“Hey there,” a familiar voice said.
“Oh, Max, hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
Max laughed a little. “Uh, I was invited?”
“Oh. Right. Sorry. Of course you were invited. That made me sound like a total ass, didn’t it?” I finished my drink quickly and started making myself another.
“I was hoping I’d get to see you around the gym, you know, for your next balance lesson.” He leaned casually against the bar with one arm and watched me avoid looking at his striking gray eyes.
“Oh yeah,” I said, trying to act casual but spilling vodka all over the bar, and myself. “I guess I’ve been busy.”
He leaned in closer to me. “Life-stuff busy, or avoiding me busy? I thought maybe I saw you in there a few times. You’re not avoiding me because of what happened last time, right?”
I stepped back a bit to put some space between us. “What? No . . . no, of course not. Just . . . busy. That’s all . . . with stuff.”
“Okay?”
“So, who’d you come with?” I asked.
“Your cousin.”
“Ha. You’re going to have to be a bit more specific in this family.”
“Damon. I’ve known him for years. He invited me the other day and made it sound like the kind of party you can’t pass up. I didn’t have any plans, so here I am.”
The look I shot Damon was full of daggers, but his back was to me, so I don’t think he noticed.
“Lame, right?” Max spoke into his drink.
“What? Oh, no, it’s great. It’s always a good party.” I bit my lip and watched the others float around us. “Have a good time. I guess I’ll see you later?” I nodded politely before walking away and adding him to my list of people to avoid that night.
An hour or so later, I was back at the bar taking shots with Talia and Damon when Max appeared again. He came up behind me and reached under my arm to steal one of the shots slotted for me. He giggled a little as he felt me stiffen in front of him, trying to not turn around. Although they were several shots ahead of me, both Damon and Talia noticed.
“I’ll catch up with you guys later,” I said.
“No, you won’t,” Damon said. “You’ll stay right here and talk to us. I never get to see you.”
“Do you know Max?” Talia asked. By the look on her face, I could see that she already knew the answer to that question.
“We’ve met,” I casually nodded again. “He owns the gym I go to.”
We were all getting steadily drunker, and the two of them continued to kill any and all attempts I made to break from the group. Several cousins floated by being introduced to the “guy from our gym,” and I pretended to be much more sober and much less interesting than I was to avoid talking to him.
I said I was okay with what happened at the gym, and I guess I was—but that didn’t mean I wanted to talk about it or think about it. Max had this penetrating forwardness about him when he spoke, which made me both uncomfortable and envious. I found myself fidgeting nervously around him, even when his big gray eyes weren’t watching me.
The crowd got rowdier as it approached midnight, the time by which I’d told myself that I would escape. I planned to duck out under the cover of darkness, and drunkenness, while the rest of the party cheered and kissed during the ball drop.
Talia and Damon had taken to openly making out in front of us, which left me standing silently next to Max, who might have been getting at least some joy out of watching me squirm. We continued in silence for a bit, with me playing the shifty-eye game, looking at him while trying to look away before he looked at me, so it didn’t look like I was looking at him. Usually, it’s funniest when both people are playing, but Max didn’t have a problem staring me down each time I tried to look at him.
The next time I looked to see if he was looking at me still, Max openly sighed, rolled his eyes, and grabbed my shoulder. “Enough. Come over here,” he said, pulling me toward the basement door. Damon and Talia were watching me let him pull me away, and I hoped they had both drunk enough that neither would have any memory of it the next day.
“I’m just going to grab another drink,” I said, jingling the ice cubes in my otherwise empty glass.
“Shut up and come down here.” He opened the basement door and pushed me through it.
“Get ready for the countdown,” someone yelled from the living room.
There were still a few people lingering in the basement, but they were mostly people I didn’t know. When I got to the bottom stair, Max opened the adjacent closet door and pulled me in with him. Its only light came from the stairwell, and I stumbled into bins of empty bottles and folded cardboard boxes as I walked through the blackness.
When I turned around, Max gently pushed me up against a shelving unit. The array of back-up liquor bottles pressed against my back and clinking from the impact. “So, are you being all sketchy because I kissed you the other day?” he started forcefully, and continued before I could respond, “Because I apologized for that.”
“No, no, it’s fine. I mean, it’s not a big deal,” I said.
The crowd started yelling out the countdown above us. “Ten! . . .”
“If it’s no big deal, then you’re being weird because . . . ?” Max leaned in a little closer to me and flashed his perfect smile.
“Nine! . . .”
“I’m not . . . I’m . . . I’m just . . .” I mumbled.
“Eight! . . .”
“You’re just what, Hat?” He was a little closer and his voice softened as he looked down at me.
“Seven! . . .”
“Well?” he whispered.
“Six! . . .”
Silence between us. I was staring up at those big sky-like gray saucer eyes of his again, and he moved a little closer, his firm chest pressed against mine.
“Five! . . .”
More silence, his breath and mine colliding in what little space was left between us.
“Four! . . .”
What am I doing?
“Three! . . .”
He smiled.
