Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Random Series #7) (9 page)

“You didn’t get mugged.”

“I got cleaned out.” The memory of this morning made my gut ache. Nothing like being betrayed by your own brother. The one you helped raise since you were eleven. 

Not thinking about that. Not thinking about that. Not thinking about that.

“That’s not the same as mugged. Muggers don’t get their hands on your wallet, phone
and
instrument.”

I said nothing.

“C’mon, Tyler. You owe me an explanation.” 

Owe. They all said that eventually. My life was a mixture of being told what I did and didn’t deserve, and what I did and didn’t owe people.

“I owe you money to pay you back. I owe you my gratitude for helping. I do not owe you an explanation,” I said, all in a voice that I hoped meant she’d put this topic to rest.

“Hah!”

Guess not.

“You think you can just be the Emperor of the Car Trip?” She started using her hands to gesture wildly. 

Fuck.

“And declare silence? Nope. You owe me an explanation because you have to admit it was pretty fucking bizarre to have you reject me two months ago, come to Joe’s hospital room, insult me, then kiss me, and a few days later show up at my home in St. Louis!”

Yeah. She was right. It was loony.

“Okay.”

“Okay?
Okay?
That’s all you have to say?”

“I guess so.”

“It’s like talking to a brick wall,” she declared to the air, as if it were listening.

I could handle being compared to the brick wall. Brick walls are solid. They stay put. They have your back. They do what they need to do and leave people alone.

Best of all?

They don’t talk.

“Who stole from you?”

My body went cold and my stomach turned into a twist tie.

“What?”

“Who stole from you?”

“A guy.”

“You know him?”

I sighed. “Yes.”

“Was it a drug deal gone bad?”

She went there, huh? Because they always go there. You look like me, you come from my part of the city, you get stereotyped.

I took a deep breath through my nose. My body was crawling with a prickly feeling that someone once said was shame. A teacher at school, maybe middle school. I don’t remember. We were learning about feelings in some social studies class and she said that shame was a social emotion. Other people make it happen to you.

But you have to do it together. They trigger it and you join in.

“Drug deal?”

“Well.” She stopped herself, her voice going quiet.

Maybe I could trigger shame in someone, too.

“You assume that’s the only reason someone like me could get rolled?”

Her cheeks went pink and she stared straight ahead at the road. Those wild hands went white-knuckled on the steering wheel.

“Tyler, I—”

“Believe what you want.”

“What?” 

“Believe what you want,” I repeated, then shrugged. “That’s what people like you do.”

Her eyebrows softened and her eyes narrowed. “People like me?”

I said nothing. Why bother? I’d said too much already, and I really didn’t need to get kicked out of the car.

“Tyler? You can’t just fold up and go silent after saying something like that!”

But I did, nestling down and facing the door.

“Tyler!” she shrieked. If she thought that would work, she was sorely mistaken. One skill I’d honed over the years: ignoring people. Even when they’re in your face. 

Especially
when they’re in your face.

“You are such an asshole.”

Whatever.

“I’m driving for twenty-nine hours with you and you could at least have the decency to talk to me.”

Silence.

“You know what? Fuck it. You don’t have to talk, but I’m not going to hold back. So I’ll just say whatever I want and until you answer, it’s all a monologue. You know what a monologue is?”

Purgatory.

“If you don’t, you’re about to find out, Tyler.”

I shifted and turned my ear away. She reached for the radio and found some pop music station that played Justin Bieber.

Great. She was getting close to violating the Geneva Convention on Torture. I might have to call in the UN.

“I think you had someone break into your apartment and steal all your stuff. I asked if it was a drug deal gone bad because it’s a perfectly normal question to ask.”

“Really?” I muttered. “If Lena got mugged, would you ask her that?” I didn’t turn toward Maggie.

Silence.

A few beats later, she said in a small voice, “No.”

“Then it’s not a normal question to ask someone. Quit pretending it is.”

She blew out a long breath, turned the station to classic rock, and went quiet.

Steve Miller Band I could handle to fill the holes in the air between us.

