Harley & Rose

by Carmen Jenner

  He runs a hand through his hair and leans back as though he’s exasperated. “I don’t understand why we’re going through this fucking shit in the first place.” He shakes his head and takes a step back. “Tell me, what the fuck is going on here, because I haven’t got a goddamn clue.”

  “We just need to be on our own—you here in Louisiana and me? I need to be at home. San Francisco is my home.”

  “You leave now and we’re done,” he warns, and those bright blue eyes hold so much anger. Anger I never thought he could direct towards me.

  God, it kills me to do this, especially after winning tonight’s game. But you can’t win them all.

  I give him a slow, crushing smile and walk away.

  “Shit, I didn’t mean that. Rose, come back.”

  “Congratulations on the win, Tiger,” I say through my tears, and hurry down the stairs.

  “Fuck, Rose!” he shouts, but he doesn’t come after me.

  I know I created this, but somehow it makes it so much worse that he lets me walk away. I want to run back up the stairs, fall against his big chest, and tell him I take it all back, but I don’t. Instead, I flee through the stadium doors and hop into an awaiting taxi, telling the driver to take me to the airport.

  In the car I call my parents, and ask them to rearrange my flights, and I don’t bother going back to the frat house to get my things. I have my purse, my phone, and my ID, and that’s all I really need. An hour later, I’m boarding a flight to LA, and I cry the whole way home.

  Never in a million years did I imagine we’d end like this. As tempting as it might have been just to stay in Baton Rouge, I won’t change my plans for him, and I wouldn’t expect him to give up that scholarship for me. He earned it, he deserves it, and even if we could work things out, we’d just be facing the same thing all over again when he went pro. And there is no way we can go back to being friends now, not after we’ve been so much more. Not after I’ve seen my future with him.

  I haven’t just lost my lover this night, I’ve lost my best friend, my soul mate, and a piece of myself. A piece of me will always remain in Louisiana because that’s where I broke my own heart.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Harley

  I flush the toilet and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, staggering over to the chair by the window because I’m sick of the sight of my bed. I wish Rose were here. Whenever I was sick as a kid, it wasn’t my mother I sought out, but a tiny blonde who lived right next door. It was her cool hands that stroked my forehead when the fever hit, and her smiling face looking down at me as I lay in my bed, wallowing in my own misery. She’d pretend to be my mother, just the way Wendy had pretended to be Peter’s. Always playing pretend, an entire lifetime of it, and now was no different.

  I wish she’d come now, but I made that impossible. I pushed her away, and for what? We’re both miserable because of it. Of course, I’m just going off what my mother tells me. I haven’t had the guts to face her since I left her lying naked in her bed with that freshly fucked glow on her cheeks. She always was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, made-up, not made-up, dressed, undressed, but I particularly love her messy bed hair and sleepy face. When she rolls over and looks at me like I just kicked her puppy for waking her? God, she’s the most beautiful fucking thing walking the planet.

  “Rose,” I whisper to my empty apartment. Jesus Christ, I need a drink. But at the thought of more poison entering my body, my stomach heaves again. No. I don’t need alcohol; I just need her. With the exception of my time in Louisiana, this is the longest I’ve been away from her, and it hurts like fuck.

  I close my eyes, and when I wake I’m on the hard floor, slumped against the wall. I must be still dreaming or fucking hallucinating, because moments later I think I hear her voice outside my window,

  “I wish it had never happened. I wish I’d never met you,” she says, and my heart thuds in my chest as I start to think maybe I’m not hallucinating after all. Because if I was, why the fuck would I imagine her screaming at me from outside my window? If I was hallucinating I wouldn’t have lost my guts to the porcelain god countless times tonight, and Rose would be in here, naked, straddling my hips and bouncing up and down on my cock. Which means she really is outside my window and I’m in hell, because the pain in her voice hurts worse than the pain in my body.

