Secrets of Southern Girls

by Haley Harrigan

  Julie climbs to her feet. August looks at her with those dark eyes, his lips parted around the cigarette. She’s jittery from the two cups of hotel room coffee she’s had, the rest of the pot waiting for her downstairs. The words from Reba’s diary are fresh in her mind, and August’s face is the most honest thing she’s seen in a long time. She lifts her hand, rests it against the warmth of his cheek, and he doesn’t flinch. The line of his jaw beneath her palm makes her want to say something, to do something. She could kiss him, right now, she thinks, and maybe he wouldn’t mind. The questions are there in his eyes: What is this? What does this mean? But she doesn’t know the answers.

  “Good night, August,” she whispers, even though the night isn’t over for her.

  She has more reading to do.

  66

  Lying in a stupor on the floor of his gallery, Toby dreams of her, except it was real once. He knows it really happened, and now he’s reliving it all in his sleep.

  It was the week after Jules had caught Reba leaving his bedroom.

  “Back again,” he said when he looked up and saw Reba in his doorway. He was more surprised than he let on. He hadn’t expected her to come back again, once Jules was on to her. He knew Jules well enough to know that if she’d confronted him, she’d have confronted Reba too. Bitch had never been one to keep things to herself. It was ballsy of Reba to come back there—during the day, no less. She locked his bedroom door behind her. Smart girl. He was painting, sitting on the floor and leaning into the wall with paint streaks on his arms and on his tank top. He’d just finished a line of coke, which he’d never have done if he’d known she was coming over. It made him focused but jittery, not what he needed with her around. Not to mention that he’d never done that around her before. Only marijuana, and not even much of that.

  “You told her I smoke pot?” Reba asked, with raised eyebrows.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Fuck, Reba, I don’t know. What did you want me to tell her? The truth?” He’d protected her, and he didn’t want to think about why. Because he didn’t want things to end was the easy answer. His body went crazy when she was around, even then, when she was over by the door like she might run at any moment. If she came closer, he’d have to touch her, wouldn’t be able to hold back.

  “I actually thought I could trust you,” she said, looking pissed off, which pissed him off.

  “Hey, you’re the one who showed up here in the middle of the night with no warning, fucked me senseless, and slipped out with hardly a good-bye. Maybe if you’d let me know you were coming I could have been waiting for you, could have kept an eye out for your supposed best friend, who obviously isn’t such a good friend anymore or you would be telling her your secrets in the first place.”

  “I don’t need your help,” she said.

  “Don’t you? You tell me. I had to tell her something. Would you rather her think you have something going on with pot…or something going on with me? Not to mention the other boy.”

  Her face was red, and there she went again, protecting her man and all that shit. He was sick of it, really. He hadn’t asked her to come over, hadn’t asked her over on Thanksgiving night either, for that matter, but he’d done the best he could to help her out—and did it even matter? She opened her mouth like she was about to give him a serious piece of her mind, but only one sentence came out.

  “Don’t you dare bring him into this.”

  Toby got to his feet and crossed the room to her so quickly that he knocked over a small jar of skin-colored paint. Screw it. He was standing in front of her, and she was looking at him with that angry, unsure pout and he said, “Why not, Rebecca? It’s all about him, right? Or…is it?” He couldn’t help it; he grabbed the back of her head with his paint-streaked hands and kissed her the way she liked it. God, did she like it. Her hands were all over him, against his arms, in his hair.

  “This is over,” she said as she tugged his shirt up over his chest.

  “It’s not. You belong to me,” he panted, as he pulled her down to the bedroom floor.

  “I don’t,” she whispered, but he could tell that even she didn’t believe it anymore.

  67

  REBA’S DIARY, 1997

  I don’t know what I’m capable of. I don’t know what lines I won’t cross, who I won’t hurt. It has to stop.

