Ruin Me (7 page)

“God, yeah. This is what he wants.” Jay pumps me fast and greedy. I bet he’d pay for Patrick to have to watch this.

“Take your shirt off,” I say.

He pauses to lean back and indulge me and I grin at him. Jay’s got such a nice body. He’s got hardly any chest hair and he’s pretty muscular, though far smaller than Patrick. He looks different than you’d expect with his clothes off. He used to swim competitively when we started dating. He never won but I always loved going to his meets because he looks damn fine in a Speedo and I wanted all the women in the stands to see who he kissed when the competition was over.

Patrick Whelan, on the other hand, looks exactly how you’d guess, if you have a greedy, idealistic imagination.

I watch Jay’s chest and abdomen as he fucks me. He’s sleek and smooth and commanding. A zillion women would prefer him to Patrick and probably want me stoned for thinking I need more than this.

I watch Jay, but I imagine Patrick. He had that same mean look in his eye as Jay does now. When he fucked my hands he’d been out of his mind, wild and frantic. I liked that. I like that I have the power to make a man that big and self-possessed into a desperate animal. I like that Jay should be the desperate, insecure one, but here he is, banging my brains out as if he hasn’t got a doubt in the world.

I think any woman who says men are predictable should try fucking an ex-con lumberjack and a cuckolded technology journalist in the same day and see if they don’t just have a change of heart on the matter.

* * * * *

“Hey. Robin.”

Carrie gets my attention from the counter and I look up from pricing sealing wax.

“What’s up? Is it time for your break?”

“Nearly. But that guy is across the road. That Patrick guy?” she elaborates, brows raised.

“Oh.” I walk over, casual, and look past the window display to where Patrick is indeed locking up his truck on the other side of Main Street. My pulse hums.

“My dad said he saved your life,” Carrie says, watching him. “Is that true?”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far…but yeah, he did help me when a guy had a knife to my throat in the Tap’s parking lot. A long time ago.”

Carrie’s blue eyes go big and round. “Oh my God, that’s scary.”

“So yeah, that’s my hero, right there.” I point to where Patrick’s waiting for a break in traffic to cross the street. I wonder if Carrie can hear my heart pounding.

“God, I’d be afraid
he’d
be the one lurking in a parking lot,” she says.

“Don’t say that. Patrick Whelan’s a very nice man.”

“Yeah, but he looks like a psychopath. And I heard he was in prison.”

“Only because he beat the tar out of the guy with the knife,” I say, sounding defensive.

“Wow, really?”

“Yeah. He’s as nice as they come.”

“Well, he looks super-scary.”

“You’re twenty.” God, twenty. That’s probably how old the kid with the knife was. I make my voice breathy and patronizing. “When you hit your sexual peak you’ll be all over guys who look like Patrick Whelan.”

“No way, Robin.”

“Call me in ten years and we’ll see who’s right. And anyhow, don’t let anyone tell you he’s a psycho. He’s my friend.” I watch Patrick jog across Main and head straight for our door. My body tingles, just like always. Like always, I love it and hate it in equal measures. “Why don’t you take your lunch break?”

Carrie hurries out from behind the counter, presumably so she won’t have to greet the psychopath pushing the door in. Patrick watches Carrie jog through the store and up the half-flight of steps to the stationery section then through the door to the back room.

He turns to me. “Hey, Robin.”

“Hey, yourself. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve never actually been in here before,” he says. “Nice place.” He’s got on a black knit cap and gray Carhartt pants, looking like a working-class wet dream. He approaches the counter and as soon as I look in his eyes I remember everything from three nights ago.

“Thanks. You saying hello, or can I help you patronize me?”

“Mostly hello. I just did at job on Brewster Street so I thought I’d stop in. This isn’t weird, is it?”

I pause, about to speak, and we both straighten up on opposite sides of the counter as Carrie reappears in her coat and heads for the front door. “See you at two,” she says.

I turn back to Patrick as the door jingles shut. “No, it’s not weird. I’d ask you if you want to go get some lunch, but I’ve got to watch the shop.”

