"So did you see him today?"
It was the same question. The same question I'd been rushing back to my dorm everyday after class to ask Jules. I figured by the end of the week, this would be more than annoying and she'd stop answering my calls entirely.
"You really make me wish I'd never told you."
"And sometimes, when I'm thinking about that instead of writing a paper or taking notes in class, I really wish you didn't either. But you did, so deal with it."
"Just because we had…” She trailed off with a sigh. “Just because that happened doesn't mean we're gonna do anything more than that."
"But the way you said you left it, with that whole 'it's a small world' thing, you made it seem like maybe you would see him again."
"And if I did, so what? It doesn't mean anything, like when a man tells you he'll call you."
"That you better have been a general one."
"And even if it wasn't, it still would be true." She laughed. Alone, because I didn't find that the least bit humorous.
"So," I said, not so smoothly transitioning. "You did see him."
"Maybe," was her coy reply.
If this was anything else, I might have begun to lose interest. Hell, I would have lost interest a long time ago and threatened to hang up on her if she had wanted to talk about it even half as much as I needed to talk about this. It was the Justin factor. It was the her meeting him, her cozying up to him, her, her, her, Marcia, Marcia, Marcia factor that I was driving me insane.
I've drooled over the man's hands. Found his freckled shoulders dreamy. Tripped and fell in love with the awkward way his voice rose and cracked when he was thrown a curveball of a question that made him nervous. I've taken it as a personal mission to recruit as many new people as possible over to the Justin side. But somehow it had never worked on her. No matter what half-naked picture I'd shown, the master-minded music I'd played, the concerts I'd dragged her kicking and screaming to, it had never worked on her. She was the uncrackable. The fortress impenetrable to all things Justin-y. And I'd tried. Lord knows I had.
And the moment she'd gotten the real deal she'd cracked and folded like cheap patio furniture.
"Girl, don't play with me."
I can't say I blame her. But I can't say I don't hate her by way of a tiny elephant-sized bit of jealousy gift wrapped in whataboutme-ery whines.
"I did but..." She trailed off and I could hear her moving around now. Like she'd decided now was a good time to get up and shuffle around every piece of paper she could get her hands on. "It was nothing. We glanced at each other a few times from across the room. We didn't even talk or anything."
"Why didn't you go over and say hi or something?"
Pffting, she said, "What would I look like walking over to Justin who's sitting with Cameron and just saying hi?"
"Like someone's who at a dinner party and is mingling." I had managed to hold back a very valley girl "duh" from the end of that sentence. "Meeting new people."
"Well, maybe I'm tired of meeting new people. Maybe..." She trailed off, shuffling and crinkling more paper to the point that I was on the verge of yelling at her about it, but then she stopped crinkling, stop shuffling papers and simply said, "I'm tired of mingling."
"Get real, Jules. Remember who you're talking to. You're the people person of the millennium. If there’s a new face to be cheesing into and cheesy small talk to be made, you're all over that."
"Well...maybe I'm..." She sighed. "Maybe I'm just different here. Maybe I've learned to be different. Different is good."
She didn't even sound like she'd bothered to try to convince herself of that before she'd tried to pawn it off on me.
"Sure it is, Jules. Sure, different is good, great, just peachy when the different is getting a different sandwich off of a Penn Station menu, but this isn't a new sandwich. You're across the country. Alone. You're all by yourself over there, because you were so sold on this 'different is good' crap."
"So what are you saying?"
"Nothing." I sighed, defeatedly, ready to backpedal my way out of this potential argument if need be. I didn't want this conversation to turn into some bitter rant on my part. I could be bitter later. "The same thing I'm always saying. Absolutely nothing."
Too bad Jules was usually the type ready and willing to pedal, full speed, into arguments. "If you didn't want me to go so bad, why didn't you try to talk me out of it?"
"Oh, right." I laughed. "So then I could be happy knowing that I talked you out of your dream."
"So why," She whined, as if she'd been holding that back for awhile. "can't you be happy for me when I'm chasing that dream?"
"Because..." I huffed, blowing a strand of my dark brown, nearly black hair out of my face from where it usually fell into my eyes. "That's no fun. You can't expect me to be selfless and supportive."
She chuckled. "Of course not. What was I thinking?"
"You weren't thinking. Just like you weren't thinking when you slept with Justin. Just like you weren't thinking when you went over to say hi, or make some kind of awkward conversation, because you just couldn't let it go that he'd seen you and hadn't approached you already."
"I told you we just glanced at each other from across the room and that was it."
"And now I'm telling you that I know you're full of shit. Different can be as good as it wants to be, but some things never change."
