The Year We Hid Away

by Sarina Bowen

  “Mmm,” she said as my mouth burned a trail from her jaw down her neck.

  “Scarlet,” I whispered. “You have the most beautiful body.” I climbed on top of her, cupping both creamy breasts in my hands. And when my thumbs brushed her nipples, she almost shot off the bed.

  “Jeez,” she gasped.

  “What?” I had been feeling a little out of control, but in a good way, or so I thought. But now I lifted my head, checking her expression.

  Scarlet took a shaky breath. “Jeez, that’s nice,” she eked out.

  Okay, then. I bent down, dropping open-mouthed kisses on her neck and down her shoulder. Scarlet was practically panting in my arms. She raised her arms, raking her fingers through my hair. She trailed them down my neck.

  Scarlet had velvet skin, the sort I could touch all day long and never get enough. My lips explored the warm geography of her breasts. And when I began to bathe one nipple with my tongue, I heard her suck in a breath. Her body went completely still. This time, I didn’t mistake her responsiveness for disapproval. Smiling up at her, I sucked the peak of her into my mouth. This elicited a breathy little moan that shot straight to my already throbbing dick.

  Damn, this girl was going to kill me. And it wasn’t because I hadn’t had sex in a ridiculously long time. It was the way she glanced down at me that was so hot — her expression a blend of surprise, wonder and lust.

  Releasing her swollen nipple with a pop, I nosed over to the other breast. As long as she kept making those hot little sounds, I could do this all day long.

  — Scarlet

  Holy hell. I had no idea there were so many nerve endings in my chest. What I didn’t know about sex could fill volumes. Bridger’s fingertips skated up my ribcage while he kissed me, his touches light and feathery. And the weight of his body on top of mine was delicious.

  Before Bridger, I had never enjoyed fooling around. My previous experience had involved surreptitious make-outs at tenth grade dances. It was all very sloppy and pointless. Hockey had consumed most of my junior year, with away games squelching the opportunity for any serious time with boys. And then? My senior year — while everyone else was pairing up and hooking up, I was a pariah.

  The loveliness happening here on my bed was all brand new. I was so inebriated with pleasure that I didn’t hear the door open.

  “Well, hellllo,” Katie’s voice rang out. “That’s what bandannas on the door knob are for.”

  When the door clicked shut again, Bridger laid his head on my chest and laughed. “Whoops.”

  “That was… embarrassing,” I said. My skin began to feel flushed.

  “Nah,” he said. “People have been caught out much worse than that, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. But that only made me wonder how many girls he’d been caught with over the years.

  And then, as it always did, Bridger’s alarm went off.

  He took a moment more with me, sliding up my body, kissing me warmly on the mouth. “I have to go,” he whispered after melting my knees one more time.

  “I know,” I whispered back. “Listen to me not complaining.”

  “And I do appreciate it,” he said, reaching for his t-shirt where it lay on my floor. He handed me my bra. “Cover yourself, or I may not make it out the door.”

  “This is me, resisting the urge to fling it out the window instead…”

  I saw him studying my nakedness again, before he threw back his head and sighed. “Damn, girl. That’s potent.”

  I laughed. “Why?” It was so hard to believe that I had anything he hadn’t seen before. Besides, even though I was no longer an athlete, I had an athlete’s body. Nobody would mistake me for a Playboy bunny.

  He shook his head. “You just do it for me, that’s all. You’re a strong kind of sexy, like you could take on Katie in a fight, and win. But also delicious.”

  I hooked my bra and swiveled it around my chest, ready to slip my arms back into the straps. But something in his face made me pause.

  He knelt in front of me then, leaning in to kiss each breast once more. And his touch practically melted me into a liquid. I wanted to leap at him again, but he stood up.

  When I hugged him goodbye, he said, “thank you, Scarlet.”

  “For what?” I whispered. “For being your Tuesday and Thursday girl?”

  His eyes bored into mine. “For all seven days. Because I think of you on all of them.” He leaned down to give me one more kiss, then turned to go.

