A Cruel Kind of Beautiful

by Michelle Hazen

  Jacob drops my jeans and prowls back up my body, stark naked. He keeps coming until he could kiss me, but doesn’t, our lips nearly touching as he props his forearm beside my head without looking away. My muscles clench, way down low. I’m intensely aware of how aroused he is, and how perfectly we’re positioned for him to slip inside me. One fragile layer of fabric is all that’s between us.

  Jacob dips his head and draws a line of kisses along the boundaries of my bra, his jaw scratching the inner curves of my breasts with a faint five o’clock shadow that nearly cripples my pulse.

  When he lifts an eyebrow at me, I manage, “Top five. At least.”

  He smiles. “On the right track, then.” He reaches behind me and my bra releases with a simple snap of his fingers. As it loosens and he tosses it away, it feels like I’m letting go of a lot more than a piece of fabric, and my chest goes tight. I remember all the times I put my bra back on while Andy and I swapped terse, painful words, and how much I hated fighting that way. But then Jacob lays his palm on my ribs just beneath my breast and leaves it there, the warmth comforting my skin even as it makes me feel more bare than I’ve ever been.

  He lowers his head so his lips stroke over mine. Not a kiss, just pure texture. From there, he shifts until his breathing is tickling over the skin of my neck, my sensitive earlobe.

  “Every inch on the body feels touch differently, Jera,” Jacob whispers. “You just have to pay attention.”

  My...everything...falters then. My heart, my lungs, my brain, my memory. I am focused so completely on Jacob that the walls could have fallen down and I wouldn’t even feel the wind.

  The first place he touches me is the hollow at the base of my throat, where my blood clamors hot and chaotic in my veins.

  The second is the soft crook inside my elbow.

  There’s not a single place he neglects, and they are all my new favorites.

  My panties melt away somewhere in the midst of it with a light whisper of fabric along my legs, a giddy thrill that I have more bare skin for him to touch. When his slow kisses start climbing up from my knee, I can’t even remember what it is like to be nervous. To want anything in this world except his full attention on one tiny scrap of my body at a time.

  Finally, he settles where I’ve wanted him all along, his broad shoulders pressing my inner thighs wide apart to make room for him. Even now, he doesn’t hurry, doesn’t go to the obvious places. He finds new ones until I’m writhing and twisting beneath his tongue, breathing in a way that is stuck somewhere between desperation and pure joy.

  I feel it all too early, that edge at the beginning of an orgasm where everything gets too sensitive and I want more but it hurts. I whimper in sheer frustration and anger because I don’t think I can bear to push him away.

  “Shh,” he whispers, lifting his head. “You’re okay. I know.”

  In the end it’s so simple. Instead of moving more urgently when I’m almost there, his tongue gets softer, slower. He pulls away until there’s almost no touch at all, just the tide of sensations that have been building one caress at a time until the pull of them is stronger than I am.

  It’s happening. Oh my God, it’s finally happening. Everything goes fuzzy at the edges as the first ripple of orgasm spasms through me.

  This is going to change everything. Jacob was right—I’m not broken and now there’s nothing standing between us and forever. I can meet Maya and...shit, what if she doesn’t like me? Jacob makes it look effortless to be a great father figure and friend and boyfriend, but I don’t know if I can match him on any of those. After college, he’s going to design bridges while my band is still playing The Basement. He’s amazing, and I’m just...me.

  My every muscle is taut, so it takes me a second to realize the wave of pleasure has frozen, quivering right at the crest but not quite breaking. I jerk back, scooting toward the headboard, and Jacob lifts his head.

  “Jera?”

  “It didn’t work,” I blurt out, though I’m not entirely sure if that’s true. I leap off the bed, grabbing my clothes.

  He sits up, at home with his nudity in a way I’ve never been. “Hey, it’s okay. Slow down a second.”

  “It was never going to work!” I bite off, this whole room full of kids toys suddenly a glaring sign that I don’t belong. I don’t even know what half those things are.

