True (2 page)

He kicked me. I couldn’t believe that he just kicked me. I yelped, and before I could respond, Tyler was between me and Grant, pulling him to his feet.

“I heard her say no. Now get the hell out of here. Go home. What is wrong with you? You don’t treat a chick like that.”

They scuffled a little, Grant shoving Tyler’s arms off him as he made his way to the door. “Man, I was doing her a favor. No one else wants her.”

Tyler’s response to that was to punch Grant in the face, knocking him into the wall. “Shut the fuck up, or I’ll beat your ass into tomorrow.”

Grant peeled himself off the wall, shot me a look of hatred, then left, the door slamming hard behind him. The tears were rolling down my face, whether I liked it or not. The realization that I was almost raped settled over me, and his hateful words lay on top of that, a final insult. He was right. No one wanted me. But that didn’t mean I could be treated like shit. It didn’t mean I wasn’t a person, that I should toss over my dignity and accept whatever attention I got, no matter how selfish and crude it was.

“You okay?” Tyler asked, popping open his beer and holding it in front of me.

I shook my head. Because I didn’t want the beer. And because I wasn’t okay.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know he would do something like that. I feel really bad.” He set his beer down on the end table. “Do you want me to give you a ride home? Jessica’s asleep.”

Great. All I wanted to do was retreat to our dorm and cry in my bed, but Jessica was taking a post-coital nap. It was bold for me, but I decided to accept his offer, even though I knew I was putting him out. “Yeah, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure, no problem. Just let me get my keys.” He made a face. “And a shirt. It’s cold out there for October.”

He went back into the bedroom and when he came out, Jessica was actually with him. “Rory, are you okay?” She rushed over to me, blond hair flying behind her, dressed in men’s pajama pants and a huge sweatshirt. “Tyler told me what happened.”

Her arms wrapped around me and I let her hug me, grateful for the contact and her concern.

“What an asshole. If I see him, I’m going to cut his dick off and shove it down his throat. Let’s see how he likes cock crammed in his mouth.”

Her vehemence made me feel better. “I should have . . .” I started—but then stopped myself. I should have what? I shouldn’t have done anything differently. I was just sitting in my chair and he made a world of assumptions and I said no, and that was the truth of it. I wasn’t going to blame myself that he’d taken a fist to the face.

“No, screw that,” Jessica said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. And I’m sorry I left you alone with that prick.”

“I’ll be right back,” Tyler said, his phone buzzing in his hand. He retreated into the bedroom as Kylie came out, her hair a hot mess, makeup streaked.

“What’s going on?”

“Grant tried to rape Rory,” Jessica said in such a loud, matter-of-fact voice I couldn’t help but wince.

“What? Are you effing kidding me?” Kylie could have been Jessica’s twin. They were both tall, blond, tan, toned. They were getting vague degrees in Gen Ed and would probably wind up wedding planners and golf wives, while I was intending to go to med school to be a coroner. I was more comfortable with dead people than living ones. But for whatever reason, Kylie and Jessica liked me. And I liked them. Their reaction cemented that feeling. They both looked like if they had had a baseball bat and five minutes alone with Grant, he’d wish he’d never been born.

I didn’t want to fight Grant. I just wanted to forget it had ever happened. “I did kiss him,” I said, because I felt guilty for that. That was leading him on, a little.

“So? A kiss is not a promise of pussy,” Kylie said.

She was right. “I know,” I said, miserable, confused, stomach upset. I sat down on the end table, looking at my boots. “But I mean, it’s not like I haven’t thought about being with Grant. I have. But he was so . . . and I don’t want it, my first time, to be like this . . . and I should have done . . . something.”

So much for telling myself I wasn’t going to do that. There I was, worried, feeling like I’d had some part in what had happened.

“Your first time? Wait a minute, are you saying you’re a virgin?” Jessica was staring at me blankly. “For real?”

Oops. I hadn’t really meant to share that. It wasn’t exactly a deep, dark secret, and it really couldn’t have been that much of a shock to her, but it wasn’t necessarily something I wanted to go around talking about. “Um. Yes. I just haven’t . . .”

Had the opportunity.

“There hasn’t been anyone . . .” I reached for the beer Tyler had abandoned and took a sip. I was drunk, but not nearly enough to not suddenly feel completely and totally middle school mortified.

“Oh.” Kylie looked bewildered. “Well, that’s cool. Lots of girls make that choice.”

“It hasn’t been a choice. Not exactly. I mean, if I could, I think I would.” I did. I was twenty, and I had all the same physical feelings as other people. Just no one to explore them with. In a way that wasn’t a quickie on the stained carpet.

“Well, why can’t you?” Jessica asked.

