by Lia Riley
I grab his wrist and point to his watch. Don’t get me wrong; I’d like to moan again too. But he’s got places he needs to be and that fact’s distracting me.
He peers at the timepiece. “I’m so late.”
“Go on, run. I can get dressed fast and let myself out.”
He hesitates. “What are your plans for later?”
“Today? Nothing much.” Replaying the last few hours in blow-by-blow, dirty detail.
His smile is mischievous. “Why don’t you hang out in my bedroom? I’ll be done in a couple hours.”
“Oh, really?”
“I’m thinking we can pick up where we left off.”
“You’re clearly a genius.” He leans in for another kiss and I clap a hand over his mouth. “Okay, get to school. Embrace your potential.”
“Yeah.” The intensity in his heavy-lidded gaze makes me shiver.
After he leaves, I splash my face with cool water. My cheeks are pink and my eyes shine. I look different—happy—deliriously so.
I whistle under my breath as I yank open the bathroom door and narrowly avoid a collision with a red-haired girl waiting outside. A housemate, no doubt. Oh man, I hope she didn’t hear Bran and I going at it in the shower.
“Sorry.” I drop my gaze, wanting to avoid direct eye contact, and pretend to massage my neck to cover the hickey.
“Enjoy yourself?” No mistaking the catty tone.
Whelp, guess she heard us.
“Excuse me, please.”
She blocks my attempted sidestep. “American?”
Startled, I raise my gaze. The girl’s red hair is styled in funky vintage victory curls. She’s perfectly voluptuous and striking. Her A-line emerald dress with a white Peter Pan collar and black kitten heels completes the glamorous ’50s pinup girl look.
“American?” she repeats, tapping her foot like I’m taking up both time and valuable hallway real estate.
“What?”
“You. Are. An. American?” She speaks with condescending slowness.
“Yeah, sure.” I start to sidle toward Bran’s bedroom.
Her eyes glitter and her tongue darts out to touch her top lip. “Bran hasn’t stooped to fucking Americans before. Guess he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
My jaw drops. What the hell? Who does this chick think she is? I am trying to process. Why does she look so familiar?
“He drooled all over you at the shop.”
The shop? Pieces slot together. The Bean Counter. This was the barista who scowled at us behind the counter earlier today. I’m not sure why the redhead has it in for me. Anxiety attaches to my body like a giant squid grappling a whale, threatening to sink me to the murky depths.
“Enjoy being this month’s flavor.” Her sneer is venomous.
“I’ve got to—excuse me.” I break for Bran’s room. When I get inside, I’m in early stage hyperventilation. Even though it’s stuffy in here, I drape Bran’s sheets around my shoulders and inhale his musky soap scent in slow breaths until the action steadies me.
Whoa. Bran’s got a serious crappy roommate problem.
I sit up on the edge of his bed and look around. The room’s surprisingly neat for a guy. I mean, not over the top. There’s no color-coordinated pen jars or erasers set in a neat line on the desk—just a general impression of tidiness and order. It’s a little lonesome, like he lives here, but doesn’t really live here.
There’s a creak of footsteps in the hall outside. I don’t really want to stick around. Maybe I’ll go home. I pull out my phone to message him an invite to come over later. The battery is dead. Crap. I glance at his desk. Surely he’s got some scratch paper in there. I open the top drawer and pull out a piece of card stock.
Dagmar and Christina Lind
are pleased to announce
the marriage of their daughter
Adie Lind
to
Brandon Lockhart
Son of Bryce and Mariana Lockhart
The paper falls from my fingers.
What. The. Hell.
I bend and grab the invitation, shove it back in the drawer, slam the door. The bottom falls from my stomach.
Married. Bran was getting married last year? He told me he didn’t have a recent girlfriend. That was a right fine bit of hairsplitting to leave out the fiancée. Or did he actually get married? Bran’s wife? The words sound outrageous. These thoughts don’t add up to anything approaching sense.
Married? It seems so old-fashioned for our age.
