THAT NIGHT, I SKIPPED MY usual nighttime jog.
My head was reeling from the day. From Shadow’s upcoming blood work results. The new job. From kissing Bane on the cheek.
Habits and repetition were the only things that kept me from throwing myself off a cliff, and I still needed a physical outlet, so I went to the outside pool for a quick swim. I did a few laps then stopped in the middle of the pool, floating facedown with my arms stretched and eyes wide. I held my breath, my lungs burning with the last, deep breath I’d taken.
The only lights visible were reflecting on the water from the outdoor lamps. It looked and felt like I was floating in the atmosphere, with nothing to anchor me back home. It reminded me of the days after The Incident, when I’d contemplated suicide. I wasn’t sure how serious I’d been—deep down, the concept still seemed so crazy, but sometimes in the dead of the night, when it was really quiet, I waited for the tears to come out, and all I felt was emptiness.
I didn’t feel so empty now. Scared, yes, and very unsure. But there was excitement there, too. Roman ‘Bane’ Protsenko was a paid escort. But funnily enough, that took the pressure off. We weren’t a boy and a girl. We were two lonely, fucked-up souls. It made wanting Bane in my life acceptable. I wanted him to fix me.
To cure me.
To hold me.
To make me laugh.
To make the pain go away.
More than anything, I wanted him to lift my shirt, see the scar, kiss it better, and tell me that I was beautiful. I could almost imagine it if I tried real hard—his beard on my marred flesh. His crinkly, soothing eyes on my sore memories.
Soft.
Warm.
Good.
Breathe.
I needed to breathe.
I snapped my head up from the water and took a greedy breath, gasping for air. My arms flailed around me, and I swam in place, looking around, before paddling frantically to the edge of the pool.
Maybe that was the difference between Bane and all the others.
I didn’t want him.
I needed him to remind me how to breathe.
I liked to think of my memories as a graveyard for my thoughts.
Moments that were already dead, so I didn’t have to worry about them happening again.
I remembered a lot of things I wished I hadn’t, and maybe that was my problem. For instance, I remembered the moment Emery yanked my shirt and jerked me into that car. The moment I realized I was in danger. I remembered the first rip of fabric in my ear—that was Emery, too, who started everything before the other two followed.
I remembered the first dry thrust into me. Nolan.
The first punch to the face. Henry.
I remembered how it felt on the operation table when they sucked my fetus out of me. Those were all crisp, clear memories. Sharp like knives. But then there was the moment I couldn’t remember at all.
The one prior to Emery trying to take my virginity.
The one when I’d already lost it.
“If only I could remember.” I clutched the roots of my hair. I could feel Mayra’s soft gaze flickering on my skin. She always gaped at me with a mixture of hopelessness and pity. My therapist looked like the classic loving grandma. White cotton hair on tan skin. Deep wrinkles and big dangling jewelry.
“Remember what?” she coaxed.
“When did it happen? When did I lose my virginity?”
I worried my lower lip, my fingers twisting together. I’d been happy with Emery. And I hadn’t slept with anyone else before him. I would remember if I had. He was my first, but when we got to business, there was no blood. No pain. His shocked face hovered over mine as he’d thrust into me, his pelvic movements becoming more punishing and desperate with every second that passed. Emery’s brows furrowed as I’d grown anxious and exasperated, writhing underneath him in unwarranted remorse. I wondered if I should fake the discomfort he craved to see in my eyes.
Some girls needed to fake pleasure. With Emery, I needed to give him my pain.
Then his gaze shifted to his PlayStation device, and mine followed.
Then I noticed the camera, blinking a red dot at me.
Then I threw a fist in his face, scrambling up, wrapping my torso with his sheet.
Then I sealed my fate.
“How do you mean?” Mayra scratched her temple with her pen.
“What if I’m suppressing something? Forgetting something?” I stood up from the seat in front of her, pacing back and forth. Mayra’s office looked nothing like her so-called personality. White on beige. Pottery Barn on West Elm. Rich on prudish. It often made me wonder which one of them was fake—the office or the persona?
“Do you think you might be trying to find a reason for why such a horrid thing happened to you? Perhaps you’d like to convince yourself that there is something for you to atone. But the truth is, Emery, Nolan, and Henry are the ones who have wronged you. Not the other way around.”
