Summer's Temptation (27 page)

I turn toward him. “Right...”

The divot between his eyes is deep, as if it’s been there the whole ride. “I knew you wouldn’t want me around, but Josh and Dylan were determined to find y’all.”

“Mmmhmm. I guess the strip club just happened to be the most convenient way to distract them.” I sound sarcastic even to my own ears.

His tongue glides over his bottom lip as he concentrates on the road. “I tried to talk them into going to the batting cages. When that didn’t work, I tried the driving range. They weren’t having it. We were at our fourth bar, looking for you, and Mirage was just up the street. I knew it was a long shot. Hannah would castrate Dylan, but I thought I’d give it a try.”

“You could have stayed home.” I stare longingly at his bottom lip. It glistens in the sunlight.

He stops at a red light and gazes at me. “I thought we were going out for a beer. I didn’t know we were looking for y’all until we walked into the first bar.”

“Okay, let me get this straight. You were trying to avoid finding me, and now I’m in your truck. You’ve thrown my crutch where I can’t reach it, and you’ve informed me I’m not getting it back anytime soon, which I assume means I’ll be with you for a while. Am I missing something?”

He pulls his phone from his pocket, hits a few buttons, and holds it out to me. “Liz texted me.”

I take the cell, and on the screen is a text from Liz, sent approximately thirteen minutes ago—probably when Tyler left to get more beer. I hadn’t even seen her pull out her phone. Sneaky woman. I click on the message.
She’s miserable. I’m tired of listening to her vomit doom and gloom. Can you please talk some sense into her?

“I can’t believe she sent that to you. I have a lame leg. I have every right to sulk.”

“That’s not why you’re miserable.” He shifts into gear a second before the light turns green. “We’re both miserable for the same reason, and we don’t have to be.”

I angle away from him again, but I stare at him instead of out the window. “Unless you have a time machine and can erase your romp with the bony, Goth blonde, I don’t see a solution.”

His whole body stiffens, and I can tell he’s trying hard to keep his eyes on the road. “How did you…” His hands tighten on the steering wheel. “Hannah told you what she looked like?”

“Yeah.”

He’s silent for a moment, hopefully overcome with enough guilt to match my jealousy. “I hurt you. I know that, but you hurt me too.”

“It was just a kiss—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Then what?”

He sighs, seeming resigned. “I have to show you.”

I don’t know what he could possibly show me that’d make a difference, but a large part of me is rooting for him because, as Liz so eloquently put it, I’m tired of vomiting doom and gloom.

Chapter 27

W
e pull into his driveway, and he hurries from the truck, jogs around the front, and opens my door. I expect to lean against him as we walk into his house, but he scoops me into his arms. I’m pretty sure I’m under his control for the next hour, and there’s no use complaining about it since being cranky won’t change the situation.

I wrap my arms around his neck to keep steady while he uses his knee to keep me aloft and unlock the door with his free hand. The moment he steps inside, I’m engulfed by the smell of stale beer and day-old pizza. The house is clean by guy standards though. No trash lies around other than a few empty beer bottles.

As we travel through the hallway, I know my time in his arms is about to come to an end, so I take a moment to inhale him. He smells like soap and clean sweat. Without thinking, I rub the hair at the back of his neck. It’s soft and silky and cut short in a way that betrays his grooming habits. He’s sloppy in front on purpose, but he keeps it neat and trimmed in the back. I don’t know why, but I find that endearing.

He walks through the doorway of his room, and we’re transported to a world of drawings. A few are in color, but most sketches are done in charcoal. Over his bed, he’s added a few new ones. A dog, staring up at its master, eyes glowing. A curvy girl, her back to us, sitting next to a lake. She’s wearing a tank top and jeans, and her long hair is blowing in the wind.

As Tyler places me gently on the bed, I glance at another sketch below the lake drawing and see almond-shaped eyes. Me. He’s drawn me and put my image over his headboard. I glance up at the girl by the lake. Me again.