  “I’m dating someone,” she says, and fuck if that doesn’t feel like a knife to the gut. Blood whooshes in my ears. I crane my neck to hear her over the pouring rain. “I’m going to sleep with him. I’m going to move on because there is nothing for me here. You broke me, Harley. Maybe he’ll be the one to put me back together again.”

  No, no, no. I squeeze my eyes tightly closed. No.

  I get up, determined to go to her though every muscle in my body screams. I make it three steps, but I fall on my ass, and the sound of her footsteps running away from my apartment echoes through the empty street.

  Maybe he’ll be the one to put me back together again.

  Is she fucking kidding? I don’t know who this guy is, and a part of me wants to just let her go, to let her be happy, but another part wants to choke the life out of the bastard. Too bad I can’t move to save myself.

  I study my rug up close, counting the threads as if I have all the time in the world. The thought of her with another man makes me physically sick to my stomach, and I puke all over the plush carpet. I created this; I’m the cause of this. I wanted this.

  So why does it hurt so fucking much?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Rose

  Age eighteen

  I set my belongings down on the single bed in the room we shared at the cottage, and I stare at the bed opposite. The one that should hold Harley’s things. The one that should have my best friend on it. This is the first Thanksgiving we’ve had without him. And it sucks.

  As far back as I can remember we’ve shared this room on the holidays. We’d sit up talking well into the night, and when we got a bit older I’d stay up even longer just to watch him fall asleep. I used to dream about climbing out of my bed, crossing the room, and waking him with a kiss, but I was never bold enough to do that. I was always too worried about ruining our friendship, and for what? It is all shot to hell now anyway. Our parents used to say there was no Rose without Harley, and no Harley without Rose. That’s still true, for me at least. There is no Rose without Harley because she died that night in Baton Rouge.

  I haven’t heard from him since I left. When I got off the plane, I’d had thirty-two missed calls. Thirty-two. I didn’t listen to a single one of them. I couldn’t. He didn’t call me after that, and I didn’t call him. It hurts too much. Just like this room and the gardens where he threw a makeshift prom, and the rug in front of the fireplace where he took my virginity. These walls are filled with sadness and regret now, and we’ve done that.

  I grab my paperback and head outside, passing the parentals with their mournful faces and the silence that fills the room every time I enter, as if they’re afraid I’ll go off like a time bomb at any second. I ignore the front gardens where we danced under the stars, and head instead for the old hammock in the tiny backyard, that Harley’s dad hung between two huge leafy trees two Christmases ago. I test its strength with my arms first, and when I decide it seems okay, I jump in, awkwardly landing with my legs up in the air over my head. After a few wobbly attempts to right myself and get comfortable, thanking god the whole time that I’m alone and Harley isn’t here to see my graceless attempt at climbing into a hammock, I settle in with my book.

  I read the same damn page eight times. I don’t mean to, but as soon as I am comfortable in the quiet, everyone in the cottage decides to come outside, and when the parentals get together, it’s loud, and generally followed up with a whole lot of drinking and several rounds of poker.

  I eventually get sick of reading the same line of Wuthering Heights—Heathcliff is a douche—over and over again, so I let the book fall to my chest and I clos
e my eyes. It feels good being here, even though it hurts. The fresh briny air, the quiet, the peace, and even though there are a thousand memories of Harley everywhere, it’s still as beautiful as it is soul-destroying.

  ***

  I wake with a start and pull the book from my chest and glance at the table that the ’rentals were occupying. The smell of Dean’s barbeque ribs is in the air, but everyone is gone.

  “Thanks for waking me, Mom,” I say, shooting daggers at the cottage as if my gamma ray glare could slice through walls. I attempt to sit up, but forget that I was sleeping in a hammock and I wind up falling out on my ass.

  “Ow!” I throw Heathcliff off into the nearby bushes. “Fucking Heathcliff.” Tears sting my eyes and then I’m caterwauling like a baby because it’s all just too much. The memories of this place, being here without him—everything.

  “Hey, now, it wasn’t entirely his fault,” a voice, his voice, says from behind me. I still as if I’m in some terribly cruel dream conjured up by all the memories that the cottage stores like a vault. “Rose?”

