I slept whole days away and I couldn’t eat. I thought about getting meds from the doctor for sleeping or for anxiety or for depression or for alcoholism or for sluttiness. But what was done was done and a pill wasn’t going to fix it. Or me.
When Jessica called and said Nathan’s friend Tyler was picking me up whether I liked it or not and we were going to hang out, I tried to say no. But then I decided that I liked to be with myself even less than I liked to be with other people.
Besides, once Kylie got back in a week, I wasn’t going to be able to be friends with any of them anymore, and this might be my last chance to spend time with them. I couldn’t be in the same room with her and pretend that I hadn’t betrayed our friendship in the worst way possible. I wasn’t going to be able to sit there and have her and Nathan kissing on each other, knowing that he had spent all summer trying to hook up with me again.
I was going to have to find a new place to live, and disappear from our group of friends.
If only it had been that simple.
If only I had walked away right then and there.
Then I never would have met Phoenix and my life would never have changed in ways I still don’t understand.
* * *
Tyler was a good ride, because he didn’t need to talk. He just drove and smoked and I stared out the window, my art supplies in my lap. I had promised to paint a pop art portrait of Tyler’s little brother Easton, and I had to do it tonight because I might never see him again if I had the guts to follow through with my plan to move out of the apartment. I hadn’t painted all summer. I wasn’t inspired. And I didn’t want to now, but I had promised I would back before the morning after with Nathan.
So since I couldn’t explain any of that, I stayed mostly silent. I did say, “Rory gets back tomorrow.”
It was a stupid comment. Of course he knew his girlfriend was coming back to school. But I wanted to make some sort of effort. It was hot, even for August, and the windows were open, air rushing in and swirling his smoke around in front of me.
“Yep. I missed her. A lot.”
I didn’t doubt he had. And I didn’t think for one minute he would have betrayed her the way Nathan had Kylie. Even if he wasn’t living with his brother and Jessica, who were also dating. Tyler just wasn’t that kind of guy. Both Riley and Tyler were loyal, and I wondered why I always seemed to attract the wrong kind of guy. The liars, the cheaters. My boyfriend freshman year had been a douche, flirting with other girls in front of me, laughing it off when I complained. My high school boyfriend had told me he wanted a girl who had her life together, who had goals. What kind of goals was I supposed to have at seventeen? At that point I already knew I was going to college to study graphic design, wasn’t that good enough? So apparently his way to fix my deficiency was to hook up with his ex at a party and humiliate me.
It was hard to believe that someday there would be a guy in my life who would love me the way my friends’ guys loved them.
Of course, I was never going to find that guy at a keg party. Another reason I had stopped going to the frat house all-nighters. I didn’t have the stomach for so-called living in the moment fun since I had woken up next to Nathan. So maybe I didn’t have my life all mapped out, but I knew that I was done with the superficial crap. I knew that I had crossed a line I never wanted to cross again and if that meant giving up alcohol forever, then that’s what I was going to do because I had gone from being cheated on to the cheater, and I could barely live with myself.
And if I couldn’t live with myself, what guy would want to?
When we went in Tyler’s house, there was someone sleeping on the couch. I couldn’t see his face since he was turned away from the room on his side, but he had black hair and a serious lack of a tan. “Who is that?” I asked Tyler.
“My cousin, Phoenix. He’s crashing here for a while.” Tyler kept walking past him to the kitchen. “Do you want a beer?”
“No, thanks.” I hadn’t had a drink in ten weeks and I didn’t even miss it.
Jessica was in the kitchen, heating up food in the microwave. It was weird to me that she lived there with her boyfriend and his three younger brothers. I had never been to her parents’ house but I knew she had grown up with a lot of money, and this was no spacious colonial in the suburbs. The house was small and dark and hot and was rundown, but truthfully she seemed the happiest she’d been since I’d met her. Riley came in from the patio and kissed the back of her head, looking at her like he thought she was the most beautiful creature the world had ever created.
“Want some?” she asked me, dishing up rice and vegetables onto four plates.
