by Theresa Alan
“Really?”
“No. Really we suck. Seriously.”
“We’re pretty bad, too.”
“I’m sure you’re not worse than us. Most of the time we can’t even keep the damn balls on the table.”
They teased each other and themselves about who was worse at pool. (Turns out it was a draw—they were all pretty remedial.) After an hour or so of playing he invited all of them back to his house.
Marin looked at her girlfriends. They both nodded their eager agreement.
“Sure. We’ll follow you.”
In the car over to his house, it was all Marin and her friends could do to keep from bursting with excited giggles.
“He’s gorgeous,” Michelle declared.
“Totally hot,” Brandie agreed.
“An older man. That is so sexy,” Michelle said.
“And look at that car. He makes a ton of money.”
“What if you guys get married? You’ll be Mrs. Brent . . . what was his last name? Well, you’ll Mrs. Rich Wife anyway.”
“You guys, shut up. I’ve known him an hour. I think wedding plans are a bit premature.” But Marin suppressed a smile as she said it. She had to admit that even though she’d only known him an hour, the idea of running off and marrying a rich older man—whether it was Brent or not—would fix a lot. It would get her out of the house. It would liberate her from having to rely on her father’s money. She would be free at last.
At his house, Brent offered the trio of girls cocktails.
“You could get into really big trouble,” Marin said. “We’re only seventeen.”
“Really? That’s it? You seem a lot more mature than most seventeen-year-old girls. I certainly wouldn’t want to lead you innocent girls down the road to debauchery.”
The way he said “debauchery”—his grin, the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice—thrilled her. He was so much more mature and self-assured than the guys her age. He was sexy and dangerous and exciting.
“We’ve already been debauched aplenty. Don’t worry. It won’t be our first taste of alcohol.”
“Somehow I didn’t think so. Anyway, I’m a gambler by nature. I’ll take my chances.”
“A gambler, huh?”
“A risk taker, sure. You have to be if you want to be in business. Hell, if you want to succeed in life.”
They talked and flirted for several hours. He took her number before Marin and her friends left, and for five anxious days she waited for him to call. With each day that passed she became more and more intrigued by him. She was used to guys calling her within hours—sometimes minutes—of her giving them her phone number.
When he did call and ask if he could take her out to dinner that weekend, she was thrilled. Going out with him was adventurous, exciting, risky. Not that her parents would ever find out. They never had a clue what was going on in her life, even if she told them. But still, she knew what she was doing behind their backs, and it excited her beyond words.
On their first date, he was a perfect gentleman. He bought her flowers, opened doors, ordered a bottle of wine—she didn’t even get carded—and told her why this bottle of wine from Provence, France, was the perfect wine to accompany the meal. She loved that he knew about wine. She loved that the waiter didn’t blink when he ordered it for the two of them. Around him she was sophisticated. A woman. No longer just some inexperienced high school kid.
She fell for him, hard. And for the first few weeks, she was delirious with happiness. Everything was perfect.
And then.
The first time he hit her they’d been dating for a month. It was just after New Year’s and they’d been drinking and laughing and having fun. She couldn’t even remember what they were talking about, but she’d made a joke about him being secretly gay, and all humor evaporated from his expression immediately. His eyes filled with rage and he punched her in the stomach.
Marin had been so shocked she burst into tears. She’d never been hit in her entire life.
“Say you’re sorry,” he said.
“I’m sorry, are you nuts? I was kidding around and you punch me? And you want me to say I’m sorry? I’m getting out of here. Don’t ever, ever call me again.”
She went to leave his place and he came up behind her and grabbed her by the arm so hard it left bruises; five purple circles around her arm.
“Ouch! That hurts. Let go of me!”
“You’re not leaving until you say you’re sorry,” he said.
He meant it, she could see that. She could see how much he wanted an excuse, any excuse, to hurt her even more. She saw it, in his eyes, what he was capable of. All at once she was terrified.
