The Novice

by Ava Lohan

  Kegan looked at me for a long time before speaking. “Pay by credit card,” he added, handing his card over to the shop assistant. Their fingers touched and I silently swore to myself. He typed in his PIN, totally calm. “Wasn’t it obvious?” he asked innocently, putting his card away.

  For the second time since I’d met him, I thought I could have killed him.

  “You really need to stop thinking about sex all the time,” he scolded me, making his new victim laugh. He was using my words against me.

  “You’re an ass.”

  He looked at me with satisfaction and covered my rage-filled eyes with the expensive glasses he’d just bought me.

  Once we were back on the street I walked as far away from him as I could.

  He followed me and laughed. If there was one thing I’d learned from my first, only, and last date, it was that I could only handle an outing with a man for about thirty-five minutes. The time it took to go on a motorcycle ride, have a stroll, and go into a store.

  “God, you should have seen your face, Rose.” He couldn’t stop laughing. It was the second time he’d said it. “She thought it was funny, while you… you looked like I had just come out as transsexual.”

  I stopped in my tracks and turned to him. “You know what? If she thought you were so funny, why don’t you just go hang out with her? I’ll just keep going.”

  He didn’t answer. I took a few more steps and turned back to him again. He was exactly where I had left him.

  “Or call her, since you have her number now. Ask her when she gets off and take her out.”

  “Take her out?” he exclaimed in disgust. “I don’t take anyone out. I don’t need to. I fuck. That’s all.” His magnificent voice was as loud as ever. He didn’t care that anyone could hear him. He was no longer relishing making fun of me—instead we were back to his typical arrogance. He took the piece of paper with the girl’s phone number on it and tore it into pieces. “And I’ll never call her. She couldn’t afford me.”

  Maybe I should have felt relieved in seeing him destroy the note, but I felt anything but relaxed. I felt as if it were me that he had torn to pieces and thrown on the ground. And I knew exactly why. Lexi’s words echoed in my ears: I could never afford Kegan.

  “What am I doing here?” I asked, trying not to show the effect his words had had on me. My voice was now louder than his and people were turning to look at us. For a moment, we were silent.

  “Rose, stop.” Kegan’s jaw tightened.

  His attempt to calm me down had the opposite effect. It was as if a storm that had been brewing inside me had suddenly broken out, ready to devastate him.

  “What am I doing with you every day when you could be spending time with someone who could pay you?”

  Kegan ran his hands through his hair and muttered a string of swear words. I could tell by his expression that he was trying not to explode. But it was too late for me: I was already out of control.

  “What do you think my life would be like now if I hadn’t come to your fucking convent? How do you think things would be if my parents were still alive?” I yelled as I stared at the ground, unable to look him in the eyes.

  If my parents hadn’t died, I could have taken out a loan to go to college—or, more likely, I could have found a job to help out at home until my dad found a new job. But I would’ve never been able to afford an afternoon with Kegan. Not a night, not even one minute. I would have never even seen Lust. I could have been that salesgirl.

  When we’d first gotten off the motorcycle, he’d seemed like a human being, like a normal guy. But Kegan was neither of these two things. And it didn’t matter that he’d caught up to me and raised my chin with his finger, more delicately than ever. It didn’t matter that he’d wiped that stupid single tear from my cheek with his thumb. It didn’t matter that he’d whispered that he was sorry, so quietly I could hardly hear him. I'd liked hearing him say it. It had made my heart skip a beat, but it wasn’t going to fix anything. The fact that it had probably been the first time he’d ever said it in his twenty-four years on the planet was a meager consolation. In the end, he did have a very small human side, and I was the only person to have ever seen it, if only for a short time. But I had to let these things go.

  Kegan and I were from two different planets, destined to gravitate in different spaces. Even if we’d crossed paths once—by mistake or by chance—we’d stayed in our own orbits. That is, until he decided to crash into me, resulting in my total annihilation.

