Pieces Ch. 01

I do not write MLA/APA essays. I write smut. Inference and ambiguity are deliberate. Run ons, fragments, splices, and rearranged structures are deliberate. Perspective shifting is deliberate. Typos and misspellings are not deliberate. Comment with specifics; arbitrary judgment isn't productive. This paragraph is the longest explanation I hope to ever write. Enjoy.

PIECES

Chapter One

He joined the Army at eighteen. Volunteered for special forces. Spent more time in conflict zones than stateside. Never looked back.

Until her.

///

Max met Nadine Calloway eleven years into a twenty year stint.

She sat two stools down at a bar in Fayetteville on a sneaky Friday afternoon. Guileless, shelling and eating peanuts, reading a paperback with the spine cracked so far back the cover almost touched itself.

He asked about the book.

She told him to sit up straight.

Three weeks later she introduced him to Ginny; eight years old, suspicious, a gap where her front teeth used to be and an opinion about everything.

He adopted her in his head before the paperwork caught up.

Nadine was not a quiet woman. She sang while she cooked, off-key, committed. She argued with the television. She kept a garden that she talked to like the tomatoes owed her money and laughed at her own jokes before she finished telling them.

She filled rooms just by walking into them. Density, not performance. She took up the exact amount of space a person should and everyone else had been doing it wrong.

Ginny had her mother's mouth.

Same stubbornness, same volume, same way of making you feel like the dumbest person in any room you shared with her. Max loved them both the way soldiers love anything: completely, silently, and with the quiet suspicion that it would be taken away.

///

you knew better

///

January.

Slashing frozen rain and sleet sheeted across the road.

They were winding along Route 17 where it follows the river before the bridge at Harmon Creek. A logging truck blew the red. Max saw the headlights swinging wide, that animal-brain calculation of mass and velocity and time you can't outrun.

The truck caught the driver's side and spun them through the guardrail like a door swinging open.

The black water. Nadine's face.

Ginny was screaming.

Cold hit him everywhere at once.

Impact, glass everywhere; the dashboard caved into his knee. Couldn't feel his left leg. The river was three feet deep at the bank and twelve in the channel and the current had them, pulling the car sideways, filling it through the shattered windshield.

He could hear Nadine gasping. Wet, wrong, too fast.

He got his seatbelt off. The latch on hers was crushed under the collapsed door frame, metal folded over metal. His hands were red and too slick and they wouldn't move and the water was at her chest and she was looking at him.

She was alive when the water reached her nose.

The current pulled him out the shattered window; he fought it, tried to get back to her door.

He screamed her name while the taillights sank, then went dark.

///

Paramedics found him forty-five minutes later, hypothermic, kneeling in the water.

///

Nine days in the hospital. Shattered tibia, crushed patella, three cracked ribs, torn rotator cuff, concussion.

///

Ginny stood in the doorway of his room, two months past eighteen, bruised and shivering violently.

He couldn't speak. Reality stuttered.

Her words as dead as her eyes.

"I wish it was you instead."

///

They gave him a cane he refused to use and a therapist he saw twice. The Army had taught him what to do with pain: put it somewhere, close the door, keep moving.

So he kept moving.

The gym became the geometry of his days. Architecture of exhaustion so precise that sleep became possible; not restful, but possible. Up at 0430 because that's when the body remembered being useful.

Iron House on Myrtle Avenue: concrete floors, a ceiling fan that wobbled like it was reconsidering its life choices, owned by a Korean War vet named Dill who smelled like Tiger Balm and kept his questions to himself.

Max appreciated that about Dill.

Pull-ups until his lats burned past the point of feeling. Deadlifts until the chalk turned pink with blood from his palms. Running the crumbled track out back where asphalt gave way to red dirt at the turns.

He counted reps the way monks count beads; not devotion but repetition, the need for motion to fill the hours between dark and dark.

The mirror showed a man who was healing and Max was still serving his sentence. The tibia had fused. The ribs knit. The shoulder worked again. His body insisted on surviving when living was the last thing he deserved.

So he pushed it harder.

Heavier. The pain was honest.

Everyone else pretended things were getting better.

///

Tuesday. Chest day. Three sets into bench press when the air in the room shifted.

He smelled her before he saw her.

