Author's Note: This chapter contains discussion of abortion, slut-shaming, and graphic sexual content with some bondage and BDSM themes.
"Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex." -Hunter S. Thompson
31 days sober
Travis wakes up when I’m halfway through my workout. I’m in the middle of my crunches when I become aware of his eyes on me, peering over the edge of my bed. Neither of us says anything to the other, though I continue to move, continue to count aloud. “Fifty-five. Fifty-six. Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine.”
“Sixty,” he whispers, and I freeze, mid-crunch.
It’s the same number he announced on the morning that Dad found out about us and kicked me out. That time, I had crawled up into my bed and curled myself around him and kissed him breathless. This time, I remain still. I hold the pose until my obliques are screaming, until my body is cramped up and shaking, and then I flop back down onto the floor and stare up at the ceiling. “How are you?”
“Not crying like a five-year-old anymore. So, that’s a start,” he says before giving a half-hearted shrug. “Still gonna have a kid, though.”
You don’t have to, I want to say, but I can’t go through another hour of that argument. I can’t try telling him, for the nine millionth time, what a huge mistake he’ll be making if he actually asks Joss to keep this baby. I can’t even think about this anymore. I stand and head for the door. “I’m going to go shower. You can have one after, while I’m doing my hair.”
Only then, in the privacy of the shower, do I allow myself to lose it. I don’t cry, and I don’t scream, but I do spend a solid ten minutes curled up in the tub, hugging my legs to my chest and hitting my forehead repeatedly against my knees. Part of me is still desperately hoping that this is all a hallucination brought on by insomnia. That maybe tonight, after Nate’s stupid karaoke party—god, am I really going to have to see Joss and pretend I’m not dying because of that thing inside of her?—and after I drop Stohler at the club where she works and after I make my way to New Haven, I’ll curl up in Ben’s bed and be able to sleep soundly, and when I wake up tomorrow morning, none of this will have happened. There won’t be some mini-McCall slotted for a life-ruining delivery in nine months.
When I finally manage to pull my shit together, I stand, shut off the water, and quickly towel off. I pull on the same jeans I wore yesterday and walk back to my room shirtless, jeans half-unzipped, nothing underneath; my arms are laden down with everything I need to do my hair, so I have to nudge the door open with my hip. Travis is still curled up on my bed, and I pretend not to notice the way his eyes track across my bare, damp chest, or the blush that rises in his cheeks. I dump the hair products on my desk—my heat protector clatters across my keyboard—and mutter, “Shower’s all yours, dude.”
He says nothing before he leaves the room, and I get dressed, then spend the next twenty minutes carefully drying, straightening, and spiking my hair. My appearance is the only thing I’m positive I have any control over right now, and I think that I might have a complete mental breakdown if I don’t get my fauxhawk just so. Luckily, I manage it, and by the time Travis gets out of the shower, I’m lying on the couch and mindlessly poking at my lip ring with the tip of my tongue. I glance over at him—he’s wearing his jeans, but he’s holding the previous day’s carefully folded shirt and boxers. I try very hard not to think about the fact that he’s going commando right now, because in less than a year, he’s going to be someone’s father. And you’re not supposed to think that way about a guy who is going to be someone’s father.
“Would it be okay if I borrowed a shirt?” he asks.
I raise a somewhat limp hand and gesture past him. “Yeah. Clothes are in the closet. Help yourself.”
There are shirts in that closet that belong to him—a few plain tees, the LHS Varsity Track hoodie, possibly one of his Daily Grind shirts. Some of them made their way into my closet while we were still dating. We spent two months stripping in each other’s rooms, then scrambling out of bed and running across the hall, half-dressed and laughing, every time we heard the crunch of tires in the driveway; after a while, things like that’s my t-shirt, yours is over there and have you seen my jeans stopped mattering that much. Some of the other things in my closet are the product of more deliberate thefts, like the hoodie. I haven’t been able to convince myself to wear any of them, though. God, it takes all of my self-restraint not to do something insanely pathetic, like fling them all into a pile on my bed and bury my face in them just so I can still get a chance to breathe him in every night.
I watch as Travis hesitates at one of the track shirts. He even tugs it halfway off the hanger, but then he’s shoving it back into place and continuing to flip through the clothes. He eventually settles on a dark gray, long-sleeved shirt with something written in navy on the front. Wait, but those colors are—god. He pulls on the shirt and turns around, not meeting my eyes, but it doesn’t matter that he won’t look at me, because I can’t look at anything but the words Patton Military Academy Marksmanship Team emblazoned on his chest. That shirt and one yearbook photo are the sole remnants of the only attempt I made at extracurricular participation at Patton; I’d been on the marksmanship team for the spring semester of my freshman year, but quit it halfway through the fall of my sophomore year, after I started dating Dave and decided that spending time with him was more important. God, that had been a huge fucking mistake—all things considered, I probably should’ve stuck with the guns instead of the guy.
The shirt hasn’t fit me properly since my final growth spurt over the summer between ninth and tenth grade, when I’d shot from five nine to six one over the course of a single month, but it fits Travis’ smaller frame just fine now. That same warm feeling that I’ve been trying to ignore for months is curling up in my heart again, but it make me feel good now. It just makes me sad.
“Are you ready to go?” I ask quietly.
He finishes lacing up his sneakers and trails after me upstairs. I collect my keys, my backpack, my wallet from the coffee table, but once we’re standing on the porch and I’m locking the front door, he hesitates. “Do you, um… I mean, I could give you a ride to school, maybe. To thank you for last night. And so you won’t have to worry about having your car in the lot again.”
“Thanks for the offer, but I usually go into town to get coffee before homeroom. I don’t want to make you late,” I say. I also don’t want to sit in a car with you, not if it means you trying to talk about what a great idea it is for you to keep your bastard.
He grabs the sleeve of my jacket and tows me towards his car, parked next to mine. “Well, I’m not sure if you’ve heard this, but I kind of work at a coffee shop downtown. I only get free drinks when I’m working, but I get enough of an employee discount to make it worth your while. Let me buy you coffee.”
The thing is, we’re still not friends. We’re barely supposed to be speaking to each other; each of us has made that request at one point or another, and I doubt one night of him crashing at my place and crying onto my shoulder is enough to change that. But at the same time… after I came back to Lakewood, after what happened with Dave, after checking into rehab, all I wanted was for someone to be there. I wanted someone to look at me, and hold my hand, and tell me that they loved me, even if they didn’t understand why I had brought these terrible things upon myself. There’s something about hitting a new low that makes a person crave closeness, even if it’s with the wrong person, and I think that’s what Travis is dealing with right now. He should be talking to Joss, or his family, or his real friends, but he’s not—he’s coming to me.
Probably because I’m familiar.
Probably because I’m the only person he knows who has made bigger mistakes than knocking someone up.
I slide into the passenger’s seat of his car without further comment, and when I glance over at him as he pulls out of the driveway, he looks relieved. It’s strange—I’ve let him drive me around in the Ferrari, but I’ve never actually been inside his car before. It’s… clean. Weirdly clean. There’s no trash on the floor, no receipts crumpled up in the cup-holders, nothing dangling from the rearview mirror. There’s one of those liquid air fresheners tucked neatly into the air vent, and one zipped CD case. Desperate for something to break the silence, I seize the case and begin flipping through the CDs. It takes me about five seconds to realize that that’s a huge mistake, because every disk is a mix I burned for him.
Every.
Single.
One.
I stare down at my own handwriting, scrawled in Sharpie across each of the mixes—they’re organized in the order I gave them to him, starting with the first one I burned, right after we met. Who doesn’t listen to music? I had scribbled across the disk before giving it to him. I flip to the next CD--songs that will make you seem cooler (even though you’re not). The rest—the ones I made after he finally let me in—are all labeled with snippets of lyrics from the songs on them.
I can keep a secret if you can keep me guessing—I’d slipped that CD into the pocket of his Daily Grind apron during the middle of his shift on my first open mic night, his birthday, the night he agreed to give us a chance.
Travis wakes up when I’m halfway through my workout. I’m in the middle of my crunches when I become aware of his eyes on me, peering over the edge of my bed. Neither of us says anything to the other, though I continue to move, continue to count aloud. “Fifty-five. Fifty-six. Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine.”
“Sixty,” he whispers, and I freeze, mid-crunch.
It’s the same number he announced on the morning that Dad found out about us and kicked me out. That time, I had crawled up into my bed and curled myself around him and kissed him breathless. This time, I remain still. I hold the pose until my obliques are screaming, until my body is cramped up and shaking, and then I flop back down onto the floor and stare up at the ceiling. “How are you?”
“Not crying like a five-year-old anymore. So, that’s a start,” he says before giving a half-hearted shrug. “Still gonna have a kid, though.”
You don’t have to, I want to say, but I can’t go through another hour of that argument. I can’t try telling him, for the nine millionth time, what a huge mistake he’ll be making if he actually asks Joss to keep this baby. I can’t even think about this anymore. I stand and head for the door. “I’m going to go shower. You can have one after, while I’m doing my hair.”
Only then, in the privacy of the shower, do I allow myself to lose it. I don’t cry, and I don’t scream, but I do spend a solid ten minutes curled up in the tub, hugging my legs to my chest and hitting my forehead repeatedly against my knees. Part of me is still desperately hoping that this is all a hallucination brought on by insomnia. That maybe tonight, after Nate’s stupid karaoke party—god, am I really going to have to see Joss and pretend I’m not dying because of that thing inside of her?—and after I drop Stohler at the club where she works and after I make my way to New Haven, I’ll curl up in Ben’s bed and be able to sleep soundly, and when I wake up tomorrow morning, none of this will have happened. There won’t be some mini-McCall slotted for a life-ruining delivery in nine months.
When I finally manage to pull my shit together, I stand, shut off the water, and quickly towel off. I pull on the same jeans I wore yesterday and walk back to my room shirtless, jeans half-unzipped, nothing underneath; my arms are laden down with everything I need to do my hair, so I have to nudge the door open with my hip. Travis is still curled up on my bed, and I pretend not to notice the way his eyes track across my bare, damp chest, or the blush that rises in his cheeks. I dump the hair products on my desk—my heat protector clatters across my keyboard—and mutter, “Shower’s all yours, dude.”
He says nothing before he leaves the room, and I get dressed, then spend the next twenty minutes carefully drying, straightening, and spiking my hair. My appearance is the only thing I’m positive I have any control over right now, and I think that I might have a complete mental breakdown if I don’t get my fauxhawk just so. Luckily, I manage it, and by the time Travis gets out of the shower, I’m lying on the couch and mindlessly poking at my lip ring with the tip of my tongue. I glance over at him—he’s wearing his jeans, but he’s holding the previous day’s carefully folded shirt and boxers. I try very hard not to think about the fact that he’s going commando right now, because in less than a year, he’s going to be someone’s father. And you’re not supposed to think that way about a guy who is going to be someone’s father.
“Would it be okay if I borrowed a shirt?” he asks.
I raise a somewhat limp hand and gesture past him. “Yeah. Clothes are in the closet. Help yourself.”
There are shirts in that closet that belong to him—a few plain tees, the LHS Varsity Track hoodie, possibly one of his Daily Grind shirts. Some of them made their way into my closet while we were still dating. We spent two months stripping in each other’s rooms, then scrambling out of bed and running across the hall, half-dressed and laughing, every time we heard the crunch of tires in the driveway; after a while, things like that’s my t-shirt, yours is over there and have you seen my jeans stopped mattering that much. Some of the other things in my closet are the product of more deliberate thefts, like the hoodie. I haven’t been able to convince myself to wear any of them, though. God, it takes all of my self-restraint not to do something insanely pathetic, like fling them all into a pile on my bed and bury my face in them just so I can still get a chance to breathe him in every night.
I watch as Travis hesitates at one of the track shirts. He even tugs it halfway off the hanger, but then he’s shoving it back into place and continuing to flip through the clothes. He eventually settles on a dark gray, long-sleeved shirt with something written in navy on the front. Wait, but those colors are—god. He pulls on the shirt and turns around, not meeting my eyes, but it doesn’t matter that he won’t look at me, because I can’t look at anything but the words Patton Military Academy Marksmanship Team emblazoned on his chest. That shirt and one yearbook photo are the sole remnants of the only attempt I made at extracurricular participation at Patton; I’d been on the marksmanship team for the spring semester of my freshman year, but quit it halfway through the fall of my sophomore year, after I started dating Dave and decided that spending time with him was more important. God, that had been a huge fucking mistake—all things considered, I probably should’ve stuck with the guns instead of the guy.
The shirt hasn’t fit me properly since my final growth spurt over the summer between ninth and tenth grade, when I’d shot from five nine to six one over the course of a single month, but it fits Travis’ smaller frame just fine now. That same warm feeling that I’ve been trying to ignore for months is curling up in my heart again, but it make me feel good now. It just makes me sad.
“Are you ready to go?” I ask quietly.
He finishes lacing up his sneakers and trails after me upstairs. I collect my keys, my backpack, my wallet from the coffee table, but once we’re standing on the porch and I’m locking the front door, he hesitates. “Do you, um… I mean, I could give you a ride to school, maybe. To thank you for last night. And so you won’t have to worry about having your car in the lot again.”
“Thanks for the offer, but I usually go into town to get coffee before homeroom. I don’t want to make you late,” I say. I also don’t want to sit in a car with you, not if it means you trying to talk about what a great idea it is for you to keep your bastard.
He grabs the sleeve of my jacket and tows me towards his car, parked next to mine. “Well, I’m not sure if you’ve heard this, but I kind of work at a coffee shop downtown. I only get free drinks when I’m working, but I get enough of an employee discount to make it worth your while. Let me buy you coffee.”
The thing is, we’re still not friends. We’re barely supposed to be speaking to each other; each of us has made that request at one point or another, and I doubt one night of him crashing at my place and crying onto my shoulder is enough to change that. But at the same time… after I came back to Lakewood, after what happened with Dave, after checking into rehab, all I wanted was for someone to be there. I wanted someone to look at me, and hold my hand, and tell me that they loved me, even if they didn’t understand why I had brought these terrible things upon myself. There’s something about hitting a new low that makes a person crave closeness, even if it’s with the wrong person, and I think that’s what Travis is dealing with right now. He should be talking to Joss, or his family, or his real friends, but he’s not—he’s coming to me.
Probably because I’m familiar.
Probably because I’m the only person he knows who has made bigger mistakes than knocking someone up.
