“Thank you, Never,” he says and he sounds genuine. “I forgive you, too.” I smile and tilt my face back. Ty presses a soft kiss to my lips. We don't linger and we don't use tongue, but there's intent there and a promise to try. At this point, what else can I ask for?
24
Ty takes me up to his apartment. It's the first time I've ever been, and I'm impressed. It's a one bedroom, one bath, with a good sized living room and a small, galley kitchen. Ty says the girl he picked up trashed it when he asked her to leave (not that I blame her), but it looks perfect to me.
There's a big, red couch with a pair of black pillows, a coffee table in the shape of an eight ball, and pictures on every wall, framed photos of vintage cars.
“My mom took those,” Ty says, but he doesn't elaborate, and I don't ask, just follow him into his kitchen where he opens a stainless steel refrigerator and grabs a couple of beers. He opens mine for me and passes it over with a smile. I'm scoping out the kitchen now, touching bowls full of fruit and a stack of folded wash rags. Not bad for a young bachelor. “I know how to take care of myself,” Ty says as he notices me looking. I point at an electric stand mixer and he grins. “I said take care of, not pamper,” he tells me with a wink. “I won that at my work's Christmas party last year. If you want it, you can have it.” I give him a look that says, I don't know shit about cooking, and take a swig of my beer. It's malty and smells like roasted caramel. I love it, but then, I'm not exactly a connoisseur of alcoholic beverages. I almost wish that I was, that I used alcohol instead of sex to make my problems go away. Seems like that would be less complicated than this.
Ty motions me to follow after him, past a small wooden table with a pair of chairs, and into the bedroom where his twin bed sits against the wall, rumpled and disheveled. There's a squat dresser against the wall opposite and a flat screen TV sitting on top of it. Ty has these big, black curtains over his windows that block out all the moonlight, but that I guess come in quite handy in the morning.
I want to ask Ty if he ever did business in here, if ever accepted money in exchange for false love, if this room is tainted. I keep my thoughts to myself, convinced that this is not the time or place for that. It doesn't matter anyway. What's done is done, and there's no taking it back. I push my trepidation and fear aside and look down at the bed.
“It's clean,” Ty tells me as reaches down and straightens the comforter, the pillows. “I don't bring people into my bedroom.” I raise my eyebrows and down half of my beer in one swig.
“What do you do with them?” Ty shrugs, but I don't press him for answers because I don't want to know. I decide that at the very least, I can sit in here without imagining Ty's cock sliding in and out of another woman. The thought makes me physically ill. I am fucking jealous, I realize which is ten shades of stupid because Ty and I are not a fucking couple. I don't want to be a fucking couple. I do not want a fucking boyfriend.
“Are you hungry?” he asks me. “There's a spicy curry stand that delivers from down the street, if you're into that kind of shit.”
“I love that kind of shit,” I tell him as he pulls out his phone. There's this weird moment in time where everything seems to slow as it drops down to the carpet in front of my feet. I bend down and pick it up out of habit, noticing too late that Ty is reaching out to stop me. The background on his phone is a photo of someone very, very familiar. “Ty?” I ask as I stare at hazel eyes flecked with green and ebony hair with one, angry, rebellious red streak. “I'm wearing the red dress I had on when we first met.”
“I thought you were beautiful,” he tells me with a smile. I hand him back the phone and he looks at the picture. I don't know when he managed to take it; I never saw him do it in those few, strange moments we shared in the bar. It's a nice picture, but it's a little weird. I shift uncomfortably. “I've taken a lot of pictures over the years.”
“I don't care.”
“Lots of women have graced this screen.”
“Men, too?” I ask sarcastically. I didn't mean to. The little monster inside of me is still there, still making me do things I don't want to do. I apologize immediately, keeping my eyes on the poster that lines Ty's door. It's a pinup girl by Gil Elvgren. She's got a hammer in one hand and her thumb in her mouth, face twisted all innocent like, at odds with her sexy thigh highs and pointed bra. For just a split second, I wish I was as glamorous as her, and then it fades away and I'm happy to be a modern woman who can rock jeans and a T-shirt the day after she rocks a cocktail dress. I like having choices.
