Sweet & Wild

by Viv Daniels

  “No, but you should have asked.”

  “You should have told me if you had,” I shot back.

  “And what if I didn’t?”

  What was the point of this little exercise? “Well, that’s why we use condoms. Boone, I trust you.”

  “Don’t trust me,” he growled. “Why would you do that?”

  “Good question,” I replied mockingly. “Probably because I’m insanely naive and sheltered and privileged. Is that what you want me to say?”

  He scowled.

  “What’s going on, Boone? Are you trying to scare me off?” Or was he just scared, too?

  “I’m trying to be realistic. Because…whatever this is, it’s…” He sighed and looked away. “It’s fast.”

  “Realistic?” I echoed. I’d done realistic. That guy dumped me for my sister. “If I’d wanted realistic, I wouldn’t have fucked you in the back of your truck.”

  He turned to me. “And now you know enough of the truth to understand that person’s not the real me, either.”

  It hadn’t been me, either. Until I did it. Until we both did. Then it had been amazing.

  “Look at you, Hannah. You’re like a princess in a castle. That is not my life and I don’t want it to be. So then what are we doing?”

  “If I’m a princess, then you’re a pirate on a ship,” I replied coyly. “And don’t tell me what I should and should not be doing with you. They only live who dare, right?”

  He groaned and fell back on the mattress, covering his face with his arm.

  “By the way,” I said at last, for lack of anything else, “it’s not a poem. It’s Voltaire.”

  “What?” Boone asked, his voice muffled by his arm.

  “Your tattoo.” I ran my finger along the writing. “It’s not poetry. It’s a quote from Voltaire. He was a French philo—”

  “I know who Voltaire is,” he drawled, sitting up. “But it’s a poem.”

  “No,” I said. “I looked it up—”

  “Be not thou as these,” Boone intoned, “whose mind is to the passing hour confined; Let no ignoble fetters bind thy soul, as free as wind.”

  I stared at him in shock.

  “Stand upright, speak thy thoughts,” he went on. “Declare the truth thou hast, that all may share. Be bold, proclaim it everywhere: They only live who dare. It’s a fucking poem, Hannah.”

  And then, without another word, he crawled out of the berth and started pulling his clothes back on. I sat there, so stunned that I didn’t even speak until he was halfway up the ladder to the deck.

  “Wait!” I grabbed my pants and shirt. “Boone!” I threw my clothes on as quickly as I could and followed him above. He’d already untangled the lines from the pier and was starting the engine. Rosy light spread over the horizon, turning the sky and water a silvery blue. Morning had come, and with it, reality.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What, that the guy you’re slumming around with knows a poem?”

  “No! I…I should have realized you wouldn’t have tattooed something on you if you didn’t know where it was from.” I understood that about him now. Boone was too careful, too caring, about everything he did.

  “What did you do, Google it?” he said, his voice stony.

  “Yes.” I hung my head. I felt so stupid. I was such a snobby bitch.

  “Well, now we know why the internet is never to be trusted, don’t we?” He turned the boat and headed back toward the yacht club docks.

  I swallowed, and tried again. “It’s a beautiful poem. Who did write it?”

  “Lewis Morris.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know him. Then again, I hadn’t actually read Voltaire, either. I was in college, and I wasn’t nearly so interested in poetry as the GED-educated bit of rough I’d been sleeping with.

  “It’s called ‘Courage!’” Boone continued. “And I put it on my body to remind me of the reasons I left home. To remind me that I wanted to be better than my parents. That I would never let their lives corrupt me. Shit.” He looked away, over the water. “I should never have brought you here. We shouldn’t be doing this.”

  Tentatively, I moved across the deck to sit down beside him. “Why?”

  “This boat, you…this is a mistake. It’s a slippery slope.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The boat was my grandfather’s,” he said, looking down into his callused hands. “My mother’s father. He died last year and left it to me in his will.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry…”

  “Don’t be. He’d been wasting away in a nursing home for years.” He shook his head. “Anyway, my mom tracked me down to give me my inheritance.”