Vanilla, maybe coconut; the lotion had no business in a gym that smelled like iron and old rubber mats. He was on his back, bar racked, staring at the ceiling fan's slow wobble when the scent cut through the chalk and sweat.

Then she was standing over him.

Lena. Ginny's Lena.

Hair piled in that wreck of a topknot she wore like she'd lost a fight with a scrunchie and decided to claim victory anyway. Upside down from his angle, grinning down at him like she'd found a twenty on the floor.

Sports bra. Black. Technically athletic wear but functioning more like a suggestion. Lavender yoga pants so tight they could've been painted on, riding low on her hips, high enough in the waist to make the strip of brown between waistband and bra hem into a statement.

He couldn't tell if she considered him person or equipment; she looked interested in taking a seat either way.

She stopped behind the bench. Thighs against his head.

Showed her teeth.

"Need a spot?"

Max had been benching twice her weight alone for two years. She knew that. He knew she knew that. The question had nothing to do with the weight.

"I'm good."

"I heard you're not good, you're better."

She tilted her head, gaze dropping from his face down the length of his body and back up again, slow enough to make the trip a tour. From her angle, standing over a man on his back, the tour left nothing uncounted.

"Looks like it could get hard any minute. Let me spot you."

Before he could sit up she'd stepped in behind the bench, positioned herself at the head, palms hovering near the bar.

Standard spot. Textbook form. Except her hips were at his eye line and the yoga pants were thin and she'd been working out before she found him.

He could feel the heat radiate off her, the faint sheen of sweat and oil along her inner thighs. She stood close enough that if he turned his head, which he did not, her crotch would have been millimeters from his face.

The fabric was damp. The scent was not vanilla.

He unracked the bar. Pressed. She spotted from above, palms under the bar, and every rep brought his focus back to the same place: her hips, her stomach, the waistband riding low, and above all of it the underside of her breasts in the sports bra that was doing exactly as much work as she wanted it to and not an inch more.

He racked it. Sat up. Turned around.

She was close. Still behind the bench, still at his head level now that he was sitting. Close enough that if he leaned forward his face would have rested just between her tits.

The rise and fall of her breathing remained unhurried, like she had nowhere to be and all day to stand in his space.

"Wanna spot me for somedeepsquats?"

She was grinning now. The grin of someone who knows exactly what she's doing and enjoys watching you pretend otherwise.

"Lena."

"Max."

He exhaled.

Put the rack between them because the rack was honest and hard and Lena was anything but.

She laughed, low and private, like he'd confirmed a bet. She hopped up on the unused bench press beside him, sat cross-legged, her knees open enough that the yoga pants stretched tight across her thighs, embossing the outline of her obviously shaven pussy.

She pulled out her phone, scrolled, casual as Sunday, like she hadn't just pressed herself against a man twice her age in a public gym.

"Relax," she said, scrolling, not looking up. "There's cameras."

She'd checked. She knew exactly how far she could push before the footage became a problem. This was Lena with a plan.

"Your girl's couch-surfing at Tyler Brandt's place."

Different register now, flat, like reading ingredients off a cereal box.

"Been there nine days."

Whatever heat she'd put in the room she pulled out again with four words.

Your girl. Nine days.

Max racked his water bottle alongside the bar.

He'd called Ginny fourteen times in the last month. Texts that sat unopened. Voicemails deleted without being played.

"She won't answer my calls."

Lena shrugged one shoulder, the motion doing things to the sports bra that were either accidental or a masterclass in multitasking.

"Won't answer mine either." She pulled out an earbud, wrapped the cord around two fingers. "But I'm not her dad."

"Stepdad."

She looked at him then. Really looked. The performance dropped and the real person showed up unannounced; that sudden gear-shift Lena could do, the flirtation falling away and underneath it a girl who'd been eating dinner at his table since she was fourteen.

"That distinction matter to you, or just to her?"

The question sat between them on the gym floor.

Ginny's girls had been a unit since freshman year, rotating through his living room like weather systems. Eating his food. Falling asleep on his couch during movies Nadine picked. He knew their cycles and their effects.

Lena was the storm front. Loud, tactile, boundary-optional. She used to drape herself across the kitchen counter while Nadine cooked and ask Max questions designed to make him uncomfortable; favorite position, worst date, had he ever been handcuffed outside of work.

