by Roxie Noir
He groans and hammers himself into me, and that’s all it takes. The white heat building inside me goes off like a nuclear bomb and the explosion rushes through me. I think I shout Gavin’s name and then a second later he erupts inside me and we come together, his face buried in my neck.
When I finish, I’m trembling a little. I feel wrung out, emptied, and I finally let Gavin’s hair go as he leans his face against the back of my head, breathing deeply like he’s trying to recover. I think I’m doing the same thing.
Finally, he looks at me again. He kisses me on the temple and then smiles, his face against mine. I slowly take my hand from the mirror, leaving a print behind, swallowing hard.
“I think we just had really loud sex in the rehab bathroom,” I whisper.
Gavin starts laughing, and after a second, I do too.
“No, we definitely had very loud sex in the rehab bathroom,” he says. “Good thing I’m no longer a patient.”
I take his hand in mine, looking at him in the mirror, and kiss it.
“I missed you,” I say.
“I love you,” he says, pulling my body against his. “And I did miss you but I think I just made that quite clear.”
Gavin holds me for another long moment. I turn my head and pull him down to me for a slightly off-kilter kiss, and then we finally detach. I pull my skirt down and find my underwear while his zips his pants again.
Then we kiss one more time, unlock the door, and go home.
50
Gavin
Two Weeks Later
The woman sitting in the chair to my right gives me another strange, you-seem-familiar look, and I try to ignore it. She’s been glancing over every thirty seconds the whole time I’ve been seated here, even though I’ve not said a single word to her.
On the outdoor stage, across the quad, a woman with gray hair reads out another name.
“Caleb Fulton,” she announces, and a young man in a graduation gown climbs the stairs, shakes her hand, takes a roll of paper from her, and descends down the other side.
Fulton. They’re getting close, and I sit up straighter, trying to get the best view of the stage I can.
I’m not supposed to be here. We’ve discussed the matter quite a bit for the past two weeks, and we specifically decided that it wasn’t the right time for Marisol’s parents to meet me, so I shouldn’t come to her graduation.
I understand the logic. Marisol didn’t think that two weeks after being released from rehab was the best time for her somewhat conservative parents to meet the tattooed ex-junkie still trying to win her back, and I couldn’t really argue with that.
So I’m only disobeying the letter of the law, not the spirit, though if she wanted to debate it with me I’m certain I’d lose.
“Laura Gateway,” the woman on stage calls.
I’ve scanned the crowd a few times, trying to figure out which are Marisol’s parents, but the place is packed full of people. I had to pay for a scalped ticket, something I definitely never thought I’d be doing. I didn’t even know that you could scalp tickets to a law school graduation until yesterday.
“Alice Gocert,” the woman says, and a faint wave of nervousness flutters through my stomach, though it’s not as if I’ve got to do anything. Everyone applauds Alice, who shakes hands, takes her diploma, and steps off the stage. I can see Marisol standing by the stairs, next in line, as she grins and waves to someone in the audience.
“Marisol Gomez,” the woman says.
Marisol steps onto the stage. She’s beaming, utterly fucking radiant as she shakes hands and accepts her diploma, giving another little wave to someone in the audience — her parents, I’m sure — before stepping down.
I want to stand up and shout Hey everybody, she’s amazing and she’s going to be a lawyer, but I don’t. I sit still and don’t make a fuss, watching Marisol walk back to her seat, and when the next person is called, I applaud politely once more.
I look up at the brick archway, trying to decipher the letters. The quad is a madhouse again, and rather than find Marisol and risk accidentally meeting her parents before I should, I’m just going to tell her where I am.
And also beg forgiveness for showing up, but I had to see her.
Gavin: I know we agreed, but I came to your graduation anyway because I couldn’t stand to miss it. I promise not to meet your parents, but I’m under the archway at Foyce Hall.
I send it and wait. A minute or two goes by, and I put my phone back in my pocket, leaning against the wall. The moment I do, of course it buzzes.
Marisol: Stay there.
I do as ordered. A few people give me second looks, but I’m wearing sunglasses, a hat, a long-sleeved shirt and slacks, so I’m pretty well incognito. Yes, I had to buy slacks for the occasion.
After a few more minutes I see her, walking down the breezeway, and I wave, hoping she’s not too angry.
She grins and waves back, so when we meet in the middle I sweep her up in a hug, spin her around, and give her a good, long kiss.
“What are you doing here?” she finally says, the words nearly bubbling over with giddiness.
“What you do mean what am I doing here?” I ask, grinning. “You think I was just passing through and happened upon your law school graduation?”
“We did agree,” she points out, but she’s obviously not angry.
“It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. And I couldn’t stand the thought of missing this.”
“How did you even get a ticket?”
“Marisol,” I say. “Do you seriously think I couldn’t get a ticket to a law school graduation?”
She rolls her eyes at me, but she’s still smiling.
“Sorry, I forgot you were a big shot who’s very important and super famous.”
I bought the ticket from Craigslist for $200, but I’m not tipping my hand about that now.
