THIEF: Part 1 (3 page)

              “Stop crying, Erin.”  Silas barely flinches as the needle pierces his skin again, the last stitch complete.  “It doesn’t hurt anymore.  How’s your head?”

              “It’s fine.”  In actuality, it feels like my head went through a windshield.  When the staff finally pulled the woman off Silas, I scrambled out of the booth to help—only to faint the second his blood touched my hand.  I woke to a paramedic practically shouting my name into my face.

              “There you go, Mr. Marlowe.”  The nurse pats down the last bit of medical tape.  “Stitches should dissolve on their own in a week or so.  Keep the bandage dry, and clean the wound once a day.  Mild soap.”  The nurse looks at me.  “You need anything?”

              I shake my head and pull my sweater around me even tighter, more than ready to leave.  The scene in the restaurant clings to me like snow.

              A police officer is waiting for us when Silas opens the curtain of his room.  “Evening,” he says to me, then looks at Silas.  “We have a few questions for our report, Mr. Marlowe.”

              Silas pushes the forms away and starts towards the Emergency Room exit.  “I’m not pressing charges.”

              “What?”  I don’t mean to yell, but I can’t possibly have heard him correctly.

              The officer seems equally confused.  “Uh…Mr. Marlowe, we’ve apprehended Abigail for assault—”

              He stops, sighs, and turns back to the officer.  “I’m not pressing charges,” he says again, biting the words.  “Just let her go, put her in the drunk tank for a night, whatever you have to do.”

              “Would you like to request a restraining order?”

              “I’ll consider it,” he answers, cutting a glance to me.  “Thank you, sir.”

              Hesitating, the officer gives a curt nod, turns on his heel, and leaves.

              I wait until we’re in the parking lot to explode.  “Why the hell don’t you want to press charges?”  My voice is just below a scream, caught inside the steam creeping along the asphalt.  “That crazy bitch cut your face, Silas.  She attacked you.”

              He opens my car door for me.  “Just get in, Erin,” he says, wilting.  “I’m exhausted.”

              I do, if only because my head is killing me, and I’m exhausted, too.

              “Guess this wins first place for worst date ever, huh?”  He forces a laugh and then, when I don’t respond, sighs.  “Okay, look…I know you think I’m nuts, not pressing charges.  But that crazy bitch isn’t a bad person.  She’s just got some real bad problems.”  Silas pauses.  “To be honest, I feel sorry for her.”

              “Oh, yeah, she seemed pretty helpless back there.”  The combination of a throbbing skull and complete confusion puts venom in my voice, but it makes him wince more than the stitches did, and guilt takes over.

              I put my hand over his on the gearshift.  “Silas…who is she?”

              He stares straight ahead at the empty highway.  “My ex-wife.”

              I feel like my stomach’s been punched.  My hand pulls away on its own.  “You were married?”

              “Yeah,” he breathes, scratching the back of his head.  “I was.”

              “Oh.”  I kick off my heels, hoping I sound cavalier.  “So what happened?”

              “I don’t know,” he says.  “We fought a lot, didn’t have a place of our own…lots of things.  I’ve always figured it was just how young we were.  We didn’t know anything.  Even when we split up, we were still so naïve.  I mean, we were only twenty-one.”

              Another punch to the gut.  My sympathy turns back to venom.

              Silas notices. “Oh…no, Erin, I didn’t mean it like that.  You’re not like we were.  We were naive.  You’ve got experience, you know?”

             
Experience.
  I hear “a record.”

              I also notice the way he says “we.”

              “I’m sorry.”  His hand slips to my knee, his touch like coals against my bare skin.  I can’t decide if I like it or not.  “I promise, I’ll make this up to you.  Let’s have a do-over date.”

              “No, thanks.”

              “Erin, come on.  Tonight wasn’t my fault.”

              “Do you still have feelings for her?”

              “Who?  Abby?”

              I roll my eyes.  “Yes.  Abby.”

              “Of course not.  We’ve been divorced for three years now.”

              Something from the restaurant comes back to me.  “Then why was she yelling about how she hadn’t seen anything from you for weeks?”  I hate how jealous I sound; I shouldn’t even care.  What’s it matter to me if Silas still loves his ex?  We aren’t in a relationship.  We’re barely coworkers.  I know nothing about him.

              But that’s the thing: I feel like I do know him.  Maybe not the details, but something deeper.  If I believed in karma, I’d wonder what I did to deserve this kind of connection.

              He pushes his hand through his hair.  “All right, I’m not proud of this, but…I kind of owe her some alimony.  Like, six months’ worth.”

