Chapter Thirteen - Tyler
“Why are you staying at Evan’s? What happened with your place? I thought you liked it.” she calls to me. She’s in the walk-in closet, looking through her mom’s things for something to wear. I’m sitting in one of the chairs in the… I dunno. Parlor? I guess? This place is pretty sick. I should see if they’ll just let me live here.
“Um, my place got…” I stop short because for whatever reason—maybe it’s because her parents are here, maybe it’s just because my dick has magical powers—things seem to be real cool between us right now. And I don’t wanna ruin it. And call me crazy, but telling her that I burned my apartment down during a psychotic fever dream after I found out that she, Maddie, was the person I was fucking seems like it might just set us back a step.
“Got what?” she asks from the other room.
“I just… felt like it was time to move on from that joint, honestly. It was so, y’know, hectic in the middle of the Strip and all. So, I dunno, I’m thinking of moving out to the desert. Quiet feels like the right play for me right now.”
“Yeah? Well, if you need somebody with a twelve-thousand-dollar drone to scout territory for you, I may know someone.” She steps out into the main bedroom area wearing…well, mom pants. And, like, a flower shirt thing. “How’s this? OK?” she asks.
Fuck. Do I lie? Do I tell her that it makes her look a fifty-five-year-old? Albeit a sexy-as-fuck fifty-five-year-old, but still. Or do I—?
“OK,” she says, and marches back into the closet.
“What? I didn’t say anything!” I call after her.
“Yeah, you did,” she shouts back.
“Do you want help?”
There’s no response. I take that to mean that she doesn’t want any help. That’s cool. Two can play this silence-implies-information game.
I sit there quietly for a moment, thinking about how…normal…this feels. Almost like she’s my girlfriend or whatever and I’m waiting on her to get ready so that we can go have Thanksgiving dinner with her family. All of which is, of course, what is happening.
Except that she’s not my girlfriend.
She’s… I’m not sure what. I mean I know who and what she is to the world, but I don’t know who and what she is to me. But I’ve been given the advice to back off and let her be by enough different people now that I’m gonna try to just shut up and not fuck it all up. (Good luck, bro.)
After a few moments of quiet (Which is nice, I’m realizing. As long as my brain plays along and doesn’t disrupt the peace) she steps back into view and leans against the doorway. She’s down to just her underwear again. Is she trying to do me in? Maybe so. Maybe her plan for getting back at me for everything is to sexy me to death. Fine. I’ll take it. About a trillion times better than the other ways people have tried to kill me.
“Can I ask you something?” she asks.
“Yes, we can do it again,” I say as I stand, start unbuckling my pants, and move toward her.
She puts her hand out to stop me. Shit. Well, worth a shot. I put my hand up in return and take my seat again.
“Yes. Please. Ask away,” I acquiesce.
“Why did you do this? All this, with my parents? Why?”
“Um…”
“Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it. I really do. I think I just showed you that.”
“Yes, and I appreciate that.” I bounce my eyebrows at her. I’m so fuckin’ charming.
“But why did you do it? What made you? Was it just so I’d fuck you again?”
Jesus. Is she serious? I can feel myself starting to get hot. I tried to do a nice fucking thing and she thinks… She thinks…
Shit. It’s hard to focus with her standing there looking sexy as...a...um...shit, I got distracted again. Fuck. But, oh! What made me do the thing with her folks? Got it.“Was it so I’d fuck you?” I laugh a little. “Um, well, I guess… OK, So, lemme say a couple things. First I talked with Pete—”
“Yeah, he told me.”
“Did he? Well, yeah, I did. And he’s kinda awesome and he basically just said that if I really gave a shit about you that I’d think about what you need and, like, give you a gift and stuff. And I do really give a shit. I give several shits. I know you don’t believe me, but…” I pause to give her a chance to tell me that she does, in fact, believe me. But she doesn’t say anything, So I continue…
“So, yeah. So, I tried to think what I could give you. Give YOU. That would be something you would like and could…use, or… Fuck. I dunno. Whatever. Evan told me you came by the station and you said it’d been a couple years since you’d seen your folks, and Thanksgiving was coming up, and shit, I figured it was the right thing to do. If you won’t let me into your world, you should have somebody here. You don’t have to do fucking everything alone. That’s all.”
She doesn’t say anything. Fine. I’m not done anyway.
“So, second… You can think I’m a selfish prick or whatever you want to think, but I gave you a gift because I wanted to and because it seemed like the right thing to do. That’s it. So, no. I didn’t expect anything from it. I certainly didn’t do it so that you’d fuck me. Hey, fucking you is a nice treat, but it’s not what I was looking for, and besides, I haven’t needed to do anything to get you to fuck me before now, so why would I start?”
She gets a steely look in her eye and kind of chews at the inside of her cheek and simmers a little while she assesses whether or not I’m full of shit.
“Believe me or don’t. Up to you. I did what I did from a sincere place. You made the choice to let me fuck you. So that’s on you. If you didn’t want to you didn’t have to. ‘Thank you’ would’ve been just fine. So as far as me getting your parents here goes, y’know… you’re welcome.”
Funny how easy it is not to give a fuck whether or not somebody believes you when you’re telling the truth.
She breathes in and out of her nose while still chewing the inside of her mouth, her tits rising and falling with the breath, causing me to imagine my cock sliding back and forth between them. Which is, in my opinion, an unfair advantage in an argument.
