She let her voice trail off as she shrugged and looked away from me.
“Well, what?” I tried to keep my voice down so the couple in the other room wouldn’t hear us. “Well, then you’ll just say fuck it and move on? Is that what you mean? Are you threatening me?”
“No,” she said quickly. “I’m not. I don’t mean to be, anyway. It’s just…I have to have more, Liam.”
“More?”
“I want to know more about you. More about your past.”
“You don’t want to know,” I told her, hoping it was true, or that I could at least convince her it was. I shifted uneasily on the floor.
“You have a habit of telling me what I want,” Tria replied. “Maybe you could let me decide that once in a while.”
I ignored her sarcasm.
“Can’t we just make out instead?”
She immediately moved away from me and looked at me pointedly. There was just no winning with her and her stubbornness. My best bet was to just get her to sleep, so I went with that angle. After all, it had worked pretty well the night before.
“You need to sleep,” I said.
“So tell me a bedtime story.”
“That shit isn’t going to help you sleep.”
She ran her hand down the side of my face and rested it lightly on my shoulder. Her eyes were drooping, and I was hoping she would just crawl onto the couch and drop off into slumber.
“Tell me the real reason Yolanda was mad about what you were eating.”
No such luck.
I turned my head to stare at the curtains covering the window, hoping she would get the hint and let it go but also knowing she wasn’t going to.
“Liam.” Tria sighed and reached up with her finger to run it over my jaw as she turned my head to face her more. Like a total idiot, I looked into her eyes again. Even in the subdued light, they were bright and shining. “I want to know. Please tell me.”
All my resolve crumbled.
“What do you want to know?” I asked with an exaggerated groan.
“Tell me about Yolanda,” Tria said. “Tell me how you met.”
The very idea made my skin crawl. There was definitely a significant part of me that couldn’t believe I was considering doing the one and only thing I always swore to myself I wouldn’t do—think about any of my history. How was I supposed to talk about it without thinking about it? Images I didn’t want to see were already flashing through my head.
Glancing at her, I met her eyes again. I didn’t know what her look meant—if she needed to know more about the man she was with before making any real decisions, if she wanted to get under my skin, or if she was just curious. Whatever it was, I wanted to give it to her, and the thought scared me.
“Fine,” I said, “but I’m smoking while we talk.”
“Deal!” she said with a genuine smile that loosened the tightness still hovering in the center of my chest.
We stepped quietly through the front door, and Tria made herself comfortable on the top of the wooden steps while I lit up. She just sat there without saying a word until I got the idea and started talking.
“Yolanda...found me,” I told her. I took a big breath and leaned my head against a four-by-four that held up part of the porch roof. I looked down, no longer meeting her eyes. “I was…not doing well. I needed money…and she found me. She recognized me and took me back to her place. She got me to straighten up, got me back in shape, and has kind of been some combination of trainer and mother ever since then.”
“She recognized you?” Tria asked.
“Yeah,” I said with a nod, secretly glad she chose that portion to focus on. “Yolanda was a trainer then, too, but she had a side job. She used to go around to high school competitions, scouting talent for some agent on the side. She was at a wrestling competition I won the year before.”
I laughed humorlessly.
“She only barely recognized me. I’d lost about forty pounds since leaving.”
“Leaving where?”
I glanced at her for a moment.
“My parents threw me out,” I said. She knew this, but I was stalling. “I, um…I had some money in the beginning, but it doesn’t last as long as you think it will, ya know?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I was kicked out of where I had been living,” I told her. “Well…sort of.”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t just…get kicked out of the place,” I finally said. I glanced at Tria and saw her sitting there, patient as ever.
“Why won’t you just tell me?” she asked quietly.
“Because what I have now isn’t worth shit. If you knew how bad I was…fuck, you’d probably never want to even look at me.” I stared at the ground, refusing to look up at her as I chewed at the pad of my thumb.
“Do you really think I would turn away from you because you went through a rough patch?” Tria asked. “You think I don’t know something bad happened to you? Do you think I can’t see that? Do you think I’m that blind?”
I looked into her eyes and forced myself to stay focused on her even though it hurt.
“I wasn’t kicked out because I couldn’t pay rent,” I told her. “I was squatting there.”
“Squatting?” Tria asked through narrowed eyes.
“Yeah. You know, just hanging out there. I didn’t have a lease or anything; I just broke in and stayed there. It was me and a couple other guys and one chick. We were all just living there.”
“And you got caught,” Tria said, surmising correctly.
“Yeah, I’d been homeless for a while before then, but that’s the point when I was really living on the streets. Before I had a car I was sleeping in.”
“How old were you?” she asked.
“Eighteen,” I told her. “What’s funny is I had quite a bit of money then.”
“If you had money, why didn’t you just rent the place?”
This was it. This was going to be the point of no return. This was very likely the thing that was going to make her turn and run for the hills. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the only confession in a long list of sins.
