by Penny Reid
“No, I woke up on my own.”
He backed me out of the kitchen, and his chest rumbled the words, “Well, since you’re up….”
Alex was full of buoyant energy, and his hands were everywhere, but mostly trying to tug the sheet from my body.
“Wait, Alex. Wait…oh, that feels good.” I melted against him and his twenty-one-year-old frame. I reminded myself that he was, indeed, a twenty-one-year-old. That at least had been established. Hence, he had the sexual stamina of a twenty-one-year-old. In addition, he’d just flexed that muscle—inside a woman—for the first time last night.
All of this taken together pointed toward him having expectations and hopes. Obviously, these expectations included lots and lots of horizontal and vertical and everything-in-between times for the foreseeable future.
If I were ever going to pry his history from him, now was the time. He needed to take a leap of faith with me.
I firmed my hand against his chest and stiffened under his capable hands and lips. “Alex, I mean it. Stop.”
My voice wasn’t as convincing as I’d hoped, but the words were right.
He stopped, but he didn’t move away. In fact, he drew me closer, into an embrace. I found myself wrapped in his arms, and he was holding me as though I might disappear at any moment.
I gave him a full minute—maybe more—and I returned his hug. I snuggled close and reveled in our shared warmth. However, it felt more and more desperate the longer we stood in silence.
“Alex?”
“Please don’t leave.”
His words might as well have been a knife in my chest. I couldn’t leave him if I wanted to. I didn’t know how healthy or rational that made me, but there it was.
“I’m not going to leave you.” I squeezed him tighter then added, “Please don’t leave me.”
This at last seemed to satisfy him. His grip slackened and he moved his hands to my arms.
“I’m not going to leave.” His gaze found mine, held it; both his words and eyes were filled with conviction.
“Good. Me neither.” I smiled for him, rescued my sheet before it could slip from my chest. “Now that we’ve established our permanence, perhaps we could talk for a moment?”
His eyes narrowed. “You sound different.”
“Yes, well, I’m trying to sort through some things.” I could tell my response did nothing to ease his mind, so I added, “And, besides, the longer I can keep you shirtless, the happier I am.”
He shook his head, his eyes now slits. “Don’t patronize me. That’s not going to work.”
“I’m sorry. I won’t.” Leave it to the brainiac to see right through that tactic.
I dug deep and forced myself to dispense with shrink Sandra. Instead, I said what I would have said if he’d already told me everything, if there were no secrets between us. “Okay, in complete honesty, I am considering knitting you a few chestless sweaters in addition to assless pants.”
Much of the suspicion in his expression cleared, and he visibly relaxed. Alex found my free hand and tugged me toward the bedroom.
“Let’s go lay down.”
I didn’t move.
Be Sandra, I told myself. You need to feel your way through this, with him. Don’t overthink it.
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t want to lay down. I want to talk to you.”
He studied me, and I noticed that his expression had changed. Whereas before he’d been suspicious, he now looked pensive. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Anything, honestly; I just want you to tell me anything.” My eyes stung. I took it as a sign that I was successfully not thinking.
His breathing deepened, and he seemed visibly torn. “You don’t want to know.”
“You’re wrong. I do.”
“No. You don’t. I’ll tell you, and then you will leave.”
His words made my chest ache. “Alex. You asked me to have faith in you. Now I’m asking you to have faith in me.”
He let go of my hand and glanced away from me—at the floor, the ceiling, all four walls. I watched him for a sign that he was at least willing to think about it.
At this point, I’d turned into that dumb female all other women judged for her blindness.
But I wasn’t blind. I was knees over knuckles in love with this guy. I knew I wasn’t going to fix him. I just wanted desperately to know him, and have his trust. If he couldn’t give me that, then we were already over.
At length, his gaze met mine again. “Fine. We’ll play truth or dare.”
“You want to make this a game?”
“I…I need an escape hatch.” The buoyant energy he’d displayed earlier disappeared. He was completely still. It was the first time I’d seen him so vulnerable. Not even when we’d made love, not even when he’d said I love you had his expression conveyed such deep-rooted self-preservation. Alex inspected me as if he could see our future written across my features. “Truth or dare,” he repeated.
I gave in to the idea of playing a game, but I knew that truth or dare would not get the job done. “No,” I stated bluntly. “We’re not playing that, because you’ll pick the dare every time.”
“Okay, then what do you propose?”
I thought for a moment, tried to come up with something fair, not too threatening. “How about we take turns saying something about ourselves? It can be real or it can be made up. Then the other person has to guess whether it’s true or false.”
“What do I have to do if I guess wrong or if you guess right?” Alex studied me with a measured look. Even in a game, he needs to know all possible outcomes, I mused.
Nonetheless, I was determined. “If I guess correctly, then I get to ask you a question, and you have to tell me the truth.”
He was shaking his head even before I finished. “No.”
“No? Why not? And don’t tell me it’s for my safety, because I promise not to ask you about your hacker past.”
“I don’t want you asking me questions.”
