Before & After You

by Michelle Chamberland

  “Holy shit, babe. Best fucking kiss of my life,” his breathy words fell over my lips. “I knew it would be like that with us,” he added, falling onto his side on the bed beside me.

  Regret immediately rolled through my stomach. What the hell did I just do?

  He ran his hand through my hair, and I closed my eyes.

  What you clearly wanted to do, you idiot, I answered my own question, trying not to think about the way I’d felt Greyson’s eyes burning holes into my retreating back as I’d led Jaymes down the hallway and into his room. Or the way Jaymes was currently pressing small kisses up and down my neck, staking his claim.

  Nail, meet coffin. You can’t take it back now.

  “You good?” Jaymes asked, pulling me away from those thoughts, and pulling himself away from my throat to look into my eyes.

  I smiled halfheartedly. “Yeah, I’m good.”

  “Then what’s that raincloud of thought behind those sexy eyes of yours about?”

  I had to physically hold myself back from rolling said eyes. I shrugged instead. “I’m thinking about how much of a child you are. ‘Give an inch, take a mile’ ring a bell? I don’t go around kissing just anyone, you know.”

  He laughed. “Believe me, I know. God, do I know. You give hard-to-get a whole new meaning, Jess.”

  “Shut up.” I shoved him.

  “Why is that, though?

  “Why is what?”

  “That you don’t hook up?”

  I shrugged again. “Doesn’t really appeal when you’ve had men twice your age trying to grope you since you can remember,” I answered without thought.

  “The fuck?” He reared back, dark eyes boring into mine. “Who?” he questioned, looking ready to beat someone down in my honor. I’m not going to lie and say that it didn’t make me feel good inside, that someone cared that much.

  “My mom’s boyfriends,” I answered. “Her sugar-daddies, her drug-dealers—you name it. She didn’t care that they hit on me; they did it right in front of her face, and she didn’t do anything about it.” Out of all the people I would’ve thought I’d be comfortable enough telling this to, Jaymes would’ve been dead last. I guess there was a first time for everything.

  Proven by that stupid, stupid kiss, my subconscious reminded me.

  Go to hell, subconscious.

  “That ever happens again, you tell me. I’ll beat the shit out of whoever tries to touch my girl,” he said.

  I snorted. “Sure thing.” I didn’t correct him, because he always called me his girl. Way before tonight ever happened.

  “Jess, baby. You finally let me inside you.” He smiled mischievously, tapping my forehead. ADD, this guy. No. Really. And it showed. “It all makes sense now. But it was only a matter of time before you fell prey to my charm…

  “So, you want to let me inside you in other ways?” He moved his lower half against me suggestively.

  “Ha! No. Go to bed.” I hit his shoulder, forcing him to lie down again. I turned off the light and pulled the covers up, and he wrapped his arm around me, breathing in contentment against my spine as we slowly drifted to sleep.

  I still remember those last thoughts I’d had before completely succumbing. How sometimes it felt like I’d been handed this life with full control, with nothing out of reach if I wanted it badly enough. But how other times it felt like I’d been strategically placed exactly where I was. Like a piece on a game board, destined to go down certain paths, where the only control I actually had was over the small fragments of time in-between all the places I was pre-destined to land.

  Like there, in Jaymes’ bed.

  Because no matter how badly I hadn’t wanted things to end up that way, and no matter how hard I’d tried to fight it, it felt like God had other plans for me all along, and the joke was on me. The joke had always been on me.

  Thirty-two Before

  WE WERE AT lunch the next day, sitting at a small table in the middle of the quad. We, as in Sara and Jaymes, and a few of his other friends. But also “we” as in whatever it was that Jaymes and I were supposed to be to each other now. He’d shown up at school that morning with a donut and iced coffee in hand—for me—kissed me on the cheek, wrapped his arm around my waist, and walked me to class, officially staking his claim for everyone to see.

