“Web of lies? What the fuck? If you haven’t guesses, Skylar, I approached you because I thought you were cute. Obviously, that wasn’t a lie,” I insisted.
“One truth doesn’t make up for the rest of untruths. You’re a liar, Emma. You lied to your friends about getting my number, and I helped you save face more than enough times. How deep is the rabbit hole going to go? What you’re going to do is you’re going to tell your friends about the date going well, show them the picture, and then find a frat boy so that I’ll be last week’s news. It’s a new week, it’s time for you to find someone else to bother.” He already got up and picked up his bag. All this time, he’d been so cool and collected, but he’d been putting on a show, tricking me into thinking that maybe, for once, a guy just wanted to talk, that he wasn’t interested in what was between my legs, but in between my ears: my brain, my thoughts, my wants. But he’d been like just the rest: he was just doing it for his own selfish reason. I guess he just wanted to get rid of me.
“Is that what you think I am, a bother?” I asked quietly. I was hoping he’d stop being so mean to me. All I’d ever wanted was for him to hold me, to fuck me, but instead, he pushed me away as I tried to pull him in. There’d never been a guy in Cali that rejected me, not even the ones with girlfriends, and now, here? With Skylar? I felt like I was back in high school again, asking out the popular guy with a homemade Valentine, him laughing and tearing it up in front of my face as my eyes pooled with tears.
He smirked. He hadn’t made a scene and I could tell he was stifling laughter. Dissing me was one thing, but laughing at me? That was a whole new level of disrespect and cruelty, the kind I wasn’t going to take from anybody. “Yeah, you are, and I’m not a fucking puppy you can play with because you think I’m cute. I’m a bouncer. My job is to make sure you don’t fuck up the club experience for other people, not to make sure you don’t hurt yourself. I’m not your dad. I’m not your boyfriend. I’m not your anything. Tell your friends that we had an okay date. Conveniently forget to set a second one. Find a new guy to bother. Don’t ever come up to me in Club Grit again. Do you understand?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I understand.” I understood where he was coming from, but why didn’t he understand that although I’d complicated things, I’d complicated them because I wanted him. I hadn’t done it to piss him off. This wasn’t some elaborate romance novel scheme where I was helping a friend get revenge by breaking Skylar’s heart. This was something else. I didn’t want to call it a crush, because those were for babies, middle school girls huddled in a corner in the library reading young adult books about people they were too mousy and shy and boring and mediocre to be. Those were for girls like the kind I wasn’t anymore, the kind that I’d never even acknowledge I’d been to most people. Maybe not even to Skylar.
“Good. I’m going to work. Bye.” I kept sipping my drink on the couch and watched as he walked to his bike. He took a fucking bike here? I got up and went out before he unlocked it.
“I still owe you for the cab.” I leaned against the bike stand but he didn’t turn to look at me, still trying to get his rusty cheap lock to open. Nobody in LA was so poor as to need a bike, at least, not around here. He wasn’t from my world. He was from somewhere more real. I hadn’t seen a bike like his since I’d left home, the kind of bike that wasn’t a fashion accessory but that took someone from point A to point B as fast as possible. Even the messengers here had fancy bikes with custom paint jobs. But Skylar’s bike? It wasn’t falling apart, but it wasn’t new. It was used, it was practical, and it was irreplaceable, just like him.
“Yeah, you do. Do you know how much those things cost? Probably not. I highly doubt you have the cash on hand for it, and if you did, it’d be in bills I couldn’t break.”
“If you’re poor, how’d I get home?”
“Work gives me vouchers to use for cabs to get home. I used those on getting you back home and had to pay my own way. It was seventy bucks each time.” Oh, that’s how.
“Just keep the change,” I said as I counted out twenty twenties from my purse. I knew it was overkill but I wasn’t in the mood for math right now and it wasn’t like it was a lot of money to me now. They were still crisp and had that new money smell that ATMs spat out all day. Skylar didn’t even count it. He just put it in his pocket and left.
My heart fell: he’d wanted the money I owed him, not a date. I’d forgotten, in my time with Omega Mu Gamma, that not every time a guy showed interest in me that he wanted a date or even a fuck. I’d forgotten that sometimes, not everything was a romantic comedy, that sometimes, people lived in real life.
