Summer's Temptation

by Ashley Lynn Willis

  He walks through the doorway of his room, and we’re transported to a world of drawings. A few are in color, but most sketches are done in charcoal. Over his bed, he’s added a few new ones. A dog, staring up at its master, eyes glowing. A curvy girl, her back to us, sitting next to a lake. She’s wearing a tank top and jeans, and her long hair is blowing in the wind.

  As Tyler places me gently on the bed, I glance at another sketch below the lake drawing and see almond-shaped eyes. Me. He’s drawn me and put my image over his headboard. I glance up at the girl by the lake. Me again.

  My throat closes up. If I’d been him, I would have torn down the pictures of me the second we broke up. But he hadn’t. Why? A worse question floats through my brain. Were they there when he brought the blonde into his bed?

  I look down in horror. I’m sitting on the bed, the place where he brings all his conquests.

  “Relax,” he says. “I washed my stuff last week.”

  I cringe. “Am I that obvious?”

  He smiles ruefully. “I can read you like a book.”

  He turns his back to me and strolls to the closet. I guess I’m stuck, so I make the best of it, scooting to the headboard and resting my back against it. Hopefully this part of the bed isn’t contaminated. As I fold my hands in my lap, I peer around the room for more pictures of me. I don’t see any, but I do notice the haunted picture of the young girl. My eye was drawn to her the last time I visited Tyler’s room. She looks just as tired and sick as ever. I want to scribble a cup of coffee next to her, but I doubt caffeine would fix whatever ails her.

  I hear Tyler rustling through the closet. A loud clanging noise makes me think something just toppled over. When he curses, I figure it must be heavy. A few seconds later, Tyler comes out holding a cardboard tube at least two feet long, like the ones architects use to store their drawings.

  He fidgets nervously with the cylinder, tapping it against his palm. “Just… don’t say anything until I’m done talking, okay?”

  I nod, staring at the tube in his hand.

  He sits next to me, stretching his long legs toward the end of the bed, and pops open the plastic lid of the cylinder. “Do you remember what I said at the lake, about the first time we met?”

  I nod again. “The hospital.”

  “Yeah. The hospital.” He taps the tube against his hand, and rolled papers slip out. He uncurls the top piece and hands it to me.

  A young girl, fifteen, is standing next to a vending machine. She looks so innocent, her cheeks round and her eyes sparkling. I lightly run my hand over her hair, careful not to smear the pencil marks. “I remember that haircut. My mom loved the show Felicity.” She’d gotten into a kick of watching reruns, and I’d fallen in love with Keri Russell’s hair. I’d cut my hair a few inches below shoulder length and gotten a kinky perm.

  “I drew that right after you left the break room with your snotty friends. I didn’t want to forget what you looked like.” He uncurls another sketch and lays it in my lap, on top of the first. “This was the second time we met. I’m sure you remember.”

  There I am, sweaty tendrils of hair swept across my neck and brow, mouth swollen from kisses, and eyes glistening with arousal. “I can’t believe you kept this.”

  “Hell yes, I kept it.” The corners of the paper curl together and he smooths them down, staring heatedly at the drawing. “I couldn’t believe it was you sitting across from me that day. I thought I’d never see you again, and there you were.” He smiles, and it’s kind of relieved looking.

  Even now, a year and a half later, the picture makes my cheeks heat. “You were supposed to do a caricature drawing. Why did you have to sketch me like… like that?”

  He chuckles, his eyes crinkling around the edges. “I hadn’t planned to draw you like that. I was going to sketch a realistic portrait and keep it, but your boyfriend pissed me off.” His smile slides away, replaced with a twisted frown. “I could tell you were nervous. You kept looking at him for support, and I heard him jacking off with some guys behind me. He wasn’t paying attention to you, and I kept thinking if I had a girl like you looking at me the way you looked at him, like he was your anchor, your life, I sure as hell wouldn’t have ignored you when you needed me. So I decided to be a dick.” He sucks in his bottom lip. When it pops free, he looks at me. “I felt bad when you got pissed, but it was worth it.”