“I'm not gay,” Ty tells me with a shrug. He sips his beer and grabs a cigarette out of a box on his dresser. It's not a Marlboro this time but a Djarum Black with cloves. They're banned in the US and I wonder where Ty got them from. I won't smoke them, but they smell good. Still, seeing that little, black cigarette in his mouth makes me want to quit. I don't know why; it just does.
“I never said that,” I tell him, finishing my beer and standing up so that we're facing one another. “I'm sorry.”
“Men pay better than woman, and it's easier to get clients.”
“You don't have to explain yourself to me,” I tell him as I turn around and walk into his kitchen like I own the place. I don't know how else to act. Ty and are not close, not really; we don't even really know each other yet I feel like I've always known him, like he's a part of me, my other half or something. I wonder, if he could read my mind, would he ask to me to leave like he did with the last girl? Would he stop coming around? Would I scare him away? It's only now that I'm even admitting these thoughts to myself. They're scary as fuck, and I don't know what to do with them. I don't know why I feel like this, and I don't like it. I wish I'd never met Ty McCabe.
I put my beer on the counter and open the fridge. Ty stops me with a hand on my arm.
“I don't have to explain myself, but I want to. I wish you were interested in hearing what I have to say.”
“How do you know that I'm not?” Ty releases me and some of the anger goes out of his face. I make an effort not to slam the fridge and set the two beers on the counter before I turn to face him. He moves up next to me and pops both tops with a bottle opener he gets from inside a drawer. “You were saying something about curry?” I continue.
“Tell me about Noah Scott,” he says as he dials a number on his phone. I sigh.
“To tell you about Noah, I have to tell you about everything.”
“So do it,” Ty says. “Tell me.” He pauses. “Spicy curry or mild curry? Those are your only choices.”
“No choice of meat?” I ask.
“I don't know what it is, and I don't want to know,” Ty says as I hear a voice on the other end of the line. “It tastes good, and I'm not willing to risk never being able to eat it again.”
“Spicy,” I say and Ty grins.
“How did I know?” I tug on his nose ring, wondering how much it hurt, wondering why he thought it would be attractive to have a piercing in between his nostrils. It's quirky, I must admit, and it does suit the whole bad boy look he's got going on. “Two spicy curries,” he tells the man on the other end of the line. “Yeah, yeah, this is Ty.” Ty puts his hand over his mouth to block his voice from the receiver. “He's surprised because I only ever order one.”
“You never ordered in for your girlfriends?” Ty hangs up without another word, and I think it's funny that he's on a first name basis with the curry stand.
“I never had girlfriends, Never,” Ty says as he grabs my hand and pulls it away from his ring. He presses a kiss to my fingertips that only confuses me and pisses me off. I tug my arm back and cradle my fingers against my chest. “There were clients and there were fucks. There's not much more to it than that.”
“I was in love once,” I tell him. Ty's face falls.
“I've never been in love.”
We stand in silence until the curry arrives at the door. If someone were to spy on us through the window, they might think we were nuts, but it works for us. It works for Ty Mc
Cabe and Never Ross and that's just the way things are.
25
“Start from the beginning,” Ty says with a Marlboro hanging out of the corner of his mouth and a box of takeout in his hands. I'm sitting across from him at this tiny, little bistro set that's so rusty I can't even tell what it might've looked like before. Ty says it came with the apartment and that it was this way when he moved in. He says it was the only thing he didn't throw away when he cleaned. “I mean the beginning-beginning. Start when you were born.”
“You really want to go back that far?” I ask with a sigh. Ty is right. This curry is amazing. It tastes like a hundred countries and a thousand plants and deserts and bazaars and all sorts of other strange, wonderful things. He's also right about the meat. I don't know what it is, and I don't want to know. It better not be cat. I take a sip of my beer and grab the cigarette from Ty's mouth. “Fine, but first, I want to know what your chance is. This is my last one, so if I'm going to trade it for yours, I want to know what I'm getting.”
“You're getting a fucked up mess,” Ty says as he twirls his plastic fork around in his food.
