The Broken Hearts' Society of Suite 17C

by LeighAnn Kopans

  “Do I remember being dropped like a used Kleenex by yet another guy since I started college? What do you think, Matt?”

  Matt’s eyes went wide and he shook his head, like he had just realized he was in a freaky alternate universe. “Amy, that is not at all what—”

  “Except that it absolutely is. You kissed me. You touched me, and I trusted you. And then you decided, what? You didn’t want me because I was a little out of it? Because I wasn’t picture perfect at that exact moment?”

  Matt held up his hands, palms out. “Hold on. No. Amy, I stopped out of respect for you. Out of respect for us.”

  She scoffed, hoping that calling forth some anger would keep more tears from pouring out. “Yeah, okay. Because I didn’t tell you that I wanted to.”

  “There is absolutely no way you could have made that decision last night, Amy. Not the way you should have, anyway, and I wasn’t about to let you. No matter how badly I wanted to.” He swallowed and looked at her, his eyes blazing.

  “I’m sorry,” Amy said, bitterness swirling in her stomach. “I thought I was in charge of my own body. I thought it was mine to control, not someone else’s. Definitely not yours. I thought you were the one who told me all that. Guess it’s different when you’re involved personally. You guys just can’t resist telling a girl what decisions she is or is not allowed to make, can you?”

  Matt winced like he’d been stung. “That’s not what I’m saying, and you know it. Just…last I knew, you didn’t even want to let me take you to dinner, and now you want to go all the way in my parents’ guest room after you had three cups of jungle juice in two hours? The first drinks of your whole life?”

  Amy swallowed hard and shook her head, refusing to look at him. He scooted forward and tipped her chin to him. “Maybe you don’t know what you want to happen between us, and that’s okay. You know? But if we’re going to do this, there has to be more behind it than disappearing inhibitions and convenience.”

  The fuzz in Amy’s brain seemed to have returned full force. His words didn’t quite make sense, didn’t really connect into an argument she could make sense of. One thought kept running through her mind—she tried to have sex with a guy, something Adam had begged her to do for months, and Matt had turned her down like it didn’t affect him at all.

  He’d turned her down.

  She couldn’t think of a response, could only wish it was possible to rewind to two minutes ago and do or say something, anything, differently. “I thought…I don’t…I’m sorry, I thought you liked me.”

  Matt let out another growl and shot to his feet, then started pacing at the end of the bed. “You don’t get it, Amy, do you? I don’t like you. I mean, I do like you. Every single little thing about you.”

  “But not like that,” Amy said, not even trying to swipe at the tears that plopped off her cheeks and dotted her jeans. “Not enough to want to…you know. Be with me.” Everything felt so heavy, from her head to her heart. Even the words tumbling out over her cotton-coated tongue were thick, labored.

  “Yes! Yes, like that. Okay? More than that.” He moved to her side of the bed, and just as quickly as he’d stood, he was down on his knees beside her, grasping her hands, like he was begging for something she couldn’t understand.

  “I don’t like you. I love you, Amy. I love your smile, I love your passion for something in life you haven’t even found yet. I love how you laugh at my stupid jokes, and haven’t ever, not once, questioned meeting me for coffee every single day, even when you didn’t order any half the time. I love your faith, that you still have it even though so much has gone wrong for you in the last few months. I love how I can’t stop thinking about you. And I hate it, too, because it means that I love you. Even though I know you don’t love me back. That’s why I can’t do this. That’s why I know that you don’t really want to do this.”

  “I can decide what I want for myself. I was drunk, but I wasn’t so drunk that I didn’t know what I wanted. What I still want.”

  Matt’s jaw flexed and he looked down at the ground again. “What about what I want? Does that matter to you at all?”

  Amy threw her hands in the air. “Of course it does, Matt. You’re my best friend. Of course I care about what you want.” He stared at the wall, his jaw clenched, and somehow he looked even more injured now than he had when he first walked in. Amy reached out to grab his hand, but he pulled away and stood up, pacing at the end of the bed.