And there were a lot of holes.

Maggie

Mr. Silent Treatment. I finally decide to try to venture back into the realm of the XY chromosomed and I pick a hot troglodyte with a chip on his shoulder the size of my fear.

I shifted in my seat, his silence like a frown. A glare. A rebuke. Should I have asked about the drug deal? No. But I wasn’t perfect, and everything that came out of my mouth from the moment he’d appeared on my doorstep—no, from the moment on that rooftop, two months ago—was just a blur of whirling emotion shaped and molded into words.

I didn’t know what I was doing, yet I couldn’t stop doing it.

Why him? Why this guy? He was turned away from me, his hip jutting up, body bisected by the beige seatbelt. His jeans were clean but well worn, a little wrinkled from the day. A small patch of skin poked out between the hem of his t-shirt and his waist and it was dappled with brown hair, yet tanned. Tight. The kind of skin a guy who spends time using his body has.

His shoulders were hunched and his neck as tense as could be. I let myself breathe for a while, fighting the impulse to lash out again. He wouldn’t be intimidated, which was good, I guessed. Hell, I didn’t know anything these days.

Lena had sent me off with her car, road food, and a pack of condoms, like the rape had never happened. For seven long years I’d taken ten thousand tiny pieces of memory. Pieces of who I had been. Slivers of a Maggie that had once been whole and taken that wholeness for granted, like we assume we can breathe.

And I’d glued all those pieces together with an awareness that came at the end of a dagger to my soul. Like being poked a thousand times a day, I’d had to soldier through the pain.

Tyler had no idea what it had taken to decide that he was safe enough to sleep with, but shallow enough to walk away from.

The scary part was that while the former might have been true, the latter wasn’t. I should have been repulsed by him, but instead I found myself intrigued. Interested.

Undeniably curious.

My hands vibrated against the steering wheel and I opened my mouth, knowing I shouldn’t.

“I’m sorry,” I said. 

“Good.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said ‘good.’”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means it’s good you’re sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“For whatever you’re apologizing for.”

“You are impossible!”

“I’m not impossible. Just confused.”

“This is the part where you’re supposed to say you’re sorry.”

“For what?”

“For....for...”

“For turning you down when you wanted to fuck?”

My legs went numb. He was still turned away, and if he’d looked right at me in that moment I think some slivers of my broken self would have sloughed off. 

“Yes.” I said it before I thought through it carefully.

Now he turned toward me. I stared at the road and let him look at me. What choice did I have?

“I’m supposed to apologize for
not
fucking a drunk girl and taking advantage of her?”

“I wasn’t that drunk! I was fully consenting.”

“You picked me for a fuck and forget.”

“A what?”

“A fuck and forget.” He snorted, still staring at me. “You wanted a quick, hot fuck, and a morning where you walk away and forget about me.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

I frowned and turned to look him in the eye. “No. it’s not. Spell it out for me.”

This was the most authentic conversation I’d had with a human being other than Charlotte or my therapist. I’d never, ever had a man talk to me like this.

Talk
with
me like this.

“You wanted me to be your throwaway guy. And you wanted to do it drunk.” He sat up, his shirt slipping up and exposing his belly before he could pull it down. He stretched up and looked at the road ahead. “I guess you had to get drunk in order to approach me.” 

“I—” I started to protest, because that’s the social expectation, right? Don’t ever admit that you use people. That you view people as objects to manipulate to achieve goals. That you stereotype because it’s easier than being vulnerable.

He stared dead on at me, one eyebrow cocked, a look of
c’mon
on his face.

“Yes,” I hissed, nearly clapping my hand over my mouth to stop the horses after they escaped the barn.

His face lit up in a grin that made my body tingle.

“Thank you.” He turned away and settled back down for his fake nap.

“For what?”

“For being real for a split second. It was nice.”

“Fuck you!” 

“Here we go again.”

“I’m real!”

“Not with me. Why’d you pick me? Why’d you hit on me?”

“Why did you say no? C’mon, real boy. Quit being Pinocchio and tell some truth.”