  “Worth it?” Is he kidding? “God, I was so mad at you. How could that have been worth it?”

  One side of his lips tip up, but it’s not an ornery smile—more a thankful one. “You never forgot me. I could tell by the way your eyes narrowed every time we passed on campus. You’d look away real fast like you were scared I’d catch you staring.” He nudges my shoulder with his. “I lived for those moments. Sometimes I wondered what you’d do if I just came up to you, dragged you to me, and kissed you. I bet you would have let me.”

  “I had a boyfriend.”

  “I know. That’s why I never did it. I don’t mess with someone else’s girl, even when I want to.” He thumbs through the rest of the drawings and pulls out another. His mood shifts slightly, his shoulders more taut than before. “Now I need you to be quiet for a few minutes and let me explain.”

  He hands another drawing to me. I recognize the moment he’s captured because it’s from only a few months ago, the day I moved into our house next door. I’m wearing tattered old jean shorts and an even older T-shirt. My face is flushed, and sweat drips down my brow as I carry a large box up the steps toward the front door. I want to ask him why he’d draw me at my worst, but per his request, I keep my lips sealed.

  He hands me another drawing. The same day. I’m sitting on the front stoop, a bottle of water tilted to my lips. My hair’s pulled into a ponytail that grazes my back.

  I don’t know why he’s showing me these pictures until he plops the whole stack in my lap and I get a look at the top one. I’m lying on the library lawn with a blanket beneath me, wearing jeans and a form-fitting sweater. I’m on my stomach, a book spread before me. In the next picture, I’m sitting on a bench, wearing a jacket and sipping a vanilla latte. In my hair is a clip I lost second semester of freshman year, only a month after Tyler drew the picture of me with kiss-swollen lips and sweaty hair. As I sort through the pictures, I realize that every one of them was drawn sometime between the sex sketch and before I moved in next door.

  With his index finger, he slowly smudges the scarf tied around my neck in the image on my lap. “The day you sat for the caricature drawing, I recognized you from the hospital. I had no idea you were on campus, and when I found out, I started to see you everywhere. At the library. The student union. Walking down sorority row. I wondered how many times I had passed you without noticing. I didn’t want to miss you ever again, so I started drawing you. It began innocently. A sketch here. A sketch there. But after a while, it kind of turned into an obsession.”

  “Why would you want to draw me?” I would understand if I had the bone structure of a model or an interesting face, but I’m nothing spectacular or out-of-the-ordinary.

  He takes a deep breath as if he has to steel himself to tell me. “It made me feel like I knew you.”

  “That makes no sense. Why didn’t you just talk to me?”

  “You had a boyfriend. If I talked to you, it would have been obvious it wasn’t platonic. Also, I wasn’t… I wasn’t really in the right mindset to get to know you.”

  I wait for him to elaborate, but he looks down and fiddles with a crease in his jeans. “Sometimes you’re cryptic, Tyler.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “But you’re not going to say more?”

  He shakes his head, still playing with his jeans. I could push him, but this is the most Tyler’s ever opened up to me, and I don’t want to be so aggressive that he clams up. Men are weird like that. Instead, I flip through the sketches. There have to be at least forty. He seems to get tenser with every new one I pull from the pile.

  “You didn
’t want me to know about this,” I whisper.

  He shakes his head, mashing his lips together. “I was practically stalking you.” His voice is full of shame.

  I don’t know if he’s embarrassed he stalked me or if he’s ashamed at having been reduced to being a stalker. Knowing Tyler, probably both. But the one thing I really don’t understand is how I didn’t notice him showing up with paper and pencil and his gaze trained on me. I’m not that oblivious to my surroundings. At least, I hope not.

  “How did I miss you sketching me?”

