Gabrielle

by Lucy Kevin

  I waited for him to figure out why I wasn’t going with him, and as the silence between us grew, I expected him to walk away. After all, he had given me my chance, hadn’t he? There were plenty of other girls waiting in the wings. Girls who would gladly take off their clothes. Girls who would get on their knees before him without even blinking an eye.

  Despite my grandmother’s past—or maybe because of it—she had always cautioned me not to sell myself too cheaply. In my mind, she reminded me that I had watched dozens of girls—prettier, sexier, far more exotic girls than me—throw themselves at this boy during the past week without making any impact at all. This was the first time we’d been alone since that afternoon in the practice room at the piano. Since then, he’d always been surrounded by a group of giggling, posing admirers.

  Remembering all of this, I decided that if he couldn’t figure out what I was waiting for, then he didn’t deserve all of these stupid things I was feeling.

  With a small, disappointed shake of my head, I turned back to the piano. I had just laid my fingers back on the keys when one word drifted softly into the room.

  “Please.”

  Beyond glad that he had figured it out, forcing myself not to rush, I gathered up my music pages and lyrics and slipped them into my shoulder bag. But before I could sling it over my shoulder, he picked it up.

  A gentleman always carries a lady’s things. Another one of my grandmother’s lessons.

  He held the door open for me as I passed through and I smiled again. He’d just passed another test.

  He was silent as we walked, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, his head down.

  “How was your first week?” I asked.

  “Okay.”

  I’d never felt this awkward around a guy before, like the me I knew had been replaced by some blank-brained stranger. And I didn’t like it. Just as I didn’t like the idea that he’d sought me out and pulled me away from my work just to play games with me.

  Which was why the words, “Why have you been acting so weird around me?” fell out of my mouth.

  The light turned green and I walked quickly across the street, leaving him standing on the curb behind me, glad for the chance to steady myself after asking the embarrassing question. I waited on the other side of the street for him as he ran to beat the red, a taxi taking the corner close to his heels.

  “I don’t hang with girls like you,” he said, his voice gruff as we walked into the park, past a troupe of teenage jugglers.

  His thrown-out g irls like you stung, but I refused to let him hurt my feelings. I didn’t even know him. I didn’t need to know him. Seven days ago he hadn’t existed. There was no reason I couldn’t turn back time in my head.

  In my heart.

  “I’ve got to get back,” I said, but then I realized he was still carrying my things. “Could I have my bag?”

  He didn’t give it to me. Instead he said, “I’m blowing this,” and then his hand was on mine and he was pulling me into him. I felt completely off balance, both inside and out as he held me there in front of him.

  “I tried to stay away from you.”

  I was utterly confused, not only by the idea that he’d wanted to keep his distance, but that it had been impossible.

  Of course, deep inside, I understood. The strong pull I had felt was not one-sided.

  “Why?”

  “You and me. We don’t belong together. But all week I’ve thought about you,” he said in a low voice.

  At the same time that he was telling me how wrong I was for him, he was taking me down the stairs of the subway station. He didn’t tell me where we were going and I didn’t ask, just kept replaying All week I’ve thought about you over and over in my head in the crowded car.

  Ten minutes later he was pulling me back up the stairs at a station I’d always passed.

  “Where are we?”

  “Some place I think you’ll like.” And then he was opening the door to a small store stuffed floor to ceiling with old records.

  My heart skipped a beat. Honestly, it felt like it did. I loved the musty smell, the way customers were standing in front of turntables with headphones on and blissful expressions.

  “There’s nothing quite like hearing the classics on vinyl,” he said by way of explanation.

  “Even if you don’t have a record player at home, I figured you’d like listening here.”

  I wanted to throw my arms around him, tell him he’d just done the nicest thing any guy had ever done for me. He guided me over to M and slipped an album into my hand, the one that had the song we’d played together.

  Our song.

  Time melted away as I put on one record and then another. Dylan moved through the store listening to everything from jazz to rock to classical and I couldn’t help but think that he was even more beautiful than I’d previously thought. Because he’d paid attention to what I liked

  —and had thought to give me more of it.

  A while later, I realized he wasn’t listening to records anymore. He was simply standing across the store staring at me. I pulled off my headphones and as we made our way to the door, I said, “That was great.”

  “I should get you back.”

  “No. I don’t want to go back. Not yet.”

  I wanted to get to know him better, thought maybe we could go get a coffee somewhere.

  The last thing I expected was for him to pull me into the nearest alley, far out of the light, beyond where any passersby could see us.

  Running his thumb across a cheekbone, stopping just at the corner of my mouth, he said,

  “God, you’re sweet, Gabi. The way you look. The way you play.” He leaned in over my forehead. “Even the way you smell.”

  I was breathing him in, too, a clean all-male scent that I’d never known could be so potent. And I loved that the first time he’d ever said my name, he’d said Gabi, not Gabrielle. I loved that he obviously felt comfortable enough with me to use my nickname.