“Because no one is offering. I guess technically Grant offered, but I don’t want it like that.” I was sorry I’d brought it up at all. It wasn’t a discussion I wanted to have with Tyler and Nathan a few feet away.

“So you want, like, romance?”

Was that what we called it? “I guess.”

Tyler came back into the room, pushing his cell phone into his front pocket. “You ready?”

“Yeah.” I found my crossbody bag on the floor and put it over my head.

“Tyler, Rory wants romance,” Jessica told him. “What do you think of that?”

My face burned with embarrassment. I didn’t want to be the subject of discussion. I didn’t want Tyler to stare at me the way he was, dark eyes scrutinizing mine. He was the typical bad-boy type—which was why Jessica liked him—and I was the kind of girl he would never notice. And he hadn’t ever noticed me, not really. I was the quiet friend of Jessica and Kylie whose presence he tolerated. But now his eyes were sweeping over me, assessing, and I couldn’t read his expression.

“I think she should have whatever she wants.” He reached out and took the beer can from my hand, his fingers brushing mine. “But nothing says romance like a six-pack. I need to pick up more beer.”

I shivered from his touch and from the inscrutable look he was giving me.

“I’m staying here,” Jessica stated. “It’s too cold outside to go home. See you tomorrow, Rory.”

Kylie was already curled up on the couch, in a praying position, half-asleep as she gave a weak wave. “Bye, sweetie.”

“Okay, bye,” I said, shoving my hands in the front pockets of my jeans, wishing I had worn a thicker coat. I was cold and I wanted a hot shower to wash away the beer and the fear and the feel of Grant’s wet lips on me. But first I had to sit in the car alone with Tyler. A perfect ending to a crap night. Awkward small talk with my roommate’s Friend with Benefits, who had punched his own friend on my behalf.

As I followed Tyler down the metal stairs, the smell of fried foods strong in the hallway, I thought that was the end of any talk about my virginity.

I didn’t know it was just the beginning.

Chapter Two

Nathan’s apartment was on McMicken Street, off-street parking only. Tyler’s car was a rusted-out sedan, at least twenty years old, with a maroon door that stood out in stark contrast against the car’s white body.

“It’s unlocked,” he told me as he stepped into the street.

So I pried open the passenger side and climbed in, shivering, crossing my arms over my chest. I checked for a seat belt, but there didn’t seem to be one, and so I just sat there, stiff, my rain boots shuffling through a pile of discarded fast-food bags and Coke cans. I didn’t know what to say to Tyler. I wanted to thank him for rescuing me. Because that’s what he had done. I wasn’t sure I could have gotten away from Grant on my own.

I forced myself to glance at him, but he was just looking back over his shoulder as he pulled out of the spot. He had a strong jaw and a little bump in the center of his nose that I had never noticed before. With his sweatshirt swallowing him, and in profile, somehow he looked younger, less intimidating than when his tattoos were on full display, and his dark eyes were staring at me. It gave me the courage to say, “Thanks.”

My voice came out like a hoarse whisper and I cleared my throat, embarrassed.

“No problem,” he said. “You can’t walk through this neighborhood by yourself at night. This fucking hill alone would kill you if the ghetto rats didn’t.”

Whether or not Straight Street got its name from the fact that it was virtually a ninety-degree incline or not, I didn’t know. It was definitely unwalkable, even during the day. But I wasn’t talking about his giving me a ride, though I was grateful for that. “Yeah, but thanks for . . . Grant.” I didn’t want to get more specific than that.

He turned now, and I was sorry he did when he gave me a look that I couldn’t read. “Sure. If you find yourself in that situation again, punch him in the nuts. But you can do better than Grant, trust me.”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t sure if it were true or not, but I did know that I would much rather be alone than have those wet, narrow lips anywhere on me, and that demanding grip on my arm, the back of my head.

“I mean, you’ve waited this long to have sex, you shouldn’t waste your virginity on an Oxy junkie.”

So he had heard me talking to Jessica and Kylie. I gripped my purse tighter in my lap, that churning sensation in my stomach starting again. The car was heaving and bucking as it struggled to make it up the steep hill, and the engine whined as Tyler gave it more gas. The street was empty, most of the houses darkened because it was after two, and I suddenly felt as trapped in the car as I had in the apartment. I didn’t want to talk about this with Tyler. Or anyone.

“Oxy?” I asked, to buy time. Dodge and weave when the subject was uncomfortable. But I’d never been particularly good at dodging anything. I was the girl in grade school gym who didn’t move fast enough and took a rubber ball in the nose.

“OxyContin. Grant likes to snort it. When he can’t get his hands on any for a while, he gets a little edgy. I told Nathan he shouldn’t let him come around anymore, but Nathan is loyal.”

