Free Magdalene by Moriah Jovan

enough on his emotional plate without
Mitch adding to it. It didn’t matter anyway; they were a thousand
miles away. Time and distance tempered any satisfaction he could
derive from unloading on either of them.
    There was only one public place he allowed
himself an outlet: In his high-performance sports car with ZZ Top
blaring from the speakers, on the road with his foot shoving the
gas pedal to the floor. He raced his demons home after having left
Cassandra at her hotel room door.
    Without kissing her.
    Undressing her.
    Making love to her.
    At those speeds, in the dark, on narrow,
twisting country roads, knowing there were patches of ice here and
there, he had to concentrate, but once he got home...
    He didn’t even glance at a clock as he took
the sweeping staircase two steps at a time to his
seventeen-year-old son’s room. He burst in to find the kid sloppily
arrayed on his bed like a pig in a blanket, asleep. He only knew
that because of the snores that came from somewhere inside that
roll.
    “Get up,” he nearly snarled as he gripped
the boy’s exposed ankle and yanked. Hard. “Outside.”
    A miserable groan issued forth from that
mass. “Dad...”
    “Now!” he barked and left the room, slamming
the door behind him.
    It was another fifteen minutes before he met
his son on the back lawn of the estate, which he had long ago
transformed into a full-length soccer field, floodlights blinding
in their intensity and more ZZ Top coming from speakers attached
just below the floodlights.
    He said nothing and fired a soccer ball at
Trevor, who promptly lost the last vestiges of sleepiness to head
the ball back at him and the game was on.
    Neither spoke as they ran and maneuvered the
ball over the snow-and-ice-littered field, no holds barred, their
breath blowing white in the cold.
    After a while, Mitch felt his tension wane.
“Loser!” he called as he kicked the ball straight at Trevor’s
head.
    “Go look in a mirror, old man!” Trevor
yelled back as he dribbled the ball down the field, dodging all
Mitch’s aggressive attempts to get it back. “You know what young
lions do to the old ones. You want me to break your arm again?”
Trevor lunged right to knock Mitch on his butt.
    Mitch laughed as he hopped up, and the game
grew a little lazier. They traded insults as fast as they traded
the ball—
    —then the floodlights and music shut down,
leaving them in the pitch black.
    They stopped and Mitch bent over, his hands
on his knees, panting. His eyes burned with afterimage and his ears
rang. He’d set the timer for two hours, never expecting that they’d
play that long, much less have another hour of play left in
them.
    “Dude, you musta had a shitty day at work,”
Trevor drawled as he bounced the ball off Mitch’s back, caught it,
and headed into the house.
    “Not exactly,” Mitch replied, straightening
to follow his son, ignoring the profanity. He heard it all day,
every day, especially when he went into the foundry and, moreover,
Trevor did too. Besides, this wasn’t the bishop’s house; it was the
house of a single father with a teenage son. Without a female
around, the males were bound to go feral at some point.
    There were moments Mitch could barely keep
himself from dropping an f-bomb or two. It was only a point of
pride that kept him from swearing at all, ever; if he did, his
public persona might crack and that he couldn’t allow to
happen.
    He entered the warm house behind Trevor and
took off his filthy winter clothes in the mudroom.
    “You need to get laid,” Trevor yelled from
the kitchen.
    Mitch barked a surprised laugh, and shook
his head as he threw his cleats in the laundry room, then entered
the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Gatorade out of the
refrigerator. Trevor leaned against the counter nursing his own
bottle. “That,” Mitch said after a long drink, “is true.”
    The boy stared at Mitch, shocked.
“Serious?”
    “I met a woman today.”
    “Shit.”
    “We had