Need Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy Book Three)

by Dunning, Rachel

  Deck and I had transcended the physical. I had let go of every inhibition, every worry, every half-empty thought. I’d grabbed life and ran with it after meeting him, even after only that short time.

  But Fear had already sown its seed deep within me. Its tumor.

  I tried to walk in the sun despite it, but I couldn’t. I tried to dance in the rain, and I failed.

  It was a few more days before Vikki convinced me that I’d been acting irrationally, that Deck’s actions and words had seemed sincere. I tried to call this Tatiana woman, just like she’d suggested I do. “Us girls have to stick together,” Tatiana had written on the note she’d sent me accompanying her fourteen-by-nine photographs. I even wondered if she hadn’t Photoshopped her exquisite figure, just to make me feel more insecure about myself. But Deck had been honest about that as well—she really was as sexy in real life as she looked in the photos.

  Fear knocked at my door, scraped its fingernail on my insecure heart...

  I tried to call her but she never took my calls. When someone finally did answer, it was a man, her husband. Her husband! So she’d been married during the incident she’d so innocently written to me about. It gave credence to Deck’s story, that she’d been lying.

  So he and I started hanging out again. Slowly, step by step. We held hands, drank coffee, drove on over to Prospect Heights and walked its park. We walked the promenade, looked out over the water toward the city, enjoyed cold winter sunsets, ate corn dogs, ate dumplings. We eventually kissed again, just like nervous and hesitant teenagers. Our tongues finally touched once more, after the trust had rebuilt itself. And, after many weeks of growth, of learning to trust him again, I let him inside me.

  It was now March, Year Zero, where we began this chapter.

  When we finally made love again, after an endless time of waiting, we climbed, rolled, screamed and flew high. The stings of pleasure were rapturous, all-engulfing. Suddenly Deck—in the moments he filled me and thrust up into me—became my world, my life, my soul, my lover, my sun, my stars, my entire existence.

  Fear.

  If I lose him..., I thought afterwards.

  We lay there heaving for breath, looking at the ceiling, knowing we were back to what we’d been before... If I lose him, now that he’s become my everything again, I’d lose more than I could ever bear to lose. I’d lose even myself.

  That tumor of Fear inside me was now head-splitting in its hugeness. Cells had combined and merged and swelled.

  We made love again, and again, and again. He became my drug, my bread, my water. I needed him more than I needed sunshine.

  He needed me too.

  But I knew Fear. We’d had dinner, Fear and I; we’d dined, we’d shared secrets; I’d told Fear everything. Fear knew all there was to know about me.

  Fear knew I was nothing more than a reed in a tornado. Soon I would break, get blown over. I was snapping already.

  Deck meant the world to me.

  Savva had meant the world to me. Losing her...losing her “suddenly” as Vikki liked to analyze about me...killed me. Losing Deck suddenly would...would...

  The thought was too much to bear. It was a looming cloud, a thunderstorm in my dreams. It was a suffocating smog, and it was moving closer, surrounding me, like a vampire in an old-time movie with fangs and a kitschy robe, engulfing me and drawing me close to him. The thought became my world. It wormed its way into my mind while I DJed more regularly at Sacrament nightclub. It flowed out the blue ink pen I used to sign on as a resident DJ for its main dance floor, the deal brokered and negotiated by the kind and roundly Randy Dhawan, his full-length pony-tail swaggering as he had smiled and grinned and shaken hands with Sacrament’s owner. Fear tinkled and twanged out of Sacrament’s heavy-duty speakers while semi-naked people writhed under its strobes and their bodies gleamed with juicy sweat. The thought crashed and clanged and kabanged while Deck and I made love later. It thrust and hit and spattered in my mind as we reached climax and soared and fired up into the skies.

  I slept less as the weeks flew by. I breathed more uneasily. Deck noticed. Deck asked.

  He got no answer. Because I had no answer to give him.

  Rearview Mirrors, as he used to say. It’s all clearer when you look at it from rearview mirrors. Back then, I hadn’t known. I hadn’t known at all.

  Fear had sewed my lips closed with thick black sutures and every time Deck asked me what was on my mind, what kept me silent as summer started to roll over the city like a smothering blanket, he got nothing.