So Grant did drugs. I guess I wasn’t surprised, not really. He had the requisite dysfunctional family, the nervous twitch. It made sense. I was disappointed, though, because it meant that I had inaccurately assessed Grant. I had seen him as a male version of myself, quiet from a lack of social skills, nervous. But it wasn’t that at all, and I had projected what I wanted onto him.

The thought made me want to cry again.

“So you’re not?” I said, then immediately regretted it. It sounded almost accusatory, when the truth was, the silence was stretching out, a long rubber band that snapped with my unintentionally harsh words.

“Not when you’re doing drugs and kicking girls.”

That made sense to me.

I didn’t really know Tyler at all, other than he was Jessica and Kylie’s party buddy, and on occasion, he and Jessica hooked up. He almost never came to our dorm room, and I had only been around him a few times at parties and at the apartment. We didn’t share any classes, and he’d never made much of an effort to talk to me.

But suddenly I liked him a whole lot better.

Unsure what to say, as usual, I tucked my hair behind my ear, but I was spared from having to answer by his phone ringing. He glanced at the screen and swore.

“Yeah?” he said, after tapping the screen, turning the steering wheel with his left elbow, heading toward campus.

I wondered if it were Jessica. But I realized that it couldn’t be Jessica, because she wouldn’t have called him. She was a texter and she always used an absurd shorthand with acronyms that no one but she understood, like LULB, which she insisted stood for
Love You Little Bitch
. Or my personal favorite,
W
? Jessica sometimes meant it as a general question, as in she didn’t understand what was happening, which most people would assume, or sometimes as
What Time?
though no one but her ever knew which one she intended.

“No. In the kitchen. No,” he said into his phone, more emphatically. “I didn’t take it. The cat probably ate it.”

The woman talking to him was so loud that I could hear her, though the words were garbled.

“Well, stop leaving your shit laying around,” he said, and with a sound of disgust pulled the phone from his ear and dropped it into a dirty change compartment next to the gear shift. “Moms are a complete pain in the ass.”

If I hadn’t been drunk, I probably wouldn’t have said anything at all. I would have just agreed or most likely, just nodded. But my mouth seemed to move faster than my brain. “I don’t remember my mom being a pain in the ass at all. She was always smiling.”

Tyler glanced at me. “Remember? She run out on you or what?”

I wondered what the statistical odds were that someone would assume abandonment over death. “No. She died. Of cancer. When I was eight.” The beer was working overtime. I never told anyone that unless they really pressed me, because the
C
word immediately brought both sympathy and fear to people’s faces. They felt instantly bad for me, yet at the same time they were momentarily afraid that it would touch their life like it had mine, and they had to whisper the word.
Cancer
. Like if they spoke it too loudly it would be conjured up in their bodies like a destructive demon straight from hell. People had told me that straight out, that cancer was from the devil, a horrible affliction of otherworldly implications, unstoppable.

Others had told me that the government most likely had a vaccination for cancer but was keeping a lid on it, to drive the medical economy. This seemed unlikely to me for more than a dozen reasons, not the least of which was that it didn’t make sense on a cellular level. It wasn’t a virus but a mutation. Yet I understood people wanted an answer for the randomness of why it struck, why it killed.

I had stopped asking why a long time ago.

Tyler seemed to get that. His response wasn’t an uncomfortable apology. He said, “Well that’s about as fucking unfair as it gets, isn’t it? My mom is a selfish bitch and she’ll probably live to be ninety, and yet yours died.”

It was kind of nice not to get the same pat response of sympathy, the one where everyone was sorry, but at the same time so damn glad it wasn’t them. I appreciated his matter-of-fact attitude. “You don’t get along with your mom?”

“Nope.” Tyler pulled into the driveway that led to my dorm. “She’s not all bad, though. She did give birth to me.” He turned and shot me a grin.

It was so unexpected that, for a second, I blinked, then I let out a startled laugh. The sound was foreign and awkward to my ears, but Tyler didn’t seem to notice. His face changed when he smiled, and his eyes warmed. In the dark, they still looked like deep, black holes, but with his lips upturned and the corners of his eyes crinkling, he wasn’t so intense, so remote.

That was when I realized why I’d always been slightly nervous around Tyler. He was what people always accused me of being—there but not present. Easygoing, but distant. Smiling, but intense. Maybe it was the alcohol, my ears still buzzing, my insides hot, my skin cold and clammy, but for the first time I didn’t feel uncomfortable around him.

“So are you really a virgin?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious. “Or were you just saying that?”

No longer comfortable. It went away faster than you could say
Awkward Moment
.

Why he thought I would want to talk about that made no sense to me at all. I was drunk, but I wasn’t
insane
. If I hadn’t even told my roommates until that night, why the hell would I sit in Tyler’s car and spill my guts? I wasn’t the confessional type. I never had been.

