That Time with Sugar Read online

  That Time

  with

  Sugar

  Tess Oliver

  That Time with Sugar

  Copyright© 2015 by Tess Oliver

  Cover Design by: Nikki Hensley

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chatper 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Tess Oliver

  Chapter 1

  I twirled the thin braid of hair between my thumb and finger. The strands were every color of brown, as if someone had swirled together every form of chocolate; milk, semi-sweet and bittersweet. Every level of sweetness, sort of like the girl. Sugar’s hair was no particular color and looked different in every light. Most days she’d had it pinned up hastily behind her head in a sloppy knot where strands stuck out in every direction like the blades of a pinwheel.

  I slid the lock of hair into my book for safe keeping. Sugar had been so pissed at me that day when she’d given me her lock of hair. I’d been such an asshole. My self-constructed stone wall always went up when Sugar came near. Self-preservation, I’d told myself then. But cowardice seemed more appropriate sometimes.

  It was impossible to erase that time, that time with Sugar. Nothing, no hurricane of drugs, blow to the head or fucking lobotomy could take that time away. I’d still be thinking of Sugar when they were dropping me six feet in the ground. That was the kind of person she was, the kind who you wouldn’t let go of even after your heart had shaken out its last beat.

  “Guess you won’t be missing those prison coveralls when you walk out of here tomorrow, eh, Tommy?” Big Hal, as we called him, had a big, plump face that looked as if some kid had modeled it from a mound of soft clay. The structure of his face seemed to change with each expression as if the cartilage just moved around freely. I was six foot two, but the guy towered over me, putting him somewhere on the edge of seven feet, a pituitary problem he’d said. But he was as harmless as a butterfly. Or at least he was now, wrapped in prison orange. On the outside, he’d killed a man with his bare hands for crawling into bed with his wife. Word around the yard was that Hal had nearly torn the guy’s head off. That didn’t seem too farfetched. They’d put Hal in charge of the library because he’d worked in one as a teen. Murderer and librarian, both titles suited him.

  “Nope, I won’t miss ‘em at all, Hal.” I lifted my fist to his. “Wish I could say the two years raced by but every fucking day seemed like a week. If it weren’t for this library and the exercise yard, I think I would be leaving this place with my hair pulled out like a chicken that’s been plucked.”

  His gigantic hand waved toward my book. “You going to catch up to her when you get out of here? The girl who belongs to that braid of hair you’re always fingering?”

  “Don’t think so.” I spoke the answer with such ease as if it was not big deal that Sugar was out of my life, as if she hadn’t taken a part of me with her. Sugar had written letters for the first seven months I’d been stuck in jail, and during those seven months, I’d been so busy trying to secure my place on the damn prison pecking order, trying to show that I couldn’t be fucked with, or fucked literally, for that matter, that I’d hardly had time to write back. I’d gotten myself thrown in solitary twice and was grateful for it both times.

  I’d wanted to write back. It just hurt like hell, pressing a pen between my fingers, trying to spill everything out onto paper. The words got stuck just like they had when I was a kid with a stutter and the words stuck at the end of my tongue. I had too much to say to Sugar and I had nothing to say to her. She was like that. She could make you want to spill your fucking guts out and render you speechless in the same moment. In her last letter, she’d told me that her mom had cancer and that she needed to take care of her. She had one of those textbook case, tumultuous relationships with her mom, but Sugar loved to take care of others. She lived to please people, to help them. The only person she didn’t like helping was herself.

  I’d kept Sugar’s letters, all of them, like one of those pathetic saps in one of the cheesy romance novels my mom liked to read. They were tucked in the stained shoebox I used to keep my bar of soap and toothbrush. I didn’t know if her mom’s cancer was the reason Sugar had stopped writing or if my lack of responses had just made her decide to quit. After her letters stopped, I’d started walking the perimeter of the exercise yard fence. Like an animal that had been caged, certain that if I went around enough times, I’d find a way out. I’d find a way outside, outside to Sugar. Blood would pool in my crap-ass prison shoes, but I kept walking. For a month, I walked circles so that there was a groove in the dirt all the way around the yard. If Julian had been keeping track of the distance, like he had kept track of his wall climbing at Green Willow Recovery, I would have reached Everest’s summit twice.

  Only it didn’t matter. I never found the way out, and I never reached her. It was for the best, my brain had told me. ‘For the best’ the same stupid phrase my dad had used when he’d taken Brutus, my dog, away for digging up the flower beds. ‘Thomas, it’s for the best’, he’d said. But for who, I kept asking myself. For my dad, I supposed, and for my mom’s flowers. But it hadn’t been the best for Brutus or me. My dog’s tongue was hanging out and his tail was gyrating like a tornado as my dad drove him away. I’d watched the car disappear around the corner, hoping that my dad would change his mind and turn back. But he didn’t. I walked upstairs and put a fist through my bedroom wall. It had been the fourth hole in a year. A day later, Gerald, my dad’s personal assistant, came in to patch the hole again. My dad told him not to paint it though. It stayed spackle white to remind me to control my temper. By the time I was shipped off to military school, there was more spackle than paint on my bedroom wall.

