“Let’s go cook something. I’m hungry,” he suggested.
“Cook? You don’t want me to cook.”
“I’ll cook. What do you want?”
“Hmmm, I could eat something. I don’t know, surprise me,” I suggested, reaching up to kiss his lips. I loved him. No doubt about it. I was in love with a man in love with four women.
Chapter 15
Becker lifted me to the counter with a kiss. “Watch this. Britney has taught me some pretty mean tricks,” he smiled on my lips. I didn’t smile back. He had to go and mention Britney. Now the thought of the two of them flirting around the kitchen pissed me off.
“Don’t do that, Cassie. This is about you and me, that’s it,” he urged, kissing my nose. I smiled a weak, whatever, smile. Sure, Becker. Whatever you say.
Becker made it easy to forget anything existed in the world but him and me. I met my match with him. He could be sillier than me. I loved that about him. I loved the fact that he didn’t care how dumb he looked, making a mustache with sprouts of celery. He joked and teased with everything he touched.
“How about this one?” he teased, wrapping my hand around the thick carrot.
“Hmm. Cold. I might like that,” I kidded back. I could do that with Becker. I could say stuff like that to him and never feel embarrassed.
“Note to self. Cassie wants to try something cold,” he recorded, talking into the carrot. Next was a long, skinny celery stick. Becker spread my legs with his body and slid the stalk between my lips. I sucked it, taking it to the back of my throat all the way with his fingers.
“You’re very, very good at that,” he teased, slowly pulling it from my mouth. He kissed me and then bit the crunchy celery. “Will you leave me alone for five minutes?” he scolded, continuing his task.
I laughed, wondering what he was making. I wasn’t the one bothering him. It was the other way around.
I’m not sure what we ate, but it was delicious. Some sort of beef tips with sautéed vegetables. We sat on my sofa and ate off one plate. I wasn’t allowed to have my own fork. Becker fed me, usually kissing the corner of my mouth every time. He took turns, giving me a bite and then him. I tried to tell him I was full five times before he stopped shoving food in my mouth.
“Can I stay?” he asked, pulling my legs over his.
“Of course.” I smiled. “I have to work in the morning. Matt is picking me up here.”
“Call off.”
“I can’t.”
“You can. Do it. What are you going to do if you go to work?”
“Sit in a car all day, I’m sure.”
“Call off. We’ll go explore some condemned building or something. Text him now and tell him you’re not working.”
“I have to call my dad.”
“Call him. Let him tell Matt. Do it. Come on. See, your black cat named Snowball even wants you to,” he teased when Snowball meowed, giving his two cents.
“Are you making fun of my cat?”
“No. I’m making fun of his weirdo owner who named him Snowball. He probably thinks you’re being racist, you know.”
“You think so?”
“No! I don’t think so,” he laughed, pulling me to his chest. “I was joking. You’re very gullible.”
“Yeah, I will agree with that. My mom was the same way, or so I’m told. I guess I don’t really remember.”
“You don’t remember her or how she was?” Becker asked, moving my hair around my back.
“Hmmm, I remember her, some things anyway.”
“Call your dad,” Becker said when I yawned.
I sat up and hit number two, speed dialing him while snapping my thumbnail with my teeth anxiously. He wasn’t going to like it. He’d tell me to go buy some medicine and get to work.
“Everything okay?” he answered, forgetting that he was supposed to call and check on me.
“Not really. I’m sick. I’m not going to work tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Where are you so sick that you need to call off work?”
“I just don’t feel good.”
“You’ll feel better by morning. Go to bed, get some sleep.”
“Tell him no,” Becker whispered.
“I can’t,” I mouthed back.
“Do it.”
I could hear the confusion in my dad’s voice. “Cass? Is someone there with you?”
“Yeah, Justine. She brought me medicine. I’m not working tomorrow, Dad.”
“Matt’s not going to be very happy, you know. You can call and tell him. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
I took a deep breath and turned to Becker. “I just said no to my father. I’m not sure if I’ve ever done that before.”
“Why?”
“Why what?” I asked, being pulled by my hand toward my beautiful new bedroom.
Becker pulled the covers back and undressed. I crawled in beside him, trying not to let my eyes wonder to his relaxed penis. “Why have you not ever told your dad no. And stop looking at my penis. You’re giving me a complex.”
“I don’t tell him no because he is Luke McClelland, and you should have a complex. You have a rather large tool.”
Becker laughed and pulled me close to his chest. My hand planted on his strong pecs and he kissed my forehead. “I’m going to teach you how to be your own person.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, looking up.
“You know what it means. You forgot to call your coworker.”
“Oh, yeah,” I remembered, reaching for my phone. I sent him a short, I’m sick, not working, text. I wasn’t calling him. Becker’s hand running along my bare ass didn’t go unnoticed while I waited for the immediate response.
Matt – You can work. I’ll buy you a bottle of medicine. We’re driving to Plainfield tomorrow to find a truck.
