“I didn’t have a fancy line,” he agreed. “I would just smile and ask, ‘My house or yours?’”
That was basically what Dexter had used, too, but it hadn’t had the same effect on me as that question did coming from Kayden’s lips. Those perfect lips. Even though I knew that it wasn’t a real offer, and even though we were already sitting in my house where we both lived so that the question didn’t make much sense, a “yes” was still hovering in my mind. “I bet you had a lot of success with that,” I said instead, and he shrugged.
“Yeah, I guess. It’s funny now to think about how much time I spent with women.”
“Why?”
“It feels like all the drugs killed my desire or something. Or maybe the withdrawal did it, I don’t know. There’s a receptionist at the community service place and she…” He stopped, but then restarted. “I just don’t want to. Not anymore. It’s kind of weird, not wanting it.”
“No sex,” I said, and he nodded. “Me neither. I could have done it with Dexter tonight, but I didn’t want to. It probably wouldn’t have been very good.”
“With that guy? No, it wouldn’t have been,” Kayden said. “It would have sucked. Don’t sleep with him.”
“I bet you were good at it. I bet you didn’t leave a lot of unsatisfied women,” I commented, and he made a face and shook his head. “Wait, you mean that you did leave them unsatisfied?”
Kayden played with Emma’s ears and she blew out through her nose, annoyed. “I don’t know.”
“You couldn’t tell? Really? I guess there are some good fakers—”
“No, I mean, I don’t know, because I never cared if they were satisfied or not.” Now he closed his eyes and shook his head. “I was there to get off, they were there so they could say that they’d fucked the quarterback.”
“Yuck,” I said immediately. “All of them? Yuck! That can’t be true, can it? And you never cared about any of them, not one? That’s really gross of you, Kayden, and not very Sir Aubrey at all. He never would have acted that way with Lady Lilac.”
“That’s just a book, not real life,” he reminded me. “I’m no Sir Aubrey or Captain Blackthorne. I never wanted to be anybody’s hero. I was happy with the way things were going.”
“Really?” I asked doubtfully. Because from what he’d told me about his life, it never seemed like he’d been very happy with any of it. “You were happy using, and not playing well, and having your brother mad at you, and sleeping around and not caring about anyone?”
Kayden didn’t answer that question except to grunt, “Jesus, Kylie, leave me alone.”
“Ok, ok,” I soothed, and Emma grunted too and pushed her nose into him so he would pet her more.
That calmed him down. “What about you?” he asked.
“What about me?”
“Are you a Lady Lilac? She didn’t sleep around, but she was wild once she got the hang of it. She and Lord Aubrey were like rabbits. Satisfied rabbits.”
I didn’t have to think about my answer. “No, I’m not like that at all. Not even a little.”
“Not like a rabbit?”
“Not like a bonobo, either. Well, I’m Lady Lilac-ish because I haven’t gotten around, not like you did, but I was never very into it. I mean, those two did it everywhere.” I thought about that as compared to my own experiences. “The last time I was with someone, it was in Montana in the yurt. We all bundled together for warmth and it was more like, why not just have sex? We may as well. So we did.”
“Sounds great.”
I shrugged. “I guess he liked it ok, but I could have done without. It was slightly warmer, though, and he was nice. He always melted some Spam for Emma and me afterwards, so it had its benefits. Who was the last person you slept with?”
He looked away from me. “I don’t remember.”
“Seriously? You don’t even remember? Kayden, you have some issues with sex,” I informed him, but then I thought that I was being a little harsh. “That’s ok, though. Lots of people do, even me, so don’t worry.”
“I wasn’t worried because I’m fine.” He shifted around on the couch like something poked him. “I don’t have issues. Why do you? Because you thought it would all be like sleeping with Sir Aubrey?”
“I guess. Those books really do paint nice picture of it, don’t they?” I agreed.
He nodded. “I never heard a woman scream like Lady Lorna did when she came three times in a row and the crew of the pirate ship thought they were under attack. I don’t think so, anyway.”
“Well, I never heard of a guy spending so much time on oral sex as Sir Aubrey. Does any man do that? Did you?”
“Uh…”
“I’ll take that as a no,” I concluded. “Personally, I can’t imagine any man lasting, like, half an hour with his head stuck up in my—”
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” Kayden broke in.
“Who are you going to talk about sex with, if not your friends? Emma knows everything. I’ve always told her all the stuff I’ve done, right from the beginning. Right from the first time.” I remembered walking into my apartment quietly so that my mom wouldn’t hear me from her bedroom, sneaking into the little closet off the kitchen, sitting on the floor with my arms around Em’s neck and crying into her fur, telling her what had happened. I sighed and she picked up her head to look at me.
“What are you thinking about? Why is the dog staring at you?”
I put my head back to rest on the couch. It really was pretty free of mushrooms. “I’m remembering the first time I ever did it and she knows what I’m thinking about.”
“Not good?”
“Not good,” I agreed. “Not good at all. What was yours like?”
“Uh…” Kayden thought for a moment, too. “I barely remember it. It was in the bathroom of a bar.”
