The Thrill of It

by Lauren Blakely

  And she has a slut for a daughter.

  She stands tall and regal at the stove, stirring a pot with a long wooden spoon. She wears a flowy magenta blouse, the color so blazingly rich she looks like royalty. She’s paired her top with trim black slacks and suede pumps, and her raven-colored hair is pulled back in a comb. She’s beautiful and she is ready for a new man.

  “Hi Barb.” I leave my purse by the door as I head into the kitchen.

  “I’m making Moroccan stew tonight in honor of you being nearly done with your second year of college,” she says coyly. I’m not sure why she says it coyly, but perhaps she’s flirting with the stew.

  “But of course. British lit originated in Morocco,” I say, since English is my major. I love to write, but not the kind of writing she does. And not the kind of writing Miranda makes me do. I like to make up fantastical tales of talking animals, magical doorways, portals to other worlds. Only I don’t really have the time to do that kind of writing anymore. I used to have notebooks and journals full of tales, until Miranda subverted my love of words with her twisted debt.

  But I don’t like thinking about Miranda when I’m here.

  My mom winks at me, loving our sisterly banter and jokes. That’s what we are. Sisters.

  “Who’s coming over tonight?”

  She screws up her forehead. Maybe she can’t remember. Or maybe…no…not this…not now. Her eyes go glassy, and her lower lip quivers. “Not Phil,” she chokes out, dropping the spoon and covering her eyes.

  I pull her to me, wrap an arm around her. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” I reassure, even though I wish she’d never met Phil, her last boyfriend. Tears leak onto my shirt as she heaves out several thick sobs.

  “I miss him,” she moans. “I don’t know why he left.”

  I do. I know why he left. I won’t tell her though. “Because he’s a jerk and you deserve better, Barb,” I say, because she doesn’t like me to call her mom.

  She nods against my chest and sucks in her breath. There. She’s pulling herself together. One hug from me, one firm but loving reminder, and that’s the magic formula to make Barb Coleman happy again. “Forget about Phil, okay? Get that dick out of your head and your heart for once and for all. Now tell me about this new guy.”

  She pulls back, exhales, brushes a hand across her cheek to wipe away the streaks of her sadness.

  “His name is Neil. And he has a son who’s just as good-looking,” she says, and winks at me knowingly.

  She picks up her dropped spoon and resumes stirring. “I want you to meet him. I think he might be perfect for you.”

  I cringe inside and a new knot of nerves takes hold. I hate being set up. But I don’t know how to tell her this. Not when she’s given me everything. Not when she’s the only one who’s been here for me since my dad is quite simply gone. Off in Europe with his new bride, or so I hear. I don’t talk to him and he doesn’t talk to me. I haven’t seen his parents either – my grandparents – since they split, and we used to visit them often. Some days, when I am feeling hollow and empty, I miss those visits even more. They don’t even write or call, not even on my birthday, and they promised they would. They promised they’d tell me stories of the times I spent with them. But when my parent split, I was excised from everyone. All I have is Barb.

  “It would make me happy. You know I love playing matchmaker,” she adds.

  That’s what I want. The desire to take away her sadness fuels me every day.“What’s his son’s name?”

  “Connor. Lovely name, don’t you think?”

  No. It’s just a name. It’s neither here nor there. It tells me nothing about him.

  “Yes. Great name.” I press my fingernails into my palm so I can feel the flesh starting to pierce. The prospect of one of her set-ups makes me desperately want to return to Cam, the man who made me Layla, the man I miss. I dig harder. I need the visceral reminder to stay strong, to keep on course. I will not bend. I will not break. I will not go back to the way I was. Layla is gone. Layla has been put out to pasture, and I am my mother’s daughter – good, honest, righteous.

  I picture my red ribbon tattoo. My reminder of how much I love my mom. Of all the good times we had. Our mother-daughter bonds. All the tests she helped me study for, all the times she took my temperature when I was sick, all the nights she tucked me into bed, the only parent there for me. Every single night.

  How I will do anything for her. Including protect her from the truth about me, and my call girl days with Cam.