“Are you hungry?” he asks. “I could grab you something.”

I think a moment. “Yeah, okay. I was going to get a bowl of soup from next door.”

Patrick nods and walks away before I can give him any cash. He returns in five minutes with a deli tub and a brown bag. He takes his hat off and tucks it in a pocket.

“Butternut squash,” he says, and hands me a plastic soup spoon and a napkin.

I peel the lid off the tub and take a deep whiff. “God, I love fall.”

Patrick pulls out a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper.

“Eat over here,” I say, patting the side of the counter away from the register. “In case I actually get a customer.”

“Business slow?”

“It’s not bad, considering. It’s just that everyone’s traveling or at the grocery store. The card companies haven’t made Thanksgiving into a stationery holiday yet. People don’t think about me much until December.”

Patrick nods, looking me over. “You have glitter in your hair.”

“I’m sure.” I shake my head and a few red flecks float down to the floor. “I was digging through the Christmas window display stuff this morning. I’ll be coming in on Sunday to holiday the hell out of this place.”

Patrick takes a few bites of his roast beef sandwich, glancing around the store. His eyes look complex in the daylight coming in through the front windows, deep brown, but with that striated iris texture to them. Everything looks complex just now.

I lean in and eat my soup, elbows on the counter just like how Patrick’s standing on the other side. There’s something familiar and conspiratorial about being close to him, knowing him the way I do now. I get a little nervous thrill, thinking how caught I’d feel if someone did come into the shop and saw me eating lunch with this man who isn’t my live-in boyfriend.

“So,” I say. “Jay’s still taking it pretty well.”

He nods.

“Maybe we can hang out after the weekend?” I want this man now, now, now, but I’m driving to Michigan tomorrow at the ass-crack of dawn with Jay. Jay will drive, and I will spend most of the journey thinking about fucking Patrick Whelan. I always think about sex during long rides, for whatever reason—automotive vibrations maybe or plain old boredom. Jay probably does too because by now I’ve surely programmed him to expect to get laid as soon as socially possible once we reach our destination.

Patrick clears his throat and makes a project of flattening the waxed paper on top of the brown bag. “I’m glad he’s taking it well.”

“Yeah, he’s really shockingly okay with it,” I say.

“I’m glad.” Patrick finally looks up. “But I don’t know if I’m taking it quite so well.”

“Oh.” I feel the blood drain from my face and chemicals invade my pulse. Fear messes with my physiology, blurring and blunting reality.

I calmly grab a piece of paper from the printer and calmly write
Back in 15 minutes
on it in marker. I tape it to the door and twist the deadbolt. I touch Patrick’s arm as I pass him and he follows me up the steps to the back room. I close the door behind us and sit on the edge of the break table.

“What aren’t you taking well?” I ask.

He holds my eyes with his then looks away as he speaks. “What we’re doing.”

“The cheating?”

“No. The being with you but not actually being with you.”

“The no-sex rule?” I ask.

He pushes a frustrated noise through his nose. “No. The you belonging to someone else thing.”

I look down at his boots. “Do you have feelings for me?” The store phone rings, making us both jump. “I’m sorry. I have to get that.”

He nods as I reach for the cordless. “Roche’s Paper.”

“Hey, lady.” Jay.

“Hey. Can I call you back? I’m right in the middle of something.”

“Just wanted to see if you could pick up some olive oil on the way home.”

“Consider it done,” I say. “See you tonight.” I wait for his goodbye and hang up the phone. “Sorry.”

“That was him?” Patrick asks.

I nod. I watch him take a deep breath.

“So, you have feelings for me?” I prompt. “Because of what we did?”

“I’ve always had feelings for you.”

“Oh. Since that night?”

“Since before that,” he says.

“I didn’t think we’d even talked before then.”

“We hadn’t.”

I frown. I don’t feel exactly creeped out, just disconcerted. “For how long, then?”

“Since maybe two years before that night. It was after your store opened but probably that same year.”