  “Take a sandwich,” I called. “We never ate lunch.”

  Chuckling, he took one out of the box on his way. He closed the bedroom door behind him, but I heard his voice say “afternoon, ladies” before the outside door opened and shut.

  I lay on my bed for a while, replaying the encounter in my mind. Taking off my clothes with a guy wasn’t something that I was very comfortable with on paper. But Bridger made my inhibitions fall away. The warm look in his eyes, and the affection in his touch made everything feel okay.

  Still, it was half an hour before I dared walk into the common room. Unfortunately, both Katies were out there, waiting for me. But if I had expected ribbing, I didn’t get any. The expression in their eyes was something entirely different from what I’d expected. It was awe.

  “So,” Blond Katie said. “That was Bridger McCaulley, right?”

  “Um, yeah?” I hovered near the window seat.

  “Interesting choice,” Ponytail Katie said. “He is so hot. I heard he used to be a real player. Both on and off the ice. But then this year he disappeared.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Why would anyone say he disappeared? I saw him all the time.

  “They say he used to be a legendary partier, but he doesn’t go out anymore. I heard a bunch of rumors, but they can’t all be true.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “His dad died, or he got some girl pregnant. Someone said he has a kid…”

  “That all sounds pretty farfetched,” I said. “But he does take a sick load of classes, and he works a lot.”

  “So where does he live?” Blond Katie wanted to know.

  She had me there. I knew he was a member of Beaumont House, so I’d always assumed he lived there. But possibly he lived on or off campus. I just shrugged.

  Ponytail Katie smirked, but Blond Katie looked thoughtful. “Just be careful, Scarlet. I don’t know why there’s so many rumors about that guy, but where there’s smoke…”

  There’s a fire.

  “Right…” I’d heard enough, so I stomped back into our bedroom. God, I wanted to shake anyone who used that expression. I’d heard it a thousand times during the months before charges were formally filed against my father. Meanwhile, all that smoke tore my life apart. Reporters camped out on our sidewalk. My teammates disowned me. The boy I’d just started flirting with at school never spoke to me again.

  If my life in New Hampshire was meant to burn out, I would have preferred a quick conflagration to the smoldering, choking curtain of smoke which ruined everything.

  Chapter Six: Popcorn vs. Schnapps

  — Scarlet

  When I checked my phone after Italian class the following week, a new voicemail waited, from an unfamiliar New Hampshire number.

  That couldn’t be good.

  I tapped the screen and held it to my ear, expecting to hear Azzan or a lawyer chewing me out for my lack of cooperation.

  A woman’s voice got right to the point. “I am trying to reach Shannon Ellison, also known as Scarlet Crowley.” Ouch. She made it sound as though I had a criminal alias. “This is Madeline Teeter, assistant district attorney for the district of New Hampshire. Would you please give me a call at your earliest convenience? There are a few questions I’d like to ask you…”

  My heart skittered even as she rattled off the number. Because I’d expected to get called by lawyers. But not the prosecution.

  When I tapped my phone to delete the message, my fingers were shaking.

  If my parents — and their lawyers — w
ere unhappy with me now, they would be ten times angrier if I ever spoke to the district attorney’s office.

  I shoved the phone deep into my pocket.

  Even before my world blew up, I’d sometimes spent time trying to figure out what my parents wanted from me. In many ways, my father was easier than Mom. Win a hockey game, and you were his favorite person. Lose, and you were invisible. A straight A report card and a spot on the girls’ all-state hockey team was all he wanted from me. Luckily I was able to deliver most of the time. Because the man could be terrifying if you disappointed him in public. He was “that” dad, the one who screamed from the sidelines, letting you know exactly how badly you’d screwed up.

  So I tried never to screw up.

  My mother was far more complicated. She wanted a tricky mixture of gratitude and reverence and success. She cared about appearances, too, in ways that I never quite understood. It was okay with her that I was an athlete — she didn’t try to dress me in skirts and heels. But in her mind, even sporty girls should be fashionable. She bought me Lululemon workout gear, and pink sports bras. She got huffy if I wore my most comfortable pair of gray track pants out of the house.

