Page 10 of Step Puck

“No, Momma. I’ll tell you. You will get help. I’ve had it. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t pay the bills. I can’t keep the electricity on, or water and I think the house is almost in foreclosure because I can’t do it all myself. So, I’ve had it. Enough already.” I get in her face, snarling, my distaste for her susceptibility to alcohol burns through my body like a conflagration of a wildfire. Burning. Burning. Burning with the drive to push her to get help with her addiction. Because she doesn’t care about me or who I am or what I want in life. She only cares for herself and what she thinks she wants right now, she doesn’t think about later, only at the moment her drug-fueled brain thinks. And alcohol is a drug. It attacks brain function, so yeah.

She sticks her face close to mine, ready for her own attack. “You don’t get to talk to me like that. I’m your mother.”

“Then act like one and not a desperate slut.” The room goes silent as the proverbial tomb. Momma raises her hand, Billy grabs it before she can slap me.

“Enough! What the fuck is going on here! I’m in the back doing books and look up to the cameras to this shit? Lorelei you’re a good worker but you’re fired. Get your check tomorrow.” My boss shouts from behind the bar, the door he just came through wide open now. I glare at Momma, this is all her fault. Now what are we going to do?

“Well Momma. Look at what you did.”

Billy tries to neutralize the situation between us. I have to ignore him. I’m done. Tears stream down my face, my stress is beyond a roof, anger zips like electrical currents throughout my body, striking my heart. The pain is almost heart attack inducing.

“I’m done Momma. Done. I’ll get my stuff and that’s it. You need big time help.” I stalk out not bothering to say one word to anyone else, heavy footsteps follow me out the door. I know it’s not Momma and I swivel around to give them a piece of whatever mind I have left after this fiasco of a night, it’s Billy.

“Why don’t you stay at my place tonight. Give you time to think of what you want to do.” I study his face to see on there what his motives can really be. I’m in a conundrum about all of this. I can go home with him or try and get a cheap motel for the night. Bay City is so ritzy they don’t have cheap anything. I’ll have to drive to L.A. I don’t want to do that. I hate the idea of having to leave. I love Bay City. It’s a made city by a millionaire silent actor who wanted to be close to the movie industry and yet far enough away for his family and other like-minded wealthy people of the time to live the quiet life. The Bay family still live here, the rockstar god John Bay.

I bite my bottom lip, not meeting his eyes. I want too so badly. I know he’s the one asking. I don’t want him to think he’s obligated, it would make all this so much worse.

“You don’t have to. You know?” There. I put it out there. I want to know his true feelings about this. No. Not want. Need. I need to know.

“Look Lorelei, I’m sure your mother will come to her senses. You’ll see.”

“Thanks. I don’t think so. She’s probably always been like this but with your dad there he took up the slack. She was always gone you know? She’s just gotten worse since Jason died.” The sadness I felt when he died is still there only mellowed slightly with age. Jason was my dad too except he wasn’t my biological father. He was the father who was there when I rode my first bike he bought me. When I fell, he picked me up, set me on my feet, kissed my scrapped knees and helped me back on. When I rode successfully, he took me inside and bandaged my wounds.

When I went on my first date, he was the one who met the boy and gave him a talking to. Not my momma. Jason.

“I’ll go with you.” I turn away from him a moment and swivel back, looking at him from the side. “You have an extra room I suppose?”

“Three-bedroom house. You can have the room furthest away from mine if you want.” He grunts, his eyes volatile, watching everything I do with the eyes of a predator. Listening to everything I say with the ears of the same predator. Ready to pounce when I least expect it. Ready to eviscerate and spread me wide when I least expect it.

“Okay. I’ll follow you.” I reach into my bag to get my keys, my eyes slide to him, finding him staring at me. I know it cliché, when our eyes meet, time and everything else stands still. The world around us stops as if we are in our own titanium bubble. The silence so deep nothing else is heard. No laughing, no loud voices, no loud music from the juke box. Only our weighted breaths as we stare at each other.

I can feel my keys hanging limp from my fingers, nothing else. There must be an invisible rope strung between us and I take a jerky step in his direction. And another. And another.

Billy’s the anchor holding the rope, pulling me closer, step by step by every step until I’m standing in front of him. His energy and magnetism draws me. Yes, he’s beyond attractive, with his magnetic, animal maleness. Not poster boy handsome. In a you-can-do-anything-you-want-to-me and do it again and again.

He lowers his head, my breath draws in a shaky, tremulous inhalation. This is the moment. My lips part and his crash on mine in a hard, bruising, can’t-wait-another-moment kiss. This. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for since I was fifteen.

10

BILLY

This is the moment I’ve been dreaming about since she was fifteen. Dreaming about but knowing she was forbidden. A child still, with a woman’s body, unskilled in the seduction she unknowingly embodied. A nymph arising from her childhood. Any thought of her that way is inappropriate and wrong at the time. Now six years later she’s legal, even though because of our age differences looked down upon.

Her mouth is heaven and I’m the devil ready to bring her back to hell with me. We’re devouring each other, my hands pull her close. Close enough for her to feel the large boner I’m sporting. She grinds her hips into mine, my thick shaft grinds against her jeans the friction makes everything worse. The want to tear her clothes off is almost more than I can stand.

“I knew it. I’m calling the cops.” The stumbling, strident, shrieking voice of Dena makes me throw my head back, staring at the starlit sky wishing to god I could get rid of this fucking stain on human existence. My chest bellows with heavy breaths as I try to control my fury.

“Call away. She’s twenty-one, adult and able to speak for herself. They’ll just laugh and haul you away for disorderly conduct. Care to spend the night in a jail cell, Dena?” I hiss with all the hate for her I now have in me. She’s the cause of all this between me and Lorelei. I hope things will straighten out between us. First, we have to finish dealing with her.

She glares at me but she’s impotent to do anything, she knows it. I think the game has been played, I’m not quite sure she might have something else up her sleeve to try and derail our possible future relationship.

“Momma. Stop this. Enough.” Lorelei takes a huge step forward to get into her mother’s face, her own seethes with frustration of having had enough.

“But, baby.”

“No. I said enough. Get ahold of yourself. Go into rehab. I’ll let you know where I’ll be. Now we’re leaving.” Her voice is as hard and withering as her eyes. Lorelei is finally done with her mother. It’s sad really but Dena has brought this on herself. I hope she can get the help she desperately needs.

“You’ll come back to me. You can’t leave your Momma who loves you. Took care of you.” Dena sneers, her glare swaps between the two of us. “You. You.” She throws her arm out as if to slap me, she’s had too much to drink for her aim to be effective. Or thinks she has unless Mike slipped some tequila in those margaritas.

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