  Sacrament took more and more of my nights, and I let it. I found myself not wanting to be with Deck, and I had no reason for it. I wanted to be with him, but every time I was, something gnawed at me inside like a New York rat in an overturned trashcan.

  I didn’t know what it was.

  Vikki noticed. She tried to tell me, she tried to let me see that I was pushing Deck away, but I had it rationalized.

  You see, I tell you now that I knew Fear. But all I knew back then was “that feeling.”

  And that feeling made me scared.

  Then other things happened, horrible things, Xavier dying was one of them, and that added to the Fear. But there was even more than that. So much of it, such a large accumulation of it in such a short time—the Universe going against us as Deck had once told me—that Fear took over my life. So, just as summer hit its peak, mid-August, and breathing the smoggy air was like going for a swim in bathwater, I called Deck, hands shaking on my mobile, sweat dripping from my brow while Vikki handed me an Imperial glass to ease my frayed nerves. I drank it, put it down, and then went to her balcony.

  “Deck,” I said. My chin trembled so hard that that was all I said.

  But by then, Deck already knew. He said, on the other side of the line, “It’s finally over?”

  I looked out at Williamsburg from Vikki’s top-floor apartment, fifteen stories high. I couldn’t answer him. The tears wrenched from inside me like so many foul animals. Then he said the final words I ever heard from him, words which would haunt me in my dreams even to this day: “I’ll always love you, Blaze. And I’ll also always hate you for making me leave.” My tears burst out so hard that I dropped my phone. It hit the balcony floor, bounced twice, eased gently through a slit in the railing and then, just for a second, paused, Deck’s face on the screen looking up at me, and then it tumbled. Down, down, down it fell, like a championship diver plummeting and swirling until—

  Splat.

  It was over.

  Vikki appeared behind me like a patron ghost. Her hands slid over my shoulders and she pulled my back onto her chest while my body gasped and retched with ridiculous tears. “Is what you really want?” she said to me, her Russian accent making her sound like a fortune-teller telling someone they’ve just seen the Dark Man on the White Horse holding the Black Flag. The card of Death.

  I nodded, turned and buried my head into her chest and felt her blouse become sodden as I wept and cried rivers onto it.

  And then I cried some more.

  “Maybe is for the best,” she said. “All that fighting cannot be good.”

  But there had been more, so much more, leading to this final and catastrophic moment... A build-up like the inexorable fuse of eight megatons of dynamite. Unstoppable. Unavoidable.

  Incomprehensible.

  Deck and I had fought more and more since that first time making love again in March, as the Fear had grown and grown in me. We’d fought daily. We’d fought hourly even sometimes. Once he’d thrown a glass at the wall and I’d ripped a vase onto his floor, smashing black sods onto his tiles. He’d accused me of closing up to him (rearview truth) and I’d accused him of...of...of anything I could damn well think of at the time! He asked me to speak to him. I tried, but it had not been good enough. I’d said, “I just don’t know what it is but every time I’m with you I’m afraid. I’m scared. And I don’t know why!”

  His Sexy Movers business had picked up, a business where women (and even
men, sometimes) paid as much for the view of Deck and his team’s bodies as they did for the actual moving of furniture. A business which, forever in my mind, would always be tainted by the image of that woman, Tatiana, who was in actuality Deck’s first real client under the new banner, even before the new business cards had been printed.

  Single and married women alike would call and I’d often pick up the phone. They’d talk to me like I was a secretary. They’d refuse to leave a message, saying they wanted to talk to “Mr. Cocks directly,” making sure to make the word Cocks sound low and gentle, and slow. Some of them even appeared at his place and, on seeing me in one of his tees, scowled and looked over my shoulder, wanting to know if this was indeed where “Sexy Movers” operated from.

  Skate runs Sexy Movers now. Vikki doesn’t bat an eyelid at the calls he gets, at the women appearing at her place wanting to sneak a peek at Mr. Sexy himself.

  But it took three years, almost to the day of Deck and me breaking up officially, for me to notice that I had likely been wrong. And when it hit me, when I first noticed those Rearview Mirrors, it felt like I had been hit by a train.

