First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances (26 page)

“Shut up!” Darla said. “You don’t exactly announce that in front of cop central.” Evan glowered at her, but clammed up. She was right. A few hatted heads turned, eyes hidden behind sunglasses.

“I was in Arlington,” he continued, as if that explained anything.

“You were in Arlington? We...you don’t live anywhere
near
Arlington.”

“I have friends in lots of places,” he said smugly. He grinned like a character in a John Hughes movie, the pastel-suited guy with the feathered, flippy hair. The guy you knew—
you knew
—within three seconds of his introduction, was going to be the bad guy.

I went cold. “What kind of drug, exactly, were you ‘storing’?”

He shrugged. “Some heroin.”

“Oh, God,” Darla groaned. I joined her.

“Fuck off,” he sputtered.

“Well, good luck getting home. Call Mom for a ride.” I turned to walk away, my stomach shredded.

“You can’t tell Mom.” He grabbed my arm,
hard.
I could tell it would bruise. It wouldn’t be the first time Evan had hurt me, but it would be the last.
 

Darla grabbed his wrist, yanked his hand off of my arm, and twisted it. He howled in pain, and two cops nearby watched. I waved and smiled. They still watched.

“You touch her like that again and I will get two guys to come over to your house and kick the ever-loving-fucking-shit out of you, and your balls will end up so far up your throat you’ll think you’re suckin’ on two cough drops. You got that?”

All we could hear was our breathing, a straining, primal whine underscoring Evan’s. In the bright daylight I could see how pale he was, how sickly, but his eyes were calculating and clever still. Not afraid. He wasn’t actually afraid of anything.
 

Evan wasn’t real unless every speck of attention was focused on him. He was enjoying the idea that he could engage us in this nastiness. Everything he had done was based on some brokenness in him that would never heal.

Evan would never heal, and Mom would never change. Like the slightest bump that sends a perfect ball of dandelion seeds reeling out into space and time, Evan’s oily half-grin was all it took to knock off a lifetime habit of going along with this. I almost wanted to thank him for the clarity.

Instead, I picked up my phone, went into my contacts and hit the most familiar number. She picked up on the third ring. “Hi, Mom.”

“No! No!” Evan shouted.

“Mom, I’m here at Middlesex County Jail. Evan was arrested on drug charges last night. I put up my car as bail for him. I thought you would like to know.” I hung up before she could respond, even though of course she’d just call me right back.

“You put your car up?” Evan’s smug tone returned. Bending over, with his hands on his knees, he hacked out a laugh so derisive it made Darla flinch.

“What’s so fucking funny?” I barked, ignoring the phone when, as I knew it would, it buzzed.

“Your car is totaled. It’s a junker.”

“What? What are you talking about? It’s perfectly... It’s at Mom’s. I left it…it’s in the driveway.” I stammered as I began to realize what he was really telling me.

His laughter faded out as Darla gave him a death stare in triplicate.

“What did you do to it?” she asked in a cold voice that fairly slithered.

I inhaled so fast and hard I sounded like I was having an asthma attack. “You drove my car?” I screeched. “You stole the keys from Mom?”

Darla’s face changed, her cheeks going pale, face turning sympathetic as she touched my shoulder. She said nothing, but she seemed to know something I didn’t understand.

“I didn’t
steal
anything. Mom
gave
me the keys.”

“Liar! Mom swore she would never...”

Stupid.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

How could I be so stupid?

Bzzzz.
My phone was still ringing. I could see that it was Mom. I cut the call off.

“Go away, Evan. Just go away. I’m done with you. Done.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. Not my fault you’re a sucker.”

“And you’re paying me back for this!” I screamed at his back as he strode off.

A middle finger was my response.

Darla gently nudged my shoulder and guided me toward the T.

We were done here.

I left the jail that day, climbed on the subway, and didn’t say another damn word to Darla until we were almost home.

My phone buzzed in my pocket off and on the entire ride as my mother desperately demanded me, and I ignored it.

“You don’t have to go back to my apartment with me,” I told Darla, who was now buried in a magazine that she’d picked up back at the station.

“It’s okay,” she said, shrugging. “Sometimes it helps to have someone there, even if you don’t feel like talking.”

“How do you know that?” I asked her.