She sighed and paused and usually that meant I'd won. Usually. But this time I didn't know what was at stake to even know for sure if winning was what I wanted.
She said, "It's usually those stubborn stains of change resistant fibers in a person's being that you try to scrub and scrub and scrub, but they just won't come out. Because maybe they aren't supposed to come out, maybe you're just looking at it all wrong."
And before I could ask what the hell she was talking about, she'd already hung up without so much as a goodbye, talk to you later, or toodaloo.
You say
You like to sleep alone
What did I care about the opening of a new boutique called The Boulevard (LA wasn't exactly in need of a new one anyways)? I didn't care. I didn't care, but that didn't stop me from being there at the dinner party.
Enter the reason I'm sitting at a table full of people and am more alone than if I'd gone stag. Zora and Leslie. Guess I should've said the reasons. They're Cameron's friends. Cameron's single friends who couldn't wait to set her up with someone and then couldn't wait to watch it all fall apart. Which all of the relationships eventually did. Some of that was their fault, most of that was Cameron's fault for listening to them.
If you wouldn't listen to a broke man's financial advice, why would you listen to a couple of serial can't-get-past-the-first-daters on how to snag and reel in a man?
Trying to reason with Cameron when it came to them was a waste of time and effort. They were her Archille's heel, only she wouldn't allow herself to see that. So twiddle D-block and twiddle dumbass stayed whispering in her ear all of their ever so helpful "advice." And after the first time they'd come onto me and I'd promptly rejected them not so diplomatically (I believe my words were, 'I'd rather have my balls twisted and yanked off first, which really is probably the exact urge I'd get the morning after if I'd been depressed and drunk enough to say anything but a hell no), their whisperings had not been so flattering when my name was brought up.
But I didn't care what they thought. I just cared that Cameron seemed to still care what they thought. And after the first time she'd blown up at me when I'd even so much as hinted at what Zora and Leslie, respectively, had tried to do, and she'd nearly dumped my ass for it, I learned to keep it to myself.
And now I was getting a brand new lesson on learning to keep to myself, seeing as how at my end of one of the many long rows of tables, I could have burst into flames and still not one of them would have acknowledged my presence. Not even Joel and Maddie, who despite having a new baby, which was also one of the sparks to Cameron's sudden fixation with her eggs outside of the breakfast table, even they, Mr. and Mrs. Extra Friendly, were on board to ignore me. But they were her friends. Just like Drew and Lindsay and Carl and Jaz and Rick and Veronica (aka Roni). They were all her friends and when she decided that I wasn't worthy of being seen or heard, then they silently agreed.
I couldn't even get so much as some slight eye contact from any of them. Cameron, who was sitting right next to me, close enough to rub elbows, was ignoring me the best. It was effortless. If I tried to add a comment into the conversation, she talked over me as if it was an Oprah conducted interview. If I tried to get in the conversation just by laughing, she laughed louder and longer to drown me out.
Her married friends at least had the decency to look awkward in this situation every now and then. To slip and nearly respond to something I'd said or done. To almost recognize my existence. Even Roni and Ricky who sometimes fought like they were trying to win the golden ticket to an episode on Cops looked occasionally uncomfortable. But Cameron was firm.
Because Zora and Leslie were firmer, even though sitting directly across from me, they were the only ones to intentionally look my way, but that was only to glare at me. Letting me know that Cameron might not have told everyone, she might not be talking to me anymore since I'd fessed up, but she was damn sure running her mouth to those two. Every well-placed glare my way was proof of that.
After a while of getting ignored, you give up fighting it. Or at least I had. By an hour into this dinner party to celebrate the opening of Zora and Leslie's boutique opening, I'd given up. I'd resorted to looking around the room, hoping something interesting would catch my eye.
That something turned out to be a someone, as I just happened to glance down the long table to the other end and spot Jules perched over there.
And I say
I miss the way you breathe
She was surrounded by people I'd find out much later were all her co-workers, and of whom she had their full attention. No sooner than I'd realized I was staring, I looked away and once again tried to follow the line of conversation at my end of the table, which was something along the lines of whether time-out was too stifling to a children's development of a sense of independence and self. I might have tried in vain to inject that a good ass whooping wasn't abuse and is probably what little Tommy needed to stop drawing on the walls with whatever he could find, especially when the 'whatever' included his own feces. I didn't bother saying any of that, because 1) they wouldn't have listened anyways and 2) they'd already lost my attention a second after I figured out what they were talking about.
You say
I get away with murder
And right back my eyes went to Julie. Luckily, she still hadn't noticed me, noticing her.
