The Infinite Onion by Alice Archer

Author:Alice Archer [Archer, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shine Even If
Published: 2020-03-30T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 49

Oliver

I’d never come in the DeVille. The risk of jizz on the leather seats was too high.

Except that time I did.

I unfolded myself from the floor, cleaned up, locked up, and jogged to the house. En route, I called Freddie to tell him I needed him.

He was willing to drop everything.

“Thank God,” I said. “Drive safely, but hurry.”

We finished the call to the sound of the minivan starting.

While I waited, I showered off the heaviness of an afternoon spent wrestling with truth and fantasy in the confinement of the DeVille, and came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter if Grant had caught me off guard with a kiss I’d then co-opted to use in a fantasy—his disregard for my privacy was a deal-breaker and I wanted him gone.

Twenty minutes after I’d called, Freddie slipped into my house with a leer and a purr. “Howdy, babe.”

“Not in the bedroom,” I said when he tried to steer me in that direction.

“No privacy in the living room,” he countered.

I used his attempt to kiss me as a lure to draw him toward the arched doorway on the far side of the great room.

“Library?” Freddie asked.

“No. No spunk allowed anywhere near the velvet couch.”

“Well, then.” Freddie reached for the door handle of the room across the wide hallway from the library. “The old hideout it is.”

My childhood hideout began as the closet where Granddad stored his collection of textiles—raw material for the strange, magnificent quilts he sold for thousands of dollars. I’d kept the last quilt he made me on my bed ever since Dad died. A dozen more he’d made for me over the years lay neatly stacked in my bedroom closet.

Renovation of the closet occurred soon after I started first grade, which I’d hated. Life at home was theater productions, courtyard parties, art experiments, and everyone treating me like I was special. School was horrible and pointless and far away. I’d rebelled, cried, thrown tantrums, argued. Dad urged me to paint it out of my system, but grew weary of tripping over stacks of dour paintings no one wanted to look at.

As a desperate measure, Dad and Granddad removed the textiles and shelving from Granddad’s closet, cut in a row of windows to the courtyard at my eye level, and installed a wall-to-wall mattress. I took to the tiny room like a pasha. Fabric draped the ceiling, layers of pillows covered the mattress, and I hogged the Christmas lights from January to November.

Not much about the hideaway had changed. The mattress made it easy to kneel and spy on Grant and the kids in the courtyard.

Freddie left his shoes in the hallway and flopped onto his back, sending up a spray of pillows. “Batten down the doors and windows.” He rubbed a hand up my shin. “I’m going to play you like the fine instrument you are. You’ll be loud. I don’t want that guy to butt in.”

“His name is Grant.”

“I don’t care. Come here.”

Daylight filtered through the wild roses on the trellis to flutter shadows around the room.

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