Colbie looked at me, surprised. “Wow, I wasn’t expecting that answer.”
I tilted my head and shrugged. “Just the truth. She deserved more from me than she got, and then she died, and I’ll never be able to give her that.”
She hesitated a long moment, and then her palm skated down the inside of my thigh to my knee and back up, closer to my groin, this time. “So if you were ever in a real relationship again . . .?”
I knew what she was getting at, what she was asking me. “I’d do things a lot differently. I got no problem being real about what I’m feeling. Maybe it’s being older, realizing life is too damn short to act tough when you don’t gotta be tough.”
“So you can be sweet and tender, is that what you’re saying?” she asked, with a wink and a twinkle in her stormy gray eyes.
I smirked. Slid my palm a little higher, and now my hand was fully under her skirt, up to midthigh, and her skin was silky soft and luscious and warm. “I can be a lot of things that might surprise you, babe.”
“Like what?”
“If I told you, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise, now would it?”
She snorted. “Cop out.”
“Hey, I’ve surprised you quite a bit since we first met, haven’t I?”
She conceded the point with a tilted nod of her head, her mahogany locks swaying. “I guess you’re right.”
“I can’t give away all my surprises right off the bat, can I?”
“Fine, fine,” she said with a laugh. “So, change of subject. Tell me about the virgin.”
I tilted my head back and blew out a sigh. “You’re sure you want to hear about this?”
She nodded. “Yes, I do. I’m curious.”
“And you’ll tell me something about yourself in return?”
She nodded again. “I will. Something revealing and personal of a sexual nature.”
I held out my hand, and she took it in hers, and we shook.
“All right, then. Here it goes. I was thirty-two at the time. Working for the FBI in the forensics department. I was a field operative, one who went to the crime scene and figured out what happened based on the evidence. Kinda like Dexter, except I wasn’t a secret serial killer. No attachments. I’d just finished a particularly gruesome triple homicide case, and I went to a bar to have a few drinks and see if I could find some company for the night. Like I said, the case I’d just helped close had been pretty nasty, and I’d put in a good eighty hours of work the previous week, so I was . . . not really looking for someone chatty, you know? I just wanted to have some fun and spend the weekend catching up on sleep.” I realized, at that moment, that after shaking hands in agreement, neither of us had let go, so we were holding hands, my right in her left, with my other hand under her skirt on her bare thigh, and her other hand on my leg—lots of touching, none of it overtly sexual. Very weird for me. “So . . . two, three drinks in, I still hadn’t scoped anyone. All the girls in the bar were either clearly with someone or in a group. I’ve discovered it’s always more trouble than it’s worth to try and separate one particular chick out of a group. I was losing hope and getting ready to just toss it in and go home. And then I saw her. Young, maybe twenty-one, twenty-two, really young. A lot younger than I usually go for, but for sure legal. Pretty, sweet looking, and all alone. She was wearing this dress, not sure what you’d call it, kind of a sundress or something. Cute, flowers on it, midthigh length, with a belt and a cardigan over it. I don’t know why I remember what she was wearing, or why it should be significant, but it just . . . was. Her outfit wasn’t meant for anyone but her, meant to be comfortable and pretty. She was alone, like I said, sitting at the bar, nursing a glass of white wine. Long, shiny blonde hair. Cute—really cute, really pretty . . . and obviously lonely. Now, that shit is not my type. If I’m at the bar trying to score a hookup, I go for the obvious types, the easy pickings. The kinda girl you’d clearly expect to be able to pick up at a bar for quick and easy one-night company, okay? Just the facts.”
“And this girl was way outside that type.”
