Save Yourself (20 page)

“So you thought you’d try the garage. Thinking out of the box, huh?”

“Yeah, well. We haven’t used it much lately.”

There was a beat. “Right.” Her eyes were moving in great, interested sweeps, taking in every detail of the windowless concrete room.

He hated the way he felt. He hated that he wasn’t telling her to go away. “Welcome to the death garage. You want the tour?”

She didn’t even blush. “Thanks, I think I’ve seen what there is to see.” Reaching into the box, she pulled out a black leather belt with an elaborate chrome buckle. “Can I have this?” He shrugged. “Whose truck is that?”

“My brother’s.”

She strapped the belt around her waist, letting it dangle loose. It looked cool like that and he found himself remembering a moment in the car when she’d been on his lap and he’d slid his hands under her ass, lifting her, pulling her closer. “So your brother’s a huge shiny truck guy,” she said.

Mike’s truck was, indeed, huge and shiny, with oversized tires and the largest risers legally allowed by the state of Pennsylvania. Patrick had hated driving it even before he hated driving. “I guess so.”

“Is he compensating for a small penis?”

“His car payment is certainly enormous.”

“Foolish, foolish humans.”

“Look who’s talking.” He pointed toward her car, parked at the curb. “If that thing cost your parents less than thirty grand, I’m a flying monkey.”

“If God didn’t want me to drive a nice car, he wouldn’t have made all those teenaged virgins buy my dad’s purity rings,” she said primly. “Sometimes they even have ceremonies where the dads put them on the girls’ fingers. It’s like a wedding, except ickier.”

He looked at her hand. “I notice you’re not wearing one.”

“Not my scene,” she said, with no small amount of smug satisfaction. “Whose stuff is all this, anyway?”

“Guess,” he said, and she said, “That’s what I thought. Won’t he eventually need it?”

“That’s why I’m going through it instead of just throwing it away.”

“Does it make you sad?”

“It makes me wish I’d busted his ass more about cleaning up.”

“Personally, I would have focused on the drunk driving,” she said.

He stared at her, stunned. “You and your refreshing candor can fuck right off.”

She didn’t even flinch. “If you weren’t already thinking it, you should have been. Hey, does the inside of your house smell as bad as the garage?”

She stood up and walked through the basement door. He scrambled to his feet, but he was too late, and she had a head start. He felt angry and nervous and like he wanted to grab her and—he didn’t even know what he wanted to do. He’d never hit a girl and couldn’t imagine himself doing it but a pressure was building inside him, a dull, base something that strained and pushed and wanted out. He made it through the basement door just in time to see her combat boots disappearing up the stairs. By the time he caught up to her, she was in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards.

“You have five packages of ramen noodles and no spices,” she reported.

“I didn’t say you could come in.”

“I didn’t ask your permission.” She closed the cupboard and opened the refrigerator. “Beer, apricot jam, ketchup. Why are you not dead of malnutrition?”

He reached across her to close the refrigerator—uncomfortably aware of the proximity of her breasts to his arm—but she was already gone, into the living room. “Oh, this is rich. All you eat is ramen, but you have digital cable? And why is there an ice chest in here?”

“For beer,” Patrick said, and she laughed.

“In case you can’t walk the ten feet to the fridge?” Layla opened the chest, peered inside, and then closed it again. “You’re right. This is about as far from a wonderland as you can get. What’s the upstairs like?”

He tried to grab her arm, but those combat boots of hers were nimble. He caught up to her in the doorway to Mike’s old room, which had become the room where they threw shit, and then he did grab her arm. Harder than he meant to, probably. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’re leaving.”

“No, I’m not.” Her arm moved, pushing against his gripping thumb, and suddenly he wasn’t holding her anymore. “I’m helping you see things with new eyes.” She scanned the room disinterestedly—the CDs and cheesecake posters left over from Mike’s high school days, the fake tree Caro had made them buy last Christmas, the blanket tacked up over the window to block the light—then moved down the hall to Mike’s current room, where she picked up one of the sequined throw pillows and made a puking noise. “Pretty. Whose room is this? Not yours.”

“Mike and Caro’s.” The thing inside him was growing.

She turned to look at him. “That would be your brother, and the girl who cheated on him with you?”