  Big Hal put his hand on my shoulder. It felt like a sack of cement. “Well, Jameson, I’m going to miss you around here. This library is going to be a ghost town now.” He yanked out a chair and sat. It looked like a doll’s chair beneath him.

  I glanced around. There was only one other person in the library, Percy Tucker, a skinny, perpetually nervous inmate who was at the bottom of the prison food chain. He sat at the far end of the library with his stack of picture books. He hated the exercise yard where the other prisoners taunted him just as he had, no doubt, been teased in the school yard. But here there were no bird faced proctors to blow whistles at trouble. Here the guards just looked the other way, not wanting to bother with the dynamics on the yard unless blood was drawn. And even then, if it wasn’t their own blood, they turned a blind eye.

  “What color are her eyes?” Hal asked.

  “Huh?”

&nbs
p; He looked at my book. It was about some guy’s climb up Mount Kilimanjaro. Julian had sent it to me a year after I’d been dropped behind bars. He was obsessed with climbing. Julian had been part of that time, that time when the three of us, Sugar, Jules and I had run for our lives. Only our shadows had followed us. And no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t outpace them.

  I rarely talked about Sugar, not even to Hal, who I’d spent more time talking to than anyone else. Talking about her twisted my gut up into an iron hard knot. It was pain I didn’t need.

  “Blue. Her eyes are blue.” Sugar’s sapphire eyes could always see right through the steel wall I’d taken years to build, the wall hiding all the shit that needed hiding, the crap that I’d even hidden from myself. But Sugar saw it. She saw everything as if she could see right into my heart and pull out the ugly strands and unravel it all. But she didn’t say anything. She left the strands there in the blackness of my damaged soul. She knew that’s where I wanted them to stay.

  “Remember, Tommy, when you’re out there, keep away from the shit that clogs up those brain cells.” Hal’s bulbous nose pushed closer to his mouth as he grinned. “You’ve got plenty of them, and I don’t say that to too many people in here.” His laughed bounced off the walls. “Come to think of it, you’re the only person I’ve ever said that to.”

  “Nah, I’m clear of the stuff now, Hal, thanks to this place. No better place to sober up than jail.” After the thousands my parents had sunk into psychs and posh rehab facilities trying to save their son, the only male heir to the Jameson fortune and, therefore, keeper of the Jameson gene pool, from his sordid habits, turned out all I’d needed was a two year sentence for assault and I was free of chemicals. I’d refused my dad’s high caliber lawyer, knowing that it would come with an entire shitload of conditions, and opted for flipping open the yellow pages and looking for a name that seemed credible. The guy, Trent Carlton, defense attorney, was far more interested in getting his fee than studying my case. He got a new sound system for his Beamer, and I got a cavity search and orange coveralls.

  “Well, Hal,” I lifted my hand and his swallowed mine in a handshake. “Take care of yourself. And watch out for those pesky paper cuts.”

  His laugh thrummed off the walls again. The sound of it would be one of the few things I missed about this place.

  I tucked the book under my arm and walked through the room one last time. The entire library was outdated as if it had been dropped here from the nineteen fifties, which it just might have been. The card file stood like an ancient relic in the center of a group of empty round tables. The yellow walls were dotted with posters of celebrities encouraging you to open your mind with books. For me, it had been the one place where I could sit and think and wonder what the hell I was going to do next.

  Chapter 2

  Two and a half years earlier.

  The pink sticky note Sugar had slipped under my door said noon. I was early but figured the hallway was clear of nurses and doctors and other people who might object to me walking into the controlled substance storage closet. Julian had cracked the code on the door weeks ago, not for any nefarious reason but just to see if he could. And, turned out, he could. The guy’s head churned with stuff like that all day, cracking codes, hacking into security systems and figuring out shit that took a lot of math. I’d never met anyone smarter than Julian. But the guy was a mess. Sometimes I wondered if it was because he was such a goddamn genius, the kind of person who could never shut down, never power off. That would make anyone a basket case.

  Jules, as Sugar and I called him, had been born a twin but his umbilical cord had been wrapped around his brother’s neck. His twin was dead at birth. Murderer before you’d even taken your first breath had to mess with your head. He’d been at Green Willow Recovery Center longer than Sugar and me. It was an exclusive semi-resort, semi-mental hospital set in one of those states that starts with a vowel and gets its fifteen minutes of fame every year when a category three tornado rips through a trailer park or small town. Jules said Green Willow was like home to him. Helped that his grandfather’s name, Colin Fitzpatrick, was on the building. The old man had been some important doctor of psychiatry. Wonder if he ever expected his grandson to be one of those twisted people housed in his recovery facility.

