The Space Between Us Read online

  Meredith looked at me, and though her lips were still fused to that hapless bachelorette, I saw the curve of a smile. She broke the kiss abruptly, her lips still wet from it. The future bride stumbled back, looking stunned, her mouth slack, eyes glazed. Her nipples were hard, too, poking at the front of her shirt. Her friends surrounded her in the next minute, closing her in, reaching to support her because it looked as if she might just keel over.

  We were very popular after that.

  Not with the bridal parties—they gave us a wide berth. But the men who’d been watching that display? Oh, they couldn’t get enough. They all wanted Meredith, of course, but I got the overflow. Too bad I wasn’t interested in dancing with any of those guys.

  I spotted the bride whose world Meredith had rocked. She looked pretty drunk, dancing with her hands up, twirling around and around. Someone had given her a handful of blinking cock necklaces, and it looked as if she’d finally had all her candy bitten off. I didn’t think she was going to last much longer, and for her sake I hoped her wedding wasn’t for a few days at least, because she looked pretty fucking rough. She also couldn’t stop staring at Meredith.

  I knew how she felt.

  Here’s the worst thing about crushes you know are unrequited. You’d think it would be better when you know that the chief reason your crush isn’t interested in you “that way” is because their door just doesn’t open in your direction. It should be easier to deal with that burning, that ache, when you know it’s not your fault, but the simple setup of nature or nurture or whatever it is that turns us into what we are.

  Let me tell you, though, it isn’t.

  It had never bothered me to know Meredith was married. I’d never been jealous of her husband, that nameless, faceless man who’d put a ring on her finger and never seemed to care where she went or with whom. I wasn’t jealous of the men she was flirting and dancing with, the ones buying her drinks. But I wanted to reach across the room and smack that candy necklace slut right across her drunken face.

  “I need to go,” I told Meredith, when the man behind me had grabbed my ass one too many times.

  “What?” she cried, too caught up in being freaked by not one, but two dudes in striped shirts, and clouded in a miasma of cologne.

  “I gotta go!” I shouted, and bumped the ass bandit off me with a hip. He tossed up his hands and backed away when I glared. “I’m wiped out!”

  “N-o-o-o!” Meredith abandoned her admirers and came after me to take both my hands. “Tessie, it’s early!”

  My given name’s bad enough. Being called Tessie is like having a sliver of bamboo inserted oh-so-gently under the fingernail. I grimaced and kept backing up, bumping into whoever got in my way, and not caring. Suddenly the room was too hot, the extra beer had settled none too happily in my gut, and I wanted to dive into a cold shower and cry my eyes out.

  On the street, I took in gulps of chilly air as gooseflesh humped up on my arms—the only humping I was likely to get tonight—and my nipples peaked in sympathy. Meredith came out right behind me. She linked her arm though mine.

  “Hey, girl, hey.” Her voice was too loud even for the street full of traffic and people. She softened it. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Just tired, that’s all.” It wasn’t a lie, but I couldn’t look her in the eye when I said it.

  Meredith pulled me a little closer. That was the problem with her. She was a hugger, a social kisser. She thought nothing of squeezing and smooching and smoothing. I’d taken it as part of her personality, but just now it was too much.

  “I’m starving!” she declared. “Come to Tom’s Diner with me first. Let’s get eggs. And bacon. And toast. C’mo-o-on, Tesla. You know you wanna.”

  She gave me that smile that slayed everyone, including me. “Meredith…”

  She sidled closer to tuck her arm through mine, our hips touching. In her four-inch pumps she was a good few inches taller than me, but she bent to press her chin into my shoulder. “Please? Please, please…?”

  I wasn’t hungry, and though normally it wouldn’t have mattered, I shook my head anyway. “Can’t. Really. I’m about to fall over. My feet hurt.”

  She looked at my shoes. “You can sit. Take your shoes off.”

  In most of my life, I’m not pliable the way I was for her. It wasn’t just me—I’d seen her work her magic on lots of people. Knowing I wasn’t special made it worse, not better, but what could I say?

