“You really need to clean this place, Em.”
I glance around the loft and shrug. I have a stack of clothes piled on a chair in the corner that I need to wash, there is a mess on the counter of the kitchenette—if I can call it that—and my bed’s unmade, which is usual.
“You’re the only one who visits, and since you already like me, it isn’t like I need to impress you,” I say to Desi as I pour some wine into her plastic glass.
“That’s highly debatable,” she says with a shake of her head and then begins to stack the paperwork on the card table, er, kitchen table—in some sort of order. “This place isn’t exactly spacious. I’m sure it would look bigger if it were clean.”
“Yes, mother.” I lean back in one of my mismatched chairs and prop my feet on an opposing one. “Do you know how freaking exhausted I’ve been lately? Between Travis and Blue Skies and the loan, I feel like I don’t have time to breathe.”
“Then quit one of them.”
“Easy for you to say. Travis manages the airfield. The odd jobs I do for him give me this glamorous roof over my head and the car to use. My job at Blue Skies pays the other bills. And the loan is going to hopefully be approved for enough so I can buy Blue Skies.”
“And then what?”
“And then I can make it what I want it to be. Pull the rest of the money for the improvements out of my ass or something, but I have to have it first to be able to make it mine.” I can see it all so clearly in my mind, but reality makes it hard to believe it just might happen.
“I have faith that you’ll be able to.”
“In the meantime, I’ll deal with the exhaustion.”
“But not too exhausted for sex.”
“Huh?”
“Who’s the flavor of the month?”
I nearly choke on my wine. “Who said there’s a flavor of the month?” I laugh.
“Hmm . . . well the black pair of boxer-briefs over there in the corner tells me there was definitely a flavor—whether it be for the night or the week or the month is up for debate.”
“Where?” And sure enough, when I look to where she’s staring, there is a pair of Shawn’s underwear bunched in the far corner of the flat.
“Which hot stud do they belong to?” she asks, holding her hand up to jokingly go through the possible names by ticking them off her fingers.
“Those would be Shawn’s.”
“Shawn? As in three months ago, Shawn?”
“Apparently.” I bite my bottom lip and wonder how they got left there. “He hasn’t stepped foot in here since asking if I minded feeding him a bottle while he wore a diaper.”
“Shouldn’t those be a diaper instead of undies, then?” We both snicker at the thought.
“Uh, yeah. I’m fearful of what else you might find when you actually do clean this place.”
“It isn’t that bad—” The lift of her eyebrows stops my response. “Okay, it is.”
“Admission is half the battle.” She laughs, but it’s her eyes flashing and that mischievous smile sliding across her lips that gets my attention.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Cue her cat-ate-the-canary grin.
“What?”
“You saw Grant, didn’t you?”
And here we go again . . .
“Why would you say that?”
“No reason.” She shrugs, but I don’t believe her. “But you want to see him again, don’t you?”
“Why would you say that?” I repeat.
“Because if you didn’t want to see him again, you would have gotten rid of this.” She lifts his card between her two fingers and hides her victorious smile.
“Uh, look around my place, Des, I obviously keep things I have no use for—case in point, Shawn’s underwear. It’s the same thing with Grant’s card.” I lift my eyebrows and hold her stare because I know she won’t back down from this unless I do.
“I disagree.”
“Great. Good for you.” I rise from the chair, needing to move and think. My place is small, and all of a sudden, it feels like it’s closing in on me. “He stopped by that airfield a few weeks ago. Gave it to me. If I cared, I wouldn’t have thrown it in a pile of junk mail, now would I?”
“And if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be so aggravated right now.”
She’s right, and she knows it, but I try to play it off as I grab a pile of clothing and toss it into the laundry basket. “I’m irritated because you won’t leave this alone. He’s become the main topic of conversation between us for the past few weeks. Why? Why is that?”
“You tell me.”
“Don’t give me your calm psychosomatic bullshit, Des.”
“Remember when I came out to visit you on the skydive-my-way-around-the-country-I’m-a-gypsy tour you took?”
