[2018] PS I Hate You

by Winter Renshaw

  “Stranger Things?” I ask.

  Her full lips twist at the side and she taps her finger against her chin. “I guess.”

  Taking a seat on her sofa, I ensure we’re separated by at least one full seat cushion as she starts the show.

  “Oh, wait. Can you do me the tiniest favor?” Maritza turns to me just as the opening credits finish. “I should probably take something for the swelling. Can you grab me a bottle of water and some Advil from the cupboard by the sink? Oh, and help yourself to whatever you want in the fridge. I think there’s some leftover beer from Melrose’s last boyfriend.”

  “Melrose?”

  “My cousin slash roommate.”

  “I see.” Rising, I head back to the glorious eighties kitchen and grab her water and ibuprofen, helping myself to an ice-cold bottle of Rolling Rock on the way back.

  “Why are you sitting so far away? That’s a terrible angle for watching TV,” she asks when I take my seat. She pats the cushion beside her, brows lifted. “I twisted my ankle. It’s not like I’m contagious.”

  With my arm resting across the back of the couch, I shrug. “It’s fine.”

  Maritza rolls her eyes. “You picked this dumb show and now you’re going to sit all the way over there where you can barely see the screen?”

  Groaning, I slide closer—but only because she has a point. “There. That better?”

  “Shh.” She swats at me just as the show begins to start. “Show’s on. No more talking.”

  Her eyes are glued and I take pride in knowing that I picked out a fucking amazing show for us to watch.

  Settling into the seat back, I cross my legs wide and watch her from my periphery. She’s totally into this and I love it.

  By the time the first episode ends, she doesn’t so much as touch the remote, letting the next one automatically play.

  “I guess this stupid show is okay,” she says, leaning forward and adjusting the ice pack on her ankle. She lifts it for a second to check the swelling, but it’s still pretty ugly.

  “Pretty sure you just broke rule number two.”

  “Pretty sure you broke rule number one,” she says, her dark hair curtaining her beautiful face as she turns to look at me.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was sweet what you did for me today. Romantic almost—textbook standards anyway. Carrying me down the trail, driving me home, taking care of me.”

  I scoff. “That’s not romance. That’s called being a decent human being.”

  Licking her lips, she tucks her hair behind her ear. “Fine. Maybe I was reading into it too much.”

  “Definitely. You were definitely reading into it too much,” I say.

  When I saw her injured, it was instinctive—I had to save her. I may do this shit on the regular with my fellow comrades, but trust me when I say I’ve never done anything like this for some random girl I hardly know.

  Reaching for the remote, she pauses the show, drawing in a deep breath.

  “Can I just say something here?” she asks. “I feel like I need to address the elephant in the room.”

  I lift a brow, having zero idea where she’s going with this. “All right. Address away.”

  “You check me out all the time,” she says. “You think I don’t see it, but I do. And you’re always looking at me like you’re two seconds from devouring me. I don’t even think you realize it. Or maybe you do. Maybe you do it on purpose because you think you’re not going to get caught. I don’t know.”

  Pressing my lips together, I stare at the paused show on the screen.

  Fuck.

  “I just … I feel like if the situation were different … if you weren’t about to be deployed … I think …” she stops, taking another deep breath. “I think we have chemistry. Basically. Is what I’m trying to say. And the more we ignore it and deny it, the stronger it’s going to get. So if we could just address it and kiss or fuck or whatever the hell we’re inevitably going to do by the end of the week, I think we could—”

  “Fuck chemistry. Fuck all that bullshit.”

  “So you’re just going to deny that we—”

  Pulling her into my lap, I silence her words with a greedy kiss, and I don’t even feel bad about it. This isn’t romantic and I’m not some Casanova trying to win her heart. I’m simply a man with needs, a man who’s been wanting to taste those lips all over again since the night at The Mintz.

  Her mouth is strawberries.

  Her tongue is peppermint.

  Her lips are hot, pillow soft.