But you know
The more I looked the more obvious it become how wrong Julie would have been for me if we'd gone any further than we'd already had. Clearly, she was all wrong from the way she held her salad fork that she was using to eat the entree to the way she chewed with her mouth open.
She was all wrong. In so many ways. From the crooked way she tended to talk out the side of her mouth to her terrible hunched posture to her ever-running mouth with its thin lips to the way she threw her head back when she thought something was really funny right before she actually slapped her knee, occasionally punctuating her laughter with a snort (or a series of snorts).
Back on my end of the table, the conversation had shifted to breast-feeding and when enough is enough. And when the kid has teeth and can hold the breast themselves, I think it would be pretty obvious, but when it came to Drew and Lindsay's Clara, Lindsay didn't seem to be too sure.
Ignoring the current topic, I found myself watching, studying Cameron as she spoke. The wild hand gestures, the pin straight posture, the slight frown lines between her eyebrows as she listened, the way she chewed on the inside of her mouth before disagreeing.
I've paid for hurting
Someone I can’t leave behind
I scooted a little closer to her, putting my hand over her hand as it rested on the tabletop. Leslie sucked her teeth at this. Zora rolled her eyes. Cameron went still under my touch, then slowly eased her hand from under mine, then slowly scooted away until the original distance was restored. Leslie smiled. Zora smiled. Cameron went back to yammering with her hand never taking the chance of settling on the table again. I went back to looking around the room.
Do you feel something
Pulling you back in
That’s when I felt eyes on me. That creeping feeling that someone’s watching you. Without thinking, I turned and stared down the other end of the table, my eyes meeting the hazel eyes of Julie.
Do you see something
You wanna see again
Realizing she’d been caught, the red rushed up into her face and her head immediately turned away. I laughed softly to myself and it was like she’d heard, because her head rose from staring at her hands in her lap to look back at me. She wasn’t embarrassed this time, so her eyes met mine confidently. A slow smile curling the ends of her mouth. I smiled back.
I could be the one
And that was it. She went back to her end’s conversation. And I went back to being ignored.
If I wasn't so oblivious ninety percent of the time, I would've known something was up when Zora and Leslie both decided to make a run for it to the Ladies’ Room and then one by one the other inhabitants slowly but surely wandered away from their half-eaten meals, mumbling about fresh air or needing a smoke.
When we were relatively alone on our end of the table, Cameron licked her lips, sighed and turned to me for the first time that night and said, "What was that about?"
I fought down a smile that nearly flashed and beat down the urge to ask who she was talking to, because she couldn't be talking to me, I didn't exist anymore, remember? Instead, I tried to remember I was still the asshole in this and said, "What was what about?"
"That. The shared smiles. The moment."
"There was no moment."
She nodded, pulling her bottom lip in before letting it go with a pop. "Of course not. I must be just seeing things in my old age."
I could make it up to you
I watched her watching me until she looked away and I was staring at her profile in confusion. Watching as she pulled her bottom lip in, biting it, licking it, biting it and then releasing it in a soft, barely audible sigh in the still fairly crowded room.
All around us the party winding down to a close, seeing as everyone was filing out or at least beginning to mill closer to the exits. They'd had their food, listened to the excited babble of two hags going on and on about their new boutique, they'd done their time.
I sighed. "What do you want me to do? What do you want me to say? Because you not saying anything to me except the random snide comment isn’t working."
She exercised her right to remain silent.
"Why won't you talk to me? There's something to talk about other than shoes or clothes or other people's babies and now you've run out of words."
"Justin." She exhaled my name like it was the hardest thing she'd ever had to say to me. "You just don't get it."
"Yes, that's exactly it. I don't get it. Help me get it."
Take me back, I’m the lonely boy who
"I just wish..."
"What?"
When she started to shake her head, I thought she was trying to duck and dodge out of the conversation as was her usual way on anything that really mattered, but instead all she did was get up from the table and walk away slowly, as if she just knew I'd follow.
I guess she was right, because now we were standing in the nearly empty lobby. Her on one side of the room, me on the other. A few people strolling slowly like they had nowhere to go, they were the only things between us besides space and opportunity. I might have tried to step closer, but she started talking and all but put a stop sign in her tone.
When the lobby was empty, save us, she began without any preamble, "Three months after we first got together and we'd had the whole Zora and Leslie episode and we nearly broke up, I was pregnant. I was pregnant, but I didn't know if it was yours, so I never told you." She was avoiding eye contact now. She was walking more, pacing the side of the room she was on. I didn't move, didn't say a word. I'm not sure if I was truly still breathing at that point.
