Follow Me Back

by A. Meredith Walters

  I thought Marco would have whooped when he heard I was rejoining the fray. He had been pressuring me long enough to dip my toes back into the scene. But he didn’t seem very happy about my news. He seemed . . . worried.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, man,” he said, pulling me to the side and away from the rest of the crowd.

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Polo? You’ve been up my ass for months to come back to the club. Remember your whole you’re the king of sleaze, X, pep talk? What the hell is your problem?”

  Marco tugged on his eyebrow ring, something he only did when he was nervous. He looked around and then dropped in close to my face, invading my personal space in a way I didn’t appreciate.

  “There’s just been rumblings . . .” he began to say, but then I heard my name being called.

  “X!”

  I looked over to see Vincent, Gash’s lackey, motioning for me to follow him.

  I turned back to Marco. “I’ll catch up with you later, all right?” I said.

  Marco shrugged as though he hadn’t been really weird only seconds before. “Whatever. See ya.” And then he bled into the crowd, returning to his spot at the front door.

  I followed Vincent to the back of the room and into a tiny office. Gash was inside with a handful of people, smoking a spliff.

  “X! Good to see you, come in,” Gash said, his voice tight with a lungful of smoke.

  He waved the rest of the people out until I was left with only Gash and Vincent.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be coming back,” Gash said, though I could tell by the smirk on his face that he knew he’d see me again. And he knew exactly what I was here for.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about your offer,” I started to say.

  Gash nodded to Vincent, who reached into a leather satchel and pulled out two freezer bags full of pills.

  I felt sick taking them from Vincent. They burned my fingers with guilt and shame.

  I couldn’t believe I had resorted to this. I had worked so hard to put this behind me, and here I was jumping back in with the sharks.

  But I was feeling desperate and I was tired of not being able to provide for myself. I just needed to make enough to get by until I could figure something else out. This would not be a permanent solution.

  I was dedicated to my new life. This would just help ensure that I didn’t drown while I was trying to live it.

  At least, that’s what I’d managed to convince myself.

  “It’s important that you’re here next Saturday with all of that. Be here no later than ten o’clock,” Gash said firmly. I frowned. Gash had never given me such specific instructions before. It was always just sell the shit and give him the money.

  “Any particular reason why?” I asked, dropping the drugs into the book bag I had brought inside with me for this very purpose.

  “Because I fucking said so, that’s why,” Gash yelled.

  What had him so wound up?

  “Okay . . .”

  Gash smoothed back his graying hair and gave me his trademark smug smile. “You’re going to make us a lot of money, X. It’s good to have you back in the fold.”

  I bristled. “I’m not back in the fold, Gash. This is a one-time thing. I just need some cash to help me get by. Times are tough, ya know.”

  Gash laughed, a disingenuous sound. “Of course. A one-time thing. No strings attached. I get it.” Wow. He was being uncharacteristically agreeable. I had expected threats of bodily harm at the very least for not wanting to go back to dealing full-time.

  “All right, well, I’m gonna go. I’ll see you next Saturday,” I said, backing up toward the door.

  “Don’t be any later than ten, X. I’m fucking serious. Otherwise things may happen to you and the people you love that aren’t very nice. You get me?”

  There was the Gash I knew and hated.

  “Yeah, I get ya,” I responded, hoisting my bag up on my shoulder.

  I left Gash’s makeshift office and headed to the front door. Hands reached out trying to grab me. Girls pressed themselves up against me, begging me for the thing I had always been able to give them.

  I used to love this. And I still felt the power of it. But it felt disgusting and wrong. I didn’t stop until I was out of the club. I didn’t bother talking to Marco again, either. Not when my shame was heavy on my back.

  Just one more time, I repeated to myself the whole way home.

  I went home and instead of sleeping, I thought about the drugs in my bag. How much I wanted them. How much I craved them.

  Just one more time . . .

  chapter

  thirty-three

  aubrey

  “i feel like we’re ships passing in the night,” I teased on a balmy Monday afternoon. Maxx gave me a tired smile, having just woken up, and kissed me as I walked into his apartment. I hadn’t seen him all weekend, this being the first we had been together in days.

  “How was Landon on Saturday?” I asked. I had only been able to speak to him briefly on Sunday, and the subject of his day with his brother hadn’t come up.

  “Huh?” he asked, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He seemed to be sleeping more and more lately. I worried he was getting depressed. I tried to keep him up and active, but he was resistant and grouchy.

  I knew he was worried about his financial situation, and I also knew that I didn’t have any way to help him. He had pounded the pavement trying to find more work, but he was coming up woefully empty-handed.

  “Your brother. The kid you were hanging out with on Saturday,” I prompted with a confused smile.

  Maxx gave me a sheepish grin. “Oh yeah. He was good. He wants me to go with him to look at art schools this summer.” He pulled out a box of cereal and dumped some into a bowl. He looked in the refrigerator, but there was no milk, so he started eating it dry. I thought about buying him groceries, but I knew that his pride wouldn’t allow him to take money from me.