  Nope, not a dream. I scrub my hands over my face, wiping away my tears. I’m sure I’m smearing dirt and everything else over my cheeks too, but as long as he doesn’t see me cry, we’re good. Slowly, I turn and face him. “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s Thanksgiving,” he says, as if that’s explanation enough. It’s been two months since I left him in Baton Rouge, but every second that’s passed since feels like a lifetime.

  “But you had that camp.”

  He nods solemnly. “I quit.”

  “What?” My chest goes through the motions, my lungs too, but I can’t get any air.

  “I walked out.”

  “Why?” I say angrily, because if he’s not taking the thing that tore us apart seriously, then what was the fucking point of all of it? The long nights, me tearing my heart out when I said goodbye, him being in Louisiana—all of it. What was the fucking point?

  “I love the game. There’s nothing better than setting foot on that field, but it didn’t feel like a game anymore.” He lowers his voice and smiles softly. I don’t smile back. “It didn’t have the same joy in it. I didn’t feel it.”

  “So you just threw it all away? You’re just giving up?”

  He shrugs. “I can’t do something I don’t love, Rose. I switched to horticulture.”

  “What?”

  “I like getting my hands dirty,” he says, as if this is a fact that I should have known by now. “A few days ago I walked out of the frat house, saw the sprawling lawns and magnolias, and decided that I wanted a different career path.”

  “But you’ve been working toward the NFL for forever.”

  “Football fell in my lap. I’ve always done it because I loved it, because everyone else told me I should, because I was good at it, but even if I got lucky enough to go pro where does that leave me when I’m thirty and had two knee replacements? I love it, but I don’t love it enough.”

  “What did your parents say?”

  “Dad yelled, a lot. And really loud. I’m surprised you didn’t hear it, actually. Your ’rentals made themselves pretty scarce. Guess I ruined everyone’s weekend.”

  “Not everyone’s.” I give him a sad smile.

  “You wanna go get drunk with me in my truck?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Please? I don’t wanna walk back in there and have it start all over again.”

  I let out a sigh and run a hand through my sleep mussed hair. “Fine, but you’re taking me to the beach. I’m not drinking in the parking lot of Lopez’s Liquor store again and getting naked in your truck.”

  He smiles uneasily. Guess I should hold off on talk of getting naked from now on.

  He walks away, and I follow. Nothing new there. When we make it through the front gate, Harley opens the passenger door first. I’m about to climb up when he snags me around the waist and pulls me toward him. For a beat I think he’s going to kiss me. He rubs his thumb over my cheek. I stare at him, uncertain, wanting more of his touch and wanting to pull away, but he holds up the pad of his thumb, showing me the dirt he wiped from my face. “Now you’re perfect.”

  God help me. My stomach does flippy things, and my heart beats double-time. I don’t want it to, but it does. He turns away, walking around to his side of the truck, and I stand there staring at the imprints of his shoes on the ground, wondering how we go back to anything from here when it hurts every time he touches me.

  With a prompt from him, I climb into the truck and stare out the windshield on the setting sun as it ignites the horizon. I avoid looking at Harley as we pull into a parking space on Scenic, but we don’t get out of the truck because there are too many people around and we have underage drinking to do. Harley hands me a beer from the cooler on the floor beneath our feet, and he clinks his can against mine.

  “To new beginnings,” he says, though it sounds rather sad.

  We talk about a lot of things, including school, my course load, where I’m living now—he’s surprised to find I’m still in my old room, and yeah, it makes me feel like a grade-A loser, but rent in the city ain’t cheap. He doesn’t talk about football or Louisiana. A part of me hates that, that I’ve been gone from his life for close to two months but that it feels a lot longer. I know nothing about what he’s doing now, who his friends are, and what he does with his free time since quitting the team, but I don’t push him for answers because I know my best friend. He tells you what he thinks you need to know when you need to know it, and nothing more. Luckily for me, that has been pretty much everything from the time we were five years old. I guess I always liked that about him—that he let me in, that I was privileged enough to know Harley’s secrets when no one else did. But it sucks being on the other end. In fact, it hurts so bad that I want to shake him and demand he talk. I don’t, because we’re not there yet.

