Forbidden Love (5 page)

“We slept together, in one crib,” she said.
“Feet to head, head to feet. Those feet that stank of summer sweat.
That head with the fuzz that didn’t grow hair until she was three.
She was always in my space. We should’ve been twins, but she was
too stubborn…wanted her own birthday.”

Trisha went on, giving her character, her
brother Lucas, the poetic authority he would have with that nimble
brain of his if he didn’t wrestle so much with the emotional aspect
of expression. Lucas talked about his brothers’ hazing, which
happened every time their mother was tending to their baby
sister—the time they put him in a plastic laundry basket and sent
him sledding down the stairs, and the time they sliced up the
family’s pet frog and tried to feed the parts to him. He described
Trisha’s incessant crying and on the nights when their father was
at the restaurant, their mother having to load all four kids in the
car and drive up and down Route 128 to get her to sleep. He
explained how her being born meant that he would have a built-in
best friend for life. He explained how her being born meant that he
would never be alone or misunderstood. He explained how her being
born was like his being born all over again, just without
flaws.

As Trisha ended her soliloquy, she let the
environment leak back into her consciousness. The first face to
gain clarity was Rusty’s. He was staring at her with a soft, almost
frightened expression, eyes wide. She squinted. Were they—watery,
even?

Trisha’s classmates applauded. She felt
gratified.

“Well,” Rusty said.

He cleared his throat and smoothed down his
shirt. Trisha thought about the defined chest and abdomen beneath
it.

“Well. I appreciate your—” He paused. “Your
honesty.”

But Trisha knew that she had flustered him
somehow, and this delighted her. She was able to concentrate for
the remainder of the class, even laugh at Jasper Weinstein’s
imitation of his Uncle Jasper, after whom he was named, who jumped
off a local bridge into a river with a beer in his hand in homage
to the first boy born to the family in five years. By the time the
class came to a close, Trisha had psyched herself up for a night of
selfish rehab in her room. She would write cathartic letters of
insult to the last three guys who had screwed her over, read the
letters out loud, douse them to mush in one of the bathroom sinks,
then order cartons of crab rangoon and vegetable fried rice and
online shop while she listened to show tunes.

Trisha left the room, making sure she was
deep in conversation with a couple of her theatre friends, and
envisioned Rusty looking wistfully after her. She decided to take
one of the back stairwells out of the building and walk alongside
the campus arboretum instead of up the central quad pathway. As she
hit the first floor landing, she heard her name behind her.

“Trisha. Wait up,” Rusty said, as he hurried
down the steps two at a time.

Oh—you’re finally humbling yourself to greet
me? Trisha thought. She considered pretending not to have heard
him. But he shouted again, and so she waited for him, leaning
against the wall with her arms folded.

“Hi,” he said, as he came to a stop in front
of her.

She averted her eyes so that she wouldn’t
have to look directly at his, those hauntingly tropical blue gems
that would lure her right back in if she stared into them long
enough. “What do you want?” she asked.

“Oh, come on,” he said gently. “Are you
really going cold on me? You know I couldn’t let on that I know you
like I do. It wouldn’t be professional. I’d probably get
fired.”

“Very logical explanation. Did you rehearse
that?”

Rusty reached out and touched her arm. “Of
course not. Look—I’m sorry for being such a dick.”

She flinched away. “You knew that you were
teaching that course, and you knew I was a theatre major. And you
didn’t say a word about any of it the other night. Don’t you think
that was a small detail I would’ve been interested in?”

Rusty smiled as if to say, You caught me.
“Would you have freaked out if you knew? Would you have been able
to concentrate on us, on the beautiful music we were making?”

Trisha glared at him. “Let me remind you that
you kicked my ass to the curb.”

Rusty sighed. He backed away a step or two
and leaned against the railing opposite her. “I know. Let me
explain that.”

