Soft and low, p.8
Soft and Low, page 8
I wasn’t sure what we were going to do. I just shook my head and hoped he wouldn’t step on a weak stair tread.
Digger sat on the bed with me on his lap. “Thanks for helping Joaquim,” he said. He bent to nuzzle my neck. “He’s a good kid. I hope this school thing works out.”
I tried to keep my thoughts on track, but it was hard with what he was doing with his mouth. “I hope so, too. I’m afraid that even if he gets in, it may be hard for him.”
Digger picked up his head. “Why? He’s plenty smart.”
“No, not that. I just mean, kids aren’t nice to other kids if they’re different. If they know he’s on scholarship, or they see Lorelei with her tattoos, I don’t know how they’ll treat him.” Digger’s face hardened. “I’m not saying I feel that way! I just don’t want him to get teased or bullied. They can be awful, Digger. Kids treat each other terribly, viciously.”
“Yeah.” His features had softened, and he rubbed his nose against mine. “You know this personally?”
I felt my body twitch involuntarily. “I’ve seen it plenty of times.”
“Uh huh.” He studied my face. “Well, we’ll watch out for that. I won’t let anybody I care about get hurt.”
I twitched again, then pretended it was because my leg itched. “I’m glad he has you.”
“Yeah, he has me.” Digger nodded, putting his forehead against mine. “Tell me again what we need to do to the house.”
“By mistake I dropped my notebook downstairs, when someone picked me up and carried me off.”
“Some asshole, I guess.” He played with the button on my shirt. “Let’s talk about it from memory. We probably need to open up the walls.” He slid the button out of the hole, then moved his fingers to the next one down. “A lot of walls.” I watched him ease apart my shirt, exposing the tops of my breasts. My chest was moving up and down quickly, making the lace on my bra tremble.
Digger looked too. “Then we’ll have to see what’s been behind there all that time,” he continued. He laid me back on the bed and his mouth traced over my neck, down to the valley between my breasts. He moved across my nipple and I twisted up, pushing it towards his lips. “We’re all anxious to see what we’ll find,” he commented, and took my nipple into his mouth, nipping through the lace.
My head fell back and my eyes closed. I held him to me and moved restlessly against him as he sucked and nibbled and flicked out his tongue. He moved to the other side and put his hand where his mouth had been. Then his hand slipped down farther to undo my jeans and his fingers moved inside, rubbing across the lace that he found under the denim.
“Cinderella.”
“Yes?” It barely sounded like a word. My voice had deserted me.
His finger moved back and forth. “This all new to you?”
I nodded. “Uh huh.” It wasn’t my own voice coming from my throat.
“Good to know. We’ll keep talking about the house. Electricity will be next. Let’s see if we can get a spark going down here.”
He went under my panties with his fingers, drawing them up and down against me, slipping through my wetness. He rubbed against one spot and I know I said something, but I was arching my back and gasping and I lost track of exactly what was going on. Digger sucked hard on my nipple and slid his finger inside me, stretching me so that I moved, a little uncomfortable, but then he put his thumb back on that spot—oh. Oh. God, God. It roared over me, all the pleasure and ecstasy, and I shook with it, pushing myself down against his hand.
Digger slid his fingers out of me and undid his jeans. He took my hand in his and guided it to his cock, hard and, oh God, huge. “Touch me,” he told me, wrapping my fingers around the warm, soft skin over the rigid length, moving my hand up and down. He rocked his hips and put his face in my neck. “Fuck, fuck…” he murmured, then, “Rebecca!” His fingers convulsed around mine and I felt him come. Digger sighed into my neck and then moved my hand away, groaning. He rolled on his back and pulled me to him, pushing my cheek to his chest. “I never had so much fun doing construction,” he said. He sounded out of breath.
I couldn’t talk yet. A funny contentment filled me, and I nuzzled my face against him, breathing in his lovely smell and listening to his heart race.
“I messed up your pretty hair,” he said, running his hand through it. “You could braid it up.”