“Two! . . .”
I smiled back.
“One!”
By the time “Happy New Year” was resonating through the house, our lips were locked again. This kiss, unlike our last, was intense, with his hand holding my head, and my hands clutching the shelves behind me. When he didn’t feel me pull away, he continued with a gentle but firm fury that pulled us closer together and pushed the rest of the world farther away.
I tried to remember a kiss, any kiss, that was better than that one. It might have just been the booze, but I relished the way he pulled a little on my lower lip with his teeth when he moved away only to release it and move back in for another kiss. For once, I let go of the worry, the questions, the contemplation, and just lived in the moment.
The overhead light startled us when it flashed on and time unfroze.
“Oh shit, sorry!” Paige slurred, her eyes widening as she realized what was going on. She giggled to herself for a second, before turning around and stumbling back up the stairs.
Heat radiated off my flushed cheeks. The moment I was living in was over, and my mind turned to judging me for my impetuousness. Another second passed and Max tried to lean in again, but I held him back with one hand, nervously scratching the bridge of my nose with my other. When he took a step back, I slid through the growing space between us and rushed up the stairs and out of the house without another word.
Chapter 18
A foghorn tore me from an alcohol-induced slumber the next morning. Okay, it wasn’t so much a foghorn as it was the message alert sound on my cell phone. But they sounded remarkably similar in my throbbing head.
I pulled myself up unsteadily and chugged the cup of stale water I still had on my nightstand. One eye was blurry
and scratchy from having left one of my contacts in, and the sweatshirt I wore the night before (and the one I collapsed into bed in) smelled a little like vodka and Max.
Cat had finally agreed to sleep with me again, and he stretched wildly before jumping off the bed with a groan when I reached for my cell phone. He was annoyed that I woke him up at an unacceptably early time.
“And how are you this morning?” a text message from Damon said.
“Ugh. Hungover.” I replied. I hadn’t realized until then just how used to Blue Ice, and its lack of aftereffects, I had become.
“You disappeared after midnight. Go home alone?”
“Yes. Did you?”
“I stayed at Paige’s . . . but not alone. I hear you had an interesting night,” another message from him read.
“No idea what you’re talking about.” I was always glad in situations like these that the other person can’t hear my voice in a text message.
“Hmmm. Sure about that?”
“Ugh.” It was futile, but I held onto the hope that the conversation would end there.
“So?”
“So, what?”
“Don’t be dumb. What’s the deal?”
“I don’t know. It just happened. We were drunk.”
“I think Max really likes you,” Damon’s next text popped up quickly, giving me the impression he hadn’t even waited for my last response.
“Eh, maybe not so much after I left.”
“Pussy.” Damon’s texts were coming in faster. “He’s a good guy. You should give him a chance.”
“What? No. It was just a stupid drunk night. Blame Kettle One.” I texted back.
“Blame whoever you want, you’re the one making out with dudes.”
“Shut up! It’s not DUDES . . . plural, it was just DUDE, as in one. Obviously, I didn’t plan on it. It just kind of happened.”
“A drunk man does what a sober man is thinking,” he wrote back with one of those annoying emojis with a kissy face.
Wondering who else Paige told about my little supply closet indiscretion, I started a few responses to Damon and then deleted them. It was good ten minutes before I had one I could bring myself to send.
“Do you think I’m gay?”
His response was too quick. “Yes,” it said.
“I’m not.” I wrote back. Or at least I never thought I was.
“I think Max would disagree with you.”
“Whatever.”
“Hat—seriously. What does it matter if it was with a guy or not? Did you enjoy it?”
“I’m not gay.”
“You’re not gay like Malcolm X wasn’t black. Just do him. You’ll feel better after . . . I promise.”
I took the battery out of my phone and threw the pieces across the room before sliding back down into bed and covering my face with my blanket. Nothing about that night made any sense to me. My eyes were shut, and I was drifting back into my coma-like sleep when incessant knocking shook my front door.
“No . . . ,” I groaned into my pillows loudly. “Go away.”
The pounding knocks continued, growing louder and closer with each interval. Whoever it was knew I was home, and I was more likely to find a thousand-dollar bill under my pillow than I was to get back to sleep with that noise. I stumbled through the dark room, digging my dried plastic contact from my eye and tossing it into one of my apartment’s dirty corners.
Charley was standing on the other side of the door, leaning her head heavily against its frame. Her oversized sunglasses covered her eyes, and a she had a cup of coffee in each hand. “Bitch, I know you didn’t think I would stop knocking,” she said. She handed me an iced coffee, pushed her way into the apartment, and flopped loudly on a kitchen chair.
“And Bitch, I know you didn’t think I’d let you in if you didn’t bring me coffee,” I said, sipping on the icy goodness she brought me.
Sunglasses still on, Charley laid her head on the table, trying to drip coffee into her mouth without lifting her head back up. “Make me food, woman,” she cackled.
I took inventory of my fridge aloud: “wilted grapes, some soy sauce, an empty bottle of Kettle One, and a half gallon of milk that I don’t remember buying. Looks like we’re eating out. And you’re buying ‘cause you woke me up.”
