For the Summer

by Shey Stahl

  It was everything I could do in that moment not to cry. Those were things you would have said to me and made me feel. Because while Rocco was saying these things to me, I heard:

  “Say it, Sophie … You have to fucking say it.”

  With a deep breath, I was brought back to the conversation.

  “Yes,” I choked out before clearing my throat. I had to gain some control over him and you so I pushed back on his chest slightly. “Your turn.”

  “Do you want … a beer?” He smirked, knowing I was thinking he was going to ask if I wanted him.

  “No, I want to get these questions over with.”

  “All right then, boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “No.” I giggled. “I like dick.”

  “That’s a good thing …” He smiled back at me, his eyes dropping to my lips. “And mine … do you think about that, too?”

  “Yes.” Trust me. This was all relevant.

  Rocco closed his eyes and groaned. His head fell forward against my shoulder, and he shook it back and forth. He muttered something I couldn’t understand before pressing me harder against the wall. “Jesus Christ …” he grunted, shifting his stance.

  “All right buddy, focus; you still have seven questions left.” I ran my hand over his shoulder and then settled on the back of his neck.

  “I only have one more I really want to ask,” he said against the sensitive skin of my neck just below my ear.

  “And what’s that?”

  He pulled back completely and let his hand fall from the wall to reach for his beer he had set down on the bar next to us. Then his eyes met mine again. “When are you gonna let me kiss you?”

  Whoa, flashback. You in the water, your chin dipping just below the surface, teasing me.

  “Do you want me to kiss you?”

  Just as I remembered this, I realized that Rocco was really close to me again and had set his beer down, allowing his hands to be free.

  I had a lot of emotions running through me, and couple that with the beer, I reacted. That was what I was left with after you. Bad decisions.

  Grabbing Rocco’s t-shirt, I pulled his soft lips to mine. Feeling his hand move around my back and down until it was resting securely on my hip, I pulled my body to his.

  And then Ivey returned. “Hey jungle monkey, where’s the hard shit?”

  Rocco chuckled against my lips and gave Ivey a grin. “Jungle monkey?”

  Ivey waggled her eyebrows, tipping her cup at Rocco. “She’s been known to swing from the bed post a time or two. Now …” She leaned into him, completely comfortable with her proximity with us, “How about the hard shit. We don’t want to remember a damn thing tomorrow except that we had a good time.

  “Well then, follow me ladies.” He tipped his head toward the kitchen.

  I did recall Ivey puking in the kitchen sink and then yelling, “Fuckin’ eh!” at the top of her lungs. We did some beer bongs … and then we did some more, with vodka. I really liked whipped cream vodka and vanilla Monster drinks, which was Rocco’s specialty. My ass flap was open most of the night, as was Ivey’s. Mike taught me how to shotgun a Monster energy drink. Mike then wore said shotgunned drink. I danced my ass off to “Brass Monkey.” Our final assessment: Rocco and Mike threw awesome fucking parties and playing air hockey with helmets and mouth guards was probably the coolest thing I had ever done. Rocco took his shirt off to which I gave him a sharpie tattoo of who the hell knew. Ivey went swimming in a mud puddle with rubber duckies she found. Mike spent most of the night wearing her footy pajamas after the puddle bath, and we filled our roommate’s car with thirty-two bags of sour cream and onion chips.

  Eventually, though, the night led to where I knew it would.

  The alcohol had gotten the best of me, as did his thick accent, and I found myself naked, in Rocco’s room. He was all hands-on from that point, sloppy even, but he still had himself under control. I enjoyed the fact that he seemed turned on, so desperate that he fumbled around, but I couldn’t get you out of my head.

  The problem was, I thought about that night and you half-naked, cargo shorts around your ankles, belt buckle clanking on the ground, one hand holding my leg up. I fucking thought about it so much, your face close to mine, breath on my neck, grunting with each push, your hands on my body, so rough with need. There was nothing romantic or even memorable, aside from the fact that I lost my virginity against a wall, to a boy who would never truly be mine. If anything, it should have been a memory I forgot. But that same boy was also the one who held my first love. And that couldn’t be forgotten.

