Before I can even work up to a protest, he places a finger firmly against my lips and slurs, “Let me at least get you the drink and the fries as an apology for almost knocking you over back there.”
I wrench away from his fingers. “Thanks, but I’m fine.”
“I know that you’re fine, baby.”
Who calls a girl he hasn’t even met “baby”? The needle on my ick radar just redlined. The guy leans in and his breath is warm and moist against my cheek. He smells sour—like a putrid mixture of beer and cheese. I push myself away, shuddering and scraping my fingernails along the bar top.
“Uhhh… Really, I appreciate the gesture, but it isn’t necessary.”
The guy steps forward, managing to position his body even closer to mine. “Well, this might shock you, but buying that drink was just a way to meet you and hopefully convince you to get out on the dance floor with me.” He winks seductively. “I’m Brady, by the way.”
The majority of the female population would probably find Brady cute with his glinting brown eyes and flirty grin. He’s working a boyish, obviously-want-to-get-in-your-panties angle that I guess works on your average college girl, just not on me. I may be out of practice in the dating scene, but I still remember how to read a guy like him and I’m not about to be a part of the one-night stand waiting at the end of Brady’s night.
I look back toward the interior of the bar where I can see the outline of bodies grinding to the fast-paced club music hammering through the speakers. This place is not my scene. Not by a long shot. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m not interested in dancing with you or anyone else tonight.” I say in a clipped tone that I hope is polite but still laced with a definite rejection. An uncomfortable knot is starting to form in the pit of my stomach.
“Okay, okay,” he says, glancing down at my chest with unguarded interest. “I can see that you’re a little firecracker and this is going to be fun. Now,” his index finger trails a slimy path down my arm, “if you aren’t interested in dancing with me, why don’t you tell me what you are interested in? That would be a good place to begin.”
Trying to ignore the sexual undercurrent rolling through his words and the jitter of anxiety pumping through my veins, I rigidly pivot my body. “I’m getting less and less interested in this conversation, Brady. Does that clarify things for you?”
“Hell,” Brady whines playfully as he fingers my braided hair. “You’re killing me here! At least tell me your name.”
I open my mouth, fully intending to shell out a fake name to get this guy to leave me alone, when a firm grip falls against the nape of my neck. I jump at the contact and the unexpected jolt of warmth that shoots down my back.
Cole
My right hand is balled in a fist. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Back off, man. I think that she already told you that she wasn’t interested. Now you’re just pushing your luck and my sense of magnanimity,” I say, stepping forward and squaring my shoulders defensively.
I know how to be threatening when the situation calls for it and this is a situation that calls for it. Brady should be down on his pathetic knees thanking God that I don’t have his ass pinned to the ground right now. I saw the scared look on Aimee’s face and I heard exactly what she said to him and now a rush of hot blood is surging through my whole body. Maybe it’s an overreaction, but I’m fucking furious.
Brady just laughs at me. “What the hell does that mean? Magnana-what?”
I feel Aimee shiver underneath my left hand and that pisses me off even more. Swallowing hard, I level a steely gaze at Brady. “Seriously, fuckwad, you need to walk away from this right now.”
Brady tilts to his left and I can see that he’s had more to drink than I initially thought. “Dude… Cole, I swear that I had no idea that the chick was here with you.” He chokes on a laugh and slaps my shoulder. “You never bring girls to this kind of thing. I thought that you liked the room to play a bit?”
My eyes meet Aimee’s. She blinks nervously and opens her mouth. “It’s not—”
I cut her off by applying gentle pressure to her neck because she does not need to clarify the situation for this asshole. If she does, he’ll only see it as an invitation and he’ll be right back to ogling her tits and imagining what it would be like to get her in a dark corner. Brady Samuels is one horny dude. He’s like a fourteen year old running rampant in a porn shop.
“It turns out that you don’t know shit, Brady, which is why I’m just giving you a warning that she’s not available. Got it?” My hip brushes Aimee’s arm as I move into the space beside her.
