By Carlene Moore
Featured Art: “Partner Pitching” by Lesley Weston

Nine 

The night my dad walked out was two weeks before Halloween. My mom and I had finished my costume, a porcupine, that afternoon and I was so excited to show him. But I stopped short in the hall when I heard my mother shriek. “You smell like perfume. Perfume.” 

“What are you on about?” My dad’s words were soft like caramel. He had been drinking.  

“Who is she? You know I’ll find out.” 

“I was twenty when you got pregnant. That was too early. A man needs to sow his seeds. It’s only natural.” 

My mom’s laugh probably tasted as bitter as it sounded. “Because I’m the only one responsible for that pregnancy?” 

“I didn’t want it. And then you went and did it again two years later.” 

“If you don’t want it, then go.” 

I don’t think she thought he’d leave. But he did. He stormed right past me, my quills scraping the wall when I backed up to let him through. He didn’t even notice or comment on the fact that his daughter was “spectacularly spikey” as my mom had said earlier that day.  

I chased him into the driveway. “Dad. Dad! Don’t you want me?” 

His eyes met mine above the hood of his car. “Aw kitten,” he said, shaking his head. But I wasn’t a cat. I was a porcupine.  

My house filled with tears and shame and cursing for a few years after that. During which I learned that being wanted, above all else, is the key to happiness. There’s a power in it. 

Eleven 

After my dad left, I spent afternoons at my grandparent’s house since my mother, a now single mom, worked two jobs to keep us in our house. My grandmother kept butterscotch candies in a drawer. One day she announced that the drawer was now off limits to me. I was overweight before my middle school growth spurt and grandma found it her duty to slim me down. “Beauty is a key to almost every door a woman wants to open.”  

Being thin, then, was the key to being wanted. Still, when no one was around, I slipped a chubby hand into the drawer and wrapped it around the crinkly cellophane. Sneaking one or two into my pocket each day after that, I’d sweat over them all afternoon until I got home and hid them in a box under my bed. After a few weeks, my grandmother’s stash ran low and she confronted my brother and I. Shaking my ducked head, I mumbled that I saw granddad with one. My brother, who was still allowed to eat the butterscotch, tried to make eye contact with me but I stared at the diamond tiles on the linoleum floor. I wasn’t sure what keys he possessed, but beauty wasn’t an important one apparently for him to be wanted. Loved. Accepted. I dug my fingernails into my palms until angry half-moons appeared.  

As for the butterscotches, I promised myself that I’d throw them away. No one wanted a chubby girl. But when I opened the box, the beautiful, yellow shining beacons of indulgence gleamed. I binged, laying on the floor eating eight, nine, ten candies, their smooth shells rolling around my mouth, their creaminess slipping down my throat. My senses alit and my endorphins flowed.  

In the morning, I had a stomachache that kept me home from school, home from my grandparent’s house. Wadding the wrappers into a compact ball, I buried them in the bottom of the trash and promised myself that it was the only time. 

Within the week, I was back at it. Luckily, my middle school growth spurt would slim me down, and hourglass-me-out, despite the butterscotches. 

Fifteen 

The buzz they came in on, my mom in bed, my Freshman-in-high-school-self wrapping up a Friday night spent in, alerted me that they had been drinking. As seniors in high school do. They smelled like cigarette smoke, spearmint gum, and cheap perfume as they whizzed past me to the basement, me trying to make myself invisible in my braces and flower pajama pants with the lines of my full-butt panties clearly visible through them. 

Ten or so people had stumbled past, but he wasn’t one of them. Perhaps he went home early. Perhaps he didn’t hang out with my brother this night. But no, Riv’s long fingers caught the door from the mud room to the kitchen just before it shut, the last partygoer other than him floating through on the lightness of youth. 