I slide into the passenger’s seat of his car without further comment, and when I glance over at him as he pulls out of the driveway, he looks relieved. It’s strange—I’ve let him drive me around in the Ferrari, but I’ve never actually been inside his car before. It’s… clean. Weirdly clean. There’s no trash on the floor, no receipts crumpled up in the cup-holders, nothing dangling from the rearview mirror. There’s one of those liquid air fresheners tucked neatly into the air vent, and one zipped CD case. Desperate for something to break the silence, I seize the case and begin flipping through the CDs. It takes me about five seconds to realize that that’s a huge mistake, because every disk is a mix I burned for him.
Every.
Single.
One.
I stare down at my own handwriting, scrawled in Sharpie across each of the mixes—they’re organized in the order I gave them to him, starting with the first one I burned, right after we met. Who doesn’t listen to music? I had scribbled across the disk before giving it to him. I flip to the next CD--songs that will make you seem cooler (even though you’re not). The rest—the ones I made after he finally let me in—are all labeled with snippets of lyrics from the songs on them.
I can keep a secret if you can keep me guessing—I’d slipped that CD into the pocket of his Daily Grind apron during the middle of his shift on my first open mic night, his birthday, the night he agreed to give us a chance.
Our whole lives laid out right in front of us—that one had been left on his desk a few days after his junior ring dance, when I first gave him that stupid ring that’s been haunting me ever since.
I want you so bad I'll go back on the things I believe in—I still don’t know whether I made that mix because we’d just slept together for the first time, or because we’d just said our first ‘I love you’s. Either way, the CD had been pressed right into his hand while I kissed him desperately in his bedroom after dinner one night.
Can we take a ride? Get out of this place while we still have time—that one had been made after the first bout of rumors began flying about us, when I realized that other people were determined to claw their way into our relationship and suck all the goodness out of it. It had taken another two weeks for me to finally give it to him, the night I picked him up from work and he showed me that tiny letter G tattooed onto his wrist.
The last CD I made before I got kicked out is the last CD in the case. I think I had tried to tell him it was because we were in the middle of exam week, “music to study by” or something dumb like that, but my real message was made all too clear by the fact that I’d written, What do you say? Would you marry me today? No one ever said Garen Anderson was a subtle man…
I toss the zippered case into the backseat and crank up the radio instead, settling for some station that plays nothing but a constant stream of Top 40. Thankfully, Travis doesn’t comment. We make the drive to the Grind in silence, and when he pulls into the lot, he leaves the car running and scurries inside with a quick instruction of, “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” I watch through the window as he says something to the cashier, who laughs and waves him closer. He jogs around the edge of the counter and fills two large cups with coffee and a little bit of creamer. I frown; after a year, he should know how I take my coffee. ‘Black’ isn’t exactly a complicated instruction. But he hands those two cups to a customer, so I can only assume that it’s some sort of trade-off, like he can go behind the counter and make his own drinks if he helps out for a few minutes. Finally, he sets out three extra-large cups and starts pulling shots of espresso into each, followed by a pump of some golden syrup, then filled the rest of the way with fresh coffee. He caps each of the cups, drops a couple of bills in front of the cashier, and returns to the car. He hands me the cardboard tray of coffee cups and says, “Two of those are for you. It’s not what you usually get, but you’ll like it.”
“I’ll hate it on principle. I don’t like change,” I say, scowling at the cups.
Travis snorts. “Yeah? Wow, I never knew that about you. Usually you adapt so well to new people, situations, and experiences.” I glare at him, and he rolls his eyes. “Just… shut up and trust me, okay?”
It’s the worst thing he could have said, because it’s probably the only thing I wouldn’t be able to deny him. I take a sip. It’s delicious, with a smooth, rich, caramel flavor; it tastes like swallowing gold. Travis is watching me, so I grimace and mutter, “It’s okay, I guess,” but he must be able to tell I’m full of shit, because he’s grinning as he pulls back out of the lot. We both remain silent for the rest of the drive to school, as well as the walk from the car to the senior hallway. We reach my locker first, and I expect him to continue on to his, but he remains at my side as I dial in my combination and unlatch the door. I stuff my backpack inside and extract the two-subject notebook I use for government and intro psych. When the door is shut once more, I lean back against the locker and finally meet his eyes.
He looks as lost as he has since he set foot on my porch last night. I can’t help it; I reach for his hand, stroke my fingers across his palm, and say, “I’m sorry I was so useless last night. You came to me for help, and I tried to—I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t.”
He shakes his head and says quietly, “It’s not like I expected you to have some magical solution. I just—” He takes a shaky breath and intertwines our fingers. My hand feels like it’s buzzing. “When everything falls to shit, you’re still the first person I think to go to. The only person who can make me feel, you know… okay again.”
“Travis?”
We both look towards the voice; it’s Joss. She’s standing a few feet away, staring at our laced fingers. When we immediately release each other, her eyes creep up to his chest, to the words on his t-shirt.
“Joss, hi,” he says. He reaches out to touch her waist, but she smacks his hand away—hard.
“Tell me this is a joke,” she says, practically vibrating with fury. “Tell me that after what I told you last night, after I told you not to tell anyone, you didn’t go straight to your ex-boyfriend and talk to him about something you promised to keep between us.” He opens his mouth, and she finishes in a broken whisper, “Tell me you didn’t spend the night with him.”
“No, I—” He breaks off and squeezes his eyes shut, licks his lips quickly before he tries again, “I didn’t spend the night with him, not like that. I slept at his house, yes, but it was just—I needed someone to talk to. I was freaking out, and—”
“You swore you wouldn’t tell,” Joss hisses.
I clear my throat. “Look, I’m not going to spread it around. I’ll keep it a secret, but he needed—”
“Stop talking right now,” she orders, and I find myself falling surprisingly silent. She turns her eyes back on Travis. “It is hard enough trying to live up to the great fantasy romance you had with him, okay? I’ve had about as much as I can take. And seeing the way you two look at each other? Feeling this—” She grabs his hand and thrusts it in front of his face so that he’s forced to stare at the engraved silver band, “—the goddamn engagement ring your ex gave you, feeling that against my skin every time you put your hands on me? Seeing you in his clothes? Knowing that you asked me to—” Her voice drops to a whisper for the next three words, “—keep this baby, and then your first instinct was to go sleep in your ex-boyfriend’s bed? It’s too much. I’m not like the other people who are content to be an interlude in the Travis-and-Garen Saga. I’m not Ben McCutcheon; I’m not okay with my boyfriend being halfway in love with someone else.”
“He’s not,” I say sharply, and she finally looks at me.
I don’t know which of us is more screwed up by the idea of Travis being halfway in love with me. For a long moment, we just stare at each other. Then she raises her hands in a gesture that looks like surrender and says softly, “Look, I’ve been waiting for some sort of… clue, I guess, to what I should do. And maybe this is it, okay? Maybe this is a sign that keeping it isn’t a good idea.”
She takes two steps down the hall, but Travis lunges after her, grabbing both of her hands and dragging her back towards him. His voice is shaking as he all but begs, “Wait, wait, wait. Joss, please don’t say that. Please don’t do that.”
“Travis, I don’t like the idea, either. You know that. I told you, even the thought of getting that done, of being someone who does a thing like that, it makes me sick, but I don’t see how we can—”
“Please don’t get rid of it. Please don’t kill it,” he whispers. He is very obviously just seconds away from having a complete mental breakdown, right here in the middle of the hallway, and people are starting to stare. I can tell that some of them are trying to eavesdrop, but I manage to scare most of them away with a sneer. Travis is still pleading with Joss, though I can’t really hear what he’s saying, because his face is buried against her shoulder. That’s probably for the best, because I’m already really fucking close to losing it right now. I can’t deal with the fact that he’s known about this—whatever it is, this fetus, this baby, he’s known about it for less than a day, and he already loves it with a desperate, possessive ferocity.
Joss’s eyes are squeezed shut as she raises a hand to the back of Travis’ head, strokes his hair soothingly. He loves it when people do that to him; god, I wish that could be my hand. He’s still leaning heavily on her, still barely making any sound, but I can hear him murmuring, “I’ll do anything you want me to do, I promise. I’ll give him up. I-I just needed some time, you know, to get over everything that’s happened, but I can do it, I can let him go. Just please don’t get rid of it. I know this isn’t something either of us expected or wanted or anything, but we can do this, Joss. It’s scary, but I know we can figure this out, we can make it work. I’ll do anything. I can be a good father, I promise, I can be better than mine w—I can do it. I just need you to give me a chance. Please, please, please don’t get rid of it.”
Joss finally opens her eyes, meeting my gaze over Travis’ shoulder. There’s a strange look on her face, like she’s relieved. Like these are the words she was hoping and expecting to hear from him, and now that they’re out, she knows… what, that this is okay? That this is right? Because it’s not, but she still says, “We can figure this out, but not if you’re not willing to try.”
“I am, Joss, I—”
“I don’t want you to talk to Garen anymore.” She’s still fucking looking at me, even though she’s talking about me like I’m not standing right here. I want to start screaming so they can’t ignore me. “I know you care about him, and I know you told me that you were hoping you two would be able to be friends again, once you were sure he was still on-track with his sobriety—” I really might start screaming soon, because my sobriety is none of this bitch’s business, “—but that can’t happen. Not if we’re keeping this baby. I can’t try to raise a child with someone who might still have feelings for his ex. Garen was your first love, and I know that’s never going to go away completely. So, I need you to keep that promise you just made. I need you to give him up completely and never speak to him again, or this isn’t going to work.”
It’s the most disgusting ultimatum I’ve ever heard, and that’s including the time I tried to shoot myself in the head so that people wouldn’t make me give up cocaine. What’s wrong with her? How can she possibly think that stop talking to your ex-boyfriend, or I’ll abort the baby you desperately want me to keep is a reasonable thing to say? I can’t see Travis’ face, but I can see the tension in his back. I can see the rigidity of his spine, the awkward set to his shoulders, but I can also see the fact that he’s hesitating. He wants her to keep this baby more than anything, but I can tell he’s thinking the same thing I am--after all this time, is it even possible for us to stay away from each other for more than a few days at a time? It’s just like the day my dad kicked me out. This thing between us is over, but he’s not going to be able to be the one to say it. I wind my fingers around his wrist and lift his hand off of Joss’ waist. She tenses up at my proximity, but Travis does the opposite—he scrambles to grab my hand again, to lace our fingers together once more, but I pry his fingers off me, then slip the silver ring off. He still hasn’t released Joss or looked at me, but he does make a grab for the ring. He fucking whimpers.
“It’s fine,” I say quietly. “I’ll go away, okay? It’s fine.”
I stuff the ring into my pocket and head for homeroom.
It’s not fine.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get the thought of life-ruiner babies out of my head for the rest of the day. It reaches a tipping point in the late afternoon, when Stohler and I are lounging around some hipster tea shop in New Haven, killing time until we head back to Lakewood for Nate’s dinner. We’re not talking about much anything—truth be told, we’re debating whether our laziness outweighs our shared desire to go outside for a smoke. Suddenly, I turn to her and ask, “Do you ever think about kids?” Her forehead creases. “What do you mean? What about them?”
“Do you ever think about having them? Or, I guess, do you think about what it’d be like to be a parent at some point?” I ask.
“If this is your way of asking me if I’ll have your test tube babies, I’m flattered, but I couldn’t bring that child into the world in good conscience. You and I have both allowed the better part of our adult lives to be ruled by three things—alcohol, cock, and bitter disillusionment with society, masked by biting sarcasm. I can’t even imagine what the ‘terrible twos’ would be like for whatever demon-creature we managed to produce together,” she says.
I stand and haul her to her feet so we can finally go outside for those cigarettes we’ve been debating. “It would probably be tolerable until high school. I didn’t turn awful until I went to boarding school. You remember Jamie, right? My best friend, guy who went to the show with us?” She raises a prompting eyebrow, and I light a cigarette for each of us. “He was the first boy I ever kissed, and even that didn’t happen until winter break during my freshman year, when I went to visit him in Georgia for a week. I was almost fifteen, and I was a total dork about it, it was so embarrassing.” I pause, then tap the ash off the end of my cigarette, considering. “I mean, he sucked my dick for the first time like, three hours later, so I guess I moved pretty quickly from there, but—”
“See? I wonder if nymphomania is hereditary,” she says thoughtfully.
I shrug, and I’m only half-joking now when I say, “Well, addiction sure as hell is.” We smoke in silence for a few minutes before I think I can stomach saying, “Travis and I aren’t friends anymore.”
Stohler smirks at me. “To be honest, I didn’t realize you guys were even done with your last bout of ‘not being friends.’ What happened now?”
I swallow hard and stare down at my boots. I’d promised him and Joss that I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I don’t want to betray any confidences… but it’s kind of hard to feel like I owe either of them anything, considering I’m the one who agreed to give up on trying to work out a friendship with Travis. They shouldn’t be asking so much of someone who’s so weak. I suck hard on my cigarette for a second before saying, “If I tell you something, will you swear to me that it stays just between us? You won’t tell the guys, no matter how bad it is or how sloppy drunk and over-sharing you get?”
Only recently did I find out that Stohler and Alex had managed to rouse themselves from their drunken stupors long enough to exchange phone numbers on the night of the show; for the past two weeks, they’ve been verbally abusing each other and arguing about early heavy metal through text messages. Sometimes, they’ll both text me at the same time—Alex will say, please explain to ur hot stripper friend that drumming and pity-fucking are NOT the same thing & im not obligated to like rick allen just bc he has 1 arm, and Stohler will say, Tell that poorly-shaven moron you call a friend that, if he doesn’t look up the 2003 live performance of “Switch 625” on youtube right now, I’m going to break into his fucking apartment and put live snakes in his bed while he’s sleeping. The fact that they’ve managed to become friends so quickly usually provokes a gross, warm, happy feeling in my gut, but not if it’s going to lead to them gossiping like middle-school girls and getting me in trouble.
Stohler waves me off, presumably to confirm her silence. I say, “Things have been tense between Travis and I ever since my relapse last month, but last night, he stayed over at my place. He needed me.”
“I’ll bet he did,” Stohler says, leering.
Usually I’d leer right back and make up some ridiculous, obscene story to make her laugh. But it’s not funny, and I don’t want her to think it is, so I give up and just say it. “His girlfriend’s pregnant.”
Stohler chokes on a lungful of smoke and doubles over, coughing and gagging. Understandable reaction. It’s several minutes before she’s able to suck in enough air to hiss, “I’m sorry, you’re telling me that a guy you used to fuck in the ass—” A passing couple turns to give her a scandalized look, “—got a girl pregnant?” Her word choice is deliberate; maybe she realizes that hearing him described as a guy I used to fuck in the ass is better than am in love with. I nod, and she hesitates before asking a question I’d never even considered. “And he’s sure it’s his?”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Is he positive that he’s the father? They haven’t been dating that long, so maybe they’re not even exclusive,” she says.