Brady shakes his head and I can tell that he’s not going to be a problem anymore. He stalks off toward the inside bar and he doesn’t look back. I’m guessing that he’s going to find the guys on the team and ask them what the fuck is up with me tonight. That’s fine. Let them try to analyze it because I sure as hell can’t figure it out.
Breathing heavily, I turn back to the bar and see that Aimee has closed her eyes. It gives me a chance to study her—to soak her in—which is something that I’ve wanted to do since the first time I saw her. Everything about this girl seems ridiculously delicate. Even the pink scar that weaves across her pale skin looks like it was drawn on her body with a fine-tip paintbrush.
My eyes slowly follow the outline of her small mouth and the slope of her nose and cheeks before moving over to the thin skin of her eyelids. She’s got these insane dark spiky lashes that magnify her light eyes like she’s some kind of doll or anime character. And that freckle…
“Are you okay?” I ask, yanking myself away from my thoughts. Damn it. Does my voice sound as scratchy as I think it does?
She doesn’t answer right away and I worry that Brady really upset her. I press two fingers under her chin and force her eyes up to mine. “I promise that he won’t bother you again, Aimee. I’ll make sure of it.”
“It’s not that,” she says, sucking her bottom lip in between her teeth. She blinks rapidly and I’m afraid that she’s about to cry. What the hell will I do if she starts crying? I’m not one of those guys who understands what it takes to be comforting.
She pulls away from me and squeezes her shoulders in around her body. “I-I’m just completely embarrassed and sorry that you had to pretend to be here with me. What a joke.” She grimaces. “Is that guy one of your friends?”
“I wouldn’t call him a friend. He’s on the track team with me so, yeah, I have to put up with his shit pretty frequently, but it’s damn sure not out of choice.” I flex my jaw and push my hands back through my hair. What is it about this girl that has my emotions all over the place? “And, Aimee, you have nothing to be sorry about. Brady should have left you alone the first time that you said that you weren’t interested.”
“It wasn’t anything—just harmless flirting. I’m the one that let him buy me the drink and fries so I don’t think I can get too angry about it.”
My eyes dart to the glass in her hand. I make a low sound of disapproval in the back of my throat. Why did she let that asshole buy her anything? “You really shouldn’t go around accepting anything from random guys that approach you at bars. He could have put something in your drink. It’s not safe and—”
The expression on her face stops me cold. Shit. She looks like I just ran over her puppy and then I want to kick myself in the balls because I remember who this girl is and what she’s been through.
“It’s only a soda and trust me—I’m always careful. It never left my sight, and anyway,” she shakes her head lightly, “it was an apology.”
I take a deep breath and soften my voice. “For what?”
She shrugs. “He bumped into me when I first got here.”
I don’t want her to think that I’m a dickhead like Brady, but I do want to lighten the mood and I’ve just found my opening. I brace my elbows on the edge of the bar. “Why didn’t you say so? You can buy me a Jack and coke—lots of ice.”
“What?” She sputters and her mouth twitches
. It’s not a real smile, but it’s damn close so I’ll take it.
I straighten my spine and raise my eyebrows. “Well, you fell on me the other day so I guess by your own logic that entitles me to a free drink.”
Aimee rolls her eyes and shakes her head, but she must be playing along because she lifts her hand to get the bartender’s attention.
Gently, I push her arm back into her lap. “Not now,” I say, leaning in and catching the sweet smell of her shampoo. I don’t know what it is, but it has me thinking about fresh-baked cookies and long afternoons at the beach.
“When would you like this so-called apology drink?” She asks, tilting her face up toward mine. She’s so close that I can feel the warmth of her breath moving over the cracks on my lips. Her skin is creamy and fucking perfect and her mouth is a delicious pink.
I move one arm and graze the back of her hand. “I was thinking that you could buy me the drink on our date.”