  -2-

  I was in Vikki’s apartment, August, Year Three, three years after Deck and I had split up, reading a magazine. I was in town for a bit. Laz and I were “off” at the time. Vikki and Skate were in her bedroom, laughing, giggling, being horny kids (she was twenty-nine by then), and the doorbell rang. I answered it, much as I had answered Deck’s door such a long time ago. And I was confronted with a young (very young!) bottle blond with tits like melons and legs up to the ceiling. Tight legs. Tight tits. Tight everything. The kind of girl you hate no matter how kind she might be. She had on hotpants, hardly anything on top...

  She placed her index finger on her bottom lip, pulled it down slightly, set her eyelids at half-mast, moved her left knee over her right (she had red, erotic heels on), and said, “Uhm, is...Sk—Skate...here?” She peered behind me.

  My legs wobbled.

  This girl wanted to have sex with Skate. Literally. Openly. The way she was standing and posing it almost even felt like she wanted to have sex with me in order to have sex with Skate! Her hormones were pumping so wildly I could practically smell them...

  “Uhm, yeah, er, sure,” I said.

  “This—this is Sexy Movers, isn’t it?”

  A moment of flashback hit me, a girl asking me something similar, many years before, except the boy that girl had wanted was called Declan, not Skate.

  I paused.

  “Miss?” she asked.

  “Uhm, yeah, sorry, I got lost there for a bit.”

  “Yeah (giggle giggle giggle) happens to me a lot as well!”

  No shit. I called Skate in the back. “Skate! Someone...uhm...here to see you...”

  The girl in stripper heels and hotpants pulled those hotpants up a little higher. Smiled.

  Skate arrived. Without a shirt. And sweating. I stood back, a little behind the door so I could see Skate but not her. But I could hear her. I could practically hear her dripping...

  She flirted.

  Skate played it cool, very cool, and very sexy.

  She asked the price. He told her. She tried to negotiate it down. He wouldn’t.

  Vikki appeared in a silk robe behind us. I expected to see a scowl on her face, but there was none, only a gentle, knowing smirk as she pulled out a Parliament and stuck it in her mouth. She moved to the kitchen counter, sat at a stool and crossed her legs, watched Skate while he “did business.” Not a care in the world in her eyes. Once or twice Vikki even raised her eyebrows at me, proud of how Skate was handling things.

  The bimbo outside eventually said, “Uhm, Skate, are those girls...‘with’ you?” referring to me and Vikki.

  Skate said coolly, “Of course.”

  The girl went silent, giggled once more. And then Skate got the job.

  Four grand for a move. After he closed the door, he put his shirt on, smirked at me, and said, “I always get a better rate when my shirt’s off.”

  Vikki stood up, put her hands languidly around his neck and said in a thick, seductive accent, “You my sexy boy. You make me so hot with all girls chasing you!” She kissed him.

  He put his arms around the small of her back, leaned her down, kissed her in return. And then said, “You know you are the only girl for me.”

  And I knew he meant it.

  Deck had told me the same thing many times before, and I had never believed him...

  It was here that, with a hot feeling of sinking lead in my guts, I began to appreciate—rearview mirrors!—what a catastrophic, cataclysmic, apocalyptic, ruinous, fatal, and just motherfreaking bad mistake I had made.

  I had made an error.

  A sad, unforgivable, life-altering-for-the-worse screw-up.

  I had told Vikki, previously, that she wouldn’t know what it’s like, that there was something Deck had been hiding! If she could only see all the women that had come by then she’d certainly see my point of view! I’d stuck to that story for three years.

  “It’s just business,” Deck had told me once. “That’s what we do, we flex our biceps and move furniture. We appeal to a female market! If I’m cold and uninteresting they won’t hire me, Blaze!”

  I’d barely caught what he’d said. My eyes had been filled with scenes and pictures that always resurfaced whenever I got insecure. “You did fuck her, didn’t you!” I was talking about Tatiana. “Her” was always Tatiana. Deck knew that. I knew that. Her.

  “Christ, Blaze! What’s gotten into you!? You’ve... You’re just...”

  “WHAT! PARANOID?”