“My brother,” he said, taking the pillow away from her, “and his girlfriend.”

She smiled. “Whatever you say.” She started to walk around the room, picking things up and putting them down again. “Do you
think they have anything interesting in here? Sex toys or porn or something?”

If Mike and Caro had any sex toys, he didn’t want to see them. She opened the closet and examined Caro’s clothes. Standing by and letting her do it felt like showing her a love letter. He knew he should stop her but he didn’t seem to be able to. Layla pulled out a flowered sundress that Patrick had seen Caro wear a few times; it had a way of floating around her knees that he remembered. Layla held the dress up to her own body and made a face. “Yikes. I’m guessing no on the sex toys. What is she, a grade school teacher?”

“No,” Patrick said. “She’s a waitress.”

Layla looked at the tag in the back of the dress and then tossed it on the bed. “Size eight. At least she’s not anorexic.” She moved on to the nightstand, opening the drawer and looking inside. “Birth control pills, lip balm, boring, boring, boring. Not even a bottle of lube.” She pointed to a picture on top of the nightstand. Mike and Caro at the restaurant Christmas party, Caro wearing a Santa hat. “That’s her?”

“You know it is.”

She made a noncommittal noise and then drifted over to the dresser, where Caro’s makeup was stuffed into a wicker basket. “Wicker.” She shuddered, but started to dig through the jumble of bottles and tubes and plastic cases anyway. “Wicker is the anti-goth. If you line it with pink gingham, it’s like goth kryptonite. This room looks like somebody bought the bed-in-a-bag sales display at Wal-Mart.”

Patrick was pretty sure that was exactly what Caro had done. “Not everybody can afford thirty-thousand-dollar cars.”

“I don’t think you get to play the poor card with digital cable downstairs and that monstrosity parked in the driveway.” Layla fished out a tube of lipstick, inspected the end, and uncapped it.

“Goddamn it,” he said, and tried to take the tube from her, but she squirmed away from him onto the bed and kneeled in the middle of it. He could have grabbed for her but it would have been too easy to
overbalance and end up with both of them on the bed. She smeared Caro’s lipstick over her lips, a deep, strawberry pink that looked odd with her heavy eyeliner and black clothes.

“Get off there,” he said, and she said, “Make me.” He saw from her parted lips and the arch of her back and the way her hands lay against her thighs that she’d had exactly the same thought he’d had about what might happen if he grabbed for her. Her eyes dared him.

He could, he thought. He could grab for her.

Then she tossed him the lipstick, and slipped easily off the other side of the bed, next to the dresser. She picked up a bottle of Caro’s perfume, sniffed the cap, and then nodded approvingly and sprayed her neck. “Not bad. Hey, close your eyes.”

“If I do, will you get the hell out of here?” he said.

“Just do it.”

He closed his eyes. He heard a rustle as she moved closer to him. Then he smelled lipstick and Caro’s perfume, woodsy and sweet and totally unlike Layla’s rich spiciness; felt breath on his neck, and before he could react a pair of warm, sticky lips pressed themselves under his ear. He could feel her body down the length of his—soft places and hard places—and his hands went to her hips, where they’d been wanting to go since the moment she’d put on the belt. Right at the top, where they started to swell out. She bit his earlobe. Layla’s sharp teeth, Layla’s quick tongue. But the smell in his nose was all Caro, not just her perfume but the smell of the room itself, laundry detergent and that carpet crap she used in here and sex.

“You want me to put on the sundress?” Layla whispered in his ear.

He kind of did. “Very funny.” His voice sounded a little thick. The thing inside him broke the surface and he kissed her. Caro’s lipstick felt smooth and satiny between their lips; Layla’s mouth opened and her hands went to the back of his head. He felt like he wasn’t behind the wheel anymore, somebody else was driving and he was just along for the ride. He opened his eyes enough to see Caro’s sundress,
lying where Layla had thrown it, and was filled with a perverse desire to throw Layla herself down on top of it. For a moment he was afraid he was going to.

Then she pulled back. “Show me your room,” she said, and laced her fingers through his.

So he led her down the hall, blood rushing in his ears. When they got there, she said, “Now this feels like you.”