  “How much do you cost?” My voice now hovered above a whisper. He drew his hand back from my face, as if my skin had suddenly caught fire. “How much would it cost to kiss you?”

  The tension in his body was evident. “Rose.” He repeated my name, but this time he sounded tired. He didn’t respond to my question.

  I shook my head gently and took off my sunglasses. Without looking at his face, I hung the glasses from his jeans and left him standing alone on the street. He didn’t follow me.

  I walked around without a destination in mind, completely disinterested in everything around me. Straight, to the right, to the left, straight again, all without knowing where I was going. Right. Without even looking at the names of the streets. Left. I could hear people laughing, indifferent to the destroyed planet that passed them by. Straight. I walked around for almost two hours, thinking of nothing, just moving. I decided to sit down on a bench and listen to some live music I heard playing nearby. I had spent my five dollars on a beer that was now half full on the ground next to my feet. I don’t like drinking, and showing my ID and ordering a drink legally in a bar hadn’t been as exhilarating as I had hoped. At sixteen, I’d thought it would have been something to celebrate, but today I felt nothing. Before entering the convent, I’d promised myself I would never touch alcohol of any kind ever again, and now here I was, going back on my word. One of many broken promises in these past two weeks. And all because of one person: Kegan Anderson.

  I felt too anxious to sit so I got up again, this time following the music to a flea market. This was an upside of going out on the weekend. With the music in my ears, I joined the crowd, while the smells of food and spices mixed in the air. There was more than just food and used clothing, and slowly, between the racks of vintage clothes and modern accessories, my mood improved. Even just looking at the stands felt good. It was mid-afternoon, but unfortunately for me, a cool breeze had swept in. I shivered and wished I had brought a cardigan with me. I had stupidly come out without my cell phone and couldn’t call Sara or Mother Superior to come and get me. I didn’t even have money for a taxi. I’d pushed all these thoughts to the back of my mind for as long as I could, but I now had to face the problem.

  “Ten dollars.”

  Someone next to me was trying to buy something.

  “I’ll give you a dollar off.”

  I could have asked the woman standing beside me if she knew of any motels nearby, or something like that, where I could call the convent. Maybe there was a café that would let me use their phone? But what would I say to Mother Superior? How would I explain my failure?

  Two fingers snapped in front of my face. I jumped back.

  “Two dollars off. Pick a color girl, I’ll give it to you for eight instead of ten. You want the one you’re holding? Black? You women and your black. You wanna wear it now or do you want a bag?”

  I looked down. My fingers were wrapped around a bracelet. I pulled my hand back. The man behind the table kept looking at me.

  “Nobody else would give it to you for eight dollars.”

  He started up his speech about how his products were nothing like the stuff you could find at the other stalls, that he had a jewelry store on Henry Street. It was a nice bracelet, sure, but I couldn’t afford it, even if I hadn’t bought that beer. He had several different colors and was now showing me them, one by one, as he continued talking.

  “Sorry,” I interrupted. “The black one is lovely—they all are—but I forgot my purse a
t home.”

  He looked disappointed, but it wasn’t my fault if he had wasted so much energy trying to sell me something. I held out my arms and spun in a circle to prove that I had nothing. The black bracelet he was trying to sell me dangled from between his chubby fingers. I had an idea.

  “I forgot my phone too. Would you let me call home?” I asked, putting on my most pathetic face. Thank God I remembered the convent’s number.

  He didn’t budge. Damn. My lost puppy face didn’t have any effect on him.

  “I’ll come to your shop on Henry Street tomorrow, and I’ll buy that bracelet—and more,” I added, trying to convince him.

  Nothing. I bat my eyelashes. Nothing. I bat my lashes again. Just when I was ready to give up, the man reached into his pocket and pulled out his smartphone.

  “We’re closed Monday,” he said with a smirk.

  I thanked him and started dialing the convent’s number. But the call never went through, as two things happened simultaneously instead.

  One: “Two hundred,” a voice said.