  The hallway was deserted, even Sugar wasn’t around yet. All the doors had been painted a watery green, except the yellow door that led to the controlled substances. It was stupid. They might was well have written ‘all the shit you junkies are dying to get your hands on is inside here’ on the door. The yellow paint was like a big neon sign, tempting us, reminding us that we had to be locked away from the stuff behind the door. The irony of it all was that Julian had cracked the code on the door through his laptop, but the drugs were all inside padlocked cages. Julian had no code for padlocks.

  I looked around once more and flipped open the cover on the key pad. An invite to be alone in a storage closet with a girl who made my fucking head spin would normally . . . make my head spin. But, more than likely, Sugar had managed to get me a pack of cigarettes. Sugar was a notorious flirt, but I hadn’t touched her. There was no way I could touch her. If I did then that would be fucking it. Like taking a tourniquet off a severed artery, that would be fucking it.

  A tiny beep let me know I’d hit the right numbers. The lock clicked and I opened the door. Lawson’s naked, dimpled ass shined back at me. His pale blue hospital scrubs were down around his ankles. He glanced back over his shoulder. “What the hell are you doing in here, Jameson?”

  Sugar was perched on a metal rolling cart in front of him, her shirt up above her tits and her hands jerking the asshole off. “Shit, Tommy, you’re early,” she said.

  “Fucking hell,” I grunted and walked back out. I yanked the door shut not giving a damn if it echoed through the whole building. My fingers opened and closed, and I had to remind myself not to make fists. Fists always ended up doing something stupid like planting themselves in plaster, or doors or people’s faces. Lawson’s face would have made a great target.

  Nurse Greene glanced up from her desk as I stormed past. “Mr. Jameson?” she asked. “Tommy?”

  I ignored her, still trying to pry open my fingers. The morning air was already thick and stifling, like wet cotton, as I stepped out onto the grounds. Strips of purposely aged bricks lined each ambling pathway. The grass was perfectly trimmed and green, not a blade out of place. No weeds. Not a damn weed in sight. There was a fountain with benches around it where you could sit and stare at the patina covered stone fish with water spurting from its mouth. The birds enjoyed the fountain more than anyone else. A perfectly planned vegetable garden was set up on some rectangular raised beds for any residents who liked to get their hands dirty and putter with plants. No one was ever in the garden except the cooks, who came out to pick vegetables. Everything was neat and orderly at Green Willow, everything except the minds of the patients that lived inside its pale green walls.

  I headed to the farthest corner, a spot where most nurses and ward assistants rarely ventured out to, especially in the heat. A set of climbing bars and even some adult-sized swings had been erected over rubber mats just like equipment on a little kid’s playground. I leaned against the bars and yanked out my last cigarette. I lit it. Smoking was prohibited at Green Willow, but the doctors and nurses had learned to look the other way. When you strip a junkie of all his favorite candy, the least you can do is leave him with the one drug that is more likely to kill him than anything else.

  I took a long drag and squinted through the veil of smoke. Sugar’s long legs carried her across the grass in her flimsy pajama style pants with the pink skulls. Much to the irritation of the nursing staff, she always wore the top of them rolled down so low, her sharp hip bones stuck out and the ‘sugar and spice’ tattoo running across her lower back was exposed.

  Sugar stopped directly in front of me, huffed in disgust and put her hands on her slim hips, a gesture of anger inadvertently morp
hing into a tease when her nipples pressed against the thin fabric of her short t-shirt. Sugar wasn’t big on wearing bras, said they were just mini-straightjackets. She wasn’t big but she wasn’t flat either. Tauntingly ample was my mental category for Sugar’s breasts. Just big enough to keep me staring at my ceiling at night. Sometimes Sugar teased on purpose, with the pure goal of tormenting me, and sometimes, like now, she did it unwittingly.

  “I told y’all to come at noon,” she finished with another huff. When she was pissed her southern drawl came out. Her accent had just enough of that sultry twang that if she said something just right, even something as pedestrian as pass me the salt, then I’d think about those words all day, playing them over and over again in my warped mind like some long lost sailor drawn to the siren’s song.

  “Why the fuck d-d-do you do shit like that?” Seven years of speech therapy and I still couldn’t lose the stutter when I was pissed.

  Sugar lowered her arms and bit her lip in sympathy. She knew I only stuttered when I was upset, and she knew it was the quickest way to seal my mouth shut. If there was one person in the entire fucking world who I never wanted to stutter in front of it was Sugar. And if there was one person in the entire goddamn world who could make me stutter, it was Sugar.

  Her long lashes flitted down as she stepped close enough that I could smell the soap on her skin. It was the same regulation soap we all used, but somehow, it smelled way better on her. She reached up and tucked my long, dark hair behind my ear. I held my breath as her finger grazed my skin. My arms were down at my sides. For the second time that morning, my hands balled into fists, cigarette and all. Same fists. Different reason. It could have been a conscientious tease, or it could have just been her way of apologizing for upsetting me. Sugar seemed to feel everyone’s pain as if she was experiencing it herself. And I knew it was something she couldn’t stop, even though it would eat her up inside.