The Goode Fight

by Seth King

  I decide I don’t even want to know, but just as I move my finger to close the Safari app something catches my eye – a police report from Nashville. I chew on my nail and open the story. Most of the details had been stricken from the record, but Stellan’s name was still listed as the initial caller who’d notified EMS of the emergency. I scan the document to see what happened in the case and then hear myself gasp.

  Stellan had found a dead person.

  After a moment I exhale and decide it could have been nothing. Maybe Stellan had walked into his grandma’s bedroom and found her having a heart attack or something. When I was in eighth grade my friend Tory found her own father dead on the kitchen floor after having a stroke one morning before school, and for all I know it could have been an incident like that.

  But something in the back of my mind isn’t so sure. Again, it’s that instinct to be afraid – and it’s getting stronger.

  I shake my head and move on to the other subject nagging at me: how to seduce him, should I ever get another chance. With trembling fingers I press the search bar and type the following:

  how to make a Christian guy start having sex

  I tap on the first search result, a medical and psychological advice page where random people ask doctors for help and hope they reply. I bite my nail as I start reading:

  Ok, I really need help here. Recently I met the most amazing guy and started falling for him, but I was crushed to find out he’s very religious and isn’t going to have sex until marriage, which could be years down the line. I definitely don’t want to wait that long, so how can I make him change his mind? He’s the only reason I get out of bed in the morning, and the thought of never being able to be with him in that way makes me want to die.

  -Amanda, 19, Gainesville, GA

  Before I read the professional’s response I pick up my left leg and rest it on the seat of the couch so I can hug my knee, the same thing I do when I’m driving in a thunderstorm and get nervous.

  From: Dr. Charles Vartanian

  Clinical Psychology Professor, Southern Delaware State University

  Amanda, the best advice I can give you is to forget this man and move on with your life. Studies show that religious views are as much of a part of your genetic identity as height and eye color, and could you wake up one morning and decide to change your height? No. I’m sure this man is amazing, but some people are just set in their ways neurologically speaking, and nothing will change that. You should simply accept this fact and save yourself the heartbreak by moving on and finding someone new.

  Awesome, I think as I finish reading. So encouraging! Below this is another response, from Leslie M. in Oregon:

  Don’t worry about this, Amanda. Men are men. They are sexual and can be seduced. Throw on some heels, put on some lingerie, and ply him with some wine. If he doesn’t hook up with you, he’s either gay, or not a male. And if all else fails, here are some Bible verses that may help you with your quest…

  Now that’s better, I think with a smile as I copy and paste the Bible verses into my Notes app for later use. I consider Googling another question for more insight, but then it suddenly dawns on me how insane I am acting, sitting here researching a guy I have met one time. As I imagine my photo being displayed on one of those dramatic crime shows called Women Who Kill: When Obsessions Turn Deadly, I close my eyes, press the Crazy Button, and decide to end my stalkerish behavior for the day.

  I toss my iPad aside and start the process of getting ready for class, but on my way upstairs, I spot the stack of letters from my student loan company on my foyer table and sigh. Great, there’s another thing to worry about besides Stellan, The Boy Who Didn’t Exist Until Eighteen Months Ago. My basic situation is this: in six months I will be pushed out into the world of adulthood as cruelly as when a mother shoves her video-game-loving son out the front door to play outside on a sunny day. I have no money, no job, and a mounting pile of bills and responsibilities that will multiply tenfold when I graduate. I know I should start looking for a job soon, but I still don’t even really know what I want to do with my life, so I keep pushing it back again and again. And that’s not even mentioning that all the jobs out there are being swallowed up by laid-off forty-year-olds with armfuls of degrees and decades of experience, teenagers in Bangladesh who will work for ten times less than me, and computers. I’m running out of time, too, because every day it seems like more and more of my safety net is disappearing from under me. I got kicked off our family gym membership for being too old, I just lost some of my health care coverage, and I had to use my birthday money from my grandma to pay my own car insurance.

