He bent forward and kissed me again. Unlike most guys, he didn't hurry, but took his time. His kiss held promise, like there was more to come if I was interested. "I think I could fall in love with you, Missy."
My heart pounded as he slowly turned and walked away. He spun on his heel and gave me a friendly wave, then reached into his jacket and pulled out a smoke. I watched him light up and flip his collar as he braved the elements and walked home.
Did he really think he could love me? Or had he said those words because he knew that I desperately wanted to hear them?
I decided in that moment, it really didn't matter. I was willing to take a risk and find out for myself where our relationship might lead. I doubted it would turn into something permanent like marriage, but if I could get somebody to love me like I'd always dreamed of, then the future didn't matter anyway. I wanted to feel cherished now, and Mick had accomplished that.
As I closed the door and stepped inside my house, I sighed. Mick was handsome and he thought he could love me. I ate up every sensation his words inflamed in my heart. In fact, I couldn't wait to get to bed so I could fall asleep and dream of Mick. When I woke up, it would be tomorrow. Then I could see Mick again.
Chapter Ten
Mick and I continued to see each other throughout Christmas break. We had sex every time we got together. Sometimes we had a few beers first, but most of the time we were sober. In fact, I couldn't think of a time we didn't go to his aunt's house and sneak up the stairs to his bedroom. Not that I minded.
If nothing else, Mick knew how to turn me on, though lately our time in bed was shorter and more rushed. Sometimes I felt like a prostitute because of the things he asked me to do, not that I'd ever admit it to my friends. I rarely saw them these days anyway.
It could have been the cigarette he insisted on smoking every time he rolled off of me that brought thoughts of prostitution to mind. Or maybe it was the fact that he'd come to expect sex whenever we got together that felt degrading. Except, unlike a whore, he never paid me to do it. I gave myself away for free.
My birthday came and went without me telling Mick. I didn't want him to know that I'd lied about my age. Maybe next year when I turned seventeen, I'd tell him the truth. If we lasted that long. Lately, I wondered why I didn't just dump him. He gave me little incentive to stick around these days.
Less than two months later, things went south fast. I should have suspected something was up when I gave Mick a carton of cigarettes for Valentine's Day and all he gave me was a cheap box of candy and a shirt that he'd probably stolen from his aunt's dresser. It was woefully out of style and it smelled like cat piss.
I threw the ugly thing into the trash as soon as he left me on my doorstep, and I cried. Either his giving me a gift had been an afterthought, or he'd found someone else to screw around with on the side.
I didn't care if he did say he loved me every time we had sex. I knew if a guy had real feelings for a girl, he'd put more thought into a gift. Tearing the wrapper off the box of candy, I sighed and peered inside. Even the chocolates looked like they were at least a year old. Without tasting them, I threw the box in the trash to join the rag he'd given me.
My pride had been wounded and I decided maybe Mick wasn't so great after all. Sex was becoming too much of a routine for us anyway. I wanted a guy to like me for more than just a good time in bed and for what I could do to please him. I wanted a guy who actually cared about my thoughts and feelings.
Mick didn't have that level of interest in me and I had no reason to think he'd ever want to change. Rather than confront him about his lack of concern and his crappy gifts, I decided to avoid him. The sad part was he didn't even care. Apparently I'd lost my usefulness, or like I'd suspected before, he'd found a replacement before I dumped him.
Maybe I just needed to get away from my friends, the city, and everything familiar since it did nothing but discourage me in my pursuit of a decent relationship that would eventually morph -- I hoped -- into true love. When I brought the subject up to my parents, they were less than thrilled with the idea of me moving out of state to live with my Aunt Laverne.
So I dropped the subject for a few months and did whatever I could to avoid Mick and his renewed phone calls. Then I met a guy named Tim and things started looking up. When my parents weren't home, which was rare, I'd invite Tim into the house and we'd climb into my bed. That lasted for a few months, until I discovered Tim was cheating on me the whole time with a girl from another school.
He never confessed, though. I found out from a mutual friend that the reason he'd lost a front tooth was he took a girl to a party and they left drunk. He hit a phone pole and lost a tooth. She'd had a few ribs broken because she'd climbed on his lap while he was driving. Someone's dad worked as an EMT and had arrived on the scene, and the story people shared about the wreck told me all I needed to know. Tim was history now, too.
After finishing my sophomore year of high school, I dated so many other guys I lost count. I didn't sleep with many of them, though. Just a few guys. My friend Shari Gecko kept telling me which guys to avoid and which ones to date. Come to find out she was sleeping with some of my dates behind my back, so we didn't last long as friends.
One night I went to a party with Mary and ran into that cute guy from last fall named Andy. He looked as dreamy as ever. Now I was sixteen going on seventeen so there was no reason we couldn't have sex. If he was still interested in me.
The coolest thing was he actually remembered me. Of all the girls in the world who liked him, he remembered my face and my name. Of course he called me jail bait at first. Then he smiled and said, "Hey, Missy, I'm thinking you're old enough now, right?"
"I sure am. What do you say we get together some time?"
He paused a moment and wrote his address on a piece of paper. "My parents will be gone this weekend. Stop by and we'll get reacquainted."
