—Corey—
When I told Dana that I was ready to leave, I wasn’t kidding around. I needed to put a meaningful distance between Hartley and my crumbling heart. Fortunately, Christmas vacation was about to hand me the perfect excuse.
But first, exams. I hadn’t wheedled and begged my way to Harkness to blow it during the first semester.
For the next two days, I worked my butt off in the main library. From a study carrel deep in the stacks, it was impossible to listen for Hartley’s voice in the hallway, or wonder whether he’d turn up to play RealStix. I ate take-out salads from the coffee shop and studied like a maniac.
Even my hope fairy took up the cause, fluttering between chapters of my calculus textbook, spouting theorems. She put on a tiny pair of glasses and perched on the lid of my travel coffee mug. Even better, she didn’t mention Hart-throb’s name. Not even once.
I turned in my take-home exams early, and then turned my attention to economics. When I sat for the exam on the morning of the tenth, I was so well prepared that having Hartley seated beside me wasn’t too much of a distraction. I finished before the time allotted. When I wheeled out of the exam, he looked up.
I gave him a quick wave, because it hurt to look at him directly. And then I was gone.
He texted me fifteen minutes later. Celebratory lunch at Commons? On my way over there. But I didn’t even reply to the text, because I was already on the phone with my mother.
“Is everything okay?” she asked, her voice breathless.
It wasn’t. Not really. But I would never admit it. “I’m fine. But I’m done early, so I changed my ticket.”
“But what about the Christmas Ball? Your brother always loved that.”
“Well,” I said, “it turns out that not everybody sticks around for it.”
“Okay, Sweetie.” Her voice was uneasy. She wrote down my new flight number and time. And I went back to my room and packed.
By the time the Christmas Ball got underway, I was in the air over the Great Lakes.
Being home for three weeks was boring, but boring was just what my broken heart needed.
Thankfully, my mother didn’t dote on me as much as she had the summer before. Not only was I used to doing things for myself again, but she’d had more than three months in an empty nest.
I was careful to smile and tell my parents how well everything at Harkness was going. And I was careful not to brood. I even volunteered to make Christmas cookies with my mom, finally making use of all the handicap accessible changes my folks had made to their kitchen after my accident.
But when I was alone — lying in my new main floor bedroom, or staring out the passenger-side window of our car — my mind always went back to Hartley’s birthday. I would relive the sensuous slide of his lips against mine, and the stroke of his tongue. When he touched me, I’d felt it everywhere. How was it possible for him to kiss me like that, and not want to do it again?
Obviously, he’d felt nothing, and I tried hard to make sense of that. I forced myself to replay Stacia’s reappearance in my mind, remembering how avidly he’d kissed her. I even made myself calculate how many hours had elapsed between the moment he had gasped with pleasure in my bed and then stuck his tongue in her mouth.
It was fourteen hours. Give or take.
The word paralysis kept running through my mind. His heart was like my unfeeling toes. I felt Hartley’s touch all the way through, but he hadn’t felt mine at all.
For Christmas, my parents gave me a new laptop — a smaller, lighter model — and I had a good time setting it up. Of course, it came with a lecture from my mother.
“The therapist says you need more time in your braces. We thought this would be easier to carry around when you’re walking.”
“Thanks,” I sighed.
“While you’re home, I booked seven sessions at the River Center.”
“Mom! Don’t I even get a vacation?”
“Not from physical therapy,” she said. “But if you want, you can do all of them in the pool instead of the gym. To mix it up a bit.”
I put my proverbial foot down. “No! Just…no.”
“Corey, you’re being unreasonable.”
I didn’t want to argue with her. I just rolled out of the room.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t much easier talking to my father. He was in the midst of his hockey season, which I’d been following online. The girls were doing really well this year, but he did not want to talk about it with me. When I tried to make conversation, I received only monosyllabic responses.
“Dad,” I said one night when we were all watching TV in a semi-comfortable silence. “Have you ever played RealStix?”
“The video game? No,” he said, surprised. “Have you?”
“It’s a lot of fun, actually. My neighbor — the guy with the broken leg — he taught me.”
