“I'm super proud of you, Ty,” I say as we pause at a street corner and dump both of our cigarettes into the nearby ashtray. “Really, I am.” I look up and see that he's staring at me with a strange expression on his face like there's more. I make an incorrect assumption about his look and blurt out, “About what happened … before … I … ”
“Never,” Ty says as he touches a finger to my chin and pulls my gaze from his butterfly tattoos and up to his face. “Listen to me. You and I, we both have problems.” I push his hand away and look down at the cement. The wind is blowing my hair into my face, obscuring my vision with ebony and crimson. Ty sweeps it away from my eyes with his ringed fingers. He's wearing mostly pearls today which is strange. Every other time I've seen him, he's had a myriad of different gems in all sorts of colors.
“Thank you, Captain Fucking Obvious,” I say because standing here on this street corner with Ty McCabe, I feel exposed, like I'm naked on the top of a mountain, revealed for the world to see. I don't like it. Not one little bit.
“What if I said we could help each other through those problems?” I stare into his eyes and wait for the other shoe to drop.
“Okay?” I say, and I sound sarcastic and bitter and completely unpleasant. I close my eyes and force myself to take a calming breath. Ty is trying here, so I owe it to him to try, too. I open my eyes and notice that he's shivering. I realize how cold my face and hands are and immediately wrap my arms around him. He did give me his coat after all. “How?”
“You know how alcoholics have sponsors?” he asks me, and I don't really like the analogy.
“Sure, yeah.”
“Well, that's what we're going to be.”
“Sponsors?”
“Yep.”
“But neither of us are alcoholics,” I say as I step back. The light has changed and we've finally got an opportunity to cross the street. “You want to like, go to an AA meeting or something?”
“No,” Ty says as he grabs my hand again and pulls me through the crosswalk. “I want to go to an SAA meeting.”
“SAA?” I ask as we head towards the hill and the massive white and beige buildings of the campus. “What the hell is that?”
“Sex Addicts Anonymous,” Ty says simply and my heart jumps into my throat.
Oh. Shit.
I dig my heels into the pavement and refuse to take another step.
“There's no way in hell I'm going to one of those meetings,” I protest, and I feel hot and jittery, like there are ants marching over my skin and making me itch. I shake my head and turn away from Ty so that I'm facing the inside of a sub shop. There aren't any people inside at the moment, and two of the employees are lip-locked behind the counter. It's not a pleasant sight, so I switch my gaze to the sidewalk.
“Never, we need this. Both of us. Or at least, I need it, and I need you to help me.” I shake my head. I am not capable of helping anyone with anything.
“I can't, Ty,” I say. I'm panicking right now and deep down, I know why. It's because he's right. He's right. He is so fucking right that I can't stand it. I should've gone out with Rick, hit the straight and narrow, got married and had babies. That's what I should've done, but here I am, standing with Ty McCabe on a street corner talking about sex addiction. How perfect is that? Somehow, even though I can't admit it to myself at the moment, I think that I'm right where I need to be. How fucked up is that? “I can't do this right now,” I whisper even though I know I will. I will do it.
“That's okay,” Ty says as he steps up real close to me and lights a cigarette next to my ear. When he exhales, I inhale and try to find some modicum of peace when the smoke fills my lungs. “You don't have to go right away. The meeting isn't until later. Right now, you and I have something else to do.”
“And what's that?” I ask because I can't handle the suspense.
“You and I are going to get tested.”
17
I'm sitting in a plastic chair next to Ty, and I'm shaking so bad that my teeth are chattering. It's not that I'm cold, not with Ty's jacket wrapped around me like a second skin. I'm shaking because sitting here in this office with these posters all around me, I feel sick.
Do you feel alone? Do you use sex as a way to connect with strangers? Have your desires motivated you to seek sex with people you wouldn't normally choose? How about in places or situations you wouldn't normally choose? Do your sexual encounters leave you at risk for STIs, unwanted pregnancies, rape or violence? Have you ever had a sexual encounter that has left you feeling hopeless or alienated? Suicidal?