Staring out the doors, she continued. "And then as some time went by and I was going crazy trying to figure out what to do, who to tell first or who to tell at all, then..." She said, chewing on the inside of her mouth. “It happened again. The dizziness. The weakness. The pain in my shoulders. No matter what I was doing in the bathroom, it would hurt for it to come out. It was happening again. And after the first time…” She took in a shaky breath and made eye contact for the briefest of moments. “After I let them cut me up, when I was just barely eighteen, I had nearly lost my tubes then. Lucky, is what they'd called me. They said, I was really lucky that it was just damaged, because I could have died. They said that maybe I could still have kids and then they started going over other options.
"But I was barely eighteen; I didn’t want to be pregnant in the first place. And then I was, and then I was dying and then I wasn’t dying and I wasn’t pregnant, and maybe I wouldn’t get the chance to be pregnant again. And even before I met you, I was dying to get pregnant again.” She licked lips, smiling weakly. “And then I did. And it all happened again. It was like I was eighteen again, or worse because I could hear that damn biological clock ticking away and I could feel my chances of getting the stretch marks, putting on mix-matched socks because I couldn’t see my feet anymore, waddling, feeling the alien sensation of my baby kicking inside me for the first time, cursing my husband out during delivery for doing this to me in the first place...all of that, that I'd been dreaming of since I was a little girl was just slipping away from me.
"But I didn’t want it. Not that way. Not the way that it was happening then. That wasn't the way it was supposed to happen.” She looked at the doors, at the walls, at the ceiling, then finally, when she'd run out of things to look at, her eyes settled down wearily on me. Shimmering as her mouth twisted, doing all the work at keeping the tears at bay. "So there's not really much to get. You might be the asshole, but then that just makes two of us."
Who loves you
She walked away and I did nothing. I didn't say anything. I didn't yell, I didn't curse, I didn't try to stop her. I didn't do anything.
I stared at my shoes. I don't know how long I stared at them, but when I looked up Cameron was nowhere to be found, but a pair of hazel eyes were watching me.
Julie was coming my way. But there were people now. A crowd of slow-to-get-out-ers that were standing in her way, so I took advantage of that and tried weave through the crowd that was causing more and more of a back-up at the door. It was like they'd just wanted to all huddle together and admire the doors rather than actually walk through them.
Someone ran into me on my left, brushing against my shoulder, but I was so close to the doors now that I hardly paid any attention. That is until that someone jumped in front of me.
When Julie looked like she wasn't planning on moving out of my way, I sighed and took a moment to try to pull myself back into myself, because it felt like a good chunk of me was just floating over my body watching me like I was a character in a movie.
"Normally," Julie started, licking her lip. "I'm a little better at taking a hint. So you nearly sprinting to the door after all the eye contact tonight is a fairly big hint, but..."
"I really need to..."
"I know you're busy. Busy probably isn't even an adequate word to describe it. You're hot right now. Not to say that you won't be in the future, but everyone wants a piece of you. Everyone knows your name, sings your songs, and buys the expensive concert tickets, so you're hot. You're important in ways that the average person will probably never get to be."
"I just...I had a really bad night. And I..."
"My point is, without rambling too much, that you're not who I thought you'd be. I'm not sure who I thought you were going to be, but whoever that is, you weren't that. And..." She licked lips, twice. "And I liked it. You. The little bit of you that I got to be around. I liked it, you. I liked you and..."
I was shaking my head. And I only realized I was when she stopped speaking in mid-sentence and a slight frown rippled her brow. I stopped shaking my head and held it for a moment; it was throbbing like Beckham had used it for soccer practice. Dropping my hands to my sides with a sigh, I said, "You spent time with me because I was cheating on my girlfriend." I paused, looking into her eyes, trying to make sure that she was understanding this. "So I don't know who you thought I was going to be, but I'm glad that finding me to be a cheater was to your liking."
When her mouth opened, my feet went back into motion, propelling me forward and out the door. I didn't wait to hear the "ooo, ahhh" from the crowd of people who were still basically barricading themselves by the doors, when they realized the doors could be more than a pretty thing to stare at.
You say
My broken heart becomes me
I was hanging up the phone on the wall over my desk, from where I'd been trying unsuccessfully to write a paper before I'd made that call, when my dorm room door opened. Christopher Price, God's gift to womankind, or so he thought, strolled into my room without knocking. I must've left the door unlocked. I quickly made a mental note to get better at locking the door as I watched him come over and plop down on my bed.
I say
I'd sell it cheap to you
He lay on my bed on his side, facing me, making my bed look warmer and cozier than it ever had. Chris was made for moments like this. He was drool-worthy eye candy from his boyish grin to his muscles that rippled through the dark chocolate of his 6'1" frame to his broad shoulders, sexy back and the oh so lickable v-cut of his pelvis.