“I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
She had tried to leave then. He insisted that she stay. She said she was tired, it was late, she should get going. He wanted her to stay. She stayed.
For the next several days, she refused to return his calls. When he showed up after school a few days later and asked her who exactly she thought she was, ignoring him, not returning his calls, she said she was sorry, she’d been busy. She was so scared of him that when he told her to get into his car, she did. And when he called her the next day, she picked up the phone and agreed to go out with him.
Marin never told anyone about Brent. Not her parents. Not her friends. Not a counselor. She was embarrassed. Her friends all thought Brent was such a catch. She was just doing everything wrong, making him mad at her. She had to stop making him mad at her. She could see in his eyes just how far he’d go.
He never made any specific threats. He never said, “If you try to leave me, I’ll kill you.” None of that “if I can’t have you no one will” business. But she knew that if she left, he would hurt her, really hurt her.
They dated for a few more months. She was always on guard with him, always watching what she was saying. She didn’t joke around with him anymore. She was careful.
He hurt her twice more, once throwing her against the wall, which had left a terrible bruise on her back for days, once punching her in her stomach. He was always careful to make sure the bruises were hidden. He knew what he was doing, and it terrified her.
She felt trapped. If he got so angry over a comment here or there, what would he do to her if she tried to leave him? Where could she hide? He knew where she lived, where she went to school. He knew what nights she practiced late at the theater, practically alone in the enormous high school.
Then one night after she’d practiced late for the spring play, he asked for a blow job and she said she was really tired. They started yelling at each other. He accused her of sleeping with somebody else, of not loving him, of being with him just for his money.
“You’re sleeping with him, that guy from the play.”
“No, but maybe I should.”
That’s when he punched her in the face.
She tore out of his townhouse, hailed a taxi, and, sobbing in pain and embarrassment, she went home, her left eye swelling so much she could hardly see out of it. When she got home, the black eye couldn’t be ignored, and her parents wanted to know what the hell was going on. She told them.
She had never seen her parents seem more concerned about her. Marin told them that she was scared for her life. That if she tried to leave him, he’d kill her. She was scared, but this attention her parents were giving her, it felt nice, too.
“I’m calling the police,” her dad said.
“Dad, he won’t spend any time in jail and then he’ll really be mad.” If he’d gotten so furious over a blow job, what would happen if she called in the police? “I’ll be fine. I’ll be going off to school soon, he won’t be able to get to me. I’ve been thinking about it, and I thought that, instead of going to Boston College or NYU, I’ll go to Colorado, and you’ll tell everyone, I mean everyone, that I’m going to Boston, and if he calls and asks about me, you tell him I went to college in Boston.”
“Honey, all the way across the country? Lying to peopl
e? Are you sure all this is necessary? It was probably just a fluke thing, him hitting you. All the hiding and lying, it seems so dramatic,” her mom said. “Maybe acting in all those plays has made you find drama where there isn’t really any.”
“You don’t think this is dramatic?” Marin pointed to her eye. “This isn’t the first time he’s hit me, Mom. I’ve tried to break up with him, but I’m so scared of him, I’m scared he’ll hurt me more if I try to leave him. If he can’t find me, I won’t have anything to worry about.”
So that’s what they did. Six weeks before the school year was out, she got approval to finish her classes via correspondence. Her understudy would take over the lead in the play. Marin wouldn’t be able to attend any graduation parties or say goodbye to her friends.
Early one morning, when it was still dark out, her mother drove her to the airport. Marin would stay in her parents’ house in Aspen until she could move into the dorms at the end of the summer. Just before her plane was about to take off at 9 A.M., she called Brent’s voice mail—she knew he’d be at work already. She said she was leaving for college early, something had come up and she was sorry she hadn’t had a chance to say a proper good-bye. She said she’d had a wonderful time with him, but she didn’t think it would be a good idea to do the whole long distance thing. Oh? Hadn’t she mentioned? She’d decided on Boston College instead of NYU after all.
