Tasting, Finding, Keeping: The Story of Never (2 page)

I put on a red dress for the party, something that matches my hair and brings out the green flecks in my hazel eyes. I don't wear tights or underwear, just a nice set of heels and a coat that has a hidden pocket on the inside, somewhere I can put my wallet.

Lacey drives us which is nice because it's too cold outside to walk. When we get to the party, I see Rick standing out on the front lawn, talking to Lacey's girlfriend. It's too much for either of us to handle, so Lacey takes us to a bar instead.

I'm not more than three feet in the door when I spot him.

There's a guy standing in the back corner. He's wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of low cut jeans that emphasize the curve of his ass. His arms are covered in tattoos and his hair is black and spiky, gelled up enough that I know he cares but not enough that I think he wasted time slaving over it. This is the kind of guy I like. I know that before he turns around and sees me staring at him. His dark eyes and suggestive smirk tell me that this is the kind of guy that cheats on you when your back is turned and that spouts a lie with every other word he says.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of guy that I want. At least temporarily. I'm never looking for something long-term, usually just a few weeks or even a few hours. Thanks to my red dress, I don't have to think up anything to say. The guy walks right across the room and pauses next to me. Lacey is already gone, hitting on some chicks near the pool tables.

“Hi, I'm Ty,” he says and his voice oozes over me and fills all the little cracks in my psyche. If Rick were to do that, if he could ever even think to do that, maybe he could glue me back together, keep me in one piece? This Ty, this person with wicked sexy lips and arms that curve with gentle swells of muscle, fills my cracks with foam that expands and breaks me into a million pieces.

“I'm Never,” I say and do my usual explaining thing that people need when they hear my name. “Never is my first name. I don't give out my last name to strangers.” Ty smiles and I can't help but feel this surge of heat in my lower belly. The woman in me wants the man in him. She doesn't care why or how or if he'll even be there later. I hate her for that. I hate myself and my hormones, and I hate men. I hate everybody.

Ty reaches out and takes a strand of my hair between his fingers. His nails are rough and cracked like maybe he does hard labor or something.

“Do you want to dance, Never?” he asks me, and I look around him at the empty expanse of floor between us and the bathrooms.

“This is a bar, not a club,” I say to him as I reach inside my coat and find a piece of gum. I like to chew gum when I'm around other people. That way, if I run out of things to say then I can always blow a bubble or something, pretend that I'm busy even though I'm not. “You can buy me a drink though.”

“Are you sure you're legal?” Ty says, and I don't like his attitude. He didn't like that I turned him down for a dance. I bet that's his best pickup line. Girls probably think it's cute. I bet he scores a lot by using it. I don't need pickup lines to score, so if Ty doesn't want to play then I'll find somebody else. I shouldn't be thinking like that. I don't
need
to fuck somebody, but at least if I do, then there'll be one, tiny, little second where I feel like somebody cares about me, even if it isn't true. Plus, seeing Ty has made me horny and I can feel my thighs clenching in anticipation. They want him almost as much as I do.

“Cute,” I say as I shrug my jacket off and let him see my shoulders. I have nice shoulders, smooth and covered with a dusting of pale freckles. Guys go nuts for them. Ty sees them alright, and his eyes travel down to my chest, searing me with heat. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Maybe you're right?” he says, as he drops my hair and takes a step back. “Are you jealous?”

“Hardly,” I say as I try to move forward. Ty blocks my path.

“Want to go somewhere else, somewhere we can dance?” I stare at him, wondering if he's really serious. He's cute, but he can't function without his pickup line. That's a bad sign. Still, maybe he'd be interested if I asked him outside.

“We can go somewhere else,” I say to him, closing the distance between us and standing on my toes. I let my heels rise off of the dirty floor as I press my lips to the smooth line of Ty's jaw and put a smoldering kiss there. “But I don't want to dance.” Ty looks down at me and smiles. When he does this, he gets dimples in his cheeks that make my heart palpate painfully. Something about other tortured souls calls to me, makes me want them. When I look into Ty's eyes, I can see that we're exactly the same. He's as wounded as I am, and we're both bleeding all over one another. It's a recipe for disaster.

