by Rainey Daye
But to their mutual surprise, Jess did not display any pent-up frustration or aggression. Instead, Jess was expounding upon something, and Troy was looking greatly caught up in whatever pearls of wisdom Jesse was sharing. That made Alex even more nervous, wondering if Jess was inadvertently adding to Troy’s hopes of reconciliation with their lover. So he dropped his hand from Maggie’s arm and hurried into the room, sitting next to Jess on the couch so that he could run interference if needed.
Thankfully, Troy was looking appropriately shame-faced and mortified. He lifted his head and tried to offer Maggie a wan smile. “I owe you an apology, Maggie,” Troy said contritely. “As your roommate was so correctly pointing out to me, just as your other one has tried to do, I really fucked things up. I am so sorry to have caused you any distress.”
* * * *
“Then why did you?” Maggie asked reservedly as she moved toward the couch, Alex and Jess scooting apart so she could safely ensconce herself between them.
Troy ran his hand through his hair, a gesture that he must have made numerous times already, judging by how his locks, no longer in their usual buzzcut, were disheveled. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I guess I kinda forgot that we are no longer together and that you’re a grown woman, free to make your own choices. I saw those pictures”—Maggie winced noticeably, causing Alex to gently squeeze her thigh—“and I went bugshit,” Troy concluded, finally looking up and completely missing Alex’s soothing gesture.
“Do you know the song ‘Centerfold’?” Troy asked then, seemingly at random.
“Huh?” Maggie asked, blinking in confusion.
“It was like the song. I had a perfect memory of you. An untarnished one. And then I saw those pictures, and I just wanted the sweet, pure Maggie of my memory back.”
“Dude, what are you talking about?” Jess asked, bewildered.
“My angel is the centerfold,” Troy muttered incoherently, staring back down into his lap.
The three lovers exchanged baffled looks and shrugs, feeling distinctly uneasy, afraid that Troy might have completely lost his grip on reality while they had been inattentive, and then Maggie leaned forward and clapped her hands, almost directly under Troy’s nose. He jerked upright, blinking at her again, his gaze slowly refocusing on the here and now.
“Explain,” Maggie snapped, exasperated.
“I was stupid for suggesting that we break up,” Troy said.
“The decision was mutual,” Maggie said stonily. “We had both grown apart after we went away to college and finally admitted it to ourselves and each other.”
“Yeah, I know. But, aw hell, Maggie, I wanted my freedom,” he admitted.
“Okay,” she said slowly, lost in the conversation yet again.
“You don’t know what is was like, getting hit on by all these sophisticated college girls, juniors and seniors even, acting like groupies because I was a starter on the team and we had a winning season.”
“You wanted to get laid,” Jess said, nodding his understanding.
Troy jerked his head toward him, clearly horrified, but the blush suffusing his face confirmed the veracity of Jess’s statement.
Maggie sighed. “Troy,” she said. “The fact that you wanted to have sex with your groupies just proves the point that we had grown apart. Back home you never would have looked twice at another woman, and you wouldn’t have recognized it if one of them started flirting with you.”
“Yeah, but even after we were reunited that first summer, I was considering my options, laying groundwork for my next visit home, you know?”
Maggie frowned, but Alex nodded understandingly. “You were debating which of the girls back home you wanted to fuck,” he said bluntly, causing Troy to wince again.
Maggie stared at Troy in outrage. “Are you telling me you were already scoping out my replacement while we were still dating?”
Troy nodded before he buried his face in his hands. Jess and Alex exchanged relieved looks behind Maggie’s back, knowing that if nothing else changed her tender female feelings for his predicament, the admission that he was thinking about other women while with her would turn the tide.
“So who was the lucky girl?” Maggie asked in an icy voice.
“Oh,” Troy exclaimed, looking up. “I never would have hooked up with one of them so soon after breaking up with you. I was laying the groundwork for future visits home.”
Maggie looked upon him with disgust, and her current lovers relaxed another degree. “So you are saying you remained true to my memory after we broke up?”
“Huh?”
“You were celibate when we returned to school?” Maggie clarified, and Troy snorted.
“Oh, hell no,” he exclaimed. “I lost count of how many women I screwed that fall.”
Maggie made a gagging sound and stood up abruptly, walking stiffly out of the room. Troy looked at Jesse and Alex in confusion. “What?” he asked.
* * * *
The men just shook their heads at his denseness, and this time Jess stood up, offering to go check on her. He found Maggie standing in the dining room, staring blankly out the side window.
“Mags,” he said softly, coming to stand beside her. “Are you okay?”
Maggie closed her eyes and sighed. “Are all men slime balls?” she asked him.
Jess chuckled. “Pretty much, sweetheart. You already know that Alex and I were no saints.”
“Yeah, you told me about your manwhore days,” she said, still sounding slightly disgusted. “I just thought you were exaggerating, you know?”
“’Fraid not, sweetheart. We were ruled by our peckers. And if we didn’t have to work for it, all the better.”
“So you’re defending Troy?” she asked in disbelief.
