by Mia Kerick
I could do that for a while, couldn’t I? In any case, I was going to do that for Savannah.
“Promise me you’ll try, Tristan.”
What choice did I really have? She deserved more in life than a platonic future with me, her asexual best friend. So I nodded.
“Swear it.” Savannah was one tough customer. “Or at least say it out loud.”
I smiled. “I’ll try, but I won’t ruin your life. If I think it isn’t working, and Robby’s getting freaked out, I’m backing off.”
She looked at me and laughed heartily, but strangely there wasn’t a trace of a true smile on her lips or in her eyes. And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what was even slightly funny about this situation. “The third piece of our unusual puzzle is out there, Tristan. I think I’ve already found him.”
Chapter 6
Robby
I COULD barely even see Mikey’s rather oversized nose above the huge pile of Maria’s Mouthwatering Mega-Mountain of Macho Nachos. And yes, that embarrassingly descriptive name was actually listed on the menu next to a snapshot that really didn’t do the monster justice. Okay, maybe I was exaggerating a little bit about how high the pile was, but still, there was enough cheese, fried beef, and sour cream on that plate to bring on heart attacks in half a dozen men.
“All I can say is it was fucking strange. They acted like a married couple, but at the same time there she was, openly out on a date with me.” I tried to find a tortilla chip that wasn’t completely smothered in the offensive ingredients, but I didn’t have any luck, so I took a sip of my Coke instead. “It just wasn’t normal.”
Mikey didn’t seem to share my revulsion in regards to the fatty ingredients. Licking the grease from his fingertips, he offered up his version of sound advice. “You shoulda told her that if she wanted a threesome so bad, you want it to be wit’ you and two girls.” After that insightful suggestion, he fearlessly dove headfirst back into the potentially heart-stopping plate of appetizers.
Trying to use Mikey as a sounding board had been a miserable idea. I tossed him my napkin, thinking that what he really needed to use to mop himself off was a full-size beach towel, and then I rolled my eyes. “Can you get your mind out of the gutter, man? I like this girl and I want to see her again.” I left out the whole part about how my first glance at Savannah’s stunning boyfriend, Tristan, had given me a woody—the likes of which I’d heard of but had never experienced firsthand before. And how when I was lying in bed last night, I didn’t know which of the two to fantasize about.
“Then go out wit’ her again, for Christ’s sake, Rob. Give it to her good at the end of the night and she’ll know which one of you two is the real man, huh?” Over what now looked like the slaughtered remains of some extremely unfortunate animal, Mikey sent me this get-your-head-out-of-your-ass glare, and delivered his final piece of questionable commentary. “An’ prob’ly the dude’s a big fag and you’re reading way too much into their relationship. Now, I’ve had enough of this chick-flick shit; I’m losing my goddamn appetite.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want this gourmet food to go to waste.” I spoke rather sarcastically, but have to admit I wasn’t too worried about poor Mikey starving to death. As long as the food was free, which it usually was when we dined together (for him, at least), Mikey’s belly was an endless black hole.
“So shut the fuck up and let me know when you bang her—and I’m gonna want details. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches… you’re gonna hafta engage all of my five senses, you hear?”
Mr. Sensitivity. Jesus, I wondered to myself, when did I start calling Mikey the same names that women usually called me? Nonetheless, when I opened the contacts on my phone to press S for Savannah, the image of haunting brown doe eyes lurked disconcertingly close to the front of my mind.
“YOU’RE staring at me.” Our eyes met over our healthy stir-fry dinners, in stark opposition to my lunch with Mikey. I’d met Savannah at a Japanese steak house in Harvard Square after a late afternoon potential job walk-through near my office. The chef had prepared our meals right at our table, his dramatic chopping and stirring blending with occasional bursts of fire and the sound of our mingled laughter. This dinner date was certainly several steep steps up from macaroni at the diner.
“Robby…. I’m not going to apologize for staring. You’re a very intriguing man.”
Intriguing? I had a reoccurrence of the Robby-the-lab-rat feeling that I’d first experienced on the night she’d asked me out. I glanced down at my plate. “I’m glad you think so.”