“No,” Ty says and although I can see in his eyes that he still finds me attractive, a light goes off somewhere in there. He isn't interested anymore. I've failed some kind of weird, little test that he likes to give to girls. “But that's alright. Enjoy your night, okay?” I watch him turn away, dismissing me just like that. It turns on this faucet of rage inside of me, and I just want to throw myself at him, tear at his pretty hair and the earrings in his nose and I want to rip them out and smash them with my heels, grind them into dust beneath my feet.

“Yeah, that's alright,” I say, feeling so mean I can't stand it. I don't feel like myself when I'm acting like this, but I can't let him walk away from me like that. This is why I hate people, even when you have the lowest of expectations, they let you down. “Because I don't pay for it anyway.” Ty stops walking and turns around.

“Are you calling me a whore?” he asks and then just shakes his head. He holds up his hands which are so covered in rings and bracelets that they jingle. “You know what,” he continues as he opens his eyes wide and looks straight at me. “Just forget about it. You're not worth it.” Ty turns away again, and I let him go. My heart is pounding so hard against my ribcage that I can barely breathe.

I'm not worth it?

Why am I not worth it?

“Fuck you!” I call out, and then I'm turning away and pushing through the doors of the bar. I wrap my jacket tightly around myself and walk the four or so blocks to the convenience store. By the time I get there, the balls of my feet are on fire, and I have to pause outside and walk back and forth on flat feet for awhile. The guy inside the store is watching me like I'm a crazy person, but that's only because he's never walked four blocks in a pair of heels. If he had, he'd give me a free pair of shoe inserts and tell me to come on in.

When the pain subsides a bit, I slip the shoes back on and go inside. I don't know what I'm there to buy, so I walk around and don't even care that the employee is staring at me like I'm a thief. That's okay. If he wants to think that, I don't care. Tears are streaming down my face, and I can hardly breathe. I can't stop thinking about the words that Ty said.

You're not worth it.

I want to tell myself that I am, I am worth it, but I can't because I don't believe it either. The reason that Ty's words have cut me so deep is because he's right. I'm
not
worth it. I'm not worth anything. I grab a box of donuts and a six pack of beer and head to the counter.

“Gimme a pack of Marlboro Reds,” I say as my eyes catch movement outside the glass doors. I dash the tears away with the back of my hand. “You've gotta be fucking kidding me.” Ty and his friends, Lacey included, are coming into the store, laughing and smiling and leaning on one another like they're old friends.

“Hey Never,” Lacey says as she pretends to be as drunk as the rest of them. “I thought you'd gone home. What are you doing here?” The girl she's leaning on starts to giggle and gets the whole group going. Except for Ty. He's moved into the chip aisle and is purposely keeping his gaze off of me and on the snack food. I hope it's because he feels bad for what he said to me, but I guess that it's really because he doesn't like me and doesn't want to get roped into hanging out by association.

“I'm picking up my three favorite therapists: sugar, alcohol, and nicotine.” This is the only time the group stops laughing, not even the clerk smiles at my joke. I don't look at Ty. I slam my ID and debit card down on the counter and hope there's enough left on there to cover the cost. I've blown through all of my financial aid for the semester and half of my Perkins loan. I tell myself I'll make up for it by pirating my chem book off the internet. It's overpriced anyway.

“Come hang with us, Never. We're going dancing,” Lacey says as she reluctantly lets the others untangle themselves from her and go stumbling through the convenience store. It only takes one of the guys a few seconds to bump into something and knock a pile of magazines to the floor. At least the clerk isn't staring at me anymore. I'm getting really fucking tired of being stared at.

“Never doesn't like to dance,” Ty says from his position next to a display of Doritos. “She told me herself.” I watch him out of the corner of my eye, but I don't stare. If I do, I think my gaze will be hot enough to melt him, to burn those colorful tattoos down his skin, bleed them across the white linoleum floor.

“Are you kidding?” Lacey says, poking me in the arm as I stuff the cigarettes into the pocket of my jacket and give her a look that says,
You talk, you die.
She ignores me or doesn't get it. Either way, she continues to blabber, oblivious to the fact that I'm pointedly headed for the door. “Never's mom was a belly dancer. She's great at it. Never, I mean, not just her mom.” I pause for a moment, tucking the donuts under my arm where they'll no doubt get squashed. Doesn't matter anyway; I'm such a sucker for powdered sugar, I could practically eat it out of the bag. Plus, I have cigarettes and booze. The night isn't a total fucking waste.