“Terribly famous and probably one of the only people to secretly turn up at a law school graduation in disguise,” I say, and kiss her again. “You should get back to your family.”
“Thanks for coming,” she says, looking up at me, her big brown eyes so sincere that it twists my heart.
“Even though we agreed I wouldn’t?”
She laughs softly.
“Yeah,” she says.
“I wasn’t about to miss it. I’m proud of you. I love you. Go before we get caught and I have to explain all this.”
One more kiss.
“I love you, too,” she says, and then she’s gone.
I start the fire when Marisol texts me that her parents are back home, and what am I up to?
I tell her to come over.
In front of the fireplace there’s a vase of two dozen roses on the coffee table and a bottle of sparkling apple cider in an ice bucket next to two champagne glasses. Part of me thinks I’m overdoing it, that she probably just wants to brush her teeth and fall into my bed, but it’s already there.
Since I got out of rehab, things have been... strangely normal. The first few days there were paparazzi outside my door all the time, but it seems as if they’ve finally given up. None of them had any idea what to make of the signed contract combined with the fact that Marisol and I clearly spent quite a bit of time together, so they mostly decided that the “fake girlfriend” story was itself a fake and gave up.
Things are largely as they were. She hasn’t technically taken me back, and I’m still on probation with her, but functionally it’s close to the same as it was.
And, of course, I wake up every morning thankful that I got a second chance I don’t deserve.
I’ve shown the band some of the songs I wrote, the ones I about Marisol, and we’ve started rehearsing them. I’m still doing all my replacement activities, running and working out, and I’ve started attending several Narcotics Anonymous meetings per week.
I’ve even gotten a sponsor: Evan, a very calm, patient surfer about twenty years my senior who’s been clean for ten years after twenty o
f heavy use. I like him because he’s never once tried to blow sunshine up my ass about the whole mess of addiction. The first time we spoke he told me that he still thinks about using every single day, and that the trick is to simply keep saying no.
Marisol’s met him. They get along. She even volunteered to come to a counseling session with me to meet my therapist and write down absolutely everything he said, including no big life changes for a year and take a multivitamin.
I now own multivitamins, though I mostly forget to take them.
There’s a knock on the door. I tried to give Marisol a key but she wouldn’t take it, saying that she didn’t want to rush anything. That she wanted to give me time to adjust, so now I’ve got a goal: prove myself until Marisol will take a house key.
“There’s Marisol Gomez, J.D.,” I say when I open the door. “How’s it feel to be an attorney?”
She comes in laughing and gives me a kiss.
“I haven’t passed the bar exam yet,” she says. “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.”
I know the bar exam’s quite difficult, but there’s a zero percent chance she doesn’t pass.
“Think you can celebrate for one day before you begin worrying about that?” I ask, taking her hand.
“Maybe one,” she says.
I lead her over to the couch and table in front of the fire, pour her cider, and sit with my arm around her as she snuggles into me.
“Thanks,” she says, her head against my shoulder. “Today was good, but it was exhausting.”
“Sounds like a proper finish to law school.”
“Yeah, they make you run one final gauntlet before you get that piece of paper,” she says, snuggling into me a little more. “Thank you.”
She pauses, and we both look into the fire for a moment.
“And thanks for coming today,” she goes on. “I’m glad you did.”
I kiss the top of her head.
“I have got one more surprise,” I admit.
Marisol raises one eyebrow.
“It’s actually G-rated,” I say, and she laughs.
I pull a long, thin jewelry box out and give it to her.
Her eyes flick to me a little nervously, and she flips the top open.
Inside is the piece of paper I’ve folded so that only MARBRI BAR REVIEW COURSE is showing. The moment she sees it, Marisol starts laughing.
I bought her an eight-week, intensive study course for the bar exam.
“Okay, you got me,” she says. “It’s perfect. Thank you.”
“I’ve never seen you wear a necklace but I know exactly how you feel about the bar,” I say, leaning in. “And you’ll smash it.”
She kisses me, still laughing.
“Do you mean crush it?”
“Apparently.”
We kiss again. She stops laughing, and soon I’ve got her legs on my lap and my hand up her skirt. When we finish we stay on the couch, naked, tangled together, debating whether apples or pears are the superior fruit.
She wins the debate, obviously, and everything is perfect.
Epilogue
Marisol
Six Months Later
“Here’s one of me stumbling drunkenly out of a nightclub at two o’clock in the morning,” Gavin says.
I scoot over in the bed and hook my chin over his shoulder, looking at his phone.
“Looks a whole lot like the door of your recording studio,” I say. “The similarity’s remarkable, really. You’d think that a nightclub would have one or two other people around, at least.”
“Sources close to me are claiming that I’m ‘out of control’ and careening toward certain ruin with the stress of a recording another album,” he goes on, flicking his thumb to scroll along. “Someone saw me drink nearly a whole bottle of tequila last night and then disappear into the men’s with a ‘mystery blond.’”
“You’ve gotta teach me how you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Be in two places at once. Or is this a Mrs. Doubtfire kind of thing?”
