“I gotta go.”
“I’ll see you Thursday,” I hammer again.
“Thursday,” he quietly repeats.
“It was nice meeting you, Brian,” Alice says in the sweetest voice. My gut clenches. This girl is awesome. The fucking best. I don’t deserve to be her friend. Not after the way I treated her.
Brian smiles briefly and looks away. “You guys better get outta here. It’s not safe for you.”
I want to yell no shit. I want to yell at him until he listens.
Brian pivots and runs off.
“Thursday!” I shout. But he’s already around the building and out of sight.
Alice
With the streets mostly empty, it only takes us half an hour to get back to campus. It’s 1 a.m. by the time Reagan parks the Jeep in front of my dorm. We haven’t exchanged a single word since we dropped off Brian, his very sweet and very troubled brother.
Reagan turns off the engine and plants his forehead on the steering wheel in between his hands, the knuckles pale. “I shouldn’t have taken you. It was stupid and selfish of me.”
“Stop that. I made the decision to come along and I’m glad I did. Your brother is sweet.”
He snorts. “Yeah, real sweet.”
“How did it happen? The cut. God, it looked awful and painful.”
“They couldn’t give him any painkillers while they stitched him up because he’s a known substance abusers,” he tells me, his voice dull and distant. “A lot of them will injure themselves to get drugs.” A shiver runs up my back. “He was trying to stop some guys from raping a girl he knows. That’s how he got cut.”
The air gets caught in my lungs, pain and sympathy pool in my gut. “Oh my God. Poor Brian. And the girl, is she okay?”
“For now. He was anxious to get back to her. That’s why I signed him out.”
I nod absently while the question I’m dying to ask hangs on my lips. “Do you think he’ll show up at the clinic on Thursday?”
He still won’t look at me. His breathing gets harsh. He sucks in deep breaths of air and expels them loudly. It’s then I realize he’s trying not to cry. With the heel of his palm, he starts pounding on the steering wheel, slams his body against the back of his seat, and tips his chin up to stare blindly into the cloudy night sky.
“I don’t know,” he croaks. “Honestly? No. I don’t think he will.” The truth comes out slowly, painfully. His throat works. The muscle along the sharp cut of his jaw twitches.
I reach over, slide my hand up his shoulder, grip his neck, hot to the touch, alive under my fingertips, and bring him into my arms. He comes easily, hiding his face and sorrow on my shoulder, his arms banding around me in a crushing grip.
I pet his back and let him ride it out on the curve of my neck, all that anguish he’s packed down over the years surging up at once. It’s not fair. He shouldn’t be carrying all the responsibility of his brother’s welfare by himself. His parents are assholes. That goes without saying.
The cotton of my long sleeve shirt is damp when he pulls away. Then in one smooth motion, before I can see it coming, he cups my face between his large rough hands and leans down. His warm lips touch mine. It’s soft and gentle, a question instead of a command. And when I don’t object, he kisses me again with more conviction. With urgency that speaks of a stolen moment that may never come around again.
I’m in shock. I’m lost in him. I’m thrilled. My joy climbs so high it is destined to end with a brutally hard landing. I know this. I do. But I want it so badly that I willingly ignore the voice in the back of my mind telling me that he’s hurting and alone. That it’s only natural to want to celebrate life, to feel something good, something tangible that connects us to another living being when we’re faced with our own fragility. That voice urges me to pull away, to stop him. But I don’t get the chance because he does it for me.
“I’m sorry. Fuck. I’m sorry, Alice.” For a moment his lips hover over mine, unsure whether to stay or go.
Stay. Please stay.
How do I tell him that I’m not sorry? That I want his sweet, soft kisses again and again. That I want kisses that are not so sweet too. All that and so much more from him.
He sits back in his seat and rubs his face. His lashes, still wet, glisten in the flood of light from the overhead streetlamp. “Please tell me we’re okay. I can’t lose you. Did I fuck this up again?”
“It’s okay. You’re upset…” I reassure, giving him the cover that his pained expression and voice are asking of me. “It was just…”
For the first time since we left the hospital, he turns to squarely meet my eyes. “A mistake,” he finishes for me, consequently driving a stake through my heart.