“Tell him no,” Becker warned when I turned to look at him. I wasn’t good at this.
Cass – I’m sick. I’m not working. Goodnight.
Matt – You can sit in a car sick. I’ll see you at 8:30 am.
Looking to Becker, he helped again. “Don’t answer. We’ll be gone by then.”
“Where are we going?”
“Where do you want to go? Tell me about your job? Why do you do something you hate?”
I dropped my head to my pillow, still laying on my stomach, and sighed. “My dad wanted me to,” I answered honestly.
“What happened to your mom?”
“You already know that. You had me investigated,” I reminded him.
“Yes. I know she was murdered, but why? Did they ever catch the guy?”
“No. Everyone they suspected came up with nothing. I know my mother’s police reports like the back of my hand. My dad made sure of it.”
“How old were you?”
“Six and three-quarters,” I sadly replied.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Becker advised, kissing my back. There was something magical about this man. A simple, comforting kiss shouldn’t feel so right.
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”
“Have you ever talked to someone?”
Rolling to my back, I felt his hand graze my nipple. “Yes. Lots and lots of times. I’ve talked about it so much, I’m not sure what’s real anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“My dad asked me over and over, and over, and over for months after it happened.”
“You were a little girl,” he stated the obvious.
“Yeah, well, he didn’t care about that. He wanted me to give him something, anything, some sort of clue he could use to find her killer.”
Becker sat up, alarmed. “Cassie, please tell me you weren’t there.”
Reaching for his hand, I smiled weakly. “I was there. I saw it happen.”
“Oh my god, Cass. That’s horrible. I’m not sure I could survive something like that. You’re stronger than I pegged you to be.”
“Gee,
thanks. I think.”
“You didn’t see the person?”
“No. I was sitting on the vanity bench. My mom had just painted our toes and I was told not to move and to keep blowing. I tended to forget about the wet paint here and there,” I explained.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I’m okay, if you want to hear it, that is. I haven’t talked about it in years, not since my last therapist when I was around seventeen. That’s when I put my foot down and refused to go anymore.”
“Of course, I want to hear it. You’ve been doing therapy since the age of six?”
“Pretty much. You’d be proud of me. I told my dad no.” Taking a deep breath, I thought about all the shrinks I’d seen over the years and explained to Becker my pathetic life. “I had just graduated high school when we found out the cancer was back. I was upset about my grandmother, not my mother that had been shot twelve years before. I was going to lose my grandma now, too. She wasn’t fighting it again. The doctor told her it was aggressive and they were going to have to hit it hard. She refused the treatment. She didn’t even try.
“I was crying in my room when my dad came in. That’s the first time in my life I’d ever stood up to him.”
“Why?”
I shrugged both shoulders. “I don’t know. He’s a very intimidating man. I was so little when my mom died. He sheltered me to the point of suffocation, took me out of public school, and hired a tutor to come to the office to teach me.”
“I’m sorry, keep going,” he said, kissing my eyelid.
Nobody had ever kissed my eyelid, it was sweet. I smiled and continued. “Which part?”
“The part where you were crying in your room.”
“Oh, yeah. He came in and sat at the foot of my bed.”
“I miss her, too, Cassandra,” he softly spoke, smashing the mattress into the springs from his large body. I’m not sure why I remember that part. I just do.
I sat up on the bed and looked at him in disbelief. “Grandma Belle is going to die. This isn’t about my mother.”
“Let’s get you some help. I’ll call that new clinic over on Main.”
“Are you serious? I’m not going to any more stupid doctors. I’m moving in with my grandma. I’m going to take care of her. She’s going to need me.”
“Oh no. You’re not putting that on your plate, not after what you’ve already been through. You are not sitting around and watching your grandmother die for god knows how long. Cancer can take years.”
“She doesn’t have years,” I assured him.
“You don’t know that. You’re almost finished with school. I want you to go right into getting your criminal justice degree.”
I felt Becker tighten his hold around me. I could hear the distress in my own voice. I hated that time of my life. I hated all the time of my life, up until now anyway. I was in so much trouble. I’d never get out of this alive, or at least uninjured, and I had a pretty good feeling it was going to hurt.
“So you moved in here and took care of your grandmother?” he asked.
“Yeah. She didn’t want me to. She didn’t want me to see her like that. She, too, thought I’d been through enough, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I wanted her to be with someone who loved her as much as I did when she left here.”
“How long?”
I smiled at the way he asked. He was trying to be gentle about it. “Not even six months.”
“That must have been tough.”
“Yeah, what about you? You ever lost someone close?” I asked, looking up at him. He smiled and kissed the tip of my nose.
“Yeah, a brother.”
“Your brother died?” That was almost as bad as a mother.
“Yeah, he was only nine. I was seven.”
“What was his name?”
Becker narrowed his eyes and studied me.
“What?”
“I just told you my brother died at the age of nine, and you want to know his name? Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“You can tell me if you want to. I just didn’t want you to feel sad. I wanted you to think of a good memory.”
