by C. S. Starr
“When are you coming home? God, Tal, I thought…” She took a deep breath. “Connor’s beside himself. Things, they’re…it’s….”
Tal felt himself twitch at the thought of his cousin and his oldest friend consoling one another. “Well, I’m sure you’ll tell him I’m fine.”
“You should call him.”
“Maybe in a few days, when I know what’s going on. We’re getting out of here soon.”
“So you’re just going to go along with whatever she says? That’s it? Tal, you’re second in charge here…Connor will send someone for you—”
Tal cut her off. “I’ll call in a few days. I’m fine.”
Leah stumbled over her words, desperate to say as much as she could, knowing he was going to hang up. “Don’t let her manipulate you, Tal. She’ll try and—”
“Goodbye, Leah,” he said, hanging up the pay phone.
He didn’t miss the anxiousness that talking to his cousin brought up in him. A few words and it was all back, swimming around in his insides like some black leech. Despite being kidnapped and thrown into a strange orgy festival, Tal had never felt clearer, and less than five minutes and he felt like the life was being sucked out of him again, not only by Leah, but by West.
“You called her?” Lucy said quietly, sitting down beside him some time later with a plate filled with corn and baked potatoes.
“Yep. She was glad to hear from me I think,” he said with a shrug, glancing over at Lucy’s concerned face. “I don’t think anyone from your end told them about Juan.”
“I’ll make sure someone does,” she said, giving him a wry smile. “Listen, I wasn’t trying to upset you earlier—”
“No apology necessary,” he said, with a grin.
Chapter 14
April 2002
Los Angeles
Nothing would have prepared Tal for the disgust he felt at the sight of Connor Wilde’s pants around his ankles in his lavish office, the girl that he’d hired to star in their first movie, The Right Way using her mouth in a way that wasn’t conducive to her learning her lines better. The Right Way was a dirty piece of shit, but that seemed to be what kids wanted to see. All the things that they should have seen a bit of at a time under normal circumstances were wide open for consumption.
Tal was no exception. He’d watched hundreds of hours of pornography in the last few months, some of it alone, some of it with friends some of it with Leah. He knew his parents wouldn’t have approved. It made him feel aroused and guilty, uncomfortable, and excited, all at the same time. Tal didn’t know much about sex before, and after watching people have sex in every depraved way possible he understood the logistics, but the dynamics that he saw in those movies didn’t match his memories of his parents, or grandparents, or anyone he’d known before. It stirred odd feelings in him. That, combined with the raging hard on that he ended up with at the most inconvenient times had left him confused about his thoughts, and irritable.
“Fuck, you fucking idiot,” Tal snapped, shaking his head before he slammed the door to the prop room. He stomped down the stairs and outside, stopping when he reached a bench about thirty minutes later.
They were paying her. Connor was paying her for sex. It wasn’t right. Tal didn’t know much about being an adult, about morals and values but he knew that much.
“I quit,” Tal said, slamming his key to the studio on Connor’s desk a couple of hours later. “You can find someone else to do whatever the fuck it is I’m doing, because I’m done, Connor.”
Connor pulled his feet off his desk and furrowed his brow. “Because of that? Come on, man, you’ve done it too.”
“With a girlfriend, at my house, who I wasn’t paying to do it,” Tal lied. He hadn’t done anything beyond heavy petting with anyone. “Connor, she’s supposed to be working.”
“Why are we so concerned with working? Working is for adults.”
“You’re giving her money.”
“I’m a nice guy,” he said, with a nonchalant shrug. “She’s not a very good actor.”
“Whatever,” Tal muttered. “I quit, whatever the fuck it is we’re doing.”
“Why don’t you go home, to your nice, big house, and think this over,” Connor said smugly. “Why don’t you think about how you’re going to fix things, and feed Leah and Rachel, and how you’re going to make a life for yourself?”
“Pretty sure I’ll figure it out,” Tal replied, slamming the office door behind him.
Two days later, an unopened Mac laptop with a stack of games and an apologetic Connor landed on Tal’s door. Leah regarded him with a frown when she answered the door.
“We’re done with you,” she said curtly, crossing her arms. “Tal doesn’t want to see you.”
“Leah, it’s fine,” Tal said, smiling at his cousin. “I got this.”
September 2012
Grove, Old Oklahoma
“I’ve never taken drugs,” Tal said quietly, glancing around the circle as the bag headed in his direction. “Have you tried these?”
Lucy smiled knowingly, relaxing for the first time after a day spent thrashing wildly in her head, after she finally resolved to just do what felt right until she had to go back to her life. “I’ve tried all sorts of things. Only natural things though.”
“What's it like?”
“Like moving past drunk with no upset stomach or hangover.” She took a handful and passed him the bag. “You'll be fine. Better than fine.”
“You sure we're safe here?”
Lucy glanced around at the kids settling in, laughing, without a care in the world and did her best to follow their lead, although she knew it would take her out of her comfort zone. “Bull is family. If he says we're good, we're good. Besides, everyone here is too fucked up to mess with us.”
Tal peered into the bag and pulled out a similar quantity as to what Lucy had in her hand. “I hope you're right.”
