You Know You Want This

by Kristen Roupenian

  Jesus Christ, Kath. Get a grip. A more reasonable voice in her head, one that sounds a lot like that of a therapist she had in college, gently inquires if all this angst is truly about Taylor and her choices. As many, many exes have informed her, Kath’s an expert in making things about her that aren’t. So maybe something else is going on? But she refuses the most obvious explanation, that she’s still carrying a torch for Taylor. She doesn’t know what to call it—this free-falling sensation she feels every time she looks at Taylor, like her hands are closing again and again on emptiness—but she thinks she knows better than to call it love.

  And then it’s evening, and they’re sitting on a hotel patio strung with fairy lights. Beside them, an infinity pool spills into the horizon, creating the illusion that you could tumble right over a waterfall into the glittering Los Angeles night. The women of the wedding party have now spent eight hours together, which, it turns out—nice job, party planner!—is way too goddamned long. Everyone’s faces are stretched taut and sore from too much smiling, and because they started too early, even though they feel increasingly like garbage, they have to continue downing drinks in order to keep their encroaching hangovers at bay. The ones who don’t know each other have run out of small talk; the ones who see each other all the time have nothing left to say. At some point in the afternoon, Taylor began texting with Ryan, and Kath can tell, from the way she keeps snatching her phone and thrusting it away from her, that they have gotten into a fight.

  Jared was due to arrive at 8 P.M., but he’s more than an hour late; he’s stuck in traffic, sending an apologetic stream of incomprehensibly L.A.-specific updates about what exit he just passed on the freeway. The guests are mostly finished eating, and a few have begun making tentative noise about going home (God, I can’t believe how wiped I am, ever since I started doing this early morning boot camp, my bedtime is like, nine o’clock). Kath keeps them around by dropping clues about what’s coming next, but all her hints make it sound like the surprise is a stripper. When Jared texts her that he’s finally found parking and is heading in, Kath shields her eyes with her hands, and scans the crowd, but he enters from an unexpected doorway, and so it’s Lizzie who sees him first.

  Breaking off her conversation midsentence, she squints. “That guy . . .” she says. “He seems familiar.” She elbows Taylor, who’s busy texting. “Do we know him? Is he famous?” But Taylor doesn’t look up right away, and so it’s another woman entirely, someone whose name Kath doesn’t even know, who cries, loudly enough to catch Jared’s attention: “Oh, my God, you guys! It’s that guy! From that TV movie! What’s it called—you remember what I’m talking about? The Boy in the Pool!”

  Chaos erupts at the table: a full third of the women recognize Jared; know exactly who he is.

  I used to be obsessed with that movie!

  I didn’t know anyone else remembered it!

  He’s still so cute!

  I used to have such a crush on him!

  Jared jerks his head like a spooked horse and looks about to flee. Kath stands up, waves her arms above her head, and signals to him. “Jared,” she says. “So thrilled you could make it. Over here.” A burbling of excitement erupts from the women. Jared, like a lamb to the slaughter, comes as called.

  Lizzie asks, “You did this? He’s here for us?”

  “He’s here for Taylor,” Kath says. What a fantastical place adulthood has turned out to be: with the power of social media and a thousand dollars, she’s summoned Taylor’s dream crush out of an ancient VHS tape and brought him here, to life.

  Kath takes a skittish Jared by the arm, turns to Taylor, and presents her gift: “Jared, I’d like you to meet Taylor. She’s a longtime fan.”

  Taylor doesn’t look quite as impressed as Kath thinks she should be, given that Kath’s just made all her teenage dreams come true. She offers her hand for Jared to shake, but Jared, catching Kath’s pointed glance, opens his arms for a hug. As they embrace, Kath watches closely for the smallest tremble, a crack in Taylor’s pristine reserve. Does she linger a little, resting her hands on his back? Did she turn her head into his neck on purpose, to inhale his smell? Maybe. Maybe not.

  Taylor steps back. “It’s so good of you to come,” she says, an adult hostess, not a breathless girl. “I’m so sorry—I know exactly who you are, of course, but remind me of your name?”

