Dirty Read online

  “Such boys. Look at them.”

  Dan laughed again, and he turned to see me. His smile widened. He gave me a little wave. I returned it. His tongue slid along his lips, and my heart thudded.

  “You like him, don’t you.” Marcy’s question caught my attention. “I can tell.”

  “I do like him.”

  Marcy has no sense of personal boundaries. She put her arm around me and rested her chin on my shoulder. It was a little sharp, and I winced.

  “So?” she asked, “What’s the problem?”

  “No problem.”

  She didn’t ask again. Wayne distracted her by pointing toward the pit beef booth, and Dan waved me over, and we all went to get something to eat. Marcy talked enough for all of us, and I got away with eating my sandwich and not saying much at all.

  I like the art show. I like the booths and the artists and the carnival atmosphere, absent of the actual carnies. I even like the food.

  This year, they had a band playing on a floating stage down by the river. We took our sandwiches and drinks to sit on the concrete steps leading down to the water. The band was good, playing a mix of oldies that pleased most of the crowd and didn’t offend anyone. Marcy and Wayne sat close together, feeding each other French fries and sharing a milk shake. Dan and I sat a bit farther apart, not sharing anything.

  This time, when he dropped me at my door, I didn’t chatter the key in the lock or make small talk. I opened the door and went inside, holding it open for him to pass by me and into the house. I shut it behind us, and he followed me down the long, narrow hall to my kitchen.He stopped in front of the dining room. “Wow.”

  I paused, feeling shy. “I just finished it.”

  He walked inside the odd-shaped room. “The Little Prince.”

  I smiled, watching him read the words. “You know it.”

  He looked over his shoulder at me. “I read it, since you told me I should.”

  Nerves caught me again, and I ducked out of the room to head for the kitchen. I filled the kettle and started heating water for tea. A moment later, he joined me.

  “This is nice, too.” He looked around at my black-and-white existence.

  “Thanks.”

  “I like that print.”

  He pointed to the black-and-white photograph I’d hung on the wall next to the back door. It showed a girl with long, dark hair obscuring her face. She sat on a low brick wall surrounding a koi pond, her arms gripping her knees. Ripples made rings on the water’s surface. That picture reminded me of all the reasons I’d never invited him here, and why I’d kept pushing him away.

  I waited for him to look at the picture again. Look harder. I waited for him to really see it, not just look at it.

  He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Where’d you get it?”

  “My brother took it.”

  The kettle whistled and I ignored him by scooping tea into the pot and pouring in the boiling water. Earl Grey, my favorite. I let the fragrant steam bathe my face before I put the teapot lid on to steep the tea.

  “That’s you.”

  “Yes.”

  “How old were you?” He stepped closer, hands in his pockets, to study the framed photo.

  “Fifteen.”

  I set out cups, sugar, cream. I rustled in the cupboard and brought out some chocolate-dipped cookies, though my stomach churned from the horseradish I’d had on the beef. I had to move the container of bamboo to the counter to fit everything on the table.

  He studied the picture a moment longer. “What were you thinking when he took it?”

  The question startled me so much I dropped the bamboo. Made of heavy, clear plastic instead of glass, the container didn’t break when it hit my tiled floor, but the bamboo, water and marbles flew everywhere, and I let out a heartfelt “FUCK!”

  Dan was already moving forward to help me, and that annoyed me. It was irrational. Petty, even, but I waved impatient hands at him to move away as I grabbed a dish towel and bent to mop up the water.

  “It will survive, Elle. Bamboo’s hearty.”

  “Someone gave this to me.” I soaked up the water as he gathered the twisting stems and set them on the table. “It was a gift. Now the roots are all broken!”

  He scooped up marbles and put them back in the container. “It’ll be okay.”

  I made a rude noise and got to my feet to wring out the towel. I had to turn my back on him to keep from saying something mean, something he didn’t deserve but something I wanted to say, anyway. Does knowing you’re about to be a bitch make it any easier? More justifiable? I didn’t think so then and I don’t now, but like a lot of things in my life, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

  The clink, clink, clink of the marbles settling into the container made my shoulders hunch with tension, and I turned. “Don’t crack it! It will leak!”

  He looked up at me, his eyes narrowing. “I’m not going to crack it.”

  I scanned the marbles in the jar, those in his hand and the few left on the floor as he finished cleaning them up. “You missed three.”

  He looked around. “Where?”

  “I don’t know where,” I snapped, irritable beyond justification. “I just know there were 287 marbles in that container and now there are only 284!”

  He stared at me. Heat crept up my throat and my cheeks. I turned back to the sink. Behind me I heard him scuffling around, then the clink of the last three marbles being dropped next their companions.

  “Elle.” Dan came up close behind me, but didn’t touch me.

  “I was counting,” I told him. “In the picture. I was counting the fish in the pond.”

  Whisper-soft, his hands rested on my shoulders. I didn’t pull away, but neither did I yield to him. He sighed and took his hands away.

  “How many were there?”

  “Fifty-six.”

  “Elle. Turn around.”

  I did, reluctantly. I wanted to fight with him. I wanted, actually, to make him angry enough with me that he would go away on his own, and I’d be saved the trouble of making him.

