Hothouse Flower (10 page)

< 15 >

RYKE MEADOWS

Emilia catches her breath. I stand at the foot of
the bed, and she eyes the buttons to my jeans. She’s naked, sprawled on my
sheets in my apartment, a layer of sweat coating her skin. Normally, I’d
fucking take her right here, without much hesitation.

But what happened last night unsettles my fucking head, and
my body responds by staying completely still.

I met Emilia a few months ago at the gym, and last night, I
called her to go to a Philadelphia Eagles game. That was my first fucking mistake.
I’ve only either taken my brother or Daisy to go watch football with me.
Yesterday, I turned towards Emilia in the stands, caught off guard by the brown
hair, the big tits, everything that I haven’t had in months.

I thought I’d want it. I thought my body would respond in
complete fucking joy.

It didn’t.

Not even a little.

A couple guys with cameras snapped photos of us during the
game. So Daisy’s going to fucking see Emilia hanging onto my arm, the pictures
posted online already. And I shouldn’t care how Daisy feels—we’re not
together—but it’s been tearing up my fucking lungs.

For fuck’s sake,
I
told
Daisy to go screw another guy. Yet, I
still
hope that she can’t find someone, even if that someone is good for her.

I glare as a horrible image flashes through my head. Of some
model fucking Daisy. Of her hands on his back, nails digging into his flesh as
he pounds against her. It’s wrong. It looks wrong, even if she’s getting off.
Because she’s not getting off by me. I want to rip the guy from her body. I
want to fucking punch him in the face for separating her from me.

Really—I should be fucking punching myself, shouldn’t I?
Why would you ever tell her to go fuck
another man?
I can’t fucking be with her. I can’t. That’s why I’m here with
Emilia. That’s why I have to date again, even if it kills me inside.

But that fucking picture—of her being intimate with someone
else—it’s
so
fucking painful. Someone
is drowning me, my throat burning with salt water and rage.

“
Ryke
,” Emilia coos. “You okay?”
She sits up, her legs dangling off the bed and she touches my hand.
No I’m losing my fucking mind. I need to go
outside, run eight miles and then go climbing. But if I told you that, you’d
want to come with me or you’d say I was crazy.

I didn’t screw Emilia last night. She fell asleep right
here, too tired to go home, and I crashed on my couch in the living room. She
woke up about a half hour ago, appearing buck naked, and then she pulled me
into the bedroom.

My cock didn’t even harden.

Even now, there’s nothing. This has never fucking happened
to me before. I’m so knee-ass deep in my fucking head that I can’t enjoy this.

She looks confused, and a wave of insecurity starts coating
her face.
 

My gaze hardens, and I lean forward and stroke her hair.
“Hey,” I tell her. “It’s not you, I fucking promise.” I even kiss her cheek so
she understands that she did nothing wrong.
It’s
just me. For however fucking cliché it sounds, it’s true.

“We can take it slow,” she says. “I really don’t mind,
Ryke
.”

“No.” I shake my head at her. “I’m not in the fucking mood
for slow.”
Just fuck her.

She bites her lip, and then she slides one of my fingers in
her mouth, sucking on it. I unconsciously imagine those lips as pale pink, that
hair as blonde, that smile as bright, and that laugh as energetic and full of
fucking life as Daisy’s.

I harden.
Fuck me.

I feel like utter shit, and Emilia is grinning from ear to
ear, my finger between her teeth. She lets go. I’m still hesitating, which is
so unnatural for me.

“What do you want me to do?” she asks.

Just fuck her.
“Lie
on your back,” I say with edge.

She scoots towards the headboard. My laptop slides down
towards me as she accidentally yanks the sheet. She said she was checking her
email this morning, but she should have fucking closed the computer before we
started fooling around.

I pick up my laptop, about to set it on my dresser. I glance
at the screen—

What the…
Daisy. I
see Daisy in a Skype window, but she closes out the moment our eyes lock.

What the fuck.

Did she…

How much did she fucking watch?
I almost chuck the fucking laptop at the wall, angry at this
situation that I’m in, angry at myself. What the fuck is going on? Why the
fuck
does this shit have to happen? The
one day that I try to preoccupy my mind with something other
than Daisy’s wellbeing and it
backfires. I just don’t understand what I’m supposed to do anymore.

