by Julia Kent
“Maggie? Do you need a doctor?” Charlotte asked, her hand patting my shoulder like I was a little dog.
“Huh?”
“She’s just freaked out,” Darla said from somewhere. “Give her space. She needs to breathe. That was a big shock, going out there. Not many people can do it.”
“But she did,” Charlotte said, squeezing my shoulder.
“You fucking saved the band. You and Tyler. And now everyone wants to know who the opening duet was,” Darla declared.
“Huh?” I was becoming a broken record.
“Drink,” Charlotte said, handing me the cold thing from the back of my neck. It was a bottle of water.
“I think she needs something stiffer,” Darla said.
“That’s what she said,” Charlotte added with a groan. I couldn’t even smile.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Tyler. What the hell had just happened out there, on stage? I became someone else, my hands guiding me through motions and song, through touch and sound, as if we’d made love on stage in front of twenty thousand people. Whatever happened in that short set felt even more intimate than making love. That was impossible, right?
You can’t get more intimate than that.
Or...can you?
My phone buzzed in my back pocket and I felt something pop in my ears. Charlotte became smaller and smaller, until I found myself lying down on the floor, phone in hand.
“Maggie!” It was Lena on the phone. “Do your friends need to call 911?”
“No,” I muttered. I pulled the phone away from my ear. Who had turned on the speakerphone?
“Charlotte just said you performed on stage with Mr. Hottie?”
“You mean Tyler?”
“Yeah. Mr. Hottie.”
Charlotte’s eyebrow went up. I didn’t see it. I could feel it. “Your gay sister called him Mr. Hottie?” she asked.
“You should see him naked,” Lena added.
Two eyebrows went up. “You’ve seen him naked?” Charlotte sputtered.
“I slept with him,” I said.
The world turned into a series of spiral squeals as Lena and Charlotte exploded, both full of happy sounds.
“Oh, my God! I knew those condoms would come in handy!”
“Your gay sister gave you condoms so you could sleep with Tyler?” Charlotte gasped.
“I have a name. I am not ‘your gay sister,’ and technically, I’m not gay. I’m pansexual.” Lena’s tone made Charlotte’s eyes go wide.
“I’m so sorry. Maggie calls you ‘my gay sister’ and I—”
“You WHAT?” Lena shouted.
“Can we get back to talking about the fact that I slept with Tyler? That seems to be the least volatile topic here,” I mumbled.
“YAY!” Lena screamed through the phone.
“My sister is cheering me on for having sex.”
“YAY!” echoed Charlotte.
“Why don’t we just announce it to the crowd?” I groaned.
“Maggie, this is huge!” Lena and Charlotte said in unison. Then they laughed. I sat up, chugged the water and felt some of my weirdness ease up.
“No. Sleeping with Tyler wasn’t huge. Getting on that stage and playing and singing at the concert was huge,” I said, correcting them.
Charlotte’s eyes softened and she gave me a hug. “What you just did for the band is huge. But breaking through everything and being sexually intimate with someone...that’s bigger.”
And that’s when I started to cry.
And cry.
And cry.
In my peripheral vision I could see workers coming in and out of the room, some holding bottled water, others long electronic cords, and one carried a giant bowl of what looked like unwrapped Reese’s cups. Minutes passed and all I could do was sob into Charlotte’s shoulder. At some point she ended the call with Lena, assuring her I was in good hands.
I was crying for the person I was seven years ago. Crying for the person I was a day ago. Crying for the feeling that something deep had shifted between me and Tyler. Crying from confusion and the absurd notion that I was falling in love with someone I didn’t understand. Who wasn’t capable of communicating what he felt.
But who felt—and expressed—it anyway.
I was just plain tired and emotionally done and I needed a friend to cry on. Charlotte’s timing was impeccable.
“Honey, we have a hotel room right around the corner. Where’s your car?” Charlotte asked as I sobbed.
“I parked it near the loading dock.”
