“I’d have flipped, too,” Adam says sympathetically.
“It’s not like he wasn’t excited I was coming,” I say, inwardly cringing because I feel like my desperation, my pathetic-ness, is just oozing out of me, like the lie must be so obvious. “He just had the dates wrong. Because of her.”
“Of course,” Adam says.
And then, even though this is when I’m supposed to continue the story, I stop. Because I can’t do it.
“Shit,” I say, and hang my head.
“What is it?”
“You and your stuff about feeling what’s right,” I mumble. “You’re messing with my head.”
“What? Lola.” He leans in, puts his fingers under my chin, and lifts it so I have to look at him. “Talk to me.”
“Fine. Okay. I just told you my ‘official’ version of that story. The spun version,” I say.
“I see,” he says quietly. “Why?”
I want to look away, but I can’t—partly because his hand is still cupped under my chin. I want to keep lying but somehow can’t do that, either. Because after everything he’s done and the day we’ve had, it feels like total shit to lie to Adam. It feels poisonous. “It’s not that I wanted to lie to you; it’s more like I want to lie to myself about it. I like the ‘official’ version better than what actually happened.”
“What did happen?”
“Dad’s assistant didn’t mess up the dates. He just plain forgot about me. Forgot I was coming. Went on vacation.”
“Oh, Lola,” he says, and puts his arm over my shoulders and hugs me to his side. “Damn.”
“It’s so humiliating,” I whisper.
“Humiliating? If anyone should be humiliated, or embarrassed, anyway, it’s him, not you.”
“Intellectually, I can see that, but emotionally…somehow I feel like I’m, you know, like it’s something about me.”
“There is nothing wrong with you. That’s bullshit.”
“Please don’t tell anyone,” I say. “I mean, it’s not a major trauma compared to some of the stories I’ve heard the last few days, but I don’t want people to know.”
“I won’t say anything. But forget comparing your hardships. It flat-out sucks, and you’re allowed to think it sucks. In my opinion, anyway.”
“Thanks, Cupcake.”
We talk a bit more about it, and what’s nice is how pissed off he is on my behalf. I can hear it in his voice and I can feel it in the way his arm has tightened around my shoulders, keeping me close at his side. After a few minutes, we both go quiet and I relax against him, the parts where our bodies meet humming with warmth, the silence comfortable.
“Do you feel better?” he says finally. “From talking about it?”
“I do, actually,” I say. “Physically and everything—I feel much better.”
“Good,” he says.
“That was nicely done, by the way.” I glance up at him with one eyebrow cocked.
“Huh?”
“You know, getting me to talk—first the sneaky escape, the great chats, the perfect latte, and this…” I indicate the cove, the ocean, the sky, with a sweep of my arm.
“I wasn’t trying to manipulate you, Lola,” he says, looking concerned.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I say. “I just mean—this is nice. It’s all been really nice.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Is this, like, your spot?”
“My spot? Kind of. One of them. I love to explore all these kinds of coves, up and down the coast.”
“So,” I say, thinking to lighten the mood, “you bring all the girls here?”
“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer,” he says, stiffening and taking his arm off me.
“Wait…what?”
“I’m offended.” He moves away from me.
“Hold on, what just happened? You’re offended at what? At my suggestion that you would romance girls on beautiful beaches, like I’m saying you’re some kind of greasy ladies’ man? ’Cause I didn’t mean it like that. Or are you offended at me putting myself in the category of ‘girl’ when I am a rehab patient and you would never in a million years think of me as a ‘girl’?”
“Forget it—”
“And by the way, I think I just caught you caring what I think of you.”
“Damn it.”
“So?”
He turns to face me. “Fine,” he says, eyes locking on mine. “Offended, maybe stupidly, because yes, it is one of my favorite places, and no, I haven’t brought anyone else here.”
“Okay…” I study his expression, trying to shake the feeling that I am suddenly in territory I have no idea how to navigate.
“And concerned about what you think…yes. Unfortunately.”
I frown. “Why unfortunately?”
“Because I care about you, and because…”
“Yes?” I say, still confused.
“I guess because despite what I said earlier, as this day goes on, I’m not sure my bringing you here was completely, um, grounded in what I…think I should be doing.”
He finishes and then watches me, like I’m now supposed to know what the hell he’s talking about and make some kind of response.
“I… Is this… Do you mean you’re mad at yourself all of a sudden for breaking the rules? Or you thought this would be good for me but now you don’t think so…even though it so obviously has been? Help me out here because honestly, I’m having the best day. One of the best days in…I don’t know how long. So what’s the problem?”
“The problem,” he says, then exhales forcefully, “is that I have been thinking of you…as a girl. Sometimes. More than occasionally. Despite my best efforts not to.”
“As a girl…?”
“Yes. Is that clear enough?”
“You…” I stare at him, willing my brain to catch up to what the rest of me already knows. “Really?”
“Yes,” he says and rolls his eyes in exasperation. “Really.”