  I try to practice all the mantras SLAA has taught me.

  This too shall pass. The three-second rule. Let the past be the past.

  There. Better. I won’t think of Cam, and his baby blues, his sandpaper stubble, his faith in Layla to reel them in. We were partners in crime. Partners in secrets. Partners in power.

  I miss my partner terribly.

  My mom stirs her concoction. “One of my sources sent me this recipe. She knows I love to cook. It calls for peanuts and carrots and sausages…”

  “Gotta love a sausage fest,” I say with a smile.

  “Harley.” She pretends to shoot me a chiding look. But she loves that I’m one of her girlfriends.

  “Want me to set the table?”

  “That would be divine. And don’t forget wine glasses,” she says, then wags a finger at me. “But none for you.”

  “Of course not, Barb. I’m underage. I don’t drink.”

  She gives me a soft peck on the forehead. “You are such a good girl.”

  I flash her the smile she loves. I am her good daughter. I am her prize pet. I make her happy.

  I reach into the cabinets for the yellow plates. They are her middle-of-the-road place settings. If she can’t quite remember the guy’s name, he hasn’t earned the fine china yet. I lay them neatly on the table, then align the silverware and cloth white napkins. Wine glasses are next.

  “Red or white?”

  She purses her lips and considers. “Stew calls for red, don’t you think?”

  I nod, as if I’m a wine connoisseur. “Absolutely. Merlot?”

  “You always know the perfect pairing.”

  Yup.

  Soon, the doorbell rings, and Neil arrives with his son Connor, one of the very many men my mom has set me up with throughout my life. Connor is a decent-looking guy, and he’s studying finance in college, and he likes the Yankees, and I put on my best pretty pony show, laughing, and flirting, and bantering with the best of them, and I know that Connor is falling hard for me because it’s so easy to reel them in. She trained me. She taught me. She made me who I am.

  Then Cam made me better. Cam made me the best.

  When dinner ends, my phone rings, and it’s Trey, reminding me he’s closing up in thirty minutes.

  “I have to go. Forgot about my study group,” I say, and excuse myself as soon as dinner is over.

  “But Harley,” my mom calls out, truly saddened by my departure. “We were having such a nice time.”

  “I know. But I have a calc test, and I need to go.”

  I’m lying because I don’t have any more tests, and after another show, I need to be with the one person who requires no lies.

  “Wait!”

  She scurries from the table, pops into the kitchen, and returns with a tupperware container of blond brownies. My favorite. “For you. I made them earlier.”

  I take the brownies. “Thanks, mom,” I say, slipping in a mom, even though I know she’d rather be Barb.

  Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict

  Page 12…

  When I was in grade school, my mom hosted elaborate parties every month. She was celebrating her liberation, she claimed, from a marriage in chains. A marriage to someone who didn’t want her, didn’t love her, who loved other women far too much, who cheated and strayed like he was earning points in a video game.

  Before the very first party, more than a year after my parents split, she brushed my blond hair til it shined and tied a red ribbon in
it. She dressed me in a red dress with spaghetti straps and a sparkly bodice. When I watched her do her makeup I asked if I could wear some. “Of course,” she said and thus began my first lesson in how to apply makeup properly. She let me wear blush and eyeshadow, even demonstrating ever so carefully in the mirror how to use a shadow brush. Then she paraded me around, introducing me to everyone the same way:

  “This is my daughter. Isn’t she pretty?”

  I smiled my prettiest smile, sometimes even gave a curtsy. After the fourth or fifth party, I was a show horse, a little pony, a figurine she’d acquired from Tiffany’s. By then, we did our makeup together before a fete. I’d bring my little wooden stool into her bathroom and stand on that as we peered in the mirror and put on our faces. It was our ritual, our bond, the way we became sisters, rather than mother and daughter.

  Then it was party time. The ratio of men to women always tipped in favor of the Y chromosomes. It wasn’t a party unless the pickings were plentiful. She’d bring me round and introduce me.

