“You know, I miss being friends. I’m sorry about the masquerade ball. I should’ve told you the truth. I was an asshole for not wanting to take her. That’s why I’m not rushing the frat. I don’t want to be that guy.”
I nod.
The moment passes. I take a step back. The magnetic force pulling us close together, into a kiss, vanishes.
“Okay, I’ll see you at home,” I say and turn to walk to the ticket counter.
Tristan grabs my hand. He pulls me close to him.
His eyes search mine.
He pushes my hair out of my face and kisses me.
Tristan presses his lips onto mine. Softly at first. As if he’s asking permission. It takes me a moment to realize what’s going on. When I do, I kiss him back.
The fire between us gets stronger.
He runs his tongue across mine.
I bury my hands in his hair.
He wraps his arms around my waist. He searches for the place where my shirt ends and then grabs my back with his hand. The touch of his skin on mine exhilarating. Shivers run down my whole body. I feel like I’ve had the wind knocked out of me. I kiss him harder and he breathes air into my lungs.
“Please don’t take the train,” he whispers. “Come home with me.”
We kiss for a few more moments. It isn’t awkward like most first kisses. Tristan knows just how to kiss me. He knows that I love feeling his breath on my neck. He knows that I love when he nibbles at my earlobes. He knows that I love it when he buries his hands in my hair and pulls on it lightly. And he knows a lot more things than this. A lot more than what we can do in a public train station, even if it is deserted.
We hold hands and kiss all the way back to the car. I don’t remember agreeing to not take the train, but that hardly matters. He opens the car door for me and continues to kiss me as I get into the seat. I watch him run around the car and hop in the driver’s side.
“I forgot how good you smell,” he says, inhaling the air.
I laugh. He hasn’t spoken to me like this in a long time. I look at him. It’s as if he’s enchanted.
“It’s probably just my shampoo.” I shrug and touch my hair instinctively.
Tristan looks me over up and down, as if he’s performing some sort of complicated analysis in his head. Then he grabs my head and pulls me toward his nose. Gently.
“Hey!” I pull away, but not before he inhales me.
“Your hair smells nice; raspberry, right?”
I nod.
“But no, that’s not it.” Tristan shakes his head.
“There’s this powerful smell of vanilla and something else,” he adds.
Finally, I give in. I smile and admit that it’s my perfume. Victoria Secret’s Noir Tease.
“Noir Tease? Really? Alice Summer, oh my!” he jokes.
I point to the source of the scent. My wrists. He picks up my hands with his and brings them to his mouth. Carefully, he kisses one wrist and then the other.
“And when did you start wearing perfume?” he asks.
“About a month ago.” I shrug. “It smelled nice. Plus, it comes with this little pump. I hate to admit it, but I feel like a real woman using the little pump to put on perfume.”
“I love it,” he says.
He kisses me on the mouth again, parting my lips with his tongue. At first, the kiss is reserved. Chaste. Nice. But it quickly starts morphing into something else. A fire starts to build somewhere deep within me. I want to rip off his clothes and press his body against mine. Tristan’s breathing quickens. When my hand brushes against his leg, I can tell that he’s getting really excited.
His hands run down my shirt and then go underneath. Flesh to flesh. My breaths speed up along with my heartbeat. With one quick motion, he unfastens my bra and my breasts are freed. His hand brushes along my belly button and then goes up. Higher and higher.
“Wait,” I whisper. He doesn’t stop immediately.
“Wait, wait,” I say louder and pull away.
“What’s wrong?” he asked with a deeply disappointed look on his face.
“Nothing.” I shake my head. “Not a thing. Except that I don’t want to do it here. We’re not in high school anymore. We have our own place.”
I wait for him to get mad, but he just shrugs. Nods.
“Are you sure? How about for old times’ sake?” he asks.
I shake my head no, trying to fit the clasps of my bra back together.
In high school, we used to do it all the time in cars. His car. My car. Our friends’ cars. There were many discreet places where teenagers had sex late at night, in cars. Our high school’s parking lot. Other high schools’ parking lots. Elementary and middle school parking lots. The library parking lot. Empty office buildings’ parking lot.
We’ve spent many hours in empty parking lots. Sometimes with friends. Drinking if one of us was able to score some beer or wine. Sometimes with our significant others.
“Hey do you remember that library parking lot near my house?” Tristan asks.
“Which time?” I ask.
We spent many long evenings there. Unlike the office and the school parking lots, the library was almost never patrolled. It was Tristan’s and mine little secret, too. We didn’t dare share it with any of our friends out of fear that word would get out and our private spot would become public knowledge.
“Hey, remember what happened to Rachel Prince?” he asks.
“How could I forget?” I laugh. “Whenever I think about having sex in a car, I think about her.”
“Really?” he scrunches up his face in disgust. “And how often do you think about having sex in cars?”
“Okay, that came out wrong.” I smile. “You know what I mean.”
Rachel Prince was in our grade and we were all close friends in 11th grade. A cop caught her and her boyfriend at the time having sex in an empty office park. But instead of just letting them go with a warning or giving them a citation, he made them get out of the car and stand next to it completely naked while he looked through their identification. When it was 20 degrees outside!
