by Mila Gray
“Don’t be,” he says. “I’m sorry that happened to you. Next time a customer acts out of line like that, you come tell me or Tessa right away. We’ll deal with it.”
I nod, but really I’m wishing that I didn’t always have to rely on others to fix my problems. I wish I could have dealt with that man myself. But most of all, I wish that these things didn’t happen to me. It’s as if I have the word “victim” tattooed on my forehead. I can’t help but wonder if the majority of men are awful or if I’m a magnet for the all the bad ones. I’d like to think Tristan and people like Kit are different. But maybe they’re not; maybe they just hide it better. My dad certainly did.
“We’re closing up,” says Kit. “I’m going to put on some music. We’ll have ourselves a little dance party. Join us?”
“I should get home,” I say.
Kit and Jessa look disappointed and exchange a glance. “Are you sure we can’t tempt you?” asks Jessa. “Why don’t you stay and have a little fun?”
“Thanks,” I say, not wanting to be rude, “but I’m tired. I’m going to go home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Kit nods. “Thanks for tonight. You did great.”
The praise means a lot. Jessa smiles at me and then gives me a hug. “Remember what I said. If you ever want to hang out, go for coffee or a walk on the beach, let me know.”
I nod, a little speechless, then hurry toward the door, anxious to get away.
“How are you getting home?” Kit calls after me.
I hesitate a beat. “Um, I’ll walk,” I say.
“No,” Kit says, pulling out his phone. “I’m calling you a taxi. I’ll pay,” he says when he sees me open my mouth to protest.
It’s only ten minutes later when the taxi pulls up outside the condo. I hand the driver the ten dollars Kit gave me and get out. A motorbike pulls in front of me. It’s Tristan. He’s alone. No sign of his girlfriend.
I stop awkwardly and wait for him to park.
He pulls off his helmet. “Hey,” he says, swinging his leg over the bike. My stomach flips at the sight of him.
“I would have given you a ride if I’d known you needed one,” he mumbles. He doesn’t seem to want to look at me. Is he embarrassed at the almost-kiss? Are we going to acknowledge it or pretend it never happened?
Neither of us says anything. I can’t help but wonder where his girlfriend is. Did they fight?
“Good night,” he says, and turns away.
TRISTAN
I can’t do it. I can’t leave things hanging like this. I turn back to her. “I’m sorry,” I say.
She frowns, cocks her head slightly to one side. “About what?” she asks.
I swallow. “I shouldn’t have …” I pause, the words fizzling on my tongue. I can’t say I’m sorry for almost kissing her, because I’m more sorry that I didn’t. But I need to explain why we can’t be more than friends. Though, as I stand here staring at her under the amber glow of the streetlight, I’ve already forgotten why that is. Something about it being complicated, though if someone asked me to spell “complicated” right now, I’d struggle.
“I’m sorry if I got you in trouble,” she says quietly, looking down at her feet before darting a glance up at me.
I frown. “What do you mean?” I ask.
She looks embarrassed and touches a hand to her chest, as though covering her heart. “I thought … your girlfriend … did she—”
“What do you mean, my girlfriend?” I ask, shaking my head, confused.
“The girl in the pink dress,” she says.
I burst out laughing. “Dahlia?”
Confusion dances across Zoey’s face.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I say, smiling. “That’s my sister!”
Zoey’s eyes widen. Her hand flies to her mouth. “Really?” she asks. “That’s Dahlia?! I didn’t recognize her and I had no idea she lived in Oceanside.”
I nod, still laughing.
Zoey shuts her eyes. “Oh my God … I thought …” She breaks off. When she opens her eyes, she’s smiling, and my heart does a massive somersault in my chest. I want nothing more than to cross the few steps that separate us and pull her into my arms. I want to kiss her, and it’s pure torture just thinking about it. But I can’t act on it. It wouldn’t be the right thing to do.