“I’m not sure you can,” Trisha said. She
would stay offended. She wouldn’t let him romance her again. She
couldn’t go through yet another round of mortification that would
inevitably wind up in more self-hatred.

Rusty put his fingers to his forehead. “I got
a phone call.”

“No shit.”

“Let me talk,” he said, not meanly. He looked
distressed.

Trisha reminded herself to be careful—he was
an actor, just like her.

“I got a phone call. From my aunt, back in
Clifton Park. She and my uncle call me all the goddamn time. They
don’t leave me alone. This is the first time I’ve been away—really
away from them. I went to Bard for undergrad and lived at
home.”

Trisha’s eyebrows popped up, almost
involuntarily. Okay, so why the weird, helicoptered childhood,
then? Rusty was taking on a kind of vulnerable expression, pinches
in the skin around his eyes.

“I lived at home because…because of my
brother.” Rusty paused. “He can’t take care of himself.”

Trisha stared at him. Was he for real? His
expression hadn’t twitched. Could they actually share something so
life-changing, so unusual, in common?

Rusty fiddled with his college ring. “My
brother—Hadden—he has Fragile X Syndrome.”

Trisha didn’t know what that was. At the risk
of sounding ignorant, she decided just to let Rusty go on.

“Hadden’s basically mentally retarded. He has
all these language and emotional issues, and he goes on these
horrible—I don’t know what to call them—like, mad binges, where he
fights with my aunt and uncle over the smallest things, then runs
out of the house and shows up to places, looking for trouble…”

Rusty sat down on the top step of the
staircase that led down to the exit. He stroked his fingers through
his hair and scratched his head, as though thinking and talking
about his brother rendered him totally bewildered. In a matter of
moments, he had dropped the arrogant act. Trisha lowered herself
beside him on the landing.

“So the other night, he escaped again, and
ended up in the 24-hour convenience store downtown, about four
miles away, and wove a bottle of ammonia and a lighter at the
cashier. He was screaming his head off in gibberish. The guy behind
the counter pushed the silent alarm and the police showed up.”

“Oh, my God,” Trisha said. For all of the
social inadequacies Lucas battled, and for all of the people who
gave him funny looks or ignored him, he wasn’t violent or
threatening. She felt her heart loosening.

“All the years I was home, I took care of
this shit,” Rusty said. “I’ve been away for five months, and I’m
telling you, they call me every fucking day about something going
wrong. They don’t know how to handle him. They say they don’t know
what he likes to eat, how he likes his clothes folded, how much
toothpaste he likes on his toothbrush. I feel like saying, where
the fuck have you been for the past five years, man? Haven’t you
paid attention at all?” Rusty slammed a fist onto his knee. He was
breathing furiously through his nostrils. “It’s so damn
unfair.”

Trisha gingerly touched his shoulder. “I’m
sorry,” she said. And she was.

“I can’t start a life like this,” he said. “I
need to be able to start a fucking life. I want to go to New York,
to start auditioning the minute I get out of here next year. But
that’s looking impossible.”

Trisha bit her lip, holding herself back from
asking a question she wasn’t sure she should ask. As if he
understood the meaning of her silence, Rusty turned and looked her
in the eyes.

“My parents are dead,” he said. “They died
when the balcony they were standing on at a wedding broke right
under their feet. Twenty-two people plunged into the rocks and the
sea below them—three people made it out alive. My mother and father
insisted on going to that stupid wedding in the Hamptons, the son
of an old fraternity buddy of my dad’s. That friendship was for
show. They actually always hated each other because my dad’s friend
always wanted my mother but would never admit it. So that’s where
that friendship got them. Fucking stone cold dead.”

Trisha’s head was whirling with the intensity
of everything. Rusty’s story had come on like some monsoon, sending
her whole sense of what had happened between them off-kilter. They
were alone in the stairwell, and she had no one to verify what she
was hearing, no one to give her a sideways glance to say, this
guy’s the real deal: tortured, trapped, and seeking companionship.
Give him a break.