I don’t understand why bad shit has to happen to people with
good intentions. I feel like I’m serving an eternal sentence of bad karma for
not meeting my brother as a teenager.

“What’s wrong?” Emilia says.
 

“I need to fucking call someone. Rain check?”

“What is it?” she asks.

“It’s too fucking hard to explain.” I point to the living
room. “I have to call a friend. You can take a shower, and then I’ll drive you
home.”

She wavers before she says, “Fine.” She leans in for a kiss,
but I end up planting one on her forehead. I don’t wait to contemplate whether
or not I’ve hurt her fucking feelings; I just shut the door behind me and sit
on my couch, the computer on my lap.

I Skype Daisy back, waiting for her to answer my call.

She doesn’t.

I dial her again and then take out my phone. I text:
Fucking answer me.
The reply comes
almost immediately.

I’ll call you on the
phone.
– Daisy

No. I need to see your
face.

She rejects my third Skype session, so I’m forced to fucking
call her by cell. She answers. “I’m sorry,” she immediately says. “You called
me on Skype like three minutes ago. I thought you wanted to talk. I didn’t see
much at all, I promise. Just…go back to doing what you were doing—”

“I can’t. We need to fucking talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she says quickly.

I rub my eyes. “Daisy…” What do I say?
I’m sorry for going down on another girl?
Daisy isn’t my
girlfriend. I also warned her that I would be dating again. If this is the
right path, then why the fuck do I feel like I need to explain myself?

The answer is there, I just don’t want to fucking accept it.
It can’t be my reality.

“Look, I’m sorry you had to see that. Believe me, this is
the last fucking thing I wanted to happen.”

“It’s okay. It’s just the cherry on top of a really, really
weird night. So weird, that I think it’s going to take years to scrub it all
from my brain.”

I frown, my eyes narrowing at the floor. “No one broke into
your room, right…”
Fuck,
Ryke
.
I run my hand through my hair. I can’t suggest
shit like that. “I didn’t think they would.” I don’t want her to think that
someone can get in.

“Not weird like that,” she says, her voice high-pitched. Her
paranoia practically ekes through the phone line. Her breathing shallows for a
second.

“Hey,” I snap. “Have you taken Ambien tonight?”

She clears her throat to calm down. “I will after I get off
the phone.”

“Fucking promise me.”

“I
fucking
promise
you,” she says. I hear the smile in her voice.

There’s a soft knock on the door frame to my bedroom. I look
up. Emilia stands there, wearing one of my T-shirts. It barely covers her
thighs. “Towels?” she whispers.

I point to the hall closet, and she tiptoes there, my shirt riding
up to her waist. I don’t look at her bare ass. Mostly because it feels like I’m
cheating on Daisy. The guilt just keeps on coming.

I wait for Emilia to return to my room so she can’t hear my
conversation. I’ve been in the media long enough to know that friends can fuck
you over quickly. Strangers even faster. Eavesdropping on one of my
conversations and selling whatever the fuck I said to a magazine was the
easiest paycheck five of my old college friends have ever made.

I don’t necessarily hate them. I just don’t go on
snowboarding trips and to birthday fucking parties when I’m invited anymore.
Two years ago, when the Calloway girls, my brother and Connor were swept up
into this publicity mess, I realized we had to band together to survive. From
that moment, I knew it was going to be hard trusting anyone beyond the six of
us. How can you when a simple fact like
I
hate Justin
Bieber
could be worth a grand to a
magazine?

The phone line is quiet.

“You still there?” I ask Daisy.

“Yeah.” She pauses. “I don’t want to ruin your time with
your…date. We’ll talk later.”

“Fuck that,” I tell her. I haven’t been able to get Daisy on
the phone in days. She won’t even let me look at her face. I have no idea the
amount of sleep she’s been actually getting. I just want to make sure she’s
okay. “What was weird about tonight?”

“You really don’t want to know.”

“Now I
really
fucking
do.”

She lets out a short breath. “I saw Connor’s penis.”