I hurry around the room, grabbing my things, find my shoes under the futon. Crap, I didn’t mean to snoop, but my eyes can’t unsee. Double crap, despite my best intentions, here we go—I’m someone else’s stupid rebound. My hands grapple the doorknob. I step into the hallway, primed to flee, when a raspy voice bursts in my ear.
“Bella?” Miles hunches in his doorway, scratching his hairy gut. “You seen my lighter? Oh, wait, you’re not Bella.”
“Haven’t seen it.” The red-haired girl emerges from the kitchen, eating cereal from a mixing bowl.
Waaaaait a sec. My mind, already ringing from wedding bells, holds up a cautionary finger. This girl is Bella? The “I miss our good-night kisses” texting Bella?
She lives with Bran?
Too much, too much, too much, my brain screams in alarm, threatening to short-circuit.
“Um, I gotta go,” I mumble, stumbling toward the front door.
“Who’s that?” I hear Miles ask.
I slam the front door but it doesn’t mask Bella’s response.
“A no one. Just the chick Bran’s sticking his dick in this week.”
Chapter Thirteen
Bran
Today the wind blisters from the north and carries record high outback temperatures over Melbourne. The city is a concrete lung, holding the hot air until we all start to go a bit mad. Take what I did, hooking up with Talia. Stupid. So stupid. And bloody awesome.
I duck into a high-end contemporary gallery for a blast of air-con and freeze beneath an Aboriginal dot painting detailing an abstracted aerial view of a desert landscape. Art’s becoming a significant source of livelihood in some indigenous communities. I eye the hefty price tag. Good, they deserve it and more. Whites have screwed the First Nations over since they decided to settle this country and declared it terra nullius—land belonging to no one. As if the people who inhabited this continent since forever didn’t matter.
The only constant with humans is their innate need to screw someone over.
Fucking Bella.
Hooking up with her was an act of willful idiocy. I’d made it clear from the start that I wasn’t looking for anything and she claimed she wasn’t either. But all of a sudden she was. And the more I tried to clue her in that she and I weren’t a thing, the more she acted like I was a challenge to win. I’m not a prize, just a dick. But not a big enough jerk to pretend I’m keen on a girl if I’m not.
I don’t want to feel anything. Not since Adie and all the shit that went down in Denmark. And I’d been doing better at handling, keeping safe distances, until I met Talia. I tried to give that girl space, knowing she was dangerous. The perfect mix of bright, undeniably American confidence coupled by a vulnerability that sets roots through the shadowed cracks in my heart.
Finally, I did it. Grew a pair and made a play, and Bella screws things up before they barely start. When I got home to a Talia-less house, Miles filled me in on what Bella had said about Talia earlier today as she flew out the door.
I’d like to send my fist straight through the galley’s stark, perfect white wall. It’s a bitch to admit but deep down I know Bella didn’t mess up the situation. I did. Why couldn’t I be straight—tell Talia about Adie, those crap months in Copenhagen last year, the plane, and all the girls like Bella since my return?
Oh wait, because she’d run screaming in the opposite direction.
“Can I help you?” A gallery attendant purses her lips. The polite person’s way of say
ing piss off, dirtbag.
I don’t bother mentioning that my dad has purchased at least half a dozen pieces in this place. Or that the gallery owner is a regular at my parents’ Melbourne Cup breakfast. The Cup’s the one event that brings them home to Australia each year. During the big November horse race, my folks put on a catered breakfast and arrange drivers to shuffle their fancy friends to their private box at the track. The women try to outdo themselves with who has the ugliest hat and the men drone about their portfolios and the price of copper in China or some shit.
I’d rather die than have that life.
“Sir? Can I help you?”
“No,” I say, shoving open the door and returning to the anonymous streets. “No, you can’t.”
Aimless city wanders are stupid in this hot weather, so I catch a tram back to Carlton. Why aren’t I at the beach? It’s the perfect day to take the Kingswood to the Great Ocean Road. Drive, windows down, past the You Yangs rising above the Werribee plain, the granite ridges where my friends and I go climbing. Cruise past my old boarding school and give it the finger. I could turn toward Barwon Heads, find the place where I kissed my first girl, inside one of the abandoned bunkers that dot Australia’s south coast from World War Two. All facing the sea for an enemy that never came.