  Silence falls over the car for the first time, and I stare out at the empty beach and the black waves beyond. It’s dark now, and I gaze at the halo of light from the streetlamp, remembering the last time we were in this truck. Heat claws at my face and neck as I recall the way his hands and mouth devoured me.

  Harley hands me another beer, and I accept it gratefully. The drinks are warm. This is my third, his fourth, and I’m vaguely aware that we should stop or we’ll wind up having to spend the night here, or worse, call our parents to come get us.

  Harley’s eyes are on me. Waiting—I think—for me to meet his gaze. I pretend not to notice. “Why were you crying?”

  “What?”

  “At the cottage. You were on your hands and knees in the dirt, crying.”

  “I wasn’t,” I protest, but I feel his eyes burning into me.

  “Rose,” he says in that tone that he uses when I need to be reasoned with.

  I glance at him and decide to give him the truth. If nothing else, he deserves at least that much from me. “Because everywhere I turned I saw you, only I didn’t see you because you weren’t there, just the ghost of your memory taunting me. I was crying because I miss my best friend.” I take a deep breath and meet his gaze, though I can barely get the words out. “I miss you.”

  “I miss you too,” he says, as if he’s in a hurry to tell me I’m not the only one suffering.

  “You do?”

  “Course I do,” he says, and apparently that’s enough for me because I throw myself at him, climbing into his lap in the small space and bringing my lips crashing down on his. My ass leans on the horn, and his tongue slides into my mouth, meeting my own with equal vigor. Harley’s hands roam my body, digging into my hips, squeezing my breasts, tugging my long honey blond hair back to expose the line of my neck to his mouth.

  Desperate and hungry for more of him, I cup his face in my hands and bring his lips back to mine. He lets out a groan, and I match it, taking more of him into my mouth. I reach between us in the cramped space and stroke his erection through his jeans. His lips graze mi
ne hard enough to bruise. I don’t care that it hurts—all I care about is that I’ve missed him, that I want him here in the cab of his truck, in the parking lot. I unfasten his zip and pull him free, and then I stroke my hand up along his gorgeous shaft and bring my lips back to his.

  “Rose, mmm.” My mouth against his drowns out his words, and I laugh a little and quicken my pace. “Rose … wait.”

  “What? Is it too hard? Sorry, I’m getting carried away. It’s just that I missed you so much.” I pepper his jaw with kisses, stroking him slower.

  “Rose, I can’t.” His Adam’s apple bobs. His hand grasps my forearm and gently pulls me free from him.

  “Why?” I say, breathlessly.

  “I have a girlfriend.”

  I have a girlfriend. Four little words that tear my entire world apart. They seem to bounce around in the cab, slicing the air between us, slicing into us, into me. All the air leaves my lungs in a rush, and my head spins from the confession, and maybe a little of the beer too.

  “Oh,” I say pathetically as I slide off his lap and land heavy on my seat.

  I have a girlfriend.

  I don’t even know how to deal with that information, so I don’t. I think a part of me just turns catatonic. I don’t cry. I don’t say a word. I just stare out the window through the fogged up glass.

  “Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you like that. I shouldn’t have let it get this far.” He rests his head on the steering wheel. “Ah fuck, I didn’t want to tell you like this. And I certainly didn’t bring you here for—”

  “It’s fine,” I say absently, because I’m afraid that if I don’t just be okay with it I’m going to break down, or worse, I’ll start screaming at him because I’m so angry. I’ve never been angrier. I’ve never felt more betrayed. We had one fight. I mean, it was a big fight, and he tried to call, but I just assumed that he’d try harder and for longer than just one day. I thought even though I’d let him go, one day he’d find his way back to me. But I was wrong. And this is on me as much as it is on him, because I didn’t fight for us either.