Page 37 of Home Wrecker

She makes me laugh.

Me: Whatever I had left you’ve melted. I’m a puddle now. I fucking missed you.

Holly responds with a video of her blowing me a kiss.

Part of me wants to tell Holly I love her. I’ve never said those words to anyone and I’m scared that, like the idea of moving in together, it’s too soon.

Bhodi comes downstairs squeaky clean, but dripping wet like a spring rain drizzling off the oak trees which line the sidewalks surrounding the lots at the auto mall. He slides a coloring book out of the stack and chooses a crayon from the bin.

“Look, Mister Cary.”

Coloring in the lines, I peek at the scribbles on Emory’s sheet of paper and start to tell her what a great job she’s doing. I wind up cracking up instead. Emory has a green and a yellow crayon sticking out from under her top lip like walrus tusks. When I look in the opposite direction, Bhodi’s got two more sticking out of his nose.

“Dude, that’s gross!” I’m falling over myself and clutching my chest at their goofiness, joining in by putting a red and a blue crayon in my ears. “Do not do this, and if you do, do not tell your moms I showed you.”

Despite my warning, we wait for Laurel to come inside with the tray of burgers. She gets a kick out of us and when she asks us whose idea it was, Bhodi and Emory point fingers at each other and I point at them.

The kids are complete wild nuts while we eat. The way our trip to the woods was, it’s awesome.

Why didn’t I have a sister?I think. Well, that’s obvious. Nobody in their right mind would want more kids raised under Rex Stanton’s roof.

However, Bhodi’s a different story. I’ve seen how amazing he is with someone Emory’s age. He gets along well with Dusty’s daughter Sylvie Rhys too. My protectiveness of Bhodi makes me feel like he’s missing out on something important.

By the time Laurel serves banana pudding with vanilla wafers, they’ve settled down.

“This is my favorite,” Bhodi says, around a mouthful of cut banana.

“Mine too. My mom used to make…” I stop with the spoon in mid-air.

The memory of Davina when I was a kid comes flooding back. My mother and I had late afternoons like this one once upon a time. She baked cookies and helped with homework. It hadn’t seemed to be important or to have made much of a difference while it was happening. Yet, all of a sudden I see the intent in Rex’s refusal to come home a decent hour and sit at the dinner table with us. He was the one who took the back seat in parenting until he’d laid the framework to make me think Davina didn’t care. That she was willingly disregarding his licentiousness. The hitch is, I’m still too indignant when it comes to Davina to do anything about whatever this epiphany is.

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17

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The television is still on when I enter the room. Cary lies on his back with the covers low on his hips. There’s a hint of his cotton boxers and the trail of dark hair I love to explore peeking out from under the sheet. Shadows and tints of color play on his relaxed jaw and the skin of his torso the way they do on clients watching the show at the club.

Warm from the July heat still radiating off the blacktop in the middle of the night, I toe off my shoes and socks and pull my white tank top over my head, shedding my work clothes. Then I slide over the mattress like a sloth and reach for the remote beside him to turn off the TV. Too lazy to roll toward my nightstand, I tuck it under my pillow, planting my face in the fluffy cotton.

Cary shifts next to me. He kisses my still pinned hair. Worry laces his sleep-graveled voice over how late it is. “Good night?”

I mummer back something incoherent. I should have been home an hour ago.

Kelsey, the new assistant manager, is working out well. The issue cropping up is the dancer from before likes to make trouble on the nights I’m off. The lack of respect sends everyone else off-kilter. Most recently, she’d tried to get her claws into Jake. He isn’t long for a solitary woman, but there’s an occasional one who warms his bed more than twice and he’s been busy with a cocktail waitress he hired.

This caused an uproar between the dancer and waitress and a series of catfights ensued. Feeling like the employee he was sleeping with had become a clinger, Jake has given me permission to let both of them go. Of course, now I’m stuck trying to be the best person I can be and waiting for a reason that’s more legit than getting let go for sucking the owner’s dick.

I keep having to put out little fires and appease frayed nerves. I feel like a failure compared to Kimber, despite her telling me on our last mill girls’ day out how she slogged through the same scenario a dozen times when she was the manager.

She also reminded me that for every stripper who thinks they’ll make the big time tied to Jake, there’s a dressing room full of dancers trying to make ends meet, feed their kids, and use the cash they earn to build a better life. I’ve seen that firsthand, and it’s part of the reason I stay.

“You okay?”

“Sure. Some nights I wonder why I do this, though.”

“Why do you?”

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