Tousle Me (19 page)

“Gosling.” He clutches his bloody stomach.  A dark look of realisation floods his gaze. “You have to stay away from me. It’s not safe.”

“What do you mean?” Look at him—he wouldn’t harm a fly. Unless the fly is a television. Or a pervy frat boy. Or my gynaecologist.

“I’ll only hurt you.” He winces as he talks. “I’ll only break your heart. There are things…things you don’t know about me…”

“Oh, Hunter.” I scoot over to cradle his head in my lap. “Don’t you understand? Nothing you’ve done can shock me. Since I met you that night, everything you’ve done for me…and last night, when you
tousled
me…” I trail off, my voice cracking as tears well up. “I’m here for you. Right here. Please don’t push me away.”

He looks so pained. Maybe it’s because of the secret he holds; maybe it’s because of the shallow but copiously weeping cuts right across his abs; maybe he’s just holding in his own fart.

“Whatever it is,” I whisper, “it won’t matter. Is it to do with your magic metrosexual rose?”

He makes a throaty little noise of panic. “It was, gosling. It
was
.”

Petals falling…dark curse…huh. I guess the bits I pulled off it the other night probably haven’t helped the situation. Can I explain this and feign a cliché misunderstanding? I suspect not.

“So tell me,” I urge, biting my lip. “Tell me.”

“But if I tell you, I have to face up to it all myself. And I’ve been trying so hard to avoid it.”

“Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt,” I say sagely, smiling bitterly through my tears. “It’s also a word that rhymes with defile.”

“That’s so beautiful.” He coughs again. “But I can’t do it. I can’t reveal to you what I really am.”

“But why?” I sob. “Hunter, I love you…I even farted in front of you. That’s how much I’m willing to share.”

He joins me, crying too. “I noticed. It was disgusting. But gosling…you know, somebody once shared with me some wise, wise words.” He pauses, while I bite my lip. “Love, they said, is not the absence of logic, but logic chewed and digested, heated and concentrated to fit inside the contours of the fart.”

We stay there for a moment, just a heap of sodden tears and blood and the remains of my lingering beef blast. I know Hunter’s trying to tell me that he loves me, but he’s all out of things to give. I mean, his erection has actually gone down.

Finally, he rasps, “Gosling. Fetch me the rose.”

I arrange the bed sheet around myself and hobble to the ornate door between his wardrobes, twisting the key with one hand and wiping my eyes with the other. The white fabric is dotted with Hunter’s blood now, like Desdemona’s handkerchief (obligatory English major fact drop HIGH FIVE). It’s weird seeing the rose room in the daylight—it looks a lot less like a dramatic room of dark pain, and more like an emo’s bedroom post-party. Tentatively, I tuck the sheet into some kind of tight contortion so it doesn’t fall down, and pick up the rose’s glass case. Then I take it back out to Hunter.

He stands before the closed drapes. He’s also pulled on his ripped stonewashed jeans. His abs are a mess of sticky red and clumsily carved comic sans; his fudge sundae hair is so tousled that the sun shines through it in puddingy highlights. Not even writing of sub-par quality can dim his glory in this moment: Hunter, pissed and wasted and broken and twisted and wicked and gone too far, like an Abbi Glines title on crack. With a penis.

If you learn one thing from me, fair reader, let it be this: a penis improves everything.

“Let me see the rose,” Hunter says softly, though there’s a gravity to his tone.

I hand him the remains of the rose in its cylindrical glass case, now withered to a stem with a dried, bulbous head. It’s a bit like I’m handing him my heart—if my heart looked like Squid Patrick Harris’s boner.

“So it’s true,” he says hoarsely.

“Looks like it.” I bite my lip.

He swings his arm and launches the case at the wall, where it shatters into roughly four hundred and seventy two tiny pieces. Ryan Gosling gives a shocked little final chunder in the corner.

Hunter lets off a primal howl. For a moment, I’m terrified that he’s turning into a werewolf, but then I remember that this isn’t that kind of book.

“I should never have let you come here!” he yells.

“But—but Hunter—”

“Look at me! Don’t you know why the band fired me? Don’t you know what I am?”

“I—I—I never knew you were fired. I thought you left of your own accord.”

“Yeah, right!” He laughs bitterly. “I got close to those guys. They were my mates, my boys.
Mein bruders
. We’d been through sold out tours, paternity scandals, three number two albums. I felt like I could trust them with anything, and God, I needed to unload my burden.” He covers his eyes with one wide palm, like it hurts him just to be able to see. “So one night—just before our very own SNL spoof, when I thought, you know, this is really as good as it gets—I got a bit drunk and decided to let it all hang free.”