  Two: The phone was taken out of my hands and handed back to its owner.

  Then a pair of sunglasses shielded my eyes from those of the man behind the stall—who was no longer looking at me, but at the man standing behind me, whispering in my ear. “Thousand.” The man who was holding me by the hips and protecting me from the cold breeze with the hottest air in the world. “Dollars.”

  Kegan had caught me off guard. I didn’t know what to say or do. I was frozen in place, just like the man behind the market stall. I was practically a mummy, except I was still breathing. I watched as he held out two hundred-dollar bills toward the man and thought about his unexpected reappearance. Kegan’s hand was now back on my side. I was irritated, confused, relieved and so much more; I had no idea which emotion was strongest.

  He pulled me back slightly, allowing me to feel his erection through his jeans. I felt my face turn purple; my mind was no longer capable of thinking about anything else. The man, unaware of this detail, looked at the money and then at Kegan.

  “It’s eight dollars,” he said, no longer as confident as before, but confused and almost uncomfortable.

  He tried to hand one of the bills back to Kegan who refused to take his hands off my hips to accept it. Kegan then slid his fingers down my backside and stepped closer to me. I swallowed nervously and held my crucifix tight. He rubbed against me and my head began to spin. Oh, Jesus. He rubbed against me again. Slowly, so that nobody would notice. Nobody but me. I somehow managed to turn the groan coming out of my mouth into a fake cough. Just in time.

  “Stop it,” I whispered.

  He responded by continuing.

  “I’ll take the yellow one,” he said, pretending he wasn’t doing anything indecent. “Keep the change—I don’t want a bag,” he said, answering the vendor before he could even ask the question.

  Judging by his expression, Christmas had come early for the vendor. Kegan freed me from his torture, as pleasant as it was embarrassing, and took the yellow bracelet in his hand. He wrapped it around my wrist and the salesman turned to help other customers, infinitely more cheerful than before.

  Kegan dragged me away.

  “Did you get yellow because it’s your favorite color? Did it even cross your mind that I might want to pick my own color?” I asked, my voice filled with rage.

  I wasn’t over it yet. He was walking at a relaxed pace; my gait was anything but. He had decided to look for me as if nothing had happened, as if we hadn’t even fought just three hours ago.

  “You were in a daze, Rose. You were totally focused on my cock, ready and waiting for you.” He wrapped his arm around my waist.

  I was mortified—had anyone heard him? Someone turned to look at us. Kegan could say that kind of thing with the same ease that others would have used when engaging in casual conversation. Talking about the weather with him was out of the question. His vocabulary was anything but ordinary. It was based exclusively on sex. I considered calling him out on it, but shook my head and decided it was better to give up.

  “Yellow because it matches your hair.”

  Maybe he was capable of having non-sexual conversations after all.

  “White,” he continued. “My favorite color is white. When I was little I never knew what color to pick. When I was nine I learned that white is a mix of all the colors in the spectrum and it became my favorite.”

  A second normal answer. But I still had my doubts that he could go an entire conversation without throwing in something pornographic.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, my tough-girl voice turning into pure curiosity. I knew perfectly well we weren’t going in the direction we came from.

  “To go fuck each other.”

  I knew he wasn’t capable of going too long without mentioning sex. And every time he did, his words made me feel like I was in a furnace. It was too hot again. I had to get some air or I was going to die.

  I pushed his hand away to get out of his grasp. I looked at the bracelet, then back at him.

  “You paid two hundred dollars for something that can’t be worth more than ten. Why’d you do that? Did you just not have any smaller bills?”

  He shrugged. “Things don’t have an intrinsic value—we decide how much they are worth. If you think that bracelet is worth ten dollars, then it’s worth ten dollars. If you want it to be worth two hundred, then it’s worth two hundred.”

  “And how much are you worth? What value have you assigned to your body and kisses?”

