Possess: An Alpha Anthology Read online

  But then, ever so slowly, Cinnamon’s brawny savior turns around.

  I stare at him. I blink. That doesn’t make him go away.

  No. It’s not possible.

  He’s in the Army. He’s been shipped to the other side of the world where I have absolutely no chance of running into him.

  I whisper, “Damn.”

  That makes him smile, a perfect design of full lips and white teeth that’ll blind you if you stare too long.

  “Hello to you too, Cricket. It’s been a hell of a long time.”

  When exes crawl out of the woodwork, don’t they always say something dumb like that? Someone really ought to study the phenomenon. His statement was inadequate, although it has been a long time since we’ve been close enough to look each other in the eye.

  “Bran,” I answer weakly, allowing the nearest wall to give me a little support. The sound of his name has sapped all my strength away. “Yes, it has.”

  A long time, but not nearly long enough.

  Chapter Two

  How do I begin to explain Matthew Branson?

  It doesn’t seem like enough to say that he was the cliché; the brash, cocksure player who roams the corridors of every working class American high school and knows the universal combination that opens the legs of any girl he looks twice at.

  I can start by explaining the day I met him. It was in the first week of kindergarten. I’d just jumped off the playground swing and managed to land in a face plant, earning a mouth full of prickly wood chips. He was the one chosen to walk me to the nurse so someone could do something about my scraped knees.

  On the way there he held my hand and looked me over with approval. “That was really cool,” he said. “You jumped so far. What’s your name?”

  “Cricket,” I answered. I must have bitten my tongue during the fall. I clearly remember tasting blood.

  “Cricket,” he repeated. “Like the bug?”

  “Yup. Except I only have two legs.”

  He smiled.

  He was just Matthew back then. That’s what the teachers called him, that’s what his father called him, that’s what I called him. He didn’t become ‘Bran’ until sometime in middle school when he got tapped to join the high school junior varsity squad. But by that time the early years when everyone got alone were long over and we’d all separated into camps. I didn’t belong in his camp and he didn’t belong in mine.

  Bran was the fortunate son born to Hickey, Ohio at a time when life was trending toward the bleak side. The town sits in the drab northeastern lip of the state and used to be a chief global manufacturing center for flip-flops. Once upon a time in the fanciful good days, most of the working age residents were herded into the flip-flop factory by the 8 a.m. whistle and stayed there until the quitting time yodel at 5 p.m. Pay was good, benefits were good and the ultimate reward was one of those quaint row houses with three bedrooms, two baths and a shallow courtyard roomy enough for a kettle grill and a squad of Adirondack chairs.

  By the time I came along, the decline was already underway. The flip-flop factory owners woke up one morning and decided they would rather have employees in China than in Ohio and nothing anyone said could change their minds. They locked the doors, handed out paltry severance packages and waved from the windows of their luxury vehicles before they drove out of Hickey forever. Legend says they did pause for a slice of pizza at Vittorio’s on Center Street first but I guess that doesn’t matter much.

  For a while people just stared at their pink slips and at each other and wondered what the hell they were going to do. After all, it was widely assumed that flip-flop production would last for eternity. The wake up call took a while to sink in.

  My father was one of the lucky ones who shook himself alive pretty quickly and was able to find a job sixty miles away in Akron. My mother started an online shop and started selling animal print headbands that she sewed herself on her old Singer machine. They were able to keep their house, raising me and my brother with everything we needed, even though they couldn’t stand each other.

  Meanwhile, Hickey started slowly leaking people as if it was a punctured tire. A big chunk of those cute row houses were emptied out and never refilled. Half the shops on Center Street closed, along with the small movie theater. A decade after the demise of the flip-flop factory, the best excuse for entertainment was Friday Night Football at the high school, where everyone would freeze their asses off on the metal bleachers and discreetly add whiskey to their insulated coffee mugs while praying to Jesus that the local boys would put on a good show.

  I’m only bringing all of this up to make it clear that the town was ripe for a hero.

  What they got was Matthew Branson.

  It would be a lie to claim that I spent so many years staring straight at him and never noticed that the guy was sex on a goddamn stick. Tall, black-haired, blue-eyed and with a body that no high school kid should have a right to own, he was something to look at. Add the mysticism of the all-American football idol whose hands were (reportedly) as good with a pussy and they were with a ball and you have a recipe for gasping, panty-sopping worship.

  Bran was a dog though. I guess most teenage guys who are served sex on a platter everywhere they go would of course be dogs. By the time he got to the midway point in high school he’d already hooked up with half of the female members of our class and started working on the other half. Girlfriends weren’t really his thing and being used like a gardening tool was never really mine so we pretty much stayed out of each other’s orbit. Every once in a while he’d surprise me with a ‘Hey, Cricket’ as we passed each other in the hallway but I never thought much of it. Bran said hello to everyone. He was that kind of guy. And even if my heart beat a little faster when I heard my name come out of his mouth, I wasn’t enough of a dreamer to believe there was anything else to it.

  Anyhow, Bran was sporadically attached to Kayla Swenson. Kayla resembled a pre-Raphaelite painting with an angelic face and curly red hair down to her waist. She was also a deranged witch. Getting on her bad side wasn’t real high on my ‘To Do’ list.

