Random Acts of Love (Random #5) (17 page)

How Joe had just sat there like a statue, constantly looking at the door like he was going to bolt the second anyone asked him to talk about his “feewings”. But before it was over, Mike had told Joe he was making himself miserable with his jealousy, and Mike had done the same thing before, and it was all on him. And Joe and Trevor had just sat there with their mouths hanging open. But then I got in a big fight with Madge about her niece, and Laura and her guys had to suddenly run out the door because of some creepy uncle or something.  

Hadn’t they learned a fucking thing from that talk? Guess not. And while I’d uprooted my entire life to come out here and see what my destiny might be away from Ohio and the struggles I’d had living in Peters, Trevor and Joe really hadn’t changed at all, had they? Joe kept doing exactly what Mike had said that day. They went on as planned, going to their law school, playing in the band, fucking me on the side and playing pretend on the surface.

Oh, my God—they had used me. And I’d gone along, like a lap dog, tongue hanging out and tail wagging, eager for table scraps.

There was a time when them table scraps was enough. More than enough.

Now it was just slop.

“Fuck them,” I said through gritted teeth, tears rolling down my cheeks. “Ashamed of me. A groupie and not a manager. Fucking chicken woman, all tight and tiny with a puckered little butthole for a mouth.”

“Chicken woman?” I heard Alex whisper to Josie.

“Don’t ask,” she hissed back. He shut up and returned to being muscle, lifting bags and boxes until we were done.

Josie surveyed the bedroom, bath, and living room/kitchen combo. “Anything else?”

My mouth and eyes felt like swollen balloons, so full they were ready to pop. She rubbed the spot between my shoulder blades. That always used to help when I was a kid. A half smile peeked out from my lips. 

“I think this does it. If I miss something, I can call Amy.” She’d be shocked. And she and Sam would hate losing me as a roommate, but also my share of the rent.

Trevor could cover it, though.

Trevor would have to deal with the consequences of his choices.

I wasn’t no shield no more.

My body went limp as a rag doll, and I sagged against Josie. I’d dressed all nice and grown-up for dinner at Trevor’s, in a wrap shirt and stylish pants, real shoes with a slight heel on my feet. I even had pearl earrings in my ears. For once, I’d tried to play by their rules—his parents’ rules, I mean. My hair was pulled back, neat and sculpted, the wild waves tamed into gentle curls. I’d worn makeup, and could only imagine I had eyes now like the raccoon I’d run over the day I met Trevor, which seemed about right now.

This whole situation stank to high holy heaven, just like that raccoon had when I’d dumped a naked Trevor onto the floor of my piece of shit Toyota.

Big, ugly tears seized my throat, my mouth, my eyes, my heart, my everything. Josie murmured a bunch of words that added up to nothing but love, the kind of love you feel for someone who is hurting, drawn from compassion and connection more than experience and knowing. Her comfort was all she could give, her presence a gift but no cure.

Alex came and between the two of them, they escorted me to the door. I reached into my pocket and handed the key to Alex. Those deft surgeon’s fingers pried it off the keychain loop, and he placed it on the small table we kept near the door for mail and stuff.

And then I was gone.

Just gone.

C
HAPTER 5

Trevor

“Fuck that fucking cold-hearted bitch,” I growled, on my fifth beer.

“I know. My mom’s awful,” Joe snorted. He was sucking on some kind of vaporizer filled with new pot he’d gotten from a friend who grew it to pharmaceutical grade. It was an inlaid wooden box with a digital display and a long plastic tube connecting the box to Joe’s mouth.  

“I was talking about Darla.”

Joe’s eyebrows shot up and he coughed and blew smoke at me, but he wisely said nothing. Smart man. Fuck everyone. Seriously. That whole event back at my parents’ house two days ago was a swirling mess of what-the-fuck that still made no sense to me. Joe’s mom was a bitch, for sure, but what Darla did afterward was unbelievable. Unconscionable. 

Unforgivable.

“So we come home and she’s just gone? All her shit moved out? She left us her food, but took all the rest of it.”

“Even the sex toys,” Joe muttered, sucking his beer until it was empty. He was staying with us. The past two days had been fucking miserable as we tried to figure out where everything had gone off the edge. Darla wouldn’t talk to us. She shut us out. No calls, no texts, no emails, no nothing.

