Authors: Lisa Desrochers
H
IS FI
NGERS THREAD
into my hair as his other hand grasps my hip and pulls me into the curve of his body. It feels so good. So familiar. So easy.
It was always easy with us. I want that back so badly that I let myself get lost in the feeling . . . until someone brushes past us on their way into the bathroom, snapping me out of my fantasy. Because that’s what it is, a fantasy. He took what we had and threw it away. There’s no way I can ever trust him again.
He leans in again, but I splay a hand on his chest before his lips reach mine. “Don’t, Rick. I can’t do this again.”
His fingers glide down my cheek and trace my lips. “Just think about it, Lexie. Please,” he says, letting me go. “I still have the ring. It and my heart will always be yours.”
“But your heart wasn’t always mine. You gave it away to Helena and . . .” I throw up my hands, frustrated, when I can’t remember the other girls’ names, “anyone else who wanted it.”
“They never had my heart. It was just sex. That’s it. It didn’t mean anything.” His face scrunches, pleading with me to understand.
My heart climbs up my throat at his words. “How can you say sex doesn’t mean anything? We lost our virginity together. I’ve never been with anyone but you because it means
everything.
”
He purses his lips and hangs his head. “I was so stupid.” His eye flick to mine again. “Tell me what to do to fix this. I’ll do anything.”
“I just need to think.” This time, when I turn for the bathroom, he doesn’t stop me.
I wash up and splash some water on my face, then stare at my shaking self in the mirror. How can I still have feelings for him after what he did? How is there any part of me that isn’t totally repulsed by him?
“Hey,” Sam says when I get back to the table a few minutes later. “You okay?”
“Have you ordered yet?” I ask.
Her gaze flicks across the restaurant, and I’m guessing she’s looking at Rick, but I don’t follow it to find out. “Prince Charming hasn’t been back. I think he was waiting for you.”
I throw a ten on the table to cover the drinks and grab my bags. “You were right. I can’t do this. Let’s go.”
We collect all my stuff and head to the parking lot. Katie pushes the button on her key fob to unlock her battered, yellow Beetle, and the alarm starts blaring as all the lights flash.
“When are you going to get that thing fixed?” Sam yells, slapping her palms over her ears.
Katie clicks the key fob again, and the shrieking stops. “Sorry.”
Sam looks the Beetle over with disdain. “We definitely need a new ride.”
“You don’t like it, you can walk,” Katie says defensively, patting her car on the roof like a dog as she pulls open the driver’s door. “So, what happened?” she asks me as we climb in.
I slouch into the backseat. “He says he still loves me.”
“Don’t do it, Lexie,” Sam warns, strapping herself in shotgun.
I tip my head back into my seat and stare at the stained roof of Katie’s car. “Why did he have to turn out to be such a douche?”
Sam slouches deeper into her seat. “The sad truth is, I think it’s in the DNA—somewhere in that Y chromosome is the douche-bag gene.”
I lean my head into the window and close my eyes, focusing on making the twenty minutes to my house without crying. I know it’s over. I’ve known it for months, but somehow time isn’t making it easier. Whoever said time heals all wounds was a big, fat liar. My heart still remembers what we had and how it felt to lose it.
When Katie drops me at home, Trent’s motorcycle is in the driveway, but the house is quiet.
“If that stepbrother of yours is looking for an end-of-the-summer fling,” Sam says, flicking a glance at the bike as I get out, “you know where to send him.”
I roll my eyes at her.
She leans out her window. “You think I’m joking, but I’m going to jump that boy’s bones sooner or later.”
“He’s probably out with his friends,” I say, waving a hand at the house. “Go find him and jump away.”
She bangs the side of the car with her palm. “Go fuck some Italian boys and forget about your dirtbag ex.” She grins. “And send pictures!”
I lean in and hug her, then move around to Katie’s side, where she’s out of the car, waiting. “Thanks for taking me shopping,” I say, looping an arm around her shoulders.
She hugs me back. “I’m so jealous.”
I pull away and smile. “I’ll be in touch.”
She climbs back into her seat. “You better.” There’s a waver in her voice, and I realize she’s tearing up.
