So Wrong

by Camilla Stevens

  She finally nodded, unable to stop the smile that came at the memory of it.

  “Okay then, let’s spend the day together, go out on an official date.”

  She laughed. “Can I at least get dressed first?”

  “Well I don’t see why we need to ruin things by wearing—”

  “What is it with you and public nudity?” she laughed, slapping him on the chest—his really firm, impressively developed chest—and pulling herself out of his hands.

  “Not that,” he said as she bent down to pick up her wrinkled dress and sweater.

  She looked up at him questioningly. The laughter was gone from his face, replaced by something she couldn’t read. Then she understood. She dropped the dress, not wanting any reminders of Darryl.

  “I’ve got something better in mind,” He said with a grin.

  25

  “Absolutely not!” she said.

  River held up the yellow dress he had saved and gave her a look of frustration. “What is it about this dress that you hate so much? At first I thought it didn’t fit you, but now...”

  He eyed her body wearing nothing but the bra and panties she had recovered from the bathroom. For some reason it was even sexier than seeing her naked in his living room moments ago. There was no way this dress didn’t fit perfectly.

  “It fits,” she said hesitantly. “It just...it...I couldn’t possibly wear it in public.”

  He took note of the way her face darkened a shade, the way her eyes darted toward the dress then looked away, embarrassed, the way she crossed her hands in front of her panties, twisting them in discomfort. Then he laughed as he got it.

  “What?” she asked, her eyes giving him an irritated glare.

  He walked toward her holding it in front of him. “Does it make you think too much of me when you wear it?” he purred.

  Her mouth fell open.

  He laughed even harder. “You know, I could smell you all over it,” he confessed. “It was pretty hot.”

  Without a word she spun around and went for her black dress.

  “Bonita, Bonita,” he said, tossing the dress on his couch and running over to her. “I’m sorry. Sometimes my mouth doesn’t know when to ignore what my brain tells it. If it makes you feel any better I couldn’t control myself any better when I was around the dress.”

  “No, that doesn’t make me feel better,” she said, giving him a look that assured him he wasn’t helping himself.

  “Okay, okay, no dress then. A shame…I really would have liked to see you in it,” He said sincerely.

  It was enough to get her to stay at least. “Okay, I won’t wear the black dress from last night; but I am not wearing that dress. Not in public.”

  That got a grin out of River as he imagined the ways she could wear it “not in public.”

  She gave him a look that told him it was written all over his face. “You don’t stop do you?” she pointed out, but at least she punctuated it with a small laugh.

  They were sitting at a restaurant called The Coop near campus. Bonita’s hair was up in a rubber band that River had given her. It was the best she could do under the circumstances. There would be a serious de-tangling session when she got back to her dorm room.

  As for her attire, Bonita was not so much wearing River’s flannel shirt as swimming in it. She had to roll the sleeves up three times just to get them past her fingertips so she could hold the menu. She also had on a pair of his gym pants, which she filled out a bit more in the hips so that they didn’t fall down her legs, but again the cuffs had to be rolled up. She had on three pairs of his socks so she could fill his borrowed tennis shoes without walking out of them. It was like she was wearing a River costume, complete with his scent.

  It was almost as tingling to the senses as the dress, but in a cozier way, like having his arms wrapped around her on a winter’s day. She sipped her coffee as she looked at him across the table, remembering last night. A smile crept to her lips.

  River noticed and raised his eyebrows knowingly. “I was that good, huh?”

  She laughed, but before she could hit him with a sharp comeback the waitress came back with their orders: Spanish omelet and skillet potatoes for River; avocado toast and fruit salad for Bonita.

  They both dug in and ate in silence for a few bites. Finally she felt River’s eyes on her, giving her a thoughtful expression.

  He put down the fork and she paused mid-bite into her toast.

  “I appreciate you being honest with me, and trusting me last night with, well, with everything, including….”

  Bonita just nodded with a smile.

  “I think you deserve to know the deal with what happened at Gascony.”

  Her eyes softened. “River, you don’t have to tell me. I trust you.”

  He gave her a wan smile. “Which is exactly why I’m trusting you with this.”

  She looked at him for a moment, then nodded.

  He nodded back, looking down at his plate as if preparing his words.

  “Like I said, it wasn’t a knife,” he looked up at her. “It was a razor…and I didn’t bring it to school. It was my friend. She—she had family issues.”

  Bonita thought back to the photo from Marianne’s yearbook. “Marie?”

  His eyes widened at the name. Then he nodded in agreement.

  “She was a cutter,” He gave a sad smile, looking down at the table. “Don’t ever believe that money automatically makes your life better. Trust me, I know first-hand.”

  He gave a brief, bitter laugh. Then his face became serious again.

  “Still, even my screwed up family was nothing like…,” he frowned. “Anyway, she took it out on her arms and thighs. I tried getting her help, but when your parents see you as nothing more than a prop to make themselves publicly presentable, psychiatric care is out of the question. To them it was bad enough that she wore black all the time and dyed her hair. Her mom was an alcoholic, pill-popping publicity whore, and her dad was a fucking tyrant, and that’s when he bothered to acknowledge her at all.

