Throb (Club Grit) (12 page)

“You know...I missed you, a lot,” said Keanne.

“You...missed me?” I asked, turning the phone to sleep mode. I looked up to look at Keanne, who was already looking at me. His sunglasses were off and in some way, he was more exposed to me in that moment than he’d ever been. Keanne, who usually acted so cool and calm, was revealing something to me that I’d never heard him say.

“Yeah, but I know I fucked up,” he said, giving me a small smile, but not turning away.

I returned the look. “You did. I missed you too, but with every day that passed without a text or a call, my heart pined a little less. I didn’t expect you to ever text me again, after a while.”

“Are you glad I did?” he asked, reaching out to take my hand, which I gave readily. He rubbed it gently, his smooth hands almost as soft as mine. It was as if he was polishing a set of precious stones with a chamois cloth, rubbing away all the doubt I’d had about the two of us, all the worries, all the sleepless nights, but some things couldn’t just be fixed through silence.

“I’m...not sure, really,” I said, looking back up at him and raising just one corner of my mouth and one of my eyebrows, giving Keanne a sad smile. I knew it wasn’t the answer he was looking for, and it wasn’t the one I was looking for either, but then again, neither was his question.

“I’m sorry,” he said, quietly.

“What?”

“I’m sorry, Becca. I should have texted, or called, or emailed. I should have kept in touch, but I didn’t want to bother you. Every time I wrote you a note, or a letter, or a text, I’d erase it and try and start over, but as the world around me changed, so did my feelings for you. I wasn’t sure what I felt for you. Were we just friends, or did we have something more? How much more?”

“I’m not sure anymore,” I said, looking back out the window because I knew that if Keanne and I kept talking about this, I’d end up crying, the way I had on so many nights, with a pillow as my only comfort...at least, before I’d met Jason, who could stop the tears he’d never seen with kisses I’d never seen coming.

Keanne didn’t let go of my hand. He pulled me back, gently. “Becca,” said Keanne. I turned at the sound of my name and he pulled himself up from his chair and leaned over the small table that blocked the sides of us closest to the wall. Taking the back of my head in one hand, he pulled me up and towards him, taking his other hand and slipping it onto my knee, for stability at first, but soon, to explore me further.

This was what I’d waited for, for almost a year. I’d wanted Keanne to kiss me since the moment I’d met him. It had been what I thought was love at first sight, unlike what I had with Jason, which had started as something fun that got out of control. I’d wanted Keanne to hold me, to caress me, and to tell me how he felt about me...so why did this feel so wrong?

I knew I should have wanted Keanne to press further into me, with his mouth and his hands. I knew I should give myself up to passion, because after all, it wasn’t like Jason and I were formally exclusive or dating....so why did I stop us from doing something that I shouldn’t regret?

“Keanne, we...we have to stop,” I said, pulling away from him and pushing his hands away from my thighs. My brain was screaming
What are you doing? You’ve wanted him for so long, and he wants you now! Any girl would let him continue, because every girl wants Keanne!
My heart was just saying one word, over and over:
Jason. Jason. Jason.

“Baby, don’t you want this?” he whispered into my ear, rubbing my thighs gently but not letting his fingers wander further up my skirt.

“There’s a man in my life now,” I said, placing a hand around his shoulder and rubbing it gently. Keanne was so firm, so fit, his muscles rippling through the soft fabric on the back of the shirt, but it wasn’t enough to make me cheat on the man I wasn’t even formally committed to. “It’s just that I—”

Keanne held up a slim finger to my lips and gave me a small smile as he pulled himself away and taking a seat again. “I understand. I do. Even if there wasn’t, hey, you say no, you mean no, you know?”

“Yeah, I do,” I said, pushing my dress back down. “Thanks.”

“I guess I should have seen what was right in front of me way back in the day, right?” he asked with a small chuckle as he snapped his fingers. One of the air stewardesses, who had been on her phone, stashed it and poured Keanne another flute of champagne before pouring me one as well.

“I mean, we’re both a lot different than before, you know?” I said, sipping at the golden bubbly liquid and almost instantly feeling more relaxed. Some people liked comfort food, I liked comfort alcohol. There wasn’t a problem that champagne couldn’t fix.

