The Broken Hearts' Society of Suite 17C

by LeighAnn Kopans

  So when the door slid open on floor seventeen, Rion forced the slight trembling from her hands and darted one out to catch his. She gave him a smile as she pulled him forward, just to let him know it was friendly, inviting. Trusting. The door clicked shut behind her, heavy, filling the air with the tension of Crash’s waiting.

  They were on her turf now. She gestured around. “This is the common room,” she said. Crash took in the decorations Amy and, a little bit, Arielle, had filled the walls with. A random movie poster on one wall, a white board with a giant cork board on either side, filled with whatever flyers and takeout menus the girls had deemed relevant. Conspicuously, no snapshots of any of the girls with anybody else. It seemed like most of them had wanted to start with a clean slate when they were here.

  “Looks like you guys are pretty close,” Crash said, pointing to the one snapshot Arielle had made them take after the first Society meeting. A selfie. They looked so together, and, actually, happy.

  “Um…I guess we’re friends. Like I said, it’s kind of unlikely that we’re getting along. And lucky.” She dropped her bag and sized him up. Rion had never seen Crash look uncomfortable, even when he was about to piss in a cup. Now he stood in the middle of their common room, fidgeting like he didn’t know what to do with his limbs. ”Just…have a seat. Read a magazine or something. I’m gonna shower.”

  “And you want me to wait?”

  “For your coat,” she said with a smile. “Yeah.”

  She ducked into the bathroom and let his coat drop to the ground with a thud. She picked it up and examined it, sighing. It was soaked with dingy water. Hopefully she hadn’t ruined it.

  Soon, she was wincing as the hot water hit her chilled skin, and after a few minutes, standing in the blissfully warm steam of the shower, staring at her feet, trying to get her scrambled thoughts together on what to do next. She towel-dried her hair, thanked whatever deities were out there that Arielle had a supply of hair elastics in her disordered pile of crap that had pissed Rion off just that morning, and swiped on some mascara and lip gloss. She nodded at the mirror. Yeah, this was okay.

  If only she’d remembered to bring some clothes in with her. She sighed, thankful that at least she had a small frame that would be mostly covered by the towel. If Crash was going to see her naked, the first time wasn’t going to be when a heavy strip of terrycloth happened to fall or slip.

  That thought alone sent a surge of heat through Rion. It wasn’t embarrassment or fear. It was pure lust.

  She knew he’d be all over her, and that she’d feel his lip ring graze places of her body that would send her over the edge.

  An edge that threatened weakness, one she hadn’t even allowed herself to get close to for a very long time.

  Rion gripped the top of her damp towel with both hands and pulled it apart, blowing out a pent-up breath slowly and looking down. Moving from the shower to the chilled air had hardened her nipples, and she admired how cute they looked over the heavy roundness of her breasts. Her stomach was smooth, and the navel piercing there was pretty damn cute. And she’d just trimmed her pubes. She wouldn’t look too bad naked, not too bad at all.

  And she had at least three hours in this suite with Crash to herself.

  What a strange feeling to be happy to be here alone, instead of trying to be alone in some other place, some crowd of people she’d never seen before and would never see again. Her heart twisted in two when she realized—being alone with Crash was what she wanted. Being alone with Crash was enough.

  Stop it, you sentimental bitch. He’s probably getting impatient waiting. Maybe he wants to go home.

  But she knew he didn’t.

  Her hand didn’t tremble as she reached for the door handle. In fact, there wasn’t an ounce of hesitation in her body. It was like her instinct had taken over, and for once, she was mindlessly, steadily, doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing.

  Slowly she stepped out of the bathroom and back into her room, forcing another door handle down, more steps into a perfectly certain uncertainty.

  She walked into her room to see Crash, his heavy boots all the way up to his hair flopped over his brow, fast asleep on her extra long twin mattress.

