15
GOING IN CIRCLES
A month passed. The ache never went away. I relived, over and over and over, every moment with Valentine. I saw him in my dreams. I woke up with panties damp from wet dreams of Valentine’s touch, dreams and memories that couldn’t compare to what the reality had felt like. I went to bed numb; I woke up crying.
I warred with myself on a day-by-day basis. I’d done the wrong thing. I should’ve stayed. I found myself on the verge of buying a plane ticket to New York, only to stop myself at the last second. Daddy had died because of Roth. My life had been unutterably and irrevocably altered because of Roth’s greedy strong-arm tactics. He’d ruined my life. But then, I’d become the person I was because of it all. I’d had to grow up fast, and I’d had to learn to be strong. It was a cycle, round and round. The kind of war that has no end. If he hadn’t done what he had, I wouldn’t have lost Daddy. But, then again, without the series of events resulting from Roth’s attempted business deal, I would never have met him. And even though I was singularly fucked up in the head and heart over him, I couldn’t resent or regret my time with him.
And I couldn’t stop wanting him. Couldn’t stop hoping for some justification to arise that would let me go back to him. I found myself waiting for a knock on the door, for the Hollywood ending in which Our Hero, the tumultuously sexy Valentine Roth, shows up at the door. He’d be rain-soaked, and he’d plead with me to take him back, and of course I’d sob a relieved “Yes!!” and we’d tumble to the floor in the throes of desperate lovemaking.
That never happened. Roth would never beg. And I’d left him. Was I an idiot for running away? Yes. A hopeless moron. But I couldn’t get over what he’d told me. I waffled about the veracity of Roth’s claims, but I couldn’t get around my gut-deep conviction that he’d been telling the truth. Which of course begged the question as to why he’d told me in the first place.
To which the only answer was that he felt compelled to be honest with me, no matter the consequences.
After arriving at Layla’s place, I let myself wallow for three days, and then I unpacked my suitcases into Layla’s second bedroom, got up, got dressed, and began hunting for work. I began to get caught up on what I’d missed in class—which felt horribly, awfully mundane and pointless. I found a job as a counter-clerk at some office in the depths of an industrial park. I wasn’t even sure what the business was, but it paid $11.50 an hour to answer phones and file paperwork, and it kept my mind off Valentine.
Okay, not totally, it didn’t.
I thought about him week after week as I filed the same exact piece of paper a fucking butt-trillion times, answered the same exact phone call a fucking butt-trillion times. I thought about him in the shower, and I even touched myself thinking about him. My fingers couldn’t possibly live up to my physical memory of Valentine’s fingers inside me, making me shake and shiver and come apart in mere moments. I was never an avid masturbator, and Roth had even ruined that for me.
Layla let me make my own way through it. She never pushed me one way or another. I didn’t ask her what she thought I should do, or what she would do if she were in my shoes, and she didn’t offer to tell me. We were once again two single girls making our way through life together, roommates, best friends, and each other’s only constant companion. We got drunk on Friday nights, and reinstituted our policy of chick flick Saturdays, which required a minimum of three bottles of cheap red wine, a gallon of Rocky Road ice cream, and a bag of Ruffles potato chips.
And I never heard a peep from Roth.
After being back in Detroit for about six weeks, I found myself at the Delta ticketing counter of the Oakland County International Airport, about to ask for a one-way ticket to La Guardia.
I chickened out, and went home.
I didn’t know where his building was, for one thing. I didn’t have a phone number, an address, anything.
I tried to forget. Tried to stop thinking about it. I couldn’t come to a decision, couldn’t figure it out. No matter how hard I tried, I was at a stalemate. Couldn’t go back to the way things were, couldn’t have him, couldn’t figure out how to live without him.
On a Friday evening, two months after my return from New York, I got a speeding ticket. Two points and $175. The following Monday I went in to the courthouse to pay it. I handed the clerk my copy of the ticket and my debit card. The clerk, an overweight, middle-aged woman with dishwater-blonde hair, stared at the ticket, typed in the number, and then looked up at me with a blank expression.
“You’re all set,” she said.
“What?” I frowned at her. “What do you mean, all set?”
“It’s been paid already.” She seemed ready to dismiss me.
“By whom?”
She shrugged. “I dunno, dear. All my system tells me is that it’s paid.” She peered around behind me. “NEXT!”
So I left the courthouse and went home. I couldn’t claim to be mystified, because it was obvious who was behind it. There was nothing in the mail, however, and no other hints of Roth after that.
At least, not until the beginning of the next month.
Layla was sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table, sorting through bills. I walked in from a late night class, and she looked up at me. “Hey. Thanks for taking care of the rent, by the way.”
I set my purse down slowly. “What?”
She didn’t look up from the check she was writing for the electric company. “The rent. You paid the rent again.”
“No, I didn’t.”
That got her attention. “You didn’t?”
“Nope.
“Well, I didn’t.”
“No?”
She blinked at me owlishly. “Valentine?”
I nodded. “Valentine. I got a speeding ticket last month, and he paid that, too.”
“Has he contacted you?”