“Remember that time up in Frisco? The time where we accidentally asked for the shots “Animal Style” when we were ordering burgers on the phone through someone else?”

“Definitely crazy,” I said with a laugh, and in that moment, it wasn’t like we were up in a private plane. It was like Keanne and I were the people we were last summer: me, a newly minted twenty one who was finally seeing the world I’d wanted to since joining Omega Mu, and him, a sheltered rich boy with a talented voice that he was showing the world for the first time, trying to make it on his own while still bankrolled by his parents.

“Becca, I have missed you, and that’s not going to change just because you’re not interested in a relationship with me. It’s fine. But I was wondering if maybe you’d like to work on my team again this summer, as my personal assistant, and maybe help with some management stuff too. If you can keep me in line, I’m sure you can handle a bunch of college interns,” he said with a laugh. We both knew that last year, I didn’t need that much guidance: I had been a go-getter, solving and preventing problems before they even arose, but management experience would look good on a resume. It’d open up doors for journalism school, because I knew that if I wanted to get into a good grad school, I’d need to be able to prove I was not only a risk taker, but a leader. Sorority experience was good, but nothing compared to managing a celebrity’s entourage.

“I’d love to,” I said, a wide smile crossing my face.

“To summer,” said Keanne, raising his flute.

“To summer,” I agreed, tapping my champagne glass against his.

Being in a plane with Keanne felt so natural. Wasn’t this where I belonged? How many girls would kill to be where I was right now, and to have Keanne pursue them romantically? I had been one of them, last summer, before Keanne was as famous as he was today. I’d fantasized about him asking me out, about him trying to sweep me off my feet, whisking me away to a wonderland of glitz and glamour, but when he actually did it, I said no.

I would have said yes last summer, when I was still enamored with Keanne, before I’d slowly forgotten about him with every tender touch from Jason. I would have said yes when he was still sort of awkward and dorky, instead of the man oozing confidence and charisma that he no longer needed alcohol to conjure up. That wasn’t who we were any more, though. We were so different, and once I got off the plane, I knew that although I could be Keanne assistant, I couldn’t be his, but I knew who had to be mine.

K
EANNE’S DRIVER WENT TO JASON’S APARTMENT FIRST, where I was dropped off, with a kiss on the cheek and nothing more, before heading upstairs with my bags, expecting the lights to be off when I entered the apartment, which, to my surprise, was already unlocked.

When I got home, I expected to walk into a darkened room. Instead, the lights were on, and the apartment, in its shades of grey and black and white, took on a golden hue, like that of candle light in the autumn, lit by lamps with special bulbs on the ground. A light instrumental album was playing in the background, which I recognized as a cover of Fall Out Boy’s “Dance, Dance” by the Vitamin String Quartet. The apartment smelled like warm tomatoes, and I looked to the kitchen area.

There was Jason, in a pair of black slacks, a white shirt, a black apron, a black bow tie, black shoes, and his hair natural, not gelled or styled, just the way I liked it. “Welcome home,” he said, pulling out one of the chairs from the small table in the kitchen.

“Jason...you didn’t have to do this. Don’t you have work tonight?”

“I called in a vacation day,” he said. “I want to hear all about your trip.”

“There really isn’t much to tell,” I said, taking the seat as Jason started to put food onto our plates and brought out a pair of chilled drinks. “Mmm, what is this?” I asked. The drink tasted familiar but at the same time, there was something different about it. The liquid was orange and milky at the top, but an ombre gradient was formed by the whole of the drink, leading to a murky brown bottom.

“I know how much you love Thai food and how much you love Long Island Iced Teas, so I tried doing a Thai iced tea with a twist for you. The condensed milk and Thai tea concentrate gives it the familiar color. Do you like it?” he asked, still working on the presentation of the food.

“No, Jason,” I said, and he turned with wide eyes. “I love it.”

“Oh, good, because I don’t know how to make anything else,” he teased.

“To answer your question...it wasn’t a great trip. Keanne is the same as he was last summer,” I said, taking another sip of the sweet drink.

“And I take it that’s a bad thing?” asked Jason, and I saw a smile on his face.

