by M. O’Keefe
“Fuck you,” I snapped, because the anger felt good and he was being a dick. “Are you honestly going to pretend like you didn’t think of me?’
His silence was a brick wall.
“You didn’t imagine what I was doing? Where I’d gone? You’re not curious?” I cocked my head waiting for him to say something. His silence egged me on. Infuriated me. “I thought of you all the time. I thought of the art room—”
“Stop.”
“You didn’t?”
He shook his head, once, a hard shake, like he was trying to dislodge me.
My body lost interest in the withdrawal, the surge of lust in my system distracting it from its cravings for a drug to take the edge off. And oh, did my body find relief in the distraction. I shifted against the seat until my back was against the passenger-side door. At my movement he looked at me over his shoulder, and I was ready for him. My lips parted, my eyebrow cocked. My shirt slipped over my shoulder, and it didn’t go unnoticed by him. Not. At. All.
“I remember the time you put your hand up my skirt—”
“Jada—”
“Remember. You pushed me up against the wall and you held my hand down on the counter—”
“Stop.”
“Was that the same time or two different times?” I knew, of course I knew; it was two separate and amazing times. I was just trying to get under his skin. “I can’t remember. I’ve made up so many fucking fantasies about that art room. I’ve come thinking about—”
“Stop.”
No way. “You held my hand down because I kept reaching for you. Putting my hand under your shirt, and you didn’t want me to. You didn’t like it. And you slipped your hand up under my skirt, remember? And I was so embarrassed by how wet I was. I thought I was gross. That there was something wrong with me. But you…do you remember?”
I could see the blush on his neck and up his face. Across his cheeks. His ears were so red. He didn’t nod or shake his head, but he remembered. Oh, he fucking remembered.
I was picking up from exactly where our bodies left off when we were teenagers.
“What you said?” I asked, leaning forward. “No?” I all but cooed at his silence.
“You liked it,” I said. I could feel my body getting hot again as I pulled apart the memory. I pulled it apart and sucked down the marrow, feeding myself with it. “You said I was beautiful. You said—”
“I know what I said,” he snapped.
“That I was juicy. That you wanted to taste me.”
“Jada—”
“I came, remember. You made me come. My first orgasm.”
I laughed in my throat and took out my ponytail, only to put it back in, over and over again, to give my hands something to do.
So I didn’t touch him.
Because this kidnapping had taken a turn.
“Do you think about it?” I asked. “Do you remember? The room smelled like turpentine. And the papers on the bulletin board crinkled against my back and I thought you were the most beautiful—”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” he said, and he turned the radio up so loud I couldn’t talk over it.
He’d tried forgetting me but it hadn’t seemed to work.
So now he had to pretend. Well, I wished him luck with that. I was the master of pretending. The queen of make-believe. I’d created a whole world for us in the last seven years. A dream.
That wish kids like us never got to have.
Part of me almost felt bad for him.
Except, you know, he was kidnapping me.
* * *
“Can you turn on the radio?” I asked when the silence and my own thoughts got to be too much for me.
He flipped it on, turning the dial until he found a station that wasn’t all static. A pop station out of Las Vegas.
“This okay?” he asked
“Fine.”
I knew it was only a matter of time before one of my songs came on and lo and behold, fifteen minutes later the first few chords of Making Waves came through the speakers. I was about to ask him to change it when he made a kind of laughing, huffing noise.
Here we go, I thought.
“That’s you!”
“That’s me.”
“I can’t believe… holy shit,” he breathed and turned it up just a little more. “This song is everywhere.”
I nodded.
“I can’t believe I didn’t realize it was you. Your voice. I mean…that’s your voice.”
I could feel him looking at me in the rearview mirror and suddenly the radio was turned down. “You must be sick of it,” he said, all that huffy amazement gone.
His understanding was surprising, the song turned down a relief. “I am. A little.”
“How did this happen?”
“I thought you didn’t want to talk,” I shot back and his silence gave me room to decide whether I wanted to talk or not. He wouldn’t – oh, no, not Tommy. No answers from that guy. But I could jabber away. It was so familiar it was almost gross. But I wasn’t Beth. If he wasn’t going to talk, neither was I.
But then, a few minutes later I was blurting; “I don’t know, really. I don’t know how it happened.”
“No?” he said, without scoffing. With in fact a tremendous amount of the old Tommy empathy. I’d been a sucker for the old Tommy empathy.
“A year ago I got a job on the make-up team for Katy Perry. I was…well, I guess I still am, a body painter and make up artist. I went on tour with her and did some music videos and it was a really amazing job for me. I got to do art and be apart of the music world and it paid really well and it was awesome.”
“It sounds awesome.”