“Right…” I get out of the Jeep. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
I’m halfway to the door when I hear, “Alice.” I turn and find him chewing on his bottom lip. “Thank you”
“No need for that.”
“You are…” He gives me a funny, frustrated look, shakes his head. “Sorry. Thank you.”
Big Deal: a nude beach?
By now, these random texts are no longer cryptic.
Me: Do I have to go full-on nude, or can I start topless and ease into it?
Big Deal: …
Big Deal: …
Big Deal: you can ease into it.
Me: Then, yeah, why not.
Big Deal: you’re full of surprises.
Me: Good ones?
Big Deal: great ones.
In the days that follow, our friendship is back on track. Even though there’s a marked carefulness in the way he treats me that did not exist before. We both seemed to have recovered from the kiss without injury. Well, at least I pretend to have recovered. In reality, I’m living in a constant state of frustration and longing for more.
I had a friend in high school who liked to enter sweepstake contests. Anything that had a prize attached, she would enter. She won once. An all-expense-paid trip to London which included a first-class plane ticket and a four-night stay at a five-star hotel.
Her mother was a single parent who worked in a department store. Not only was it her first time out of the country, but it was also her first time out of the state. When she returned I asked her how it went. I expected her to be over the moon, regaling me with details sure to turn me gecko green with envy. Instead, she said it was terrible and depressing, that winning the trip was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Up until that point, she’d been happy with vacations at the Jersey shore. Her life had been complete, fulfilling. The trip showed her what she was missing out on. She said she wished she’d never gone.
That’s what kissing Reagan is to me. My imagination didn’t even begin to do the reality of it justice. And now I’m stuck knowing two things. The first is that nothing and no one will ever compare, and the second is that he’ll never be interested in me as anything other than a friend. I was a mistake, a lapse in judgment because he was feeling vulnerable.
Chapter 20
Alice
“What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” Reagan asks as soon as I answer my phone. It’s the third time he’s asked me this same question in the last two weeks. I’m seriously tempted to say I’m busy even though I’m lying in bed, staring aimlessly out the window into a cloudless blue sky.
I couldn’t afford to go home and Aunt Peg and Wheels hit the road. They’re in Vegas. I declined their invitation to go with them. He knows this. He also knows I turned down Dora’s invitation to go to San Diego and have Thanksgiving with her family. He knows Zoe’s in Cabo with her mother, and Blake went to New York to visit her sister. He knows all those things because we spend way too much time together. Neither of us voices out loud that two people who aren’t dating shouldn’t be spending every spare minute together but he hasn’t brought it up, so why should I.
“Reading.”
“Good. You’re coming with.”
“Where?”
“To my parents’ for Thanksgiving dinner.”
He said he wasn’t sure whether he was going. He didn’t want to deal with his father riding him about bailing Brian out again. Apparently the hospital had contacted his parents that night and they had refused to get involved. Nice, right?
Brian never did show up the following Thursday at the clinic. Even worse, Reagan didn’t seem at all surprised or upset by it. He said he’s been disappointed so many times it doesn’t even smart anymore.
“No––”
“I’m picking you up in twenty minutes,” he says, speaking over me.
There is no way I’m going to Dr. and Dr. Reynolds’s house of horrors in Beverly Hills. No way. I don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out it’ll turn into a disaster. “No.”
“Yes.”
“Reagan––”
“Alice––”
I fight the smile pulling my lips apart. “I’m really into this book.”
That’s a lie. A stone-cold lie. I’m really not. Not even a little bit. My mind has been wandering for hours. Turning onto my side, I stare at the contents of my open closet with trepidation. There’s nothing in there even remotely appropriate. “And I don’t feel like getting dressed.”
And that’s the truth. The God’s honest truth. The last thing I want to do is attend a fancy dinner with Reagan’s uptight parents. “I was going to order Chinese takeout and watch Elf.”
“Great fucking movie.”
“Twinsies. You can watch it with me.” My voice ends on a high note, hoping that he’ll drop it. My hope is thin, however. I’ve learned the hard way that Reagan has the tenacity of my cousin Marie’s rescue Chihuahua, Liberace. You can’t play fetch with that dog ’cause he––like Reagan––won’t let the damn bone go.
“After we get back from my parents’.”