  To Mom, it wasn’t worth doing unless you did it in style. And when the TV trucks began to pull up in front of the house, she didn’t fall apart. No — if anything, she upped her trips to the salon, determined to look stylish and confident every time they filmed her coming out of the house.

  If I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, I might reason that hers was the pathetic response of a person with no other way to contribute to her husband’s cause. But it was hard to be generous to a woman who had refused to acknowledge that my father’s legal troubles weren’t just a minor inconvenience.

  Every day I thanked the gods of the Harkness Admissions Department that they’d sent me a fat envelope. Before the scandal, several schools had begun recruiting me for hockey. But nearly all of them dropped me when the story broke. Only two schools admitted me — Harkness, who was probably just too confident in its 300-year-old history to care about scandal. And Sterling — the college where my father coached. They probably admitted me out of obligation.

  Thank God I wasn’t sitting in New Hampshire with nowhere to go. I planned to stay as far from my father’s trial as I could possibly get.

  Normal people lived for the weekends. But I was not a normal person. Friday night loomed, and with it the usual poor set of options for entertaining myself. At times, I’d tagged along with The Katies to parties, but they always left me cold. I hated small talk and warm beer. Apart from deafening music, parties seemed to offer little else.

  This Friday, I thought I’d stay in and watch some reruns on my laptop. But after dinner, as Blond Katie made plans on the phone, she kept eying me. “I’ll ask,” she said before hanging up.

  Then she turned to me, and I readied my excuses on my tongue.

  “Before you say no,” Katie began, “it isn’t a party.”

  She was so on to me. “What, then?”

  “The freshmen football players we’ve been dating have a friend in town,” she said.

  “And you want me to be your third? For what?”

  “A game!” she said. “Harkness versus Brown. Please? It starts in an hour.”

  I looked out of our rapidly darkening window and wondered what Bridger was up to. Working, of course. I hated to admit it, but his unavailability was starting to get to me. There was no chance in hell that the Katies’ football friends would be as interesting as Bridger. They’d probably be several notches down the evolutionary chain. But I was sick of staying home on Friday nights, practicing the guitar and texting Bridger at work.

  “Okay,” I sighed. “But if the guy tries to grab my butt, I’m leaving.”

  The Katies’ boyfriends’ visitor had a neck the size of a ham, and introduced himself as Spunky. Surely his parents had given him another name, but whatever it was, I never found out. I caught myself wondering who would give himself a weird new name on purpose.

  And then I realized that’s exactly what I’d done, too.

  We trudged along in the cold and I tried to stay on top of the conversation. But there wasn’t much of one. Anything the girls said caused the football players to grin, and then one of them would declare it “dubious.”

  For example:

  A Katie: “And then the bartender swore that he knew how to make a Flaming Salamander. Even though I’d invented the name of the drink just to stump him!”

  A Football Player: “That is dubious.”

  And so it went, until the moment I realized where we were headed. “Hang on,” I protested, stopping on the street corner. “I thought we were going to a football game?”

  Ponytail Katie spun around and pinned me with her gaze. “They wouldn’t be joining us then, would they? Duh! Tonight is a hockey game. The preseason scrimmage against Brown.”

  Oh, crap. “But… I don’t go to hockey games,” I whined.

  “Scarlet,” she protested, hoping I was not about to bail. “We’re here already.”

  And so we were. Defeated, I followed them into the arena where I’d always expected to compete.

  It made for a much more depressing evening than I’d bargained for, to say the least. And that’s the only reason I drank from Spunky’s flask whenever it was passed my way. It was filled with some kind of fruity schnapps, a flavor so sweet that it made my teeth itch. I thought it was weird that football players would want to get drunk on a sissy thing like schnapps. At least, it seemed weird until I got toasted on it. And then I figured out that’s probably why they’d brought it.

  Tonight I was really not on my game.