  But he’d also slapped Sara on the ass as we’d dropped her by her class first, had bought another girl lunch ten minutes ago, and had slipped a note from a different one into his pocket. So, we weren’t together, together. Which honestly, was a huge relief. But also, he definitely felt like our kiss gave him permission to touch me a whole lot more than either one of us was used to—which was saying a lot. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  His fingers were currently hanging from my back pocket as he talked with the guys. I focused on my sketchbook in front of me, drawing Sara’s profile. She was quiet today. Withdrawn. I chalked it up to her a-hole of a father, because she always got like that after he’d been in town for the weekend. But it felt like something bigger must have gone down, because she was even quieter than usual. Even more pissed off at the world than she usually was, too.

  I didn’t blame her. Our parental situations were night and day, but it didn’t make either one of them any less shitty. Her mom worked some nine-to-five, barely scraping by, and her dad—I don’t know what the hell her dad did—but what I did know, was that he only came home every other weekend and when he did, the energy in their house completely shifted. He was rough with her mom, beat on her brother, and ignored Sara for weeks at a time, literally giving her the silent treatment because of the type of clothes she wore, or because of the guys she hung out with, or because of something as stupid as her cracking open his two-liter bottle of soda without his permission.

  I’d learned all of this based on observations alone, but even worse than that, I’d also heard him call her a whore and a slut more times than I could count, when he actually was talking to her. She shrugged it off like it didn’t matter, but I could tell that it hurt her. I mean, of course it did. We couldn’t be abused and neglected by the only people in this world we should’ve been able to count on to love us and not be scarred by it in some way.

  Sara bit down on her bottom lip, lost in thought.

  I drew her that way, shading around the space where her teeth met her lip. Shading underneath her chin and around her sad eyes.

  I vaguely heard one of the guys ask Jaymes a question that involved me before he wrapped his arm around me and pulled me into his side, his other hand coming up to grasp my chin as he placed a kiss square on my mouth. My eyes went wide as I pulled back.

  “Jess is mine now,” he said with a stupid grin, eyes locked on mine. “She finally let me inside her last night,” he added, a pride-filled tone that slipped past his smirk.

  I shook my head at him, holding back a mouthful of curse words, and, if I was being totally honest, an exasperated laugh, too. Because we both knew exactly how it sounded. We both knew the truth behind those words. But for whatever reason, we both kept our mouths shut. I guess I didn’t really care what anyone thought about what did or didn’t happen between us. It was none of their damn business.

  But when I finally looked away, I saw the back of Greyson’s head moving in the opposite direction from our table.

  I tried my best to ignore the way my heart was pulsing in my throat. Had he been standing here the whole time, and I just hadn’t noticed? Or did he just happen to be walking by?

  Either way…

  Had he heard what Jaymes said?

  I had no clue. Maybe he had, or maybe he hadn’t.

  I wasn’t sure which one of these I hoped it was more.

  Thirty-three Before

  I STEPPED FOOT in my bedroom after school that day, and something immediately felt off. There was an easel and a line of paints, charcoals, and pencils in front of me that hadn’t been there before. And when I took a few more steps into my room, there was a person that had never been in there befo
re either. At least not when I’d been in the room with her. Because this was her house, so obviously she had been in this room before, at some point.

  Elizabeth, my…stepmom? No. My dad’s wife. She stood there, staring at the pictures I’d pinned to her wall.

  I dropped my backpack onto the floor by the dresser.

  “Oh—hi,” she said the words through a startled breath, jumping a little at my intrusion. “I was just leaving some things…” she gestured towards the easel and art supplies, “I’ve seen you drawing in your sketchbook, and I…” She took a step closer to the photos. “You did this?” she asked, neglecting to finish her previous sentence.

  I swallowed back a rude response. It was like instinct, to throw fire at the people who stood in front of me before they could burn me first. “Um…yeah,” I eventually found it in me to answer her.