“I will. And I’ll see you when I’m home for winter break.”
“Bring home a hot Italian!” Sam calls from across the car.
I can’t help cracking a smile as I turn for the house. I slide my key into the front lock and pushed the door open, then wave at Katie and Sam. Katie gives a bleep of her horn, and they pull away from the curb. I watch until they disappear around the corner, then head upstairs.
I climb the stairs to my room two at a time and dump my bags on the floor near my closet. But what Rick said keeps cycling through my brain.
I still have the ring. It and my heart will always be yours.
I thought we’d be together forever. But then he ripped my heart out in the most humiliating way possible. I don’t think I love him anymore . . . but what if I never find anyone else? What if that was my one shot at true love? We were so happy. Why did he have to fuck it all up?
“Damn you!” I grab a picture frame off my dresser—one that has a picture of me, Sam, and Katie at graduation that I put in over the top of a portrait of me and Rick at prom—and heave it at the wall between Trent’s room and mine. It shatters, leaving a gash in the blue paint next to my collage of favorite sketches.
I sink into a sobbing heap on the carpet, glad I have the house to myself. I don’t need an audience for my meltdown.
“Lexie?”
Trent’s voice comes through the door, but I can’t catch my breath to answer. So much for no audience.
The door hinges creak as he pushes it open and pokes his head through the crack. He has a minor case of bed-head—his chocolate brown curls smashed on one side—and his wrinkled gray Loyola Wrestling T-shirt and well-worn jeans look slept in. “Hey, you okay?”
“Yeah . . . great,” I heave between sobs.
“That was stupid. Sorry.” He comes into the room and crouches next to me, rubbing my back.
I wipe my forearm under my nose. “Sorry to wake you up.”
His deep brown eyes are all concern. “No biggie. What happened?”
“Nothing.” But then Rick’s face when he said he still loved me flashes in my mind, and I heave another sob.
“Come here,” Trent says, pulling me off the floor by a hand. He tows me to the bed and sits, pulling me down next to him. I tuck my head against his solid chest, and he wraps me in his strong arms and rocks me like a baby. He hums as he rocks me, and I know the tune instantly. My heart melts a little, remembering the first time he ever sang it to me, four years ago.
Trent’s thing, like his mom’s, is music. Julie teaches piano, and by the time I met Trent the summer before his freshman year, he could play almost anything. When our parents got married two years later, Julie tried to teach me, but I don’t really have the patience for sitting at the piano for a half hour each day to practice, so after about a year of trying, she finally stopped forcing it on me. But Trent couldn’t get enough. He taught himself guitar and started his first garage band that year. They played together all through high school. Now he’s a music performance major at Loyola. With my fetish for the visual arts and his for music, between the two of us, we have the arts pretty well covered.
All my tight muscles begin to soften as his fingers knead my shoulders. This is what only he can do for me. What he’s
always
done for me.
Dad and Julie started dating the summer before I started eighth grade. By the time they got married, when I was fifteen and a half and Trent had just turned sixteen, we all knew each other pretty well.
Trent and I got comfortable around each other pretty quickly, even before we were officially a family. We’d hang out and play Warcraft when our parents were on dates, and one or the other of us would just start talking. A lot of the time it was about our parents. I’d gone through a rough patch around that time, missing the mother I never knew and blaming myself that she was dead—which the shrink said was partly because there was a new mother figure in my life and partly because of my raging hormones and my growing awareness of my own mortality. Put whatever psychobabble label you want on it, all I knew was I hurt. I’d tell Trent how I thought I killed my mom by being born and how I wondered if that made me a murderer. He said it didn’t, but I always thought he only said it to make me feel better. I’d usually end up curled around him in his beanbag chair after I started crying.
Other times, he would talk about how his dad and his new wife wanted him to go live there with his twin half brothers. I begged him not to, and he said he never would. He told me how his father used to take him to his peewee baseball games on Saturdays when he was little, and how there was a “friend” that he always met there while Trent’s team played. And how he’d tell Trent to stay put with the other kids while he helped his “friend” with something at her car. And how he left for work the day after Trent’s seventh birthday and never came home. And how all Trent really remembered was Julie’s crying all the time. And how his dad and his “friend” had the twins just a few months later and got married as soon as the divorce was final.