Neither of us moves. And neither of us says anything. I’m frozen. I don’t move toward her, but I can’t walk away, either.
“Well,” she finally says, “I should probably go to bed.”
Bed. I shake my head, preventing my mind from picturing what it would be like to have her in my bed. All I manage by way of response is a nod and a kind of grunt. Zoey doesn’t make a move to leave, though, and I wonder … Is she waiting for me to say something or do something? Fuck.
Before I can do anything, she walks away. Bigger fuck. Shit. I watch her, telling myself it’s for the best. It’s an infatuation, and it will go away. Best not to screw up my friendship with her or with Will by kissing her, or even worse, sleeping with her.
“Hey, Zoey?” I call out before I can stop myself. What am I doing?
She’s on the steps, and she turns to look at me, unable to disguise the hope in her face. Shit. It’s a killer, that expression. The same way she looked at me when we almost kissed in the alley. “What?” she asks.
I can’t let her walk away. I need to kiss her. And caution and all the rest of it can go to hell.
“Can you come here?” I say.
Zoey frowns, and for a beat I wonder if I’ve read it wrong, but then she slowly walks back down the stairs and I start walking toward her. She pauses at the bottom of the stairs, and I keep walking, stopping when we’re almost touching, barely a centimeter between us. The voice of reason in my head is just a dull background noise that I’m ignoring, my focus on Zoey’s lips. Her breathing hikes.
My hand cups her cheek. I stare into her eyes. She looks at me, her face so open, like she’s standing, holding her heart in her hands and offering it to me. The vulnerability gives me pause. But then she does something unexpected: she pushes up on tiptoe and presses her lips to mine.
I’m too shocked to respond. At least for the first three seconds, the time it takes a lit fuse to run up the rope and meet the dynamite. At which point, it’s BOOM. World’s on fire. No more thought in existence, let alone any internal debate.
I wrap my arms around her and kiss her back, finally getting to feel the lips I’ve been fantasizing about, and they’re even softer than I imagined, and sweeter, too. She’s tentative, but when I drop my hands to her waist and crush her body against mine, her lips part in a loud exhalation and the kiss changes from being sweet and tentative to the opposite. She opens up and lets me really taste her, her hands twining in my hair, pulling me closer, and my God, I want her.
My brain is shouting things at me that I ignore because all there is is Zoey, bombarding every sense. The smell of her filling my lungs and making me never want to come up for air, the taste of her making my head spin, and the feel of her skin—smooth as silk—as my hands find their way underneath her shirt to circle her waist.
She’s breathing as hard as me, as though we’re both running a sprint. It’s zero to one hundred in less than a second. Her hands tighten on my back, pulling me even closer. I’m so wrapped up in Zoey that I don’t hear the car pull up behind me or the door slam. I don’t hear anything until Zoey pulls away, and then I turn and startle, feeling a dreadful sinking sensation.
Fuck. Fuck. Shit.
“Tristan?”
Brittany—blond, fully made-up, wearing a black silk slip of a dress that might even be a negligee—is staring at me and Zoey.
All the blood is draining away from every extremity in my body and seeming to pool at my feet. This is bad. Very bad. I’ve made a very big mistake.
“What. The. Fuck,” Brittany announces.
I swallow. I knew it was a bad idea to send that text when I left the restaurant today. It was a heat-of-the-moment,
need-to-purge-Zoey-out-of-my-system text. I got carried away with Zoey and the unexpected kissing and forgot about it. That’s not going to fly with either of them as an excuse, though.
Zoey looks at Brittany, then turns to stare at me with a fury that’s biblical. She steps back and out of my arms. Her eyes are flint but also gleaming with tears. And her nostrils are quivering as though she’s fighting back either a torrent of anger or grief, or probably both. I hate it. I hate having caused it. In fact, I hate myself more in this moment than I ever have in my life.
“I’m sorry,” I start to say.
“If you wanted a threesome, you should have told me,” Brittany says. “I would have been down for it, but some notice would have been nice.”