She stood and helped lift me up. “Let’s go. There’s a block of rooms at the hotel and let’s get you settled into one. You look like you need a long bath, a long talk, and a lot of wine.”
I sniffed and tried to laugh. My body buzzed like I’d been shocked by radioactive bees. “You got that out of order.”
Charlotte gave me a gentle smile, her red lips parting to show straight, white teeth. “C’mon.” And with that, we walked out of the backstage area and she opened a door, the air hot and steamy. I handed her the car keys and she climbed in.
She had no problem driving a stick shift.
“So, spill,” she ordered, backing out of the loading dock and turning right. “You slept with him. And...”
“And I slept with him. He’s amazing. Infuriating and inconsistent and stubborn—”
“And amazing.”
“Yeah.”
Charlotte chuckled. She sounded eerily like Lena. “The Amazing Frown,” she declared. We turned a corner and she maneuvered the car to an underground parking garage beneath an enormous skyscraper hotel. She pulled in to the Valet Parking section.
“Fancy.”
She shrugged. “It seems to be a thing here. Besides—expense account.”
“Does that mean we get to drink fancy wine? Something that costs more than three bucks a bottle?”
“Three bucks gets you a thimble of wine in L.A.” she said with a laugh.
“I hope the expense account is enormous, because I need a bathtub full of wine.”
“After what you did for the band, Maggie, I think they’d fill a swimming pool with Merlot just for you.”
We got out of the car and I snagged my backpack. Charlotte handed the keys to the valet, got a ticket, and led me to the elevators. She kept looking at me, stealing covert glances.
“I’m the same Maggie. Haven’t changed. Take a picture. It lasts longer,” I mumbled.
“You have changed.”
“Sleeping with Tyler changed my physical appearance?”
She shrugged, the motion insolent and languid. The doors parted and she stepped out on the seventeenth floor. “You may not believe it, but yes.”
“How? And if you say I’m less uptight, I’ll take that as an antifeminist stereotype and tell on you.”
“Tell who?”
“The Director of Residence Life back at the college. You are a Resident Director. You can’t hold stereotypes.” I struggled to keep myself from laughing but failed.
Charlotte just snorted. “It’s not that you’re less uptight. It’s more that you look relieved.”
“I’m crying and relieved?”
“Yes.”
Damn. She was right. She led me to a room and pulled out a pocketful of key cards. “Darla gave these to me. We haven’t even checked in yet. There’s a room for me and Liam, Darla and Trevor, one for Sam—and one for Frown.” She looked up at me through her impossibly-long black lashes. “This can be Frown’s room.”
“I—uh....”
“Let’s go in,” she said in a voice that permitted no argument. Charlotte walked into the bathroom and turned on the tub. It was an enormous jacuzzi tub that looked like it could hold twelve people. I walked past the bathroom door and marveled at the rest of the room. Airy, Scandinavian colors and sharp lines, with a view of the hills outside of Los Angeles.
“Random Acts of Crazy has hit the big time.”
“Thank Darla for it. I don’t know how she m
anages the budgets, but she managed this.” Charlotte reached for a bottle of wine in a bucket of ice and read the label. She turned to me. “You okay with white?”
And that’s when it all hit me.
“I had sex,” I whispered. The room began to spin. “I had sex and I liked it. And he didn’t hurt me. He was loving and it was good and I didn’t come but that’s okay because he was so sweet and oh, God, Charlotte, I think I’m falling for a guy named Frown.”
I sank to the floor and hugged my knees, rocking forward and back. She dropped down, too, and put her arms around me.
“It’s okay. Shhhhh, Maggie.”
I laughed, a hysterical sound that felt like machine gun fire. “That’s what he said last night, Charlotte. Last night when we made love. He was so gentle and sweet. He asked for consent every time he—”
“Are you sure he’s not a unicorn?” Charlotte asked.
I pulled out of the hug and looked at her. Both sets of eyes were wet. “I don’t know what the hell Tyler is.”
