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

by Blakely, Lauren

  “Are you guys hooking up?”

  I scoff. “No. It’s only class.”

  If she only knew.

  “Can I have him, then?” She waggles her eyebrows. She’s met Trey. She knows he’s unbelievably beautiful. She has no clue how I met him though.

  “Sure,” I say, as if the thought doesn’t make my insides churn. I don’t want anyone to have Trey. But I can’t tell Kristen about the meetings we go to, the real way I know him. I try to throw her off the scent. “Or his friend Jordan. He’s cute too, don’t you think?”

  She nods knowingly. “Honestly, either one of them would be fine. Why don’t you just make that happen, Harley?”

  “I’ll text Trey that we should all get together and go see a band or something,” I say, and then fire off a quick message.

  Kristen and I have been friends since the start of high school, but she doesn’t even know the half of it. Or the half of me. If anyone were to know about the SLAA meetings, about my past, about my men, it’d be Kristen. She is my closest girlfriend. But that word—close—it’s all so relative. Close means you share clothes, dreams, secrets, maybe even the darkest of secrets. That’s how it’s supposed to be. And sure, I know things about her because we’ve been friends since we played field hockey together at our high school. She was a beast on the field who took no prisoners and was known far and wide for hitting below the knees. I asked her once why she had so much aggression, and she said she took out her frustration over her parents’ crappy relationship when she was playing.

  They were divorcing when we were in high school.

  Here’s the thing. She’s open. She’s let me in on her secrets, that she struggled with bulimia when she was in high school and she was in therapy our senior year to help her have, as she likes to say, “a better relationship” with food. I know her insecurities too. Sometimes she’s abrasive or too in-your-face, and it’s all part of her tough-gal persona. But underneath, she wants what most people want—happiness. And I know her hopes. After college, she plans to jet west to California and become a screenwriter, chase the Hollywood dream.

  But I barely tell her anything. Maybe because she’s so together. Because she’s battled her demons and won. Or maybe just because I’m no good at telling the truth.

  She knows I like music and doing makeup, how I take my lattes, that I like to invent stories about animals and magic, and that someday I want to live on the beach and soak up the sun and fall asleep to the sound of ocean waves lapping the shore. She knows that my dad ditched us long ago to move to Europe and that I’m close with my mom. But more than that? I wouldn’t even know where to start. I’m like that person who scatters clues across several states, making it tough for the cops to gather enough info, or witnesses, to assemble the whole sordid story.

  No one except Trey.

  It’s weird that one person can know your before and your after.

  And that’s not Kristen.

  Because I haven’t told her a thing about my mom’s habits. And honestly, there is nothing I want to say. My mom is my mom. She needs me, and I need her. She took me to every doctor’s appointment, tended to every scraped knee, and read to me every night before bed. So what if she had men over all the time? She wasn’t cheating on anyone. She was the one who was left. She was the person abandoned, and she finally found a way to be happy again. It doesn’t matter that I knew all her boyfriends, that I heard her late-night moans and groans, that I know what it sounds like when my own mother has an orgasm, that I’m too familiar with the things she says when she’s getting turned on. No one in the whole wide world can be privy to the fact that my mother, who has done more good for society than most people, has another side. The side that turned her daughter into a prostitute.

  Those secrets are lodged so far and so deep inside me I don’t even know how I’d get the words out. I’d need more than a shovel to dredge them up—I’d need a bulldozer to exhume them. And even if somehow, someway, the words could tunnel out of me, I know they’d spill out my mouth all disfigured and unrecognizable, a foreign tongue no one could understand. Sometimes when I say the words silently in my head, at a whisper, I can still feel a fierce red blush covering my cheeks. I was a call girl.

  But the real reason I don’t tell her is this—because I loved it. I loved the crazy burn, the rush, the thrill of the power. Because I needed it, I wanted it, I craved it.

  I still do.

  I’m not cured.

  SLAA hasn’t fixed me.