  “I don’t know what to say to you, Amy. I don’t know how to make this okay for both of us.” His steps got faster, and he watched them flash over the carpet.

  “Matt. Matt, stop it.” Amy shot to her feet too, and stood in his path. She didn’t know what possessed her, but her hands reached up and grabbed his upper arms. “Just…stop.” When she felt him still, her fingers brushed down, grazing the muscle on the inside of his forearms, then finally rested, tip to tip, with his. Matt’s head fell forward to rest against Amy’s, which tipped up slightly, begging for contact.

  Finally, she added, “This is okay. Right here. Right now.” She pushed up on her tiptoes to make their lips meet, not thinking twice about morning breath or the coffee that most likely still lingered on his tongue. She didn’t care about anything but showing him how she felt about him, right here, right now, so he would understand how serious she was. The rough noise that came from the back of his throat and rumbled against her lips, then his long fingers pushing through her hair, holding her close to him, made her heart soar.

  “I love you,” he said when he pulled away from her a moment later. His fingers drifted down to her neck, pressing in the tiniest bit in time with his heartbeat.

  Amy’s heart thudded painfully. “I love you.” Her voice was simple, quiet. Honest. Begging him to understand.

  Matt’s eyes closed, too tightly to be from happiness. The pain squeezed through his voice when he replied. “Then be mine. Not, like, I would own you, or whatever. But be with me. Promise me you’re planning on tomorrow. Share your days with me. Let me be yours.”

  “I can’t.” Amy’s arms wrapped around Matt’s waist. “I can’t be in a relationship with you, I can’t share my everyday life with you until I’ve figured out what I want it to be.” She squeezed him close, held on for dear life.

  “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing since you got to Northern?”

  Amy tucked her head into Matt’s chest, hugged him closer, even as she felt his hold on her starting to weaken. Please understand. “I’ve been spending all this time learning who I could be, what my life could be like, yes. But you’ve been right by my side the whole time. I’m grateful for that, but I’ve never been on my own.” The force and depth of that truth threatened to drag her down into a deep, dark hole, but she fought to stay on the surface.

  “I understand,” he said, letting his arms drop so that all that was left of their embrace was Amy, clinging to him where he stood. An emptiness sunk into her heart and bloomed through her chest—the realization that this thing between them, whatever it was, was ending. “I understand, but that means we can’t do this.”

  Hearing it the second time didn’t make it any easier. She loosened her grip on him, pulled away, backed up a step. How was it possible that this felt like the dream and last night felt like the only thing that was real? How could something that felt so right to her feel so wrong to him?

  She barely realized that she’d started to cry, and when tears dripped down her cheeks, she didn’t move to find a tissue. She didn’t want to move, didn’t want to be the one to walk away. The fear of never being this close to him, never touching him like this again, was so real that it terrified her.

  Matt was right. She didn’t know what she really wanted. She only knew her feelings were real—the feelings of wanting, and of fear. Sorting them out was becoming more difficult by the second.

  When Matt stepped past her to reach for the tissue box on the nightstand, the tears came harder. He handed her a few tissues, then motioned for her
to sit beside him on the bed. “You have to understand that this kills me, Amy.” His words were choked. She believed him. “There’s nobody else,” he continued. “Right now, I can’t imagine anyone else being as perfect for me as you are. And there’s nothing I want more than to be with you—in all the ways. If you figure out who you are, and that that’s what you want too…you know where to find me.”

  “But I do,” Amy said, and she caught a flash of hopefulness in his eyes. “I told you. I want…this. I’ve never been surer of anything than I was the moment I asked you to kiss me.” That kiss felt so close and so far away at the same time, it seized her heart.

  “I know you said you love me. But that’s not enough. Not enough for us to do this, Ames.” He gestured to the bed and she felt a flash of shame for how she’d put herself out there, what she’d exposed. “Tell me you want to be with me, that you want us to be together.”