For one flawless moment, I let myself sink into that possibility. That would be fucking beautiful—if it were someone else’s kid, and Travis had no obligation to it. If he could be free. But it’s impossible for me to convince myself that it might be true, because this is Travis. There’s no social networking site that says that Travis McCall is in an open relationship with Joss Pryce—well, mainly because I don’t think Travis even has a facebook, but also because he doesn’t do open relationships. He didn’t with me, he didn’t with Ben, and I know he doesn’t with Joss. There’s no way he’d be involved with her if there was even a chance she was sleeping with someone else.
I shake my head and say, “No. They’re definitely exclusive. It’s definitely his.”
“That sucks,” Stohler says, cringing, and I nod my agreement. A beat, then she says, “So, what the hell does that have to do with you two? Why do you have to stop being friends just because his girlfriend’s going to pop one out next summer?”
I explain what happened in the hallway this morning with Joss’ ultimatum, how I ended up being the one to agree to it, not Travis. The ring is still weighing heavily in the pocket of my jeans, but I don’t take it out; Stohler’s rolling her eyes enough as it is. She lets me go into an embarrassing level of detail about the entire conversation, but by the time we make our way to the car to head over to the restaurant, she has lost all of her patience with me. She kicks her stilettos up onto the dashboard and announces, “You’re a goddamn idiot, you know that?”
“I mean,” I say frowning, “I’ve heard that before? But why am I an idiot now, specifically?”
“Did it ever occur to you that just because someone tells you and Travis that you need to give up on each other, you don’t necessarily have to do it?” she demands. “Like, when you got kicked out, you didn’t have a choice about leaving, but you could have told him you still wanted to be with him. You could have worked around it, you didn’t have to let people break you up. And today, when that little shrew said you couldn’t talk to each other anymore, you both should have told her to go fuck herself.”
“I couldn’t,” I protest. “If he didn’t agree to it, she would have gotten an abort—”
“No. No, I’m sorry, but that’s a crock of shit. Either she wants to keep the baby or she doesn’t, alright? That’s not a decision she would make based on whether or not her baby daddy still talks to an ex sometimes. That’s stupid,” she says. I scowl the rest of the way to the restaurant.
We’re the last ones to arrive. Everyone else is gathered in the parking lot, waiting for us. Once I park and get out, Nate turns to me and purses his lips. “You’re late.”
“Almost always, yes,” I agree. He must forgive me, though, because he steps forward and gives me a quick, unexpected hug. And if my hands happen to graze his ass as he pulls away, well, happy birthday to him. I gesture to Stohler and say, “This is the friend I told you I was bringing. Nate, Stohler. Stohler, Nate.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Nate says, extending a hand to her.
She accepts it. “Likewise. Happy birthday.”
We make our way into the restaurant, where we are greeted by an enthusiastic host, who garbles at us in Italian. All ten of us blink back at him. He repeats the words, slower. When we don’t respond, he begins to look distressed, though his only response is to speak a third time.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Italian. Isn’t there anyone available who can come deal with us for just a second?” Nate says. It’s fairly obvious that he’s not pleased, and I can’t really blame him—I’ve been to this place before, and I know that almost everyone who works here speaks English. It makes no sense for the one person here who speaks nothing but Italian to be acting as a host.
I sigh and edge through to the front of the group. My grasp of the Italian language has never been that great—I’ve always preferred French. But I did spend a few weeks in Florence when I was sixteen, so I’ve picked up enough to get by. I say, in poorly accented, slightly broken Italian, “Abbiamo una… fuck. Uh. Una prenotazione per la cena… per dieci persone. Il suo compleanno è oggi. Il ragazzo fiammeggiante con la maglietta rosa.”
The man blinks around the group, and when his eyes finally land on Nate in his pale pink Oxford and striped bow-tie, he lights up and exclaims, “Buon compleanno!”
“He says happy birthday,” I say to Nate.
“You speak Italian?” Nate says in a hushed, slightly awed tone.
I hadn’t realized how much my ability to speak foreign languages turned guys on until I met Travis, who used to turn into a complete slut the second I started whispering French into his ear. Apparently Nate is of a similar sentiment, even if he’s only hearing me half-ass some Italian. I smirk and say, “You should hear me speak French.” I look back to the host and say, “Dice ‘grazie.’ Il nostro tavolo, per favore.”
The host beams and leads us to a long table in the back. There’s the usual awkward pause while everyone tries to figure out where the least awful place to sit is. Stohler rolls her eyes and sinks into the seat at the head of the table, and I take the chair on her right. Nate immediately sinks into the seat on my other side, and the others fill in around us.
Travis is the last person to sit down, in the only remaining chair—the one directly across the table from me. Of course. But that’s not a problem—it’s totally possible for me to spend this entire meal not looking forward, right? I turn to my left to address Stohler, but she’s already rising from her chair and saying, “I’m going to the ladies’ room. If the waiter comes by, get me a glass of wine?”
I nod, and she disappears down the hall leading to the restrooms. She’s been gone for approximately three seconds before Nate turns to me and says, “She seems nice.”
I snort. “Who, Stohls? Yeah, let’s see if you still think that once you’ve had a real conversation with her. She’s a mega-bitch.” It’s my absolute favorite thing about her. When our waitress—a pretty, college-aged girl who thankfully speaks English—comes by to extend the management’s birthday wishes to Nate and take our drink orders a few minutes later, I request a water for myself, then gesture to Stohler’s empty seat and say, “The girl who’s sitting here will be right back, but she asked me to order for her. So, can I get a glass of chianti for her?”
“I’ll need to see her ID before I can serve her. And even if it’s for her, I can’t put the order in if it’s being placed by someone under twenty-one,” the waitress says, somewhat apologetically. Without bothering to consider whether or not she’ll be pissed at me for going through her things, I dig Stohler’s license out of her purse and pass it to the waitress. While she’s checking the birth date, I pull out my own wallet and hand over my fake ID. Both pass inspection, though the waitress says, “Twenty-two’s a little old to be going to a sweet sixteen party, isn’t it?”
I smile blandly, jerk my head towards Travis, and say, “They’re my stepbrother’s friends.”
I haven’t technically lied; he is my stepbrother, and they are his friends. Even the fake license was passed over without comment—I never said it was real. Only once the waitress has taken the rest of the orders and headed back to the kitchen do I realize that the rest of the people in my group are blinking over at me warily. Christine is the first to say, “I mean, I want to make a comment about the fact that you just whipped out a fake ID, but I can’t even pretend to be surprised that you have one.”
“I have two, actually,” I say, grinning. “They both say I’m twenty-two, but one is an Ohio license that I used whenever I was in New York, and the other is a New York license that I used whenever I was in Ohio. That way, the person checking it is already going to be unfamiliar with it, so any imperfections won’t be noticeable.”
Stohler finally returns to her seat at the head of the table. On her other side, Travis says, “I didn’t put that much thought into mine, honestly. Pretty sure it’s from like, Oklahoma, or something.”
“You have a fake ID?” Joss says, turning to blink at him. I’m staring down the table, making somewhat awkwardly prolonged eye contact with John so that I won’t have to look at my ex-boyfriend.
“Yeah,” Travis says. There’s a beat, and I can tell he’s trying to figure out how he can backpedal enough to keep his squeaky-clean, honor-student image intact, even though he’s just admitted to something that’s definitely illegal. “I mean, I don’t use it to buy drinks, or whatever. I’ve only used it twice, once to get into a concert at an eighteen-plus venue and once to get my tattoo.”
“You have a tattoo?” Joss says, voice slightly sharper. I catch my lip ring between my teeth to restrain a smile; I’m not sure exactly how much deeper Travis is planning to dig this hole, but I’m pretty excited to find out. Almost as excited as I am to see the supremely pissed-off look on Joss’ face when she realizes what the tattoo is.
“Um… no?” Travis tries, and I snort. Even without looking at him, I know he’s blushing. He amends, “Okay, yes, I do. But it’s really small, so it’s not…”
His eyes are burning into my skin, like he expects me to bail him out. What a goddamn stupid expectation. Even if I were willing to address him right now, it probably wouldn’t be to make this easier on him. But his staring attracts the attention of the others; Nate nudges me with his elbow and says, “What’s his tattoo?”
In the two seconds it takes for him to ask the question, my brain and body switch into default conversational avoidance mode. I lean back slightly in my seat so that I can drape my arm across the back of his chair, just barely touching his shoulders. It’s enough contact to draw his eyes away from my face, which is a good start. My fingertips are tracing the seam between the body of his shirt and the sleeve. I say, “So, now that you’re officially sixteen, when are you getting your driver’s license?”
It’s the perfect question to ask—I see a few of the other people at the table look a little abashed for not paying more attention to Nate, especially considering we’re here to celebrate his birthday. He makes a face and says, “Ugh, I have no idea. I need to get my permit first, and go through driver’s ed, and stuff like that.”
“What, seriously? That’s stupid. You can get your learner’s permit at fifteen and a half in Ohio. I got my license a few weeks after my birthday, and even that delay was just because I was at boarding school in New York until spring break,” I say, making a face back at him.
That’s a lie. I didn’t get my license until summer—my broken ribs were still healing while I was home during spring break, which made using a seatbelt too uncomfortable for me to sit the exam. Besides, I’d begged my parents to let me put it off until after my surgery so that my nose wouldn’t be crooked in the picture. But those details are mine, and they’re private. They don’t matter anyway; the comment prompts John to launch into a charming little anecdote about getting his own license the year before, which Christine follows up with a story about her older sister crashing the student driver vehicle on her first day of driver’s ed.
By the time our drinks arrive and we place the order for a few pizzas for everyone to share, Travis’ tattoo and the fake IDs are completely forgotten. At seven thirty, one of the managers of the restaurant steps out onto the tiny stage that’s set up in the corner. He turns on an ancient microphone—it screams out a protest that causes everyone to cover their ears—and announces, “Welcome to Karaoke Friday! Anyone who wants to sing can come right up and add their name to the list. If there’s no one ahead of you, just go ahead and start singing your heart out.”
He has barely had time to vacate the stage before Miranda, Christine, and Joss are scurrying up onto the stage to join together in performing a breathy, Marilyn Monroe-esque “Happy Birthday” for Nate. He blushes but cheers for them anyway, and I find myself smiling more than I thought I would. Once they’ve finished, Christine remains on the stage to launch into a Katy Perry number that, with lyrics like yeah we danced on tabletops and we took too many shots, mostly just sounds like my boarding school experience. She kills it, though, and by the time she hops off the stage, everyone at our table is grinning.
“Hey, Stohler,” I say, shoving the book of song options at my friend. “Wanna do a duet with me on ‘Barbie Girl’?”
Riley snorts, but Stohler takes a sip of her wine and says, “Sure, but only if I get to sing the guy part.”
“You’re a leggy blond wearing five-inch stilettos and a minidress, and I’m a dude with a lip ring and the upper body strength to bench-press a high school freshman. Of course you’re going to sing the guy part,” I say. What’s the point of making awful, hilarious song choices if you don’t load them down with as much self-deprecating irony as possible?
“I’ll hate it on principle. I don’t like change,” I say, scowling at the cups.
Travis snorts. “Yeah? Wow, I never knew that about you. Usually you adapt so well to new people, situations, and experiences.” I glare at him, and he rolls his eyes. “Just… shut up and trust me, okay?”
It’s the worst thing he could have said, because it’s probably the only thing I wouldn’t be able to deny him. I take a sip. It’s delicious, with a smooth, rich, caramel flavor; it tastes like swallowing gold. Travis is watching me, so I grimace and mutter, “It’s okay, I guess,” but he must be able to tell I’m full of shit, because he’s grinning as he pulls back out of the lot. We both remain silent for the rest of the drive to school, as well as the walk from the car to the senior hallway. We reach my locker first, and I expect him to continue on to his, but he remains at my side as I dial in my combination and unlatch the door. I stuff my backpack inside and extract the two-subject notebook I use for government and intro psych. When the door is shut once more, I lean back against the locker and finally meet his eyes.
He looks as lost as he has since he set foot on my porch last night. I can’t help it; I reach for his hand, stroke my fingers across his palm, and say, “I’m sorry I was so useless last night. You came to me for help, and I tried to—I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t.”
He shakes his head and says quietly, “It’s not like I expected you to have some magical solution. I just—” He takes a shaky breath and intertwines our fingers. My hand feels like it’s buzzing. “When everything falls to shit, you’re still the first person I think to go to. The only person who can make me feel, you know… okay again.”
“Travis?”
We both look towards the voice; it’s Joss. She’s standing a few feet away, staring at our laced fingers. When we immediately release each other, her eyes creep up to his chest, to the words on his t-shirt.
“Joss, hi,” he says. He reaches out to touch her waist, but she smacks his hand away—hard.
“Tell me this is a joke,” she says, practically vibrating with fury. “Tell me that after what I told you last night, after I told you not to tell anyone, you didn’t go straight to your ex-boyfriend and talk to him about something you promised to keep between us.” He opens his mouth, and she finishes in a broken whisper, “Tell me you didn’t spend the night with him.”
“No, I—” He breaks off and squeezes his eyes shut, licks his lips quickly before he tries again, “I didn’t spend the night with him, not like that. I slept at his house, yes, but it was just—I needed someone to talk to. I was freaking out, and—”
“You swore you wouldn’t tell,” Joss hisses.
I clear my throat. “Look, I’m not going to spread it around. I’ll keep it a secret, but he needed—”
“Stop talking right now,” she orders, and I find myself falling surprisingly silent. She turns her eyes back on Travis. “It is hard enough trying to live up to the great fantasy romance you had with him, okay? I’ve had about as much as I can take. And seeing the way you two look at each other? Feeling this—” She grabs his hand and thrusts it in front of his face so that he’s forced to stare at the engraved silver band, “—the goddamn engagement ring your ex gave you, feeling that against my skin every time you put your hands on me? Seeing you in his clothes? Knowing that you asked me to—” Her voice drops to a whisper for the next three words, “—keep this baby, and then your first instinct was to go sleep in your ex-boyfriend’s bed? It’s too much. I’m not like the other people who are content to be an interlude in the Travis-and-Garen Saga. I’m not Ben McCutcheon; I’m not okay with my boyfriend being halfway in love with someone else.”
“He’s not,” I say sharply, and she finally looks at me.
I don’t know which of us is more screwed up by the idea of Travis being halfway in love with me. For a long moment, we just stare at each other. Then she raises her hands in a gesture that looks like surrender and says softly, “Look, I’ve been waiting for some sort of… clue, I guess, to what I should do. And maybe this is it, okay? Maybe this is a sign that keeping it isn’t a good idea.”