Chapter Four, #DTF:
THE LAST THING I EXPECTED WAS THAT SKYLAR WOULD BE STUCK ON MY MIND FOR THE REST OF THE COMING WEEK. I didn’t go to that week’s #ThrowbackThursday and instead, went with Kim to Beta Rho Omega’s “Pub Night”, where they had a variety of artisan craft beers and ales. I was technically underage, but that didn’t really matter. In my acceptance packet to Omega Mu, I’d received a fake ID straight out of the engineering lab of UCBH, with a hologram and laminated surface to fool any bouncer and the on campus cops. Unlike a lot of frosh, I wasn’t stupid enough to wear stuff with my class year on it. I wasn’t about to advertise that I graduated high school around this time last year. High school was in the past, and what mattered right now, more than my present, was my future, as Samantha kept reminding me. Maybe that meant that courage came in a liquid form for me now (and that enthusiasm came in pills, and that bravery came in a syringe filled with powder and that I was assured none of the other girls had diseases and besides, we were sisters, why not be blood sisters, right?) but wasn’t my future worth it? Wasn’t I worth it?
I knew what all the girls dreamed of. They either wanted guys like their dad or the men that would be the future fathers of their own children. They wanted the kinds of guys that could buy summer homes where everyone wore white to sunset parties and drank white wine at eleven in the morning on their white designer couches eating white brie on white toast crackers. They wanted the kinds of guys that had power, that were men while most were boys, that had #class instead of #swag but didn’t wear fedoras and watch children’s television shows. They wanted the kinds of guys that they read about in magazines, the kind that sometimes dated someone that wasn’t a celebrity but once they did, never left her because she either fucked his balls off like a porn star or kept them in her new designer purse purchased with his money.
Of course, we weren’t just there to drink. I could get one of the older sisters to get me alcohol whenever I needed it, they had a run to the liquor store at least once a week. What I was there for was to get some of that enthusiasm and bravery. I was there for my drugs.
Downstairs, in the basement, was where the guys got high. People jokingly called it “Rape Central”, unless they were jealous God Damn Independents, the people without sororities or fraternities to call their own, the kind that didn’t really belong in our world but were invited for reasons I didn’t really understand yet. I knew that the frat boys would fuck anything that moved, but the girls of Omega House had standards, even if many “applicants” to their bedroom were accepted. Only Omegas and Betas were allowed down in the basement so I had to flash my lavaliere, the little silver pendant that said OMG in white rhinestones on sterling that would be upgraded to one with white diamonds and white gold on graduation, to gain entry.
The room was filled with smoke, the sweet skunk’s scent of weed as well as the mulled leather smell of tobacco, and a bunch of old furniture was downstairs, stuff that had accumulated over the years but was still usable: a few large leather couches with holes that were extremely plush as well as a mirrored coffee table that people were setting up lines of coke on, the way that some people set up their grocery and makeup hauls for Instagram shots. There’d be no photos here: we weren’t that stupid. One of the first rules that Omegas learned was that what happened in Beta Basement stayed in Beta Basement.
“Hey,” I said, ex
tending the word out. A few of the guys raised their hands.
“’ey, girl,” said a guy I recognized: DeAndre, someone I’d met at one of the few obligatory frosh mixers and had subsequently taken with me when I ditched. He patted his lap and it was obvious he’d let bygones be bygones, let cock teases be cock teases, so I went to sit on his lap. He was wearing workout shorts and I could feel his big, stiff cock through his pants. So cliché: we’d made out under the bleachers until we were busted by the soccer coach, but seeing as it wasn’t high school, we were just told to get lost instead of written up. I had to go to class so we hadn’t gone further. I’d left him needing, wanting.
Tonight that could change.