I thought of the bathrooms at Roy’s Tavern. Despite all the cleaning for Dexter, they were pucid. “Ugh, really? But why don’t you remember?”
“I made varsity my freshman year of high school and I went out with the older guys. I drank so much beer that I could hardly stand and they thought it was hilarious. A woman walked up and took my hand, and the whole team started yelling, and she pulled me into the bathroom and we did it. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t want to have sex with her, I knew that.”
“Oh. That’s really awful. That wasn’t consensual, Kayden! She should have been arrested!”
“Yeah.” He looked off into space for a minute then glanced over at me. “Definitely not a Sir Aubrey or Captain Blackthorne quality experience. What was yours?”
“That was basically me, too. I mean, I wasn’t expecting it to happen and it was over pretty fast.” Emma stirred and scooted, huffing. She pushed herself across his lap so she could put her chin and paws on my leg.
Kayden shifted again under her weight and she growled. “What’s with the dog?”
“She knows that it’s hard for me to remember. It was a tough day when it happened,” I explained, and bent over to put my forehead on Em’s soft head.
“What are you talking about?”
“The day I lost my virginity. It was because we owed a lot of rent. We were so behind and my mom wasn’t working, and I went to talk to the landlord about it. Because she wasn’t doing very well with her health at that point and we’d finally gotten off the waitlist and gotten a place, and it’s really, really hard to find a Section 8 apartment. You know, subsidized.” He clearly didn’t know. “For people who can’t afford housing on their own.”
“Like me.”
“Exactly, but you have a friend to help you. We didn’t,” I said.
“So, you went to talk to the landlord.” Kayden frowned. “Did he—did he take advantage of you? Is that what you’re saying?”
I patted Emma’s head. The feel of her fur was very soothing. “Yeah, he did. He said he would forgive the rent and be generous in the future if I slept with him. So...we needed to stay, and that was someth
ing that I could do to help us.” I remembered every moment of it: the jingle of his belt as he fumbled it open, the quick jerk of his zipper, the stapler on his desk pressing into my chest as his body lay over mine. “It was really, really bad the first time. But after that, I knew what to expect, and then I could deal better. Then it was just the anticipation, knowing that it was coming every month, that made it hard.”
“Are you serious?” Kayden had jerked up to sit straight. “Every month, you had to go sleep with him to pay your rent?”
“Part of the rent,” I clarified. “He still got money from the housing authority, too.”
“When did this stop?”
“When I got a job and could give him more money. He still threatened to evict us, but I was smart enough by then to know the kind of trouble he’d be in if I went to the police. When my mom died, when I was eighteen, I left for good.”
His features seemed to harden, somehow. “So when did it start?”
“When I was fourteen. Emma was really young.”
“So were you. You were really young, way too young. That’s so terrible, Kylie.”
“If you were a freshman your first time, then we were the same age,” I told him. “You were too drunk to say no and I was too afraid to say it. It wasn’t right for either of us.”
“No, I guess it wasn’t.” Kayden shifted again and his arm hovered over me, like he was afraid to touch me. I pulled it down to rest on my shoulders and I put my head down against his chest. “I’m sorry that happened to you.” He pulled me closer.
“I wish it was more like Great-aunt Maude and Ronnie,” I told him. I snuggled my cheek against his shirt. He smelled delicious, and this seemed to be just as calming as snuggling with Emma. It eased the edges of the evening, like the awkward conversation with Dexter, the look on his face when I’d told him that I wouldn’t be sleeping with him. The slight rash I thought I’d seen on my cheeks. I couldn’t feel it now, when I ran my fingertips over my face.
“Did they write about sex in their letters?” he asked me.
“No, of course not! She’s not that kind of girl, for sure, but they probably will do it soon because they’re going to get married. They love each other so much! He calls her ‘sweetheart’ every time he writes.”
“Sweetheart,” Kayden repeated, and I let myself pretend for a moment that he was saying it to me.
Chapter 10
Kayden
Bars. Parties. More parties. Women, booze. A few whispers and then some laughs, and those conversations I assumed were about drugs. I had already been tested twice for illegal substances since I made the Junior Woodsmen but I hadn’t seen any of the other guys passing over their samples, so maybe it was a personal program just for me and not team-wide. I figured it was still a good idea for them to whisper about whatever banned substances that they were smoking, snorting, or swallowing.
I put my gear into my locker and tried to stop listening to the guys in the next row over as they discussed what they’d done on New Year’s Eve. My big night had been spent with Emma, who was pretty good company in spite of her gas, but as time went on I’d gotten the feeling that she was worried about Kylie. I knew how the crowd could get at a bar on a big party night like that, having been out on a few myself, so I ended up going down to Roy’s early to wait in the parking lot for her. Just in case it got rowdy in there, I was available—I had my doubts about her boss’s ability to handle any major problems, since as Kylie said, he was the size of a bandicoot. She really knew a lot about animals.