She takes two steps down the hall, but Travis lunges after her, grabbing both of her hands and dragging her back towards him. His voice is shaking as he all but begs, “Wait, wait, wait. Joss, please don’t say that. Please don’t do that.”
“Travis, I don’t like the idea, either. You know that. I told you, even the thought of getting that done, of being someone who does a thing like that, it makes me sick, but I don’t see how we can—”
“Please don’t get rid of it. Please don’t kill it,” he whispers. He is very obviously just seconds away from having a complete mental breakdown, right here in the middle of the hallway, and people are starting to stare. I can tell that some of them are trying to eavesdrop, but I manage to scare most of them away with a sneer. Travis is still pleading with Joss, though I can’t really hear what he’s saying, because his face is buried against her shoulder. That’s probably for the best, because I’m already really fucking close to losing it right now. I can’t deal with the fact that he’s known about this—whatever it is, this fetus, this baby, he’s known about it for less than a day, and he already loves it with a desperate, possessive ferocity.
Joss’s eyes are squeezed shut as she raises a hand to the back of Travis’ head, strokes his hair soothingly. He loves it when people do that to him; god, I wish that could be my hand. He’s still leaning heavily on her, still barely making any sound, but I can hear him murmuring, “I’ll do anything you want me to do, I promise. I’ll give him up. I-I just needed some time, you know, to get over everything that’s happened, but I can do it, I can let him go. Just please don’t get rid of it. I know this isn’t something either of us expected or wanted or anything, but we can do this, Joss. It’s scary, but I know we can figure this out, we can make it work. I’ll do anything. I can be a good father, I promise, I can be better than mine w—I can do it. I just need you to give me a chance. Please, please, please don’t get rid of it.”
Joss finally opens her eyes, meeting my gaze over Travis’ shoulder. There’s a strange look on her face, like she’s relieved. Like these are the words she was hoping and expecting to hear from him, and now that they’re out, she knows… what, that this is okay? That this is right? Because it’s not, but she still says, “We can figure this out, but not if you’re not willing to try.”
“I am, Joss, I—”
“I don’t want you to talk to Garen anymore.” She’s still fucking looking at me, even though she’s talking about me like I’m not standing right here. I want to start screaming so they can’t ignore me. “I know you care about him, and I know you told me that you were hoping you two would be able to be friends again, once you were sure he was still on-track with his sobriety—” I really might start screaming soon, because my sobriety is none of this bitch’s business, “—but that can’t happen. Not if we’re keeping this baby. I can’t try to raise a child with someone who might still have feelings for his ex. Garen was your first love, and I know that’s never going to go away completely. So, I need you to keep that promise you just made. I need you to give him up completely and never speak to him again, or this isn’t going to work.”
It’s the most disgusting ultimatum I’ve ever heard, and that’s including the time I tried to shoot myself in the head so that people wouldn’t make me give up cocaine. What’s wrong with her? How can she possibly think that stop talking to your ex-boyfriend, or I’ll abort the baby you desperately want me to keep is a reasonable thing to say? I can’t see Travis’ face, but I can see the tension in his back. I can see the rigidity of his spine, the awkward set to his shoulders, but I can also see the fact that he’s hesitating. He wants her to keep this baby more than anything, but I can tell he’s thinking the same thing I am--after all this time, is it even possible for us to stay away from each other for more than a few days at a time? It’s just like the day my dad kicked me out. This thing between us is over, but he’s not going to be able to be the one to say it. I wind my fingers around his wrist and lift his hand off of Joss’ waist. She tenses up at my proximity, but Travis does the opposite—he scrambles to grab my hand again, to lace our fingers together once more, but I pry his fingers off me, then slip the silver ring off. He still hasn’t released Joss or looked at me, but he does make a grab for the ring. He fucking whimpers.
“It’s fine,” I say quietly. “I’ll go away, okay? It’s fine.”
I stuff the ring into my pocket and head for homeroom.
It’s not fine.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get the thought of life-ruiner babies out of my head for the rest of the day. It reaches a tipping point in the late afternoon, when Stohler and I are lounging around some hipster tea shop in New Haven, killing time until we head back to Lakewood for Nate’s dinner. We’re not talking about much anything—truth be told, we’re debating whether our laziness outweighs our shared desire to go outside for a smoke. Suddenly, I turn to her and ask, “Do you ever think about kids?” Her forehead creases. “What do you mean? What about them?”
“Do you ever think about having them? Or, I guess, do you think about what it’d be like to be a parent at some point?” I ask.
“If this is your way of asking me if I’ll have your test tube babies, I’m flattered, but I couldn’t bring that child into the world in good conscience. You and I have both allowed the better part of our adult lives to be ruled by three things—alcohol, cock, and bitter disillusionment with society, masked by biting sarcasm. I can’t even imagine what the ‘terrible twos’ would be like for whatever demon-creature we managed to produce together,” she says.
I stand and haul her to her feet so we can finally go outside for those cigarettes we’ve been debating. “It would probably be tolerable until high school. I didn’t turn awful until I went to boarding school. You remember Jamie, right? My best friend, guy who went to the show with us?” She raises a prompting eyebrow, and I light a cigarette for each of us. “He was the first boy I ever kissed, and even that didn’t happen until winter break during my freshman year, when I went to visit him in Georgia for a week. I was almost fifteen, and I was a total dork about it, it was so embarrassing.” I pause, then tap the ash off the end of my cigarette, considering. “I mean, he sucked my dick for the first time like, three hours later, so I guess I moved pretty quickly from there, but—”
“See? I wonder if nymphomania is hereditary,” she says thoughtfully.
I shrug, and I’m only half-joking now when I say, “Well, addiction sure as hell is.” We smoke in silence for a few minutes before I think I can stomach saying, “Travis and I aren’t friends anymore.”
Stohler smirks at me. “To be honest, I didn’t realize you guys were even done with your last bout of ‘not being friends.’ What happened now?”
I swallow hard and stare down at my boots. I’d promised him and Joss that I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I don’t want to betray any confidences… but it’s kind of hard to feel like I owe either of them anything, considering I’m the one who agreed to give up on trying to work out a friendship with Travis. They shouldn’t be asking so much of someone who’s so weak. I suck hard on my cigarette for a second before saying, “If I tell you something, will you swear to me that it stays just between us? You won’t tell the guys, no matter how bad it is or how sloppy drunk and over-sharing you get?”
Only recently did I find out that Stohler and Alex had managed to rouse themselves from their drunken stupors long enough to exchange phone numbers on the night of the show; for the past two weeks, they’ve been verbally abusing each other and arguing about early heavy metal through text messages. Sometimes, they’ll both text me at the same time—Alex will say, please explain to ur hot stripper friend that drumming and pity-fucking are NOT the same thing & im not obligated to like rick allen just bc he has 1 arm, and Stohler will say, Tell that poorly-shaven moron you call a friend that, if he doesn’t look up the 2003 live performance of “Switch 625” on youtube right now, I’m going to break into his fucking apartment and put live snakes in his bed while he’s sleeping. The fact that they’ve managed to become friends so quickly usually provokes a gross, warm, happy feeling in my gut, but not if it’s going to lead to them gossiping like middle-school girls and getting me in trouble.
Stohler waves me off, presumably to confirm her silence. I say, “Things have been tense between Travis and I ever since my relapse last month, but last night, he stayed over at my place. He needed me.”
“I’ll bet he did,” Stohler says, leering.
Usually I’d leer right back and make up some ridiculous, obscene story to make her laugh. But it’s not funny, and I don’t want her to think it is, so I give up and just say it. “His girlfriend’s pregnant.”
Stohler chokes on a lungful of smoke and doubles over, coughing and gagging. Understandable reaction. It’s several minutes before she’s able to suck in enough air to hiss, “I’m sorry, you’re telling me that a guy you used to fuck in the ass—” A passing couple turns to give her a scandalized look, “—got a girl pregnant?” Her word choice is deliberate; maybe she realizes that hearing him described as a guy I used to fuck in the ass is better than am in love with. I nod, and she hesitates before asking a question I’d never even considered. “And he’s sure it’s his?”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Is he positive that he’s the father? They haven’t been dating that long, so maybe they’re not even exclusive,” she says.
For one flawless moment, I let myself sink into that possibility. That would be fucking beautiful—if it were someone else’s kid, and Travis had no obligation to it. If he could be free. But it’s impossible for me to convince myself that it might be true, because this is Travis. There’s no social networking site that says that Travis McCall is in an open relationship with Joss Pryce—well, mainly because I don’t think Travis even has a facebook, but also because he doesn’t do open relationships. He didn’t with me, he didn’t with Ben, and I know he doesn’t with Joss. There’s no way he’d be involved with her if there was even a chance she was sleeping with someone else.
I shake my head and say, “No. They’re definitely exclusive. It’s definitely his.”
“That sucks,” Stohler says, cringing, and I nod my agreement. A beat, then she says, “So, what the hell does that have to do with you two? Why do you have to stop being friends just because his girlfriend’s going to pop one out next summer?”
I explain what happened in the hallway this morning with Joss’ ultimatum, how I ended up being the one to agree to it, not Travis. The ring is still weighing heavily in the pocket of my jeans, but I don’t take it out; Stohler’s rolling her eyes enough as it is. She lets me go into an embarrassing level of detail about the entire conversation, but by the time we make our way to the car to head over to the restaurant, she has lost all of her patience with me. She kicks her stilettos up onto the dashboard and announces, “You’re a goddamn idiot, you know that?”
“I mean,” I say frowning, “I’ve heard that before? But why am I an idiot now, specifically?”
“Did it ever occur to you that just because someone tells you and Travis that you need to give up on each other, you don’t necessarily have to do it?” she demands. “Like, when you got kicked out, you didn’t have a choice about leaving, but you could have told him you still wanted to be with him. You could have worked around it, you didn’t have to let people break you up. And today, when that little shrew said you couldn’t talk to each other anymore, you both should have told her to go fuck herself.”
“I couldn’t,” I protest. “If he didn’t agree to it, she would have gotten an abort—”
“No. No, I’m sorry, but that’s a crock of shit. Either she wants to keep the baby or she doesn’t, alright? That’s not a decision she would make based on whether or not her baby daddy still talks to an ex sometimes. That’s stupid,” she says. I scowl the rest of the way to the restaurant.
We’re the last ones to arrive. Everyone else is gathered in the parking lot, waiting for us. Once I park and get out, Nate turns to me and purses his lips. “You’re late.”
“Almost always, yes,” I agree. He must forgive me, though, because he steps forward and gives me a quick, unexpected hug. And if my hands happen to graze his ass as he pulls away, well, happy birthday to him. I gesture to Stohler and say, “This is the friend I told you I was bringing. Nate, Stohler. Stohler, Nate.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Nate says, extending a hand to her.
She accepts it. “Likewise. Happy birthday.”
We make our way into the restaurant, where we are greeted by an enthusiastic host, who garbles at us in Italian. All ten of us blink back at him. He repeats the words, slower. When we don’t respond, he begins to look distressed, though his only response is to speak a third time.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Italian. Isn’t there anyone available who can come deal with us for just a second?” Nate says. It’s fairly obvious that he’s not pleased, and I can’t really blame him—I’ve been to this place before, and I know that almost everyone who works here speaks English. It makes no sense for the one person here who speaks nothing but Italian to be acting as a host.
I sigh and edge through to the front of the group. My grasp of the Italian language has never been that great—I’ve always preferred French. But I did spend a few weeks in Florence when I was sixteen, so I’ve picked up enough to get by. I say, in poorly accented, slightly broken Italian, “Abbiamo una… fuck. Uh. Una prenotazione per la cena… per dieci persone. Il suo compleanno è oggi. Il ragazzo fiammeggiante con la maglietta rosa.”
The man blinks around the group, and when his eyes finally land on Nate in his pale pink Oxford and striped bow-tie, he lights up and exclaims, “Buon compleanno!”
“He says happy birthday,” I say to Nate.
“You speak Italian?” Nate says in a hushed, slightly awed tone.
I hadn’t realized how much my ability to speak foreign languages turned guys on until I met Travis, who used to turn into a complete slut the second I started whispering French into his ear. Apparently Nate is of a similar sentiment, even if he’s only hearing me half-ass some Italian. I smirk and say, “You should hear me speak French.” I look back to the host and say, “Dice ‘grazie.’ Il nostro tavolo, per favore.”
The host beams and leads us to a long table in the back. There’s the usual awkward pause while everyone tries to figure out where the least awful place to sit is. Stohler rolls her eyes and sinks into the seat at the head of the table, and I take the chair on her right. Nate immediately sinks into the seat on my other side, and the others fill in around us.
Travis is the last person to sit down, in the only remaining chair—the one directly across the table from me. Of course. But that’s not a problem—it’s totally possible for me to spend this entire meal not looking forward, right? I turn to my left to address Stohler, but she’s already rising from her chair and saying, “I’m going to the ladies’ room. If the waiter comes by, get me a glass of wine?”
I nod, and she disappears down the hall leading to the restrooms. She’s been gone for approximately three seconds before Nate turns to me and says, “She seems nice.”
I snort. “Who, Stohls? Yeah, let’s see if you still think that once you’ve had a real conversation with her. She’s a mega-bitch.” It’s my absolute favorite thing about her. When our waitress—a pretty, college-aged girl who thankfully speaks English—comes by to extend the management’s birthday wishes to Nate and take our drink orders a few minutes later, I request a water for myself, then gesture to Stohler’s empty seat and say, “The girl who’s sitting here will be right back, but she asked me to order for her. So, can I get a glass of chianti for her?”
“I’ll need to see her ID before I can serve her. And even if it’s for her, I can’t put the order in if it’s being placed by someone under twenty-one,” the waitress says, somewhat apologetically. Without bothering to consider whether or not she’ll be pissed at me for going through her things, I dig Stohler’s license out of her purse and pass it to the waitress. While she’s checking the birth date, I pull out my own wallet and hand over my fake ID. Both pass inspection, though the waitress says, “Twenty-two’s a little old to be going to a sweet sixteen party, isn’t it?”
I smile blandly, jerk my head towards Travis, and say, “They’re my stepbrother’s friends.”
I haven’t technically lied; he is my stepbrother, and they are his friends. Even the fake license was passed over without comment—I never said it was real. Only once the waitress has taken the rest of the orders and headed back to the kitchen do I realize that the rest of the people in my group are blinking over at me warily. Christine is the first to say, “I mean, I want to make a comment about the fact that you just whipped out a fake ID, but I can’t even pretend to be surprised that you have one.”