“How do you know about women’s hair?” I asked drowsily.
“My sister. I used to do her hair before she went to school. My mom worked the early shift. I’m pretty much an expert.”
I picked my head up and looked at his face. He did have a satisfied, kind of smug expression. Maybe this was the “laid face” that Lorelei had been talking about. I hoped no one else was giving it to him.
“What are you looking at, Cinderella?” Digger put his hand on my cheek. “You got all worried.”
I didn’t know how to say what I was thinking. Or what I was feeling. “What’s your real name?” I asked instead.
“Digger.”
“That’s not a nickname?”
He ran his thumb over my lip. “Do you have a nickname, besides Cinderella? Anyone ever call you Becky?”
“Wreck.”
“Huh?”
I put my head back down. “When my brother was little, he couldn’t say Rebecca. He said Recca instead and then he just called me Reck. Then it turned into Wreck, with a W, because…because other people thought it was funny.”
“Like a car wreck? How’s that funny?”
I sat up and started buttoning my shirt. “I need to get home.”
Digger reached for me again. “Why? What do you have going on tonight?”
“I need to get dinner for my brother. He has basketball practice right now and he’s always starving afterwards.”
“He’s not old enough to help himself?”
My fingers slowed on the buttons and I played with one, twisting it. “I like cooking for him. He doesn’t really need me anymore, but there are some ways I’m still good. I always make him dinner, when our, um, whenever I can. It’s our tradition.”
Digger watched me try to fix myself up. “Why don’t you and I do something outside of this house tomorrow night,” he suggested.
I was sorry I was going to have to say no to that idea. I stood up and tucked in my shirt. “I can’t, unless you want to meet me out. I’m supposed to go somewhere with Tracey. But I’m going to tell her, it’s the last time we’re going to a bar or a club. If she wants to hang out with me, we can do something I like to do instead.” I nodded firmly.
Digger slapped me on the butt and I squealed. “That’s a good idea. Where are you going with her?”
“Some place in Ferndale.”
“Sounds terrible. I’ll go.”
I turned, smiling. “You will?”
“Only if you’ll come back here with me after.”
My smile fell. “I don’t know if I—” I stopped myself. I was a grown woman. I wasn’t going to mess this up with Digger because of my father, no matter what it cost me. “Ok.”
Digger’s hand was still on my butt, and now he squeezed. “Your ass fits so nice in my hand.” He slapped again and left his hand there. I moved my hips unconsciously, rubbing into his grip. “Go, or those jeans are coming right off,” he ordered me.
I tried to look dignified and businesslike as I walked past the grinning electrician in the hallway downstairs and said goodbye.
The next day, I met Sylvie Bowen, now Sylvie Bowen Everhart, at a coffee shop near Lamb’s Academy. It was an off-hour for beverage sales, apparently, and the few people in there were typing on their phones or reading, so it was nice and quiet. Sylvie came in just after I found a table and smiled and waved when she saw me. “Hi, Rebecca!” She came over and gave me a hug. “Wow, you look so different!”
“Do I?” I patted the hair down on my shoulder.
“Different in a good way! You look great. Life after high school must agree with you.”
With her, too. She was glowing, but she had always been beautiful. Sylvie rested her hand on her little pregnancy bump when she sat down after getting herself an herbal tea, so we talked about the baby first, a boy they were planning to name after her husband’s twin brother. She had married a guy who worked with her dad and was now running the business her father had started, and it was clear from the way Sylvie talked about him that she was totally crazy in love. I asked about her sisters, too, and they were all doing well. The one I knew the best after Sylvie, Rosemond, had just given birth to a son. “You know, we all have our ups and downs, but things with the Bowens are good,” Sylvie told me, smiling. “What about you?”
I toyed with my coffee cup. “I’m fine.”
“I see your brother around the Lamb’s campus. He’s a cutie.”
I grinned. “Isn’t he? He has a girlfriend now.”
“I know, Maryam. We all gossip in the admissions office,” she explained. “But what are you doing? Working?”