  When I was a little girl I thought that by the time I turned twenty-two I’d have a great job, a husband, and maybe a baby on the way. But now that I’m here I have no job prospects, no husband prospects, and definitely no baby prospects. At least I won’t have to worry about a pregnancy with Stellan, I think with a dark laugh. But seriously, all the traditional markers of adulthood- buying a car, buying a house, getting married, having a kid- seem ages and ages in the future to me. Not even on my horizon, actually. Why haven’t I grown up by now? I mean, I don’t even pay my own cell phone bill, I’ve never written a check in my life, and a few weeks ago I saw a snake crawl into my living room from my back porch and ended up crying from atop my kitchen counter for ten minutes while calling my dad and asking him to come get it out. It’s like life gave me all the responsibilities of an adult, but forgot to actually make me an adult in the process. I see a hundred different roads stretching out in front of me, and I have no idea which to choose: if I buckle down and choose a career and work my ass of for the next ten years to become a successful businesswoman, I could be single and childless at the age of 32. If I take the opposite route and start looking for a guy to marry, I could be tied down with three kids and a miserably unfulfilling existence at the same age. The decisions I make right now are going to govern the rest of my life, and that terrifies me to the point of paralysis. It’s like I’m driving a car headed straight for a brick wall, and even though I know I’ll have to pick a new course of action soon, I can’t decide which way to turn for fear of making the wrong choice and watching my life blow up in my face. I used to dream of becoming a “grown-up” like it was some cool fabulous thing, but now that I’m getting closer and closer to the real world, all I want to do is go back to being a worry-free sixth grader eating a popsicle on my couch after school while watching TRL and messaging Cara on AIM. All I know for sure is that whatever adulthood was supposed to feel like, it’s not this, and so I guess I’ll forget about figuring it all out for now and just keep cruising blindly down the road of life, lost and scared and free and alive, my hand out the window and nothing on my mind but having fun and being young and falling in love.

  Or falling in lust. At this point, I’m pretty sure I’d fall into a muddy puddle if Stellan Goode were involved.

  6

  Stellan Goode

  I’ve got a problem. It is getting harder and harder to get Taylor Haney out of my head.

  I try to condition myself not think about her, not to talk about her to my friends, not to bring up her Facebook profile for the zillionth time and enrage myself by clicking on the pictures of her with that tall Australian dude, but I can’t help it. I’m obsessed with her. I can’t stop running over the details of the other night in my head over and over again: I loved the way she kept smoothing her long bangs whenever she got nervous, the way she kept licking the corner of her mouth whenever she thought hard, the way her sweet, brown eyes smiled when she talked, the way they looked at me in the mirror while I tasted her. Just the simple touch of another human being brought back a rush of emotion in me that caught me completely off guard, and I had no idea how much I’d missed it, how terribly lonely I’ve been all this time. And now I’m wondering if maybe, just maybe, I don’t have to be so lonely anymore.

  And that thought scares the living shit out of me.

  On Saturday morning I hit the
gym again with my cousin in yet another attempt to clear my head and distract myself from the explosive lust I feel every time I think about Taylor. I like the gym better when it’s empty, with no eager-eyed girls- and the occasional mom- setting themselves up on nearby machines and pretending to exercise while they watch me, their hair and makeup untouched by sweat. After I gave up dating and all that, I had a lot of energy that needed to go somewhere, and so I threw myself into the gym and rarely stepped out of it for weeks. When I do something, I devote myself to it one hundred and ten percent, and this was no different- but the attention brought on by my transformed body was an unexpected side effect. I don’t really take it too seriously, though, because if any of those girls knew of the monster beneath the muscles, they’d stop staring in an instant. They’d turn and run in the other direction, actually.

  My workout starts out pretty well, but as I do my over-head presses, I find myself so distracted by Taylor that I miss a beat, lose my balance, and drop the 135-pound bar on my left toe.

  “Fuck!” I scream as I grab my foot and hop around. My cousin and workout partner, Kane, my best friend and the only person who knows about my past in Nashville, frowns over at me and then backs away a little.