  We’d actually been friends once, Kayla and I, right up until eighth grade. That ended one day when we were in the girls’ room raiding the tampon machine. I passed some comment about how Beyonce’s latest album didn’t really do much for me. For Kayla, that was reason enough to slap me across the face, call me a fucking Goth freak and pretend I was invisible forever.

  Oh well, I thought it was good riddance at the time. Kayla was a crazy, sticky-fingered asshole who was always stealing my black eyeliner. Her favorite word was ‘effing’ and she cracked her knuckles constantly. I didn’t miss her. She would give me one more reason to curse her name but that wouldn’t be happening until years later.

  So, the way it stood at the end of high school, I had my crowd (a tiny clique of artists and outcasts) and Bran had his (the rest of the breathing mammals). He won a scholarship to play football at a Catholic college on the east coast and I was going to a second rate art school in Chicago. Even though we were vaguely in the same place geographically speaking, we occupied separate worlds. Still, it looked like both our dreams were going to come true.

  Too bad dreams aren’t always dependable.

  Dreams can shatter as easily as a right knee when a pickup truck and a cottonwood tree collide. The knee belonged to future NFL quarterback Matthew Branson and the pickup truck to his drunken best friend. The cottonwood tree just happened to be minding its own business on the side of the road.

  Dreams can also vaporize in a puff of exhaust smoke when your father raids your college funds to service the expensive mistress he’s been keeping in Akron and then leaves in the dead of night rather than explain anything to anyone. At least he left a post-it note on my dresser mirror. It said, ‘SORRY’. Below it he scrawled a very convincing sad face.

  Of course, I’d heard what happened to Bran the April before graduation. If Hickey had a daily paper, Bran’s accident would have been front p
age news for a month. I doubted he’d heard what happened to me. Either way, neither one of us would be going anywhere after graduation. We would get to watch from the sidelines while everyone who could make a run for it did so.

  He still had his crutches at graduation and as he limped across the stage after gathering his diploma, I felt vaguely sorry for him for the first time. In fact the whole audience remained hushed and sober until he was across the stage and then erupted into such thunderous applause you would think he’d just finished rolling his lame body across the nation on a three-wheeled skateboard.

  As the summer wore on I didn’t give much thought to Bran. His family was a rare prosperous one in Hickey and even without a football scholarship he would do all right working in his dad’s lumberyard.

  For my part, I lucked into a waitress job at Garcia’s, one of the last remaining eating holes on Center Street. Berto Garcia always had a hard-on for my mom and was probably hoping for to get somewhere now that she was done being married. My mother tried to get me to enroll in the community college twenty miles away. She offered what little money she had but I just shook my head and told her to save it for my little brother, Gavin.

  Despite all my former lofty goals, I just couldn’t get interested in plodding through college algebra and trying to figure out where I fit into things. My father’s betrayal had broken something in me and I really had no idea about anything anymore. At least when I was running around with hot plates balanced in both hands I wasn’t thinking. In August I watched my best friend, Hallie, take off for California to claim a scholarship in a prestigious film school. The day she left I handed her a care package filled with cheetah-print headbands and a batch of freshly baked tortilla chips.

  Hallie gave me a patchouli-scented hug and tugged lightly on one of my honey-colored curls. “You’ll make it, Crick,” she said with confidence. “You’ll get out of here.”

  I just nodded and returned to artfully arranging the table settings. I doubted her words. I doubted everything. I was sinking, slowly.

  And that’s when Matthew Branson walked in.

  “Hey, Cricket,” he announced and looked positively delighted, like I was exactly the person he was hoping to run into.

  When Bran plunked himself down at the bar I saw Berto raise a scruffy eyebrow but he didn’t object and told me to bring over an enchilada plate, on the house. It was when I was setting out the chips and salsa that I noticed Bran was staring at me in the way girls always want to be stared at by the hottest guy around, whether they admit it or not.

  “Sit down with me,” he said, and yanked a stool out like there could be no answer other than ‘OHMYGODYES’.

  “I’m working,” I told him, wishing I had one of those bland, blushless faces. I could feel the heat. I knew my cheeks were bright red.

  Bran smiled. “There’s no one else here, Cricket. Sit.”

  I sat. I’ve often wondered how things would have gone if I hadn’t but sometimes you don’t know when you’ve reached a fork in the road until you’ve already irrevocably chosen your path. Then maybe you look back, cover your mouth and curse ‘Oh shit!’ but of course by then it’s far too late to change direction.

  That afternoon Bran and I talked like we’d always been friends, trading stories about the people we’d grown up with, people who were now leaving one at a time. Even Kayla had skipped off to State U but Bran waved a hand dismissively and said they were done a while ago anyway.

  Bran was surprised when he learned I wouldn’t be hightailing it out of Hickey myself. He said he always figured I would be one of the first ones to leave and I wondered how the hell he knew enough about me to form that conclusion. He was funny and charming and kept brazenly allowing his hand to brush my leg, just in case I didn’t get the picture that this was more than a platonic chat.