She didn’t go home for two years after that.
She hadn’t fallen in love since. Not one serious relationship in all these years.
She dated, but she worried she couldn’t fall in love.
She’d agreed to meet Andrew, the guy she’d met at aMuse the other night, at the new Chinese restaurant on Sixth Street. Andrew was cute—broad shouldered, with sandy hair and dark brown eyes. He worked at a venture capital firm in Boulder. She’d liked him because he’d seemed so sure of himself. Of course, they’d only talked for about fifteen minutes in a loud, crowded bar, so it wasn’t like she knew him well. But it had been a long time since she’d had sex, and this dating crap was the best route to getting some.
She got to the restaurant a little late. He was already there, sitting at a table. He jumped up when he saw her. “Marin! I’m so glad you could make it!”
“Oh, yeah, um, sorry I’m late.”
“No problem! So is this okay? Do you like Chinese?”
“Yeah, that’s why I recommended this place.”
“Right!” he laughed. He hadn’t been this geeky and overeager the other night. What was going on? “God, I’ve thought about you nonstop since the other night.”
“Hmm.”
“You’re probably hungry. I should let you look at the menu.”
She looked it over and the waitress came by. “A glass of plum wine, please.”
“Me too!” Andrew said.
When the waitress left, Andrew said, in a mock Chinese voice, “Me lika the mu shoo pork. Me lika it long time.”
Marin forced a smile. She could tell that he could tell the smile was forced. He shifted uncomfortably.
“So, tell me more about yourself,” he said. “What’s a gorgeous, funny woman like you doing being single?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I haven’t met the right guy yet.”
He launched into what he may have thought were funny tales of the hazards of dating, but Marin found him dull. He was trying too hard and it made everything worse.
Marin would have to do a better job of screening her dates in the future. What had happened? He’d seemed so cool the other night. Maybe he’d been drunk then and that relaxed him so he wasn’t this eager-to-please dork. It was the story of Marin’s dating life. It’s not that she wanted guys to play games or play hard to get, but she wanted a guy who didn’t get so nervous around her. She wanted a guy who didn’t declare his love for her within hours of meeting her. Guys that said they were in love with her after so short a time obviously weren’t in love with her but her appearance. She would get old one day, and these guys who liked her just for her looks would leave her for a younger, prettier woman. A relationship couldn’t be based on attraction alone.
So many times Marin had had to break it off with a guy. She’d left a trail of crying men in her wake. She hated making men cry, but she couldn’t go on any more dates with guys who didn’t make her laugh. More times than she could count, guys had killed themselves trying to impress her—almost literally. There was Chris, the guy she’d gone skiing with who tried so hard to dazzle her with his skiing abilities that, as he zoomed down the mountain, watching her to make sure she was watching him, he crashed into a tree and broke his leg. Then there was the guy driving her to a restaurant, nervously glancing at her off and on the whole trip there, staring a few seconds too long—long enough to rear end a Jeep and total his car.
Whether they nearly mangled themselves or not, she was sick of going out on dates where every word uttered took awkward effort. She was sick of the endless strain of not connecting with someone, not feeling the fire, that spark. She wanted love, passion, fever. She was ready. It was time.
16
Stop the Clock on Christina’s Fifteen Minutes Already
Jason sat at his desk working on lesson plans before his fourth-period class. So far, no mention of the cattle rancher or any sort of punishment had come up. Jason suspected that the rancher had thought he could put the fear of God into Jason and that alone would censor Jason’s lesson plans henceforth. The rancher didn’t know Jason well at all. If anything, Jason became more political than ever, while still being careful to avoid seeming militant by cracking jokes and keeping a smile on his face much of the time.
Sophomore Sarah Synnesvedt entered his office with a light knock.