              “Why don’t you just tell her you don’t have it?”

              “Oh, I have the money.  But I’m not giving it to her until she gets her drinking under control.  I can’t stand the thought of basically paying her to kill herself.”

              His explanation makes me feel guilty again, but also relieved.  I touch his arm and say, “That’s sweet of you.  To worry about her like that.”

              “Yeah, well.  I understand if you still don’t want to get involved with me,” he says.  “I mean, I hope that isn’t the case, because I really like you.  I’m just saying, I’d get it.  I come with a little drama.”

              “So do I.”

              He smirks, scrunching the bandages, then flinches.  “I promise you, Abby is not a permanent fixture in my life.  She’s part of my past.  But, as you can see, the past likes to pop up now and then.  Right when shit starts going right.”

              I nod, watching the city limits sign lunge towards us from the darkness.  This, at least, I can understand.

When I tiptoe, shoes in hand, into the house, my mother’s waiting for me.  Or it might just be coincidence, a common bout of insomnia.  My mother is not the waiting-up type.

              “How was your date?” she asks, patting the sofa.  All I want to do is fall face-first into bed, but the thought of navigating my room changes my mind.  My possessions are still crammed into boxes, filling ninety-percent of my old childhood bedroom.

              Not for the first time, I desperately miss my apartment.  It was a converted loft downtown, in the historic district, with hardwood floors and giant original windows.  I loved looking at the city’s skyline through the old glass, warped with drip marks, just before night fell.

              Once news got to my boss about my theft charges, I lost my job as the youngest manager in history at Bailey Brothers Furniture.  I lost my sweet paycheck.  I lost my apartment.  And a few weeks later, when I pulled the U-Haul up to my mother’s stoop, I lost my dignity.  The day I moved out—my sixteenth birthday, right as the sun rose—I spit on that very stoop and swore to myself I’d never come back.

              And yet, almost five years later, here I was.

              “It was interesting,” I answer, finally.

              My mother doesn’t possess typical conversation skills; instead of picking up on my word choice and asking a follow-up like, “Interesting, how?” she smiles and says, “I’m glad.  He seems like a nice boy.”

              “Mm-hmm.”

              “Where’d you go?” she asks, eyes still on the television.  “Dinner and a movie?”

              “Wedding expo and a bar.”

              “Oh,” she says, “that’s interesting.”

              “Yep.  Told you.”

              And that’s that.  Mother-daughter bonding at its very finest.

              Making out in a horse stable wasn’t how I planned to spend my morning, but
c’est la vie
, I suppose.  At least, I tell myself, there’s fresh hay underneath us when Silas ambushes me the next day.

              Somehow, he manages to surprise me in plain sight.  I hear the gate creak, and when I look up, he's swinging on it like a kid, grinning.

              “Hey,” I smile, “what—”  But that's as far as I get, because he kicks forward on the gate and kisses me.  My words, or any semblance of language, go up in smoke.

              “What are you doing?” I ask, when he finally pulls his mouth away from mine.  I’m not outraged or incredulous, or anything I probably should be.  Just curious.  My hand winds into his hair at the base of his neck, and I pull him close again, hungry for more.  I've never understood that—actually hungering for someone.  I figured people were just dressing up the real word for it: horny.  But now, as he climbs the gate and slides down to the ground, his body rubbing against mine, I get it.

              “I don’t know,” he whispers, and that’s when he guides me, imperceptibly, to the hay I’ve just piled in the corner.  He closes the gate with his foot, a true multi-tasker.  “Last night, after I dropped you off, I just drove around for hours, kicking myself for how things ended.  I thought…well.  Let’s just say I thought the night would have a very different ending.”  Half his words are whispered against my lips, barely audible.

              I smile, my teeth bumping his.  “A happy ending?”

              He pauses, blushing.  “I’m not usually….”  On my hipbone, I feel his hand fluttering nervously.  “I don’t rush into things with girls.  Abby kind of ruined my ability to trust people.  But with you….”  He shakes his head and kisses me again.  “I don’t know how to explain it.”

              “That’s how I feel too,” I say, “like I already know you so well.  But I’m not sure how.”

              Silas nods, his mouth moving to my neck.  I run my hands under the back of his shirt, feeling every muscle working as he keeps himself elevated above me, barely any space between us.

              I forget where I am, why I’m even here.  I stare into the rafters and try to remember the last time I felt attraction like this, but I can’t.  The closest thing I’ve had to chemistry was not having to ask my one-night-stands to leave before dawn, so I wouldn’t have to look at them in fresh daylight and regret; somehow, they always read my mind, and I’d wake up alone.  The way I liked.