  The Katies bought popcorn, and I ate a bunch of it to try to cushion the schnapps. The Harkness men’s team was skating really well, and it made for a very exciting game. Tied at 1-1 for most of the first two periods, Harkness came out swinging in the third. The team captain sent a Howitzer right over the goalie’s glove and into the net, and I was on my feet with the rest of the cheering crowd.

  This had once been my whole life — watching the puck whip across the ice, critiquing the plays, and scanning for a breakaway. I missed it. Terribly.

  Given the chance, I would have distracted myself with a little conversation. But in spite of his name, Spunky wasn’t a talker. And I couldn’t even fidget with my generation’s favorite escape — my phone — because I’d left it behind in my dorm room by accident.

  With four minutes left, Harkness drew a penalty, and the entire stadium leaned forward to see whether Brown would be able to make anything happen during the two minute period when one of our defensemen sat in the sin bin. Both teams amped it up, skating fast, checking hard.

  We survived it, the Harkness players ragging the puck until their man was freed. And when the buzzer rang, Harkness had won, 2-1.

  By the time we stood to leave, I was drunk on schnapps and the achingly familiar sound of the puck smacking the boards. Tipsily, I followed The Katies and their thick-necked men toward Hannigan’s Bar, where the doorway was jammed with hockey fans. I waited with my roommates, wondering how they planned to get past the bouncer. None of us was twenty-one. Maybe that didn’t matter?

  But when the crowd before us cleared, Blond Katie stepped up to the bouncer. As I watched, she and all the others pulled IDs from their pockets.

  Fake IDs.

  Crap! This was going to be embarrassing. I didn’t have a fake ID, nor did I have a clue where to get one. On the other hand, I now had the perfect excuse to leave without them. I leaned over to Ponytail Katie. “Sorry, I can’t get into this place. I’m outie.”

  Then, just as I turned to go, my eyes swept the bar. As the crowd moved, I caught a pair of familiar eyes looking back at me.

  Bridger was there, sitting on a barstool.

  My mouth fell open. I wanted a closer look, but shifting bodies blocked my view of his end of the bar. Feeling awfully drunk, I wondered for a half a second if I had imagined it.
r />   “Let me see some ID, miss,” the bouncer demanded of me then.

  “I…” Shaking my head, I turned for the door. What had just happened? Bridger, who was too busy to ever see me on the weekend, was chilling at the bar. I felt as if I’d been slapped.

  The wintry air outside was bracing. I stopped just beyond the bar, trying to get a grip on myself. I felt my pocket for my phone, once again remembering that I’d left it behind. If I texted him right now (“Hi Bridge, how’s work?”) I wondered what he would reply.

  Betrayal made my throat feel hot.

  “Where are you going, pretty girl?”

  I looked up to find Spunky the football player. “G… gotta go,” I choked out.

  “You could stay here with me,” he said, taking a big step forward. In response, I took a staggered step backward, my bottom colliding with the brick building. The guy put his big hands on my shoulders, pinning me there. “It’s early,” he whispered. “Don’t run off.”

  Now I was actually trapped, and feeling afraid. The rush of hockey goers had filtered into the bar, or down the streets. There was nobody but me and the big galumph holding me to the wall.

  Great.

  I squirmed to the side, but he stopped me. He put his feet between mine. There was no way to finesse this, other than the obvious. So I put both my hands on his chest and gave a mighty shove. “Back off,” I said.

  “Be nice,” was his response. He leaned in to kiss me. I gave another great shove and craned my neck away from his alcohol soaked breath. He only grabbed my arms and pinned my wrists against the building.

  That’s when I really began to panic. “OFF ME!” I screamed.

  And then he was gone. I felt the cool air of freedom, and registered the sound of a heavy body falling to the sidewalk. “Aaaarrgh, fuck!” the guy hollered. When I looked down, he was curled up in a ball, holding his nuts.

  And Bridger was standing over him. “What part of off me did you not hear?” he growled. He wound up for another kick, but the guy rolled away, flopping over onto his other side, still protecting the family jewels.