The Start of Us: Book 1 in the No Regrets series

by Blakely, Lauren

  Never ever ever.

  And she let me touch her. She wanted me to touch her. She told me she’d never let anyone touch her the way I did. Hell, if that wasn’t a crazy turn-on, I don’t know what is.

  Nothing could even compare to it.

  Still, the scar I’d landed a few months ago was the final sign I needed to change my ways, put everything behind me, including her. Which is why I’m here.

  But when I walk into my first meeting of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, I grab the doorway and hold on tight. The whole room is rocking, like a ship that’s hit choppy waters. I must be seeing things. There’s no way she can be here.

  She’s the last person I ever thought I’d see today. Hell, I didn’t think I’d see her ever again. I figured that was for the best. But here she is, in this meeting room with me, of all places.

  My heart trips over on itself, then it sputters out of control and collapses.

  The only girl I’ve ever been with who’s not older than me. The only girl who didn’t feel like a fix.

  And evidently Harley’s a lot like me.

  No wonder the clock was ticking last night. We both took one final hit before going on the wagon.

  I grab an empty chair and try not to think about her during the meeting. But it’s impossible. Because last night with her didn’t feel like the reason I’m here. I didn’t touch her in the way I’ve touched others. She felt different. She felt real.

  And I don’t know how the hell to navigate this. To see her like this. To run into her every week or so. Even this Joanne lady who’s running the show issues the reminder—some sort of rule we should follow. A guideline so we can stop being fucked-up from sex.

  “It’s recommended that you abstain from sexual, romantic, or any type of love relationships in your first year of recovery,” Joanne says, while her knitting needles click faster and faster.

  I remind myself that’s why I’m here, that’s what I want to do. To change. I’m committed to doing things right for the first time in a long time.

  But then, there’s Harley—though she calls herself Layla in the group.

  And the connection we had wasn’t just physical. It went deeper. It touched a part of me that’s been closed off for a long time.

  I grit my teeth, stare at the wall, try to figure out what the hell to do.

  Weirdly enough, the answer comes in the cheesiest poster ever on the wall—a kitten and a puppy hanging out.

  Buddies.

  Dear God, is that what I’m going to do?

  But maybe, just maybe, that’s the way through.

  A way that helps me live a new life, and a way that helps me learn how.

  Through friendship.

  Yes, that’s the answer.

  Right there, in front of me.

  Like a flashing neon sign.

  We could help each other as friends. Maybe that’s part of the starting over.

  Something I’ve never truly had before—a friendship with a girl. And now that I see her again, I don’t think I want to be without Harley in my life.

  At the end of the meeting, I walk up to her. I keep it light at first. “What are the chances?”

  She looks down and away, then back at me, and whispers, “Everything I said last night was true.”

  My heart thumps faster.

  “Good,” I say, and wish her words didn’t affect me so much. I know I need to stay away from her. But I don’t want to. I want something with her. Something I’ve never experienced. Perhaps it’s all we can be. But I’ll take it, if she’s willing. “But there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  Her eyes widen. She seems nervous, worried. “What is it?”

  “It’s not a bad thing,” I say quickly.

  “Okay,” she says, breathing a sigh of relief. “What’s going on, then?”

  I scratch my jaw, then inhale, looking for some new kind of courage to ask something I’ve never asked. “Do you . . .want to be friends?”

  Her smile is instant. Genuine. And it spreads across her whole face, reaching her eyes, which sparkle. “Are you making a friendship pact?”

  I laugh lightly. “Yeah I think I am.”

  “So we’d be friends who help each other with this whole thing?” She gestures to the room, as if to indicate the group.

  “Is that crazy?” I’m nervous now.

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” she says. But then she turns serious. “But we have to forget about last night. Put it behind us. Let it be the past.”

  I nod several times, completely agreeing. “It’s the past. Let’s start something new now. We’ll make a promise to help each other. We won’t let the other slip.”

  “Accountability,” she says, thoughtful.

  I hold out a fist for knocking. “To friendship?”

  She knocks back. “To the start of us. The start of us as friends.”

  It’s funny because we said we’d let fate intervene if we were meant to see each other again—I just don’t think either of us expected it to happen so soon.

  9

  Harley

  Six Months Later

  Over the next six months, Trey and I do just that.

  We become the best of friends.

  We see each other at meetings. We have coffee at Dr. Insomnia’s. We wander through the park. We go to bookstores. We grab tacos and bagels and sandwiches. Most of all, we talk.

  Wherever we go, we don’t stop talking.

  It’s like the night we met. When we talked first, when we connected first.

  We build off that nearly every day, sharing the good, the bad, the ugly as we traverse New York and SLAA and meetings, so many meetings.

  But so much support too.

  On the one hand, he’s the man who gave me one fantastic night.

  But on the other hand, he’s my new best friend.

  And that’s what matters.

  The here and now.

  The way we stick to the plan.

  Besides, I don’t need a lover.

  I need a friend, and he’s stepped all the way up, especially as I work my way through my debt.

