Manties in a Twist (The Subs Club Book 3) (9 page)

Ryan’s hand trailed down my side. “Well, you guys are still kinda . . . Hal only died a couple of years ago, right?”

“Little over two years.” Sometimes it felt like yesterday, sometimes it felt like ten years. “He was one of those guys who didn’t care about—whatever. If you were too busy to hang out or flaked on plans or whatever. He showed up whenever the hell he wanted to and would just leave randomly. Like, we’d all be hanging out and then look around and be like, ‘Where’s Hal?’ You didn’t really ‘make plans’ with him, you just did stuff in the moment.”

“That would drive me crazy.”

I grinned. “Uhhh, you’re not huge on plans either. I mean, how many times are we in the middle of something, and then you’re like, ‘Let’s go do this other thing
right now
’?”

“I’m not like that!” he protested, laughing. “I need structure.”

I gazed at the wall. At the crown molding he and I had spent hours sponging the cobwebs off when we’d moved in. Thought about the well-dressed hare in our front hall. “Hal didn’t drive me crazy,” I said at last. “Not really. The others got annoyed with him sometimes, I think, but I didn’t.”

Another silence. He was breathing so slow I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. Then he said, “Just don’t ever let them make you feel like you’re the one who needs to change.”

“No. Of course not. They never make me feel that way.”

I kind of didn’t want to talk about this anymore. I felt guilty for complaining about my friends to Ryan, but also still pretty pissed at Dave. I remembered that look Gould had given him, and it made me wonder what they said when I wasn’t around. I’d never been very sensitive about stuff like that, but tonight it kind of bothered me.

I pulled on the corner of my pillowcase. “I think I’m moving on faster than they are.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I miss Hal a lot. But Gould’s still
so
pissed at Bill, and Dave’s still, like, everything reminds him of Hal. And I just feel kind of . . . He’s gone. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

Ryan nodded. “Well, people grieve for different lengths of time. There’s no rules.”

“I know. I’m not blaming them.”

“Oh, I didn’t think you were. I just meant you shouldn’t feel bad if you think you’re moving on faster.”

“I don’t.” I paused. “
Should
I feel bad?”

“No. I just said that.”

“Okay.” I shifted. Everything inside me felt kind of sour and sloshy, like I’d swallowed ocean water. “Can we not talk about it anymore?”

“Sure. What do you want to talk about?”

“Can we go get our juicer tomorrow?”

“Yeah, if you want. Our gift card’s not gonna cover that, though.”

“Credit card.”

He tipped his head to look at me. “We should be a little careful. We’ve been putting a lot on the card.”

“Does this mean we can’t get the Geegs salad bar when we go?”

“Geegs? Is that what we’re calling Giant Eagle now?”

“Yuss.”

“Well, we could get salad ingredients for, like, five bucks. Instead of the bar for eight million dollars.”

“I guess.” I tightened my arms around him until he grunted. Shook him a little. “I want to make carrot juice. And experiment with kale.”

“Patience. Patience.”

I kissed his shoulder, right on top of my favorite mole. “Tell me a story.”

“About what?” He licked my neck, so I murdered him a little bit, very gently, by rolling on top of him.

“Megalodons.”

“What do you want the megalodons to do?” His voice was muffled underneath me.

“Eat some people and fuck some shit up.”

“All right.” He pushed on my chest. “Stop smothering me.”

I rolled off him and onto my back, looking up at the ceiling. Then his, like, really fucking pleasant cartoon voice filled the darkness.

“Thousands of years ago, megalodons roamed the seas. These massive predators would—”

“How massive?”

“Sixty feet. Longer than a semitruck, with a head the size of a garage.”

“Ermahgerd.”

“I know. And although some scientists believe it to be an ancestor of the great white, the fine serrations of the megalodon’s teeth suggest it’s more closely related to the modern mako shark. But, at any rate, it was king of the seas, feeding on whales and other megalodons, until the changing climate and dwindling food sources trapped it in the ocean’s deepest trenches, beneath miles of frigid water.”

