by Kent, Julia
Instead, I blinked slowly, as if my eyes were a camera shutter, so that I could freeze my brain, extract the memory at any given time of the bliss of just this. Aunt Josie wasn’t gonna believe it. She didn’t believe half the shit that came out of my mouth, but she really wasn’t gonna believe that I could have a dream-come-true moment like this. We’d both given up on dreams, probably the night our daddies died.
She’d been begging me to move in with her ever since she’d got out of this hellhole, but I’d been held back in by Mama and all her needs. It felt good to have my needs fulfilled and as Trevor sipped his coffee he looked at me, puzzled, and said, “What about you, Darla?”
Oh my God, could the man read my mind? Was I that transparent? “What about me?” I said, a cagey tone seeping in.
Joe set his cup down, looked at Trevor, looked at me and said, “He’s right, where’s your coffee?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” I said, not wanting to admit that I didn’t have another cup.
Trevor stood, pulled the sock off himself, and started to get dressed.
“About time,” Joe said, taking another sip.
“Hey, man, I spent twenty-four hours buck naked doing God knows what.”
“I know what you were doing,” Joe said, shooting me a jaunty, slightly naughty, incredibly evil little grin.
“We were only doing that part of the time,” I said innocently, batting my eyelashes. “I have no idea what happened to him before I found him.”
“Nevertheless,” Trevor interrupted. “I’m getting dressed now but it’s not my natural state anymore.”
Joe snorted, coffee almost spraying everywhere but he held it in, a general politeness and decorum in all of his actions. As I spent more time with the two of them, even these twenty minutes or so, I saw how much of it was in Trevor too. There was a gentility that was bred into them – or maybe it was just forced into them – by so many years of being taught, or scolded, or both. It was what people around here would call snobbery – or in a more slang way they would say, You think you’re better than us?
There was a tone of that in both men, that kind of politeness, that kind of polished pattern to their words, the perfect grammar (unless they were talking smack on purpose), the near-flawless eye contact, the gestures that were well thought out and sophisticated. The whole way that they operated in one smooth, collected, classy way. No one in my life acted like this – and for sure no man in my life acted like this. I just liked watching the two of them, but I especially liked watching Trevor’s body as he slipped into the ill fitting clothes – which prompted Joe to take a final swig of his coffee, hand me the cup, and jump up out the door.
“Wait, don’t get dressed yet.” He held up one finger and sprinted outside.
“Which is it?” Trevor complained. “You want me to get dressed. You want me to not get dressed. What the hell?”
“Maybe he wants a threesome,” I joked, winking at Trevor – who went dead still.
He turned around to me with exquisite clarity and said, nostrils flaring, eyes widening, hands reaching out for me, “Is that an option?”
God knows what I might have blurted out – my mouth seems possessed half the time, conduit for God the other half – so I was grateful when Joe burst back into the room holding a small paper bag, the kind you get at really nice grocery stores that we don’t have around here.
“I brought you a change of clothes,” he said, shoving the bag at Trevor.
Still staring at me, Trevor seemed reluctant to end our conversation. I was grateful, though, for Joe’s intervention saving me from needing to answer a question no man had ever asked and that I’d assumed no man would ever ask. Around here, a threesome meant some good ol’ boy who got so drunk that he hired two women to come service him because he forgot about the first one and then ended up too drunk to perform for either of them but owed one fuck of a lot of money.
Trevor’s idea, though, had an edge to it, something that would tip us into a new dimension. I wanted to make sure before I answered that he meant what I thought he meant. Even if he didn’t, the better route was to say nothing. So, thank you Jesus, thank you God, thank you Joe.
Breaking eye contact, Trevor looked in the bag. “Awesome,” he said, nodding, pulling out a cotton t-shirt that had some sort of joke I didn’t get on it, a pair of jeans that slipped onto him like a glove, his own socks, and a pair or Merrills. He dressed with unthinking familiarity and grace. Now he just looked like any old college student.
Fumbling under the bed, he found what he was searching for and put the straw hat on his head.
“What the hell is that?” Joe asked, laughing.
“Beats me.”
“That’s what he had on him when I met him,” I said. “Well…not on him. All he wore was a guitar and a collar.”
Joe gaped at me. “A guitar?”
“That’s it. Just standing there on I-76 with his thumb in the air and a big old silly grin on his face.”
“When you put it that way, who wouldn’t stop for him?”
I opened my mouth to respond, but Trevor stopped me cold.
“Hey,” Trevor whispered, his hand snaking over my hip. The way he touched me, like he possessed me – I liked it. His lips were next to my ear and I shivered. “Thanks for last night.”
I turned around, found myself in his arms and looked up. “No, the pleasure was all mine,” I said, smiling.
Joe cleared his throat and stepped outside. “We really need to get on the road,” he called out. “Sorry.”
“I’m the sorry one,” Trevor said, his eyes full of mourning. I imagine mine were filled with more. He kissed me softly and then suddenly, like a drowning man, his hands were all over me, grabbing my ass, sliding over my ribs, cupping a breast. The passion was like a dying man going after his last meal before execution. I felt it too, the desperation, but the words that kept going through my head weren’t going to come out.