“Adam Hartley?” my mother asked. “I remember him. He’s quite a looker.”
“Marion!” my father said, laughing.
“I call ‘em as I see ‘em,” my mother said, which made me laugh. And then I noticed something important. For the first time since my accident, my mother didn’t look tense.
“Anyway, we’re friends,” I said. “And we play a lot of hockey on the screen. Since neither one of us can play the real thing.”
There. I’d said it out loud.
My father picked up the remote and shut the TV off. There was silence as he turned to study me. “And that’s fun for you?”
I nodded.
He hesitated, deciding. “Well, where can we get one?”
We bought RealStix at Best Buy that very night. That was one clue that things were still weird at my house. My very thrifty parents had been spending money like water since my accident. They renovated the house, they bought me every device and distraction I pointed to. So even though Christmas had just come and gone, my father handed over his credit card for a video game console.
Coach Callahan quickly became a RealStix fan, too. And when my brother Damien came home for a long weekend over New Years, he played as well.
But I could easily beat them both. After all, I’d learned from the master.
Hell and damn it. I was thinking about Hartley again. That had to stop.
—Hartley—
I woke up on New Years Eve lying naked in what felt like a cloud. In reality, it was a big guest bedroom in the east wing of Stacia’s mansion. I was alone, because whenever I stayed in Greenwich they put me in a room by myself. Her parents weren’t idiots — they probably knew that we had sex. But they wanted plausible deniability.
I didn’t take it personally. If they wanted to pretend that their baby girl would never fill the jacuzzi tub in her private bathroom and then perform a strip tease for me, that was their prerogative. Good thing they’d been out to a lengthy dinner party the night before.
In my guest room, the sheets were made out of some kind of ridiculously soft cotton. I’d heard Stacia and her mom yammering about thread count once. Seeing as I was twenty-one years old and in possession of a dick, there was no way I paid attention to a conversation like that. But whenever I slept at chez Beacon, I had to admit that their obsession with European bed linens had its merits.
Since my boot cast had finally been removed the day after Christmas, I woke up truly naked, my morning wood brushing the sheets, my feet free to tangle in them.
Delicious.
My mind wandered. I was mostly healed from my injury now. The leg was always sore at the end of the day, and my range of motion wasn’t perfect yet. But it was progress. I’d just gotten a note from the Harkness College housing office informing me that they weren’t going to bother reassigning me to a room in Beaumont until next year. So I’d be keeping my oversized single, with the private bathroom and the double bed.
Thinking about McHerrin made me think about Corey. Which meant that I was suddenly thinking about her while lying buck-ass naked with a big boner. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the first time. For the past two weeks, I kept flashing back to that night in her bed, to the way she felt against my body. When I touched her, she’d made the most erotic sigh I’d heard in my life. It was hard to forget a detail like that.
Truthfully, it was just plain hard.
And when I really felt like torturing myself, I thought of that intense moment earlier on that night, when she bent over me and… Damn, I’d felt a jolt like never before. That’s for calling me chicken, she’d said. The fire in her eyes when she’d said it made me want to lose my mind.
Why couldn’t I stop thinking about it?
Seriously, we really hadn’t done all that much. It was just a little hook up. People did that all the time, right? Admittedly, it wasn’t just a drunk and horny flailing. I cared a lot for Corey, but that was only partly why I started it. The things she’d told me about her troubles had really weighed on my mind. More than anything, I wanted her to know that she was one hundred percent sexy. I thought I could prove it to her, and then I did.
The trouble was, I proved it to both of us.
So now I was lying in my girlfriend’s house, hard as a freaking board, and thinking about another girl touching me. And then — because I have never gotten away with anything in my life — the bedroom door opened, and Stacia waltzed in. She was already dressed in tight black pants and a soft, expensive-looking sweater.
I cleared my throat. “Hi, hottie.”
