“I HATE THAT IT HAS to be like this,” I tell David as I walk out to the garage.
“We have six months until you graduate.” He leans into me, pressing my back against the car as he gives me a flirtatious smirk. “You’ll grow tired of me when you realize you miss all the sneaking around.”
I roll my eyes. “Doubtful.”
His face straightens, ditching the humor when he pulls me against him. “Everything’s going to be okay. I’m not going anywhere.”
I soften against his strong embrace; I’d linger in it forever if I could. David rests his chin on top of my head, cradling me close. After Thursday night, I decided to stay for the rest of the break. I couldn’t leave him, not after what had happened between us.
But it just wasn’t that night. We made love when we woke up the following morning, and we haven’t been able to keep our hands off each other since. Each time we’re together, I relax a little more, lose myself a little more, and love him a little more. It’s been awkward for me though because I haven’t been able to orgasm, but with his comforting words, he’s tempered my insecurity about it. He’s assured me we’d get there with time.
David drops a kiss in my hair, and when I look up at him, I see all I ever want to see in his blue eyes, which sit on the brink of silver right now.
“Six months,” he reminds before we kiss goodbye.
The moment I drive away is the moment I want to turn my car around. Even though I’ll see him at school tomorrow, it isn’t the same. I hate him as Mr. Andrews, hate that his title forces us to pretend we’re not what we clearly are. It makes me feel like what we have is wrong and dirty. But outside of school, when we escape the blanket of stigma, I know what we share is anything but dirty.
I park along the curb when I see a strange car in the driveway. I haven’t even walked through my front door, and I’m already stained in discontent. But at least the worry of being caught doesn’t plague me anymore.
My mother has never questioned my whereabouts a single time, and I guess, for that reason, I appreciate her lack of attention toward me.
When I turn the lock and step inside, all that appreciation is syphoned right out of me. A man, who is much younger than my mother, comes down the stairs with his T-shirt in hand and the button to his pants still unfastened. He walks right past me with an indifferent, “Hi.”
I watch in disbelief as he shrugs on his shirt and strides out the front door. In just a few short seconds, everything good that has come from this break rots in front of me. I brace myself as I make my way to her room, praying with every step that this isn’t what I think it is. But prayers in my world are nothing more than tarnished pennies at the bottom of wishing wells.
In a sea of mussed up sheets, my mother lays face down and naked—a disgrace beyond the boundaries of words. Blood boils in vehemence, singeing my veins on the path to nowhere because my heart is far past broken—it’s burnt ash.
Fury flames my palms, begging me to slam them into her makeup-smeared face. Instead, from her nightstand, I grab hold of what she values the most, and send it flying across the room. Glass shattering against the wall wakes the beast.
“What on God’s earth are you—”
“How could you?” I scream through the sea of red now coloring my vision. “You had sex with that man in this bed? His bed?”
She grabs her silk robe from the floor and shouts right back at me, “What the hell has gotten into you?” as she ties the sash.
“I hate you!” Tears fly down my face, and I grab the first thing I can find. Her hands go up, and the book strikes them.
“Get out!”
“You’re trash! That’s all you are. How can you cry over Dad and then have sex with another man in his bed?”
“Shut your fucking mouth,” she lashes, storming over to me.
I back up a step. “Don’t come near me. I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”
But she does. Quicker than I can get away, she slaps the salt right off my cheeks, but she’s hungover, and when I push her away she falls to the floor.
“You think you can hurt me any more than what you already have?” My vocal cords sear in fiery pain as I yell at her. “Look at you? You can’t even stand up because all you do is drink. You don’t care about me at all. You can’t even pretend to care about me.”
She stumbles to her feet, but I push her back down.
“Can you even see me?”
“You think I don’t see you?” she seethes, and this time, when she gets up, I don’t touch her. “I see you all the time. You haunt me in my dreams, reminding me over and over that you’re the one I’m left with and not him!”
“Is that what you want? You want me gone?”
“I want my goddamn life back!” she screams with balled fists, as if it might just come true if she shatters glass with her words.
“You never deserved the life Dad gave you. You might as well have pissed on his grave!”
“How dare you? I loved him with my entire soul.”