  Snatching up a stray sock, I run. I throw on clothes as I go, hopping into my jeans and yanking my shirt over my head, keeping my bra and underwear balled in a fist as I rip open the front door.

  “Jera, wait! What’s wrong?”

  I only grabbed one boot on my way out of his bedroom, and I can’t stop to put it on or he’ll catch up to me, but at least my keys are in my pocket this time. I abandon the sock and boot and sprint barefoot down the sidewalk.

  It would be one thing if my body or my lack of expertise screwed things up again. But if he says goodbye now, he wouldn’t be saying it to our messed up sex life. He’d be saying it to all of me. And why wouldn’t he? I’m barely learning how to be a girlfriend. I have no idea how to be the mom Maya desperately needs, and I don’t dare try because if I do it wrong, I’ll hurt the person Jacob loves most in the world. He must have suspected I couldn’t do it, too, because all this time, he’s been protecting her from me.

  When I hear his voice behind me, I only run faster.

  Chapter 25: Running Backward

  I pull into a spot in front of Danny’s apartment complex and shut off the car, trying to get my mind around everything that has changed in the space of an hour.

  I wish I could hide behind anger, to rail at Jacob for lying to me, but he was right not to tell me.

  If he would have told me when we met that his “family responsibilities” included a two-year-old child, I would have run, far and fast enough to save us all. The only reason I allowed myself to want Jacob was because I figured if he didn’t like who I was, he could walk away. Maya doesn’t have that option.

  My mind keeps circling, studying each piece of my past like it’s a tarot card. If Jacob would have told me the truth about Maya, I never would have gone out with him. I never would have fallen for him, never would have started to believe that a guy could like me when I wasn’t putting on a show to impress him. Never would have known that I’m not always a cold fish in bed. But what was the point of going through any of that? Even if I’m enough for Jacob, I’ll never be enough for his baby sister.

  I used to think if I could find the right guy, he’d love me exactly the way I was, and that meant I’d never have to change. I should have known it wasn’t that simple. Love changes everything.

  Shoving tears off my cheeks, I open my car door, leaving my bra and underwear crumpled on the passenger seat like two more casualties of this shitty day. I limp barefoot across the parking lot, wincing at the gravel that bruises my feet. I left my stupid phone behind, so I don’t even know if Danny’s home. It doesn’t matter. If he’s not, one of his roommates will let me in. Jacob will look for me at my house, and I can’t face him right now.

  I trudge up the concrete stairs to the second floor of Danny’s apartment building. Maybe this is why Andy disappeared after we broke up. I’m sure the sight of my face was a reminder of every problem he couldn’t fix. Suddenly, it’s a lot harder to blame him for that.

  My knock is exhausted and off-center, but it must be enough because after a second, Tiki answers. Her canary-yellow dreadlocks are tied back today with something that looks like an old bike chain, a plasticky rhinestone protruding from the crooked piercing in her nose. She stares at me out of eyes ringed with two or three days’ accretion of eyeliner.

  “Your funeral.” She walks away, leaving the door open.

  I don’t know what that means, and I don’t care. I have no idea how Danny puts up with Tiki, and she’s the steadiest of his three roommates. The living room reeks of pot, incense, and oil paints, and I hold my breath as I pass through it and head up the hallway.

  Letting myself i
nto Danny’s room, I pause and hold onto the doorknob, rubbing one foot over the other to brush the dirt off. My eyes are pointed in front of me, but the whole world is kind of a blur, which is why it takes a minute for me to realize what I’m seeing. I blink and glance behind me to be sure I opened the right bedroom door. End of the hall, check, past the perpetually burned out bulb, check.

  Instead of Danny’s smoothly monastic furnishings, punctuated by pockets of chaos, it’s all chaos. The mattress hangs off the futon; the end of it protruding onto his desk, his sketchpads scattered on the floor beneath. The basket holding his charcoal pencils has rained out onto his pillow, and the basket for his shoes looks like someone put their foot through the bottom of it.

  His room looks the way I feel.

