Hate at First Sight

by Penelope Bloom

  “Together,” I said.

  “Does he know that?”

  “What do you mean does he know that? I basically spelled it out for him.”

  “Did you spell it out simply enough for a guy to understand?”

  I sighed. “Yes. Even the dumbest of guys should’ve seen plain as day that I wasn’t planning on going anywhere. Even if I hadn’t, though. He should realize he can’t keep strong-arming his way into my life if he wants whatever is between us to mean something. It’s like the only way he knows to care about me is by handcuffing me to him.”

  “For the record,” she said slowly. “I’m not arguing for him. I just want to make sure you see all the angles here so you can make the best choice, but… Zach never struck me as the kind of guy to open up. To anyone. He told you whatever he told you, and it sounds like it was hard for him. Maybe the guy is feeling a little vulnerable for once? Insecure, even? It’s probably new to him, and maybe clinging to the contract is just a safety net.”

  “I’m sorry but I’m having a hard time picturing Zach being insecure.”

  Mandy shrugged. “People change, you know. And who knows, maybe he has always been insecure when it comes to you. Think about it. I know you’re sworn to secrecy about what he told you, but if it was as hard for him to let you in as it sounds, maybe he was pushing you away all this time because he was afraid you wouldn't accept him if he let you in."

  “Okay, Dr. Phil,” I said sourly. “When did you become Zach Thornwood’s cheerleader?”

  “I’m not trying to be his cheerleader. I just know you’ve always kind of pined after him.”

  “I didn’t,” I said too quickly.

  “Oh come on. You tried—poorly, I might add—to hide it from me, but you’ve always had a thing for him. You’re my little sister. You couldn’t even hide it from me when you’d borrow my jacket when we were kids.”

  “Well, maybe you shouldn’t root for me to forgive Zach, or accept him, or whatever it is I can’t seem to do. What happens when the new girl scent fades from me? How long is he really going to be able to suppress his natural instinct to be an asshole?”

  “He’s trying though, isn’t he?”

  “For now,” I said. “Kind of, except for the contract.”

  “Look, Ari, would I try to guide you to something that was a bad idea?”

  I thought about that and my mind passed over several times in our past when she had inadvertently done exactly that. There was the time she burnt off my eyebrows with a potato gun. The time she made me lose half the skin on my knees from an ill-advised combination of her bike, a rope, and my gravity board. There was even the time she told me to try dating again after I moved out to Florida and I wound up with Craig-has-a-thing-for-feet-McCreeperson.

  She held up a placating hand, like she had just realized her own track-record wasn’t as good as she was implying. “When have I ever not had your best interest at heart?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Is that your final question, or do you need to modify it a little more?”

  She glared. “I’m serious, Ari. I mean, don’t do anything you don’t feel right about, obviously. I just can’t help rooting for you and him. Maybe I’ve watched too many movies, but you guys are like the perfect movie couple, the one that is always fighting but you know they belong together, and everybody but the two main characters realizes they should be together.”

  I felt some truth in what she was saying, but I was still so peeved about the contract that I didn’t want to admit it. It was such a stupid thing, like one symbolic brick that remained from what was once a towering wall, and all he had to do was kick it out of the way but he refused.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said finally, because I wanted to be done arguing about it. Whether she realized it or not, she was only forcing me to come up with more and more reasons I shouldn’t give Zach another chance by presenting his side of the argument.

  We were halfway through our second movie when my phone buzzed. I looked down and saw a text from Zach’s phone.

  <3 Zach <3: This is Taylor. Using Zach’s phone. He had an asthma attack on stage. He’s backstage and won’t let doctor’s touch him until you get here. He keeps asking for you. Get here ASAP!

  Mandy let me use her car to get to the venue, and I felt a little bad because I probably burnt half her tires off with how quickly I was taking corners trying to get there. If something happened to Zach because he was so stubborn and stupid that he’d refuse a doctor just to get me to come to his side, I was going to kill him.

