Addicted

by Amelia Betts

  As Liam got closer, I noticed his green eyes sparkling in the blue glow of the pool lights. It reminded me of the first time we met, when the church parking lot lights had lit up his eyes so that they looked almost iridescent.

  “Probably my restaurant,” he finally said. “It’s the only place I feel totally fulfilled, you know? I don’t think about my problems when I’m there.” He chuckled to himself. “Which is odd, because the restaurant has plenty of problems of its own. But you know what I mean. Who you are, your personal life, it all goes out the window when you have a business to run, food to cook.”

  “Is that how you used to feel when you performed? Like you forgot all your problems?” I was doing the thing where I asked all the questions to ensure we didn’t start talking about me, afraid of what I might reveal.

  “No. It wasn’t the same. I mean, I liked it when we were young. But later on, I ended up hating it… being onstage. I felt like everybody was looking at me.”

  I laughed at his seemingly obvious statement. “Well, they kinda were.”

  “Yeah, that’s not what I mean. I don’t know. It felt intrusive. I didn’t really like myself. It makes it hard.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t imagine having to stand onstage in front of thousands of people. “I guess I always just assumed the myth about rock stars, like you’re living everyone’s biggest fantasy.”

  “Well, there’s that too. I definitely lived the fantasy, at least part of the time. Hey, is that a hot tub?” He pointed to the other end of the pool.

  I nodded, trying to curb my enthusiasm at the thought of Liam making the journey from pool to hot tub naked.

  “Do your lower legs want to come join me in the hot tub, then?” Without waiting for an answer, Liam hoisted his drenched, naked body out of the pool directly beside me. Trickles of water dropped off of him and onto my shirt. The urge to stare was maddening, but I kept my eyes to myself, a wicked smile threatening to creep across my face. No! my inner voice chastised. No looking, no flirting, no touching.

  Poker-faced and decidedly not staring at Liam’s ass, I followed him to the hot tub and, once again, sat on the side, this time as far away from him as possible. Inwardly, I gave myself a heartfelt congratulations for keeping my dress on and staying the course. If I had gone in the pool, all I would have thought about was whether or not he was looking at me, whether or not he was still attracted to me, or if somehow he had magically changed his mind about having sex with me again.

  “So, how’s it going with the eating?” he said, seemingly out of nowhere.

  “Pardon?” I responded with arched eyebrows, immediately on the defense. Whenever I felt offended, I made a point of saying pardon instead of excuse me. For some reason, it seemed to convey more anger.

  “You said you do the Overeater meetings, right?”

  “Yeah, well, anonymously I do.”

  “Well, friend, I’m not trying to pry. It’s just that you told me about it.” He flashed a crooked smile, something that probably got him out of trouble more often than not. “I figure it’s probably all in your head, though. I told you, I think you look great. I like a girl with a little meat on her.”

  “Ugh, please don’t say that!” My cheeks reddened.

  “Why are you so insecure?”

  I shook my head and redirected my attention to the stars, my feet nervously kicking back and forth underwater. “I don’t know. Anyway, OA is not about weight. It’s about food ruling your life. Some people who go are totally average. Some are even thin.”

  “So why does food rule your life, then? C’mon, be real with me. My mother committed suicide when I was three. What’s your excuse?”

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” I looked back at Liam, whose expression had turned serious.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said. “She threw herself off a bridge. When I was eighteen, I tried to do the same. Same bridge even.”

  “Wow,” I said, at a loss for words. Liam’s abrupt confession had snapped me out of my insecure pity party, reminding me this was a troubled soul I was dealing with, even if he did come disguised in the body of Adonis.

  “I didn’t do it anyway. I came this close—” He held up his index finger and thumb for emphasis. “But I didn’t do it. So there’s my most intimate fucking secret. Now what’s yours?”

  “I don’t know, nothing like that. Here’s the thing—I don’t really like talking about myself,” I said.

  “Why not? You don’t trust people?”

  I shook my head, trying to find the right words to explain my unwillingness to share personal information.