  “Hey, I’m your best friend, you don’t have to be scared of me,” I tell him, and he smiles weakly. Kane looks sort of like me, just with darker hair and fifteen pounds less muscle, and he’s the closest thing I have to a brother these days – he’s a replacement brother, if you will. He’s one of my only family members, come to think of it, now that my parents have abandoned me. Sure, he’s scared of me half the time, but the other half he’s totally supportive, and somehow our friendship just works.

  “Jeez, that’s probably the first time I’ve ever seen you drop anything,” he grimaces. “Distracted by that situation with your dad or something?”

  “No,” I grunt as I bend down and rub my foot. “He’s an asshole who hates me and is about to cut me off any day because I’m not some playboy who brings home a different girl every night. That’s not going to change.”

  “Let me guess, then,” he says ominously. “It’s that Tia chick from my birthday the other night, isn’t it?”

  “Her name is Taylor Haney, not Tia,” I tell him. “And yes, I was thinking about her.”

  As Kane shakes his head, his friend Andrew, an ingrate moron whom I cannot stand, looks over from the punching bag in the corner.

  “Ah, you’re boning that Taylor bitch?” he smiles. “Damn, she’s pretty hot, and the ass on that thing is awesome. I tried to holler at her freshman year, but she turned me down – seemed a little prudish to me. But if you’re hittin’ it, then good on you, man.”

  Kane slowly looks over at me, terrified, and waits for my reaction. As I stare at Andrew, my blood boils in my veins and I metamorphosize into a monster I can barely control.

  “If you call Taylor Haney a ‘bitch’ one more time,” I growl as Andrew’s expression quickly goes from boastful to terrified, “I will beat your fucking ass on video and then post it on YouTube so everyone can see what a pathetic, misogynistic fuck-tard you are. Got it, needle dick?”

  Andrew starts to tremble as his face turns the color of his boxing gloves. “Uh, sorry man, I was just saying…”

  “Well, here’s a tip: don’t.”

  He sulks away, his workout ruined before it even began. I turn back to Kane. “Why did you even ask about her, anyway?”

  “I don’t know, I just don’t get it,” Kane says as he returns to his workout, finally looking away from Andrew. “I mean, I don’t wanna burst your bubble or anything, but why do you like this girl so much? I’ve never seen you like this. You’ve been talking about her for two days. She’s hot and everything, but what makes her so special? How do you know she’s different from all the other girls who try to hook up with you just because of…who you are?”

  “Because I’m the one who pursued her,” I tell him, ignoring the shocked look he gives me in the mirror. I smile to myself for a moment as I picture the last person I’d looked at in a mirror. “I’m the one who started this, Kane. I saved her from some d-bag who tried to get with her at the bar, and I didn’t have to. I wanted to. I chose to. And as far as what makes her so special…you’d kick me in the face if I told you.”

  “Stellan, we’re men here. I can handle it.”

  “Okay then,” I say as I pick up the bar again. “Something’s just…different about this girl, man. She’s smart and funny and sweet and classy. I don’t know, whenever I think about her, I…I just wanna smile.”

  Kane shakes his head at me in disapproval, but the smile in the corner of his lips betrays him.

  “Yeah, you’re right, I do want to kick you in the face now,” he says after a beat. “So what are you going to do now? You know you can’t be with her like a normal person, Stell. There’s just so much that could happen…”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” I grunt as I lift the bar up to my chest and then push it above my head again and again, savoring the delicious strain on my back and shoulder muscles. That pain means I’m wearing myself out and doing something to curb my monstrous sexual appetite for Taylor, which means I’m that much closer to possibly being able to see her again.

  “Sorry, Stell,” Kane says, “but you know what I mean.” He looks around to make sure no one is listening before turning back and lowering his voice. “And it’s not just that. You know she could find out about Caitlin and tell everyone. You like your new life in Durham. You’re happier here. Are you sure she’s worth risking all that for?”

  “Taylor is worth risking everything for,” I say without hesitation as I lift up the bar one last time.

  “Wow,” he says, his worst fears confirmed. “Okay then.”