  I couldn’t be with guys like Rocco, as hot as he was, because I was constantly mind-fucked by your memory.

  I gripped the bottom of Rocco’s t-shirt, pushing it up to see him. He helped me by peeling it off and dropping it to the floor by my jeans.

  My panties felt like a slip ‘n’ slide. He didn’t need to know that. Everything he was doing was arousing but also felt kind of wrong. Wrong touch, wrong name, wrong everything.

  “I can’t …” I cried out against him.

  He stopped instantly, putting a good two feet of distance between us.

  Rocco stared at me, blinking in disbelief that I was telling him to stop. I was pretty sure, positive almost, this had never happened to him before. Any other time, in another life where I wasn’t me, the girl in love with a memory, I would have rode the shit out of this Italian stallion.

  Sometimes I did wonder what the fuck was wrong with me and why I couldn’t brainwash myself into curing the gaping hole in my heart.

  The next morning Ivey and I sat over beer and bagels again. She was telling me about her dream last night where she was running through a hotel lobby in Vegas holding her own shit in a towel. The bellhop outside refused to get a taxi for her, so she threw her shit at him.

  Crazy girl. Then she asked about Rocco. “Who was that guy last night?”

  “Rocco?”

  “There really shouldn’t be a question in that answer if you slept with him,” she reminded me. “I bet he fucked like a god!”

  “I fucking hate your brother, Ivey. I need therapy,” I said, taking another swig from the bottle before handing it back to her. “And I didn’t rock Rocco’s world like you think. Your brother has destroyed my life.”

  “I hate him, too. He stole my White Stripes CD before he left.” Ivey shook her head. “Little motherfucker.”

  We parted ways that afternoon, and I went back to my writing. Finally, I had declared my major. Journalism.

  There was certainly a lot in between that wasn’t relevant, but this, nights like that night with Rocco, those were important because it showed me just how caught up in you I still was. At first, this journal started as a memory, a chance to find out when and how it changed for you.

  And then, over time, it was becoming a way for me to move on.

  Was it making me feel better?

  Not really. I thought it was helping with the process, though. Every time I picked the pen up and retold another memory, a weight was lifted and placed inside this journal.

  2011

  When I started writing in the journal, current events were how I tied my life to the outside world. A way to connect, when in reality, I was disconnected. But did you really care what the price of gas was? Probably not. Or who won the Super Bowl? Probably not.

  I cared that Nate Dogg died, and Ivey and I listened to “Regulate” for an entire week. I cared that Ivey and I read Fifty Shades of Grey, a book about a billionaire and his obsession with a submissive he wanted to bang. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little intrigued with being tied up, but sadly I had no one with whom I could try that.

  Breaking Dawn: Part One came out. Guess where Ivey and I went? We tried to act like we weren’t there to see Edward Cullen’s naked ass, and boy were we sorely disappointed when the sheet was too high. But … he did break a headboard, so there was that.

  We also saw
Fast Five at midnight. Who could say no to Paul Walker? Not me.

  Adele released her newest CD, 21. I’d spent nights lost in those songs. Oh, and Lady Antebellum’s, “We Owned The Night.” You had told me once that we owned the night. I clung to that memory through these songs.

  And then came the night where I wondered if all that was just complete bullshit. The night of my twenty-first birthday.

  When I turned twenty-one, all of my sisters came out to Athens to celebrate. It was the first time since the summer I met you that all my sisters had been together in the same place at the same time.

  It was nice to have my sisters around, but get them all together and shit got real. Stephanie and Sara never did get along, and marriage hadn’t tamed either one of them.

  I was sure they were going to kill each other by the end of the night.

