I couldn’t move, though, and I couldn’t stop. My brain kept going over the images that had been cycling through it on an endless loop all summer: Julianne and Jill, coming to the Examiner offices late that night, both of them serious, looking older than their years. Julianne’s face as she described Daniels’s advances. And then the loop veered off reality and sped through pictures I could only imagine: Julianne’s lifeless face as she lay on the floor—Beth, who had reported on the suicide for the Allenhurst Examiner, had talked to the cops and learned that she’d been found on the floor of her bedroom, a detail that had been kept out of the initial news reports. Jill’s face when she found Julianne cold and dead.
I’d been seeing those images; they weren’t new. But now I was really seeing them. The color was turned up, the sound was turned up—everything was turned up.
My sobs grew louder, more anguished. It was almost like they were coming from outside my body. I could feel my chest heaving, but at the same time, it was like it was happening to someone else. I could hear myself becoming more and more unhinged, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
Officer Perez could, though. Arturo could. He held me tight me as I cried. Those arms I’d perved out over for so many years… It was like they were containing everything inside me that was trying to fly away. They were strong, but patient.
They reminded me of the only other time someone had taken that much care with me. And of course, that would have been the only other time I stood inside Arturo’s embrace, that night Royce was on his coke binge and I became uncharacteristically hysterical.
“I see you,” he’d said that night. I thought he’d meant right then. Like he was saying it to snap me out of that weird, scary fight-or-flight mode I’d been in.
But maybe he really did. Really, truly did.
The thought was shocking enough to make me stop crying.
Intriguing enough to make me pull back against those steadfast arms, which immediately loosened their grip but did not fully release me.
Compelling enough to let my hands float up and come to rest on his cheeks, which were dusted with the stubble of late afternoon.
I kept expecting him to stop me, to push me away like he had last time, in his car after that disaster of a Delta Chi party. To say that my defenses were down, that my judgment was clouded by my emotional state.
It was true. But it wasn’t all of the truth. The truth was, I wanted to be seen. No, I wanted him to see me. No, not even that. The hard kernel of truth I carried around deep inside was that I just wanted him.
“This is not a good idea,” he murmured before my lips hit his.
“You’re not thinking clearly,” he rasped as I let go of his cheeks and snaked my arms around his neck.
“I’m not thinking clearly,” he whispered as I hitched myself up, holding onto his neck for leverage as I wrapped my legs around his waist.
He caught me. Kept me.
Kissed me.
He licked deep into my mouth, stroking me with a tongue that was insistent but unhurried, which should have been a contradiction but somehow wasn’t.
I hadn’t had a boyfriend since high school. There had been a couple casual, short relationships the first semester of freshman year at Allenhurst, but once I started the column, I’d eschewed boys entirely. They kept me too busy to do the socializing necessary to make and maintain my connections. Still, between high school and those early college encounters, I’d had my share of kisses.
This was not like those kisses. The boys I’d kissed before had always made me feel like kissing was a prelude to something else. Something to get out of the way so other, bigger, more important things could happen. They might not have meant it that way, but there was an undercurrent of impatience that I could usually sense, like their desire was too big to be kept at bay for very long.
Arturo’s desire was big. I didn’t mean that literally, but it was that, too. I could feel him, thick and hard, between my legs, the heavy denim of his jeans not sufficient to contain him. But it was also controlled. He pressed against my now-wet panties but not in a demanding way, not like he was trying to move things along, more like it simply felt good. I got the feeling that he could stand there forever, supporting my full body weight and kissing me. Like he wanted to stand there forever. Like kissing me was enough. Like I, right now, as wretched as I was, was enough.
But of course it couldn’t last. He was too good. I could only be happy that it lasted as long as it did—that it happened at all—before he set me down. He tried to, anyway. He broke our kiss with a gasp and loosened his grip on me, but since I had all four limbs wrapped around him like a koala bear hugging a tree, nothing happened.
He laughed, which was pretty much the last thing I would have expected, and his arms came back around me and he carried me inside my apartment, kicking the door shut with his foot. He walked clear across my living room until he was standing over my sofa, then tried to dislodge me again. I had to let him. It would have been too embarrassing not to.
“Don’t make a big speech about how that was a mistake,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” I echoed. I had braced myself for an onslaught of recriminations and regrets.
“Well, it was, but I won’t make the speech if you don’t want me to.”
I blinked, stunned into silence by his agreeableness.
“You have classes tomorrow?”
It all came back, rushing at me like a roaring river—where I was, who I was, what I was. It was like I’d been fighting to swim against the current, like some stupid, doomed salmon, and kissing Officer Perez had taken me out of that current for a moment, for long enough to get my breath—for long enough to forget.
But it was almost worse, having had that reprieve, to be plunged back into the cold, black, relentless water.
“Your classes,” he was saying, over-enunciating and stooping so he could get his face right close to mine. “What time are they over tomorrow?”
“Four,” I said.
He stepped back with a small smile, as if my answer pleased him. “I’m on the seven-to-three shift tomorrow, so that’s perfect.”