My throat closes up. If I’d been him, I would have torn down the pictures of me the second we broke up. But he hadn’t. Why? A worse question floats through my brain. Were they there when he brought the blonde into his bed?

I look down in horror. I’m sitting on
the bed
, the place where he brings all his conquests.

“Relax,” he says. “I washed my stuff last week.”

I cringe. “Am I that obvious?”

He smiles ruefully. “I can read you like a book.”

He turns his back to me and strolls to the closet. I guess I’m stuck, so I make the best of it, scooting to the headboard and resting my back against it. Hopefully this part of the bed isn’t contaminated. As I fold my hands in my lap, I peer around the room for more pictures of me. I don’t see any, but I do notice the haunted picture of the young girl. My eye was drawn to her the last time I visited Tyler’s room. She looks just as tired and sick as ever. I want to scribble a cup of coffee next to her, but I doubt caffeine would fix whatever ails her.

I hear Tyler rustling through the closet. A loud clanging noise makes me think something just toppled over. When he curses, I figure it must be heavy. A few seconds later, Tyler comes out holding a cardboard tube at least two feet long, like the ones architects use to store their drawings.

He fidgets nervously with the cylinder, tapping it against his palm. “Just… don’t say anything until I’m done talking, okay?”

I nod, staring at the tube in his hand.

He sits next to me, stretching his long legs toward the end of the bed, and pops open the plastic lid of the cylinder. “Do you remember what I said at the lake, about the first time we met?”

I nod again. “The hospital.”

“Yeah. The hospital.” He taps the tube against his hand, and rolled papers slip out. He uncurls the top piece and hands it to me.

A young girl, fifteen, is standing next to a vending machine. She looks so innocent, her cheeks round and her eyes sparkling. I lightly run my hand over her hair, careful not to smear the pencil marks. “I remember that haircut. My mom loved the show
Felicity
.” She’d gotten into a kick of watching reruns, and I’d fallen in love with Keri Russell’s hair. I’d cut my hair a few inches below shoulder length and gotten a kinky perm.

“I drew that right after you left the break room with your snotty friends. I didn’t want to forget what you looked like.” He uncurls another sketch and lays it in my lap, on top of the first. “This was the second time we met. I’m sure you remember.”

There I am, sweaty tendrils of hair swept across my neck and brow, mouth swollen from kisses, and eyes glistening with arousal. “I can’t believe you kept this.”

“Hell yes, I kept it.” The corners of the paper curl together and he smooths them down, staring heatedly at the drawing. “I couldn’t believe it was
you
sitting across from me that day. I thought I’d never see you again, and there you were.” He smiles, and it’s kind of relieved looking.

Even now, a year and a half later, the picture makes my cheeks heat. “You were supposed to do a caricature drawing. Why did you have to sketch me like… like
that
?”

He chuckles, his eyes crinkling around the edges. “I hadn’t planned to draw you like
that
. I was going to sketch a realistic portrait and keep it, but your boyfriend pissed me off.” His smile slides away, replaced with a twisted frown. “I could tell you were nervous. You kept looking at him for support, and I heard him jacking off with some guys behind me. He wasn’t paying attention to you, and I kept thinking if I had a girl like you looking at me the way you looked at him, like he was your anchor, your life, I sure as hell wouldn’t have ignored you when you needed me. So I decided to be a dick.” He sucks in his bottom lip. When it pops free, he looks at me. “I felt bad when you got pissed, but it was worth it.”

“Worth it?” Is he kidding? “God, I was
so
mad at you. How could that have been worth it?”

One side of his lips tip up, but it’s not an ornery smile—more a thankful one. “You never forgot me. I could tell by the way your eyes narrowed every time we passed on campus. You’d look away real fast like you were scared I’d catch you staring.” He nudges my shoulder with his. “I lived for those moments. Sometimes I wondered what you’d do if I just came up to you, dragged you to me, and kissed you. I bet you would have let me.”