Everywhere I fucking look there's another poster with a girl or a boy who's either crying or holding their head like they're in pain. And my answer to every single fucking question that's printed above their melancholy faces is YES. Y. E. S. It's almost enough to make me walk out. The only thing keeping me seated is Ty's hand in my lap. He's been letting me examine his tattoos as a way to keep my mind occupied.
“So I only got things with wings,” Ty says as I trace an orange and black butterfly on the back of his hand. “Because I wanted to be free. Every time I got a new tattoo, I promised myself that this was the day I changed everything. This was the day I grew my own wings and flew away.”
“What happened?” I whisper, afraid that if I speak too loudly, the receptionist might look up and see me for what I really am. A person with a broken soul. I swallow hard and glance at the door fearfully when the bell above the entrance rings. There are no other patients in here now, but if there were, I don't think I could do this. I couldn't sit here with anyone who knows what I really am, what's wrong with me, why I'm here. Except for Ty. Just Ty. Fortunately, it's just a delivery man. He drops a small package at the front desk and leaves while I keep my head tilted down and away for fear that he'll memorize my face, call me out on the street or something, see me in class.
“I never really tried, Never. I didn't know what to try for.”
“But you do now?” I ask, but before Ty can answer, the door to the back opens.
“Mr. McCabe?” the woman with the clipboard says. She's smiley and nice and all, but I bet underneath all of that sweet, she's thinking, What the hell is wrong with these kids? Why are they here? What happened to make them this way? I stare into her brown eyes and am paralyzed with fear. This is my worst nightmare come true. Inside these walls, I cannot lie. I cannot pretend, not anymore.
“Are you going to be okay?” Ty asks me as he shakes my knee gently to grab my attention. I look over at him and don't know what to say. No? Is that an option.
“I have to tell you a secret,” I say to him. Maybe now isn't the best time, but after. I'll tell him after. “When we get out of here. I want to tell you what I didn't say that day you picked me up in Art History.” Ty nods his head and presses a chaste kiss to my cheek.
“I would like that, Never,” he says to me. “I really would.” As he rises to his feet, I have to close my eyes to keep myself from following after him. I count up to a hundred and back down to one again. When I open my eyes, there are tears in them.
Here in this office, in this room with the too true posters, my own mortality sits in a plastic chair of her own, stares me straight in the face and smirks. I feel her eyes on me, calculating, judging, disapproving.
“I already know what you think of me,” I say aloud and notice that the receptionist's eyes lift from her computer for just a second and gaze out at me. I give her a tight-lipped smile and resist the urge to flip her off. My anger is just a reaction to the fear I have inside of myself, a fear that somehow, one of the dozens of stupid mistakes I've made, the desperate attempts at filling that deep, aching, loneliness, will kill me. That I'll go out of this world alone and without dignity. That I'll never really understand what it means to live.
I get up three times and go to the door, and three times, I turn around and go back, sit in that plastic chair and wait with my inner Never staring at me, waiting for judgment day. I don't read any of the magazines that sit on the table to my right n
or do I watch the silent TV screen that's hanging near the ceiling, flashing bright colors at me in a blurry slide show. I just sit and wait and think. And when I've had enough of that, I get out my phone and dial a number that I haven't dialed in a long, long time.
Three rings later, and I hear: “Hello?”
I swallow hard, try not to cry again and say one word, “Beth?”
18
“Never? Oh my god, Mom, it's Never. Never?” I open my mouth to speak, but the words won't come out. They're stuck deep down inside, buried by hurt and pain. I start to cry again and dash the tears away angrily while I listen to my sister's frantic voice. “Never, are you still there? Please answer me, Never.” Beth is hysterical. She's sobbing, and I can just imagine her face in my head, the way her nose turns red when she cries and the way her pretty eyes go all bloodshot like she's been smoking pot or something. I always thought she was prettiest like that though, raw and not so perfect as she pretends to be. I miss her, and I hate her.
