“You better at least buy me breakfast,” she mumbled as she finally walked out, tugging her hoodie on.
“Let’s go.” I walked hastily down the foyer, and when I pulled the door open, I held it for Jessa, ushering her out to the hallway and closing the door as silently as I could behind us.
We stood at the elevators and Jessa yawned as I rocked on the outside of my shoes, impatiently, desperately waiting for the doors to open.
“Gabe.” Keegan’s voice came from down the hallway. “Where are you going?” He sounded one part confused, two parts just plain angry.
“We’re going home,” I muttered, refusing to look at him as he came jogging up to us.
“What’d you do now, asshat?” Jessa asked him as she crossed her arms on her chest.
He looked at her for a moment but then turned his attention to me. “What…? Why are you…?” He shook his head, his eyes wide and confused.
The elevator doors finally opened. When I stepped forward, he grabbed my wrist and pulled me back. “What are you—?”
“I heard you,” I spit out as I shook his hand off my wrist.
A rush of breath left his lungs, and he just stared at me.
I finally shook my head and followed Jessa into the elevator. When I turned around and faced him again, he was staring at the floor.
“You don’t understand what you heard,” he said quietly.
“Oh, no. I do,” I said coldly. “I just got too busy fucking you to remember what an asshole you are. Don’t worry. I remember now.”
He stared at me as the doors closed. The last thing I caught was his lips snarling and a curse erupting loudly from his mouth. I heard what I can only assume was his fist as it hit what I could also assume was the wall. I inhaled and exhaled slowly, closing my eyes as the elevator descended.
Jessa said nothing to me, and her silence uncharacteristically remained for the thirty or so odd minutes it took us to get a cab, find a diner that was open near our bus station, and be seated. She even remained remarkably silent as we scanned our menus. Or I should say she scanned her menu. I stared at mine without actually seeing anything.
I finally looked up at her. “I shouldn’t have dragged you through all this, Jessa. This weekend kind of went off the rails, and I’m sorry. I had no business letting us stay there last night—”
“Whoa…” She held her hands up as if slowing me down. “Just hold up, G-Dog. Dragged me through this? Your friend shows up and offers us a ride to Chicago in his nice-ass car. He then cooks us a damn good meal and lets us stay in his posh-ass condo.”
“Jessa—” I started to say.
“I’m not finished.” She held her finger up, silencing me. “I’ll give you that things seemed to go wonky from there. I mean”—she scratched her head—“you two end up having some sort of weird Jedi mind fight at the dinner table, and then you
sleep walked
”—she used her finger quote on that one—“into his room in the middle of the night. And then this morning you wake up and decide to hate him because of
something you heard
.” More finger quotes. “So, yeah, it got weird. But this has actually been the most interesting weekend I’ve had in a long time.” She smirked. “Oh… Oh, wait! Are you worried that I’ll find out you’re not a virgin?” She looked around the restaurant.
I cringed. She was going to humiliate me now.
“Hold the press, folks,” she said entirely too loudly. Eyes glanced in our direction, honing in on the sound of her announcement.
“Shut it,” I hissed.
Jessa leaned down, cupping her hands around her mouth and whispering, “My nearly twenty-two-year-old sister isn’t chaste, ladies and gents. Nobody panic. Your seatback can be used as a flotation device.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but I was so confused by the last part that I closed my mouth again and shook my head. When I finally got my shit together, I cleared my throat. “So, you’re saying I didn’t emotionally destroy you this weekend. Is that it?”
She snorted. “The past year and a half of my life emotionally destroyed me. You, dear Gabe, are the only thing that’s helped me keep it together.” When she reached across the table, she took my hand. “Okay. Listen. I am more than willing to hate him for you.” She nodded quickly, even as she pursed her lips sarcastically. “In fact, I will steal his car and drive it as though it were my own just to show him how much I hate him. I would do that for you,” she said emphatically. “Because I love you.”
My lip twitched as it tried to pull up slightly, but then my throat tightened, and my chest did too.
Jessa sighed sadly as she cocked her head to the side. “But maybe you could tell me why I hate him. Because I kind of actually liked him.”
I kind of had too.
“I can’t—”
She let out a frustrated sigh.
“—talk to you about this.” I studied her face. “I’m sorry. I just can’t. I’m not trying to push you away, Jessa. I’m not.”
“For someone who’s not trying to push, you sure push really hard.”
Jessa and I ended up at the laundromat that afternoon, Jessa using the laundry carts as her own personal inter-laundromat transportation device and me actually folding our laundry. I hugged her when she dropped me back off at home, and I ran upstairs quickly to avoid being seen by any of my housemates.
I was getting entirely too good at avoiding them. So good that most of them eyed me suspiciously when I walked by, not holding much hope I’d actually be stopping to speak with them. It made me a shitty person. I knew that. A lot of things made me a shitty person, and my behavior toward my friends was probably the least of them.