  If Toby doesn’t touch me, I will be able to stay away. If I don’t think of him, of not only the way his body feels against mine but other things, like the way he caresses the skin of my naked back, the soft kisses on my palms, then I’ll be okay. Like the way he asks about my life sometimes, like he could actually care. But it doesn’t matter. I’m done with him, have to be. I told him so. I haven’t been to Toby in almost a week, not that he hasn’t tried—showing up at my window, catching me as I come home from school. That’s fine. You’ll come back. I know you will. Both times I’ve gotten away before he could touch me, put his hand on my arm or neck or, God, anywhere. If he touches me, it will melt my self-control like an ice cube in the Mississippi sun, and it will all be over and I will want him again and again.

  I watched him from my bedroom window. He was working on his Firebird in the driveway, his jean-covered legs splayed and his upper body hidden beneath the car. I watched him crawl out and climb inside, a look of intense concentration on his face as he cranked the car and listened to the engine. He was beautiful like that—alone, with all of the attitude stripped away. I had to keep myself from raising the blinds, from opening the window so he could see me when he looked over. Because then he would see the longing, naked on my face.

  This want, this desire—it’s for Toby alone, for his lean body and the lines of his hip bones, his long hair and cocky smile, the way he calls me Rebecca in his rough Southern drawl like my name is the sexiest word anyone has ever spoken. I always thought that love and desire would come together, two ribbons around one pretty package. But I don’t love Toby. I can’t love Toby. It’s August, isn’t it, that I love, that I’m risking everything for?

  I’m not so sure anymore.

  68

  REBA’S DIARY, 1997

  Saying it was the worst night ever isn’t enough. Can there be anything worse than worst? It was that. It was that kind of night.

  I can’t believe I let Jules talk me into Southern Saddle. I can’t believe I let Jules talk me into anything at all.

  We’d gone nearly three weeks without speaking, which was awful, and awkward, and all manner of unpleasant words that you would associate with not speaking to your best friend.

  And then two days ago, there was a knock on my bedroom door, and when I opened it, Jules was standing on the other side. We stood there in the doorway, staring at one another for what seemed like a decade, before Jules finally spoke. “I’m sorry. I really am. I shouldn’t have acted like that.”

  And just like that, we were friends again. And I was glad. Even with all of the secrets between us, being without Jules made me feel stranded on a raft in a lonely ocean. Friendship is like that, I guess. Comforting, even with its flaws.

  “I’m sorry too.”

  “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”

  I nodded and looked away, because it wasn’t true.

  So last night, Jules insisted that we should do something fun, something adventurous. I could have told her no. I should have told her no, but I didn’t, so we ended up at Southern Saddle, our summertime stomping ground.

  Nothing much had changed in the months we’d been away—the wood-paneled walls, torn vinyl booths, wooden tables with the slick waxy coating on top. We claimed a booth and I mindlessly sank a fingernail into the tabletop, making a crescent shape there. A country cover band we’d never seen before was playing, and Jules started to tap her foot. What is it about a place like Southern Saddle that makes Jules come alive, when the same mak
es me want to hide away?

  “I’ll go get us some drinks?” Jules asked, and I nodded. I didn’t offer to go with her. I could have been at home, feet tucked into a blanket and a book in my hands. I could have been with August at the river, though it has gotten harder to meet there now that the weather has finally turned cold.

  I’ve started to feel anxious around August the same way I do around Jules. I never know, when I open my mouth, if my words will betray me and the truth will fall out, flat and sharp-edged, knifelike. Oddly, the only one who knows me anymore, all of me, is Toby. He knows everything: my dangerous affair with August, my dangerous affair with him, my problems with Jules, my dad’s loss of the promotion, the fact that I am not really doing drugs. Maybe it was a mistake to keep him away, after all. He certainly knows my body more intimately than anyone else. Somehow, he had become an expert on me.

  Maybe it all meant something.

  Or maybe not.

