Pulse (Contemporary new adult/college romance) (Club Grit Trilogy) (5 page)

We got a seat on a couch and put our stuff under the coffee table. He asked me about my day, I asked about his. He was surprised to learn I was nineteen; I was surprised to learn he was twenty three because he looked a lot younger, even with the tats and muscles. I learned that he didn’t work during the day, just nights as a bouncer at the club because he was in a band, The Eldritch Poet’s Society, inspired by the works of some guy named Dell Hatecraft or something. I asked what had gotten him into it.

And so Skylar explained. “I’ve lived in LA all my life, and I’m in the music scene. No, you haven’t heard of my band, and yes, we’re trying to change that. But anyway, I was at a show and afterwards, I was approached by a nightclub owner. This guy, he wasn’t the kind of guy I’d take for decent, but obviously, I’m not about to judge someone based on appearances. I know what it’s like to be judged.” He rolled up his sleeves and I knew what he meant. My heart dropped and I looked away: what would he think of me if he’d known what I’d thought about him the first time I saw him? That he’d have to be an easy lay because he had his hair gel’d up and had arms full of tats? It wouldn’t be cute. At all.

“You look a lot different outside of the club,” I blurted out and instantly wished I hadn’t. Fuck. Why was I so awkward around him, when he was the only guy I wanted to be my usually up-beat, cheery, fun self? Why was he getting this sort of reaction out of me? Was it the pills or something different? I’d been out with guys at parties and stuff stoned and high off my ass and I’d never made such an ass of myself, but then again, they’d also been majorly #fuckedup and Skylar was far from that. Did he even drink or smoke or do anything fun? For a bouncer, he wasn’t exactly the life of the party.

This was supposed to be a fun date to give the whole mess closure and instead, I found myself caring what he thought of me. He wasn’t an Omega sister, he wasn’t in a frat, he didn’t even go to my college and I was sure that if I saw him again at the club it wouldn’t have had to have been a big deal, so why did I care what he thought?

“Anyways, right now, I’m sort of between classes. I can’t afford to take classes every semester, so I only take them in the fall. During the spring and summer, I work. I’ve done this for four years so far, so I have two years of college done, at a community college, and I’m saving up now so I can get the last two years done all at once.”

I just couldn’t stop looking in his eyes. In the bright of day, he looked so different, and the glasses he wore were plain, cheap, but drew attention to his eyes which were like two golden suns captured in milk and punctured with the deepest of abysses straight through the middle as if they were meant to be beads on a designer necklace. I watched as the caffeine took hold and his pupils widened, the irises changing slightly as they became thinner and the layers were squished together.

I lost track of what he was talking about, between sips of my drink and nodding at what I thought was the right time. I thought he noticed so I quickly asked him a question. “So what’s in the bag? Are we going on a picnic?”

He avoided the question. Fuck. It had been a long time since I’d actually just had a guy to talk to like a normal human being that I guess I forgot what to do. I wasn’t really all that different from the nerdy girls we made fun of at the sorority, the kind that joined academic societies instead of social ones, the kind that weren’t like us, but did have boyfriends who doted on them and surprised them with gifts and went with them to anime conventions. “Let’s take a picture,” he said, and so I pulled out my phone and took a picture with the front facing camera, making a cute pouty face next to his cheek.

He looked at the picture and smiled, but no for the reason I wanted. “Great, now I can leave,” he said, as he started to get up.

“Wait, what? Was it the duck face?” I asked. This wasn’t fucking funny but he had to be joking. Maybe he was an ass hat hipster (it’d explain his outfit), but that was no excuse for tasteless humor. Sarcasm was for douchebags who though things like ironic graphic shirts were funny.

He raised a brow. “Uh, no? I did the date thing. My obligation is over, and you’ve got a picture for your friends to prove I met up with you. I’ve lied for you, but I’m not about to become your girlfriend. I never would, I wouldn’t even sleep with you, because I don’t date or fuck liars and that’s what you are. I shouldn’t have ever given you that cab ride home, Emma. You’ve been more trouble than anyone else I’ve helped. That’s what I try to do: I try to be the nice guy instead of the asshole, and I try to help people, but I just get tangled up in their webs of lies and messes.”

“Web of lies? What the fuck? If you haven’t guesses, Skylar, I approached you because I thought you were cute. Obviously, that wasn’t a lie,” I insisted.