“Come in,” he said, gesturing to the chair in front of his desk. She started to close the door behind her. “No, no!” he said in mild panic. “Keep the door open please.”
Sarah wore far too much make-up and too few clothes. Jason was only twenty-five years old, but he felt like some old fuddy-duddy who was horrified by teen fashion. Christina Aguilera was in cahoots with the devil as far as he was concerned. He wanted teenage girls to know that, in the case of fashion, less was not more, more was more.
He was also in a tricky position because, since he was just a few years older than the girls he taught, many of his female students thought they had a real chance of seducing him. He’d found countless notes that he was sure had been strategically planted talking about how hot Mr. Hess was and what sort of lascivious acts they’d like to engage in with him. He couldn’t help but be shocked when he compared their behavior to his own at their age. He never would have behaved like that. He’d been shy with girls in high school and had dated the same girl from sophomore year to their freshman year in college. In his sophomore year they were still at the making-out-and-mild-waist-up-only groping stage. He’d thought about sex, certainly, but in the abstract way you dreamed about becoming a rock star or movie star, something distant and far off that you had no actual intentions of doing anything about to make the fantasy come true. He and his girlfriend waited until their senior year to have sex. Even though that was only two years older than the students he taught, he thought these sophomores seemed so much younger than he had ever been. He wanted them to stay innocent as long as they could. He tried to be a realist and remind himself he had been exactly that young when he was a sophomore, but his visceral instinct was to dress these kids in amorphous burlap-sacks and segregate them into gender-divided boarding schools where there was no access to the evils of MTV or teen movies.
“Mr. Hess?” Sarah fluttered her eyes, which were coated in glittery silver eye shadow. Jason knew nothing about make-up, but he knew for a fact that Ramiro would have pointed commentary to make about Sarah’s over-the-top look. “I was a little confused about what you talked about the other day with the, um, mitochondria and organelles?”
He happily reviewed the concepts with her, delighted that he wouldn’t have to de
al with teaching about human reproduction until the spring. Every time she cooed about how smart he was, he deflected her compliments by quickly asking her to repeat back what he just said and how that applied to cells and energy or whatnot.
Sometimes Jason wondered if he could head off his students’ flirtations by wearing a wedding ring, but he feared that this might make him even more appealingly unattainable.
When Sarah finally left, he had only ten minutes to get to class, so he closed the folder of papers he was grading, inadvertently knocking over the publicity photo of the members of Spur of the Moment that he kept on his desk. He righted it and paused a moment to look at it. It always made him feel good to have his best friends smiling at him. He focused his gaze to the left-hand corner of the picture where, if he’d had graphic software, he could have cropped everyone else out and it would have just been him and Marin.
They looked so good together—he’d always thought so.
He wished he could get over his crush. It was embarrassing and silly. But he was a guy who, when he fell, he fell hard. His first girlfriend had broken his heart when, a month after they started college together, she left him to date the fourth-floor resident advisor in her dorm. Jason hadn’t dated anyone for the rest of his freshman year, hadn’t even looked at anyone else, though there had been plenty of interested women. It wasn’t until Marin that he’d been able to get over his high school sweetheart.
It didn’t help that Jason and Marin slept together every now and then—usually in bursts of three, four, or five weeks at a time, although sometimes not for long stretches in between. Just when he thought he really should make a concerted effort to date someone else, they slept together again. In those giggly moments of making love, giving each other massages, and whispering things of no importance, he knew he couldn’t date anyone else—it wouldn’t be fair to the woman he tried to date. He loved Marin, wholly and passionately.
He figured that she was just young and didn’t want to feel tied down. Frankly, he didn’t think he was ready for marriage yet himself. Their lives were still too much in a state of flux. They worked crazy hours and drank too much and stayed up late more often than not. They weren’t still in college, but this was also nothing like a life with a mortgage, two kids, steady hours, and a healthy balanced diet that wasn’t heavily supplemented by beer and tequila. He liked it that way. For now.