“At least they were still wearing their shoes,” Tristan jokes.
Rachel’s incident went around school like a scary story intended only for teenagers. Almost everyone, it seemed, stopped messing around for a couple of weeks. Long enough for the shock to wear off and the hormones to kick in, I guess.
“I can’t believe that he actually took them to the station and made them wait there for their parents to pick them up. What an asshole.” Tristan shakes his head.
“At least they got to put their clothes back on,” I say.
“I didn’t give it much thought at the time. But I think what that cop did was probably illegal. I mean, he can’t just make a 16-year-old girl stand naked outside and look at her without breaking some sort of law. Right?”
I have no idea. It does sound like it should be illegal.
“Don’t you think we were lucky?” I ask. “That nothing like that ever happened to us?”
He nods. “Really lucky. We didn’t even have any close calls!”
“Oh my God.” Tristan takes his eyes off the road and turns to me.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh my God, I want to have you right now, Alice. It’s been way too long.”
“Watch the road!” I say turning his face back away from me.
“Are you sure we can’t pull over somewhere? It’ll be fun,” he pleads.
I want him too. I want to kiss again. I want to bury my hands in his hair. Kiss his belly button. And more. But I stay firm.
“No.” I shake my head. “It’s cold. We have two great beds to choose from. And I want to take a shower. Wash Simon and this whole night off me.”
Then I give it another thought. That’s not right. The night has actually ended way better than I’d expected.
“Well, not the whole night,” I add.
“Fine.” He shrugs. “You’re right. It’ll be more special
at home.”
44
We are still more than an hour and a half away from home. I try to quench the anticipation building in the pit of my stomach with something fun to think about it. I ask him about his family. I haven’t heard anything about them for a long time. As we start to talk and laugh, I discover that there’s so much that we hadn’t talked about. And it all suddenly floods in.
For instance, Tristan thinks that his little brother, Cayden, is gay. Gay and doesn’t know it.
“How can he not know it?” I ask. “He’s 15! Maybe he’s just not gay.”
“Well, in that case, he’s in denial or something. I’m pretty certain that he is.”
“Maybe he’s just afraid to come out?” I ask.
“Why would he be? He knows that my parents won’t care. They’ll probably be happy!” he says.
“It takes a while to be comfortable in your own skin,” I say. “You have to be patient. I mean, I still can’t come out to most people about being a writer.”
But we don’t just talk about serious things. We also talk about funny, heartfelt things. Like last Christmas.
“Do you remember when you chased me around the house for my candy cane?” I ask.
“No!” he says imperatively. “It wasn’t yours. You got it as a gift, yes, but you hate candy canes! And by the way, who the hell hates candy canes anyway? They’re peppermint and sugar! I know for a fact that you love peppermint tea.”
“That’s not at all the same thing,” I shake my head, smiling. “What’s important is that that was my candy cane. And you just expected me to give it over!”
“Because you weren’t going to eat it!”
“You didn’t know that.”
“Oh yes, I did.” He nods furiously. “I found that stash of candy canes in your closet from the year before. You didn’t eat one! You just kept them all away from people who actually like them. You greedy, greedy girl!”
We crack up laughing. I laugh so hard, my eyes tear up. When he catches his breath, Tristan turns to me.
“I’ve missed you, Alice,” he says as we pull up to our building. He’s planning on returning the rental car tomorrow. After parking, we head straight up to our dorm.
“I’ve missed you, too,” I say in the elevator.
A flood of emotions starts to sweep through my body the higher we climb. If I don’t do something, tears will flow out of my eyes and I won’t be able to stop them. I lean up to Tristan and kiss him.
In the middle of that passionate and explosive kiss, as he tears at my clothes and messes up my hair, I suddenly realize that I don’t need an apology from him over the break up. And I don’t want to think for a second about what this all means. I don’t even want to know if I want him back. I just want to be with him.
We kiss furiously until the elevator beeps and the doors open. We stumble out, almost forgetting our bags inside. At the last minute, Tristan shoves his hand in between the doors to keep it from leaving. Reluctantly, the elevator opens.
When we get to our dorm, I head straight to the bathroom.
“Okay, I’m going to hop in the shower and I’ll meet you in your room?” I say.
“Unless you want me to join you?” he winks.
I roll my eyes and shake my head.
When I get out of the shower, I reapply my makeup just a bit. I brush my hair, flip it over to give it some life, and leave it damp. I look in the mirror. Is this really happening?
“Just breathe,” I say to myself. Suddenly, I wish that I had one of those tattoos on my wrist that says ‘just breathe.’ I’ve made fun of those on many occasions. I mean, when do you really forget to breathe? But at this point, I could use one. A visual reminder to relax. Take a break. Breathe in and out.
My heart beats so hard, it feels like it’s going to jump out of my chest. I knock on his door. No one answers. I knock harder. When he doesn’t answer again, I push it open.
Tristan’s sitting on his bed with his laptop. He barely looks up. He has a despondent look on his face. When he looks up at me, he doesn’t look at me so much as through me. Somewhere far away.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
He shakes his head. But just a little bit. It looks so much like a nod, but different. I wait for him to speak. A minute passes. It feels like a century.