  She let out a sigh, full of steam and keyed-up sexual tension, escaping from her body in that one breath. Once again, Crash had foiled her. He’d taken every image she’d had in her head of tearing his clothes off, licking his abs, and moaning as he thrust into her, and met it with a completely different sight—one that told her to take care of him.

  His head turned to the side and he made a low moan from deep in his throat, his eyebrows knitting together in his sleep. Across the cheek that had been on the blanket was the clear indent of a spiral notebook binding, and Rion rushed over to pull it gently out from under his head. When her fingers brushed his temple, his mouth twitched up in a smile and a soft sigh rose from his lips.

  Goddammit, if she wasn’t careful, sleeping Crash would melt her cold, dead heart to a puddle before she even got a chance to fuck him. In her short dating life, sex was first and feelings were closely guarded, most likely not explored or given at all.

  Rion shivered. The air in her room was even colder than that in the bathroom, probably because it sat on the outside wall of the suite. She reached her arm out to brush Crash’s fingers, and his hands were like ice. On tiptoes, she pulled a heavy blanket from the top shelf of her closet. It was rough and an ugly gray, but it had come with the room. Rion knew it was clean, because Amy had offered to wash everyone’s linens the first week they were at school. Crossing the little space quickly, Rion draped it over Crash, marveling at the way it left the toe of his boot peeking out, while she had been able to curl all the way up inside it like a turtle hiding in a shell.

  No emotions before fucking, she reminded herself, smiling a little at her admission that fucking Crash was inevitable, even if it wasn’t going to happen right now. But when she pulled it up over his chest, and felt the hard muscle beneath it, her body started moving independently of her brain again. She let her fingers trail down his shoulder, across his strong forearm, down the back of his hand. And when her fingertips grazed his, he closed them into his palm, gripping them firmly.

  Rion’s eyes darted to the humungous sleeping guy’s face. Eyes still closed, lashes still fluttering in the deepest of sleep. And then a low hum from his lips, the beginning of words.

  “Mmmm, baby. Come here. So cold.” She could tell there was little effort in the way he tugged her down toward him by the hand, and yet it would have been impossible to break away even if she’d wanted to. If she let him pull her down on top of him, he’d wake up, and whatever wonderful thing he was seeing in his dreams would be ripped away from him.

  “Everyone deserves sweet dreams,” Rion murmured, and let her body, still wrapped only in a towel, fall perfectly into the narrow space between his body and the edge of the bed. Lying there stiffly, she waited for Crash to say more from the dream world. But the only change was a relaxed expression, instead of the drawn eyebrows he’d had a second ago, and the slightest of smiles.

  Rion toed up the edge of the blanket and wiggled her body underneath it, making the towel fall away from her thigh as she did. Then she tried to control her brain at the one monumental thought that kept skittering through it—You are in bed with Crash. You are in bed with him, and his arm is around you, and you’re sharing a blanket, and you, my dear, are naked as the day you were born.

  More naked, in fact, than she’d ever been with Tate. Probably closer, too—he always liked to fuck in a position that let him see her body, then disengage as soon as he could. This full-body touching was weird. Very weird, but very nice.

  The room was bright, but pressed against the hard curve of Crash’s body, she felt warm, and held, and secure. When his arm wrapped around her waist and tugged her even closer, she only tried to resist for a second before realizing that, as much as she’d programmed herself to resist being squeezed, penned in, weakened
—his arms felt like they belonged around her.

  And then, exhausted, she fell slowly, peacefully asleep.

  Amy

  Talking to Mom had been almost impossible lately.

  Dad was no problem. Ever since she’d turned nine or ten, she’d stopped being Daddy’s little girl in his eyes and turned into a little woman. Amy would never forget the first time she’d asked him a question—probably about some boy or another—and he’d awkwardly chuckled, then called to her mother. “Leslie? Your daughter has a question for you.” He’d patted her on the head and turned back to his football game.

  Amy knew that, on some level, she’d been a disappointment to her father. The second child who had not only been another girl, but had such a traumatic birth that her mother wouldn’t be able to have any more children. Amy had taken away Dad’s chances of ever having a son.

