Never Sweeter (Dark Obsession #1)

by Charlotte Stein

  And he succeeded, too. He succeeded because of this:

  “I just forgot I wasn’t always your friend.”

  That was where they were now—on such good terms that he could pull a prank on her and assume that she would laugh. Their past had almost been erased for him, to the point where she was just his buddy and he was just her buddy and that was—good god, she didn’t know what that was. Soothing, her mind informed her.

  Though it was possible that was just the feel of his hand on her back.

  He was rubbing her in these soft, slow circles, so good she almost forgot they weren’t always friends, too. The only thing in her head was how nice it felt, to just give in to this. Every tensed muscle unwound and every nerve in her stopped fizzing, until finally she was just a boneless weight against him. Her cheek was against his shoulder and her arms were draped around his, everything so still and quiet suddenly that she could have almost kind of…kind of…

  “Are you…are you falling asleep?”

  “I was just nearly killed. I’m entitled to a rest.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t complaining. Sleeping on me seems way better than never wanting to speak to me again. Or trying to kill me in return. I mean, you are fully capable of doing it now.”

  “I was going to get you in a headlock.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But then I got comfy.”

  “Is that what I am? Comfortable?”

  There was amusement in his voice.

  Good amusement. Warm amusement.

  Plus, he was still stroking her back and her hair.

  “Like a big couch.”

  “Never thought being called a couch would make me feel so good.”

  “Does it really? Make you feel good, I mean?”

  “Nothing has ever made me feel better,” he said, then seemed to hesitate. As though whatever he was going to say next might cost him. And when he started speaking, haltingly, she could understand why. “Know how many times I wished I could have done this for you after the bluff? Must have been a hundred. A thousand. A million.”

  It cost her, just to hear it.

  “Well, you almost killed me again. But you saved me this time. You saved me,” she said, intending it as a half joke to lighten things a little. Only somehow, it didn’t work at all. Her voice came out brittle and broken, and when she was done he didn’t reply. He didn’t so much as whisper a word.

  He just bunched her hair into his fist, like some kind of weird reflex.

  Then pressed his face against her temple. Squeezed her hard in his big arms.

  And he did it all for a long, long time. So long she could feel her throat starting to tighten. Her eyes starting to sting. This is what regret feels like when someone puts it in the form of an embrace, she thought, then suddenly that stinging sensation was twenty times worse. If she didn’t say something soon, she was going to lose it. Though even more frightening was the idea that he might.

  “Tate? Are you okay?”

  “Uh, yeah. Yeah, why? Did it seem like I wasn’t okay? Because I totally am. I wasn’t crying or anything. I’m way too manly and macho to cry about something so stupid,” he said, but she could tell he didn’t really mean stupid at all. She could hear the secret words behind it: something that means the world to me. And when she pulled back, she thought she could see it in his face, too. Just a little around the eyes, red rimmed, and in his tensing jaw.

  Though she didn’t really get the full impact until she gave in to the urge to kiss him. Not on the lips, of course. Just on the cheek, to say thank you. The way a buddy might, definitely like a buddy—only it didn’t go like that at all. As she leaned in she saw the shift in his expression, from moved somehow to something else. His eyes closed and an arrow appeared between his brow, like it pained him.

  Like it bruised him, to be touched so tenderly by someone.

  He wasn’t used to it, she thought, but it was more than that, too. Different from that—and especially when she made contact. She pressed her lips to his cheek, feather light and barely moving, and heard a sigh escape his lips. So soft it was hardly there, but god it seemed loud to her. All of this seemed loud. Every sensation and feeling was heightened, from the tingle in her lips where they had touched him, to the way he looked at her as she drew back.

  His gaze was hooded now, the blue between the lids a blurry line.

  And those lips of his, so softly parted…

  It made her think he wanted to kiss her cheek in return. In fact she thought he might have, if she hadn’t pushed off from him at that exact moment. She had to shed her shoes to do it, but she managed it. She swam back through the quiet waters, trying to grin and look casual as her heart battered against her breastbone.

  Trying to sound casual, too, despite everything.

  “You know, now you’ve got me in here we should probably try to have fun.”

  “That would be a great plan, if you weren’t still in the clothes that almost drowned you.”

  “I already ditched the sneakers.”

  “Ditch the sweater and jeans and I’ll feel better about it.”

  “If I do that I’ll basically be in my underwear,” she said, even though she could already see the logic of what he was saying. Her legs felt coated in lead weights. The sweater was getting heavier by the second. It was just a commonsense suggestion, yet somehow it didn’t feel that way.

  And doubly so when he shook his head.

  He just did it so awkwardly, like the physical equivalent of someone stuttering.

  “I wasn’t…I’m not going to look at anything.”

  “I know that. Of course I know that.”

  “So then what’s the big deal?”

  “No big deal, I guess.”

  “I mean I’m half naked.”

  He stood up, as though the point needed emphasizing.

  But by god, it really did not at all. She already knew that he had those heavy pectoral muscles.