  “You didn’t.” He taps his temple. “I have a good memory. I took a mental snapshot and drew it later. But I did stare at you a lot, trying to make sure I remembered every angle, the lighting, the background, what you wore. God, that sounds creepy.”

  Yeah, it kind of does, but it’s Tyler, so it’s also kind of flattering. “Have you done this with other girls?”

  “Hell no,” he says without hesitating. “I felt dirty enough doing it with you.” He crosses and uncrosses his feet at his ankles and shifts as if he can’t get comfortable. He’s obviously uneasy letting me see these pictures.

  I guess I can’t blame him. If I’d drawn dozens of sketches of him without his knowledge, I’d want to keep that to myself too, which begs the question… “Why are you showing me these now?”

  “So you’ll believe me when I say that the night you came over and asked me to be your fuck buddy, you were requesting the impossible.”

  “But you said yes.”

  “I said yes, I’d be your fuck buddy. I never said you’d be mine.”

  Something doesn’t ring true about what he’s saying, and I go back to the night I put my ego on the line and asked him to be my go-to guy. So much happened in the course of that evening, I have a hard time conjuring our conversations. I sift through the shadows of left-behind emotions, and when I hit on the right one—surprise and resignation—I realize why I’m confused.

  “What about the other girls? You said you would still hook up with them.” I had been appalled, but in the end, that was the proof I’d needed that we’d keep our hearts uninvolved.

  He looks at me blandly. “I lied.”

  I press my palms into my eye sockets until I think my eyeballs will burst. “Oh, my God. I believed you. Why would you lie about that?”

  “You didn’t leave me any choice. If I hadn’t, you would have dumped me then and there. You didn’t want attachments.”

  “What about the threesome? You brought those girls back to your room after I asked you to be my fuck buddy. None of this adds up.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  I drop my hands. “Well, I’m here and I’m listening, so now’s the time to explain.”

  He sighs, but he nods. “I was completely freaked out when you asked me to be your fuck buddy. At first, I thought you weren’t the girl I’d respected for all those years.”

  I cringe, remembering his look of disgust after I’d asked him to hop in bed with me. “You thought I wasn’t innocent. I could read it all over your face.”

  “Virtuous,” he says. “Isn’t that what you called yourself at the lake? But the thing is, I knew you were virtuous, so then I figured you wanted to experiment with someone and I was the kind of guy you were looking for. I didn’t want to be that guy, Cassie. That’s why I kicked you out. I mean, it wasn’t your fault you thought of me that way. I was that guy, the one girls came to for no-strings-attached fun, but I was pissed at myself and you for rubbing it in my face.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

  “I know. I said it wasn’t your fault, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like a world-class douchebag. Anyway, I figured if that’s how you saw me, I might as well live up to your expectations, so I invited those girls to my room.”

  My stomach twists, and I feel as though I’m going to gag. No girl wants to imagine the man she cares about having a ménage à trois. How can she ever live up to an experience like that? “You know, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to hear about the threesome.”

  “I know, but like you said, you’re here and you’re listening. I need to tell you. Please, Cassie.”

  I shake my head and close my eyes. Even though I don’t want him to go on, I say, “Okay.”

  “So they were going after each other, putting on a show for me—”

  My eyes pop open. “Really, I don’t need to hear any of this.”

  He takes my hand, slipping his fingers through mine. “I’m not saying this to hurt you or make you jealous. I just… I need you to understand where I’m coming from.” His soft blue eyes plead with me.

  I nod for him to go on.

  “So the girls… I’d seen it all before. Done it all before. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun, but I realized I was tired of it. College is supposed to be about having fun, experimenting, doing things you’d never do in the ‘real world.’ But what you don’t know until it’s too late is that when you spread yourself over all those different people, it thins you out. It makes you less of who you are, and more of who they want you to be. Those girls wanted me to be their experimental, wild ride, the one who brought out the uninhibited tramps in them. They wanted the same thing from me that you wanted. I was tired of that role. It’s not who I am.”