“I’m good.”
She switched out plates in the microwave and said, “Then let’s go in the other room. I want to talk to you alone.” She touched Riley’s elbow. “Can you put these in for the boys?”
“Got it.”
I followed her back into the living room and she sat on the floor by the coffee table. “Sit. I want to talk to you about what the hell is going on.”
I did want to tell her. I wanted to get the awful truth out and ask her what I was supposed to do about Nathan. But I couldn’t. All I could tell her was a small portion of the truth. I looked nervously at the sleeping cousin. “He can hear us. I feel weird talking in front of him.”
“He’s totally out. He just got out after five months in jail and he’s been sleeping for two days.”
“Jail?” I whispered, a little horrified. “For what?” How could she say that so casually, like it was no big deal?
She scooped rice into her mouth. “Fuck me, that is so good.” She closed her eyes and chewed. “I’m going to have to step up the workouts but I think carbs are worth it.”
I didn’t say anything, sitting down on the floor next to her, drawing my knees up to my chest. I was wearing a sloppy T-shirt and I dragged it over my bare knees, making a tent, cocooning myself.
“Okay, so what is going on? Seriously. You won’t drink, you won’t go out. You’ve lost weight. You don’t answer my texts. You’re even dressing differently. I’m totally worried about you.”
I was worried about me, too. I couldn’t seem to drag myself out of the anxiety that had been following me around. “I’m moving out of the house as soon as I find a new place to live.”
“What? Why the hell would you do that?”
Tears came to my eyes before I could stop them. “I just have to. I need to stop drinking.”
“But, it’s not like Rory is a big drinker. And I’m sure Kylie would respect it if you said you wanted to chill with the alcohol.” She looked hurt. “We would never pressure you to party. God, that’s so not us.”
“I know.” It made me feel even worse. “It’s just I feel like I need to be alone for a while. I was even thinking about moving home and being a commuter. It’s not that far to my parents, only like a forty-five-minute drive to class.”
“You would seriously want to move home? That just blows my mind.” Jessica stared hard at me, tucking her blond hair behind her ear. “Besides, this is going to leave Rory and Kylie with a whole house to pay for since we’ve both bailed on them. I feel really bad about doing that.”
So did I. But I felt worse about screwing Kylie’s boyfriend. What would I do when Nathan came over to hang out? I couldn’t play it cool, like nothing had happened. I wasn’t drawn that way. “Didn’t Tyler say he wouldn’t mind moving in with Rory?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know if he can actually afford it.” Jessica frowned, picking up her fork. “I guess I can ask him. I guess maybe Nathan could move in there, too, with Kylie. Bill is moving into the engineering frat house.”
I dropped my knees, alarmed. That was not what I wanted to happen. I didn’t want Kylie to become even more dependent and more in love with Nathan.
“This is so weird,” she said. “This is totally not what we planned. It’s like complete roommate shuffle. What happened?”
Rory fell in love with Tyler. Jessica fell i
n love with Riley. I blacked out and had sex with Nathan.
Not exactly the same happy ending for me. I wanted to tell her so desperately I swallowed hard and clamped my mouth shut. Telling her would only mean she would have to keep a secret from Kylie. From Riley, too. Telling Kylie would only hurt her to appease my guilt.
I couldn’t do it.
Shrugging, I said, “Things change.”
“Robin.”
“What?”
“If you got attacked or something you would tell me, right? You know you can tell me.” She reached out and touched my arm, expression filled with concern.
And it went from bad to worse. Now she thought I was a victim. I nodded. “I would tell you. It’s nothing like that, I swear.”
“Because it seems like you started acting strange after the party at the Shit Shack. Something is obviously wrong. So if that Aaron guy did something to you, tell me.”
“No, he didn’t.” I shook my head emphatically. Aaron had just been a guy I had danced with, flirted with, kissed. Before he ditched me and somehow I ended up going home with Nathan.
“Did something freaky happen? Did you do something you regret, like anal?”