  I was sure she hated it, that she wanted me to take them all down immediately. To patch and paint her pristine wall until it looked like I had never marred it in the first place.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said, in a soft, awe-filled way that took me completely by surprise. “The way you’ve arranged them, but…the pictures themselves. You took these?”

  I cleared my throat, feeling more uncomfortable than I wanted to admit. My hands were starting to sweat. I wiped them down the sides of my jeans. “Yeah…I did.”

  She smiled tentatively. “You’re good. Really good. You should seriously think about art schools—if you haven’t already.”

  The urge to talk to her came out of nowhere. Words bubbled up my throat, ready to be set free, but I clenched my teeth down around them. I’d never told anyone my hopeless dreams of places I would never see and colleges I could never afford. I wasn’t going to start now.

  But of course I’d thought about them. Nearly every day for the past decade of my life. Since the very first time I’d put pencil to paper and drew castles in the sky I desperately wished I could live inside of.

  “That’s not really in the cards for me,” I finally answered instead.

  Her face scrunched up in that way that it does when people feel sorry for you. “How so?” she asked. “There are scholarships and awards, and I know your father would—”

  “No,” I shook my head, cutting her off. We weren’t going there either. Not now, not ever. I didn’t know what my future looked like, but I knew it would be painted without his help. I could do it on my own, like I’d done almost everything else on my own since the first day I could remember.

  Our lingering silence turned awkward. On my end, anyway. I didn’t know why she kept standing there, staring at my pictures when there was nothing left for either of us to say.

  She released a breath. “I’ll leave you be then.” But she paused by the doorway, adding a, “Happy Birthday,” with a sad smile.

  And, oh. Oh. It all made a little more sense now—the easel, the art supplies. I swallowed. “Thank you,” I said quietly, and I meant it.

  “You’re welcome.” She hesitated, stalling another step. “You know…I’m a firm believer that if you believe in yourself hard enough, you can make any of your dreams come true…

  “But no one has ever made it to the top without accepting a little help along the way,” she finished, and walked out the door.

  And I think that to a lot of people in my situation, her words would’ve sounded like total bullshit. But I knew, somewhere deep down, that what she’d said was true. It was just that the world had taught me I couldn’t rely on anyone but myself if I wanted to make it through this life in one piece.

  Thirty-four Before

  IT WAS THE first time I’d ever attempted to put paint on a canvas in a way that made sense to me, the day Elizabeth had left all those supplies in my bedroom for me to use.

  But it wasn’t the first time I’d tried to channel the darkness I felt stirring inside of me into something else—into something outside of myself, attempting to turn that churning ball of pain and confusion into a thing of beauty instead of allowing it to fester and drag me under.

  There was something about the brushstrokes of paint, though, that felt entirely new. That felt even more calming than the sound of pencil scratching against paper. I wouldn’t have believed that was possible until that day.

  I got lost in it.

  I must’ve sat in front of that easel for hours. Until the sun had fully set, and the sky had turned from bright blue and orange to magenta and indigo, and then dark. Dark, and sprinkled with stars.

  When I finally pulled away from the painting, I found myself staring into my own eyes. A simple self-portrait of a girl. Only her hands were wrapped around her neck, fingertips digging into her own flesh. But looking into her eyes, you wouldn’t know it, that she was strangling herself. She looked oblivious—sad, but entirely oblivious—of her own self-destruction.

  As I sat there, studying the features of my own face staring back at me, I could feel something slowly happening. A click; a shift. Something of magnitude rearranging itself inside of me, connecting thoughts of my past to emotions of my present in a way I hadn’t understood before.

  I spent the next two weeks holed up in my room like that. Painting, or constantly looking forward to the next chunk of hours I’d be able to spend in there, learning the differences between brush and pencil, paper and canvas. Learning to process my feelings in a way that made sense to me.

