The small bathroom falls into a tense silence. My heart is beating fast and hard. Under the fluorescent lighting, I can clearly see the range of emotions flickering in Tyler’s verdant eyes. There’s a hint of surprise hidden in the outrage.
“Are you kidding me?” He glances around the room as if looking for a window that’s never existed, like if he stares at the four walls for long enough an exit will suddenly appear. But there’s exactly that: four walls, and a locked door.
“No,” I say, feeling impressed with myself for making a split-second decision, and making the right one. The right decision was to prevent Tyler from leaving. I don’t even mind that I’ve dragged myself into this claustrophobic complication with him and that we might be locked in here for hours. Perhaps the only way to unlock this door is to take it off the hinges, or ram it down, and perhaps we might have to wait it out until morning when the neighborhood handyman can come to our rescue, and perhaps I just don’t care.
Tyler, on the other hand, does care. Getting out is his only concern, and the locked door is the one thing that’s in his way. He steps around me, his shoulder brushing mine as he nudges me to the side. His long fingers wrap themselves around the handle of the door and he vigorously shakes it, willing the lock to collapse in on itself, but his efforts achieve nothing.
“Just give up,” I say as I study the way the veins in his arms tense as he yanks at the handle before finally accepting the fact that tonight he will not be meeting Declan Portwood.
He places both hands on the back of his neck before straining to face the ceiling, letting out several slow breaths as he attempts to calm down. I like the way he sighs, the way his eyelids flicker shut for a moment as his shoulders and chest rise and drop back down, sinking low as the oxygen leaves his body. And when he has gathered his thoughts, he tilts his face down and turns to fix with me with an indignant, aggravated look.
“I’m sorry that I actually care,” I tell him. He’s awaiting an explanation and perhaps a real apology, but he’s not going to get either. “You’re just going to have to find another way to distract yourself. An alternative. One that won’t kill you.”
He glances around the room again, still hoping to discover a way out, but only ends up meeting his own eyes in the reflection of the cabinet mirror. He can’t look at himself for long, at the fire within the depths of his eyes, and soon he’s staring at the floor. “You were becoming my distraction,” he mutters, but his voice is not as gruff as it was several minutes ago. “But apparently I can’t have you.”
I don’t know how to reply to him. Words rise in my throat, but somehow I find I can’t speak. Instead, I take a deep breath, and when I finally form a reply, my tone is gentle and quiet, like we’re at risk of being overheard, even though we’re not. “Why am I a distraction?”
Tyler looks up then. He stares back at me with apprehension, his head tilting to the side as though he has to remind himself of what the answer is. But eventually he parts his lips to speak, and carefully murmurs, “Because you make things a little easier. Because I get to focus on you instead of everything else.”
I observe the curl of his lips as the words roll slowly off his tongue. They paralyze me, my body frozen in my spot by the shower, and it hits me just how real all of this is. “Then don’t stop,” I say, with a slight tremble in my voice. I take a cautious step toward him, not quite sure where I’m going with this. It just feels right.
He’s still staring back at me, his eyes still locked with mine, but he’s blinking fast and breathing heavier and I know that he still wants one thing and one thing only. I reach up to touch his jaw, and his skin is burning hot as the fire in his eyes.
“Focus on me,” I whisper.
“Then distract me,” he orders. He lifts his hand, delicately reaches for my fingers on his jaw, and moves my hand away. I flinch at the coldness of his hands in contrast to the warmth of his face. Two complete opposites. Like him and me.
“We can talk,” I say. The atmosphere around us has shifted from tense to calm, loud to quiet, and I almost whisper for fear of breaking the comforting stillness. “We’ve never once just talked.”
“Okay. Let’s talk,” he says. Carefully stepping around me, he presses his back to the shower door and slides down to the floor. He extends his legs and heaves a sigh, his head hung low, eyes closed. I wonder what he’s thinking about. Me?
