Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) by Cindy Brandner Page A

felt about her position in the family. ‘The only thing special about me Jamie was that I found you,’ she told him later still when life had seen fit to break her heart for the third time in seven years. ‘Three strikes and you’re out, isn’t that what they say in American baseball?’ she’d said to him over closed suitcases, closed doors, closed chapters and then she’d taken herself away, for good and for always and gave herself to a man she’d never be able to see or to touch and therefore would never hurt her.
    He still couldn’t really absorb it; Colleen had been his, not God’s. His in a way that she could never belong to God. He couldn’t even close his eyes without seeing her like golden webbing on the back of his eyelids, half-reclining on their bed, sweetly unselfconscious, because there was nothing to hide from Jamie, ‘come here you beautiful mick bastard,’ curling her fingers in invitation and he, young, so young, eager, in love, mad with it, unbelieving that this woman, this pale moon and water creature would allow him the liberties she did. Divine heat, so powerful that it felt sacred, religious, frightening even at times. He’d been in a state of grace for that short space, pure and without sin, or so he’d thought. There, within the sacristy of sheets, limbs and skin, he had believed love inviolable. A lucky bastard, for once. It was the way he tried, strenuously, to remember Colleen. Other pictures interfered, Colleen lying still and diamond white, death’s hieroglyphs traced fine and swirling upon her face, pools of blue-black blood laying silent beneath her upturned hands, a self-crucifixion gone awry. That had been the day she’d discovered she was pregnant with Stuart.
    ‘I cannot do this again, Jamie,’ she said simply, calmly, when the doctors had brought her around and informed Jamie of his impending fatherhood.
    Third time lucky, he’d told himself with enough grim determination to almost believe it. Three strikes and you’re out, he should have listened to Colleen, for she’d the wisdom of blighted motherhood on her side. Unlucky bastards, he and his three sons, unlucky bastards all.
    ‘I cannot do this anymore,’ she said again, after Stuart. ‘I have seen too many little blue coffins and I cannot hope anymore. I may, just may be able to stay sane if I leave now, but if I stay I will surely go mad.’ So, he’d let her go, thinking that sanity was highly overrated. His own sanity seemed determined to stay as hard as he tried to drink it away, work it away, fuck it away. His own holy, or unholy as it were, trinity. Drinking, working, fucking. Drinking at night until he could find oblivion in a scant few hours of sleep, working until he thought his brain would crack in half, company doubling its profits, then trebling and him not giving a damn about any of it. Pissing the money away on booze and women. There were plenty of women, he was beautiful, rich and wild, a combination that raised blood pressures and lowered knickers. He’d actually bought a deserted Pacific island for one woman on a weekend he’d no memory of. Fucking to Oblivion, the required journey for the only destination he longed for. Yevgena had been wrong, there’d been a lot of women, just none that he’d allowed under his skin. He did all the permutations, fucking, screwing, shagging, banging and any other crude metaphor one could think of for the Black Act, the Dirty Deed, the Sheet Shimmy, the Horizontal Hoochie-Koochie, he just didn’t make love anymore. A night for each of them, never more than once, no matter how sweet and suppliant, no matter the tears and recriminations, no matter the pounding, thrusting, slick, sweating white goddamn heat of it. Nomatternomatternomatter.
    Paddling so hard and wondering why he didn’t just let himself drown, people had pissed away their lives on less pain, less heartbreak, less black sucking fear. Other people had, why not him? Why oh