When I looked back up at Savannah, she was licking her lips, but not at all suggestively. “Well, I can’t eat another bite. That was delicious.”
The light from the many well-placed candles and the spontaneous bursts of flame coming from different corners of the room highlighted Savannah’s face. The mood was certainly set for romance, so I reached across the table and drew her dainty hand into mine. She squeezed my fingers harder than I expected, and I looked up quickly, catching her point-blank stare. For some reason, Savannah’s absolute directness, her complete lack of flirtation, allowed me to relax a little. Yes, The Ice Man, as I’d been referred to more than once, melted a bit around the edges.
Now, to attack the area of Savannah’s reticence. “You haven’t told me anything about when you were a kid.” I could only watch as the candor of her gaze repositioned itself into the wariness with which I was far more familiar. “Why’s that?”
“Not my favorite subject, I guess.” She lifted the tiny crockery cup of tea to her lips, but didn’t drink it; she just held it there. “My childhood was nothing like yours.”
She spoke with such a note of finality that I knew her intention was to have slammed shut the subject with that one cryptic statement, but I stuck my foot in the door. I continued to look at her expectantly.
Savannah placed the cup back on the table, and then withdrew her other hand from mine. “I’m going to keep it brief, if you don’t mind. No house with a white picket fence, no Waldo the Golden Retriever, no happily married parents, no private Catholic school.” So she really had been listening intently to my life story. “Just my drunk of a mother, her lowlife boyfriend, and me. A crappy apartment. Food stamps. Get the picture?”
Wow. I was not expecting to hear that. In fact, I didn’t know anyone else, not personally at least, with life circumstances like hers.
“That is, until Tristan came along.” She lifted her blue-green gaze nearly to the ceiling, and this wistful smile shaped her narrow lips.
Bingo! She’d given me exactly the opportunity I’d been waiting for. “So, how did you meet Tristan, anyways?”
If I’d thought her eyes had grown shadowed before, then right now I’d have to call them fully eclipsed. Nonetheless, she graced me with a rather vague answer. “We met on the street.”
Once again, she’d managed to yank the rug out from beneath my feet. “On the street?” I asked. From what little she’d already told me, I highly doubted that they had been two precocious ten-year-olds playing hopscotch on Brookline Avenue when they’d been formally introduced by their hovering nannies. The circumstances must have been more sinister. I didn’t have to voice my query, though; my face betrayed my confusion.
“Both of us took off from home when we were teenagers.”
That was blunt. “Y-you g-guys were r-runaways?” As could have been expected, I displayed behavior that was the polar opposite of calm, cool, and collected.
She nodded but offered nothing more in the way of explanation. Typical.
I was forced to examine the curly top of her blonde head as she picked up her chopsticks and thoughtfully drew lines through the rice that remained on her plate. “Why did you run away?”
If I had to bet my life right then, I’d have bet that Savannah wasn’t going to answer my last question. And I’d be dead. Because after at least a full minute, during which she’d expertly used her chopsticks to move the rice from one side of her plate to
the other and back again, she didn’t look up, but she did start talking. “My mother’s boyfriend was a creep. He couldn’t keep his hands to himself.”
“Are you saying that he made passes at you?”
My most recent inquiry served to make Savannah smile at me in an annoyingly patronizing manner, as if she believed I’d been born only yesterday. “That’d be a polite way of putting it.” She thought for a minute, and then the direct side of Savannah reemerged. Looking at me squarely, she replied. “If I’d stayed, my mother and I would have shared a lover. How’s that for me having ‘a close family unit’?”
I was stunned. What kind of a mother would allow that sort of thing to go on under her roof? “Did she kick him out?” I asked hopefully.
Sour laughter preceded her answer. “She didn’t care if I was part of the deal or not, as long as her boyfriend stuck around. Anyways, I left before he could get what he was after, if you know what I mean.”
That was a pretty messed-up situation, to say the least. “How old were you when this was going on?”