“Hi.” She closed the door behind her and turned to me with a silky smile. And there it was. Whenever I was here, in the lap of sick luxury, and the princess from Greenwich looked at me like I was the tastiest thing she’d ever seen, it just made my year. She was feasting those hazel eyes on me, the punk from the ass end of the state, with no father on my birth certificate, and a bank balance that would barely fund the next five months of pizza and beer.
Stacia’s attention meant something to me that I didn’t like to talk about.
So it was just as well that talking wasn’t what Stacia wanted from me. She flung herself onto the bed, and then looked right down at the tent I was raising in the sheet. “Well, hello there,” she whispered, her eyes flashing with mischief. “I didn’t know you’d already be…up.” She pressed a kiss onto my shoulder, and then immediately began working her way downward, dragging the sheet with her.
My body did not fail to notice.
About ten seconds later, after sweeping her long hair down my bare chest and abs, she reached the goods. With no preamble, she opened her mouth and sucked me deep inside. Whoa. All I could do was take a gasp of oxygen and sink into the mattress.
I closed my eyes, but that was a mistake. Because my brain went right back to where it had been before Stacia opened the bedroom door. And so I found myself picturing someone else’s face even as my girlfriend worked me over.
Fuck! That was no good. I wasn’t that big of an asshole. I opened my eyes again and sat up on my elbows. It was quite the visual, my girlfriend bent over me; her hair splayed everywhere, her mouth busy. Or rather, it should have been. But from this angle it was easy to see that Stacia would soon be making another trip to her colorist. The roots of her hair were a shade she’d never cop to. And then Stacia began to moan, which should have got me back into the groove. But the sound of it was exaggerated, like a porn film.
They were the same noises she always made, so it shouldn’t have rankled. It’s just that so many things about Stacia were carefully calibrated to reflect an image — her hair color, her lingerie, her voice. She’d once told me that she was taught to always smile while saying “goodbye” at the end of a phone call, because the other person could hear the smile, and they’d feel validated.
And this is what I was thinking about while my dick was in her mouth. Distracted now, I could tell that it was going to take awhile. The urgency was gone, and Stacia was going to need to use some Division One jaw action to get this done. God, I really was an asshole.
But then her phone rang, trilling out the theme to Beethoven’s ninth, the ringtone which Stacia used for her mother. For a moment, I thought she was going to ignore it. So I reached down and gently cupped her head, her silky hair falling through my fingers. “You’d better get that,” I whispered.
“Sorry,” she said, straightening up, then whipping out her phone. “Hello? I’m upstairs, just waking Hartley up.” She shot me a look full of innuendo. (And yes, Stacia’s house was really that large. Her mother didn’t bother looking around for her. It was easier to call her cell.)
The mood was officially broken, and it wasn’t even my fault. Giddyup. With Stacia still on the phone, I hopped out of bed and into the bathroom, closed the door and started the shower.
A minute later, as the hot water rained down on my back, Stacia came into the bathroom. “The caterers are downstairs already, and my mom wants my help deciding where to put everything. There’s breakfast in the dining room today, because the sun room furniture has to be moved for the party.”
I stuck my head out of the shower and smiled at her. “I’ll see you down there?” Reaching out, I tagged one of her hands and pulled her in for a quick kiss. She gave me a Stacia grin, and then left the bathroom in a hurry, before her hair could be kinked by the steam. (Say what you will about me, but I paid attention to my girl’s little habits. Much more than she ever paid to mine.)
After the world’s fastest shower, I dressed. Stacia had bought me clothes for Christmas. Since clothes and jewelry were about the only things she was interested in, she was awfully good at picking them out. The shirt I threw on now was a shamelessly expensive thing from Thomas Pink. I turned up the cuffs to keep it casual, because that’s how I roll. But the girl had really good taste. The jeans were some brand I’d never heard of, and could only be purchased in France. Whatever.
Wearing my Stacia-approved threads, I went downstairs to the dining room. Henry — Stacia’s father — sat alone at the head of a giant table. “Good morning, Mr. Beacon,” I said when he looked up. There were three newspapers stacked in front of him. Someone had taken the time to line the edges up perfectly.
