Getting Dirty

by Mia Storm

  “Hi,” I say and he jumps and straightens himself in his seat.

  “Can I help you?”

  I step into the door. “I know Caiden Brenner isn’t at this school anymore, but he’s moved since he worked here. Do you know if there’s someone who might know where I can find him?”

  His face twists as if he just ate something rotten. “He’s been gone a year. If he’s not at the address in his employment record, we wouldn’t have had any reason to update it.

  So, that’s it. He’s gone. He’s moved on with his life.

  “Thank you,” I say, already turning for the stairs.

  I drop into my car and pull out of the lot as the first tears roll down my face. When the road ahead of me gets so blurry I nearly hit an oncoming car, I pull over to the shoulder. I fold my arms over the steering wheel and rest my forehead on them as sobs hitch up from the deepest part of me. Every muscle clenches as my body vomits out the pain in a river of tears, leaving me raw and bleeding inside.

  This is when I know what Nate did for me. I traded this pain for the numb humiliation being with him brought me. A voice slithering through the darkest corners of my mind whispers to me to go back to the numbness. But that’s sick, and I’ve already been sick for too long.

  So I pull my head up, scrub my face clean with my sleeve, embrace my mangled life, and drive home.

  I’m relieved to find that neither of my parents’ or Nate’s cars are parked out front when I pull up to the house. I unlock the front door and when I push it open, the first thing I see is Marcus, sprawled on the family room floor with an ice bag on his hand and his other elbow crooked over his eyes.

  “What happened?”

  He uncovers his face and I see a welt rising on his left cheekbone when he sits up. He bends his knees up and wraps his elbows around them, shaking his head.

  I slide onto the floor next to him and poke at his cheek. “Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  I wave a hand in front of his face and look into his pupils. “Are you dizzy? Do you think you have a concussion or something?”

  “No. I just have a walking douchebag for a best friend.”

  Oh, shit. “What happened?”

  He scratches the top of his head. “Nate said you broke up with him. When I asked why, he told me to ask you. When I said I was asking him, he muttered something about your roommate being hot and it wasn’t his fault, so I fucking leveled him.”

  My heart squeezes into a hard ball and I feel sick. “Thanks, but he’s totally not worth it.”

  He drags himself to his feet, flexing the knuckles of his right hand. He holds his left out to me and I take it. “But you are,” he says, pulling me off the floor. “There’s a reason I didn’t want him anywhere near you. He’ll fuck anything that walks.”

  I only realize my eyes are welling when Marcus tugs me to his chest. It feels so good to be back in his arms. I let things stay bad between us for too long, but I understand why now. I knew Marcus would be the only person who’d look close enough to see that I was dead inside. If I pushed him away, I was safe to self-destruct without anyone trying to stop me.

  Seeing how he reacted to what happened with Caiden, I know I can never tell him Nate raped me. He’d think it was his fault, somehow, and he’d never forgive himself for not protecting me. But I need his arms so badly right now.

  “It’s always been us against the world, Blaire,” he says. “That hasn’t changed. The only difference is that that cocksucker is now part of ‘the world’ instead of ‘us.’”

  “When did our lives get so fucked up?” I ask into his T-shirt.

  “When Dad looked at Mom with that lusty spark in his eye.”

  I hear the smile in his voice and laugh through my tears, blowing snot out my nose onto his T-shirt. “Nothing good could ever come of that.”

  Chapter 26

  Caiden

  She arrives at Tino’s alone tonight and sits with the same group of poets at a table up front. I watch from the barstool in the darkest corner, but instead of scotch, I’m drinking Coke.

  There are five poets who read, and Blaire listens intently to each one. When Gloria is introduced, she squeezes Blaire’s shoulder on her way to the stage. She finishes and after her scores post, the room goes quiet and the MC, Craig, looks at Blaire like he’s going to eat her alive when he says, “We’ve got a special performance tonight, a returning house favorite, racking up sixty-three wins over a two-year period before she left us for bigger and better things. Please welcome back to the Tino’s stage, our very own, Blaire Leon!”