  Sadie, more than likely looking for some comfort, called some friends from her college days and helped me celebrate with Ivey and Lenny.

  Until some secrets were revealed.

  I knew based on Stephanie’s comments that you had messed around with her. I wasn’t stupid.

  “Do you ever see Bensen anymore?” Stephanie asked curiously, slurping her third Cosmopolitan.

  “Why?” Sadie asked, her voice louder than necessary. “Trying for a double header with brooding Bensen?”

  My head whipped around, confused and quite frankly a little disgusted. I stared at the two of them blankly, trying to comprehend what the hell that meant.

  “Did you mess around with Bensen, too?” Shanna asked, half paying attention, half shaking her ass to the Petey Pablo song playing in the bar.

  Like I said, I knew you had messed around with Stephanie, but Shanna, too?

  Who the fuck were you?

  My mood went to shit, and I started slamming beers. Seemed like a good idea to me.

  “He’s just another boy, Sophie. And not even a good one.” That was Sadie’s two cents.

  My heart and everyone around me, my sisters included, told me to walk away back then. Any other time I would have listened. Should have listened. But I didn’t. Instead I lived for the summer in many ways, and that got me here, writing in a journal to remember the past. Oh, and drinking. A lot.

  I had to think about it, but maybe you never really cared? Obviously you hadn’t cared that much because you hadn’t called since that night under the deck.

  And then it made me think, was it really you I was holding on to, or just what you took from me?

  “So let me guess, you fucked him?” I asked Stephanie.

  I waited for the retaliation of my words, but they didn’t come. Instead, she acted like I had just pointed a gun at her.

  Stephanie shook her head, eyes closed as if she could barely look at me. “No, I never did. It never got that far with us.”

  Even knowing you didn’t sleep with her, it still stung remembering that you had in fact kissed her right in front of me, and it felt just as real right then and ten times worse than it ever did that night.

  Stephanie and I never really got along and I couldn’t honestly tell you why that was; we just didn’t, and this was just another obstacle in our way.

  It didn’t bother me as much that I knew something had happened between you and Shanna because that was really before anything but a friendship had been established between us. Yeah, it wasn’t what I wanted, and I was upset that you were the reason she and Corey broke up, but it hurt more to hear it from Stephanie that something had went down between the two of you.

  I was drunk. I felt the heat rising from my chest to my ears, and it wasn’t all from the alcohol. Every time I talked with someone about you, I felt as if I knew a little less about the boy who I spent every summer worshiping.

  Who the fuck were you?

  I got chatty when I was drunk, you knew that, and to my dislike, I had no volume control. The more I tried the less I had. As did Sadie.

  What seemed like a perfectly normal and relaxed conversation to us was a screaming match to anyone sober. In my defense, there were no sober bystanders. So there was that going for me.

  “Jesus,” I moaned, peeling my coat off to cool myself down. “Did he mess around with our entire family? What about Mom, please tell me that didn’t happen?”

  I was expecting an answer. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Unfortunately, because Sadie was drunk, she answered me. “Sophie, he only messed around with Shanna and Stephanie.” She giggled. “And I never touched him. I knew you had a thing for him.” Tossing her straws from her fresh Malibu and Coke, she spoke again. “Shanna didn’t realize and Stephanie, well we all know she wants all guys to worship her, so she tried.” Sadie snorted, her drink at her lips. “And from what she told me, he said no.”

  I couldn’t say I wasn’t pissed because I was. I thought, and it seemed I wasn’t very educated here, that we had something special together. As it turned out, I was completely wrong and what hurt the worst was my sisters were the girls I tried so hard to differentiate myself from, only to have you share a part of yourself I thought was reserved for me. I never wanted to be like them, but because of you, I was just another girl lumped in the Who-Messed-Around-with-Bensen-Cole Club.

