In any other company, I would have laughed, but with the steel-toe-ball-kicking image fresh in my mind, I vowed to never piss Julia off in person. “You study at a graveyard?” I asked, genuinely curious because I’d seen a lot of things in my days, but this was a first.
“It’s quiet,” she answered simply, pulling a hoodie that was five times too big over her head.
There were about a dozen follow up questions to this, but I knew I didn’t want to unravel the reasoning of a madwoman. Julia studied at the graveyard. Good enough for me—case closed.
“Oh, real quick,” Julia said suddenly, snapping her fingers. “Could you turn around for a moment? While you’re still feeling generous?”
Going with my two prior mental notes regarding Julia, I did as commanded, not having a clue as to why. “This what you had in mind?” I asked, spreading my hands to the side like I was about to be frisked. For all Hades knew, I could have been.
“Damn,” Julia said finally, sounding like she’d just run a few miles. “You should wear jeans of the butt hugging variety more often.” I’d never enjoyed being objectified less. “I feel a bout of inspiration. Should make for some particularly dark poetry.”
“Dark poetry and a graveyard?” Emma said, clucking her tongue. “Jules, you’re too predictable.”
I caught Julia flick a wink back at Emma right before she grabbed a handful of my right buttock. “Bon Appetit.”
Julia’s goodbyes were just as warm and conventional as her greetings. The door slammed shut—one befuddling woman down, one more to go.
“Sorry about that. She can be a little rough around the edges, but she’s got a heart the size of Africa,” Emma said, tucking a leg underneath her as she plopped down on her bed.
“Sandpaper’s rough around the edges. That girl’s a frickin’ Sherman tank plowing you over. And then she puts it in reverse just to make sure she got you good and flat,” I said, looking for a place to sit. I wanted to sit next to her on the bed, but knew this would make her uncomfortable, and I most definitely did not what to sit on whatever voodoo witch magic was infecting Julia’s bed, so I did what I rarely do and took the middle ground.
I hooked the computer chair with my leg and scooted it towards Emma. “You weren’t in class today,” I stated, the fact that she was wearing a pair of boxers that were made for someone twice her size, coupled with a Stanford Football sweatshirt, hitting me. It was a mix of emotions, seeing what she wore to bed at night, but realizing these were Ty’s.
“You noticed,” she said, fidgeting with the hem of the tent sized sweatshirt.
“It’s my job to notice,” I said. Her eyes flashed to mine, something unreadable in them. “As your Love Project partner, that is.”
The warmth flooded over the unreadable in her eyes. Crash landing averted. “Thanks for checking on me. I just wasn’t feeling well enough to go to class today.”
“And you’re the kind of girl who wouldn’t skip a class even if she woke up and discovered her arms had been sewn to the carpet,” I said, scooting a couple inches closer because I couldn’t help it. I was magnetic and she was metal, or maybe she was the magnet and I was metal. Whatever I was, I was drawn to her on a subconscious level. “So I’m not buying you woke up this morning and had a scratchy throat so you decided to skip a Monday’s worth of classes. Spill your guts.”
“Not feeling well doesn’t only relate to the physical you know,” she said, grabbing her pillow and folding it into her stomach.
I was thrown by her sudden flash of vulnerability. Emma showed the least vulnerability of anyone, man or woman, I’d ever known. So of course that meant she was likely the most vulnerable.
“Don’t I know it,” I said, following her lead down vulnerability lane. “I’m so mental I was the test subject for half the psychology books on the market. My ‘sick days’ are what my brothers like to call mental health days.” Actually, they called every day a mental health day when it came to my life, but I didn’t feel the need to elaborate on that.
She threw me a sympathetic smile, but even that was rimmed in sadness. There was a story, a long, detailed one, behind why the never-seen-a-B-on-a-report-card girl was hiding in her dorm room on a glorious California fall day. However, I was smart enough to know if she wasn’t going to elaborate, I wasn’t going to push it.
“Thanks for everything,” she said finally. “The flowers, the shirt, the apology. You’re kind of special, you know that?” she said, unable to meet my eyes.
“Special ed, right?” I said, beating her to the punch.
“No,” she said, “
special,
special.” She continued, clarifying everything, “you have a gift for drawing people to you—it’s like everyone you pass has to look.”