  Which was why, she was sure, he’d loved Adam so much. The day they started dating in eighth grade, she’d seen it in his eyes. It was like she’d gotten married a decade early, and she was going to spend the time still living at home, but belonging to Adam. Which meant that Adam would belong to her family, too. Since that day, Dad’s interaction with her had basically involved giving her a side hug, kissing her head, asking how her day was, and then talking to Adam about football over dinner.

  Mom was different. Mom listened to her every plan for the future, her every detail about every date with Adam, her every little daydream about the life they’d lead together. Everything with the assumption that Amy would follow the teachings that good girls of their church were expected to follow—no sex before marriage. Most of them did “everything but,” and were too shy to define what “everything but” meant. Most of their mothers knew, and none of them did anything about it. It was a the dirty secret that kept Tripp Creek’s teen hormones quelled and its good Christian image upheld at the same time.

  So that late fall afternoon, right before Adam’s eighteenth birthday party, when he’d let his hands wander under her shirt and over her breasts—under her bra—Amy had had no idea whether this fell into the ‘everything but’ category or the ‘sex before marriage’ category. She knew what sex was, parts-wise, but when Adam’s mouth had grazed her nipple, then sucked there, it felt more intimate than anything she’d ever imagined doing before being married to someone.

  It had also felt really, really good. And that had terrified her.

  So, when mom had asked how their date was, she’d frozen up. For the first time ever, she hadn’t known whether she could talk to Mom about something without getting her disapproval, without making her freak out, without initiating a CIA-level watch on her at all times. So she’d said it was fine, talked about the wildflower bouquet Adam had brought her, then stewed in her own turmoil about the whole issue for a week. A week later, as the family walked to church, Amy had finally gotten the nerve to ask Mom the question. Amy figured that if the conversation got really uncomfortable, it would have to stop when they reached church no matter what. Mom had looked at Amy like she’d asked whether bread needed yeast to rise.

  “What do you mean, what counts as sex? What makes you even wonder that? You and Adam haven’t ever done anything further than kissing. I know that,” Mom had said when Amy had opened her mouth, cutting her off, “because Adam is a pastor’s son and you are a good Christian girl and you’ve made a commitment, before the entire congregation at your baptism, to live your life for nothing but His glory.” Amy had fought to keep from rolling her eyes. God’s glory was fine, but she wanted to talk to her mom, not a theology professor. “And you’ve promised your father—and me—that you will keep yourself pure until marriage.”

  Mom had nodded at her own words, trying to reassure herself of her daughter’s chastity, and looked back to the path. Amy thought her steps quickened, but she couldn’t really tell. She was focusing too hard on holding back tears.

  From that day on, it had been hard to know what she could tell Mom and what she couldn’t. One thing she knew for sure was that the only thing she could say about her time with Adam was, “It was a great date, he was a perfect gentleman.” Then, at Christmas, when Adam’s hands had ventured below her waistband, had pushed inside her body, she was too afraid to even ask her sister. Bridget was closer to Mom than Amy was, and that one walk to church had scared Amy off the topic of s-e-x forever.

  So much so that when things got ten times worse in the Spring, she was too afraid to do anything but hide in her room.

  So she’d managed to bite back most of her tears when she told mom about the breakup, and made sure to paint the details of perfectly obedient Amy doing the major that everyone agreed would be great for Amy. She loved working in the church nursery so much, and she planned to move back home. Probably, mom said, this would all blow over, and she’d marry Adam anyway.

  Early Childhood Education, Mom had said, was a perfect career for a girl like her. She could take a break from working to have babies, and go back to work when they went to school. Most people didn’t want to teach preschool anyway, especially not in their little town. Amy never told mom that she only liked working in the church nursery because the growl in Pastor Mason’s voice when he gave his sermons scared the heck out of her. Especially when she worried so much that she and Adam may or may not have been guilty of the very sins he preached against every week.