He wasn't baring too much skin today. Just a wife-beater and sweats, but sometimes he'd walk in straight from practice all sweaty and shirtless with his basketball shorts hanging low on his waist and the only thing that saved me from becoming like every other foolish girl when they saw him was the fact that he'd eventually make his way towards my bed. And gorgeous or not, I didn't want him sweating all over my sheets and making them funky.
Propping his head on one of his large hands, he smiled a dimpled smile at me and went into his usual routine. "What do I have to do to get you to go out with me Friday night?"
That was my cue to roll my eyes. "Ask your girlfriend, Raedel, for permission."
You say
I should
Wrap all the lies I've told in
This only made him smile wider. "You know me and Rae have an open relationship."
"Yeah, and that's why Toni is walking with a limp now."
10 dollar bills and smoke the
He winced at that. For as much as he wanted to be that playa, playa type, under all the bullshit he was the good guy, the one-woman man. "That was a misunderstanding."
"I think Toni understood it all very well after Rae head-butted her."
money doesn’t burn so clean
"So Raedel’s got some anger issues..."
Do you feel something
"Chris, shut up. It's not gonna happen and the only reason you even like to bring it up is because you know it's not gonna happen." I frowned at him. "You get some kind of sick enjoyment off of flirting with girls who you know you don't have a chance with."
Pulling you back in
"So I don't have a chance with you?" He sat up then, the frown overtaking his features making him look suddenly serious now. "With how cold this bed is, I wonder who does have a chance."
Rolling my eyes, I said, "Spreading your legs doesn't make a person less lonely."
Do you see something
You wanna see again
"So you're lonely?"
"Don't you have something better to be doing? You have a girlfriend. You're an athlete. Go dribble a ball. Run a lap. Swim a lap. Juggle your balls, I don't care."
I could be the one
His dimpled grin was back as he sat forward, kicking his legs out in front of him, planting his feet on the floor and slipping them back into his flip-flops. "First admit that you like me always coming over here."
Last year, I'd made the mistake of letting Jules drag me to one of the football games and then the next day, when Chris and I were in class together, I made my second mistake by saying 'good game' to him. And pretty much from then on, he was the lost little puppy that followed me home and I couldn't shake him. Jules used to say that I couldn't get rid of him because I didn't want him gone and he'd agreed, and I'd never hesitate to tell them both to lay off the crack.
"I thought you didn't like liars?"
"And who says I like you, Miss I Don't Have A Chance?"
I smiled. It was hard to look at him for long and not smile, but I always gave it a good try. "So once you're rejected you just give up?"
"Are you asking me not to?"
I could make it up to you
He'd leaned in a little more to say that. My bed wasn't that far from the desk, which was close enough that he was brushing up against the side of it now.
I did the safest thing and just turned back to my computer. Back to the white screen and the black cursor that was blinking from where I'd left off at. My name. It was a ten page paper on two books, one of which I'd read half-way through, the other I'd read the title. It was due on Friday. Today was Thursday.
Take me back, I’m the lonely boy who
I could feel him still watching me, but I was trying to ignore it. It was a different kind of staring contest. I could only win if I managed to not look over at him. Two minutes later, the white screen was still too empty, the black cursor was blinking at the bottom of the paper. But the page was still blank. I'd only hit enter until I'd gotten to the bottom of the page, pretending that doing this was going to connect some dots in my head. Maybe if I'd read more then there could be some dots to connect.
I lost when I glared at him and he just smiled, rolling over onto his back, laying down, making sure to be shoeless before he'd done so. I'd already screamed at him about that before and he was a quick learner. Staring at the ceiling with his hands behind his head, he was silent for awhile. So I clanked on the keyboard to keep us afloat in the silence. Then after awhile he said, "Who were you talking to before on the phone?"
I opened my mouth to spill the whole my best friend hooked up with Justin Timberlake story, but I didn't feel like having to show the pictures as proof when he inevitably didn't believe a word of it and somehow the thought of getting lectured about how I was being a good for nothing friend cause I just couldn't let it go and be happy for her, somehow that just wasn't very appealing to me.
Instead, I said the next best thing to the truth, "One of Dionne Warwick's psychic friends."
Rolling onto his side to watched me again for a moment, before he said, "And what cosmic wisdom did dey b'stow 'pon ya, sista girl?"
"Always remember to lock your door. You never know what whack ass Jamaican accent producing freak might walk through it when you're not looking."
Who loves you
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This chapter featured: Black Lab “ Lonely Boy