  Jared introduces himself with a little bow, prompting a wave of giggles from the table. “So,” he says, “you’re getting married?”

  In a practiced gesture, she displays her ring. “I am.” Taylor says, “I’m sure Kath’s told you this, but you were quite the star of our sleepover parties, back when we were kids.”

  “No,” Jared says. He bares his teeth at Kath. “She didn’t mention that, funnily enough,” he says, and they all smile tightly at each other until at last Lizzie leaps in.

  “Jared! What have you been up to this whole time? Are you still acting, or . . . ?”

  Jared launches into a meandering explanation of DadZone. Taylor raises her eyebrows at Kath. I can’t believe you, Taylor mouths, and Kath ostentatiously shrugs.

  “Jared,” Kath says, hoping to liven things up. “Can I order you a cocktail?”

  “No thanks!” Jared says cheerfully. “I don’t drink.”

  “Jared!” one of the women interrupts. “Tell us what it was like to make Blood Sins. How did you end up taking that role?”

  “It’s a funny story, actually . . .” Jared says, and all the women at the table bend toward him, flowers in the sun. For all his desire to be taken seriously, it’s clear to Kath that this is not his first evening dining out on twenty-year-old lust. He’s a skillful courtesan: attentive, charming, and with an astonishing ability to deflect overt sexual advances with jujitsu speed. Over and over again, the women try to flirt with him, and over and over again, he parries and returns the subject to DadZone, until Kath starts to feel like they’re at war: her goal is to push the night toward sex, riskiness, excitement . . . while he, very politely, is trying to schmooze them all to death.

  Thirty minutes tick by, then an hour, then an hour twenty-five. The women appear to be mildly enjoying themselves, peppering their guest with questions, but Kath wants to chomp a bite out of her wineglass, feel the shards splinter and crunch between her teeth. She’s paying a thousand fucking dollars for this meet-and-greet?

  “Jared,” she says, the sudden thickness in her voice informing her she’s drunk. “I have an idea. Do you want to go swimming?”

  “Ha, ha!” he says. “It’s a bit chilly for that, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t think so,” Kath says. “Lizzie and Taylor and I grew up in Massachusetts. We’ve gone swimming in weather way colder than this.”

  She looks at the other two for confirmation. Taylor ignores her, but Lizzie rises to the occasion with a wicked smile. “Swimming could be fun,” she says. She takes Taylor by the wrist. “Remember that time we cut French class senior year and went to the kettle pond?”

  Taylor looks up, mid-text. “And snuck back into school soaking wet.”

  “And Mr. Swan was all, ‘Why are you two drenched?’ And we were like, ‘We needed to take showers after gym!’ ”

  Kath knows this story only from Lizzie’s insistence on continually retelling it—it’s one of a few just she and Taylor share—but she’ll take any chance to break the night out of its stagnation, so she smiles encouragingly at Lizzie.

  “Come on. Let’s do it. Let’s go swimming,” Lizzie says, and the other women pick up and carry her excitement. When Taylor says, “I don’t know . . .” they chant her into acquiescence, pounding their fists lightly on the table: “Taylor! Taylor!” until she finally agrees.

  The women swirl tipsily toward the pool, shedding shoes and purses as they go, but Jared remains seated, his arms folded across his chest.

  Kath stands over him. “Aren’t you coming?”

  “Nah,” he says. “I think I’ll sit this one out.”

&nb
sp; He loathes her for getting him into this, it’s obvious, but so what? She loathes him, too. He’s a lightning rod, that’s all, for a kind of wild reckless energy; the target of desire, not its source.

  “Come on, get in the pool,” she says.

  “No, thank you. I didn’t bring my suit.”

  “Hey,” she says and leans in close. “I paid you a lot of money to be here, so how about you get the fuck over yourself and go swimming with my friend?”

  Jared frowns, stares straight ahead, and does not look at her, and she wonders if underneath the stiffness and the dullness and the pride is shame. “Please,” she says. “It would mean so much to Taylor . . .” but when he doesn’t answer, she adds: “I’ll throw in an extra hundred bucks.”