  He whispered against my forehead, “You’re so damn innocent. Too innocent.”

  For the second time with him, my brain turned to mush as my body caught fire. Only this time, it wasn’t his music that called to me.

  It was all him.

  “I’m not that innocent,” I said softly, turning my face into his palm to let the words brush against his calloused skin.

  Or rather, I was that innocent, but wasn’t sure I wanted to be anymore.

  I heard his breath rush from his lungs and was momentarily shocked to feel how much he wanted to be with me against my belly. Perhaps, I later thought, he’d been trying to shock me—not just with his words but with his body as well.

  Going up on my toes, I wrapped my arms around his neck and leaned closer, close enough that kissing me was his only option.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  His kiss was softer, sweeter than I had thought it would be—than I had imagined it in my dreams—until the moment his tongue slipped inside my teeth.

  My breath caught in my throat and my body went stiff with surprise for a split second.

  But then, when I felt his tongue retreat, I couldn’t let it go. Not without reaching out with my own and licking across his.

  It was the strangest sensation, but good too. He tasted different than me. Sharper. Saltier.

  I thought I’d known what passion was, that I’d felt it when music moved me. I thought it came from perfect blue-sky days. From jumping into a cool lake on a hot summer afternoon.

  From reading a book that choked me up and made me cry.

  But now I began to know a different kind of passion. One that took me over, inside and out, up and down, round and round. I felt as if my eyes were opening for the very first time.

  And I never wanted to shut them again.

  I could feel the tension in his body beneath my fingertips. The tendons along his neck and shoulders were taut as he let me explore his mouth. I had been kissed before, but I had never been the kisser.

&nbs
p; Slowly, I ran the tip of my tongue out onto his lips. From the center, to the corner where his upper and lower lips met, I learned the contours of his mouth. And all the while, he let me explore without taking the upper hand he could have had so easily.

  His fingers threaded into my hair as his tongue found mine again. Somewhere during our kiss, he had backed me into the wall. He pressed me into it so that I was sandwiched between the warmth of his body and the cool brick behind me.

  Looking at the facts—that we hardly knew anything about each other, that he was so much bigger than me and could have easily hurt me if he wanted to, especially in a dark alley in a somewhat seedy neighborhood—I should have been frightened. But somehow, right from the beginning, the facts had been irrelevant. My brain, my heart, my body, all recognized him as something special.

  And yet even though I wanted to get closer, to go deeper into this beautiful darkness that I had never really known existed, I couldn’t just sink into it completely.

  I mean, I didn’t do stuff like this. And wouldn’t making out with Dylan—in an alley, no less—make me just like everyone else, like all the other girls who had thrown themselves at him?

  But the main thing swirling around inside of me—what I later realized I didn’t want to admit to myself—was how afraid I was of what I was feeling.

  I wasn’t used to being out of control.

  A part of me, the nerve endings that were still tingling, dancing, liked it. Obviously. But the other part of me—the sheltered girl I’d been for seventeen years—wasn’t at all sure that she did.

  He stepped away from me, jammed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I don’t mess with virgins.”

  My virginity had never been an issue. There had never been any kind of opportunity for me to lose it, nobody that I would’ve considered sleeping with. At the same time, his statement made it extremely obvious that he had plenty of experience.

  Sounding much more confident about what we were doing than I felt, I said, “You seem really hung up on the whole virgin thing. How many girls have you slept with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I tried to hide my shock. He was my age. How many people could he have slept with?

  Not enough to forget, surely. I decided he must just be trying to scare me away.

  “You must know.”

  “See, that’s the thing. The fact that I don’t know how many girls I’ve slept with means that you should run as fast as you can in the other direction.”

  Wow. He wasn’t kidding. And he was right; I had no business making out in an alley with some guy who had slept with more girls than he could count. Or remember.

  But at the same time, there was a secret thrill to it.

  Maybe I should have been asking myself, how much of his attraction had to do with the forbidden? How much did it have to do with Dylan being the poster child for the sexy bad boy?

  But I didn’t want to sit there analyzing what I was feeling.

  I just wanted to feel. “What if instead of running, I told you that I wanted to kiss you again?”

  He groaned. But he didn’t move any closer, and that was when I realized he had just passed another test. A real player—the kind of guy he claimed to be—would’ve jumped me right then. Instead, he was a pillar of self-control.

  “You don’t know who I am. What I’ve done. What I’ve seen,” he said. “You don’t want to know.”

  True, I knew absolutely nothing about him, aside from the gossip that had been running around the halls all week. Of course, in that moment I wanted nothing more than to hear his entire life story from the moment he had been born.

  “Where are you from?”

  “California.”

  “Did your parents change jobs? Is that why you moved here?”

  I thought it was a yes or no question. Instead, he said, “It’s complicated.”

  How could I not want to know, “Why?”

  He half-grimaced. “Another reason to steer clear of good girls. You ask questions.”

  “And we want answers, too,” I said in as light a voice as I could manage with his kiss still running through my veins, with his taste still on my lips.