"Do I have to wait until then to get a kiss from a hot guy like you?" Good grief, I even sounded like a slut. Oh well.
He winked. "I think I can oblige you now."
We kissed and it reminded me of the first time we met. He was a skilled kisser, but not a man handler when it came to my body. I liked that about Andy. Plus, the look of intense desire in his eyes told me I had the same effect on him that I had the first time. The weekend couldn't come soon enough for me.
I asked almost as an afterthought, "Do you have a girlfriend?"
A rogue grin tugged at his mouth and he said, "Now I do."
Be still my racing heart. What girl didn't want to hear that, right? And from a sexy guy like Andy? I felt like I'd died and gone to heaven.
You think I would've worried about stuff like VD since my morals had become so loose, but that happened to other people who messed around. Not me. At least I hoped not. How would I explain that to my parents? At least with condoms I had some protection. Not many guys I knew wanted to wear them.
When Saturday arrived, I grabbed the bus across town. Andy lived about as far on the other side of the city as he could get, but I figured it was worth transferring on two busses to get to his place. His house was average, like mine, and painted a bright shade of green with white trim.
Come to find out Andy had a Slavic background, and according to Mary, those guys were pretty intense lovers. Mary said they even made Italian guys seem lame.
With all that imagery floating around in my head, I was expecting the time of my life in Andy's bed. What I didn't expect was how much it would hurt with a guy that huge. Maybe it scared me when I first saw him naked. I don't know what happened, but it was nothing like I thought it would be. It seemed to go on forever and I prayed he would finish and get off me.
The moment he did, I excused myself and went to the bathroom. It hurt to walk. Did all girls feel that way with him, or was there something different about me? I thought about asking, but decided against it. Andy seemed to have lost interest in talking once he'd gotten what I came to his house for. It grieved me to think
our date was little more than a free "call girl" like myself coming over to climb into the sack with a guy I barely knew. When had my life gotten so out of control?
I even thought about praying, but figured God wouldn't hear a sinner like me. Regardless, I started to feel like I was looking for love in all the wrong places. I know it sounds cliché, but I couldn't think of a better description of how I felt.
While I was doing well in school, I didn't think I could stand another year with the same people who now knew that I was easy according to my ex-friend Shari Gecko, who passed rumors around the school. Some crappy friend she turned out to be. I told my parents I couldn't last another year with the same group of kids. I had no real friends anyway, so what would it hurt for me to transfer schools?
My parents resisted the idea of me leaving, of course, until I took half a bottle of pain pills and made sure my mother found me in time to make me puke it up. My father came home that night furious. "What did you hope to accomplish, Missy?"
I didn't know what to say, so I hung my head, which hurt like someone had hit it with a hammer. I made a mental note to avoid taking too many of those blue pills in the future. The after effects sucked.
"Missy, tell us what's wrong. We just want to help." My mother's voice pleaded and sounded on the verge of tears.
My throat didn't want to work, so I swallowed hard and stared at them until my parents started fighting. Dad accused Mom of passing her depression on to me and Mom said Dad was the cause of my grief since he gave me permission to have sex with all the guys in the neighborhood when he got me on the pill.
I was shocked that they fought and said such mean things to each other. Worse, most of what they screamed in each other's faces was true.
"I just want to die," I whispered.
My parents turned and glanced at me, and all arguing ceased. My mother's eyes filled with tears and my father clenched his fists. He asked through tight lips, "What did you just say?"
"I want to die. Just let me die!" I sobbed into my hands.
For a while, other than my desperate cries, silence lingered between them. After I calmed down and couldn't shed another tear, my mother said, "Aunt Laverne told us you could stay with her if it would help. We told her it wasn't necessary when we talked about it the last time, but I think we'll call her again. Maybe going to California will be the change that you need."
I brightened just a bit when I thought about moving away from all this. My father put his hand on my shoulder and said in a soft voice, "There's a Christian high school there. We'll pay whatever the fee is to get you enrolled. If you want to go to school there just say the word."
Conflicted by my parents sudden support for me and the desire to leave my sad past behind, I decided to take their offer to move for the last two years of high school. I'd miss my parents, but if it would help me turn my life around, I was willing to try anything.
Chapter Eleven
When the time came to get on the plane, I had no regrets. I'd distanced myself from Mary and Cathy and the rest of my low-life friends. I needed hope for the future, and while the idea of going to a Christian school made me want to cringe, it couldn't be any worse than my public high school where kids pushed drugs at you during lunch recess and guys just wanted to get into your pants. Maybe the boys would be nicer there.
Berating myself for even thinking about guys, I rubbed my eyes and tried to sleep. Wasn't that a big part of my problem? Once I'd had sex, I seemed to have forgotten how to relate to boys without letting them touch me and trying to turn them on. Somehow my head had gotten things backwards and I'd lost my knack for basic communication.
I wanted my life to be simple again, like it had been before I was ruined by friends like Jenny and her scumbag boyfriend. How I wished I'd never listened to any of them. At least then I wouldn't feel like a used up girl who hadn't even reached her seventeenth birthday. How did other girls live like this and seem happy? Or was it all a big façade for them too, like I tried to portray to cover up my hurt?
