by Tamara Lush
What the fuck, man?
Oh, come on!
This raid’s screwed now. Who’s that girl? She’s HAWT.
I look at her a second time. Her eyes, which are huge and skittish, make my chest hurt. Her flimsy blue T-shirt is wet and clings to her breasts. My skin feels tingly, like it always does right before I get an erection, because that’s the effect she’s always had on me, and I guess, always will.
A barrage of loud gunfire roars in the background as we stare at each other. From the corner of my eye, I see my camouflage-clad avatar gurgle and gasp a cartoon death.
Cata’s mute as a butterfly.
“Shit, I’ve been killed,” I say softly. Rising, I toss the console onto the sofa, which is littered with protein bar wrappers, water bottles and, inexplicably, an orange plastic sword. I pull off the headset and throw it down on the cushion alongside all the other crap.
“Diego.” Her voice is flat.
“Cata.” My heart speeds up as I step toward her, feeling the magnetic pull that hasn’t faded over time. Overwhelmed with memories, I watch her take a step backward. As if she’s scared. As if I hurt her.
I guess I did. But she hurt me, too. Which is probably why we haven’t spoken in five years. That and my lack of communication skills. I’m better online than real life. I can somehow express myself playing video games, but when I’m around people _ especially women _ I often say the wrong things. Or I don’t say enough. Or something. I usually can’t figure out why I’m so inept. Maybe it’s because I’m a guy.
Cata was the one person who understood me, but I ultimately said the wrong things to her, too.
But now that we’re in the same room, all bets are off. At least for me, the pain has vanished faster than a level 32 spell in World of Warcraft. Liam and Sawyer would probably say I’m weak and pussy-whipped, but they don’t know how much I’ve wanted this moment to leap from my fantasies and into real life.
“Catalina,” I say softly, and her eyes grow wider. Less angry.
I’m a foot away from her, closer than I’ve been in years. My hands jam into my shorts pockets as if they know better than my brain that they shouldn’t touch her. Her eyes falter and lower to my chest, and my gaze follows.
“Oh, um. Sorry.” I had thrown on a white-button down over my shorts but had fastened only the bottom three buttons. I quickly close a few more, not wanting her to see that I’m still wearing the long silver ball chain and the pendant she gave me years ago. I raise my eyes to see her licking her bottom lip. Her legs are bare and pale. Smooth and soft. They look even paler because she’s wearing little black shorts. God, I always loved her skin. Are those raindrops on her ankles? I almost groan out loud and try not to stare.
I can practically feel the testosterone surging through my body as I stand there. She’s my ideal woman. Surely there’s something biological or psychological in my feelings. Maybe because we were childhood friends. Or because she was my first love. My only love. There have only been a few women since her, but none as memorable as her. Only Cata occupies a chamber in my heart. All the chambers, truthfully, and two main arteries.
“Do I get a hug?”
She shrugs, which both annoys and angers me because I want us to immediately be exactly like we used to. Fun. Easy. Hot for each other.
“I’m not sure you deserve one.” Her voice has an edge. “But, hi. It’s good to see you. I guess.”
She steps toward me, and I take that as a sign. I close the distance between us and wrap my arms around her. I can’t help it. She smells like pizza and perfection.
Letting her go was the biggest mistake of my life, now that she’s back, I swear it’s not going to happen again.
Chapter Three
CATALINA
Of all the things I anticipated about tonight, ending up in the arms of my first love wasn’t one of them.
“Why are you here?” I mumble into his neck. “When did you come back to Palmira?”
He doesn’t say anything as he pulls me closer. I swallow and nearly stop breathing because his touch feels so excellent. I screw my eyes shut.
With only a little hesitation, I press my face into the hollow of his neck, where it meets his collarbone. His skin is warm and smooth and I want to kiss it. His hands are firm on my back and I feel melty.
“Cata, Cata, Cata,” he murmurs. I hum a muffled squeak into his neck. God, he smells good. Citrus-y. Soapy. Yummy.