  My heart was pounding and my stomach was in my throat as I ran toward the venue. Thankfully, one of Zach’s security guys was out front and he recognized me, so I didn’t have to stop and answer questions. He escorted me in through the front gates and out to the stage, where I was surprised to still hear the murmuring crowd. I would’ve thought Zach disappearing with an asthma attack would’ve cleared out the audience. In fact, I hadn’t seen any real traffic leaving the venue on my way in.

  I saw the whole bulk of the crowd then and I also saw Zach standing on stage with his band, looking perfectly healthy.

  His security guard kept leading me forward, toward the front. I could see Zach’s face on the huge screens and from the looks of it, he had spotted me. Why wasn’t he playing any music? Why was it so quiet? What the hell was going on?

  Then the crowd started to notice me. At first just a few heads turned, and then the murmuring voices spread and spread and spread, until it felt like ten thousand people were all staring at me, whispering excitedly like they were in on something I wasn’t. From the looks of it, they were.

  “That’s her,” Zach said. His voice rasped out at me through expensive speakers and I was close enough to see him now without looking at the big screens.

  “What is going on?” I shouted, but he couldn’t hear me.

  He looked to Brent and Taylor and he nodded for them to start playing.

  I spared a thought for Brent. I felt bad at how things had happened between us. Even in a world without Zach, it would’ve never worked. I hoped he knew. I didn’t want him to always feel like there was some lingering possibility that Zach had snatched away.

  I didn’t recognize the song, and I had trouble focusing on it at first because the weight of eyes on my back was like something physical, like the air weighed thousands of pounds and wanted to force me to curl in on myself and close my eyes.

  But when I saw the way Zach was looking at me, it all melted away. Those eyes. They were the eyes I had fallen in love with, way before I ever knew what to call the thundering emotion in my chest. They were the eyes that had fueled as many nightmares as dreams. The eyes that had a way of softening just a fraction for me and only me. The same eyes that locked onto me at the Battle of the Bands eight years ago and turned my world upside down.

  He was my drug and I was his.

  And they were playing a new song.

  He spoke into the microphone while Brent and Taylor kept the music running behind him, a kind of trance-like rhythm with a steady beat that added an emotional weight to his words. “This is my girl,” he said, pointing to me. “My Gardener Girl. My fucking world. And I wrote this song for her.”

  He knelt down, picked up a thick packet of paper and held it out to me long enough for me to recognize it as the contract. He lit a match, set fire to the contract, and dropped it in front of him, where it caught and slowly went up in flames, the pages curling black and flaking away.

  And then he sang.

  He sang about regret and pain, about the best thing that ever happened to you being right in front of your face and about letting it get away. He was singing about us. About his feelings, and about how all along, he’d just been pushing me away because he thought he deserved sadness and misery. To him, I’d always been the promise of a better life, but I was a promise someone else deserved, only now he realized he was too damn selfish to let someone else have me. He didn’t deserve me, but he was going to take me.
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br />   It was a slow song, the kind of song where technicality and catchiness were usually traded for pure, raw emotion. It was the kind of song so many famous artists were remembered for, and he had written this one about me.

  Yeah I broke us to pieces,

  My Gar-den-er girl,

  But we’re better together, so better together.

  I can be your Frankenstein,

  Take out my heart and mix it with yours,

  We were just shattered pieces on the floor-oh-or-or-or.

  But now we’re together, so better together.

  Yeah it’s you plus me,

  Yeah it’s fucking messy,

  Yeah it doesn’t make sense,

  But there’s only one thing I know for sure,

  I don’t want this to end,

  My Gar-den-er Girl.

  My world shrunk down into the space between the two of us. It was only us. His words sank into me, each like medicine, like a balm for my scorched heart. He had never been good at talking about his emotions. I knew that. But his music was him. It was pure, and his song said it all. It said all he needed to say.

