And yet, they were a tangle of limbs and fervid kisses, peeling clothes off each other with reckless abandon.
He appraised the tantalizing canvas beneath him, fingertips winding along the delicate curvature of her breasts and coasting across her concave stomach.
“That first day in the shop, when you looked up at me with those big, blue eyes, I knew I was fucked,” Peter admitted between kisses while hooking a thumb in the side of her underwear. “I may have been too stubborn to do anything about it, but I knew.”
Ryleigh caught him by the wrist and the halting action sent him into a spiral.
Did I fuck this up? Did she not want to go this far?
Throat constricting, he laced his fingers in hers, mumbling, “We don’t have to take this anywhere you don’t want to go, alright?” He pressed a kiss to the back of her hand. “The last thing I want is to make you uncomfortable. I’d never forgive myself.”
“Everything’s fine.” She shook her head, teeth scraping her bottom lip. “I just want you to know, I’m glad this is happening with you and not some random fraternity asshole.” Ryleigh propped up on her elbows, hovering in front of his face. “I trust you.”
All Peter needed to snap back to reality was her intimate warning label. The advisory lifted the lustful haze that had clouded his judgement since agreeing to stay in her bedroom.
But, God, how he wanted her. And it was not until then Peter registered he could never have her, at least not completely; he was twice her age and, in a few weeks, they would return to being strangers.
No, he could not do this. Not to her.
Peter broke away and yanked on his boxers.
“We can’t do this.”
Ryleigh was left dumbfounded in the middle of the mattress, clutching the sheets to her bare torso. Bewilderment trumped her devastation. One minute his hands were roaming all over her and the next he was on the edge of the bed, face buried in his hands. Pain radiated in her jaw as she tried to understand why he would not allow her this bliss, why he would get that close to her, only to back out.
“Why do you get to call all the shots? I’m as much a part of this … whatever we are, as you.”
“You don’t know what sex does to a relationship. It changes everything.” Peter utilized that certain grown-up, ‘I’m older, I’m wiser’ tone she deemed condescending.
She despised when he resorted to this voice.
“So, what? We’re not in a relationship.” She strived to keep tears at bay, tears that were testing her waterline’s levy. “Why are you treating me like a child?”
“Because, Ryleigh, I care about you and I don’t want you to make a mistake. You’re leaving. I’ll become a footnote in your past, a faded memory of the old life you left behind. I’m not the person who should be responsible for taking something so precious away from you, something you can never get back.” As he spoke, she studied the shape of his spine, easily observable in the hunched-over position he had taken.
“It’s my body. Don’t you think I should be the one to decide who takes what from me? And clearly you don’t care, but I wanted it to be you,” Ryleigh spat out.
Peter turned toward her, an animalistic edge animating his visage, and yelled in an eardrum-bursting octave. “Why are you being so stubborn about this? I told you, I can’t do it. I won’t do that to you. I know you’ll regret it.”
Each one of his poisonous words skewered her already sluggish heart. She could not confine the tears any longer. They cascaded down her cheeks at an unthinkable pace, an endless stream of saltwater.
“I won’t regret it, that’s what you don’t understand.” Ryleigh’s insistence faltered through the sobbing.
Launching to his feet, he paced around the bedroom.
“Oh, no? I’m sure your freshman year you’ll meet some guy and fall in love. You’ll wish you had saved yourself for him. Then what? How will you feel then, knowing you lost a piece of yourself here you can never reclaim?”
“How can you not see that person is you? That I’m in love with you, dammit,” she wailed, fists clenching the sheets while her kiss-swollen lips quivered.
Her eyes widened upon realizing what she had said.
“You’re 18, what the hell do you know about being in love?” he demanded, ignoring the confession as if it was not monumental.
This was not how Ryleigh had envisioned professing her love to him: nearly naked and crying amid her rumpled bedsheets, mid-argument.
But their entanglement had long been marred by inconvenience, and this instance was no exception.