I nodded. “Way, way outside it. Probably wasn’t even looking for company on the stool next to her, let alone what I had in mind. I’m still not sure what came over me. I was in a shitty mood, I was exhausted, I was frustrated, and I was horny. I’d been too busy that week for anything but work, so all I really wanted, to be blunt, was to get my rocks off and then sleep for twelve hours. So why did I sit down next to a sad, lonely, cute girl? I don’t do cute. Cute is a death sentence. Cute is . . . just no. But there I was. I bought her a glass of wine, and I struck up a conversation and ended up closing the bar with her. Just talking. We didn’t even drink that much, or at least I didn’t. She did, though. So by the time the bar closed, she was blackout drunk and couldn’t even tell me her own name, much less where she lived. So, I—”
Colbie eyed me sidelong, eyes narrowed. “Puck. You didn’t.”
I stared at her, not bothering to disguise my anger. “Fuck no! Jesus, Colbie.”
She raised both hands in a gesture of apology. “Hey, we don’t know each other very well.”
“If you can’t see by now that I’m not the type of guy to rape a blackout drunk chick, then either you’re a terrible judge of character, or I come across as a lot more of a skeezy shit-ball than I thought.”
“Or maybe I was feeling you out, seeing how you’d react to the insinuation.” She shrugged and smirked at me. “The vehemence of your response goes a lot farther in telling me about what kind of guy you are than anything else you might say.”
I blew out a calming breath. “I’m glad I passed your test, in that case.”
She reached out and trailed a finger through my beard. “So. Lonely drunk girl . . . what’d you do?”
“Took her back to my place. I couldn’t just leave her there.”
“You could have gotten her address from her purse.”
I cocked my head to the side. “I suppose. But everything life has taught me says to never ever dig in a woman’s purse. Especially one I don’t know.”
“You said you’d been talking to her most of the night.”
“Doesn’t mean I knew her well enough to go hunting in her purse.” I waved my hand. “Point is, I put her in my bed, made sure she wasn’t gonna choke on her own vomit, and then set some Gatorade and Tylenol on the bedside table.”
“What did you guys talk about?”
I waved a hand. “Just . . . random bullshit. Politics, movies, music, surface shit. Nothing deep, nothing about ourselves.” I paused. “The only reason I brought her to my place was because it seemed safest. Even if I had gotten her address, she was so clobbered she would have needed monitoring, and she’d mentioned that she lived alone. I slept on the couch and got up a few times to check on her, make sure she hadn’t upchucked in her sleep.”
“So then in the morning . . .”
I hesitated. “In the morning . . . she woke up at like eleven, and I made coffee, and we had a super awkward conversation. The first thing I told her was that, in case the fact that she’d woken up completely clothed wasn’t enough of an indication, she’d passed out in the cab, and I’d tossed her in bed and that was that. I wasn’t sure what kind of girl she was, if she’d assume we’d banged or be worried about it . . . I just wasn’t sure. Like I said, we hadn’t discussed ourselves, like at all. She seemed embarrassed, but also upset, still.”
“Not seeing where this is going, to be honest.”
“Eventually, I flat out asked her what was wrong.” I let the silence hang for a moment, thinking back. “She didn’t answer for a long time. When she did, it was to tell me that she’d planned on getting drunk, going home, and killing herself.”
“Holy shit. Why?”
“That’s verbatim what I said, actually. She told me she was twenty-one, a virgin, and had terminal cancer.”
“Oh my god,” Colbie breathed.
I nodded. “Now you see where it’s going.”
She sighed. “I
think so, yeah.”
“She reached up and pulled her wig off, because I guess she could tell that I was feeling a little skeptical, maybe. She didn’t look sick, you know? When she took the wig off, she was completely bald.”
“Jeez. What did you do?”
“What does anyone do in that situation?” I laughed. “I completely blanked. Froze. Like . . . what was I supposed to say? Ask how long she has left? Seems cold, to me.”
Colbie nodded. “I can see the difficulty.”
“At that point, I experienced what still remains the longest, most tense, most awkward silence of my life. I’m not an emotionally comforting sort of guy, you know? I’m still not, and I was even less so, then. I was still pretty hurt and pissed off and fucked up over Raquel, wasn’t really in a place where I knew how to comfort a pissed off dying girl.”
