Sweet Seduction

by Anthology

  Her cheeks went pink and she stared straight ahead at the road. Those wild hands went white-knuckled on the steering wheel.

  “Tyler, I—”

  “Believe what you want.”

  “What?”

  “Believe what you want,” I repeated, then shrugged. “That’s what people like you do.”

  Her eyebrows softened and her eyes narrowed. “People like me?”

  I said nothing. Why bother? I’d said too much already, and I really didn’t need to get kicked out of the car.

  “Tyler? You can’t just fold up and go silent after saying something like that!”

  But I did, nestling down and facing the door.

  “Tyler!” she shrieked. If she thought that would work, she was sorely mistaken. One skill I’d honed over the years: ignoring people. Even when they’re in your face.

  Especially when they’re in your face.

  “You are such an asshole.”

  Whatever.

  “I’m driving for twenty-nine hours with you and you could at least have the decency to talk to me.”

  Silence.

  “You know what? Fuck it. You don’t have to talk back, but I’m not going to hold back. So I’ll just say whatever I want and until you answer, it’s all a monologue. You know what a monologue is?”

  Purgatory.

  “If you don’t, you’re about to find out, Tyler.”

  I shifted and turned my ear away. She reached for the radio and found some pop music station that played Justin Bieber.

  Great. She was getting close to violating the Geneva Convention on Torture. I might have to call in the UN.

  “I think you had someone break into your apartment and steal all your stuff. I asked if it was a drug deal gone bad because it’s a perfectly normal question to ask.”

  “Really?” I muttered. “If Lena got mugged, would you ask her that?” I didn’t turn toward Maggie.

  Silence.

  A few beats later, she said in a small voice. “No.”

  “Then it’s not a normal question to ask someone. Quit pretending it is.”

  She blew out a long breath, then turned the station to classic rock and went quiet.

  Steve Miller Band I could handle to fill the holes in the air between us.

  And there were a lot of holes.

  Maggie

  Mr. Silent Treatment. I finally decide to try to venture back into the realm of the XY chromosomed and I pick a hot troglodyte with a chip on his shoulder the size of my fear.

  I shifted in my seat, his silence like a frown. A glare. A rebuke. Should I have asked about the drug deal? No. But I wasn’t perfect, and everything that came out of my mouth from the moment he’d appeared on my doorstep—no, from the moment on that rooftop, two months ago—was just a blur of whirling emotion shaped and molded into words.

  I didn’t know what I was doing, yet I couldn’t stop doing it.

  Why him? Why this guy? He was turned away from me, his hip jutting up, body bisected by the beige seatbelt. His jeans were clean but well worn, a little wrinkled from the day. A small patch of skin poked out between the hem of his t-shirt and his waist and it was dappled with brown hair, yet tanned. Tight. The kind of skin a guy who spends time using his body has.

  His shoulders were hunched and his neck as tense as could be. I let myself breathe for a while, fighting the impulse to lash out again. He wouldn’t be intimidated, which was good. I guessed. Hell, I didn’t know anything these days.

  Lena had sent me off with her car, road food, and a pack of condoms, like the rape had never happened. For seven long years I’d taken ten thousand tiny pieces of memory. Pieces of who I had been. Slivers of a Maggie that had once been whole and taken that wholeness for granted, like we assume we can breathe.

  And I’d glued all those pieces together with an awareness that came at the end of a dagger to my soul. Like being poked a thousand times a day, I’d had to soldier through the pain.

  Tyler had no idea what it had taken to decide that he was safe enough to sleep with, but shallow enough to walk away from.

  The scary part was that while the former might have been true, the latter wasn’t. I should have been repulsed by him, but instead I found myself intrigued. Interested.

  Undeniably curious.

  My hands vibrated against the steering wheel and I opened my mouth, knowing I shouldn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said ‘good.’”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means it’s good you’re sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “For whatever you’re apologizing for.”

  “You are impossible!”

  “I’m not impossible. Just confused.”

  “This is the part where you’re supposed to say you’re sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For....for...”

  “For turning you down when you wanted to fuck?”

  My legs went numb. He was still turned away, and if he’d looked right at me in that moment I think some slivers of my broken self would have sloughed off.

  “Yes.” I said it before I thought through it carefully.

  Now he turned toward me. I stared at the road and let him look at me. What choice did I have?

  “I’m supposed to apologize for not fucking a drunk girl and taking advantage of her?”

  “I wasn’t that drunk! I was fully consenting.”

  “You picked me for a fuck and forget.”

  “A what?”

  “A fuck and forget.” He snorted, still staring at me. “You wanted a quick, hot fuck, and a morning where you walk away and forget about me.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  I frowned and turned to look him in the eye. “No. it’s not. Spell it out for me.” This was the most authentic conversation I’d had with a human being other than Charlotte or my therapist. I’d never, ever had a man talk to me like this.

  Talk with me like this.

  “You wanted me to be your throwaway guy. And you wanted to do it drunk.” He sat up, his shirt slipping up and exposing his belly before he could pull it down. He stretched up and looked at the road ahead. “I guess you had to get drunk in order to approach me.”