  Kegan stopped walking and I followed suit. We’d made it to his motorcycle, parked where it shouldn’t have been, obviously. It wasn’t where we’d left it. He’d ridden his motorcycle to look for me. For five seconds I was floating on air, then I came back down to Earth.

  “How much do you cost? How much does it cost to kiss you?” I repeated the questions he was refusing to answer. I wanted to be hurt. I needed to know.

  He looked at me with his indecipherable expression. He took off his sunglasses, piercing me with his emerald eyes. But I didn’t give in. I raised my chin in defiance. Now that he was no longer touching me, the air chilled my arms. I warmed them up with my hands.

  Kegan flashed me a malicious smile. “I already told you how much it costs to kiss me.” He had to stop himself from laughing, and I understood he had something in mind. “You must have been distracted.” He was messing with me.

  “No you didn’t,” I protested.

  “Two hundred.” He took off his jacket and moved behind me. “Thousand.” He wrapped the jacket around me. I basked in his scent, now on my skin. “Dollars.” He took my hand in his and helped me zip up the jacket.

  It didn’t matter that I was swimming in it—I would have gladly worn it until my dying day.

  He came around to face me. “But you were too focused on my—”

  I raised my hand to cover his mouth and prevent him from saying that word out loud again. A woman was walking by with a stroller, for God’s sake. I gave him a strange look but my sunglasses prevented him from seeing it.

  “Nobody pays you that much for a kiss,” I said, slowly sliding my fingers away from those lips that I could never afford.

  I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Two hundred thousand dollars was insane. As amazing as it was to kiss him, and as damn good as he was, that figure was ludicrous. Despite his lifestyle and his filthy rich clientele, I had a hard time believing what I was hearing.

  “The value you give money isn’t the same as someone who has spent their life sitting on millions of dollars.” Once again, Kegan had demonstrated his ability to read my mind. “Fucking me is actually cheaper because I like it. But there are people who pay me two hundred thousand dollars just to kiss me.” He lowered his head until I could feel his breath on my face. “Per kiss.”

  My heartbeat quadrupled. I was afraid he could hear it. Beat by beat. The sound was deafening. Even louder than the live music we’d listened to earlier. I brea
thed in his breath, unable to take my eyes off of those lips that, to some, were worth two hundred thousand dollars. He brought them close to mine until they nearly touched. My stomach twisted. My hands, completely disconnected from my brain, reached under his shirt. I ran my hands over his sculpted stomach, silently counting the seconds until we would kiss. I wanted that kiss with all of my being. He had won. I didn’t care who saw us anymore. In that moment I would have forgiven him for any obscenity that came from his mouth.

  My mental countdown began. Five. Kegan smiled in response to my touch. Four. He came closer, allowing my hands to drift to his pecs. Three. His hands wrapped around my cheeks and pulled my face to his. My eyes had no way of escaping his gaze. Two. I held my breath as Kegan drew his lips toward mine. One.

  He looked me in the eyes and ended the magic. “Would you give me two hundred thousand dollars for a kiss?”

  Lie. If I told him that I would, would he give in to my desire?

  “If you had it, would you give it to me?”

  Zero.

  “No.”

  His hands slid down my face.

  I never could’ve lied about something like that. I would never have that kind of money, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t use it to buy a kiss. Kegan stepped back without saying a word. I couldn’t tell if my answer had disappointed him or if he was just trying to figure out if I was telling the truth. But I had no regrets about how my mental countdown came to an end. I could handle the pain of that lost kiss. I could ignore the fire that had been burning in my core since he’d found me. But I couldn’t lie like that.

  He put on his black helmet and then placed that awful lime green thing over my head. All without saying a single word or looking me in the eye.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We drove through an iron gate, but this time we weren’t at Lust. We got off the motorcycle, and Kegan fiddled with his cell phone while I gazed at the beach house’s garden. All these houses looked the same. Weekend homes for people just swimming in money. I looked up. The sun had set and the sky was as gray as Kegan’s mood. I hopped from one foot to another.