Not that I was aware of. I couldn’t prevent a shudder. “No. No anal.” Though I did do something I regretted, more than anything else I’d ever done. The person who said that life was too short for regrets clearly had never done something super shitty.
“Jessica!” Jayden called her name from the kitchen. “Can you come here?”
“Yeah, I’ll be right there, buddy.” She set down her fork. “Be right back.”
Jayden was eighteen but he had Down syndrome and I knew that Rory and Jessica both cut him a lot of slack. If he asked for attention, they gave it to him, and I was totally grateful for the interruption. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could lie to direct questions.
As Jessica went into the kitchen, the guy on the couch suddenly coughed. I turned and saw dark eyes staring at me. He had rolled onto his back and was sitting up on the arm roll, his hair sticking up in front. My palms got clammy and I stared back, horrified.
Not only was he completely and totally hot, he had obviously been awake for more than thirty seconds. He looked way too alert to have just opened his eyes.
“Uh, hi. I’m Robin,” I said, my hands starting to shake. What had we said? Nothing incriminating, I didn’t think. I hadn’t admitted anything. Though I had said anal out loud and that was awkward enough. All those nasty jokes about prison popped into my head and my cheeks burned.
His expression was inscrutable, but he nodded. “Phoenix.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, because that’s what you say even if there was zero truth to it. It wasn’t nice to meet him. He was a criminal and I was a lying cheat and I was way too preoccupied with my own self-hatred to have anything interesting to say to him.
“Yeah. Sure.” He sounded about as enthusiastic as I felt.
Agitated, I sat down on the coffee table next to the couch, wiping my hands on my denim shorts. “Sorry if we woke you up.”
He shrugged. “No big deal.”
I wasn’t sure what to say after that. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and like his cousins, he had tattoos covering his chest and arms. The one that caught my attention was the bleeding heart. It looked severed in two, the blood draining down his flesh toward his abdomen. It was beautiful and creepy and bold. Was it a metaphor? It seemed a little poetic for the average guy, but something about his steady stare suggested he was no ordinary guy. His dark hair stuck up then fell over one eye, so it felt like he had an extra advantage, that he could watch me from behind that cascade of hair.
Jessica hadn’t told me why he had been in jail and I decided I really didn’t want to know. Phoenix was trouble and trouble was exactly what I was trying to avoid.
“I’m not a big fan of anal either,” he said.
Giving or receiving? I couldn’t tell if he was making fun of me. He didn’t seem to be trying to lighten the mood with a joke for my benefit since he still looked stone faced. It made me super uncomfortable.
“We thought you were asleep.”
“What difference does it make? You didn’t confess to a crime.”
Thank God. “I don’t like just anyone hearing my personal business. You don’t even know me.”
“You’re right, I don’t.” He threw back the blanket that had been covering him below the waist and he stood up. He was in his underwear, black boxer briefs that clung to his thighs. “Robin.” He added my name at the end like it was an accusation.
His body was lean and wiry, yet muscular. He looked like he worked out constantly, but had been born with a raging high metabolism, so he would never be bulky, but every muscle was obvious, the V of his hips so defined, it made my mouth thick with saliva in a totally inappropriate way for the situation. He bent over and picked up a pair of shorts off the floor, stepping into them and drawing them up. But he left them partially unzipped and the belt clanked against his thighs as he moved out of the living room and down the hall into the bathroom without another word to me.
I watched him, unnerved. There was something hard about him, mysterious. His name suited him, unusual and intriguing. Annoyed with myself, I went into the kitchen, where Jessica was clearly laying out the situation for Tyler.
“So what are we going to do? Kylie and I were supposed to share and Rory and Robin each had their own room, but now there’s an empty room completely.”
“Can you guys just break the lease?” Riley asked. “I mean, what difference does it make? Everyone can move out.”
“My dad and Rory’s dad are the ones who signed the lease. I don’t think either one of us needs to piss our dads off any more.”
Riley frowned. “No. That’s no good.” He looked at me. “I guess you should find a replacement, since you’re the one moving out.”