“Can we talk about Tiffani?” I ask this question with extreme caution, diving into the complicated topic as gently as I can. “Calmly this time.”
The mere mention of her name creates tension and it forces Tyler to look at me, as though he’s trying to figure out if I seriously just brought her up. I see an odd flash in his eyes, but then he glances away. “Fine,” he says through gritted teeth.
I step over his legs and drop down onto the cold tiles, pressing my back against the door, pulling my knees up to my chest and hugging them to my body. “Why won’t you break up with her? You don’t even like her. You said so yourself.”
Tyler trains his eyes on me. They slowly fall to my lips, to my hands wrapped around my knees, and then return to mirror my gaze once more. I wonder if he’s considering whether to give me an honest answer or if he’s just trying to buy time while he invents a lie. “I can’t break up with her.”
“But why?” His reply only irritates me more. Unless she’s holding him at knifepoint, then I see no reason he can’t just end the useless relationship that he clearly cares little to nothing about.
Tyler shakes his head and places a hand on his face, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger before groaning loudly. “Tiffani’s really good at acting like she’s the nicest girl around. But she’s not. The second you do something wrong to her, she turns into a psychopath. She knows too much about me. I can’t risk it. At least not right now.”
“Psychopath?” I lift my head and look at him, perplexed. “What does she know?”
“It’s . . .” His words taper off, and he looks uncomfortable, almost pained. He places his palms flat on the tiles by his side. “Okay. Example: Back in January, she heard I’d been hanging out with this girl during lunch period every Tuesday, which I totally hadn’t, and she went crazy. I slaved over an essay for English Lit for two weeks straight, because I had to get my grades up, and she told my teacher that she wrote it. My entire grade dropped and I got suspended for cheating, which is so dumb. The same day she used her mom’s email to email my mom, telling her that she was concerned for my well-being because I was smoking joints in the school basement. That part is true, and Tiffani’s the only one who knew. Mom didn’t talk to me for almost a month. I would have dumped Tiffani back then, but she made it clear that I shouldn’t ever go there. So I never have. Breaking up isn’t an option. There are so many more things she can do, because she has the upper hand in all of this.”
There’s a brief silence, and then I ask, “What else does she know, Tyler?” I’m trying to absorb his words, attempting to make sense of them. I try to imagine Tiffani doing those things, and at first I can’t, but then I remember the look in her eyes this morning when she told me she knew I was lying. She terrified me. Somehow, I believe Tyler. She definitely has the potential to do those things.
Tyler isn’t quite meeting my eyes. “Do you remember the first day of summer?”
The sudden change in topic, from Tiffani’s controlling nature to the start of the summer, takes me by surprise. “Yeah. Dad was annoying and the barbecue sucked and you rudely stormed into it.”
“Yeah, that.” I’m waiting for him to laugh. He doesn’t. In fact, he just looks even more uncomfortable than he already was. “I was super pissed off.”
“Why?” I remember eavesdropping on his argument with Ella that night, but I don’t remember them discussing why he was mad in the first place. He looked furious when he pulled up outside the house.
There’s another silent pause. “I was mad at Tiffani,” he finally admits. By now he’s not even looking at me. He’s just staring at the tiled flooring. “I’ve been thinking about getting involved in something for a while, and she found out that night,” he explains, but his voice is quiet and a little raspy, and I realize he’s not going to tell me what it is he’s thinking about getting involved in. I can tell it isn’t something he can be proud of. “She said she won’t tell anyone as long as I stay with her until graduation. That’s why I was sucking up to her for a while at the start of the summer. You know, in American Apparel and stuff . . .” His cheeks flush with color in sheer embarrassment of having to talk about it, but I don’t mind. I’m just glad he’s being honest with me. “As long as she’s happy and I don’t break up with her, she won’t tell, because that’s what she does, Eden. She likes to blackmail people into doing what she wants, so that she can look cool and stay on top of the rest of us.” He exhales and shakes his head. “She told me she used to get bullied when she was younger, so I guess when she started at our school, after she moved here with her mom after the divorce, she wanted to make sure no one stepped over her. She wants to be better than everyone, cooler than them all. Having me by her side helps to boost her ego. That’s why I’m stuck in this mess.” When he stops talking, he groans. “I hate this.”