I think about those empty bunkers sometimes, especially after I got to Europe and everything unraveled. I wonder if waiting for the worst to hit was harder than when the shit went down.
Turns out both activities suck.
I unlock the front door. Bella’s bike is gone and Miles is at work. My house is empty for once. All I want to do is sit in a cold bath with a beer and not think about my screwed up life. I head to my room, peel off my shirt, flick on the fan, and fall onto my bed. On the wall, above my head, is a poster of a work by my favorite painter, Sidney Nolan. It’s of Ned Kelly, the famous bushranger, Australia’s answer to Robin Hood in the nineteenth century. He and his gang made suits of armor from tin and robbed from the rich to give to the poor. He was betrayed and captured not far from the city, and the last words he offered before they hanged him in the Old Melbourne Gaol were “Such is life.”
In the painting, the visor to Ned’s helmet is open, revealing nothing but blue sky and white clouds. I used to think the artist tried to depict a man with nothing—show a person free from life’s bullshit grind.
But now as I stare at the poster, I realize how wrong I’ve been.
Maybe the heat’s made me a little mental, because I’m feeling this…this mateship with a mythology—an art house poster. It’s just me and Ned in here and he’s got my back. If someone peered into my mind, what would they see? The sky, sun, life, hope? No, probably stagnant, bitter pond scum.
I knead my temples. So what if living is a bitch sometimes? Things don’t have to get screwed with Talia. I don’t know how to put things right with her, or even why it matters, but it does. She matters like no one I’ve ever met before.
Why not dig deep, muster the courage to grab this short time we’ve got with both hands? Be willing—really willing—to give it a go? At least be friends. I can do that, right?
Because such is life.
And maybe the part that makes everything beautiful, worthwhile, bearable is the trying.
Chapter Fourteen
Talia
I trail Marti and her girlfriend, Lucy, down a dodgy backstreet searching for Skin Tight, a local piercing parlor. No simple tongue barbell for Marti; she wants the big daddy, a clitoral hood ring. The idea makes my toes curl.
She and Lucy dragged me from my room where I holed up from the heat, listening to dark ’80s emo and biting my fingernails into jagged edges. The residential hall is under attack from a mice infestation. Tiny shadows skirt the halls, dart out on the stairs, and elicit shrieks in the shower. I’d planned to stay in and Google rodent-related diseases. You know, just in case.
And because I’d rather think about bubonic plague—turns out it still exists in the twenty-first century, who knew—than a certain boy who can’t stop infecting my thoughts.
That’s when Marti came to the door, ordering me out, despite the fact the temperature hovers in the high nineties.
“Bella, oh yeah, that chick’s a trip.” Lucy plays with one of her thick rainbow-hued dreadlocks. “Always rabbiting drama. Never shuts up.” Lucy works alongside Bella making coffee at the Bean Counter.
Marti’s shamelessly pumping her girlfriend for information on my behalf.
I could have contacted Bran myself, but that would mean talking to him. Being mature is not high on my present must-do list. Not after he ditched me alone this morning in the house he apparently shares with an ex.
Not to mention that he was engaged this time a year ago.
Despite my best intentions, I’m falling for a guy who is like a wormhole of rebounds.
“Bran.” Lucy’s tone is knowing. “Everyone knows that bloke.”
I tune back into the girls’ conversation with a quickness. “Really, why?”
“You wouldn’t think it, but the dude’s a total man tramp.”
My heart pays a quick visit to my stomach, confirming my suspicions.
Marti notes my stricken expression and grabs Lucy’s hand. “Baby, maybe you should tone it—”
Lucy snorts, oblivious to any attempt to silence her. “He drops trou all over town.”
I adjust my shirt—the thin cotton feels more like heavy wool. This information settles into my bones, and the hurt ebbs, like I’m in an empty room watching dust motes float in the half-light.
“Why do you want to know about Bran?” Lucy pins me with a penetrating look. “You fancy him?”
“No.” My response is automatic. “Well, yes. Kind of. I didn’t know he was together with Bella.”
