The Thrill of It

by Lauren Blakely

  Maybe this is the new high. He skims one hand once across my back, so lightly it could be a friendly touch, but even through my flimsy shirt, my insides flutter like hummingbirds, and my mind is back to our night.

  His hands on my naked skin.

  The unfamiliar ache in my body that craved more of his touch, of the way he seemed to memorize me with his palms and his fingertips, as if he needed to trace every inch, to imprint the feel of me, the outline of my body in his memory. Then his lips everywhere, traversing my arms, neck, breasts, belly, legs, ankles, and back up to calves and knees and thighs, then in between. His lips and his tongue made me want to die and live and soar. I’d never let go like that, never moved like I did with him, with abandon, with desire, with the sharp, sweet rush of wanting someone to touch me for the first time.

  I let go with him. I gave my body to him. In a way so many of them would have paid top dollar for. But I didn’t ever want anyone to see me like that. To watch me, feel me, hear me come.

  Maybe he’s the arrow.

  Maybe he’s the thing I’m not withdrawing from.

  The one person who knows all my stories, the one person I’ve become best friends with in recovery, is the only one who knows exactly how I feel, what I think, what I want, what I hate, what I need.

  Who I am.

  I don’t know how to be known like this. In this naked kind of way. Like, I’ve taken everything off and am waiting for judgement.

  Or touch.

  Maybe they’re one and the same.

  I sigh once, then manage to pull away from his grasp and look at him, giving him a quick nod. “Thank you,” I whisper.

  He tilts his head to the side, his hair falling past his ear. His hair is light brown with hints of copper. It’s thick and full and he could be a shampoo model, only he doesn’t have that overly coiffed, perfectly combed look. His hair is deliberately undone, purposefully tousled, and all I want is to run my fingers through it and cling to it and never let go. Hold his cheeks in my palms and kiss deeply and without regret.

  Hear him groan.

  Let him do the same to me.

  Look in his eyes, see myself reflected back. Because his eyes, like the rest of him, are beautiful. They’re the color of a forest, of a green beer bottle, of lush grass after it rains. They are the reflection of every girl and woman falling in love with him, because they all do. Then there’s his face — strong cheekbones, the stubbled jawline, and his scar that tells me he’s like me.

  He went too far. He hurt others. He was hurt.

  But that hurt is part of the connective tissue of our strange friendship that blurs all sorts of lines, that spills over into the feeling of more, even if we don’t truly venture there. Sometimes he looks at me like he wants to go there again, and he can probably tell too that I still want him that way. It’s so hard not to rake my eyes over him. He’s tall and sculpted, and I bet if you turned off all the lights and it was pitch black and there was a sea of shirtless twenty-one-year-olds guys I could find him by touch.

  No one has ever felt like him.

  But if I acted again on these desires, then he’d be Twenty-Five. And if he’s Twenty-Five, then I’m just the same. And I have to be different. So only when I stop wanting him, stop feeling for him, stop thinking about him, can I have him. But even then he’d never have me, so it’s a moot point. Besides, what do I know about feelings? Nothing. They make zero sense to me. I don’t know if they ever will.

  Trey

  Her hands on my belt drive me crazy. But I won’t be the one to break her. She is trying so hard to be good. She is so fucked by Miranda and by her mom and I hate all they do to her. I can’t be the one to lead her down this path. Even though I think of her all the time, and the memory of our night has fed my imagination countless times.

  The trouble is I know she’s dying to see Cam again. And I know I’m fighting all these stupid chains that my past keeps clamping on me.

  The other day I stopped by my parents’ building to have dinner with them, and it was like walking into the lion’s den. Everything about that place reeked of my past, of all the afternoons I’d spent in those corner penthouses with those women. Those pent-up, ravenous women whose husbands never gave it to them enough, or whose husbands had grown tires around their midsections and bald patches in their hair.

