A Change in Gravity

"One bathroom is mostly done. Just need to grout the tiles."

"What will you do when you are finished with the place?"

Mitch paused to consider. He cracked open his can of soda. "The kitchen is an ancient pit with no lights to speak of. The roof is three layers of old shingles and will leak like a sieve if it ever rains here again. There is wonky and outright dangerous wiring all through the walls. The raspberries and blackberries are out of control. Trees needed to be pruned twenty years ago. The garage and that funky work shed we used to use as a clubhouse will fall right down without some repair to the framing. I might never be finished."

"Bullshit."

"What?" Mitch looked at his cousin as if she had started speaking Mandarin.

"You heard me. Look in the mirror, Mitch. You're young. You're in good health. Even with everything that has happened to you... you should be in a city where there are jobs and...."

"People who don't know me?" He finished.

"Yes. And don't feed me even more bullshit by trying to tell me it hasn't occurred to you."

Mitch put down his sandwich, opened his mouth, then closed it.

Rose spoke instead. "So, Mitch. Why are you here?"

"I..."

His response was interrupted by loud voices from the front of the store. It sounded like two women. The argument was not clear, but Mitch recognized one of the voices.

He sprinted down Aisle 3. Piper was face-to-face with a taller, stouter woman who had short black hair, nose ring, and a sleeve tattoo.

"Stay away from him!" The tall woman sneered. "He doesn't need you... you whore!"

Mitch froze. Hair prickled on his neck. He glanced around to see who might have heard this. Suddenly his fear was not fear for Piper's person.

"I never want to see the asshole again!" Piper shouted back, taking a step forward.

The woman moved aggressively. Mitch forced himself between them and wrapped his arms around Piper to shield her. He realized his mistake as he turned his head and saw in his peripheral vision the tall woman's fist swinging around on its way to Piper's now defenseless face. But before the fist reached its target it was snatched back into space.

Rose lifted the woman like a child and marched her toward the big glass doors.

"Get your sad ass out of my store, Emily, or I will call the sheriff."

He heard some scuffling, followed by the sound of a body falling to the asphalt, getting up, and running off. A car door slammed. Tires squealed in the parking lot and faded into the distance.

Rose came back into the store breathing hard, her face red.

"Sorry, Piper," she panted. "Are you okay?"

Mitch realized he still had Piper in a bearhug. She shoved his arms away, nodded to Rose, and walked calmly out into the bright sun.

Rose read Mitch's confused face. "Piper's ex-husband's girlfriend."

**********

Early in the morning, Mitch was woken by light blasting in past a blind which didn't quite fill the whole window. Yawning, he let the shade snap roll up and looked out on the morning. The sky was violet high up, turning to dark blue on the horizon. The air was still and he could feel the night chill clinging to the trees, the soil, and the stucco of the house. He saw robins examining minutely the small patch of grass where the sprinklers reached. He saw the half-disk of the sun rising above the hills on the eastern rim of the valley.

He saw Piper sitting in a chair in his backyard.

She huddled inside a brown heavy knit sweater, arms crossed across her chest. She was staring into the distance.

He got up and pulled on some sweats, then went into the kitchen and dropped two tea bags into two mugs, added water, ran them in the microwave, and spooned in sugar. He shouldered open the door and walked into the backyard.

Piper looked up as he put a mug in front of her.

"Thank you." She nodded to the table. "For this... and for that."

"I'm sorry she called-"

"Don't be," she broke in. "She doesn't know. She was just slinging shit. It's what she does. She's mental. But I do appreciate the help."

"Thank Rose. I was just in the way."

"I already did," Piper said. "Rose has been a good friend... seems like forever."

Mitch slumped back and she noted his suddenly-grim countenance with dismay. Nothing she could say to wipe that one out.

"Can we be friends?" she asked suddenly. Then she added, "Again?"

He looked into his mug for the answer, but it was oddly not there. "Why would you want that? I thought you hated me. For ten years I have counted on you hating me."

Piper was genuinely taken aback, so much so that she sat up straight, her eyes wide.

"Hate you? Hate you for what?"

"For leaving you. For lying to you - telling you I didn't love you anymore."

Piper's mouth dropped open.