“It’s my mad fashion sense,” I said, never one for deflecting a compliment, but the sincerity of Emma’s words and the tilt of her brow as she struggled to get it out had me squirming in my chair.
“I can see that,” she said, staring at my present attire. “But I think I understand it now. Why people are drawn to you without even knowing why.”
“Care to enlighten me?”
“It’s because you’re this giant, warm fuzzy,” she said, grinning at my expression of disbelief. “It’s impossible to not feel better when you’re around. Positively hopeless. I mean, I was feeling crappy. Like, crappy day of the decade award glum. And then in you stroll, smiling that one you’re sending my way now”—she thrust her hands at me in accusation—“and you’re acting all sympathetic, and understanding, and apologetic, and, well . . . perfect.”
“I’m not perfect,” I emphasized, raising my hand. “A far cry from it, in fact. A perfect guy wouldn’t have made you cry.”
“I made myself cry,” she replied. “You didn’t say anything that was untrue or overly harsh. I cried because I made myself cry.”
I couldn’t take the martyr thing any longer. I’d never been a fan of the whole taking-the-weight-of-the-world on my shoulders thing.
“You cried because I acted like a dickhead. I wish I could say that my actions and words Saturday night were selfless, only brought to the surface because I had your best interests in mind, but that would be a lie,” I began, wondering why, after a lifetime of striving to tell the truth, it was so darn hard right now. “When I lost it on Ty, and then lost it on you, I was focusing on my anger, my frustration, what I wanted. I wanted to believe I was doing what I was to help you, but I was only helping myself. And when he put his hands on you and threw you down, I saw red. I wanted to kill him right there, and I could have,” I continued, despite her eyes widening with each sentence. “But you know what was the number one reason I wanted to cease his existence?”
I didn’t expect her to answer, but she did. “Because you thought he hurt me?” Her voice sounded small, fragile. Like I could break it if I touched it with my pinky.
“No,” I admitted, shame slumping my head down. “If I was this special, perfect guy, that’s what it would have been. That’s what it
should
have been, but at the forefront of my mind, my primary justification for wanting to kill him was because I didn’t have a rat’s right to order him to never put his hands on you in that way again. That right belongs to a boyfriend, or a brother, or something else that I’m not.”
I didn’t want to look up. I was sure I’d perform hari kari on myself with the scissors sitting on her desk if I found her looking down on me with pity, or disappointment, or disgust. Although I knew I deserved it all. “So that’s why I lost it. There’s the boiled down truth. I saw the red door and wanted to paint it black because I had no rights to demand you be treated with respect, no rights to protect you.”
Her hand found mine, weaving its fingers through mine. Warmth flooded me, the kind that made it impossible to remember what cold felt like. “You’re my friend, Patrick,” she said, squeezing my hand. “That gives you every right.”
This whole conversation was beautiful, as intimate as I’d ever had with a woman, and, despite her assurances threatening to make a joke of my real-men-don’t-cry policy, I realized I’d skirted the real issue by not admitting that I didn’t only want the right to stand up for her, I wanted all of her.
These were two somewhat similar and very different things.
“I’ll remember that the next time Ty tries to throw you on your derriere again,” I said, reverting to lightheartedness when I felt anything but. “Wait, what am I talking about? There better not ever be a next time,” I growled, trying to block the image of Emma falling shock faced to the ground.
“There won’t be,” she whispered to herself.
“Wait,” I said, too good at interpreting the unsaid for my proverbial blood pressure’s sake. “He hasn’t done this before has he? Pushed you around?” I didn’t want to ask it because I knew if she confirmed he had, I’d be facing murder charges in about half an hour, but that was a secondary concern.
When she didn’t give me an immediate answer, I tilted her chin up with my hand until she was forced to look at me. “Emma?”
“No, never,” she answered. Her eyes didn’t dart to the side, she didn’t bite her lip, she didn’t run her fingers through her hair; nothing said she wasn’t telling the truth, and I would know. Being a strength instructor the better part of forever, I’d taught “Truth Detection and Lie Evasion” only about one thousand times to about ten thousand students. It was ingrained. “He was just so drunk Saturday night, drunker than I’ve ever seen him. He wasn’t acting like himself.”
“All due respect, Em,” I said, moving my hand from her chin because it was what I was supposed to do, not what I wanted to do. “But in my experience, alcohol doesn’t create a monster out of nothing. It only lets it off the chain.”