“One truth doesn’t make up for the rest of untruths. You’re a liar, Emma. You lied to your friends about getting my number, and I helped you save face more than enough times. How deep is the rabbit hole going to go? What you’re going to do is you’re going to tell your friends about the date going well, show them the picture, and then find a frat boy so that I’ll be last week’s news. It’s a new week, it’s time for you to find someone else to bother.” He already got up and picked up his bag. All this time, he’d been so cool and collected, but he’d been putting on a show, tricking me into thinking that maybe, for once, a guy just wanted to talk, that he wasn’t interested in what was between my legs, but in between my ears: my brain, my thoughts, my wants. But he’d been like just the rest: he was just doing it for his own selfish reason. I guess he just wanted to get rid of me.

“Is that what you think I am, a bother?” I asked quietly. I was hoping he’d stop being so mean to me. All I’d ever wanted was for him to hold me, to fuck me, but instead, he pushed me away as I tried to pull him in. There’d never been a guy in Cali that rejected me, not even the ones with girlfriends, and now, here? With Skylar? I felt like I was back in high school again, asking out the popular guy with a homemade Valentine, him laughing and tearing it up in front of my face as my eyes pooled with tears.

He smirked. He hadn’t made a scene and I could tell he was stifling laughter. Dissing me was one thing, but laughing at me? That was a whole new level of disrespect and cruelty, the kind I wasn’t going to take from anybody. “Yeah, you are, and I’m not a fucking puppy you can play with because you think I’m cute. I’m a bouncer. My job is to make sure you don’t fuck up the club experience for other people, not to make sure you don’t hurt yourself. I’m not your dad. I’m not your boyfriend. I’m not your anything. Tell your friends that we had an okay date. Conveniently forget to set a second one. Find a new guy to bother. Don’t ever come up to me in Club Grit again. Do you understand?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I understand.” I understood where he was coming from, but why didn’t he understand that although I’d complicated things, I’d complicated them because I wanted him. I hadn’t done it to piss him off. This wasn’t some elaborate romance novel scheme where I was helping a friend get revenge by breaking Skylar’s heart. This was something else. I didn’t want to call it a crush, because those were for babies, middle school girls huddled in a corner in the library reading young adult books about people they were too mousy and shy and boring and mediocre to be. Those were for girls like the kind I wasn’t anymore, the kind that I’d never even acknowledge I’d been to most people. Maybe not even to Skylar.

“Good. I’m going to work. Bye.” I kept sipping my drink on the couch and watched as he walked to his bike. He took a fucking bike here? I got up and went out before he unlocked it.

“I still owe you for the cab.” I leaned against the bike stand but he didn’t turn to look at me, still trying to get his rusty cheap lock to open. Nobody in LA was so poor as to need a bike, at least, not around here. He wasn’t from my world. He was from somewhere more real. I hadn’t seen a bike like his since I’d left home, the kind of bike that wasn’t a fashion accessory but that took someone from point A to point B as fast as possible. Even the messengers here had fancy bikes with custom paint jobs. But Skylar’s bike? It wasn’t falling apart, but it wasn’t new. It was used, it was practical, and it was irreplaceable, just like him.

“Yeah, you do. Do you know how much those things cost? Probably not. I highly doubt you have the cash on hand for it, and if you did, it’d be in bills I couldn’t break.”

“If you’re poor, how’d I get home?”

“Work gives me vouchers to use for cabs to get home. I used those on getting you back home and had to pay my own way. It was seventy bucks each time.” Oh, that’s how.

“Just keep the change,” I said as I counted out twenty twenties from my purse. I knew it was overkill but I wasn’t in the mood for math right now and it wasn’t like it was a lot of money to me now. They were still crisp and had that new money smell that ATMs spat out all day. Skylar didn’t even count it. He just put it in his pocket and left.

My heart fell: he’d wanted the money I owed him, not a date. I’d forgotten, in my time with Omega Mu Gamma, that not every time a guy showed interest in me that he wanted a date or even a fuck. I’d forgotten that sometimes, not everything was a romantic comedy, that sometimes, people lived in real life.