“Know what?”

“How do you know that sometimes...no, not sometimes, that
right now
that’s what I need?”

Her eyes shifted a bit and she frowned, rolling the question around a bit with her tongue inside her teeth. Her nostrils flared, and then she said, “It’s what comes natural.”

It’s what comes natural
, I thought.
What came natural to me?
My phone rang again. I picked it up and decided to face what lies beneath. “Hello,” I said, knowing and holding the phone about three inches from my ear.

“Evan! What happened to Evan?” my mom screamed.

Stay calm,
I told myself,
remember, you are no longer emotionally involved
. “I left Evan at the Middlesex County Jail,” I recounted. “He might need a ride. The two of you need to figure this out. Then again, it’s not like you can pick him up in
my
car.”

Mom let out a string of words that made no sense. Darla held her palms up and made a motion with her head that indicated she didn’t understand a word Mom was saying. Neither did I. The emotion was clear. “What happened?” Mom finally said.

“Ask him.”

“Amy!” The chiding outrage didn’t work this time. Nothing. The sound of her voice smacked up against a vacuum in me.

Another string of high pitched shrieking and groaning came out of the phone, and it surprised me to realize that’s all it was. There were no words, no sentences, and as Mom went on and on, I summoned my new clarity. It would always be like this.
 

It would
always
be like this.
 

Evan sucked all the oxygen out of the room, and Mom was right there, eager to enable him.

I couldn’t do anything. I could sign the title of my (trashed) car over as his bond and still get screamed at. I could probably give up my first born child, and it wouldn’t be enough. As Mom babbled into the phone, a kind of comforting detachment seeped into my bones. I didn’t have to play this game anymore.
 

“You can’t tell anyone,” Mom fumed into the phone. “My God, do you know what this would do to me at work, if people knew that Evan—that—well, there must be some mistake.”

“There’s no mistake, Mom.”

“Well, how did he—how did he get out of j—what ha—?”

“He had a $7500 bail set, Mom. He called me, so I went down there and paid $750 and put my car up as bond.”

“You …what? Why would he call you and not me?”

Unbelievable. Nothing about the crashed car. Nothing about my rescuing Evan. Nothing.

Yesterday—earlier today, even—I would have hoped that my sacrifice would have been acknowledged, that my mom would give me some attention for being the good girl. That was the dynamic that had been set up so many years ago, but now? Recounting facts for her was really just recounting the new emotional reality for myself. Just a series of factual statements, of transactions: $750, a car title, a statement of fact. No hope.

“I—I mean,” Mom was sputtering, “I’m sorry that you chose to do that. You could have called me and I could have come down there and taken care of it.”

“I could have done that, but I didn’t. Evan wanted me to take care of it without letting you know.”

“Well, you should know better than to—”
 

Click
. If I wanted to be verbally abused, I didn’t need to hear it from her through my phone, did I? She’d planted her voice in my head,

The phone rang again. This time I really was done. I turned it off.

A day or two ago I would have started crying at this point, but again, once you let go of hope the only tears left are for the person
you
once were—who had hope. Without it, there’s nothing to cry about.
 

The train lurched a hard left, and then it stopped, bringing us to my station. “You okay?” Darla asked.

“I can take it from here,” I said. “You go on to Trevor, and thank you. Thank you so much for everything that you did. It’s been a hell of a two days. I was really wrong about you,” I admitted.

“Go on,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “I got all day to hear this.” Wisecracking Darla had faded, and the woman standing before me was more vulnerable. More human. I really had misjudged her, and my words didn’t come easily. Probably because the feelings didn’t, either.

“That day you met me on the subway? I’d just moved to the city. My boyfriend and I split up a few months ago and my mom was...well, you know more about what my family is really like now.”

“I can only imagine. Hovermom with a blind spot for that piece of shit,” she said, nodding.

I snorted. “That is the most cogent explanation of my family I’ve ever heard.” Seriously.

“And you’ve been carrying a torch for Sam since high school,” she ventured, rolling her wrist in a circle, encouraging me.

“Yes,” I admitted. “I have. There’s so much more to it, and then there’s Liam – ”

“What does Liam got to do with anything?”

“Next time I shove a phone up my crotch I’ll tell you about Liam on the cab ride.”