"After what I did," she said. "I thought you left me for...."

They stared at one another, the steam from their teas curling up white in the calm air.

Piper shook her head as if to clear it, as if she had been floating and was now being pulled back to earth.

"For calling you Mark."

**********

Ten years before. Mitch had flown back from the east coast for Christmas break.

While Mitch was away, Piper attended classes at a community college sixty miles from Pogonip.

During their junior year at Pogonip High they had both applied to Duke, and they had both gotten in and been awarded generous scholarships.

Mitch's parents were happy to provide the rest of the funding for their son's education at such a prestigious university.

Piper's? Not so much. Her father refused to pay for a plane ticket or give her money for expenses. He claimed that she was just going there to shack up with Mitch. It was a goddamn waste of good money. She could go to school locally. Colleges were all the fucking same.

Mitch had known that Piper's father had dropped out of high school. He worked in an auto dealership body shop. Mitch had always gotten along with the man and was surprised at the vehemence of his sudden anti-intellectual outbursts.

Piper's mother was caught in the middle. Wanting the best for her daughter but not financially or emotionally independent enough to speak against her husband's tirades.

Mitch said he would not go either, then, but first his parents and then Piper insisted that he not do something so outrageously stupid.

So it had been that they ended up on opposite sides of the country. They called and messaged and wrote, but they were of a certain age and had the normal desires of that age. They had been aware enough not to make promises to each other that might not be kept. They each went to parties, talked with members of the opposite sex who had equally normal desires, and nature had its way.

Mitch knew Piper was dating. He had many friends in Pogonip who let slip hints of it when he talked to them. He would have been more bothered by it had he not met Addison.

Addy was tall, blonde, freckled. She had azure eyes and a wide smile full of pearly teeth and when she focused on you... you were the only person in her world. Mitch did not know how she did it, whether it was a natural talent or something she had cultivated, but when she turned those big blues on him the first time at a mixer at her sorority he was hooked and gaffed.

He was not without charm himself, and he mustered up as much as he could and aimed it at her. Over the course of that semester they were face to face, lip to lip, then skin to skin.

In his dorm room, tie hooked ceremoniously and traditionally to the exterior doorknob, he had taken in Addy's nakedness for the first time with an intoxicating giddiness. Her puffy blonde bush, prominent mons, conical tits with pink nipples, her perfect thighs.

An hour or so later they lay together, sweaty and content in the glow of coupling. He asked her to marry him. Addy giggled like it was the funniest joke she had heard.

Thoughts of the west coast slowly dissolved in the stream of living.

Piper knew nothing of Addison. Piper did know that the guys she dated were fun, but none had given her the butterflies that came to fluttering life in her abdomen when Mitch kissed her and caressed her. This Christmas, she was determined to love him so hard he would ask her to marry him and flee this little hole in the ground. If he didn't, she was going to ask him to marry her. Why not?

Mitch came home, and that afternoon Piper called his mother and invited herself over. She ate with the family, who were happy to see her and happy to imagine that the two were back together. Mitch suspected that his parents loved Piper as much as they loved him. He ate his meatloaf, stealing glances at Piper and comparing her to Addison.

He loved Piper. He always had. They were best friends and understood each other on a deep level.

He loved Addison. She was strange and new and exciting. Her smile made glands inside him excrete powerful hormones.

Piper turned her face to him and he felt that old rush of... affection, protection, lust....

He played with his meatloaf, poking it like he and Piper had poked dead frogs with sharp probes in high school biology, sitting together. Lab partners, of course.

It came to him in a painfully blinding epiphany. He could do it. He could have both. Piper here and Addison there. Neither had to know about the other. He could fuck Piper on breaks and Addison all during the term.

Then the beautiful vision detonated into shards. He saw the problems with that scheme. The logistical problem, the intelligence problem, the emotional problem.

Most of all, he saw the problem of his guilt. Piper was his friend. Could he string a friend along like that?

And what happened after graduation?

He raised his eyes. Piper was listening to something his father was saying, but her eyes were on him. And they were filled with puppy enthusiasm. Adoration.

He knew what he had to do.