“No.” I shook my head, feeling like the room wasn’t big enough to contain all my anger. “What I’m saying is…”
“You could have broken your hymen falling from a bike or inserting a tampon. Some girls are born with no hymen at all. I’m worried that looking for reasons why this has happened to you might pull you away from the road you should be taking to recovery. Acceptance and rehabilitation will come when you realize nothing bad happened before. You did nothing to invite such behavior,” she burst into my words, quiet but stern. Her eyes followed my movements, but I knew her butt would never leave the couch. I stopped in front of her window, glancing down toward the street. Something made me look for Bane’s red truck. He was probably at Café Diem, getting hit on by every person with a pulse. Pam included. I hated that he drew so much attention. I hated that he’d slept with people for money and connections. And I hated that I was secretly excited to start working for him.
Most of all, I hated that I’d been with Mayra ever since I was twelve, shortly after Pam and I had moved in with Darren, and I still counted every minute of every session, waiting for it to be over.
But Bane…he was a different story. Today I’d woken up feeling different than yesterday. Maybe I’d had time to digest everything that had happened, but I felt slightly possessive of Bane, and that was worrisome.
He made me feel normal, and that was more than I could say about most people I came across. My curiosity toward him bothered me, too. But talking to Mayra about him, or about my mom hitting on him, made me feel…weird. For one thing, Mayra was a longtime friend of Darren’s family. I couldn’t trust her not to pay it forward. Ethics codes be damned. I pressed my fingertips to the cold window glass.
“There’s a chunk of memory missing from my brain,” I gritted out. It was during the year Pam and Darren had gotten married, shortly after Dad had died. Everything had happened so fast and all at once. Mayra said it was a natural reaction. So much had happened to me in such a short time, I’d created an abyss in my memory to cope with all the changes.
“We don’t remember every single day of our lives.” I watched Mayra play with one of the many necklaces on her chest through the reflection of the window. “And that’s a good thing, Jesse.”
The clock next to Mayra’s couch chimed with glee—not the subtlest signal our session was over, I’d once pointed out, and Mayra even agreed, but never changed it—and that was our cue. We gave each other respectful nods.
“By the way, I got a job.” I dropped the bomb a second before we were done.
“Jesse!” Mayra smiled from her couch, and as always, it didn’t reach her eyes. “That’s wonderful! I want to hear all about it next week.”
Now it was my turn to grin. I sometimes did that. Dropped important stuff at the end of my meetings with Mayra just to see her shutting me down and kicking me out. It reminded me she wasn’t a friend. She was a paid ally, the worst thing a person could have, and call me paranoid, but reminding myself that she was Team Benjamins and not Team Jesse helped.
“Yeah.” I grabbed my backpack and slung it over my shoulder, one foot already on the threshold. I zipped my hoodie all the way up before I got out to face the world. “Can hardly wait.”
I once read that people often mistake infatuation with love, and that the best way to distinguish between the two is to look at the time it took you from the moment you met the person to the moment you realized you couldn’t let them go, even if you tried.
Falling in love is when you lose yourself slowly, piece by piece.
Infatuation is when you lose yourself all at once.
Love is like ivy. It wraps around you, chokes every part of you quietly. It is not patient, or kind, or gentle. It is needy, cunning, and suffocating.
When I made my way to Café Diem, I genuinely thought I was doing Bane a favor by warning him about Pam. But that’s because the ivy was only tickling my feet at that point, not yet gripping my ankles and rooting me to the ground. Bane and Pam were scheduled to meet there, and an overwhelming notion of loathing toward my own mother filled my chest. I had one friend. She’d had at least four lovers. Not only had she slept with Nolan while I was dating Emery at the beginning of my senior year—a fact Nolan enjoyed sharing with me the night when he took me against my will—but there had been others, too.
Her married plastic surgeon.
Her young personal trainer.
She even had a dating app called NoToNosy where she’d met other married men. I didn’t get why Darren turned a blind eye to all the bullshit she threw in his face. He owed her nothing. A different man would have kicked us to the curb long ago.
I parked at the promenade and strode with purpose, hyperaware of the stares and looks. Walking in the middle of summer wearing a hoodie was odd. Being known as the girl who was into orgies and suicide? Even odder. One guy in particular made my steps falter. He wore a gray beanie, a white tank with the word “FREE” scribbled on it, and flowery board shorts. He didn’t look much older than me, leaning against a Mercedes, loitering in the way cool SoCal young people did. Like time was of no significance and youth was eternal. I thought he was going to talk to me. Luckily, it was just my overworked imagination and thriving paranoia. He smiled, gesturing with his hand to say hi. I ignored him, my pulse hammering against my eyelids. I descended the stairs leading to the café that was right on the beach, below the promenade. I couldn’t breeze in, knowing Pam and Bane would notice me. So I stayed outside, lurking by the chained bikes, until I spotted them from the glass windows, sitting in the same corner Bane and I had sat in when he’d made me that smoothie. My heart rebelled inside my chest. I felt cheated by both of them, when in truth, neither of them had promised me loyalty.
