I INSPECT the refrigerator’s contents. Champagne and expensive brands of arum cram in most of the space. I open a drawer and discover a pathetic bag of carrot sticks. As a girl who frequently burns off thousands of calories by grinding on pelvises, I need my protein. I’ve heard enough mean comments about my emaciated figure to wish for meat on my ribs. Girls can be cruel.
“I can’t believe you lied about groceries,” I say, irritable. I slam the fridge closed and jump on the counter. For however historic the Drake claims to be, the inside looks more like a modern escape. White and silver appliances. White countertops. White ceilings and walls. If it wasn’t for our red and gray upholstered furniture and framed Warhol-inspired art décor, we’d be living in a hospital.
“If I knew I was going to make a pit stop at Douchebag Row, I would have bought you a bagel at Lucky’s.”
I glare. “You ate this morning?”
He gives me a duh look. “Breakfast burrito.” He pinches my chin, still taller than me even though I’m on the counters. “Don’t look so glum, dear. I could have always stayed at the diner while you found your own way home. Want me to rewind time?”
“Yes and while you’re leaving me to escape the frat house, you can go and pick up groceries like you told Nola.”
He sets his hands on either side of me, my breath hitching. “I change my mind. I don’t like that reality.” I want him to lean in, but instead, he edges back and starts gathering liquor bottles from the white cabinets. “Nola needs to think I feed you, Lil. You’re looking a bit skeletal. When you breathe, I think I can see your ribs.” Boys can be cruel. He pours whiskey into a square glass beside me.
I purse my lips and open a cabinet above his head. When I slam it, he flinches and spills whiskey all over his hands.
“Jesus.” He finds a towel to dab up the puddle of alcohol. “Did Mr. Kappa Phi Delta not do his job?”
“He was just fine.”
“Just fine,” Lo says, his eyebrows rising. “What every guy loves to hear.”
Red welts surface on my exposed arms.
“Your elbows are blushing,” he tells me, a smile growing as he re-pours. “You’re like Violet from Willy Wonka, only you ate a magic cherry.”
I groan. “Don’t talk about food.”
He leans over, and I stiffen. Oh my… Instead of taking me in his arms—something I imagine in a momentary lapse of weakness—he brushes the bareness of my leg while grabbing his cell from the charging dock. I immobilize again. The touch barely fazes him, but my insides ripple in eagerness and want. If he was a no-named, redhead with splotchy acne, I may still feel this way. Maybe.
Maybe not.
My fantasy tangles: Lo keeping his fingers on my knee. Roughly leaning over me, trapping me beneath his weight. My back arching against the cabinets—
“I’ll order pizza if you go take a shower. You smell like sex, and I’m reaching my limit of inhaling foreign male stench.”
My stomach collapses, and my fantasy poofs into reality. I hate picturing Lo and me unchastely together because when I wake up, he stands inches from me, and I wonder if he can tell. Can he?
I scrutinize him while he sips his whiskey. After a lingering moment of silence, his brows scrunch and he looks at me like what the hell? “Am I going to have to repeat myself?”
“What?”
He rolls his eyes and takes a large swig, not even grimacing as the sharpness of the alcohol slides its way down. “You, shower. Me, pizza. Tarzan eat Jane.” He bites my shoulder.
I ease back. “You mean Tarzan likes Jane?” I hop off the counter, about to go wash off the frat house from my skin.
Lo mockingly shakes his head. “Not this Tarzan.”
“Alcohol makes you mean,” I say casually.
He raises his glass in agreement while I pad down the hallway. Our spacious two bedroom apartment masquerades as our lover’s den. Pretending to be together for three years hasn’t been simple, especially since we started the ruse as seniors in high school. When we decided on the same college, our parents actually proposed our living situation. They’re not very conservative, but even so, I doubt they’d understand or agree with my lifestyle, bedding more guys than is appropriate for a young girl.