  My awareness of the concert and the people around us faded back in. They were roaring their approval. People were reaching out to touch me, to congratulate me. For what?

  It felt surreal. I looked at the contract on the floor of the stage and saw it was nothing but a smoldering pile of carbon now. Every slight breeze was enough to blow more flakes away from what had seemed so ironclad and untouchable to me only a few weeks ago.

  The contract was gone. His feelings were laid out for me. He wanted me, not just the idea of me or the satisfaction of knowing he had taken me. He wanted me enough to bare his heart in front of all these people. All the people here, and all the people that would probably end up seeing this on YouTube. It was a leap of faith for him, I realized. He was hanging his neck out and waiting to see if I would bring the cleaver down or if I’d help him back to his feet.

  It would take a long time for all the pain of my past to go away, and I wasn’t sure if Zach could ever fully heal the wound, but he was trying. He was trying so hard it made my heart break to think of doing anything but give him a chance.

  I’d never been one for theatrics, but what I did didn’t feel like it was for anyone but us. I just couldn’t wait to hold him any longer, not even until we got backstage and I’d have him to myself.

  I climbed up on the stage and ran to him. We hugged to the sound of applause and whoops. When Zach leaned in to kiss me, there were appreciative whistles from the crowd, and I knew it was a moment I’d be replaying in my head again and again, maybe for as long as I lived. I hoped it was the first of many good memories with Zach I could revisit, and that one day they might outweigh the bad ones.

  “I meant every word,” he whispered to me.

  It felt oddly intimate to be in front of so many people but to still have a private moment. No one could possibly hear us over all the noise.

  “I know you did. I feel the same way. I—”

  He put his fingers to my lips and grinned. “Hold up. If you were about to drop an ‘I love you,’ you don’t get to beat me to it.”

  “I was going to say I have a stomach ache, so if you were hoping to get some after that performance it’d have to wait until morning. I was pigging out on Recee’s and—”

  He kissed me again, and I couldn’t stop smiling even through the kiss. I was going to say it. I was going to throw it out there and hope it stuck, hope it wasn’t just a meaningless phrase that would sour and go old between us.

  “I love you,” he said. “I loved you when I hated you and I love you now. That means you’re screwed, because I’m crazy about you even when I don’t like you.”

  I laughed and chewed my lip, eyes locked on his. “That doesn’t make sense, but I feel the same way. And I love you too, God help me, but I do.”

  “Damn right you do. After that performance, you’d be crazy not to.”

  I rolled my eyes, but grinned. “Careful, Thornwood. You know I can be stubborn. Get too cocky and I’ll be tempted to put you in your place, just to teach you a lesson.”

  The sound of the crowd cheering finally started to die down, and then I made the mistake of turning to look at them. I’d heard the phrase, “a sea of faces” before but never realized how true that could feel when you looked out over so many people. For a brief moment, my brain tried to wrap itself around the fact that each and every face among those thousands belonged to a person with their own life and dreams and their own opinion on what had just happened between Zach and I on stage.

  “What do we do?” I asked Zach.

  “Well,” he said, having to shout to be heard still even though the crowd wasn’t as loud anymore. “The concert is over. I told them I had a special treat for the final song, so usually this is the part where we walk off stage.”

  “Wait a second. No matter how romantic this was, I want to say for the record that you’re a total dickhole for lying about the asthma attack. I could’ve died with how fast I drove to get here.” I was trying not to look at the crowd again because it made my stomach want to fall to the floor. They were still watching us, like they were expecting something else, or like they just enjoyed seeing us talk, even if they couldn’t hear what we were saying.

  “Sorry about that. I drafted up an apology plan for later. I think you’ll like it.”

  “Does it involve flowers? Chocolate?”

  “It involves you bent over the desk in my hotel room while I eat you out from behind.”

  “Oh,” I said quietly, voice lost in the din of voices. “That might possibly work.”