“At night, I’d do makeup on myself, really wild stuff and I’d sing cover songs and I’d film it on my computer and upload it onto YouTube. I’d been doing it forever. I’d dress up like a Pheonix and sing an Arcade Fire song. Or a Zombie-nun and I’d sing Like A Virgin. Silly stuff. I got a little following. Nothing huge. Mostly fun. But then I did this mermaid make up and I decided to sing an original song. I uploaded Making Waves at like midnight on a Friday night and I woke up in the morning and it had like seven million views. Two days later I sang on Ellen in the full make-up, a day after that Sherman my manager called me to talk about representation and…well, the rest is history I guess.”
“How long ago was this?”
“I uploaded that video seven months ago.”
“Holy shit,” he breathed. “That’s crazy.”
“Try living it,” I said with a weary laugh. “I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining.” Because there was nothing worse than someone living a dream life and complaining about it.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“What’s not to like? I get all the finest kidnappings.”
“But are you happy-?”
“You know, turn up the radio, I don’t want to talk anymore.”
* * *
By the time we skirted Flagstaff, caught in the traffic of a city waking up and going to work, I was really sick. I couldn’t pretend anymore. I was sweating and shaking, my eyes closed in a wince against the daylight. He didn’t say anything, didn’t bother asking me if I was all right anymore—because it was pretty obvious I wasn’t.
He just turned on the heat, blasting the vents into the backseat, but it did little good.
“We’re almost there,” he said like that was supposed to make me feel better. Give me hope. The other end of this trip promised me nothing.
“Now…you want to talk.” I opened my eyes and turned my face to look at him in the rearview mirror, this strange reflective place where our eyes met and then looked away. The distance and the angles made it all feel… safer.
“Who are you dropping me off with?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“What if…what if you’re dropping me off to people who are really going to kidnap me,” I swallowed. “Like hold me ransom and shit.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
My laughter had claws that raked at my bones.
“Handing me over to someone who will hurt me…that’s hurting me, Tommy. Hate to break it to you.”
“No one is going to hurt you.”
“You don’t know that, do you?” I asked. “Like no one even said that to you. You’re just hoping it’s true.”
I watched his hands squeeze the steering wheel, and I tried not to let it hurt. That I meant so little to him that promising not to give me to someone who would hurt me was a hard thing.
“I won’t hand you over to anyone who will hurt you.”
“Promise,” I said, sharp and fast. Because I was sick. And I was vulnerable. And somehow it was him, here. Tommy. Who’d protected me at my weakest. Who’d charged into that office—a skinny, underfed boy. “Promise me you won’t let anyone hurt me. Promise me like you’re still the boy who gave me those graham crackers. Promise me like that.”
“I promise,” he said, but he didn’t look at me.
12
Tommy
The way she smiled at me when she realized who I was…it was the same way she’d smiled at me when she looked up and saw me walking into the computer lab that day a million years ago.
Like the sight of me made her so happy.
It kicked me in the fucking gut, that smile. Just like it had then.
I still couldn’t breathe right.
And all that shit she was talking about those lunch hours in the art room.
She’d thought about it. She’d made herself come thinking about it.
I mean…what was I supposed to do with that knowledge? How was I supposed to sit up here and drive and not lose my shit?
And how could she think for one minute that I didn’t like her touch on my skin. That I had been in any way repulsed by her?
She’d been beauty personified.
Her hand under my shirt when we were in the art room… If I concentrated, I could pull it up so clearly. Like it was real. Like it was happening now. I’d liked it so much I’d almost come in my pants. I’d been so hard, it had taken every bit of my strength not to lean up against her. Not to grind into her.
God. The things I’d thought… the things I’d wanted.
Still wanted.
Fuck.
It took everything I had not to pull the car over onto the side of the road and just…stare at her. Just take her in. Catalog the changes.
She was beautiful. She was more beautiful than I could have ever imagined. All that beauty combined with something so wild. So artistic and unique.
Beth had turned into something I lacked the imagination to even describe. That inky hair with all its colors and her eyes so bright and cutting. And she was a woman now, with a woman’s body. All that promise realized.
She was tourmaline and I was fucking concrete. But she always had been. And I’d always known it.
My shoulder still burned where she’d bitten me. I reached back to touch it, in the guise of rubbing a sore muscle. But I could still feel the imprint of her teeth. The small divots. My shirt was damp from her mouth.
Part of me, exhausted and perverse, wished she’d made me bleed.
Blood pounded in my dick and I hated it. Hated myself.
My shoulder would burn for days. Just as my body had burned for years after St. Joke’s. The dreams I’d had about her were matches under a fire that never went out.
The clock said 7:50 and I pushed the gas pedal to the floor, sweat crawling down my spine. I had the heat blasting into the backseat, trying to warm up the woman shivering there. I’d never felt so keenly my lack of a jacket. I had nothing to put over her except Pest, and she’d soundly rejected that body heat.
The high-performance engine responded in a nanosecond, and we hurtled around a semi and a slow-moving pickup truck.
Beth—no, Jada—was going into withdrawal. How bad the withdrawal was going to depend on what she’d been taking and for how long.
I pushed the gas to the floor.
Because I needed her out of this car. And out of my life.
Because she was bringing back all the memories. The fucking feelings.
