and ridiculous abs conjuring ordinary people into caricatures of themselves.
How could I deny him his talent? How could I be jealous? My aunt had move don fairly quickly and was happy now, so where was the harm? He had been taking money from wealthy, burnt out women for years, and what he gave them went far, far deeper than a quick fuck in their laundry rooms before their husbands came home. It was an unspoken understanding between us. We were an unlikely pair, I knew it, but he tolerated my warped sexuality and I tolerated his …line of work.
Jared had fucked me so hard he seemed to have melted melt my brain – and I was left now with a strange new imprint, a permanent glitch in me that compelled me to live out the same scene again and again. I was stuck as the naughty virgin asking for it, and I couldn’t get out. And he was stuck being my bad boy and I would rather he squeeze my throat than hold my hand.
Now I was a little older, and living alone where my mother would never catch me in the act, and I was running out of space to put new tattoos, and worse, running out of people who cared.
The trouble with having wild fantasies like mine is that sometimes, they come true.
Chapter Fourteen
Jared and I didn’t see each other for another year at least.
In hindsight, we were both pretty immature. My aunt had moved to Costa Rica to give my mom something to stress about. Perhaps she’ll get married there to some guy, who knows. We adopted Buttons, who got fat. I finished my degree, although just barely, and, my old good girl image well and truly fouled, I began to relax a little.
I thought of Jared often, how we were ridiculous opposites of each other, how all that weirdness that had happened in his dark little apartment was like the meeting of matter and antimatter, cat and dog, good girl and bad boy.
But opposites sometimes cancel each other out. We had seen to the end of that game and didn’t know what more to do with each other, and so we drifted, I guess. I wondered whether wealthy, sexually frustrated women were still paying his secret way through college, or whether he still kept that same little stash under his futon, like he always did. I went to therapy for the beginnings of an eating disorder. My mother and I threw plates on the floor and I told her I was never going back to church. Mostly, life moved on.
Of course, by now, you can guess that that wasn’t quite the whole story, and that him and I had unfinished business to tend to. That business resolved itself one rainy afternoon, when I bumped into him outside a supermarket. It was unmistakable - I could recognize his body, his gait, anywhere.
“Mel? Oh my god is that really you?”
I spun round to look square into his face, still as youthful as ever, only with a quieter knowing sparkle in it instead of the naughtiness I had remembered. He was different somehow, but only a little. He still had that same audacity that comes with wearing loungewear in public, that cockiness that comes from an effortlessly buff body, that cheeky sideways grin.
Without thinking, I flung my arms around him and gave him a big, broad hug. He was surprised, even laughed a little. It felt easier, so much easier, to just touch him and be close to him than to say words, which I had none of just at that particular moment. He laughed again at me struggling to find something to say, and so I leant in and hugged him again, this time laughing too.
He had finished his degree, he told me, and had recently landed a job he had been interviewing heavily for the past few months. Things were looking up for him. He was going to move, next month, to a new city, and start a new life there. He seemed so happy.
“It was good luck that I bumped into you then!” I said, and we both went a little sad.
He had moved out of his dingy apartment, and, naturally, had long parted with that ugly black futon, the altar on which I had sacrificed all my weird sexual hang-ups. Over and over
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