  If Kristen knew where I really went when I say I’m at the writing workshop, she might not want to be friends with me. She wouldn’t want to have lattes with me or share an apartment with me. I’d be the slut, the sex addict, the whore that everyone would think I am. That Miranda thinks I am. That all those stories—true fucking stories—that Miranda makes me write prove I am.

  No wonder Trey won’t touch me again. No wonder he keeps me at a distance. He’s getting healthy, he’s healing, he’s moving on from his past, and he can see me for what I am.

  Dirty. Slutty. Whore.

  Soon, he’ll walk away too. That’s why I don’t tell Kristen about Layla. She’d walk straight the other way. That is what people do. They leave when you get too close.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Nah, I ate at my mom’s,” I say.

  “Damn. I wanted to split a pizza.”

  “I’ll eat a slice if it’ll make you happy,” I offer. I can do that. Kristen doesn’t like to eat by herself. Says it reminds her of the times when she scarfed down food alone.

  She claps once and smiles widely. See? This is so simple. I made her happy by saying I’d have a slice. She dials her favorite pizza delivery place and orders a cheese pie. I wish I could do the same—have a healthy relationship with love.

  I wish love were like pizza.

  She kicks her feet up on the coffee table. “We should have a girl’s night out Friday. Let’s go somewhere. Meet some guys. There’s no one at this college I like. I want a man. Not some stupid frat boy.”

  “No, you don’t,” I say. “You don’t want a man.”

  I’ve had men. Most of them are awful.

  17

  Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict

  I didn’t sleep with any of them. I could lie and tell all sorts of sordid stories about being eighteen and fucking forty-two-year-old men, but I won’t. Because I didn’t do that. My pimp loved me. He took care of me. He would never have sent me on jobs like that. Sometimes I played the escort role for the buttoned-up guys who wanted a sexy young girlfriend at a fancy dinner function. Or for the suit who had a hankering for a schoolgirl on his arm at a bar.

  But I was also assigned the middle-aged men with weird fetishes.

  Like one of my regulars. His name was Gerald, and he was a banker. We met every Friday at 4:15 when the markets closed. He wanted me to wear my green plaid skirt, starched white blouse, and my good old faithful Mary Janes. Our regular meeting spot was a hotel in Midtown, because no one knew him in Midtown. He liked to hear about my day at school, the things I learned in class, but he especially longed for stories of what my friends and I talked about in the locker room. I made it all up. I told him we discussed lingerie, and what kind of lacy underwear we preferred to wear when we masturbated.

  “I wore a black bustier when I fingered myself last night,” I told him. “My friend Holly gets herself off wearing her red silk teddy.”

  He’d start breathing hard, then ask for more. I served it all up for him, tales of trigonometry and English literature, chiffon and lace, fingers and spread legs.

  Then he’d ask me to kiss him once, spank him ten times, and tell him to sit in the corner.

  That was all he wanted. Stories and spanking.

  I can only imagine what sort of fucked-up shit he was dealing with to want that every Friday afternoon.

  Afterward, I would find my pimp and tell him everything. He’d grin, pat my shoulder, and we’d toast. Like we’d conquered the fucking world
.

  18

  Harley

  A needle clicks. Joanne is cradling her latest creation, an earthy looking brown-and-yellow mass of yarn that appears to be transforming into a sweater. She knits at meetings because it became her hobby in recovery. I suspect she transferred addictions—sex to knitting. But I’m pretty sure knitting is healthier.

  She begins the meeting with an affirmation. I despise affirmations, so I look down and fidget instead as the others join in. It’s Chloe, Ainsley, and me—only the girls today. The guys are in a guys-only meeting a few doors down.

  “I release the fear of rejection, the fear of pain, and all the past beliefs that have led me astray. I am comfortable with who I am. I think before acting. I seek honesty, truth, and trust in all my relationships.”

  I feel all squishy inside as I mumble a word or two with the others. Sometimes, it’s too much therapy, too much insight, too much introspection here. Sometimes I want to rage against the calm, healthy, boundaried, love-is-not-a-battlefield-it’s-a-quilt attitude.