Her blue eyes widen and my stomach clenches. I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something about blue eyes so light and clear that they seem to go on for miles. “Our date? Are you joking?”
I don’t know. Am I joking? I don’t think so. Just because I haven’t asked a girl to go out with me in years doesn’t mean that I can’t, right? “I’m not joking,” I say and it feels more like the truth than a lie.
Aimee’s words are careful, decided. “I don’t date.”
I brush a few loose hairs away from her face and bend to her ear. She really does smell amazing. Absolutely amazing. “I don’t date either, so I won’t tell if you don’t,” I whisper.
Her forehead creases and I can tell that she’s thinking it over. That’s probably a good sign. At least she didn’t flat-out turn me down which is kind of what I’d been expecting. And then I almost laugh because here I am, happy that some girl I barely know is thinking about saying yes to a date with me. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Aimee stares down at her fingers splayed open on the bar. “I-it’s just—”
“Please don’t overthink it.”
This snaps her eyes back to mine and I can see a change in them. The difference is minor, but I catch it and it makes everything in my chest turn over. I can tell that she’s wondering about me the same way that I’m wondering about her.
She starts to speak, but her gaze zeroes in on something over my shoulder and her entire body stiffens. What the hell? I look behind me and see Daniel over by the rear entrance talking to Chad Moody.
Shit.
I thought he had a date with that chick from Colson’s class. Maybe it fell through, or maybe he brought her here, or maybe he figured out that she’s the raging bitch that she seemed like and he took her home early.
When I turn my head back, Aimee’s gasping like she can’t get enough air into her lungs. “I th-thought you said that he wasn’t going to be here tonight. I can’t—”
I grab both of her hands, but she’s already pulling away and I’m just clutching the fabric of her shirt like some creep. “Wait. Aimee, please wait! You haven’t even gotten your fries yet.”
She doesn’t wait. Of course she doesn’t.
CHAPTER THREE
Aimee
I feel her before she opens the door to my bedroom.
“Aimee?” Her voice is hesitant. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I croak into the darkness.
The door widens and a stream of pale light finds me. Mara comes into my room and sits on the bed. Her hand finds the shape of my foot through the comforter and she cups her palm around my toes. “You’re crying?”
I half-laugh. “Yeah… I saw Daniel Kearns tonight.”
Silence. “Do you want me to call Mom?”
“No.”
More silence. Mara clears her throat. “Do you want to talk about… her?”
Do I want to talk about her?
I wouldn’t even know where to start. “No.”
After a few minutes of quiet, my sister lies down beside me and wraps her arm over mine. “I wish that I could make this better for you,” she says softly.
“But you can’t,” I answer. “No one can.”
***
Sometimes it’s easier to think about her in pieces.
She loved Lemonheads. She dipped her fries in ranch dressing. When we were fourteen, she drew a swirling mustache on her face with a black Sharpie and wore a sombrero to her parent’s Christmas party and spoke with an accent the whole night. In general, she talked too much, laughed when she got nervous about something, and she never passed up an opportunity to sing karaoke.
She decided that she wanted to be a vet when her cat swallowed a nickel and had to have surgery to remove it. We were eleven.
Her nails were a mess. She bit them down to nothing but would still paint them with glitter nail polish before a big race because she swore up and down that it brought her good luck in the water. On special occasions she tended to overdo it in the perfume department.
Pixar movies always made her cry. She was allergic to scallops. She had a birthmark shaped like Idaho on her lower back.
Those are the things that you don’t get to read in an obituary—the memories and bits of a person that make up a whole life.
My best friend, Jillian, was sixteen when she died. If she had lived for another nine days she would have made it to seventeen.
I try not to picture her on that last day—in the blue top with the light purple flowers embroidered around the collar and those shorts that she made from her favorite pair of jeans, but sometimes I can’t help it and the memory gets inside my head and my heart and it’s all I can do to keep breathing air. I wonder all kinds of things and I want to cry and I want to yell until my throat hurts and I want to pull all of my hair out. But, mostly, I want to go back to that night so that I can grab her hand and lace her fingers through mine, fusing us together.