From there, we just started telling each other everything else. He’s the only one who knows all the sordid details of my love life—things too embarrassing for even Sam and Katie. I’ve confided all of it to Trent, in detail. Like how, graduation night of our junior year, when Rick and I were in the backseat of his dad’s car in the process of trying to lose our virginity, he couldn’t figure out the condom in the dark and ended up tearing it. And how we’d done it anyway, without protection. When my period was three days late, Trent had been right there with me, sweating out each day until it came. He had gotten in Rick’s face when we started dating at the end of sophomore year and gave him the standard brotherly warning about treating me right. And when Rick screwed around on me, Trent made good on his promise and decked him.
But that’s just the kind of guy Trent is.
With effortless charm, classic good looks, a quick wit, and an impeccable sense of style, he’s basically a six-foot, two-hundred-pound people magnet. I doubt there’s anyone who’s ever spent more than five minutes with him who doesn’t consider him a friend.
He graduated from high school the year before me and left a wide swath of broken hearts in his wake. I’m convinced that more than half of my friends in high school were only friends with me because they hoped I’d hook them up with him. “I can’t believe you’re related to Trent Sorenson! He’s so hot!” is all I ever heard, even from Sam and Katie. Hell, I’d even crushed on him a little when our parents first started dating.
Though he’s not one to kiss and tell, I get the solid sense that the trend of endless friends and countless broken hearts has continued into his first three years in college. But what I know that no one else does is that things aren’t as easy for Trent as he makes them seem.
Only I know how deep his father’s leaving cut. He hated his dad so much that, when our parents got married, he wanted mine to adopt him, but his dad wouldn’t let that happen. Trent feels like his father made him an accomplice in his mom’s undoing. No matter how many times I tell him it wasn’t his fault, he beats himself up constantly for not having seen what was going on. And he’s never told anyone else, including Julie, what happened during all those peewee baseball games. He feels
that
guilty.
Only I know that the reason he’s never panned out to be the college wrestler everyone thought he would be is that his heart just isn’t in it. He’s wanted to quit since freshman year to focus on his music, and the only reason he hasn’t is because he’s afraid to disappoint Dad.
Only I know that since sophomore year at Loyola, he’s wanted to quit school altogether, but he knows how much that would disappoint Julie, who thinks any musician worth his salt needs classic training.
He’s miserable, and only I know it.
But our
big
secret—the one we spit swore to each other we’d take to our graves? We were each other’s first kiss.
It was the day after my fifteenth birthday, about five months before Dad married Julie, and it was one of my bad days. I was in Trent’s lap in his beanbag, crying over how I’d killed my mother fifteen years earlier, and he wiped the tears off my face and told me everything was going to be okay. He rubbed my back and pulled me to his shoulder, and the next thing I knew, we were kissing. The kiss was tender and sweet, and it lasted for a long time. I still remember how gentle his hands felt as he hugged me closer and that his lips tasted like bubble gum. But the instant it was over, we knew it was wrong. He just looked at me for a minute, then cleared his throat, and said, “We can’t do that anymore.”
I nodded, we spit in our palms and shook on it, and that was that.
It’s always been easy to talk to Trent. Just knowing he loves me unconditionally—that he’ll never judge me, and I don’t have to hide who I am from him—it makes me feel understood. And he’s never stopped holding me when I’m upset. Like now.
“I’m guessing this is about Rick,” he says, and I hear the edge to his voice.
I hiccup and nod.
“What me to kick his ass again?”
I snivel. “Would you?”
“Anything for you, Lexie,” he says with a squeeze of my shoulders. “Tell me the whole sad story.”
I love how my name sounds when he says it. When he sings, his voice gets a little gravelly when he gets to the really emotional parts, and he says my name like that, with just a hint of gravel.
I breathe deep to get my thoughts straight. “Sam, Katie, and I went to the Applebee’s at the mall. I didn’t know he was working there this summer.”