Hovering in the doorway, I crossed my arms over my chest, miserable. “I’ll just move home and I’ll pay my portion of the rent. I can cover it with my paychecks from waitressing.”
I was trying to be fair. To not stick them with either a bigger rent or with a roommate they didn’t know and may not get along with, but Jessica’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“Wait a minute. So you’d rather live at home with your parents who are like sixty years old, and your ancient, evil-eye-giving grandmother, while paying rent on a place you don’t live in, than room with Kylie and Rory? Okay, I call bullshit. What the fuck is going on?”
When she put it like that, it did sound insane. “Nothing is going on. I just need time to . . . reevaluate.”
But Jessica was tenacious. “There is something going on and you need to tell me what it is.”
Phoenix strolled into the kitchen, scratching his chest, and went to the fridge. “I think if she wanted to tell you she would have already,” he commented.
That about summed it up.
“And who asked you?” Jessica said, whirling to glare at him as she yanked Jayden’s empty plate out from in front of him and started scrubbing it aggressively in the sink.
“Just an observation.”
“Well, mind your own business.”
“I think Robin would probably say the same to you.”
They stared at each other and I felt the tension between them. Phoenix being in the house obviously upset the balance of Jessica being house princess. She was a strong personality, and she enjoyed being the only girl in the house. Somehow Phoenix was challenging her, and it was obvious to Riley, too. He held up his hand.
“Alright, chill out. Both of you.”
“Please don’t fight because of me,” I pleaded, feeling even more horrible with each passing second. “Just please don’t.” And to my horror, I started crying, tears welling up and rushing out of both eyes silently.
Everyone looked at me in shock and no one seemed to have a clue what to say. I wasn’t known for being particularly emotional. Fortunately, Easton intervened. “Hey, aren’t yo
u supposed to draw me?” He tapped the canvas Tyler had propped on the floor next to the table. “When are you doing that?”
“Now,” I said, taking an empty seat next to him and wiping my face, concentrating on drawing my breath in and out, slowly, evenly. “I just need some space.”
That was definitely a metaphor.
Jessica went into the other room, clearly agitated, and Riley followed her, murmuring in a low voice. Tyler encouraged Jayden to go outside and shoot hoops with him. It left me at the table, methodically squeezing my oils into my paint tray, Easton across from me, bouncing up and down on his chair, and Phoenix leaning on the counter eating rice straight out of the container.
He was watching us, but I ignored him. Yellow, pink, blue. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. If I just focused on one thing at a time, I could function.
And it actually felt good to have my brush in my hand, the smell of the acrylics familiar and soothing. I felt calmer.
There was a knock at the back door and Easton jumped. “Who is that?”
“It’s probably my girlfriend,” Phoenix said. “Or my ex-girlfriend if this conversation doesn’t go well. She’s supposed to come over.”
So of course the gorgeous bad boy had a girlfriend, despite his incarceration.
Phoenix opened the back door and I have to admit, I tried to pretend I was busy working, paintbrush in my hand as I used a bold magenta to do the outline of Easton’s head. But I snuck a glance up at the girl who walked into the kitchen and I tried not to be judgmental. She looked hard. Older than she probably was. Bad dye job, turning naturally brown hair bleach blond, drying the texture out. Lots of eyeliner. Bad skin. Her jeans were too tight in the waist and too big in the butt. Not the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen but maybe she was super sweet. And who was I to judge?
“Hey,” she said and tried to kiss Phoenix.
He shifted out of the way and rejected her effort. “Why didn’t you come see me when I was locked up?” he demanded with no other greeting. “Not once. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, Angel.”
Oh, God, seriously? Her name was Angel? I threw up a little in my mouth. I couldn’t think of a name less suited to a girl who looked like she could beat the shit out of me if I looked at her wrong. Carefully, I set down my paintbrush and pushed my chair back. Clearly this was a private conversation and I had enough drama of my mine. I didn’t want to be involved in someone else’s.
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