“I have two, actually,” I say, grinning. “They both say I’m twenty-two, but one is an Ohio license that I used whenever I was in New York, and the other is a New York license that I used whenever I was in Ohio. That way, the person checking it is already going to be unfamiliar with it, so any imperfections won’t be noticeable.”
Stohler finally returns to her seat at the head of the table. On her other side, Travis says, “I didn’t put that much thought into mine, honestly. Pretty sure it’s from like, Oklahoma, or something.”
“You have a fake ID?” Joss says, turning to blink at him. I’m staring down the table, making somewhat awkwardly prolonged eye contact with John so that I won’t have to look at my ex-boyfriend.
“Yeah,” Travis says. There’s a beat, and I can tell he’s trying to figure out how he can backpedal enough to keep his squeaky-clean, honor-student image intact, even though he’s just admitted to something that’s definitely illegal. “I mean, I don’t use it to buy drinks, or whatever. I’ve only used it twice, once to get into a concert at an eighteen-plus venue and once to get my tattoo.”
“You have a tattoo?” Joss says, voice slightly sharper. I catch my lip ring between my teeth to restrain a smile; I’m not sure exactly how much deeper Travis is planning to dig this hole, but I’m pretty excited to find out. Almost as excited as I am to see the supremely pissed-off look on Joss’ face when she realizes what the tattoo is.
“Um… no?” Travis tries, and I snort. Even without looking at him, I know he’s blushing. He amends, “Okay, yes, I do. But it’s really small, so it’s not…”
His eyes are burning into my skin, like he expects me to bail him out. What a goddamn stupid expectation. Even if I were willing to address him right now, it probably wouldn’t be to make this easier on him. But his staring attracts the attention of the others; Nate nudges me with his elbow and says, “What’s his tattoo?”
In the two seconds it takes for him to ask the question, my brain and body switch into default conversational avoidance mode. I lean back slightly in my seat so that I can drape my arm across the back of his chair, just barely touching his shoulders. It’s enough contact to draw his eyes away from my face, which is a good start. My fingertips are tracing the seam between the body of his shirt and the sleeve. I say, “So, now that you’re officially sixteen, when are you getting your driver’s license?”
It’s the perfect question to ask—I see a few of the other people at the table look a little abashed for not paying more attention to Nate, especially considering we’re here to celebrate his birthday. He makes a face and says, “Ugh, I have no idea. I need to get my permit first, and go through driver’s ed, and stuff like that.”
“What, seriously? That’s stupid. You can get your learner’s permit at fifteen and a half in Ohio. I got my license a few weeks after my birthday, and even that delay was just because I was at boarding school in New York until spring break,” I say, making a face back at him.
That’s a lie. I didn’t get my license until summer—my broken ribs were still healing while I was home during spring break, which made using a seatbelt too uncomfortable for me to sit the exam. Besides, I’d begged my parents to let me put it off until after my surgery so that my nose wouldn’t be crooked in the picture. But those details are mine, and they’re private. They don’t matter anyway; the comment prompts John to launch into a charming little anecdote about getting his own license the year before, which Christine follows up with a story about her older sister crashing the student driver vehicle on her first day of driver’s ed.
By the time our drinks arrive and we place the order for a few pizzas for everyone to share, Travis’ tattoo and the fake IDs are completely forgotten. At seven thirty, one of the managers of the restaurant steps out onto the tiny stage that’s set up in the corner. He turns on an ancient microphone—it screams out a protest that causes everyone to cover their ears—and announces, “Welcome to Karaoke Friday! Anyone who wants to sing can come right up and add their name to the list. If there’s no one ahead of you, just go ahead and start singing your heart out.”
He has barely had time to vacate the stage before Miranda, Christine, and Joss are scurrying up onto the stage to join together in performing a breathy, Marilyn Monroe-esque “Happy Birthday” for Nate. He blushes but cheers for them anyway, and I find myself smiling more than I thought I would. Once they’ve finished, Christine remains on the stage to launch into a Katy Perry number that, with lyrics like yeah we danced on tabletops and we took too many shots, mostly just sounds like my boarding school experience. She kills it, though, and by the time she hops off the stage, everyone at our table is grinning.
“Hey, Stohler,” I say, shoving the book of song options at my friend. “Wanna do a duet with me on ‘Barbie Girl’?”
Riley snorts, but Stohler takes a sip of her wine and says, “Sure, but only if I get to sing the guy part.”
“You’re a leggy blond wearing five-inch stilettos and a minidress, and I’m a dude with a lip ring and the upper body strength to bench-press a high school freshman. Of course you’re going to sing the guy part,” I say. What’s the point of making awful, hilarious song choices if you don’t load them down with as much self-deprecating irony as possible?
There’s no one else ahead of us, so we both head up to the little stage; Stohler brings her wine glass. I’m grinning like an idiot from the second she leers at me and says, “Hiya, Barbie.”
“Hi, Ken!” I chirp back, and there’s a loud whoop from the back of the room, possibly from Riley.
“You wanna go for a ride?”
“Sure, Ken!”
“Jump in!”
It only gets better from there. We spend the next three minutes prancing around the tiny stage, singing back and forth at each other, dancing around, hanging off each other. When I trill that she can undress me everywhere, she yanks up the front of my shirt, exposing my admittedly sick abs; Annabelle catcalls, and Nate looks like he’s going to have a panic attack. By the time the song ends, I’ve got one of her legs hiked up around my waist, and she’s smacking my ass in time to the words, “Come on, Barbie, let’s go party.” Half the drama club looks scandalized, but the other half looks amused, and I’m having a blast, so who gives a shit?
We return to our seats just as the pizzas are arriving. I manage to eat half a slice before Stohler, determined not to go more than ten minutes at a time without harassing me, says, “So, I’m really hoping that that was you joking and mocking the song, and that’s not how high-pitched your voice usually is. Can you really sing, or have you just been making that up for attention?”
I grin at her. “I can really sing, but I mostly bring it up for attention.”
“Haven’t you heard him yet?” Nate leans around me to ask. Stohler shakes her head. “You must not have known each other for that long, Garen never stops singing. It’s kind of unbearable.” I reach under the table and pinch his thigh. He jolts, almost upending his water glass, and I shoot him a smirk. He flushes dark red and continues, “How did you two meet?”
“He bought me through one of those mail-order bride services,” Stohler says, shrugging.
“Dad was wicked pissed I didn’t get a prenup, but things are going well so far,” I agree. “She mostly spends her days doing the usual wife stuff. You know, running up my credit card bills, acting as my arm-candy at all of the country club cocktail parties—”
“—making passive-aggressive comments about his inability to live up to his father’s legacy—”
“—swallowing—”
“—pretending not to notice when he ogles Lorenzo, our pool boy—”
“—sleeping with my best friend from boarding school whenever I’m out of town on business—”
“—having weekly brunches with his mother, where I mainline mimosas to distract myself as she not-so-subtly wonders what happened to that nice Jewish girl he was dating a few years back.”
I look at Stohler. “That reminds me. She says you haven’t been returning her calls.”
“I’ll return her calls when she stops drunk-dialing me at four in the morning to ask when I’m going to give her a grandchild. I’m twenty-two years old and a size zero. I’m not going to ruin my figure and my life just so she can parade Garen Junior around in a seersucker onesie,” she says, and I kick her hard in the shin. Travis, who had been smiling at the exchange of barbs, goes still. Joss pales, like she can’t stop herself from picturing what her body will look like once she’s ballooned up at nine months.
Quickly, I turn to the rest of the group, force a smile, and say, “We met at a nightclub in New Haven a month or so ago.”
“I didn’t realize you could still go to clubs. You know, without using,” Joss says, and for once, I don’t think she’s actually trying to be an ass.
I do my best to return the favor and say simply, “I can handle going to bars and clubs and stuff—places that serve booze or where people are doing drugs—but only if I’m in the right frame of mind for it. If I’m dealing with a shitty day, or I’m already feeling tempted, it doesn’t work out that well.” And right now, looking around at this group of people who don’t seem like they’re trying to judge me as much as I expect them to, I’m not ashamed of what I’ve been through. I incline my head slightly towards Stohler and admit, “We met the night I relapsed in September. She realized how fucked up I was, and she helped me. We’ve been friends ever since.”
“Actually, I just realized he was a little rich kid from the suburbs and was hoping I could hold him for ransom, but it turns out his parents didn’t want him back,” Stohler says, avoiding my eyes. Nothing in the world makes her as uncomfortable as someone showing genuine affection for her. That’s probably half the reason I do it—because seeing her not know how to accept a hug or say you’re my friend, too is kind of hilarious, in a sad, emotionally stunted way.
To make up for tormenting her with two seconds of friendship, I reach over and tug on a lock of her hair. “The faster I get up there and sing, the faster I can get back here and you can tell me how amazing I am. So, got any requests?”
“I want you to do whatever your best karaoke song is,” she says, “because if you don’t impress me, I’m bringing you to work with me and selling you to the first man who thinks you’re pretty enough to buy.”
The problem is, my go-to karaoke song—the one I can really rock out on—is sort of… filthy. It’s full of drinking and using and fucking and no shortage of curse words, and I’m just not sure that that’ll go over well with this group. But it’s not like I can go up and sing a love song or something and not have everyone here know exactly who I’m singing to. So I shoot her a wide smile and say, in a sing-song tone, “You asked for it,” before jogging up to the little stage.
It actually takes me a few seconds to remember the name of the song I want, and even longer to talk the karaoke DJ through finding it on the machine. But eventually, he gestures me towards the microphone, and I scuff over to it, grinning around at whoever’s in the restaurant as I say, “Hi. I’m Garen, and I’ll be singing ‘Do It Again! You’re Not Making Me Want to Touch You!’ by You, Me, and Everyone We Know. So, here it goes.”
“Hi, Ken!” I chirp back, and there’s a loud whoop from the back of the room, possibly from Riley.
“You wanna go for a ride?”
“Sure, Ken!”
“Jump in!”
It only gets better from there. We spend the next three minutes prancing around the tiny stage, singing back and forth at each other, dancing around, hanging off each other. When I trill that she can undress me everywhere, she yanks up the front of my shirt, exposing my admittedly sick abs; Annabelle catcalls, and Nate looks like he’s going to have a panic attack. By the time the song ends, I’ve got one of her legs hiked up around my waist, and she’s smacking my ass in time to the words, “Come on, Barbie, let’s go party.” Half the drama club looks scandalized, but the other half looks amused, and I’m having a blast, so who gives a shit?
We return to our seats just as the pizzas are arriving. I manage to eat half a slice before Stohler, determined not to go more than ten minutes at a time without harassing me, says, “So, I’m really hoping that that was you joking and mocking the song, and that’s not how high-pitched your voice usually is. Can you really sing, or have you just been making that up for attention?”
I grin at her. “I can really sing, but I mostly bring it up for attention.”
“Haven’t you heard him yet?” Nate leans around me to ask. Stohler shakes her head. “You must not have known each other for that long, Garen never stops singing. It’s kind of unbearable.” I reach under the table and pinch his thigh. He jolts, almost upending his water glass, and I shoot him a smirk. He flushes dark red and continues, “How did you two meet?”
“He bought me through one of those mail-order bride services,” Stohler says, shrugging.
“Dad was wicked pissed I didn’t get a prenup, but things are going well so far,” I agree. “She mostly spends her days doing the usual wife stuff. You know, running up my credit card bills, acting as my arm-candy at all of the country club cocktail parties—”
“—making passive-aggressive comments about his inability to live up to his father’s legacy—”
“—swallowing—”
“—pretending not to notice when he ogles Lorenzo, our pool boy—”
“—sleeping with my best friend from boarding school whenever I’m out of town on business—”
“—having weekly brunches with his mother, where I mainline mimosas to distract myself as she not-so-subtly wonders what happened to that nice Jewish girl he was dating a few years back.”
I look at Stohler. “That reminds me. She says you haven’t been returning her calls.”
“I’ll return her calls when she stops drunk-dialing me at four in the morning to ask when I’m going to give her a grandchild. I’m twenty-two years old and a size zero. I’m not going to ruin my figure and my life just so she can parade Garen Junior around in a seersucker onesie,” she says, and I kick her hard in the shin. Travis, who had been smiling at the exchange of barbs, goes still. Joss pales, like she can’t stop herself from picturing what her body will look like once she’s ballooned up at nine months.
Quickly, I turn to the rest of the group, force a smile, and say, “We met at a nightclub in New Haven a month or so ago.”
“I didn’t realize you could still go to clubs. You know, without using,” Joss says, and for once, I don’t think she’s actually trying to be an ass.
I do my best to return the favor and say simply, “I can handle going to bars and clubs and stuff—places that serve booze or where people are doing drugs—but only if I’m in the right frame of mind for it. If I’m dealing with a shitty day, or I’m already feeling tempted, it doesn’t work out that well.” And right now, looking around at this group of people who don’t seem like they’re trying to judge me as much as I expect them to, I’m not ashamed of what I’ve been through. I incline my head slightly towards Stohler and admit, “We met the night I relapsed in September. She realized how fucked up I was, and she helped me. We’ve been friends ever since.”
“Actually, I just realized he was a little rich kid from the suburbs and was hoping I could hold him for ransom, but it turns out his parents didn’t want him back,” Stohler says, avoiding my eyes. Nothing in the world makes her as uncomfortable as someone showing genuine affection for her. That’s probably half the reason I do it—because seeing her not know how to accept a hug or say you’re my friend, too is kind of hilarious, in a sad, emotionally stunted way.
To make up for tormenting her with two seconds of friendship, I reach over and tug on a lock of her hair. “The faster I get up there and sing, the faster I can get back here and you can tell me how amazing I am. So, got any requests?”
“I want you to do whatever your best karaoke song is,” she says, “because if you don’t impress me, I’m bringing you to work with me and selling you to the first man who thinks you’re pretty enough to buy.”
The problem is, my go-to karaoke song—the one I can really rock out on—is sort of… filthy. It’s full of drinking and using and fucking and no shortage of curse words, and I’m just not sure that that’ll go over well with this group. But it’s not like I can go up and sing a love song or something and not have everyone here know exactly who I’m singing to. So I shoot her a wide smile and say, in a sing-song tone, “You asked for it,” before jogging up to the little stage.
It actually takes me a few seconds to remember the name of the song I want, and even longer to talk the karaoke DJ through finding it on the machine. But eventually, he gestures me towards the microphone, and I scuff over to it, grinning around at whoever’s in the restaurant as I say, “Hi. I’m Garen, and I’ll be singing ‘Do It Again! You’re Not Making Me Want to Touch You!’ by You, Me, and Everyone We Know. So, here it goes.”