Zoey looks at her, her mouth falling open. Then she looks at me as though wondering if that was actually my intention.
“No,” I say in alarm, “that’s not what I …”
Zoey shoves past me, not letting me finish, which is fair enough. I reach for her automatically, but she pulls her hand away like she’s been bitten by a snake and races past me, not up the steps to her apartment but down the street. Brittany steps aside to let her pass, and Zoey doesn’t even acknowledge her. I should follow her—I want to follow her—but my feet remain frozen. I’m weighted down by the knowledge of how big this fuckup is.
Brittany crosses her arms over her chest and shakes her head at me. “Is that your girlfriend?” she asks.
“No,” I say.
“So what happened? Did you booty-call a few people at the same time in the hopes one of us would show up?”
“No,” I say weakly.
“You’re an asshole,” she spits. “You know that, right?”
I nod. Yes, I am.
ZOEY
I run, and I don’t stop running until I reach the ocean’s edge. Great heaving sobs burst out of me as I take a few steps back and sink down onto wet sand, burying my head in my arms. How could I have misjudged him so badly? I told myself not to get close, and this is why.
I’m such a damn idiot. I punch my fist into the sand.
Something alerts me to another person’s presence on the beach. I whip my head around, but it’s impossible to see much beyond twenty feet. The chances are if I can’t see them then they can’t see me either. Still, my senses are ringing alarms. My brain automatically conjures thoughts of my dad, but what would he be doing here, on a beach, in the middle of the night? It can’t be him. He doesn’t know where we are.
I wonder if it could be Tristan, but he’s probably back at his apartment getting it on with that girl. I scrunch my fists into the sand. I wish to hell we’d never moved here.
My senses prickle again. Someone is definitely out there in the darkness, close by. They must have heard me crying. I pick myself up, wiping my face, and start walking fast toward the street, but before I make it, someone bursts out of the dark and leaps in front of me. “Zoey!”
I suppress a scream. Jesus. It’s Tristan. I’m so mad I don’t stop. I shove past him at a run. “Leave me alone,” I tell him.
“Please,” he calls out, and jogs to catch up with me. “I’ve been looking for you. I need to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I tell him.
Tristan curses under his breath, but he doesn’t give up. He chases after me. “I know. I get it. I’ve been a jerk, and I understand if you never want to see me again or speak to me again, but just let me say this one thing first.”
I keep walking, mad that he probably thinks I’m crying over him when I’m not. I’m crying over myself and how stupid I am. He races after me, catching me as I reach the boardwalk. He jumps in front of me, blocking my path, holding up his hands, trying to get me to stop.
“I’m sorry. I fucked up. I’ve never done this before. I mean … I’ve never felt this way about anyone. And I was scared that I would do this … that I would make a mistake and fuck up … And I have.” He runs a hand through his hair, grimacing.
Lies. All lies. Does he really think I’m falling for it?
“I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
I decide the only way out of this is to feign indifference. “Okay,” I tell him coolly, looking in his direction but almost through him. “I forgive you.”
He double-takes. “You do?”
I nod and try to get past him.
“Nothing happened with Brittany,” he tells me. “I swear.”
“I don’t care,” I say, hating hearing her name fall so easily from his lips. Lips that just kissed mine.
“You don’t forgive me. You’re just saying it.”
“I do forgive you. I just don’t care. You’re right. It was a mistake. I made one too. Let’s just forget it.”
He shakes his head. “No. You weren’t a mistake, Zoey.” He sighs, glancing around as though trying to figure out which excuse to try on me.
“I don’t want to be a jerk,” he says. “Dahlia convinced me it would be the wrong thing to ask you out—that it would only complicate things. What with everything going on in your life. And Brittany had texted me earlier in the evening wanting to hook up, and on the spur of the moment, after I left the restaurant, I texted her back because …” He breaks off, squeezing his eyes shut.