  “That’s…nice.”

  “It’s an excuse,” he said coldly. “I hadn’t spoken to my mother in six years.”

  That sentence seemed impossible to me, even though Dad and I were barely speaking these days. Six years? I tried to imagine what it took for Boone’s mother to go looking for her son after everything that happened. It couldn’t have been merely because she wanted the boat off her hands. She must have cared a lot. “Is she still with your father?”

  “No. She’s got a new husband now. She swears he’s a really, really nice guy,” Boone sneered. “Of course, that’s what she swore about my father, too, so who knows?”

  I reached out and stroked Boone’s arm. His muscles were tense, holding an entire childhood of anger. Or maybe he was still just angry at me.

  “The boat is mine, but she pays for the slip,” he said. “And if I could have had it any other way, I wouldn’t even accept that much. Money comes with strings.”

  My heart broke for both of them, mother and son. “Do you see her much?”

  Boone laughed mirthlessly. “You have no idea. She wants things to go back to the way they were. Dad’s gone and he was the problem, right? And I can’t seem to explain to her that it wasn’t just him. It was her, it was the whole system. I don’t want any part of it, Hannah.”

  I squeezed his hand. “Okay.”

  “No. Not okay,” he said. “Don’t you get it? What you said the other night about the curtain between your real lives and the show you put on? That’s what my life was like, too. And my mom had pretended so long it was like she believed the lie. No one else knew what was backstage, and she liked it that way. And when—” He stopped for a second. “When I told people, she just danced harder, and no one believed me.”

  I ached so hard for that boy—that scared fifteen-year-old boy that Boone had been, whose own mother had chosen her lies over him. But I was a psych major once, and I’d read articles about the kinds of self-deceptions an abused woman could get very good at believing. Boone’s mother was a victim, too.

  “It’s like she thinks she can just buy me back with this wreck of a boat. Even though it’s not even hers.”

  I said nothing, just sat and listened.

  “And now you’re here, and when we were just fooling around, it was fine, but we can’t keep this up, or I’m going to get dragged into it all over again.”

  “No you won’t,” I said. When we were just fooling around, he’d said. Did that mean Boone also thought we’d gone further than that tonight? “I don’t care about your family. Mine aren’t exactly saints, either.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” He looked pained. “Believe me, it’s been a long time since I let myself want anything as much as I want you.”

  “Boone,” I whispered.

  His expression closed up tight again and he looked at me, jaw set. “But this is a mistake. We should never have taken it this far. I don’t think— I can’t be with you and live the life I want.”

  His words fell like lead around my heart. “Why not?”

  Boone closed his eyes and said nothing for a long moment, just sat there and breathed. “Because you’re Hannah Swift.”

  I recoiled as if he’d slapped me. “I told you. That’s not what I want. That’s not who I am.”

  “It is who you are. Lo
ok at you. Designer jeans, trust fund apartment, fancy college. Don’t kid yourself. You can screw the handyman if you want, but you know it’s just a game.”

  There was no point in denying it any longer. No matter how good it felt to play, no matter that we dressed up for dates and talked about our feelings in the middle of the night, it was stupid to pretend. My friends told me so, and Boone clearly knew it, too.

  Something horrible and hot worked its way from my belly to my throat, choking off every argument, every response, every thought but this:

  “Take me back,” I said flatly. “I want to go home.”

  “Yeah,” he replied, his voice cold. “I thought you might.”

  Fifteen

  When I got home, I realized my troubles had just started. I stepped out of the Uber and stared anxiously at my father’s car sitting neatly in the open garage, right next to Mom’s.

  I’d never actually gone over the rules regarding sleepovers while I was living with my parents. When I had my apartment near Canton, Dylan could stay at my place or I could stay at his and my parents were never the wiser. Me staying out all night and coming home to my childhood bedroom? Well, that was awkward.

