The Thrill of It (2 page)

I’m five minutes early and there’s one other person in the room. A thin woman with pink hair cut in a stick-straight bob rises and greets me.

“Hi. I’m Joanne. Welcome to the SLAA meeting,” she says, pronouncing the name of the group like
slaw
.

“Layla,” I mumble, not sure how words are even coming out of my mouth as I give her a fake name. There is no way I’d use my real name here. Besides, Layla is the name that brought me here. Layla is my
other
name. Layla is the other me.

I shake Joanne’s hand. It feels smooth and she smells like lavender. Maybe she just put on lotion.

“Coffee?” She smiles brightly at me, as if coffee is the answer to every addict’s deepest desires. Because it’s the only acceptable drug.

I am a junkie. I take what I can get.

I nod, barely able to speak. I sit in one of the chairs as Joanne pours coffee from a pot into a chipped ceramic mug with the slogan
When in Doubt, Don’t.

Great. If only I’d had a collection of mugs emblazoned with
Keep it Simple
and
Just for Today
, maybe I’d never have slid down that slippery slope into Layla.

“I’m so glad you’re here, Layla,” Joanne says, flashing me another happy grin. “Do you knit?”

Crap.

Do I have to make small talk with her?

She gestures to her canvas bag, spilling over with yarn, steely blue knitting needles and what looks to be the start of a maroon scarf.

“I’m not very crafty,” I say and leave it at that as she talks about the scarf she is working on, and how she’s going to pair it with a matching sweater, and I simply smile at her without showing any teeth.

There. I’m keeping it simple.

I’d rather go mute for this meeting because my mouth feels like cotton and my head is a pinball machine and the last thing I want to do right now is talk about how my life has spun out of control.

Except for last night. Because there is one guy who didn’t make it on my list. One guy who never felt like a list. The guy from last night who inked my shoulder, and kissed my body, and who gave me something I’ve never felt before – touch without agenda. A true and real want. He didn’t want anything more from me than me. It was such a foreign feeling, but such a wondrous one.

I’ll never see him again.

Soon the room starts to fill and I keep my head down, doing everything I can not to meet their eyes. I don’t want to know what other addicts look like. I don’t want to know if they look like me. I stare at my shoes, my Mary Janes, the black buckle shiny because it’s always shiny because that’s what made me top of the line. I was the whole package – the shoes, the plaid skirt, the white blouse, the beyond-innocent look on my face.

I hate that I miss that me.

I miss her terribly.

Even after last night, and all that it could have become, all the ways it was different from the past, I still miss me when I was Layla.

The circle of chairs has been filled in with guys and girls. I scan their faces and all I see are their secrets.

Then my blood goes both hot and cold when he walks in. The guy from last night with the scar across his right cheek.

Trey

This is the last place I want to be even though it’s the only place I should be.

Seeing as how I have a permanent reminder on my face of what happens when you go too far.

I’d be able to handle this better if I could extradite the memory of last night from my stupid head. But I can’t because she’s staked a home in my skull, and the images aren’t going away anytime soon. That girl who walked into No Regrets, the West Village tattoo shop where I work, was the hottest girl I’d ever seen, and so damn innocent looking – a combination that killed my self-resolve to start over. She had a sweet smile, a sexy t-shirt and a skirt that left just enough to the imagination at first. She wasn’t like the women I was used to. She was the total opposite. She wasn’t like my regular customers at the shop either. She’d never been inked and she didn’t look like the type who’d want to mark up her body. She was the kind of girl who’d wear pearl earrings, blow dry her hair, and apply pink lip gloss. She was all Manhattan preppy, gorgeous blond hair, and brown eyes, and so not the type for a tat.

“Can you do a red ribbon? The one I sent you when I made the appointment?”

“Yeah. I can do whatever you want. It’s all ready for you,” I said, then brought her back to my booth, and showed her the transfer paper based on the ribbon design she’d sent me online. I figured it was a cause tattoo, like for all those charities that use red ribbons. “Anything special about red ribbons?”

