Mr. And Mrs. Wrong

He sat on the side of the bed and took off her shorts, sliding them down slender hips and legs until she faced him in nothing but neon-purple panties, a pair of red lips printed above the crotch. Outrageous. But that was Lucky. He peeled them off and tossed them aside.

Given her history, it was a miracle she’d even remembered to put on underwear. She often forgot it and her shoes, or she got distracted while dressing and ended up wearing something crazy, like one rubber beach shoe and one fuzzy house slipper.

Right now only the nails on her right hand had polish, and two of her left toes. She might have done it purposely. Then again, she might have spaced out in the middle of painting them and not realized she hadn’t finished. With Lucky you were never quite sure.

The bed was too small, the room too hot to be comfortable, and the air, as always, held the unpleasant odor of mildew. Outside, a tugboat—or towboat as Lucky called them—chugged upriver toward one of the inland docks, its horn blaring. The pilot checked his position by flashing a search beam back and forth between the banks. With each swoop, the light penetrated the curtains and illuminated the bedroom.

Jack wiped the annoyance from his mind as he hurriedly shrugged out of his own clothes and pulled Lucky down to lie with him. He concentrated, instead, on the taste of her mouth. Sweet. And on the taste of her breasts. Even sweeter. When he entered her it was better than the fantasy he’d been having for the past couple of nights. The fantasy about this very thing…

He began to move with almost cruel slowness, long, controlled strokes that had her writhing beneath him. Again and again he took her to the edge of madness, then withdrew.

Why couldn’t she care as much about him as she did her damn river? He’d expected her to follow when he’d made his ultimatum and rented a place in town. She hadn’t. Over him, she’d chosen mud, fish guts and noisy insects.

Still, fool that he was, he couldn’t stay away from her. And he couldn’t move back. Even if his pride allowed it, they had other problems that proximity alone wouldn’t resolve. Still…anything was better than this sham marriage they’d created.

The tugboat passed, the sizzle of the bugs again invaded the room, and he and Lucky climaxed in near-perfect unison. When he could breathe once more, he took his weight off her and gazed into her eyes. They were dark, unreadable.

“Move to the apartment with me.”

“No. You come home.”

They’d both spoken the same words a hundred times before.

“This isn’t a home, Lucky. It’s an undeclared disaster area. When we married, I never expected you’d want to live here permanently.”

“My family—”

“Hell, I know. You don’t have to tell me. I have it memorized.” Her family had settled this bend in 1837 and a Mathison had lived here every generation since. The original log cabin had long ago fallen in to decay, but this ridiculous place, erected near the same spot by her late grandfather, might as well be the original, considering its condition.

When the winter rains came, the river rose, sometimes to a level that threatened the whole area. The dam downstream couldn’t always handle all the runoff.

Jack hadn’t lived in Potock long enough to see a flood, but he’d heard the old-timers in town talk about how bad the floods could get. This bedroom told the story. The walls had water stains all the way up to the window casement.

Despite that, and even though she knew he was uncomfortable here, she refused to live in town, even for part of the week. They’d tried it for a month and even he’d had to admit the running back and forth had been inconvenient.

So he’d given in and suggested they build another house on the river—a decent house—but this land was too low, and Lucky wouldn’t hear of selling it. They were at a stalemate.

“You have to commit to this marriage if we’re going to save it,” he told her.

“I have to commit?” She sat up, so Jack did, too, propping his elbows on his raised knees. “You’re the one who ran out of here at the first sign of trouble—like a coon with hounds on his tail.” Her hick accent had thickened with her indignation. “You left me, Jack. Not the other way around.”

“Because I felt like a visitor here, or one of your specimens, packed up and put on the shelf to take down every now and then when you felt like it.”

“I never treated you like that.”

“Yes, you did. After giving up everything in Pittsburgh, including my career, to move down here and be with you, I still didn’t get a commitment. You live the way you want. You do what you want. I expected compromise when we married, but I didn’t figure I’d be the only one doing it. Hell, we’ve been married nearly a year and your photo credits in the newspaper still say ‘Mathison’ instead of ‘Cahill.’ How do you think that makes me feel?”

“This is about my job again, isn’t it.”

“Only partly.”

“It galls you that I won’t quit just because you decreed I had to. Admit it.”

“Yeah, it galls me.” And he wouldn’t apologize for it. He worried about her. She ran around at all hours and alone. And she had a bad habit of getting in the middle of the stories she photographed.

“Let me see if I have this right,” she said. “You hate my job. You hate my home. You hate my lifestyle. I guess I should count my blessings that you get along so well with my family.”

“You’re being catty now.”

“And you’re being unfair. You complain about how I treat you, yet I can’t ask you a few simple questions about your past without you shutting me out. That infuriates me.”

“You know everything there is to know. My parents died in a car accident, and I’ve pretty much been on my own since I was sixteen. End of story.”

“That can’t be all. How did you take care of yourself? Don’t you have any other family?”

“Not anyone who matters. I have an older cousin I lived with until I finished school.”

“You never told me that. Why haven’t you ever mentioned him?”

“Because we’ve lost touch. I wasn’t that close to him, anyway. He gave me a room to sleep in and that’s about it. I paid for it a thousand times over by working my ass off in his hardware store after school and on weekends.”

“You don’t have any grandparents? No other cousins? Aunts and uncles? Surely there’s someone.”

“No. The army was my family after high school.”

“What was your childhood like? I find it very odd that you never mention it unless I bring it up. It’s as if, I don’t know, it never happened. You don’t even talk about your life before you lost your parents. Why is that?”

“Because there’s nothing to tell. We were an ordinary family.”

“But why was—”

“Let’s concentrate on the present, okay? Nothing else is really important.”

She slumped and shook her head. “See? You’re closing up on me again. You do this every time and it makes me crazy.” Tears formed. “I’m terrified of what’s happening to us, Jack. We’re not making any progress toward getting back together. We’re not communicating. We talk, but we never resolve anything.”

“Then let’s not talk.”

“We have to. I have things I need to tell you.”

“Later. Let me hold you.”

He kissed her and brought her back down to lie with him spoon-fashion, his front pressed against her warm backside.

It was always the same. They made love, she cried, and he went back to his apartment to lie awake and feel guilty about her tears.

He’d tried to stay away, but he couldn’t. An hour didn’t pass when he didn’t think of her. And nights…God, nights were hell. In the dark, the regrets of his past closed in; demons with faces and names he’d tried to forget rose up to assault him, and only the hot pleasure of Lucky’s hands on his flesh drove them away.

Maybe he would bite the bullet and move back in. Living with her, even in this hellhole, was better than living without her.