Slinging my arm out toward the bed, I shriek in putrid hate, “This isn’t love!”
“You don’t know what love is, missy.”
“Don’t talk to me like a child.”
“But that’s what you are. You and Kroy are kids playing around with the idea of love when all you have is petty infatuation.”
She’s so out of touch, not even knowing that I haven’t been with Kroy since the summer.
“I know love,” I defend.
“You know nothing. You kids live in fantasyland. Well, guess what? Life isn’t a fantasy, so wake up!”
“I am awake. I’m the one paying the bills and taking care of this house while watching our money disappear because you’re too damn drunk to go get a job. You want to talk to me about living in a fantasyland? I’m not the one drinking myself into oblivion and whoring around!”
“Cam!” Kroy shouts, but the second I see him walking into the room, my mother takes another swing at me.
She checks me off balance, and I fall into the nightstand, clipping the side of my face on the way down. My cheekbone flares in pulsing heat as the blow jars me, blurring my focus. Before I can get my bearings, Kroy’s hands are on me.
“Get her out of here,” my mother yells at him.
“I hate you,” I lash back, and the tears resurface. “I hate you so much!”
I kick and scream as Kroy drags me down the hall to my bedroom. Once inside, he kicks the door shut and locks us in. When I jerk myself out of his hold, I continue my hysterics. “She’s crazy. I can’t stand her anymore.”
“Cam, calm down.” He steps toward me with his hands outstretched, but it isn’t him I want touching me. “I can’t understand you when you’re upset like this.”
He runs his hands down my arms, and it’s now I notice my whole body’s shaking. I sit on my bed and take in a few deep breaths, fighting against the adrenaline spewing into my system. The moment my heart rate begins to drop, the itch to release returns with a vengeance.
When the bed dips, I look to Kroy, who’s sitting next me and ask, “What are you even doing here?”
“I just stopped by to see if you were home and I heard the screaming. The door was unlocked—but—what the hell happened?”
“I came home—” I catch my slip and quickly cover with a lie, “I ran out to grab a coffee and when I got back some guy was leaving. I didn’t even know she had someone over last night.”
“Okay?” he questions, not catching on.
“She had sex with some random in my dad’s bed, Kroy!”
“Shit.”
“I lost it. I mean, I’ve been dealing with her crap and avoiding her as much as possible, but seeing that guy . . . I just snapped.”
He doesn’t say anything, and I don’t blame him. There is no right thing to say so silence is better. All I want right now is to taste the bite of the razor and then run back to David’s house, but I can’t. It’s already risky enough that I’m there so much, knowing a few kids from school live in his neighborhood.
“You want to come over to my house? Get out of here for a while?”
“Do you mind?” Anywhere is better than here at the moment.
“Of course not.”
“I’m going to take a quick shower first,” I tell him, knowing I won’t be able to kick what my body craves until I give in and satisfy it into temporary dormancy. “I’ll come over in a bit, okay?”
He’s a fool to my deception, and when I hear the front door close, I lock myself in the bathroom and add another bad memory tally to join all the others.
Forty-five minutes later, when I leave my room, I can hear my mother weeping while cleaning up the glass from the busted vodka bottle. Not one piece of me feels sorry for her anymore. There was a time that I used to though. No matter how drunk or how mean she was to me, a part of me empathized with her pain, because I felt it too. But that tenderness for her has hardened to steel.
I walk down to Kroy’s house, and when I knock, his mother answers.
“Camellia, dear. How are you?” says the woman who tended to my busted up knees when a six-year-old Kroy insisted he pull me behind his bike with nothing more than a jump rope and a pair of roller skates.
“Good,” I force a smile as I walk in, but I keep my bruised cheek turned away from her. It’s bad enough that Kroy knows, I don’t need his mom asking questions as well.
“Mom,” Kroy says when he comes into the room. “Cam and I are going to be in the media room.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. Just tell Bailey so she doesn’t bother us,” he responds about his little sister.
Ignoring her concern about Kroy’s insistence that we be alone, I follow him upstairs to the movie room, which is the same room we’d often make out in. It’s strange to be back in such familiar surroundings. It brings to the forefront how much has changed in the past few months.