Her change of topic gives me whiplash. “Where are you going with this?” Annoyed with her and this conversation when Grant already bothers me enough.
“We went to that bar in Podunk, Maryland. Remember that place?”
Of course I remember. Too many drinks and constant laughter. How good it was to see Desi again after meandering around the country for a few months while I got my head together after the death of my mother. “God, yes. We had fun that night, didn’t we?”
She nods, her smile growing. “There was that bachelorette party there.”
“Oh my God. Yes. They were so raunchy. And then the stripper showed up. We laughed so hard at how cheesy his moves were.” I can still hear the hoots and hollers in my ears. “We thought he was a police officer coming to kick them out, and surprise, surprise, he was the entertainment.”
“Yep. But he was sure nice to look at.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Remember when you saw him and said that there was something about a man in a police officer’s uniform that you found super sexy and couldn’t resist?”
Bingo. She just got to the point of this detour in conversation.
I stare at her from across the space where I’ve started to collect some of my clothes strewn about. “Desi,” I warn.
“What?” she asks, voice feigning innocence as she blinks rapidly. “You can’t resist a man in a police officer’s uniform. Grant is a police officer. In a uniform. And yet, you’re resisting him.”
“There are a shitload of issues with your statement.”
“Like?”
He lied.
And just like that, everything I’ve been fighting when it comes to Grant—every excuse, every bit of irritation, every bit of wanting him near but push him away—is summed up in those two tiny words. They have never before crossed my mind, but now they make perfect sense of why I’ve acted the way I have.
I’m immediately brought back to the pinky promise he made me. The tears in his eyes when I looked at him before I walked out of the classroom. The pressure in my chest that felt as if an elephant was stepping on it as I made my way to the principal’s office.
Feeling like I’m suddenly lost in a fog I should have seen coming, I forget that Desi is sitting there staring at me and walk a few steps to sit on the edge of my bed.
It’s stupid really. To hold that much resentment for so long over something. It’s ridiculous to think that of all the shit I’ve been through, that is the one thing I’ve harbored subconsciously.
But it is.
He lied. He was the one person I trusted in that whole teeny, tiny world I had back then. He was the one place I felt safe. And normal. I believed him when he said he’d keep my deepest, darkest, most shameful secret, but he didn’t. Instead, he told and tore my whole world apart.
Sitting here at the age of twenty-eight, I know what he did was right. Sitting here a survivor because of him, I know I should actually seek him out and thank him.
But it’s so much easier to blame him.
It’s much more palatable to pretend that he was the one who hurt me instead of the man I was supposed to trust above all others, my dad. It’s so much simpler to blame my lack of trust or want for any kind of intimacy on the little boy I left behind.
“Em?”
The softness of Desi’s voice is enough to make me blink. I’d been sitting and staring blankly at the dirty pair of Shawn’s underwear for I don’t know how long, and I look away. Panic claws its way up my throat as I try to process my epiphany without letting her get a glimpse of the past she knows only the gist of.
“Yeah. Sorry.” I shove off the bed and begin collecting the rest of the clothes and shoving them into the hamper like a mad woman as I try to hide the trembling of my hands. “I just was remembering when we were kids is all. How his hair used to stick up all the time and how much I loved hanging out at his house after school.”
“Hm,” she murmurs, and I don’t look up because I haven’t quite gotten ahold of my unexpected emotions yet.
“I lost the train of thought. Where were we?”
“You were going to set me straight as to why you’re resisting the hot guy in a police uniform. Then I was going to reiterate just how damn good he looks in said uniform and how if you’re not going to let him get frisky, er, frisk you, then I’m willing and able to take your place. Then you were going to roll your eyes and tell me I’m jumping to conclusions and that he only wants to be friends, which we both know is a load of horseshit. I’d tell you when he looks at you, it’s obvious he wants more than to meet you for coffee at Starbucks. You’d tell me I’m making it up, that you’d never meet him at Starbucks because you can’t imagine spending that kind of money for a cup of coffee, but you know damn well you’ve thought about him in that way too and when he walks into the room your lady bits go all tingly . . . even though you won’t admit it.” She takes an exaggerated breath. “What have I forgotten?”