  Danny’s huddled half-in and half-out of the closet, knees up and fingers buried in his hair. Behind him is a carnage of black clothes, some of them ripped like he pulled them off the hangers too hard. I suspected he was still dating the girl Jax mentioned at our concert but I didn’t know for sure until this moment.

  I drop to the floor in front of Danny and wrap my arms around him, even though he’s all sharp angles right now and hard to hold. Laying my head on his forearm, I close my eyes. I miss Jacob already, the way his hands never felt like they were touching just my body. It felt like they were touching me, like he was drinking my personality in through his skin and he could never get enough. I wish I could know for sure if that’s how he felt, or if I wove it all out of how much I wanted it to be true.

  “Why does this shit keep happening to me?” Danny whispers.

  I shake my head against his too-hot skin, and I don’t open my eyes. I hurt everywhere and I don’t know how to stop. His pain just expands into mine until it all feels the same.

  “I meet a girl and she seems really into me, but then after a while, she wants me to change. It’s always something and fuck it, Jera, sometimes I want them so bad I almost think I could do it. That I could be different.”

  I suck in a sharp little breath, new tears hitting my eyes. “I know, D.” It’s been our problem since junior high. Every breakup is different, but somehow they’re all the same. There’s always something about us that doesn’t fit with other people.

  “She hated you,” he mutters, and I love him for how confused he sounds, like that’s not even possible.

  He lifts his head, our arms and knees still all tangled together. The overhead light is off, or maybe broken, and the evening light from the window is fading to a weak gray.

  His hazel eyes sharpen when they spot the tear streaks on my face. “Fuck,” he says. “Jacob?”

  I nod, the knot in my throat growing. I can’t talk about it yet, not even to Danny. “You first.”

  He shakes his head. “She’s been jealous of you, ever since she came to one of our gigs and saw us laughing together. Tonight, I was bummed that the Amp deal didn’t work out. I was trying to cheer myself up, so I was watching some of our best shows on YouTube. Anyway, my girlfriend came over while the video of ‘My Air’ was playing. She totally flipped her shit, and then I told her we passed on the record contract. She didn’t get why I was fine with it. Said I was going nowhere with my life and she wasn’t going to be stuck with some deadbeat.”

  “Who is this crazy bitch?” I burst out, and the corner of Danny’s mouth twitches. Not a smile but for a second there, it almost was. “I’m sorry, D, I want to be supportive, I really do, but mostly I just want to slap your girlfriend with a refrigerator, you know?”

  “She’s not as bad as you’re thinking.” He drops his head, and I scoot in so it can rest on my shoulder. I can read in the slump of his body how tired he is. “She knows what she wants, and I’m...I don’t know, not exactly that. I mean, I’m a tattoo artist. It’s not even as if that’s in the meantime while I go to school or something, like you. I want to be a tattoo artist, and even if we had signed with Amp, I’d still want to ink people. Maybe that’s a deadbeat thing to like, or whatever. I don’t know.”

  I mentally upgrade the refrigerator to a school bus. Preferably with teeth. And talons.

  “It’s not wrong to love art, Danny. Tattoos are a thousand times more permanent than paintings, and way more personal. If people are going to inject ink under their skin, they need somebody as talented as you, so it won’t get screwed up.”

  “It isn’t just my job she doesn’t like. It’s you, it’s me.” He lifts his head, his bright eyes gone dull. “People just don’t get us, you know? But you’re the only person who has never asked me to change and I don’t give a shit what she says, Jimi, I’m not giving you up.”

  My vision wavers and I hug him, his knee caught between us and digging into my ribs, but I wouldn’t let him go even if my bones started to crack.

  “Is Jacob pissed about us, too?”

  I shake my head into Danny’s neck. Jacob saw us sing “My Air” in person, and he was crazy about that song, even though he knew it wasn’t about him. In fact, the only thing he’s ever said about Danny is that he loves to watch us riff off each other during rehearsals. He had some kind of baseball metaphor for it that I didn’t get at all, but I liked the shine in his eyes when he was explaining it to me.

  “He want you to change?” Danny asks, his voice so raw that I know he was probably yelling when he wrecked his room, before I showed up.

