Twice in a Lifetime (22 page)

“We headin’ straight to the hotel?” Jesse asked hopefully.

Sweet shook his head. “I wanna check out this shithole town. Look for some sign of Barstow, McCoy, or that car a theirs. Might be easier than we expect.”

“But if we don’t see ’em,
then
we get a room, right?”

Sweet smirked. He knew that Jesse hated sleeping in the Cadillac. Though the man was a stone-cold killer, he was also a bit of a dandy; with his nice clothes and carefully coifed hair, he would prefer sleeping in a bed, even the kind found in some two-bit dive, to roughing it.

“We’ll just pull off the road and catch a few hours,” the drug dealer answered, only because he wanted to piss off the other man.

Jesse groaned. Malcolm didn’t seem to care.

“Come mornin’,” Sweet continued, “we’ll ask around and see if anyone’s seen ’em. They mighta passed through a week back.”

“And if no one’s seen ’em?” Jesse asked, clearly annoyed that he was going to spend another restless night sleeping in the cramped car.

“Then we keep lookin’,” Sweet answered as he leaned back in his seat.

Ever since he’d left St. Louis, he’d had only one goal: to find that son of a bitch Barstow. Sweet wouldn’t rest until he got back everything that had been stolen from him. The mechanic would pay.

And so would anyone stupid enough to be mixed up with him.

C
LARA HAD JUST SHUT
the pickup truck’s door when the Plymouth pulled into the driveway behind her. She peered through the windshield at the passenger seat, hopeful that Drake would have Tommy with him, but he was alone. For a long while, he stayed behind the wheel, staring out at her, before finally shutting off the engine and getting out. It was then, just as Clara was about to ask him what he’d found, that Drake stepped into the meager light of the bulb above her side door.

She gasped at what she saw.

His face was covered in bruises, dark and mottled, the corner of his mouth and one eye badly swollen. His cheek had been cut; dried blood stained his skin. He smiled at her, trying to downplay his injuries, but doing so caused him to wince.

“What happened?” Clara asked, rushing to him, her hand rising to his face, where it hovered; she was afraid to touch him.

Drake shrugged. “It’s no big deal,” he told her. “I just had a disagreement with some guy about which of the Andrews Sisters was the best singer. He swore by Patty, but I’ve always been partial to LaVerne.”

Clara knew that his attempt at a joke was for her sake, to put her at ease, but the sight of his battered face made her feel sick to her stomach.

She grabbed his arm. “Come inside so I can clean you up.”

Drake shook his head. “You don’t have to. It’s not that bad,” he said. “Besides, you should see the other guy.”

Without a word, she pulled at him; Drake offered only the slightest resistance before giving in and following. Clara sat him down at the kitchen table. Under the brighter light, his wounds looked even worse; if Drake was correct and he’d gotten the better of the fight, then Clara felt sorry for whoever was going to have to tend to his opponent. She wet a washcloth and gently wiped away the dried blood on his face and hands. Drake flinched the first couple of times she touched him, but he refused to turn away or complain.

“I’m going to go get some things,” she told him. “Don’t move.”

“Hurts too much for that,” he said with a weak smile.

In the upstairs bathroom, Clara gathered what she would need: some bandages, alcohol to disinfect his cuts, and a pair of scissors. The whole time, her mind raced, wondering what had actually happened. Who had Drake fought? Did it have anything to do with Tommy? All she wanted was to ask Drake questions until he told her the truth, but deep down, Clara knew she had to trust that he would tell her in due time.

Before she went back downstairs, Clara checked on her mother. Christine’s door was open as they’d agreed, but she was sleeping, her nightstand light still on, a book lying across her stomach. Clara was glad; she wanted to be alone with Drake.

Back in the kitchen, Clara sat facing him. She poured alcohol onto a clean cloth and prepared to properly clean his wounds.

“This is going to sting,” she told him.

Drake smirked. “Worse than what you were doing before?”

“Probably.”

When she touched the cloth to the angry red cut on his cheek, his reaction, a quick spasm and tightening of his jaw, told Clara she had been right.

Once she finished putting the last bandage on the row of small cuts crisscrossing his bloodied knuckles, Clara sat back. “No more jokes,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”

He nodded and took a deep breath.

Drake told her about all the places he’d looked for her son, roaming across town, and about how he’d gone to the tavern as she had suggested. He recounted how he had gone inside, ordered a beer, and sat down at the bar to wait and see if Tommy showed up.

“The next thing I know, someone starts a fight with me.”

