by Amelia Betts
Panicked, I hurried back toward the kitchen.
“Hey!” he called to me as he emerged from his office. I froze in place, feeling terrified and culpable, as if I had done something really wrong. I had almost forgotten it was Liam who had asked me here in the first place.
Liam held his unbuttoned pants at his waist as he sidled up to me, his eyes squinted. My heart was pounding as he leaned in and gently kissed my cheek.
“Hi. I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said, his lips trailing down to my neck.
“I liked it,” I said, just as surprised as he was to hear the words come out of my mouth.
“Oh yeah?” He looked me in the eye, a little flicker of excitement in his own.
I nodded and Liam did the same, biting his grinning lips as he grabbed my hips and led me into the darkened dining room, back to the table where he’d first tried to seduce me. There was nothing to do but let it happen. He was like the undertow and I was the reckless beachgoer who had swum out into the surf zone. As he stripped off my shirt and jeans and laid me out on the table in nothing but my white cotton panties and mismatched black lace bra, the other girl, completely naked, appeared behind him.
“This is Hadara,” he said.
I looked at the girl, who greeted me by tickling the inside of my knee that was bent over the edge of the table. “Nice panties,” she said. “I’d like to take them off of you.”
I wasn’t sure where this was going, or if I was really prepared for it, but I did nothing to protest. She was so muscular, almost manly in her physique, and she possessed a forceful, sexual energy that, much like Liam’s, seemed undeniable. Liam moved to the side of the table and stroked my hair as Hadara spread my legs using the length of her forearms. Hovering over me, she pulled my bra down and pushed up my breasts as she sucked at each nipple, biting at the tips of them gently with her teeth, then licking up to my neck.
I turned to Liam, beckoning him with my eyes. He reassured me with a smile. Even though I was in over my head, his presence lulled me into a kind of trance. He leaned in and kissed my forehead, whispering into my ear that I was beautiful, that he’d been dreaming of watching me. Meanwhile, Hadara’s hand slipped inside my underwear, her fingers expertly maneuvering between my legs.
“Have you ever been with a girl?” she asked.
“What?” I exclaimed, suddenly confused by her presence, as if I had imagined her this whole time.
“I said have you ever been with a GIRL?” Her voice became incredibly loud, as if she were yelling into my ear. I heard a knocking sound, faint at first, then louder and louder.
“Somebody should get the door,” I muttered. “There’s somebody outside.”
Liam looked at me like I was crazy. “What door?”
“Somebody’s knocking!” I said, louder this time.
“But there is no door. Look around you.” He spread his arms wide, and I saw that the room was a pitch-black void.
* * *
The knocking was insistent. I woke up in a sweat. Unlike the morning after Liam and I had had sex, I now had to convince myself that nothing had happened, although I was in a similar state of disbelief. The dream had been so vivid, so real. The woman even had a name, Hadara—did she exist? I wanted to call him and ask, to fact-check my own subconscious as if I were writing a term paper about superfoods and needed to make a footnote.
Becoming aware of the actual knocking at my door, I realized this was why I woke up. Someone was really knocking. It was probably Julien. Yikes.
“Mischa?” Sounding insistent, he called to me from outside as I scrambled out of bed. Despite my efforts not to, I was squinting at him like a mole when I opened the door in my ratty boxers and T-shirt. Julien, of course, was looking put together in dark jeans and a pale blue button-down.
“Listen, I’m going ahead into the office. You wanna meet me there?”
“Oh no, I overslept.” I rubbed my eyes, barely awake. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine, really. I’ll just see you when you get there, okay?”
“Okay.” I waved goodbye as Julien hurried off, then shuffled back to the bed and checked my phone—it was nine o’clock already. My alarm should have gone off at seven-thirty, but I had no recollection of waking up. I’d probably turned it off mid-sex dream. My heart started to race a little as I worried about what Julien must be thinking. Of course he had to see me in my worst sleeping outfit, a pair of too-tight boxers and a paint-splattered Dolly Parton concert T-shirt; I probably had the look of someone recovering from a late-night bender. The only thing I could do was pull myself together and make it to the office as quickly as possible.
In the shower, I tried to get my mind clear, but images from my dream kept running through my head. After seeing Julien, the fantasy threesome I’d been having seemed particularly wrong, like my father had just caught me making out with a juvenile delinquent. I thought about how Julien would view Liam if they ever met, almost certain he would disapprove.
My innocent, romantic side didn’t understand how Liam still had such a hold over me. Couldn’t I see that he had used me and thrown me away? Then again, I was only human. My brain was bound to run wild with all sorts of thoughts and sex dreams about him because he was beautiful, and dangerous, and had an Australian accent, but most important, because I had slept with him in real life, making him one of only two people I could honestly say that about. The only way I was going to stop thinking about him was by sleeping with someone else, and the odds of that were exceedingly low. Nobody wins the lottery twice.
* * *
I rushed to meet Julien at his office, but it still took me forty-five minutes. When I walked in, he was absorbed in a book. A few seconds passed before he realized I was there.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” he finally acknowledged me with a wink. You’re not in trouble, said the look on his face.