  “You don’t trust men?”

  To this I nodded. It was a knee-jerk reaction, unintentionally honest. “My dad left when I was eight.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “The Philippines.”

  “Never to return again?”

  “Nope.” I rolled my eyes to feign indifference, feeling a trickle of sweat slowly making its way down my chest. I felt like running and hiding. Something about acknowledging that my dad had left long ago was nearly unbearable. When I had told Bradley the same thing, about a month into dating him, he had gone silent and then asked, without a hint of irony, “So, does that mean you have ‘daddy issues’?”

  Liam stood up from his seat in the hot tub and walked over to me, placing a warm, wet hand on my knee. The shock of his touch sent a wave of electricity up my leg. “That’s rough,” he said.

  “Hey, at least he didn’t commit suicide.” The minute it came out, I regretted how flippant my comment sounded. “I’m sorry. That sounded horrible—”

  “Listen, I never knew her. I can’t remember her. It’d probably be just as hard if I knew she was in another country somewhere, ignoring me.”

  “Who knows?” I looked into Liam’s iridescent eyes just inches from my own. He removed his hand from my knee and held it out for me to take. When I placed my hand in his, he tenderly kissed the top of it, the soft warmth of his lips against my skin causing me to shudder. My breath caught. I was overwhelmed by his touch, his proximity, my body stiffening in anticipation of what would come next. But nothing else happened. He released my hand and returned to his seat.

  “My dad never talked about my mom growing up,” he said. “I guess he thought it was less painful that way. We didn’t visit her grave or mention her on her birthday. Her side of the family lived eight hours away in a small town, and we never went to see them. He even hid all the pictures of her. I think he was worried I would ask too many questions if he left them out. Anyway, now I can’t stop thinking about sex, go figure. It’s the only thing I’ve cared about since I was ten. It’s why I started a band. We had groupies by the time we were fifteen, some of them in their twenties. I just had sex all the fucking time, like all the fucking time. I’d try to keep a girlfriend every now and then but I cheated on all of them. The only solution I ever came up with was to avoid sex with real people as much as possible because it always turns to shit. But when I don’t do it with women, I masturbate constantly. Except for these past few months. Bobby’s really been helping me get better, even though he’s a bit of a wanker.”

  I laughed at the thought of Bobby ushering Liam away from me like a stern parent. “Yeah, how was that guy ever a sex addict? I mean, who was he doing it with?”

  “Internet porn.”

  “Oh… right.”

  Liam stretched his arms behind him on the hot tub ledge and, for the first time that night, stared at me—really stared—studying my face in a way that made me feel shy. I leaned back on my hands and looked up at the sky, pretending not to care—and part of me didn’t. Somehow talking candidly about my dad had made me feel strangely free, like I had nothing to hide.

  “We’re underdogs, Mischa. And that’s a good thing. There’re a lot of people walking around acting like they’ve got no problems, no skeletons in their closet, and maybe they don’t! But that’s what makes us interesting. You’re a good egg, though, I can tell. Your mom p
robably never had to worry about you when you were younger.”

  “Only when I would binge-eat half a week’s worth of food in one night,” I said matter-of-factly. Liam looked at me in disbelief and we both laughed. I wanted to say something to prove that I wasn’t as “good” as he thought—somehow that comment made me feel like he was distancing himself from me, even though he had meant it as a compliment. I lowered my voice in an attempt to sound confessional. “Hey… I had a dream about you the other night. I walked in on you with another girl, and then all three of us were having sex.”

  “Ooh! That’s not a good girl’s dream.”

  “Her name was Hadara. The other girl, I mean.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Exotic!”

  “It all seemed very real. It made me think, you probably do that a lot, huh? Have threesomes?”

  “Eh. Not anymore. They’re overrated.”

  Of course he has an opinion on threesomes. “Why?”

  “You know, it’s cliché but the whole attention problem. Two people start to pair off and the third gets jealous.”

  “Did you ever have a threesome with another man?”