“You know I'm always right, most of the time,” her eyes twinkled as they met his. “It’s like a little vacation, a trip. We deserve a little vacation, Tallie.”
Truth was, Lucy needed to get away from the mess in her head, and she knew this had the potential to be either a wonderful or a terrible way to do that.
“Well, if you're saying that, it must be true,” he replied dryly, popping one in his mouth. “Okay, I can eat these. They’re…they kind of taste like dirt.”
Lucy shifted out of the circle, which was now lopsided and half missing as people went off on their own adventures, and turned to face him, crossing her legs at the ankles as she chewed a few of her own. “The last time I did these was with Zoey when we were eighteen, and we ended up passing out on the kitchen floor. Cole had to put us to bed.”
“Do you still think it was her that ratted you out?”
Lucy shrugged, her eyes heavy. “Less than before, after hearing what Bull had to say, and thinking about it. I wouldn't bet the farm on it though.”
“Do you miss her?”
Lucy ate the last of her mushrooms and lay back in the grass, and tried to push Zoey’s sad eyes out of her mind. “I don't know,” she remarked thoughtfully. “Not in the ways that I thought I would.”
“What ways did you think you would?”
“I just think there have been bigger things that have made what we…well, they’ve made what we had seem fairly insignificant, and that’s not how I should be thinking about the person I’m supposed to be in love with. I mean, I’ll miss talking with her, and having someone who knows me well to share things with, but in terms of romantic love, I think I'm over it. Maybe.”
“And you did sleep with that other girl—”
“Eh,” she shrugged. For as long as she’d known Zoey, she’d understood that, no matter how many guys she’d slept with, she’d be insecure until she admitted to herself that she was a lesbian. She needed a label, something Lucy was discovering more and more that she didn’t have much of an interest in. “We’ve never had the most monogamous of relation
ships. That's why I didn't castrate you when you told me about you and her. She’s had a hard time embracing the fact that she’s attracted to women. She likes to tell people it’s just me, but it isn’t. I know it isn’t.”
“Strange relationships are strange,” Tal said, blinking up at the sky, which had taken on a beautiful orange glow with the setting sun. “I’m in love with the wrong person. Have been for years.”
Lucy looked at him curiously, since he’d never mentioned anyone before. “Are you still?”
“I’ll always love her. Maybe even the way I'm supposed to someday,” he mumbled, as they watched the colours swirl together in the sky. “These are nice.”
“Who is she?” Lucy asked curiously. “I didn’t know you had someone.”
“It’s…it’s not that I have someone. I mean, I do, but not in a normal sense. She’s….”
“She’s what?” Lucy asked with expectation in her voice as his pause dragged out. Her mind raced with a series of sordid possibilities, none of which made any sense from what she knew about Tal so far. “What is she?”
“It’s Leah, okay?” Tal muttered. “Go on, make fun.”
Lucy laid back in the grass, her hair fanned out behind her. “Oh,” she said, unfazed, watching the sky move around her. “I…didn’t think you were going to say that. I thought it would be much worse.”
He waved his hand with finality. “I’m done. I mean, we’re done. I decided before I left for Campbell last week. No more. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if...” he trailed off with a sigh. “I can’t go down that road, and it’s just very inappropriate in so many ways, and—”
Lucy pulled him down beside her and grabbed his hand, lacing her fingers with his as she squeezed tightly. She smiled at him, and within a couple of seconds, his mouth was twitching at the corners too. It felt good to touch him, she decided. Not scary at all.
“This is supposed to be fun. If you let yourself go in that direction, it can get scary. Only think of the positive.”
“What’s positive?” Tal said, his eyes locking with hers. “Tell me something that’s good. Something nice.”
“You’re not what I expected,” she whispered, her heart pounding. “How’s that?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied, rolling onto his side, as she did the same, their bodies aligned in the grass. “Depends on what you mean.”
“Come a little closer,” she said, as she tried to push the spider webs that were forming in her brain aside long enough to say what she wanted to say. “Closer.”
He obliged and scooted towards her, their noses an inch apart. “You’re not as intimidating as you used to be, Lucy Campbell. You better watch out.”
She blinked away the lights flashing in the back of her mind. “And you’re not as much of a waste of life as I thought you were.”
“Flatterer.”
There, in the grass, all constructs fell, and Lucy and Tal were left really and truly alone for the first time, without the interference of themselves or anyone else. She knew it was the drugs, but Lucy found herself overwhelmed, being with him. She did her best not to let it show.
“I like your alternative reality more than mine. The one where you’re in university. Tell me about that.”
“It’s not so great,” he chuckled. “I live at home, and my mother is menopausal and crazy.”
“It’s still nicer than anything I could imagine.” She squeezed his hand and adjusted her fingers around his. “I wish I could dream up nicer things.”
Tal smiled over at her as her head began to swim. “Come with me.”
“To university? To your fantasy?”
He nodded with a silly grin. “I’ll sneak you into my house and you can stay with me until you get on your feet. In your own fantasy.”
Lucy liked that idea, she decided, unable to control her smile. “How would we meet?”