“Together? Nah—Bella’s all drama. But when it comes to Bran, I can’t blame the girl’s reaction. He so used her.”
Marti rolled her eyes. “Pfffft. He used her.” She air-quotes Lucy’s words. “Who says she didn’t use him right back? Girls are always either sluts or weaklings in these stories. So boring.”
“All I’m saying is that Bella was into him way more than vice versa. At work we all saw that. She would have, too, if she ever stopped to pull her head out. Anyway, he’s an ass but not bad-looking…for a dude.” Lucy slips her arm around Marti’s waist, tugs her close. They exchange cute secret smiles.
I want to crack their smug skulls together. I mean not really, but kind of.
A dull ache spreads through my abdominal cavity. Ovarian cancer? The idea twinges a place deep in my hollow chest even though it’s almost statistically impossible in my early twenties. I’ve already been reassured by my doctor that my chance of being struck by lightning is statistically far greater. My chest starts to throb. What if I have a heart murmur? Or a defective rib? Or rib cancer? Or rib cancer and ovarian cancer? Or—
“Hey, there it is.” Lucy flings out her hand toward the squat gray brick building across the street.
Inside Skin Tight, a sullen guy lounges behind a glass case stocked with gauges and silver earrings. Marti approaches him with Lucy while I zone in on tattoo mock-ups on the wall. Swallowing feels harder than normal at the moment.
I need to calm down. I’m freaking because I’ve had confirmation that Bran doesn’t really care about me. I’m another conquest who fooled herself into believing I was special, that I alone had crawled under his thorns and prickles, glimpsed something deeper.
I’m a huge idiot. All I was to him was a casual hookup. Thank God we didn’t have sex.
Eventually I’ll probably run into him. Will he call me out, make me explain why I ran?
What would I say? That I didn’t travel all the way to Australia to be a notch on his man-whore belt?
Yes, I’m seeking adventure—life experience—not commitment, but that doesn’t mean I want to be used. Or snarked at by former conquests while trying to exit his bathroom.
Why can’t I have a simpler study-abroad ho
okup? Like Jazza?
Except Jazza doesn’t make me throb all over. Jazza doesn’t treat me like a secret waiting to be unlocked. Jazza doesn’t push me, pull me, prod me. Jazza didn’t tell me I was perfect only for him, make me believe this truth in the deepest part of my heart.
“Talia, come over here.” Marti climbs into the wide black chair, wiggles from her panties, and bends down to wad them in one hand.
The piercer, who goes by the name Dice, pops his neck. I try to focus on his impressive tri-colored Mohawk rather than the instruments gleaming on the stainless steel tray.
“You wax, that’s good.” Dice grunts as he stares between Marti’s splayed legs with a clinical expression. “Less pinching.”
Ew.
I watch Dice lift a needle. My stomach curls into a tight ball. Jesus. I don’t even pluck my eyebrows.
A wayward staph infection probably lurks in the pleather piercing chair. There’s zero chance I’d ever get my clit pierced. What if it all goes bad? Who wants to risk a Barbie doll crotch? I close one eye but can’t bring myself to look away when Dice leans forward, head nodding in time to the death metal piping in through the crappy speaker system. The rage sounds tinny and I almost snicker except that Marti’s eyes form perfect blue spheres.
“Um, is he supposed to stretch it that far?” I whisper to Lucy as Dice tugs Marti’s lady bits out like a rosy pink nub of Play-Doh. I don’t think the clit was meant to be pulled like saltwater taffy.
The needle moves into position. Stabs.
“Oh maman, maman, maman.” Even my rudimentary grasp of French understands Marti is calling out for her mom.
I tear toward the front of the shop, either that or hurl on Dice’s combat boots. There’s a bowl of peppermints by the cash register and I grab a fistful, unwrap one, and thrust it into my mouth. My tongue feels different. It’s not like I normally think about my tongue but I stick it in one corner of my mouth and then to the other. Does it really feel strange or is it me being nuts again?
I need to stop thinking like this. Not healthy. Not helping anyone. I’ll probably give myself a gnarly disease from anxiety. Stress kills. Isn’t that what everyone says?
