by Kristen Mae
He jogs over as I climb the steps to the dorm. He’s wearing a blue hoodie I haven’t seen before, soft and warm-looking. “Hey, Mal, happy New Year!”
“Hey, Rome.” He opens his arms wide and I let him hug me, not even thinking about my damp clothes. He smells good—clean and herbal and solidly masculine.
“Oh, shit, is that sweat?” He’s smiling, the laughter of his friends still clinging to him like a residue of contentment. It’s so different from my own mood that I can’t make sense of it.
“I went swimming,” I say, and it only hits me after the words are out how odd that sounds, to announce that I went swimming in January.
He’s still smiling, but his brow is knit with confusion. “Come again?”
“There’s a river if you follow the trail at the end of that street over there…” I gesture half-heartedly.
“Oh.” His shoulders visibly slump. “You went with Garrett?”
“Alone.” I look over Rome’s shoulder at the group of kids behind him, worried they heard. I feel protective of this secret. The river, the manatees, the magic, Garrett. Everything about Garrett.
Rome turns and looks too, then faces me again. “But, Garrett…are you still…?”
I nod even though I’m not sure.
He nods too, pursing his lips, flaring his nostrils a little—reluctant but unsurprised acceptance, like Well, what did I expect?
“I’m going to go upstairs now,” I say.
“It okay if I walk up with you?”
I shrug.
We take the stairs, and already I’m thinking I don’t want him here, I don’t want him being this great friend while I wait for Garrett to call. Because that’s all I’m doing: waiting for Garrett to initiate those last steps that will finally break me.
Rome follows me into my room. Daphne isn’t here. I pull my wet clothes off without even thinking, and Rome makes a little noise behind me, like a gasp, and I realize I’m behaving oddly, not caring about the right things. “Sorry,” I tell him.
His hand encircles my wrist and I swivel and face him, give his eyes my whole naked body just to see what he’ll do. Just to tease him. And he doesn’t even react, like, what is he, some kind of angel who can’t see the wrong in me? Can’t he stand up for himself? Can’t he demand to be loved in return? But no, I can tell by his face, he’ll let me hurt him and still he’ll stand there and stare at me like this, all imploring, his brown eyes shiny like a puppy’s though he’s not looking at my body—his eyes stay right on mine.
“Rome,” I say, pulling my wrist away.
“Something’s wrong with you. You’re…not right in the eyes.” His face is a cloud of worry.
“I’m fine.”
“Malory, I don’t know what to do here.” He sits on my bed and puts his head in his hands, and I just stand there in the middle of my room, naked, staring at him. After a few moments he lifts his head to look back at me, but, again, only at my eyes. “I thought the break might help, that going home would be good for you, but now I see you with this…emptiness, and you just ripping your clothes off like I’m not even here—”
I snort. “You’ve seen me naked before.”
“It’s different, and you know it. I know something is wrong, and I’m trying to think, trying to figure out what’s the best thing to do for you…”
I laugh, and it sounds maniacal—even I can hear how nuts I am. “Come on, Rome, it’s not your job to look out for me.”
He slaps his thighs. “Then whose job is it? Who else gives a fuck what’s happening to you? You sure as fuck don’t. Jesus Christ, swimming in the freezing ass river in the middle of January, what the fuck?” He takes his hat off and smashes it in his hands.
“Rome, I was running. I was hot.” But I’m thinking of the shivers that wracked my body as I sank into the water. I should have just stayed there and let myself slip away. It would have been peaceful. I pull on a pair of underwear, shorts, a T-shirt, and sit next to Rome. I want to say something reassuring, but I know there is nothing I could say to ease his fears. Because his fears are legitimate; he’s right to worry about me. So I just sit there pushing and pushing at my cuticles, rubbing away something that isn’t even there.
“Malory,” he says. “I hope you get that I’m not trying to…to have a relationship with you. I can accept being only your friend. But I thought what we did”—he crushes his hat again, almost punches it—“ah, fuck, I thought I could make you see that it doesn’t have to be Garrett’s way. It doesn’t have to be with me, but it doesn’t have to be the way it is…with him.”
I stare at him for a minute, trying to absorb his words. Trying to find a way in my head to crave him, or to crave someone else, or to crave anything else, besides Garrett—besides the pain. And I think maybe I could, maybe I could be this other version of Malory where I’m truly confident, and not just the high-achieving façade of some failure who only succeeds by flukes, who has to use sex to feel loved, who wasn’t observant enough to notice her own mother planning her death.
Who was not even enough reason for that mother to want to live.
But as I spin through these thoughts, I realize I’ve already lost the confident, happy, alive version of Malory. There is no other version of me. This deeply flawed, inherently bad version is the only Malory there is left.
I still haven’t responded to Rome. I must look vacant and ghostly to him, and as I look down at my own arms and legs, I realize that they feel vacant too—uninhabited, drained of life.
“God,” he says, laying his head in his hands with a deep sigh. “I fucking hate how I feel about you.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Monday morning: I want you to come over tonight.
As if I am brave and feisty and self-assured, I text back, Sure I’m invited?
Come when you get out of class.
