Thick Skin: A Flashback Romance Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Beck and Ruby’s Playlist

  Epigraph

  Prologue | Ruby

  Chapter One | Beck

  Chapter Two | Ruby

  Chapter Three | Beck

  Chapter Four | Beck

  Chapter Five | Ruby

  Chapter Six | Beck

  Chapter Seven | Beck

  Chapter Eight | Ruby

  Chapter Nine | Beck

  Chapter Ten | Ruby

  Chapter Eleven | Beck

  Chapter Twelve | Ruby

  Chapter Thirteen | Beck

  Chapter Fourteen | Beck

  Chapter Fifteen | Ruby

  Chapter Sixteen | Beck

  Chapter Seventeen | Ruby

  Beck

  Chapter Eighteen | Ruby

  Epilogue | Beck

  Epilogue | Ruby

  Mailing List

  Thank You

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Billie Knight

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  Beck and Ruby’s Playlist

  Click Here to Listen

  Epigraph

  “Fear is stupid, so are regrets.”

  ― Marilyn Monroe

  Prologue

  Ruby

  It was hate at first sight.

  At least, that was what everyone thought.

  People forget love can be just as powerful, and make you just as crazy.

  Chapter One

  Beck

  In the late 1940s, my family moved to Treeport, Illinois. We had to move because our surname was dirt in our old town. People heard “Walker” and thought of nothing but drunken brawls, unpaid debts, and stolen wives.

  The move gave us a fresh start, but it didn’t last long. It ended the day when the sounds of the morning were missing. As I rose from my bed, the sink didn't run before the burner was lit, and my dog didn't scratch at the back door.

  I dragged my feet through a cold house, my body not waking as fast as my brain. When I saw our front door wide open, and our entry table overturned, I knew my father’s latest sober streak had ended. He had been kicked out of a bar, had come home mad, and had taken his anger out on the door and table before he passed out in the front yard.

  I found him snoring in dead grass, beside a rusty mailbox that had our name painted on its tilted post. That was the last thing he did before the shakes took over his hands. He wrote the neat, capital letters with white paint.

  Dad didn't take responsibility for our reputation going downhill in Treeport. He claimed it had already happened, the prior week, when I chose ballet classes over playing a sport at my new school.

  My body, with its tall, broad frame, was better suited for sports; but the heart wants what it wants, and sports never spoke to mine. Dancing hardly even spoke to it, but Ruby Fairweather sure did.

  The blue-eyed blonde was the only girl with curves in our class. She was also the only girl who arrived with skinned knees, and dirt in her hair. She liked to play rough, in the woods, with the boys. She enjoyed that almost as much as she enjoyed ballet, and I enjoyed watching her do both.

  In the woods, Ruby was a wild tomboy, but she turned into an angel when she danced, putting a precise kind of beauty on display that could tell you a story: from beginning to middle to end.

  I danced more like a fall down the stairs, or a wrong turn down a one-way street. That was how my ballet instructor described my movements. When her remarks made me cry, she’d remind me: “Thick skin, Mr. Walker. Thick. Skin.”

  That was what little boys needed, if they wanted to be dancers. They had to ignore taunts from their peers and funny looks from their fathers, because only thin-skinned boys could be broken.

  The ballet studio closed a few months later, and our instructor moved away, but Ruby was still in Treeport. Still climbing into trees and seeing how far strings of spit would slide out of her mouth, before they broke away from her full lips and fell to the ground. Still asking her mother to refill her popcorn bucket at the cinema, before the movie even started. When the pretty older woman stepped out, several buttery pieces of popcorn (that Ruby had hidden in her pocket) were thrown at the back of my head.

  Thick skin—and the fact that she was a girl—stopped me from climbing over my seat and teaching her some manners.

  She provoked me like that for a decade while I refused to retaliate. While parents decided they liked Ike, kids listened to rock ‘n’ roll, and the town, state, and country changed.

  By the time the 1950s were almost over, I was all grown up physically, but not quite mentally. Ruby was freshly eighteen, a year younger than me, and held the title of curviest girl in the county.

  By then, she had long given up blowing off steam with rowdy males, and had thrown out her tomboy overalls and sweats. She walked around in the same ironed clothes the girls in social clubs always wore, while they paid someone else to shine their shoes, and went to church on Sundays.

  Blowing off steam was pretty much my life at that point. I rode around with my motorcycle club, the Dark Horse Gang, pretending the cigarette behind my ear wasn’t just a prop and that an auto shop wasn’t my future.

  Sometimes, Ruby would bum a smoke from me, when no one else was around. She, however, wouldn't look twice at anyone outside of her social circle when they walked into Treeport’s only diner. She wouldn’t look twice at me when boys in letterman jackets pointed at the engine-grease stains on my hands, before making the shape of an “L” with their fingers.

  On those days, thick skin saved someone's teeth, but—no matter how hard I tried to avoid them—fights were breaking out everywhere, between my kind (the greasers) and her kind (the preps).

  Every week, preps were pushed into stools at the soda fountain, and greasers were jumped while their bikes sat at stoplights.