  “Nah. Really. I need to get home. It’s late,” I pointed out, though certainly we’d each been out later than this before. “And I have stuff to do tomorrow before work.”

  She nodded, but reluctantly. I wondered, not for the first time, how often Meredith didn’t get her way. She held out her arms for a hug I could think of no graceful way to decline, but instead of pressing against me and letting go, Meredith lingered.

  I loved the way she smelled. Loved the whisper of her breath against my cheek and the low, slow seduction of her chuckle. I tried to let her go, but my arms closed naturally around her waist, my hands flat on the bony parts of her shoulder blades poking up beneath the silky fabric of her top. I closed my eyes, pathetic, wanting something I knew I wouldn’t get.

  “Tesla, Tesla,” Meredith murmured into my ear. “There’s something I want you to do for me.”

  It shows you what sorts of scenes go on in downtown Harrisburg that nobody even gave us a second glance. Two women embracing on the sidewalk, both dressed to impress. I guess the two guys shoving each other across the street or the girl who tripped and went down, too drunk to get back up even when her friends tugged her by the arms, were more exciting to watch. Meredith hugged me, and she whispered in my ear, and I thought I’d like to stay like that for a very long time.

  “What’s that?”

  She turned her head slightly, her lips brushing my earlobe and sending sparkling shimmers of pleasure all through me. “I’m afraid to ask you.”

  My heart thumped as I tried to breathe. She’d kissed that girl on the dance floor and made it about power, not seduction, but that didn’t stop me from imagining what it would be like for Meredith to kiss me, instead. I thought of it every time I saw her. I turned my head, too.

  “Just ask me,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t ask. Hoping she’d just…do.

  She moved against me, then pulled away enough to look into my face. My lips parted, waiting. My hands slid to her hips.

  Meredith smiled, and once again I was lost in the curve of that mouth. The flash of her eyes. She leaned in, and so did I. Waiting.

  “I want you to fuck my husband,” Meredith said.

  Chapter 11

  “You took a cab here, right? Let me drive you home.” Meredith ran her hand down my arm, then clutched lightly but briefly at my wrist. “Let’s talk about this. Okay?”

  She seemed nervous as she pulled out of the parking garage, tapping the steering wheel too rapidly to match the beat of the music. She had her iPod hooked up, and I lifted it to see what she was playing. A song I didn’t know, something slow and syrupy. It reminded me of slow dancing and the heavy scent of flowers, tiny twinkling white lights strung through mosquito netting. That sort of thing. Sexy music.

  I wondered if she’d picked it on purpose or if it was coincidence. When the next song came on, something much the same, I figured she’d made a playlist. I put the iPod back.

  In the light from the dashboard, Meredith’s eyes flashed. She kept them on the road, after giving me the quickest of glances. “I need directions.”

  “Across the Market Street Bridge to Nineteenth Street, near the library. I’ll show you.”

  She sighed. Her fingers rap-a-tapped. We rode in silence except for when I gave her directions, until she pulled up in front of my house. When she turned off the car, the music didn’t stop but the dash went dim. We sat in the dark and listened to a woman sing about longing.

  I said nothing.

  When the song ended, Meredith pushed the button to turn off
the stereo. The silence was louder than the music had been. So was the sound of her breathing. She turned to face me, and her perfume wafted toward me in the close space.

  “Charlie and I have been talking about this for a while, but it’s hard, you know. To find someone.”

  “I bet it’s not so hard.”

  Her laugh sounded nervous, too. I found the Meredith who didn’t know what to do with herself charming and sweet and a little disconcerting. “Not if you don’t have standards.”

  “I’m glad to know I meet your standards,” I said in a low voice.

  “But you don’t want to do it?”

  “I haven’t even met him, Meredith.”

  “You could meet him first. Of course.” She leaned a little closer, into the small bit of light shining from the streetlight. She paused, smiled. “You haven’t said no.”

  I hadn’t decided to say no. “I want to know why.”