I considered running upstairs, digging my Wet & Wild mascara from the drawer, but it was too late. His lanky body followed his hand and then he was there. I was fifteen. He was eighteen. Unobtainable. Desired, so desperately desired, but off limits. My brother, perhaps to play the role of our missing dad, announced the first day of school that I was unavailable. And this was his best friend. What gave my brother the right? His thirty-six extra months on this planet? 

“Hey,” Riv said. His Adams apple rippled the white shell necklace illuminated against his tan skin. I clenched my teeth together to stop imagining biting into that flesh. 

“Hey,” I managed leaning back against the kitchen counter to hide the panty lines. “Good night?” I flipped my hair to one side in a manner that seemed like something an older girl might do. 

“Better now,” he said, a step towards me.  

My heart pounded in my chest as hard as if those words were a marathon and I had run them. 

His cologne smelled like a humid summer night. I forced a slow inhale, telling myself not to be greedy, because greedy is obvious, and obvious scares men away. 

“I was about to head up to bed, slip into my pajamas,” I said. These pants from Gap that my mom bought me were my pajamas. But I wanted him to imagine underwear or a slinky cami. 

“These aren’t pajamas,” he crossed the distance between us and fingered my t-shirt. I jumped at the electric shock.  

His breath smelled of beer when he leaned in. His lips grazed mine before the basement door opened and we flew apart. 

That summer, his car was a den of teenage hormone hunger. I’d run down the block and look around quickly before sliding into the front seat. We’d find open fields, dark corners, abandoned lakes, still forests. We found each other. Young lust and the secret of it made it unbearably good, fueling the spark with gasoline. When he would come to pick my brother up to head out, and then turn to wink at me, my knees would buckle. 

In the fall, he left for college. So did my brother. And that was it. I waited by the phone, it didn’t ring; I stared down the street, no car appeared. 

I died my hair, got my braces off, and coupled up with a now senior. 

The first weekend of my brother’s Thanksgiving break, I slid in a few minutes past curfew. I heard the music in the basement but headed for the kitchen and threw open the refrigerator door. Lit by the cold light, I recognized Riv’s arms as they encircled me, his breath hot on my neck as he said, “I thought I heard someone come in. Where were you?” 

Keeping my head straight forward so he couldn’t see my smile I said, “None of your business. I heard my brother say that you have a girlfriend. Ask her where she’s been tonight.” 

His lips pressed to the skin behind my ear. “She’s far away.” 

“My boyfriend is close by,” I said, and his lips stilled their path towards my shoulder.  

“Does he know about me?” Riv asked. 

I sighed, as if this question was beneath me. “He knows there was someone. Before.” 

So slowly it was almost imperceptible, his warm hand slid upwards from my waist. “The way I see it, time is a construct. And if we’ve done this before, and your boyfriend knows it, what does it matter if it happens one more time?” 

I turned then and took him as my snack. Because I could. Because my boyfriend’s world and his girlfriend’s world and his/my secret world were all distinct. Because I wanted to. Because he wanted me. 

Twenty-five 

At my brother’s wedding, Riv’s speech didn’t include me. No reference at all to the family member that he had been sleeping with on and off for a decade. Maybe because he was there with his fiancé. Not that I cared because I was there with Juan. A bilingual speaker who curled his rs and curled my toes. A paramedic. The good guy that ran in when others ran out. I was in love and he couldn’t get enough of me. I had been in long-term relationships before, but never like this. 

Near the end of the night, I danced with my grandad. When the band concluded the song, and we broke apart, drunk on happiness, my granddad reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a butterscotch. “For my beauty,” he said. I took the candy and hugged him fiercely then returned to Juan. “Want this?” I asked, producing the glistening candy.  

“Not a butterscotch girl?” he asked, unwrapping it and popping it in his mouth. 

“Not anymore,” I said and kissed him.  

Thirty-three 

As I’m leaving my son’s room after pulling the blanket up to his chin, baby fat still clinging to his round face and chunky hands, Juan appears at the door. “Alone at last. Care to try?” He reaches for my hand and raises it to his lips, kissing the knuckles.  