Ty is staring at me with an expression that says he's
disappointed.
What he thinks gives him the right to look at me that way is beyond me.
You're not worth it.
I shake my head and step out of the way of the glass doors. They're swinging inward and ushering in a rush of cold air and a pair of guys that I don't like the looks of. There's a girl with them, too, but I don't like her anymore than I like them. I ignore them all. There are a lot of shitty people in this world. I know that better than anyone.

“I'm going to take the bus home,” I tell Lacey even though I hate the fucking bus. The campus is several miles from where we're at, and I don't want to walk back alone, in the dark, in a pair of high heels. Talk about a disaster waiting to happen.

“No, no,” Lacey says, grabbing my arm as I reach for the door. She's pouting her lips and looks really stupid with her red lipstick smeared around her face like a clown. She thinks she looks cute that way. “Come hang out with us,” she pleads as she nods her head at Ty and leans in for what's supposed to be a surreptitious whisper, but actually comes out loudly enough that I know he hears her. “He's single and cute, don't you think?”

“You're a lesbian,” I say to her, not trying to be judgmental but wanting to prove that she doesn't know shit about guys. “How do you know if he's cute or not?” Lacey rolls her blue eyes to the ceiling like she just can't believe how difficult I'm being. I don't know why she's being so pushy. We're not even friends, just roommates. Never Ross doesn't have any friends. Not anymore. “Look, I just want to go home, okay? Is that hard to understand?” I push past Lacey and reach for the door when a loud noise sounds from behind me. At first I think that one of Lacey and Ty's drunken buddies has knocked over some cans because that's what it sounds like. Then I turn around and see the gun.

It's clutched in the hands of the new girl and it's pointed straight at me.

“Get down on your fucking knees,” she tells me and I know better than to argue. Adrenaline pumps through my blood as I squat down and set the six pack on the floor next to the donuts. Lacey is still standing, and her legs are shaking, actually
shaking.
I don't blame her because these people, whoever they are, are serious as a fucking heart attack. The clerk is already dead, slumped over the glass counter like a doll. His eyes are as empty and lifeless as the dead father's are in my single, lonesome memory, and there's blood, a whole lot of blood. It's splattered across the counter and the floor, glistening red as rubies. I look away from the body and over at Lacey. If she doesn't get it together then she'll be joining the clerk on the other side, and I don't think Lacey's ready for that. Something my mother once said pops into my head at random.
That girl was a young soul; she wasn't ready to die.

“Lacey,” I say as quietly and calmly as I'm able. The girl with the gun looks spooked and the guys behind her, they both have guns, too, whether I can see them or not. I can tell by the way their hands hover around the openings in their coats. The sneers on their once handsome faces tell me that they wouldn't mind using them. “Get down.” Lacy collapses to her knees with a thud and slumps to the side. She's passed out. I swallow hard and try to catch a glimpse of Ty and his friends. They're hidden in the aisles, obviously down on their knees, too. Ty is the only one I can see and he doesn't look afraid, just pissed off.

At first, I'm thinking this is just a robbery gone wrong, that if we sit still and wait, that they'll go away and leave the rest of us alive. I mean, the girl with the gun looks kind of freaked out, like maybe she didn't mean to shoot the clerk. Her brown eyes are dilated and blood shot; they flicker around the room like bugs in a jar. Her hair is stringy and blonde with dark roots. It's not a good look for her, giving her pale skin an ashen quality that, combined with the sweat on her brow, makes her look like she's sick.
Drug addict?
I wonder as Ty starts to crawl across the floor in the opposite direction from where I'm crouched. I'm guessing that he's trying to get to the door that's marked
Employees Only
which is fine with me because if he gets out, presumably he'll go for help.

“What do I do now?” asks the girl as one of the guys hops over the counter, shoves the clerk's body out of the way and smashes his gun into the register. Her voice sounds young but rough, like her short journey on this earth hasn't been the most pleasant. I can agree to that, but I don't sympathize with her actions. I'm aching, too; I'm broken, too, but I don't take it out on everyone else. I draw inwards with my pain. Maybe that's not healthy either, but it's better than shooting a man who, as far as I know, did nothing wrong except show up to work today.