  “Why you?”

  “Why you want another woman to fuck your husband, first of all.”

  “Because I think he’d like it,” she said.

  “What about you?”

  She glanced at me with a tilt of her head and an assessing look. “I want to watch him with another woman. It’s a fantasy, okay? Can you understand that?”

  “Sure. Of course.” Probably better than she could’ve known. “You’re not worried?”

  “About what?”

  “That it’ll cause problems. A lot of people can’t handle watching someone they love with someone else. They think they can, but they can’t.”

  “We’ve talked about it. I’ll be fine.” She sounded confident again, not nervous, and the smile had crept back to her mouth. “I want to watch him go down on a woman and make her come. I think it would be hot.”

  My throat went a little dry. “Okay, then. So why me?”

  “Because you’re sexy as hell. Because I think you’d be up for it, without making it too weird.”

  “Because I’m wild.”

  “Because you know what you want, and you take it, Tesla.”

  “You’ve talked a lot about it, I guess. With Charlie?” I didn’t know how to feel about that. Flattered? Maybe wary. More than a little turned on.

  Meredith’s husband fucked her. And fucking him, well, that might be as close as I could ever get to knowing what she tasted like. But still I couldn’t quite manage to outright agree.

  “And now I’m talking about it with you.” She leaned even closer, and the waft of her scent drifted across my face, getting inside me with every breath. “Tell me you’re not freaked out about this, Tesla.”

  It took a little more than a proposition to freak me out, of course, but it touched me that Meredith was worried. “I’m not freaked. Just surprised, that’s all. And flattered, I guess.”

  Her smile got a little bigger. She said nothing, and the silence grew in the space between us until I felt compelled to break it with something witty or clever, if only I could think of something to say. There was nothing I could give her except a smile in return, but Meredith didn’t seem to mind.

  “It would be fun,” she said. “I promise.”

  I’d heard that before.

  Chapter 12

  “It’ll be fun,” Chance told me. “I promise.”

  In my short experience with the brothers Murphy the promise of fun could be counted on if you considered illicit sex and sneaking around fun, which I guess I did at the time. Chance’s promises, on the other hand, weren’t quite as reliable. It wasn’t so much that he was deliberately false, just that he was easily distracted. He was trying to get me to agree to go to the Christmas dance with him.

  Just him.

  Chase would be going with Becka Miller. She was on the girls’ basketball team, was a good six inches taller than me and wore her bland, brown hair cropped short in a style that was in no way half as cute as a pixie cut. I’d never said more than a couple of words to her and frankly, that was the way I wanted to keep it. Becka Miller was a jock who could pound me into next week if she wanted to, and since her temper was as ugly as her haircut, I wasn’t going to risk giving her a reason to want to.

  Also, really, the Christmas dance? I couldn’t have thought of anything I wanted to do less than put on a semiformal dress and buy a dead flower to stick on the front of his sport jacket, then go to dinner at the IHOP and dance to music that would surely suck while couples who were “in love” gyrated all around us.

  Not with Chance Murphy, anyway.

  To my surprise, because he wasn’t the sort of guy I’d ever thought would care about dumb shit like that, Vic told me I should go. He was at the stove, mixing up some instant stuffing to go with the pork chops we were having for dinner. I’d made up some of those instant biscuits that come in a tube, and Cap was off somewhere doing Cap stuff, like lifting weights or possibly deconstructing string theory, who the hell knew with him. We had a little, unconventional family, but even so, I wasn’t expecting Vic to offer me paternal advice.

  “You might have fun,” he said.

  “That’s what Chance said.” I put out the butter, some forks and plates.

  Vic turned, stirring the stuffing with a wooden spoon that probably harbored an army of bacteria. “And you don’t believe him?”

  Of course, I hadn’t told Vic about what was really going on before and after the tutoring sessions, and all the times I told him I was going to tutor them and didn’t even crack a book. So now I carefully didn’t look at him as I finished setting the table. “Not sure.”