  “At any rate, some asshole student found her with the razor blade right after a cutting session before school one day. They ratted her out to the powers that be. She panicked and told me, mostly because I was the one she always thought of as an older brother figure. I think I sympathized the most with having parents who are megalomaniacs…or not there at all.

  “They did the whole search of her and her belongings and found nothing. Because I was her friend, and pretty much a social outcast at the school, I knew I would be included in the search. I purposely took the fall and let them find it on me instead. Someone had to go down for it, and she was in no condition to handle that kind of repercussion.

  “I never told anyone what really happened because Marie was entitled to her secrets. I certainly wasn’t going to betray her trust just to save my own hide. I still won’t…which is why I’m trusting you.”

  River looked at Bonita meaningfully, and she nodded, promising to keep this between them.

  “In the end, when you’re the son of Richard Wright, zero tolerance at school becomes sort of an amorphous idea. I knew they would go somewhat lightly on me because of that. I was suspended, missed out on the last part of junior year, which devastatingly meant no prom.” He gave her a sardonic grin. “That part was fine. What wasn’t fine was Marie taking the guilt out on herself.”

  He stared hard at Bonita. “That was when she stepped up from cutting her arms…to cutting her wrists.”

  “Oh River,” Bonita said, reaching across the table to hold his hand.

  “Thankfully she was discovered in time. Of course, her parents hushed everything up, sending her off to some secluded institution. They wouldn’t even tell me where, in fact blaming me for everything in the first place.

  “I was already, what you might call angsty, as a teenager,” he gave her another wry smile. “This kind of pushed me over the line to full-fledged degenerate. I was a total shit to the few friends I had left. I
was even worse to my own family. It lasted for a few months until my brothers stepped in to handle things. Michael, the oldest, introduced me to his boxing trainer. It was amazingly therapeutic. It helped me keep myself in control. Alex was the one to encourage me to find out what I was interested in doing with my life and that’s when—”

  His eyes shot to hers then looked away.

  “At any rate,” he said heaving a sigh, “by the time I returned to school senior year I was a changed man.”

  He sat back in his chair and eyed Bonita.

  “Now you know the actual truth. I did finally manage to catch up with Marie a few years ago. She’s better, especially now that she’s an adult and can handle her psychiatric care herself. It’s a slow progression, but she’s getting there. I visit her once a month just to check in. I think eventually, once she can fully disentangle herself from her poisonous family, she’ll be able to make it on her own.”

  Bonita stared at him for a while, then squeezed the hand she was holding. “Thank you for telling me this, even though you know you didn’t have to.”

  He stared right back at her, his eyes clear as day. “I know we don’t know each other all that well yet, but I don’t want us to start off with secrets. I want to be open and honest with you, and I hope you feel the same.”

  Bonita’s eyes fell to her plate and she let go of his hand. She had told him about Darryl, but hadn’t revealed everything: the money, her father’s church, the hold that the West family had on hers now.

  Part of it was that some of those secrets weren’t hers to tell. Even though she felt she could trust River with her father’s secrets the way he had trusted her with Marie’s, it still seemed like a betrayal to reveal them.

  His revelation about Marie had been to calm her fears about his mysteriously notorious past. Her revealing her father’s mistakes would serve no purpose other than to put both River and her father on the spot.

  Her own monetary woes were another issue.

  She knew that River, being the son of Richard Wright, could probably easily solve every one of her financial problems.

  But she’d be damned if she was ever going to be dependent on a man again…even a man she trusted.

  26

  Bonita pulled out her book. French Literature was on to Sartre now.

  “Good morning, Tulip,” Marianne said with a sigh, falling into the seat next to her. “You’d think by senior year I would have reminded myself to avoid morning classes. Ah well, there’s still one semester left to sleep in!”

  Bonita smiled at her friend. Then her eye was caught by the boy walking in the door behind her. His eyes locked on hers and he gave her a secretive grin, which she returned, her face getting warm. Then he was off to his seat up front without a word.

  None of it was lost on Marianne as she looked back and forth between the two of them.

  Bonita tried focusing on her book rather than face that scrutiny. Naturally, her friend was having none of it.

  “Unh-unh,” she protested. “You don’t get off that easily, Tulip.”

  “What?” Bonita asked innocently.

  “Don’t ‘what’ me,” Marianne said laughing. “What was that look?”

  “What look?” she asked, even more innocently.

  “That look that said you and Mr. Shooting Star did the deed.”

  It was so on the nose it caused Bonita to forget herself. “No it doesn’t,” she gasped. Then more intimately “does it?”

  “Oh my God!” Marianne exclaimed. “I was just joking!”

  Now Bonita was embarrassed, realizing she’d just outted herself.

  “So you really did?” Marianne said conspiratorially. “You go girl.”