  “But if it’s not who you are, why did you do it in the first place?”

  He looks at the picture of the haunted girl. The longer he stares at her, the more his eyes dim. “Necessity.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I walked out on those girls.”

  I’m not convinced he’s ever going to tell me who that girl is, so I let him be.

  “I’m not even sure they noticed I’d left. I think they were just using me as an excuse to try some girl-on-girl. So I came straight to your house. You’d never told me why you wanted a fuck buddy—”

  “You wouldn’t let me.”

  He squeezes my leg. “Hush, Cassie.”

  From anyone else, it would have sounded condescending, but the way he says hush, drawing out the shhh, melts me a little.

  “I didn’t know what was going on in your head,” Tyler says, “but I was hoping… I was hoping I was wrong and it was just a ploy. I’ve had girls ask me to be their fuck buddy before when that wasn’t what they really wanted. It’s easy to tell when a girl just wants sex, and when she wants something more, like a boyfriend.

  “A few girls have tried to go about it backward. ‘Let’s hook up,’ they say. Next thing I know, they’re asking me to their sister’s wedding. I learned a long time ago to stay away from those girls, but I was hoping…” He clears his throat. “I was hoping maybe I had read you wrong and you were one of them. Then we could cut through all the bullshit.”

  He twists to face me and takes my other hand. “I would have done it right, Cassie. I would have asked you on a date. I would have bought you flowers and gone stargazing with you every Sunday. You would have known from the beginning how much I cared about you and how much I wanted you.

  “But when you told me why you really wanted a fuck buddy, I could see in your eyes that you still loved Wyatt. You weren’t trying to trap me in a relationship. You didn’t even want me to be your experiment. You were only trying to get back something Wyatt stole from you: your heart. You thought I could help you, but I knew that didn’t mean you’d give me your heart once you had it back.

  “I know this sounds stupid, but being your fuck buddy was my one chance with you. So I took it. And I hoped, one day, you’d open your eyes and see me, the guy who risked a broken heart just to be with you any way I could.”

  I never thought Tyler could make me feel like a complete and total asshole—he’s the one with the reputation, after all—but he’s done it up good. “Tyler, I’m sorry—”

  “Stop. I don’t want you to feel bad. I made the choice to be your fuck buddy. I knew what I was getting into. There’s no reason for you to feel guilty. That’s not what I want. I’m telling you this so you�
��ll understand why I got so mad when you kissed that teacher. I was jealous as hell and pissed at myself for getting into such a shitty situation. I was pissed at you for not seeing how much I cared about you and how much I wanted you to care about me. I figured you’d come in and tell me to leave, that I’d served my function and you were ready to move on. I had a million angry thoughts shouting around my brain, and none of them let me believe for a minute that it wasn’t over between us—”

  “Tyler?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think this is the most words I’ve heard from you in one sitting.”

  He smiles, but it’s a small one, not big enough to crinkle the skin around his eyes. “I only talk a lot when it matters.”

  “And this matters?”

  “More than you’ll ever know.” He presses our hands together and stares at them. “Now that you know…” He swallows hard. “Now that you know… does it change anything?”

  Did it? If I listen to my fluttering heart, yes, it changes everything. He risked getting hurt for a girl still in love with her ex. That’s braver than I could ever be. Braver than most anyone could be. Without him, I’m pitiful. He’s pitiful too. Seems right to put us both out of our misery. But my brain keeps reminding me that this is Tyler. Threesomes. Random coeds in his bed every other night. A fling with a girl because I hurt him. But God, I hurt him almost enough to justify the fling.

  He tilts his head, waiting. His thumbs caress my knuckles, and as I watch them gliding across my skin, I know it all comes down to one thing: I want this man in my life. We may not work out. It may be a disaster, but kind of like when I’m reading a really good book, I want to know what happens next. I want to know if we’ll get our happily ever after.

  “Okay,” I whisper.

  His thumbs go still. “Okay?”