“Wow,” I say. It’s all I can muster up right now. Tyler’s been right all along. He really doesn’t want to be with her, and he’s not just saying that to make me feel better. He genuinely is stuck in a complicated situation, and I can’t help but feel like I’ve made it worse for him. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m not breaking up with her,” he says gently, finally glancing back up to look at me. He looks sad. It makes me feel sorry for him, because I honestly don’t know what advice to give him. “Not yet, at least. I can’t risk it right now.”
“Then what are we going to do?” The floor is cold against my skin, but I try to ignore it, focusing my attention on the person across from me as I try my hardest to understand him.
Tyler fixes me with a stern stare. “I just don’t want to make anyone suspicious,” he tells me.
“Suspicious about what?”
“Us,” he says firmly. With another sigh, he unfolds his arms and runs a hand back through his hair, tugging on the ends, and I notice the familiarity of the action. It’s something he does subconsciously, a sign of his anger or distress, something that perhaps offers him some comfort for a split second. “We need to just act normal for now until we figure this out. That’s another reason I can’t break up with her. People would wonder why. So for now, she has to stay in the picture, because Tiffani is my normality.”
“But it’s wrong to do this to her,” I say quietly. I envision her tear-streaked face again this morning as she sobbed uncontrollably against her comforter, releasing the brunt of the hurt she felt. We inflicted that upon her, and although it feels so long ago, it’s only been a matter of hours. Maybe she’s still distraught, and right now Tyler and I are hovering on the edge of a dangerous line that should not be crossed. Tyler might be in a relationship with Tiffani that he can’t get out of and she might have forced him into that, but it doesn’t give us the right to cheat.
“Eden,” Tyler says. When I meet his eyes, his head is cocked and he’s studying me. “Talk about something else. Talk about Portland.”
My eyebrows furrow as I cross my legs, placing my interlocked hands onto my lap. “You want me to talk about Portland?”
“I want you to talk about yourself,” he says. His eyes are smoldering now, bright and vibrant, locked with mine and unwilling to break our shared gaze. “Tell me something that no one else knows.”
There is honesty within his eyes, somewhere within the fire that’s still burning, and I know that I can trust him enough to share my secrets, to tell him about Portland and the people there. It takes me a minute or so to make up my mind. Only Amelia knows my secret and I’m undecided whether or not I want to make that two people instead of one, but then Tyler gives me an encouraging nod, like he’s trying to convince me to jump off a cliff with him, and I give in.
I take a few deep breaths, building up the courage to speak. The truth is, I don’t want to admit what’s going on. “I love Portland. It was an amazing city to grow up in,” I say with a sort of sad smile, as though I’m reminiscing about the good old days, as my grandparents would call them. “I had three really close friends. Amelia, Alyssa and Holly.”
“Had?”
“Had,” I confirm. Tyler is staring at me with keen interest, taking in my every move, every word. “When my parents got divorced I was thirteen, and it hit me really hard. I used to cry myself to sleep, because my mom would be crying and my dad wouldn’t be there and I didn’t know how to make her feel better and it just sucked. It really, really sucked.” I pause for a moment, my next few words proving difficult to force out of my mouth, but somehow I manage, somehow I can handle it. “I started to eat a lot because I was so upset, and I put on some weight during freshman year. Alyssa and Holly had a lot to say about it.”
I can see Tyler glance down at my body, and it only makes me feel even more insecure than I did before. I try to breathe in. “You’re not fat,” he states bluntly, like he’s mad at me for even suggesting it.
“That’s because I run, Tyler.”