  Like Ms. Rachman in 10E. I nearly ran into her in the lobby the other day, and seeing her brought back the memories of how needy and hungry she was. She used to run her fingers through my hair and hum happily. Like she was blissed out beyond any and all recognition. I was eighteen then, and she loved to be on top, her fake breasts barely moving as she rode me, her wine red nails raking through my hair.

  “God, Trey, I love your hair. You have so much of it,” she said.

  Didn’t take a genius to figure out Mr. Rachman was on the thinning side upstairs.

  Her husband, a corporate litigator, never found out. He still travels all the time, defends companies from lawsuits, and ignores his hot wife. She still wants me to not ignore her. She crooked her finger to call me over when she spotted me in the lobby a few days ago. I pretended I didn’t see her. I faked her out with the earbuds I had in, Screaming Trees blasting in my head. I wear them every time I go to my parents. So I have an excuse to ignore them all. I try desperately to avoid all the beautiful women who live there.

  I can’t not go. My parents pay for college. They want to know how I’m doing. They want to know what I’m learning. They want to know if I’ll switch majors and study medicine like they did and become a plastic surgeon.

  “That ship has sailed, dad,” I said the other day.

  Still, they try. They’d rather I change my mind, stay in school for many more years, turn pre-med, become a respected doctor in the family. Not a guy who studies art and history and works part-time at a tattoo shop. I’m their only hope after all. There’s no one else.

  When I make my weekly visits to their building, my parents and I serve up uncomfortable small talk. We dart around all the things and people we’re not allowed to bring up. Like they never even existed.

  They taught me how to ignore the obvious.

  But I can’t ignore Harley. She’s not like them. She’s not like anyone I’ve ever known. It’s almost enough to make me tell her why my family doesn’t talk, why we are so closed-off, messed-up, and perfectly plastic on the outside. But I’ve told no one except my shrink. Harley tells me everything, and I can’t manage to give her the simplest truth. I never learned how.

  Maybe that’s why we can never be together.

  That, and the rules, and the group, and the fact that I’d never know what to do with a girl like her. She’s a girl. And I only know women, and I only know sex. I don’t know what to do with someone who’s not a game, a conquest, a way to numb the pain. With her, I’d have to be myself, be honest, and truthful, and let her all the way in. Besides Harley’s a former call girl. So really, the fact that I want to inhale her all night, to run my tongue from her delicious earlobe down to her neck and between her perfect breasts – that are real, that are so fucking real, and soft, and full and demand to be kissed every time I see her – is irrelevant.

  She would never want me the same way. That one night was a last hurrah, a final goodbye to the past. She could have anyone. But she hardly seems to want anyone. Except Cam, and the thought of that makes my skin crawl. I don’t even know the guy, she told me she was never involved with him, but he was her fucking pimp. He whored her out, and that makes me hate him. That makes me want to do to his face what the husband of the lady in the penthouse apartment did to mine when he caught me with his wife.

  “I should go,” I mutter.

  “Me too,” she says.

  “Are you going back to your mom’s tonight?”

  She shakes her head. “Back home. I’m sure Kristen misses me,” she jokes. Kristen and Harley have a run-down railroad apartment not far from here that’s rent-controlled and has been for one hundred years. Or s
o it seems.

  “Cool. I’m going to meet Jordan for a beer,” I say, referring to my buddy who works at the coffee shop next to No Regrets. He hates coffee, can’t stand the smell of it or taste of it from working with it all night long. He needs beer more than ever to get the scent of caffeine off of him, he likes to say.

  “Have fun. Tell him I say hi,” she says and gives a playful wave, as if I’d pass that on to my friend. “We should set him up with Kristen someday.”

  “Yeah. They might like each other.”

  She starts to leave, but I reach for her arm. Damn, her skin is so soft. I could layer kisses on her arms and be satisfied. Actually, that’s not true. Any kiss would make me want more. “I’ll walk you home.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to.”