  A heavy silence hangs between us, and I know exactly what he’s going to ask next.

  “…And do you think you’re strong enough to be alone with her?” he says finally. “Are you at all worried about the whole Caitlin situation repeating itself, or whatever?”

  As I set down the bar I spot my reflection in the mirror and then glance past it, unable to look at the face I see staring back at me.

  “Every second. I worry about it every second, Kane.”

  After my workout I hit the locker room and let the water run over me as my imagination runs wild. I picture myself without all my problems and issues and baggage, being able to be with Taylor the way she deserves someone to be with her, love her the way she deserves to be loved, fuck her the way she deserves to be fucked. Good and hard and passionately and intimately, letting her know that she’s my girl and showing her how much I appreciate that by making her scream my name for hours. Without thinking, I start to stroke myself as I envision what that union would look like.

  Suddenly we’re together on the shores of a lake at night in the dead of summer, the moon shining back at us from the surface of the rippling water. I lean in and kiss her, slowly, softly, and then pull back and place kisses on her forehead, her cheeks, her ears, her neck, marking my territory. She is mine. Her pulse starts to speed up as I take her hand and softly kiss the pad of her finger and tell her how beautiful she is, and then without warning I slip it into my mouth and bite it, making her gasp. I push her down on her back, lift her knees, and start licking her bikini line and sucking on the skin of her upper thighs, making her whimper and whine. I begin rubbing her through the thin fabric of her bikini, ever-so-slowly, as I run my tongue all over her legs. When she’s good and wet I push the fabric aside and slip my finger in, pushing in and out faster and faster until I pull it out without explanation. I stare into her eyes for one moment before plunging my thumb back in and pressing on her G spot on her upper wall while sucking her clit, and she moans louder and louder, building higher, pushing towards the top, but just as her legs begin to twitch I stop, get on my knees, and stare down at her as I take myself out of my pants. She looks up at me hungrily, desperately, and I know the moment has come. I lean in, put the tip of my dick aga
inst her entrance, and get ready to push into her and let our passion take us away…

  I close my eyes and feel my body tense up, but at the last moment I come to my senses and realize I am about to orgasm in a public shower because of Taylor. Goddamn, this girl turns me on, I think as I let go of my dick and let it flop against my leg. Too much for my own good, actually – she’s got me acting like some kind of sex addict. Sure enough, I look over and see an old man staring at me from across the large, open shower room, enjoying the scene a little more than he probably should have been.

  “Perv,” I mutter, turning off the faucet and snatching my bag from the table in the corner.

  But does she even care? I ask myself as I towel off, the old man frowning with disappointment as I leave the room. Does she even know how badly I want to lay with her on a bed; to stroke her hair and just hold her all day? I doubt she does, and it pisses me off to no end. I’d stormed out of her house like an asshole, and she probably thinks I’m a total jackass now and never wants to hear from me again. And plus, I know she’s out of my league – she’s normal, and I’m not, and that creates a distance between us that I am not sure I would ever be able to overcome. But still I almost want to text her and apologize – her number is right on her Facebook profile, since she’d sent it to her friend in a conversation – but I don’t know what to say, and I’m afraid she might not even respond. And plus, just the thought of texting her makes a funny, ticklish feeling blossom somewhere deep in my stomach, and I don’t know how to even begin processing the reasons behind that.

  Ugh, I think to myself. What am I even doing right now? I look down at the initials engraved on my watch and try to focus, to remind myself of why I’d chosen this life in the first place. I’m better now, happier now. When I showed up here out of nowhere, a boy with no past, I’d caused a stir at first, but after a while things had started to die down. The girls realized I wasn’t going to date them, and soon they stopped asking. The rumors that have sprung up around me to explain my abstinence have been bizarre, sure, but helpful, too, because at least I don’t have to explain myself anymore. Religion, homosexuality, even a whisper this spring that I had warts on my dick – it all works for me. People think they know the reasons I’m off limits, and even if they’re wrong, I’m not going to correct them. The monster is at bay – for now, at least – and that’s keeping everyone safe.