  Everything is better than I remember, and when her hands find my hair and her nails rake against the nape of my neck, I almost fucking lose it.

  “Hi.” Maritza straddles me, pressing her hips against my growing cock as she balances on her knees. Her mouth curls, her eyes light, and I crush her cherry lips all over again.

  “Is your ankle okay?” I ask between kisses, my mouth grazing hers.

  “I don’t feel a thing, Corporal,” she says, breathless and smirking just before our tongues collide.

  My hands grip her hips before working the hem of her shirt, fingertips trailing her soft skin until I reach the smooth fabric of her pink bra.

  “This means nothing,” she says, grinding harder. “Right? Tell me it means nothing. We’re just … we’re just getting it out of our system.”

  “It means nothing,” I assure her, unhooking her clasp. My hands slip beneath her bra, cupping her perfect tits. I’m so fucking hard it hurts and while I want to enjoy the hell out of all of this, I’m counting down the minutes until I’m deep inside of her, all the way in, fucking her in a way she’ll never forget so long as she lives.

  And I don’t say that out of arrogance.

  One-night stands and short-lived flings are kind of my specialty, and I’ve been told I’m the best, that I always deliver.

  “Oh, my God!” A woman’s voice shrieks and the front door slams.

  Maritza climbs off me, tugging her shirt back into place and fixing her hair. “Melrose, hey. I didn’t know you were going to be around today. Thought you had auditions?”

  The other woman, who’s easily the blonde-haired version of Maritza, stands with her mouth agape and eyes wide as saucers, shocked gaze flicking between the two of us.

  “Melrose, this is Isaiah. Isaiah, this is my roommate slash cousin, Melrose.” Maritza and her cousin exchange looks. I take it they’ve discussed me before.

  She looks familiar, like a face I’ve seen before. Maybe on TV. Or it could just be the striking Claiborne resemblance.

  “My audition ended earlier than I thought.” Melrose hooks her bag on the back of a living room chair.

  “Oh, yeah? How’d it go?” Maritza asks, pretending like Melrose didn’t just walk in on us about to fuck.

  My cock is still hard, though it’s beginning to diminish thanks to the sheer fucking awkwardness of this situation.

  “Fine,” she says. “I read for some part in some Ryan Gosling movie. I’d be playing his snarky younger sister. It’s got about twenty lines, so that’s something.”

  “No kidding. Better than ‘victim number two’ on Law and Order,” Maritza says with a wink.

  “That role put me on the map.” Melrose points. “I landed two other parts because of that role.”

  “I’m not knocking it,” Maritza says, palms up.

  “Anyway, I’m going to go for a run,” her roommate says. I don’t know this chick from Adam, but she seems a bit down. I imagine it gets exhausting auditioning and getting your hopes up and dealing with disappointment after disappointment. “If you two feel the need to continue to get your freak on, kindly do it in the privacy of your boudoir.”

  Maritza rolls her eyes and Melrose disappears down a hallway.

  “She’s always in a mood after her auditions,” she tells me. “She wants so badly to be the Gloria Claiborne of our generation. Her words, not mine.”

  “Nothing wrong with setting goals.”


  “Right. I have no room to talk. At least she knows what she wants to do with her life and she’s taking the necessary steps to get there.” Maritza reaches for her water bottle on the coffee table, lifting it to her swollen lips, the very same ones I was claiming a few minutes ago.

  But now the moment is lost.

  And maybe it’s for the best.

  “I should go.” I rise, grabbing my phone and trying not to acknowledge the disappointed look in her eyes that has no business being there. She should be fine with me staying and equally fine with me going. “See you tomorrow. I’ll text you the info in the morning.”

  Showing myself out, I walk toward the front gate and wait for my ride.

  Half of me wants to stay.

  The other half of me knows it’s best that I go.

  Saturday #5

  “OKAY, LET ME JUST apologize quick.” I hobble up to Isaiah the second he enters the main doors of the La Brea Tar Pits, maneuvering through groups of families, mothers with small children, and preschoolers on field trips. “I had no idea this was, like, a children’s science center type place.”

