Page 23 of Christmas With the Convict

“I never wrote anything before I met you,” he says, finally closing his journal. “Now, I write every day.”

“What do you write about?”

Chase smiles up at me.

“Sorry.” I shrug, hugging myself. “I’ve been curious.”

He holds his journal like he’s considering handing it over before he sets it down on the end table. “Someday, I’d like you to read it… Not yet.”

The quiet yawns.

It feels different down here. This was my safe haven for so long. Now, it feels exposed, connected to that gaudy mess upstairs and the people in it.

“Chase, where would you have gone if you hadn’t got in my car?” He looks away. “And don’t sayPueblo. Where? Really?”

Chase leans forward, examining me for a moment before reaching under the sofa. He pulls out his ratty, folded leather vest. In his other hand, one of the chef’s knives from the kitchen gleams.

He looks up at me as if to give me a chance to run or scream for my father. I unfold my arms and sit down on the couch next to him. By the look on his face, you’d think I just performed the most gracious gesture anyone has ever seen.

“Before I got arrested.” He clears his throat. “I was in a gang. They called it a motorcycle club, but it is what it is. It was a gang. We… we did bad shit. Like I said, my dad took off when I was fifteen. These guys with their choppers and their vests and their guns and knives felt like a better option than being alone, starving, freezing in the fucking winter because the gas got turned off.”

Chase holds up a patch from his vest. It’s an emblem of an ugly, narrow-faced goat with green eyes. It’s been roughly cut from the chest of the vest.

“The Goats. They said they’d take care of me. And, for a while, they did. But once I got locked up, I didn’t hear a word from them. No visit. No help inside. No one there when I got released.” Chase smiles, shakes his head, and hands the patch to me. “You know, when I walked out that gate, I still had hope thatsomeonemight show up. One of them. My dad…”

The patch seems to beat in my hands like his heart. He’s just handed me a piece of him, a chunk of his past that he’s ashamed of. A part of the man I’m dying to know.

“If it weren’t for you, Wendy, I might have gone back to them as if nothing had ever happened. I might have pretended that they didn’t leave me out to dry. Anything to just feel like I belong somewhere, even if it wasn’t real.”

When I look up, trails are streaked down Chase’s cheeks into his growing beard. He’s not sobbing or even crying, really. He’s releasing, holding his head high in spite of the pain he’s felt.

I reach out and run my thumb over each track.

Chase closes his eyes and sighs like a soothed beast.

“You belong somewhere.”

I hop up, pull my thin Bradbury novel from the bookshelf, and slide the patch between the pages.

“You belong withme.”

Slowly, with my back to him, I undo the buttons on my blouse. It falls as silently as the first snow of winter, followed by the lightsnapof my bra.

When I turn around, Chase once again looks like a cornered animal.

This time, Iwantto see what he’ll do when he’s pressed.

“I don’t care about any of that insanity upstairs.” I unzip my pencil skirt, sliding it down my hips. “Because I don’t feel like I belong there anymore.”

His chest heaves.

I can see his fingers twitching, begging his mind to be commanded to touch me.

“Wendy…”

“No,” I huff, stepping between his legs in just my white panties and heels. “I don’t care. I don’t care if we get caught. I don’t care if my family clutches their Goddamn pearls.”

I slide into his lap, gasping as his hands finally take what’s theirs.

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