I huffed and sputtered. “Well, what do you propose as your forfeit?”
“I’ll tell you something true, but you don’t get to dictate what it is.”
I stared at him for a long moment. He stared back. His face was expressionless, blank.
It wasn’t much, but it was something. It would have to do…for now.
“Fine…fine—that’s fine.”
He cleared his throat. “What will your forfeit be?”
“Same as yours. If you guess right, then I’ll tell you something true.”
Again, he was already shaking his head before I finished. “No. Not good enough.”
“What?! Why?”
He just shook his head, his lips firm.
“Well then, what do you propose for my forfeit if you guess right or if I guess wrong?”
He lowered his voice and his eyes narrowed slightly, sharpened. “I’ll ask you to do something I want.”
At his words, heat suffused my chest, and my heart rate spiked. I met his somber stare, but I was forced to take a deep breath before I could respond without a squeak in my voice.
“Can you be more specific?”
He shook his head, arrested my gaze, unyielding as granite.
I huffed again, gritting my teeth as I rebelled at the idea of blindly agreeing to some future unknown whim or favor. What if he wanted me to clean his apartment, or worse—have anal sex?
Just…no.
“You can’t expect me to just write you a blank check,” I said. “I gotta have something, some idea before I agree to this. Can you give me an example?”
As he considered me, his gaze shifted to my hand, which was still holding the sheet like a protective cocoon. “It won’t be anything illegal.”
“Oh, well, in that case, fine!” I mock laughed, mock shrugged, waved my free hand through the air mockingly. “Fine, fine—as long as it’s not illegal, of course I’ll do anything as long as it’s not illegal, because that’s really the only li
ne of concern to be crossed, isn’t it?”
His mouth twitched, but he added, “Or painful. It won’t be illegal or painful.”
“But, really, what’s the point of doing anything unless it’s illegal or painful?” To my surprise, my voice was louder than I intended and infused with half sarcasm, half anger.
Yeah. I was definitely feeling all over the place.
He reached for me, held me by the shoulders, attempted to still my movements. “And I promise you can say no.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, I did still my movements. I blinked at him. “I can say no?”
He nodded. “Yes. You can say no.”
“No hard feelings?” This time it was my eyes that narrowed.
He smiled, small and sweetly, stuffed his hands in his pockets. “No. No hard feelings.”
“Hmm….” I contemplated this and studied him with my experienced shrink-Sandra eyes. I finally determined that I felt this game was fair. At last, I stuck my hand out for him to shake—which he did.
He motioned to the living room. I turned, walked to it, surveyed my options, and decided on a chair next to the couch. The last thing I needed was him touching me before I had a chance to learn something about him.
He appeared to be amused by my choice and claimed the other single chair in the room—opposite mine across the length of the coffee table.
“I’ll go first,” I said, and waited for him to offer an objection. When he did not, I said something true—convinced he would guess wrong. “I lost my virginity at fifteen to a seventeen-year-old.”
Alex choked, his mouth falling open in plain shock. “Sandra…!”
“True or false?”
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him, and studied me. He said, “False.”
“Wrong. It’s true.”
He frowned, and I watched as his eyes moved over me with compassion. “I knew it was true. I just wanted it to be false.”
His words stung a little, and I looked away. I didn’t feel ashamed. Losing my virginity wasn’t an act I’d ever romanticized. From a young age, growing up around animals, it seemed like something to cross off a list rather than an expression of affection and respect between two people. I’d wanted it over and done.
I cleared my throat, waved my hand in the air. “Okay. Your forfeit, please.”
He stared at me for a long moment. “I thought you were a plant, a narc, when you first started coming to the restaurant.”
My eyebrows did weird things on my forehead as I attempted to understand his statement. I blurted, “What? Why?”
“Like I said earlier, you were too perfect. I thought it was a set-up.”
“I still don’t get this; how was I perfect?”
A spark of something electric ignited his eyes, “Gorgeous, green-eyed, loud-mouthed female who makes men cry comes in every other Friday night for years. Wears only sexy dresses, high heels, and discusses topics such as Star Wars parenting theory, karaoke as foreplay, sleep obsession, the phallic qualities of knitting and crochet tools, and the continuing status of Pakistan as a viable US ally. All this and she couldn’t be bothered to give me the time of day. You were perfect. You were a fantasy.”
I buried my face in my hands because I didn’t want him to see me smile. “I’m a fantasy.” I repeated it. I thought about getting stickers made.
“Yes, you are, Sandra. But I thought they’d set it up—invented you. I thought you were one of them.”
“They being…?”
“Take your pick: NSA, FBI, CIA, MI-6.”
“This is crazy.” I leaned back in the chair, met his gaze, now unencumbered by the glasses that he usually wore. His mask was off.
“I thought this kind of stuff was only for movies and bodice-rippers. But then you’d be a one-eyed duke, and I’d be a plucky orphaned governess, and we’d be fighting French spies in Regency England.”
“I’ve never known any different. Paranoid is my normal.” He shrugged.