  His eyes scan the lobby before dragging the length of a realistic-looking woolly mammoth.

  A little curly-haired boy in a red polo plows into him, shouting sorry as he runs off. His mother chases after him, and just outside a yellow bus full of elementary schoolers pulls into the drop off lane.

  This place has been open all of twenty minutes and already it’s filled to the brim with tiny humans, their loud voices echoing off the high ceilings and expansive wall space.

  “We can go somewhere else,” I tell him, apologizing with my eyes and my voice and the placement of my hands on his broad chest.

  Raking his teeth across his lower lip, he pulls in a deep breath, like he’s mulling it over, and then he shrugs.

  “It’s fine. We’re here,” he says.

  “You sure?” I lift a brow. “I’ve got some other ideas, more places we can go.”

  Isaiah shakes his head and hooks his arm over my shoulder, which catches me off guard for a moment. We walk to the ticket desk, the warmth of his body permeating through my cotton tee and his spicy cologne filling my lungs.

  “How’s the ankle?” He asks when we reach the line.

  “Better. Sore but better.”

  Ten minutes later, tickets in hand, we begin a self-guided tour, beginning at their Titans of the Ice Age exhibit and moving on to the Fossil Lab, which seems to be popular with the preschoolers surrounding us.

  We stop at Pit 91, where they’re conducting a live excavation, unearthing saber tooth tiger and dire wolf fossils, and Isaiah stops to watch.

  “You know, I read once that if you placed the entire timeline of the universe into a single calendar year, humans would show up on December 31st at 11 PM,” I say. “I’m paraphrasing, but you get the picture.”

  His lips flatten. He’s engrossed by the architects digging in the dirt with all of their fancy tools and brushes.

  “Isn’t it crazy when you think about how inconsequential we are? As a species, we’re still so new and all these living, breathing creatures existed millions and millions of years ago. It blows my mind, really. Kind of makes me awestruck and depressed at the same time,” I say.

  “Depressed?” He turns to me.

  “Well, not clinically depressed, but almost kind of sad … because it makes me feel like someday maybe millions of years from now, we’re all probably going to be extinct. Just a bunch of fossils in the ground, no legacies to leave behind, no one to tell our stories.”

  “I still don’t see how that’s a sad thing. Being extinct. If we’re dead, we’re not going to be around to care,” he says. “And these dinosaurs and whatnot have left a legacy of fossil fuels, if you want to put it that way. They didn’t live and die for nothing.”

  “I guess, but I just think people are always so fixated on their problems all the time, but if they could just look at the big picture—that someday they’re just going to be a pile of bones in a mound of dirt—maybe they’d worry a little less? Live a little more? Try to contribute to society or leave the world a little bit better than they found it?”

  “You’re such an idealist.” He hooks his arm around me, which marks the second time today, and my heart does the tiniest flutter without so much as asking for permission.

  We spend the next couple of hours touring the garden and a few more dig sites before stopping at the lake pit.

  Hot bubbling asphalt glugs behind us as we stand next to a bunch of fake animals pretending to play in the pit.

  “What do you think it’d be like if we went extinct and some future species found our bones and turned us into robotic models and placed us on display?” I ask as we watch the bubbles float to the surface and pop.

  “Probably about how you’d expect.” He clears his throat, glancing down at me, and I’d love to know what he’s thinking about.

  “You know, my grandma in the sixties, all she wanted was to have a legacy, to be remembered forever. People were always comparing her to Marilyn Monroe, especially after Marilyn died, and my grandma would get so upset because unless you die young and your beauty is immortalized, you’ve got nothing to leave behind but your good deeds. But if you’re simply known for your beauty, no one really cares if you’re feeding orphans and adopting shelter dogs or paying for vaccines in third world nations. She wants to be remembered for her philanthropy, but anytime someone hears the name Gloria Claiborne, all they associate her with is old Hollywood glamour or that white bikini.”