“I...I…lost the money,” he finally says. His voice shakes.
“What money?”
“The money I invested with Dylan’s guy,” he says slowly. There’s a difficulty in each word, it’s as if to say it, he has to move a car singlehandedly from one side of the street to another.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” I wrap my arms around him. He doesn’t push me away. Just continues to sit there. Lost in a world that I can’t reach.
“I lost $15,000,” he whispers, burying his head in his hands. “How could I be so stupid?”
“I’m so so sorry.” I embrace him.
I don’t know what to do to make him feel better. I wish there was something, but I feel utterly helpless. Just be here for him, I say to myself. Just sit here and listen.
“It was going so well. My $5,000 investment became $10,000. I was going to take it out, but then I didn’t. I put it all back in, Alice,” he says.
Whilst at first, words didn’t come at all, now they’re practically tumbling out of him. “Why did I do that?” he asks. “I’m so stupid.”
“No, you’re not,” I whisper.
“I made another $5,000 and then…then it all disappeared.”
“How?” I ask.
He takes a deep breath. Lets it out and then says, “The stock plummeted after the CFO of the pharmaceutical company was arrested for insider trading.”
We sit in silence for a long time. I don’t know what to say and Tristan has nothing else to say. Eventually, and with a great deal of effort, I turn off the light and take the laptop from his lap. I pull the covers over him and give him a kiss on the cheek.
“Where are you going?” he whispers.
“I thought I’d give you some time to rest,” I say.
“Can you stay? Please?”
I climb into bed with him. Tristan wraps his arms around me. He presses himself against me. We spoon for some time. Minutes tick away. Sometime later, I turn to face him. I think that he’s asleep, but he’s wide awake. Still staring out in the distance.
“You should get some sleep,” I say. “Things will be better in the morning.”
Tristan looks at me. He disentangles his hand from the covers and brushes his index finger along my bottom lip. His fingertip feels soft like silk. Slowly, he pulls himself closer to me. I feel his breath on my lips. Our lips touch.
His lips are effervescent. He parts my lips with his tongue. It feels familiar and strange at the same time. As we kiss, our bodies morph into one. I can no longer tell where he begins and I end.
Suddenly, his kisses become more forceful. He presses his whole body into mine. Every last inch of it is hard and strong. He climbs on top of me and kisses me harder. So hard that it borders on painful. I try to keep up. I push back into him. He rises a little above me. I’m surprised at my own strength.
We make out well into the night. It doesn’t go further than that. We don’t rip our clothes off. We simply make out. Like teenagers. Because, mainly, we still are. I don’t want to lie. It’s not like thoughts of pulling off his clothes don’t strike me. But I don’t initiate. And he doesn’t either. At this moment, this is enough. This is more than enough. Sometime later, after we’re both worn out, we fall asleep in each other’s arms.
45
It’s 3:37 am when I sneak out of bed to get something to drink. As I pour myself a cup of milk, Dylan comes in and flips on the lights. He startles me. I shield them as best as I can, but the bright lights still sting my eyes.
“Hey, I’m so sorry. Didn’t know you were in here,” he says.
Dylan’s dressed in a suit. The one he wears exclusively to clubs.
“Shit, Alice, I�
��m not having a good day,” Dylan says.
“Neither is Tristan,” I say.
He looks away. Pours himself a cup of water. “Oh he heard? I was going to tell him in the morning.”
“He lost 15 thousand dollars, Dylan,” I say, crossing my arms.
“Oh shit, I didn’t know it was that much. I thought he’d only invested five.”
“No, he invested his gains back into it.”
“Ah, well, that’s what happens.” Dylan shrugs.
“Is that all you’re going to say?” I ask. “That’s all his savings. He lost everything.”
I’m so angry, I want to punch him.
“Hey, if it’s any consolation, I lost twenty grand. Just about.” He shrugs.
“Yeah, but he doesn’t have a rich dad to bail him out,” I say. “You can still afford to go party all night. He can’t.”
Dylan shrugs. He doesn’t look like he cares much.
“How could you let this happen?” I try again.
I have to make him understand. I know I shouldn’t be doing this at three in the morning, after I didn’t get much sleep and he has been out all night. But I can’t stop myself.
“Hey, listen, it was an investment. He knew what he was getting into.”
“But it was your guy!”
“So what? That guy made him $10,000! Would you be here yelling at me if he had pulled out?”
“No, but he didn’t, did he? He lost all his money!”
“I don’t want to hear this shit, Alice,” Dylan says. “I lost a lot of money, too. Tristan’s a big boy.”
“He’s right,” Tristan says, coming out of his room. “He’s right, Alice. I knew about the risks.”
“But don’t you think Dylan should’ve warned you—“
“No,” Tristan cuts me off. “It’s fine, really. It’s not Dylan’s fault.”
“It just sucks,” I say. “You lost so much money. I just wish I could help.”
“I know, but you can’t. No one can. It’s fine,” he says.
“No, it’s not.” I shake my head and open the door to my room.
Auctioned to Him_Damage Page 121