“I had a boyfriend.”

“I know. That’s why I never did it. I don’t mess with someone else’s girl, even when I want to.” He thumbs through the rest of the drawings and pulls out another. His mood shifts slightly, his shoulders more taut than before. “Now I need you to be quiet for a few minutes and let me explain.”

He hands another drawing to me. I recognize the moment he’s captured because it’s from only a few months ago, the day I moved into our house next door. I’m wearing tattered old jean shorts and an even older T-shirt. My face is flushed, and sweat drips down my brow as I carry a large box up the steps toward the front door. I want to ask him why he’d draw me at my worst, but per his request, I keep my lips sealed.

He hands me another drawing. The same day. I’m sitting on the front stoop, a bottle of water tilted to my lips. My hair’s pulled into a ponytail that grazes my back.

I don’t know why he’s showing me these pictures until he plops the whole stack in my lap and I get a look at the top one. I’m lying on the library lawn with a blanket beneath me, wearing jeans and a form-fitting sweater. I’m on my stomach, a book spread before me. In the next picture, I’m sitting on a bench, wearing a jacket and sipping a vanilla latte. In my hair is a clip I lost second semester of freshman year, only a month after Tyler drew the picture of me with kiss-swollen lips and sweaty hair. As I sort through the pictures, I realize that every one of them was drawn sometime between the sex sketch and before I moved in next door.

With his index finger, he slowly smudges the scarf tied around my neck in the image on my lap. “The day you sat for the caricature drawing, I recognized you from the hospital. I had no idea you were on campus, and when I found out, I started to see you everywhere. At the library. The student union. Walking down sorority row. I wondered how many times I had passed you without noticing. I didn’t want to miss you ever again, so I started drawing you. It began innocently. A sketch here. A sketch there. But after a while, it kind of turned into an obsession.”

“Why would you want to draw me?” I would understand if I had the bone structure of a model or an interesting face, but I’m nothing spectacular or out-of-the-ordinary.

He takes a deep breath as if he has to steel himself to tell me. “It made me feel like I knew you.”

“That makes no sense. Why didn’t you just talk to me?”

“You had a boyfriend. If I talked to you, it would have been obvious it wasn’t platonic. Also, I wasn’t… I wasn’t really in the right mindset to get to know you.”

I wait for him to elaborate, but he looks down and fiddles with a crease in his jeans. “Sometimes you’re cryptic, Tyler.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“But you’re not going to say more?”

He shakes his head, still playing with his jeans. I could push him, but this is the most Tyler’s ever opened up to me, and I don’t want to be so aggressive that he clams up. Men are weird like that. Instead, I flip through the sketches. There have to be at least forty. He seems to get tenser with every new one I pull from the pile.

“You didn’t want me to know about this,” I whisper.

He shakes his head, mashing his lips together. “I was practically stalking you.” His voice is full of shame.

I don’t know if he’s embarrassed he stalked me or if he’s ashamed at having been reduced to being a stalker. Knowing Tyler, probably both. But the one thing I really don’t understand is how I didn’t notice him showing up with paper and pencil and his gaze trained on me. I’m not
that
oblivious to my surroundings. At least, I hope not.

“How did I miss you sketching me?”

“You didn’t.” He taps his temple. “I have a good memory. I took a mental snapshot and drew it later. But I did stare at you a lot, trying to make sure I remembered every angle, the lighting, the background, what you wore. God, that sounds creepy.”

Yeah, it kind of does, but it’s Tyler, so it’s also kind of flattering. “Have you done this with other girls?”

“Hell no,” he says without hesitating. “I felt dirty enough doing it with you.” He crosses and uncrosses his feet at his ankles and shifts as if he can’t get comfortable. He’s obviously uneasy letting me see these pictures.

