Random Acts of Love (Random #5) (4 page)

And then—I exploded, the dark undertones of some voice I only accessed in climax making my throat raw and ripe, our kiss folding into itself as passion overwhelmed conscious movement, bodies melding together into pure nerve and lust and pleasure. 

His fingers, firm on my hips, relented, letting me out of the grip of orgasmic madness, hands going soft and gentle, the moment spent. All that was left was the reconnection as we recalibrated, sliding him out of me and settling in under his arm and the covers to find my inner equilibrium. Trevor’s heart thumped hard and steady in his chest, my breathing soon matching it as if I were made for him.

“You sore?” he asked as I cuddled against his chest. 

Shaking my head, my hair ground into his pecs, making a husking sound. “Not really. Probably in half an hour.” His low chuckle made me settle in and take a deep breath. The scent of our sex was like a fresh morning breeze.

It was missing a third note, the aroma of Joe and his intensity, dark and alluring. I could have sex with Trevor any time. How ironic that here I was, cuddled in Trevor’s arms while Joe was...gone. Off with Mommy.

Stop it
, I chided myself, knowing that the negativity had to stop. A woman I’d never met (when would we meet? Ah, that one plagued me on long, dark nights alone...) controlled so much of my inner life, my state of being pulled to and fro by puppet strings attached to Joe. I wasn’t in the habit of being someone’s marionette, and I didn’t much like not being able to confront my master by proxy.

Some day.

Some fucking day.

The elusive Mrs. Ross would get an earful, and that’s exactly why Joe didn’t want us to meet. I took that thought in and chewed it around a bit, knowing it was bullshit. Joe didn’t hold back from introducing us because he thought I would explode on his mom.

I knew better.

C
HAPTER 2

Darla

The phone call came out of nowhere two days later.

I mean
nowhere
. It was like being hit in the head by a chunk of concrete some asshole kids threw off an overpass at your car because they were bored and had nothing better to do than to huff glue they bought on sale at Home Depot and do stupid shit like endanger other people.

My phone buzzed in my back pocket like it did any other time I got a call. There really ought to be a special ring tone for life-altering events, you know? Like a Darth Vader ring tone. Or something ominous. A voice that says, “YOU DON’T WANT TO ANSWER THAT, DUMBSHIT!”

But no. I hit “Talk” like any other normal phone call and, naive and completely clueless, I said, “Hi Mama.”

She was breathless. “Darla! Darla, I—”

“Hang up, Mama,” I said in a low, calm voice.

“What? Why on earth? We just started talking.” Her voice was choked and straining.

“Because I’ll call 911 for you, and the ambulance will come,” I said in a soothing voice. She’d caught me at my apartment and no one was here. No landline, either. Fuckall if a plastic phone with a cord wouldn’t come in handy now, but I couldn’t worry about that. I needed to hang up on my Mama and be terrified as I called 911 in Ohio and get her some help for her obviously fatal distress.

Fucking
now
.

“You sound like you’re having a heart attack,” I added. “Get off the God-damned phone, Mama, so I can call.” Anger and outrage and pure, blinding fear built up in me like a giant zit ready to go Vesuvius on me.

“Are you out of your God-damned fucking mind, Darla Jo Jennings?” My mother’s voice shifted in that moment from sounding like she was in deep distress to sounding like
I
was in deep shit.

“What?” All these hormones and adrenaline coursed through me like soldiers getting the wrong orders. “What, Mama? I—”

“I call you to deliver the happiest news of my life in twenty fucking years and you cut me off and threaten to hang up on me so you can call me an ambulance, like I’m sick and not delivering the news to my one and only beloved daughter—who, by the way,
abandoned
me nearly two years ago—that I’m getting married and all you can do is act like I’m some feeble-bodied soul sucker who needs to be carted off to the...” 

Mama’s voice washed over me like a blanket of confusion, warm and wet and a little bit like a teen boy jizzing for the first time. It felt good and mystifying, yet shameful and a little sticky.

“MAMA!” I called into my glass-covered case of buzzing misery. “What the fuck are you blathering on about? Married? Did you have a stroke? Because I ain’t seen you near a man other than Uncle Mike or old Doc Oglethorpe, and I know you ain’t fucking either of them. Doc Oglethrope likes his women with a size six foot.”