A hearty laugh and kinder eyes were her answer. “Get back to the whole ‘You’re the greatest, Darla’ speech.”

“You are,” I said simply. “You’ve helped me out of two of the most bizarre, embarrassing, horrifying experience of my life – in the same damn week – and I barely know you.”

“It’s called being a f-r-i-e-n-d,” she answered, spelling out the word.

“Most of my friends, I...I couldn’t go to with this.”

She let that sentence just hang there.

“Thank you for going places with me that most people wouldn’t. You’re a very special person, and I appreciate everything you’ve done,” I finished.

The words that came out of my mouth were what I had hoped to hear from my own mom, and Darla seemed to recognize that, throwing her arms around me in a quick hug and then scampering off.

She’d respected exactly what I’d asked of her. Maybe that was her secret.

She just did what you needed most.

Chapter Eight

Sam

Instead of getting the sleep I needed, I sat on the couch listening to Darla, Trevor and Joe fight. Joe had come back from orientation and their days together before he left for law school were numbered. If I could have been anywhere else I would have been. I needed to get a decent night’s sleep, or at least part of a night’s sleep. I thought I’d have some success napping from about seven to ten before heading off for one of my gigs. No such luck.

“What do you mean you don’t like my Spam?” Darla snapped.

“It’s disgusting,” Joe said.

“It’s not disgusting. It tastes perfectly fine. You mix it in with eggs and Velveeta and it’s good.”

“That’s the problem, Spam and Velveeta in the same meal.” Joe shuddered. “Ugh.”

“Well, what would you prefer I make?” she asked in a sickly voice. “Would you like lavender-massaged chicken with a side of fingerling potatoes, a pound of which costs more than I used to make in an hour?”

Joe grabbed the Spam can of the counter. “This is glutamate hell. You’re feeding us preservative hell,” he insisted, running his finger over the list of ingredients that was half the can long. “Do you realize that some of these things are chemicals that are used in biological warfare? And Velveeta? Are you kidding me? You might as well mix candle wax with cheese.”

“You’re just looking for a reason to pick a fight,” Trevor said, glaring at Joe.

I knew what he was thinking:
don’t blow it, this is our last chance for sex before you leave.
And Joe knew it, too, of course. But he was so wracked with fear and anxiety over going to Penn, over leaving Trevor and Darla, and over finally getting away from his parents geographical grasp, that he needed to distract himself, and for some reason he chose to do that by picking a fight with the people he knew would never reject him.
 

I didn’t understand the strategy, really, but my own approach, complete withdrawal, hadn’t exactly turned out that well. I was just hoping that things kept going the way they’d started to with Amy, and that maybe it really was possible to undo a complete clusterfuck of my own making.

“This is what I know,” she said, “this is what I eat. This is my food. This is my comfort food. I like canned meat. I like Velveeta. I like macaroni and cheese that comes in a box and not the kind that is found at the hot foods counter at Whole Foods. I like the flavor and the taste of these things, and if you don’t, you don’t have to eat it.”

“But I have to smell it.” Joe’s voice told me he was going in for the kill. I recognized this tactic from his debate cross examinations; he was looking for any hint of blood.

“Oh, I’m so sorry to offend your sensitive olfactory sensibilities,” she said, clanging the frying pan down on the stove. “Make your own goddamn dinner.” And with that, she stormed out, Trevor following. He turned back for a moment to glare at Joe and mouth,
What the fuck?

Being on the outside, I could see the clash. Joe and Trevor came from families with moms who acted like a McDonald’s french fry was napalm. If Darla ever met Joe’s mom, and that hadn’t happened yet, (a point of contention for the three of them) she’d probably die of the spot from being in such close proximity to someone who ate MSG.

Deprived of the fight he’d been going for, Joe stood there comically for minute, staring at the slammed bedroom door. He looked at me, shook his head and then hung it, walking slowly into their bedroom after them. I laughed; Joe was going to pay for that. Five minutes later, it turned out I was right. Man, I wish I had been wrong because I heard Darla giggle and then say “there’s nothing wrong with pegging, honey” and then Joe’s muted response. I crammed orange foam earplugs into my ears and slammed the pillow over my head. There really was no hope for a nap, but I tried.