But first, he walked her home. The whisper-silent night was frost cold and clear as thin ice. Their breath formed white cotton candy bunches in front of their faces.

Across the street, Grampy Pete's lights were out. At Piper's, only the porch light was on.

"Come in," Piper said pulling on his arm. "They went to the movies."

He thought he might tell her tonight. Break it off clean so the wound could begin to heal. But not here. He could not leave her to grieve alone in a dark cold house.

So he went in. And old habits were followed.

Piper grabbed Mitch and kissed him hard while managing to shrug off her coat, sweater, and shirt. He unhooked her bra and stared at her pendulous breasts, grown in the past few years to be a little ungainly on her small frame, but wonderfully so. He filled his hands with them.

"Can you believe how big they've gotten?" she giggled. He pinched her nipples and she gasped.

Minutes later she was on her back in her bedroom, on the comfortable old carpeting.

Mitch thrust into her, hard and steady. Her snug cunt was familiar; his body molded into hers like they had been designed to fit. It was being back home.

Piper closed her eyes and began to moan. "Oh... oh... fuck... fuck me... oh, Mark..."

Mitch froze on an upstroke. An internal dialog flashed through his brain.

Who the hell was Mark? Obviously the last guy Piper had fucked. Had she heard herself? She had just called him by another man's name. Apparently she had not. What should he do? Should he pull out and leave in disgust?

He thought about that for a microsecond.

The answer was: No.

He continued to pump into her, and she continued to vocalize.

She didn't call him Mark again. What came out of her mouth were not words in any language Mitch recognized. Whines and grunts and nonsense syllables.

He increased his frequency.

He looked down into her beautiful face, a face he had loved and still loved, no matter what the world rained down.

She looked up at him wide-eyed and it sent him over that cliff.

He began to ejaculate. She went stiff and mewed like a kitten.

Mitch's mind peeked into another reality, one where this was the last time he would be inside his longest and truest love.

Piper's imagination blossomed in rose red and purest white as she knew this was the man she was going to marry. Her lover forever.

They lay in silence for a long time, Piper curled on Mitch's chest.

Piper wondering if now was the right time to ask him.

Mitch knowing now was the wrong time to tell her.

The next day, Mitch borrowed his father's truck and invited Piper to drive around Pogonip and the surrounding farmland. He hoped to find a gentle way to break it to her.

Piper snuggled next to Mitch as he drove. They reminisced about the places they had been together and the people they knew.

When they were on a stretch of road that came near to the small river that ran through Pogonip, Piper pointed to a sandbank. "Remember when we made love there?"

He did.

It had been a blinding, dazzling day. The sun reflected hot off the surface of the water in nuclear bursts. They kicked off their shoes to wade and splash in the crystal-clear ice water of the little river. They chased the fast ripples as catfish zipped past. She remembered the silver flecks sparkling in the sand and the feel of the damp barely-yielding firmness as his weight pressed her bare ass into it. She could still see his face above her, snarling with lust, hungry and yet filled with love. Her moans as she felt his hardness nestling into her bush, seeking her slippery wet.

Mitch nodded. "I never asked you. Did you get any sand in your...."

"No," Piper laughed. "If I did, your big load of stuff washed it out."

Mitch parked on the street in front of Piper's house. The perfect moment had not come during their drive, and he know he was running short of time. His heart raced. He tasted bile in the back of his mouth.

He would give anything not to do what he had to do. It was going to hurt his friend.

But to not do it meant hurting her even worse in the future.

"Piper?" He hesitated.

Piper sat up. Mitch was going to ask her. This was the new beginning of them.

"I..." he continued slowly. "I'm in love with another woman."

He had the courage at least to keep his eyes on her face and continue to watch as realization crept across it. Her smile relaxed to neutral, then her mouth opened to gulp air. She began to blink rapidly. Tears rolled down her pretty cheeks.

Once he had leapt out of the trench, he had no place to go but forward.

"I met her at school."

Piper began to sob. Whole body sobs, her shoulders rocking into each lungful.

"I'm sorry, Piper. I just can't let you keep hoping...."

Piper looked away, out of the window.

"I want my mommy," she cried.

Mitch felt like the most horrible person in all creation that he could not take her into his arms at that moment.