  “Tesla,” Vic said, but stopped.

  I still didn’t look at him. I pretended I didn’t know he was staring at me as I rummaged in the fridge for some salad and drinks. But he was still staring when I finally had to close the door and turn around.

  “It might be good for you,” Vic said.

  I greeted that with a curled lip. “What—the Christmas dance? Are you kidding me? Really?”

  “Going out with a guy, having a good time. Doing something…normal.”

  The bottle of ranch dressing clattered on the table as I finally faced him. “I’m not normal, Vic. Me and Cap, not normal. You, not normal.” I gestured around the kitchen. “None of this is normal. And you’re really the only one who seems to have a problem with it.”

  His face got hard then, and while most of the time Vic’s gaze was guileless, now it was scary fierce. He slammed the pot of stuffing on the table hard enough to make the plates jump. I jumped, too.

  “What, that’s a shitty thing for me to want? That you and Cap should have a normal life, after—”

  “Nothing bad happened to me there!” I shouted.

  Vic had crossed the small kitchen to me faster than a blink, and gripped my upper arm hard enough to bruise. “No, but it could have!”

  He was hurting me, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing it so he could feel guilty about it later. Caught flat-footed, I couldn’t get close enough to Vic to look in his eyes and with the table behind me, I couldn’t back up. All I could do was wait for him to realize what he was doing.

  With a muttered curse, Vic dropped my arm and backed away. First he scraped a hand over his face. Then he put his hands on his hips, head hanging, shoulders hunched. A vast and painful silence filled the space between us. I hadn’t wanted to cry when he grabbed my arm and hurt me, but I had to swipe away tears now.

  “It wouldn’t have been your fault if it did, Vic. Nothing that happened there was your fault.” Even at eighteen, I knew that it didn’t matter. Vic blamed himself, maybe because it was easier to feel guilty for failing rather than admitting that no matter what he’d done, he’d have been unable to succeed.

  “It could have,” Vic said again in a lower, broken voice.

  “But it didn’t.” I didn’t reach to touch him. “I’m okay. Cap’s okay. And that is because of you, Vic.”

  “You should go to that dance with that boy.” Vic went back to the oven to pull out the pan of pork chops, whi
ch he put on the table along with the small pot of green beans from the stovetop. “Get a pretty dress, take your pictures. Have fun with friends your own age.”

  That was the key, right there. Friends my own age. I’d gotten over our summer fling, but Vic had not—which didn’t mean he was still hung up on me, or yearned for me, or anything like that. In fact, I’d have been more likely to suggest a renewal of our sexual relationship than Vic, who seemed uncomfortable remembering it. And certainly never spoke of it.

  “What’s going on? Dinner ready?” That was Cap, back from wherever he’d been. He had dirt on the front of his shirt and grass stains on his knees. The rest of his jeans were soaked.

  “What the hell were you doing?” I asked.

  “Flag football,” he said.

  “In the snow?” I rolled my eyes.

  At sixteen Cap had finally started growing into the promise of his huge feet and hands. He ate constantly, slept like the dead and took showers so long the rest of us were left with icy water. He scored off the charts on standardized tests, but got solid Cs in school, not because he didn’t understand the material but because he couldn’t seem to remember to turn in his homework.

  Now he gave me a blank look. “Yeah?”

  “Wash your hands, sit down and eat.” Vic let his eyes skate over me. “You, too.”

  We did eat, Cap putting away more than Vic and me combined. After, we told Cap he had to do the dishes since we’d made the meal. Vic headed off to the den to watch television. I had homework, but instead of going upstairs to my room to do it, I followed him.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” I said from the doorway.

  He’d settled into his recliner, feet up, beer in one hand. He didn’t even turn to look at me. “What’s that?”

  “I’ll go with Chance, if you go out with Elaine.”

  Vic half turned his head. “Who?”

  “Elaine,” I said patiently, knowing he knew exactly who I meant. “Red Ford Probe, comes in for an oil change every couple of months whether the car needs it or not.”