I yawned, trying to imagine the darkness of the room was the darkness of the ocean’s deepest trenches.

He bumped me. “You sleepy?”

I yawned again, my voice going high. “Nooo, I waa-aa hear bowww the . . . deeh trenshizz.” I closed my mouth with a hum and nestled closer to him.

“Okay, well, the megalodons were lurking in the deepest trenches. Until one day . . .”

I half listened as he told a story about a megalodon named Devil’s Tooth that escaped the trenches and rose to the surface to eat an evil surfer named Bodhi.

“Wait,” I mumbled, almost asleep. “She ate Patrick Swayze from
Point Break
?”

“Yep.” Ryan stroked my hair. “Her cruelty knew no bounds.”

“
Your
cruelty knows no bounds,” I murmured.

And then I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up in the night with him snoring softly beside me and yellowish streetlight coming in through the slats of the blinds.

I got up, pissed, then got back into bed and pulled him close to me. Lay there for a few minutes. Sometimes I had trouble sleeping in this apartment. And there were still mornings I woke expecting to see my old bedroom and feeling confused for a second about where I was. What was
really
weird was that sometimes this place made me feel homesick—not for my old apartment, but for my mom’s house. Which, don’t even ask me how that worked. I guess I’d felt so totally comfortable in my frat-house garage-sale pad and so glad to be living on my own for the first time that homesickness had never come up. But here, in this house full of adulting, I sometimes missed
not
being an adult.

Weird. I glanced over at Ryan, wondering if he ever felt that way.

I reached out and poked his jaw to see if I could get him to make an annoyed
I’m sleeping
noise. But he didn’t make a sound.

I’d never had a serious relationship before. I’d dated in high school and college, but I dunno . . . high school was high school, and in college guys maybe thought I was too immature for long-term stuff. What was happening right now was a
big
deal to me. I kinda wished I could talk to Ryan about that. I mean, I
could
. I could talk to him about anything. But sometimes with deep stuff, it was harder to start the conversation.

It was way easier to talk about megalodons and juicers and even panties.

I closed my eyes and imagined the room smelled kinda like dirty clothes and toast crusts instead of like new curtains.

And eventually I fell asleep.

My dad arrived in town Tuesday, and he asked if I’d go with him to get ice cream. Like I was seriously six.

So of course I said yes.

I was quiet as we headed out of the city in his rental car. We were going to this drive-in he’d been obsessed with years ago, out in the suburbs. He’d asked me if Mom and I still went there much, and I’d been kinda like,
No, dude. Mom and I don’t really drive forty minutes to get ice cream together.

I still felt sort of shitty about making fun of my friends with Ryan. I mean, I hadn’t really made
fun
of them, but . . . The whole thing seemed stupid now. I got it: People in love were obnoxious. So I was driving the guys crazy right now by hanging all over Ryan, and everyone would get over it eventch.

Gould called during Dad’s and my attempt at small talk to ask if I was still friends with the woman who ran a bondage group called Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Rope-bots, and if I could put him in touch with her. I glanced over at my dad and said into the phone, “Yeah. I’ll text you the info.” I felt crappy enough about yesterday and desperate enough for distraction to try to engage Gould in a conversation, but he sounded like he was in a hurry.

“Hey,” I said finally. “I’m really sorry I haven’t been around lately. I seriously do miss you guys.”

“No worries.”

I’d been hoping for something like,
Dave’s crazy, and we all love Ryan, and everything’s awesome.
“We cool?”

“Yup. I gotta run. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

I hung up.

Dad glanced at me. “Was that your boyfriend?”

“Nah. Gould.”

Dad didn’t say anything for a moment. “He doing well?”

“Yeah. He’s had a rough time since Hal—like, worse than the rest of us, maybe. But he’s better now.”