  “Sounds like she needs a good PR team.”

  I roll my eyes. “Does it really count if you have to publicize it? It’s like those people who donate money to places so they can get their names on a plaque on the wall as a “Gold Star Donor” or whatever the stupid name is.”

  “Giving is giving.”

  “Unless you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Some people give for others. Some people give for themselves.”

  “It’s not really our place to judge other people’s reasons for giving,” he says, words terse.

  “Yeah, well, you haven’t met some of the elitist assholes who hang out with my parents and brag about how much money they donated to their kids’ schools. One jerkoff donated a hundred grand so he could have his kid’s name painted on some mural on the playground.”

  “It’s their money,” he says. “They can spend it how they want.”

  “Stop making me sound like an asshole,” I say. “I’m just being honest. This is a judgement-free zone. You can’t judge me for judging other people.”

  “Seems a little hypocritical.”

  I wrinkle my nose. “Okay. I take back everything I said. Everyone who ever donates a single dollar to a single cause is a selfless saint.”

  Isaiah laughs. At me. “Why are you getting so worked up? This is such a dumb conversation to have. Who the hell cares who donates to what and why?”

  Drawing in a deep breath, I let it go, crossing my arms over my chest. “I don’t know. You’re right. It’s dumb.”

  He slips his arm over my shoulder—again—and gives me a side hug. “You ever heard of the phrase ‘stay in your own lane’?”

  “No?”

  “It means mind your own. Don’t worry about what anyone else is doing,” he says. “Trust me, it’s the only way to live. Worry about yourself. Forget the rest.”

  Turning to face him, I glance up into his warm gaze, studying his perfectly chiseled features and longing to brush the strand of dark hair off his bronzed forehead.

  “What made you enlist, Isaiah?” I ask. “It takes a lot to sacrifice money for a good cause, but it takes even more to be willing to sacrifice your life. That couldn’t have been an easy decision for you.”

  He releases my gaze, his expression hardening. I can practically feel him closing up.

  “It’s a long story. Some other time, all right?” he asks.

  I bury my disappointment in a small smile. “Of cours
e.”

  I know from talking to my cousin, that a lot of guys enlist for very personal reasons and it wouldn’t be right to push and prod. Maybe with time, he’ll open up?

  Making our way around the tar pit, we stop next to a mastodon. Isaiah reads the plaque beside it, but I try to read him.

  And fail.

  Miserably.

  There’s no denying something’s there, something that makes my heart trot when he looks at me, something that makes me slick on an extra coat of lip balm or an extra spritz of perfume before dashing out the door to meet him.

  And while I’m the one who made the rules—no romance and only honesty at all times—I’m the one who can’t stop thinking about what would happen if we broke one of them.

  Only problem is, I have zero idea if he’s thinking what I’m thinking. He’s so even-keeled and emotionally guarded, but they say actions speak louder than words and the fact that he’s here, spending time with me doing stupid shit has to count for something … right?

  “Why are you staring like that?” Isaiah asks when he turns around.

  My cheeks warm. I’d been spacing off. “No reason.”

  “Bullshit. You can’t lie, remember? Tell me what you were thinking about.” His lips draw into a playful smirk, and I can’t decide if I like his mysterious side or his spirited side best. It’s like trying to choose between white chocolate and milk chocolate, which are both delicious in their own ways.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  And I’m serious. He doesn’t want to know that I’m thinking about him in a way that I was determined not to. Besides, he’s leaving in a few days. There’s no point in ruining the rest of our time together by making this situation unnecessarily complicated.

  “Try me,” he says, his stare boring into me. Something tells me he’s not going to let this go.

  Giving myself a moment, I gather my thoughts and nibble on my lower lip. “I was just thinking about connections.”

  “Connections?” His hands rest on his hips, his shoulders parallel with mine. I have his full, undivided attention.

  “I was just thinking about how I hardly know you, but I feel connected to you,” I say, cringing on the inside but fully embracing the discomfiture of this conversation.