After I Was His

by Amelia Wilde

  I’ve been awake for a while.

  All I learned from Wes at dinner was that Bennett Powell, his roommate, walked away from Newark for three months. Wouldn’t answer calls. Wouldn’t answer texts. He sent one cryptic message and got out of town. Or somewhere else in town.

  It’s been on my mind ever since.

  The weekend’s free, with nice weather and sunshine, and Newark isn’t that far. The desire to shake things up is so strong I can’t shake it out with dancing, or improv class, or pretending I’m on set while I’m selling insurance.

  Hence why I’ve showered and packed a small bag, intending to make this a road trip for the ages. At least as far as Newark.

  I try again. “Wes.”

  He takes in a sharp breath and rolls over, muscles glorious in the dawn light. “Whit—what are you doing in here?”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  He flips onto his back and throws an arm over his eyes. “Why don’t you think quietly in your own bedroom?”

  “We’re stuck in a rut. We need to do something. We need to get out of town.”

  Wes pushes himself up on one elbow and looks at me. “You’re free to leave town any time you like.”

  “I want you to go with me.”

  I’ve caught his interest, but he narrows his eyes, his hair adorably sleep-flattened. “You’re as transparent as Saran Wrap. You know that?”

  “I am not. I am opaque. I am the very model of mystique.”

  “You want to go to Newark and find my missing roommate.”

  “Fine—maybe I am transparent.” I rock forward onto the balls of my feet and back down again. “But, look. When’s the last time you took a trip for the hell of it? When’s the last time you did something spontaneous?”

  “When I moved in here with you. That was pretty spontaneous. And now you’re waking me up at an indecent hour to—”

  “I know you get up early on the weekends, Wes. You’re only missing”—I glance at the clock on his bedside table—”ninety minutes of sleep.” I run over to the bed and perch on the edge. “Isn’t that worth it? If the trade-off is excitement? Adventure?”

  “Trust me. Newark is not an adventure.”

  “I could make it an adventure.” He wraps an arm around my back, curling into me as if by habit. “Come on. Trust me.”

  Wes looks at me, his eyes glinting in the dim light.

  Then he climbs out of bed.

  Wes: Where are you?

  His text comes in exactly fifteen minutes after he steps into the shower, all thanks to me. I want to jump him. I’ve wanted to jump him every day since last Friday, but it’s as if the air between us has turned solid. I can still sit next to him, I can still talk to him, I can even still touch him—but Wes seems to have doubled down on the kind of disciplined life that makes me want to burst out of my own skin.

  There’s the gym membership, for one thing.

  I text him back.

  Whitney: Outside—waiting by the car.

  On Sunday morning, he went out and came back four hours later, his hair damp and his shoulders relaxed. I’d leaned against the kitchen counter, casually pretending that I hadn’t spent the last four hours trying to burn off the incredible energy of wondering. I’d gone running. I’d watched three episodes of a new reality show on Netflix. I’d made tea.

  “I got a gym membership,” he’d announced into the air while I stirred the sugar into it.

  “You look like it,” I’d practically purred.

  But he’d only flashed that smile at me and asked if I wanted to grab lunch.

  Wes: Be right down.

  Wes jogs down the steps of the front entrance three minutes later and plants his feet in the center of the sidewalk, a little duffel bag slung over his shoulder. “Clothes for a weekend, in case,” I’d shouted at him from outside the bathroom door. He heard me.

  “You entrapped me.”

  I toss him the keys. “If entrapment is the same as renting a car, then yes, I entrapped you.”

  He jiggles the keys in his hand and stays put. “There’s no way you planned this all this morning.”

  “Fine. I put in for the car rental last night with an absurdly early drop-off time. But if you really don’t want to go...”

  I’m provoking him, and I know it. But he’s been so distant, so uptight, this week that I can’t help but think...

  Well, I think a lot of things. And those things are best discussed on the open road.

  Wes takes a deep breath of the fresh, clean morning air, brimming with possibility. “Are you dead set on going to Newark?”

  “No. But I think you are.”

  He laughs out loud, the sound echoing off the front of our building. “I am not.”

  “I hate to appeal to your military sensibilities—”

  “Then don’t.”

  “—but isn’t there a saying that goes ‘Never leave a man behind’?”

  He rolls his eyes, his mouth curved in a smirk. “Powell left me behind.” A bird calls into the beat of silence. “But you have a point.”

  I clap my hands together. “Yes, I do. I was right all along. Come on—let’s beat the traffic out of here.”

  “I’m driving.”

  “Yeah.” I shoot him a look and open the passenger-side door. “You’re holding the keys.”

  “This isn’t going to be much of a road trip.” Wes steps on the brake, bringing us to a smooth stop at the first stoplight after our apartment.

  “No?”

  “Newark is thirty-five minutes from here, this early in the morning.”

  “Right. I looked that up last night too.” I tip my phone into my purse and wedge it between my foot and the center console of the car. The pressure there reminds me of Wes’s hands on my hips, and my mouth waters at the memory of it. “We can keep driving.”

  He cuts a glance at me. “I thought you were set on going to Newark.”

  “Is your friend Bennett Powell an early riser?”