“Oh, fuck no!” Jess exclaimed. “He dumped you so he could be a manwhore with a clear conscience. That’s a whole ’nother ballgame. Alex and I hadn’t had a real, honest-to-goodness girlfriend in a long time. Completely different boat here.”
Maggie harrumphed to herself and continued to stare out the window with her arms crossed over her chest.
“What’s really bothering you?” Jess asked with uncharacteristic insight into her mood.
“Is there something wrong with me?” she finally asked in a small voice.
“Wrong with you? Are you nuts? You are absolute perfection. Alex and I pinch ourselves every day ’cause we find it hard to believe that you choose to share yourself with us.”
“If I’m so great, then why would someone dump me for random bits of ass?” Maggie asked with rancor.
Jess sighed as he put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed her tight. “I don’t like defending that bastard, but you have to admit that all that adulation probably went straight to his head. Who knows how they displayed it? For all we know, he literally kicked dozens of women out of his bed because he was staying true to you those first couple of years. But after awhile, and being so far away, well, you can only take care of the problem yourself for so long before you either develop blisters or a permanent cramp, you know?”
Maggie shot him a disbelieving look and an eww face at the imagery his words conjured while Jesse waggled his eyebrows at her, flashing her his dimples in a cheeky grin, which in turn caused her to chuckle.
“Okay, I get it. He was horny. And he was honorable enough to officially call it quits, face-to-face, before he let himself be led around by his dick.”
“You know,” Jess said as if just struck by the thought. “You’re normally not so coarse with your language.”
“Yeah, well, I’m still nursing some major anger here,” she pointed out, and Jesse nodded, saying, “Anger is good.”
Maggie took a deep breath and slowly allowed the disgust and anger and hurt to melt away. Jess took the opportunity to slip into the kitchen and return with a glass of wine, which he silently handed to her. Maggie smiled her thanks as she sipped it, feeling more anger melt away with each sip as she returned her gaze out the window. Whe
n she had drained the glass, Jess gently removed the glass from her fingers, setting it down on the sideboard before inquiring softly if she was ready to return to the living room.
Maggie hesitated for only a moment before she nodded her head and allowed Jess to lead her back into the room where Troy and his confessions awaited.
* * * *
He looked relieved to see her and opened his mouth to apologize, but Maggie cut him off, sitting back down on the couch.
“I think we got off track somewhere,” Maggie said, and Alex nodded.
“Troy was referring to that song about how a guy, years after high school, discovers that the girl he had a crush on posed for a girlie magazine,” Alex said in way of explanation. When Jess and Maggie simply stared at him in confusion, Alex clarified, “The song is called ‘Centerfold.’ The refrain is that ‘my angel is the centerfold.’”
“Oh,” Maggie breathed, the light finally dawning. “So when you came across those very private and highly personal photos of me…”
“My imagination ran away with me. I thought that maybe someone had taken advantage of your innate innocence and convinced you that they were art-house pictures rather than porn. I worried about what you might have accidentally become involved in,” he tried to explain.
“So instead of calling me or firing off an e-mail saying, ‘What the hell is up with you and those pictures,’ you thought the best thing to do was to come here and spy on me?”
“I wasn’t spying on you!” Troy cried, clearly outraged at the accusation. “I was trying to find the perv who took the pictures.”
“By following me around campus and watching the house I live in,” Maggie pointed out.
“I figured you were in touch with him or he would get back in touch with you. It was just a matter of time,” Troy said.
“And then what? What were you going to do once you identified the photographer? Though for the life of me, I can’t imagine how you thought you’d be able to identify him.”
“Oh, I knew I would recognize him when I saw him. He’d be the one with the ‘I saw Maggie in all her naked glory and I want to see her like that again’ look. I was going to get him alone and then beat the crap out of him until he turned over all the copies so he couldn’t sell them, and then I was going to warn him to stay the hell away from you from now on,” Troy said, so matter-of-factly that the three looked at him in horror.
“Uh,” Jess said tentatively, “you do know that the pictures were taken by mutual consent, never intended to be seen by anyone, right?”
“I do now. But I didn’t know it then.” Troy tried to defend himself. “And it doesn’t change the fact that I would love to see the bastard castrated.”
“You have no right to be jealous about anyone I might decide to have sex with,” Maggie said indignantly. “And if you would have just contacted me, I would have told you that it was two consenting adults taking advantage of a camera while they were indulging their mutual passion with each other,” Maggie pointed out.
“Yeah,” Troy sighed. “I know that now. But like I said, that song just kept playing over and over in my mind, and I guess I went a little nuts imagining how many people might have gotten ahold of the pictures.”
A little? Jess mouthed to Alex, who grimaced in agreement.
“I didn’t like the idea of you being tarnished like that, Magpie. Uh, I mean, Maggie,” Troy corrected himself as she narrowed her eyes upon him.
“And now all the pictures are gone and you know it was just a spur of the moment, got caught up in the moment aberration, so there’s nothing left to worry about, right, Troy?” Maggie said distinctly.
“Right,” Troy agreed. “Though I find it hard to believe that you would get so caught up in the moment with a casual sex partner when you wouldn’t even let me take a picture of you topless.” He all but pouted in an undertone.