  Why can’t love be a battlefield?

  Life is a fucking battlefield. Who said love was supposed to be any different? Maybe there’s no truth or honesty in love. There doesn’t seem to be much in life. Not from what I’ve seen. Not from Miranda. Not from Phil. Not from the assholes my mom busts with her investigative pieces. Maybe everyone, everywhere is an addict of some kind.

  At least some of us admit it.

  Chloe says all the words, loud and proud, not missing a single syllable. Chloe is one of those super-involved people, sharing every detail of her recovery, from having slept with twenty-two guys by the time she was the same age to admitting a few weeks ago that she’s had three STDs and one pregnancy scare. Sometimes I think about all the stuff I know about Chloe from these meetings, yet we’ve never once hung out, and frankly I don’t think either one of us has the desire to. We just don’t have that much in common, to be honest.

  I don’t hang with Ainsley much either, but she’s new and just started a few weeks ago. Teachers are her vice. She lost her virginity to her high school music teacher, then proceeded to work her way through the rest of the arts department before she started college.

  I didn’t sleep with any of my clients. I drew lines, a lot of lines, and I didn’t cross them. Before Trey, I never came close to going all the way. I never even almost did it. I stuck to north of the border. To places I could control—mouths, tongues, lips, words, names. When I was with a man, I was in control, complete and total control, because I didn’t let go. I didn’t want someone’s hands going there, drifting down, traveling to places on my body where I might start making sounds too.

  Nobody has ever heard me for real. Nobody but Trey.

  I don’t say much to Chloe or Ainsley at the meetings. They’re doing better than me; they’re further along. I’m too ashamed to tell them I miss the man who sold me, I’m dying for a boy in the group next door, and my own mother wants to set me up on dates. But I don’t have to talk today, since we have a guest speaker.

  Joanne puts her knitting down and introduces a woman named Danielle, keeping it first names only, as always. “She’s twenty-five. She’s a total rock star because she’s been on the wagon for”—Joanne turns to Danielle as the two women sit down—“how long?”

  “Four years,” Danielle says. She’s thin, with pointy elbows and sharp cheekbones. I wonder if she has an eating disorder and just channeled one addiction into another.

  Maybe Danielle will tell a tale that will remind me of me, that will help me move on, that will let me heal. But I don’t even know what I’m healing from, except myself. My own bad choices, my own horrid decisions that brought me here. But how can they be so awful if I miss them and desperately long for those times? When I walked into a job, I savored the power, the control, the dominance. When my heels clicked and my hair swished and my lips shone, I thrilled to be the one in charge.

  As Danielle talks, my mind starts to drift, to return to the heady rush of a call from Cam, a booking from Cam, reporting back to Cam. The money was irrelevant. It was never about the money. It was about the way all my senses tripped into supersonic speed when his name appeared on my phone and he delivered the details, the things to say and do, and not say or do.

  Wear the red satin dress from Bloomingdale’s when you have dinner at Le Cirque with David. Ask him about business and be fascinated with everything he tells you about computer chips.

  Handcuff Saul and run your nails down his back.

  Scold Carter sharply when you “catch” him masturbating in the hotel bathroom.

  Walk up to Robert and ask him to dance with you when Prince starts playing at the nightclub in Soho.

  Bathe John in a bubble bath. Quietly. Say nothing.

  Everything was clear. Everything was decided in advance.

  I flash back to the jobs, hearing bits and pieces of Danielle’s requisite story—how she was told as a child by her mom that she was never attractive because she was fat, how she desperately wanted men to think she was pretty.

  That snaps me out of my daydreaming.

  “But I was a smarty-pants and I figured out pretty quickly that I could be skinny if I threw up,” Danielle says. Yup, she’s a cross-addict who went from food to men. “And it became a game to me in a way. It was all about control. And then I thought, Maybe there are other things I can control too. You all know where this is going, of course. I thought I could control men and sex. Getting the boys to notice me, the fat girl who was now skinny, became my new project. And if a boy didn’t notice me, I’d amp it up. Wear shorter skirts, tighter shirts, flirt more. And boys became like the ideal weight on the scale—this thing I wanted and had to have. I didn’t sleep with any of them. I was a virgin when I graduated from high school.”