  Liam looked at me for a while before answering. “Yeah.”

  I exhaled loudly without meaning to, recalling the day in seventh-grade sex ed when the teacher talked about “high-risk” behaviors and all the terrible afflictions that came along with them. A question that should have popped into my head the minute I’d met him crossed my lips without warning. “So do you get tested regularly?”

  “I’m clean,” he answered, a hint of defiance in his voice. “And by the way, the time with the guy was in my early twenties.”

  “Of course! I’m not judging you. I’m sorry. I had a crush on a girl once. I just mentioned the testing thing because I meant to say it the other night. That was bad timing. I don’t know why people take it so personally—”

  “Mischa,” he interrupted my rambling. “Calm down. We were safe, and I’m not taking it personally.”

  “Okay.”

  “All right.” He lowered his arms back into the hot tub and watched the water as it bubbled up around him.

  A long pause followed. We had hit a wall. One of my legs kicked too hard and surfaced, sending a little splash of water into his face. “Oops. Sorry,” I said. I jokingly braced myself, and Liam waded over to me and grabbed my feet.

  “I could do it!” he said, and gave them a tug. “You could be in here in two seconds flat!”

  I wiggled my feet in his hands. “Please have mercy on me,” I begged.

  Liam bit his lower lip and tugged once more. “Why do you make me feel giddy?” he said.

  I chuckled, my cheeks aching from smiling so big. “Ditto,” I said.

  Liam sat down again. He let his arms float on the surface of the water. “So what do you do? Other than run errands for that boring professor guy?”

  I raised my eyebrows, surprised to hear Liam slight Julien. Obviously they hadn’t hit it off when I had been hiding in the bathroom the other night. “Well, I’m working on a juice cleanse,” I said, stretching out my legs in the water, “and I’m waiting to hear back from grad schools. I applied for some masters programs in nutrition.”

  Liam’s face crumpled. He suddenly seemed distracted as he reached out for one of my toes. “Do you think I’m a slut?” he said in a gloomy tone of voice. He pinched my toe and let it free again.

  “No!” I leaned forward to sit on my hands. I tried to make eye contact with him but he looked away.

  “Yeah you do. How could you not? You think I’m the slut that’s going to give you AIDS,” he said, and flicked at the water.

  “I really don’t.” My heart was swelling. I wanted to comfort him; he seemed so vulnerable. “Liam—”

  “Never mind. It’s getting hot in here.” He rose from his seat, his naked torso in full view. “We should probably go.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. Out of nowhere, my heart had been sucked into a vat of quicksand. In the past two minutes alone, my emotions had vacillated between happy and scared and defeated so quickly I should have had whiplash. Everything felt so loaded between us now that we had opened up to each other. Yet the conversation had been so natural and fun, I had imagined us staying here on the rooftop until the sun came up, watching it rise together like a couple of wayward kids at summer camp. Now I was nearly convinced he hated me.

  As Liam stood dripping by a deck chair, I realized there was nothing to dry him off. “Oh, we forgot to get towels!” I said. “I’ll go down and grab one.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll just follow you.” Liam’s voice was hard to read. He left a watery trail as he shuffled behind me into the elevator and stood there, holding his clothes in a bundle at his waist.

  “You know… I dreamt about you too,” he said with a straight face as we arrived at the second floor, the doors opening before I could respond.

  “Were we having a threesome?” I asked, desperate to steer things back toward flirting.

  “No. Just the two of us. I don’t think I’d like to have a threesome with you.”

  “Why not? Because I’m a ‘good girl’?” I rolled my eyes for him to see.

  “Because I wouldn’t want to share you,” he said.

  Chapter Eleven

  Inside the men’s shower room, I flipped on the lights. Instantly, I was reminded how gorgeous Sasha’s spa was throughout. She had modeled it, room by room, after some spa at an insanely expensive Greek resort where she’d spent her second honeymoon. This room included two massive eight-headed showers, a dry sauna, a steam room, and a large marble bench in the middle. The lighting was warm and bright, like a sunny afternoon without the sunlight.

