CHAPTER FIFTEEN | DUKE
I blinked open my eyes and was immediately struck by a sharp ray of bright white sunlight that was beaming mercilessly through my bedroom window.
“Fuck,” I grunted, pinching my eyes closed. The sun burned bright red through my eyelids, and I shielded my face with the palms of my hands. Out of habit I started to rub at the fuzzy auras that were burned into my eyes, but I immediately stopped when I felt a jolt of pain ripple through the entire left side of my face.
What the fuck happened last night?
My mind was completely blank. Then I blinked and saw the sudden flash of a fist flying into my face. I winced, remembering the pain of four knuckles cracking against my brow bone.
The gears in my head started turning, and my memories from last night slowly fell into place: the fight at Rusty’s, the punch I had taken to my left eye, the taxi cab ride home, the frozen peas and bottle of Fireball, the game of ‘two truths and a lie’ with Beck, that kiss…
That fucking kiss.
“Fuck,” I grunted again, thrusting my head back against my pillow.
Waves of sharp pain were pounding through my skull, and I couldn’t tell if it was because of the black eye, a hangover, or something else entirely.
I pinched my eyes shut and saw visions of Beck stepping towards me in the living room. I remembered her hands on my chest, and my fingers in her hair…
I remembered her asking — no, telling — me to kiss her. I remembered the way her lips had tasted like whiskey, and I remembered wanting her…
Each vision of Beck hit me just as hard as the visions of that fist slamming into my eye socket.
I wanted to disappear, so I yanked the covers over my head and everything immediately went black around me.
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time buried under the covers of my bed. Not because I was hiding from the boogeyman or reading comic books or jerking off to my father’s Playboy stash or anything like that. (For the record, my father didn’t have a stash of Playboy magazines. Instead, he had a mistress. She lived in the East Village and she probably saw my father more often than I did.)
I was burying myself under the covers because I wanted to escape. When I was a kid, I believed — genuinely believed — that if I concentrated hard enough, I could make myself disappear. Never mind the limitations of basic physics; I was convinced that it all came down to sheer will power. If I just tried, I could do it.
I didn’t just want to disappear; I wanted to teleport myself to some corner of the world that was far the fuck away from Manhattan.
I used to daydream about an alternate universe where the Williams family lived in the suburbs and ate Eggo waffles for breakfast and Mom’s Mystery Meatloaf for dinner.
In this alternate universe, my suburban dad would take me fishing on the weekends and grade my math homework on school nights, and my suburban mom would remind me to eat all of my vegetables at dinner and brush my teeth before bed.
At twelve years old, I had only ever known that kind of idyllic family life to exist in prime time sitcoms and parallel universes. Night after night, I would hide under my covers and imagine that world. I would pinch my eyes shut and clench every muscle in my body, straining to disappear…
And every morning, I would wake up in the same bed in my parents Manhattan apartment.
Now, I blinked up at the blackness of my bed. I had given up on trying to disappear a long time ago, so what the hell was I doing here, hiding under the bed sheets like a child?
Look at yourself… you’re being a coward.
I jerked the sheets off of my head and felt the glare of the morning sun sting my eyes.
I knew that kissing Beck was on the top ten list of stupidest things I could possibly do, right up there with getting into bar fights and shotgunning Fireball. But the truth was, I didn’t regret any of it.
So what was I so afraid of? I asked myself as I stared up at the bright whiteness of the bedroom ceiling.
Was I afraid of Beck? Was I afraid that she would hate me, blame me, reject me, never want to speak to me again…?
I blinked my eyes, and I saw my fingers grazing under her chin as I pointed her face up towards mine…
Was I afraid of myself? Was I afraid of what I’d felt last night? Was I afraid that I had wanted to kiss Beck? Was I afraid that even now — even sober — I still wanted to kiss Beck?
I didn’t know the answer to any of those questions, but I did know that I wasn’t a snot-nosed brat living on the Upper East Side anymore. I couldn’t hide in bed like a child. I couldn’t make myself disappear.
I had to be a man. Whatever was waiting for me on the other side of the door — rage, regret, rejection — I knew that I had to face it.
So that was exactly what I did.
I pulled on a clean Firehouse 56 t-shirt and a pair of Tom Ford sweatpants, then I armed myself with a deep breath and threw open the bedroom door.
Beck was already wide awake. I found her in the kitchen making breakfast. Her hair was damp from taking a shower and the only thing she had on was an oversized Van Halen concert t-shirt that came down to the middle of her thighs.
My cock throbbed, remembering the way I’d had my hands around her last night…
Now she was standing tip-toed over the gas cooktop, using a spatula to scrape around some ominous yellow goop that was festering in a hot skillet.
“Good morning, sunshine,” I greeted her as I shuffled into the kitchen.
“Oh, hey,” she said in a flat voice without glancing up from the skillet.
Well this is awkward…
My head was still throbbing and I knew the only cure was caffeine, so I made a beeline for my espresso machine.