He continues to study me, as though he’s trying to figure out what I’m thinking, just like I always try to figure him out. He slowly shifts his body across the floor, almost cautiously, and then positions himself directly in front of me. My body is trapped between his legs and he places his hands on my knees, his touch making me flinch. “Keep talking.”
My train of thought has been interrupted by the desire to reach over and kiss him, so I place a hand to my cheek and force myself to continue. “They made me feel like shit,” I admit, because it’s true. Alyssa and Holly did treat me awfully for over a year, they did throw snide remarks about my weight into every conversation, and they did cause the downward spiral of my mental health. “I had two of my supposed best friends calling me fat every day, so I started running. We don’t talk anymore, but they still bitch about me on the low. It’s just hard, because Amelia . . . Amelia’s still friends with them. She stuck by my side the whole time, though.”
“Eden,” Tyler says, firmly again, like the only way to get my full attention is to use the quiet force of my name. “That’s why you always say you’re never hungry, isn’t it?”
My lips part as I stare back at him, almost embarrassed that he’s paid so much attention to me. Not even Dad has picked up on this. But then again, he’s always been selfish. “You noticed that?”
“Only just now.” He glances down to stare at my legs as he runs his fingers from my knees to my thighs, lightly skimming my skin. “Just so you know, I completely disagree with those girls. I’m sorry for what they did.” With his head still tilted down toward my thighs as he continues tracing patterns, he glances up at me through his eyelashes, his eyes unbelievably powerful, and I succumb to their strength and the sensation of his skin against mine.
And he must feel the way my shoulders relax and sink back down with a breath of relief, and he must sense the way my entire body grows almost limp beneath his touch, and he must be sharing the same thoughts as I am, because his fingertips stop circling my skin and he grabs my thighs, leaning forward and crashing his lips against mine.
I don’t know why, but I love it each time he completely dominates the situation. It’s like he’s doing all the hard work while I bask in the exhilaration and the adrenaline. I’m starting to get used to the way his lips fit against mine. My arms seem to move on their own accord, loosely throwing themselves around his neck as I smile against him somewhere amidst the kiss. I like that this is beginning to feel familiar.
It doesn’t take long for his tight grip on my thighs to loosen, his hands wandering elsewhere, somewhere new and risky. The kiss slows down as his focus switches from my lips to his hands. They hover by the hem of my shirt for a few moments, brushing the material as though he’s waiting for me to object, but I don’t want him to stop. I tighten my arms around his neck and pull his lips harder against mine.
Tyler gets the message. He clasps my waist beneath my shirt with one hand as they other finds its way to my bra, leaving the thrilling trail of his touch along my body. I don’t know how he manages, but he slides his hand inside the lace and cups my breast all in one swift movement. He tears his lips from mine, pulling back to meet my eyes for a moment, before moving back in again to plant a row of kisses along the edge of my jaw. His hands are still on my body, his thumb rubbing my breast in soft circles, his skin cold yet oddly sensational. Soon his other hand joins in and I suddenly grow self-conscious. I’m staring up at the ceiling through half closed eyes, my face tilted to the side as Tyler plants kisses on my neck and cups my breasts. I’ve never been all that fortunate in that area, especially in comparison with Tiffani, and I suddenly grow paranoid that Tyler will burst into laughter any second, but he never does.
I can feel a moan rising in my throat, and I try my best to suppress it, already embarrassed enough as it is, but then Tyler sighs against my neck and his breath tickles my skin. I move my hands to his jaw and draw his lips back to mine, but before they connect once more, our eyes lock for a moment. We catch our breath as we stare at one another, comfortable in our embrace and unable to hold back the small smiles toying at the corners of our lips.
We shouldn’t be kissing on the floor of his bathroom and his hands shouldn’t be on my body and I shouldn’t be enjoying it. The scandalous nature of it makes it all the more exhilarating.
And all the more worth it.