  My phone buzzed in my purse, but I only noticed because the light caught my eye. I saw it was from Mandy and checked it.

  Mandy: WTF!!! You guys are live on the news. Can’t believe what I’m seeing. YES!

  I put my phone back in my pocket and looked to Zach. “Can we go somewhere private? I think my face is going to melt if I blush any harder.”

  Zach led me backstage by the hand, and when even the simple innocence of holding his hand had my stomach doing cartwheels, I knew I was in trouble. I should’ve known a long time ago, but there was no more doubting it. No more fighting it. I was his for the taking, and all he had to do was reach out and grab what he wanted.

  His hair was damp with sweat and his shirt was sticking to his chest, and I’d never been a sweaty guys are hot kind of girl, but Zach made it look divine. Beyond divine. There had always been a larger-than-life quality to him. Even when I was trying my hardest to hate him, I couldn’t ignore the magnetism he had. He was so wonderfully unique and tragically broken. At times, I had thought I was so drawn to him because I thought I could put him back together, that maybe I was the only one who could do it.

  Now I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I couldn’t stay away because we were both broken, and some of the pieces had been lost. The only way for us to be whole again was together. I might have just been riding the high of his song and the moment we just shared, but frankly, I didn’t care. It felt right. It felt completely and totally right for once.

  “I love you,” I blurted.

  “You damn well better,” he said.

  I gave him a playful shove that had a little more juice than I intended, almost knocking him backward.

  His face grew serious, and he leaned down, eyes heavy. “I love you too. So much it fucking scares me.”

  “That’s better,” I said with a smile.

  Brent and Taylor walked into the room, then. Taylor clapped Zach on the shoulder like a proud father, ignoring the fact that we were clearly having a moment. “Good shit, man. If that doesn’t get you laid, I don’t know what will.”

  Zach looked like he was about to stab Taylor in the throat.

  Brent gave a kind of grudging smile. “I have to admit. You two do look good together.”

  “You’re damn right we do,” Zach said. “Aribella would look good next to a trash can.”

  “W
ow,” Brent said. “I take that back. She looks good with you. You look like a brown-noser who is going to say anything to get laid.”

  "Guilty," Zach said. "So if you want it to stop, you know what has to happen."

  “Who wants it to stop?” I asked with a grin. “I’ve been waiting eight years for Zach to be nice to me. If all I have to do is hold out for this to continue, he’s in trouble.”

  Taylor and Brent smiled, but Zach didn’t look amused.

  “I need you two to leave. Now,” he said firmly to Taylor and Brent, who gave each other a look before nodding to me and leaving us alone.

  “No more Mr. Nice Guy, Gardener Girl.”

  “Hey,” I said, laughing. “I only got Mr. Nice Guy for like three seconds. Can he come back for a little bit longer?”

  Zach was past jokes though. His eyes were full of animalistic hunger, and I loved that he could look at me that way. I was his fix, and he knew it. He advanced on me, taking purposeful step after purposeful step until I backed into the wall. We were in a small room, and there was no reason to think people wouldn’t barge in. It was private room for the band to relax in before and after the show, the kind the guys always called a “green room”. There was a couch, a loveseat, a little coffee table, and a tv mounted to the wall. I saw myself reflected in the glossy black of the TV. I was wearing pajamas. My face turned a bright, burning shade of red when I remembered where I had come from when I got Zach’s text. I just stood on stage in front of thousands of people in my pajamas. I was going to be all over YouTube in my pajamas. Dammit, Zach. Couldn’t you have lied about something less urgent so I thought I’d have time to put on some decent clothes?

  “You make me better,” he breathed, lips inches from mine.

  “You’re giving me too much credit. I only stuck around because you’re too damn cute.”

  He smirked. “Liar.”

  “Guilty.”

  “Tell me you’ll stay, Aribella. The contract is ash now. Tell me it doesn’t matter. Tell me you’re not going anywhere.”

  “I’m yours. Completely yours.”