“Good, then it's an even trade.” Ty smiles and we both turn our heads as a couple police cars flash past, brightening up the darkness on this side of the city for just a moment before they disappear. From here, Ty and I have a view of all the disturbing nightlife that calls this place home. I see hookers on the corner and drug dealers in the alleys, but above it all, I see the city stretching away, rising and falling, old buildings mixing with new. It's pretty if you tilt your head to the side and squint. It's all about perspective. “But what's it about? How do I know I can trust you with mine?”
“I meant to tell you, before, about the phone, that I've never left a picture on it that long.”
“You're changing the subject,” I tell him as I lean back and let the cool breeze tease along my skin. Soon, it's going to be unbearably cold out here, but for now, it's just right.
“Even after you called me a whore, I left it up. I've left it up this whole time.”
“Why?”
“I don't know.”
More silence.
“I was born approximately twenty-one years ago in a dingy, little hospital in some Midwest dump.” Ty grins and steals the cigarette back from me. “My mother was young, eighteen I think. She had my sister, Beth, when she was sixteen.” I raise my hand up for him to see and he presses his palm against it, rings and all. My heart flutters strangely and for a moment, I can't breath. I curl my fingers around his and manually open my chest for air. It isn't easy. I point to my thumb first and then to each subsequent finger. “Beth, me, Jade, Zella, India.” I pause and hold up my other hand. Ty takes this, too. I don't know why he keeps touching me like this, but I might have to ask him to stop. It's too confusing, too … I don't even know. Just too. Too. Too. Too. “Lettie, Lorri,” I finish as I squeeze his hand with mine. When I'm finished, we both pull away at the same moment and focus our eyes on the parking lot. There's a couple with a baby down there, trying to figure out how to get a car seat into the back of their dinky, little sedan.
“Seven girls, five fathers.” Ty doesn't judge me which is nice. He just sits there and listens, sipping his beer and smoking his cigarette. I love the way the wind plays with his hair, teases his face with it and curls it gently with its fingers. It's poetic somehow. “My mom got married to my dad when she was pregnant with Beth. Then they had me and then Jade and then Zella.” I sigh. “But my mom cheated. A lot. Constantly.” I hold out my hands, and I notice that they're shaking again. I grab my beer and hold it so that I have something to do with at least one of them. That way, maybe Ty won't notice. “I think my therapist was dead wrong about everything,” I tell Ty with a small smile. “Maybe because I didn't tell her the whole story?”
“Or maybe therapists just suck?” Ty adds. I laugh, but it sounds hollow and empty. Recanting this story is not the easiest thing for me, but it's part of the process, part of this whole healing binge that Ty has just started me on, this path through thorns and rocks and swamps, this path that isn't easy but that has to be traveled. If not, I doubt I'll make it long enough to get my degree.
“I have 'mommy' issues, Ty. If there's anything that's wrong with me, that's it.” I close my eyes and try to remember what it was like to be at home, with Mom hating Dad and Dad despising Mom and all of us in the middle of something we didn't understand. My mind paints me a nice picture, depicts the events and the scenes and the faces the way they should be, but I know it's not real. I don't really remember the way it all went down. “Jade was not my father's daughter, not biologically, but he loved her anyway.” I pause and a bit of something comes into my head. Custody. Was that what it all boiled down to? Is that why my father died? I swallow hard and Ty can tell that's something's wrong.
“Are you okay, Never.”
Tears prick my eyes.
“I can't do this,” I say and Ty leans over, puts his hand on my knee and just waits. That's the one plus side of hanging out with other tortured souls. They know when to press, when to stay quiet, and when to stop. Usually.
“You can,” Ty whispers, but I've kept my past locked away for so long that opening it up has opened me up. It's burst out before I was completely ready and torn me to shreds. I drop my beer to the pavement of the patio where it crashes into a million pieces, just like me. I'm breaking, cracking, splitting. I had thought, at first, that Ty's voice could slither into my psyche and rip me apart, but now that he's sitting there across from me and speaking so softly that I can barely hear him, I know that that isn't true, not entirely. He has that ability, sure. He has it because I'm attracted to him, like there's this magnetic force between us pulling us together and pushing us apart. He has it because I'm so sure that he could break me if he wanted to. That's the part I was right about. What I was wrong about was Rick. Rick could not have glued me together like I'd imagined. He couldn't have because his pull wasn't strong enough, not like Ty's. Ty's. Ty McCabe's.