  When the dinner crowd started to filter in I had to return to work. Bran wandered off at some point and I figured I wouldn’t be seeing him again anytime soon. I was shocked to find him waiting for me at the back door when my shift ended.

  “Come for a ride,” he said and gave me the all-American grin that was used to getting anything it demanded.

  I argued. Barely. “It’s late.”

  He hooked his arms around my waist and pulled me in.

  I could feel him. All of him.

  “No, Cricket,” he insisted, the low, lusty tenor of his voice making all kinds of crazy deals with my hormones. “It’s early.”

  Then he stared down at me with such blazing fire I was immediately ready to bid adieu to my grudging virginity.

  Bran had other things in mind though. Once he folded me inside his truck he drove thirty miles to Marlboro where civilization was more advanced. He let me pick a movie at the theater and sat through a cotton candy chick flick with his hand on my knee. When it was over we grabbed some coffee and donuts and headed back to Hickey.

  By the time he dropped me off at my front door I was a little embarrassed, thinking I’d totally misread him. He wasn’t a talking cock after all, or at least his cock wasn’t interesting in talking to me. But then, before I touched the front step of my house he spun me around and kissed me so long and hard I thought I would turn inside out. His tongue explored expertly, teasing and testing, before he moved his mouth to my neck. He sucked the skin between his lips hard enough to pinch and I moaned as he worked the flesh for a solid minute. It felt good, so very good. A bolt of desire sliced through my belly and wreaked havoc between my legs. He could have done anything to me, right there in the driveway of the house I’d grown up in. I would have had no objection. But then he just stopped.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, baby,” he whispered before casually running his hand across my breasts, looking down with something that seemed pretty close to regret, and then sauntering back to his truck. I was so stunned by the lingering sensation of Bran’s tongue in my mouth (THE Bran! His tongue! My mouth!) and the sting of the hickey on my neck I just stood there. I stood there for a long time.

  Only hours later, when I was replaying the scene in my head over and over did I realize he’d called me ‘baby’. I just didn’t know why. As I brushed my teeth before bed I noticed the distinct red patch on my neck. I got all worked up again just thinking about it. I touched the area and was amazed. It seemed like he’d claimed me somehow, that the unsightly oval of discolored skin meant I was his. Then I scolded myself for jumping to conclusions. To normal people, one brief make out session didn’t mean a thing.

  Bran really did show up the next evening to take me out again. And the night after that. If that wasn’t surprising enough, he didn’t even try to get me horizontal. Every evening there was always that intense kiss at my front door, like he wanted to wait until I was nearly out of his reach and my mother was staring him down from the porch before he really touched me.

  We got along amazingly well. Bran never even glanced sideways at another girl when we were together. He would stop by the restaurant just to see me on his lunch break even though the lumberyard was clear across town.

  I liked him. Tremendously. I found myself thinking about him all the time, always hungry for the chance to see him again. Being with Bran left no room for examining the disappointing turn of my life. He was funny and gorgeous and intensely interested in every word that came out of my mouth. When some nagging part of my mind asked ‘Why me?’ it was silenced by a new, optimistic voice that answered, ‘Why not me?’

  We went on like that for about three weeks. Then, one night when the first nip of autumn was in the air, we drove out to the old reservoir. Bran spread a thick wool blanket along the deserted concrete bank and pulled me down beside him. I didn’t say a word when he casually unbuttoned my shirt and rolled the fabric over my shoulders.

  “Cricket,” he breathed, staring down at my body and running his hands all over me with lust written all over his incredibly handsome face. “I always had my eye on you.”

  Even though I was getting so aroused by the feel of his hands I was afra
id I’d faint, I wasn’t about to let that line go by, not when I knew a few things about his history.

  “Okay, Bran. Your ‘eye’ was on me and every creature with tits in Hickey.”

  He smiled as his fingers played on my belly and moved down to my jeans, unsnapping, then slowly unzipping.

  “No way,” he insisted, running a thumb just inside the tip of my panties and clearly enjoying the way I squirmed. “I didn’t hook up with half those girls who ran around bragging about it.”

  “And what about the other half?”

  He grinned wider. “You shouldn’t believe everything that you hear.”

  His finger dipped lower and my common sense took a turn for the invisible. Bran was slow and deliberate, searching, pressing, finding the button that made me bite my lip and stifle a moan. It was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. He knew exactly how to work a girl, not matter what he said.

  “Come on, there’s no way you can tell me you’re innocent,” I countered but it came out as a faint squeak.

  Bran gave me another wicked smile and my weak defenses melted. “Not innocent, honey. I didn’t say that.”

  I closed my eyes. “Please don’t remind me of your male sluthood.”

  He paused in the delicious way he was stroking me and cracked up laughing. “My what?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Bran turned grave, thoughtful. “I do. You’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

  The direct question made me defensive. “So what?”

  “So.” He started sliding my jeans down, ever so slowly. “I’m gonna show you a thing or two right now, sweetheart.” My jeans were over my hips now, sliding lower every second. “You want me to?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  Bran cupped one hand between my legs, massaging gently. “What was that?”

  “Yes, I want you!”

  His grin was full of sex and daring mischief. “Yeah, baby. I know you do.”