  The only place where peace often prevailed was Oliver's Alley. There, bitter disputes were solved with a game and a handshake. The oldest members of my club (Ash and Teddy) had stopped bowling though, and they didn't even act nice when the sheriff was in earshot.

  You couldn't have their attitudes and get any respect in Treeport; so, I kept going to the bowling alley. And I kept seeing Ruby, out front, having a smoke between games.

  “I thought you Dark Horse boys were too cool to come here now, Beck,” she said, one day, while I parked my motorcycle.

  She was alone, with her back against a wall, dressed in a short blush-pink sundress that would have looked modest on a skinny girl—but on her, it looked like it belonged in the red light district.

  “Too cool? I thought we were losers?” I said, because the L-shaped fingers in the diner had been stuck in my mind for weeks.

  Ruby lit a cigarette and shrugged as smoke filled the air. It was infuriating when she responded like that—looking like she had never apologized (or felt guilty) for anything in her life.

  “Well, I see you already have a cigarette,” I said. “Since you only seem to want me around when you need one, I’m going inside.”

  “Wait.” She pushed herself off the wall. “I heard about this club ... It just opened—not far from here. Everyone’s talking about it. My friends didn’t want to see what the fuss was about for themselves. Do you want to go with me, tonight?”

  My heart lurched as I glanced at the dark sky above us. “It’s night already.”

&nbs
p; “So let’s go now.”

  For a moment, I considered telling her to fuck off. But then I remembered mud in messy blonde buns and perfect pirouettes.

  “I’m ready if you are,” I said, straddling my bike.

  Ruby nodded and stomped out her cigarette with a white heel. “Just don’t drive like a maniac. Okay?”

  “Can’t make any promises,” I said, patting the rear seat of my bike.

  I felt Ruby glare at me, but I didn’t look at her. I stared at the cigarette, part of it pink from her lipstick—most of it crushed—all of it discarded—and wondered if I would suffer the same fate.

  Chapter Two

  Ruby

  Having Beck so close didn’t feel real. I had imagined myself on his bike, with my hands on his waist, hundreds of times before that evening. And somewhere north of one thousand fantasies had been born in my brain years before he found that black bike at a junkyard and fixed it up.

  The daydreams had begun after I first saw him, with Ash Duffy. They were walking together, toward our schoolhouse, through the field the boys from the rougher parts of town used as a shortcut.

  The two of them could have been brothers. They both had jet-black hair—the same color as the leather jackets that would become their second skin—and eyes darker than the Devil’s. When the other girls looked at Beck, they had seen a menace, but I had seen a dreamboat—and I hated myself for it. I had promised my mother I would never run around with boys like that.

  My own daddy had been one of them. He wooed and seduced Mama, then left her high and dry when she was six months pregnant. So, after I was born, she moved from a big city to Treeport, and told everyone that my father had died in a factory accident. She abandoned her greatest aspirations when she left that city, and then she got stuck in a little town, just like her mother had before her.

  She didn't want that kind of life for me. She wanted me to reach for things that women, in the 1950s, were told they couldn’t grab—or hold onto—or make their own. And she was terrified that a boy like my father would lead me astray.

  “The kind of boys who make you swoon are the same boys who will ruin you,” she had warned, since I was barely five years olds.

  So, I distanced myself from Beck, lashing out at him whenever I felt like pulling him closer. Whenever he turned his handsome face toward me, so I could read it.

  That face hid nothing, and turned the bad into the worst, because what I read was a love letter I couldn’t reply to.

  My I-can’t-stand-him act worked at school, in the woods, and at the ballet studio, where the town’s tallest boy danced like a duck with its tail on fire. Everyone was convinced I hated Beck—but I couldn't convince myself. Not when my body grew, and turned treacherous, and I was left alone with dirty thoughts.

  I would touch my breasts, and feel Beck’s rough, stained hands—or stare at an ad I had torn from a magazine, in which a husband had bent his wife over his knee, and imagine Beck bruising my backside.

  Eventually, after years of pining, I had to accept the fact that those fantasies would never be enough. Putting my fingers inside me, and moaning Beck’s name, wasn't enough either. I needed more. I needed him, hot and wild and careless, in my bed, between my legs, making me forget my mother's rules and expectations. So, I asked him to take me to that new club, and nearly died of joy when he said yes.

  When the doorman let us into the dimly lit space, we walked right into people moving and shaking to live music. The nightspot was so crowded the dancefloor had bled into the outer edges of the room, and was even occupying most of the space near the bar.

  “So, this is the joint that's made preachers all over the county nervous,” Beck said, as his dark eyes scanned the room, taking in the dancing couples, who were unlike any couples I had ever seen before.

  Boys were dancing with boys, girls were dancing with girls, and having different skin colors didn’t stop the heterosexual couples from dancing in each other’s arms.

  “Yeah,” I said. “This is it.”

  “I like it,” Beck said, taking my hand. “Let’s dance.”