“For my dad at the auction house. Besides that, nothing’s really happening.” My mind leapt to Digger and I felt heat rise in my face. “I see Tracey a lot.”
Sylvie made a funny face. “Is she still getting into trouble?” Even though Sylvie was older than we were, Tracey had managed to make an impression with everyone at the school.
“As much as she can. But she’s fine.” I hoped. She had sent me a strange message that morning that hadn’t made a lot of sense. I was crossing my fingers that she hadn’t been pill popping at her job again.
“My mom said she ran into your mom,” Sylvie told me. “How is she doing?” She tilted her head, looking serious.
I looked down at my coffee. Everyone from Lamb’s had known what had happened in my family. “She’s better than she was.” I looked up, and Sylvie was nodding sympathetically.
“Do you ever hear from Margot?”
I realized my hands were in fists on the table and I carefully straightened them out. “No. Never.”
“The last address we had from her for the school was still your house here. She hasn’t updated any information for us.” She shrugged. “I checked before I came to meet you.”
“It’s been a long time, now.”
“I’m so sorry, Rebecca. I can’t even imagine if I didn’t see one of my sisters.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Just thinking about it, and you missing Margot…”
I willed myself not to cry. I took a sip of coffee and cleared my throat. “I’m sure we weren’t as close as you are with your sisters. Anyway, like I said, a lot of time has passed. I’m fine.”
Sylvie nodded. “I have to say, one of the reasons I wanted to meet with you right away was because my mom said she was worried after she saw your mother.”
My heart beat harder. “Oh?”
“My mom said something just seemed off, I guess. She wanted to get together with your mom again and see if there was anything she could do to help. What do you think about the four of us, you and I and our moms, having lunch together? Or dinner?”
My mom would probably say no. “I’ll ask her. Thanks.”
“Sure.” She reached in her bag and pulled out a file, very businesslike. “Now, you wanted to talk to me about Joaquim Wynne, right? Tell me about him and why you think he’d be a good fit at Lamb’s Academy.”
I was thrilled to change the subject from my horrible family issues. I told her all about Joaquim and Lorelei, more stuff that Digger had told me too, about how they had struggled. “I just wanted you to know more of his story, in case he was getting overlooked because his mother is asking for financial aid. Lorelei, his mom, wants to be involved in the school, too, like in the Parents’ Committee, and fundraising, and whatever you guys need. Digger, uh, her boss, Digger Brody, he suggested that he would be able to donate to school auctions, or really, he’d do anything that would help Joaquim get into the school.”
“I noticed that name. He would be willing to pay partial tuition, if necessary, according to the application.”
I hadn’t known that and my face must have shown it. Sylvie put her hand over her mouth. “I wasn’t supposed to say that. I would get in huge trouble…”
“No, Lorelei mentioned that to me,” I lied, very obviously. Sylvie still looked worried. “I already knew that Digger was willing to pay what he could,” I stated with more assurance. “You didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know.”
She relaxed. “Ok. I love this job, and I don’t want to jeopardize it. Or God forbid, to lose it. I’ve lost enough jobs in my life.”
I imagined having a job that I loved. A bakery right next door to a certain garage in Detroit. I snapped back to attention. “You’ve lost jobs? Really, you?”
She started laughing. “Oh, yes, maybe a few.” We spent the rest of our time before Sylvie had to go back to work laughing about what she had done after college.
“Let me know about going out with your mom,” she repeated as we said goodbye in the parking lot.
I nodded, thinking that I hadn’t really spoken to my mother all week. Maybe the week before, either. “I will,” I told Sylvie.
Then I drove home remembering back to when my mom really, really hadn’t been ok. I didn’t want Ian to have to go through that again. I didn’t want it for myself, either. It made me think more about my sister, Margot. And since I was alone in the car, and no one could get mad at me for remembering her, I let myself cry.