“Who was it?” Clara asked.

“Some big lug, tall and wide as a mountain with hands the size of canned hams. Ornerier than a hound dog with a soup bone.”

She thought for a moment. “That sounds like Chet Miller. He’s there so much that I’m surprised they don’t make him pay rent.”

Drake rubbed his jaw. “He didn’t seem interested in introductions.”

“He just started a fight with you for no reason?”

“That’s what I thought at the time, but later I found out otherwise.”

“What do you mean?” Clara asked.

“I’ll get to that.”

He told her about winning the fight, not in a bragging way, but more matter-of-fact, admitting that he could have just as easily lost. Still unsteady on his feet, he’d left the bar, but then, when he was almost to the Plymouth, he thought he saw Tommy. When he ran after him, he hadn’t been able to catch up.

“After that, I headed back to the car,” he told her. “But when I got there, I found a young woman leaning against it.”

Clara tensed. She wanted to ask who it was but couldn’t find her voice; she had a sneaking suspicion that she already knew.

“It was Naomi,” he confirmed, “the girl I’ve heard so much about.”

“What…what did she want?”

“That’s the same question I had,” Drake answered. “But before I could ask it, she did something I hadn’t figured on.”

“What was that?”

Drake’s eyes found hers. “She kissed me.”

“You…you kissed her…?”

Even as Drake had driven out of the tavern’s parking lot, he’d known that what had happened with Naomi was going to hurt Clara. His fears had been proven to be well founded. But he wasn’t going to lie. If the two of them were going to have a strong, secure relationship, it had to be built on honesty and trust. So while Drake knew that he’d done nothing wrong, that he had never been tempted by Naomi, convincing Clara otherwise wasn’t going to be so easy.

“Not exactly,” Drake corrected her. “It’s more that
she
kissed
me
.”

Carefully, painstakingly, he explained how Naomi had thrown herself at him, emphasizing that he had pushed her away, rejecting her advances. Drake told Clara how he had anticipated her trying to kiss him again, how he’d stopped her, and that Naomi had ended up on her backside in the gravel. Finally, he recounted how he’d been slapped for denying her. He finished by describing Naomi as he’d left her, furiously angry in the middle of the bar’s parking lot.

“Naomi threw herself at you?” she asked, trying to piece it all together.

“She wasn’t really interested in me,” he answered.

“Then why did she do it?”

“Because all a gal like Naomi wants is a reaction, the stronger the better,” Drake told her. “If she’d gotten her mitts on me, if I’d been willing, it would’ve hurt you and Tommy. She would have stirred up a hornet’s nest, just to be entertained. Then, when the fire she lit burned down, she would’ve moved on to the next sucker willing to buy what she was selling.”

Drake could see that while Clara was listening to him, she wasn’t
hearing
what he said, struggling to get past the kiss. She searched his face for something, a sign to put her aching heart at ease; when she didn’t find what she was looking for, she glanced away. “You…you weren’t tempted?” she asked, her voice faint, almost a whisper. “She’s a pretty girl…”

“Don’t you believe me?” he asked.

Clara turned to look at him. She nodded. “It’s just that…” she began, but her voice trailed off.

Drake took her hand. He rubbed his rough, calloused thumb over her palm, feeling her warmth, hoping that his touch was comforting. “I’m not a boy, interested in every skirt that comes along,” he told her. “I haven’t been one for a long time. Naomi never had a chance. What I want is something different, something real.” He squeezed her hand hard enough to make Clara look him in the eyes. “I want
you
. Nothing will ever convince me otherwise.”

Slowly, Drake leaned forward, lowering his face toward hers. The look in Clara’s eyes clearly said that his words had moved her. She showed no hesitation in moving closer, inclining her head so that their lips would meet. At first, their kiss was tender, almost chaste, but it soon grew in intensity. Their mouths opened, their tongues touching, their passion potent enough for him to ignore the ache of the bruises marring his face. He considered being cautious and backing away, not giving in to his desire for fear that he was reading the situation wrong, that he was about to make another mistake; but instead, he decided to damn his caution, to live for the moment, to show Clara exactly how he felt.

“Drake…” she moaned into his mouth.

Growing bold, Drake grabbed her elbow and pulled her to him; Clara didn’t resist, rising out of her seat. She sat on his knee, wrapping herself in his arms.

His hand rose to touch her cheek, tracing the curve of her jaw. Their kiss continued hungrily, as if each of them had been starved for the other’s touch. Drake’s fingers descended across her shoulder and onto her collarbone. When he traced the soft underside of her breast, Clara gasped but didn’t move away. But when he lifted her blouse to feel the bare skin beneath, she abruptly broke their kiss and leaned back.