  Amy’s mouth dropped open, full of excuses about heartbreak and independence that, while real, didn’t come close to being enough for Matt, right here, right now.

  “Amy, we could even be working toward the next date. I don’t care how small it is. I’m not saying we have to get married or anything. College kids have sex. Humans have sex, even when they’re not married, and that doesn’t make them bad people. That’s not a bad thing. But I have to know that you’ll still want to be mine the next morning over coffee, or at Easter services three months from now, just as much as you said you did that one time you accidentally drank way too much with my stupid high school friends.”

  How could she possibly know that? How could she possibly promise to imagine a future with Matt when that exact thing had ended so disastrously before?

  She couldn’t. How could she let another guy become her everything, a guy she loved even more than she’d ever loved Adam? She couldn’t. Not if she didn’t want to be totally crushed once again.

  Amy forced her body to attention. Pulled her hands away, wiped at her eyes with the pads of her fingers. Then, commanding a stony face, looked at Matt again. “Okay. You’re right.”

  He pressed his lips together in a hard line and blinked fast, twice, three times. Then nodded, getting to his feet again. “You get some rest, okay? I’ll take you back to Northern later on.”

  “No, that’s…I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Amy mumbled. “I’ll call Rion.” She didn’t know what Rion was doing, or even where exactly she was, but the idea of sitting beside Matt for two hours after what had just happened was unbearable. “She’s only like an hour from here,” Amy lied.

  Matt sighed. “Just…okay.” Amy could hear that he was holding back his concern, and his downcast eyes spoke to just how much defeat was pushing it aside. The swirling fuzziness in Amy’s head started to thicken into a heavy ache, probably made a million times worse by the tears that started up all over again, taking hold of her heart and her core and yanking them back and forth so that it was all she could do to muffle her sobs in her pillow.

  Rion

  Christmas was shit. Well, at first. She’d gone back to the house, awoken the furnace from a long slumber, and sat under an electric blanket until the living room warmed up enough for her to move her fingers. She hadn’t gone grocery shopping, and now that she was bundled up, watching the day’s snow start to fall, she really didn’t think she would. The box of granola bars and jar of applesauce she’d found in the pantry would do just fine for today.

  She’d promised Mom a visit, and tried to psych herself up for it in every possible way. But when the sky darkened on Christmas Eve, she still hadn’t driven up to the tall chain-link gates across town, hadn’t been able to imagine what she would say, or how she’d even be able to look Mom in the eye.

  Christmas morning, when there was a knock at the door, she’d ducked down further on the couch, cursing herself for not parking her car a couple blocks away. She didn’t want to answer questions about how her mom was doing, didn’t want to look into well-meaning neighbors’ pitying eyes when they asked how she was doing. Honestly, she didn’t even want to sign for a fucking package. She had a prison visit to psych herself up for.

  One more series of knocks on the door, and along with sinking into the blanket, she’d started to sink into a depression. She berated herself. At least you have a fucking roof over your head, bitch. At least one of your parents is still alive. There are other kids that have it so much worse.

  It was true. She knew kids in the group home whose parents were addicted to crack, or serving life in prison, or who basically lived at the local bar and slept in their own vomit half the time. Compared to that, a father dead in a car crash and a mother in minimum-security prison looked downright cushy. But none of the platitudes she recited at herself made any difference. She was sad, and she was lonely, and there was no fucking way she was going to go out of her way to see Crash again before school started.

  As much as she enjoyed spending time with him—hell, as much as she was falling in love with him, an issue she was more aware of each and every day—she wouldn’t push herself into his life. She’d already let her emotions lead her to do stupid things that she’d lived to regret. She felt herself falling for him. It was like a dream where she watched herself tumble headlong over a cliff—with a mixture of interest and vague terror.

  Yet the experience of being so warm and comfortable and deep with him was too good for her to leave willingly.

  Finally, the knocking stopped, and her shoulders relaxed. And then, her phone buzzed in her hand, lit up with a green text bubble and six beautiful, thrilling words: “Hey Miss Hermit. Answer the door.”

