Mixed Signals

by Alyssa Cole

  I hobbled away, struggling to maintain my grip on Danielle and my guitar. None of the people standing around offered to help. Greg had made it clear that I was not one of them, and they treated me as such. Danielle shifted against my side, and her eyes fluttered open to thin slits. “Large Marge, you saved me,” she whispered before going slack again. I felt the tears well up again. Saved her? I’d gotten her into this mess.

  With a pang of regret, I let my guitar drop gently to the ground, then hauled her up into a more manageable position.

  I realized that we had no ride—I couldn’t trust Devon after what Greg had just threatened me with—and I’d left my wire cutter along with the rest of my stuff. There would be no hot-wiring high jinks to save the day. The thought of dragging Danielle through a dangerous part of town made me want to vomit. I didn’t know what else to do, though.

  A familiar voice in front of me rang out as I started to walk away from my precious guitar and into what could be the worst night of my life.

  “Your first gig, and I had to find out through a third party?” I’d thought Devon had a great voice, but in that moment Edwin’s playful tone was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. “Not cool, Maggie. I think you’re letting your celebrity go to your head.”

  My heart filled with an emotion that it was too small to accommodate, a burst of happiness that could have passed for angina. I was happy for the pain because it was prompted by Edwin’s presence, and that meant Danielle and I were safe now.

  He gently gathered Danielle’s weight from my side and waited as I walked back and picked up my guitar. I thought he would say something to Greg and his acolytes, who watched with blank expressions, but he didn’t look at them at all. Simply turned and started heading in the opposite direction of the group. I followed him.

  As we moved away, a beer bottle landed by my foot and smashed against the broken-up concrete that was common in this part of town. I jumped, and hated myself for it, but Edwin kept walking.

  “Anything else comes flying this way, and I’ll break your fucking necks one by one.” His voice was as calm as when he’d greeted me, which made the threat that much creepier.

  Nothing else was thrown in our direction.

  “Pikachu sent me a text earlier saying you and Devon were fighting and she was worried about you. The network has been acting up, though, so I didn’t get it until a little bit ago.”

  God. Danielle had been worried about me, and I’d stopped paying attention to her as soon as I got the crowd’s attention. She’d certainly scored in the shitty friend department.

  Edwin’s truck was parked just around the corner. He loaded Danielle into the back and went to slam the door, but I stopped him before he did. With shaking hands, I pushed her jacket aside and gave her clothes a cursory check. Her jeans were buttoned and zipped, and her hat was the only thing askew. I pulled it down and straightened it.

  “I don’t think anything happened.” My voice sounded weird and my hands were shaking as I tucked Danielle’s jacket around her. An arm went around my shoulder—Edwin’s arm—and there was no wondering whether or not it felt right, no moment of ambivalence like I’d always experienced with Devon. I leaned into him and tried to block out all the horrifying thoughts that had played out in my imagination when I’d seen Danielle out of it and surrounded by a group of strange men. “Anything could have happened to her. Anything. And it would have been my fault.”

  Edwin’s warmth ensconced me from both sides now as he pulled me into his embrace. This wasn’t like the fleeting hugs he used to give me when visiting my family; there was a tenderness that was a testament to how close we’d grown over the past few weeks. He sighed and ran his hand down the back of my head and over my neck, sending a riot of confusing sparks colliding with the anger and fear already in my system.

  “Give me a second.” He turned and grabbed her wrist, looking at his watch and counting off. He pulled back her eyelids and did the various steps of a basic medical check I’d seen Gabriel perform a few times over the years. “Her vitals are fine. I think she needs to just sleep it off.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, stepping back and forth to keep the autumn frost from freezing me in place.

  “People having adverse reactions to drugs was kind of a big problem when I was a cadet. So yeah, I’m sure.”

  I let his words anchor me and my shaking subsided. Military experience could come in handy in unexpected ways, even if he didn’t like to discuss that part of his life.