DeAndre Willard was a member of the Beta Rho Omega class who had a different girl on his arm every night. A football player, he was at the college on an athletic scholarship, majoring in a three-two program in business administration. However, he didn’t need the money: he was a legacy member of Beta House, his father a member back in the eighties, and the scholarship was a lure to accept him to the UCBH campus instead of his father’s alma mater, some Midwestern state school, so that the school could get a donation. It had been explained to me by Kim when I’d asked about him before, and she said that although he was fun, I should see what the other guys were like before pursuing him. However, I’d checked out my other options and they were terrible, especially the one that wouldn’t get the fuck out of my mind: Skylar, Skylar, Skylar, his name popping in and out of my head like an annoying notification on my phone that I just wanted to smash against the floor so it’d break and disappear but right now, it was all about DeAndre.
And DeAndre? He was Perfect with a capital P. He wasn’t anyone’s boyfriend and as far as I knew, nobody had brought him back to the Omega House, the only place relationship sealing sex counted, so he was free game. I said we should do something that weekend, and of course, he agreed, giving me a squeeze on the ass and a kiss on the cheek. Whenever I ended up at Club Grit, it was going to be the easiest night ever.
“Take a line, babe,” he insisted, leaning down to the table.
There were so many. Some were thick, some thin. There were short lines and long lines. There were lines that had something else smashed in making them a pastel color and others that were pure snow white. I really didn’t care. I just wanted to forget about Skylar. Knowing his name just made me so mad. I wish I hadn’t, I wish I’d never seen that stupid name tag on the shirt and that I hadn’t let the image of him burn into the back of my eyeballs as if my retinas were a used CRT screen that had run the same screensaver over and over so many times that when the display was off, the image remained.
That first line was the hardest, but it always is. It’s the one that feels weird, and I know people say that cocaine gets better and easier to use and more fun, but really, it doesn’t. Every time, it’s like inhaling sand in a desert of pleasure, but that’s still sand. Every time, it burns your lungs, your nostrils, whatever it touches, and it burns away the icy paralyzing pain and helps you relax. It’s so fucking bad, I know it is, but I really just don’t even care at this point.
Because in college?
Your parents aren’t around to give you a hug when the mean professor gives you a C instead of the B+ you knew your paper deserved.
Your friends only give you hugs for group photos.
You have to play the stupid games people play, throwing around words you find offensive and don’t believe in, words that degrade you, or your friends, or your family, to see how far you can go and how edgy you can be.
You have to play the stupid games.
You have to win.
Maybe I took the coke to keep from crying or maybe I took it to become more fun or maybe I took it because without it, I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough for Skylar, and he was a fucking bouncer. A bouncer! How had I been unable to get what should have been the easiest lay of my life? What had happened to the persona I’d built up, of being the unattainable blonde chic chick that talking to was a privilege rather than a right?
Maybe she never existed
Or maybe? I just had to let her out.
And another line went down. It was so cheesy, but each time I took a line, I shook my head back and forth as if that somehow made the pain go away faster, as if I could imagine the pain being shout out of my eyes like rays and every time one of those pain bullet light rays hit something, and destroyed it, a part of me was better and cleaner and better and cleaner and that the deafening loudness of the room would overtake me so that I could just forget about my own life, abandon identity and abandon worries and self-contempt.
One thing led to another. Don’t they always?
I started to make out with DeAndre to impress the other sorority girl down there, one of Sam’s friends whose name I was too fucked up to remember.
He started to grind me into his lap as if I was a stripper. I could feel his cock, stiff under his pants, and I knew that if I was sober, I’d feel dirty, but right now, as the coke made me want him, need him, I felt my panties cling to me and knew I was wet, that I was wanting, so I played along, lifting my arms up and crossing them behind my head, as I straddle DeAndre and moved my hips up and over him in a way I knew could drive him crazy, a way I hadn’t known how to move until I came out to California and learned that as an Omega, I had to be willing to do whatever it took to please a man, to make them like DeAndre: needing and wanting for my flesh. I didn’t know that I’d have to pull off stripper style moves to get men, and that batting my lashes wasn’t always enough to get as far as I had to get what I wanted.
We were told to jokingly get a room by some random in the smoky room before they took a line of coke.