Don’t ask me how I know that. Let’s just say I was twenty-one and me and Jane opened online dating profiles on a fetish site one night after drinking too much strawberry wine and we learned a little too much about the dating habits of a bunch of people in Peters, Ohio. Can’t let a man put a speculum in you for your yearly pap after finding out he has dreams of sticking a Tom Ford deep inside you and fucking the shoe’s insole.

Anyhow.

“Darla,” she said, a hiss coming out after her words. Great. That meant she was smoking again. Her voice sounded like she’d turned into a wolf, like in one of the romance novels I was reading. “I did not call you to talk about Wilbur Oglethorpe and how he likes to fuck shoes. I did not call you because I’m clutching my chest and too stupid to call 911 on my own but call my daughter six hundred miles away. I did not call you to be treated like I’m too stupid to live.” Her voice hitched, like she shifted from Gear 1—Angry to Gear 2—Guilt.

“I called to tell you I’m getting married.”

Now a blanket of guilt stretched over
me
.

“Married?” I squeaked.

“Yes,” she said in a disgusted, but relieved voice. As if I had finally gotten a punchline that she’d had to explain so many times the joke wasn’t funny anymore.

“To a man?”

“No. To a fucking tree.”

“Mama, you been on the internet a lot, right? Doing your sweepstakes.”

“What the hell do sweepstakes have to do with getting married?” she said with a laugh and a draw of her breath. Yep. Smoking again. “It ain’t like I won me a man in a contest. I’d rather have cash than that.”

“Then...where? Is this some email order bride thing? You being sold off to some work crew in the oil fields of North Dakota?”

Deadly silence. All the hairs on the back of my neck and upper arms started to stand on end. Oh, shit. I’d insulted her, hadn’t I? See, Mama and I don’t have conversations like this. Ever. Mama had never brought a man home. Never talked about dating. My daddy died in a car crash when I was four years old, and while I have vague memories of him, I don’t have a sense of Mama with him. Or Mama as a sexual being.

Mama as half of a couple.

My stomach lurched.

“You think the only way I can get myself a man is to be sold off?”

Fuck.

“No! No, that’s not what I meant at all.”

“Think about what you just said to me.”

Ice water filled my skin.
Think about what you just said to me
. That’s the phrase Mama always used when I was little when I’d said something so wrong I was about to get spanked. A flash of panic made me turn my ass so it was up against a wall where it couldn’t get a smack. Muscle memory. Mama loved me dearly but she was never above giving me a good whooping on the butt when I done wrong.

At the age of twenty-four I could still do wrong, apparently.

See what I mean about that phone call thing? You just never know when your day will go from glowing sunshine to geysers of shit.

“Who is he, Mama?” I asked in a tiny voice, so small you could stick me in your pocket.

“Wilbur Oglethorpe.”

I froze. Mama would have to have a vagina that felt like a shoe on the inside for that man to—

Laughter. Peals of hacking laughter greeted me as mama coughed and laughed, choked and brayed.

“Gotcha!” she said. “As if I’d marry a seventy-five year old man who talked openly at church coffee hour about all the ways you can get Viagra into your bloodstream faster. Pervert.”

I snorted, but a defensive fear hit me. Hey, Dr. Oglethorpe had his kink. I have mine. If I told Mama the truth about me and Trevor and Joe, would she call me a—

Pervert?

“How can you get Viagra into your bloodstream faster, Mama?” I asked in a robot voice.

“You wanna talk about Viagra, or you wanna congratulate me on finding the best man I could ever imagine to find for a stepdaddy for my little girl?”

This time, the earth tipped on its axis like a frat boy at pledge week. Go home, Earth. You’re drunk.

“Stepdaddy?” The word came out like I was hacking up a hairball.

“That’s right, sweetie. Calvin loves you so much already.”

“Calvin?”

“Calvin McMasterson.”

The name seemed familiar. I remembered a Julie McMasterson from high school. A grade or two below me. The quiet, studious type, so shy you wondered what she was up to.

Wait.

“McMasterson? Mr. McMasterson?” A ripple of unreality tore the room in half. You have got to be fucking kidding me. I knew who Calvin McMasterson was, and suddenly, this entire conversation felt like one big prank. Today wasn’t April Fools, was it?