  I take her hand, and the feel of her is the thing I want most and dread most in the world. But I can’t stop holding her hand, even though I’d never know what to do with her for real.

  When we reach her building, she turns to me. “Did we even have plans tonight?”

  I shake my head. “I just like seeing you.”

  Maybe I’ve said too much. Maybe I haven’t said enough.

  “I like seeing you too.”

  “Better me than Cam,” I say, then want to kick myself for admitting that. For saying those stupid words. But I don’t stop. “Don’t call him. Please.”

  I sound like an idiot, begging her.

  She stands on her tip toes, and brushes a soft, sweet, dizzying kiss on my cheek, on my scar, whispering, “I won’t.”

  I want to believe her.

  Chapter Four

  Harley

  “Were you at your writing workshop with the hottie tattoo guy tonight?”

  Kristen lowers her red cat’s eye glasses and stares at me over the pages of a script. Kristen is a film major and she always has her nose in a story. She’s scrunched up on the couch in our apartment, studying a marked-up screenplay.

  “Yeah,” I say, the lie rolling seamlessly off my tongue.

  “Are you guys hooking up?”

  I scoff. “No. It’s only class.”

  If she only knew.

  “Can I have him then?” She waggles her eyebrows. She’s met Trey. She knows he’s unbelievably beautiful. She has no clue how I met him though.

  “Sure,” I say as if the thought doesn’t make my insides churn. I don’t want anyone to have Trey. But I can’t tell Kristen about the meetings we go to, the real way I know him. I try to throw her off the scent. “Or his friend Jordan. He’s cute too, don’t you think?”

  She nods knowingly. “Honestly, either one of them would be fine. Why don’t you just make that happen, Harley?”

  “I’ll text Trey that we should all get together and go see a band or something,” I say, and then fire off a quick message.

  Kristen and I have been friends since the start of high school, but she doesn’t even know the half of it. Or the half of me. If anyone were to know about the SLAA meetings, about my past, about my men, it’d be Kristen. She is my closest girlfriend. But that word—close—it’s all so relative. Close means you share clothes, dreams, secrets, maybe even the darkest of secrets. That’s how it’s supposed to be. And sure, I know things about her because we’ve been friends since we played field hockey together at our high school. She was a beast on the field. She took no prisoners and was known far and wide for hitting below the knees. I asked her once why she had so much aggression and she said she took out her frustration over her parents’ crappy relationship when she was playing.

  They were divorcing when we were in high school.

  Here’s the thing. She’s open. She’s let me in on her secrets. She struggled with bulimia when she was in high school, and she was in therapy our senior year to help her have – as she likes to say – “a better relationship” with food. I know her insecurities too. Sometimes she’s abrasive, or too in-your-face, and it’s all part of her tough gal persona. But underneath, she wants what most people want – happiness. I know her hopes too. After college, she plans to jet west to California and become a screenwriter, chase the Hollywood dream.

  But I barely tell her anything. Maybe because she’s so together. Because she’s battled her demons and won. Or maybe just because I’m no good at telling the truth.

  She knows I like music and doing make-up, how I take my lattes, that I like to invent stories about animals and magic, that someday I want to live on the beach and soak up the sun and sleep to the sound of ocean waves lapping the shore. She knows that my dad ditched us long ago to move to Europe and that I’m close with my mom. But more than that? I wouldn’t even know where to start. I’m like that person who scatters clues across several states, making it tough for the cops to gather enough info, or enough witnesses, to assemble the whole sordid story.

  No one except Trey.

  It’s weird that one person can know your before and your wish for after.

  And that’s not Kristen.

  Because I haven’t told her a thing about my mom’s habits. And, honestly, there is nothing I want to say. My mom is my mom. She needs me. I need her. She took me to every doctor’s appointment, tended to every scraped knee, and read to me every night before bed. So what if she had men over all the time? She wasn’t cheating on anyone. She was the one left. She was the person abandoned, and she finally found a way to be happy again. It doesn’t matter that I knew all her boyfriends, that I heard her late-night moans and groans, that I know what it sounds like when my own mother has an orgasm, that I’m too familiar with the things she says when she’s getting turned on. No one, no one, no one in the whole wide world can be privy to the fact that my mother, who has done more good for society than most people, has another side. The side that turned her daughter into a prostitute.