“That sounds like a great idea,” DeAndre practically purred and he pulled me in for a deep kiss. There were catcalls and whistles but he just turned me around, carrying me on his back piggyback style. I was too tired, too wasted to really get up there myself but I knew that I had to do this for DeAndre, if I wanted to have someone there for me, the way Skylar wasn’t going to be, even though he’d pretended otherwise on Friday, pretended he cared about me and wanted me when he didn’t, when DeAndre and his dick were the next best thing and the only thing available to make me forget Skylar, to please and pleasure me in ways Skylar would never because it had all been a lie. He accused me of being a liar, but at least I’d never pretended to like him when I didn’t. At least I really had wanted him.
As I was carried upstairs by DeAndre, I saw Kim with one of the senior members of the frat, clipboard held behind her back as she had him grind his pelvis into her groin with her skirt hiked up. We locked eyes and I saw she was just as fucking high as me, so out of it, but not out of it to not be able to see that I was trying to make things right again, that I was making an effort to fit in with the rest of the sorority and that Skylar wasn’t an issue anymore. She gave me a thumb up and I kept walking with DeAndre.
The rest of the night was blurry. All I remember was feeling better than I had in a long time. It felt like I took ecstasy and I very well might have, because I would never know what was in those lines. Maybe roofies, who knew and who cared? I didn’t sign up for AP Kindergarten, but for college, and this wasn’t a daycare session, this was sorority life.
Of a few things I was certain.
I did have sex with DeAndre, more than once, more than twice, and I was so glad I hadn’t forgotten to take my pills because he’d insisted he’d forgotten to bring his special condoms, so we had to go bareback. The next morning, I woke up with my pussy still filled with his cum which hadn’t soaked the sheets entirely, but had ruined my dress. I didn’t think dry cleaning would ever get out the bleachy, salty stain.
And I couldn’t get that same stain’s taste out of my mouth, so I knew that I’d given him head too.
I also knew it wasn’t enough to get Skylar out of my head, though, and that I wasn’t able to just forget him that easily. Drastic times called for drastic measures and it was a new
day, a Friday, and that meant I’d get another chance to do something to Skylar at Club Grit. I just had no idea whether the plan was seduction or something more sinister.
This #yolo, #swag lifestyle that people try to live, at nightclubs, dancing and drinking with strangers and getting fucked up? It's not to live. It's so they can fucking forget about living and for a while, just not have any inhibitions, so they can have some reckless dangerous fun. It's so they can have more regrets, and more things to forget, and more reasons to keep on living in a chemical fueled wonderland. And for some people, like me? That's alcohol and nicotine and random guys. And for some people, it's harder stuff, like coke and BDSM and swinging. The harder you climb, the deeper you fall, and sometimes there's no coming back up. Sometimes, the only way left is down, digging past rock bottom and coming out the other side.
That morning, Kim had walked into the room and woke me up so we could get our walk of shame done in silence discreetly. We were the silent sluts, the secret sluts, the ones they used and the ones they’d break.
The only question was how soon.
Chapter Five, #Swag:
“THE FOLLOWING GIRLS MAY STEP FORWARD,” said Kim Lee. She called out half of the pledge class, the half I wasn’t included in. The others looked at me nervously. The fact that I wasn’t included either meant I’d royally fucked up or that this was one of Kim’s fucked up psychological fear tactics meant to keep everyone in line. It was so weird, so cliché. Was it really a sisterhood if not everyone was equal, or if some sisters were more equal than others? It didn’t really matter though, because I wasn’t on that list so I wouldn’t be going to Club Grit that night.
And I was wrong. Kim continued, “And, you all can go to the den. Tonight, you are to watch some cartoon princess movies because you all fucking failed at the last social in terms of manners. I expected a five page report from all of you, by the time I get back from Club Grit, on the graces of a certain princess and how they’re lacking from your lives, as well as how you can improve. Size twelve, Times New Romance, with one inch margins and yes, Katie, I will be measuring,” said Kim, tapping her keyboard while glaring at the pledge. I rolled my eyes. Last week, Katie had been given a report for mouthing off to the social chair of Beta Rho Omega, our sorority’s big brother frat, and she used thicker margins than allowed. Of course, Katie had noticed, and of course, the reprimand was loud and public. Honestly, how Katie had thought that anything else was appropriate for college was beyond me.
Pulse (Contemporary new adult/college romance) (Club Grit Trilogy) Page 5