              But with Silas, I’m already in the light of day.  I can see every part of him clearly, and regret’s nowhere to be found.  Him sneaking away is the last thing I want.

              “Can I?” he asks, hand poised at my bra, and I nod.  He reaches around me and somehow snaps the clasps apart with a single motion, and before I can marvel at his skill, he's taken one of my nipples into his mouth and the other between his fingers.

              “God, Silas...” I whisper, arching my back.  I press myself into his leg, ravenous for more.  It's another first for me, saying a guy's name.  With others, it was a lot like my pickpocketing: I didn't want to remind myself they were actual people.  It was so much easier to get what I wanted when I could pretend they were just the means to an end.

              But with Silas, it's like I can't say his name enough.  He whispers mine back, one hand sliding into my pants.  I'm more than ready, but like his appearance in the stable, somehow he surprises me even when I'm already waiting, looking him right in the eye.  When his fingers enter me, I gasp his name in a sharp, thankful cry.

              “This,” he says softly, “is what I had in mind for last night.”  He thrusts his fingers deeper and upward, to my G-spot.  It's another first—no one, excluding myself on a few tipsy, lonely nights, has found or even bothered looking for it.

              Not that I'm able to think about that right now: Silas is merciless, even when I beg him to stop.  “I don't...think...I can stay quiet,” I pant, squirming under the weight of his body.

              “Good,” he smirks, and picks up the pace.  I brace myself, trying to prepare, but Silas is the master of surprise yet again.  All at once, my orgasm ripples through me from my feet upward, and I cry out again, his name like a pealing bell through the rafters.

              As my heartbeat slows and my body finds its bearings again, I realize it's not my joyful scream echoing: it's the real bell, signaling the end of the morning session.

              “Silas,” I whimper, spent, but still hungry for his kiss.  “I've never....”  I swallow hard, trying to catch my breath.  “That...God, that was....”

              He smirks again.  “I'm flattered.”

              “No,” I whisper emphatically, “you don't understand—I've never orgasmed like that, without me having to....”  Suddenly shy, though I have no clue why, I shrug.  “Well...you know.  Play with myself.”

              “Seriously?”

              I nod bashfully.

              “Well,” he says, tucking my hair behind my ear, “maybe soon I'll get a chance to repeat my performance.”  He takes my hand and kisses it.  “Like...tonight?”

              And all of a sudden, there it is: the bristling chill I always get before climbing into bed with someone, the fear that always comes with some cute boy's innuendos.  Time heals, but not overnight.  Not even over five years.

              “Um...maybe,” I stammer.  I look him in the eye.  His expression is so soft and patient, I know I can tell him the truth, or at least part of it: “I want to go a little slower.”

              “Oh.”  He looks surprised, but not hurt, thankfully.  “No problem.  I'm sorry if I was too forward, it's just...I was going crazy last night.  I kind of couldn't help myself today, you know?”

              I smile.  “Yeah, I know.  And thank you.”

              We hear the rest of the staff heading towards the barn, the horses' hooves clomping slowly uphill.  I hastily shake the hay off Silas’s shirt and hand it to him; he helps me find my bra, thrown over the gate to the stable.

              “You got a mirror?” he asks.  When I shake my head, he smiles and reaches out to pick debris from my hair.  “Let’s just fix each other up, then.  Like how monkeys groom other monkeys.”

              “Oh, that’s attractive.”

              His laugh, low and mischievous, makes every nerve in my body electric.

              When we’re all ready, I head out of the stables first.  I’m halfway to the lounge when I turn back, realizing one of my earrings is missing.  Before I can even break into a jog, though, I stop.

              Silas is just outside the stable, hugging a little girl about four years old.  He picks her up and swings her, both of them laughing, and I see it’s the kid missing an eye, the one I almost gasped at yesterday.

              I move closer, slowly, eager to watch up-close.  His comfort with her is amazing.  No wonder he became a counselor.

              “Bye bye see you later,” the little girl tells him, in a flat but run-together way, before another counselor leads her to the idling shuttle.

              “See you, sweetheart.”  Silas waves and watches her go.  His face suddenly looks so sad, I can’t stand it.

              “You okay?” I ask.

              He jumps.  “Oh…Erin.  You startled me.”

              I gesture towards my ear.  “I, uh…left my earring in the stables.  You mind helping me look?”