Nadine would throw a dish towel at her and call her incorrigible and Lena would blow her a kiss and Ginny would groan from the next room.

Before. When Nadine was alive to stand between them.

Lena left mid-conversation, no goodbye, like the world would wait for her. She slid off the bench, stretched her arms overhead in a motion that arched her back and lifted the sports bra to the absolute frontier of coverage, held it for exactly one second longer than stretching required, caught his eye in the mirror, winked, and walked out.

Max stood in the empty weight room and breathed.

The air where she'd been still smelled like vanilla.

///

He finished his sets. Drove home in the truck Nadine had picked out; silver F-150, still smelled faintly of her lotion when the cab heated up in summer. The house smelled like dust and old coffee. Rooms where someone used to sing smell different when the singing stops.

///

He showered cold.

Not cool. Cold. The faucet turned all the way to the right, water hitting his shoulders like the river had hit them that night. He stood in it until his breathing went shallow and the cold chewed through the muscle into bone.

Thirty-eight degrees.

He'd looked it up after. Thirty-eight

degrees and moving fast and dark and she'd been alive when it

reached her

mouth and he'd been alive when they

pulled him out and one of those facts

was a mercy and it wasn't his

///

The doorbell caught him halfway into sweatpants. Towel around his neck. Hair dripping onto the hardwood Nadine had chosen three months before she died, still fighting him about the stain color two days before the accident.

Honey oak. She'd wanted honey oak.

He'd wanted dark walnut.

They got honey oak.

He opened the door.

Ginny. On his porch. Wearing a hoodie three sizes too big, some band he didn't recognize, cigarette burn near the collar. She was thin in a way that had nothing to do with health; the kind of thin where food had stopped being worth the effort. Bruises stamped beneath her eyes from the inside out. Hair that hadn't seen a brush in maybe a week.

She stood there. Teal JanSport on one shoulder. The defiance of a person who has exhausted every other option and resents the one that's left.

Max looked at her. She looked past him, into the house where her mother used to sing.

He stepped aside.

"You missed breakfast," he said. "But there's eggs."

///

The day, light, and a cold crypt where love and home used to live beneath her sternum.

Max.

Unbearable.

She knew nighttime. The emptiness where normal lives dreamt and broken minds linger.

///

Ginny sat in the car with the engine off, keys biting into her palm. Bass thumped behind the front door. Orange flickered in an upstairs window. Candle or cigarette. She couldn't tell from here.

She could leave.

Turn the key, reverse down the gravel, be home in twelve minutes. Home. The word tasted wrong. Max's house wasn't home. Home was wherever she'd been sleeping that week, which lately was a couch at Tyler Brandt's.

Before that a futon at her coworker's from the temp agency, and

Before that the back seat of her own car in the Walmart lot off Route 9 until someone called the cops at 3 a.m.

She didn't go home.

She went somewhere worse.

The night air hit her bare shoulders and she wished she'd worn more. Or less. The dress was wrong. Too much effort for a house party, not enough armor for what waited inside. She remembered feeling healthy, proportional. When she bought it the dress felt...right.

Now she was all pinched edges and exaggerated curves.

Heroin chic.

Her laugh echoed off the dilapidated rafters and came back meaner.

Confirming.

The door was unlocked.

///

Inside: bodies, noise, the particular thickness of air that meant too many people in not enough square footage. Someone's Bluetooth speaker competing with someone else's, the overlap creating a din like two songs drowning each other. She recognized nobody. Then everybody. Faces from high school resurfacing like old photographs left in water. Warped. Familiar enough to hurt.

She shouldered through the living room.

Someone handed her a beer. She took it, didn't drink it, used it as a prop. A bottle in your hand meant you belonged. She'd learned that at fourteen. Her mother at a barbecue, laughing, drink in hand, never finishing it. How the glass caught the light. How easy she made it look.

A boy she half-recognized said words she couldn't hear. She smiled, nodded, kept walking. He could have been proposing marriage or ordering a pizza. The living room was a wall of sound and she was passing through it like a stone through water.

No one.

The hallway smelled like spilled beer and someone's cologne, thick and sweet, the kind boys sprayed on over bad hygiene. A couple was pressed against the wall by the bathroom.

His hand on her hip, palm driving under her waistband. No room for thought between skin and sweat.