“Perfect for what?”
“What building is your last class in?” he asked, ignoring my question in favor of posing his own.
“Stanton Hall,” I answered.
“I’ll pick you up outside Stanton at five past four,” he said. He glanced at the floor. No, at my feet, actually, which, like my legs, were bare. I wanted to wiggle my toes under his scrutiny, but I forced myself to be still. “Wear comfortable shoes.”
“Is this a…date?” I asked, bewildered.
“Nope,” he said. Then he put on his sunglasses and walked out the door.
Chapter Eight
Arturo
When I pulled up in front of Stanton Hall, I no longer thought what I was doing was a mistake.
I’d driven home from Dawn’s place yesterday afternoon and gotten immediately into a cold shower, whereupon I’d sifted through everything that was fucked up about the whole situation. I was nine years older than she was. I was an employee of the college, and she was a student. Worse, I was in a position of authority at the college where she was a student. True, I didn’t have power over her academic future like that Daniels asshole had over Julianne’s, but it was difficult to get more authoritative than “cop.”
But in the end, I couldn’t convince myself that any of it mattered enough to dissuade me. I hadn’t gotten as far as I had in my career without having good instincts, and my instincts said today was going to be hell for Dawn. She was drowning, and she needed help. She needed a friend. Despite her previous popularity, I didn’t think she truly had any of those.
The emphasis needed to be on friend, though. I couldn’t undo the past, but I could do my job, which was to look out for the people on this campus. Wasn’t that why I was so stubbornly hanging on here despite all the family pressure to jump ship?
Except, I had to admit, I
wasn’t really here in the line of duty, as evidenced by the fact that I was driving my own car. Dawn was probably looking for the cruiser, because although I was parked less than half a block down from the main entrance to the building, idling on the side of the road, she didn’t recognize my beat-up Camaro.
Her obliviousness gave me a few moments to watch her unobserved. My gut had been right. She looked like she’d been through the wringer. Her hair was back to its usual poufy state, so she’d clearly tried to armor herself for the day, but her eyes didn’t lie. I’d flattered myself that some warmth had come back into them by the time I left her apartment yesterday, but they were back to being haunted. Hunted.
I pulled up closer to where she was standing and watched her eyes widen—anything was better than that haunted look—when she realized it was me. I leaned over and cranked down the window. “Hop in.” She smiled almost shyly as she obeyed, which was weird, because I was pretty sure Dawn Hathaway didn’t do shy. At least the old Dawn Hathaway hadn’t. I wanted to pepper her with questions, but I held back, letting a surprisingly comfortable silence settle over us as I navigated away from campus and onto the highway. Allenhurst was a typical college town, a mini-metropolis full of students, hippies, and townsfolk. But it was remote—you didn’t have to drive far from town to get to the country.
“So you’re not, like, planning to abduct me or anything, I hope,” she said, breaking the silence when I pulled off the interstate onto a rural two-lane highway.
“They kind of frown on cops abducting people, so I try not to make a habit of it,” I said, still having to work to prevent myself from besieging her with questions. What did people say to you today? Where did you eat lunch? Did anyone give you trouble? Tell me their names. “Here we are.” I pulled off the road to a little grass-covered clearing.
Dawn hopped out of the car and made her way to a sign that marked the entrance to the trail. “‘Dunkirk Creek Trail’?” she read.
“Yep. It’s a creek that runs through the countryside here. There’s a right of way owned by the county, which maintains a public trail.”
“We’re going hiking?”
The incredulity in her tone and the way she scrunched up her nose were awfully cute. “We are.” I let my eyes travel down her body to check that she was properly outfitted. She was wearing a black sweatshirt with raw seams, and light blue jeans tucked into black-and-white-striped legwarmers. She looked like an extra in a Pat Benatar video. Her outfit was capped off with pale pink high-top sneakers, which was the most important thing, given the uneven terrain we’d be tromping over.
But then, because I was a bastard, I let my eyes travel back up, taking in the same jeans and sweatshirt, but this time appreciating how they hugged her small, perfectly proportioned body. I’d felt those slight curves beneath my hands, pressed against my chest, flooding all my senses as I’d held her yesterday, and I was having trouble turning off the reptilian part of my brain that was shouting “Again!”
Tamping down a wave of lust, I turned toward the entrance to the trail. “Come on.”
“I haven’t been hiking since I was a kid,” she said as she fell into step behind me.
“Yeah, I guess New York City doesn’t present a ton of hiking opportunities,” I answered, gratified that she was talking. I’d learned from my dad that it was easier to talk when you were doing something, especially something that didn’t require you to look at the other person. Hence the hike.
“Nope. But my father used to send me away to sleepaway camp upstate all summer when I was a kid.”
Her choice of words—send me away—did not escape my attention. “So what’s with this no-mother business?” It was a terribly personal question, but I thought, given the magnitude of the summer’s events, it might feel like less of a big deal to talk about, relatively speaking.
“My dad accidentally knocked up some woman he then paid off to have me and hand me over.”