  “I—” I started to protest, because that’s the social expectation, right? Don’t ever admit that you use people. That you view people as objects to manipulate to achieve goals. That you stereotype because it’s easier than being vulnerable.

  He stared dead on at me, one eyebrow cocked, a look of c’mon on his face.

  “Yes,” I hissed, nearly clapping my hand over my mouth to stop the horses after they escaped the barn.

  His face lit up in a grin that made my body tingle.

  “Thank you.” He turned away and settled back down for his fake nap.

  “For what?”

  “For being real for a split second. It was nice.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Here we go again.”

  “I’m real!”

  “Not with me. Why’d you pick me? Why’d you hit on me?”

  “Why did you say no? C’mon, real boy. Quit being Pinocchio and tell some truth.”

  His neck went tense again. I struggled to keep my eyes on the road.

  Silence.

  “Hypocrite,” I spat out. How in holy hell was I going to manage twenty-eight more hours of this?

  He shot around in his seat like an alligator twisting to subdue its prey. “Hypocrite? How in the fuck am I a hypocrite?”

  Ah. I hit a nerve.

  Let’s poke it a bit.

  “You expect me to be real and pour my guts out but you’re sitting there withdrawn and sullen—”

  “I am not sullen—”

  “And you’re being a total emotional wuss.”

  His eyes blazed, shining with a calculated gleam, like a chess
player processing nine moves ahead. All the possible permutations led to one outcome:

  Either he was a coward, or he was gone.

  “I turned you down because the timing wasn’t right.”

  “Timing?”

  “You caught me on a really, really bad night.”

  “What happened?”

  He sighed. “You’re not my fucking shrink.”

  “I have no desire to be anyone’s shrink. I’ve been a patient far too many times.”

  He narrowed his eyes and watched me as he tapped on the car’s console. Then he asked: “Because of the rape?”

  Oh, we were getting real, all right. “You know about that?”

  Nod.

  “How?”

  “Liam.”

  “Liam told you?” I was going to go back to Massachusetts and strangle him.

  “He told me your full name and to Google you.”

  “And you did.”

  “Yes.”

  “Before or after the, uh...rooftop?”

  “Does it matter?”

  That made me jolt. Does it matter? Did it really matter? Somehow it did, but I couldn’t explain why.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded and blinked rapidly. I never noticed how long his eyelashes were. So dark compared to his brown hair. He had almond-shaped green eyes and the kind of lashes that look fake. Like someone plugged them in one at a time. It made him look so beautiful, like an actor’s close up shot.

  “Okay. I understand.” He watched the landscape go by, a boring series of fields and farms. “It was after. Liam told me when I visited Joe in the hospital.”

  “After you kissed me.”

  “Yes.” He didn’t argue about the wording. Just yes. Yes I kissed you.

  “Why did you kiss me?”

  “Why are you asking me all this, Maggie?”

  “Because I don’t really have anything to lose, Frown. You already rejected me, and I’m burning with shame at that, but you turned to me when you needed help and now you’re at my mercy. If I’m going to be humiliated, I might as well get some truth in the bargain.”

  That grin again.

  “When you put it that way...”

  I smiled. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Your dimple piercings look awesome when you smile. You should do it more often,” he said.

  “Quit changing the subject!”

  He snapped his fingers in a gesture of aw, shucks. “You want to know why I kissed you in the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you looked like someone who needed a kiss.”

  “A pity kiss?”

  “I don’t do pity kisses, Maggie. Or pity fucks. And I don’t let people turn me into fuck and forgets, remember?”

  My mind was reeling.

  “When you’re ready, you can tell me why you asked me to sleep with you. The truth. But I don’t think you’re ready now,” he said.

  And with that he turned away and really did go silent, leaving me with a pile of thoughts so tangled it would take way more than twenty-eight hours to straighten them out.

  Tyler

  Two hours into the trip I was ready for something in my stomach.

  Which felt like someone poured battery acid in it. Other than the cookies and coffee back at Maggie’s house, I’d eaten nothing for way too long.

  I rifled through the bag of food her sister had packed. Spotted the gummy bears. More colors in there than Maggie’s hair. I imagined eating one. I did not gag.

  Progress.

  As I tore open the bag, Maggie barely glanced at me. She was listening now with great intent to some NPR report about how drinking green coffee made your metabolism do something. Maybe it turned you into a serial killer or made your babies smarter. At one point the news began, and I focused in on a few sentences:

  “...CDC officials landed in the small, rural town of Peters, Ohio, in central Ohio, where a mysterious gastrointestinal illness has swept the town. The puzzling condition has hospitalized eighty people and more than one hundred others have been treated for dehydration and diarrhea in area hospitals and clinics. The CDC is considering a quarantine in case an infectious agent is the cause of this....”

  “Isn’t Darla from Ohio? Or is it Iowa?” I asked Maggie.