Gavin laughs.
“You mean, every time I left the room, was I secretly running to some nightclub, raising hell, and then coming back before the three of you noticed I was gone?”
“You were gone for a while that one time.”
“I was playing with another woman’s pussy.”
“That would be a good headline. ‘Frontman’s girlfriend catches him teasing bandmate’s pussy,’” I say, laughing.
“I got that pussy quite excited,” Gavin says. “And I offered it drugs.”
We were at Darcy’s apartment last night, where we had dinner with her and Trent and then hung out until about one in the morning, at which point I nearly fell asleep on her floor cushions.
A month or two ago, she took in a stray cat with two differently colored eyes. His name is Bowie, and his interests include laser pointers, catnip, and scratching people who try to pet his belly.
“I’m still confused that they’re not together,” I say.
“People can be friends,” Gavin points out.
“He knows where everything is in her kitchen better than she does,” I counter.
“They’re close friends, and she’d be perfectly happy to eat peanut butter sandwiches for every meal, so someone’s got to know where things are.”
“She reminded him about his sister’s birthday.”
“I think Trent’s seeing someone,” Gavin says, still scrolling through his phone. “He mentioned he had a date, a week or two ago.”
I don’t say anything, but I’m one hundred percent confident that it’s not serious between him and anyone else. It’s just not.
Gavin stops on a photo of the two of us walking out of a grocery store. It’s not a flattering picture, and I make a face.
“We’re on the rocks after our row at the market,” he says, scanning the article. “Did you know?”
“Chunky peanut butter is an abomination and I’ll never apologize for speaking my mind.”
“But how do you really feel?”
I sigh and reach around him, scrolling the text up on his phone. It’s the usual nonsense — someone took a picture of the two of us where we look annoyed, so they concocted a story about how Gavin’s alleged partying is going to break us up.
Every word of it’s completely untrue, but it still makes me angry. For the past six months Gavin’s been working his ass off at staying clean. He’s stuck to his recovery plan religiously.
About two months after he got back from rehab, he turned down sex with me because he didn’t want to be late to meet his sponsor. It’s that serious.
When he got back, I told him I wanted to be official again.
For a while he wasn’t in the press at all, but with the new album well underway Valerie’s been sending press releases again, and it’s reminded the gossip news that he exists.
“Oh, and I’m leaving you for an older man I was seen embracing, as I’m apparently bisexual now,” he goes on, looking at a picture of him giving his sponsor a hug at a restaurant.
“Evan’s a catch,” I say. “Was that last week?”
“We’d just had a long talk about Liam,” Gavin says.
I run my fingers up his arm and take his hand in mine, my cheek still against his shoulder.
“And?”
“And Evan had a brother,” Gavin says, his voice getting a little far away. “Similar situation, actually. He got better and his brother didn’t. His brother died a few years ago.”
I kiss his shoulder, intensely glad for Evan. There are some things about Gavin I know I’ll never be able to understand or really help with, and this is one of them.
“Did he have any advice?”
He shifts his fingers in mine and puts his phone on the bedside table, thinking.
“He said there wasn’t much advice to give, other than to know that the guilt never goes away but as time goes on I’ll get used to it,” he says. “And don’t do drugs. He did say that
as well.”
“I agree with both of those things.”
Gavin takes his hand out of mine and rolls me over in bed until I’m lying on my back and he’s on his side, one hand stroking my hip. We’re both naked because we haven’t gotten out of bed yet on this lazy Sunday.
“Speaking of drugs, I completely missed Thursday,” he says.
I wrack my brain for a moment, trying to remember what Thursday was. Gavin just smiles, waiting for me to figure it out.
“Was it six months?” I finally say.
“It was.”
I reach up and stroke his hair, feeling awful that I forgot. Six months clean is a big deal. It’s further than he got before, and here I didn’t even notice.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, but Gavin just smiles.
“I don’t actually mind,” he says. “It feels rather good that sobriety is normal instead of cause for celebration.”
“Yeah, but I wanted to celebrate,” I say. “This stuff matters to me. I like having concrete, countable proof that...”
I trail off, because I’m never exactly sure what to say here.
“Proof that I mean it this time?” he asks, softly.
“Proof that you won’t break my heart,” I answer.
“I do, and I won’t,” he says. “Marisol, I promise. And I’m going to prove it.”
I believe him. Deep down, in my bones, I believe him.
“I know,” I whisper.
He leans in and kisses me softly.
“Does this mean you’ll say yes this time?” he asks.
My stomach flips, and I swallow.
“Gavin, you know it’s not—”
“I know,” he says, laughing. “No big life changes for a year, and you do love following guidelines.”
“They’re there for a reason, you know,” I tease. “I’m helping.”
“By turning down my marriage proposals?”
“You’re making me sound like a monster,” I laugh. “I didn’t say no, I said not yet.”
“So eventually I’ll get you to yes,” he says, his eyes dancing. “Through a campaign of maintained sobriety and repeated proposals.”