“All I know is that I’ve never felt this way about anyone. I didn’t think it was possible to feel this way. When I’m away from you, I feel sick. I get lightheaded whenever I see you. My stomach knots up and I can’t breathe.” Her voice crumbled. “You’re all I think about.”
This time she said it.
The vocalization could not have been clearer. The weight of the phrase hit him like a pile of bricks in slow motion, the enunciation of each syllable striking with devastating impact.
What was he to say in retort? That his tongue tripped on itself whenever they spoke? That she made his knees quake and his heart soar?
It sounded exceedingly cheesy in his head, and he doubted it would sound much better vibrating over his gravelly vocal chords, which presently ached from their torrid shouting match.
Peter slumped to the floor. He primed himself to deliver unto her his ultimate truth, the tiresome verity that had weighed his body down the bulk of adulthood. “Someone else said that to me, once. I found out too late she didn’t mean it.”
“Is that why you hate relationships? Because you got your heart broken?”
Ryleigh seemed to have offered herself an explanation rather than posing a legitimate question. Sliding on her tank top, she moved from the bed and sat across from him on the floor.
His jaw shut like a padlock, unwilling to respond. Peter’s heartbeat thrashed in his ears as he bore all of his focus on the wall.
For years, he had banished the humiliation, pain, and choler associated with the dreaded past relationship, keeping it well-guarded from others but from himself most of all. But there was no way out of the conversation at this point, especially after disbanding their almost-lovemaking.
“Her name was Heather.” The two dangerous syllables sharpened his husky tone and harpooned his aching chest, clawing at layers of scar tissue surrounding his bitter heart that had never fully healed.
“Is she the reason you tried to … why you’re on your medicine?” Even in this arena of vulnerability they had entered, Ryleigh did not utter a word about the horrible act he had been driven to commit.
Nodding, he remained quiet as he collected the courage necessary to proceed with the story that had been hidden away for so many years. The story that was not in the headlines he diligently composed week after week, but rather one he had tossed into his filing cabinet, hoping it would never again see the light of day.
Tonight, it made the front page.
“Our junior year of college, she asked me out. I was sort of starstruck by her audacity. She was the first girl who’d ever shown any interest in me. I was crazy about her, and even though it came back to bite me in the ass, I trusted her. So, I gave her something I could never get back.”
Peter’s speech deliberately mirrored their previous conversation while his eyes pleaded forgiveness.
Chin trembling, tears flowed from Ryleigh for the second time that night. A bolt of grief struck her, punishment for how she had treated him in the wake of their interrupted intimacy.
All this time, he had wanted to protect her, to shield her heart from what had shattered his.
“In the middle of senior year, I found out she was cheating on me. With my best friend. I was angry, confused. I didn’t understand how she could claim to love me, but then have the nerve to do something that demonstrated the total opposite. I was completely destroyed. It’s a miracle I graduated on time.”
An eerily reminiscent smile punctuated his intensity. “That’s how I ended up here, a Californian in Connecticut. I wanted to get as far away from her as the country would allow.”
“I can’t believe your girlfriend betrayed you like that, but your best friend, too? That’s awful. I can’t even imagine how you felt.”
Her sliver of consolation, while heartfelt, was fruitless, evident by the harrowing hollowness of his glare.
“It was terrible, but that’s not when …" Peter trailed off, sighing. “Fast forward: I’ve been working at the paper for a while and my career is steady. The rest of my life? A fucking mess. I hadn’t dated anyone since. I tried, but nothing worked out. I wasn’t clicking with anyone and, even though she’d hurt me, I couldn’t keep her off my mind. Because that’s what attachment does, it keeps you blind and loyal to shitty people.”
“I thought I was ready to settle down. You know, all the things people think they want when they’re heading into their 30s.” He released a dark laugh. “So, I looked her up online. We reconnected. I told her I’d be going out to California soon to visit my parents. It was a lie, of course. I hadn’t planned a trip. I only wanted to see her.”