“Wait,” Clara told him breathlessly.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, worried that he’d gone too far, too fast.

“This…this is what you want?” she asked.

“Yes, I do,” he insisted.

“You want to be with me…
this
way…”

Drake nodded. “More than I could ever tell you with words.”

“Then we can’t do this here. Someone could interrupt us,” Clara explained.

She got out of his lap, took his hand, and led him to the door. Before Drake could ask where they were going, she stepped into the night, the darkness swallowing her as she hurried toward the garage.

Drake followed.

As Clara walked from the house to the garage, her heart raced. The night had grown cool, causing the gooseflesh on her arms to rise, but she hardly felt it. Drake’s kisses and touches had ignited a desire in her that couldn’t be extinguished, that she didn’t want to put out. Years had passed since a man had touched her, but her yearning for such attention had never completely disappeared; rather it had hibernated, sleeping until the right man had come along to wake it. Drake McCoy was that man.

When he’d pulled her into his lap, Clara had decided that she would give herself to him, if that was what he wanted; clearly, he longed for the same. But making love to Drake in her home came with risks; her mother was sleeping upstairs, and while Tommy hadn’t been around for days, the thought of him walking in on them was terrifying. Since they couldn’t go back to Drake’s hotel room because of Amos, that left only one place where they could be alone.

Clara opened the side entrance to the garage—the front doors were still broken—and flipped on the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.

“Where are we going?” Drake asked when he caught up.

“Come with me,” she answered.

At the back of the garage, a drop cord hung between two beams. Clara pulled down hard, revealing a folding staircase. After a quick look back at Drake, she began to climb.

The room Joe had built above the garage was small and sparsely furnished; a chair and desk were on one side of the room, while a small bed and nightstand sat against the opposite wall beneath the only window. Because of the roof’s slant, there wasn’t much room to stand. In the summer it was as hot as an oven, and in the dead of winter it could feel like an icebox, but now, in the springtime, it was quite pleasant. A decade ago, Joe had used it after a long night of fine-tuning the truck or tinkering at his workbench; he would sleep here rather than risk waking Clara.

For what she planned to do with Drake, it wasn’t ideal, but it was the only place they could go to ensure they would be alone.

Drake immediately understood.

He took her hand and led her to the bed. Little light shone through the window or up the stairs, but it was enough for them to see where they were going. Drake leaned down and began to kiss her, tender yet insistent, both of their passions still aroused, and it wasn’t long before he began to undo the buttons of her blouse. He was halfway down, the tops of her breasts revealed, silver in the moonlight, when she stopped him.

Drake frowned with no anger or annoyance, but with concern. “Clara…”

She nodded but found that she couldn’t speak. She didn’t know how to tell him what she was feeling. There was no denying that she wanted him. Her body ached for his touch. But as much as she yearned for the physical, she was nearly overcome by emotion. What was about to happen was a turning point in her life; she’d had the same feeling when kneeling at Joe’s grave, a sense that things were about to change forever. Making love to Drake would set them both on a new course, toward some unknown future. It was both exciting and frightening. She knew that she could still stop, even now.

But she didn’t want to.

Every fiber of her body, of her heart wanted this,
needed
it. She had made her decision. There was no more looking back.

Clara rose on her tiptoes and kissed him. Drake was slow to react, but his hesitance didn’t last long. He soon put his hand on her cheek, his fingers sliding back to disappear into her hair, then drew her closer, their tongues touching tenderly, his breath hot in her mouth. Clara was dimly aware that he’d resumed undoing her blouse; as if in a trance, she returned the favor, her fingers tugging at his shirt, stumbling over the buttons. What happened next was a blur. One by one, items of clothing were removed; her blouse, his boots, her skirt, his shirt, her bra, until both of them stood naked before each other.

“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he told her.

Clara couldn’t contain her flush of embarrassment and turned away.

“Look at me,” Drake said.

She did as he asked and saw that, while it was hard for her to accept such a compliment, he had given it honestly, believing every word.

Once again, they began to kiss. Drake’s hand gently cupped one of her breasts, holding its weight for an instant before giving it a soft squeeze. Gasping with pleasure, Clara placed a hand on Drake’s thigh, then ran her fingers across his skin, rising toward his hip before sliding over to brush against his penis, already stiff with desire and anticipation. Now it was his turn to gasp.