I guess I can’t blame him. If I’d drawn dozens of sketches of him without his knowledge, I’d want to keep that to myself too, which begs the question… “Why are you showing me these now?”

“So you’ll believe me when I say that the night you came over and asked me to be your fuck buddy, you were requesting the impossible.”

“But you said yes.”

“I said yes, I’d be
your
fuck buddy. I never said you’d be mine.”

Something doesn’t ring true about what he’s saying, and I go back to the night I put my ego on the line and asked him to be my go-to guy. So much happened in the course of that evening, I have a hard time conjuring our conversations. I sift through the shadows of left-behind emotions, and when I hit on the right one—surprise and resignation—I realize why I’m confused.

“What about the other girls? You said you would still hook up with them.” I had been appalled, but in the end, that was the proof I’d needed that we’d keep our hearts uninvolved.

He looks at me blandly. “I lied.”

I press my palms into my eye sockets until I think my eyeballs will burst. “Oh, my God. I believed you. Why would you lie about that?”

“You didn’t leave me any choice. If I hadn’t, you would have dumped me then and there. You didn’t want attachments.”

“What about the threesome? You brought those girls back to your room after I asked you to be my fuck buddy. None of this adds up.”

“It’s complicated.”

I drop my hands. “Well, I’m here and I’m listening, so now’s the time to explain.”

He sighs, but he nods. “I was completely freaked out when you asked me to be your fuck buddy. At first, I thought you weren’t the girl I’d respected for all those years.”

I cringe, remembering his look of disgust after I’d asked him to hop in bed with me. “You thought I wasn’t innocent. I could read it all over your face.”

“Virtuous,” he says. “Isn’t that what you called yourself at the lake? But the thing is, I knew you were virtuous, so then I figured you wanted to experiment with someone and I was the kind of guy you were looking for. I didn’t want to be
that
guy, Cassie. That’s why I kicked you out. I mean, it wasn’t your fault you thought of me that way. I was
that
guy, the one girls came to for no-strings-attached fun, but I was pissed at myself and you for rubbing it in my face.”

“I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

“I know. I said it wasn’t your fault, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like a world-class douchebag. Anyway, I figured if that’s how you saw me, I might as well live up to your expectations, so I invited those girls to my room.”

My stomach twists, and I feel as though I’m going to gag. No girl wants to imagine the man she cares about having a ménage à trois. How can she ever live up to an experience like that? “You know, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to hear about the threesome.”

“I know, but like you said, you’re here and you’re listening. I need to tell you. Please, Cassie.”

I shake my head and close my eyes. Even though I don’t want him to go on, I say, “Okay.”

“So they were going after each other, putting on a show for me—”

My eyes pop open. “Really, I don’t need to hear any of this.”

He takes my hand, slipping his fingers through mine. “I’m not saying this to hurt you or make you jealous. I just… I need you to understand where I’m coming from.” His soft blue eyes plead with me.

I nod for him to go on.

“So the girls… I’d seen it all before. Done it all before. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun, but I realized I was tired of it. College is supposed to be about having fun, experimenting, doing things you’d never do in the ‘real world.’ But what you don’t know until it’s too late is that when you spread yourself over all those different people, it thins you out. It makes you less of who you are, and more of who they want you to be. Those girls wanted me to be their experimental, wild ride, the one who brought out the uninhibited tramps in them. They wanted the same thing from me that you wanted. I was tired of that role. It’s not who I am.”

“But if it’s not who you are, why did you do it in the first place?”

He looks at the picture of the haunted girl. The longer he stares at her, the more his eyes dim. “Necessity.”

“What does that mean?”

“I walked out on those girls.”

I’m not convinced he’s ever going to tell me who that girl is, so I let him be.

“I’m not even sure they noticed I’d left. I think they were just using me as an excuse to try some girl-on-girl. So I came straight to your house. You’d never told me why you wanted a fuck buddy—”

“You wouldn’t let me.”