She sighed, folding herself around the pillow deeper. “Listen, could we not talk about Ty anymore? And by anymore, I mean never again. He’s my boyfriend and you’re my friend, but the two of you can’t tolerate each other, even in conversation, so I’m officially invoking my right to not discuss either of you in the other’s company because I refuse to forfeit either of you.”
The cell phone on her nightstand vibrated, earning a nervous glance from her before she turned it off without sparing a closer look at the caller ID. Chances are she already knew who it was and chances were the same I did too, but only seconds following her Ty-talk-off-limits ultimatum, I wasn’t going to say anything. “I want to keep you both,” she finished, a corner of her mouth lifting like she was guilty for wanting this.
I was nothing short of elated that she wanted to keep me in any way, so I tried not to agonize over her wanting to keep Ty too. A loser like that would dig his own grave eventually—he didn’t need any help from me. And from the look of his girlfriend’s face, he was one misstep away from hanging himself. And guess where I’d be? Right here, waiting for her. For as long as it took because, as hard as Emma tried to front that she didn’t feel it, the link tying us together was as undeniable as it was inescapable.
That might have been a cocky thing to assume, that this supreme specimen of a woman who was “officially” off the market had a gravitational pull towards me, but I knew few things better than women, and moments like this, when her eyes flitted away from me as quickly as they flickered to me, like she didn’t know where to look without giving herself away, told me what I needed to know.
Friends didn’t have a problem looking into each other’s eyes.
“Em, I’m yours to keep. I’m not going anywhere,” I said, contemplating rolling the last few inches to her bed. “So this is the last I’ll say about your soon-to-be ex,”—her eyes did a half roll—“I was in the wrong Saturday night, but so was he. One of the gazillion lessons my mother pounded into my brain was that it’s never okay to lay your hands on a woman in an angry way, so I’ll do my darndest not to badmouth him in front of you anymore, but fair warning that I won’t be able to control myself if he lays his hands on you again. I don’t care if it’s a rumor I hear in passing, I’ll throttle him.” I was giving the fanatic a little too much leash, so I reined him in, softening my threat with a smile. “Those are my terms. If those are acceptable, please make your mark here,” I said, tapping my cheek while flashing her a wicked grin. “With your lips.”
“My lips are off duty,” she said, wielding her pillow as a weapon. “This will just have to do.” The pillow grazed my face like she could hurt me with a feather stuffed rectangle of fabric. She could have cold-cocked me over the head with a duffel bag full of bricks and I wouldn’t have been phased.
“Did you just throw the opening swing in what is surely to become a world war of pillow fights?” I challenged, playfully grinding my fist into my other hand. “I’m not the kind of man to retreat from an attack, you know.” Shoving the chair back towards the desk, I grabbed the black satin pillow off Julia’s bed.
“Don’t. You. Dare,” Emma warned, pushing back into the corner of her bed.
“Nothing can save you now,” I said, wielding the pillow like it was Excalibur. “Any last words?” I asked, already mid-swing.
“Yeah,” she said as I suddenly found myself half-spread over her bed with her straddling me in the most chaste way I’d ever been straddled. Emma was wicked fast. And strong. “You shouldn’t mess with girls who grew up with four older brothers who served wet willies for breakfast.” Her brows popped twice as she grazed me again over the face with her pillow. I didn’t even make an attempt to stop her. Immortal instincts aside, I don’t think I could have.
Having her hovering above me, smiling the one only Emma could, pinned to the bed by her knees, the scent of her sheets—and these were only a few of the sensations that were intoxicating me—I laid beneath her like an old man on his death bed, happy to go out with his boots on.
But as soon as Emma moved to position herself off of me, my state of frozen drunkenness evaporated. Before she could right herself, I had her pinned back to the bed, although I took the chaste high road and only trapped her with my hands over her shoulders, despite my chest aching to pin her a few other ways too. She looked as surprised as I had moments ago, but managed to laugh through it, rolling side to side, trying to free herself.
“And you shouldn’t mess with the boy who weighed twenty pounds less than his three brothers who liked to use whatever limb they could to take out their internalized jealousy at me for being the good looking one in the family,” I said as sternly as a man could as he was being prodded in the sides. My laughter mixed with hers, until I was certain nothing could ruin this moment.