  Those secrets are lodged so far and so deep inside me I don’t even know how I’d get the words out. I’d need more than a shovel to dredge them up. I’d need a bulldozer to exhume them. And even if somehow, some way, the words could tunnel out of me, I know they’d spill out my mouth all disfigured and unrecognizable, a foreign tongue no one could understand. Sometimes when I say the words silently, in my head, at a whisper, I can still feel a fierce red blush covering my cheeks. I was a call girl.

  But yet, the real reason I don’t tell her is this–because I loved it. I loved the crazy burn, the rush, the thrill of the power. Because I needed it, I wanted it, I craved it.

  I still do.

  I’m not cured.

  SLAA hasn’t fixed me.

  If Kristen knew where I really go when I say I’m at the writing workshop, she might not want to be friends with me. She wouldn’t want to have lattes with me or share an apartment with me. I’d be the slut, the sex addict, the whore that everyone would think I am. That Miranda thinks I am. That all those stories – true fucking stories – that Miranda makes me write prove I am.

  No wonder Trey won’t touch me again. No wonder he keeps me at a distance. He’s getting healthy, he’s healing, he’s moving on from his past and he can see me for what I am.

  Dirty. Slutty. Whore.

  Soon, he’ll walk away too. That’s why I don’t tell Kristen about Layla. She’d walk straight the other way. This is what people do. They leave when you get too close.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Nah, I ate at my mom’s,” I say.

  “Damn. I wanted to split a pizza.”

  “I’ll eat a slice if it’ll make you happy,” I offer. I can do that. Kristen doesn’t like to eat by herself. Says it reminds her of the times when she scarfed on food alone.

  She claps once and smiles widely. See? This is so simple. I made her happy by saying I’d have a slice. She dials her favorite pizza delivery place and orders a cheese pie. I wish I could do the same – have a healthy relationship with love.

  I wish love were like pizza.

  She kicks her feet up on the coffee table. “We should have a girl’s night out Friday. Let�
��s go somewhere. Meet some guys. There’s no one at this college I like. I want a man. Not some stupid frat boy.”

  “No you don’t,” I say. “You don’t want a man.”

  I’ve had men. Most of them are awful.

  Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict

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  I didn’t sleep with any of them. I could lie and tell all sorts of sordid stories about being seventeen and fucking forty-two-year-old men, but I won’t. Because I didn’t do that. My pimp loved me. He took care of me. He would never have sent me on jobs like that. Sometimes, I played the escort role to the buttoned-up guys who wanted the sexy young girlfriend at a fancy dinner function. Or the suit who had a hankering for a schoolgirl on his arm at a bar.

  But I was also assigned the middle-aged men with weird fetishes.

  Like one of my regulars. His name was Gerald, and he was a banker. We met every Friday at 4:15 when the markets closed. He wanted me to wear my green plaid skirt, starched white blouse, and my good old faithful Mary Janes. Our regular meeting spot was a hotel in midtown because no one knew him in midtown. He liked to hear about my day at school, the things I learned in class, but he especially longed for my stories of what my friends and I talked about in the locker room. I made it all up. I told him we discussed lingerie, and what kind of lacy underwear we preferred to wear when we masturbated.

  “I wore a black bustier when I fingered myself last night,” I told him. “My friend Holly gets herself off wearing her red silk teddy.”

  He’d start breathing hard, then ask for more. I served it all up for him, tales of trigonometry and English literature, chiffon and lace, fingers and spread legs.

  Then he’d ask me to kiss him once, spank him ten times, and tell him to sit in the corner.

  That was all he wanted. Stories and spanking.