He still wants me, that cocky bastard, fuck yeah, so I’m pulling on my jeans and shrugging myself into a sweater and rolling my cello out the door. Go to class! Study hard! Practice! I’m all smiles today. I play through my entire audition during my lesson and Yarvik says, “Well, it must have done you some good to go home and see your family. You seem like a whole new person today, back to your old self.”
I grin at her. “I do have a lovely family.” I think back to that old cherished memory of the four of us around the dining table with the black window behind me, how little Liza with her squeaky voice filled me with untenable, pointless hope. I think of how I too appear one way but am something entirely different from what people see—just like my mother. Everyone is so drunk on hope that they can’t recognize the darkness lurking behind the lies. Hope is an illusion, just like in Liza’s song. Nothing is ever as it seems, so what’s the fucking point?
The day flies by. I see Rome on my way out of the dorm that evening, and I suppose he knows where I’m going because his eyes look sad.
“Don’t worry, Rome, it won’t be like this forever,” I tell him as I breeze by. I’m such a bitch.
By the time I’m standing on Garrett’s front stoop, knocking lightly on his door, the fluttering in my belly is less like butterflies and more like bats. My throat is tight with the memories of his fingers wrapped around it, and between my legs…well, there is the proof that I wanted this all along. I’m practically rocking on my heels with anticipation.
The door swings open: Superman with his wild ice eyes and his dimpled smirk. His gaze slithers over me like a serpent, checking me out—checking me out to see if all is going according to plan. Is there a plan? I search his eyes to see if I can discern one, but there is only cold.
“What do you want?” I ask him, and the sly upturn of his mouth tells me it was the right thing to say, exactly the right thing in exactly the right tone, submissive but laden with innuendo—violent innuendo.
He holds the door open a little wider and steps back so that I can come inside. It’s just as cold inside as outside, and I cross my arms over myself and look around, inspecting the pl
ace as if it’s my first time here. Nothing has changed.
I wander across the living room and into the kitchen, tense with hypervigilance, and I realize I’m expecting to find evidence of the blonde he fucked. Jealousy singes the nerves beneath my skin, takes my breath away. I have to close my eyes to ward off the feeling. I know he’s not mine—I am his, not the other way around. It doesn’t go both ways.
“Am I at least first?” I ask him suddenly.
“First?” He raises an eyebrow at me.
“Am I your favorite? Do I do enough? Am I enough?”
A little smile. He moves toward me, slides a hand between my arm and my waist, snakes it around my back and presses me to him. He’s hard. When he looks at me like that, I’m not sure I even care whether or not I’m his favorite. I’m so coiled with desire that I’m ready to cry.
He bends slowly, brings his mouth to my neck, and sucks gently there. Then he moves his lips down, kissing every place his hand touched the last time I saw him, and I can’t tell if he’s a little bit sorry and this is his way of communicating that, or if these kisses are merely a reminder that my neck is his possession and I’d better not forget it.
I sigh, relaxing under his touch.
He pulls my sweater up and over my head, and I lift my arms to help even though I know it will make me cold. “So you went home to see your family?” he asks.
“What’s left of it, yes.”
“Take your jeans off,” he says.
I unbutton.
“What was it like? How did you feel?”
“It was beautiful. My sister…” My tongue solidifies. I can’t say anything about Liza. “It was okay. Peaceful. I practiced a ton.”
I’ve slid my jeans off now and his hand is between my legs, over my underwear, and he’s drawing his index finger back and forth along my center, feeling the wetness already there. “You practiced? For the audition?” He sounds surprised.
“Every piece I’ve ever played,” I say, and I grab his hand and press it roughly to myself, clamp my legs around his fingers and tremble, lifting my eyes to his. He’s smirking again, so fucking smug, this guy.
“You just can’t wait, can you?” he says, and I can’t speak anymore, but I shake my head no. No, I can’t wait.
He backs me up until I bump into the kitchen counter, and when I climb up I start shifting to pull down my underwear, but no, he wants me to keep it on this time. He grabs the fabric and bunches it together, then pulls it upward into my crack, rubbing me and exposing me at the same time. “Ah, fuck,” I hear myself saying, and he says, “Keep doing it to yourself,” and he steps away from me, pulls a chair from the kitchen table and turns it so he can sit and watch.
I’m hot all over, boiling hot, writhing with the need to please him—god, I missed this—and I grab my underwear just like he commanded and yank upward so that the fabric is centered where it needs to be, and then I’m totally sliming it, holy shit, I must look like such a whore. I can see the strain in his face now, his jaw tightening and his nostrils flaring and I hear myself talking but it’s like it’s not coming from me: “Enjoying the show, Garrett? You like watching me get myself off?”
At my words, his features rearrange themselves into something more placid, more bored, than what I saw a moment ago. “Make yourself come,” he says, and those words are damn near all I need. I work the fabric against my wetness and when that’s not enough I slide a couple of fingers in too, spread my legs wider because something about being exposed and spread for him makes it better, makes me that much dirtier, and soon I’m coming hard, shuddering and falling apart atop Garrett’s kitchen counter, just like the first time. I go down on him while we’re in there, turn my eyes up at him and gag myself with the effort of it, swallowing easily and hungrily when he’s ready, and he makes a fist in my hair, pulling so hard that I let out a muffled cry as I finish him.