My mother cited my eldest sister’s college experience as reason enough to share a space with my “boyfriend.” Poppy’s random roommate brought friends over at all hours, even during finals week, and she used to leave her dirty clothes (including panties) on my sister’s desk chair. Her inconsiderate behavior was enough for my mother to settle on off-campus housing for me and push Lo right into my bedroom.
It’s worked out for the most part. I remember a weight rising off my chest once the doors shut and my family was gone. Leaving me alone. Letting me be.
I step into the quaint-sized bathroom and shimmy off my clothes. Once in the steaming hot shower, I exhale. The water washes away the smell and grime, but my sins are here to stay. The memories don’t vanish, and I desperately try not to imagine this morning. Waking up. I love the sex. It’s the after part that I haven’t quite figured out yet.
I squirt shampoo on my hand and lather it in my short brown locks. Sometimes I picture the future. Loren Hale working for his father’s Fortune 500 company, dressed in a tight fitting suit that chokes at the collar. He’s sad. I never see him smile in my imagined futures. And I wouldn’t know how to rectify it. What does Loren Hale love? Whiskey, bourbon, rum. What can he possibly do past college? …I see nothing.
Maybe it’s a good thing I’m not a fortune teller.
I’ll stick to what I know. The past—where Jonathan Hale brought Lo to informal golf games with my father in attendance. Me by his side. They discussed what they always do. Stock, ventures and product placements for their respective trademarked brands. Lo and I played Star Wars with our golf clubs, and they chided us when I bruised Lo’s ribs, swinging my light saber too haphazardly and too hard.
Lo and I could have been friends or enemies. We always saw each other. At boring conference waiting rooms. In offices. At charity galas. In prep school. Now college. What could have turned into a cootie-driven relationship with constant teasing transformed into something more clandestine. We shared all secrets, forming a club with a two-person quota. Together, we discovered superheroes in a small comics shop in Philly. Something about Havok’s galactic adventures and Nathaniel Grey’s time-traveling plights connected with us. At times, not even Cyclops or Emma Frost could fix our troubles, but they’re still there, reminding us of more innocent times. Ones where Lo wasn’t boozing and I wasn’t sleeping around. They allow us to revisit those warm, unadulterated moments, and I gladly return.
I finish scrubbing last night’s debauchery from my body and slip my arms in a terry cloth robe. I cinch it around my waist as I head into the kitchen.
“Pizza?” I ask sadly, noticing the bare counters. Technically they’re anything but bare, but I’ve become so desensitized to Lo’s liquor bottles that they might as well be invisible or another kitchen appliance.
“It’s on its way,” he says. “Stop giving me those doe eyes. You look like you’re about to cry.” He leans against the fridge, and I subconsciously eye the zipper to his jeans. I imagine his gaze on the strap to my robe. I don’t look up to ruin the image. “When’s the last time you’ve eaten?”
“I’m not sure.” I have a one-track mind, and it doesn’t involve food.
“That’s discomforting, Lil.”
“I eat,” I defend poorly. I see him pulling my robe in my fantasy. Maybe I should drop it for him. NO! Don’t do it, Lily. I finally look up and he watches me so carefully that my face immediately begins to heat.
He smiles into a sip of his glass. When he brings it down, he licks his lips. “Do you want me to unbutton them, love, or should I wait for you to get on your knees first?”
I gape, mortified. He saw right through me. I’m so obvious!
With his free hand, he pushes his button through the hole and slowly unzips, showing the hem of his black tight boxer-briefs. He watches my breathing go in and out, jagged and sporadic. Then he takes his hands off his jeans and leans his elbows on the counter. “Did you brush your teeth?”
“Stop,” I tell him, way too raspy. “You’re killing me.” Seriously, my entire body, not just my lungs, hyperventilates.
His cheekbones sharpen, his jaw locking. He sets his drink down and then zips up his jeans, fishing the button back through.
I swallow hard and tensely hop on the gray wooden bar stool. With shaky fingers, I run them through my tangled, wet hair. To stop replaying the moment, I pretend it never happened and go back to our earlier conversation. “It’s a little difficult to constantly stuff my face when we never have food here.” We eat out way too often.