  She makes her way slowly up the stairs and Craig wraps her whole body in a long, tight hug. He whispers something in her ear and her eyes are wide with…shock? disgust? when she pulls away from him. She watches him leave the stage and takes a minute to collect herself before she steps up to the mic.

  When the bright spotlight hits her face, my heart lurches.

  She looks drawn, purple circles in the hollows of lifeless amber eyes; the glow in that fair complexion gone, as if life has beaten her down and robbed her of her contagious spirit.

  She stands in front of the mic collecting herself for longer than usual, and when a tear courses down her face, she makes no move to wipe it away.

  She takes one last breath, then lifts her head and starts.

  “Have you ever thought: What’s it all for? I don’t mean after a particularly bad day, when your whole life is sliding into a steaming shithole. I mean, have you ever sat down and really contemplated the point of life?”

  Even with the tear, her voice starts light. A little whimsical.

  “Is the point of life success? But how do you know when you’ve achieved enough success? How do you quantify it? Measure it? Is it how much you know? IQ points? The number of degrees you hold? Or does a sharp mind only make you more capable of justifying even your worst decisions? Maybe success is measured in the number of friends you have on speed dial? But then how do you determine which of your collection would gladly throw you under the bus when it’s in their own best interests?” She shakes her head. “So if it’s not knowledge or friends, maybe success is money? But if someone else has more than you, how can you know if you’ve hit the benchmark? Is it truly the guy who dies with the most toys who wins?”

  Her tone becomes harder and takes on more of a bitter edge as she progresses. I start focusing on every word, trying to ferret out what she’s telling me about her life in between the lines.

  “Is the point of life happiness? Are rats on a treadmill happy? If they could speak, they’d probably tell you they’re not unhappy,” she says with a lift of her hand. “They get on that fucking wheel of their own volition every. Single. Day. And they run themselves into the ground. So, what is happiness? How do you know when you’re happy? Is happiness just the absence of sadness? Is the point of life just not to be sad?”

  My heart hammers so hard in my chest I can see each beat ripple the fluid in the glass I’m gripping so tightly it’s in danger of shattering. If anyone deserves to be happy, it’s Blaire. But she’s quite obviously profoundly sad.

  “Or maybe the Beatles really were tapped into the universal consciousness and all we need is love. Maybe love is the golden ring on the carousel of life. Could it be that we’re intended to spend our days perusing a transient and ethereal emotion? Something so fleeting that, when you grip it too tightly, it slips through your fingers and vanishes like smoke on a breeze? Something that repeatedly leaves your heart ripped open and bleeding out any hope that it even exists?”

  The peal of anguish lacing her words rips my heart open. She’s not been hurt by love. She’s been destroyed by it. Acid rolls up my throat, knowing I played a part in that.

  “Even if the point of life is just not dying, we all fail there eventually too.”

  She pulls the mic from the stand and walks to the side of the stage. “From where I stand, life looks something like this: We get up. We get up. We get up,” she says, raising the
hand not holding the mic higher with each “up.”

  She drops her hand. “We fall down.”

  She moves to the other side of the stage. “We get up. We get up. We get up,” she says, repeating the process.

  “We fall down.”

  She comes back to the middle of the stage and sits at the edge with her legs dangling. “Sometimes we fall on our own.” She holds a hand palm out to the audience, then thrusts it forward. “Sometimes we’re pushed.”

  Who pushed you, Blaire? Was it me?

  “So, is that the point? Because, honestly, it seems the most likely scenario. Life is just some sort of cosmic joke. No matter how hard we strive for happiness, knowledge, love, success, no matter how close we get to grabbing that golden ring, or how sure we are that we get the point of the whole thing, at some point the universe is going to shove us down just to prove us wrong.”

  I didn’t think she saw me, but as she gains her feet, her gaze locks on mine, and I know I’m right. I did this to her.