  “I have no idea. He got up early when we lived together, but it’s been months since then. Maybe he’s changed his ways.”

  “It’s going to be eight in the morning when we get there. If we go straight there.”

  “Is there somewhere else you want to go?”

  “You tell me.”

  Wes sighs. “I’m not that kind of guy.”

  “You’re not the kind of guy who picks up and goes to destinations unknown?”

  We roll forward through the intersection. “Not usually.”

  “So about last weekend—”

  “My God, woman.”

  “Was that an unknown destination?”

  “You entrapped me,” he says again. “You entrapped me to have some weird conversation about the fact that we had sex one time—”

  “It was more than one time. And you loved it. So why the deep freeze?”

  “Deep freeze? Is that what this looks like to you?”

  We pass by a Chinese restaurant snugged up next to a Sephora. I could spend an hour in there, changing everything about my face for the hell of it.

  “It feels like it.” I make a hammering motion that looks one-hundred percent absurd. “And I want to smash it.”

  He sighs. “You’ve been waiting all week for this.” It’s not a question.

  “Well, yeah.” I can’t look him in the eye, because he’s driving. I wanted it this way for him, but I’m regretting it now. I look out the windshield. Peeking at him out of the corner of my eye is awkward as hell. But twisting to stare at him seems worse, in a way. I settle for the middle distance of the dashboard. “Listen, I know I...pushed.”

  “Pushed me?”

  I think of those words rolling off my tongue, as if it were a scene from a movie. Fuck me, I’d told him, and he did. He did exactly as I asked. “I’m the one who initiated our...encounter.”

  “I’d agree with that assessment. But it wasn’t unwelcome.”

  Wes delivers this news in such a flat, matter-of-fact
tone that it takes a few beats for me to register his meaning. “Wait—it wasn’t unwelcome?”

  “Jesus, Whit, have you seen yourself in the mirror? Of course it was welcome. And it’s not only that. You’ve got this unbelievable—” He holds the steering wheel tight in his hands. “You drive me crazy.”

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “Both.”

  I breathe in the silence, waiting for him to fill in the yawning blank.

  It goes on a little too long—another stoplight—for him to speak again.

  “It’s good in that you’re irresistible. But it’s bad in that...” Wes’s voice trails off.

  “You’re killing me.”

  “I’m used to order.” He looks at the road, turning carefully onto the side street that’s going to take us to the highway out of the city. “I’m used to some level of control in my life. You’re the opposite of that.”

  “But it’s irresistible. You need that, on some level.”

  “I need something,” Wes admits. “But you didn’t hear me say that.”

  Ten minutes outside Newark, the urge to speak boils over.

  “Don’t hate me.”

  Wes groans. “I loved it, okay? I admit it fully. What we did last weekend was dangerous, but it was awesome too.”

  “Whoa. Don’t get in over your head, fella.”

  He shoots me a look as we glide over the freeway, hovering right at the speed limit. “I can feel you over there, you know. Getting in over your head.”

  “Fine.” I lay both hands flat over my chest. “Your body has taken me over. Your moves in the bedroom have consumed me. And Wes?”

  “Yes?” He wears at least a half-smile. I can see it from here.

  “I know this isn’t the kind of thing that’s supposed to work out.”

  He laughs. “What makes you think that?”

  “They say that opposites attract. Nobody ever talks about what happens when they collide.”

  We whip past a road sign—four miles to go. “It gets awkward,” he says. “People pull away from each other.”

  “But what if people don’t want that to happen?”

  “Hypothetically, they could give it a shot.” He cuts a glance at me, a strange hope burning in his eyes. “Even though, hypothetically, it could be the mistake of a lifetime.”

  “We all make mistakes,” I say diplomatically. “Plus, you’ve already crossed the line.”

  “What line?”

  “Not fucking around with roommates.”

  “Tell me. What loophole did you find, Whit?”

  I clear my throat like a fancy professor. “It’s not fucking around if we give this a serious try. Just to see what happens.” Every inch of me tingles with excitement, with anticipation. It steals the breath from my lungs. It’s brighter than the rising sun. I know I’m pushing too far. I know I’m pushing too hard. But I need him close to me. I need the wall to come back down.

  “Deal.”

  I take his hand in mine, yanking it clean off the steering wheel, and kiss the back of his knuckles. I know it’s a risk. And I don’t care.

  “You gonna let me drive?”

  “Yeah. Drive wherever you want.” I let go of his hand, but my palms ache to take it back. “The world is your oyster.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to find Bennett.”

  “Right—yes. Let’s find your missing roommate, and then let’s get a room.”

  20

  Wes

  “Where should we go first?” Whitney furrows her brow and watches the high-rises of downtown Newark go by in the bright morning sun. It’s not long until June, and part of me is desperate—desperate—to see Whitney in one of those fifties-style bathing suits, laying out on the beach. “You don’t think Bennett is still waiting at your apartment, do you?”

  “He’ll have found somewhere else to go.”

  “Did you text him back?”

  “No.”

  I see her head swivel toward me out of the corner of my eye. “Are you going to?”

  “Not right now.”

  She waits a beat. “Why not?”