“I don’t think you have a problem stuffing your face,” he says, “just not with food.”
I bite my gums and flip him off. His words would hurt more from anyone else. But Lo has his own issue that rests in the palm of his hand. Everyone can see it, and as I glance between him and the drink, his crooked smile hardens. He presses the rim of the glass to his lips and turns his back on me.
I don’t talk to Lo about feelings. About how it makes him feel to watch me bring home a different guy every night. And he doesn’t ask me how it feels to watch him drown into oblivion. He stifles his judgment and I withhold mine, but our silence draws tension between us, inescapable. It pulls so taut that sometimes I just want to scream. But I keep it inside. I hold back. Every comment that undercuts our addictions fractures the system in place. The one where we both live being free to do as we please. Me, bedding any guy. Him, drinking all of the time.
The buzzer rings beside the door. Pizza?! I beam and head over to the speaker box in the foyer, pressing the button. “Hello?”
“Miss Calloway, you have a guest downstairs. Should I send her up?” says the female security attendant.
“Who?”
“Your sister, Rose.”
I internally groan. No pizza. Time to pretend with Lo again—even though he’s fond of keeping up the charade when no one’s around, just to taunt me. “Send her up.”
Lo goes into roadrunner mode and zips around the kitchen, shutting liquor bottles into locked cabinets, pouring his drink into a tinted blue cup. I click the remote and the flat-screen TV blinks to an action flick. Lo plops on the gray-stitched sofa and kicks his feet onto the glass coffee table, acting like we’ve been immersed in the movie for the past half hour.
He pats his lap. “Come here.” His amber eyes swim with mischievousness.
“I’m not dressed,” I retort. And the spot between my legs already pulses too heavily to be in touching distance of him. The thought electrifies my nerves.
“You’re wearing a robe,” Lo rebuts. “I’ve seen you naked plenty of times.”
“When we were kids,” I retort.
“And I’m sure your breasts haven’t grown since then.”
My mouth falls. “Oh, you are…” I find a pillow on the nearby chair and start assaulting him with it. I get two good hits in before he swoops his arms around my waist and pulls me on his lap.
“Lo,” I warn. He’s been teasing me all day, making it harder than normal to withstand him.
He stares at me deeply, and his hand moves past my kneecap, edging up the robe, and settling on the inside of my thigh. He stops there, not making the next move. Fuck. I quake beneath him, needing his actions to go further. Not thinking, I place my hand on his and shift his fingers towards the throbbing spot. I push them inside of me. He stiffens.
Holy… My toes curl, and I rest my forehead on his broad shoulder. I hold his hand in a strong vice, not allowing him to do anything without my permission. Just before I go to move his fingers in and out, a knock sounds on the door.
I jolt awake. What am I doing?! I can’t look at Lo, I let him reclaim his hand, and I scuttle off him.
Lo hesitates. “Lil?”
“Don’t talk about it,” I say, mortified.
Rose knocks louder.
I stand to answer, walking with more tension everywhere than before.
I hear Lo’s footsteps behind me, and then the creak of the faucet as he turns the handle. I glance back and see him rinsing his fingers with soap.
I’m an idiot. As I turn the knob, I inhale, trying to wipe my mind clean of the bad combo: sex and Loren Hale. Having him as my roommate is like dangling coke in front of a druggie. It’d be easier if I let myself at him, but I’d rather not turn our relationship into friends with benefits. He means more to me than the other guys I bed.
The door swings open, revealing Rose: two years older, two inches taller, and two times prettier. She waltzes into the apartment, her Chanel handbag swinging on her arm like a weapon. Rose frightens children, pets, and even grown males with her icy eyes and chilling glares. And if anyone can unmask our false pretense, it will be my fiercest sister.
Right now, I pale at even meeting Lo’s gaze, let alone pretending to be in a relationship with him. I don’t ask Rose why she’s arrived uninvited and unannounced. This is her routine. It’s as though she feels entitled to all places. Especially mine.