  And the things she had no idea about were best kept a secret. She didn’t want to see his surprisingly narrow hips, or know that the strip of hair that trailed down to his bathing suit was darker than the hair on his head. All it did was make her stomach feel suddenly full of hot silver.

  She had to look away before it spread to other places.

  “I know. I was just wedged against your half nakedness.”

  “And it wasn’t weird.”

  “Weird isn’t the word I would have used.”

  “What, then? Come on you can tell me. We’re friends here.”

  “If you think I’m going to say amazing you are sorely mistaken.”

  “No, I don’t think you’re going to say amazing. I think you were going to say enormous and gross and misshapen, like something you dug up that might one day come alive and destroy humanity.”

  “Dude, you can come up with all the great movie premises you want, I’m never going to give in to such a blatant fish for compliments. Compliments that you do not need, I might add. I mean, of the two of us, you are not the one who spent high school feeling like the blob.”

  She turned back to him, still laughing.

  Then stopped dead the second she saw his face.

  He was serious, somehow. Really deadly serious.

  And he kept on being serious, all through his next little speech.

  “Yeah, but you totally get now that I never meant any of that shit. Whereas I know for a stone-cold fact that my size still completely freaks you out. In my dorm room you couldn’t get away fast enough—and the same thing just happened here. As soon as you realized how close I was you swam away. You even turned as soon as I stood up, like my body burned out your eyes.”

  “I was just trying to get out of my jeans,” she said.

  Then she wrestled with the buttons, to make it look like the truth. She even got her arm out of one sleeve of her sweater, to back it up—but could see it was having no real effect. He looked almost morose. He’d submerged every inch of his torso, as though her eyes on him
were just a little too much. Her eyes on him, Tate Sullivan, the guy who’d once made her attempt to cut off her love handles with a pair of scissors.

  It was incredible, unbelievable, infuriating.

  Yet the ache to tell him otherwise remained.

  “And besides, your body doesn’t burn out my eyes, Tate. I doubt it could ever do that to anyone, considering you’re a six-foot-five-inch athlete in the prime of his life.”

  “What difference does being an athlete make?”

  “Oh come on. You know what kind of difference it makes. Just look at the way girls drool all over your hot bod constantly. I swear to god the other day some babe tried to take an up-skirt picture of you, even though you weren’t wearing a skirt. Last Tuesday this incredibly hot cheerleader asked me if I would be interested in getting you involved in a threesome. And when I told her that we aren’t even doing a twosome, she said: ‘Come on, no one on earth could spend that much time with him without at least sucking his cock.’ ”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the same. They all like the gigantic meat head and the enormous pecs and the total lack of any visible neck. They find it super hot, whereas you kind of gag over it.”

  “And their opinion is the one that matters. Mine doesn’t.”

  “Feels like it does though. I don’t want you to find my body gross.”

  Now he was almost up to his neck in the water.

  Apparently, hiding his nipples wasn’t enough.

  “I don’t, Tate. I really don’t find it gross at all.”

  “Boring, then. Boring and stupid.”

  “I don’t think muscles can be boring and stupid.”

  “No, but they make the people who have them look that way. They make you look like a big, lumbering oaf or….” He paused, clearly struggling. Though it was only after the next part that she realized why, exactly. “Or like some brainless lunkhead,” he finished.

  And then it hit her, hard and right in the heart.

  That was what she had called him.

  “Oh, like that means anything coming from a brainless lunkhead,” she had said, shaky and over her shoulder, while running away. But even so, it was there. And more important, it had affected him. It had affected him so strongly that he still remembered it now. She had thought he would just shrug it off, that it would mean nothing to him, but it had.

  It was making him hide right now, his face the only thing visible above the waterline. And when she drifted close, he was the one who backed away. He was the one who seemed shy now.

  “I was just trying to get back at you, Tate.”

  “I know that. I know. I don’t think you did anything wrong. It’s just now I can’t help wondering…is that how you see me? Do you still see me that way sometimes? Like at the party, I caught you looking at me. And your expression seemed to say ‘Oh look at that dumbass with his dumb jock friends.’ ”

  “Probably because that’s what I did think—until you came over and were as cool to me as you were in the library. Because you know I was still afraid then. I still thought that maybe you would just switch back to the guy you were before, now that it wasn’t just you and me. But can you blame me? This guy, the one I’m talking to now, the one who admits mistakes and says sorry and has epic conversations with me about Dirty Dancing…I’ve only just met him. I don’t have four years of experiences with him to lean into.”

  “I wish you did. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time in high school.”

  “In what way do you think you wasted your time?”

  She expected him to hesitate then. To give her a chance to prepare herself for what was coming.

  But he didn’t. He just came right out with it, like he’d always had it locked and loaded.

  All he needed was someone to ask, so he could fire the thing directly into their heart.

  “I thought being cool was the most important thing. So much so that I actually used to hide books I was reading inside skin mags. Once I got sent to the principal’s office because I kept answering questions in this smart-ass way, like I didn’t know. But I did know. I always fucking knew. I fucking know now, but still get this clenching feeling whenever I go to raise my hand.”