I still didn’t think anyone knew this but me, but two weeks after Bill Henson’s trial ended, I’d gotten a call from Gould to come pick him up at the hospital. I’d gone to get him, freaked out as all fuck that he’d been in an accident or found out he had cancer or something. Except it hadn’t been an accident. He’d taken a whole bottle of pills, and then called 911, and he’d been in the hospital for two days under observation.

“You can’t tell the others. Please. It was a mistake.”
Over and over. I’d been too shocked to focus on anything beyond the fact that he’d
tried to fucking kill himself
. And the fact that he’d called
me
.

That was usually how it worked. People acted like I couldn’t be trusted with serious issues, and yet when they had a real problem—or something they wanted to keep secret—a lot of times they came to me.

If you’re a good listener, people tell you shit.

If you pretend you’re dumber than you are, they tell you lots of shit.

I guess I believed him about it being a mistake, since he’d called his own ambulance. Plus the hospital should’ve kept him for a week at least, but they let him go after two days because the psychiatrist basically concluded he wasn’t at risk for another attempt. I’d made him swear on Hal’s memory he wouldn’t try it again. He kept going on about how I couldn’t tell the others—especially Dave. I’d refused to take him back to his place. Made him stay at my apartment for a week. Gave him my bed, and I took the couch. He mostly didn’t argue, and we actually had a pretty good week together, talking and shit. He’d said he hadn’t really wanted to die, he was just tired of missing Hal and feeling angry at Bill every single day, and he couldn’t think of a big enough way to let out all those feelings. When I finally let him go, I made him promise he’d call me if he ever needed me. But he didn’t call.

Like, where was the balance? If you had a group of friends, and you were used to being up each other’s butts all the time—not literally, although Dave and Gould, who knows?—and then you started to realize that even though you wanted to be there for them, you also wanted to have a life where maybe
all
their problems weren’t also your problems, what did you do? And I didn’t mean that as, like, I resented being there for Gould when he needed someone, because I would have done that a thousand times over. I just meant . . .

I didn’t know what I meant.

I tried to focus on Dad, who was talking about how some plaza we were passing had changed in the years since he’d lived here. He always reminded me a little of someone whose job it was to lure people into the circus back in the day. Everything he said kinda sounded like you were being told to step right up and see the bearded lady. “What an Old Navy! Three stories high. Tallest Old Navy I’ve ever seen!”

And he’d bark away about dumb stuff like that, but the second he tried to talk about anything remotely serious, he’d stammer and trail off every couple of words. If the bearded lady had come to him and been like,
I have the clap; I need a few nights off
, he’d have been all,
Oh . . . um. I see. If you could just . . . Can you finish your shift, or . . . No? Well, of course . . .

He’d cheated on Mom when I was a kid, and I’d always felt bad because, like, I still loved him, but I was on
her
side, so I treated him pretty shitty. He was really supportive of me, though. He worked as a financial advisor and was plenty loaded, but he didn’t care that I loved being a cook at the Green Kitchen, or that my goals weren’t super lofty. He liked that I wanted to be a musician, and every year for Christmas, he got me something music-related, so that was cool. He said “follow your dreams” a lot, which was pretty cheesy, but it made me feel good.

I had a lot of dreams. For instance, I wanted to launch a fake review trend for an Amazon product. Like that hundred-thousand-dollar watch that everyone started sarcastically reviewing and saying it had saved a bus of school children and raving about the fifty-eight-thousand-dollar discount you got when you bought it on Amazon. Or the book
How to Avoid Huge Ships
, which had a whole bunch of reviews from people pretending they’d been smacking into huge ships for years before this book came along.

Also, I liked writing, even though I wasn’t great at it. I once wrote a comic called “Snow Wanderer,” about a homeless kid who wanders around during winter, surviving on the carrots from snowman noses. He finds some that have eyes made of zucchini slices too. I’d done the illustrations, which basically looked like that guy with the splattery paintings except with crayons, but hey.