  I start to nod, and then stop. He didn’t, not really. Jacob’s never questioned that music should be my career, never asked me to spend less time with my friends.

  The only thing he’s ever asked me for is a chance.

  I take a shuddering breath. This entire time, Jacob’s been so patient, making me laugh when I was wound up tight with stress, smiling when I expected him to scowl, and texting me so I never felt forgotten, even when we couldn’t get our schedules to match up for days on end. He’s been perfect. That’s exactly the problem because I’m not, and I’m just walking a tightrope, precisely balanced but knowing it can’t last. There’s a catch. There’s always a catch.

  “He needs me to be something I’m not,” I whisper. He needs someone strong, like him, who isn’t going to take off when things get tough. He needs a mom for Maya.

  I’m just a junior in college, with a band that can barely earn beer money and a house dripping with out-of-code asbestos, lead-based paint, and shag carpet harboring forty years’ worth of toddler-killing germs.

  “Danny!” shrieks Tiki from the front room. “What the fuck, man?”

  I pull back, sniffling. “What is her problem?”

  “I’ll deal with it. Be right back.”

  He shoves to his feet and pulls the bedroom door open. He’s not moving right. Heavy and angry; nothing like his normal fluid quiet. I hate his stupid ex even more for that.

  “I’ve got better things to do than get up and down off the couch a hundred times,” Tiki says, “answering the door for your stupid friends because you’re too lazy to come out of your stupid room. Like it’s not hard enough to chill with you throwing shit around back there.”

  Bong water bubbles, and I roll my eyes. I guess she’s not having that much trouble chilling. But wait, what did she say about answering the door? Did his ex come back?

  I shoot off the floor. I could use a fight right now, and who the hell does that girl think she is, insulting his band and his art?

  The front door scrapes open.

  “Jera probably told you to say she’s not here, but I know she is,” Jacob’s voice says. “Can I just talk to her, please?”

  All the blood in my veins turns to shards of ice and pain, and I jerk to a stop in the hallway just out of sight of the living room. Tiki’s bong starts to bubble again, marijuana smoke threading greasily through the incense.

  “You told her she had to change for you,” Danny says. “Which means you can point your feet the fuck away from my house.”

  The door smacks into something and then there’s a vibrating twang like it ricocheted back off.

  “I told her
what? Are you kidding me right now?”

  “You are going back down those stairs,” Danny says. “It can be on your feet or on your face. Believe me, I don’t care which.” His tone is utterly flat. Both times I’ve heard him sound like that before, he proceeded to get himself arrested.

  I scramble across the living room. “He didn’t have a choice about what he was asking of me,” I tell Danny. “He has a kid.”

  Sweeping past my friend, I shiver when my bare feet hit the concrete of the landing outside. If Danny has a reaction to that particular bomb drop, I don’t look up to see it. Out loud, all he says is, “You want shoes?”

  “I have her shoes,” Jacob says.

  I look up. My combat boots dangle from one of his hands, socks tucked neatly into the tops, my messenger bag and jacket in his other hand. I don’t know if I should be comforted or terrified that he gathered up all my things before he came after me.

  “Drama stays outside,” Tiki says, trying to slam the door. Danny stops her and looks to me.

  “It’s okay,” I promise him, and only then does he let Tiki slam the door closed. Normally, I’d lay into her for that, but I don’t know if Jacob plans on staying long enough for us to bother going inside. After a month, there’s not a single thing of mine in his house except what I left today. There’s something so wrong about the idea that he could walk away right now and leave no trace except the raggedness inside of me.

  “How did you know where I’d be?” My house is in the opposite direction from Danny’s apartment, and Jacob got here too fast. There’s no way he had time to loop around and check my place first.

  He exhales, and it sounds funny, like he pushed it out between his gritted teeth. I don’t dare raise my eyes high enough to check.

  “When the fuck are you going to admit that I know you, Jera?” he asks. I flinch. I’m not used to that word—not from his lips. “I want to know, honestly. What did I do so wrong that you feel safe to run to him when you’re upset, but not to me?”