The Seven Dwarfs Motel and Cabins. I start to laugh.

“You did say you wanted to bounce a bed in a hotel named after a Disney movie,” he murmurs, his voice very sexy.

“How did you remember that bit of stupidity, with everything that’s gone on since we got here?”

“I remember everything you say. Always.”

The look in his eyes makes me shiver. I smile and hug him, trying to contain my dopey happiness over this.

I watch him climb from the Jeep and go into the lobby. In a moment he’s back, room key in hand, grinning.