“Because…because…” I took a long, deep breath, closed my eyes, and blurted out the rest. “Because I was a junkie. I didn’t want to use the money for rent because then there wouldn’t be enough for heroin. I had a nice car when I left my parents’ house, and I sold it so I could buy more smack and needles and shit to get high. I was a strung-out junkie when Yolanda found me near the gym where she worked.”
I kept my eyes closed, half waiting for her to run off into the rain. My hands were shaking, and even holding them in fists against my thighs wasn’t working to still them. After a minute or two, when I knew she was still there beside me, I looked at her again.
“How long?” she asked. “How long have you been off it? I mean—you are off it, right? I would have noticed if you were doing something like that—”
“Years,” I said, wanting to get the words out fast enough to stop her train of thought. My voice managed to contain a hint of desperation. “Ever since the last time—the time Yolanda was going on about when I gained too much and got the shit kicked out of me. That was the only relapse I ever had. I swear—I’m totally clean now. Over four years—I swear!”
“I believe you,” Tria said simply. She stood up, stood beside me, and laid her hand on my cheek.
“You do?” I asked quietly.
“Of course,” she replied. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“There’s more,” I said. I had to swallow hard, but I kept talking. “I did shit—a lot of shit I’m absolutely not going to talk about—but it was bad. I would have done anything for the drugs.”
“Did you kill anyone?”
I felt a lump lodged in my throat.
“No,” I whispered, wishing I could believe I wasn’t responsible for it myself. “But I’ve seen a lot of death.”
“Do you still struggle with it?” Tria asked quietly. “I mean, with wantin
g to…to do that?”
“Wanting to do heroin? Yeah. All the time. Not every day anymore, but yeah, I struggle.”
She traced over the edge of my jaw with her fingers, scratching at the scruff that had formed during our trip.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“For what?”
“Giving me some of you,” she replied. She stood up on her toes and pressed her lips to mine.
“Will you unpack when we get home?” I asked. “In our apartment?”
She chuckled.
“If you really want me to.”
“I really do.”
She rose up on her toes again and ran the fingers of both hands on either side of my jaw and up into my hair. Her head came forward slowly, and she brought our lips together again.
“I hope you mean that,” she said quietly.
“I do mean it,” I told her. I pressed my lips back to hers as I wrapped one arm around her back to bring her a little closer to me. We kissed softly for a minute, and then Tria pulled away reluctantly.
“We need some sleep,” she said. “Tomorrow is going to be insane.”
“Well, I can’t argue with the second part of that,” I said.
We went back inside, and I settled myself on the floor. Tria climbed over me and onto the couch, and I lay down on my back below her. I knew right away that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep where I was. Despite the extra padding, the floor was pretty damn uncomfortable. That didn’t bother me so much—I’d slept in much worse places—but listening to Tria breathe and not being able to touch her was driving me batty.
I closed my eyes and just lay there for a while. After the first few minutes, I felt something against my arm and moved the opposite hand to grasp Tria’s fingers. She sighed but didn’t say anything. The physical touch helped, but it wasn’t quite enough to let me doze off.
Several minutes later, I heard her soft voice.
“Liam?” she whispered. “Are you awake?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled. I opened my eyes but couldn’t really see much other than dark blobby shapes that were either slightly darker or slightly lighter than the other dark blobby shapes around them.
“I can’t sleep.”
“Me either,” I said.
“I think I’m used to soft beds,” she said with a quiet giggle.
The slight laughter ended quickly, and I felt her fingers tighten around mine. I took in a deep breath and then sat up straight.
“Scoot up,” I said.
“Scoot up?”
“Yeah—move so you’re at the edge of the couch.”
“Liam, we are not both going to fit on here.”
“Just do it.”
Tria shifted, and I climbed over the top of her and wedged myself in between the back of the couch and the back of Tria. I wrapped one arm securely around her waist and slid the other in the crack of the cushion so I could reach around her head and bring it to my shoulder.
“Is this your way of getting to touch my boobs?”
“No,” I told her. “When I do that, I want to have time to enjoy them. Maybe we’ll stay at one of my uncle’s hotels on the way back.”
“Hmm…that might be nice.”
“You’d like that?”
“Yeah, I would,” she said. “I’d never been to a hotel like that before.”
“Well, maybe we’ll get one of the regular rooms and use the leftover money to pay for it. I don’t need him showing up at the crack of dawn and interrupting my fun again.”
“Maybe.” Tria shifted around a little bit to get comfortable. “But that suite was amazing.”
It was entirely possible that I was going to have to do a little more pride swallowing. Tria shifted again.
“I’m going to fall off,” she said.
“I’m not going to let you fall,” I told her. I tucked my face into her hair and inhaled before touching my lips to the edge of her ear. “Go to sleep.”
Her body rose and fell with a deep breath, but she settled against me, and soon I could hear the regulated breathing of sleep. I tightened my grip a little and lay my head next to hers, trying to expel thoughts of the past from my mind.
I fell asleep with a vague memory of the smell of sweat and a bitter taste in the back of my throat.
*****
I woke to soft, female voices.