  “Because I’m starving.” I steer us onto a side road. Three blocks in, there’s a diner with an honest-to-God parking lot. “You dragged me out of the apartment before I could eat.”

  “Where’s your spirit of adventure?”

  “I’m on the adventure. But a man can’t travel on air alone.”

  “You should embroider that onto a throw pillow.”

  I pull the car into the parking lot and turn it off with a decisive flick of my wrist. “I’m not embroidering anything. But I will order breakfast for you, if you want.”

  “You’re so manly.” She says it lightly, a joke, as she’s leaning for the door handle, but I catch her wrist. She spins back to me, eyes aglow.

  “Am I going to have to remind you how manly I am?”

  Whitney’s face lights up, her cheeks turning pink. “That sounds filthy.”

  “You said you wanted to give this a serious try.”

  “And I meant it.” Her chest rises and falls with shallow breaths.

  “If you’re serious, you know you can’t always be in charge.”

  She bites her lip. “I am not into men like you, but damn, Wes...”

  I rest my fingertips at the curve of her jaw, then drag them lightly down the side of her neck, her shoulder...and back to where I held her wrist. Then I take my hand away. Whitney sucks in a breath, like the loss of contact is as palpable as a shock. “You hungry?”

  “Ravenous.” She flicks her eyes down to the front of my pants, where there’s an obvious bulge. “And you look like you’re—”

  “Ready to go.” I throw open the car door and step out. “Come on. Let’s go get a table.”

  Whitney lets out a frustrated grumble. She follows me anyway.

  “Does your neck hurt?”

  I pull my hand away and look back at the wreckage of breakfast on my plate. I’m on the edge of eating too much, so there’s still a third of a pancake left, but I put my fork down several minutes ago and settled for coffee. The old habit must have taken over.

  “No.”

  Whitney narrows her eyes. “That’s not the first time I’ve seen you rub your neck like that.” She wraps her own hand around a mug with the diner’s logo in white. She ordered half-coffee, half-hot chocolate, which seems exactly like her. “Did something happen? You know, while you were in the Army?”

  “Yes. I broke my neck.”

  Her eyes go wide.

  “I’m kidding. No. Nothing happened.”

  She blows a breath out through her lips. “Getting blown up isn’t nothing, Wes.”

  “My sister can’t keep her mouth shut, can she?”

  “In her defense—” Whitney takes a deep sip of her drink and closes her eyes, as if mediocre diner coffee and hot chocolate from a package are the nectar of the gods. “She was talking about Dayton, not you. You just happened to be part of the story.”

  I stare down into my own coffee. The heat curls up around my face, but when it makes contact, it’s not the humidity of a hot drink but the dry heat of the desert. The pedal presses hard against my foot. It takes force to steer the Humvee, it takes strength, it takes a steady hand on the wheel and a confident stomp of the boot. It’s not some zippy rental car, and the road isn’t the recently patchworked highway between New York and Newark. It’s dirt and stone, deep tracks pitted into the earth, and the Humvee dips and bounces over each ridge.

  “Wes?”

  “Yeah?”

  Whitney’s face is the picture of concern. “You’ve been looking at your coffee for”—she glances at the clock behind the counter—”several minutes.” She draws her bottom lip between her teeth. “Did I say something wrong?”

  Something unhinges in my chest, a valve releasing, and I want to tell her. I want to tell her everything. How that Humvee haunts my dreams. How I find myself in the driver’s seat every time there’s
a fender-bender in traffic. How looking at Dayton—my best friend, even though I don’t deserve him—leaves me feeling sick inside.

  But I hesitate.

  She’s out of her comfort zone already and in the back of my mind, I hear a warning. Telling her, as much as I want to, is the third rail.

  “What made you come to Newark, anyway?”

  There’s the truth at the very base of it. A woman. Julie. We met one weekend on base, and she was moving there. It didn’t work out. But even so, I thought I could hide from everything in Newark—from the memories. From the guilt.

  I couldn’t.

  The waitress buzzes by the table and drops the bill neatly between us. “Can I get anything else for you two?” Whitney reaches for the bill and the waitress winks at her. “Oh, honey, let him pay. Look at him! He’s got you out the morning after. That must count for something.”

  Whit flashes her a smile I recognize from her audition practices and nods, her nose wrinkling. It’s almost too cute.

  The moment shatters. I press my lips shut tight. A woman like Whitney—especially Whitney—doesn’t need to hear about the things that happened when I was thousands of miles away. All that might as well have happened on another planet. It has nothing to do with her.

  “She’s right.” I snatch the bill off the surface of the table and dig for my wallet. “I’ll get this one.”

  “Aren’t you manly?” Whitney flutters her eyelashes, but I see right through the little joke. I’m not going to get out of this. Not forever.

  “Okay. Here we go.” Whitney claps her hands in the passenger seat of the rental car. “I’m belted in. Let’s find your roommate.”

  “We can try, but no promises. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t always answer texts.”

  “So...exactly like you.”

  “I’m answering right now.”

  Whitney grabs my wrist. “Is this too much? Did I—” She purses her lips. “Did he leave on bad terms? Am I pushing you back into a bad situation?”