  He hopped down and shut the door behind him. “We need to get out of here. One, you’re freezing, and two, I’m strong, but I actually can’t break, like, twelve necks in a row.”

  I barely registered anything about him helping me into the truck and tucking his sweatshirt around me, except for the moment the tip of his nose brushed against my jawline as he tried to buckle me in. I was still shaken up and just beginning to feel sick to my stomach, but that brief touch, accidental though it was, made me crave more. I wanted to be held and told it would be okay. Not by my mother, not by my brothers or Arden, but by a man who cared for me. In my twenty years, I’d never experienced the physical comfort provided by someone I needed. Edwin had given me a taste of it, and I wanted more.

  He got into the driver’s seat, but as if he could sense my need, he reached over and held my hand. He didn’t caress me or place my hand in his lap, like other guys would have. He simply let me hold on tight. He was just there.

  He reached his left hand around to awkwardly turn the key in the ignition, then clutched the wheel. “I understand that you’re upset. But that back there? That wasn’t your fault. Allocation of guilt is one subject I’m an expert in. It would have been the fault of whoever touched her, and the guys who stood around and let it happen.”

  His voice from a few weeks back flashed into my mind. I didn’t protect her.

  We drove in silence, but the thoughts whirling in my head needed release. My body felt tight with anger, with the need to tell him that thing I’d never talked about. The thing I’d treated as no big deal because, in this day and age, it wasn’t. “It would have been my fault, because I know what men are like. I usually don’t think about it, and I don’t let it affect me, but someone...a guy...tried to force himself on me. One day when I was coming home from my program.” The truck swerved just the tiniest bit. I only noticed because he was such a careful driver at all other times. I don’t know why, but it made me feel better that he was thrown for a loop. I certainly had been.

  “Maggie.” His grip tightened on mine, as if he was trying to pass something to me through his touch. Comfort. Strength.

  I took a deep breath. I wasn’t going to cry. “My parents’ van broke down. I knew how to fix it, but I didn’t have the tools I needed. One of my classmates, a guy who had been friendly to me, Kenny, offered to drop me off close to home since he passed near the cabin to get to his family’s house. I was wearing my cutest skirt that day, one with little birds in flight, because I’d felt so good about myself as I got dressed that morning.” The words got tangled in my throat then, testing my resolve not to cry. I’d never told anyone about this, except for Devon. The imaginary Devon I’d occasionally still talked to in my mind, not the guy he’d turned out to be in real life. “Kenny’s hand started creeping over to my leg while I was in the middle of talking about our last exam. He was still driving, but his hand went right up to my...you know, and he started moving his fingers.” Suddenly the potty mouth I’d been chided over was out of commission. In my memory, the story was much more graphic, but some self-defense mechanism compressed my words to their simplest form as they spilled out. Humiliation scalded me, even though I knew it wasn’t my fault. Part of that shame was because Edwin already knew how this story ended.

  “Before that, I’d always convinced myself that if a guy tried anything like that with me, I’d kill him. But I was so sh
ocked, I just sat there. Finally, when his fingers moved my underwear aside, something inside me snapped back into place. I grabbed his hand and pushed him away. And you know what he did? He laughed. He laughed and said there was no need to be coy because he knew I wanted it, that Asian girls liked to play hard to get before giving it up. That’s how it worked in all the porn he’d seen. And then he shoved his hand back under my skirt.”

  I didn’t tell Edwin about grabbing the wheel and almost driving us off the road in an effort to distract him when I wasn’t strong enough to push him away. I didn’t tell him how Kenny had called me a cock-teasing bitch. Of course I’d wanted it to happen, he’d said. Why else would I have accepted his ride? I did tell Edwin the last thing he said, shouting at me from a few feet away from where I’d jumped out of the car and tumbled to the ground: “Not every guy is going to be as nice as I was.”

  Edwin took a deep breath, and even that brief moment of silence felt like an eternity. I didn’t know what he was supposed to say, but I was so scared that whatever he said, he’d think less of me.