I shook my head. “Not a word.” I went into the kitchen and grabbed two beers and the box of leftover pizza from the night before, and took a seat on the floor beside Layla. “Before he told me what happened, he told me, and I quote, ‘You will always be mine. And I take care of what is mine. So if you do walk away, you will have no worries. Never again, no matter what.’” I twisted the top off my beer and took a swig. “So I guess this is his way of reminding me of that.” I frowned as I realized something. “Wait. You said, ‘again.’”
Layla grabbed her beer and a slice of cold Little Caesar’s. “Yeah. Last month and this month.”
I sighed. “Not me either time. I was planning on helping out this month, though.”
A few moments later Layla peered at me with a curious expression. “What about your mom and Cal?”
I picked a pepperoni off my slice and ate it. “He was there, too. I checked on Mom the other day, and they said there was a ‘sizable donation’ to my account, meaning she’s set for…basically forever. What that means, I think, is that he bought the nursing home and is writing off her care. Cal’s tuition has been paid, too. All of it, up front. He doesn’t know, though. I wouldn’t even know how to start telling Cal about any of this.”
“So he’s basically taking care of you. And me. And your mom and brother.”
“Yep.” I dabbed at my mouth. “And Grandma and Grandpa.”
“But he hasn’t called you, texted you, written you, nothing. Even though, if we’re to believe him, what happened was an accident. And you walked away from him.”
“Yep.”
“After he flat-out told you he’d fallen for you.”
“Yep.”
Layla stared at me with a flat expression. “And you, clearly, are still in love with him.”
“Why clearly?”
She shrugged. “Because it’s obvious. You’re moping.”
“I’m not moping!”
She gave me an are you kidding me? glare. “Yes. You are. I’ve stood by for the last three months and let you have this your way. But now it’s affecting me.” She set her bottle down, which meant she was serious. She never put her bottle down until it was empty. “I don’t like being in debt to someone. And now he’s paying my rent.”
“I didn’t know he’d do that.”
“I know that.” She clutched my fingers. “You need to figure your shit out, babe.”
“I’m trying.”
She shook her head. “No, you’re not. You’re trying to think it through, trying to make sense of it. The thing is, though, it doesn’t make sense. It never will. You can’t equal it out. What he did and how you feel for him may never…wash, I guess. You just have to make a decision and stick to it. Right now, you’re basically just burying your head in the sand and hoping it goes away.” She emptied her bottle and then stood up. “And from what you told me about Roth, a man like him doesn’t just go away.”
I scrubbed my face with one hand. “You’re right. I know you’re right. But I still don’t know what the right thing is.”
“Sometimes…I think sometimes, Key, there is no right thing. There’s just…the best thing. The only thing. I’m not saying I know what that is for you, but I think you do. You’re just…avoiding it.”
Goddamn Layla. That was why she was my best friend: She was willing to say the shit that I didn’t want to hear. She kissed the top of my head in a very rare display of affection, then went into her bedroom, leaving me alone in the living room, my thoughts whirling and skirling, desire and fear and anger and confusion duking it out in my skull.
I was torn in three parts, you see.
One part, my head, was a confused mess, a boiling cesspool of turmoil and memory. I missed my father, missed how my mother had been before her breakdown. Missed being an innocent girl with no worries except my grades. Yet I also desperately missed Roth. I hated that he was responsible for Daddy’s death, but I also understood that it was an accident rather than malicious homicide. Yet again, if Roth hadn’t been so underhanded in his tactics…and around and around it went.
My heart was less complicated. I was in love with Roth, and desperately wanted to go to him, to leave a note for Harris to find, to do anything I could to get Roth back in my life. My heart didn’t care about what had happened. I’d come to a kind of peace with Daddy’s death long before I’d met Roth. I mean, I don’t think you’re ever truly over the loss of a parent, not when they’re taken so suddenly, and especially not when, in my case, he was taken so violently and mysteriously. So I missed him, but he was gone. I had good memories of him. I knew he’d loved me. And nothing Roth did or said could change that.
And then there was my body. There was no question at all in that department. I was lonely and horny and frustrated. I wanted Roth. I wanted his mouth on me. I wanted his cock inside me. I wanted his hands, and his muscles and his tongue and his eyes and his words and that spicy cologne he wore.
The problem was reconciling head, heart, and body into one decision that would affect the rest of my life. Contact Roth, and tell him to leave me alone, let me live my life and pay my own bills? Contact Roth, and go back to him? Ignore him, and try to move on? I thought one thing, then the other, in rotating cycles moment by moment. The thought of picking one and just going with it terrified me into paralysis. What if I chose the wrong thing? What if I eradicated him from my life and couldn’t ever get over him, never stopped wanting and loving and missing him? What if I went back to him and had misjudged him, or misconstrued my feelings for him, or what if he’d moved on and didn’t want me anymore? Or what if I tried to ignore him and hope he went away, but he never did and I never got over him and never moved forward, and just lived my life in a confused spiral of going-nowhere misery?
ARGH.
Imagine my trepidation, then, when, at the end of three months, I found an Envelope. Roth’s unmistakable handwriting. My name.
I slumped to my butt, sitting on the stairs just inside the foyer of our apartment building. I slid a shaky finger under the flap of the envelope, managing to give myself a paper cut in the process.
No check this time.
A letter. Written in his clear, firm, masculine hand.