Joe Hill - Horns

“Lee,” she said, pushing him back. “My necklace.”

It fell softly against the floor. They stood looking down at it, and then Lee bent and got it and held it out to her. It shone in the sun and lit her face in gold.

“I can fix it,” Lee said.

“You did last time, didn’t you?” she said, and smiled, her face flushed, her eyes weepy. She fidgeted with her blouse. A button had come undone, and he had left the top of her breast wet. She reached forward and put her hands over his, closed his fingers around the cross. “Fix it and give it back to me when you’re ready. You don’t even have to use Ig as the middleman this time.”

Lee twitched in spite of himself, wondered for a moment if she could mean what he thought she meant by that. But of course she did, of course she knew exactly how he’d take it. A lot of what Merrin said had double meanings, one for public consumption and the other just for him. She’d been sending him messages for years.

She cast a discerning eye over him and said, “How long have you been in those clothes?”

“I don’t know. Two days.”

“All right. I want you to get out of those things and in the shower.”

He felt his heart tighten; his cock was hot against his thigh. He looked at the front door. There wasn’t time for him to wash up before they had sex.

“People are coming,” he said.

“Well. No one is here yet. There’s time. Go on. I’ll bring you your drink.”

He walked ahead of her down the back hallway, as hard as he’d ever been in his life, grateful his underwear was holding it down against his leg. He thought she might follow him into the bathroom and reach around and unbutton his pants for him, but when he stepped in, she closed the door gently behind him.

Lee undressed and got into the shower and waited for her, the hot water hammering against him. Steam billowed. His pulse was quick and forceful, and his absurd erection wavered in the spray. When her hand reached around the curtain with his drink, another rum and Coke, he thought she would step in after it, clothes off, but as soon as he took the drink, she pulled her hand back.

“Ig’s here,” she said. Her voice soft and full of regret.

“Made it in record time,” Ig said from somewhere behind her. “How are you, man?”

“Hello, Ig,” Lee said, the sound of Ig’s voice as unwelcome as if the hot water had cut out all at once. “Doing okay. Given the circumstances. Thank you for coming.” The “thank you” didn’t come out quite right this time, but he decided Ig would hear the edge in his voice and write it off as emotional strain.

“I’ll bring you something to wear,” Merrin said, and then they were gone; he heard the door shut with a click.

He stood in the hot water, half in a rage at the idea that Ig should be here already, wondering if he knew something-no-had an idea that-no, no. Ig had come at high speed because a friend needed him. That was Ig to the core.

Lee wasn’t sure how long he’d been there before he realized that his right hand was hurting. He looked at it and found he was holding the cross, the gold chain wrapped around his hand, cutting into the skin. She had looked him in the eye, with her blouse half unbuttoned, and offered him her cross. She could not have offered herself to him any more plainly, his leg between her thighs while she surrendered it to him. There were things she did not dare say outright, but he understood the message she was sending him, understood her perfectly. He looped the chain of the cross around the showerhead, watched it swing, flashing in the late-morning light, flashing the all clear. Soon Ig would be in England and there would be no more reason for caution, nothing to stop them from doing what they both wanted.

AFTER HIS MOTHER DIED, Merrin called and e-mailed more frequently, under the pretense of checking to see how he was doing. Or perhaps that really was what she thought she was doing-Lee could not underrate the average person’s ability to deceive himself about what he wanted. Merrin had internalized a lot of Iggy’s morality, and Lee thought she could only go so far, could only hint so much, and then he would have to take the lead. Also, even with Ig away in England, they wouldn’t necessarily have a clear path at first. Merrin had settled on a set of rules about how people of high status acted. She would have to be persuaded that if she were going to fuck someone else, it was actually in Ig’s best interests. Lee understood. Lee could help her with that.

Merrin left messages for him at home, at the congressman’s office. She wanted to know how he was doing, what he was doing, if he was seeing anyone. She told him he needed a woman, he needed to get laid. She said she was thinking of him. It wasn’t hard to see what she was working up to. He thought often she called after having a couple drinks, could hear it in her voice, a kind of sexy slowness.

Then Ig went to New York City for his orientation with Amnesty International, and a few days later Merrin began pestering Lee to come see her. Her roommate was moving out, and Merrin was going to take her bedroom and would have twice as much space. There was a dresser she had left at home, in Gideon, that she wanted, and she e-mailed Lee, asked if he would bring it down the next time he got to Boston. She told him her Victoria’s Secret things were in the bottom drawer, to save him the trouble of searching for them. She told him he could try on her fancy underwear, but only if he took pictures of himself and sent them to her. She texted him, said if he brought her the dresser, she would fix him up with a girl, a blonde, just like him, an ice queen. She wrote that the sex would be great, just like beating off in front of a mirror, only better, because his reflection would have tits. She reminded him that with her roommate gone there was an extra bedroom at her apartment in case he got lucky. Letting him know she would be alone.

By then Lee had learned to read her coded messages almost perfectly. When she talked about this other girl, she was talking about herself, what they had to look forward to. Still, he had not decided to bring the dresser, was not sure he wanted to meet her while Ig was in America, even if he was a few hundred miles away. They might not be able to keep their impulses in check. Things would be easier with Ig gone.

Lee had always assumed it would be Ig who discarded Merrin. It hadn’t crossed his mind that she might want out, might be bored and ready finally to be done, and that Ig’s going away for six months was her chance to make a clean break. Ig came from money, had a last name with some cachet, had a connected family, and it made sense for him to play the field. Lee had always assumed that Ig would dump her around the time they graduated from high school, and that would fix that; Lee could have his turn with her then. She was going to Harvard, and Ig was going to Dartmouth. Out of sight, out of mind, that was what Lee figured, but Ig figured different, was down in Boston fucking her every weekend, like a dog marking his territory.

All Lee could think was that on some level Ig held on to her out of a perverse desire to hold her over Lee. Ig was glad to have Lee as his sidekick-the reformation of Lee Tourneau had been Ig’s high-school hobby-but he would want Lee to know there were limits to their friendship. He would not want Lee to forget who had won her. As if Lee did not remember every time he closed his right eye and the world became a dim shadowland, a place where ghosts crept through the darkness and the sun was a cold and distant moon.

A part of Lee respected how Ig had taken her away from him, back when they both had an equal shot at her. Ig had simply wanted that red pussy more than Lee, and under pressure he had become someone different, someone wily and smooth. With his asthma and bad hair and head full of Bible trivia, no one would ever think of Ig as ruthless or cunning. Lee had stayed close to Ig for most of ten years, following his lead. He thought of them as lessons in disguise, lessons in how to appear harmless, safe. Faced with any ethical quandary, Lee had learned it was best to ask, What Would Ig Do? The answer, usually, was apologize, abase himself, and then fling himself into some entirely unnecessary act of make-nice. Lee had learned from Ig to admit he was wrong even when he wasn’t, to ask for forgiveness he didn’t need, and to pretend he didn’t want the things he had coming to him.