“He sounds like a real human being.”
“Yes.”
“Then hang on to him. They’re rare.”
“As rare as unicorns?”
“Rarer.”
She stood and poured us both a glass of wine, mine twice as full. “Here. Drink half of this and by the time you’re done, go take a long soak. I have to go back to the concert.” She walked to the door, then paused.
“You want me to let Frown know you’re in here, waiting for him?”
The wine had a fruity scent, with a hint of something woodsy. I chugged the entire glass in one long, cool gulp before I set it down and walked closer to her. I reached for the bathroom door and swung it open, then said:
“I do.”
Tyler
The concert felt like nothing more than an afterthought.
All I could think about was Maggie. How it felt on stage, singing to her. How we kissed in front of twenty thousand people. How terrified she was to go on stage, and yet...she went. How she got over that fear and did it for me. Even when I told her not to.
How she didn’t listen.
How she followed me when I told her to go home.
How all of that should have made me say fuck it and run screaming from her.
And how all of that made me fall for her.
I needed her. My fingers itched to touch her skin. A rising impulse I couldn’t shake kept building inside me, like a pressure cooker that could only be released through being with her.
Two encores and More Than Nothing came on stage. Random Acts of Crazy was done and the guys wanted to party.
I only wanted her.
Liam went straight to Charlotte. Trevor kissed Darla. Sam stood next to me, awkward and twitchy, his hands drumming on his thighs. Amy wasn’t here. I didn’t know why not. I didn’t really care.
Where was Maggie?
As if Charlotte heard me asking the question in my head, she walked over, leaving Liam with Sam. “You’re wondering where Maggie is?”
I said nothing. I couldn’t. I stopped breathing.
She rolled her eyes. “She’s in room 1717 at the hotel. Your room.”
I exhaled. “Thank you.”
Liam came over with a cockeyed grin and slung his arm around Charlotte’s waist, goosing her ass. “What’s up?”
She ignored him. “Just, Frown...be careful with Maggie.”
Liam stiffened. “What did you do to her?”
“They slept together,” Charlotte said, so casually it was like I didn’t hear her.
Liam’s eyebrows shot up. “You fucked Maggie?”
An elbow hit him cleanly, right under the ribs, as Charlotte gave him one hell of a jab. “They didn’t fuck! They made love!”
“She told you,” I said to her, blinking hard, trying to process too much all at once.
“Yes,” Charlotte said simply. “Just...please. Don’t hurt her.”
“I didn’t. And I won’t.”
Charlotte held out the card and told me the name of the hotel. I started to leave, then stopped.
“Is there a drugstore around here?” I asked Charlotte.
“There’s one next to the hotel,” she said.
Before anyone could say another word I was out the door, searching for the exit. I had something to buy.
And then a lot of things to say.
Maggie
The knock on the door woke me up. After a long soak in the giant bathtub, a scrubbing with some lavender-verbena soap that smelled like hope, and another large glass of that yummy wine, I’d dozed off on the giant bed, rolled up in a fluffy terrycloth bathrobe that was bigger than a sleeping bag.
The click-click of the room key being slid into the door made me jolt.
“Hello?”
Tyler. His voice made my stomach clench, then relax. I became acutely aware of the sound of the wind against the window, the soft thud of his footsteps, the moment he came into view, sweaty and carrying a small, white plastic bag.
I sat up and felt for my half-dry hair. I must have looked like a Muppet who’d been unpacked after a few days of stagecoach travel.
“Hi,” I said, shy and transfixed.
“Here.” He thrust the bag into my hands.
“What’s this?”
“Open it.”
I did, the packets coming into view just moments before my eyes teared up.
“Oh, Tyler.” Hair dye. Four packets of flavored drink mix in red, yellow, purple and orange.