The thing I like about this song is that it starts soft, with a little bit of a swinging feel, and then the third verse is all screaming excitement, and by the time I get to the chorus, I get to sing it like I mean. It’s all raunchy lyrics, and dragging my fingers through my spiked hair, and tossing bedroom eyes at Nate just for the hell of it, and laughing because it’s fun. I sometimes forget how much I love to perform like this.
But at least I won’t be out alone, I’m with my uncle and his mother
And the rest of my family’s history is with me, shouting, “HAVE ANOTHER!”
And now I’m taking all the liberties I was too scared to before
I’ve accepted that we’re just chemicals, now bend over and touch the floor
I unhook the mic from the stand, dart off the stage and throw myself back towards the table, walking my fingers up Joss’ arm as I sing, “Plan A has got a boyfriend, but she melts to my touch--” Joss shrugs away from me, but I’m already moving to curl an arm over Miranda’s shoulders, “--Plan B has got a crush as much as she’s got a lust—” I move on and run my fingers through Stohler’s hair, using a half-second breath pause to press a hard kiss to her jaw halfway through the rest of the verse, “--Plan C, well, God forgive me, she, she just lives to fuck. I’ll just act like I’m not in control.”
Stohler gives my bicep an exaggerated squeeze, but I’m already bolting back to the stage for the next verse. “Well, I’m feeling reckless, and I feel the need to stress this, I’m stepping out. And I’ll take this, drink this, do this, smoke this, fuck you while we’re somebody else.”
I make my way through another few rounds of a chorus, and by the time the song is finished, the rest of the patrons are clapping, and my friends are catcalling, and I’m buzzing. My blood is running hotter under my skin, and I can’t stop myself from grinning as I fling myself back into my chair. Fuck, I wish I could spend the rest of my life feeling the way I feel when I sing.
Stohler prods me in the ribs. “I know I said that selling you would be punishment for singing poorly, but I think I’m going to have to do it anyway. There have got to be a few old perverts out there who would love to own a singing nympho.”
“That’s what I keep telling my dad every time he starts demanding that I plan for my future. But then he just bitches about how you can’t just sing your way out of all your problems, Garen, and in the real world, no one cares that you can deepthroat—”
“Um, has he been in the real world? Because that was literally a question on my job application,” Stohler says.
“Where the hell do you work?” Miranda asks, alarmed, at the same moment that John says, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, “What was your answer?”
To Miranda, Stohler says, “Hot Mess, on Columbus.” To John, she cocks her head to the side, gives him a brief once-over and says, “And why don’t you come by the club sometime after nine tonight and find out?”
I raise my water glass to my lips and, before taking a sip, pause long enough to mutter, “Rein it in, Stohls, he’s in high school.”
“What, your boyfriend’s the only one who gets to troll the Lakewood High School drama club for seniors to touch?” she says, inspecting her nails.
“Uh, last I checked, I was only nine weeks younger than my not-boyfriend—”
“I-I’m sorry, I’m not trying to like, harp on this or whatever,” Miranda interjects, and Stohler and I both turn to look at her. She looks a little uncertain. “I just… I don’t know what ‘Hot Mess’ is. I don’t really get what you do.”
Stohler fixes her with a measured stare, and Miranda shifts uncomfortably. I don’t blame her—Stohls has this way of looking at people that makes it seem like she’s capable of seeing inside their head and reading all their secret thoughts. Finally, she says in a flat voice, “Hot Mess is a strip club. And I think that makes it fairly obvious what I do.”
No one says anything for a moment. And then, obviously addressing me even though her eyes are on the table, Joss says quietly, “I can’t believe you brought a fucking stripper to hang out with us.”
I want to flip the fucking table. I can’t believe she has the nerve to judge Stohler just for doing things that she doesn’t have enough life experience to understand. It’s the same bullshit they pulled on me when they first met me, passing judgment on my addiction without any of them ever stopping to ask me about it. I’m opening my mouth to tell them all to go fuck themselves—especially Joss—but before I can say anything, Travis turns to his girlfriend and says, speaking for the first time in almost an hour, “Who Garen hangs out with is kind of none of your business, Joss.” I get the feeling he’s really not just talking about this dinner. “Neither is what Stohler does for a living. She’s been cool to everyone all night, and then you guys started grilling her. Don’t turn into a bunch of assholes just because you didn’t like the answers she gave to questions she never intended to have you ask.”
Stohler turns her eyes to me, but jerks her head towards Travis. “Is this him?” Have I really gone an entire night without bothering to tell her that she’s sitting less than a foot away from the boy who’s the reason for everything good and bad in my life? I nod. She echoes the gesture. “I get it.”
I knew she would.
Even if I wanted to jump to her defense as well, I wouldn’t have to; Stohler can take care of herself. She jerks her chin towards Annabelle and says, “You’re the choreographer, aren’t you?”
“Who, me?” Annabelle says, jumping. “Y-Yeah, I am.”
Stohler nods slowly. “I can tell. Dancer’s build, and all that.” She cocks her head to the side. “Is that what you’re going to school for? Dance?” Annabelle nods. “Yeah, well, that was my major. I went to Tisch. I had great internships, a bunch of dance companies were interested in me, and then I graduated. And let me tell you something: finding a job as a legitimate, professional dancer? Not exactly a cakewalk. That’s true for all artists. Dancers, musicians, actors. Choreographer Girl, you might want to invest in a pair of six inch heels, because odds are real fucking good that you’ll end up using your dancing talents in the exact same way I’m using mine now. This kid—” She sweeps a hand in my general direction, and I steel myself for whatever insult I know she’s going to toss off to make her point, “—is talented as fuck, but he could still end up as a wedding singer, for all I know. And you—” Her eyes roll to lock onto Joss, who glares at her. Stohler lets out a soft breath of a laugh. “What do you want to be, sweetheart? Do you want to be a little singer, too? Do you want to be an actress?”
Joss says nothing. Under the table, I curl my hands into fists tight enough that my fingernails dig half-moons into my palms.
“Good luck with that,” Stohler says, leaning forward ever so slightly, “because you’ve got ‘shotgun wedding’ and ‘stay-at-home mom’ written all over you. And I can’t wait to see how well that holier-than-thou attitude suits you when you’re my age, have multiple children and no college education, and are stuck in a viciously unhappy marriage, possibly with a guy who’ll spend the rest of his life checking out the waiter during your weekly date night at Chili’s, and wishing he’d worn a condom.”
Both Travis and Joss look like they’re going to be violently ill, and I know that if any of the other people look at them, they’re going to realize that Stohler isn’t speaking hypothetically. To cover for their reactions, to draw everyone’s eyes away from them, I summon up every bit of lying strength I have and make myself burst out laughing. It works—the rest of the people at the table look to me, and it must be convincing, because no one seems to look shocked or appalled, except for Miranda, who is still looking incredibly uncomfortable. I clear my throat, raise a hand in surrender, like I’m trying to smother my amusement, even though nothing has ever been less funny. I say quickly, “Sorry, sorry. Don’t mind me.”
From the other side of the table, Riley thankfully attempts to diffuse the tension by interjecting, “Look, I don’t care where you work. If I could get people to pay me to take my clothes off, I’d probably do it, too.”
“I wasn’t trying to offend you,” Miranda adds, looking genuinely upset at the idea of having hurt Stohler’s feelings—if Stohler even has feelings. “I was just surprised, and everything came out without me really thinking about how it would sound. I’m sorry. We didn’t mean anything by it.”
“This one did,” Stohler says, flicking her fingers dismissively in Joss’ direction, “but I accept your apology.” She grabs her purse and stands up, turning her eyes on me. “I should really get going. It’s almost eight thirty, and I have to be in at nine.”
I stand up and pull my wallet from my back pocket. The food here isn’t expensive—the three pizzas and all the drinks probably still don’t top eighty bucks, but I don’t know if they’re planning to get dessert once we leave. I pluck two fifties from my wallet, toss them onto the table and say, “Dinner’s on me. I’ll see you guys on Monday.” And then, because why is no one acknowledging him except for me, I duck down and press a kiss to Nate’s cheek, barely half an inch from the corner of his mouth. “Happy birthday, Nate.”
The instant Stohler and I have made our way outside, settled into my car, and I’ve pulled out onto the road to bring her to work, she says, “Sorry. For bitching out your friends, or whatever.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “They deserved it.”
We drive in silence. I chance a glance at her ever few minutes, but she alternates between staring out the window and blinking down at her hands. She only speaks when it’s time to tell me to turn into the parking lot of the club where she works. Hot Mess is a complete hole in the wall; it’s surprisingly large, for a strip club, but there are no windows anywhere on it. The plain brick front is painted black, and the name of the club is spelled out in glowing neon pink script on top of the building. By the street, there’s a glowing silhouette of a busty woman on a pole; next to the silhouette, a real woman is smoking a cigarette and shivering. Her ankle-length coat is gaping open to reveal purple lingerie that stands out like a bruise against her pale skin.
For a long moment, Stohler stares at the lighted silhouette. Finally, she turns to me and says, “I really fucking hated high school, you know.”
I let my head fall back against the head rest. “Yeah. I hate it, too.”
I want to apologize for bringing her along tonight. I want her to know that I had no idea my friends would be so weird about her job, or that they’d even find out about it. I can tell she wants to apologize again, too, for arguing with my friends, for almost revealing what I told her about Travis and Joss. But even if she did apologize, I wouldn’t be able to tell her I forgive her, because there’s nothing to forgive. I can’t expect her to apologize for her job any more than other people should expect me to apologize for being in recovery.
Eventually, the silence is too much. She climbs out of the car without another word and goes inside. I pull back out onto the road and use the GPS on my phone to navigate my way to Ben’s apartment. It’s not a long drive—by quarter after nine, I’m pulling into the lot behind his building and parking in the first free space I can find. We hadn’t planned a specific time for me to get here, so I lock my car and spend the next twenty minutes sitting on the hood of my car and chain-smoking. When I’ve finished the pack, I head inside, press the intercom button and wait. A few seconds later, the speaker crackles out, “Hello?”
“’s me, babe,” I say. “Wanna let me up?”
The door unlatches with a loud click, and I essentially bolt up the stairs. The apartment door is unlocked, but Ben’s red Chucks and Alex’s plain white tennis shoes are already next to the door, so they must both be home. I throw the deadbolt and head down the hall to Ben’s room. He’s sitting in his desk chair and thumbing through a paperback; he’s wearing sweatpants, a plain white t-shirt, and his glasses, and his face is unusually scruffy, like he hasn’t bothered to shave today, maybe yesterday either. He looks up at me with a small smile and says, “How was dinner?”
He’s such a decent guy. He’s cute. He’s sweet. Why couldn’t it have been him? Why couldn’t I have just made everything easier on everyone and fallen in love with him, instead of Travis? I curl a hand around his elbow and pull him to his feet, nudging him back towards the bed. “Dinner was stupid. All I want to taste is you.”
“Your single-minded dedication to achieving orgasm never ceases to amaze me,” Ben says, though he strips off his t-shirt and falls back onto the mattress. I crawl up onto the bed after him and kiss him. We end up making out for ages, until our lips are almost bruised and we’re both painfully hard and rutting up against each other. And the whole time, I’m waiting. I’m waiting for the moment when I’ll start to really feel something for him. I’m waiting for the moment when he stops being one of my best friends and starts being someone I could want to spend the rest of my life with. I’m waiting for the sparks I felt every time Travis so much as brushed his fingertips across my arm.
They don’t come.
I break away to mouth across his neck and say, “Tell me what you want me to do to you.” Tonight, I don’t think I can handle regular sex—sweet kisses, soft touches, simple anything. I can’t deal with it right now. I need something hard and fast and maybe a little bit twisted; Ben can always be counted on to come up with some pretty sick shit, so for now, it makes the most sense to just defer to him.
“Nothing, I—do whatever you want to do to me. That’s what I want,” Ben replies, but his words come hesitantly, which can really only mean that he has something he’s craving, but he doesn’t know how to ask for it. God, it must be pretty fucked up, if after everything we’ve done, he’s still nervous about saying it.
I nuzzle his scratchy, unshaven cheek with mine and say, “Come on, babe. Tell me. I’ll do anything you want.”
Except let you top me. Or hit me. Or make me bleed. Fuck, I should probably be setting these limits out loud, shouldn’t I? But then Ben looks away and says, all in one rushed breath, “Restraint. I don’t care if you tie me up, or just pin me down, and I’m not asking for anything like—I’m not asking for any sort of roleplay, or whatever. It’s not like I want to pretend you’re ra—” I suck in a breath, and he goes immediately still for a second. Only when I let out my breath does he continue in hushed tones, “I don’t want it to be like that, okay? But I’ve just been thinking about it lately. Fantasizing, I suppose, about you restraining me somehow, making me feel like I can’t move, fucking me from behind. That’s what I want. Please tell me if that’s not okay, or if any part of that makes you uncomfortable, and if that’s the case, then we won’t do it. Because if you’re not able to enjoy it, I’m not going to be able to enjoy it, and the last thing I want is to make you feel pressured, or upset, or unsafe. Please tell me.”
The nervousness makes sense now; after all, who wouldn’t balk at least a little at the prospect of asking someone who’s been through that to hold them down and fuck them mercilessly? But he’s not asking me to take that. He’s not asking for me to feel what I felt when Dave used to hold me down, and he’s not asking for us to play games, so I’ll know if this goes too far. Still, I say, “Has anyone ever tied you up before?”
He hesitates, then shakes his head. “No. This would be my first time.”
I fucking love being first. First kiss, first fuck, first bondage, apparently. My dick gives an interested twitch against his thigh, and he must feel it, because he rolls his eyes. I smirk at him and roll off of him, unbuckling my belt and threading it out of my beltloops. “I need you to be vocal with me, alright? I know sometimes you get weird about asking for what you want—I’m talking about specifics, not just yes, Garen, fuck me harder—I need to know that if you’re uncomfortable or in pain, you’re going to say no so that I know I need to stop.”
“Likewise,” he says, watching the progress of my belt. “Seriously, you don’t need to pretend to be into this just because—”
I grip his waist and roll him so that he is facedown on the bed, then settle myself on the backs of his thighs. I curve my fingers into little hooks and dig them ever so slightly into the tops of his shoulderblades, but don’t move them yet. His back is tight and still with the anticipation of being scratched, and I can tell it’s taking a lot of effort for him to stop himself from ordering me to just fucking do it already. Only when he begins to shift restlessly beneath me do I lean down to put my lips against his ear and say softly, “I’m not just pretending to be into this.”