  “Jesus. Maggie, I’m so sorry that happened to you. That feels really fucking inadequate right now, but I’m sorry.”

  I knew what I said next was going to make him feel even worse, but he deserved to know. We needed to finally usher out the elephant in the room. “He was right, you know,” I said. I began fidgeting, hating that I couldn’t control the shake in my voice and the full-body humiliation that almost made me stop talking. I pushed forward, though. “I realized that even then. As I walked down those miles of road home, it was all I could think about. I decided I would get rid of my virginity on my terms, with a guy I wanted. That way, when I inevitably met the next Kenny, I would know I hadn’t let him take that. I fixated on it to keep my mind off the fear that pushed me to hide from every passing car. And when I got home, the person I wanted was there, alone in Darlene’s old bungalow, and—”

  The truck swerved to the side of the road, a controlled turn this time, and then he was leaning over the seat and hugging me close, running his palm over my hair, my ear and the wetness on my cheeks.

  I gave a shaky laugh. “You shouldn’t feel bad. You couldn’t have known why I suddenly tried to jump your bones.” My attempt to lighten the mood failed, and I gulped back a sob. Even though he hadn’t known, his rejection had felt like an abandonment. Like he was sentencing me to something terrible by not giving me something good. All my rude behavior to him from then until the move to Oswego had been fueled by an act of desertion he hadn’t even been aware of.

  “You came to me, and I turned you away.” I felt him shake his head. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have done what you asked, but I would have done this.” He gathered me closer into his embrace, as close as the seat belt allowed. “And then we would have figured out what to do about Kenny, like use him for target practice. I’m sorry I didn’t help you.”

  “It was an extreme request. I think I was in shock.” I shook my head and snuggled closer into his warmth. Behind us, Danielle snored deeply.

  “Is there anything I can do to help now?” His face was close to mine, and his hand rested on my shoulder. His gaze was intense and hot and made my insides go warm, like he’d doused me in liquid accelerant. He wanted me, I realized. All the weird looks he’d been giving me over the last few weeks had been flashes of this suppressed emotion—desire. But his desire wasn’t a pressing thing. It lurked behind the anger and the pain that he felt on my behalf, and that made it even better. Edwin Hernandez knew all of my greatest traumas and humiliations, and he still wanted me.

  “I still haven’t had my first kiss,” I said. The fear in me was changing—it was still fear, but a different form, one that nipped at your heels as you stepped forward into a new phase in your life and tried to scare you away from change. But I’d never let my fear bind me. I’d walked down that road after Kenny had left me and wished someone else would try to hurt me, just so I could use all the self-defense moves I’d been too shocked to use on him. I’d demanded that my biggest crush get it on with me and scared him out of his wits. And I was older and wiser now.

  I placed my hand on Edwin’s shoulder and trailed it up the muscles that bunched along his neck. He shuddered at that slight touch, a vulnerable motion on such a large guy. My own body was still, finally, but his shiver seemed to pass through me, leaving a lingering buzz in its wake.

  His mouth drifted closer to mine. “Not to be a jerk, but I’m gonna have to call you out on that. I saw Devon kiss you a few weeks ago. Remember, that whole weird scene in his room? The douchebaggieness, then the face-sucking?” He didn’t seem to be jealous, but he wasn’t entirely pleased either.

  “Technically you’re right. Devon has kissed me twice, actually, but without preliminaries and without asking. I want to kiss someone and know it’s about to happen.” To need the kiss like I needed to sing and play. Like I needed Edwin.

  He looked at me for a long time. “Maggie?”

  “What?” My voice was a hoarse whisper caught at the back of my throat.