The commercial-grade, polished chrome behemoth occupied an entire corner of the apartment’s kitchen. I had imported the machine straight from Italy a few years ago, back when I still blew my nose on hundred dollar bills. Now, that espresso machine was one of the last remaining luxuries of my former life.
I had never considered how ridiculous it actually looked until Beck had bought herself a mint green Keurig and positioned it on the counter space directly next to my Italian stallion.
Ridiculous or not, it still made a damn good shot of espresso. I popped the portafilter out and started to pack the head with coffee grounds.
“I’m making breakfast,” Beck stated the obvious, still refusing to glance up at me. “How do you take your eggs?”
“Anyway that I can get ‘em.”
“How about rubbery, barely edible, and overcooked beyond recognition?”
I glanced over my shoulder at the stovetop. The contents of the skillet had taken on a gelatinous consistency, and the color had shifted from neon yellow to an ominous grey.
“Oh,” I blinked down at the mess, then added unconvincingly, “I mean… yum! I love scrambled eggs.”
“This isn’t scrambled eggs,” she scowled. “It’s a ham and cheese omelet.”
“Oh,” I glanced down at the grey matter again, trying to discern how the shapeless pile of mush could resemble an omelet. I cocked my head. “There’s really ham and cheese in there?”
Beck slammed the skillet back down on the stove and glared up at me, pinning her fists onto her hips.
“Nobody’s forcing you to eat it,” she growled. “I was just trying to be nice.”
“It was very nice!” I said, throwing up my hands in surrender. “I do want to eat it! It looks really… fancy.”
She kept on glaring as she grabbed a pair of plates from one of the kitchen cabinets, then divided the steaming grey goop — correction: omelette — into two servings.
In the interest of surviving breakfast, I dumped an extra shot of espresso into my coffee mug before I joined Beck at the table.
My plate of egg medley was waiting for me when I slid into my seat. Up close, the grey egg mixture looked and smelled even less appetizing than it had in the skillet. My stomach twisted and turned, but I tried to remain stoic.
Beck watched me through narrowed eyes as I picked up my fork and shoveled up a clump of mysterious mush. I started to raise the fork to my mouth, bracing myself for the worst, and then—
“Wait!”
I froze, fork hovering inches from my open mouth. I glanced up at Beck.
“Before we eat, I think we should address the elephant in the room.”
I gulped, trying to decide what was worse: eating the grey omelet, or talking about that elephant in the room.
I glanced down at the grey mush again. The omelet is definitely worse.
“I agree,” I said, dropping the fork onto the edge of my plate. “We should talk about what happened last night.”
We stared at each other in silence for several seconds, and I realized that she was waiting for me to speak first.
My mind raced, trying to put together the right words to express the way that I felt:
I don’t regret it. I didn’t want it to end. I wouldn’t mind doing it again…
The words were already forming on the tip of my tongue. I opened my mouth to speak, but so did she. Our voices overlapped.
“Listen, Beck. I don’t—”
“Last night was a mistake.”
We both went silent again, and she pointed her eyes down at the grey mush on her plate.
“Last night was crazy and we were both drunk, and I think that things just got out of hand,” she said, addressing her severed half of the omelet instead of me.
A mistake. The word echoed over and over again in my head.
She sighed, and her shoulders slumped down under her baggy Van Halen shirt.
“Moving forward, I think that it’d be best if we just forget the whole night ever happened,” she said. Then her eyes flicked up, and I was pelted by her ice-cold stare.
Mistake. Mistake. Mistake.
I was shell-shocked, and I couldn’t stop that word from ringing through my head.
My mouth still felt glued shut, but she was waiting for an answer so I forced myself to nod.
“Good,” she nodded. Then she dug her fork into the pile of eggs on her plate and shoveled a bite into her mouth. Her face immediately twisted into a grimace. “Oh, fuck… that’s really bad.”
I didn’t give a shit about the eggs anymore.
Feigning indifference, I scooped a giant blob into my mouth and mashed it around. It didn’t taste like anything.
“Tastes fine to me,” I grumbled through the mouthful of mush.
“Duke, you really don’t have to eat the eggs,” Beck said.
I ignored her, shoveling another scoop into my mouth. She sighed as she jerked her seat back and stood up from the table, then she muttered something under her breath as she carried her plate to the kitchen sink.
My mind had already wandered back to disappearing when I felt something vibrate in the pocket of my sweatpants. I slid out my iPhone and glanced down at the screen to see an incoming call from Brie Wallace.
I swallowed the mush in my mouth as my eyes flicked between the two options on the phone screen. Tap green to accept the call, or red to decline.
I glanced up at Beck, who was feeding her omelet to the rumbling kitchen sink disposal. Then I glared down at the phone screen again.
That’s when I realized that Brie had been right about me all along. I was just a bad habit. I was just a mistake.
Maybe I was just being cocky, but I had always considered myself a catch. I thought of myself as a hotshot fireman or a town hero or a debonair billion-heir… but in reality, I wasn’t any of those things.
In reality, nobody wanted me. I wasn’t a catch at all. I was just the midnight vice that turned into morning-after regret.