“Morning, son,” he said. It always gave me a weird jolt to hear Mr. B. Call me that. No other man ever did. “The coffee’s hot, and I just asked Anna to make me an omelet. If you catch her now, she’d be happy to make one for you.” He slid the top newspaper across the gleaming wood surface.
“That sounds like a plan.” I passed through the room and walked into the commercial-sized kitchen beyond. There, amid more burnished wood and stainless steel, the personal chef stood swirling butter into a pan.
“Hola, Hartley!” Anna chirped. “Qué quieres para el desayuno?”
If I tried to answer her in Spanish, I’d disgrace myself. “I’d love an omelet, if you’re doing those today.”
She switched to English, pointing a finger at my chest. “Cheese, onions and ham, well-browned?”
“You always remember.” Anna was awesome. I hoped the Beacons paid her a big fat salary, because she sure as hell deserved it.
“El café está allí,” she added.
“Gracias. Did Stacia get hers yet?” I asked.
“Haven’t seen her.” Anna leaned over the cutting board and began to dice chunks of onions into a tidy pile.
“That’s not good,” I said, heading for the coffee service. “We can’t have Stacia under-caffeinated.”
“You know what to do.” Anna punctuated that sentence with the sizzle of my onions hitting the pan.
I poured two cups of coffee and then went to find my girlfriend. She and her mother were in deep conversation with a woman in a Katie’s Catering apron. I’ve noticed that the big, fancy outfits the Beacons hired to work at their home always had homey little names. Tommy’s Taxi. Frankie’s Forestry. But it was such a ruse. There were probably seventeen Katie’s Catering vans driving around Fairfield County right now, sucking money out of the mansions with a fire hose.
“God, thank you,” Stacia breathed into my ear when I handed her the mug. She put a warm hand on my back. And while her mother and the caterer went on and on about passed hors d’oeuvres, Stacia gave me a honeyed smile over the rim of her cup. It was a smile that belonged in a Victoria’s secret catalog, and it was aimed at me and me alone.
And yet I felt… Hell. I didn’t know how I felt. Her perfect body was so familiar in my hands. She had all the right curves in all the best places, and creamy skin, and pretty hair. But somehow I was seeing it from a distance that hadn’t ever been there before.
Maybe it was the fact that she’d been half-way around the world for a few months, and I wasn’t used to her. But suddenly, I felt a lack that hadn’t been there before. The craving I’d always had — to have a big life with the most beautiful girl — she’d always satisfied it. But for some reason, there was an unfamiliar hunger in my gut now, and I didn’t really know what to make of it.
Maybe I just needed an omelet.
I gave Stacia a kiss on the cheek and left the women to their party planning. It was time to eat my omelet, and to let Mr. Beacon chat me up about my econ class. And that would probably remind me of Corey. Which would make me think about…
Fuck.
—Corey—
On New Year’s Eve, my parents always drove over to the Friedberg’s house in Madison to ring in the New Year with champagne. “Come with us, guys,” my mom said.
Champagne was not my friend. “I think I’ll skip it,” I said.
“I’m going to hang with Corey,” Damien said.
After they left the house, Damien and I made ice cream sundaes and flipped channels on the television. Watching the ball drop in Times Square was too lame, so I picked out an old movie.
“So,” my brother said after he’d finished his ice cream. “How come you’re not hanging out with high-school friends?”
Uh oh. If my brother was quizzing me, it was probably because my parents put him up to it. “You weren’t here last year, but it was rough. A lot of my friends dumped me, especially hockey friends. Except for Kristin, and she’s in Fiji with her parents.”
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
“I’m over it.” That was mostly true. “But I don’t feel like working for it, you know? I’m going back to school in a couple of days, anyway.”
“Fair enough.” My brother took my empty bowl from my hands. “But Mom and Dad think you’re depressed. Like, clinically.”
Crap. That meant my mood had been more transparent than I’d hoped. “I’m not, honestly. School is good. I like it there.”
“Your roommate seems great.”
“She is!”
He measured me with a blue-eyed stare. “I told them they were overreacting. But you’re acting really quiet, so it’s hard to sell your side of it.”
