Lauren Blakely: The Thrill of It

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

Her husband, a corporate litigator, never found out. He still travels all the time, defends companies from lawsuits, and ignores his hot wife. She still wants me to not ignore her. 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. I 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 try desperately to avoid all the beautiful women who live there.

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. 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 pre-med, 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 can’t manage to give her the simplest truth. I never learned how.

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 girl like her. She’s a girl. And I only know women, and 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, to run my tongue from her delicious earlobe down to her neck and between her perfect breasts – that are real, that are 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. I don’t even know the guy, she told me she was never involved with him, but he was her fucking pimp. He whored her out, and 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.

“Cool. 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 of it or taste of it from working with it all night long. He needs beer more than ever to get the scent of caffeine off of him, he likes to say.

“Have fun. Tell him I say 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 want most 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. For saying those stupid words. But I don’t stop. “Don’t call him. Please.”

I sound like an idiot, begging her.

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

I want to believe her.

Harley

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

Kristen lowers her red cat’s 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.

“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. She 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. 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. I know her hopes too. 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 make-up, how I take my lattes, that I like to invent stories about animals and magic, that someday I want to live on the beach and soak up the sun and sleep 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 enough witnesses, to assemble the whole sordid story.