  He’d shook his head, walked out of his kitchen. And on and on it went...

  On that August, Year Three, having watched Skate do his thing with this girl (and there would be other girls that would come by later where I saw the same thing), I saw...something else. I saw...business.

  Watching Skate kiss Vikki here, cold lead sank in my stomach.

  Because now I knew. Now I knew that I’d been paranoid. Three years later. All those years I’d believed it, all those years, and I...finally...knew.

  But it was too late.

  The mind plays tricks. The mind protects. The mind fights to keep pain away and tells you lies to convince you to avoid the potential pain.

  He’s cheating on me with other women.

  I was a fool to have believed him.

  I’m a burden on him.

  He doesn’t like me mixing tunes at an underground club.

  It’s too good to be true. It can’t last. Nothing could be this pure. You’re gonna fall, Blaze. You’re gonna fall hard.

  On and on, my mind lied to me.

  When the truth was, the only truth: You’re freaking scared, Blaze, so you’re grasping at anything you can, and secretly sabotaging this relationship with your accusations, because you’re scared!

  I was.

  Here, in Vikki’s living room, watching the two of them continue kissing after Blondie’s visit, I finally cottoned on to the fact that I really had been scared. That my mind had sabotaged the union, pretended to show me things that weren’t there, to “protect” me from the potential loss of someone who’d come to mean...more to me than Savva had ever meant.

  That smile. That endless smile...

  And, in trying to protect myself from losing him, I lost him anyway.

  The mind plays tricks.

  By now Deck had been with plenty other women, I knew that. I think the latest bimbo I’d heard of on ESPN had been some supermodel tight-tittied diva of some sort—you know, the black-haired, tall, exotic, legs to the moon type. He’d been with several of those, I believe. It was hard to miss it. Deck is the hottest guy in all of football. Even if you don’t follow the NFL, you’d hear about him somewhere. He was—is—every hetero woman’s favorite bad boy. The colorful ink all over his right arm doesn’t help. Neither do the occasional bar-fights (he’s been fined a few times for those.) The traffic violations. “A man with
a past,” the papers say.

  Yes, I am that past. And I’m in his past. But it doesn’t mean I don’t love him. I realized I still did after this Sexy Movers incident at Vikki’s place.

  That was when I got Declan’s name inked on me, just as a reminder. A piece of him that I would always keep with me, just like the skull and the dead tree and the wolf on my arm remind me of Savva. Will I ask him to take me back? No. I won’t. That water has traveled, that ship has sailed. He’s moved on and I guess so have I.

  Of course, Laz asked about the tattoo in one of our “on” periods. In fact, our next “on” period started that very month in Year Three. It seems that I tended to seek out Laz every August...

  When he asked about it, I told him it had been a childhood crush. When he wasn’t happy with the answer, I grew cold, and my body stiffened. Noticing it, he dropped it. Laz only wanted me when my body was hot. Conversation and “Getting to Know Each Other” never played a big role in our, uhm, “relationship.”

  I’m sure some day I’ll find someone who it won’t be like that with. I’m sure of it. I had my chance with Deck, I blew it. I learned from it.

  What did I learn? I sometimes ask myself...

  Maybe Deck blew it, too. Maybe he could’ve been more patient. But I didn’t make it easy for him. So maybe that’s what I learned: be more patient, be more...trusting. Just the thought of it makes me gulp. But it is something I need to do. So, sure, yeah, that’s what I learned, I guess. Next guy that comes along, I’m gonna be more trusting, and more patient. Because that impatience, that sense that the person you’re with is some type of drug to be fired up the nose or into your blood, isn’t real. No, it’s not. It’s... There’s no such thing as that type of love! It’s...just not workable. Right, that’s what I learned, maybe. That kind of love is unsustainable. Yeah, there’s a good word. Right. Unsustainable. M-hmm. Good, solid word for a lesson learned.

  I look over at Vikki across the table from me now at Tom’s. Skate’s leaning back on her, and he’s bent his head back so that their lips can touch. Her tongue is buried in his mouth. I see his chest begin heaving with passionate, unstoppable love for her. They’ve been like that for almost five years going now, not an ounce of heat lost between them.