We’re still hugging. This is like the longest hug in the history of hugs. I squeeze him because I want to feel the wall of his chest. He doesn’t let go.
My mind spins fast as I allow my eyelids to close. Does he remember what happened between us? That’s a stupid question. Even if he'd stopped loving me, which he obviously did, how could he forget what happened?
Something about his hard embrace tells me he does remember, and something in the way he possessively pulls me closer, tells me that he hasn’t forgotten how our bodies react to one another’s. Like tornadoes of fire on the surface of the sun.
I inhale, and he smells like grapefruit and spice and everything not-so-nice about our very fucked-up past. Our history bubbles up, and with it, a long-buried feeling of shame. Trembling, I squeeze him back even tighter. I’m normally not a hugger. But I want to feel his body, hot and hard, against mine. It’s an exquisite torture, because I’m still so pissed at him after all these years.
How I had wanted this day to happen. And yet, I had also dreaded it, hoped it would never become a reality.
“Hey,” I whisper against his neck. My thoughts break and return to our first kiss. We were at Disney’s Star Wars weekend in Orlando, a week after high school graduation.
Without parents.
The kiss happened during the Mexico ride at Epcot. It was blissfully cool and dark and he awkwardly leaned in and planted one on my lips. I was surprised enough to giggle, then I leaned in and kissed him back, making sure my tongue touched his.
“Wow,” he’d breathed.
Later that night, I was in the hotel suite bed and Diego, my brother and their friend Jake were in the living room, on sofas and in sleeping bags.
I thought I was being bold when I texted Diego:
When Jake and Scott fall asleep, come in here with me. The door’s unlocked. Just be quiet, and pretend you’re going into the bathroom.
He slipped into my bed silently, stretching out next to me in the darkness. All that night, we didn’t speak much, make noise or get a lick of sleep. All we did was kiss and touch each other everywhere.
Hie hands were hesitant and shook as they explored under my shirt and down my panties. His soft gasp in my ear when his fingers made their way between my legs was the sexiest thing I’d ever heard.
And when I started to wrap my fingers around his hardness beneath his shorts, he circled my wrist with his fingers. My heart was beating so hard I thought it would burst. I’d never touched a guy’s cock before that night, but I wanted to feel all of him.
Diego, though, had more restraint than I did.
We can’t do this now. Not here. Please stop, he had whispered softly in my ear. I won’t be able to control myself. And we don’t have condoms.
To this day, it’s still the most erotic night of my life.
You’d think that two virgins alone for the first time would immediately bang, but we didn’t. Not that night. I guess we were too surprised that we had crushes on each other, so we waited. And did everything but sex that summer.
I’m trying to put those memories aside, tuck them back where they belong. Now we’re older, we’re hugging and I’m still puzzled about why he’s in a mansion playing video games. We embrace for another beat, and then my eyes open and land on the huge flatscreen TV, where some sort of chat is taking place. Words scroll down the left side of the screen.
Who’s the ho?
She’s an eight!
Is that the pizza girl? FUCK YEAH!
I step out of his arms and point at the TV, a lump forming in my
stomach. “Ahh what…?”
He glances at the screen with a pained expression. “Come out here, Cata. I’ll explain.”
I shiver when he says my name. The old Diego called me Cata. No one before, and no one since. The way he says my name brings me back to before. Before, when everything was simple and good.
But it’s now after, and he’s changed. He’s no longer the skinny gamer geek I knew in high school. Sure, he was cute back then. Introverted, too, but I had broken through his walls. First as a friend, then as his girlfriend.
And then those walls came crashing down. They destroyed us. Me, anyway. Over the years, I had done a pretty good job of convincing myself that I was over him. Or thought I had. I had even stopped looking for him on Facebook and Twitter because after years of not finding him, after years of not hearing from him, I’d given up.
Seeing him in person makes me doubt everything.
Shaking, I follow him into the adjacent room and study him from behind.