The thing was, one of them owed it to me, anyway.
I watched as Pam threw her head back and laughed at something Bane had said, fluffing her bleached blonde hair and pushing down the fabric of her pink cocktail dress. She swirled a manicured bubblegum-pink finger around the rim of her wine glass and nodded at what he said as if he’d just shared the cure to cancer with her.
Bane was slouched on the chair in front of her, talking lowly and looking blissfully bored. I’d learned his facial expressions by now. There weren’t that many. When he was invested, his eyes glittered like he was high on something. On life. But right now he looked like he was on the verge of yawning.
Pam reached across the table and put her palm on his, pressing her free one to her heart. He withdrew his hand without as much as a blink, tucking it into his pocket.
It was a tango of push and pull for the next ten minutes.
She flipped her hair. He pressed a button on his cell phone to check the time. She giggled. He craned his neck and glanced over her shoulder, barking something at Gail and Beck. She squeezed her arms together to show her ample cleavage. He leaned down to pet a dog that sat under the seat of the customer next to him. I was partly relieved at Bane’s rejection of her advances and partly furious that she had pretended to care about me when actually, all she wanted was to sleep with the guy who’d tried to befriend me. Most of all, I felt unequipped to deal with all the sudden changes in my life. So much so that it took me a few seconds to register that they had gotten up from their seats. By the time I snapped back into reality, Pam was already heading toward the door. I leaped behind the café, hiding behind a concrete wall. They both stepped out, and I could hear them chatting.
The flick of the lighter as Bane lit himself a joint. The suggestive purr Pam unleashed after he did.
“Sharing is caring,” she drawled.
“Spare me the bullshit, Pamela. You’re one of the most capitalist people I’ve ever met. You wouldn’t share a pile of shit if you thought someone else truly needed it.”
“You don’t have to be so harsh.”
“You don’t have to be so desperate.”
Pause. My heart swelled, and I was pretty sure I meant it in the literal sense of the word. I felt it spreading inside me, almost too big to carry.
“So what are your intentions with my daughter?” Her voice thickened as she took a hit of his joint. Bane’s answer came after a calculated pause.
“It’s not her panties that I’m after.”
“Good. Because she’ll never sleep with you.”
My cheeks flamed. It wasn’t that she was wrong. It was that she chose to tell him the truth because the underlining message was, but I will.
“I don’t look at her that way.”
“Like what?”
“Like a cum-soaked hole. Besides, she’s too young for me,” he snapped. My jaw tensed. He was only five years older. We’d both be in our twenties in a few weeks. Another invisible ivy branch curled around my leg, rising higher, toward my knee. Why does it bother you?
“Well, as long as you know…” Pam trailed off.
“Nice meeting you, Pamela. I hope to see a lot of you while hanging out—not sleeping—with your daughter.” And that was it. I watched from my hidden spot as Pam climbed up the stairs from the beach to the promenade. I gave Bane a few more minutes to finish his joint and get back inside before I stepped out of hiding, only to find out that he was still standing there.
Peachy.
Making a direct move toward the stairs without allowing any eye contact, I heard him sigh melodramatically behind my back.
“Next time you miss me, just give me a call. Although stalking is definitely a preferred method if your goal is to stroke my ego.”
I froze mid-step, a blush heating my face in an instant. I was doing a lot of blushing lately. That was another thing the new Jesse didn’t approve of.
“I was just…” I looked around me, searching for…what, exactly? A comfortable slice of sand I could stick my head into?
“You were just…?” He cocked an eyebrow, walking toward me. Each time I met him, I was knocked off balance by his sheer maleness. And not in a good way. Even in my memories, in which Bane was carved handsomely, I still couldn’t fully capture his sharp bone structure and bright green eyes. “Let me guess—you were just in the neighborhood and decided to drop by and see if I’d hit on your mom?” He leaned his shoulder against the glass wall of his café, his hands shoved deep inside his pockets. I kicked a little stone, sending it to the other side of the road, my eyes hard on my Keds.
“I told you, Snowflake. I ain’t gonna fuck up what we have.”
“So you keep saying,” I said.
“And so you keep not listening. Change of topic. What do you wanna do on the last day of your freedom?”
“Freedom?” I sounded dumb, even to my own ears. It was the cinnamon breath mixed with the ocean salt of his hair that did it. Standing so close to the man without running for my life felt like an accomplishment, but it didn’t leave me unaffected.