              “Not at all.”  He takes one last look towards the shuttle, exhales, and shoots me a smile that doesn’t totally seem genuine.  “Let’s hurry, before they get the horses stabled for lunch.”

              I find the earring right away, but tuck it into my palm and pretend to keep looking.  Without looking up from the hay, I ask, “Who was that little girl you were talking to?”

              Silas doesn’t look up, either.  “Emma.”

              “One of your kids?”

              He stops, elbow-deep in the hay.  “Huh?”

              “You know,” I prompt, “one of the kids you counsel?”

              “Oh.”  He goes back to searching.  “No, not really.  Not…officially, I mean.  She’s been coming here for two summers now.”

              “You two seem pretty attached.”

              “What’s your earring look like?” he asks, practically interrupting.

              I can’t help but recoil, a little.  “Uh…it’s a diamond stud….”  Just when he turns back around, I say, “Found it.”

              “Great.”  There it is again, that forced smile.  He stands up, brushes the dirt and hay from his pants, and holds out a hand for me.  “Ready?”

              I know something’s up here.  But the sight of Silas smiling at me, forced or not, makes me not care.  At least, not right now.

              “Yeah,” I say.  I put my hand into his.  “Ready.”

There’s something about summer.

              Everything moves in slow-motion, yet flies by before you can really notice.  Dating Silas is a lot like that first night at the bar: it drags along gloriously, like the ascent of a roller coaster, while somehow spinning past so quickly your stomach jumps into your chest, like on the descent.

              We go out every night after work (I get sick of calling it “service,” especially when his job sounds so much better) and take turns picking where we go and what we do.  At the end of each date, we sit in his car nervously, making small talk, as though in a few minutes we won't have our mouths and hands all over each other.

              But, true to his word, Silas doesn't pressure me.  He takes his cue from me, what I seem comfortable with, even though I can tell he wants more.

              “You want to go back to my place?” he asks one night.  It’s almost July, and through the window behind him, I see fireflies.  I nod.

              His apartment is small—about the size of my old studio, just with walls, which makes it seem even smaller.

              “Can I get you anything?” he asks, kicking his shoes off by the door while I look around.

              “Wine?”

              “Uh….”  He shrugs.  “Sorry.  Fresh out.”

              “Beer’s fine, too.”

              Silas makes a face.

              “Jeez, no beer, either?  What kind of bachelor pad is this?”  I throw my purse onto his couch, then make my way towards the hall.  Walking backwards, I motion for him to follow.  “Guess I can make do,” I whisper, as he closes in on me and puts his arms around my waist.

              “We can just watch a movie,” he offers.  He’s already kissing me and opening his bedroom door, before his sentence is even finished.

              I’ve already undone his pants, slipping my hand into the opening of his boxers.  His erection twitches inside my fingers.  “Uh-huh,” I whisper.  “We could.”

              “There’s…there’s a documentary on Netflix….”  He watches as I take my hand away and pull his pants down to his knees.  “It’s about the…uh….”

              “Sounds interesting,” I say, right before I kneel and take him into my mouth.

              “Yes,” he sighs, leaning against the doorframe.  He winds his fingers into my hair and gently guides me, showing me the rhythm he needs.  His cock is easily bigger than anyone else's I've seen, almost intimidating, and my throat gets sore fast.  But I don't stop.  Whenever I look up at him, he locks his eyes with mine and whispers my name, shuddering.

              “Okay, okay,” he says, gently pulling my hair to free himself.  He sighs again and smiles as I stand back up.

              I’ve only had one drink, a shooter at the hole-in-the-wall place he picked for our date, but with Silas naked just a few inches away from me, I feel as disoriented as if I’d killed a full flask or more.  It’s like being drunk without any headache or nausea.

              “Are you sure?” he asks, breathless, as I peel off my clothes.  Instead of answering, I pull him down onto the bed with me, falling together.

              He starts working on me, and I'm tempted to let him; I know I could orgasm several times tonight, if I wanted to.  But I'm too hungry for him.  All of him.

              “Silas, I'm ready,” I say.  He doesn't need to be told twice; immediately, he moves into position.  I put my hands on his chest and push back a little, the familiar pre-sex fear beginning.  I add, “Um...but slowly, please.”

              “Anything you want,” he agrees.

             
Anything you want. 
This makes me relax. 
Want.

              He actually cares about what I want.  If I wanted to stop this whole night, bring it to a screeching halt and watch television instead, all I'd have to do is say so.  And he'd listen.

              But of course, I don't want to.  The fact he cares is enough.

              “Thank you,” I smile.  He nods, a question; I nod back, permission.