His neck went tense again. I struggled to keep my eyes on the road.

Silence.

“Hypocrite,” I spat out. How in holy hell was I going to manage twenty-eight more hours of this?

He shot around in his seat like an alligator twisting to subdue its prey. “Hypocrite? How in the fuck am I a hypocrite?”

Ah. I hit a nerve.

Let’s poke it a bit.

“You expect me to be real and pour my guts out but you’re sitting there withdrawn and sullen—” 

“I am not sullen—”

“And you’re being a total emotional wuss.”

His eyes blazed, shining with a calculated gleam, like a chess player processing nine moves ahead. All the possible permutations led to one outcome:

Either he was a coward, or he was gone.

“I turned you down because the timing wasn’t right.”

“Timing?”

“You caught me on a really, really bad night.”

“What happened?”

He sighed. “You’re not my fucking shrink.”

“I have no desire to be anyone’s shrink. I’ve been a patient far too many times.”

He narrowed his eyes and watched me as he tapped on the car’s console. Then he asked: “Because of the rape?”

Oh, we were getting real, all right.

“You know about that?”

Nod.

“How?”

“Liam.”

“Liam told you?” I was going to go back to Massachusetts and strangle him.

“He told me your full name and to Google you.”

“And you did.”

“Yes.”

“Before or after the, uh...rooftop?”

“Does it matter?”

That made me jolt. Does it matter? Did it really matter? Somehow it did, but I couldn’t explain why.

“Yes.” 

He nodded and blinked rapidly. I never noticed how long his eyelashes were. So dark compared to his brown hair. He had almond-shaped green eyes and the kind of lashes that look fake. Like someone plugged them in one at a time. It made him look so beautiful, like an actor’s close up shot.

“Okay. I understand.” He watched the landscape go by, a boring series of fields and farms. “It was after. Liam told me when I visited Joe in the hospital.”

“After you kissed me.”

“Yes.” He didn’t argue about the wording. Just yes. Yes
I
kissed
you
.

“Why did you kiss me?”  

“Why are you asking me all this, Maggie?”

“Because I don’t really have anything to lose, Frown. You already rejected me, and I’m burning with shame at that, but you turned to me when you needed help and now you’re at my mercy. If I’m going to be humiliated, I might as well get some truth in the bargain.”

That grin again.

“When you put it that way...”

I smiled. I couldn’t help myself.

“Your dimple piercings look awesome when you smile. You should do it more often,” he said.

“Quit changing the subject!”

He snapped his fingers in a gesture of
aw, shucks
. “You want to know why I kissed you in the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“Because you looked like someone who needed a kiss.”

“A pity kiss?”

“I don’t do pity kisses, Maggie. Or pity fucks. And I don’t let people turn me into fuck and forgets, remember?”

My mind was reeling.

“When you’re ready, you can tell me why you asked me to sleep with you. The truth. But I don’t think you’re ready now,” he said. 

And with that he turned away and really did go silent, leaving me with a pile of thoughts so tangled it would take way more than twenty-eight hours to straighten them out.

Tyler

Two hours into the trip I was ready for something in my stomach.

Which felt like someone poured battery acid in it. Other than the cookies and coffee back at Maggie’s house, I’d eaten nothing for way too long.

I rifled through the bag of food her sister had packed. Spotted the gummy bears. More colors in there than Maggie’s hair. I imagined eating one. I did not gag.

Progress.

As I tore open the bag, Maggie barely glanced at me. She was listening now with great intent to some NPR report about how drinking green coffee made your metabolism do something. Maybe it turned you into a serial killer or made your babies smarter.

At one point the news began, and I focused in on a few sentences:

“...CDC officials landed in the small, rural hamlet of Peters, Ohio, in central Ohio, where a mysterious gastrointestinal illness has swept the town. The puzzling condition has hospitalized eighty people and more than one hundred others have been treated for dehydration and diarrhea in area hospitals and clinics. The CDC is considering a quarantine in case an infectious agent is the cause of this....”