“Oh, about thirteen or so, and fourteen when I’d had enough of fighting him off and split.” I had no idea how she managed to do it, but Savannah kept her expression completely blank as she informed me of her youthful plight. She may as well have been listing the ingredients of banana crème pie. “And things were much worse at Tristan’s house….”
Suddenly, I didn’t want to hear any more. I didn’t want to imagine those soft, trusting brown eyes of his red-rimmed with tears or swollen with pain. For some inexplicable reason, the concept of Tristan suffering was simply intolerable to me. I had to make this conversation stop. “Well, that sure sucks for him.” I used a note of finality in my voice that I hoped would push Savannah on to the next topic of conversation.
I failed quite miserably; she looked at me as if I’d kicked her puppy. “Yeah, it really did suck for him.” More accurately, she was glaring at me as if I was an asshole who’d stuck his foot deep in his mouth. Which was exactly who I was and what I’d done.
Was it too late to redeem myself? “Sorry, that sounded cold. And Tristan seems like such a great guy—he didn’t deserve to be treated poorly.”
She wasn’t buying what I was trying to sell her.
“I mean nobody deserves that, especially not a kid.”
Savannah might as well have looked through me; it was as if she was in a trance of some sort. Her voice dropped to a tone so low I could barely hear her. “His uncle succeeded where my mother’s boyfriend failed.”
The blood froze in my veins. I was shocked. I was pissed. I was repulsed. Why in fucking tarnation did Savannah feel the need to share that little tidbit of information with me? I had no need for the grisly details of Tristan Chartrand’s tragic childhood. My mind was already fucked-up enough when it came to that dude, the last thing I needed was to add pity and compassion to the mix.
We sat there, our arms folded politely on the table. Savannah was stone-faced and I’m sure I appeared completely distraught. Yes, Robby Dalton, The Cold-hearted Snake, all shriveled up in the grass in complete emotional devastation. And I had absolutely no idea what to say next, so for the longest time I said nothing. Finally, when it had become sufficiently clear that Savannah was not going to be the first to speak, I sputtered, “I don’t blame him for leaving…. Uh, I’d have jumped ship too, if that shit was happening to me.”
Savannah nodded like maybe I’d passed (as in, barely squeaked by) some sort of test. She reached out for my hand again, this time holding it loosely. “Thanks for dinner, Robby. Let’s get out of here.”
IT SEEMED like there were a lot of stairs leading up to Savannah’s third-floor apartment. And a lot of silence between the two of us. A lot. We hadn’t spoken very much since I’d stuck my foot in it back at the restaurant. Conversation in my Jeep had been pretty much restricted to the directions to her place.
“Tristan should be home by now.” Savannah knocked on the door. “Hey! Open up, it’s me!”
And me—the guy who wined and dined your girlfriend tonight, I thought, but wisely chose to stifle the words.
The door swung open wide and suddenly all I could see was a fucking gorgeous smile. It was too perfect for words… and then there were those expressive eyes of his. But I couldn’t dwell on them too much right then; they brought to mind the pain I now knew he’d experienced as a child. However, I couldn’t help but notice that at the moment, those soulful eyes actually seemed to be sparkling with genuine enthusiasm at seeing me again.
No sooner had I stepped through the door than I felt Tristan’s palm slap down gently on my shoulder in greeting. I shivered. “I was hoping you guys would come back here after dinner!” I could tell he meant each word. “Can I get you a beer, Robby?”
“Uh, sure… if you’re gonna have one.” It seemed like I’d just asked him to join Savannah and me, didn’t it? And it also seemed like the two of them caught each other’s eyes and smiled.
“Can you get me a Diet Sprite?” Just as Tristan removed his hand from my shoulder so he could head off to the kitchen, Savannah started tugging insistently at my arm. “Come on. Let’s go sit down.”
A couple of minutes later, seated alone on the oversized tan couch as Savannah had gone to visit the bathroom and Tristan was still in the kitchen, I peered around as inconspicuously as I could manage, trying to take in the details of their apartment.