“I’m sure they think school is too hard on me, or something. But really, it’s much less interesting than that. It’s just boy trouble.”
At that, Damien looked startled. “Um, I don’t know if I should hear this part. Sex is, like, the only thing I can’t discuss with you.”
I smiled for the first time all night. My whole life, I’d tried to stock up on things that made Damien squeamish. There weren’t many. “You don’t want to hear all the dirty details?” It was a total bluff — I’d never spill.
But it worked. He looked more uncomfortable by the second. “Please tell me you’re not sleeping with Hartley.”
My reply was quick and easy. “I’m not sleeping with Hartley.” And that’s the problem. But brother still looked a little tense. “Or anyone else,” I added.
Relief washed across his face. “So what’s the trouble?”
Clearly I wouldn’t explain. But I did have a question. “Damien, do you think that you would ever find a woman in a wheelchair sexy?”
His forehead creased. “Well, sure. But I haven’t met any women in wheelchairs. Present company excepted. And you can never be sexy. Because you’re my little sister.”
I snorted. “Unfortunately, the rest of the world agrees with you. When guys look at me, I think they just see the chair. Like I’m not a full-on member of the opposite sex.”
“Look, Corey,” he put his chin in his hand. “If Sofia Vergara passes me on the street in a wheelchair, I’m still going to chase her down the sidewalk.”
“So if I had giant boobs and a role on a hit TV show…”
He laughed. “Don’t forget the hot accent. She really rocks it.”
Yeah. There was really no hope for me.
When our movie ended, Damien and I played another game of RealStix. My brother made the unfortunate decision to play as the Red Wings, and I had no trouble crushing him. “Thanks for taking it easy on me,” I teased afterwards. He gave me an eye roll and went into the kitchen for a beer.
That’s when my phone rang. I plucked it off the coffee table and saw Hartley’s number on the display. My heart gave a squeeze of surprise, and out of nowhere, my hope fairy appeared. Pick it up! She was wearing a sparkly dress for New Year’s.
A smarter girl would not have listened. A smarter girl would have let it go to voice-mail.
I answered it, of course. Then his husky voice was right there in my ear. “Happy New Year, Callahan.”
“Hi,” I said, my voice breathy. I swallowed and tried to get a grip. “Where are you?” I asked. Wherever he was, it was loud.
“I am at a very stuffy party in Greenwich, Connecticut. But I was thinking about you.”
“You were?” I didn’t intend it to sound like a challenge. But the question of what Hartley thought about me was a heavy topic on my mind.
“Of course,” he said, his voice a warm rumble. “I thought you, of all people, probably couldn’t wait to see the ass crack of last year.”
I had to pause and think about that for a moment. The year of my accident was officially over. Celebrating was a perfectly sane idea, and just the sort of thing that one friend would consider for another on New Year’s Eve. “Good point,” I said. “Thanks, Hartley.”
“I just hope the next one treats you better. You deserve it.”
His words just hung there. They were nice words, but somehow they sounded like a dismissal. “Thanks,” my voice was quiet. “I’m sure it will be better. Yours too.”
“You never know,” he said. His voice sounded lost, somehow. “Look at the clock, Callahan. Happy New Year.”
I looked at the time on our cable box just as it rolled over from 11:59 to 12:00. “Happy New Year, Hartley,” I swallowed. And then I couldn’t stop myself from saying the thing that popped into my head next. “Don’t you have someone you need to go and kiss?”
He chuckled. “You Midwesterner, you. My New Year’s was an hour ago.”
Hell and damn. My little time zone blunder made me feel low. Because I was Hartley’s afterthought, the person he called when the real event was over. “I’d better go.”
“Take care of yourself, Callahan. I’ll see you next week.”
Ugh. Even those two minutes on the phone with Hartley worked their way under my skin. Even though I knew it was foolish, I spent the next day analyzing what I should or shouldn’t have said, and what I might have done differently.
Damien flew back to New York, and so I didn’t even have him around to distract me. I needed to stop thinking about Hartley, but my brain would not quit conjuring up his dimpled smile.