  I am more than halfway finished with it, I remind myself as I walk to St. Patrick’s Cathedral one spring afternoon with Trey by my side as usual. “It’s what friends do,” he says. “Walk each other to meetings in churches,” he says wryly.

  “More like a punishment check-in,” I remark.

  “You’ll get there.”

  “I hope so.” But I won’t truly be on the other side till I slice off this albatross that owns me. The albatross in the church demanding her pound of flesh.

  My debt. I have been up late, up early, up all around. I have been living and breathing and choking out the words the woman who waits in the house of worship makes me put down on the page.

  All the tawdry tales. All the names—anonymously—from my list.

  She makes me dive into them. Makes me share the story behind the kiss, the man, the where, the when, and most of all—the why. Make them titillating but vile too, she said. Make sure you come across as someone who desperately needs redemption, absolution.

  Sometimes I wish I could punch a hole in the story of my life that I am forced to write for her—Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict.

  Trey takes my hand, squeezing it, and I shiver. I’m not cold. It’s May, and it’s warm, but any kind of contact from him makes me feel so good.

  Except I won’t go there again.

  He won’t either.

  Those are the rules of our friendship pact—no touching, no kissing, no nothing more whatsoever. We don’t discuss what happened the night before we met again.

  We don’t need to.

  But that also means I don’t tell him that with this friendship have come more feelings.

  I don’t tell him because I want him to make it through.

  “I don’t need another one of these,” he’ll say, then run his index finger absently across the scar on his right cheek. But I love his scar
. I want to trace it and kiss it and touch it. Scars are sexy—they say you’ve lived and that you’ve survived. That’s how I see him. But I don’t want to be the one who knocks him off the wagon. So this friendship is all we allow. No messing around. That’s what we promise to do in SLAA. One year. Alone. Without anything. Without kissing. Without dating. Without relationships.

  But abstinence, withdrawal, a break, whatever-you-call-it doesn’t stop my worn-down, wasted heart from wanting this boy by my side to be more than my friend.

  I squeeze back, taking the slightest bit of contact with him I can get. I’ve never held hands with anyone before. The men who ordered barely legal eighteen-year-old call girls weren’t the type who liked to hold hands. Shocking, right?

  Trey flashes me a grin as we let go of each other’s hand.

  “You can do this, Harley. It’ll be over soon.”

  I scoff. “Not soon enough.”

  When we’re one block away from the church, I say goodbye. “And this is where you must go, my sweet escort.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “I should have been an escort.”

  “You’d have been the best. Anyway, I don’t want her to see you. She’ll find some way to dig her claws into you.”

  He looks over his shoulder as if he’s checking out claw marks on his back. “Damn. I still have some other ones there. Scars everywhere.”

  I swat him. “I like your scars. Besides, I’m sure you’ve had many marks on your back.”

  “Covered in ’em. Everywhere.” His eyes light up. There’s a part of him too that misses his past. Longs for his drug.

  “Get out of here, boy toy.”

  This is how we operate. I know his past with women. He knows my past with men. And we can tease each other. No one else knows my past.

  “Call me later though, okay? Let’s hang out after I’m done with work?”

  “Of course,” I say, because we are addicted in a new way now. Addicted to contact with each other. We talk every day, text every day, see each other most days.

  He salutes me and walks off to catch a subway back to the West Village, where he’ll spend the evening studying for his final exams in between making permanent marks on the skin of customers.

  I walk one more block, grit my teeth, narrow my eyes, and tell myself I am iron, I am steel, I am unflappable.

  Then I enter another church.

  I never thought I’d spend so much time in them for reasons other than worship. I grip my field hockey stick in one hand. I don’t even play anymore. I simply like weapons, and I like flexing my fingers around it as I pass through the musty vestibule, ignoring the holy water and the candles, and take my customary spot in the fifth pew from the back, laying the stick across my bare legs.

  I’ve been summoned by my dark overlord, and I can’t say no.

  Such is the life of a former teenage call girl who’s being blackmailed.

  It’s a Tuesday afternoon, so there’s no service now. I glance around at the other churchgoers; a few scattered faithful are here. Or desperate, depending on how you slice it. As I scan their bent heads, I wonder if anyone hears their silent pleas. Maybe some are even asking for forgiveness for their sins, which is what I’d be doing if I were a religious girl.

  But I’m not.

  I hear the familiar sound of Miranda’s heels clicking across the stone floor.

  Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two…

  When I reach one in my head, she’s sliding into the pew, maintaining a two-foot distance between us, as if getting closer to me would infect her. I kind of wish I had pink eye, could touch my eye then zoom in on her with the pad of my index finger, just to watch her pull away and freak out.

  But then, she’d find some way for me to pay for that too.

  She says nothing as she stares at the sweeping altar ahead of us. Her golden-blonde hair is piled high on her head with a clip, her medium length bangs swept over her ear. She looks amazing, especially in her sharp gray skirt that fits well and the pretty indigo blouse she wears. She’s lost about twenty pounds in the last six months.

  I want to tell her it wasn’t the twenty pounds that did it. But she’d never believe me. I’m dog poop on her shoe, a gnat buzzing in her ear, the smoke alarm that won’t stop bleeping.