  She scrunched up her face in concentration. “I thought she was from Iowa.” We both shrugged, the first time we agreed on a single thing. It seemed to remove some of the tension in the air.

  I put one red gummy bear on my tongue, moving slowly, like it was a cockroach.

  I closed my mouth. The sweet, fruity taste was fine.

  I sighed and relaxed. Sort of. “Relax” was an odd term after the conversation we’d had. Way to start off a long car trip where I felt like an asshole already. My calf throbbed from Cujo’s bite. My cock and balls had settled down and didn’t ache, but my ass hurt from sitting for so long.

  And my brain was in a blender again.

  Something about Maggie made me want to talk. I don’t talk to people like this. Every time she asked me a question I wanted to give an answer. Answers are dangerous. You never know how the other person is going to react. You read their faces, their tone of voice, their demeanor and see if it matches the actual words. If not, go for safety. Say the fewest words. Be boring. Be nothing.

  And when they match? When the words match the nonverbal cues?

  I don’t know.

  It hasn’t happened much before, and never like this.

  Never with someone I wanted to trust.

  That night, two months ago, on the rooftop came back to me like being inhabited by a spirit. My breath caught in my throat and I went taut. My ribcage ached from containing the impulse to move. To talk and ask and pry and answer and share.

  You can only go so long in life being an island before you realize the mainland is pretty damn nice, too.

  Problem was, never before had I met someone who seemed to hate me and like me at the same time. I didn’t think the hate part was real. I think she hated the truth I brought out in her.

  And then there was that whole rape thing.

  She ignored me as I ate, stretched, drank water and let my stomach settle, but eventually she started talking. I knew she would. The air between us had too much potential. It felt ripe and raw.

  Her words would be, too.

  I stared at her, a little awed. This wasn’t real, right? People like Maggie didn’t exist. People who wanted to hear the truth. Who accepted my truth. Who didn’t judge or categorize.

  Well, she did. Had. But something told me she had a wall as impenetrable as mine. When you encounter that, you have to find out what’s on the other side. Because if it was what I thought it was, Maggie was as strong as me.

  And needed someone to be weak with.

  Maybe I was wrong and this would fail.

  I had to take that chance. Not like I had a choice.

  “I asked you because you’re hot.”

  I was in the middle of taking a huge swig of water when her words hit me and I sprayed the entire dashboard in an impression of Mrs. Wilmer’s watering hose.

  “Jesus Christ, Tyler!” Maggie shouted.

  “Sorry.” I wiped my chin. “It’s not every day an older woman calls me hot.”

  “Older? I’m twenty-nine. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  Her jaw dropped. I grinned at her. “Cougar,” I said.

  She gaped, then made a cute little nose crinkling gesture. “Rawr.”

  I burst out laughing. Couldn’t contain it. Isn’t every day a chick tells me I’m hot. Especially a chick I rejected.

  “Why else?” I asked through gasps.

  “Because I’m lonely.” She gave me the side-eye.

  “Lonely’s pretty much the reason everybody hooks up,” I replied, wiping the dashboard with the edge of my shirt.

  “Why did you really turn me down?” she asked. I looked at her and caught her checking out my abs. I flexed them and she quickl
y looked away.

  “You want the truth, or what I’m supposed to say?”

  “The truth, of course.”

  “You say that like it’s obvious.”

  “It is.”

  “Then you haven’t lived a hard enough life.”

  “You know what, Tyler? You have this thing. This thing about being a know-it-all who thinks the world is judging him. Like you’ve had the hardest life ever and no one’s had it as bad as you.”

  Silence.

  “You don’t know what other people live with on a daily basis. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation—”

  “Quoting Thoreau at me?”

  “You read Thoreau?”

  “No. I just know the quote from a coffee mug my mom had when I was younger.”

  “Oh. I figured you studied him in college.”

  “Didn’t go to college.” I sighed. “See? You assume everyone else is like you.”

  “No, I don’t!”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Everyone else doesn’t dye their hair and pierce their face.”

  “You only do that so you won’t be everyone else, but it doesn’t do any good. Changing the outside doesn’t change the inside.”

  “Then why do you have so many colored tattoos?”

  “Because I like them.”

  “Maybe I like my colored hair and my piercings.”

  I just grunted.

  “And maybe your problem is that you assume you’re too different from the rest of the world to bother even trying to make a connection.”

  A forcefield surrounded me, like a layer of sweat that glowed.

  “Do you know the rest of that quote?” I asked her, my voice low and slow.

  “The rest of what quote? I wasn’t quoting anything.”

  “The Thoreau quote.”

  “That’s it. ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation—”

  “—and go to the grave with the song still in them,” I finished for her. “The entire quote is, ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.’” I gave her a look I’ve never given anyone in my life before. I can’t describe or explain it.

  “Oh.”

  “I am not going to the grave with the song still in me.” And with that, I reached into the backseat and pulled out Lena’s guitar, making room in the front seat for it in my lap.

  Maggie looked at me for longer than was safe, then whipped her head back to watch the road.