“It’s terrible. I was hoping maybe he’d gone and done some growing up, and maybe, that after experiencing a gamut of things, he’d realize that what was missing from all his memories was me. That was stupid of me, though, and now...I’m not even sure why I liked him.”

“What does that mean for your summer?”

“It means I’m still going to work for him, and I do have to sort out some paperwork with him about that, but I might not work directly for him. I might manage a team of assistants, so that’s good, and it’ll look great on the resume, but...it made me reconsider a lot of stuff.”

“Like, us?”

“No, don’t worry.”

“I meant, maybe, did you think about us in a different light?”

I knew what Jason was getting at but I had to hear him say it. “Whatever could you mean What we have is good...right?”

As he placed the plate of pasta in front of me, the sauce’s steam caressing my face, he asked me the question I knew he’d been dying to ask for a long time. “Becca...I was wondering if maybe, you’d like to take our relationship to the next level.”

“What else is there?” I teased, pretending to be easy breezy, but inside? My heart was throbbing. I knew what I wanted him to say, and finally, I knew I was ready to give an answer that wouldn’t hurt either of us. It had taken a horrible trip with a mediocre man to finally realize what I had with Jason was special and deserved a title, but the fact that I knew with certainty that committing to Jason was the right thing to do made the decision so much easier to make.

“Becca, will you...be my girlfriend?” he asked, taking a knee and looking up at me as if he was proposing. It was supposed to be a joke, but it was all too fitting, given the fact he’d gone to this much effort just to ask me out.

“Okay, but first, I have to ask you a question,” I said, getting out of my chair and taking a knee myself. “Jason. Will you be my boyfriend?”

“Of course,” he said, leaning in to kiss me. “Sorry, it’s just –”

This time, it was my turn to cut him off. “Is that of an of course yes, or an of course no?” I teased.

“Yes, Becca, I’d love to be your boyfriend, I love you so much,” he said, and then, realizing what he’d added on the end before even I could, he retracted it. “I mean – ”

“Are you implying you don’t love me?” I asked slyly.

“No,” he said.

“No, you don’t love me?”

“No, I mean –”

“Jason, you know I’m a dreadful tease. It’s fine. It’s actually more than fine, because I’m asking you to be my boyfriend because I love you. I love you, Jason. I feel like the biggest jerk in the world, needing a trip with Keanne to figure that out, but I think that what happened was I idealized him in my head, I made him into something he wasn’t, when what I wanted all along was what I’d already had.”

“Does that mean you two...?”

“Had sex? No. We didn’t.”

“So is this relationship still open or – ”

“You know how you said you hadn’t been dating anybody else? Since we met?”

“Yes?”

“Well, I’ll just put it this way. I only went home with guys when I went to Club Grit. I don’t go to Frat Fridays or Thirsty Thursdays, just Club Grit.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Probably what you’re trying to figure out: I haven’t been with anyone since I’ve been with you. That scared me, Jason, for the longest time. And trust me, it wasn’t on purpose, but for some reason, ever since I met you, I just didn’t need anyone else. I know it sounds weird and strange and obsessive, but I haven’t wanted another man since I’ve been with you. It’s not about the sex, it’s not about your appearance, it’s about the way you get me, and more and more, I’ve been realizing most people don’t get me.”

“What about like, the rumors?”

“About me and other guys?”

Jason nodded.

“Yeah, that’s exaggerated. I’ve taken a few guys back to Beta Rho from the Omega House, but only because they were too drunk to get there on their own. The rumors about me sleeping around are only half true. I did before I met you, but haven’t since. However, I never made any sort of effort to prove those rumors false. People are going to attach labels to me no matter what. It’s what happens: I’m either going to be called a slut or a bitch. Honestly, what’s so bad about being either, or being both? If I fight it, I’m just giving people power, giving them a word to use against me, a label that they’ll assume that, because I’m fighting, I think is negative. It sounds weird, I know, but...I just didn’t care enough to combat the rumors. Plus, I didn’t want you getting the wrong idea about us.”

“What do you mean?”

“You and I...we never had the conversation, about what we were, about what to call what we had, about what the limits and boundaries were. We ended up okay, but you know that it’s a fluke, right? We’re not supposed to be okay, we’re not supposed to work out, but somehow, we’re still together. It’s pretty nuts, isn’t it?”