  When he still didn’t reply, I said, “If you’re trying to be mysterious, you’re doing a really good job of it.”

  Finally, he smiled at me, another smile so beautiful it took my breath away. “Girls fall for the mysterious thing every time,” he joked.

  I worked to relax into his smile, tried to forget that he hadn’t actually told me anything about himself. But it seemed he was right: Good girls weren’t happy just going with the flow.

  Even when the flow kissed really, really well.

  “So, it wasn’t a job?”

  “I’m here with my mom.”

  He didn’t give me anything else and it was pretty clear that he wasn’t going to. At least, not yet.

  “Okay then,” I said, letting him think I was dropping it, “how did you learn to play and sing like that?”

  “I’ve always had a good ear.”

  “What you’ve got is a heck of a lot more than a good ear.”

  He smiled again. “You don’t exactly suck, you know.”

  “I’m more of a songwriter than a performer. What you walked in on last week was a total aberration.”

  His smile fell away, to be replaced by that intense stare that kept making my legs shake.

  Just a little, but still, it was a new sensation for me.

  “You blew my mind, Gabi.”

  As far as I could see, there was still no point in playing games. Either something was going to come of this attraction, or it wasn’t. The question was, what did I want?

  Who was I kidding? I knew exactly what I wanted. Whether or not it—whether or not he

  — was good for me.

  “You blew mine, too. The way you played. The way you sang.”

  I knew I shouldn’t say any more, that good girls didn’t talk like this, but I had to. “And the way you kiss.”

  The same crazy vortex that made me say how much I liked his kiss had me taking a step closer, had me saying, “Kiss me again.”

  Finally, I got to see that look he’d given me in the practice room a week ago. Like I was taking his breath away word by word.

  And he wasn’t sure how to get it back.

  “Now I know why I keep away from girls like you.”

  I took another step closer. “Why?”

  “Because you’re irresistible.”

  I thought he was going to kiss me again, but then he was moving away from me, saying,

  “The first time I saw you, sitting there at the piano, I knew who you were. You were as far out of my league as a girl could get. I could smell money on you. Safety. Perfection. I want you, but I don’t want to be the guy who takes all of that away from you.”

  I guess I should have appreciated his chivalry. But how could I when I was reeling from his rejection? Plus, it upset me that he would judge me so quickly. So unfairly.

  I wanted desperately to prove him wrong.

  “You don’t know anything about me,” I said.

  Taking my words as the challenge that they were, he raised an eyebrow, his mouth curving up slightly as if he were laughing at me.

  Foolish, foolish me, hating his doubt, hating that he thought he was somehow bigger, harder, more complex than me, I said, “My grandmother was a courtesan.”

  I let the words fall onto the cement between us, watched them slip and slide into his brain, and honestly reveled in the knowledge that I had shocked him.

  “Your grandmother was a prostitute?”

  Hearing my words twist around in his mouth to come back to slap me across the cheeks, I realized I’d gone too far. I’d thought only of proving to him that I, too, had darkness hidden in my past. I’d simply wanted to show him that we weren’t that different at all.

  But in a heartbeat he’d gone from surprised to disgusted.

  “No,” I protested, frantically
working to erase that horrible word, thinking of everything my grandmother had said to me the night we’d chopped vegetables in the kitchen. “Being a courtesan is about more than sex. It’s about art. And culture. And travel.”

  And love, according to my grandmother. But I didn’t say that to him, not when it seemed like such a big jump from prostitute to love.

  Not when I didn’t believe it myself.

  “What the hell do you know about what a courtesan does?”

  “My grandmother has always been honest with me about her life. About her past.” In saying so I dared him to be as honest with me. My chin lifted high, I kept my eyes steady on his.

  “Her mother was one, too.”

  Our family business, I almost joked.

  “What about yours?”

  I didn’t get his question. “What about my what?”

  “Your mother.” His voice dropped dangerously low. “Was she a prost—a courtesan, too?”

  I took a step away from him. “Of course not.” The pain that always speared me when I thought about my mother nailed me. Way down deep inside. Hidden away from everyone.

  “She’s dead,” I whispered.

  He tried to reach out to me then. I heard him say, “I’m sorry, Gabi,” but all the magic had gone out of our afternoon. Instead of a darkly romantic alley, all I saw was the garbage on the cracked cement—and all I could hear in my head was his horrible question.

  Was she a courtesan too?

  Of course my mother hadn’t been one. She and my father had been in love. He’d died in a car crash before they could marry.

  It wasn’t fair to hate Dylan in that moment for simply asking what I should have realized was an obvious question. But I did—because with only a handful of words he’d made me doubt something I’d always taken for granted.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “I’ll make sure you get back home okay,” he said, following close behind me.

  We didn’t speak as we got back on the train, headed back to school. I could see he wanted to say something to me, that he felt horrible about what he’d said, but when we got to the stop at our school I made sure to squeeze in between two large women who were getting off before he could say another word. The doors opened and I disappeared.