She had handed off all band manager business work to Amy, who was struggling to make sense of it. Charlotte helped, and had called in her buddy, Maggie. Darla did the work of three God-damned women.

How could she dump this on us?

I’d wrapped up my stupid semester at Harvard, Joe was done at Penn, my internship was looming at the biggest law firm in the city, and if my summer job went well I pretty much had an associate position when I finished. The next few months were pivotal:

Do well at the firm and set my future up, or...

Go wild on tour with zero stability but fulfill a dream?

Without Darla, the second option seemed so empty.

And so did the first.

Liam walked in without knocking, grabbed my half-consumed beer off the end table, chugged it down, went to the fridge, got two more, handed me one and popped his own open. He drank most of that, sat down, and muttered, “Women!”

“Charlotte?” Joe asked.

Liam burped. “Yeah. We’re fine.”

“You always think you’re fine,” I groaned. “And then bam—she moves out on you, won’t take your calls, and when you complain she took the best sex toys—” 

“You
complained
?” Joe gaped.

“I was trying to get some kind of response out of her.”

“Did you?”

I snorted. “She texted me a link to Charlotte’s sales site.”

Liam hooted. “Man, she hates both of you. So much. So, so much.”

We both turned and looked at him. “How do you know?”

“Charlotte,” he said easily. “The hens are all rallied around her. Over at Josie’s right now. They’re doing whatever chicks do when they have some asshole who broke up with them. It seems to involve lots and lots of ice cream and Nicholas Sparks movies.”

“We didn’t break up with her,” I protested. 

“You kinda did.”

“WHAT?” Joe and I shouted at the same time.

“You humiliated her.”

“My MOM humiliated her,” Joe said.

“Trevor, too.” Liam finished the beer and got a second one.

“Explain,” I demanded, standing and wobbling a little. Normally, this much beer would have me peeing for three minutes, grinning the whole time. Drinking when you’re angry brings a completely different feeling to the buzz that comes along. I was unmoored, like a gyroscope with a dent in one of the rings. Loopy and uncentered. Unbalanced and unhinged.

“Do I look like the Dr. Phil translator for you guys?” he barked.

Sam walked in, carrying a bottle of vodka, a half gallon of orange juice, and a giant box of tampons.

All three of us halted and stared.

“Don’t ask,” he muttered, turning bright red. His blushing was about as masculine as, well...that purchase.

“We are whipped with a capital P, aren’t we?” Liam muttered. He stood, got four glasses from the cupboard (none of which matched), put ice in them all, and poured enough vodka to choke a horse, with a splash of orange juice. 

It was a fruit, right? Vitamin C. Good for us.

Gulp. Mine was gone in three swallows. It burned. Good. I needed to simultaneously stop my emotions while I enhanced my body’s sensations.

This would help.

“Look at Sam!” I exclaimed, suddenly feeling such affection for my poor friend. “He got kicked out of his house, his dad beat the shit out of him, he went to college anyway, hooked up with the girl who got away, and now he gave her a rock and he’ll only ever dip his wick in the same pussy pool forever and ever.”

That speech sounded a lot better in my head.

“And that is so—” 

“Sad,” Joe muttered. “The same pussy forever, huh?”

“And you were only getting half a pussy, dude,” Liam said to him, his drink half gone.

Joe bristled. “Huh?”

“With Darla. You two shared her. Half a pussy.”

“It wasn’t half. I got the whole pussy.”

Sam and Liam looked at me with expressions of assessment. “So you were the only one who put it in the...” Sam’s voice trailed off and he blazed like a candy apple.

“Ass. You were the assrider?” Liam finished for him.

I frowned. The room spun. “What?”

“If Joe got one hundred percent of the pussy with Darla,” Liam asked, slowing his words, “then that makes you the brown starfish expert.”

“He means you’re the one who shoved it up her ass when we had sex,” Joe said bluntly.

I shrugged. Liam was grinning like he expected me to be ashamed or be offended by this.

“It’s cool,” Liam said, giving Sam a meaningful look, but Sam wasn’t catching.

“Not really. But why does it matter? Sex is sex,” I added, deciding it was time to pour myself another vodka and orange juice. Except this time I had a brilliant idea and decided I would leave out the orange juice part. And the glass part. I just lifted the jug to my lips and drank it like nectar.

“You know,” Sam asked, leaning in, “is it better when there’s three of you?” 