  “There is no fucking carousel ring.” She gives her head a bitter shake. “Hell, there’s not even a carousel. The joy you felt while you were riding—the certainty that you’d weathered the shit storm of life and the wind in your hair was your reward—it was all just a fucking illusion.”

  She turns and walks back to the mic stand in the middle of the stage, snapping it back into the bracket.

  “The point of life is that it’s pointless.”

  There’s a minute of dead silence as she spins for the stairs, and then the group at her table in the front stands and starts to clap. Within a few seconds, the whole room is standing.

  But Blaire doesn’t stop for the hugs or high fives she’s being offered. She doesn’t even seem to notice there are other people in the room. She comes directly to where I’m now standing, next to my barstool, and stops in front of me.

  The scores post, but I don’t hear a word Craig is saying. All I know is Blaire’s desperate gaze.

  “You had a beard last time I saw you.”

  At her statement, my stomach plummets into my shoes. I lift a hand to my freshly shaven face. I only had that beard while I was with Hannah. And I was always with Hannah. She was right, I was hiding behind her like a shield. I thought that’s what I needed to do. Not for my own safety. For everyone else’s. For Blaire’s. I needed to keep her safe from me.

  I take her elbow and usher her to the door. When we hit the sidewalk, she pulls her arm out of my grasp and keeps going. I follow, because, let’s face it, I’m helpless to do anything else. I’d follow her into the pits of hell if I could have her there.

  “Are you still together?” she asks without looking at me.

  “No.”

  Hannah spent this morning trying to convince me to stay at her place until I could find an apartment I could afford, but I could feel myself already questioning my resolve. It would be too easy to slip back into the same pattern and just hide behind her the rest of my life. So I checked into a seedy pay-by-the-month hotel this afternoon and told her I’d be back for the few things in her apartment that are mine when I had somewhere to put them. I shaved, slept for a few hours, then got in my car and drove to Tino’s.

  About half a block up, I see her car. She reaches into her pocket and the lights flash as she clicks the lock. She lowers herself into the driver’s seat, but when I try the passenger door, it’s still locked. She slams her door and cranks the stereo. Arctic Monkeys shake her windows.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve let myself listen to that song.

  When she makes no move to unlock the door, I pace to the car parked ahead of hers and lean against the trunk. Inside her car, “Do I Wanna Know?” plays on repeat, asking if this feeling flows both ways. I pray to God her answer is yes.

  Her forehead is propped against the wheel. She doesn’t move.

  For the next half hour.

  So I wait. If she drives away, I’ll let her, but only because I know she understands what she’s leaving behind. She’s making her choice, and I have no choice but to let her.

  Finally, she lifts her head and her eyes find mine. I hold her gaze and try to convey everything I’m feeling with a glance. I want her to feel me to her soul and know everything I am is hers if she wants me.

  She opens the door and gets out. I shove off the car and face her.

  “Do I want to know?” she asks.

  I nod and take a step forward, but her expression is one of a feral animal, cornered and scared.

  “Do I want to fucking know, Caiden?” she growls through gritted teeth, shoving both hands into my chest and knocking me back a step.

  I hold my arms to the side, bearing myself open for whatever she needs to do. “Whatever you want is yours, whether it’s just my body, or my heart and soul too. You own me, Blaire. You always have.”

  She comes at me again, but this time, instead of pushing me, she slams into me, her arms reaching around me and gripping so tightly I feel my ribs pop.

  I fold my arms around her and press my face to the crown of her hair. “No more holding back. I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Tell me,” she says into my shirt.

  I lift her face and look into her eyes, trying to make her feel my words. “I agree with almost everything you said in your poem just now. We all spend our whole fucking lives grabbing at shiny things we think will make us happy—all the ridiculous benchmarks that we or people around us have set to measure our worth. We get so caught up in it that I think we lose sight of the things that matter, and when that happens, life is going to feel pointless. But I don’t think it is. That’s the part I disagree with.” I shake my head and thumb the tears from her cheeks. “All I can tell you for sure is I don’t have many answers, but I’ve got one. There has never been a time through any of this that I stopped loving you. You are what matters. When I lose sight of you, life is pointless. With you here, in my arms—” I lean forward and press my lips to her forehead. “—not so much.”