She lifted her arms at me, but not her head. “Carry me!”
* * * * *
“This is so good,” Charley said around a mouthful of food. We were at our favorite diner, inhaling a standard post-drinking healthy breakfast of extra cheese omelets, sausage links, and french fries smothered in ranch dressing.
I stretched and yawned. “Since when do you get hung over? Did you even drink last night?” I asked.
“I got caught talking to Sydney’s date and his brother for most of the night.” She chugged her third glass of water. “What a fucking tool. He kept telling me how sexy he thought I was and I kept telling him to fuck off, but he wouldn’t. He thought I was joking, but look at this face. If I gave you this face, would you think I was joking?” she asked, scrunching her face to make the most unattractive look I had ever seen on her, or anyone else.
“What’s his name?”
“As if I’d remember.” She waved her empty glass at the waiter. “Just leave the pitcher,” she said to him when he came over. “I doubt I asked his name,” she said to me.
“Did he finally get the hint?”
“No!” She held up a clean butter knife to check her teeth. “They left and then like fifteen minutes later he called my cell and left this disgusting drunk voicemail. I’ll have to remember to thank Syd for giving him my number. You have to hear it. He sounds like he’s playing with himself while he left the message.”
“Ew. I’m all set. Thanks.”
“I know,” she yelled again, startling the people at the table next to us. “Like I’d want that midget anyway. He was not attractive at all, and I couldn’t stop staring at his freakishly large nose. I mean, come on. You could see his brain with those nostrils. Besides, he looked like he had a small penis.” She stuck her straw in the water pitcher and finished it off, then reached around to snatch a pre-set water from the table behind us. “Now him,” nodding at the waiter as he walked by again, “him I’d take home. I bet he’d look good with my bedspread.”
“Slut,” I whispered into my coffee as I sipped it. The people at the next table were already blushing because of Charley, and I didn’t think they needed to hear me be vulgar too.
“Oooooh.” She turned back to me. “Speaking of sluts . . .” She tilted her head down and peered at me over the rims of her scratched sunglasses. “Let’s talk about you.”
Shit.
I put my face in my hands. “Was there anyone that Paige didn’t tell?” I said through my fingers.
“I don’t know, but that’s not who I heard it from.”
“Super. I’m glad to be the source of such juicy news. Maybe we can just post it on Facebook.”
“Maybe I will later. So, what’s the deal?”
“Did you see that Damon is back with Talia?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah . . . when is he not? Tell me about this guy.”
Maybe I should tell her about her real father . . . that would change the subject.
“Just so you know,” she leaned back in her chair and pulled her leg up to hold it near her chest, “I don’t have to work until Tuesday, so I can sit here and wait this out for a long time.”
I gave a small, nervous laugh. “I don’t have anything to report.”
“The hell you don’t. I saw his sexy self last night,” she said. “He was one hot fucker. If you’re not going to jump him, I will,” she said before making a loud “mmm, mmm, mmm,” noise and throwing her dirty napkin at me.
“You know, not for nothing, and I’m not pretending to be the subjec
t matter expert in this kind of thing, but . . . isn’t your family supposed to, I don’t know, freak out when they catch you making out with another guy—tell you it’s wrong or something?”
“In this family? Bitch, please. We’re a bunch of black pots standing in a glass house waiting for some kettles to throw stones at. No one can say shit to anyone about anything. Plus, let’s be real here for a second, it’s not like anyone cares that it was a guy. I think I would have heard about this even if it was a girl you were tongue wrestling with. It’s so rare for you.”
“I know. But still, I don’t . . . ,” I grumbled and hurried through my words. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Tough shit. We may be loud, never know when to get the hell out of each other’s business, and say things we probably shouldn’t, but we’re supportive. Hell, I’m supportive, and that gives me the right to hear all kinds of lewd details. Now get on with it, slut.”
“I don’t know. It was a stupid drunken night. It just happened,” I said, shaking my head.
“You’re way too uptight about this. Why do you care that it was with a guy?”
“I don’t know what the hell I’m saying. Maybe I don’t even care that it was with a guy. I just never thought about it before. I thought I wanted . . . I don’t know. Please can we just change the subject?”
“Hmmm . . . denied. You’re overthinking this whole thing. Maybe you just never met a guy worth exploring it with. Come on. Give me something good that I can hold against you later.”
“You suck.”
“Now if you had said that to him last night, this could have been a totally different conversation.” The glee from her sadistic words spilled out all over her.
“Shut up,” I yelled, throwing my half-eaten piece of toast at her. We were turning into the kind of customers that the waiters would curse about after we left, and dread ever seeing again.
“He looks like an amazing kisser. And, I hear you guys were really going at it . . . ,” She took her phone and snapped a picture of me. “So, was he?”
“What was that for?”
“Just something to remember this moment by.”
Secrets The Walkers Keep: A New Adult Urban Fantasy (Casters of Magic Series Book 1) Page 15