“So what happened?”
“She asked if I’d take her home, so I did, and that was that, I thought.” I glanced at Colbie. “This is where it gets interesting. Two months pass, I pretty much forget about her. Then the door buzzer thing goes off at like three in the morning, Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, whatever you want to call it. I answer the door in a pair of underwear, because what the fuck? Nobody I knew even knew where I lived. It was her, the girl. I never got her name, and she never offered. By the time morning came around and she was admitting to being terminal and a virgin, it seemed kind of late to be like, ‘oh hey, by the way, what’s your name?’ You know? So I never got her name. Then she shows up at my door at three in the morning. She’s crying. No wig, a lot thinner, looked sick this time.”
“God, Puck.”
I nod. “So, I bring her inside, and she sits on my couch, and says she has a favor to ask.” I pause, and then pitch my voice high. “‘You can’t say no, because I’m dying, and you’re not allowed to deny a dying person their last request.’ That’s what she said to me, verbatim.”
“Dear god.”
“Yeah, pretty much. So I’m like, ‘all right, what’s your request?’ She tells me she doesn’t want to die a virgin. She’d been waiting for the right guy, the right time, and then she got sick, and it would be cruel at that point to get involved with someone emotionally. Apparently there was a guy, but she’d pretended she wasn’t in love with him so he wouldn’t get all invested with a dead girl walking. That was her phrase—dead girl walking.”
“This sounds like a novel.”
“Felt like one,” I said. “So I tell her I assumed she wanted me to . . . be the one. And she just nodded. My head was spinning. Like, what the fuck? What was I supposed to do? Again, I was at a complete loss. She said . . . she didn’t know my name, and I didn’t know hers, and she wanted it to stay like that. She didn’t want me to pretend feelings, don’t make it weird. But she also didn’t want to just . . . get it over with, right? She wanted to enjoy it, but keep it impersonal to a degree.”
“Goddamn, Puck.”
“So, I agreed. Like she said, I couldn’t be like, no, I’m not doing that. I mean, it felt fucked up, you know? But, at the same time, if you look at it from another perspective, it didn’t have to be that much different than any other random hook-up. I just had to put aside the fact of her terminal illness and just pretend she was . . . just some nameless chick I’d picked up at the bar.”
“And that’s what you did?”
I nodded. “I did.”
Colbie was silent for a while. “So?”
I eyed her. “So . . . what?”
She snorted. “You can’t stop now. What happened?”
I blinked. “Um, well . . . I slept with her.”
“And?”
“And what?” I paused. “What is it you want to hear? A play by play?”
“Was it good? Was it hot?”
“It was . . . yeah. It was good. It was hot. I told her the only way I could make sure she had a good experience was if we had sex more than once. I’d never been with a virgin, but I knew enough to know the first time was never very good. And I didn’t want her first time to be her only time, and have it be . . . anything less than memorable, I guess. So we started out kissing. Good place to start, right? The girl could kiss, too. I mean, damn. She had that shit down. I let her just sort of . . . dictate things, to start with. Figure out whether she really wanted to carry through with it, you know?” I hesitated, feeling oddly protective of the details. “She was . . . eager. After that first time, she was . . . insatiable. She stayed with me for two days. I called off work, said I had a family crisis to deal with. A boldface lie, but whatever. I made sure she had the time of her life. We never exchanged names, and we never talked about our pasts. Basically, we spent the better part of forty-eight hours eating, fucking, and sleeping.”
“Wow.”
I shrugged. “I . . . I wasn’t ever quite able to completely forget . . . the circumstances, but I like to think she was able to do that for those two days.”
“How’d it end?”
“I woke up, the morning of the third day, and she was in my bathroom, sick. She asked me to call her cab, so I did. She kissed me, told me thank you for giving her a priceless gift, and then left.”
