Red-Blooded Heart Read online

  And it’s not her.

  It’s Graham.

  He’s holding up his cell phone and stepping out into the yard. He’s wearing another scarf. “You said there was service out here!”

  Juniper pokes her head out of the door. “I said it was spotty.”

  “Hell,” he says.

  “Who do you need to call?” she says. “You don’t need to call anyone. You know, there’s a land line.”

  “Well, what if someone wants to call me?” he says. “You ever think about that?”

  “It’s spotty,” she repeats.

  “You didn’t think about that,” he says. “You don’t think about that stuff. Sometimes, you really don’t think things through, you know?”

  She stares at him, and I can’t quite make out her expression, but it seems pretty blank, as though she’s got no emotion at all. “Sorry.”

  Why is she apologizing to him? That makes no sense. He’s the idiot. He’s the one who’s worried about cell service. She shouldn’t have brought him with her out here, and she shouldn’t be apologizing to him. I want to strangle this guy.

  “Yeah, well, you can apologize all you want, but that doesn’t help me, you know?” he says. “I’ve still got a cell phone that’s about as useful as a paperweight.”

  “I really am sorry,” she says, and now she comes out of the house and shuts the door and puts her hand on his arm. “There’s internet. Send a message over Facebook or something. Make a post that says if it’s urgent, people shouldn’t call, but email.”

  “That’s stupid,” he says.

  Did he just call her stupid? My hands clench into fists? What the hell? Why is she into this guy?

  “Sorry,” she says again. “I’m trying, Graham. But you know I don’t have as many good ideas as you do.”

  He sighs. “That’s true. I’ll have to think about it and figure it out myself.”

  “Yeah, and I’m sure you will, because you’re super smart.” She beams at him.

  I glower. What the fuck is this entire conversation? This is the same chick who sat down to dinner with me and started calling me a girly man? How does she end up with this fucker, telling him he’s “super smart”?

  His shoulders slump. He puts his phone in his pocket. “I don’t know about all this, June. You said I’d love it up here, but it’s kind of a shithole, you know?”

  “I know,” she says. “Stick it out, though. Please?” She wraps her arms around him and presses close, tilting her head back, offering him her lips.

  He kisses her, and it’s like he’s devouring her face.

  I’m on edge. I’m twitching and I can hardly catch my breath. I want to run out of the woods and tear them off each other and I want to punch Graham’s stupid face over and over and over.

  I can’t do that, so I make myself leave. If I watch much more of this, I will lose control.

  * * *

  -juniper-

  We haven’t even been here for two hours, and already, Graham is getting on my last nerve. I wanted us back up here sooner. He had told me before that he’d be happy to come up to spend the winter with me. We talked about it a lot, and he never indicated that he was going to try to back out.

  He can work from his computer, and he negotiated it all with his boss. It’s all set.

  But when I got back to the city, he started dragging his feet about leaving. He had attitude about everything, and he’s such a baby.

  Sometimes, when I’m with Graham, all I want to do is go outside and scream at the sky for ten minutes straight. He’s maddening.

  But I tell myself that it’s not going to be much longer. It’s just this winter, and then he’ll be out of the picture. I can maybe make a few visits to see him after it’s all taken care of, but eventually, I’ll break it off, and it’ll be done.

  After he loses it over cell service, I distract him with making food. I’ve been making freeze-dried concoctions for him for months, getting him ready for what it’ll be like out here, and he really likes them. In fact, whenever we go out together in the city, he likes to brag about how “we” are going to be living off the grid together and how “we” cook with freeze-dried food.

  Since we’re in a relationship, he has ownership over everything I do. Suddenly, it’s “we,” when he really means “me.”

  Whatever.

  Graham is… well, he can be trying.

  Eating shuts him up for a while, and then he spends a few hours on his phone in the afternoon.