It was interesting. And if I had to describe it in a few short words, I’d say the place had a “We are the World” theme going on. It had been tastefully decorated with what looked to be African pottery and Navajo baskets, artfully placed on well-used but sturdy wooden trunks. Middle Eastern-looking rugs and South American wall hangings covered almost every square inch of wall space. This was not Savannah’s college crash pad, nor was it Tristan’s bachelor pad. This apartment had been thoughtfully and lovingly decorated. It was a home.
Just then Tristan emerged from the kitchen balancing three frosted mugs. “I wasn’t sure if you liked your beer in the bottle or not, and then I remembered I’d stuck some mugs in the freezer, so….” He handed me a mug, placed the one filled with soda on the coffee table in front of the couch, and took his own to the puffy fake suede chair that was placed diagonally to where I sat. I took a couple of deep breaths to calm my already raging hormones, which seemed to act up almost involuntarily when in this dude’s presence, and forced myself to take a long look at him.
Tristan Chartrand was no doubt one of the most beautiful human beings I had ever set eyes on. Yes, that sounded dramatic, but it was really just me being honest. His features were perfectly even; his tan skin was smooth and flawless; his hair was shaggy and casual, like he’d just stepped in from a windy day. And he had this pixie-like quality, a little spark of spirit in his eyes, all buried beneath his shyness. It was nothing short of adorable. Tonight, in his snug Goo Goo Dolls concert T-shirt and these oversized gray sweats tied loosely at his hips, he looked very young and innocent. I made a feeble attempt to remind myself that I wasn’t into the pure-as-the-driven-snow type. Right.
Lifting his sock-covered feet onto the coffee table, Tristan asked, “Did you and Savannah have a nice dinner?”
“Uh huh. It was great.” I had no choice but to continue staring across the coffee table at Tristan’s picture-perfect face. And body. Wouldn’t want to miss out on that important detail, now, would I? Don’t get me wrong, Tristan wasn’t buff or anything, but from what I could see below that scrap of a T-shirt, the dude had himself a decent set of abs. “Fashionably slim” would describe him pretty well, not at all gangly. And the guy had a respectable amount of definition in his pecs and biceps too. He’d obviously spent a bit of time on a weight bench.
“Where’d you take her?”
What the fuck am I doing? I was acting like I was in some European art museum scrutinizing Michelangelo’s sculpture of David.
“Um, Robby, where did you guys eat dinner?”
Suddenly realizing th
at Tristan had asked me a question, I dragged my gaze up from the strip of his belly at which I found myself staring, and met his eyes. “Uh… oh, we had Japanese.”
“I don’t think Savi’s ever had Japanese before.”
Well, I guess you’d know, wouldn’t you? Again, I didn’t say it out loud. I just shrugged.
Savannah returned to the living room, now dressed in an oversized Red Sox baseball jersey, which had “PEDROIA” printed across the back in bold letters, along with tight black leggings, her hair pulled up in a messy bun. “And Tris, they cooked our dinner right in front of us—at our table!” When she was around her roommate, it was as if she was about fifteen years old. “And it was so good! I brought you back our leftovers. They’re in a box in the fridge. But it’s too bad you couldn’t have come with us.”
Yes, it’s a crying shame, I thought drily.
Tristan smiled at Savannah like they shared some kind of big secret. “Somebody has to work in this relationship.” He wasn’t being cruel; he was just teasing her (and evidently financially supporting her).
Savannah laughed and then asked, “Speaking of work, how did it go tonight?”
As the pair exchanged their “how was your day, dear?” small talk, I took the opportunity to further check out my surroundings. Speckling the multicultural décor like spots on a dog, were framed photographs of Tristan and Savannah. Always smiling, always touching. At the beach, at Savannah’s college graduation, in front of what looked like a bar in Quincy Market… looking like the world’s happiest couple. Making me wonder what the fuck I was doing with my ass planted on their comfy couch. That was when I noticed that there were only two doorways in the very short hallway off of the living room. The one at the end of the hallway stood wide open: clearly a bathroom. And there was only one other door. The bedroom.