The room froze, just like in that new Disney movie. We all became Disney princesses and began singing as the wall melted. Okay, that part may not have actually happened anywhere except in my singular mind, but it could have.

If Joe had some acid.

“What?” Joe asked, stretching his legs out on the coffee table, knocking the remote onto the floor.

“The sex,” Sam persisted. “Is it better with three, vs. two. I’ve always been curious.”

“Find out for yourself.”

“I can’t. I’m with Amy,” he said simply.

“Ask her about finding another woman and getting it on,” Liam joked.

“Or another man,” I said.

Liam’s idea of a threesome and mine clearly did not square, because he scowled at that suggestion.

I imitated his face. Made me feel like a bulldog in heat. “What’s this?” I pointed to my own scowl. “What the fuck is wrong with two men and a woman together?”

He held his palms up. “Nothing’s wrong with it. Just not my thing.”

“Your thing is fucking every piece of meat you could get your hands on until Charlotte waltzed back in and yanked the leash she has you on.”

He tensed. “That is not what happened.”

“And neither is what you think about me and Darla and Joe. And yeah, Sam, it’s way better.”

He gave me a skeptical look. “You’re not making much sense, Trevor.”

“Good. Give me a hit of acid or a button of peyote or some pot-laced firecracker sandwiches and I won’t make any sense at all, which is where I want to be an hour from now.”

Joe walked out of the room on steady legs and came back in holding a tiny baggie of something and showing it to me. “Here,” he declared.

I held it up to the light. It looked like about a teaspoon of harmless white powder.

“What the hell is this?”

“Remember that peyote you ate two years ago in your parents’ basement?”

“Yeah.”

“This makes that look like baby formula.”

“Oooooo.” I opened the baggie, tipped my head up and dumped it in. Joe lunged at me as I shoved him away, snatched a beer from the end table and guzzled it all down.

“Trev, no, that’s meant to be....” His voice wound down as he realized it was too late. “For ten people or so.”

“So that was the elephant dose?”

Joe frowned and rolled his eyes. “Uh... just remember to say hi to the machine elves for me.”

“Fuck me.”

“We can find you someone,” Liam said with a nudge. “You’re a free man.”

A free man.

“That’s right! I am!” I knew I loved Liam. L-O-V-E-D him. He was so soft and hard and tall like me, and now his eyes looked like Skittles I could just pluck and eat right off his face.

“And you know what?” I added. “FUCK DARLA! I’ve spent the last two years in chains, and now I’m free. I’m freeeeeeee!” I started singing The Who and that went on so long that after a while I noticed Sam brought a load of laundry into the living room and began folding it.

And then I grabbed my phone and texted every single contact in there except for my parents, my boss, and the law school advisor and dean.

PARTY AT TREVOR’S APARTMENT. 9PM. EPIC PUSSY AND ASS. BRING GIRLS, BOOZE, DRUGS, SEX TOYS AND SMALL ANIMALS.

And hit “send.” Three hundred and twenty-two contacts. People love me. I love them. My hands felt really good when I touched myself. Darla wouldn’t ever let me touch her again with my magic hands. Her loss. I really wanted Chipotle right now. 

Liam, Sam and Joe jumped as their phones buzzed.

They all looked at me with various expressions of pure love.

“It’s on,” I said simply, and that’s the last thing I remembered for three days.

Darla

Charlotte, Amy, Charlotte’s friend Maggie and me were at Josie’s, having us an ex-boyfriend beat down. Alex had offered to take Josie up to some sweet place in Vermont for the weekend, a romantic retreat that made me want to hurl pea soup and monkey shit at them even while I was happy for them.

When you just broke up with someone, any people who are happily in love are like the Antichrist.

Charlotte and Amy were allowed to be with me because they were my friends, and because they brought chocolate liquor, chocolate, and a tray of spanakopita and kebob from my favorite Greek place in Somerville. Otherwise, they were on the No-Fly list as far as I was concerned, Amy’s glittering little diamond-chip engagement ring like a nasty little gargoyle face that taunted me from her hand.

True love is a myth. It’s this total snow job society sells you to make you buy shit like diamonds and Valentine’s Day cards, but it’s so much more insidious than that. From Disney princesses to big-budget movies to romance novels, nothing sells like the story that one day your princes will come and you will live Happily Ever After.