  Bonita rolled her eyes and focused on the front of the class hoping that Professor LeFlor would show up already.

  Marianne just laughed. “Alright, Tulip. I’ll leave you alone…for now.”

  Bonita just shook her head, completely mortified. Then her eyes darted to River sitting up front. She noted the body language of Ms. Hopeful sitting next to him and glared.

  Hands off sweetheart, he’s spoken for.

  Marianne caught the glare and giggled. “Oh, you are so spilling everything after class,” she warned.

  Sure enough, after class there was no way to make a hasty escape from her friend’s interrogation.

  “Oh, come on, Bonita,” she urged. “This is what BFFs are for. I don’t need details, I just want to know how it was.”

  “It was wonderful; end of story,” Bonita said with finality. “There, are you happy?”

  “Of course not. That tells me nothing!”

  “On the topic of men in our lives, when are you going to put poor, sweet Brad out of his misery?” Bonita taunted, knowing exactly which button of Marianne’s to push.

  She laughed as her friend’s face became strawberry red. Bonita could see the denial coming to her face and stopped her.

  “Don’t even.”

  “I don’t know, it’s just so…cliché,” Marianne said, wrinkling her nose. “My family’s new money, his family’s old money, it’s so depressingly typical.”

  Bonita just stared at her. “That’s probably the whitest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Marianne blinked at her for a quick moment, then burst out laughing. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve got my man, you need to go and get yours,” Bonita said, laughing along with her.

  When she got to her dorm room, a fresh vase of flowers were on the desk on her side of the room. No doubt Ms. Moynahan had once again allowed Stacey to deliver them from the mail room straight to the recipient.

  It was a vase of red roses, at least two dozen of them. Absolute perfection.

  Bonita,

  Always and forever.

  Darryl

  It was chilling in its simplicity. Always and forever? And why flowers?

  She didn’t have the time or the inclination to decipher it all, she just wanted them gone. She picked up the entire vase and carried it into the common area.

  Three girls were walking by, giggling and talking, but paused to watch, first in envious admiration then in complete shock when she deposited them, vase and all, into the trash can.

  “Somebody must have been a bad boy,” said one of them with a smirk.

  Bonita looked her straight in the eye. “You have no idea.”

  27

  Something was wrong.

  River felt it the second his eyes blinked open. Bonita wasn’t by his side. He slid his gaze to the right and saw the shadow of her naked figure in the darkness of his bedroom. Sometime during the night she had shifted from lying on his chest and rolled over on her other side.

  The light creeping in from the sides of the curtain told him it was already well into morning. He took the risk of reaching over to turn on the light by his bed. When it blinked on, he quickly glanced over to her sleeping form to see if it had woken her.

  Now there’s a lovely vision.

  He and Bonita had been together officially for over two weeks now, a good portion of that time spent in his bed. They had evolved since that first night, becoming surprisingly acquainted with each other’s bodies and their reaction to stimuli.

  The way her fingernails lightly raked the back of his shoulders as he made love to her.

  The purring sound she made when he grazed that one part of her neck right above the collarbone.

  The way she looked at him above those glasses just as her mouth covered the head of his cock.

  The way she moaned when he grabbed her ass, his fingers digging in hard.

  The way she murmured his name chant-like right before she was about to come.

  The way he stared deep into her brown eyes just before he was about to come.

  Right now, the bed sheets barely covered her back, stopping at the apex of where her hips curved back down toward her thighs. He admired her shape which was sensuously reminiscent of a violin. She even had the same coloring. His eyes followed the slo
pe from her shoulder down to her waist and back up again where her hips rounded out.

  He grinned and reached over, his fingers lightly strumming the skin covering the line down the middle where her spine was.

  She shifted in her sleep, causing the covers to fall like an avalanche down her hips, revealing the round cusp of her ass.

  River chuckled to himself, pleased with his own devilry.

  Then he plucked her spine again. This time she groaned out of her sleep and waved a hand blindly behind her, warding off the offending tickler.

  “Do you really want me grumpy this morning? Because this is how you make me grumpy,” she mumbled into the covers, curling up into a ball, making sure to bring the sheet back up with her.

  Oh well, I tried.

  He laughed to himself one last time then pulled himself out of bed. After pulling on the pair of jeans Ms. Grumpyhead had been more than happy to get him out of last night, he went to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. As it percolated he thought about getting to work on his pet project, which would soon be his chosen career. God help him.

  He unlocked the trunk where he kept his notebook and pulled it out, setting it on the coffee table as he went to make a cup of coffee. Mug in hand, he settled onto the sofa, feet up on the table and set it down, replacing it with the notebook and a pen. These weeks with Bonita had put him behind on updates. Now was as good a time as any to catch up. He was so absorbed in filling in the lines that he didn’t notice when Bonita walked in.

  “Mmm, now there’s a sight I like to wake up to. And you even made coffee.”

  His head snapped up and he quickly shut the notebook, looking up with a guilty expression on his face.