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  The only thing he’d done wrong was make me like him. And how could I tell him that? “No.”

  “Then what?” He ran a hand through his hair. “You’re acting like I pissed you off.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “You didn’t.”

  “Then what?” He gestured from himself to me. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing is going on!” I scowled. He scowled back. The phone rang and he looked at it while I made no move to answer. On the fourth ring, I jerked the handset from the cradle and thumbed the talk button. “Hello?”

  “Hello, darlin’.”

  “Hi.” I turned away from Dan.

  “Is this a bad time?” Chad asked.

  “Yeah. Can I call you later?”

  “Sure, baby doll. You okay?”

  “I’ll call you later.” There was no use lying to him. Chad could tell when I was upset.

  “Sure, sure. Later, ’gator.”

  I disconnected and hung up. Dan had put his hands on his hips. I met his gaze with a steady one of my own.

  He looked at the phone. Then at me. I couldn’t help it. I smiled, snarky bitch. “Yes?”

  He shook his head. “Do you want me to go?”

  It wasn’t what I wanted, but I nodded. “I think that would be best. Yes.”

  He stared at me a moment longer before letting out a hiss. He tossed up his hands. “Fuck it. Right. Okay. I’ll go.”

  He couldn’t have gone very far. Down to the newsstand on the corner and back, less than ten minutes. I hadn’t even had time to finish cleaning up the mess from the bamboo before my front door rattled beneath his knock. I almost didn’t answer it, but the thought of him making a scene in front of my neighbors changed my mind. I yanked it open.

  He had a bouquet of crimson roses. “I’m sorry.”

  If my expression showed half of the horror I felt, he could ha
ve had no doubt about my reaction. I stepped back with a grimace. There were roses when my brother died. Roses all around him. Roses at the funeral. Roses on his grave.

  I hate roses.

  “Elle?”

  I put a hand over my mouth to keep from smelling them. “Take them away.”

  He hesitated, then leaned out the front door and tossed them into the garbage pail next to my small concrete porch. He came in and shut the door behind him. I put my hand up to keep him from coming closer.

  “What kind of woman doesn’t like roses?” He looked so perplexed I might have laughed if I wasn’t still so distraught.

  “I’m allergic to roses,” I lied. “I told you to leave!”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Not until you tell me what the hell’s the matter.”

  I pushed past him into the living room, but he snagged my elbow and turned me. “Let me go.”

  He didn’t. “Is there someone else?”

  “Why is that the first question men always ask?” I jerked my arm out of his grasp.

  “Is there?”

  “Fuck you, Dan.” My throat hurt. My head hurt. I didn’t want to be having this conversation, but it had begun and I didn’t know how to stop it.

  His hand went to the throat of his shirt, working the buttons. “If that’s what you want.”

  I backed away from him. “Very clever. Get out.”

  He advanced on me, his shirt hanging open. I had never seen him look this way, like storms brewed in his eyes. They’d gone dark, no longer brilliant blue-green but the color of a lake before a storm. His mouth had thinned into a grim, determined line, and I suddenly found it difficult to believe I’d ever seen him smile.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t want it.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him that very thing, but no words would come. I stammered something I meant to sound negative but only made him quirk his mouth into something too scary to be a grin.

  He pulled off his shirt and started with his belt. I took another step back. My heart hammered. I couldn’t look away from his face. His anger. His determination.

  “Tell me, Elle.” He frowned.

  I took a few deep breaths. “I told you in the beginning, Dan.”

  “Yeah, you don’t date.” He sneered, looking me up and down. “You’ll let me fuck you seven ways to Sunday, but you won’t let me take you on a date. Elle, what difference does it make what we call it?”

  “It makes a difference to me!” Tears would have eased the tightness in my throat, but even then I couldn’t find them. “It’s something, Dan, I can’t—I don’t—I just don’t want…I don’t…”

  I shook my head, took another few deep breaths while he stared at me. “I don’t want a boyfriend.”

  “Why not?” He buckled his belt again, with angry hands, then started on his shirt. “I’m good enough to get you off but not be your boyfriend? Is that it? You’re ashamed? You’re married? What?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Then what,” he said, softer, buttoning his last button and moving toward me again. “Because I thought we were past this bullshit.”

  I let him touch me for a moment before I pulled away. I sat on my couch, a pillow hugged in my arms to create distance between us. I didn’t indicate he should sit, too, but he did.

  “I thought you liked fucking me.” The explanation was lame, but the best I could manage at the moment.

  “I do. I do, Elle. But I like being with you, too. Don’t you like being with me? Just hanging out?”

  He sounded vulnerable, and it made me hate myself. It made me hate him. I pulled on the tassels of my pillow and tried to find kind words, not cruel, to explain myself.

  “I don’t want a boyfriend,” I repeated. “I don’t want that commitment. A boyfriend is flowers and holding hands and having to buy cute little cards for holidays. A boyfriend is an investment, an emotional investment, and I don’t want to give it and I…I don’t want to expect it.”