“How’s that,” he said. Trying as hard as he could to take control again, to put on the brakes.

“Chaotic. It’s good, though. I like chaos.” She lay down on his bed and propped her boots up on the windowsill. Her shirt had pulled up slightly when she lay down; her fingers drummed impatiently against the exposed flesh, as if to call attention to it. She looked as though she had no intention of getting up, soon or ever, and her expression was so blatantly come-hither that part of him wanted to laugh.

But that baser place in his brain said,
Hey, why not
. There were thousands of reasons why not—he didn’t have time, he didn’t like her, she wasn’t who he wanted, it could get him arrested—but in the end, Patrick went to her. Right there, on his rumpled, unmade bed. Right where he had been with Caro, right where she had left him.
I will not fuck this girl
, he told himself, over and over again. As he pulled her shirt the rest of the way off, as she reached behind her back and unhooked the red bra, he kept his eyes closed. He didn’t want to know what she looked like naked, didn’t want to be able to call up her image later, when he was alone. The feel of her nipples under his palms, the way she shivered as his fingers moved over her ribs—that was bad enough. But she didn’t feel bad, her hands, her mouth.
I will not fuck this girl
. As she unzipped his jeans, as he let her. He didn’t tell her to do that. She did it on her own.
I will not
. She lowered herself down and took him into her mouth and his thoughts turned to noise, a rushing torrent of pleasure and disgust. There was no telling where one feeling broke off and the other began. The monster that had been growing inside him since the moment he’d seen her—since before
that, since the car, since the long night of dreams, since Caro—raged, but Layla herself was warm and smooth and disturbingly practiced. He could have said
stop
but he didn’t, he said nothing at all, her hands ran over his hip bones and the only thing he said was in his mind, where she couldn’t hear it.

I will not fuck this girl
.

Sensation shot through him, cold like steel but good. Blankness behind his eyes, abstract shapes of no-color on the insides of his eyelids.

When the burst had subsided he felt her tongue trace the length of his torso, her warm body moving to nestle in the crook of his arm. Without opening his eyes he reached for the sheet and pulled it over the two of them. He’d just come in her mouth but he still didn’t want to see her naked. That base part of his brain had gone quiet, the monster had vanished. Where the raging torrent had been was nothing but silence. It was like jerking off—the burst of pleasure, and then the quiet loneliness—but a thousand times worse. The arm around her was his arm and the hand at the end of it stroked her shoulder as if of its own accord. Miserably, he wondered how soon he could get her to leave.

“There,” she said, and the self-satisfied tone in her voice reassured him. This girl was no innocent, no shy little thing. “How was that?”

“Good.” The word was hard to get out. Nothing in him seemed to work the way it should.

“I thought you’d like it.” Now that she was covered, he opened his eyes. All he could see of her was her scalp and her blond roots. He’d dated girls who spent their whole paychecks to get their hair that color, and Layla dyed hers black. Who was this girl, why was she in his life, why was he allowing her to be? “I guess I’m not too young after all, am I?”

The last of the anger faded and all that was left was guilt and the sudden awareness that when he’d been eighteen, Layla had been nine. “No,” he said, “you’re definitely too young.”

She rolled over, folded her arms on his chest, and rested her chin on her hands, her black camera-lens eyes fixed on him. “Maybe you’re too old. Have you ever considered that?”

“I consider that all the time.”

“Chronology is irrelevant.”

“I think the legal system feels differently.”

“The legal system can eat me. As if the moment I turn eighteen, I’ll magically become capable of reason, but in the meantime my poor little underage brain is nothing but pudding.” She ran a hand over his chest. “I know what I want. As you may have noticed.”

He sighed. “You have some very strange ideas about pillow talk, you know that?”

“And you have some very strange ideas about when it’s appropriate to be miserable. You’re acting like you just got a root canal instead of a blow job.”

“Sorry,” he said.

She traced his collarbone with one finger and even as the motion sent a shiver rippling up his spine, he noticed that her whole postcoital thing had come straight from Hollywood: the folded arms, the finger on the collarbone. Except it couldn’t be postcoital because there’d been no coitus. Technically.

I did not fuck this girl
, he told himself.

“Do you love her?” she asked.