So I just looked at him.

“I’m going to take that as a yes.”

I wanted to tell him to mind his own goddamn business. To stop pressing a girl he didn’t know for intimate details about her sexual experience. That it was rude. But I remembered that he had, in fact, saved the very virginity he was questioning, so I didn’t want to be a bitch. I just shrugged. Really, what difference did it make? I was already a collegiate abnormality. Likes to study! Hates to talk! Won’t go tanning! See this freak-show exhibit in her natural dorm habitat . . .

But I actually surprised myself by opening my mouth and saying, “Yes, I am.”

My admission silenced him for a second, but then he drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel as he put the car in Park in front of my dorm, a seventies-built tower of glass and steel. Light from the streetlight was flooding into his car, showing even more clearly how dirty and ancient it was with a slot for a cassette player crammed full of what looked like parking tickets.

“Do you have a purity ring or whatever?”

Now that I was in, and the beer had loosened my lips, I said the first thing that came into my head. “I prefer to call it my hymen.”

Tyler let out a laugh. “No, I mean one of those rings you wear on your finger . . .” He looked at me, understanding dawning. “Oh, wait, you’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

Which made him laugh harder. “Rory, you are an interesting chick.”

Interesting wasn’t exactly a riveting compliment, but he hadn’t called me a freak, which was how I felt sometimes. As if I had been assembled in a different way altogether than everyone around me, and while I liked the end result, everyone else was confused about how to interpret my very existence. They watched me, suspicious, as if I were a Transformer and they were waiting for metal arms to spring out from my chest cavity.

I didn’t think that I’d ever seen him laugh before, or maybe I had just never noticed, my attention focused on Grant, who I had thought was more likely to fall in with my plan of exploring human mating and relationships. But then again, Jessica and Kylie tended to dominate all conversation in a group setting, so maybe their own perfectly affected laughter had drowned out Tyler’s.

But for some stupid reason, I liked to think that he was laughing just for me.

Which was when I knew I was even more drunk than I realized and I needed to get away from him before I sat there blinking at him like a baby owl indefinitely. Before I put some sort of hero worship onto him that he might deserve, but didn’t mean a damn thing. Before I substituted one pointless crush for another.

I shoved open the door, half falling out, clinging to the handle and the remnants of my dignity, like he could hear my stupid thoughts. “Thanks,” I said over my shoulder, barely glancing back as I exited the car, clutching my bag.

There was no response, and when I struggled to slam the heavy door, which seemed to weigh a million pounds and required more coordination than my icy fingers had, I realized that he was just staring at me. There was a cigarette in his mouth, and he was lifting the car lighter up to it, his hand guiding it to his destination without thought. As he sucked on it to catch the paper and tobacco on fire, his eyes never left mine.

The smile was gone. There was nothing but a cool scrutiny.

I shivered.

Then I walked as fast as I could to my dorm, digging in my bag for my swipe card.

Once inside, I paused at the front desk to check in and I glanced out the front doors.

His car was still there, and I could see the shadow of his outline, the tiny red glow of his cigarette.

***

“How are you feeling?” Kylie asked, coming into our room with more noise than could possibly be necessary.

I pried my eyes open and gave a mumbled, “Like shit,” before crawling back under my blanket. I had woken up at five in the morning and had gone into the bathroom we shared with the room next door to throw up. It had shot out like a garden hose on high, and I had slid down onto the cool tiles, regretting my lack of dinner, regretting those stupid beers that I’d only had because I was nervous being around a guy who had turned out to be a douche bag.

None of it was logical. I didn’t do stupid things, as a rule.

I was paying for this one. And after crawling back to my bed, soaked in sweat, I had slept restlessly off and on for hours. I had no idea what time it was when Kylie and Jessica came back, and I didn’t give a shit. I wanted to die. I would dedicate my body to science, and they could study the effects of cheap beer on socially awkward college sophomores.

“Do you want anything?” Jessica asked.

“A gun to shoot myself.” My head felt like someone was repeatedly taking a sledgehammer to it, and my stomach felt like the lining had been manually torn out by werewolves, and replaced with maggots crawling up my throat. And I wasn’t being overdramatic. I felt like ass. Like two-day-old roadkill. Like chewing gum on the bottom of a chicken’s foot. That’d been hit by a car.

My bed creaked and sank as one of them sat down by my feet. Even that small motion had me gagging.

“We’re going to lunch. Do you want to come with us?” Kylie asked.

I didn’t even bother to answer that. It hurt to move my mouth, and that was possibly the stupidest question I’d ever heard in my life. I wouldn’t go to lunch if a million dollars were offered along with a guaranteed Liam Hemsworth make-out session.