“You told them your dark secret,” I whisper, my heart hammering in my knees.

“Oh, I told them, all right! Do you have any idea what it’s like to lose your mother, gosling?”

“Uh…well kind of. Mostly I just communicate with her on Facebook so she’s not all up in my grill.”

“I loved my mummy, God dammit. I didn’t know she was still in that stable.” He pauses for breath, his voice turning raspy. “I didn’t know the horse was still…in…her.”

My eyes dart back and forth. “Uh…what?”

“Do you know what upper class English mothers do when they get bored?” he spits.

“Crochet? Whiny blogs?” I put up a finger in epiphany. “Ooh! Go on
British Bake Off
?”

“They get horses,” he sneers. “And before you know it…they’re…fucking the horses.”

I bite my lip very, very hard. “That’s what you’re trying to tell me? That your mom was having sex with her, uh, stallion?” Which is weird, I’ll grant. And illegal. But I did think about Sparkles that one time…

“I’m telling you I burned her down, right along with that fucking horse and the fucking stable!” he roars, shoving his foot into the still-sparking TV. It explodes on the floor in a blaze of blue lightening and smoking cables. “I murdered my own mother, gosling! As well as her bloody horse.” He coughs through the heavy air.

Hunter’s a murderer. I stand there, frozen, letting this little factoid sink in.

“I told them my most shameful secret,” he goes on in desperation, “and do you know what they said? They couldn’t work with a murderer. I said that was rich, coming from a bunch of Germans. And…they fired me.”

Hunter’s a murderer.
I roll the words around in my head, trying them out in different arrangements to see if they’re any less horrifying. A murderer Hunter. Murderer a Hunter. Hunter Murderer A. Hmm. No. This is pretty pointless, actually.

Hunter staggers up to me, ripping my personal space open and taking it for his own. “See,” he seethes, “I warned you. I knew just how you’d react. You hate me. You’re repulsed. By. Me.”

“I…I don’t know what I am,” I utter. I don’t really know what he is, either, aside from strangely alluring.

“You should leave now,” he hisses, “and never come back. I wreck lives. I shred weasels. I’m a walking fucking disaster of epic prepositions.”

“Proportions!” I erupt in his face. “PROPORTIONS!”

“Well FINE!” he shouts into mine. “Now get the fuck out of my wing, and never come the fuck back!” Then he crumples into a heap again, watching me as I go.

Each step is an effort. Each step is a miserable miracle. Each one is a small step for womankind, but one giant leap over smoking cables and a random axe. Ryan Gosling gives a melancholy hiss of farewell, and I ssssss right back at him as I choke down my sobs.

Before I disappear, he whimpers, “Do me a favor, gosling. Check my heart at the door on your way out.”

I stagger down the staircase, which is still smothered in day-old bruised rose petals. It smells a bit like my granny’s bathroom. As I wade through the dark red sea still wrapped in my white, almost bridal bed sheet—and away from my monster of a boyfriend—it occurs to me that there’s some serious imagery up in hey-uh, yo. And that only makes me weep harder.

“Labron,” I sob, crashing into the kitchen. I find him slumped over the marble and mahogany island, surrounded by empty glass bottles and cans of Red Bull. “Hunter’s von flipped his lid. Please take me home.”

He lets out a loud hiccup. “Well sure thing, Cinderella. But you should know...” Then he lets off a burp. “I’ve been chugging this Courvoisier since, like, three in the morning.”

My upper lip twitches in disgust. “Courvoisier and Red Bull?”

“A brother’s gotta do what a brother’s gotta do.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Anyway.” He burps again, adjusting his loose tie almost like he’s making room. “I am three sheets to the motherfuckin’ wind, let me tell you.” He rolls his shoulders and does a little dance. “Pass the Courvoisier,” he sings. “Man, that tune is a diamond in the rough.”

“Labron?” I croak. “Do you know Hunter’s dark secret?”

“You mean the one where his band gets him cursed by Nazi gypsies to repent for the sin of burning his mom to death by earning the love of an innocent young rose? That one?”

“There’s another one?”

“Probably.” He hoots with drunken laughter. “But hey, you won’t top that first one, right?”

I think of the cupboard. “Right,” I manage.

“Anyway.” He yanks the limo keys out of his pocket with a jingle. “Let’s get this show on the road!”