“They’re special to me.” That was all she said on the subject. But we talked about everything else – music and school and what we wanted out of life – as she sat in the chair and pushed up her sleeve to her shoulder. It was a damn good thing I knew how to concentrate because I could
smell
her. She had on some kind of wild cherry lotion, and the scent drove me wild, along with her hair, her eyes, her body.

Which made zero fucking sense since I’ve never been attracted to girls younger than me.

Never ever ever.

But maybe the scar I’d landed last month was all I needed to change my ways.

When I was done with her tat she said thanks, then turned on those hot little heels and started to walk out.

That’s all.

Nothing more.

But I wanted more. My shift was over, so I followed her to the door. “Don’t go,” I said.

I didn’t have time to craft a line, or feed her some bullshit, and trust me. I know how to feed lines. I know how to spin them on the spot.

But I didn’t want to lie anymore.

We went out for coffee, we wandered around Manhattan, and we rode a midnight train where I first kissed her. There was this strange vibe in the air, like we were in Europe and had met on a backpacking trip, and only had twenty-four hours to spend. So we spent them together.

There was a ticking clock all night long.

We went back to my apartment near school, and I hadn’t had a thing to drink, but I felt buzzed and tipsy just being near her.

We didn’t go all the way. But she let me touch her. She
wanted
me to touch her. She told me she’d never let anyone touch her the way I did. Hell, if that wasn’t a crazy turn-on I don’t know what is.

Nothing could even compare to it.

So when I walk into my first meeting of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, I grab the doorway and hold on tight. This whole room is rocking, like we’re on a ship and hit choppy waters. I must be seeing things. There’s no way she can be here.

My heart trips over on itself, then it sputters out of control and collapses.

Harley.

She’s the only girl I’ve ever been with who’s not older than me. She’s the only girl who didn’t feel like a fix.

And, evidently, she’s a lot like me.

No wonder the clock was ticking last night. We both took one final hit before going on the wagon.

I grab an empty chair and try not to think about her during the meeting. But it’s impossible. Because the night with her is the last I’ll have like that for a long time. Even this Joanne lady running the show issues the reminder – some sort of rule we should follow. A guideline so we can stop being fucked up from sex.

“And it’s recommended that you abstain from sexual, romantic or any type of love relationships in your first year of recovery,” Joanne says, while her knitting needles click faster and faster.

But I’ve never been one to heed warnings.

At the end of the meeting, I walk up to Harley, who calls herself Layla. “What were the chances?”

She seems nervous, worried. She looks down, away, then at me and whispers, “Everything I said last night was true.”

My heart thumps faster.

“Good,” I say, and wish her words didn’t turn me on so much. I know I need to stay away from her. But I don’t want to. I want
something
with her. “We could be friends maybe.”

She nods and smiles. “Yes. Let’s be friends.”

At least it’s something.

Chapter One

Six Months Later

Harley

I am more than halfway done.

I tell myself that as I walk purposefully to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, taking a deep, steadying breath. Trey is by my side. He holds my hand. He almost always holds my hand.

Correction: He almost always holds my hand when we’re far, far away from the rest of them. “It’s what friends do,” he says, and I hope he says it to remind himself of our rules – rules we have both followed to the painful, white-knuckle letter – no touching, no kissing, no nothing more whatsoever – but
this
– this we allow. Only we never talk about why. We never discuss what happened the night before we met again. There is some unwritten rule that we are on the other side.

But I won’t truly be on the other side until I can slice off this albatross.

This debt. I have been up late, up early, and up all around. I have been living and breathing and choking out the words this woman demands of me.

All the tawdry tales. All the names – anonymously – from my list.

She makes me dive into them. Makes me share the story behind the kiss, the man, the where, the when, and most of all – the why.
Make them titillating but reviling too,
she says.
Make sure you come across as someone who desperately needs redemption, absolution.