“Meet you in there,” I say, guilt swirling in my gut like foam in a tidepool. We agreed to have a second child three months ago. I’m still taking the pill each morning. 

Since our son came along, I’ve been demoted to second place in Juan’s orbit. Another child means another demotion. I don’t want to be third.  

When my Book Club wraps up the next night, I don’t head home. Instead, I drive to a bar two towns over. “I’ll have a beer,” I say to the bartender. One of the crafts on draft with the gaudy handles. He rattles off a few options and I pick something that sounds like regret. 

Cold, microbrew hitting my tongue always summons Riv to mind. I don’t drink it when I’m with Juan. In dark corners of nameless bars, when I take a me-weekend, when Juan works late or travels, it’s then that I let the amber liquid ignite my senses, tasting of youth and secrets, smelling of cigarettes and the upholstered backseats of cars. 

The bartender slides a pint across the worn wood, barely noticing me, definitely not checking me out. It sloshes on its way, leaving foamy puddles in its wake. I take a sip and can feel Riv’s fingertips in my hair, wild and roaming.  

This is what our kisses taste like. This is the smell that he leaves on my collarbone. This precedes his tongue circling my belly button. Sex in my house is always about “trying” for a baby these days. Riv and I don’t “try” for anything but pleasure; it’s there that we succeed. 

When enough time has passed, electricity pulses through my body and I forget what the after is like. The hotel sheets so crisp that their creases slice. The clothes coming off are a tango of gyration and beats and pulses. The aftermath is a ballet of head ducking, eyes flitting everywhere but together, soundless leaps towards the door. 

 Pulling my phone from my pocket, I scroll to his name. Hover. Is his wife inexplicably away? I hope Juan cheats on me too.  

A year after I had my son, when I needed to be looked at, touched, taken to bed in a not-the-mother-of-my-child-sort-of-way, I ran into Riv. The year of motherhood had changed my body, the lines on my face, the car I drove, the clothes in my closet, the way Juan saw me and treated me. Riv was changed too, two kids under his belt by that time. But those were things we didn’t notice, didn’t discuss. 

I miss my youth. I miss the hormones and the lack of inhibitions and the bad decisions and the wrinkle-free forehead. I miss the breasts that drew attention instead of infant cries. Young lust burns in the embers, reckless and wild, long after the bonfire is moved out of the woods and into designer firepits. No one wants middle-aged women. But Riv wants me. 

We promised the last time that it was the last time. We told ourselves we were good people making a bad mistake. We told ourselves that the burn wasn’t worth the spark. Together, we are liars. 

“Want another one?” the bartender asks, the tattoo on his neck snarling as his gaze skips over me to two twenty-something-year-old girls. 

I should say no. Order a Pinot Grigio or a Manhattan. Go home. I double tap the rim of the glass with my right fingertip. Despite my want, half-moons sting my left palm. 

According to NPR, habits follow a psychological pattern that has three steps: a cue (the microbrew), a routine (contacting him), the reward (his tongue in my mouth, his hands on my skin, his need and mine). I need to form a new pattern. Instead, I pull out my phone, scroll to his number, and compose a text: “Hey, Butterscotch. You around?” 

The whole second beer is in my gut, a third already ordered, when the reply comes in, “The woods or the lake?” 

When I was young, I wanted to be older. Now that I’m older, I want to be young. 

The bartender slides the third beer to me. I take a deep breath then relish in every drop before throwing cash on the bar and walking back in time. 

---

Carlene Moore is a writer from Denver working on her debut novel. This piece is separate from that. A graduate of Denver-based Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop’s The Book Project (2019) and Post Grad Program (2025), she also has been an artist in residence at Estudio Corazon at Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch, a member of Claire Lombardo’s cohort at Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer Session, and an attendee of Steve Almond’s Master Workshop. She is seeking representation.