“Yeah.” He kicked his joint with his boot, shooting it to the sand like a soccer player. “Before you start gainful employment tomorrow.”
“Don’t you have any poor unfortunate souls to embezzle?” I tilted my chin up, crossing my arms over my chest. Bane laughed.
“Happy to report all the unfortunate souls I’m in charge of are blissfully embezzled. Have you done your ten-mile run for today?”
“How do you know about my ten-mile runs?” My forehead crumpled. Sure, he’d seen me jogging the night he scared away Henry and Nolan—but that seemed a particularly specific number. Ten miles. Bane’s eyes widened before his casual smirk returned.
“Mother Dearest told me a little about you today.”
“There’s nothing dear about her.”
“Looks like we’re in agreement on that one.” He unleashed his devil’s smile, then snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “Italian ice cream.”
“People will think it’s a date.” I bit my lower lip, hating that I cared. I was allowed to get out of El Dorado. I was allowed to date, if I wanted, not that I did. And I was allowed to go on an ice cream run with a male friend. I knew, logically, that all of those things were true, but it didn’t make them any less frightening.
“Right.” Bane tucked his wallet into his pocket. He was already striding toward the stairs. “Remind me who cares?”
“I do.” I stayed cemented in place. “I have a bad reputation.”
He stopped, staring at me. “Mine’s worse.”
“Wanna bet?” I snorted bitterly. He smiled one of his relaxed smiles that felt like a lullaby. His next sentence came as a hushed whisper. “Already told you. I heard all the rumors about you, Jesse. Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em to death. Fuck this town, and its preppy, judgmental residents, and every idiot who looks at us funny. Don’t you get it? We’re the outliers. The rejects. We’re free. Free to do whatever the hell we want, because it won’t matter. We’ll never fit in here, so we don’t have to try. We’re liberated from all this bullshit.” He motioned around us with his hand. “They can’t hurt you if you don’t give them permission to. So don’t.”
I took a step toward him, hesitant. People were coming in and out of Café Diem, and no one looked at us funny. Maybe that was part of the reason I liked hanging out with Bane. People weren’t quick to disrespect him. I still found it hard to believe that he wanted to hang out with me after all the rumors.
They’d said the night in the alley was not really in an alley, but in Henry’s house, and that it had been a consensual orgy. The abortion news also leaked into the eager ears of townsfolk. I once heard Wren’s friend, Kandi, say, “The baby probably died of embarrassment. Could you imagine? Being conceived in a mass orgy?”
But Bane didn’t care.
He screwed for a living, for God’s sake.
No wonder he was the only one here to accept me.
He said it was personal, and maybe that’s what he meant. Maybe he just hated slut-shaming so much, I was a pet project for him. The worst part was that I didn’t even care. I was still grateful for the friendship.
“All right,” I said, the words so heavy in my mouth I said them again, this time louder. “All right, let’s go.”
We walked silently to the ice cream parlor, basking in the glorious sun. Our hands almost brushed when he opened the door to the shop for me, prompting something inside me to rise like a tide then soar like a tsunami. I ordered two scoops—two more than I would have eaten any other day.
There was something about Bane that made me want to reinvent myself. To try something fresh. I went for pistachio and Eskimo ice cream. And for the first time in a long time, the food I was eating actually had a taste.
It tasted new.
I liked it.
When we got out of the ice cream parlor, I turned around and told him, “About us holding hands in Dr. Wiese’s clinic…”
I was feeling brave, but then he stopped, turned around, and looked at me seriously. “Yeah. Wasn’t thinking. Won’t happen again.”
“No,” I said, stopping, too. We were now the only people standing in a busy promenade, disrupting the rest of the people, and not giving much of a damn. “I was wondering if we could do this again sometime. Not, like, in a weird capacity or anything. I just want to know that I, uhm.” I swallowed, glancing around. “Can.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about his inked hand on mine. About the moment my lips fluttered on his surprisingly smooth cheek. His nostrils flared, and something I couldn’t decipher zinged in his eyes. Whatever it was, he weighed his words carefully before he said them. “Yeah.” He looked around us, like someone was watching, tugging at his beard. “Sure. You want me to surprise you, or just do it now?”
I thought about it for a second, resuming our walk. We were in sync now.
“Surprise me.”
We reached the end of the promenade and waited for the light to turn green before we crossed it. His palm found mine, but he kept looking at the traffic light, like nothing was happening, all bored and indifferent.
“Okay?” he whispered under his breath.
“Okay.”