  It also happened to be far better than the alternative…allowing myself to linger on thoughts of Greyson. On the betrayal I’d seen in his eyes the day after Jaymes had made his stupid announcement, or the way we hadn’t said a single word to each other since our fight in that parking lot. And it was better than focusing on the way I’d been feeling more and more resigned with letting people believe Jaymes and I were a thing—with letting Jaymes believe him and I were a thing—with allowing myself to believe him and I were a thing.

  Because I guess that’s what we were now. What we had been for a while: Boyfriend and Girlfriend.

  But more than any of that, more than all of it, those hours of solitude helped me chisel away at the walls I’d constructed around my heart. Walls I hadn’t even realized I’d long been standing outside of.

  Thirty-five Before

  ANOTHER WEEK PASSED by.

  Sara was still distant. More than ever before, really. But I had no choice but to leave her be. There was that unspoken rule between us, that we wouldn’t talk about the shit that haunted us and dragged us down. And she’d quickly shut down all my offers to try and do something—anything—that would pull her out of her funk.

  So I had no other option than to wait it out, wait for her to come around when she was ready.

  It was a little lonely, though, if I was being honest, without her usual, over the top personality in my face as an easy and welcome distraction.

  But I was busy, too. Between painting and homework and school and hanging out with Jaymes—more than I would’ve thought I’d want to, by the way. But it had been nice, his company. I’d learned that while he was annoyingly pushy verbally, he actually wasn’t all that pushy physically. And the fact that he’d been content with infrequent, small kisses and simply hanging out, watching movies, and not doing much of anything at all, kind of surprised me. Or a hell of a lot surprised me, if I was being completely honest.

  That’s not to say he was a perfect gentleman, though. No—that idea was laughable. His dirty mouth, and flirtatious nature, and wandering eye far more than made up for it. He was still the same old Jaymes, just without a new notch or two in his belt every night. One that I proudly had not put in there either, or ever planned to.

  So, I made it through that week with minimal human contact. With Sara, my dad and Elizabeth, Greyson. I was good with it, I guess.

  But our poetry presentation was due in a couple of weeks, and to say I wasn’t looking forward to it would’ve been a massive understatement. Standing up there next to him, pretending the past few months had never happened, sounded like pure torture.


  But I’d deal with that when I got there.

  For now, I was going to turn in my “Life in Action” shots to Ms. Greenburg, my photography teacher, keep painting, and keep hanging out with…Jaymes.

  …Maybe.

  Thirty-six After

  THE AESTHETIC OF Toca Madera never ceases to fascinate me. But the way it provides a backdrop for Greyson is downright sinful.

  Because there he stands—dark suit, dark hair, light eyes in the darkness of this room—surrounded by deep-red, velvet couches; black walls; and gothic chandeliers, providing muted light to the room around him—and everything about it is just so damn sexy, and seductive, and sinful.

  Sinful, sinful, sinful, because the thoughts running through my mind right now are anything but holy.

  And holy shit, but adult Greyson is so fucking attractive it hurts. Literally—physically—aches inside my chest.

  And obviously I already knew this, having seen him twice in the past two weeks, but I wouldn’t know it with the way my heart skips at least eight solid beats when he spots me at the bar and smiles, one corner of his mouth pulling up higher than the other in the way that I’ve always loved.

  There’s something about the way he looks at me now that’s different from earlier tonight, though, and different from the day we ran into each other at the coffee shop, too.

  An intensity, a familiarity, in the way he strides towards me, eyes searching mine. I could be crazy, but his are saying so many things.

  Is there still something here? Do you feel this too?

  I’ve missed you.

  I’ve missed you; I’ve missed you; I’ve missed you.

  And surely, if he was taken, he wouldn’t be here right now looking at me like that, right?

  A throat clears beside me. “We’re embarrassing ourselves here, ladies,” Ricky says.

  I force myself to look away from Greyson. It’s no small feat. I have to peel my eyes away from his face and body, inch by agonizing inch, before I can turn in my seat and face Ricky.