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

by Blakely, Lauren

  Then he stopped sketching, sat next to me, and swiped a tear from my cheek that I barely even realized was there. I don’t think I was even aware of how these tales Miranda demanded would be an excavation and would unearth not only memories of all those men—my mom’s and mine—but also the way I felt. I’d never shed those tears when I was younger. Never when any of it was happening. Only when I revisited them, with my gut twisting, my heart splintering, all with Trey by my side.

  He knows everything about me.

  He’s the only person I’ve ever let in.

  He learned my wishes and hopes the night I met him, and he learned my secrets shortly after the day I ran into him at SLAA.

  So, really, I am an open book to him, and he to me. Add that to all the reasons we can’t ever be, though, because no one wants to be with someone they know the very worst things about. I glance up from the portfolio and watch him. He looks so sexy in his well-worn jeans and T-shirt that shows off his strong arms, those tattoos snaking down his carved muscles. Black ink, tribal patterns, lines and shapes skate over his skin, everything in threes. His shoulder is marked with three suns, his chest with a trio of silhouetted birds. Symbols of the people he never knew, he told me.

  That’s all he says about them. He won’t tell me more.

  He locks the drawers where he keeps his equipment, straightens up the portfolios that grace the wooden tables in the entryway, and then closes up.

  I hand him a brownie, and he takes a bite.

  “It makes me crazy that your mom is such an awesome baker,” he says.

  “I know. You wish she were all bad.”

  “Sometimes,” he says, and I tuck the Tupperware container back in my purse as he finishes the brownie.

  “What did you ink tonight?” I ask as we leave the shop and my ears are assaulted with the screeches of cabs and cars, my nostrils hit with a blast of exhaust from a nearby bus turning onto Christopher Street.

  “Some dude came in wanting two arrows on his bicep.”

  “Did it mean something?”

  Trey nods. “He’s in recovery. He used to drink himself stupid. Said it means It’s the pain of the arrow coming out, not the arrow going in.”

  “I haven’t heard that one. Must not be a regular Joanne mantra.”

  “Yeah, me neither. But do you think it’s true?”

  I shrug as we pass a sleek bar called the Pink Zebra. It’s a magnet for cougars. My chest seizes up, and I silently hope that a whole pack of them won’t spill out as we walk by. Trey’s temptation—sexy olderwomen. But I have no such luck. The door opens, and two gorgeous women emerge. One is wearing Jimmy Choos, the other Louboutins, and both are decked out in painted-on jeans and slinky tops. I want to cover his eyes so he can’t see them, but I’m too late. He’s drawn to them, a moth to the flame. But they turn the other way, and we keep walking. I ignore the look of hunger I see in his beautiful green eyes as he shakes his head, as if he can shake them off.

  “I guess…” he says in a low voice, then trails off. Maybe his mind is wandering back to the women. Or maybe that’s all there is to say, because we both know what’s unsaid. Some days the arrow coming out hurts like hell. Some days you miss your drug like you can’t even believe. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise—withdrawal is a bitch on wheels. It feels like someone is ripping your fingernails out with pliers.

  “How was dinner tonight? Did your mom try to set you up?”

  “It was the usual. The way it always is.”

  “Did it make you miss Cam?”

  We stop at the light on Seventh Avenue, waiting to cross.

  Cam.

  Trey’s question pierces me because no one else would ever ask it, no one else could. I can’t seem to tell my mom the truth, or my roommate Kristen, or even Joanne at SLAA. But Trey, the only guy who’s ever made me feel any sort of reckless abandon, any sort of true desire? Apparently I can open up to him about taking money for not-quite-sex.

  “Do I miss Cam?” I muse out loud as if I’m turning over the words, considering them from every angle.

  With a vengeance.

  With the blaze of a thousand suns.

  With every piece of twisted DNA in my body.

  Cam is the arrow. I miss being his. Being in control. Being powerful. I want the arrow back in.