  I go out to start working on firewood. I don’t have nearly enough, and I know I will need it this winter. I’d like to have as much as I can gather before the snow starts. There are a lot of big branches and tree limbs that have fallen down in the forest behind my house, and I’ve been going out to load them onto my wagon and then dragging them back home. Some of them I can break up by hand. The others I need to use a hatchet in order to turn them into manageable pieces.

  I’m trying to work up to the idea of cutting down an entire tree. I could do it if I wanted. I’m strong. I’ve been working on my upper body strength for years now, and I’m stronger than most men I meet. I’m sure I could take Graham if it came down to it. I’m counting on it, in fact.

  I’m not stronger than Deke, of course. I feel a little shiver at the base of my spine thinking about him. I think of our bodies pressed close in my kitchen. I think of the way his mouth felt on mine.

  Damn Deke.

  I fully expect him to show up soon, and I’ll have to introduce Graham, and it’ll be hell.

  I don’t know why I didn’t tell him about Graham before. I should have. It would have been the easiest way to get him to leave me alone, I bet. But I guess I wanted to flirt with him, and I wanted to kiss him. Maybe I’m not a very good person.

  The thing is, I want Deke for me.

  I want Graham for, well, for much bigger things. It’s not about me. It’s about ideals and resolutions and fulfilling my plans. My excruciatingly detailed plans.

  The Deke thing, it’s selfish. I can’t afford to be selfish right now. Maybe after it’s all over, Deke will understand. He said that thing once, about sin, and consequences, so maybe he’ll get it. Maybe then it’ll be okay to want things for myself. Maybe.

  Honestly, I haven’t given a lot of thought to after. I probably won’t know what to do with myself once it’s over.

  And it isn’t over yet, so that’s what I need to be focusing on.

  I drag branches, and I try to focus.

  I don’t expect Graham to offer to help. He’s not wired that way. But he comes out as I’m stripping limbs off the branches I’ve brought in, and he looks over what I’m doing.

  “What the hell is that?” Graham points to my hatchet.

  “It’s a hatchet,” I say. I should be cutesy about it, play dumb or something, pretend I can’t remember what it’s called. Graham eats that shit up. But it’s hard to think all that through when I’m a little out of breath from doing physical labor.

  “It’s like a baby ax?” he says. “Or an ax for girls? Do they make axes for girls?”

  “That’s right,” I say, smiling at him, sugary sweet. “You know I couldn’t handle a big ax.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “For firewood. So that we can have heat this winter.”

  “Don’t you have electric heat?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not? You have those solar panels.”

  “Yeah, well, that would drain my solar panels, trying to run heat,” I say. “It just doesn’t make sense when I have all this free fuel right here.” I gesture to the woods.

  He looks out at the woods. “Right.” He’s annoyed. I have pointed out something that he didn’t think of, and now he’s going to get mad.

  Damn it.

  “Well, it might be free, but you’ve got to do all this, you know, work to get it,” he says. “The sun just shines.”

  I force myself to smile at him. “You’re right, baby. Maybe I didn’t thi
nk it through. Maybe electric heat would be better. Soon as I save up for more solar panels, I’ll do it like you say.”

  He licks his lips. Will this pacify him? Sometimes, I think he just likes to be mad.

  I wait, tensing. What’s he going to do?

  “You should have asked me before you had the house built,” he says.

  “I know,” I say. “I really should have.”

  “It was stupid of you not to,” he says. “You do a lot of stupid things, Juniper.”

  I hate it when he calls me stupid, which he does twenty times a day. I try my best to let it roll off my back, but sometimes it’s hard. “You know I do. I can’t help it. I’m not as smart as you are, that’s all.”

  He sniffs, and he’s pacified, but he’s not sure he’s pleased about it. Now he’s looking for something that he can use against me, something that he can point out that’s off so that he can lash out.

  I don’t move. I don’t speak. I don’t breathe.

  “You should stop that,” he decides. “Come in, because it’s cold outside, and you shouldn’t be chopping wood.”

  “Okay,” I say, and I do what he says.

  He slings an arm around me. “What’s for dinner, huh?”

  “What do you want?” I say, dropping my voice to something almost seductive. Anything to keep him distracted.