“Why?” I ask that one single word, and Beth goes silent. People are shouting in the background. I don't know which people, my sisters or maybe even my mom, but I'm definitely not ready to talk to her yet. I don't even know why I called. After five years, I just up and do it in the middle of a fucking clinic? Is it Ty? Is it me? What is it? Maybe it's because I know that I'm here for a reason, Ty brought me here for a reason, and if it's to find out that I've got something, that I'm going to die, I need to get this off of my chest or my spirit really will just disintegrate and become nothing. I swallow my anger at Beth for just a moment. “Why didn't you stand up for me when you knew I was right?” Beth stays silent, and I watch the clock across the room from me, hanging over the other Never's head like a halo.
Ticktock, she says.
“Oh, Never, where are you? Are you safe?” she blurts out.
The door across the room opens and Ty emerges with a small bandage on his elbow. When he first steps out, he's smiling, but as soon as he sees my face, he practically runs across the office and kneels down beside me. I look at him looking up at me.
“Are you okay?” he asks again, and I can see he's worried that bringing me here was a mistake. What he doesn't know is that this day, this blip in the reel of life events that will inevitably define who and why and how and what Never Ross and Ty McCabe are, is the most important day of all, the turning point for both of us. That's why it's hard; it has to be hard or it wouldn't count. That's the rule of the universe, I suppose. As Andrew Carnegie once said, Anything in life worth having is worth working for!
I don't respond to Ty's question because I'm not sure of the answer.
“Never? Never? Answer me, please, god,” Beth sobs as Ty pulls the phone from my stiff fingers, looks at the screen and then puts it to his ear.
“She's having a crisis of character at the moment,” Ty says as he gives me the world's smallest, cutest smile. “I'll have her call you back.” He hangs up, and then slips the phone into the front packet of the coat. “This is your secret?” he asks, and he sounds awfully broken up about it. Ty moves from the floor and sits on the chair next to me, taking my hand in his and weaving his ringed fingers through mine.
“Part of it,” I admit as the door in the back opens once again and reveals the smiley lady with the ponytail and the perfect teeth.
“Never Ross?”
I close my eyes and gather courage around myself, all of it that I can muster. I have that in spades, you know. It takes a lot of courage to go through life in the dark. Most people have a nightlight, something to chase away the monsters and beautify the storm, but I've never had that, so I've learned to be brave. I might fuck strange people and I might cry and maybe I smoke too much, but I know how to deal, so that's what I'm going to do.
“Never,” Ty whispers so close to my ear that I can feel his hot breath against my skin. In spite of the situation, it makes me shiver. “It's your turn.”
I open up my eyes and rise to my feet. All the while my hands are shaking, and the mortal me still sits beneath a plastic clock in a plastic chair and smiles.
19
I cry through my entire examination.
I cry when they ask me routine questions.
When was your last sexual encounter? Who was your last sexual partner? How many sexual partners have you had in your lifetime? Do you use protection?
I cry when they take my weight and my height and my blood pressure.
Five foot seven, one hundred and forty-one pounds, the perfect 120/80.
I cry when they ask me to remove my jacket.
It smells like cigarettes and dangerous boys with broken hearts, like a shield against painful reality.
When I first start to cry, the woman who's asking the questions feels really bad and even gives me a hug and a cup of black coffee. I sip it down slowly, but it doesn't help. I just have to let the emotions wash over me and feel them, all of them. Hiding away from them doesn't work. Hiding away from them is what got me here.
They poke my arm and draw blood, lots of it. When they first put the needle into my flesh, the pain is almost unbearable, like a laughable analogy of all the pricks I've used in myself to try and cover up my feelings. I bite my tongue and force myself to watch the nurse weave the metal into my flesh. She wiggles it around for a moment, and then tugs on the plunger at the end of the tube.
“Okay, Never, try to sit still and we'll get this over with as quick as we can.” Crimson fills the tube, glistening bright under the fluorescent lights as it's pulled from my body, bit by painful bit. “We have to get a few samples since there are multiple tests. You did say you wanted a full workup, didn't you?”