  Being Cam’s was the only thing that ever made me feel like my life wasn’t orchestrated by a master puppeteer.

  “Maybe a little,” I admit.

  “Did you call him?”

  I shake my head. Not calling Cam is a daily battle, but it’s one that makes me hate myself. Because how can I want to hold hands with Trey and still miss Cam like a phantom limb? Miranda is right. I don’t deserve redemption.

  “Have you ever gone skydiving?”

  I stop at Trey’s non sequitur as an ambulance zooms down the street, its horn blaring. “What kind of segue is that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we just need a thrill in our lives. Don’t you miss the high?”

  “Every day,” I admit as we cross the street.

  Miranda forced me to go to SLAA, but I knew I belonged there because I was drugged on love, on almost-sex, on power. Knowing didn’t stop me from wanting my drug though. I am dependent. I still am.

  Trey stops at the subway entrance.

  “Maybe we just need to find the daring in the every day,” he says, then perches on the railing that leads down into the subway station. He’s seated on the edge, holding on with his hands. He leans back so far that his body is nearly parallel to the sidewalk.

  “Trey!”

  He lets himself fall further, so his head is upside down. It’s New York, so most people ignore him, but a few on the steps below point as they keep clicking down the stairs. Trey hooks his feet around the bottom of the railing, and then lets go with his hands. His head, arms, and chest drop down.

  Rationally, logically, I know he’s not going to fall. But all I can picture is his gorgeous face smashed to bits on the concrete below.

  “If you’re worried, just grab me,” he says, as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. I reach for his brown leather belt and jerk it hard, yanking him upright. His face is red and near mine now, and the air is crackling like an electrical storm. My heart is racing and my adrenaline is surging, and I’m no longer thinking about Cam. I’m thinking about this guy so close to me. His mischievous grin. His sparkling eyes. How they know me, see through me. How I let him in that first night, and we talked about everything—music, happiness, the future, even my grandparents who I never see and who I miss terribly some days. I’m remembering, too, the way I felt when he first kissed me, then touched me. Then his mouth on my body, all over me. Soft and slow and caressing.

  Like something I wanted.

  Fuck. I can’t go there. I haven’t let myself think about our one night together in ages.

  “You know I won’t fall.”

  I shake my head. “You know that scares me,” I say. I don’t let go of his belt. He places a hand on my hand. Skin on skin. His flesh on mine. I try not to shiver. But it’s useless. I do anyway, as my stomach executes a huge somersault.

  “I’m like a bad horror film director. I can’t resist scaring you, because you’re so damn cute when you get scared.”

  He jumps down off the railing and engulfs me in a hug, wrapping his strong arms around me, pulling my face to his neck. God, he smells good. All sweat and work and some woodsy scent that’s just so him.

  “Sorry about Miranda and your mom and all those stupid guys,” he says softly in my ear, just for me, just to me. “I don’t want you to be with any of them. I don’t want you with anyone.”

  I dig my fingernails into my palms to stop from pressing my body into him, from whispering kisses across his neck. Because this Trey, this soft, sweet, caring Trey, is the only guy I’ve ever let touch me without an agenda, the only man I wanted to kiss, the only man who’s ever made me come. I didn’t fake it with him. I never knew not faking it could fee
l so good. That giving in, letting go, could be scary and intoxicating all on its own.

  Now, with him so close, arms looped around me, his smell in my nose and his strong body pinned against mine, I don’t know what happened to withdrawal, because nothing feels painful right now. I only feel potential. Possibility. The slim hope of starting over, like a stone skipping across the water, whisking up a few drops.

  Maybe this is the new high. He skims one hand once across my back, so lightly it could be a friendly touch, but even through my flimsy shirt, my insides flutter like hummingbirds, and my mind is back on our night.

  His hands on my naked skin.