“And so we’ll both go about our separate lives now, maybe occasionally running into each other if we visit our hometown at the same time, but nothing more,” Maggie added loudly, overriding his grumbles.
Troy looked up at that statement and opened his mouth, a hangdog look on his face.
“Oh, fuck no,” Jess found himself saying. “Don’t even go there, dude. You fucked up. You fucked up real bad, and don’t delude yourself into believing that Maggie will ever give you a second chance after this.”
Maggie tried to shush him, but Alex jumped in, adding his two cents’ worth. “You violated her trust, Troy,” he told him. “You made some monumentally stupid decisions here, and there’s no coming back from that. Maybe someday Maggie might start to see you as a friend again, but until that happens, your best bet is to go away as gracefully and quietly as you can.”
Troy looked at Maggie, pleading with his eyes. “They’re right, Troy,” Maggie said softly. “I’m not yours to protect. I appreciate your motives but not the way you went about things. Your actions basically destroyed whatever trust I may have still felt toward you.”
“But, Maggie,” he cried. “It only took me a couple of months of freedom to realize that I had thrown away the best thing that had ever happened to me. I wanted you back, and I cleaned up my act. I buckled under the following term and stayed sober and celibate for you.”
“Don’t you dare try to turn this around on Maggie,” Jess warned him, his voice pitched low in anger.
Troy blinked at him in confusion. “Huh?”
“Maggie told us how you wanted to get back together with her over the summer,” Jess told him.
“Couldn’t fool you, could I, Magpie?” Troy asked with a small smile, which he quickly lost when he saw Maggie’s adverse reaction to his inadvertent use of his old nickname for her.
“Mom gave me a heads up,” Maggie told him. “I told her not to get her hopes up.”
“And you shot me down before I could make my move, I know. I remember. But…”
“No buts,” Maggie said. “I’ve moved on.”
Troy frowned. “You don’t have a boyfriend. Don’t try to convince me that you do. I’ve watched you enough to know that you’re not even casually dating.”
“You really don’t want to remind me what you know about me,” Maggie warned him, and Troy wisely snapped his mouth closed.
“What I meant,” Maggie said after taking a deep breath to calm down while Jess and Alex attempted to soothe her nonverbally, “was that I’m no longer small-town Maggie Conner. I’ve acclimated to my life here, and the things that small-town Maggie should have been perfectly content and thrilled by are no longer things that the present Maggie finds exciting or interesting. And unfortunately, you fall into the small-town-Maggie category,” she said bluntly and watched as Troy winced at the put-down.
“But, maybe…” he began.
Maggie looked at him without a trace of sympathy. “If you really wanted me back so badly, you wouldn’t have found yourself a fuck buddy while you were stalking me and proceeded to knock her up,” she said ruthlessly and watched his face blanch as he cringed. “You fucked up, Troy. Big time. And you are going to continue to fuck up unless you take a good hard look at yourself. And that includes accepting responsibility for your actions and living with the consequences. And that not only means your baby, but it also means the loss of my friendship. I can’t forgive you for your actions. I don’t care how pure you think they were on your part. I still feel violated. I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive you, and you shouldn’t waste your time trying to find ways to force my forgiveness. You need to get on with your life and stay out of mine!”
Troy sat there, ashen faced, as she spewed her venom upon him. And in the end, he took it like a man. “You’re right. I started seeing a counselor at school last spring when my partying got out of hand. I think I’m going to have to start seeing him again. There’s a lot of shit I need to work out, and I need to concentrate on me in order to do it. I’m just grateful that you have Alex and Jesse to watch out for you, because like it or not, you will always be important t
o me and I will always want to be assured that you’re being taken care of, even if you think you don’t need anyone to do that. Because, believe me, we all need someone to watch over us and steer us in the right direction. To tell us when we’re making a mistake or about to fuck up big time.”
Maggie stared at him in silence for a long while, chewing over his words while shooting looks at Alex and Jesse out of the corner of her eyes to gauge their take on what was said. Finally she nodded and tried to change the subject with, “So what are your plans about the baby?”
But Troy surprised her by giving her a small smile and saying, “That’s really none of your concern, is it?”
Maggie opened and closed her mouth several times, surprised speechless.
“You’re right,” Alex said. “None of our business, though I hope you will send us a baby picture when it’s born.”
“Of course,” Troy said.
“Well, then,” Jess interjected. “We did invite you to dinner, after all, so how about we head into the dining room? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m starving.”
“Actually, I’ve lost my appetite, and I’m pretty sure Maggie has, too,” Troy said in an odd voice. “I think we’re done here. Take care, Magpie. I’ll be seeing you.”
With those cryptic words, Troy gathered his coat and walked toward the front door, Alex and Jesse quickly trailing after him, just in case. They remained watching until his car was out of sight. After all, old habits died hard, and Troy might have seemed repentant, but there was no denying that he was still a loose cannon. None of them would be sleeping easy until they knew for a fact that he was gone from their town.
Chapter 20
Maggie awoke on Christmas morning brimming with excitement. Their first Christmas together! She jumped out of bed and pulled on her robe before rushing back over and bouncing on the bed in an effort to awaken Jess and Alex.