Thank God, mine replied.
“I’m so sorry, I must have turned my alarm off in my sleep—”
“Judging by the sound of it, you were having some kind of dream.”
Oh no. I blushed what I’m sure was a garish shade of red, then tried to cross my arms over my chest in the most casual way possible. “Really? I don’t remember. I think I was dreaming about flying or something…” Lying had never been my forte, and I could tell from his face that I was only digging myself deeper. He had heard me moaning, or saying something dirty in my sleep, if not both.
“Listen.” He leaned forward, holding out the book in his hand for me to take. “Can I get you to xerox this? Make two copies. In one of them, highlight all the quotes about race. Anything on the topic whatsoever—food, modes of dress, personal hygiene, nothing’s too boring. It might take a couple days.”
“Okay, no problem.” I took the book and studied its title, something overly long and dryly academic. At least it would be a new distraction, albeit one that sounded pretty boring.
“You haven’t had any problems with the copy machine at the library, have you?”
I shook my head. I did not elaborate that spending eight hours in the corner of the library hovered over a copy machine with a traveling beam of light that blinded me each time I forgot to put the cover down sometimes caused me to question my sanity.
“Good. Hey, Mischa, I really appreciate all the grunt work you’re doing. I’m gonna find a way to make it up to you, I swear.” Julien smiled, baring his trademark gapped teeth. The smile was infectious; I had caught it by the time he turned his attention back to his laptop and started typing away again. On my way out I saluted him, referencing our little in-joke from that day we had eaten tacos on the beach, and he brought his hand up to salute me back.
* * *
“Yo, sexy secretary! You pregnant with the old man’s child yet?” Gracie greeted me with her usual onslaught of provocations when I called her at lunchtime, sprawled on the concrete steps in front of the library.
“No, but I might be impregnated by the Xerox machine before the summer’s ove
r, depending on how many copies of entire books he wants me to make.” Or by Liam’s love child, I thought, realizing I could no longer hold back on telling her the news. It was bubbling inside me like pressurized fizzy water, ready to spew all over the kitchen counter after a bumpy ride home from the grocery store.
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I have been given the task of reorganizing the supply room here. How these people can fill an entire room with office supplies, I have no idea. The natural foods lobby is more powerful than we think. And in need of many, many highlighters. Anyway, listen, I gotta tell you about this junior senator I met at a charity brunch this weekend. Did you know it was possible to meet someone at a brunch?”
Before I could stop her to get the Liam news off my chest, she was off and running, detailing her latest boy-chasing exploits. Gracie was almost as bad as me with her obsessions; the difference was she usually managed to ensnare her objects of desire. She was persistent and confident where I took no for an answer before the question was even posed.
“Gracie, I hate to interrupt—” I cut in.
“You wouldn’t believe it if you saw him, in his three-piece suit. He’s got like seven names that end with a Roman numeral. So yeah, he’s basically a blueblood nightmare. Did I say he was from Rhode Island? Well, he is. So why am I surprised?”
“Gracie—” I tried again, to no avail.
“Junior senator from Rhode Island, look him up. Anyway, we’ve been e-mailing. I predict a very patriotic Fourth of July in my future.”
“Gracie, you’ve got to stop talking, I have something to tell you!” I practically shouted.
“What?! I thought you said nothing was happening with him. What are you not telling me?”
“It’s not Julien. It’s someone else. And I have to tell you because I haven’t told anyone but Isabella and it’s killing me,” I said.
“Well, give me the goods, gringo!” she responded in haste.
“Ok…” I squinted up at a puffy white cloud that was temporarily shielding me from the sun and drew in a breath of air. “I slept with some guy,” I said, scrunching my face as if I had just ripped off a Band-Aid. The irony of my word choice did not escape me. Slept with some guy. Could it really be called sleeping together if it takes place against a car?
“Who?” Gracie said, in deep and utter shock. “Frank? Michael? Charlie? Samuel?” She named every guy from our major, as if they hadn’t decided against me four years ago.
“No. No one you know.”
“Seriously? Who is it, then?”
“It’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Cough it up, sister. This is landmark. You haven’t gotten laid since Bradley!”
I winced at the sound of his name: Bradley. The guy from freshman year, the one who had broken my heart and ripped it into tiny shreds without the slightest hint of remorse. “Hey!”
“I know, I know. The name we shall not speak, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said, recalling the pact that Gracie and I had made spring semester of freshman year to never speak Bradley Griffin’s name again. At first, we had done it so as not to get caught talking about him, because that’s all I had done for a solid nine months (aka the human gestation period—we had called it my grief baby) right after he had dumped me. After that, the pact had remained in place so that I would finally get over him, because somehow just his name had the power to bring it all back at once—the pain, the rejection, the embarrassment. He had been a premed student, super smart and just cute enough for me to fall for him instantly when we had met in Intro to Psychology, an elective we were both taking in an attempt to figure out our own messed-up psyches. But the minute he had realized the extent of my eating problems, he had decided “we were no good for each other,” which really meant that I had been no good for him. The epiphany had come right around the time I had gained back thirty of the forty pounds that I had lost from the tapeworm. Needless to say, it had been a harsh pill to swallow, and though I had mostly recovered from the heartbreak, I still thought of him in times of weakness.