What?
“Excuse me?”

“I was looking at porn, and I accidentally stumbled upon
Rose and Connor’s sex tape. Hence, his penis. To think, I managed to dodge the
explicit version for a whole year. I thought I was going to get away without
seeing it
forever
.”

I lean back against my couch and pinch the bridge of my nose
in a cringe. Not a lot can make Connor Cobalt fucking uncomfortable, but
learning that his girlfriend’s little sister saw him having sex—that may do it.
My face has hardened in a wince.

And I have a hard time imagining her seeing anyone’s dick
but mine. Nausea barrels through me.

“Are you going to say something?” she asks.

“I haven’t even seen those videos.”

“Jealous?”

“Not in the fucking slightest,” I tell her. The shower turns
on, the pipes groaning through the walls. I glance at my closed bedroom door
and then back at the floorboards. “Daisy, you weren’t looking at porn to try
and fall asleep, were you?” It’s a fucking path that no one would want her to
go down.

“No…” She sounds like she has something else to add, so I
wait for her to speak again. I can hear her shifting on her bed. “I had a guy
over tonight.”

The temperature drops ten degrees. My head is fucking
submerged beneath an ocean again, that gritty salt water sliding down my
throat. I see an older guy fucking the hell out of her, and I almost kick the
coffee table. I calm down with a deep breath. “Yeah?” I run my hand through my
hair a couple times, messing up the already disheveled strands.

“Yeah,” she says, leaving it at that.

“Did you look at porn together?” I shoot up to my feet and
head to the fucking kitchen, the phone to my ear with one hand. I open the
fridge, nothing in there but a case of water and a leftover sub from
Lucky’s
.
Don’t punch
the fucking wall.

“That would definitely be another weird thing for the night,
but no, we didn’t watch it together.”

“Is he still there?”
Don’t
fucking think about it.
I open the freezer to distract me. It’s just as
bare
as the fridge. A package of freezer-burnt chicken and
a tray of ice. In the last four months, I’ve spent almost no time in my
apartment. Maybe to grab some clean clothes and my climbing gear. Other than
that, I’ve been at Daisy’s place.

I’ve been sleeping in the same bed as her. I’ve been taking
care of her. She’s mine. She feels like she belongs to me. I don’t want to
share her with any other fucking guy. And I don’t want to be with any other
fucking girl.

Anything else feels like a sickening betrayal. How the fuck
did we get to this place?

“No,” she says. “He’s gone. I thought maybe I wasn’t doing
it right, so I was going to look at porn.”

“What’s
it?
” I
ask, finding a packet of oatmeal in a drawer. I tear it with my teeth and pour
it into a bowl. I uncap the water bottle as she answers.

“Sex. I can’t orgasm. I think it’s a physiological problem,”
she states matter-of-factly. I remember a time when she claimed that she
orgasmed
before. We were in Cancun for Spring Break, and
she said she skipped foreplay, just went straight to sex and experienced
something more. I should have been happy for her, but I felt more fucking joy
when she admitted that she got it wrong. That she thought she climaxed, but
after talking to her sisters, it didn’t seem euphoric enough to be that
heightened peak.

“You
can
orgasm,”
I tell her. “I’ve fucking heard you, sweetheart.”

There’s no answer. I called her sweetheart—I do it unconsciously,
and I know every time I say it, her lips rise.

“Daisy?”

“Huh?” She laughs a little. “Can you say that again?”

“No.” I realize I’ve overflowed my fucking oatmeal with half
the water bottle. “Shit,” I curse. I have to dump all of it in the trash.

“Sorry,” she says.

“No, it’s not you,” I tell her. After scraping all of the
oatmeal out, I toss the bowl too hard in the sink and it cracks. What the fuck
is wrong with me today? I shake my head. “I fucking hate talking to you on the
phone.”

“Me too.”

I lean against the cupboard and stare at my bedroom door,
keeping an eye on whether or not it opens again. I have to be fucking cautious
with people I bring over. I had a one-night stand steal a pair of my fucking
boxer-briefs a year and a half ago. She sold them for three grand on eBay.
“Were you careful with this guy?” I ask her.