“Holy shit” is all I can manage to say at the moment. Everything has gone into a simultaneous slow-motion/fast-motion state—slow-motion in the present where we are sitting facing each other on this pile of rocks out on the ocean, and every tiny changing expression on his face suddenly has to be translated inside me to mean something new, and all the sensations in my body stretch out from one heartbeat to the next—the places he was touching me only a minute ago so much colder than they should be, my lungs not quite getting enough air, the deep-down pull to get closer to him. Meanwhile the fast-motion swirls in another part of me, where my mind is replaying all my moments with Adam since I arrived at Sunrise—the sparring, the provocations, the banter, the push and pull of will and emotion and intellect, the between-moment moments—this film plays in my mind and I see, for the first time, that there is something there, has been something there all along.
Not like the thing with Wade—something totally different.
“Holy shit,” I say again, shaken. “You like me.”
“Yeah.” He gives a cute, weird, almost helpless sort of laugh. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“So…” The wind picks up. I swallow, eyes still locked with his. “You brought me here to do something about it?”
“No,” he says, “that was definitely not my plan.”
“But now you’re going to do something about it?”
“Other than telling you? No. No way.”
“What?”
“Oh my God, I shouldn’t have even told you. We need to go.” He scrambles to his feet, breaking the moment, then reaches a hand out to help me to mine, and once I’m up, starts off ahead of me for the shoreline.
“Wait—Adam…”
He has to have heard me, but he doesn’t turn back. In fact, he’s practically running away.
“Listen, you chickenshit,” I shout, huffing and scrambling as I try to catch up. “What the hell?”
By the time I get to the beach, he is up at the top, putting his shoes on, and I ha
ve no choice but to jog after him, slide into my flip-flops, and then follow him to the parking lot.
In the car, we get our belts on and he puts the key in the ignition.
“Wait,” I say, putting a hand out to stop him from turning it. “Please could you just hold on a minute?”
“Yes,” he says with a heavy sigh, refusing to look at me.
“Don’t you even want to know if I’m…if I would be into it?”
“No,” he says. “Because whether you would or not, neither answer is going to make me happy.”
“Well, that’s too bad, because maybe I would be.”
He groans and puts his head in his hands.
“Seriously, right now, Adam? Okay, my mind is a little bit blown and it took me a second to…uh, adjust, but guess what? I think I would be.”
“No, no, no,” he says.
“Why not?”
“Because.” He raises his head to look at me. “As I have told you over and over, there is a line. Our relationship is supposed to be professional. We shouldn’t even really be friends, much less…the other things I’d like us to be.”
“Other things, huh?”
“Don’t.”
“I can’t help it, Adam. We’re talking about it, so I’m thinking about it. We’re alone in a locked car in a mostly deserted parking lot where no one knows us,” I point out. “We could do other things right now and no one would have a clue.”
“No.” Adam turns and presses his forehead against the driver’s side window. “And besides, this isn’t about just wanting to mess around in a parking lot.”
“Fine.”
“Which would be a huge mistake.”
“I said fine,” I repeat, voice sharp because now I’m feeling embarrassed.
“Okay,” he says.
“So…are we talking never?”
“Not while I’m working at Sunrise and you’re a patient, or even an outpatient. And you’ll be an outpatient for a long time, ideally.”
“You do realize it’s still true, however effed up I may seem sometimes, that I don’t need to be in rehab? That I’m only still in rehab because there’s no parental unit willing to get me out?”
“Doesn’t change anything.”
Now I’m the one to put my head in my hands and groan in frustration.
“Lola,” he says softly, putting a hand on my back, which sends sizzling pangs up and down my spine, “not doing something you really want to do because you know it’s the wrong thing, or the wrong time—doing the hard thing—that builds strength. That’s what character is about.”
“Blah, blah, blah…”
“I’m sorry. I was stupid to tell you. Regardless, I can’t be a good mentor to you if I’m trying to be something else at the same time. And you? Admit it—you have no idea what you want. Maybe you’re vulnerable. Lonely. Maybe you’re just flattered. Maybe you didn’t even think of me like that until five minutes ago.”
“Maybe I’m going to punch you in the nose for making assumptions about what I do or do not feel, or what I do or do not want,” I say, though he has an extremely valid point about my not having thought about this until five minutes ago. I’d felt it, yes, but I hadn’t thought about it. “Let’s just forget it.”
“Please don’t be mad.”
“Mad? Mad is the least of it, Adam.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
To my frustration and discomfort, Adam accompanies me to dinner and for the rest of the evening until I return to the dorms. It’s his job, I get it. But I can’t clear my head with him so close all the time, and I need to clear it because now that I’ve clued in, I am suddenly insanely attracted to him. Not only that, but since we’ve agreed not to talk about the “other things” subject and that’s all I can think about, it leaves me with nothing to say to him, which is awkward, which makes me grumpy.
He doesn’t have much to say either, probably for similar reasons, plus the fact that he’s beating himself up for all of it. Still, he refuses to ditch me.
And then, when he finally leaves me and I head into the dorms, I miss him.
It’s infuriating, frustrating, confusing, insane.
I go to bed early, exhausted, but only sleep fitfully.
Around midnight, Talia climbs into my bed.