He’s wearing baggy, faded-tan cargo shorts. A white shirt with a toned, hard chest underneath. A sculpted chest, even. Like he works out. Not huge and muscular, but sinewy and sexy, a slightly amped up version of the boy I once knew. I wonder why my brother, or my best friend Jessica, didn’t tell me that Diego was back on Palmira Island.
I’ve gotta call Jessica the minute I get back in my car.
I spy Diego’s calves. He clearly works out now. He was glued to his computer in high school. He never worked out back then. When did he start working out? What’s he doing in this huge house? Why is he lounging around with his shirt half-unbuttoned?
Well, at least I knew the partial answer to that. He’s never had much fashion sense. I’m actually shocked his clothes look so new and he’s not wearing those stupid blue-and-white rubber sandals with socks like he used to. His shirt actually looks expensive and linen, like he bought it somewhere fancy and didn’t wear a free T-shirt he’d gotten in the mail as game swag. Like he used to.
I wish he hadn’t covered up his muscles by doing up those buttons, because I want to stare at him, all of him. It’s as if he’s modest, which is absurd since I’ve seen every square inch of him naked. First when we skinny-dipped in the Gulf together as kids. Then later when our teenage hormones inspired us to act out of lust. Or love. Or whatever it was. God knows, I’ve spent many a sleepless night trying to figure out what it was.
Sawyer and Liam are sitting at the desks tapping away on computers, and Diego pauses near Liam. “Dude, can you take over my shift so I can talk to Cata? Oh, and turn off the cameras downstairs.”
Liam scrutinizes Diego, then shoots a long look at me, and nods. He turns back to the computer, his fingers skimming across the keyboard. Then he rises and when he enters the room with the TV, I hear him clap a few times and shout, “Okay streamers, Dracula’s Cyborg’s here.”
Cameras? Shift? Dracula’s Cyborg?
By now, Diego’s flipping open one of the pizza boxes and my mind’s spinning. “Slice?” he says, as if we haven’t spent the last several years apart. As if we’re about to take the pizza to my room, read some comics and then kiss each other breathless.
Which is exactly what I want to do right now. Sort of.
I shake my head and gape. Although it’s obvious he has no interest in me anymore – if he did, he wouldn’t be studying the pizza in the box as if it were the Rosetta Stone – my heart is doing flips. He’s better looking than any Wall Street trader in an expensive suit. I realize I’m staring at his body, my mouth open. Raising my eyes to his face makes me swallow a swoony sigh.
“Hmm. Do I want pepperoni or plain cheese?” Diego murmurs.
Why is it taking him so long to pick out a slice of pizza? I drink in the sprinkling of dark stubble on his jaw and how his hair is longish and curly and looks all rumpled, like he’s gotten out of bed.
Diego. Bed. Diego. Bed. The very thought, something I’ve long tried to forget, makes me unsteady. I wish there was something nearby to grab onto, to ground me, because it seems like I’ve suddenly detached from my body.
I watch Diego smirk at me, then at Sawyer. “Fucking good raid tonight, dude. Our numbers have been up every day this week.”
“I think we’ve been the top streamers for the month, from what I’m seeing in our stats,” Sawyer says, never taking his eyes off the computer screen. Diego walks over to Sawyer and stands behind him, looking at the screen with a slice in his hand. He points at the screen and Sawyer says something about visitors.
I have no idea what’s going on.
When had Diego gotten so confident? So primal? So masculine?
So hot.
Wait, what am I thinking? I don’t even like him. I don’t want to like him. And I have good reason for not wanting to be around him: the summer after our senior year, right before we were supposed to lose our virginity to each other, he was stupid enough to leave his phone behind at his job at Palmira’s only game rental store.
His phone held several dozen photos of me.
I was naked in some of them.
Those were the ones that ended up on the cell phone screens of every guy under the age of 25 on the island. Not the photos that he took of me studying, or playing Zelda or smiling pretty on a beach. No, it was the one I snapped while on my bed. The one I took in the mirror, topless. The one of me submerged in a bubble bath, wearing only a grin. One nipple showed through the bubbles.