  Chapter Three

  Beck

  I felt at home at the club, dancing alongside society’s outcasts. Ruby and I didn't come from different worlds in the same way that they did—and we would never be treated as harshly as they were—but we were no strangers to ignorant stigmas that could make you feel like you were on the outside looking in. We had both experienced something similar at ballet recitals, when people were stunned when an unladylike, curvy girl danced better than stick-thin, demure ballerinas, and were shocked when they learned a boy—from a rough part of town—had given ballet a chance.

  So, while the outcasts tried to pretend they were like every other couple, Ruby and I pretended the harsh judgments and strict norms that kept greasers and preps apart didn't exist. And as we indulged in the rhythm of the music, we were cheerful—excessively so—like we had to use up all the cheer before it spoiled.

  Several upbeat songs got the blood going, then the music changed, softened. I swallowed, palms slick as I closed the tiny amount of space that remained between me and Ruby. I wiped my palms on my jeans, then held one of her hands up, while I placed my other hand on her hip. She allowed me to lead as we one-stepped, gazing into each other’s eyes.

  “You’re brave,” I told her.

  “Huh?”

  “It takes courage for a girl to ask a guy out, especially to a place like this.”

  “I know.”

  “So, why did you do it?” I asked, dreading the answer. Dreading that she'd say: You were my last resort. Don’t get a big head about it. “I thought you hated me.”

  She closed her eyes for a second and held in a laugh. “I can’t hate you, Beck; no matter how hard I try.”

  I had never seen Ruby like this, talking freely about her inner thoughts. It felt good, right, but I needed more. I wanted to dig deeper and strip away anything that was false, so I could take in the naked truth. Most of all, though, I just wanted her, and it hurt. It had ever since my feelings were in their infancy, but the sting of her indifference toward my childish crush was easier to cope with than the cruel ache that replaced that stinging pain, years later. The cruel ache that could only be ignored when I wrapped my hand around my cock and moaned her name.

  “Well, then,” I said, “why don’t you stop trying?”

  “Because, all my life, I’ve been told girls are asking for heartache when they fall for a boy like you.”

  You mean a loser, I thought, as my grip on her hip tightened.

  “If you believe that, we should probably go.”

  I didn’t want to leave, but I wasn’t going to stand there and listen to her badmouth me for the millionth time. There were a lot of things I’d beg for, but love wasn’t one of them. I didn’t want a girl—even the girl of my dreams—to choose me because I had pleaded for her to overlook my flaws. I wanted her to choose me because she saw the good in me.

  “Maybe we should,” Ruby said, deadpan.

  My chest felt tight as she pulled away and moved past me. There was so much I wanted to say, but I held my tongue and followed her out—as she strode right into a scrawny man, who was walking past the club.

  He staggered a bit, but regained his footing quickly, his head snapping toward the sign by the door. It said, “We welcome all patrons. No separation.”

  The man took one look at Ruby’s fair skin—and my tan that never faded—and got the wrong idea.

  “Watch your fat ass,” he snapped, “race-mixing slut.”

  Thick skin was the last thing on my mind when I punched him in the face, so hard that he stumbled over the curb of the sidewalk and fell into the road.

  “Hey!” Ruby shouted. “He’s not worth it!”

  I wasn’t listening. I was too busy dragging him up, while horns blared.

  “Take it out of the street, assholes!” the driver of a white Hudson Hornet shouted out his window.

  “Wanna be next?”
I fired back, but I pulled the foul-mouthed jerk onto the sidewalk.

  I punched him again and he went down with a busted lip, face bloody.

  “You made your goddamn point,” Ruby said, jumping in front of me before I could pull him to his feet a second time.

  She put her hands on my chest and pushed hard, backing me into an alley. I couldn’t see the man anymore, but I heard him muttering curses as Ruby shoved me up against a brick wall.

  “You’re an idiot!” she barked at me. “You could have killed him!”

  “So what?” I said, breathing heavy.

  Heat flashed in her eyes as she grabbed the collar of my jacket and raised herself up on the tips of her toes.

  I thought she was going to bite my head off. Instead, she crushed our lips together, giving me a taste of heaven that set me ablaze and blocked out the world.

  If someone had told me, before that night, that heaven would taste like smoke and lipstick, I wouldn’t have believed them—just like how I didn’t believe Teddy when he told me you can help a girl find paradise with nothing more than your mouth on her nipples—but our heavens aren’t all the same.

  With Ruby, I discovered mine smelt like vanilla perfume. For days, whispers of it would be found on clothes I refused to wash, and every whiff of vanilla would make my mouth feel that kiss. The first mindless one that turned into others, which were frantic and violent, until we rested our sore mouths and gave each other questioning looks.

  “We shouldn’t do this here,” Ruby said.

  “Then,” I said, “let’s do it at my place.”

  She didn’t argue.

  Chapter Four

  Beck

  The ride home was a torturous interval, but Ruby was in my arms before we reached my bedroom, letting me know everything would be good again. The rhythm of the dance floor, and need in the alley, followed us all the way to my house, and it was easy to get lost in getting lost: hands, tongues, lips, and teeth, driving me mad.