  I’ve heard people use the phrase out of sight, out of mind, and I wonder if a warped version of the opposite could be true as well. Not out of mind, out of sight, but in mind, in sight. Because when Jules came back to the table and set two plastic glasses down on the table, she had an annoyed expression on her face. “Well, this night has taken a turn for the worse. Guess who I ran into? Toby.”

  It was a natural response—my head turned automatically to look for him, and there he was, at the bar, talking to Bryant and absentmindedly running his fingers through the long, dark hair of the woman whose arm was wrapped around his waist.

  My hands were shaking as I reached for my glass, and the liquid inside sloshed out onto my fingers. When I took a sip, I could tell that Jules had already added the alcohol. When I felt the sting on my tongue, I took a long, hurried gulp of the mixture and tried to keep the hurt I felt from flashing across my face like a stupid, too-bright neon sign.

  “Ugh,” Jules groaned. “Well, maybe we can at least talk him into giving us a ride home later, unless he ends up leaving with that thing.”

  “Who is she?” I managed to croak. I could feel my heart beating angrily in my chest. All the while, I tried to maintain an expression of calm, and I wondered how Jules could manage it, acting, because this pretending hurt.

  The woman was older, clearly, and dressed in calf-high boots and a denim miniskirt. Her cleavage spilled defiantly over the cups of her tight halter top. Isn’t she cold? my erratic mind wondered. Her hair was dark and straight, with choppy bangs invading the line of her forehead and lips smeared with orange-red lipstick. She was boldly, shamelessly pretty. They made a dark and sexy couple, Toby and this woman. Toby’s blue-and-black flannel shirt hung open, exposing his white V-neck tee beneath. There was a silver necklace against his throat, and his hair was pulled back into a ponytail. I’ve seen his ragged, worn-in blue jeans before. I have unzipped them, watched them fall from his hips into a denim puddle.

  I felt like I was going to be sick.

  “Don’t know,” Jules said. “I’ve never seen her before. Seems like they just met tonight.”

  “She looks disgusting,” I spat out, before I could help myself. I slapped a hand across my mouth to keep the rest of the words inside, the obscenities that fought to escape from my lips. I could feel my eyes widen in surprise.

  “Wow. Say what you really think,” Jules said, laughing uneasily. Because those kinds of words, in that tone, don’t usually come from my mouth.

  “Sorry,” I said quietly, removing my hand and tearing the wrapper off my straw with much more aggression that was necessary. I took another long drink of what must be Coke and vodka, which sounds unpleasant but actually wasn’t terrible at all; in fact, it was probably the only thing keeping me in the booth, functioning, and not running out of the bar in confused tears.

  We watched them for several minutes. I drank and drank. I don’t know why, but I have never imagined Toby with anyone else. It has never occurred to me, not when he looks at me the way he does, like he couldn’t possibly ever want another person the way he wants me. The power I thought I had, before—I felt it stripped away from me suddenly. I was ordinary in my jeans and sweater; I was nothing special. Not compared to that.

  “He’s in love with you, you know.”

  “What?” I looked up, startled, from the paper wrapper I was tearing to shreds on the table.

  “Bryant.”

  “Bryant?”

  “Bryant. The bartender. He’s checking you out right now.”

  I sighed, furious with myself for being disappointed. “Jules, you know it’s you he’s checking out, right?”

  “No way.”

  “Yes. He told me. He likes you. He’s always liked you.”

  I tried to work up a smile for my friend, my eyes darting over to see if Bryant was really looking our way. What I saw, instead, was the mysterious woman leading Toby to the back of Southern Saddle, past the restrooms and toward the employee exit. “You know what?” I said, after draining the rest of my drink. I could hardly form words. “I think I’m going to go to the restroom.”

  I stood up, realizing I was tipsy—more than tipsy—when the room swirled uncomfortably around me. At least I got far enough away from Jules before I started to stumble and had to slow down and focus. If Jules thought I was drunk, no way would I have the chance to follow Toby. The pair had already disappeared through the metal door in the back. As soon as I reached the hallway with the restrooms and the employee exit, I rested a hand lightly on the wall. Better.

