Anything For You. Kristan Higgins

the grand opening wound down, Jess waited in the park by the lake until the lights went on in Connor’s apartment, and then knocked at the back door.

      A minute later Connor opened, hair wet from a shower, jeans on but not buttoned. No shirt, his muscular chest utterly perfect, the smooth skin on his ribs begging for her hands.

      Her knees were already soft with want.

      He leaned in the doorway, and a smile tugged one corner of his mouth.

      “Jessica Dunn. What are you doing here?” he said, and his voice scraped against that soft, aching place inside her, and she wrapped her arms around his waist and kissed him.

      Good God.

      She spent the whole night.

      A thought occurred to her in the dark, after Connor had made love to her for the second time and was sleeping, his heavy, beautiful arm around her, a dangerous thought, the kind she knew she shouldn’t think, piercing into her brain like an ice pick.

      She felt safe.

      The thought itself made her almost jolt up in bed.

      That was usually the forerunner of doom.

      She’d thought she was safe when she was nine and her father actually won seven thousand dollars on a scratch-card, and that money was going to help them get a better place to live. It would be the start of a new life for them, where Dad could get a job he’d keep; he’d always thought he’d be a good mechanic, and they made lots of money, and Mom would sober up if they lived in a real house because it wouldn’t be so depressing, and Davey could get into that nursery school with the nuns who’d help him more than the public school, where he was always pulled out for speech therapy or put in time-outs.

      That weekend, her father went to Rolling Thunder Casino and lost the seven grand plus eight hundred more...everything they had. The electricity had been turned off for six weeks, and Mrs. Cooper brought them food.

      She’d felt safe, too, when Mom had three months of sobriety when Davey was six and Jess was thirteen. She’d lain there in bed, Davey’s soft little snores so sweet and lovable just a few feet away, and it dawned on Jess that at last, she wouldn’t have to be the one in charge, that maybe she could stay after school for extra help in math, now that Mom was sober and life was normal.

      The next day, Davey had an outburst in kindergarten. Mom was called in and after she collected Davey, stopped at the package store for a handful of little Popov vodka bottles. When Jess got home, Davey was asleep on the couch in front of Terminator II, his face covered with dried snot from crying, and Mom was passed out in bed.

      When she was sixteen, she’d felt safe after her mother’s mother came to stay, a woman Jess had only met once before. Mom was in the hospital with jaundice, and Dad was who knew where, and all of a sudden, Grandma had pulled into the trailer park with three bags of groceries. She cooked for Jess and Davey and did the dishes, too, and said she respected Jessica for having a job. She wasn’t a warm and cuddly grandmother, but she was there, she was sober and she took charge. Davey was scared of her, but he’d get over it, and it was so, so nice to have a real adult in the house. On her second night with them, around 10:30, Grandma looked at her and said, “You have to get up early. Why don’t you go to bed?”