No, they weren’t. Dammit.
I wasn’t going to ask, I wasn’t gonna say we’ll meet again or you can always come back or any of the other things that raced through my brain a million times a minute because I wasn’t going to be that girl. I wouldn’t beg. I wouldn’t plead. If someone like Trevor Connor wanted me he knew damn well where I was and he could find me. The hurt I’d risk from asking would wipe away all the pleasure and the fun of the past day. I could risk having my heart broken by having him leave, but I couldn’t risk having him break my heart by saying he wouldn’t come back.
“Hang on,” he said, pulling away breathless – and then he trotted outside and said something to Joe.
Joe came back in and said, “Can I get another cup of coffee before we hit the road? I’m exhausted and Trevor can drive but – ”
“Yeah, yeah,” I stopped him in mid-sentence, poured him a cup. “It’s good. It’s all cool. Where’s Trevor?”
“He just went out to talk to his mom.”
“Oh, OK,” I said quietly.
For some reason I could hold it together when Trevor was in the room, next to me, his scent filling the air, but Joe was a stranger. He sat in silence. I didn’t know too many people who could do that. Actually, I didn’t know any people who could do that, including me. His body was tight, a bit nervous, as if he weren’t quite comfortable in that beautiful skin of his. I wondered why not. If I looked as perfect as he did I’d walk around all day admiring myself and being the most comfortable person in the room.
My mind clung to that brief little interlude just so that I could keep the tears at bay. Trevor was leaving, this madness was done, and my life…well, the clichéd thing to say would be my life would never be the same but that was a big load of shit and I knew it. My life would go back to being the same. The same thing every day, the same job which, by the way, I had to be at today at f
our o’clock, working a stupid four to nine shift. The same everything. Trevor had come into my life – a hitchhiker who took me for a ride when it came down to it. And now Joe was here to take Trevor back to his world and leave me stewing in mine.
I looked around my little cottage and suddenly it seemed so silly, so child-like. A little girl’s attempt at an escape from a very dismal reality. Maybe that was it? I thought as I let the tears fill my eyes, because fuck it, if Joe was gonna see me cry, Joe was gonna see me cry. When Trevor came back in he’d find a red-faced Darla and if I was never gonna see him again then why did I care?
I felt like a little four year old again, confused and not knowing why I was so sad, except now I was twenty-two and I knew exactly why I was so sad. Because I was losing the one guy I’d ever responded to on every level and that had to be OK. I had to be OK with it.
But I wasn’t OK.
“So you play with Random Acts of Crazy,” I said to Joe, hearing the shake in my own voice, hoping he was polite enough to pretend it wasn’t there.
That blindingly beautiful face turned to me. He leaned back in his chair, a little awkward now, but trying to give the impossible impression of casualness. “Yeah.”
Oh, boy. This one was talkative.
“And are you going to keep going on tour with Trevor?” I said slowly, trying to figure this guy out. Breathe, Darla, breathe, I told myself. Get through the moment and you’ll be OK. Trevor will be back in a minute. Let the man’s mom chew him out. Let him come back and say his goodbyes.
Joe looked completely stumped by that question. “Tour? We’re not – we don’t do this seriously,” he said, shrugging.
“You don’t?” I said, incredulous. “You realize how much of a following you guys have online?”
“That’s online,” Joe scoffed, waving his hand. He took a sip of his coffee and peered at me as if completely oblivious to the force that those men had become in indie music circles. As our eyes locked, we held the stare for a few seconds longer then we should have and then I broke away because it was weird. Like, really weird. There’s no way someone like that would want someone like me.
You said that about Trevor, a voice whispered in my ear.
Yeah, another voice said, and he’s leaving.
Joe
Well, this was awkward. More awkward than walking in on Trevor and Darla naked – or nearly naked. I could see what Trevor saw in her even though this woman was nothing like any of the chicks he normally banged. She was big, curvy, and what people would call full-figured back in my grandmother’s generation. In Massachusetts other women our age would call her fat and maybe she was, a little bit – but there was a deep confidence in the way that she moved her body that made her seem more substantial, more present – more there. Like someone who was real and grounded and firm.
Nobody back home would have given her two looks. Our friends would have just passed her by, so I wondered why Trevor picked her. The more I watched her, and then the more I tried not to watch her, the more I was drawn to something.
But where the hell was Trevor? This was taking too long and I was sick and tired of being chewed out by his mom. We needed to get on the road so I could get him back at a reasonable enough hour that all of this could just go away. Plus we had finals coming up. I wasn’t going to blow my senior year finals and not be able to go to law school in the fall. That would be the biggest fucking nightmare of my life and the fallout from my parents would…well, even Trevor wasn’t worth that.
Something in the way Darla shifted her head made me turn and look, and I saw tears in her eyes. Oh, shit. Of course she was upset. Trevor was that kind of guy that you got upset over. At least, the chicks did. He had this way about him that made people feel bigger, and better, and smarter, and wilder than they really were. Which is exactly why I had to be careful around him – because if I wasn’t careful I’d find myself driving six hundred miles through the night to pick him up from one of his crazy schemes.