“Why haven’t you answered my calls?” Her voice layers with frost. She lifts her large, round sunglasses to the top of her head.
“Umm…” In the foyer, I dig through a basket of keys that sits on a round table. It usually houses my runaway phone that has found every opportunity to jump ship from my person, and it doesn’t help that I don’t carry a purse—an issue Rose likes to reignite. But I have no use for an item that I’ll lose in a boy’s apartment or dorm. Then he may find a way to return it, and I’ll have to interact with him a second time.
Rose huffs. “You lost it? Again?”
I resign the search, only finding a few dollar bills, bobby pins, and car keys. “I guess. Sorry.”
Rose turns her vulture eyes on Lo, who wipes his hands on a dish rag and tosses it aside. “What about you? Did you lose your phone too?”
“No. I just don’t like talking to you.”
Ouch, I cringe. Rose sucks in her cheeks as red heat flushes them. Her heels clap against the hardwood floors, nearing him in the kitchen.
His fingers whiten against the plastic blue cup that hides his liquor.
“I’m a guest in your apartment,” Rose snaps. “Treat me with some respect, Loren.”
“Respect is earned. Next time maybe you should call before you stop by, or maybe you should start with hey Lo, hey Lily, how was your day, not demanding things like a royal bitch.”
Rose whips her head to me. “Are you going to let him talk to me like this?”
I open my mouth but words are lost to uncertainty. Rose and Lo constantly bicker to the point of annoyance, and I never know which one to support: my sister, who can be so mean at times that she’ll spew hate until it hurts, even at me—or Lo, my best friend and my supposed boyfriend, my one constant.
“That’s mature,” Lo says with distaste, “make Lily choose sides like she’s a dog that has to pick a favorite parent.”
Rose’s nose flares in protest, but her yellow-green, cat-like eyes attempt to soften. “I’m sorry,” she tells me, surprisingly sounding apologetic. “I just get worried about you. We all do.” The Calloways do not understand the word “alone” or how someone could want privacy from their family. Instead of being the rich, neglectful parents, mine happen to be all-consuming. We had a nanny when we were younger, but my mother immersed herself in every aspect of our lives—too involved at times but also incredibly devoted and nurturing. I would love my family and their clinginess if I wasn’t so embarrassed about my daily (and nightly) activities.
Some things need to be kept secret.
“Well, you see me. I’m fine,” I say, refusing to glance back at Lo. Two minutes ago, I was about ready to do anything and everything to him. That want to be pleased has not diminished, just my stupidity to do it with him has.
Her eyes narrow to slits and she gives me a long onceover. I tighten my robe, wondering if she can tell how my body feels by looking. Lo sure as hell can.
After a short moment, she retracts her claws. “I didn’t come here for a fight.” Right… “As you know, tomorrow is Sunday, and Daisy will be here for the luncheon. You’ve claimed to miss the past few because of exams, but it would mean a lot to our sister if you could spare a couple of hours to welcome her home.”
My empty stomach clenches with guilt. “Yeah, sure, but I think Lo may have plans already, so he might not make it.” Good, at least I can bail him out of the obligation.
Rose’s lips purse as she directs her irritation at Lo. “What is more important than accompanying your girlfriend to a family event?”
Everything, I imagine him saying. His jaw twitches as he withholds a smartass retort. Probably dying to mention how this is a function that happens every Sunday, regardless if Daisy attends or not.
“I have racquetball scheduled with a friend,” he lies with ease. “I can cancel if it means that much to Greg and Samantha.” Lo knows that if Rose is fussing over the luncheon, then my parents will surely blow steam if I show up without him on my arm. They’ll draw unreasonable conclusions—like he’s cheating on me, or heading down his old childhood past of partying too hard. He still does (maybe even more) but its best they not know that.