I claw both hands down until my fingertips are resting in the space where the small of his back meets the curve of his ass. There are ten parallel lines of violently reddened skin running down the length of his back, and he whimpers, grinding his cock down onto the mattress and reaching for me. I catch his wrists and bend his arms so that they’re behind his back, hands gripping opposite elbows, then carefully wind my belt around them so that his forearms are pinned together. I move to buckle the belt, but he shakes his head and whispers, “Tighter, please.” I move it a notch tighter, then buckle it into place after he nods.
It’s the last instruction he gives me for the rest of the night. After that, he lets me leisurely remove the rest of our clothing, then obediently spreads his legs when I retrieve the lube and condoms from his nightstand. I spend probably close to half an hour fingering him—working him up, stretching him open, getting him to the point where he’s thrashing and pleading and desperate, and then backing off completely. I want this to last; I need this to last. Finally, when the wait is getting to be too much for either of us, I use my knees to nudge his legs further open, roll the condom on, and slam into him in one swift motion. He immediately pushes up to meet my thrusts, but I press his forearms more securely to his back until he’s unable to do anything but take whatever I’m willing to give him. I’m being fucking vicious with him, and he’s loving it.
Maybe that’s the problem.
All the fantasies I had about working things out with Travis, all the dreams I had of our future together… they were pointless and naive. This—pinning someone down, tying someone up, fucking someone until he’s bruised and begging—is what I’m best at. I’m in my element here, in someone else’s bed and half-soaked in someone else’s sweat. This isn’t something that Travis McCall can build a future on.
What’s it like when he’s with Joss? Do they do it at her place or his—the same house where he lost his virginity to me? Do they experiment, is there kink, do they switch up what position they do it in? Is it rough and desperate and sometimes painful, like it is with me and Ben? Or is it sweet and playful and perfect, like it was with me and Travis? How does he touch her? How does he feel when she touches him? Will he love her after the baby comes, after they’ve got that bond for their rest of their lives? Does he love her now? Does he tell her he loves her, when he’s inside of her?
Ben sighs as I roll my hips into him. I drop my forehead to the back of his neck and contemplate telling him, I love you. It’s not really true, but it’s not really a lie, either. I could say it, and he could say it back, and maybe it could be as simple as that. We’d go from being not-boyfriends to being real boyfriends, and sure, neither of us would feel for each other what we both felt for Travis, but maybe we could someday. Maybe eventually, we could find it in us to be together forever, maybe we could be a family, just like Travis and Joss and that baby are going to be.
I try to force the words out, I try, but what I end up saying is, “Love the way you take it.”
“Your cock feels so fucking good,” he whispers. I lean just far enough away from him to slip one hand between us so that I can rake my fingernails down his back. He lets out a soft cry and arches into my touch.
Maybe I can work my way up to it. Start smaller, start with the things that don’t feel like lies. I lick a stripe up the side of his neck; he keens, and I shift to whisper into his ear, “You look so hot like this. Spread out for me, hard and aching for it.” That’s true, that’s just a fact; that’s easy to say. I drag my teeth over his earlobe. “You’re so fucking sexy, babe. S-So—” I press a hard kiss to the edge of his jaw, and he twists his head just far enough to the side that our eyes lock. That’s enough to prompt a hesitation, but I have to at least try to do this. If Travis is moving on, if he’s going to have his little relationship and his little family and his little baby, I need to try to do the same. I need to try to move on, and there’s not a single person on this planet who I would rather do that with than Ben. I reach up to touch his jaw with the very tips of my fingers and force myself to continue in a hoarse breath, “So unbelievably gorgeous.” He’s tightening around me, beneath me, and I’m not sure if it’s because he realizes what I’m doing, or because he’s approaching orgasm, or both. My thrusts are slower now, steady but shallow, and I have to keep talking. I readjust slightly so that I can twist my head enough to touch our foreheads together even as I continue to fuck into him. My neck is cramping up, but it’s important to make this meaningful, right? It’s important to make it romantic, isn’t it? I need to look him in the eyes. I need to make myself talk. “Y-Your body, your face, your eyes… god, your eyes are beautiful. All—All of you, everything, your mind and your heart, everything about you is beautiful. You’re so fucking perfect.” Say it, you fucking idiot. Say it. What’s wrong with you? Say it, say it, say it. “I love—”
He surges up into a kiss, swallowing my words, and bucks against me, alternately fucking himself back onto my dick and grinding forward against the mattress. He’s clenching tight around me, and he hasn’t stopped kissing me, and it’s not long before I’m shifting away from him and shoving his legs together again, bracing my knees outside his thighs and flattening my palms against his shoulderblades, arms locked straight as my hips piston hard down into him. He’s wound up so tight beneath me, straining against the belt on his arms and gasping into the pillow, and then he’s going completely silent and coming, cock still untouched except for the friction of the mattress. It only takes a few more thrusts before I fall apart completely; his hands, still strapped behind his back, brush gently over my waist, steadying my still-jerking body. He makes no complaint when I collapse on top of him, but that’s probably because he’s still trying to catch his breath.
As soon as I can move, I pull out and dispose of the condom, returning as quickly as possible so that I can unbuckle the belt and toss it aside. Ben winces a little and rolls his shoulders to release some of the tension that must have gathered there in all the time he’s been restrained; I kneel next to him and do my best to massage some feeling back into his muscles, then into the angry red marks left by the belt. It’s not like I’m hardcore into BDSM, it’s not like I’m really part of the scene, but I know that things like aftercare are important, so I’m not about to just roll over and pass out cold, even though that’s sort of what my body wants to do. Besides, if I just go straight to sleep, I won’t have a chance to try to make myself say the whole phrase, and I don’t think I’ll be able to convince myself to say it in the light of day. When Ben finally rolls onto his back, I lie down next to him and kiss his forehead. “You alright?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he says, and he seems to really mean it.
“Good,” I murmur, kissing his lips this time.
He lets me, but when I pull away, he says, “I can tell what you’re doing, you know.” I don’t reply. “I know what you were going to say.”
“You should have let me say it,” I say. He shrugs. I scowl across the room, fixing my eyes on the door, and before he can stop me with a kiss again, I say, “I love you, Ben. I-I’m in love with you, and I want to be with you for real. I want you to be my boyfriend.”
“Garen, look at me,” he says, and I’m not really planning to do any such thing, but he cups my jaw in his hand and forces me to face him. I reluctantly meet his gaze. His thumb strokes across my cheekbone, and he says, too calmly, “You’re one of my best friends, and what we do together is fantastic. It’s honestly the best sex I’ve ever had in my life. I love you—” I try not to start hyperventilating, “—but I’m not in love with you.”
I allow myself to laugh as I shrug away from his hand. “God, what a line.”
“It’s not a line, it’s how I feel. And it’s how you feel, too,” he says. “I want to keep doing this with you, but not if you’re going to keep trying to turn this into something it isn’t. Not if you’re going to try to force yourself to fall in love with me just so you can convince yourself you’re not in love with someone else anymore. What we have is good as it is, okay? You’re a really amazing not-boyfriend.”
Maybe I could be an even better real boyfriend, if you’d let me. If I’d let myself. I can’t say that, though, not without ruining everything. So I settle for shrugging and hooking an arm around his waist to drag him closer. “Okay. Things are good are they are, you’re right. I’ll stop.” For a guy who claims not to want to be my boyfriend, he sinks easily into my embrace. I want to apologize, but ‘sorry’ seems a little cheap. Instead, I say in a small voice, “If it were up to me… if I could be in love with anyone, I’d be in love with you. I know I’m not, and you’re not, but if I had a choice, I’d choose to be in love with you.”
Ben smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “No. If it were up to you, you’d still be in love with Travis. He’d just love you back.”
But at least I won’t be out alone, I’m with my uncle and his mother
And the rest of my family’s history is with me, shouting, “HAVE ANOTHER!”
And now I’m taking all the liberties I was too scared to before
I’ve accepted that we’re just chemicals, now bend over and touch the floor
I unhook the mic from the stand, dart off the stage and throw myself back towards the table, walking my fingers up Joss’ arm as I sing, “Plan A has got a boyfriend, but she melts to my touch--” Joss shrugs away from me, but I’m already moving to curl an arm over Miranda’s shoulders, “--Plan B has got a crush as much as she’s got a lust—” I move on and run my fingers through Stohler’s hair, using a half-second breath pause to press a hard kiss to her jaw halfway through the rest of the verse, “--Plan C, well, God forgive me, she, she just lives to fuck. I’ll just act like I’m not in control.”
Stohler gives my bicep an exaggerated squeeze, but I’m already bolting back to the stage for the next verse. “Well, I’m feeling reckless, and I feel the need to stress this, I’m stepping out. And I’ll take this, drink this, do this, smoke this, fuck you while we’re somebody else.”
I make my way through another few rounds of a chorus, and by the time the song is finished, the rest of the patrons are clapping, and my friends are catcalling, and I’m buzzing. My blood is running hotter under my skin, and I can’t stop myself from grinning as I fling myself back into my chair. Fuck, I wish I could spend the rest of my life feeling the way I feel when I sing.
Stohler prods me in the ribs. “I know I said that selling you would be punishment for singing poorly, but I think I’m going to have to do it anyway. There have got to be a few old perverts out there who would love to own a singing nympho.”
“That’s what I keep telling my dad every time he starts demanding that I plan for my future. But then he just bitches about how you can’t just sing your way out of all your problems, Garen, and in the real world, no one cares that you can deepthroat—”
“Um, has he been in the real world? Because that was literally a question on my job application,” Stohler says.
“Where the hell do you work?” Miranda asks, alarmed, at the same moment that John says, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, “What was your answer?”
To Miranda, Stohler says, “Hot Mess, on Columbus.” To John, she cocks her head to the side, gives him a brief once-over and says, “And why don’t you come by the club sometime after nine tonight and find out?”
I raise my water glass to my lips and, before taking a sip, pause long enough to mutter, “Rein it in, Stohls, he’s in high school.”
“What, your boyfriend’s the only one who gets to troll the Lakewood High School drama club for seniors to touch?” she says, inspecting her nails.
“Uh, last I checked, I was only nine weeks younger than my not-boyfriend—”
“I-I’m sorry, I’m not trying to like, harp on this or whatever,” Miranda interjects, and Stohler and I both turn to look at her. She looks a little uncertain. “I just… I don’t know what ‘Hot Mess’ is. I don’t really get what you do.”
Stohler fixes her with a measured stare, and Miranda shifts uncomfortably. I don’t blame her—Stohls has this way of looking at people that makes it seem like she’s capable of seeing inside their head and reading all their secret thoughts. Finally, she says in a flat voice, “Hot Mess is a strip club. And I think that makes it fairly obvious what I do.”
No one says anything for a moment. And then, obviously addressing me even though her eyes are on the table, Joss says quietly, “I can’t believe you brought a fucking stripper to hang out with us.”
I want to flip the fucking table. I can’t believe she has the nerve to judge Stohler just for doing things that she doesn’t have enough life experience to understand. It’s the same bullshit they pulled on me when they first met me, passing judgment on my addiction without any of them ever stopping to ask me about it. I’m opening my mouth to tell them all to go fuck themselves—especially Joss—but before I can say anything, Travis turns to his girlfriend and says, speaking for the first time in almost an hour, “Who Garen hangs out with is kind of none of your business, Joss.” I get the feeling he’s really not just talking about this dinner. “Neither is what Stohler does for a living. She’s been cool to everyone all night, and then you guys started grilling her. Don’t turn into a bunch of assholes just because you didn’t like the answers she gave to questions she never intended to have you ask.”
Stohler turns her eyes to me, but jerks her head towards Travis. “Is this him?” Have I really gone an entire night without bothering to tell her that she’s sitting less than a foot away from the boy who’s the reason for everything good and bad in my life? I nod. She echoes the gesture. “I get it.”
I knew she would.
Even if I wanted to jump to her defense as well, I wouldn’t have to; Stohler can take care of herself. She jerks her chin towards Annabelle and says, “You’re the choreographer, aren’t you?”
“Who, me?” Annabelle says, jumping. “Y-Yeah, I am.”
Stohler nods slowly. “I can tell. Dancer’s build, and all that.” She cocks her head to the side. “Is that what you’re going to school for? Dance?” Annabelle nods. “Yeah, well, that was my major. I went to Tisch. I had great internships, a bunch of dance companies were interested in me, and then I graduated. And let me tell you something: finding a job as a legitimate, professional dancer? Not exactly a cakewalk. That’s true for all artists. Dancers, musicians, actors. Choreographer Girl, you might want to invest in a pair of six inch heels, because odds are real fucking good that you’ll end up using your dancing talents in the exact same way I’m using mine now. This kid—” She sweeps a hand in my general direction, and I steel myself for whatever insult I know she’s going to toss off to make her point, “—is talented as fuck, but he could still end up as a wedding singer, for all I know. And you—” Her eyes roll to lock onto Joss, who glares at her. Stohler lets out a soft breath of a laugh. “What do you want to be, sweetheart? Do you want to be a little singer, too? Do you want to be an actress?”
Joss says nothing. Under the table, I curl my hands into fists tight enough that my fingernails dig half-moons into my palms.
“Good luck with that,” Stohler says, leaning forward ever so slightly, “because you’ve got ‘shotgun wedding’ and ‘stay-at-home mom’ written all over you. And I can’t wait to see how well that holier-than-thou attitude suits you when you’re my age, have multiple children and no college education, and are stuck in a viciously unhappy marriage, possibly with a guy who’ll spend the rest of his life checking out the waiter during your weekly date night at Chili’s, and wishing he’d worn a condom.”
Both Travis and Joss look like they’re going to be violently ill, and I know that if any of the other people look at them, they’re going to realize that Stohler isn’t speaking hypothetically. To cover for their reactions, to draw everyone’s eyes away from them, I summon up every bit of lying strength I have and make myself burst out laughing. It works—the rest of the people at the table look to me, and it must be convincing, because no one seems to look shocked or appalled, except for Miranda, who is still looking incredibly uncomfortable. I clear my throat, raise a hand in surrender, like I’m trying to smother my amusement, even though nothing has ever been less funny. I say quickly, “Sorry, sorry. Don’t mind me.”
From the other side of the table, Riley thankfully attempts to diffuse the tension by interjecting, “Look, I don’t care where you work. If I could get people to pay me to take my clothes off, I’d probably do it, too.”
“I wasn’t trying to offend you,” Miranda adds, looking genuinely upset at the idea of having hurt Stohler’s feelings—if Stohler even has feelings. “I was just surprised, and everything came out without me really thinking about how it would sound. I’m sorry. We didn’t mean anything by it.”
“This one did,” Stohler says, flicking her fingers dismissively in Joss’ direction, “but I accept your apology.” She grabs her purse and stands up, turning her eyes on me. “I should really get going. It’s almost eight thirty, and I have to be in at nine.”