That was an especially popular one.
So I heard.
Fuck.
The memory makes me anxious. I chew on the inside of my bottom lip.
Pizza still in hand, he turns away from Sawyer and tilts his sexy, rumpled head at the door and stares at me, hard. “Let’s go in the kitchen.”
I nod and swallow.
I step into a cavernous, modern space, all gleaming golden granite countertops and sleek white appliances. While still holding the pizza with one hand, Diego grabs a paper napkin out of a holder and leans against the sink. He smiles that big smile of his where I see his top and bottom teeth, the one he used to flash, right before he kissed me. I position myself on the other side of the kitchen island, keeping something solid in between us.
“What is this? What are you doing here? In this place? This house? Who owns it?”
He tilts his head and grins. “I own it.”
When he sees my obvious surprise, he laughs. “What? You didn’t think I’d ever be successful enough to afford something like this after a total of two semesters at community college?” He gestures around the room with the pizza slice.
“No, it’s just that … the camera and the guys and …” I’m having trouble forming coherent sentences. Mostly because he looks so damned delicious, standing there with his glittering almost-black eyes. I’d made myself forget how his eyes could hypnotize me. And yeah. This house. It’s a multi-million dollar mansion.
It’s all so confusing. I clear my throat. I tug my elastic out of my hair and retie my ponytail, which I always do when I’m nervous.
Chapter Four
CATALINA
“So you’re a pizza delivery girl now? Working for your family’s restaurant?” He takes a bite of the slice and ignores my questions. He munches and stares at me, the tense silence between us unbearable. I sense an edge in his voice.
“I lost my job at that news website in New York.” I try to say the words casually. “I’m helping Scott out now at the restaurant, and Mom needs me now, you know.”
I don’t want to talk about my parents. Not with Diego.
“NewsNow, right. I heard something about that, you working up there for that site. So you did make it to the big time. What happened?”
I shoot him a brief, incredulous look. If he heard something about where I was, or even why I was fired, why didn’t he try to get in touch with me? Oh right, because he doesn’t care. And he probably doesn’t follow the inside baseball of New York media, so maybe he doesn’t know the whole, pathetic story.
Catalin
a Richardson, the rising star of NewsNow Media, who was aggressive in her scoops about the mayor’s office, the city council, and a subway scandal. Catalina Richardson, who got the coveted job at NewsNow a month before graduating from Columbia.
Catalina Richardson, fired over a politician’s dick pic.
“Staff changes.” I shrug, trying to appear nonchalant. “Happens all the time in media.”
I wasn’t going to tell him about how the sex-addicted state representative texted me photos of his junk, and when our site published those pics, the pervy politician pulled strings with our website’s parent company and got me fired. If Diego doesn’t know about that, I’m not bringing it up. Not after what happened between us.
When it comes to technology, there’s only one way to sum up my feelings: it’s complicated.
Diego wipes his mouth with a napkin. “Sucks. I’m sorry. So you came home.”
I stand even taller, aware of my spine, trying not to look as defeated as I feel. “Had to. No other choice. Plus, I wanted to be here for Mom, after…” my voice trails off but I quickly recover. “I’m not planning on being here long, though. I’m applying for jobs at websites everywhere.”
He nods. I say nothing and the awkward silence is back.
“I wanted to go to your father’s funeral,” he says softly. “I couldn’t believe Chris, of all people, had a heart attack. He ran every day.”
I avoid his eyes and his concern. I don’t want to talk about my father or his funeral. I’d hoped to see Diego there. And had been disappointed and pissed when I hadn’t. I stare at the thick butcher block topping the kitchen counter island and chew on my bottom lip.
“I wanted to go, but I was in Hong Kong when everything happened and couldn’t get back in time. I tried, Cata. I really did.”
I don’t respond but I force myself to look into his eyes. They’re big and transparent. What? Diego was in Hong Kong? I shake my head, trying to clear the confusion from my mind. “What were you doing in—”