I looked at my phone screen. Nope.

“Mama, you’re marrying the town taxidermist?”

“Yep. He says the best thing he stuffs these days is me.”

My eyes searched the living room for something to pierce my eardrum so I didn’t have to hear this. Too bad the television remote was too big.

“Darla?” she finally asked. “You there?”

“Yeah.”

“Well? Ain’t you gonna congratulate me?”

A wall of sadness hit me. Hard. Something like a sob formed at the base of my throat, and my heart slowed down and sped up all at the same time. Maybe I was the one actually having a heart attack. What if I had to tell her to hang up so I could call 911 and get me an ambulance to have my own emergency?

“Oh, Mama,” was all I could finally say around the lump in my throat and the giant ball of cotton that my brain had turned into. “Congratulations.” The word felt like I was saying it around razor blades in my mouth, but I knew I had to say it, even if I didn’t feel it. There are certain points of decorum that even I know have to be met whether you like it or not. My failure to say that simple word could ruin my relationship with my mother forever.

So I said it.

Even if I didn’t feel it.

“You sound like your cat just got run over in front of you and you watched its head pop off and roll into a drainpipe ditch,” Mama said.

Well, now.

That’s about right.

“Mama, no, I—”

“Don’t start lying to me, Darla Jo. I know you.”

Start
lying? Aw, shit.

“I know this comes as a shock. I know you don’t like to think of me as a person with needs.” 

Oh, hell no. We are not talking about sex.

“But I am a woman. Not just a mama, and not all broken like I was for two decades.” She paused, her voice softening. “I loved Charlie with all my heart.”

My face tingled, eyes filling with tears. That was what I felt. Grief. Grown up grief, so different from what a four year old feels when you’re told Daddy won’t come home no more ’cause he went to be with Jesus. I used to be so jealous of Jesus. He got all the good people.

“I know you loved him, Mama.” 

“And I tried all these years to find a way to take all those feelings I had for him and just kill them off. Murder them. Cut them off like the accident cut off my foot. But you can’t just amputate your heart.” She gave a sad, bitter laugh, then inhaled deeply. A pause. A whoosh of air. I could almost taste the smoke. “No matter how hard you try. It’s persistent. It wants to feel.”

Ain’t that the truth
, I thought. Mama couldn’t have delivered a harder gut punch in person if she tried.

“Now, Calvin, you see, he’s...quiet. Nice. Sweet, even. I’ve known him all my life and never once thought about doing the two-backed nasty with him.”

That lump in my throat became bile.

“But then one thing led to another and—”

“How?” I blurted out, wishing I hadn’t.

Her voice lit up and filled with wistful warmth. “We had one of those town fairs you know I despise. Jane insisted I go, though. Said her little ones were excited about the face painting and she was going anyway, and I should come. Would get me out of the house, and how I need sunshine on my skin to make vitamin D. Some medical shit like that. But I’m not stupid. She tried to get me to go out because she knows how depressed I get.” 

I loved Jane more than ever in that moment. We’d been best friends in high school, but had fallen apart after she married a highway off-ramp preacher with a mean streak that included beating her. She’d become Mama’s personal aide when I’d left.

“So anyhow, I go to the fair and Jane gets my scooter in her car, and—”

“Your
what
?” A vision of my overweight, one-footed Mama on a little kid’s scooter made me hyperventilate with nervous laughter.

“My scooter. My—oh, stop that, Darla. Not a kid’s scooter. The kind with wheels and a basket at the supermarket.”

“You have one of those now?” A lot was changing back home, and fast. Too fast.

“Yes. Jane got it into her minivan for me and we went to the fair. Calvin had a booth. We started to chat and he invited me to come over to his business and see his stuffed lizard—” 

“That’s what he calls it?” I cracked.

Silence.

“Oh, Darla Jo,” she said, starting to giggle. “More like a stuffed Gila monster.”

Great. Now we were comparing my future stepdaddy’s cock to reptiles. I couldn’t win.

“Anyhow,” I said, cutting her off with a nervous glance at everything in the room, “he proposed? Isn’t that sudden?” 

“We been datin’ for six months. When you’re my age, that’s like two years in your twenties. He’s a sweet man and he’s lonely, too. His wife died of cancer a couple years ago. We need each other. We love each other,” she said shyly.