Sometimes, I wish I could punch a hole in the story of my life that I am forced to write for her –
Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict
.

Trey grips my hand tighter, looping his fingers through mine and I shiver. I’m not cold. It’s May, and it’s warm, and any kind of contact from him sends me soaring. The more I know him, the more I want him, and the more I can’t have him. We are in recovery, and he’s told me many times he wants to make it through.

“I don’t need another one of these,” he’ll say, then run his index finger absently across the scar on his right cheek. But I love his scar. I want to trace it and kiss it and touch it. Scars are sexy – they say you’ve lived and that you’ve survived. That’s how I see him. But I don’t want to be the one who knocks him off the wagon. So this friendship, this hand holding is all we allow. No fooling around. That’s what we promise to do in SLAA. One year. Alone. Without anything. Without kissing. Without dating. Without relationships.

But abstinence, withdrawal, a break, whatever-you-call-it doesn’t stop my worn-down, wasted heart from wanting this boy by my side to be more than my friend.

I squeeze back, taking the slightest bit of contact with him. I’ve never held hands with anyone before. The men who ordered jailbait teenage call girls weren’t the type who liked to hold hands. Shocking, right?

Trey flashes me a grin.

“You can do this, Harley. It’ll be over soon.”

I scoff. “Not soon enough.”

When we’re one block away from the church, I say goodbye. “And this is where you must go, my sweet escort.”

He raises an eyebrow. “I should have been an escort.”

“You’d have been the best. Anyway, I don’t want her to see you. She’ll find some way to dig her claws into you.”

He looks over his shoulder as if he’s checking out claw marks on his back. “Damn. I still have some other ones there. Scars everywhere.”

I swat him. Fine, this is another allowed touch. “I like your scars. Besides, I’m sure you had many marks on your back.”

“Covered in ‘em. Everywhere.” His eyes light up. There’s a part of him too that misses his past. Longs for his drug.

“Get out of here, boy toy.”

This is how we operate. I know his past with women. He knows my past with men. And we can tease each other. No one else knows my past.

“Call me later though, okay? Let’s hang out after I’m done with work?”

“Of course,” I say because we are addicted in a new way now. To contact with each other. We talk every day, text every day, see each other most days.

He salutes me and walks off to catch a subway back to the West Village where he’ll spend the evening studying history for his final exams in between making permanent marks on the skin of customers.

I walk one more block, grit my teeth, narrow my eyes, and tell myself I am iron, I am steel, I am unflappable.

I enter another church.

I never thought I’d spend so much time in them for reasons other than worship. I grip my field hockey stick in one hand. I don’t even play anymore. I simply like weapons, and I like flexing my fingers around it as I pass through the musty vestibule, ignore the holy water and the candles, and take my customary spot in the fifth pew from the back, laying the stick across my bare legs.

I’ve been summoned by my Dark Overlord, and I can’t say no.

Such is the life of a former teenage call girl who’s being blackmailed.

It’s a Tuesday afternoon so there’s no service now. I glance around at the other churchgoers; a few scattered faithful are here. Or desperate, depending on how you slice it. As I scan their bent heads, I wonder if anyone hears their silent pleas. Maybe some are even asking for forgiveness for their sins, which is what I’d be doing if I were a religious girl.

But I’m not.

I hear the familiar sound of Miranda’s heels clicking across the stone floor.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two…

When I reach
one
in my head, she’s sliding into the pew, maintaining a two-foot distance between us as if getting closer to me would infect her. I kind of wish I had pink-eye, could touch my eye, then zoom in on her with the pad of my index finger just to watch her pull away and freak out.

But then, she’d find some way for me to pay for that too.

She says nothing as she stares at the sweeping altar ahead of us. Her golden blonde hair is piled high on her head with a clip, her medium length bangs swept over her ear. She looks amazing, especially in her sharp grey skirt that fits well and the pretty indigo blouse she wears. She’s lost about twenty pounds in the last six months.