  She breathes a shaky breath. “Tell me again. That last part.”

  I lift her and crush her body to mine. Nothing has ever felt more right. “I love you, Blaire, with everything that I am. As long as you want me, I’m not going anywhere.”

  Her ankles lock around my hips and she hikes herself higher up my body with her hands around my neck. “I thought I lost you.”

  “What do you want, Blaire? Tell me what you want from me.”

  “Take me home,” she says, and from the look in her eye, I know she doesn’t mean to her parents’ house.

  I take the keys from her hand and load her into the passenger seat of her Mini. I duck into the driver’s seat and pull onto the road. She reaches for my hand on the stick shift and weaves her fingers between mine, then leans her head against my shoulder.

  We pull into my cheap no-tell motel fifteen minutes later. I scan my key and guide Blaire through the door into the cramped, musty room. She kicks off her shoes and climbs under the covers in all her clothes. I toe off my Vans and go to the other side, sliding in next to her and wrapping my body around hers.

  She falls asleep quickly, exhausted, no doubt. She looks so beaten down. But her body twitches, still wound too tightly to relax, even in sleep. I hold her and send her any shred of peace I can find within myself. I breathe her in and live in this place, where I never thought I’d be again. Eventually, I drift off and dream of being right where I am.

  ∞

  I wake to pale morning light and a warm body draped over mine. When I open my eyes, Blaire is on top of me. Naked.

  She smiles down at me and traces the lines of my mouth with the tip of her forefinger, making me smile in return. She pushes herself up so she’s straddling my hips and starts on the button of my jeans.

  I strip my T-shirt off as she works my fly, then let her drag my jeans down my legs.

  On the way back up, she slows to give my raging hard-on a tongue bath. When she teabags my balls, they pull tight and I groan. She licks from
base to tip again, but just as she opens her lips to sheath my cock with that hot, wet mouth, I reach for her arms and drag her up my body. “I want to be inside you when I come.”

  I reach for my wallet on the nightstand, but she grasps my hand and lays it on her breast. She lift her hips and positions the head of my erection at her opening. “I’m on the pill.”

  She rolls her hips, taking me inside, and Christ, she’s tight. I feel the full measure of my aching cock sinking through her slick folds until I’m seated to the root inside her. She starts to rock her pelvis on mine and I grasp her hips and move to her rhythm.

  I trail my fingers over those perfect C cups, down flat, tight abs, to the center of her world. I work her clit and she starts to moan, a feral sound from deep inside her. Her hand cups her breast and she rolls the nipple under her thumb. The fingers of her other hand follow mine between her legs. She mimics the movement of my thumb with her fingers. After a minute, I slip my hand out and watch as she continues to work her clit.

  I grasp her hips and pump harder, thrusting as deeply into her as I can, desperate to moor myself so far inside her that no one can dig me out. It’s not long before her inner muscles clamp hard around my cock as she screams out her release. I come hard just behind her, because watching her get herself off with me inside her is one of the hottest fucking things I’ve ever seen.

  She lowers herself onto my chest. “I wanted to know how you do it. I’ve never been able to come on my own.”

  “I find that hard to believe.” Her body is so receptive. She just rides the waves of desire with no inhibitions.

  “I’ve never really been close except with you.” Her tongue laps a ring around my nipple before she sucks it. “I can’t seem to really let go if we’re not together…like I need your energy or our connection or something for my body to work right.”

  I wrap my arms around her. “We were made for this.”

  She rocks her hips against mine and grins down at me. “Then I think we should do it again.”

  I smile and roll her onto her back. She spreads wide and I start to move inside her, my cock already pulsing with the influx of blood as it hardens again.