I laugh. Somehow, she has given me exactly what she didn’t know I needed, her quirky and lighthearted sense of humor. It’s drawn me back to the world I created for myself. One where the past is black, and day by day, I make my own future.
“Then I’d ask you why you’re so invested in this person you just met and why you keep pushing him on me, your best friend, who prefers to keep shit with the opposite sex simple.” I lift my eyebrows to challenge her.
Desi purses her lips and shrugs. “I’d tell you that he’s nice and obviously safe. Besides, why is it so bad for me, your best friend, to want you to have another friend to count on should I walk out the front door and, I don’t know, get struck by lightning.”
“And out comes the guilt card,” I say with gusto. “You forgot something, though, there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”
“It could be heat lightning.”
“Whatever,” I laugh. “You’re just as irritating as he is.”
“Oh, he’s irritating, is he? That’s a good thing. Pray tell.” She props her chin on her hands like an eager child.
“A good thing? I call it a pain-in-the-ass thing,” I say, playing along even though I’m the one who has been creating the friction with Grant. Then again, he did do the whole CVS stunt . . . so, I’ve earned the right to be pissed at him.
“But why does he irritate you?”
“Because he’s a man. Because instead of writing me a damn ticket for going ninety miles an hour he called my bluff when I told him I was speeding because I was having a feminine emergency and took me to CVS to buy Tampax for me,” I explain, fully expecting her to understand. When I look up, the sympathy I expect on her face isn’t there. Instead, she’s grinning ear to ear.
“Oh. Wow. So the guy saves you from a reckless driving ticket, a possible trip to jail, and is considerate enough to buy you tampons when he thinks you’re having period problems. Man, he sounds like a real bastard.”
“I assure you, it wasn’t out of the kindness of his heart.”
“You know what they say about boys who pick on you . . .”
“No. What?”
“It means they like you. And be careful, you’re rolling your eyes so hard they just might get stuck there.”
I do it again for show. “You forget, I knew him in third grade. He was much sweeter then.”
“He still looks pretty damn sweet to me,” she murmurs, her lips sliding into a mischievous smile.
“I told you, I’m not disagreeing with that . . . but he’s Grant.”
“Yeah, and I’m sure Grant,” she says, mimicking the way I said his name, “wouldn’t say no to a little fun with you.” She rises from her seat and makes a show of tossing his card on the table before resting her hands on her hips and sighing.
“Uh-oh, should I assume you’re going to finish the rest of our conversation for me?”
“You mean the one where you start making lame-ass excuses about why you can’t call Officer Sexy back? Like how you think it’s creepy to go out with a boy you knew in third grade, to which I’d counter with how there is nothing boyish about him now and who fucking cares? Is anyone keeping tabs? So what? You guys hung out, colored pictures of rainbows during class, and swung on the monkey bars together. None of those things matter when we factor in his hotness, his uniform, and his handcuffs, which I’d put a million dollars on him knowing exactly how to use. I reject that argument. It’s moot. Next?”
I use a pair of tongs to pick up Shawn’s underwear and put them in the trash while hating and ignoring the fact that everything she said makes perfect sense. But she doesn’t know about how he fits into my past or the particulars. My mom is gone, my dad is out of jail and somewhere I don’t care to know, so that leaves Grant and his family as the only ones who do. What about that? How does that make me feel?
I just don’t know.
“I think you’ve pretty much covered the bases.” I turn to face her.
“Good. Then my work here is done.” She dusts her hands off as she grabs her purse, picks up the bag she set beside it, and holds it out to me. “I cooked for you.”
My face lights up and my tummy growls. She really loves me. “Is there dessert?” I ask, skeptical as to why she had the forethought to bring me bribery. She nods. “You’re forgiven for the inquisition.”
“That’s what I thought.”