  I wrapped my arms around his waist and nuzzled into his chest. “That’s awesome, Maxx.” Aside from the financial stresses, I knew that he agonized over how to make his relationship with his brother work again. Landon felt betrayed, and I completely understood where the younger boy was coming from. And in true teenage fashion, he held a serious grudge.

  Maxx crunched on his cereal and swallowed before leaning down to kiss the top of my head. “I’d like to take you out sometime next week. Somewhere nice,” he said suddenly. I pulled back and looked up at him.

  “You don’t have to. I’m just as happy staying here and hanging out with you,” I protested. I didn’t want Maxx wining and dining me when he could barely afford the bare-bones groceries in his kitchen.

  “I’d really like to. I haven’t had a chance to take you out on a date that you deserve.”

  I kissed his chest and laid my cheek over his beating heart, strong and sure beneath my ear. “You have other things you have to pay for. You don’t need to take me to some fancy dinner,” I argued.

  Maxx put his bowl on the counter and wrapped his arms around me so that we held each other. “I haven’t done much right by you, Aubrey, but let me do this. Besides, I’ll be flush with cash after the weekend,” he said offhandedly.

  I leaned back, pulling out of his hold slightly, and gave him a questioning look. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?” I asked.

  “I’ve been given a chance to make some great money.”

  I brightened. “Did you take your stuff to a different art gallery?” I asked hopefully. I had, as subtly as possible, been suggesting he try to sell his art to other art dealers. The interest was out there for his work; he just needed to seize it. He had been adverse to it after his earlier rejection, but maybe he had finally come around.

  Maxx scratched his temple. “Uh, no. That’s not it. I don’t really want to talk about it right now, but hopefully my days of living hand to mouth will be over soon and I can finally start banking on our future.” He pulled out of my arms and dropped his now-empty
bowl into the sink.

  I wanted to badger him about this great new opportunity. The fire in his eyes worried me. But before I could say anything, he picked up the small gift bag I had brought with me and held it up.

  “Is this the surprise you were teasing me about?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, feeling distracted.

  Maxx grinned and began pulling tissue paper out of the bag. He lifted the heavy frame into his hands and stared down at the picture behind the glass. His face was carefully blank, and I wondered if I had overestimated his pleasure at receiving it.

  “How did you find this?” he asked quietly, not looking at me, his eyes trained on the photograph of the four people in the picture.

  “Actually, I found it one of the first times I was ever here. I know you kept it in the back of your drawer, and I just thought it was time you took it out of hiding, don’t you think?” I asked quietly.

  Maxx stood there for a long time, then without a word, he walked down the hallway. I followed after him, not sure what he was going to do. He approached his dresser and slowly put the framed photo in the center. He moved it until it was facing his bed.

  “I hope it’s okay that I did that. I wasn’t trying to violate your privacy—” I started to say. Maxx grabbed me suddenly and hauled me up against him, his mouth claiming mine hungrily. He pulled back a moment later, both of us breathless.

  “Thank you, Aubrey. Thank you so much. Every day you remind me of what it means to be given a second chance. And I swear to God I won’t let you down.”

  Then we stopped talking for a while.

  Sometime later, when we finally came up for air, we lay on our sides pressed together in his bed. Maxx played with my hair, and I stroked lazy circles on his chest. “Do you ever think about where we’ll be in ten years?” I asked him.

  Maxx ran his hand up and down my back. “All the time,” he murmured. I rolled onto my belly and propped my chin on his chest, looking up at him through my lashes.

  “What do you see?”

  Maxx pulled me up so that I was eye level with him. “I see you. I see me. I see us living in a great big house with a dog that you insisted on naming Molly, though I liked the name Daisy.” Maxx’s eyes take on a faraway expression, and I watch him, fascinated as he recounts a life we hadn’t lived yet.

  “We have a little girl, five years old, who looks exactly like you, but she loves to paint, just like me. You’re pregnant with our little boy and we spend our weekends fixing up the nursery. I paint a motorcycle on the wall and you hang blue curtains in the windows. Your parents come to visit on holidays and my brother stays with us when he’s in town. You’re a teacher and I’m an artist and we make it work because we love each other just as much, ten years from now, as we do right now.”

  His beautiful vision for our future gives me goose bumps. “Wow, you’ve really thought about this,” I said softly, kissing his chin.

  “Every day, Aubrey. It’s what gets me through all the bad stuff. It’s what kept me in rehab. Let me show you something.” He carefully pulled out from underneath me and got out of bed.

  He walked over to the pile of painted canvases that had slowly grown over the past few months. He pulled out a canvas toward the back. He brought it over to the bed and sat down, holding it in his lap.

  I sat up and crawled over to him, looking over his shoulder, and was instantly speechless.

  It was a picture of me in profile. In true X style, it was vivid and detailed. The colors were more muted than was typical of his artwork, but it punched me in the gut with its power.

  In the painting, I stood in front of a window, looking over my shoulder, my long hair billowing behind me, bleeding into a large sun hanging in the imaginary sky. I wore a long, flowing dress that disappeared into a field of flowers at my feet.

  The painted Aubrey held her hand out, and long, masculine fingers intertwined with my slender ones. Maxx had painted himself emerging from the shadows to grasp me. He had never painted himself before. I couldn’t deny the significance of this picture. It took my breath away.