  The unfamiliar ache in my body that craved more of his touch, the way he seemed to memorize me with his palms and his fingertips as if he needed to trace every inch, to imprint the feel of me in his memory. Then his lips everywhere, traversing my arms, neck, breasts, belly, legs, ankles, and back up to my calves and knees and thighs, and in between. His lips and his tongue made me want to die and live and soar. I’d never let go like that, never moved like I did with him, with abandon, with desire, with the sharp, sweet rush of wanting someone to touch me for the first time.

  I let go with him. I gave my body to him. In a way so many of them would have paid top dollar for. But I’d never wanted anyone before to see me like that. To watch me, feel me, hear me come.

  Maybe he’s the arrow.

  Maybe he’s the thing I’m not withdrawing from.

  The one person who knows all my stories, the one person I’ve become best friends with in recovery is the only one who knows exactly how I feel, what I think, what I want, what I hate, what I need.

  Who I am.

  I don’t know how to be known like this. In this naked kind of way. Like I’ve taken everything off and am waiting for judgment.

  Or touch.

  Maybe they’re one and the same.

  I sigh once, then manage to pull away from his grasp and look at him, giving him a quick nod. “Thank you,” I whisper.

  He tilts his head to the side, his hair falling past his ear. His hair, light brown with hints of copper, is so thick and full that he could be a shampoo model, only he doesn’t have that overly coiffed, perfectly combed look. It’s deliberately undone, purposefully tousled, and all I want is to run my fingers through it, cling to it, and never let go. Hold his cheeks in my palms and kiss him deeply and without regret.

  Hear him groan.

  Let him do the same to me.

  I want to look in his eyes and see myself reflected back. Because his eyes, the color of a forest, of a green beer bottle, of lush grass after it rains, are the reflection of every woman falling in love with him, because they all do. Then there’s his face—strong cheekbones, stubbled jawline, and the scar that tells me he’s like me.

  He went too far. He hurt others. He was hurt.

  But that hurt is part of the connective tissue of our strange friendship that blurs all sorts of lines, that spills over into the feeling of more, even if we don’t truly venture there. Sometimes he looks at me like he wants to go there again, and he can probably tell that I still want him that way too.

  But if I acted again on these desires, then he’d be Twenty-Five. And if he’s Twenty-Five, then I’m just the same. And I have to be different. So only when I stop wanting him, stop feeling for him, stop thinking about him, can I have him. But even then he’d never have me, so it’s a moot point. Besides, what do I know about feelings? Nothing. They make zero sense to me. I don’t know if they ever will.

  15

  Trey

  Her hands on my belt drive me crazy. But I won’t be the one to break her. She is trying so hard to be good, and I can’t be the one to lead her down this path. Even though I think of her all the time, and the memory of our night has fed my imagination countless times.

  The trouble is I know she’s dying to see Cam again. And I know I’m fighting all these stupid chains that my past keeps clamping on me.

  The other day I stopped by my parents’ building to have dinner with them, and it was like walking into the lion’s den. Everything about that place reeked of my past, of all the afternoons I’d spent in those corner penthouses with those women. Those pent-up, ravenous women whose husbands never gave it to them enough, or whose husbands had grown tires around their midsections and bald patches in their hair.

  Like Ms. Rachman in 10E. I nearly ran into her in the lobby the other day, and seeing her brought back memories of how needy and hungry she was. She used to run her fingers through my hair and hum happily. Like she was blissed out beyond any and all recognition. I was eighteen then, and she loved to be on top, her fake breasts barely moving as she rode me, her wine-red nails raking through my hair.

  “God, Trey, I love your hair. You have so much of it,” she said.

  Didn’t take a genius to figure out Mr. Rachman was on the thinning side up top.

  Her husband, a corporate litigator, never found out. He still travels all the time, defends companies from lawsuits, and ignores his hot wife. And she still wants me. She crooked her finger to call me over when she spotted me in the lobby a few days ago. I pretended I didn’t see her and faked her out with the earbuds I had in, Screaming Trees blasting in my head. I wear them every time I go to my parents’ so I have an excuse to ignore them all. I desperately try to avoid all the beautiful women who live there.