I would have been about twenty-five. That was when my grandmother died and I inherited the money that helped me move to Dereham from Montpelier and open this store and put a down payment on the little condo I owned before Jay and I moved in together.

Patrick licks his lips, looking nervous. “I don’t know if I’m in love with you or anything,” he says. “But I’ve liked you for a long time.”

“Why?” I’m cute enough, I guess, but I’m not infatuation-worthy gorgeous or crazy-charismatic or intriguing. Just a short brunette with a paper shop and a rusty hatchback.

“I was across the street one day,” Patrick says. “At the hardware store. You came running out of your store with a broom and started whaling on these two kids for throwing rocks at birds.”

I haven’t thought about that in years, but as soon as Patrick says it my blood starts pumping, hot with the adrenaline I felt that afternoon. These two teenage boys had tried to rush at the pigeons on the sidewalk and stomp on them and, failing that, they decided to whip rocks at the awning that runs above my store, and the ones to either side of it, where the birds roost. It was right around the time the shop opened, when my grandma’s death was still an open wound. My grandma had loved birds and I completely flipped out. I was young and easily wound up then, plus the store was new and stressful and I felt vulnerable when I was there.

“It was a mop,” I say. I remember seeing red and grabbing it from beside the door and stalking outside and screaming at them. I hit one of the boys hard in the ear and left a big wet sponge print on the other’s tee shirt. I probably looked totally insane, swinging a mop at those idiot kids and shrieking about animal cruelty.

“That’s when you decided you liked me?” I ask. “When I was assaulting junior high schoolers? I’ve probably never been such a spaz in my entire life.”

“I always thought that was really cool, that you did that.”

I shrug. “I think they only took off because they thought I’d call the cops. Not because of my bad-ass samurai-janitor skills.”

“They called you a crazy bitch.” Patrick smiles deeply and it gives him little squinchy rolls beneath his eyes.

“Well, that was pretty accurate. I’m lucky their parents didn’t sue me.”

“You know that night, in the parking lot,” he says. “That wasn’t just luck. That I found you.”

I feel another buzz in my pulse, another sip of a stiff brain-chemical cocktail. “No?”

He shakes his head. “I’d been wanting to talk you all night. Well, I’d been wanting to talk to you for two years, but that night I told myself I finally would. I was going to offer to buy you a drink the next time you dropped your glass off at the bar but then you left. And I was drunk enough to follow you and drunk enough to not think trying to talk to you for the first time in a dark parking lot wasn’t totally sketchy. So I went after you, and you know how all that turned out.”

“I’m sure glad you did,” I say. “Well, actually, I wish I’d still been thirsty. Then I guess we would have just talked, without me getting traumatized or you spending half a year in prison.”

“You would’ve let me buy you a beer?”

“Sure.” I probably would have felt intimidated by Patrick though, and I don’t know if my attraction would have ever bloomed the way it did if things had played out how he envisioned. I probably would have flirted politely with him and gone home alone, and he’d have ended up a tiny footnote.
April 14, went to the Tap, got hit on by a bona fide lumberjack.
Instead he’s got his own chapter in the book of my life. More than that. For the first time in the years Jay and I have spent trying to ignore how the living ghost of Patrick Whelan haunts our relationship, I feel uncertain about how I honestly want all this to play out.

“I want my relationship to work,” I say quietly, trying to remember that it’s true.

Patrick nods and I catch his eyes dart to the clock on the wall. We have a few minutes before Carrie is due back. He steps close to where I’m sitting on the table and against anybody’s better judgment I let him nudge my thighs apart with his. I put my hands on his waist, on his soft, old, flannel work shirt. I feel his lips touch my forehead then my temple. Then he kisses me, once gently with his lips closed then deeper. My body rouses when his tongue slides against mine and my skin prickles as I feel the hum of his moan against my mouth. This time though, more than I want to fuck him, I want to cry. I want to slap him for making this complicated or for yanking open a curtain and shining the harsh light of reality over how complicated it’s been all along. I want to hurt him for how good he makes me feel, but I hate that I have the power to hurt him if I want to. I push him away after an excruciating minute and slide off the table.