“It means the world to them,” Rose says, as if she has the power to speak for other people. “I’ll see you two tomorrow.” She stops by the door and eyes Lo’s jeans and plain black T-shirt. “And Loren, try to dress appropriately.”
She exits, her heels tapping in the distance.
I let out a long breath and reorient my mind. An impulse to finish what I started with Lo eats at me, and I know better than to return.
“Lily—”
“I’ll be in my room. Don’t come in,” I order. I downloaded a new video yesterday called Master of You. I planned to watch it much later, but I’m going to shift my schedule.
“What about when the pizza arrives?” he asks, blocking my path into the hallway.
“I won’t be long.” I try to slide by, but he extends a hand to the wall.
His bicep flexes at the movement, and I take a huge step backwards. No, no, no.
“You’re aroused,” he says, his eyes still on mine.
“And if you hadn’t teased me, I wouldn’t be in this position,” I say, frantic. “If I still can’t satiate this, I’m going to have to spend my afternoon traipsing around Philly for a guy wanting an afternoon quickie. Thanks a lot.”
Lo grimaces and drops his hands to his side. “Well now I’m stuck going to your family’s lunch, so I guess we’re even.” He turns his body, letting me through.
“Don’t come in,” I warn him again, my eyes bugging. I’m more afraid of what I’ll do to him if he does.
“I never do,” he reminds me. With this, he heads to the kitchen and waves tersely, downing the rest of his whiskey.
After my second shower and self-medication in the form of porn stars and an expensive vibrator, I tug on actual clothes: a pair of jeans and a maroon V-neck.
Lo sits in the living room, eating pizza and flipping through channels. A new glass of whiskey balances on his leg.
“I’m sorry,” I apologize quickly.
His eyes briefly flicker to me before returning to the television. “For what?”
Sticking your fingers in me. “For getting you involved in Sunday’s luncheon.” I uncertainly take a seat in a red recliner opposite the couch.
He watches me like he always does, assessing my current state. He swallows his bite of pizza. “Honestly, I don’t mind going.” He wipes his fingers on a napkin and picks up his glass. “Better your father than mine.”
I nod. So true. “So…are we okay?”
“Are you?” His eyebrows rise.
“Mmm-hmm,” I mumble and avoid eye contact by grabbing a slice of pizza and scurrying back to the safety of my chair. Safe distance, check.
“I’ll take that as a weak yes, considering you can’t so much as look at me right now.”
“It’s not you; it’s me,” I say through a mouthful, licking sauce off my finger.
“Again, what every guy loves to hear.” I can feel his eyes grazing my body. “I’m not even coming on to you right now.”
“Don’t even start,” I warn, holding up a finger. “I swear, Lo.”
“Okay, okay.” He sighs. “You’re going to The Blue Room tonight, aren’t you?”
I jerk back in shock. “How’d you know?”
He looks at me like seriously. “You rarely go to the same club more than three or four times. For a while, I thought we were going to have to move one city over so you could find a place to…” He pauses, trying to find the words. “…fuck.” He flashes that bitter smile.
“Very funny.” I pick a pepperoni off the cheese. “Do you need a sober driver tonight? I can drop you off somewhere before I leave.” I have no problem shooing away beer and hard liquor.
“No, I’m going to the club with you.”
I hold in my surprise. He only ventures out with me on selective nights, and they vary too often for me to make sense of them. “You want to go to The Blue Room? You do realize this is a dance club and not some smoky hole-in-the-wall bar?”
He shoots me another look. “I’m well aware.” He swishes the ice cubes around in his glass, staring at the liquid. “Anyway, it’ll keep us from staying out too late and missing tomorrow’s luncheon.”
He has a point.
“You’re not going to care if I…” I can’t even finish the thought.
“If you leave me to go bang some guy?” he says, kicking his feet on the coffee table beside the pizza.
I open my mouth but lose my thoughts again.
“No, Lil,” he says, “I won’t get in the way of what you want.”
Sometimes I wonder about his desires. Maybe he does want to be with me. Or maybe he’s still pretending.