  “All right, you can take a shower if you want. We’ll just have to steal the towel you use so no one notices.” I was pretending to be very lax about the whole thing, but inside I felt the inevitable worry I had whenever I broke any rules. When Gracie had asked to use the showers, I had told her no way.

  I started to leave Liam there, with plans to raid the second-floor mini-fridge and try to forget the last few awkward moments of conversation on the roof, but before I knew it, he was grabbing my wrist to stop me. “Wait,” he said in a pleading tone, dropping his clothes so that his naked body, tanned and taut, stood before me, completely exposed.

  “No, Liam. We’re keeping each other out of trouble, remember?”

  “But this isn’t trouble. This is different,” he whispered, plunging his hand into the hair that dangled at the nape of my neck, sending tingles up and down my spine as he moved in to kiss me.

  I wanted to believe him, that this was different. In the moment, I actually did. Maybe it was his kiss that convinced me. His lips were extra soft after the swim. As was his skin, and the way he touched me. It was like he’d shed an outer layer of toughness in the pool and become this vulnerable person, or maybe it just seemed that way because he was naked and I wasn’t. All I knew was that, somehow, he had taken me in his arms and slipped his tongue inside my mouth until all my good intentions had evaporated and I was kissing him back like my life depended on it.

  My hands slinked up his arms and rested on his bare shoulders as he began rocking against me, grasping my butt, then inching his fingers around to my front and down the neckline of my dress. I raised my hands, allowing him to pull the dress over my head slowly. I was wearing a cotton pushup bra with yellow and white stripes that Liam instantly focused on. He moved his hands over my breasts, then underneath the shoulder straps.

  “I like this. You could have worn it in the pool.” He smiled and tugged down on the straps, pushing my boobs together as he sank his face into my cleavage. “Your tits are fucking divine,” he said, kissing up the top of my chest and my neck. “Come here.” He took me by the waist and walked me backward until the backs of my knees hit the marble bench in the center of the room. I sat down and Liam picked up my legs and laid them out. He held up an index finger as he walked over to the corner of the room t
o grab a white folded towel from the stack, then returned and placed it at the other end of the bench. He nodded a silent command, and I lay back, resting my head on the towel.

  Nothing could have prepared me for this. I had believed Liam when he said he needed a friend and had accepted that his attraction to me had been a one-time thing—in his mind, I was over, used up. Barely five minutes ago, I was wondering if he would ever want to speak to me again after tonight.

  He sat beside me on the bench for a moment, dragging his right hand up and down the middle of my torso. “I like you, you know that? You make me wish I was different.” His voice was hushed, soothing. You are different, I thought as I lay there, waiting to see what he would do next, every bit of exposed skin prickly with anticipation. If he didn’t believe it about himself already, I wanted to somehow show him that he was different.

  Liam lowered his knees to the floor and began kissing my belly, nipping at my belly button with his tongue. He moved his mouth down to the waistband of my panties and tugged at it with his teeth, growling mischievously. Pausing for a second, he glanced up at me. “I saw up your dress when you were sitting at the hot tub.”

  “No, you didn’t.” I laughed, my belly tingling as Liam rested his chin on it.

  “Yes, I did. I couldn’t stop thinking about getting in it.”

  My stomach contracted as I laughed even harder. I felt giddy as the object of Liam’s rapt attention.

  He went back to work, dragging my sheer yellow underwear over my hips and down my legs, and tossing them behind him. “Thank you for wearing those, but they won’t be needed,” he said, his eyes on mine as he moved around to the far end of the bench. From there, he grasped my ankles and pulled me toward him, burrowing his face in between my legs. I could feel the heat of his breath on my skin as he kissed the area just above my clitoris, making me gush with wetness. He moved down, licking and nibbling at my inner thighs, the tease of his tongue driving me crazy with anticipation. I started whimpering, tensing my entire body.

  “Does this feel good?” He slid his hands from the inside of my knees up to the tops of my thighs, parting my legs even wider.