  It was safe to say I looked like hell. My hair was matted from sex and sea wind, my mascara was runny, I’m sure I smelled like I’d spent the night sweating in the arms of a strange man, and my clothes were rumpled, the sparkly top and sandals obviously not suited to a Sunday morning.

  The walk of shame had never been so shameful.

  I set my jaw, adjusted my purse strap on my shoulder and headed up the front walk. There was nothing I could do now. I mean, I could get in my car and drive away—maybe to a mall, where I could buy decent clothes, or the Canton gym, where I could at least take a shower and scrub the smell of sex from my skin.

  Unless they had seen the Uber pull up.

  I slipped into the house with as little fanfare as possible and crept down the hall toward my bedroom, hoping desperately that I could make it there without seeing either of my parents.

  “Hannah.”

  I stopped creeping. I stopped entirely. My parents sat at the table in the breakfast nook, bathed in morning sunlight as blue light from the tiled pool glittered and bounced in the background.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said. “Dad. How are you guys this morning?”

  “Where have you been!” Mom exclaimed. “Do you have any idea—”

  “Why don’t you get cleaned up, Hannah,” Dad said, interrupting her, “and then come back out here. We have to talk.”

  I nodded, dread chilling my blood, and hurried to my bedroom, where I took the world’s quickest shower, combed my hair, brushed my teeth, took my medicine, and dressed in something sweet and conservative, for all the good it would do me. My parents had just seen me at my “screwed an ex-drug-dealing, former-teen-runaway handyman on his wreck of a boat before he basically told me to get out of his face” worst. No button down top with a daisy print all over it was going to make that any better. I combed my hair, took a deep breath, and went to face the firing squad.

  Back in the kitchen, Dad was still seated at the table, but Mom was bustling at the counter. “Are you hungry, Hannah? Would you like some orange juice?”

  “Yes, please,” I said meekly.

  “Sit down, Marie,” Dad stated. “Hannah will be fine for now.”

  Mom sat. I sat. We both waited for Dad to talk.

  “Your mother,” he said, “was very concerned when you didn’t come home last night. She tried to call you, but your phone didn’t even ring.”

  That’s right. I’d turned it off in the theater. “I’m so sorry, Mom. I turned—”

  “You could have been lying in a ditch, Hannah!”

  Dad lifted his hand and Mom fell silent. “You may think that just because you’re twenty-one, that you don’t have to follow any of our rules anymore, but you’re living under our roof, and what you did was unacceptable.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I repeated. “I didn’t think that you would be waiting up. I’ve been living on my own for—”

  “I have no idea if this kind of irresponsible behavior is the norm for you nowadays, Hannah,” Dad said now, “but it would certainly explain your lackluster performance in school.”

  Ouch. That stung. “I don’t make a habit of staying out all night, Dad, no. You know me, I tend to have nice long, monogamous relationships.”

  Not even a flicker.

  “Like the one I had with Dylan, before he dumped me. For that other girl.”

  Still nothing. Man, he was good. And I didn’t care one bit if I was just infuriating him further. Who was the man with the mistress to hold any moral high ground over me?

  “Is that what this is?” Mom said, distraught. “You’re still all broken up over that boy? You’re worth more than that, Hannah. Don’t sell yourself short. You aren’t a cheap slut.”

  “I don’t think I’m a cheap slut,” I said to her. “Do you?”

  Her mouth snapped shut.

  “So, yes, is what you’re saying,” I continued dryly.

  “No!” Mom leaned back, affronted. “Never. But you’re out all night, God knows where…”

  “The point is, your mother and I are worried about you, Hannah. We think your behavior is getting a little bit out of control, and it might start affecting your future.”

  “Because I stayed out one night?”