Afterward, we shower together, all close and clean and dignified, then towel off, brush our teeth, and go to bed naked. It’s almost like we’re an honest-to-god couple the way we touch each other so politely, snuggle like a pair of lovebirds. I like how we seem almost normal when we most certainly are not. I like that we are beautiful, but at the same time, everything is wrong with us.
He tells me about his mother then, a surprise; I’ve gotten used to the idea that he cares only for himself. And he moves me with his talk of her, so much that I find myself jealous of her, of the one woman who has conjured love from this man. How does she do it? Is it biology? Or is he merely bound by obligation, and to him, that is the same as love?
“A whole turkey dinner,” he’s saying, his voice filled with awe, “and with my uncles and their families there, too, probably twenty people. You would never have known she was hurting.”
I press my cheek against his solid, muscled chest and trace a line up his abdomen with the tip of my finger. “You’re a good son,” I say.
“What did you do to celebrate Christmas? Any family get-togethers?”
I flatten my hand against his stomach. He is so hard beneath this soft skin. “My Aunt Bonnie was there with my sister and me. No special dinners or anything. With three people it would be…weird.” And wrong, I think, without my mother.
As if he can read my mind, Garrett says, “You must miss your mother very much around the holidays.”
My chest constricts. It feels odd, his empathy, as out of place as if he’s wandered into a barn wearing a tuxedo. And though I could not talk about Liza before, now I want to play along. I want to believe he has even the tiniest spark of real feeling for me. “I do miss my mother. So much. Liza has a picture of her on her dresser, the only picture of Mom in the house. But she gave me an album with tons of pictures of Mom in it. It’s beautiful.”
He strokes my hair. We haven’t talked like this since the early days when we first got together. Was it too much sex between the two of us, is that all? Did I dehumanize myself acting like such a whore? Did I dehumanize him?
“You said before that you thought your dad influenced her…”
And now my body feels like it’s being filled up with a slow-rolling cloud, dense and patient and black.
He crosses his arms behind his head, shifts a little like he’s trying to get comfy. “Did he ever try to influence you? Did he…do with you or your sister what he did to your mom?”
You’re ordinary. Not the kind of person anyone would miss.
If you tell, you will regret it.
I’ve grown cold again, shivering cold. It is not death that is scary, but rather the burgeoning awareness that a seed has been planted in my mind and has grown there like a weed, stretching deep roots into the soil of my subconscious, curling and choking out everything else. I know it will feel better not to be alive, but it is unbearable to know that this has been done to me, that the person I was supposed to be never got to exist. My father took my mother’s life away. Now he’s taking mine.
“He did,” I whisper. “My father…he’d sit on the floor by my bed at night and say ugly things. I think he tried it with Liza too, but something about her…she’s unbreakable. She’d probably say I was the strong one, but she’d be wrong.”
I do not tell Garrett about the time I grabbed my father’s wrist and threw his hand back at him. You can’t touch me like that. It was the only time I was ever strong, and it made my father meaner. To my mother.
“From the moment I laid eyes on you,” Garrett says, “I thought you would be someone I could break.”
I shiver again. It cuts me to the bone for him to put it out there like that—to confirm that he has known this all along.
“It wasn’t really your father’s doing, though,” Garrett says. “Some are naturally weak, and some are naturally strong. Liza will be fine no matter what happens; she’s a survivor.” He lowers his voice and leans in close. “Your mother was not. You are not.”
Not my mother. My heart swells with rage, my teeth are chattering now, and I jerk and twist just as Garrett’s hand com
es up between my legs and cups me roughly, and then his fingers start to probe, searching, testing. Impossibly, I am wet and ready, sopping, as if him talking about my unworthiness—my mother’s unworthiness—has been the greatest turn-on. I push him away, this fucker, talking about my mother like that, fuck him, but he’s on top of me in a heartbeat, pinning me to the bed.
“You’re wrong, Garrett. My mother was—”
“Was probably just like you, Malory. Think about how much you love me to hurt you.” He jabs me hard between the legs with I don’t know how many fingers, and I buck and try to kick but he’s got all his weight on me, his free hand pinning my arms. I twist my face toward his wrist and try to bite, but I snap only air. He has my mother all wrong. My father took his frustration with me out on her. It’s not that she was weak. It was me. It was my fault. Tears squeeze from my eyes, but I buck and kick again, trying to throw Garrett off me.
“Oh,” he says, laughing. “Feisty little whore, are we, now that I’ve insulted your mother?” He drives himself into me, hard and deep—no condom, and I guess it doesn’t matter anymore—and I pull a hand free and push against his chest. He’s way too strong. I’m a twig compared to him—and yes, breakable.
He takes both of my wrists now and slams them against the mattress over my head, forcefully enough to jar me out of my fight.
“You know there’s no point in fighting me.” He leans in so close his mouth almost touches mine, his wintergreen breath overpowering, dissonant against the rot of his soul. “You know I’m going to fuck you if I want to fuck you. And…I think you even know, deep down, that you want it.”