After a moment she says, “Do you think it makes me hot when you get pissed?”
That is so totally not anything I was expecting her to say.
“I—Uh. I don’t… Um. Why? Does it?” There’s probably a little hope in the question.
She smirks. “A little.”
Holy shit! This day is getting dysfunctionally better by the second!
“Fuck,” she says, hanging her head. “What the fuck are we doing?”
I stand and approach her. Carefully. “We are figuring it out. I guess.”
“Figuring what out?”
I reach her and lift her chin with my finger. Her eyes are wide and seeking. “It. All of it. This shit. Why it’s happening. What it all means.”
She laughs a tiny, mirthless sniffle.
“What?” I ask.
“I have this shrink, who’s fucking terrible, by the way.”
“Oh, you should see mine,” I tell her. “She’s the balls.”
She ignores me, and keeps talking. “—and this shitty shrink told me something that has kind of stuck with me.”
“Which is?”
“Basically, that things have no meaning. Good things. Bad things. They just… happen. And if that’s true, I don’t know what the point is in trying.”
“Wow, somebody said something like that to me too,” I say.
“Yeah? Who?”
“Um… James Franco.” (Oh, boy. Here we go.)
“You know James Franco?”
“Uh, a little,” I say. “Not the point. Point is that maybe… Maybe, yeah, things just happen. Maybe that’s true. And maybe they don’t objectively mean anything. But we can give them meaning. If we want. It’s up to us to decide what something means.”
Her eyes squint slightly, like she’s deciding how full of shit I am.
“Look, I don’t know why all of this is happening either. Why this is you and me, and why it’s happening now, and what’s gonna happen in the future. I’ve definitely learned I suck at predicting the future. But I do know that I’m fucking tired, Maddie. I’m tired of fighting. I’m tired of fighting everyone and everything all the goddamn time. So… So, I’m choosing to see that you and me… Here… Now. That… That it means I can stop. For a little while, at least. Because I’m not all alone. There’s somebody out there who… understands. And that, if we choose to, we can help hold each other up. That’s the meaning I’m deciding to assign to all this.”
Her breathing speeds up again a little.
“That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. And not only was that a good fucking speech, it has the added benefit of also being true. So fuck it. I’m gonna stop while I’m ahead.”
She laughs a bit, which makes me realize I’ve been holding my breath, and now I let it out on a long sigh.
She smiles with her lips but not her eyes. “I’m tired too,” she says.
“I know.”
“You hurt me real bad.”
“I know.” I want to tell her I’m sorry. But it feels small. And besides… She knows.
Then she says, “Pete said something to me too.”
“Yeah? What?”
“He said when you’re young and haven’t fucked your life up so bad it can’t be fixed yet, you think there’s always a next time. And that there isn’t always a next time.”
“Jesus, Pete’s like Santa Claus meets the Buddha meets Rambo,” I say with astonishment, and she laughs. So do I. And fuck, it feels good. But not as good as her taking my hand in hers, which she does now.
“Tyler?”
“That IS my name.”
“I don’t know if I can do this right now.”
Fuck.
But, yeah, I get it.
“I know. I do. I know. We don’t have to…y’know. But maybe we can just… There’s a lot we need to catch up on. Maybe we can just hang out and at least… Do that?”
She closes her eyes and says, “...Yeah. Yeah. We can…do that. I mean, fuck, dude, that story you told about living in Rio HAS to have more to it.”
“Oh, hell yeah, it does. But I’m not gonna say that shit in front of your parents.”
She gets an impish grin and says, “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t worry about that. C’mere.” She grabs my hand and pulls me into the closet with her, opens a dresser drawer and pulls out something that looks like a woman’s fur stole with a piece of metal attached to one end.
“What is that?” I ask. “A…? Like, a boa, or…?”
She laughs loudly. I love her fucking laugh. “You don’t know what this is?” she asks. I shake my head. “It’s a fox tail!” she says in a whisper for some reason, even though nobody else is here.
“Well, yeah, I get that. I mean it kinda looks like a—”
“No. A fox. Tail.” Now she says it like putting extra emphasis on the words will help me understand better.
“I don’t—” I start.
“It’s a sex toy! This”—she holds up the metal part—“is a butt plug. And then this part”—the furry part, she means—“just hangs out the back and kinda makes a woman look like a…y’know…fox. Or kitten. Or whatever.”
“Uh, OK, well, first, that’s the hottest thing I’ve ever heard of. How do you know about it?”
“I work in a strip club.”
“Right. Copy that. But then second, that means that…your—”
“—MY prim and proper MOM is rocking some freaky fox tail action in the sack!”
“Holy. Shit.” I can’t stop the grin from spreading. “I don’t know how I’m gonna look at her the same way now.”
“Oh, please. You were already flirting with her downstairs, this just reinforces that she probably wants you to.”
“Hey! I’m pretty sure she was flirting with me. Which isn’t my fault. I’m mad flirt-worthy. Everybody says so.”
She grins, grabs my shirt, and pulls me in for a kiss. A long, sweet, hot, perfect, almost too perfect kiss. Then she pulls back and says, “We better get downstairs. They did fly all the way here for dinner.”
She smiles. And I’m fucking happy.
“Cool.” I smile back. And then, as I push her hair out of her face, I take the fox tail from her, hold it up, grin, and offer…
“And your mom did say you could wear anything of hers you wanted…”