Ginny looked away. Not from modesty. From envy. Boy, girl, wall. No ghosts. Just want and its immediate answer.

She passed a mirror in the hall and caught herself. Sharp ribs. Prominent collarbones. Her once-modest bust the only softness remaining. The same bruising under her eyes she'd stopped trying to conceal. Hair she'd washed this morning for the first time in four days specifically because she knew she'd be here tonight. Girl in the mirror sleeping in her car and living on gas station coffee and peanut butter crackers. Girl in the mirror wearing a dress that cost forty dollars she didn't have.

She kept walking.

Kitchen. That was the play. The kitchen had always been theirs. The four of them would migrate there like some biological imperative, perching on counters, claiming the space the way cats claim the warmest room.

The warmth extinguished in a river off Route 17.

///

She smelled it before she saw it. Sandalwood. Lena's incense, the same brand since sophomore year, the smoke threading through the kitchen doorway like an invitation. Or a leash.

Lena spotted her first.

"Finally."

One word. Lena's whole body said the rest. She was off the counter in a single motion, barefoot, jean shorts frayed to obscenity, a cropped tank that belonged to someone smaller. She crossed the kitchen in three steps and grabbed Ginny's wrist. Not her hand. Her wrist.

"You're late."

"I almost didn't come."

Lena's grip tightened. Just a fraction. "I know. That's why you're late."

She pressed a red Solo cup into Ginny's free hand. The vodka hit Ginny's nose before she could lift it. Strong. Lena never measured.

Marisol was at the counter. Lime wedges lined up on the cutting board like little green soldiers. Her knife work was precise, rhythmic. Oversized flannel over a tank top, her uniform. Wide hips, full chest, the fabric tugged down over both. She didn't look up when Ginny entered but her voice carried.

"Sit down. You look like you haven't eaten."

"I ate."

"Liar." Marisol slid a plate of crackers and cheese across the counter without breaking her cutting rhythm. "Eat."

Ginny ate. The cheese was sharp, expensive. Even when Ginny had been sleeping on couches and eating peanut butter with her fingers at midnight, Marisol would show up with containers of food from the restaurant, unlabeled, left on whatever porch or doorstep Ginny was closest to. Never a lecture. Never a condition. Just food appearing where Ginny was.

Astrid materialized. That was the only word for it. One moment the stool by the fridge was empty; the next Astrid was on it, legs crossed at the ankle, a joint pinched between two fingers trailing smoke toward the ceiling fan.

"You wore the dress," Astrid said.

"So?"

"So nothing." Astrid took a pull from the joint. Held it. Let the smoke leave her in a slow, controlled stream. "You look good."

Ginny took a drink. The vodka burned a line from her tongue to her stomach and she leaned into it. Wanted it. The warmth settling under her ribs like a second pulse.

Lena hopped back onto the counter, legs swinging. Heels drumming the cabinet below. "Okay. Everyone's here. Everyone's alive. Can we stop being weird now?"

"You're the weird one," Marisol said.

"Always. But I own it." Lena lifted her cup. "To being weird. To being back together. To the kitchen."

They drank.

The room got warmer. Or she did. Lena's knee against her thigh. Marisol's hand on her shoulder blade, brief, adjusting her own posture, but the palm was warm through the dress. Astrid's smoke drifting past Ginny's face, sweet and close.

The ache sat behind her ribs.

She'd missed it in Tyler Brandt's apartment with his PlayStation humming and his roommate's girlfriend crying through the wall at 2 a.m. She'd missed it in the back of her car with the parking lot lights turning everything sodium-orange. She'd missed it in every temp office where she answered phones for people whose names she forgot by Friday. This. The four of them. The only room where she stopped vibrating.

///

Marisol pushed the plate closer. "How are you?"

Not how's it going. Not what have you been up to.

Ginny shrugged. "I'm here."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the best one I've got."

Astrid's shoulder lifted. Dropped. The joint migrated to her other hand. "You're back at the house."

"For now," Ginny said.

Lena leaned forward. "Speaking of the house. Guess who asked about you at the gas station."

"Don't."

"Tyler Brandt."

Ginny closed her eyes. "Why."

"Because you vanished and now you're back and he's Tyler Brandt. He peaked junior year and he's been coasting on it since. You're the most interesting thing that's happened to him in months."

"I'm not interesting."