  So she’d started in her Intro to Early Childhood Education class, numb from Adam’s betrayal and desperately clinging to something from her old life that she thought she was sure of. But by now, the first week of November, she’d lost track of how many times she’d fallen asleep doing the assigned reading, how many phone calls she’d ignored from the local Head Start office trying to put her in a field placement, how many times she’d daydreamed in class instead of paying attention to the subject material that was supposed to fascinate her.

  She had no idea what to tell Mom as she stood outside the ECE class building with her graded midterm in hand, staring at the red marks and scathing comments, wondering how she could fail so spectacularly at the one thing everyone expected her to be perfect for.

  A single tear ran down her cheek, and she swiped it away. Her phone, tucked away in the side pocket of her purse, buzzed against her. She knew it was Mom, who, in her empty-nesting, had taped both Amy and Bridget’s schedules to her fridge, calling them every day after their afternoon class.

  She also knew she couldn’t answer Mom’s call. Ever since she’d felt shamed by their one and only sex talk, Amy hadn’t walked into a single conversation with Mom without a contingency plan. And now she had none.

  Amy forced her legs to walk toward Francis, where she used to walk in search of coffee, and now walked in search of Matt. They never planned to meet, but he was always there when she walked in. In fact, she’d lost track of how many times they’d met there, lost track of how many times he’d guessed just the kind of drink she wanted and already had it on order for her. Matt’s Jesus t-shirts had started to grow on her, and he claimed that her presence helped him focus on his school work. “It’s one thing to be a slacker in the super comfortable company of your own bad self,” he’d said, “but when there’s someone you respect sitting right across the table from you, it’s a lot harder to spend the whole afternoon watching cheesy reality shows on YouTube.”

  She knew it wasn’t true. Not the part about wasting time on YouTube—Matt was always doing that—but about the productivity. They never got very much work done when they were together, because they talked the whole time. Matt was passionate in a way that would have had him labeled crazy back home. If there was a topic that interested him, or something that tugged at his heartstrings, he would obsessively learn everything about it, and then report back to her. Once, he had said something about non-traditional Christianity, and Amy had challenged him.

  “There’s only one kind of Christianity,” she’d said. “You either believe or you don’t.”

  “So you’re telling me that Jesus’ followers were the
same kind of Christians that ransacked Muslim and Jewish settlements in the name of Christ?”

  “I…” a blush had come to her face. “I honestly am not sure what you’re talking about. We never learned much about that in history classes.”

  “You never learned about the Crusades?”

  “A little. I learned about King Richard. How he fought for what he believed in, civilized a lot of towns, gained land for England. But I didn’t think it was a big deal. Definitely not a bad thing.”

  “History is written by the people who won,” Matt had said, shaking his head. “And they never want to look bad.”

  Amy wouldn’t lie—the whole exchange had made her feel pretty stupid and a little uncomfortable. But somehow, she’d felt comfortable enough with Matt to tell him so. And his response had floored her. “Good,” he’d said. “If we don’t feel uncomfortable, we’re not learning. Now, you tell me something that makes me feel all squirmy.”

  Matt had given her his full attention then, and she’d felt whatever confidence she’d lost to her ignorance of the Crusades come flooding back.

  That day, she’d just come from her introduction to urban planning class—one that had been suggested by her advisor to bolster the Early Childhood Education major Amy had been planning on. And the advisor had been right. In short order, she’d learned buckets of things that tied city layouts to educating the littlest minds in the country.

  Quality of education was closely tied to socioeconomic status of the local environment, and kids who didn’t go to a good preschool and kids who were poor were usually one in the same. Those kids didn’t do well in Kindergarten. To Amy, that information had felt like a gut-punch. For one, she had never known that, and for another, any ideas she’d had about helping children learn in her cozy community back home would do nothing to help the fact that there were kids whose lives were determined by how much money was put into their education at the age of three.