  I thought, because I had my suspicions based on conversations I’d heard over the years, I wouldn’t be as hurt to know the truth. But really, hearing it from my sisters, knowing that they knew that side of you, hurt more than I wanted to admit. It damn near killed me to know that once I finally experienced that with you, I lost you almost as quickly. No matter what we’d had all those years, my sisters were with you first, and knew what it was like to be with you in that way.

  I wanted to quit writing to you. I wanted to burn this fucking book and forget I ever met you.

  I didn’t. Obviously.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. All I thought about was you and my sisters and what their experience with you was like. Did you sweet talk them? Did you kiss them? Did you beg them like you begged me?

  Shanna came stumbling out of the bathroom around four that morning having most likely spent the night on the toilet from those questionable tacos she had. “Hey,” she mumbled, pale as a ghost, falling next to me, arms and legs fanned out.

  “Are you alive?” I teased, my humor returning slightly as I picked up one of her arms and then let it fall back to the bed.

  “Yah, just remind me never to eat fish tacos again.”

  “Did you have sex with Bensen, Shanna?” I couldn’t help it. I needed confirmation you were really that much of a douche bag, plus it was all that I could think about. This journal had been consuming me.

  “No,” she mumbled, face still planted in the pillow. “It never got that far.” I think she felt bad and then looked over at me. “It wasn’t anything special, Sophie. And it certainly didn’t mean anything. He wasn’t into it—that was for sure. And I felt horrible afterward because he asked me not to say anything to you. I realized then he felt something for you.”

  I grumbled a few words and then said, “It apparently didn’t mean shit to him.”

  “You meant something. He didn’t sleep with me or Stephanie because of you, and he had the opportunity a few times with her.”

  “How do you know that?” I pushed the pillow away from her. “Did he say that?”

  “He gave her a ride to the lake one night, or something, I don’t really know, but I guess she tried something with him and he declined.”

  Maybe you weren’t horrible?

  No, fuck that, you were.

  It was a good thing I hadn’t known what you were really like back then.

  Again, I almost stopped writing and burned this journal.

  June 2012

  Why was it that people who were dying constantly thought about living? They wondered what they could have and what they would have done differently.

  I believed people could be living, but really dying—depression, disease, just miserable for no reason.

  Then there were people dying but li
ving. They were living their last days to the fullest, experiencing and believing they had given it everything they had to give, knowing inside their heart they’d never truly die.

  That was who I wanted to be. I wanted to have the dying but living attitude.

  When I started this journal, I was living but dying. And that went on for years. Too many years if you asked me … and probably anyone around me.

  Through these pages covered in silly drawings and countless acts of love, hate, worship and regret was a love.

  I saw what I was to you. Now I was more aware of that than ever, but I felt something else entirely all those years, something you didn’t give me but showed me. I was real. I was Sophie Kaden. You taught me parts of this world no one had ever showed me before, including heartache.

  But I taught myself how to live with that.

  Older, not necessarily wiser, I did learn from what I wrote. I was one step closer to being me and seeing what I needed to see.

  All of what I’ve written is true, Bensen. These are my thoughts, memories, doubts, confessions, demands for answers, and my summers. I’ll never show you, never have an ounce of the braveness to be who I am like you do, but this is my story and it is real.

  Believe me when I say that writing it, I felt everything real was slipping away, and somehow I was living for you again, living for those summers, something I swore I would never do. And couldn’t any longer. I moved on. I graduated college with a journalism degree, a passion, a reason, and I am ready to put down the pen and move forward.

  I’m sure I could carry this heartache forever, but I am ready to let go. Those summers seemed insignificant at the time, but they were the beginning of something, and maybe, in some ways, the end.

  Maybe you’ll never read this. Maybe I’ll be brave enough to tell you someday, show you the story of our life, the story of my life, and how I went from sweet Sophie Kaden to just me. Sophie.

  When I think about those summers and the memories I have, I’m reminded that it is the story of my life, as it was, and it’s more than one story. My life has consisted of several stories, each one wrapped around another, tied to another, leading into another.