  “Here, honey. I have someone I want you to meet,” she’d say and I’d flash my best smile as she continued. “Isn’t she pretty, isn’t she pretty, isn’t she pretty…”

  I was good at writing too. Still am. I eat stories for breakfast. I read them, I write them, I plot them, I breathe them. But somehow, I never got the “This is my daughter. She’s good at writing,” introduction.

  I was pretty. That was my purpose.

  Is it any surprise I became what I am? I was programmed for this.

  Chapter Three

  Harley

  I thumb through Trey’s drawings in a portfolio at No Regrets, stopping at an image of wings. Feathery, pillowy wings that could whisk you away to a better world. I flash back to the time he created this tattoo image, late one night at his apartment. He drew in his sketchbook and I huddled in the corner of his futon, laptop on my knees, pounding out every word Miranda wanted me to write. Chronicling my lurid stories of the twenty-four men who were my downfall. He stopped sketching, sat next to me, and swiped the tear from my cheek that I barely even realized was there. I don’t think I was even aware of how those tales Miranda demanded would be an excavation, and unearth not only memories of all those men – my mom’s and mine – but the way I felt. I’d never shed those tears when I was younger. Never when any of it was happening. Only when I revisited them, all with my gut twisting, my heart splintering, Trey by my side.

  He knows everything about me.

  He’s the only person I’ve ever let in.

  He learned my wishes and hopes the night I met him, and he learned I had secrets the day I ran into him at SLAA.

  So, really, I am an open book to him, and he to me. Add that to all the reasons we can’t ever be, because no one wants to be with someone they truly know. I glance up from the portfolio and watch him. He looks so sexy in his well-worn jeans, a t-shirt that shows off his strong arms, those tattoos snaking down his carved muscles. Black ink, tribal patterns, lines and shapes, skating over his skin, everything in threes. His shoulder is marked with three suns, his chest with a trio of silhouetted birds. Symbols of the people he never knew, he’s told me.

  That’s all he says about them. He won’t tell me more.

  He locks the drawers where he keeps his equipment, straightens up the portfolios that grace the wooden tables in the entryway, and then closes up.

  I hand him a brownie and he takes a bite.

  “It makes me crazy that your mom is such an awesome baker,” he says.

  “I know. You wish she were all bad.”

  “Sometimes,” he says, and I tuck the tupperware container back in my purse as he finishes the brownie.

  “What did you ink tonight?” I ask as we leave the shop, and my ears are assaulted with the screeches of cabs and cars, my nostrils with a blast of exhaust from a nearby bus turning onto Christopher Street.

  “Some dude came in wanting two arrows on his bicep.”

  “Did it mean something?”

  Trey nods. “He’s in recovery. He used to drink himself stupid. Said it means it’s the pain of the arrow coming out, not the arrow going in.”

  “I haven’t heard that one. Must not be a regular Joanne mantra.”

  “Yeah, me neither. But do you think it’s true?”

  I shrug as we pass a sleek bar called the Pink Zebra. It’s a magnet for cougars. My chest seizes up and I silently hope that a whole pack of them won’t spill out as we walk by. Trey’s temptation – sexy, thirtysomething women. But I have no such luck. The door opens and two gorgeous, skinny women emerge. One is wearing Jimmy Choos, the other Louboutins, both decked out in painted-on jeans and slinky tops. I want to cover his eyes so he can’t see them, but I’m too late. He’s drawn to them, moth to the flame. But they turn the other way and we keep walking. I ignore the look of hunger I saw in his beautiful green eyes as he shakes his head, as if he can shake them off.

  “I guess,” he says in a low voice, then trails off. Maybe his mind is wandering back to the women. Or maybe that’s all there is to say because we both know what’s unsaid. Somedays, the arrow coming out hurts like hell. Somedays you miss your drug like you can’t even believe. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — withdrawal is a bitch on wheels. It feels like someone is ripping your fingernails out with pliers.

  “How was dinner tonight? Did your mom try to set you up?”

  “It was the usual. The way it always is.”

  “Did it make you miss Cam?”

  We stop at the light on Seventh Avenue, waiting to cross.

  Cam.