“I wasn’t sure which colors to buy. Picked the ones I’ve seen you wear the most. Figured they’d be your comfort colors.” He sat on the bed, breathing slightly hard, and reached up to tug on one piece of my fading red hair.
I dipped my head, shy again. “Thank you.”
“I thought stress would make you dye your hair.”
“What stress?”
He laughed at that, his throat working and his stomach bouncing as he laughed until he began to wheeze, the sound contagious and ridiculous, earthy and pleasant. Happy Tyler was so different from Dour Frown.
I liked them both.
Maybe even loved them both.
I stood, crossing the room to find the rest of the bottle of wine. I poured us each a half glass and looked around, startled to see a second bottle. I handed him his glass and he studied it, eyes full of amusement.
“I’m more of a Rolling Rock kind of guy.”
“Drink up, Frown. We could both use a toast after what we’ve been through.”
“Been through? Is that what’s happened? We’ve been through?” His eyes narrowed and he held up his glass, standing up and walking to me. “I think we’ve done more than ‘been through.’”
“You define it, then. You’re the one who’s so good with words.”
His nostrils flared with something just beyond amusement. “A toast. To Maggie. Who gave and gave and gave until...”
I had the glass at my lips, perched with the wine touching my tongue. He paused. I paused. Whatever he said next would alter my entire life’s course. I knew it in this moment, and waited to hear my destiny.
“Until,” Tyler said, clearing his throat, “I was so full of your compassion, that I could finally give some back.”
“No,” I choked out. “Your compassion was all you.”
He took two big swallows of wine, finishing the small glass, and set it down, reaching for me. “Yes. it was my compassion. But you unleashed it.”
The wine in my glass sloshed as he took me in his arms and kissed me, tasting like grapes and sweat and a tender desperation.
He pulled away and stared at me. The room was spinning. So was my heart.
“Let me show you what a good person can do. Let’s take back some of the power that was taken away from us. I want to reclaim,” he sighed, “and I want to do it with you.”
I always knew, somewhere so layered inside me that it didn’t seem quite real, that there was a person like this out there in the world for me. I coul
dn’t let myself vocalize that. Couldn’t say it aloud in case I jinxed it. Couldn’t peel back the overlays and acknowledge the existence of that hope. It’s one thing to believe something: it’s quite another to say you believe it.
And it’s something altogether different to say that you believe it’s true.
Standing there, looking into eyes that mirrored mine like we were matter and anti-matter, I felt a realignment, as if my DNA had re-calibrated. My heart beat on. My blood rushed through me. My muscles all worked. The words queued up as though they knew when to come out.
And the air went in my lungs, and out. Inhaled by him, and out. We volleyed our breath in even patterns, like watching tennis players in the first game at Wimbledon.
If this was real—and the jury was still out—how real was it?
“You know what I want?”
“Tell me.”
“I want you to make love to me three times.”
“Three? Tonight?”
“Three.”
He started to ask why. Then he gave me a gentle look of understanding, a dawning recognition of the power of what I was saying.
“It would be an honor, Maggie.”
My fingers trembled as I set down my wine glass, then slowly, eyes locked on his, undid the sash of my bathrobe. He’d seen me naked in the full light yesterday.
On stage today.
And now, as the bathrobe dropped, I realized it was time to let him all the way in. To let myself all the way in.
To let go.
“You sure about this?” he asked, his eyes wide and intense, taking me in. He was all primal heat and I was enjoying being looked at like this.
From the way his pants were tightening, I could tell he was, too.
“Quit asking me that, Frown, and kiss me.”
“Don’t have to say it twice,” he said, filling his palms with my breasts in under a second, his mouth hot and tangy on mine. A rush of every emotion I’d been feeling since I last touched him came roaring through me, my hands frantic against his skin, ripping his shirt off over his head and reaching for his jeans button.
“Is this okay?” I asked, his mouth on my neck, nipping as I struggled to get his pants off.
“Jesus, Maggie. You don’t have to ask.”
I laughed. “Consent works both ways.”