Oh. Wait. That’s exactly what had just happened to me.
Instinct made me want to reach out and say the right thing, to comfort her, but what are you supposed to say? “Hey, it was nice meeting the girl Trevor banged last night and uhh…see you…never?” There wasn’t a script for this. No professional development class offered by the on-campus career center taught you what to do when your band mate takes too much of your stolen peyote and winds up in a state you’ve barely heard of with a girl who lives in a potting shed. Or, if there was, my mom and my academic advisor had never signed me up for it.
Speaking of moms, Trevor’s was probably ripping him a new asshole right now. Man, that bitch could scream. Everybody had wondered what happened to Trevor. I still didn’t remember. I just woke up passed out in the basement of his house and he was gone. All that was left were his clothes, and thank God he had called me, finally, because lying to his mom had been getting harder and harder.
Judy had been the one to figure out that he really was gone. His shoes were still there, his clothes, his phone, his wallet, everything, and all that was missing was his acoustic guitar. And Trevor. He and I had eleven hours of driving ahead of us, and I supposed that I would learn the story. It would probably be another Trevor story, some half-assed, half-fiction, half-real yarn that he would spin to make everyone come out looking good and to make his own folly seem amusing.
He was half Tucker Max and half Jack Kerouac all tied up in a Gordon Gekko bow. Of all the guys I knew and had gone to school with over the years, each one of us groomed for med school, law school, an MBA, and in rare cases a Ph.D., Trevor was the one who had the whole package – but he was also the one with the biggest rebellious streak. Seeing what that looked like now, as we were about to launch fully into our trajectories, was kind of scary.
Trevor
Walking out of Darla’s little place, I stepped out into the sunlight, feeling the warmth on my skin, making me realize just how crazy the past who the hell knows had been. Had it really only been thirty-six hours since I’d been in my own basement back in Sudborough? Two thirds of that time I had no memory of, and of the rest I remembered every second of. The past twelve hours with Darla like an entire lifetime lived in half a day.
How could I walk away from that? I felt my gut tighten, my chest swell, muscles in me coming alive that needed to be there, and exercised, and moved, and pushed to some sort of limit. I wanted to go and run a hundred miles, or ride a bike around the country, to swim across a great lake, to do anything but walk away from her.
A fleeting image of going home with Darla in tow made me laugh, a little too maniacally on the inside. My mom would fall over in a dead faint if I brought someone like her home, and my dad would probably give me an atta boy and then purse his lips with disapproval and pour himself another Seven and Seven when he realized I was serious.
Besides, she had a life here. Opening up to me last night, cradled in my arms, she’d told me all about what had happened to her and damn, did I feel like a fucking fool. But her life was not mine and mine wasn’t hers, so this had to end. I had to leave, right?
Walking outside, I punched my mother’s phone number into my phone and she picked up on the second ring. “That better be you, Trevor,” her sharp voice cut through the glass of the iPhone.
“No Mom, it’s Whitey Bulger.”
“Ha ha, very funny. If that’s your way of telling me that you’re a criminal on the run then we have a big problem here, mister.”
I closed my eyes and felt my balls crawl up into my groin again. “No. No crime, Mom. Other than the crime of not being under your thumb all the time.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped back.
“It means whatever you want it to mean, Mom.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m just hanging with Joe.” In Ohio.
> A snort came through the phone. It sounds like a fart. “Joe Ross has been lying thorough his teeth to me. I’ve been talking with his mother and – ”
“And what?” I countered. “She’s going to put him to bed early tonight? Ban him from playing with his Nintendo for a week? C’mon, Mom. We’re men. With lives.”
The sharp inhale of a shocked gasp was all I heard for a long moment. “Just come home,” she finally said. Never one to be wishy-washy, the steel in her voice made me grit my teeth. If Mom said jump, I was supposed to say How high? Not Fuck off.
“I’ll get home eventually.”
“Get home as soon as possible,” she said. “Your dad’s really worried about you and so am I.”
“I know you are.”
I was supposed to feel some sort of genuine affection and gratitude for the fact that she was worried about me, but right now I was pissed and didn’t give a shit what she thought. She always wanted to know exactly where I was and what I was doing. I was a twenty-two-year-old man who was about to go into law school. When did I get to do what I wanted when I wanted and how I wanted?
I heard whispering and then two voices arguing in the background, Mom popping back in a little louder than she should have been. “OK, honey, so I’ll see you. Be home within an hour.”
Click.
An hour. Yeah, right. My tongue rolled along the inside of my jawline and I could feel the muscles in my neck tightening, a familiar flash and heat of anger making the back of my skull go cold and hot, the alternating chill a flag for doing something ridiculously inappropriate.
That was her phrase: “That’s ridiculously inappropriate,” she would say all the time when I was a child. Ridiculously inappropriate. She used it so much I almost named our band Ridiculously Inappropriate. If she’d have allowed us to have a dog it would have been called ‘RI’.
