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And then it’s just breath. Noise. It’s just moaning, grunting.
It’s knowing what she’s doing, picturing her doing it, her tits, her pussy, her eyes closed and her mouth open and the way her face looks when I make her come.
It’s my hand working hard and fast, her fingers flying, this thread of connection between us, nothing real about it, nothing true, nothing right, but here it is, anyway. Nothing I can do about it. Nothing I want to do but this, but Caroline. Nothing.
She sucks in a breath, says, “Now,” and I go with her with a grunt and a hot splash on my hand and a little bit on the couch, which, fuck, I’m going to have to clean that up, but I can’t even care. She’s trying hard not to make noise, and even so I can hear her, I can hear the not-noise she’s making, and it’s fucking glorious.
I come apart, a little bit. Lean back, close my eyes, listen to her. I go loose, unhinged, and break into pieces.
But I feel, afterward, like maybe some part of me got put back together.
It’s late. I walk out to the greenhouse, dodging dog shit in the backyard and wishing I’d turned on the back porch light.
I step in something too soft. “Fuck. ”
I try scraping off my boot in the grass, but it’s no use. The smell is in my nose now, my lip curling. I have to find a stick, try picking brown crap out of the treads, but that doesn’t work, either, and I end up turning on the garden hose, covering the cold copper fitting with my thumb, blasting the sole of my boot and sending flecks of shit shooting all over the place.
By the time I’ve got the boot cleaned off, my pants are sticking to my shins. I’m cold and pissed, disgusted with everything.
I’m going back to school in a week, and my whole life has turned into a minefield of crap.
When I get to the greenhouse and open the door, I don’t see Bo right away. I take a breath, trying to find a calm spot to do this from. It’s not his fault I stepped in dog shit. Not his fault I’ve been waiting to talk to him for days and there’s never a right time.
He’s working. Mom’s around. Frankie needs help with her homework.
Bo has been pushing away from the kitchen table and disappearing for hours at a time, and I’ve always thought of the greenhouse as his domain, where he goes to be alone, not to be pestered by his girlfriend’s kid, who’s sleeping on his couch, eating his food, getting in the way.
But I have to talk to him, because I’m leaving soon. Nobody else will tell me.
There’s music playing in the back. I follow it, follow the light, and find Bo just leaning there, blowing cigarette smoke out a broken pane of glass into the night.
I recognize the song. Metallica. He’s into all those old metal bands, but Mom can’t stand the stuff.
The greenhouse is a rusted-out dump, a lot of the glass broken. Bo loves it. He likes growing things—not just weed, which he only plants back in the woods, but vegetables, herbs, all kinds of shit. He talks about finding a freeze-drier, storing up food against the collapse of civilization, but he mostly ends up putting bushel baskets of tomatoes and corn and peppers out by the road with a sign that says: Help yourself.
Bo is short, barrel-chested, with a shaved head and grizzled chest hair you can usually see because he goes around shirtless or half unbuttoned. In his prison uniform—belt weighed down with his radio, his phone, a nightstick, his Beretta—he looks like a badass.
He is a badass. He’s got the scars to prove it. I saw him get into a fight once at a bar. He destroyed the dude who picked the fight. Just destroyed him.
It’s partly because of Bo that I’m at Putnam instead of the community college. Because I trust him to keep his job, take care of Mom, watch out for Frankie, and not morph into a pervert or an asshole when I st
op paying attention.
He loves them. Both of them.
I’ve never been completely sure Mom loves him back. He had to ask her out a bunch of times before she said yes. Had to court her for a few months before she started sleeping over at his place. She likes being with him, likes his house, but I don’t think she likes the idea of being Bo’s old lady for the rest of her life.
I think she’s addicted to the way my dad makes her feel. That exciting, edgy, fucked-up rush she can only get from him.
“I fell in love with him the second I met him,” she told me once. “I was fifteen, and he drove into town on that motorcycle, and the world stopped spinning. ”
Bo can’t compare with that. Nothing can.
I know, because I felt that way the first time I saw Caroline, and I still do. If there’s some way to turn it off, I haven’t found it yet.
Bo taps ash on a jagged glass edge, dropping it into the weeds on the other side of the window.
“What happened with the cops?” he asks.