“I can’t believe you’re sleeping like that.”
Tria shook with quiet laughter.
“He gets kind of a death-grip,” she said. “He’s like this every night.”
“So you are living with him?” Nikki asked for confirmation.
“Yes. It wasn’t really planned; it just sort of happened.”
“I had it all planned from the beginning,” I mumbled with my eyes closed. “Welcome to my parlor and all that shit.”
Tria laughed aloud as she turned slightly to smack my arm.
“You did not!”
She wriggled, and I abruptly released her from my grasp, leaving her to fall to the floor with a thump. Nikki laughed and walked away from us and into the kitchen. I rolled over and peered over the edge of the couch. Tria lay on her back with a surprised look on her face. Her hair was all over the place—and from the position on her back, it framed her face in a wild tangle of frizzy strands.
“Your hair makes you look like one of those chicks from an eighties rock video,” I told her.
“Thanks a lot!”
I gave her a half smile.
“You’re beautiful,” I told her as she sat up and tried to calm the mass of hair.
“I’m surprised I have any hair left,” she mused, “the way you are always trying to use your nose to build a nest in it!”
I laughed.
“You smell good,” I said with another smile. “If I could figure out what you were putting on your hair that smelled like that, I’d probably just bathe in it.”
“You are not right!” Her information wasn’t news to me.
“Anyone want breakfast?” Nikki stood near the wall by the kitchen and held up a tray of what appeared to be gigantic muffins.
Tria quickly fumbled around inside her purse and without too much trouble came up with a hair band. I was always surprised at how quickly she managed to find shit in there. I peered over the edge of the Purse of Doom—feeling brave—and glimpsed inside as she wrapped her hair in a bun at the top of her head. I couldn’t figure out what any of the shit in there was, and I quickly retreated until I was a safe distance from the potential event horizon of the thing.
After breakfast—which was awesome though I wouldn’t eat more than one of the huge things—Tria pulled me to the side.
“Well, she still intends to go through with it,” Tria informed me. “I’m going to stick with her today and help her get ready.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked, trying not to sound petulant.
“Can you keep Brandon company?”
“Seriously?”
“He’s nervous and freaking out,” Tria whispered as she glanced over her shoulder. “I don’t know what you said to him last night, but he keeps asking her if she’s sure she wants to do it. She does—I can see that now—but he’s not so sure anymore, and that’s got her all upset. He needs to be there for her as much as I do.”
“This is too fucked up,” I mumbled under my breath.
“Please, Liam,” Tria implored, and I couldn’t bring myself to say no.
So as the women-folk locked themselves in the bedroom, I was stuck trying to entertain myself all day with a guy who I really didn’t want to be anywhere near. Lucky for me, he didn’t seem to be in much of a talking mood. For the most part, we smoked cigarettes and drank beer in silence on the porch.
As the afternoon dragged on, Brandon was getting more and more tense. I was trying to make sure he paced himself and ate something throughout the day so he wasn’t totally shit-faced by the time we were supposed to go to whatever fucked up little magical altar in the woods where this was all goi
ng to take place. I glanced over at Brandon’s empty bottle between his hands, noticed the condition of my own, and figured it was time for another.
“Want me to grab you one?” I asked as I stood up.
Brandon just nodded, so I headed inside to the fridge. Through the window, I stared at the water pouring from the sky and wondered if it was ever going to fucking stop. How was it that the whole town didn’t just float into the sea? I also wondered if my jacket was going to be enough to keep me from being absolutely soaked before the whole thing was done.
I couldn’t believe I was actually going to hang out and watch a public train.
Before I got back to the front door, I heard an unfortunately familiar voice.
“Where’d the bike come from?”
“Demmy,” Brandon replied.
With determination—but for what, I wasn’t sure—I opened the door and stepped back out onto the porch. Douchebag looked up immediately.
“You have to be fucking kidding me.” Keith glared at me with flared nostrils.
I was never one to turn down boobs, but punching this asshole in the face just might be worth the loss.
Chapter 23—Take the Plunge
There was a part of me that was highly amused by the whole thing. I could tell by the wide-eyed look Douchebag flickered between me and Brandon that he had no idea I was here. I could also tell by Brandon’s nonchalant attitude that he didn’t mind me being here anymore, and he also didn’t give a shit that Keith was pissed off about it.
“What the hell is he doing here?” Keith yelled at Brandon. “Do you know who this asshole is?”
“He came with Demmy…er…Tria,” Brandon replied.
“He’s the one I warned you about!”
I walked casually over to Brandon and handed him his beer. I turned to Keith and kept looking at him as I tilted my own beer to my lips just as casually, then pulled out a smoke and lit it.
“You want one?” I asked Brandon.
“Yeah,” he replied.
Holding in the smirk was impossible as I handed Brandon a cigarette, then held out my lighter, flicked it, and lit the smoke for him. I knew how friendly and natural the whole action would look from Keith’s point of view, and the only thing that might have amused me more would be his arrival while I was squeezing Tria’s ass with my tongue down her throat.