Of us. All of us. Carissa and Rosa and Simon. Memories of me. The kid I’d been. Starving and so fucking sure I could take care of everyone.
The fucking wishes I’d wished for us. All of them dust now. Mud and shit and nothing.
“Jeez, Tommy, is this some kind of kidnapping race?”
I understood what she was doing. Being a smart-ass because I was scaring her, because she was freaking out.
We all needed armor in this world, and I was glad to see she had hers.
Jada was excellent armor.
It’s none of your business, I told myself. Who she is or what she’s become. It has nothing to do with you. You’re going to drop her and walk away.
And not look back.
That was fucking key. I wasn’t going to spend the next seven years building a life for her in my imagination. I wasn’t going to make small talk and get to know her. I wasn’t going to exchange numbers with her and text her in a few days. I wasn’t going to imagine her underneath those clothes. The changes the years had made.
I would drop her off, and I would forget her.
I would.
Promise me you won’t let anyone hurt me. Promise me like you’re still the boy who gave me those graham crackers. Promise me like that.
I had no reason to believe whoever was on the other end of this drop-off would be there to hurt her.
But there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t, either.
There were ten minutes left on the clock, and according to my phone we were still twenty-five miles away.
I took the exit off the highway and followed smaller roads up into the foothills of the San Francisco Peaks.
“I think I’m dying,” she said. The first words she’d spoken in a while.
“It’s the drugs.”
“I know it’s the drugs,” she snapped. “I just feel like they’re making me die.”
“Do you know what you were taking?” I asked her.
“Downers after shows so I could sleep. Uppers so I could wake up and perform. There were other prescription things too. The injection was a serious sleeping…thing.”
“Sleeping?” I said before I could stop myself. Concern flaring up before I could stop it. She’d always had so much trouble sleeping.
“Yeah, it’s still a problem.”
I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to give a shit.
The things she’d been taking were a cocktail designed for addiction. She was going to have a rough day or two ahead of her for sure. And more in the future. I still had bad days, moments when I’d give anything for some sweet oblivion. And I’d been clean for five years.
“It wasn’t…I haven’t been doing these drugs all along. It was only…the last part of the tour. Everything was just so intense.”
I made a low rumbling noise of understanding.
“I thought I could control it.”
I understood that feeling, too but there was nothing to say, so I kept my mouth shut.
My phone squawked a few more directions at me, and soon I was driving down a long asphalt road, with mesquite growing high and thick on either side. The driveway opened up into a circle in front of an old beautiful adobe mansion with black metal balconies and white curtains fluttering through open windows. The property was groomed with trails and other outbuildings. Flowers bloomed everywhere.
There was even a fountain in front, water spitting from a fish’s mouth.
Everything about it said class.
And safe.
I exhaled a breath I’d been holding for what felt like forever and pulled to a stop in front of a discrete sign that read:
Willow Addiction Rehabilitation Facility.
Oh God. Oh thank God.
Giddy with relief, I put my forehead down on my steering wheel.
Reha
b. I was driving her to rehab.
The relief was fucking thrilling. All the tension in my body just drained away. For a second I couldn’t feel my face.
I put the car in park and turned, not sure how this particular conversation was going to go.
“We here?” she asked. Her eyes were closed and she was shaking, holding on to her thin body with both hands like she might rattle away if she didn’t.
“Yeah,” I said.
“How bad is it?”
“Open your eyes. It’s not bad at all.”
“Is it a spa?”
“Not quite.” Her eyes blinked open. So brown, her eyes. I’d forgotten how they changed, light and dark depending on the light around her. I saw them now, bloodshot and swimming in tears, and I saw them seven years ago as she sang in that church beside me. I would see them forever, I supposed.
“Rehab?” she said when she saw the sign, and laughed. “This guy you owed a favor to thinks I need rehab?”
“I guess so,” I said lamely, because I’d been up for a solid twenty-four hours at this point and the world was getting fuzzy. And nothing Bates has ever done has made sense.
“I don’t need fucking rehab,” she said. “It was just a rough month.”
I said nothing. I didn’t have to.
“Don’t do that,” she sneered. “Don’t judge me.”
“I’m not.”
I wasn’t. I’d been where she was right now, too many times. The judgment she felt was her own.
“You don’t want to check yourself in, fine,” I said. “Go in and call your people. Call the cops. Go back to your life. I’m just…” So many fucking things. Too many to name. “Supposed to drop you here.”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do. Call my people. All of them.”
But what she needed was this place. And I was pretty sure she knew it.
“Can you walk?” I asked.
“You’re a jerk.”
“Can you dial a phone?”
“An asshole.”
“Can you remember the name of one person who could help you?”
“You could help me and drive me away from here,” she said.
I shook my head.
I’d fulfilled my promise, and I had the rest of my life to live, without the shadow of Bates and Beth and St. Joke’s over my head. I was going to drop her off, drive to Los Angeles and drown every memory of her in a bottle of whiskey. That’s what I was going to do.