I stand up and pull my wallet from my back pocket. The food here isn’t expensive—the three pizzas and all the drinks probably still don’t top eighty bucks, but I don’t know if they’re planning to get dessert once we leave. I pluck two fifties from my wallet, toss them onto the table and say, “Dinner’s on me. I’ll see you guys on Monday.” And then, because why is no one acknowledging him except for me, I duck down and press a kiss to Nate’s cheek, barely half an inch from the corner of his mouth. “Happy birthday, Nate.”
The instant Stohler and I have made our way outside, settled into my car, and I’ve pulled out onto the road to bring her to work, she says, “Sorry. For bitching out your friends, or whatever.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “They deserved it.”
We drive in silence. I chance a glance at her ever few minutes, but she alternates between staring out the window and blinking down at her hands. She only speaks when it’s time to tell me to turn into the parking lot of the club where she works. Hot Mess is a complete hole in the wall; it’s surprisingly large, for a strip club, but there are no windows anywhere on it. The plain brick front is painted black, and the name of the club is spelled out in glowing neon pink script on top of the building. By the street, there’s a glowing silhouette of a busty woman on a pole; next to the silhouette, a real woman is smoking a cigarette and shivering. Her ankle-length coat is gaping open to reveal purple lingerie that stands out like a bruise against her pale skin.
For a long moment, Stohler stares at the lighted silhouette. Finally, she turns to me and says, “I really fucking hated high school, you know.”
I let my head fall back against the head rest. “Yeah. I hate it, too.”
I want to apologize for bringing her along tonight. I want her to know that I had no idea my friends would be so weird about her job, or that they’d even find out about it. I can tell she wants to apologize again, too, for arguing with my friends, for almost revealing what I told her about Travis and Joss. But even if she did apologize, I wouldn’t be able to tell her I forgive her, because there’s nothing to forgive. I can’t expect her to apologize for her job any more than other people should expect me to apologize for being in recovery.
Eventually, the silence is too much. She climbs out of the car without another word and goes inside. I pull back out onto the road and use the GPS on my phone to navigate my way to Ben’s apartment. It’s not a long drive—by quarter after nine, I’m pulling into the lot behind his building and parking in the first free space I can find. We hadn’t planned a specific time for me to get here, so I lock my car and spend the next twenty minutes sitting on the hood of my car and chain-smoking. When I’ve finished the pack, I head inside, press the intercom button and wait. A few seconds later, the speaker crackles out, “Hello?”
“’s me, babe,” I say. “Wanna let me up?”
The door unlatches with a loud click, and I essentially bolt up the stairs. The apartment door is unlocked, but Ben’s red Chucks and Alex’s plain white tennis shoes are already next to the door, so they must both be home. I throw the deadbolt and head down the hall to Ben’s room. He’s sitting in his desk chair and thumbing through a paperback; he’s wearing sweatpants, a plain white t-shirt, and his glasses, and his face is unusually scruffy, like he hasn’t bothered to shave today, maybe yesterday either. He looks up at me with a small smile and says, “How was dinner?”
He’s such a decent guy. He’s cute. He’s sweet. Why couldn’t it have been him? Why couldn’t I have just made everything easier on everyone and fallen in love with him, instead of Travis? I curl a hand around his elbow and pull him to his feet, nudging him back towards the bed. “Dinner was stupid. All I want to taste is you.”
“Your single-minded dedication to achieving orgasm never ceases to amaze me,” Ben says, though he strips off his t-shirt and falls back onto the mattress. I crawl up onto the bed after him and kiss him. We end up making out for ages, until our lips are almost bruised and we’re both painfully hard and rutting up against each other. And the whole time, I’m waiting. I’m waiting for the moment when I’ll start to really feel something for him. I’m waiting for the moment when he stops being one of my best friends and starts being someone I could want to spend the rest of my life with. I’m waiting for the sparks I felt every time Travis so much as brushed his fingertips across my arm.
They don’t come.
I break away to mouth across his neck and say, “Tell me what you want me to do to you.” Tonight, I don’t think I can handle regular sex—sweet kisses, soft touches, simple anything. I can’t deal with it right now. I need something hard and fast and maybe a little bit twisted; Ben can always be counted on to come up with some pretty sick shit, so for now, it makes the most sense to just defer to him.
“Nothing, I—do whatever you want to do to me. That’s what I want,” Ben replies, but his words come hesitantly, which can really only mean that he has something he’s craving, but he doesn’t know how to ask for it. God, it must be pretty fucked up, if after everything we’ve done, he’s still nervous about saying it.
I nuzzle his scratchy, unshaven cheek with mine and say, “Come on, babe. Tell me. I’ll do anything you want.”
Except let you top me. Or hit me. Or make me bleed. Fuck, I should probably be setting these limits out loud, shouldn’t I? But then Ben looks away and says, all in one rushed breath, “Restraint. I don’t care if you tie me up, or just pin me down, and I’m not asking for anything like—I’m not asking for any sort of roleplay, or whatever. It’s not like I want to pretend you’re ra—” I suck in a breath, and he goes immediately still for a second. Only when I let out my breath does he continue in hushed tones, “I don’t want it to be like that, okay? But I’ve just been thinking about it lately. Fantasizing, I suppose, about you restraining me somehow, making me feel like I can’t move, fucking me from behind. That’s what I want. Please tell me if that’s not okay, or if any part of that makes you uncomfortable, and if that’s the case, then we won’t do it. Because if you’re not able to enjoy it, I’m not going to be able to enjoy it, and the last thing I want is to make you feel pressured, or upset, or unsafe. Please tell me.”
The nervousness makes sense now; after all, who wouldn’t balk at least a little at the prospect of asking someone who’s been through that to hold them down and fuck them mercilessly? But he’s not asking me to take that. He’s not asking for me to feel what I felt when Dave used to hold me down, and he’s not asking for us to play games, so I’ll know if this goes too far. Still, I say, “Has anyone ever tied you up before?”
He hesitates, then shakes his head. “No. This would be my first time.”
I fucking love being first. First kiss, first fuck, first bondage, apparently. My dick gives an interested twitch against his thigh, and he must feel it, because he rolls his eyes. I smirk at him and roll off of him, unbuckling my belt and threading it out of my beltloops. “I need you to be vocal with me, alright? I know sometimes you get weird about asking for what you want—I’m talking about specifics, not just yes, Garen, fuck me harder—I need to know that if you’re uncomfortable or in pain, you’re going to say no so that I know I need to stop.”
“Likewise,” he says, watching the progress of my belt. “Seriously, you don’t need to pretend to be into this just because—”
I grip his waist and roll him so that he is facedown on the bed, then settle myself on the backs of his thighs. I curve my fingers into little hooks and dig them ever so slightly into the tops of his shoulderblades, but don’t move them yet. His back is tight and still with the anticipation of being scratched, and I can tell it’s taking a lot of effort for him to stop himself from ordering me to just fucking do it already. Only when he begins to shift restlessly beneath me do I lean down to put my lips against his ear and say softly, “I’m not just pretending to be into this.”
I claw both hands down until my fingertips are resting in the space where the small of his back meets the curve of his ass. There are ten parallel lines of violently reddened skin running down the length of his back, and he whimpers, grinding his cock down onto the mattress and reaching for me. I catch his wrists and bend his arms so that they’re behind his back, hands gripping opposite elbows, then carefully wind my belt around them so that his forearms are pinned together. I move to buckle the belt, but he shakes his head and whispers, “Tighter, please.” I move it a notch tighter, then buckle it into place after he nods.
It’s the last instruction he gives me for the rest of the night. After that, he lets me leisurely remove the rest of our clothing, then obediently spreads his legs when I retrieve the lube and condoms from his nightstand. I spend probably close to half an hour fingering him—working him up, stretching him open, getting him to the point where he’s thrashing and pleading and desperate, and then backing off completely. I want this to last; I need this to last. Finally, when the wait is getting to be too much for either of us, I use my knees to nudge his legs further open, roll the condom on, and slam into him in one swift motion. He immediately pushes up to meet my thrusts, but I press his forearms more securely to his back until he’s unable to do anything but take whatever I’m willing to give him. I’m being fucking vicious with him, and he’s loving it.
Maybe that’s the problem.
All the fantasies I had about working things out with Travis, all the dreams I had of our future together… they were pointless and naive. This—pinning someone down, tying someone up, fucking someone until he’s bruised and begging—is what I’m best at. I’m in my element here, in someone else’s bed and half-soaked in someone else’s sweat. This isn’t something that Travis McCall can build a future on.
What’s it like when he’s with Joss? Do they do it at her place or his—the same house where he lost his virginity to me? Do they experiment, is there kink, do they switch up what position they do it in? Is it rough and desperate and sometimes painful, like it is with me and Ben? Or is it sweet and playful and perfect, like it was with me and Travis? How does he touch her? How does he feel when she touches him? Will he love her after the baby comes, after they’ve got that bond for their rest of their lives? Does he love her now? Does he tell her he loves her, when he’s inside of her?
Ben sighs as I roll my hips into him. I drop my forehead to the back of his neck and contemplate telling him, I love you. It’s not really true, but it’s not really a lie, either. I could say it, and he could say it back, and maybe it could be as simple as that. We’d go from being not-boyfriends to being real boyfriends, and sure, neither of us would feel for each other what we both felt for Travis, but maybe we could someday. Maybe eventually, we could find it in us to be together forever, maybe we could be a family, just like Travis and Joss and that baby are going to be.
I try to force the words out, I try, but what I end up saying is, “Love the way you take it.”
“Your cock feels so fucking good,” he whispers. I lean just far enough away from him to slip one hand between us so that I can rake my fingernails down his back. He lets out a soft cry and arches into my touch.
Maybe I can work my way up to it. Start smaller, start with the things that don’t feel like lies. I lick a stripe up the side of his neck; he keens, and I shift to whisper into his ear, “You look so hot like this. Spread out for me, hard and aching for it.” That’s true, that’s just a fact; that’s easy to say. I drag my teeth over his earlobe. “You’re so fucking sexy, babe. S-So—” I press a hard kiss to the edge of his jaw, and he twists his head just far enough to the side that our eyes lock. That’s enough to prompt a hesitation, but I have to at least try to do this. If Travis is moving on, if he’s going to have his little relationship and his little family and his little baby, I need to try to do the same. I need to try to move on, and there’s not a single person on this planet who I would rather do that with than Ben. I reach up to touch his jaw with the very tips of my fingers and force myself to continue in a hoarse breath, “So unbelievably gorgeous.” He’s tightening around me, beneath me, and I’m not sure if it’s because he realizes what I’m doing, or because he’s approaching orgasm, or both. My thrusts are slower now, steady but shallow, and I have to keep talking. I readjust slightly so that I can twist my head enough to touch our foreheads together even as I continue to fuck into him. My neck is cramping up, but it’s important to make this meaningful, right? It’s important to make it romantic, isn’t it? I need to look him in the eyes. I need to make myself talk. “Y-Your body, your face, your eyes… god, your eyes are beautiful. All—All of you, everything, your mind and your heart, everything about you is beautiful. You’re so fucking perfect.” Say it, you fucking idiot. Say it. What’s wrong with you? Say it, say it, say it. “I love—”
He surges up into a kiss, swallowing my words, and bucks against me, alternately fucking himself back onto my dick and grinding forward against the mattress. He’s clenching tight around me, and he hasn’t stopped kissing me, and it’s not long before I’m shifting away from him and shoving his legs together again, bracing my knees outside his thighs and flattening my palms against his shoulderblades, arms locked straight as my hips piston hard down into him. He’s wound up so tight beneath me, straining against the belt on his arms and gasping into the pillow, and then he’s going completely silent and coming, cock still untouched except for the friction of the mattress. It only takes a few more thrusts before I fall apart completely; his hands, still strapped behind his back, brush gently over my waist, steadying my still-jerking body. He makes no complaint when I collapse on top of him, but that’s probably because he’s still trying to catch his breath.
As soon as I can move, I pull out and dispose of the condom, returning as quickly as possible so that I can unbuckle the belt and toss it aside. Ben winces a little and rolls his shoulders to release some of the tension that must have gathered there in all the time he’s been restrained; I kneel next to him and do my best to massage some feeling back into his muscles, then into the angry red marks left by the belt. It’s not like I’m hardcore into BDSM, it’s not like I’m really part of the scene, but I know that things like aftercare are important, so I’m not about to just roll over and pass out cold, even though that’s sort of what my body wants to do. Besides, if I just go straight to sleep, I won’t have a chance to try to make myself say the whole phrase, and I don’t think I’ll be able to convince myself to say it in the light of day. When Ben finally rolls onto his back, I lie down next to him and kiss his forehead. “You alright?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he says, and he seems to really mean it.
“Good,” I murmur, kissing his lips this time.
He lets me, but when I pull away, he says, “I can tell what you’re doing, you know.” I don’t reply. “I know what you were going to say.”
“You should have let me say it,” I say. He shrugs. I scowl across the room, fixing my eyes on the door, and before he can stop me with a kiss again, I say, “I love you, Ben. I-I’m in love with you, and I want to be with you for real. I want you to be my boyfriend.”
“Garen, look at me,” he says, and I’m not really planning to do any such thing, but he cups my jaw in his hand and forces me to face him. I reluctantly meet his gaze. His thumb strokes across my cheekbone, and he says, too calmly, “You’re one of my best friends, and what we do together is fantastic. It’s honestly the best sex I’ve ever had in my life. I love you—” I try not to start hyperventilating, “—but I’m not in love with you.”
I allow myself to laugh as I shrug away from his hand. “God, what a line.”
“It’s not a line, it’s how I feel. And it’s how you feel, too,” he says. “I want to keep doing this with you, but not if you’re going to keep trying to turn this into something it isn’t. Not if you’re going to try to force yourself to fall in love with me just so you can convince yourself you’re not in love with someone else anymore. What we have is good as it is, okay? You’re a really amazing not-boyfriend.”
Maybe I could be an even better real boyfriend, if you’d let me. If I’d let myself. I can’t say that, though, not without ruining everything. So I settle for shrugging and hooking an arm around his waist to drag him closer. “Okay. Things are good are they are, you’re right. I’ll stop.” For a guy who claims not to want to be my boyfriend, he sinks easily into my embrace. I want to apologize, but ‘sorry’ seems a little cheap. Instead, I say in a small voice, “If it were up to me… if I could be in love with anyone, I’d be in love with you. I know I’m not, and you’re not, but if I had a choice, I’d choose to be in love with you.”
Ben smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “No. If it were up to you, you’d still be in love with Travis. He’d just love you back.”