  I pressed my palms to the metal door and pushed softly, then harder when it didn’t budge. I was at once desperate and terrified to see what Toby was doing with this woman, what he would do with someone who wasn’t me.

  He told me once that I belonged to him. But no matter what I’d allowed myself to believe, he never said anything about belonging to me.

  The door groaned as I walked out in the darkness. It was a wasteland of asphalt and metal Dumpsters with trash spilling out of their wide mouths. The employee parking was poorly lit by dim, flickering streetlights. The music from inside the bar was muffled but audible, the beat relaxed and happy. I didn’t see anyone outside, and I stood still for a moment, listening.

  I heard him, his voice, a moan. I followed the line of the building and turned a corner, and there he was, leaning back against the stucco, eyes closed, a strand of hair having escaped his ponytail and settled against his cheek. And the woman, on her knees in front of him on the dirty asphalt, hands on his hips and her red-lipped mouth all over him.

  “Mmm.” The noise came from him, but he didn’t touch her, didn’t grip the back of her head or pull her closer, like he does with me. Instead, his hands were flat against the wall, as though holding himself in place.

  I watched. The streetlights flickered on and off like a bug zapper on a summer night, and the whole scene felt like something from a haunted house, something from a nightmare.

  I couldn’t hold back my choked sob.

  Toby’s eyes snapped open, and his green eyes seemed darker when he looked at me. It felt like roots had grown out of my feet and through the parking lot, and I was shivering and burning up and I couldn’t move for what felt like the longest moment of my entire life. All I could do was watch the grotesque scene shimmering and swirling in front of me.

  His mouth opened like he might say something, but he didn’t, and then my legs were working again and I was clumsily running back into the bar. Then the scene finally changed, and I was in the restroom at Southern Saddle, hunched over in a cramped stall, retching.

  69

  Toby’s awake again, and the buzz he’d counted on to carry him through the night is already wearing off. He hauls himself out the side door of the gallery and up the stairs to his apartment. The lock is a goddamned mystery—he can’t even find the right key on his key chain—and why does he bother locking the door anyway? There’s nothing but a staircase in
between the gallery and his apartment, and if someone made it into the gallery to steal his paintings…well, then they might as well take everything.

  He fumbles with key after key, and eventually, after a few hours or seconds—who fucking knows?—the door swings open. The loft is ancient, something a New Yorker like Jules would probably find trendy. But he just liked the convenience, and he’d gotten a discount on the loft when he rented the space underneath for his gallery. He owns them both now. The keys slip from his grasp and thud against the beat-up hardwoods. Big windows overlook the town of Opal. He can just barely see the lights from The Inn from here, maybe a mile out, and the glowing sign for Southern Saddle. He doesn’t go there anymore, hasn’t for a while. Not since the night when Reba caught him there with that woman.

  He remembers Reba’s face that night, remembers thinking, indignantly, that none of that shit was his fault. Hadn’t Reba broken it off with him? Hadn’t she told him it was over? Hadn’t she run away any time he’d tried to talk to her? All the time he’d been with her, Toby hadn’t even thought of another woman, even though he knew Reba still had the other boy. It was because she consumed him. How could he waste his attention on anyone else when there was the possibility of Reba?

  But he could only hear her tell him no so many times.

  It would have been no big deal, except that Reba had to be there to see him try to move on. He blamed Jules instantly, because he knew Reba well enough by then to know that she would never suggest going to Southern Saddle herself. She didn’t belong there, in that sleazy, smoky hellhole. But hadn’t he wanted her to see? He’d already spotted her when he let that woman lead him out back… What was her name anyway? Chloe? Carly? Hadn’t he wanted Reba to feel it, that jealousy like poison? Hadn’t he wanted her to feel what he felt?