“How can that be? It’s not like you were born this way.”
Alex’s mouth firmed and something passed behind his eyes. “Okay…my turn.”
His desire to change the subject was not lost on me, but I let him anyway, unchallenged. I shelved it for later.
He licked his lips then took a deep breath. “Do you remember when I told you those three stories at the coffee shop after we saw Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I remember—the one about the wolf, your father, and the boy.”
He glanced away. When he spoke again, his voice was barely audible. “The story about the boy is true.”
The silence resulting from his confession was like a third person in the room. I don’t think either of us was actually breathing.
When I began to feel lightheaded, I forced myself to inhale. “What…what did you say?”
His eyes met mine, and everything about him felt different, like he was suddenly a stranger. “The story about the boy was true. When I was eight, I killed him in self-defense.”
“What?!” I fought to swallow. “Oh, my God,” I said on a long, exhaled breath, and my next words were an autopilot reaction. “But how? Why were you…was he your brother?”
He shook his head, glanced at his hands like he hadn’t seen them in a long time, and said, “Foster brother.”
“You were…you were in foster care?”
He nodded, his hands still absorbing all his attention.
“Why were you in foster care?”
“My biological father went to prison, and my mother died in a car accident when I was five. I had no other family, so they put me in a home until he was released.”
I stood from my chair and began pacing the room. I did not know what else to do in that moment. It gave me a chance to collect my thoughts without looking in his eyes and all the conflicting emotions I saw there. Unfortunately, in my experience, Alex’s story was not unique. At five, he might have been adopted if his father had been dead, or had relinquished his parental rights. For better or for worse, the system is set up to place children into a holding pattern—sometimes for years—until the biological parent is available to become a caregiver.
The rights of the biological parents are the system’s first priority. That meant Alex, at five, waited with strangers until his father was ready to take care of him.
“Was he ever released?” I asked, standing still for a moment to look into his eyes.
He nodded. “Yes. But then he’d go back to prison for some other crime, and I’d go back into homes.”
I sank onto the couch, then stood and paced again. “And when you were eight, you were attacked?”
Alex’s voice was a monotone as though the words were rote, as though he were reporting something that happened to someone else. “They institutionalized me after it happened, which—in a lot of ways—saved my life I think. We had access to computers for the games they had us play as part of our therapy, but we had no access to the Internet. I’d always been good with computers. I started hacking by figuring out ways around the safeguards they’d built into their intranet.
“Even at eight, it was so easy, it was fun. So when I gained access to the Internet, I read all that I could. I read about how to program and write code; how to decipher mathematical patterns, algorithms, and network structures—just anything I could get my hands on. When I was released….”
“Back to your father?”
He paused, his jaw set, his eyes unfathomable. He ignored the question, gave me his profile. “When I was released, I was behind in school. I had a lot of time to myself when I was supposed to be focused on catching up. The catch-up took no time—math, elementary school science and English, geography—it was a joke. So I used the time by myself to form relationships with the hacking community.”
“Is this where the bitcoins come in?”
He didn’t nod. He held perfectly still, his eyes widened slightly. I realized that thi
s was territory where I’d be better off not knowing.
“Never mind,” I said quickly. “Forget I asked.”
He glanced at me, frowned, then looked at his hands. “No, no. I want to tell you.”
At this, I needed to sit again, and decided the best spot was directly across from him again. “Should you tell me?” I asked, my voice laden with meaning.
He clenched his jaw. “Probably not, but I want to.”
I winced. “Is it because I’m so easy to talk to?”
“No. It’s because if I tell you, then you will never be able to leave me. You’ll be trapped.” He met my eyes then, dared me to look away.
“Alex, that’s not an okay thing to say.” I shook my head. “That’s not even okay to think.”
“But it’s the truth, and I meant it. Maybe I am unbalanced.”
I met his gaze squarely. “You shouldn’t want to trap someone if you care about them.”
“I do care about you.”
“Then….”
“But I also want to trap you.”
I choked on nothing, wiped my face with my free hand, and realized I was still dressed in only a bed sheet. “You are…you are completely…you are just absolutely….” I peered at him through my fingers. He was watching me with his phantom smile. I breathed out slowly and let my hand drop. “You’re just tired of being alone.”
“No.” he shook his head, his tone flat. “I never minded being alone. I’ve been alone my whole life. Being alone is easy. What I don’t want, what I don’t think I could survive, is being without you.”
“That’s because I’m your first. I’m the first person you’ve been physically intimate with.”
“Nope.” He shook his head.
“You’re confusing sex with stronger feelings.”
“Sandra.” My name held a warning.
“You’ll see clearly after….”
“I won’t. I won’t ever see clearly again. If you remember, I was in love with you before we made love. I told you that.”
I bit the inside of my lip and my eyes fell to the floor. “You just said I was a fantasy, perfect. You can’t be in love with perfect.”
“I’m not in love with a fantasy. I’m in love with Sandra Fielding. Even though she won’t say it, she’s in love with me. If my math is correct, then that means we’re both already trapped.”