T
HE LAST THING I EXPECTED WAS THAT SKYLAR WOULD BE STUCK ON MY MIND FOR THE REST OF THE COMING WEEK. I didn’t go to that week’s #ThrowbackThursday and instead, went with Kim to Beta Rho Omega’s “Pub Night”, where they had a variety of artisan craft beers and ales. I was technically underage, but that didn’t really matter. In my acceptance packet to Omega Mu, I’d received a fake ID straight out of the engineering lab of UCBH, with a hologram and laminated surface to fool any bouncer and the on campus cops. Unlike a lot of frosh, I wasn’t stupid enough to wear stuff with my class year on it. I wasn’t about to advertise that I graduated high school around this time last year. High school was in the past, and what mattered right now, more than my present, was my future, as Samantha kept reminding me. Maybe that meant that courage came in a liquid form for me now (and that enthusiasm came in pills, and that bravery came in a syringe filled with powder and that I was assured none of the other girls had diseases and besides, we were sisters, why not be blood sisters, right?) but wasn’t my future worth it? Wasn’t I worth it?

I knew what all the girls dreamed of. They either wanted guys like their dad or the men that would be the future fathers of their own children. They wanted the kinds of guys that could buy summer homes where everyone wore white to sunset parties and drank white wine at eleven in the morning on their white designer couches eating white brie on white toast crackers. They wanted the kinds of guys that had power, that were men while most were boys, that had #class instead of #swag but didn’t wear fedoras and watch children’s television shows. They wanted the kinds of guys that they read about in magazines, the kind that sometimes dated someone that wasn’t a celebrity but once they did, never left her because she either fucked his balls off like a porn star or kept them in her new designer purse purchased with his money.

Of course, we weren’t just there to drink. I could get one of the older sisters to get me alcohol whenever I needed it, they had a run to the liquor store at least once a week. What I was there for was to get some of that enthusiasm and bravery. I was there for my drugs.

Downstairs, in the basement, was where the guys got high. People jokingly called it “Rape Central”, unless they were jealous God Damn Independents, the people without sororities or fraternities to call their own, the kind that didn’t really belong in our world but were invited for reasons I didn’t really understand yet. I knew that the frat boys would fuck anything that moved, but the girls of Omega House had standards, even if many “applicants” to their bedroom were accepted. Only Omegas and Betas were allowed down in the basement so I had to flash my lavaliere, the little silver pendant that said OMG in white rhinestones on sterling that would be upgraded to one with white diamonds and white gold on graduation, to gain entry.

The room was filled with smoke, the sweet skunk’s scent of weed as well as the mulled leather smell of tobacco, and a bunch of old furniture was downstairs, stuff that had accumulated over the years but was still usable: a few large leather couches with holes that were extremely plush as well as a mirrored coffee table that people were setting up lines of coke on, the way that some people set up their grocery and makeup hauls for Instagram shots. There’d be no photos here: we weren’t that stupid. One of the first rules that Omegas learned was that what happened in Beta Basement stayed in Beta Basement.

“Hey,” I said, extending the word out. A few of the guys raised their hands.

“’ey, girl,” said a guy I recognized: DeAndre, someone I’d met at one of the few obligatory frosh mixers and had subsequently taken with me when I ditched. He patted his lap and it was obvious he’d let bygones be bygones, let cock teases be cock teases, so I went to sit on his lap. He was wearing workout shorts and I could feel his big, stiff cock through his pants. So cliché: we’d made out under the bleachers until we were busted by the soccer coach, but seeing as it wasn’t high school, we were just told to get lost instead of written up. I had to go to class so we hadn’t gone further. I’d left him needing, wanting.

Tonight that could change.

DeAndre was a member of the Beta Rho Omega class who had a different girl on his arm every night. A football player, he was at the college on an athletic scholarship, majoring in a three-two program in business administration. However, he didn’t need the money: he was a legacy member of Beta House, his father a member back in the eighties, and the scholarship was a lure to accept him to the UCBH campus instead of his father’s alma mater so that the school could get a donation. It had been explained to me by Kim when I’d asked about him before, and she said that although he was fun, I should see what the other guys were like before pursuing him. However, I’d checked out my other options and they were terrible, especially the one that wouldn’t get the fuck out of my mind: Skylar, Skylar, Skylar, his name popping in and out of my head like an annoying notification on my phone that I just wanted to smash against the floor so it’d break and disappear but right now, it was all about DeAndre.