Ryleigh’s shoulders hunched, envious of this deep, obsessive love Peter had for this woman, and perhaps not for her. She feared this Californian harlot had ruined him forever, that he was no longer capable of love.
“I flew out, and we met up for lunch one day. When she walked into the restaurant, it was like the first time I saw her, across the lawn of our college campus.” Something in Peter’s eyes suggested that he was in a far-off place, submersed by the ghost of his own memories.
“We caught up, and I thought everything was going fine, until I pushed the idea of being a more permanent part of her life. That proposition triggered the seven-headed beast. She wasn’t interested. But instead of politely excusing herself, she stayed to humiliate me. She said I was a ‘nice boy’ and that’s why she’d asked me out in the first place, because she thought she needed a change from her usual taste in guys.” Peter lowered his head, muttering, “Can you believe that? She reduced me to a fucking social experiment.”
“We got into a fight, right there in the middle of the restaurant, at the height of which she admitted to cheating on me the entire time we were together, not just toward the end with my best friend.”
“When I got back to my parents’ house, I sort of … spiraled. The pain was overwhelming. I had to get rid of it, make it stop.” His vacant gaze fixated on his lap, unbudging as he gathered the strength to proceed.
“The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital with a tube down my throat and a million IVs in my arms. My mom was there, waiting. She found me lying on the floor when she came home from work. I wouldn’t wake up; I couldn’t wake up. I thought I’d done myself in. It was the most irrational decision I’ve ever made: trying to end my life over a girl who viewed me as a way to pass the time. But it made sense in the moment, and gave my emotions permission to defy rationality.”
“The day I woke up, I remember the doctor stopping by my room. He told me I wouldn’t have made it if my mom found me any later. She saved my life.” Peter’s body shook, tears falling from their reservoir. Watching him cry destroyed Ryleigh. She felt helpless, like there was nothing she could ever do to fix him. “I was embarrassed that she’d seen me in such a pathetic state of self-loathing, but mostly I felt indebted to her for what she’d done.”
Peter was her battered and jumbled Rubik’s Cube whose colors she had at last aligned, each uniform face highlighting all that was beautiful and flawed within his soul.
“I know you think I’m young, and that I don’t know what I’m doing or what I want; but I meant what I said earlier. I love you, Peter.” A nonhomogeneous cocktail of hurt and devotion swirled in her gut. She swiped the back of her hand across her puffy eyelids. “Nothing you just told me changes that.”
Ryleigh tossed and turned all night. Having Peter here was supposed to be comforting, but not when the uncomfortable weight of his secret shared the bed with them.
Her heavy lids fluttered open and shut, like a drained butterfly struggling to flap its wings. She fumbled to click the lock screen on her phone upon each occasion, fatigued eyes hardly registering the numbers.
5 o’clock. 6 o’clock. At 7, Ryleigh gave up the gun.
As she crept from the clutches of the memory foam mattress, her slumbering companion did not stir. Peter slept on his stomach, wiry arms buried beneath the pillow, comforter halting mid-back. His deep exhalations were audible, though she was pleased to note they were a far cry from snores.
The sight of his long, lithe form tangled in her marigold sheets was something she could have gotten used to.
But it was only hers to behold one more morning.
A brick lodged itself in her stomach. Ryleigh did not want to think of losing him, not with his demons clinging to every inch of her psyche, not with last night’s passion and raw sincerity tarrying on her skin.
She swiped a t-shirt from her dresser and bemoaned the less than stellar underwear selection. In hindsight, postponing laundry day had not been the brightest idea what with Peter spending the weekend at her place. Snatching the least embarrassing pair, patterned to the nines with corgis, she went next door to the bathroom.
While the water heated in the shower, she removed her invisible retainer and rinsed it under the faucet before retiring it to its case.
The hot streams pelted Ryleigh awake, serving as a welcome precursor to the overindulgent amount of coffee she planned to drink. That comfort eased her tired mind, inviting more pleasant thoughts to take root—particularly, thoughts of what went down in her bed some six odd hours prior.