“You’re awake,” she whispers.
“I am now.”
“You were already. I could tell by your breathing. And you’re giving off some crazy energy. Don’t worry, I brought my own pillow,” she says, and snuggles down under the duvet. It’s such an odd thing, I’m not sure how to respond.
“So you kind of wigged out today, huh?”
It takes me a second to realize she’s talking about the post-massage, running-around-in-a-sheet-acting-hysterical episode. That was this morning, but it feels like it happened a week ago.
“I guess I did,” I say.
“One time last year we were down in San Diego—my mom had a conference. Anyway, I got into the minibar and somehow ended up running naked through the streets of San Diego with nothing but a knockoff Prada bag to cover me.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. I know if it were you, you’d have a real one. Anyway. For some reason I always end up stripping naked when I’m high. And, you know, you tend to meet people really easily that way—when you’re naked.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“So then I met up with this band and we did coke and then I had sex with one of their roadies who was this freakishly over-endowed ex–circus performer. Unfortunately he thought it was fun to try to strangle me in the middle of it and I tried to fight and it…didn’t end too well. Lot of bruises.”
I manage to breathe, “Jeez, Talia,” all the while battling the visual imagery and trying not to be shocked.
“Anyway, I thought that might make you feel better.”
“Feel better?”
“You know, about today and running all over the place in a sheet.”
“How…how was that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Just that it could have been worse.”
“Ahhh.”
She wriggles closer so she’s right next to me. “I hope I’m not making you feel weird.”
“Your feet are freezing.”
“Oh, sorry.” She moves them away. “I’m not trying to get sexy with you or anything. Anyway, I like guys. But I miss my sisters and I feel so…I’m cold all the time, you know? I think sometimes that’s why I have sex.”
“Because you’re cold?”
“Yeah.”
“Talia, that’s the worst reason to have sex I’ve ever heard.”
“I know, I know.”
“Try clothing, you know?”
She giggles.
“Seriously. You run around naked all the time, you’re going to get cold. Invest in some layers—a wool sweater, some leg warmers. Talk to Jenny, our Barney girl; she’s got that down.”
“Sure. Problem solved. Who needs rehab, huh?”
“Exactly.”
“So…you running around in a sheet…breakthrough? Breakdown?”
“I don’t know, I was just feeling a little crazed. I called my dad and we had a fight.”
“Really? About what?”
“Oh, you know, he can be kind of…overprotective,” I say.
After that, I am awake for hours, thinking about Dad, Mom, about Wade and the fact that I forgot he existed for much of yesterday—the entire time I was with Adam, basically. I think a lot about Adam and how I don’t really know what to think about my attraction to Adam, but how the result of that last part of our outing yesterday is that yet again, I’ve been rejected.
Monday morning, Talia is back in her own bed. I feel horrible—from being awake most of the night, and maybe cumulatively, from all the drama. I feel like a truck fell on me.
Of course there is no chance in hell anyone will let me stay in bed, not with such a momentous “breakthrough” going on.
And…I want to see Adam. W
ell, I do and I don’t…but more do than don’t.
I emerge slowly and pull on ripped boyfriend jeans and a hooded light blue T-shirt with a Warhol banana on it. I put my hood up and tie it tight under my chin so none of my hair shows and then put on my bracelet.
As part of my rehab-chic line I’m going to create “get a real boyfriend” jeans, “get your own boyfriend” jeans, and indoor sunglasses—sunglasses with big, lightly tinted lenses that you can wear inside and hide your eyes but still be able to see perfectly.
And maybe some armor for these crappy days when it feels like regular clothing is not enough because the whole world can see through it and under your skin.
Anyway.
A few minutes later, I sink into one of the chairs in the lounge and start on the two cups of (craptastic) coffee I’ve poured myself, which makes me think of Adam, who is not there yet.
Adam arrives, freshly showered and shaved by the look of him, but a little puffy around the eyes, like maybe he didn’t sleep well, either. He glances quickly at me, then away, and all my hopes of my attraction to him being a one-day thing go down the drain. I want to run my fingers up the back of his neck, where his hair is just long enough that it starts to curl. I want to drag him off, somewhere away from here, and talk to him for hours. I want to know what his mouth feels like on mine.
I’m in deep trouble, in other words.
Up in front of the group, he opens his binder, looks down to find the affirmation. “‘My intuition tells me the right thing to do, moment to moment. I trust myself.’”
I see it work on him—see him, as he says it, letting the thought settle in, like he always tells us to do. I see how he is decided, how he actually, no matter what he might feel for me, does trust himself—it comes off him in waves.
And I think, Yay for you.
And I think, Screw you.
And I think, Maybe it’s time to refocus my energy on Wade.
And another part of me thinks, Who…?
Wade Miller. Gorgeous, sweet, needs-to-be-rescued, has-fewer-scruples Wade Miller. Yes. That will help.
I take myself back in time and see him like he was when we first met, back in time to that feeling—thirteen and crazy about someone for the very first time.
It helps, but only for a little while.
Lola Carlyle's 12-Step Romance Page 18