She launched herself out of the truck and sprinted for her front door.

**********

That was the last time they had communicated. Ten years passed. They had not spoken, written, seen each other.

"I didn't think you heard yourself," Mitch said.

"It was inside later, in my bed," she said. "Crying my eyes out trying to think what had gone wrong with us. I thought back over every word, every movement. Then I remembered. I had called you Mark. And I hated myself. I wanted to die. If I had been braver...."

Piper looked at Mitch directly with clear dry eyes.

"I am sorry, Mitch. That must have been emasculating. I insulted you as a man and as a lover. You had every reason to break up with me. It was my own damn fault."

Mitch smirked. A chortle bubbled out. Then he bent over in his chair, guffaws taking him like an epileptic fit. He could not remember the last time he had laughed this hard.

Piper stared at him, wondering if he had developed some mental problem in the past decade.

He finally sat up and wiped his eyes. He saw the expression on Piper's face and began to laugh again.

"Sorry... sorry," he croaked out. "I just..."

He took a deep breath and swallowed.

"Yeah, I was a little... taken aback when my girlfriend spoke another man's name as I was in the middle of fucking her."

He saw Piper's dismay and held up a hand. When he spoke again, he was calmly serious.

"No. It was not as bad as you might think. Hear me out. First of all, I must have been doing a pretty good job if you dropped such a faux pas and didn't even notice. That was a hell of a compliment. I forgave you in about a split second. You never even felt the delay, did you?"

Piper shook her head.

"I was so in love and in lust with you that nothing could have stopped me finishing. It felt great then... but sure made what I did to you the next day seem even shittier. I've felt guilty about it for ten fucking years. And now I find out that you blamed yourself the whole time. Ten years of guilt for... nothing.

"I lied to you so that you would let go. I couldn't keep stringing you along. It had nothing to do with... what you said that night. I'm sorry for that lie. I'm sorry for a lot of lies. I think I reached my life's quota. Anyway, no more. Ever."

They sat in silence for a time.

"I would have said yes," Piper said abruptly.

"What?"

"I would have said yes. You were going to try and have me here and her there. You weren't going to ask, but I would have said yes."

Mitch's mouth was open like the fool he felt. The smartest girl - no, woman - no, person - he had ever known.

"That day..." she continued. "Hit me hard because... I was going to ask you to marry me. I would have said okay to your plan if I had the chance. I would have taken any part of you I could get."

"Ask me?"

She held his eyes with a steady unwavering gaze. "Yeah. You have issues with that?"

"No, of course not...." He sat back in his chair, his mind churning through this new information. The timing of his actions.

I could not have done more damage to her if I had sat down and plotted it out.

Piper was clasping her hands together, her eyes on the ground. Neither spoke for a long time.

"You never answered my question." She said softly.

MItch looked at her. The young girl who had captured his heart so long ago. The woman he had wronged. The prostitute hiding her trade from the world. The Piper who was willing to forgive.

He stood and held out his hand.

"Yes, I would be honored to be your friend again."

**********

Sunday morning Mitch opened his front door and walked to the street, on his way for a coffee and a potato donut on Main Street. Piper's car was gone. Perhaps she was just out for early morning refreshment, the same as him.

No. She's gone back to work.

He made the short trip to the bakery, purchased his items, sat and drank the coffee and ate the donut at a small table. He watched people he had known and who had known him since he was a toddler. Some greeted him, some nodded to him. A few asked after his parents. Nobody asked him where the hell he had been all these years.

He felt like he was part of a community again, but this time it was a community present by choice.

He sat on his new front steps for a long time, looking over at Piper's house.

He went inside and came back out carrying a decrepit blue gym bag. He went to his car and slung the bag into the back seat, then stood on the curb.

"This is fucking bullshit," he muttered. "What the hell are you doing, Mitch?"

He jumped into the car and drove off.

**********

Double D Ranch

Lulu picked him immediately out of the crowd of her girls mingling with the drunken gamblers, nervous tourists, and blasé regulars. She had come out to monitor the latest lineup and saw him leaning against the bar carelessly swirling a drink.

She picked her way across the floor.

"Hello, Mitch," she said. "What brings you back?"