  She stopped then with the clothes. Her arm was still half in and half out of the sweater, but it didn’t matter. What mattered were those words, and the way they just upended her whole world. Everything she thought she knew about him, gone in an instant.

  Not just gone: obliterated.

  “You made fun of me for things you actually wanted to do. You called me a fucking nerd, like, a million times, and all the while you were just dying to do the same things.”

  “That…was kind of the case, yeah.”

  “Oh my god. Oh my god, Tate, why didn’t you just…” She threw up her hands, splashing water in two arcs. “Why didn’t you just join me? Why didn’t you stop and just come and talk to me like you talk to me now? You didn’t have to hide books in fucking skin mags—I would have let you read them right in front of me without a goddamn word about it. I would have been happy to have you there!”

  “I know that. Do you not think I know that? You’re doing it right now. It literally took me like nothing at all to persuade you to accept me and let me sit with you and read with you and do all this nerdy shit,” he said, getting louder and louder as he went. He had to take a steadying breath, just to make the rest of his speech come out normal. “It wasn’t just you I fucked over. I fucked myself over. Our lives are forever changed because I was too much of a coward to really go for…to really…to really be who I wanted to be.”

  “It’s not too late though.”

  “That’s really kind of you to say, honey, but I know it is.”

  “I’m not just being kind. Look at everything you are now.”

  “I’m a wrestler now. That shit is set in stone—there’s no going back. My scholarship is based on it. My whole future is built around it. If I stop, my family will see it as me throwing away millions of dollars. I will be throwing away millions of dollars. And for what? A few books I want to read?”

  “I don’t think it’s just about a few books you want to read.”

  “Then what do you think it’s about? How else would you put it?”

  “You hate wrestling, Tate. You hate it. Like, a lot.”

  She could see he’d been about to say something more. Protest the point, maybe, in a pretty fierce tone. But then something seemed to stop him. It made him stutter when he finally did get some words out, always on the verge of shaking his head but never quite managing it all the way.

  “I…I wouldn’t say that I…I mean not hate, exactly.”

  “It sounds a lot like hate to me, bub.”

  “No, no. I mean there are things I like about it.”

  “Yeah? Can you name three for me right now?”

  “Absolutely I…” he started, but even he seemed to know he was never going to finish. It took around five seconds to cover his eyes one-handed as realization set in. “Okay, maybe I hate it a little. Like, the weigh-ins are usually not a lot of fun. I don’t think I’ve eaten cake in ten years. And then there’s my knees and most of my joints and the constant ringing I have in one ear. By the time I’m thirty I’m probably gonna have the body of an eighty-year-old, if I even make it that far, and—”

  “Did you just say if you make it that far? If, as is in maybe not?”

  “It puts a lot of strain on the body. And then there’s, like…head injuries.”

  “And you think you like wrestling? You think it’s really awesome?”

  “I think I made my bed, and now I have to lie in it. Nobody to blame for that but me.”

  He shrugged one now visible shoulder, that self-consciousness partly gone. Though what did it matter, when it had been replaced by this awful fatalism? He sounded like someone being slowly marched to his death, and he capped it off by being more concerned about her.

  “You, on the other hand, have plenty to blame on someone else.”

 
“Like what? What should I really blame you for?”

  “Are you kidding? You don’t trust anything I do. You don’t trust anything that anybody does.”

  “And you would know that how, exactly?”

  “Because you flinch about a second after anyone says your name. Because the look on your face when your new buddy comes running up is like a flower, grateful that the sun has risen again. Because you choose seats at the back without fail; you eat nothing in the cafeteria in case someone is watching. It took you twenty minutes to dare come into the gym because you knew other people like me were in there, and you always will until the day you die. I made that happen to you, Letty. I made you take the road marked FOREVER WARY OF OTHER HUMAN BEINGS, instead of the one you should have taken.”

  “And what was the one I should have taken?”

  “The one that leads to an apartment somewhere cool like New York City, surrounded by cool friends who all do cool things like writing articles and making documentaries, every night full of wine and TV marathons and board games, and you have some guy, some great guy who wears glasses and has a big, dark beard and knows how to quote poetry and make seasoned cashews and shit.”

  She managed a laugh after that. Shook her head and even rolled her eyes a little—for the cashews part though, really. Not for the rest of it. The rest of it was making her heart rattle around in her chest.

  “So you think I deserved a hipster boyfriend.”

  “You know what I mean. You know what I’m saying.”

  “I do. I just really doubt I would have ever had those things.”

  “Yeah, but unlike me, you had a shot at living that fucking awesome life. And I swear to god, if it kills me, if it takes me a thousand years—I’m going to give you that back,” he said.

  Then suddenly her eyes were stinging again. She had to start fussing with the sweater just to get it under control, finally getting it off. The tears were still coming. They were starting to make her lower lip tremble, so obvious that the only way to truly hide it was to swim away for the second time.