  He made a noise low in his throat, and I wanted to smack him for understanding me even when I wasn’t being clear. “You don’t want to expect me to want to be with you, do things with you, that aren’t just sex?”

  “It’s not that I never had one,” I replied. “A boyfriend. I did.”

  “And he hurt you.”

  “It wasn’t that simple.”

  “It never is.” He rumpled his hair with a sigh. “But all other men should pay for his sins?”

  “Something like that, yes.” Yet again, that wasn’t really what I meant.

  “Elle…” Dan seemed at a rare loss for words. “We’ve been together for four months, and I still don’t feel like I know anything about you.”

  The tassel unraveled beneath my nervous, twining fingers, and I balled the threads in my palm. “You know lots of things about me.”

  “Yeah. I know how to make you come.”

  “That’s something, Dan.”

  He frowned. “It’s not enough.”

  I looked up at him. “It has to be.”

  “Why, Elle?” He demanded. “Why does it have to be all?”

  “Because,” I cried, honest. “It’s all I have!”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Believe it. I barely have enough of myself for me. I don’t have enough for anyone else.”

  He rubbed his face. “Because of your ex?”

  “No, Dan,” I said more kindly that I’d thought I could. “Not because of him.”

  He stared at me, seeming lost. “Did he hurt you? Physically, I mean.”

  That surprised me. “No. Why would you think that?”

  He lifted his hand, fast, and watched me flinch. “Because of that.”

  I shook my head. “No. He never hit me, if that’s what you mean.”

  “But someone did.”

  “My mother has,” I told him. “Not for a long time.”

  I could see he thought he was getting an insight from my admission, though he couldn’t know my mother smacking me around was the smallest piece of my life’s fucked-up puzzle. His expression softened, like he understood.

  “Don’t pity me,” I said sharply.

  “I’m not.”

  “She stopped when I got big enough to hit her back.” I watched him again, taking a perverse pleasure in revealing this small truth.

  Cocktail party secrets. The sort of things people reveal over drinks to strangers because it makes them seem open. I’ve always thought if someone reveals that their mother smacked them or their daddy drank too much to a stranger, what sorts of darker, more awful secrets are they hiding? I waited for him to tell me about his own horrid childhood, because it’s what people do. Share the bad things that have happened to them to make you feel better. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

  “I’m sorry that happened to you. Not sorry for you.”

  “Bad things happen,” I said. “Every day, all the time. To lots of people. She never chased me around with a butcher knife or anything.”

  “And yet you still flinch.”

  I shrugged. “You’re angry and you’re bigger than I am. Some things are habit.”

  He sighed. “What’d your boyfriend do? Cheat on you?”

  “No.”

  “But he broke up with you.”

  The longer we talked the less urgent I felt to make him leave. He was defusing me in the way he had. Whether it was conscious or not I couldn’t tell, but I wasn’t unaware of it. I knew what he was doing…and as with so many other things we’d done, I let him.

  I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to explain myself, to relive the past, to tell him the truth and why I was the way I was. Because the truth was, I might have told him I wanted him to go, but I didn’t really want him to leave.

  “We were young. I was nineteen. He was twenty. We met in college. His name was Matthew.”

  His name was Matthew, and the first time he kissed me, I thought I’d never be able to breathe again.

  “You loved
him?” His question sounded tentative.

  “I thought I did. I thought he loved me. But what’s love, anyway? A word.”

  “It’s a feeling, too.”

  “Have you ever been in love?” I shot back.

  He didn’t answer for a full minute. “So what happened?”

  “He thought I was cheating on him, but I wasn’t. I wouldn’t have.” I narrowed my eyes at Dan, who didn’t seem inclined to disbelieve me. “But he insisted. He’d found some letters he thought were from a lover. He called me a liar, and some other things. Slut, mostly, though being called a liar hurt worse. I should have lied and told him what he wanted to hear, but instead I told him the truth.”

  “He didn’t believe you?”

  “He did,” I said, thinking about it.

  “But if you weren’t cheating—”

  “It was a long time ago,” I told him. “And like I said, we were young.”

  “And you’re not going to tell me any more.” He frowned.

  “No, Dan.”

  “And you want me to go.”

  I looked into his eyes. “No. I don’t.”

  He moved closer, encouraged, and put his hand on my shoulder. “Then what do you want, Elle?”

  “I want you not to have to settle,” I told him.

  “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

  “I know that’s what you’ll be doing. Because if you want more from me, you’re not going to get it.”

  He said nothing for a long time. “When I read The Little Prince, I thought you must be the rose. You with your four thorns, convincing me you’re able to defend yourself. But now I know you hate roses. So you must be the fox instead. So maybe what you really want is for me to tame you.”

  From a lot of men, that speech would have made me laugh, or roll my eyes. Then again, a lot of men wouldn’t have read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic story of The Little Prince, or bothered to try and understand it.

  I reached for his hand and held it between both of mine. “The fox tells the Little Prince he is a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. Just like the flower was like a hundred thousand other flowers.”

  Dan tucked a strand of hair behind my ear with the hand I wasn’t holding. “But the fox asked the prince to tame him. To make it so they’d need each other and be unique to each other. And he did it.”