“Listen, I’m gonna have to go any second now. They want me to take ‘meeting minutes,’ whatever that means.”
“I think it just means take notes.”
“Right. Anyway, speak now or forever hold your peace, because these assholes are on a strict deadline to give me carpal tunnel syndrome before the summer’s over.”
“Ha. I’m glad we both resent our basic duties,” I said, examining my fingernails, still a little thrown by the B-word.
“I know, it’s very postcollegiate of us. Now spill.” I heard a crinkle of paper and the undeniable sound of my friend smacking on chewing gum.
“Okay. He’s a stranger. I met him at a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting. He’s from Australia and he looks like a male model. I know these things sound untrue, but they aren’t, I promise. Oh, and he owns a restaurant—Trio, the expensive one on the west side.”
A voice piped in the background on Gracie’s end. She muttered a hurried “okay” before whispering into the phone. “Oh. My. Holy. Fuck,” she said. “Sex Addicts Anonymous? Australia? Model? Expensive restaurant? These sound like buzz words from some fantasy role-playing scenario. Are you delusional?”
“I swear I am not lying. Delusional? Perhaps. But I did sleep with him.”
I heard a knock and more muttering on Gracie’s end.
“Ugh!!!” she finally groaned. “I gotta go! Send me a link to his Facebook, okay?”
“I don’t have his Facebook. I don’t even know his last name!” I shouted, but Gracie had already hung up. As a younger student brushed past me, a dial tone kicked in.
* * *
At five o’clock, I made my way back across the quad and into the old brick Lit building where Julien’s office was located on the second floor. In the middle of a typing spree, he glanced up distractedly as I placed the book and the clean copy I’d made on his desk and told him I’d be done with the highlighted version by end of day tomorrow. I had secret plans to reward myself for the monotony of the day with a trip to Damiano’s, the only place in town that sold pizza by the slice, so I unintentionally sounded a little clipped when asking, “Is there anything else you need before I go?”
“Uh, yes, actually. I need your company tonight, if you’re available,” he said.
Oh no, I’m going to be trapped in this office, my pizza-driven brain fretted. He’ll probably want to order Indian.
“Here’s the deal—today is Cecile’s birthday eve. Tomorrow we’ll celebrate at her grandmother’s house, but tonight I made reservations somewhere special and I’d like for you to join.” Julien finished typing something and glanced up at me with a formal smile.
“Really?” I said, doubtful that Cecile would want me there.
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t want to spoil Cecile’s special birthday dinner. She hardly knows me.” I imagined myself alone in the house when they went out for dinner, free to binge comfortably in the kitchen—something I hadn’t had the luxury of doing since moving in—and prayed he would see the logic in my argument.
“Please, I bore her to death. She’ll be happy to have another girl around.” He winked. “We’ll leave at seven.”
Chapter Eight
I didn’t realize the restaurant was Trio—Liam’s Trio—until we were pulling into the parking lot. That’s when my heart began to palpitate like I had just snorted excessive amounts of cocaine. The possibility that Julien was taking Cecile for such an expensive dinner on her fourteenth birthday hadn’t even crossed my mind. And yet, here we were. At least I had worn my good dress—a black silk shift that slimmed me as much as any garment on God’s green earth was capable. Still, it took me nearly a minute to follow them out of the car, trailing like a reluctant third wheel. The questions running through my mind were the obvious ones: Would Liam be here? If so, would he see me? What would he say? How would I introduce him if he approached? What would Julien think?
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I knew the Sad Sacks. I had to look them up on my phone to remember the name of their hit—“Ginger Snap”—but it wasn’t hard to find. Later on, I realized I’d attended a music festival back in high school, and they had been on the roster. I couldn’t remember seeing Liam perform, but I might have. In any case, it was breaking news that made me want to call Gracie from the bathroom with a bragging report: “In addition to sex addict/Australian restaurateur,” I would say, “you can now add rock star. I slept with an actual rock star!” It wasn’t something I would normally broadcast, but Gracie kept a sexual bucket list and I’m pretty sure a roll in the hay with a rock star was in the top ten. But a call from the bathroom was out of the question given my general paranoia that someone (perhaps one of the incredibly good-looking waitresses that were flitting about the dining room in button-downs and ties) might overhear me. Thus, for now, there was no one with whom I could share the news—unless, of course, I wanted to simultaneously corrupt the newly fourteen-year-old Cecile and repel her father.
* * *
“Flat or sparkling?” I heard the waiter address Julien and was surprised when he turned to me instead of Cecile for feedback.
“What do you think, Mischa? Flat or bubbly?”
“I’m sorry, say that again?” I was still reeling over “Chef Rock Star” and therefore confused by the simplest of questions.