“Hold on,” she’ll say to me. “I don’t want you to let go.”
***
“So then I was all, ‘you have got to move on because like I’ve told you a hundred times already—we are done and there’s no going back.’ And he started whining and sniffling and begging, the big baby.” Jodi rolls her eyes dramatically. “I just don’t know how to make things any clearer for the guy without completely killing him.”
I nod my head as I tear the top of the sweetener packet and dump the powdery contents into my Styrofoam coffee cup. It’s Wednesday and Jodi and I are getting coffee in the Student Union before our last class of the day. So far I’ve seen her hopped up on Indian food and live music, and on a sugar high from one too many Twizzlers, but I’ve never seen her on a caffeine rush. Just the thought of it is intimidating and I wonder if I should have a tranquilizer on hand. Just in case.
“So, what happened after that?”
I follow Jodi as she navigates through the crowded tables to a set of oversized chairs and a sofa arranged in a sunny corner. She plunges herself into one of the chairs and pries open the lid of her coffee cup.
“Well,” she says, blowing on her coffee and looking at me sideways. “After two decent orgasms and a container of Moo Shu Pork, he went home. I haven’t heard from him since, but Jason’s like clockwork. Even though I keep telling him to leave me alone, the poor guy can’t make it ten days without showing up at my front door begging me to take him back.”
“Wait.” I blink slowly, adjusting myself on the sofa. “You had sex with him? After you told your ex-boyfriend all this stuff about moving on, you had sex with him?”
“And Chinese food.” Jodi nods. Today she’s got the blue streaks in her hair wound into tiny braids and pulled back from her face. Her eyes are heavily lined with dark kohl and she’s switched out the little silver stud in her nostril for a gold one.
“I don’t understand. I thought you said…”
“I said that Chinese isn’t my favorite, but in a pinch I can totally deal.”
“That is not what I meant and you know it.” I shoot her an exa
sperated look. In less than a week, Jodi and I have fallen into an easy pattern. She was annoyed with me when I stood her up last week at Dirty Ernie’s, but she told me that she’d get over it if I bought her an ice cream cone after the concert we went to on Saturday. Just to be on the safe side, I bought her a sundae with a mountain of whipped cream and three cherries on top.
I look at her hard. “I don’t understand why you had sex with him if you want him to leave you alone. Maybe I’m crazy, but that seems counterintuitive.”
“Oh.” Jodi leans in with an impish smile on her lips. “Well, Jason is too much of an idiot to make for good boyfriend material, but his, umm, eggroll is… well, let’s just say that it’s supersized. So from time to time I make an exception to the terms of our ‘strictly friends’ agreement.”
I flush red. “And that’s not confusing? Don’t the lines get blurred?”
Jodi rests her head against the wall above her chair and sighs. “Well, yes it’s confusing, Aimee, but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. And Jason can be very persuasive when he wants to be. He does this thing with his tongue and it’s so—”
I lift my hand to stop her. “I really don’t need to hear about what Jason can do with his tongue. Seriously.”
Jodi’s smile widens. “Aimee Spencer, are you blushing? Is this conversation embarrassing you? What if I were to… I don’t know… tell you that Jason has a name for his penis? And it’s very descriptive.”
“Shhhh,” I murmur, my eyes scanning the nearby tables.
Jodi smacks her lips together. “I can see that you’re not a fan of the word penis. How about if I were to say… nipple? Or orgasm? Penetration?” Her voice is dangerously loud and the people around us are starting to look. “Scrotum?”
“Jodiiiiii!”
“Aimeeeeee!” She mimics my whiny tone then bursts into her signature breezy laughter. For someone so incredibly petite, the girl can make some noise. “I wish that you could see your face. You’re like this.” She crumples her forehead and contorts her mouth into a scowl.