  “It’s about to happen.” He moved his head toward me slowly, his eyes on mine as if he were ready to stop at the slightest flinch. I wanted this, though, and leaned forward to meet him. When his mouth pressed against mine, I made a sound of surprise—his lips were much softer than I could have possibly imagined—and the pleasure that thrummed through me was something entirely new. When Devon had kissed me, it’d been great, but there had been so much emotional feedback that it was hard to separate what was real from the echoes from our shared past. Now Edwin was pulling me close as his lips brushed and brushed and brushed, and each touch resonated in me clean and pure and true, and so damn deliciously good. It wasn’t cool to compare—it wasn’t fair to either one of them—but it was the difference between playing a cigar box guitar and a handcrafted Fender. Transcendent.

  I leaned into the kiss, wanting more of the exciting new feeling. Waves of heat washed through my body as his tongue met mine and showed it what to do by example. His leadership skills extended beyond the job site, it seemed. I tried to get closer to him, but something was holding me back. Not emotion this time—my seat belt. I groaned in frustration, and he thrust his tongue into my mouth harder. Then I was groaning because the rhythm pulsing between my legs responded to how he was both rough and gentle, to the way his hand settled on my thigh but didn’t move further. His fingers pressed into my jeans, as if preventing his hand from traveling of its own accord.

  A loud snore sounded from the backseat, and he pulled away and leaned back in his seat, breathing heavily. I looked over my shoulder.

  “We need to get her home,” I said, guilt edging up under my giddiness. I didn’t regret the kiss, but there was a time and place for everything, and whatever was happening between us could wait until Danielle was comfortable.

  “Mags—”

  I held my hand in front of his face. “You’d better not apologize for that, or give me some weird bullshit line about protecting my emotions.”

  His dimples shadowed against his cheeks before he pushed my hand aside. “What? If I’m worried about anyone’s emotions right now, it’s my own. I’m nice, but shit, I’m not altruistic.” He started the car and we were on our way again. “I was gonna ask if you were hungry. Larry saved you some chili the other night, and it’s been cluttering up my fridge.”

  “Oh. Yeah, actually, I am.”

  “Good. We can put Danielle to bed and keep an eye on her while we have something to eat. I have cards—maybe we can play I Declare War or something?”

  Poker was more my thing. I Declare War was boring, and the game took forever. That meant he had bad taste in card games, which was a deal breaker, or he wanted to spend some time with me, and not just to build up his credit toward getting what he thought he deserved. A bright wash of happiness drowned out the bad parts of the night at the possibility that it wa
s the latter. I tried to tone down my feelings. One kiss didn’t prove anything about a guy’s intentions, as Devon had so clearly proven. But the worst Edwin had ever done to me was try to protect me from myself. It might have been naive to believe in him, but that was what college was for.

  I knew that unpleasant things awaited me in the morning. My lost guitar case and, more importantly, John’s couture jacket. The awkward conversation that would occur when next I saw Devon. Figuring out whether I should be worried about Greg’s weird aggression toward me. But for the rest of the night, I was going to give being a normal college student a shot.

  “That sounds great,” I said. “As long as jokers are wild.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  After stopping at Edwin’s dorm so he could run in and pick up the food, we headed back to my dorm. I wondered what his room looked like. Was he the kind of guy to hang up shitty posters? Were the walls bare, or did he have a lone picture of his family? Did it smell like him—that piney, Edwin-ey scent that was quickly becoming one of my favorite smells? His sheets probably smelled like that... The thought set off a tumult in my belly. I thought of the way his hand felt against my thigh again and wished it had gone higher, explored further. But there was a good reason it hadn’t.

  I turned in my seat and looked at Danielle, who appeared to be sleeping peacefully.

  Edwin came around the truck and opened my door, pulling my gaze in his direction. The smile I gave him was involuntary. Maybe it was the drama of the night, or the relief at finally being able to speak to someone about what’d happened to me, but just seeing him filled me with an appreciation that smoothed away all the rough edges of the earlier events. He paused as he climbed back into the truck with the food, and I wondered if the expression on my face gave everything away. I’d tried to hide my feelings from him behind a don’t-give-a-fuck attitude for so long that the thought was scary, but I didn’t look away.