  Trey’s question pierces me because no one would ever ask it; no one else could. I can’t seem to tell my mom the truth, or my roommate Kristen, or even Joanne at SLAA. But Trey? The only guy who’s ever made me feel any sort of reckless abandon, any sort of true desire – apparently I can open up to him about taking money for not-quite-sex.

  “Do I miss Cam?” I muse out loud as if I’m turning over the words, considering them from every angle.

  With a vengeance.

  With the blaze of a thousand suns.

  With every piece of twisted DNA in my body.

  Cam is the arrow. I miss being his. Being in control. Being powerful. I want the arrow back in.

  Being Cam’s was the only thing that ever made me feel like my life wasn’t orchestrated by a master puppeteer.

  “Maybe a little,” I admit.

  “Did you call him?”

  I shake my head. Not calling Cam is a daily battle, but it’s one that makes me hate myself. Because how can I want to hold hands with Trey and yet still miss Cam like a phantom limb? I am gross. I am disgusting. Miranda is right. I don’t deserve redemption.

  “Have you ever gone skydiving?”

  I stop and stare at Trey’s non-sequitur as an ambulance zooms down the street, its horn blaring. “What kind of segue is that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we just need a thrill in our lives. Don’t you miss the high?”

  “Every day,” I admit as we cross the street.

  Miranda forced me to go to SLAA but I knew I belonged there, because I was drugged on love, on almost sex, on power. Knowing didn’t stop me from wanting my drug though. I am dependent. I still am.

  Trey stops at the subway entrance.

  “Maybe we just need to find the daring in the every day,” he says, then perches on the railing that leads down into the subway station. He’s seated on the edge, holding on with his hands. He leans so far that his back is nearly parallel to the sidewalk.

  “Trey!”

  He lets himself fall further, so his head is upside down. It’s New York, so most people ignore him, but a few of them on the steps below point as they keep clicking down the stairs. Trey hooks his feet around the bottom of the railing, and then lets go with his hands. His head, arms and chest drop down.

  Rationally, logically, I know he’s not going to fall. But all I can picture is his gorgeous face smashed to bits on the concrete far
below.

  “If you’re worried, just grab me,” he says, as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. I reach for his brown leather belt and jerk it hard, yanking him upright. His face is red and near to mine and the air is crackling like an electrical storm. My heart is racing and my adrenaline is surging, and I’m no longer thinking about Cam. I’m thinking about this guy. So close to me. His mischievous grin. His sparkling eyes. How they know me, see through me. How I let him in that first night, and we talked about everything – music, happiness, the future, even my grandparents who I never see and who I miss terribly some days. I’m remembering too the way I felt when he first kissed me, then touched me. Then, his mouth on my body. All over me. Soft, and slow, and caressing.

  Like something I wanted.

  Fuck. I can’t go there. I haven’t let myself think about our one night in ages.

  “You know I won’t fall.”

  I shake my head. “You know that scares me,” I say. I don’t let go of his belt. He places a hand on my hand. Skin on skin. His flesh on mine. I try not to shiver. But it’s useless. I do anyway as my stomach executes a huge somersault.

  “I’m like a bad horror film director. I can’t resist scaring you because you’re so damn cute when you get scared.”

  He jumps down off the railing and engulfs me in a hug, wrapping his strong arms around me, pulling my face to his neck. God, he smells good. All sweat, and work, and some woodsy scent that’s just so him.

  “Sorry about Miranda and your mom and all those stupid guys,” he says softly in my ear, just for me, just to me. “I don’t want you to be with any of them. I don’t want you with anyone.”

  I dig my fingernails into my palms to stop from pressing my body into him, from whispering kisses across his neck. Because this Trey, this soft, sweet, caring Trey, is the only guy I ever let touch me without agenda, the only man I wanted to kiss, the only man who’s ever made me come. I never faked it with him. I never knew not faking it could feel so good. That giving in, letting go, could be scary and intoxicating all on its own.

  Now, with him so close, arms looped around me, his smell in my nose, his strong body pinned against mine, I don’t know anymore what happened to withdrawal, because nothing feels painful right now. I only feel potential. Possibility. The slim hope of starting over, like a stone skipping across the water, whisking up a few drops.