How I wished everyone would stop pretending and be real with me. Could I find a guy like that? Or was it a waste of time to even look for a decent man? One thing I knew for sure, though, was real life wasn't like Porky's, The Last American Virgin, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. People in Hollywood made a lot of money getting young girls like me to believe it and go see their latest films, but it wasn't real.
Real life hurt.
You didn't see that portrayed in films. No, they made sex, drugs and rock-n-roll seem hip. Well, I knew that wasn't even close to the truth. Sure, it felt good for a little while, but once you were used up and the guys moved on, there was no worse feeling in the world. Maybe a Christian school would be good for me.
Unless people were the same there.
I had no doubt there were hypocrites in every institution, but I held on to the hope that I'd find real love at my new school. I couldn't bear to consider the alternative, which meant there were no good guys anywhere. That couldn't be true, or people would never get married, right? There had to be a way to snag a guy that didn't use sex to hook them.
Maybe the Christian girls at my new high school could teach me ways to win a guy's heart without physical incentives. So far the only heart I'd won was the devil's. He had me right where he wanted me, too. I felt hopeless and alone, and worse than I'd ever felt in my life. Some days I didn't care if I even woke up the next morning.
With that sad thought in mind, I fell into a deep sleep. A parade of ex-boyfriends went before me as I sat in a chair with flashing lights above my head. Each young man paused for several seconds in front of my throne. I could see everything from their perspective, and then things shifted back to my point of view.
We were on a game show called, That's Not My Life, and the prize was me.
Not a single guy remembered my name, even though I knew their bodies intimately. I gave them hints, even spelled my name out for them, and still they looked at me with blank stares. I woke up crying.
Someone patted my hand. The elderly woman next to me asked if I was okay.
With a nod, I braced myself for landing. I'd only ridden in a plane once before and it had scared me when the wheels touched down because I wasn't expecting it. Maybe I needed to take that approach to relationships. Expect hurt and disappointment and I'd see it coming before it slapped my face. It couldn't hurt to try that approach. Nothing else seemed to be helping.
I waited in line with my carryon bag secured over my shoulder and exited the plane with the other passengers. Aunt Laverne waited for me at the end of the jet bridge and enveloped me in a hug so grand that I nearly cried. She looked a bit older than I remembered, but still resembled the favorite aunt I used to visit as a young child.
I'd have to ask her later why she stopped sending my parents tickets for me to come visit her during school breaks and over the summers. Aunt Laverne had never married, and from what I gathered, she never wanted to. But she saw me as her child.
Maybe it didn't matter. The fact was I had arrived ready to begin my new life in California. Aunt Laverne had always been kind to me, taking me under her maternal wing and showing me a good time when I was a child.
When I started Middle School it seemed our regular visits had petered off. Maybe she didn't want to interfere with my summer sports, or maybe the fact I hadn't asked what happened confirmed for her that I'd outgrown our visits. For some reason I'd forgotten about our bond and it made me feel incredibly selfish.
Had my aunt missed me? The force of her hug told me she had. My voice sounded muffled as I spoke against her large breasts. "I'm sorry we lost contact, Auntie. I used to love our visits."
Aunt Laverne held my shoulders and said with conviction, her eyes wet, "Don't worry about it, Melissa. What matters is you want to stay with me now."
The sincerity in her eyes told me she meant every word. Had something happened to keep us apart that I wasn't aware of? My father only had one sister, and my mother was an only child, so I
didn't have many relatives. I did find it odd that our contact ended and for whatever reason, I stopped caring.
My throat knotted with guilt. Was I really so self-focused that I never asked?
As I rode in a taxi with my aunt to her old Victorian home in the outskirts of San Francisco, I remembered the area as if I'd grown up there. In some ways I had. "I miss coming here. Everything looks the same, but different now. Not as big."
"That's because you haven't come to visit since you were eleven."
I glanced at my aunt and asked, "What happened? I never asked."
"Your father and I disagree on a number of things. One of them is the way I live my life. He thinks I should get married and I told him I like my life the way it is."
"That seems like a dumb reason to keep me from visiting you."
"There were other things, but I don't want to talk about them right now. Maybe later after you get settled, okay?"
"Sure. I can wait."
The taxi driver pulled up in front of my aunt's home and I smiled. We had some good times here. Why didn't I think of this sooner? "Dad said you work at a Christian school in the city? He said I'll be attending there. Is that true?"
"Yes, I've already taken care of everything." My aunt paid the driver, who lifted my luggage from the trunk and set it on the ground.
"Thank you, George." Aunt Laverne reached for one of my suitcases, and I grabbed the other.
Why didn't it surprise me that she knew the driver by name? Then again, few people in this neighborhood owned cars. It didn't make sense due to so many other modes of transportation being available.
"I'm the principal at Grace Christian, so I made sure you were signed up for the best classes we have to offer. In fact, since you've gotten good grades and you're ahead on credits, I thought you might want to accelerate things and graduate early. Then you can enroll in the University next fall and start college."
"I never liked high school much. Maybe I'll do that."
Somebody Love Me (Journeys) Page 7