  I am nuisance made human, with killer legs and face to boot.

  I am her worst nightmare.

  Or I was until she realized she could turn the tables on me.

  She bows her head, clasps her hands together, and steeples her long fingers, pale-pink polished nails meeting at the points. I imagine what one would look like chipped.

  She’d shriek in displeasure, like a kettle on permanent boil. I stifle a smile.

  “You should pray, Harley Coleman,” she says crisply.

  “It’s not my thing.”

  “It should be.”

  “Thanks,” I say, but don’t give in to this request. To others yes, but not this one.

  Rule Number One when being blackmailed: maintain some lines.

  The more you bend, the more your extortionist tries to break you.

  She begins a low prayer, inaudible to anyone else, but crystal clear to me.

  It’s the Catholic prayer of purity. “Jesus, Lover of chastity, Mary, Mother most pure, and Joseph, chaste guardian of the Virgin,” she says, the icicles in her voice stabbing at the last word.

  I roll my eyes and bob my head as she continues on, substituting “begging you to plead with God for me” to “begging you to plead with God for Harley.” She finishes with “have mercy on her,” though she doesn’t mean a word of what she’s saying. There is no mercy for me from her. Well, unless I tell my mom everything. And telling her anything or everything is the one thing I will never do. Never as in never ever, ever.

  Rule Number Two: know your own lines.

  I’m stuck here. Protecting my mother. I have to protect her.

  “Ah,” she says with a hearty sigh and a hugely false smile. “I feel so much better, don’t you? Cleaner, right?”

  “Like I just took a bath in holy water.”

  She glares at me. “You jest in God’s house?”

  I nod. “I do. I do jest in God’s house. Frequently, in fact.”

  “I’ll take the pages now.” She holds out her long-fingered hand to me, her wedding band with its sapphire and diamonds reflecting across the stained-glass windows.

  I dig into a side pocket in my purse and hand her a thumb drive.

  She takes it, looking at it with disdain. It’s part of the routine: I give her a thumb drive every time, and every time she regards it like a diseased object. “Hmm. You couldn’t bother to print it out?”

  “I don’t have a printer.”

  She snorts, then slips it into her vast purple purse. “I want this book done soon. One more month at the most. You need to work on the next chapters. And make them tawdry. Make them sordid. Make them as lurid as they can be.” I inhale sharply. This woman is sick. “Then, give her the redemption she doesn’t deserve,” Miranda adds in her cool, calculating voice.

  She.

  I try to imagine the person in the memoirs isn’t me.

  I picture myself as someone else when I write it—I even hear a different voice in my head telling my story as I pen the chapters she makes me write. I have to hear it differently. I don’t want to be that person. And I want to believe it’s fiction, and not my life.

  I stand up, eager to play even a lowly two of clubs in the form of leaving first. “I’m late for my British lit class.”

  “You can expect a follow-up from me sometime this week.”

  “Sometime, like anytime?”

  She shrugs smugly. “Perhaps any day of the week.”

  Rule Number Three: know when to bluff.

  “If you don’t tell me the day, I’ll tell my mom everything.” She may hold most of the cards, but the thing about blackmail is everyone has something to lose. Including Miranda. I don’t want my mom to know about the boo
k she’s forcing me to write anonymously, but she doesn’t want my mom to know she’s making me write it either.

  She purses her lips. “I’ll email you.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  As I scoot out of the pew, she grabs my wrist, and her pink nails dig into my skin. I fantasize about brandishing my field hockey stick and whacking her upside the head. There’d be a brilliant gash across her forehead. Blood would ooze into her blue eyes and leave a sticky trail in her blonde hair.

  “Don’t. Sass. Me,” she says in a low hiss, determined to have the last word.

  I yank my wrist from her, clamp my lips together, and let her have what she wants. My silence.

  I leave, but I don’t go to British lit, because I don’t have class today. I have a dinner at my mom’s house. It’s date night with a new man, and so she needs me there. She always needs me. And I need her.

  10

  Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict

  It’s been my mom and me as long as I can remember. I don’t remember much about my dad, so this story won’t be about him. All my memories are of my mom, starting with how unhappy she was after my dad walked out when I was six.

  My mom was miserable for more than a year. She cried late at night, deep tears that could fill rivers and overrun their banks. She thought I was asleep, blissfully in dreamland and unaware of her pain. But I heard her phone calls with friends, her “What did I do wrong?” pleas, and her desperate, endless self-doubt. She missed the bastard, against her better judgment.

  She tried to hold it together during the day, but I’d still find her crying in her cereal or wandering aimlessly around the apartment, sniffling and missing and hurting.

  “Don’t cry, Mom,” I’d tell her, and she’d wrap me in a tight embrace.

  “I won’t, darling. I have you to make me happy.”

  After endless days and nights like that, she started to heal, to let go, and eventually the sobfests died down.

  Then she was ready to start over. To carve out her new happy.

  Dave was the first after my dad. I was in third grade, and Dave spent many nights at our house. He had a son one year older than me. Sometimes when Dave visited in the evenings, my mom told us to play together. She and Dave wanted to chat and have some time alone.