But she’d come out fine at the end of her shift, very tired but not like she’d had any kind of trouble. “Oh, lordy, am I glad you’re here!” she’d said, and smiled like I was a Christmas present. Those had actually been light around our house over the holiday, except for Emma, who’d gotten a load of toys from her owner. Kylie had made me promise not to buy anything, since I couldn’t afford it. I hadn’t even considered presents, but I told her not to get anything for me, either. She’d given me a book anyway, one she’d ordered specially because she thought I might like to try alien romance and the author was local, so she’d even gotten it signed.
I had that book in my bag right now, in fact, and I made sure it was at the bottom so that my new teammates wouldn’t see it. I was having enough problems with the Junior Woodsmen without them knowing that I was reading Startripping to Love by Magdalena Whitaker, featuring a peach-colored alien with horns and a whole lot of abs. Apparently, alien males had the sex equipment that made them compatible with human women, and they also had muscles all in the right places. But my locker was in a separate row from the rest of the team in this craphole place, anyway.
“New guys there,” the equipment manager had said when he’d first shown us around a few weeks before, and he’d pointed to the back of the room. Our lockers were in the same practice facility that the real Woodsmen team used in the off- and preseason, but it definitely wasn’t the same space I’d used before, back when I’d been a player in the real league. This part of the building was dirty, dirtier than Kylie’s mushroom and shit-filled house, with dented metal and dripping pipes and apparently, little to no heat.
I remembered how I’d pulled up to the parking lot of this giant, orange facility on my first day as a rookie with the Woodsmen team. I’d wanted to puke, both due to nerves and due to party the night before, and it had been awful. I wasn’t allowed to park there now as a Junior Woodsmen, which was ok. I didn’t need to relive that day when I’d been a rookie.
Since the day we’d been shown around, the other new players had gravitated over to find empty lockers in the row with the returning players so that the whole team was together. Except for me. I was still in the back of the room, now by myself. It suited me fine—they were out of my way, so we had even less to do with each other.
“Rami,” a guy called out, and a lot of other voices joined in, greeting their former quarterback as he came off the field. He was the former QB for sure, because with a few weeks of practice behind us, I was getting closer to where I’d been before as a player, and it was evident to everyone on the field that I was better than he was. It was evident to everyone, players and coaches, that I was going to be the starter. I had the playbook fully down and everything was clearly run through me, with Rami as the backup. It was my team.
I listened now as Rami discussed our practice with the offensive players, talking to the O-line about things that had gone right and wrong with their footwork, talking to the running backs about their routes, talking to the receivers about the number of reps they were taking. They all had something to say to him, serious answers and easy laughs, nobody getting pissed about the criticism he was giving them, even when it was pretty pointed.
And then, someone said it, the words that I heard all the time. On this occasion, it was the right tackle yelling, “Fuck, Rami, why aren’t you our QB?”
Yeah, it was what they were all thinking. Maybe I could move better in and out of the pocket, maybe I had a release at least a second quicker, maybe I threw ten yards deeper and hit them in the numbers every time. None of that shit mattered, because they all wanted Rami Nour as their quarterback, and not me.
I thought briefly about staying hidden in my row until their little meeting broke up, but then I also thought, screw ‘em. I slammed the locker door and grabbed my bag, and I walked out past where most of the starting offense was clustered together on the dirty benches in the cold room. I felt their eyes on me, and I looked straight ahead. Screw every last one of them.
“Matthews.”
I held up my hand in a wave but I didn’t slow down. I also didn’t extend my middle finger, which was my first instinct.
“Matthews. Matthews!”
By now, I was almost into the parking lot, almost on my way home and out of this place that I hated so much, but I did stop. “Yeah,” I said to Rami. “What.”
“I want to talk to you about what you’re doing after our practices. After Coach called it for the day, I al
ways used to—”
“I’m not interested in what you used to do,” I said.
He blinked. “You don’t want to hear what worked for us in the past?”
“What was your record last season, Rami?” I asked him, and I watched surprise, then anger rise up on his face. I already knew that they’d barely made it past .500 and his personal numbers had been terrible. Kylie had looked him up on my laptop and wondered about all the quarterback stats, and I’d explained what they meant—like how bad his completion percentage was, how even with the devo league receivers on the other end of his passes, it should have been higher. It had been a terrible season for him, but his career numbers weren’t that great, either, and neither was the overall record for the Junior Woodsmen. They consistently sucked, not just last year.
“What’s that quote about insanity?” I continued. “Doing the same things over and over and hoping for a different outcome? The coaches decided not to go that way this season and I’m not going to either. I’m not going to copy you, that’s for sure.”
“Why do you have to be such an asshole?” Rami demanded.
“Me? Are you serious? Who’s the guy still trying to be the man in charge around here?” I asked him. “You’re still trying to be the fearless leader. I hear you talking to them after practice, every damn day! You can’t let it go.”
“Let it go?” He stared at me. “If I’m holding onto control of the team, it’s because no one else is picking up the reins! It’s like you’re only half here, and the half that’s out on the field and in the locker room with us is a real prick. Have you ever even talked to anyone? Name one other guy on the team. I bet you can’t.”
I pointed at him. “You’re…Rami, is that right? The former starting quarterback?”
He shook his head, looking like he wanted to hit me. “Who’s the center? What’s his name, the guy who gives you the goddamn ball?”
The Bust Page 17