Chapter 6
That Friday morning had dawned with me awake before my alarm, lying in bed with a pit in my stomach. My father was coming home that afternoon. It had been a wonderful few days of freedom for me; the only contact I’d had with him was listening to Ian’s side of the conversations they had when our dad called each night to check in with him and keep in direct control over all the details in Ian’s life. What was his homework? When was his next test? Had he gotten the score report for the practice college entrance exam? What did the college counselor say—not the one that the school provided, but the extra expensive one our father had hired for Ian? What happened in practice? How much playing time would each benchwarmer get in the next game, therefore taking minutes away from the starters (i.e. Ian)? There were a million questions to answer.
But for me, it had been radio silence and pretty much absolute happiness, until that morning. I had stretched in bed. It was funny how much more awake certain parts of my body felt since I had…hung out with Digger at his house the day before. Alive and kind of, was it aware? Ready.
After I left the coffee shop and Sylvie and cried in the car, missing my sister, my thoughts returned to my father. The pit in my stomach from the morning also returned when I saw his car in his reserved space in the parking lot. He was already back. I’d thought I had at least an hour more of freedom.
I hurried up to the office I shared with Melina. The door was open and I started to sweat. Oh, no.
My father was sitting at Melina’s desk. Except now, her monitor was gone, her files were gone, her pictures, everything except the office phone. I swallowed hard and swung my bag off my shoulder. “Hi, Dad. Did you have a good trip?”
He just continued to look at me without answering. My hands were shaking as I sat down at my desk. I knocked a pile of papers onto the floor by mistake, bent to pick them up, and dropped some again. Why wasn’t he talking?
“Have you been wondering where Melina is?”
I jumped. “Yes. I called down to Human Resources but they didn’t have any information.”
“They weren’t giving you any information,” my father corrected me. “We’ve been looking into you, too.”
“I don’t know what that means.” My nails were digging into my palms.
“It means that the accounting department did a careful examination into Melina’s activities here at Lindhart.” He stopped and looked at me, and I forced myself to look back into his eyes without blinking or flinching. “Do you know what they discovered?”
I swallowed and shook my head.
“She was stealing, Rebecca,” he said softly. “She was padding invoices, expense reports, falsifying bills of lading. She was stealing from this company. From me.”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know that!” He couldn’t do anything to me in the office. There were too many people around.
My father continued to study me, eyes flicking back and forth over my face. “That was what I told them in Accounts.”
Hope lit a small flame inside me. I let myself smile at him a little. “Really? Thank you. Thank you for trusting me.”
He laughed. “Melina was very tricky. Very crafty. She skimmed money for years before we caught on. I don’t trust you,” my father said, shaking his head. “I knew you were too stupid to plan anything so sophisticated and that Melina would have been too clever to let someone like you be involved. Obviously, you were too dense to see what she was doing right in front of your face. How do you think that made me feel, to have people in my office telling me that either my daughter was stealing, or that she was too brainless to notice it was happening? I, again, was ashamed. Of you.”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek, hard. I would not cry. I would not cry. It made him angrier. I couldn’t explain that Melina never let me do anything, that she, like him, never trusted me with any real responsibilities. I couldn’t have known what she was doing.
No, probably I could have, but I was just too complacent and unquestioning. Stupid, once again. Stupid.
“I received an interesting memo this morning from Kelvin Gallagher in the warehouse. He had some excellent ideas about how to modernize this department.”
“It was from…Kelvin and I wrote…” I stammered out.
“I think he’s correct. There’s too much redundancy and obviously not enough oversight. Melina’s position will be eliminated. That means there’s no reason for you, either.”
Again, I felt my heart beat with hope. “I can find another job, somewhere else.”
“No, you cannot. Who would hire you? Employers have standards, Rebecca. Can you imagine yourself at a job interview? Tripping into the room then unable to answer basic questions? No, I’ll find something else for you. Something where I can more closely monitor your activities, which you obviously require. Last weekend, your friend Tracey let me know you were lying about your whereabouts, and today I’ve found that you’re leaving during the work day without letting anyone know.” He eyed the paper coffee cup I had carried in with me. It was pointless to try to explain.