  I look away, feeling a strange twisting in my belly. I don’t want to hear her story anymore.

  “And I justified my behavior. Because I didn’t do much with any of these guys. Made out, kissed, a little more. But by the time I graduated, I’d made out with a couple dozen guys in my school alone. Even though I never did more than kiss.”

  Never did more than kiss. Those words echo, then circle, threatening to ensnare me.

  I push my chair back and mutter, “Excuse me.”

  I leave the room and walk down the hall to the bathroom, clutching my stomach on the way. I feel like I’m going to throw up. I push open the door to the church bathroom, and it’s freezing in here. It’s like they’re pumping ice into the bathroom. I jam my hand against the door of a stall, pushing so hard the metal smacks the inside wall. I shut the door and kneel down on the floor, pulling my hair back into a makeshift ponytail to protect it.

  But nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. I never barf. I never wretch. I don’t even dry heave. I just feel sick to my stomach, so I come here and I kneel and I wait, as my gut tightens like two hands are grabbing my insides, gripping them. I stay like this for a few minutes. Then I flush the toilet, though I flush nothing. I stand up, leave the stall, go to the sink, and wash my hands.

  It’s quiet in here, so quiet. No one is talking, no one is telling stories, and I find the silence a relief. I think of Cam, of how being his made me forget the noise that had surrounded me. With every gig, I was erasing all those sounds I grew up overhearing, erasing the part I played at all those dinner parties and at all those dates she set me up on.

  So, one note to Cam won’t hurt. It won’t set me back. I take out my phone and send a note to Cam before I can even think about what I’m doing, before I can even contemplate it.

  Hi. Missing…

  I stop typing the message. What am I missing? Him?

  I return to the keys. I know what I’m missing. I know what I want. I want Trey.

  Badly.

  But I can’t have him.

  Last night when he wrapped his arms around me by the subway entrance, when I ran my nose along his neck and inhaled him, when his hand brushed against my back and I sighed
like I wanted him again—it only reminds me of how vulnerable I felt that one night with him so many months ago. We’re not together, and we can’t be, so how can I live with being vulnerable, with wanting, with feeling?

  I don’t know how.

  I don’t have a clue.

  Love isn’t a quilt. Love isn’t patient, love isn’t kind. Love is a game, a chase, a thrill. Love is wild and warlike, and every man and woman must fight for themselves.

  I can play the game.

  I can control love.

  I need to feel in control. I need to hold my world, my life in the palm of my hands and be the one who sets it in motion. The only one. I’m not controlled. I control.

  I finish the message to Cam.

  Hi. Missing things...

  I hit send and return to the room. Joanne gives me a faint sympathetic smile. I don’t look at Danielle the rest of the meeting. I spend the time contemplating my fingernails and considering how to finish the next chapter for Miranda.

  When the meeting ends, Joanne asks me to hang back for a minute. I pour a cup of coffee as I wait. It tastes bitter and sludgy, but I drink it quickly while Joanne makes small talk with Danielle and Ainsley.

  Then they’re gone, and she turns to me.

  “Hey, Layla. Everything okay?”

  I nod several times. “Just peachy.”

  Just peachy? Who says that? What is wrong with me? But I have to act like I mean it. Like I’m peppy and healthy. Otherwise, she’ll know what I was up to. Sneaking off. Texting my drug.

  She raises her eyebrow, noticing my weird word choice. “Danielle really bugged you, huh?”

  “No. Not at all. Not one bit,” I say. If I lie to my mother, my flesh and blood, the woman who raised me, I can lie to this lady.

  “Layla, I just want to make sure you’re okay. I want you to get the help you need,” she says gently.

  Can you rub out Miranda, then? That’s what I really need.

  “I am okay.”