Becker smiled. “Without the gruesome details, he died on a farm tractor, doing something he was too young to be doing.”
“Beck?”
“Hmmm?”
“What was his name?”
“Thatcher. You’re making me fall in love with you,” he softly spoke and touched my bottom lip with his finger. I kissed it, watching the corner of his lip curl.
“I was six and three-quarters. I was sitting on the vanity bowing my toenails. That’s what my mom told me to do. I was to sit there and blow my toenails until they were dry enough to not come off on something else. You see that blanket over there? That was always folded at the end of my parent’s bed. There’s a bright pink stain on it from me climbing up the foot of the bed one day with sticky toes. There’s one on the couch, too,” I explained that day for whatever reason.
“Cassie?”
“I was kicking my feet back and forth, below the bench. I blew my toes every time I straightened my legs and kicked the supports with my heels. My mom was sitting on the edge of the bed, talking like she always did. I remember she asked me what we should make Daddy for supper, I remember she told me Grandma Belle bought some flowers and wanted me to help her plant them. I asked her if Justine would be there.”
“Cass, stop.”
“I remember when she looked up from painting her toes to tell me to stop kicking the legs. Just blow, she said. That’s when it happened. It wasn’t a loud bang at all, not like on TV. It was more like a ptew. I didn’t see who was at the door. I couldn’t from where I was sitting. They left. They ran and I sat there, staring at my mother’s limp body on the floor. Do you know for how long, Beck?”
“Cass, stop.”
“No,” I said, sitting up. I knew what I was doing. That’s why I didn’t stop. I wanted to think about my mother’s bloody face, not how Becker was falling in love with me. “Four hours, Becker. I blew my pink toes for four straight hours. I didn’t even call 9-1-1. I sat there, swinging my legs and blowing my toes, thumping the wood with my heels. They said it wasn’t my fault. That I was in shock. My dad didn’t think so. My dad still blames me. Had we gotten her to the hospital sooner, she would have had a better chance. I didn’t go see her. I couldn’t. I was too afraid of her. The nurses had to calm my father down and pull me away when he squeezed my arms and demanded that I go talk to her. She’ll die if you don’t go talk to her. He said that, Becker. She’ll die if you don’t talk to her. Can you believe that?”
“Okay. Okay, Cass. I get it. Stop now. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to push you over the edge. I’m sorry,” Becker soothingly spoke in my hair. I hadn’t even noticed I started crying. When did that happen? I didn’t have tear ducts. They stopped working when I was six. Six and three-quarters.
“You can’t love me, Becker. I can’t love you. We have to stop this,” I tried, convincing myself more so than him.
Becker pulled me close to his warm body. I took solace in his arms, a comfort I’d never felt before.
“Shhh, what’s her name?”
Chapter 16
I spent the entire next day with Becker, and the next, and the next. Some evenings we went to his estate and ate supper with the girls, others he came to my house. Becker was right. Christina was an amazing cook. I never wanted to eat another frozen pizza as long as I lived. Her restaurant was going to do amazing.
I wondered why none of them was jealous over the time that Becker was spending with me and not them, but then chalked it up as the dating process. He probably had to do that with all of them. None of them seemed to care that I was getting most of his attention, until Friday night. Another off the wall, bad, bad, bad thing happened. Mason picked Justine and me up from my house. I saw it as soon as he looked at her. The way her eyes sparkled and her face lit up was obvious, and not just to me.
I didn’t ask her to go
. I simply told her that I was going to a cookout at Becker’s when she asked me to go do something. She invited herself. She was my best friend after all, and needed to scope out what was going on in my life, make sure I was okay. Of course, Becker thought it was a splendid idea.
“Hi, Mason. This is my friend Justine. Where’s Beck? I thought he was coming,” I asked, introducing Justine.
“Hello, Justine. Pleasure to meet you,” Mason said with a ridiculous smile plastered across his face.
I rolled my eyes. “Becker?” I asked again.
“Oh, he ran to the store to pick up a few thing. I’m supposed to tell you girls to bring your bathing suits.”
“That’s okay. I’m not getting in,” I assured him. No way. These legs haven’t seen enough sun for that. I wasn’t prancing around in a bikini with the other beautiful girls. Talk about a fish out of water. I did awkward enough without adding to it.
Justine and I rode the backseat. Mason didn’t really talk to me because he was too busy looking right at Justine through the rearview mirror. They talked about her job, and doing pedicures and cutting hair and before we made it to Becker’s estate, they were setting up a date for his pro-bono haircut and nail donation.
Justine – He’s beautiful and funny. Why didn’t you tell me he looked like this?
Cass – And he’s married to two other women….
Justine – Becker is married to three and you’re still seeing him.
Cass – No I’m not. This is just a fun barbeque. Becker and I are never going to be like that. He knows that.
Justine – Oh, so he’s just cheating on the other three with you? I don’t think it works like that.