  Dad snorted, then start ticking off items on his fingers. “Because you stay out all night. Because you spent tens of thousands of dollars of your trust fund to tour through Europe instead of going to school. Because you dropped out of school to begin with.”

  “It was a leave of absence,” I argued, but he wasn’t listening.

  “Because you can’t seem to even decide on a course of study. Because you can’t manage to keep even a 3.0 average. Because you’ve gotten in shouting matches with both of us recently…”

  Well, recently for Dad and me was nine months ago, but sure. I guess it was recent in our history of actually speaking to one another.

  “And because you’re sitting here right now acting as if none of this is a problem.”

  I looked down. I hated to admit my father had a point, but it was undeniable. Sure, I was angry with my parents—with him, especially. But my problems at school hadn’t started with my discovery of Tess and my father’s secret life. I’d fantasized about taking a semester off long before I’d even gotten sick last fall. And then, when everything went down—my thyroid diagnosis, Dylan dumping me, Dad’s car accident and all the things I learned afterward—it seemed like the perfect time to get away from it all.

  And then I came back and it was all still here, just as messy and impossible as I’d left it. Was Boone just another Europe, some way I could run away from everything I didn’t like about my life? He’d taken me away from my father at the yacht club, from Jeffrey at the country club, from my fight with my mom last night.

  Well, now I was back from Boone, too. And he’d been even more worthless than Europe. Europe hadn’t pushed me away the moment I thought I could trust it.

  Europe also didn’t give me lots of orgasms. The most I ever got out of it was fluent French.

  “Are you in agreement, Hannah?” Dad said. “That your present lifestyle cannot continue?”

  I gave a tiny nod. What could I say? I did suck at school. I had made a mistake with Boone. Hell, I’d wasted half the week writing some stupid horror movie screenplay that I wasn’t even going to tell anyone about.

  “Good. That’s the first step. Now, Hannah, you may think that your mother and I have made bad choices, or have erred in some way while raising you, but I want you to know that we have your best interests at heart. We love you very much and we only want to see you succeed in the world.”

  I couldn’t even look at him. Huge tears spilled from my eyes and dripped down my cheeks. And it didn’t matter that what he was really saying and what my mother thought he was saying were two different things. He was
telling the truth, either way. Dad had kept Tess and her mom a secret to protect us, to keep our family together and our image intact. I had a million dollar trust fund because Tess had nothing. It was incredibly, epically, mind-blowingly wrong, but he’d done it for me.

  And what had I done with all that preferment? Nothing. While Tess, who’d been royally screwed over, was some kind of scientific genius who managed to scholarship her way into our family’s favorite alma mater after Dad refused to pay. Dad had picked me, and I threw it in his face.

  “So, we have some ideas, sweetheart,” Mom said now. “To help you get back on track.”

  Dad put it somewhat differently. “You’ve made some bad choices, Hannah. It’s time you let us help you make better ones.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t until three days later that the text buzzed through on my phone from Boone.

  I want to see you.

  Was he kidding me? After the way things had ended the other day? I punched the screen keys furiously.

  Tough.

  My mother had been right. I needed to have more self-respect than that. So what if Boone had been the best sex ever? He was also rude to me, and confusing, and there was no future with him anyway. And I desperately needed to get my future in line. Maybe not who I married and settled down with, à la Jeffrey’s disastrous plans, but my major or my goals for a post-college career, at the very least.

  Mom and Dad weren’t perfect, but that didn’t mean they were wrong about everything. I was twenty-one, I was a junior in college, and I needed to figure my life out. That wasn’t going to happen hooking up with handymen, no matter how cute they were.

  My parents had worked out a schedule for me. It was a good one. Together, we’d perused the Canton Course catalog and my transcripts, trying to see what it would require for me to pursue any of my attempted and abandoned majors in my final three semesters of college.

  “The point,” my mother had said, “is just to pick something and get through it. It doesn’t have to be your whole life. I was an anthropology major. You don’t see me living with a tribe in Guam.”