Rusty was surveying her face, which she hoped
appeared to him as open and welcoming. She wasn’t entirely sure
what to say. Rusty raised a hand to her cheek and scooped away a
lock of hair that had clung to her jaw. His touch, after all of her
anger about the weekend fiasco, and after all that he had revealed,
sent shivers through her. Those eyes, she thought. Those goddamn
beautiful eyes. They’re going to suck me right back in.

“After you talked about your brother, I knew
you’d understand me.” His voice was calmer now. “I had to come
after you and tell you why—why I’m so fucking crazy. I felt like we
could…” He trailed off.

Trisha swallowed. Rusty kept his hand
hovering near her cheek. “We could what?” she asked, needing him to
finish his thought.

He curved his hand around her neck and pulled
her to him. The sultriness of his lips caught her off guard, and
she nearly slid from the step. But his arms reigned her in. He held
her, tenderly, letting his mouth sit on hers and unleashing a long,
lazy breath of pure relief. In return, she inhaled him, at once
scolding herself for her own weakness and thanking some higher
power for this second chance.

They kissed, and kissed, and kissed. They
leaned into one another and against the stairs for what seemed like
hours. Once, they heard a set of heavy corridor doors creak open
and slam somewhere above them, and they both looked up, startled;
but whoever it was clomped down only one flight and disappeared
down the second floor hallway. Trisha had never felt so settled in
a kiss, so comfortable, as though she were lounging in the sun on a
white-sanded beach somewhere, or simply breathing to exist, or
completely suspended in time without one human concern. She loved
that he took his time. Unlike a few nights ago, there was nothing
frantic, now. His agenda felt different.

But Trisha knew that things were changing
when Rusty trailed a finger from her jaw line to her neck, and dug
into the folds of her scarf. He began to unwind it, all the while
brushing her collarbone and triggering tiny shocks through her
chest.

“You must be hot,” he whispered into her
ear.

The hair on Trisha’s arms rose. In a cogent
moment, she opened her eyes wide and looked around.

“We’re in a stairwell,” she said.

“Yes, my dear. What a brilliant observation.”
He was nuzzling her. “I like my student actors to be aware of their
surroundings, always, to take note of the real-life stage that they
can bring to their dramatic one, to recreate life as accurately as
possible…”

Trisha laughed. “You’re full of shit, sir.”
Damn—he made her feel so playful, so sexy! That conniving bastard.
She was beginning to forget her scorching shame from a few nights
earlier.

“You’re right! Another brilliant
observation.” Rusty unbuttoned her coat and pushed both flaps
aside. He brought her in closer by the waist. She sensed the heat
brewing between them. “You ever made love in a school
building?”

Trisha’s heartbeat stopped for a millisecond,
and when it resumed, it banged clumsily, warning her that Rusty was
a guy who got what he wanted. Could he be serious? Screwing on the
stairs in the performing arts center, in the late afternoon, with
the enthusiasm of amateur actors and musicians echoing from
practically every classroom? Something about the prospect incited a
flicker of excitement between her legs. She squeezed them together,
not sure she should surrender to the urge.

“We can’t,” Trisha whispered. His hands were
on her thighs, now. “I thought you said you’d get fired if anyone
knew about us.”

He smiled cunningly and slid his hand onto
her breast. “As you said, I guess I’m just full of shit.”

With his left arm, in one nimble motion, he
swung her on top of him. She straddled him, and he stirred in
response. He put his hands on her buttocks.

“This is more like it,” he said. “You’re
snapping me out of my bad mood, baby.”

Trisha found herself once again in awe of his
striking looks and his power over her. Now she had an explanation
for why he had been such an asshole, and it was a valid one. Maybe
she wouldn’t try to rationalize why she shouldn’t get roped back
in, maybe she would just let herself go, maybe this could be the
adventure, and eventually the sure thing, that she had been
searching for.