  Maxx looked at me. “When I think of my future, this is what I see. You. Me. Together.” I kissed his shoulders. He put the painting down beside him and reached around to cup my face. “Which is why I will do anything for you. I will walk through fire to give you the life you deserve. Do you trust me to take care of you?” he whispered, kissing my cheeks, my nose, my mouth.

  Did I trust him?

  I wanted to.

  So I didn’t answer him, choosing to kiss him instead and hoping that was all the answer he needed right now.

  I stared down at the course listing for the education department and was overwhelmed. There was a lot to choose from. And in doing the calculations, by changing my academic track midstream like this, I was pushing back my estimated graduation date by at least a year.

  But I wasn’t questioning my decision to move away from counseling. I truly felt it was the best choice I could have made. It just felt right.

  I was sitting in the Coffee Jerk, sipping on my latte and poring over the catalogue. Maxx wasn’t working, which was just as well, because I needed to focus on figuring out how I was going to make this whole change-my-major thing work.

  “Whatcha lookin’ at?” I glanced up as Brooks pulled out the chair opposite me and sat down. I hadn’t seen much of him in the last few weeks. Not since his declaration that had left things feeling very awkward.

  I lifted the course book in my hands. “Picking out classes for the fall.”

  Brooks frowned. “So you’re really changing your major?” he asked.

  I bit on my lip and nodded. “Yeah, I am.”

  I expected a lecture or at least a snort of disgust, but I got neither. Brooks simply looked at me thoughtfully.

  “You’re not going to tell me again how stupid I’m being to throw away the last three years? No berating comments on how far behind I’m putting myself by doing this?”

  Brooks shook his head. “Nope. None of that. You can’t force something that doesn’t work, Aubrey,” he said with a tinge of sadness.

  I had a feeling that he was talking about more than just my major.

  He took a sip of his coffee. “I’ve decided to go to the University of Maryland for grad school. I just accepted their offer last week,” he said.

  I dropped the course catalogue onto the table and looked at my friend. “What happened to staying at LU for your master’s?” I asked.

  Brooks took another sip of his coffee and looked at me, his eyes meeting mine. “I would be staying for all the wrong reasons. I think you were right when you said it’d be good to get away.”

  I felt a knot forming in my stomach as my guilt flared viciously.

  I had treated Brooks Hamlin unfairly. He had been nothing but supportive and a true friend, and I had used him. Emotionally manipulated him. Then cast him aside when Maxx reentered my life.

  I didn’t like myself very much in that instant. Not at all.

  “I know what you’re doing over there,” Brooks said, breaking me out of my self-loathing.

  “Oh yeah? And what is that?” I asked tightly.

  “You think this is about you and what I told you. That’s pretty narcissistic of you, don’t you think?” he teased good-naturedly.

  “But you seemed so sure about staying on at LU,” I countered.

  “Yeah, and maybe I was hedging for something to happen between us. I love you, Aubrey, that hasn’t changed. But it wasn’t cool of me to put that on you when I knew you didn’t feel the same way.”

  I clenched my hands into fists. “I led you on, Brooks—”

  “And I knew why you were doing it. I knew you were in love with Maxx and nothing had changed. Even though I can’t really stand the guy and think you can do so much better, that’s where your heart is. I can’t force you to feel something for me that isn’t there. And to put that pressure on you wasn’t right.”

  I reached across the table and grabbed ahol
d of his hand, squeezing it. “You are such a great guy, Brooks. You’re one of my best friends, and I really hope that never changes, no matter where we end up. Because this—” I squeezed his hand a little harder. “This is the kind of friendship that lasts a lifetime.”

  Brooks squeezed back. “I know. I hope you realize that I only want the best for you. And even if I don’t entirely understand why, you seem to think it’s Maxx. And I have to be okay with that. I have to trust you to make the right choices for yourself and stop treating you like you’re incapable of making your own decisions.”

  Trust.

  There was that word again. It seemed that everyone was having trouble embracing it.

  “I appreciate it, Brooks, I really do.”

  We smiled at each other in that easy, familiar way of ours, and then Brooks grabbed the course catalogue and flipped through it.

  “There are some great classes in here. What’s the track you’ve decided on?” he asked, changing the subject.

  I let him steer our conversation into territory where we felt the most comfortable, and I knew that it would take some time and maybe some distance, but we’d be okay.

  chapter

  thirty-four

  aubrey

  it was Saturday evening and Renee and I were walking back from the campus library. Maxx was spending time with Landon again, so Renee had asked if I wanted to keep her company while she finished up a project for her marketing class that was due on Monday.

  “We’re such wild and crazy chicks. Hanging at the library on a Saturday night,” I laughed, slinging my coat over my shoulders. We were marching into the first week of May, the end of school just around the corner, and it was finally warm enough to walk around at night without a jacket.

  I loved the summer. It was my favorite time of year. I planned to suggest to Maxx that we go down and stay with my parents for a few weeks after school let out. Marshall Creek was only an hour’s drive from the Outer Banks. I wanted to have the time with Maxx to really unwind and relax after how stressful the last few months had been.