  And I can’t not go. My parents pay for college. They want to know how I’m doing. They want to know what I’m learning. Most importantly, they want to know if I’ll switch majors and study medicine like they did and become a plastic surgeon.

  “That ship has sailed, Dad,” I said the other day.

  Still, they try. They’d rather I change my mind, stay in school for many more years, turn premed, and become a respected doctor in the family. Not a guy who studies art and history and works part-time at a tattoo shop. I’m their only hope after all. There’s no one else.

  When I make my weekly visits to their building, my parents and I serve up uncomfortable small talk. We dart around all the things and people we’re not allowed to bring up. Like they never even existed.

  They taught me how to ignore the obvious.

  But I can’t ignore Harley. She’s not like them. She’s not like anyone I’ve ever known. It’s almost enough to make me tell her why my family doesn’t talk, why we are so closed off, messed up, and perfectly plastic on the outside. But I’ve told no one except my shrink. Harley tells me everything, and I’ve held back the most important part of my past.

  Maybe that’s why we can never be together.

  That, and the rules, and the group, and the fact that I’d never know what to do with a woman like her. I only know sex. I don’t know what to do with someone who’s not a game, a conquest, a way to numb the pain. With her, I’d have to be myself, be honest and truthful and let her all the way in. Besides, Harley’s a former call girl. So really, the fact that I want to inhale her all night, run my tongue from her delicious earlobe down to her neck and between her perfect breasts—that are real, so fucking real and soft and full, and demand to be kissed every time I see her—is irrelevant.

  She would never want me the same way. That one night was a last hurrah, a final goodbye to the past. She could have anyone. But she hardly seems to want anyone. Except Cam, and the thought of that makes my skin crawl. She told me she was never involved with him, but he was her fucking pimp. He whored her out, and I don’t even know the guy, but that makes me hate him. That makes me want to do to his face what the husband of the lady in the penthouse apartment did to mine when he caught me with his wife.

  “I should go,” I mutter.

  “Me too,” she says.

  “Are you going back to your mom’s tonight?”

  She shakes her head. “Back home. I’m sure Kristen misses me,” she jokes. Kristen and Harley have a run-down railroad apartment not far from here that’s rent-controlled and has been for one hundred years. Or so it seems.

  “Coo
l. I’m going to meet Jordan for a beer,” I say, referring to my buddy who works at the coffee shop next to No Regrets. He hates coffee, can’t stand the smell or taste of it from working with it all night long. He likes to say he needs beer to get the scent of caffeine off of him more than anything.

  “Have fun. Tell him I said hi,” she says, and gives a playful wave—as if I’d pass that on to my friend. “We should set him up with Kristen someday.”

  “Yeah. They might like each other.”

  She starts to leave, but I reach for her arm. Damn, her skin is so soft. I could layer kisses on her arms and be satisfied. Actually, that’s not true. Any kiss would make me want more. “I’ll walk you home.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to.”

  I take her hand, and the feel of her is the thing I both want and dread most in the world. But I can’t stop holding her hand, even though I’d never know what to do with her for real.

  When we reach her building, she turns to me. “Did we even have plans tonight?”

  I shake my head. “I just like seeing you.”

  Maybe I’ve said too much. Maybe I haven’t said enough.

  “I like seeing you too.”

  “Better me than Cam,” I say, then want to kick myself for admitting that. But I don’t stop. “Don’t call him. Please.”

  I sound like an idiot, begging her.

  She stands on her tiptoes and brushes a soft, sweet, dizzying kiss on my cheek, on my scar, whispering, “I won’t.”

  I want to believe her.

  16

  Harley

  “Were you at your writing workshop with the hottie tattoo guy tonight?”

  Kristen lowers her red cat-eye glasses and stares at me over the pages of a script. Kristen is a film major, and she always has her nose in a story. She’s scrunched up on the couch in our apartment, studying a marked-up screenplay.

  “Yeah,” I say, the lie rolling seamlessly off my tongue.