Page 57 of The Caretaker
“We’re complete opposites, but I think that’s why we work. It also helped that I only had to deal with him for a couple months out of the year.”
“Tell me something about him,” he said, snuggling deeper into me.
“Why do I get the feeling you just want to hear me talk?”
“What makes you say that?” He smiled mischievously.
“Because for some odd reason you love to hear me talk, especially when you’re sleepy.”
Noon hummed. “You know me so well already.”
“Because I’m obsessed with you. I study your every move, your every word… Your silences too.” I pecked him on the lips once, then twice, then again. I peppered him with kisses untilI had to stop myself or risk starting up a whole new round of lovemaking, and I wanted to talk to him. Loved talking to him.
“Pauly’s a flirt,” I started before he could protest the end to my onslaught of affection.
“Oh, I love him already,” he groused, and I bopped him on the nose. He bit down on my finger faster than I could yank it to safety, then kissed the hurt away. “He’d get along with Leland. Well, the old Leland, I should say. He’s a reformed flirt now that he’s with Franklin.”
“Can’t wait to meet your friends,” I whispered, refusing to let the idea scare me anymore than it already did.
“And my sister, Deb. She lives back home in Seattle, though. We’ll visit.”
“I’d love that.”
“We don’t get to see each other much, but we’re close. Plus, she loves to give Leland hell. Always has. She’s responsible for his ridiculous nickname.”
“What is it? Can’t be worse than Care Bear.”
“Well, they both have the word “bear” in them…” He trailed off as his eyes enlarged comically. “Shit, he’s never going to let me hear the end of it.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, amused. “I’ll defend you and your nickname.” We lapsed into silence for a while, stroking and nibbling at one another.
“How will you introduce me to Pauly?” Noon’s tone lost some of its lightness. We were still married to other people, and although that would change the moment Patrick and Stacey returned, we needed to decide how we were going to navigate the situation around the people we knew.
“I’ll say I hired you to oversee the renovations.”
“Think he’ll believe it?”
“Think you can manage to keep your hands off me for five minutes?”
“No,” he said without a trace of humor. He hugged me hard enough to leave bruises, and kissed me hard enough to do the same before causing my back to arch when he plunged the full length of his middle finger into me. “I don’t think I can. And even if I could, I wouldn’t want to.” He didn’t remove the digit, but he didn’t move it within me either. Another sign of his exhaustion. Noon liked to keep me plugged with one or more fingers as we slept.
I waited until my breathing had leveled, until the intensity of his stare simmered to burning embers. “You know I’m not hiding this because I’m ashamed of it, right?”
“I know,” he assured me. “We can’t live in our truth without sharing how we got here, and it’s no one’s business right now. We have a right to our privacy until we say otherwise.” His eyes slowly closed and didn’t reopen, and panic began to set in. I wasn’t ready to lose him to eight hours of sleep. I wanted to stay awake with him forever.
“Tell me something about you,” I said. His eyelids reopened at a snail’s pace. “Tell me something from your childhood. Talk to me about your mother.”
He gave me a sleepy grin but obliged. “My mother was an alcoholic. A mostly functioning one during the day. Nights were a different story, and nothing I ever did would make her stop drinking.” His voice was a tired rasp, his gaze going distant. “If I hid the alcohol, she’d just buy more. If I replaced half the contents with water, she’d just drink double the amount. And if I stole her money so that she couldn’t afford to buy more, she’d put on a pretty little dress and miraculously have more money by sunup. She’d stumble inside, reeking of cheap cologne and booze.”
“Noon,” I breathed, and he hummed in acknowledgement of my empathy.
“One night, she got so drunk that she fainted over the toilet bowl, banging her head on the edge of it. It scared the crap out of me,” he whispered, his blank stare lighting up as if a movie reel had fired up in his mind. “I didn’t know what to do. If I called the cops we’d be taken away from her—or I would. Deb primarily lived with her father. I wasn’t so lucky. I didn’t know who my father was. My mother didn’t either.”
My breathing turned unsteady with my mounting distress for him, so he removed his finger, immediately sending two back in, trading one heart pounding emotion for another.
“It was just the two of us that night, so I took care of her. I rolled her onto her back and placed my ear to her heart to make sure she was alive. Then I cleaned her up. Mopped up all the vomit, disinfected the cut on her forehead and put a bandage on it. The bandage was too small. It was the best I could do.”
I tried to pull his hand away, to sink further into the pain in my heart rather than the pleasure overtaking the rest of my body. But Noon was an immovable slab of stone.