Tal thought about it for a minute, his face screwed up in concentration. “We’d take a comparative politics class together. My mom used to lecture part time at UCLA, and there’s this auditorium there that she used to teach in and I used to go to sometimes…after,” he swallowed. “Because I’d imagined I’d find her there, and it would be so busy, and she’d drive me home and we’d have tea like we did sometimes before Dad and my brothers were home, and she’d answer all my adult questions. We’d meet there.”
Lucy gave a decisive nod. “That’s the where. What’s the how?”
His eyes settled on hers and stayed there, for the first time really lingering. She looked at his lashes, and his eyes, almost black in the dusk.
“The how is embarrassing,” he said, leaving her eyes to trace the apples of her cheeks.
“Tell me,” she insisted curiously.
“It’s a big auditorium. New. High tech. There are laptops. I’m sitting above you, three or four rows up, and you’re wearing this grey t-shirt, a lot like the one you’re wearing now, and I look down, and I can see…I can see down your shirt. The edges of your bra. It’s black, I’m twenty-one going on fourteen, so I look, and of course you don’t imagine that someone rows up is looking at your breasts, so you go on with your business, and you’re chewing your pen, and you cross your legs, and it’s…it’s a lot. It’s distracting.”
“Do we have a test that day?”
He shook his head. “No, so I’m free to ignore the beardy professor at the front. He’s old, close to retirement, but he’s sharp, and he has this question that he asks every year on the first day of class, and the person that answers it in a way he likes always gets an A. He doesn’t give them the A, but they always get it anyway. For the last twenty years.”
“What’s the question?”
“I don’t know,” Tal said with a shrug. “It’s his question, not mine.”
“So how do we meet?”
“You answer it better than anyone has, ever, and everything just stops. I stop looking at your breasts. Kids stop typing on their laptops, they stop ignoring the old man at the front of the class and they look at you.”
“And I hate that. I would hate that.”
“But you don’t show it.” Tal’s thumb instinctively stroked her palm. “You make everyone think, me included. I pay for your coffee at Starbucks after class. It pisses you off.”
And just like that, she was there too. “But it doesn’t really.”
“No?” His eyes joined hers again. “You sure seemed mad.”
“I was flustered after class, and I was already having a hard time fitting in, and I just wanted to fade to the background, but I couldn’t, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Then what happens?” Tal asked, nodding at her.
She bit her lip thoughtfully. “We end up doing a group project together, and I decide you’re smart, and we both like reading pretentious things, so we talk about those a lot. I insist that you read the Communist Manifesto and we talk about it late into the night until they kick us out of the stacks at the library for being too loud. I tease you for enjoying Atlas Shrugged.”
“But you respect me for introducing you to The Watchmen, after I make you read it.”
“I haven’t read that.”
“You have, in this world.” Tal visibly relaxed, and she felt familiarity wash over her. “And you really liked it.”
“What happens next?”
“We become friends. Your girlfriend hates me, because I’m funnier than she is.”
Lucy shook her head, and she furrowed her brow as Stacy from the night before flashed in front of her eyes, in a weirdly familiar dorm room. “No. She hates you because we spend so much time together.”
“You touch my face, one night at this dive bar that you always make me go to because the people are interesting.” Tal reached over, and his fingers ghosted her cheek. “Like that.”
“It’s heavy, after that, because there are a lot of things you don’t know, and that I can’t pretend they aren’t scratched into me. I don’t call you for a while.” A
tear ran down her cheek. “But I miss you.”
Tal nodded solemnly. “But do you remember what happened next?”
Lucy thought about it, but couldn’t know with certainty. “Kind of?”
“I buy you a coffee a few weeks later, and you’re wearing that grey t-shirt again, and you invite me back to your dorm room to give me a copy of The Magus from your first year English class because you wanted someone to talk about it with. Your room is really small.”
Nodding thoughtfully, Lucy picked up when he stopped. “And I sit on the bed, and you sit in the chair, and you ask me what changed.”
“Because I missed you too.”
“So I start talking, and I tell you about my grandfather, and I won’t look at you, but I tell you. I want you to know, even though I decided a long time before not to tell anyone since I was starting fresh.”
“I don’t understand at all, and I find myself angry.” She lay her hand on her chest and Tal’s heart beat rapidly. She could almost see it thudding through his hoodie. “With no one to be angry at.”
Tal closed his eyes, and Lucy’s hand detached from his and moved to his cheek, rubbing it gently. “I’m not really sure what to do with that.”
He nodded against her hand. “We part ways for the summer. You have this job tree planting with your brother in British Columbia and I do a bunch of volunteering with places I think will look good on my law school applications. I start seeing this girl, but….”
“You tell me that a lot more meant a lot less when you were with her,” Lucy replied. “After you stop by my tiny, tiny apartment when I’m back in town with a case of beer, and I insist we go out because I’m terrified at the idea of being alone with you.”
“So we’re back at the cheek-touching bar, and I can’t think of anything but the way your hand felt on my face, and you tell me about all the bears that almost ate you when you were tree planting over the summer, and I imagine I’m one of those bears, and I’m not a pussy chicken shit that can’t even tell the girl I’m very much in love with that I am, even if it doesn’t mean anything because I knows she’s a lesbian.”