“Are…are you sure you’re okay to drive? I mean, I could call Archer…” I could sure use an eighties power ballad right about now.

“Ginger. Do I
look
like I’m okay to drive?” He stumbles over a bar stool and lands on the floor, groaning.

“I guess.”

He picks himself up, dusts himself down. Hiccups again. “Then let’s roll.”

* * *

Nothing can drag me out of this desolate black hole. I lie in bed for two days straight, not showering or eating, subsisting on glasses of filtered water and at times, my own tears. They taste like stale pretzels.

Sparkles bakes me cupcakes but they just go in the garbage. I want to share in his joy at being retweeted by Channing Tatum, but all I can manage is a raspy
neeeeigh
of solidarity
.

A new box of shiny, gorgeous advance review copies arrives, but I can’t lose myself in any of them. Not even Juniper Armenseabass writing as Jay-Z.

Labron got me home okay on that desperate morning, but he got a DUI on the way back. I guess that’s what happens when you crash a limo into a taco stand in a blaze of ‘Club Tropicana’ and brandy breath. I should go to Hunter, beg him to bail his friend out of jail, but I can barely bring myself to go to the bathroom, let alone reach for the cell.

Should probably change my sheets.

For hours, I’ve been watching the Savage Richtung drama unfold on CNN. Hunter’s meltdown is even bigger news than the actual reunion, and horrible snaps of him shutting his cock in the window are all over Twitter. Every time they’re shown, I have to put my head under the covers—all I can hear is the crushed, fleshy sound of his penis being ironed like a pancake, and his high-pitched squeal of pain.

Enid barges into my room, her skin a pale shade of green and her hair all over the place. I’d say she was tousled, but nobody is allowed to be tousled except Hunter and me.

“Hey there, lady troll,” she calls. “You coming out from under that bridge yet?”

“Very funny,” I mutter.

“Yeah, well—” She claps a hand over her mouth and makes a run for the bathroom, where the sounds of her barfing are even more impressive than Ryan Gosling’s.

I sure hope Hunter’s poor one-eyed snake is okay. Sniff.

Enid is sick. She says it’s a bug going around campus, but we both know it’s continued punishment for being a whore.

“Bleugh.” There’s a flushing sound, and then she emerges again, patting a tissue over her mouth. Sparkles nudges his tray of copious baked goods toward her with a glittery hoof, and she accepts a cupcake covered in Haribo and white frosting. “Dude. It’s beautiful, but I’ll probably just look at it, not eat it. If that’s okay.”

“Neeeigh,” Sparkles says, not looking up from the laptop. He joined Goodreads today. He hasn’t actually read any books but he loves making random reviews with loads of GIFs and plagiarized lines from Amazon. Mama’s boy. Heh.

Enid perches on the end of my bed. “So what are we doing today?”

“Moping,” I mumble. “Brooding. Snivelling. Ing-ing.”

“I thought we could do stuff girls do to get you out of your Hunter funk. Have you got Netflix? We could watch
Trousersnakes on a Plane
.”

“I do love that movie,” I say sadly. “But it will remind me too much of Hunter.”

“You can’t just rot in here forever, Cammie.”

“Oh yes I can. Just watch me.”

“Ew. No.” She adjusts her pink t-shirt, revealing prominent rib bones.

“Jeez, Enid,” I exclaim, almost enviously. “You’ve lost weight.”

“It’s a little diet trick I like to call horrific illness.”

“Score.”

“I know, right? I figure Captain Purity—or whatever his name is—might change his mind about me now. You know, see me in a different light if I’m thinner and less busty and…I guess…innocent. Child-like.”

I frown. “That would make him kinda creepy.”

“Maybe I like creepy.”

Trust Enid to try outdoing my killer love interest with her paedophile one.

I think of how Hunter is a murderer. I wish I could tell Enid, but it’s not my secret to share. Over and over, I’ve tried to come to terms with his little revelation, but I can’t even let him off for being a vampire—you know, because he isn’t one. Stephanie Meyer, you did
not
prepare me for this. My rage is UNTOLD.

And smells kinda sweaty. Sure could use a shower.

“Archer’s wondering where the hell you’ve gotten to,” says Enid. “And you’re going to flunk out of Critical Thinking for Darren Hayes Lyrics if you don’t get your butt to class soon.”

“I know, I know. But Enid, what am I meant to do without Hunter?” The tears advance upon me, vicious in their assault and stuff. “He was my everything.”