“Jesus.” It took a lot to shock me. Allenhurst wasn’t exactly a hotbed of crime, but you’re a cop for long enough and you’ve pretty much seen the worst humanity has to offer.
“I’m exaggerating,” she said, “but only a little. I used to have visits with her, but they stopped when I was thirteen. I asked if I could move in with her. She got all flustered, and then she wrote me a letter a couple weeks later saying it was better if we didn’t see each other anymore. I can only assume my dad made that happen, and that he used his customary tool to do so—money.”
“You never tried to reestablish contact?”
“Of course I did. I wrote and apologized, said I didn’t need to live with her. She just…never wrote back.”
What she was saying was heartbreaking, but it was good that she was saying it. I’d had a feeling she had been living in her own head all summer. I’d wanted to get her talking about Julianne and the article, and her experience being back on campus, but I’d take what I could get. And I truly wanted to know where she had come from, was intensely curious about the circumstances that had shaped her.
“Your dad stayed single all this time?” I asked.
“No. He got married when I was twelve.”
I didn’t miss that that had been a year before she asked her mother if she could move in.
“That’s when I started going to summer camp,” she went on. “His wife didn’t want me around over the summer.”
“Oh, that can’t be true,” I protested. “Blended families are hard.”
“It is true,” she said matter-of-factly. “I overheard them talking about it. I went to a boarding school during the year, but she wanted me gone over the summer, too.”
Shit. No wonder Dawn was so perpetually in search of popularity. After facing rejection after rejection as a child, she simply wanted to be wanted. When she’d talked about her father not seeing her, I’d assumed she’d meant it metaphorically. I think she had, but it seemed it was also literally true.
There was a fallen log in the path, so I jumped over it and held my hand out to help her over it.
Instead of taking it, she stopped and cocked her head, staring at me from the other side of the log. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
I wasn’t easily flustered, but the question threw me, perhaps because I didn’t know how to answer it in a way that wasn’t at least partly selfish.
Instead of pressing me to answer, she hopped up on the log, but rather than come down the other side of it, she grabbed my hand and started walking along it lengthwise, like a tightrope walker. The log slanted upward, so she got higher and higher, and soon I was reaching up in order to continue holding her hand.
“You can see the creek from up here,” she said.
“Yeah. The trees are pretty thick on this section of the trail, but if we go about ten more minutes down it, we’ll come to a clearing where you can get right up next to the water.”
She shook her hand out of my grasp and turned so she was facing me, then lowered herself to sit on the log, swinging her dangling legs back and forth. “Why are you being so nice to me?” she asked again. “I’ve never done anything but cause you trouble.”
“I like you,” I said, gambling that the truth wouldn’t get me into too much trouble.
“You like me, or you like making out with me?”
Both. “I like you,” I said emphatically, because she needed to hear that. But when her face fell a little, I said, “I liked making out with you, too.” But before she got the wrong idea, I hastily added, “Liked, past tense. Because everything about that was wrong.”
“Really?” she asked, and for a moment she reminded me of the old Dawn, always pushing, forever trying to get a rise out of me.
“Yes. To begin with, I’m—oh, shit.”
She had leaned back and begun slowly sliding down from her perch, but she was a good five feet up. I instinctively reached for her to try to help break her fall, and she did that clinging thing she’d done yesterday, like she was the firefighter and I was the pole.
“I don’t really want to hear all that,” she whispered, when we were eye to eye, and once again, I had no choice but to hold onto her, to will my body to be calm in the face of almost unendurable temptation.
“All what?”
“All the reasons this shouldn’t happen. You’re too old. You’re a cop, blah, blah, blah. I told you yesterday I didn’t want to hear that speech.”
Her face was two inches from mine. Her lips were two inches from mine. Jesus Christ, it just about killed me, but I closed my eyes and said, “Blah, blah, blah: that’s exactly it. You can’t blah, blah, blah over everything that’s wrong with this.” I attempted to shake her loose, but she held tight. “Let go of me,” I said, as gently as I could.
She obeyed—kind of. Like that day I’d busted her stealing Ace, she slid down my body. There was no way she could miss my raging boner.
And she didn’t. As her belly slid down over it, she raised one eyebrow and licked her lips before saying, “Blah, blah, blah?”
I wasn’t at all sure how I was going to get out of this, but then she granted me an unexpected reprieve. Her feet hit the ground, and she stepped away from me and said, “So let’s see this creek.”
After a few minutes of silent hiking, which I used to compose myself, I decided to just ask what I wanted to ask. “How are you handling things?”
She spun around—she’d been walking ahead of me. “How do you think?”
“I think not well.” When she started to protest, I said, “You know I was at the barbecue yesterday afternoon. I saw you trying to walk across the quad. I heard what they called you.”
“What?” she said, her attitude morphing into one of defiance. “Murderer? So? They weren’t wrong.”
“They were wrong,” I snapped, though the rational part of me knew getting annoyed at her wasn’t going to help.
The Gossip: New Wave Newsroom Page 7