“How are you feeling?” he asks as we sit in one of the leather loveseats. He touches the crest of my cheek, and I flinch away. “This looks really bad. You need ice?”
“I’m fine. I took some Tylenol at home.” I slip off my coat and lay it over the arm on the seat next to me. “I just can’t believe her.”
“It’s really fucked up.”
“Can we not talk about it?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t. I just . . . I just don’t want to talk about her.”
“Movie?” he suggests. “I’ll let you pick this time.”
I smile at the guy I thought I had fallen in love with, but I realize that maybe my mother was right. That we were merely toying around with the idea of love. Because what I shared with him doesn’t even come close to what I have with David. With David, there isn’t a shred of doubt that I love him and that the love is real. He makes the ashes of my heart beat in a way I never thought possible. And I doubt its cadence will ever go back to what it was before him.
I sink back into the plush cushions and get comfortable. I half pay attention to the movie; I’m too busy replaying the past few days in my head. Memories of David’s hands and mouth on my most secret parts, touching me in ways I’ve never been touched. The exquisite pain of having him inside me. The tender moments afterward when he would hold me and talk to me like no man has.
Thoughts of David drift me so far away that, when lips brush against mine, I almost kiss back. The touch is familiar, but isn’t David’s, and I startle.
“What are you doing?” I jump, pushing against Kroy’s shoulders.
“What’s the big deal?”
“Kroy, I don’t—we aren’t—” My words fumble.
“Relax, Cam. It’s just me.”
“We can’t do this.”
“Why? I mean, I totally get how you were feeling this summer, but—”
“But what?”
It takes him a moment of pause before saying, “I miss you.”
“I miss you too.” It’s a lie that comes much too quickly, one I shouldn’t have said because I shouldn’t lead him on.
“I don’t think you do.”
“Kroy . . .”
“I feel like you’re slipping away. Aside from our one class together at school, I never see you. You hide away instead of spending lunch with me, our conversations feel nonexistent—”
“Don’t do this.”
“What’s going on with you?”
“What do you mean?”
He shifts and turns square toward me on the couch. “I mean you’re never around anymore. Every time I pass by your house, your car is gone. I drove by every day this break, and today was the first time your car was there.”
“So now you’re spying on me?” I question, growing defensive and also nervous, knowing he’s checking up on me.
“We live in the same neighborhood, Cam. I wouldn’t exactly call it spying.”
“What is it that you’re wanting from me?”
“I don’t know.” His words are a huff of frustration. “Maybe I’m just sick of feeling like I’m on the outside when I’ve practically spent my whole life with you.”
“Why can’t I just be alone?”
“You are alone. That’s the problem. Because I don’t want you to be alone, because I want to be with you, because I miss you.” His words come out dripping in desperation for us to go back in time.
But we can’t.
And now that I have David, I don’t think I’d want to go back to when it was easy with Kroy even if we could.
“Where are you when you’re not at home?”
I try to hide my hesitation before spoon-feeding him more lies. “I’m just out. I’m anywhere that isn’t there,” I tell him. “Even when my mom is gone, it’s not an easy place for me to be. There isn’t a single room in that house that doesn’t hold memories of my dad. So, I leave. Sometimes I go to the library, sometimes I go to the mall, and sometimes I just drive.”
“You know you can always call me or come over here.”
“That’s the thing . . .” I take a second before continuing. “I just want to be alone.” It’s a blatant lie he can’t see through. It used to be the truth, but now I’d rather be with David than anywhere else. I choose him over loneliness. “I’m not trying to hurt you, but I need to do this on my own.”
“Do you know how hard it is not to be the one helping you?”
“I guess, in a weird way, you are helping. It’s just not in the way you want.”
He doesn’t respond. He doesn’t say a single word.
“Maybe I should go,” I offer, and he doesn’t even try to stop me when I grab my coat and leave.
I walk home, the same walk I’ve walked since I was a little girl, but this time, it’s so apparent that Kroy isn’t the boy of my dreams the way he used to be. And the friendship we once had might not survive my deceit. I can already feel the wedge between us, probably more so than he does because I’m the one forcing us apart with my duplicity.
I’ll carry the blame though.
I’ll take the hit.
I’ll accept whatever the outcome of us may be if it means I don’t have to lose him.