  “Two hundred,” he says grimly.

  “Fine. But this next half hour better be good.”

  And in a movement so fluid that she can’t help but wonder if some part of him knew exactly how the night would go, he kicks off his shoes and walks to the pool, pulling his shirt off as he goes. “Ladies,” he says, his voice oily and self-mocking. The guests are all still clustered at the edge, not yet having gathered the courage to jump in. Jared tosses his shirt in a crumpled ball off to the side, and stands, wide-legged, in front of Taylor. “As much as I’d like to believe you all were intrigued by the premise of my web series, as your friend was kind enough to remind me, I was invited here for a reason,” Jared says. “Who would like to join me for a swim?” Gyrating his hips, he unbuckles his belt, unsheathes it from its loops, and twirls it around his head.

  The guests ooh and ahh, but Kath cringes, furious. He’s doing exactly the thing she dreaded, that she sought him out in order to avoid: he’s turning himself into a joke and taking Taylor with him. He wriggles out of his jeans, dancing to imaginary music, smoothing his hands down his thighs, while Taylor looks on, vicariously humiliated, like the unwilling object of a rendition of “Happy Birthday” performed by the waitstaff at a themed restaurant. Fuck you, Jared Nicholas Thompson, Kath thinks. Fuck you straight to hell.

  Now Jared’s pants are pooled around his ankles, and he’s in just his underwear, still dancing like a fool. But at least he looks the way he ought to: lithe and hairless, tender-skinned. Despite all his efforts to make himself ridiculous, he’s beautiful, and as she sees this, Kath sees Taylor register it, too—not through any obvious change in her expression, but just a kind of softening around the edges of her face.

  Jared cracks his back and stretches, displaying the twin dark bursts of hair beneath his arms, and Taylor reaches up and tugs her ponytail loose from its band. Then, without warning, Jared crouches and dives into the pool, inexpertly, drenching the women closest to the edge. One woman takes out her cell phone and begins snapping photos. “What’s the wedding hashtag again?” she whispers, but no one answers her.

  * * *

  The boy in the pool is doing the butterfly stroke, just like he did in the movie twenty years before. His arms crash operatically down into the water in perfect synchrony, while the rest of his body pulses in a tight wave that ripples down his stomach, hips, and thighs. Each time he finishes a lap, he flips direction with a dramatic kick, leaving a champagne trail of bubbles in his wake. They might as well be in a seedy motel, past midnight, because the noise he makes churning through the water is the only sound any of them can hear. He finishes three laps, swimming the final distance underwater, his body a shining ribbon of motion trembling in the stillness of the pool. He comes to Taylor, who’s sitting at the edge, her legs tucked beneath her, and treads water, waiting patiently, until she stands. Her eyes half-closed, as though she’s dreaming, she slides her sandal off and offers him her foot. He takes hold of it, and cradles it, and then, with only a flicker of a glance toward Kath, he sucks Taylor’s toe deep into his mouth. All the women watching take one collective breath. Forgotten on the table, a silenced cell phone glows three times and then goes black. Taylor pulls her foot free, rests it lightly on top of his bare shoulder, and pushes him violently under. He slips down, his hands splayed against her calves, and as the seconds go by, though she knows it’s just a game, a paid performance, Kath can’t help but imagine him underwater, trapped and thrashing, waiting for Taylor’s permission to breathe. At last, with a ragged gasp, he surfaces, water droplets jeweling like diamonds in his hair. He gazes up at Taylor, and she looks down at him.

  Oh, Kath thinks, I did it. I gave her what she wanted. What will happen now?

  Taylor laughs. “I think that’s enough for tonight,” she says. She lifts her foot out of the water, and that’s when Kath comes up behind her, puts her hands on her shoulders, and shoves her in.