  * * *

  -deke-

  When I get back home, I’m in a full-on rage.

  I have a huge pile of firewood, but I start on more. I chop down a tree and then start hacking it into pieces. I swing and I sweat and I swear.

  What the hell is her problem? Why would she be with that guy? And why the hell didn’t she tell me she was with that guy?

  When she kissed me, she was cheating on that fucker. Not that he doesn’t deserve it, but what does that say about her, hmm? It doesn’t make her look very good, that’s for sure. It makes her look like a fucking slut.

  It’s true that I always fall for the wrong kind of girl. I always think that I’m falling for someone who’s sweet and good and then it turns out, underneath, she’s awful.

  She lied to me.

  She told me that she was single. Not in so many words. We never talked about it. I never asked. But a lie of omission is still a lie. The way that she flirted with me was a lie. And the way that she kissed me was the worst lie of all.

  I slam my ax into the wood, and suddenly I’m imagining swinging the ax at her, the blade cutting through flesh and bone and blood spattering everywhere. Blood on my clothes, on my hands, on my face—hot, coppery, red.

  She lied to me, and she chose that fuckface over me.

  Girls always want to date assholes, when there are perfectly nice men living right next door who would be so much better for them. Why are girls like that?

  I swing the ax again. More blood.

  And then suddenly, I crumple. I drop the ax and I sit down on the ground.

  I’m crying.

  No.

  Fuck that, I’m not crying. I don’t cry. I haven’t cried since I was a little boy. Like all real men out there I have learned not to cry. I have turned off my tear ducts in an attempt to be manly. There is nothing that makes me cry.

  I’m definitely not crying because of thinking about the blood.

  I’m definitely not thinking about being in the shower, scrubbing my body, the blood pink as it swirls down the drain, washing my hair and washing my chest and scrubbing and scrubbing and the hot water going cold and outside the door, she is sobbing and—

  A long, deep breath. A calming breath.

  Now, there is nothing except the silent, cold woods. The wind is fluttering through the naked branches. I am alone. There is no blood. There are only splinters of wood scattered over the dead leaves of the forest floor.

  I pick up a piece of wood and probe the sharp point of it with my finger. It is like a wooden needle. If I push hard enough, I will bleed.

  So, I do. I push and push, expecting the sharp wood to break through my skin at any minute. I want it to.

  It hurts.

  I push, and it hurts worse and worse and worse.

  And then I stop, before I actually break the skin.

  What the hell am I doing?

  * * *

  -juniper-

  When I first meet Graham, he is dating my friend Aleisha.

  Well, my ex-friend Aleisha. She and I are no longer friends, since I am with Graham now. That’s a thing that you aren’t supposed to do, sleep with your friend’s boyfriend. I don’t tell Aleisha that I am stealing him for a reason that is bigger than both of us, that I am doing it for selfless reasons. I can’t explain to her what those reasons are, for one thing, and for another, she wouldn’t get it.

  Graham is actually a very lucky find. I don’t really have the plan all put together until I meet him. It’s a shapeless, formless kind of mass in my head. I get pieces of it nailed down, but then I can’t figure out how to make the rest of it work. And then I meet Graham, and it all comes together.

  The first time I meet Graham, it’s at a party, and he seems like a normal sort of guy. He’s very outgoing, and he talks a lot, and he tells a lot of jokes, and everyone seems to like him. I don’t even notice how quiet Aleisha is when he’s around.

  Soon, Aleisha is no longer going to parties. She’s no longer going much of anywhere.

  I call her one day, and I ask her to come hang out with me some night. “We’ll grab dinner, get drinks, have a girls’ night,” I say.

  “How about lunch?” she says.

  This seems like pretty sad substitution, but she says that Graham wants her all to himself in the evenings and she laughs a little, but it’s a weak laugh. I file this away as strange, but no alarms go off in my head.