I stare at him. That’s his excuse? “Because you wanted sex. And you were using her,” I say.
He shakes his head. “She was the one who suggested it in the first place. Sex, no strings. I wasn’t using her. We were using each other.”
“Is that all you wanted?” I ask before I can stop myself. “Sex, no strings?”
“No,” he says angrily. “Believe me. I would never want that with you. That’s my point.” His voice gets quieter. He stares me right in the eye. “You don’t have to believe me, but I want more than that with you. Maybe it sounds stupid, but there’s something there between us—I think you feel it too.”
I make my face poker flat.
“Look,” he says. “You can walk away, you can never talk to me again, and I won’t blame you, but know that kissing you was not a mistake.”
I take a step back to maintain the distance because when he gets too close it makes it hard to remember why I’m so angry.
“I fucked up,” he says. “I would never, ever hurt you, not intentionally,” he says, his brown eyes boring into mine as though trying to will me to believe him.
“My father used to say that to my mother,” I say quietly.
Tristan opens his mouth, then shuts it. He’s taken aback, and I regret it the moment the words leave my lips. But then I shake off the regret because it’s true. He stares down at the sidewalk for a few seconds, then looks up at me and nods. “I’m not your father,” he says. “But I understand why you don’t trust me.”
I grit my teeth. As mad as I am, as hurt as I am, I still have to fight the urge to move toward him and let him wrap me in his arms.
“I’m sorry,” he says, looking me in the eye. “Hurting you was the very last thing I wanted to do.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” I tell him, lying through my teeth. My tone turns icy. “You taught me a lesson.”
It’s as if my voice has cut through his skin. He even flinches.
I’ll never trust anyone ever again, I think to myself, and with that I keep walking, head high, the crack in my heart growing with every step I take. I hate it—hate my betrayed, betraying heart. It has no right to crack or break without my permission.
Tristan walks behind me. I can sense him there, twenty or so feet back. I’m guessing he wants to make sure I get home safely because that would be just the kind of Tristan thing to do, which again makes me mad for some reason. I don’t want his chivalry. I never asked for it. I was fine before he came along. I don’t need him watching out for me.
When I reach our street, though, I find my pace slowing. My brain allows myself to think about what would happen if I turned around and waited for him, if I believed his words and accepted his apology. If I told him I liked him too.
A heat rushes through my body as I remember how safe I felt when I was in his arms. Honestly, I wanted him to never let me go. I felt like I had been drowning my entire life—and finally, he was there, pulling me out of the water, helping me to safety.
But I was a fool. I have to learn to swim by myself. That’s the only way to survive in this world.
Maybe if I were another kind of girl, the kind of girl who doesn’t learn from her mistakes, I’d stop right here, turn around, and wait for him to catch up to me. Then when he did, I’d tilt my head back and let him kiss me. If the world were a different kind of world, the kind you see on-screen, where love is made to look real, then maybe there’d even be a happily-ever-after.
But I’m not that girl. And it’s not that world.
TRISTAN
Self-loathing is a new experience for me. When I stare in the mirror, instead of being okay with what I see, I hate myself. The voice in my head is stuck on a loop, admonishing me like a furious drill sergeant, telling me what a useless, stupid asshole I am and how I’ll never make this right, not in a million years.
A week has gone by, and I’ve thrown myself into both work and working out, trying to avoid Zoey in real life and the Zoey in my head. The first is easy enough because I’m never really home, and she’s busy with her own life, but the latter one, the Zoey in my imagination, is harder to avoid because I keep getting flashes of her smile, her lips, keep remembering what it was like to kiss her.
The worst thing is knowing I hurt her. Even though she told me she wasn’t hurt, I know it’s bull. I lie awake in bed every night replaying that kiss, hearing her sighs as though she’s right there with me, feeling the weight of her in my arms like some kind of missing limb. I’ve accepted this isn’t some stupid infatuation. It isn’t a passing thing. It’s not going away, and living next to her is torture.