  Scarred

  I found the book shoved behind a shelf in the library. Hardly a book at all, really. No covers, just a bunch of Xeroxed pages stapled together. No space for a card in the back, or one of those little scanner strips, either. I rolled it up, put it in my pocket, and walked straight past the librarian. Rebel rebel.

  When I got home, I opened it to the first page and did exactly as instructed. I drew a chalk circle on the floor of my basement, crushed together basil and blackberry from my cupboard like I was mixing up a fancy summer cocktail, then added a burnt lock of my hair and a fresh drop of my blood, gouged with a pin from the ball of my thumb. Not because I believed it would bring me my heart’s desire—I wasn’t even sure I had one of those—but because I’ve read enough books in my life to know that when you find a collection of spells hidden behind the shelf at your local library, you have to try at least one.

  To my disappointment, but not my surprise, nothing happened. I flipped through the rest of the book, curious about what else I could have conjured: wealth, beauty, power, love. They all seemed a bit redundant: at least some of those must have been covered under the category heart’s desire. Frankly, the whole concept was a little too New Age–y for me. I got up to go. If I hurried, I could still make it to the bar in time for happy hour. The thought of summer cocktails had made me thirsty, and the basement reeked of burnt hair.

  He wasn’t there, and then he was. His knees were scraped bloody on the concrete, his palms splayed out as though he’d fallen. His head was bowed. Shaking like a dog just come from the bath.

  Naked.

  I almost laughed. That was the part of my brain that started working again first, the part that thought, A naked man, what a literal definition of desire. Then the rest of me caught up and I scrambled up the basement steps shrieking, tripped, and fell against the door.

  As I blubbered and pawed at the door handle, he stood up. Swayed. His ankle turned in a way that made me wince. He stumbled, righted himself again.

  He lifted his head and looked at me.

  “Don’t be scared,” he said.

  Only, he had an accent, Scottish, maybe, or Irish, so he swallowed the a and the r came out long and burred: “Don’t be scarred.”

  Finally, I forced the door open, then slammed it and locked it shut behind me. Fleeing into the kitchen, I snatched the two biggest knives from the knife block and crouched down into a defensive position. I’d expected him to chase me, to try to kick the door down—it was flimsy—but thirty seconds passed, and the basement stayed quiet.

  Keeping my knives at the ready, I edged over to my purse and knocked it over with my elbow, so that my phone skittered out across the table.

  I could call 911 and I wouldn’t even have to explain.

  “There is a naked man in my house.”

  “How did he get there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  That would bring them, sirens wailing. If, when they arrived, he had vanished—if I were hallucinating all of this—I could tell them he had escaped through the window. Calling the police was a low-risk solution.

  But.

  If my sense of the absurd was the first chunk of my brain to recover from shock, and fear the second, curiosity was coming in a slow third.

  I had done magic.

  Sometimes, when people
in stories encounter the paranormal, they react with horror as the fabric of reality shreds and they are faced with the dawning recognition that everything they once believed was a lie. As I stared down at my phone, I had that exact feeling, except the opposite: not horror but a giddy, mounting joy. This was what all those books had promised. I knew it, I thought. I knew the world was more interesting than it was pretending to be.

  * * *

  I put my phone in my back pocket, double-checked that I knew exactly which button to push to make an emergency call, and put on my black leather jacket, partly for warmth but mostly for psychological reinforcement. Knives at the ready, I descended the stairs.

  He was still in the middle of the circle, where I’d left him.

  If I describe him to you in terms of hair, eye color, shape of face, the effect will be all wrong, because he was the living, breathing incarnation of my deepest desires, not yours. You must imagine your own naked man, and I will tell you only this: he was larger than I would have expected, more fully embodied, and that is only half a dirty joke. There was no prettiness about him, and nothing effeminate. Nothing angelic, either, so if that’s what you had started to picture, start again.

  I sat down on the top step of the stairs and jabbed my knife at him.

  “Don’t move.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “Look.” He took a half step forward and then fell back, as though he’d walked into a glass door.

  It looked real enough, but for all I knew, the universe had sent me a naked, duplicitous mime. I poked the knife in the air again in warning.