“Test me for all of it,” I tell her without any sort of inflection. The tears have finally dried on my face, salty and sticky. Now I feel a bit emotionless like I'm in shock or something. “I'm probably disease ridden.” The nurse laughs, but I can tell she's only doing it out of nervousness. Once the tube is full, she pulls it off the needle and slips it into a tray of rounded slots. There's at least a dozen of them, so I know I'm in for the long haul. I lean my head back against the chair and watch as she repeats the process.
“I know it doesn't seem like much, but your boyfriend must care a lot about you,” she says, and I don't correct her assumption that Ty is my boyfriend. She knows that he was the last person I slept with and I'm guessing by his actions that I'm the same for him, so it makes sense. I wish it was that simple. Plunge, blood, twist, slot, repeat.
“Because it's romantic to find out if your lover is as diseased as you are?” I ask, and am sorry that I even said it.
“A lot of men refuse to come in here. We get more girls than we do boys, most of them saying that their lovers want them to get tested, but won't get tested themselves. It makes me sick.” The nurse smiles at me and searches my face for a moment before she looks back down at the bloody tube in her hand. “I understand that it's only been a week since your last sexual encounter, but did you want us to run a pregnancy test as well?”
“Lay it all on me,” I tell her.
Either she takes this literally or Ty signed me up in advance for this torture because their next course of action is to hand me a water bottle and a cup, assign me to a bathroom and force me to pee.
I sit on the toilet with my pants around my ankles and just stare at the back of the door. I've left the lights off, but I can still see the poster. There's a girl who looks a lot like me with almond shaped eyes, curved brows, and a crooked smile. She even has a nose like mine. It's small and pointy, a feature of mine that I've always hated but that guys often tell me is cute. She's holding a sign that says, I Am Worth It.
“I'll bet you are,” I say to her as I sigh and try to force myself to go into the stupid cup. If I ever get horny again after this, it'll be a miracle. I should've stuck with Rick's road to redemption because Ty's is rocky and filled with thorns. Ty. Ty McCabe. The mysterious man with the sexy smirk and the perfect abs and the bleeding heart. What a fucking nightma
re. What am I going to do with him anyway? Why did I even go back to his apartment? To be friends again? Is that what I want to be? Do I have to define our relationship?
You get each other, isn't that enough?
I shake my head, down the water bottle, and do what I need to do. When I'm finished, I wash my hands and put the lid on the cup, taping it down just so as I've been instructed. When I come out of the bathroom, blinking my eyes at the bright light, the nurse takes it with a smile and a gleeful Thank you! that I just don't buy because really, all I gave her was piss. I put my hands on my hips.
“Am I done now?” I ask as I look around for my coat.
“If you're looking for your jacket, I gave it back to Mr. McCabe,” she says with a smile. “And no, darling, you're not quite done yet, there is one more test. We need to get a swab. Come with me and I'll show you to your room.” I sigh and follow her out, watch as she hands my piss to another lab tech, removes her gloves, and washes her hands with foamy soap. She then escorts me to another room, a much scarier room.
There are pregnant women and women with babies plastered on all the walls, and in the center of this white washed hell hole is a chair with metal stirrups and straps that look so medieval that I nearly bolt in fear. The nurse puts a hand on my arm as if to comfort me.
“There's a hospital gown there for you. If you wouldn't mind putting it on, we can get started. You can leave your top on, but please remove your pants and underwear. The doctor will be with you shortly.”
“What if I do mind?” I ask as I give the nurse a look over my left shoulder. “What the fuck is this?” Miss Smiley does what she does best, putting on this big, goofy grin that's supposed to make me feel better but doesn't.
“We need to get a vaginal swab to make sure we can thoroughly rule out the possibility of infection, Miss Ross. With your sexual history, it's – ”
“Fine,” I say as I hold up my hands. I don't need to hear anymore about it. I just need to get this over with before I lose my nerve. “That's fine.” The nurse squeezes my shoulder and leaves me alone with smiling stock photos. I don't bother to use the bathroom and instead just strip right there in the office, feeling horribly vulnerable and more uncomfortable than ever.
Tasting, Finding, Keeping: The Story of Never Page 8