Colbie was silent for a while and then sighed. “And you never saw her again?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Well, not in person. I was reading the local newspaper one morning about a month later, and I was trying to fold the fucking thing so I could read the comics, and the obituary section fell out. I saw her face.” I paused, tugging on my beard. “I put the paper down before I could read anything about her. Threw the paper away and went to work.”
I could tell this threw Colbie. “Why? You didn’t want to know? Not even her name?”
“I wanted to know more than anything. But her request was that she remain anonymous to me.”
“Why do you think that was?”
“I don’t know. It’s something I think about, sometimes.” I shrugged. “My best guess is that she wanted me to remember the time we spent together for what it was, rather than associating it her with her life. She didn’t want to become some mythic, tragic figure for me.”
“Is that how you see her?”
I shook my head. “Honestly, no. It worked. I know absolutely nothing about her. All I know, all I remember, is two days of what was, if I’m honest, really great sex. When I start to feel nostalgic or start to put some kind of tragic angle on my feelings toward her, I think about those two days spent naked, making her feel things she’d never felt before. I think about the sex, and I make it about that. Because I like to think that’s what she wanted. And also because otherwise, I might go a little crazy over the whole thing.”
Colbie eyed me thoughtfully, and I waited for her to ask the questions I could see percolating behind her eyes. “So was it the best sex you’ve ever had?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“No?”
I shook my head again. “If I said yes, I’d be romanticizing it. It wasn’t the best ever. It’s up there, but not the best.”
“So who was the best?”
I laughed. “You don’t mind asking the hard shit, do you?”
She laughed with me. “Hell no. That’s how you get to the good stuff. And if someone isn’t willing to answer the hard questions, they’re not worth my time.”
I tilted my head. “How do you figure?”
“Life is too short for bullshit, Puck. I OD’d, I told you that. I realized then that, as cliché as it sounds, life is what you make of it. After that, I became aggressive about going after what I wanted, and ever since, I refuse to waste time on people who aren’t worth my attention. If you can’t be real with me, if you can’t be upfront with me, if you can’t handle me asking the hard shit, then what’s the point?”
I acceded the point with a grunted huh sound. “Fair enough. Well, then, I guess the answer would be . . . this chick named Maya. I met her on vacation and we spent a week together in a tiki hut, in bed. I think I had more sex in that week than any other
entire month. She was . . . fucking wild, man. Totally batshit crazy, like legit, she was a goddamn lunatic, but she was a fuckin’ wildcat in the sack.” I squeezed Colbie’s thigh. “Your turn.”
“Okay, I guess it’s only fair. So, something revealing and personal of a sexual nature.” She twisted a strand of my beard around her finger and tugged on it; I debated telling her that the way she tugged on my beard was a crazy-ass turn on, but decided to leave that tidbit for later. “Okay, I’ve got it. So it’s no secret that smack junkies will do just about anything for a hit, right? I’m sure you’re familiar with the stereotype, right? Well, I made a rule for myself that I’d never use sex as a tool, no matter how desperate I got. And I never did. Even when I was in the depths of withdrawal desperation, I refused to trade sex for a hit. I was terrified of getting trapped in prostitution, because that was something I saw all too frequently. There was a group of us, homeless people, junkies, alkies—the dregs, the losers, the . . . the castoffs and the lost, you know? We lived in this little community under an overpass. It was hell, but it was better than an alley, or somewhere alone. I wouldn’t call any of those people friends, really, but we looked out for each other, to a degree. A lot of the women, they’d get desperate, and they’d turn a trick to get money for the next hit, and then they’d need another hit, and the only way they could get money for another hit was turning another trick. It turned into a trap, and I guess I always held out hope, deep down, that I’d figure some way out. Part of me didn’t want to believe that was really my life, or something like that. But I just . . . I refused. I’d been a virgin when my uncle raped me, and I think that helped make it easy to never let that become a way out. The only experience I had was rape, and it felt like even if I willingly let some guy fuck me in exchange for money or drugs, it’d still feel like rape, still be that same thing Uncle Craig had done.”
Puck: Alpha One Security Book 4 Page 10