I gasp like I'm coming up for air, and suddenly, I'm just sitting there with these big, fat tears rolling down my face. I think my nose is running, too, and I'm hiccuping, finding it hard to stop my hands from shaking so bad that they hurt.
“Never,” Ty says as he pulls me off my chair and onto his lap. He wraps his arms around me and holds me while I cry. And cry. And cry.
I cry into Ty's perfect shoulder and breathe in the scent of tobacco on his shirt. I run my fingers through his soft, soft hair, and I wait for the feelings to subside, to die down, to relax into me instead of take over me. At first it doesn't seem as if they're going to. Normally, in this situation, I would look for someone to have sex with, but I know I can't do that anymore. If I want to deal with my past instead of just bury it, I have to let shit sit with me for awhile.
“Tell me about Noah,” Ty says and I laugh through my tears. “That's better,” he says as I sit back and he runs his thumb under my swollen eyelids. “That's the sound I want to hear.”
“Scoping out the competition?”
“There is no competition,” Ty says and the words, I think, are fiercer than he meant them to be. What the hell? Ty smiles and moves on as if he hadn't said that. “So. Noah Scott. Was he bigger than me?”
“Ty,” I say, but it's funny enough that I laugh a little bit, that I pull back from my fears enough that I can breathe, that I can speak without hiccuping. “I don't remember,” I tell him honestly. “What I do remember is that the first boy I ever loved had blue eyes and blonde hair. He had a perfect smile and a soft touch. He's studying business now,” I add as an afterthought. I can look at Noah online, spy at him though rose colored glasses, see what he wants me to see, but I can't really know what's going on with him, if he missed me after I left, how he felt when he woke up alone and found my note. “We started dating freshman year of high school,” I tell Ty, wondering vaguely what he was like in school. If we'd found each other then, would we have suffered like this? Did we need all
of this pain and hurt to make us who we are or would we have fallen together like a fairytale couple, gotten married, had kids? “We dated up until I left. He used to write me poems.” Ty smiles.
“Is that why you hated it when I tried to quote you poetry?”
“Noah always had his own words. I guess I can't stop comparing everyone I meet to him.”
“Why not just call him?” Ty asks as if the solution is that simple, as if I can just pick a phone and call a boy I haven't seen in five years.
“That didn't go over so well with Beth,” I say. I have over a hundred missed calls on my phone now. I looked when I was in the bathroom earlier. I've thrown my sister a line, and it's only a matter of time until she finds me. “My last name isn't Ross by the way.” I pause. “Well, it is now, legally. I was born Never Regali.”
“Ah,” Ty says, still wrapped around me, chin resting on my shoulder. This is a rare thing for me, snuggling a guy like this. I tell this to Ty.
“I haven't had anyone hold me since Noah.”
“Was he your first?” Ty asks and, determined to tell him the truth, I answer honestly.
“Yes.”
“Why did you leave?” Ty asks, digging straight down through all the bullshit to the root of the problem, to the core of my issues and my pain, to the seed that started it all.
“You saw the video,” I tell Ty. “You heard her announce her engagement?” He nods. “Well,” I say as I wait for Ty to light a cigarette. It's a Djarum Black this time, and without hesitation, I pluck it from his fingers. Smoke kills, but secrets kill faster, and if I'm going to say this aloud, for the third time in my life, I'm going to need it. “The man she was planning on marrying was the one who killed my father.”
26
Ty doesn't ask me to explain anymore after that, but I do anyway. I tell him how my father was murdered, how he was strangled from behind for eight long minutes. Six minutes where I sat and did nothing, just watched as the man that loved me, that I loved back, died with his eyes glassy and his face purple, choking on vomit and bile. I've blocked a lot of it out, fortunately, or I might not just be a sex addict. I might be a whole lot worse. I've forgotten the gurgling sounds that he made as he died, and the way his body slumped to the floor. I forgot the long hours where I sat there, still as a statue with my arms wrapped around my knees.
Tasting Never (Never say Never) Page 11