  Rion had squealed and jumped out of her cocoon of blankets like there was a fire under her ass, then sprinted to the door. She was in old sweatpants, no bra, and three layers of old shirts—her hair was standing up on end and she hadn’t even bothered to put eye shadow on that morning. But she only thought about those things long after she let Crash in, wrapped her legs around his waist, and let him carry her back to the couch and strip every layer of clothing off of her with his chilled fingers and his teeth.

  There was a specialty art store he wanted to check out close by, he’d explained in the afterglow, when they’d halfheartedly fought over the electric blanket—it wasn’t big enough to cover both their asses. Rion had finally gotten him to admit that “close by” was almost an hour away, but she only complained for a little bit before he used his mouth to shut her up. Later, when he’d been looking for food in the kitchen and found only her grandmother’s old recipe box, he’d gone to the store and come back with armfuls of grocery bags.

  It turned out that Crash was an amazing cook, too. He made sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, a classic roast, mashed potatoes, and, unbelievably, pumpkin pie. It all filled her stomach when she fell asleep wrapped around him on the couch to A Christmas Story.

  That night, she’d dreamed that she and Crash had moved in together, into this house, the one she’d grown up in, lived almost every happy moment of her life in. He set up a mixing studio for her in the spare bedroom and brought her homemade dinner while she worked late into the night.

  The day after Christmas, she’d woken up with his tongue between her legs. After the most amazing two minutes of her life to date, she’d screamed his name, and melted into his laughing chest when he came up for air a few seconds later. “You know what’s fucking stupid? You still don’t know my real name,” he said, dipping his head to suck at her neck just below her ear.

  Waves of lingering pleasure coursed through her, and she forgot for that moment that she didn’t really want to know his name. “Mmm. Stupid.”

  “I mean,” he said, shifting on top of her, pressing his hard cock between her legs, hitting the exact spot that still throbbed from what he’d just done. “It’s fucking unbelievable that you’ve fallen in love with a guy named Colin.”

  “What?” she moaned as he pressed in.

  “Yep,” he growled. “Head over heels in love. Which, you know,” he g
runted, starting to move slowly in and out, pulling unbelievable friction through her and making her head spin, “I should get a lot of credit for, considering I had to piss in a cup before you’d let me take you out for pancakes.” He bent his head to suck one of her nipples into his mouth, and she gasped, the words ‘Colin’ and ‘love’ swirling around her brain and refusing to land anywhere solid.

  Until afterwards, when they lay in the still early morning quiet, wrapped up in each other, like they’d done every time for the past couple months. Habits, comforts. Rion was developing them with Crash—Colin—without thinking twice about them.

  So there, with warmth radiating through every cell of her body, Rion made a choice. Instead of watching herself fall for him and fighting every inch of the way, she was going to go along for the ride. She tucked her head into his shoulder and murmured, “You were so right.” She felt the breath catch in his chest, cherished the tension she imagined buzzing against her cheek.

  Finally, he said, “About not knowing my name?”

  “About the love thing,” she answered, letting the words come out strong and sure before she could stop herself. “Head over heels. Definitely right. Colin.”

  Then he dug his fingers into the spot right under her ribs where he knew it killed her every time, and she tucked in on herself, consumed with laughter. She barely noticed her phone buzzing on the nightstand, until it stopped and started, stopped and started again. A total of five times.

  “If that is my mom in jail, fuck her,” Rion said, trying to hide in Crash’s strong, warm side even more.

  “You’re going to hermit town again, babe.” Crash pulled “I will not let you. You have so much life left to live.” He rolled over and grabbed her phone, leaving her cold. She moaned into the sheets. “Oh, fuck. It’s Amy.”

  Rion sat bolt upright, pulling the sheet over her chest. “Is she okay? She texted me she went home with Copperhead for Christmas because of her dick ex. But I didn’t hear from her after that…” Rion grabbed the phone and scrolled through Amy’s messages.