How long she had awaited a moment like that with Peter, and how quickly the splendid ordeal had ended.
Ryleigh tried to recreate the experience, hands wandering to every coordinate he had caressed. He handled her body with such care, almost like he was afraid to touch her. Or perhaps, he had forgotten the mechanics of intimacy during his years of abstinence. She wanted to believe the former: that he was a gentle lover.
If Peter had things his way, she would never find out.
Once out of the shower, she knotted the t-shirt at her waistline and brushed through her dripping hair. She stole a glance inside her bedroom, where Peter was still very much out for the count, and then headed downstairs.
Her heart ached prancing around the house without him. Ryleigh craved his company, every second of it he could spare. The hourglass of their semi-relationship mercilessly consumed their precious grains of time.
Soon, they would be left with nothing.
Pre-heating the coffeepot was second nature when Ryleigh swept into the kitchen each morning. She scooped grounds into the forever filter as the temperamental appliance took its sweet time warming up. If one thing would summon Peter, it was coffee.
But, she did not expect it to work its magic pre-brew.
“Cute panties.” His scratchy voice resonated at her rear. The mocking overtone was so obvious, it may as well have reverberated off the walls. “What do you think a corgi would make of you plastering their heart-shaped butts all over your adorably flat backside?”
Flat? Ugh. She did have a flat butt, but let the record reflect, it was grabbable; and Peter had grabbed it on plenty of occasions without airing a single complaint.
“Shut up. And good morning to you, too.” Ryleigh rolled her eyes, clamping the fresh lock on the bag of ground coffee. “I didn’t know you were capable of waking up this early.”
“It’s weird, before I opened my eyes, I swear, I knew you weren’t there.” He clutched something in his left hand as he headed to the sink and turned on the faucet. Peter cupped the empty hand, letting water pool in it.
A small collection of pills vanished into his system—but these were noticeably different than his other medication. He must have detected the stifled look of curiosity on Ryleigh’s face.
&n
bsp; Flexing his hands, he said, “Arthritis.”
She snagged some creamer out of the fridge and cut off the coffeemaker as it delivered an obnoxious beep signaling the completion of a brew cycle. “I thought people didn’t get arthritis until they were a million years old.”
Peter came up behind her, arms wrapping around her waist. Those sinewy limbs enveloped her, ushering in his maddening non-showered essence: repugnant VOC-laden ink from the newsroom clashing with soft and spicy sandalwood deodorant. The tender gesture almost reduced her to tears.
What if this is the last time he holds me like this?
Though he was hellbent on Ryleigh having a ‘normal college experience,’ she feared—and understood now more than ever, tethered to his warm, lean body—a normal life could not be led in Peter’s absence.
His breath tickled the top of her head. “A depressed recluse with joint problems. Looks like you’ve hit the boyfriend lottery.”
Peter identified his critical mistake the second she spun around in his arms. The jerking motion cast tiny water droplets off Ryleigh’s swishing wet strands.
Her eyes narrowed as she searched his features. “Boyfriend? When did we unban those terms from our situationship?”
While he had no idea what ‘situationship’ meant, the connotation seemed negative. It hurt to hear her refer to them in such a way.
“I put you through it last night. You’ve earned the right to a temporary title.” Of course this beautiful cappuccino-making poetess was a temporary installment in his life. He had been foolish to believe otherwise, to distort glimmers of hope into rays of truth. Their truth existed, though hidden, in the fabric of this painfully delusional conversation. “B.F.N.—boyfriend for now.”
“Being able to call you my ‘boyfriend for now’ for a few weeks is my greatest romantic accomplishment to date.” Ryleigh strained on her tiptoes to steal a kiss and the sweet, knee-buckling scent of coconut shampoo emanating off her water-logged tresses swarmed him. She peeked at him while pouring creamer into what he hoped was her mug. “Do you want yours black?”
Loving Rosenfeld Page 19