  The alarms don’t start blaring until months later, when Aleisha is calling me the morning of our latest lunch date to cancel. She only goes out to lunch anymore with me. She never goes out at night. And it has to be lunch on a weekday, so that she leaves from her work and goes back there. Never on a weekend. Apparently, Graham wants her all to himself on the weekends too.

  I’ve read enough trashy articles in women’s magazines to get an idea of what’s going on here, and the alarms are blaring. So, I let Aleisha off the hook for lunch, but then I show up at her work anyway. She’s not there. She’s called in sick. So, I go to her place and bang on the door until she answers and I can see her very cliche black eye for myself.

  I don’t confront her about it. I don’t even ask. I don’t want to hear her unoriginal lies.

  Instead, I start emailing her about how she needs to leave Graham and now, because he’s an abusive dickwad.

  She responds in the typical way that abused women do, by denying it and then by making excuses for him and finally by refusing to answer my emails.

  I go to the police, and they tell me there’s nothing they can do. Graham is allowed to use my friend as a punching bag as long as she’s cool with it. They need her to press charges against him. I tell them this is bullshit. Why can’t I press charges against him? Why can’t I say that I think he’s bad for my friend? Why can’t I say that he’s gotten inside her mind and made it so she doesn’t know how to be away from him anymore?

  Because Aleisha is not the same. She is timid now, and she doesn’t trust herself anymore, and she is always peppering her statements with probably-stupid-of-mes and how-dumb-can-I-bes.

  The police say it doesn’t work that way.

  Of course it doesn’t. Poor Aleisha is getting beaten and having her head screwed with, and there’s nothing anyone can do. Graham wins.

  I find out some things about Graham. I figure out where he works, and I figure out that he likes to go out for happy-hour drinks at a bar around the corner from his office. Aleisha, of course, must sit home and wait for him, presumably because Graham is too insecure to handle letting his girlfriend talk to anyone except him. Graham is deeply pathetic and insecure. That is why he is abusive. The only way he feels big is if
he makes everyone else feel small.

  I start going to the bar where he has his happy-hour drinks. I wear tiny tank tops and tight jeans, and I tell Graham that I’ve been secretly fantasizing about him for months, ever since the first time I met him. I tell him that he’s the hottest guy I’ve ever seen. I tell him I want to blow him in the bathroom.

  It’s surprisingly easy to get Graham to dump Aleisha.

  And then he’s mine.

  What a fucking prize.

  The hell of it though, the real irony of the situation, is what it’s like with him. That first night in that bar bathroom, me on my knees on the dirty tile, undoing his zipper while he tugs on my hair, pulling it at the roots just enough so it hurts and then I have him in my mouth, and he fills me up and hits the back of my throat, and I’ve never been so wet in my life.

  Sex with Graham, it’s kind of amazing.

  * * *

  -deke-

  The next night, I’m in the crawlspace.

  I know that I should forget about her, but I can’t. I have this awful curiosity. I want to know how it is that this works, how she could be with this Graham person. It doesn’t make any sense. So, I’m there, and I’m half-afraid that I’m going to see her fuck him or something, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch that without killing them both.

  I shouldn’t be there, but I am.

  Juniper is in the kitchen. She is washing dishes.

  He is in the living area, and the cabin is so small that there isn’t really much space. It’s all one room. Did she always intend to bring this guy up here? Why did she never tell me this was supposed to house two people? Why did she always make it seem like the place was designed only for her?

  There was the fact that I floated the idea of using a full mattress to add some storage space, and she insisted it had to be a queen.

  Maybe that was a clue I should have honed in on.

  Whatever.

  Right now, they’re not talking. He’s on his phone, sprawled out on the built-in couch that I made for her. Not for him. God, he doesn’t belong there.

  He’s drinking a beer.

  She has a beer out on the counter, but I don’t notice her picking it up to drink all that often. She’s just washing the dishes, and it seems like she’s been at it for a long time. Hell, what is she washing in there? What did they eat for dinner? It didn’t look that complicated to me. Maybe two bowls, two forks, and a saucepan. That should have taken her five minutes.