In my daydreams, Hartley snuck into my bedroom at night, pulling back the covers and slipping into my bed. There were very few words between us in my fantasies. In fact, there were only two. “I’m sorry,” Hartley whispered. And after that, there was only kissing and the hasty removal of clothing. And then…
Hell and damn.
Everything that happened in my dreams was something he did with Stacia and not with me. And when I tried to make sense of why, my heart broke into ever-smaller pieces.
The math just didn’t add up for me, because she was so awful. Beautiful and awful. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand why he’d want to undress the equivalent of a swimsuit model. But the investment seemed strange. Even during our brief New Year’s call he’d confessed to being at a very boring party with her. Why do that? The only logical conclusion was that the allure of her gorgeous body more than made up for the pain of spending time with her.
I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. Hartley was hot. But it wasn’t just his body that I wanted. We had fun together — lots of it. We sparred and we joked. I knew he enjoyed my company. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind.
But obviously it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. And I couldn’t help blaming my disability. A whole Corey Callahan — with two working legs, and none of the baggage that comes with being broken — might have been enough to shift me from the kind of girl that he wanted for a friend, into the sort of girl he wanted in his bed.
But I was stuck this way. He was with her, and I was alone. Very, very alone. I needed to get a life, and I needed to do it fast. All the time I’d spent hanging out with Hartley had been wonderful, but it meant that I didn’t have other friends.
And now that felt like a big error.
When I’d departed for Harkness in September, I’d left the Student Activity Guidebook on my desk. Last summer, I’d only found the listings depressing. Nothing could replace hockey in my life, and I hadn’t imagined that anything else in that book was worth considering.
But now I read it avidly. I needed a new hobby, and a new set of faces in my life. It was the only way to get over Hartley. There would be no more Friday nights spent smiling across the sofa at him. Instead, Stacia would march him around to dances and parties, and he’d let her. Soon enough his leg would be completely healed, and he wouldn’t even have to ask which floor the party was on. He wouldn’t be a gimp anymore, not even a little. Even that little link between us would be severed.
It depressed the living hell out of me.
As I searched for my new passion, my copy of the student activities booklet became as dog-eared as an old lady’s bible. Needless to say, things like the debate club and student politics held no appeal. Music wasn’t my thing, and those groups were already formed. Drama? Right. The next big production at the student theater was going to be A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was hard to imagine Titania or the fairies on crutches.
I almost didn’t bother to read the Intramural Sports section. At Harkness, the houses competed against one another, accumulating points. It was just like in Harry Potter. Instead of Quidditch, there were the usual muggle offerings: soccer, basketball, and squash. There was nothing for me there. I paused on “billiards,” but my chair wouldn’t really sit up high enough for me to reach the table. And anyway, I sucked at billiards, even as a whole person.
When I finally spotted it at the bottom of the last page, I laughed. There it was — a sport for me. It wasn’t perfect. In fact, it was a little bit ridiculous. But I thought it might be a winner.
“Mom?” I found her in the laundry room, folding my father’s underwear.
“Yes, honey?”
“I will do those sessions in the therapy pool. Not the gym.”
Her face brightened. “Great! Let’s find your bathing suit.”
“Do you think I could start tomorrow?”
She ran for the telephone.
The pool therapist was a blond Amazon named Heather. She was a few years older than me, and almost certainly a favorite among the male rehab patients. They must be lining up for sessions with Heather and her bright red one-piece.
After a half an hour with her, I was clinging to the side of the pool, panting. As it turns out, swimming with only your arms is exhausting.
“Really, Corey,” Heather said. “Most patients use the float belt, at least at the beginning. It doesn’t make you a wimp.”
“But we don’t have a lot of time,” I said.
“What, exactly, are your training goals for our sessions together?” Heather asked, tipping her perfect chin towards me.
“Swimming as hard as I can. And one extra thing. I need to figure out how to climb into an inner tube, with my butt in the center.”
“Because you want to…go river tubing?” she guessed.
“Not exactly,” I said.
When I told her my plan, she laughed. “I’ll find an inner tube, then. This will be fun.”