Someone had shoved a letter under my door when I’d been out, and as I entered the room, I stooped to pick it up. It was from the school. I tossed it on my desk as I started pulling my clothes off. I dressed in a pair of jogging pants and a sweatshirt and then flopped down on my bed.
I stared at my ceiling for a while and then finally pulled myself up and grabbed a couple of textbooks from the stack on my desk, along with the letter. I was behind in pretty much everything, and when I was behind, I tended to skip class because I didn’t want to confront my behindness. I spent the next few hours trying desperately to immerse myself in the reading I needed to do. I tried so hard, in fact, that I could regularly be heard saying such things as: “Hold it together, G-Dog” and “Come on. You can do this.”
Sadly, I didn’t hold it together, nor did I actually prove I could do anything other than stare into space for exceptionally long periods of time. Like many things in life, being a productive student had fallen disastrously by the wayside, much like being moral, being social, being decent in any manner whatsoever.
I finally grabbed the letter I’d tossed on my bed. I’d been avoiding it. There was a time when I’d expected letters like this to be good news. I’d received the hey-you’re-a-rock-star-and-made-the-Dean’s-List letter a few times, the wanna-be-a-mentor-to-other-students-cause-we-think-you’re-swell letter, and even the we’re-doing-a-spread-on-highly-productive-students-in-the-St.-Mary’s-Monthly-and-we’d-like-to-interview-you letter.
My letters didn’t look quite the same at this point, and after receiving the we-regret-to-inform-you-that-you’re-being-placed-on-academic-probation letter at the end of last year, preceded the semester before by the congratulations-you-just-lost-your-scholarship letter, I’d stopped holding out much hope these letters would make me smile anymore.
Half the time, I didn’t even bother opening them. But I was feeling a bit self-destructive—hell, it could likely be reasoned that my entire life was self-destructive—and I tore into the envelope, bracing for the news.
It was a we’re-concerned-about-your-emotional-wellbeing letter with a nice little invitation to come into the student counseling office to “chat” about how life is going.
That would be one hell of a chat.
I’m well. Thanks for asking,
I thought sarcastically.
I’m struggling to keep up with my workload right now because I’ve been spending a fair amount of time prostituting myself to wealthy Chicago businessmen for the past year. As it turns out, hating yourself and being disgusted by yourself makes it really hard to focus on important things like reading text books. No, I don’t expect it to get any better anytime soon because I no longer actually believe life “gets better,” and thanks for offering to listen, but maybe you could wipe that look of shock and disgust off your face now before I punch it.
My lips actually pulled up when I thought about that chat, and I even started to laugh quietly, but then the laugh died in my throat, and I returned to staring at the ceiling.
I finally shoved my books and the letter off the bed and closed my eyes, slipping away to sleep. When my phone buzzed at me, I woke in a start. My heart hammered for a moment when I thought about Keegan. I almost wanted it to be him. But I also really didn’t want it to be him. I’d been stupid to let myself think he might be different than all the other penises I’d met. He
was
different, but in an altogether dangerous way. He was different because he could make me feel things that other men couldn’t. He could make me feel human in a way I hadn’t felt for a long time, but that’s exactly why he was a threat to me. Because none of it was real, and placing even an ounce of trust in him would burn me in the end.
None of that really mattered, though, because if he wanted to reach out to me, he couldn’t. He didn’t have my phone number, and when I realized that, I was devastated…and relieved.
I sat up, grabbed my phone, and swiped my thumb across the screen. It was a text message.
Forward From: WD.
Haven’t seen you in a while. Wed. night. The Drake. 7 p.m.
End Message.
I closed my eyes and let my chin drop to my chest. William Drake liked to fuck at the Drake, because…why the hell wouldn’t he? Good ol’ William.
I’ll see you at 7.
I curled up on my side and stared at the wall in front of me. It was time to stop pretending. I was too old to be playing make-believe after all, and that’s all Keegan had really been. He was a kiss, he was a feeling, he was an act, he was a distraction. He was just so good at making me forget about the mess I’d created.
But it was all just pretend.
Chapter 11
Keegan
MONDAYS
were, without doubt, the shittiest day of the week. Everyone knew that. But this Monday was particularly heinous. I didn’t want to be in D.C. I especially didn’t want to be in D.C. after the shit way my Sunday morning ended. Flying in the opposite direction of the woman I couldn’t seem to stop sticking my dick in when she was clearly pissed at me was nearly painful. I couldn’t solve anything when I wasn’t there, and let’s face it, I was a problem solver by nature. The fact that my trip to D.C. was to meet the Malcolms, who I was irrationally pissed at, wasn’t helping matters.
I called my mom the moment before I boarded my flight mid-afternoon and let her know I was on my way home. She naturally decided this was cause for celebration, and after promising I’d be there for dinner, I finally managed to hang up. By the time I was disembarking two hours later, I was seriously regretting agreeing to the invitation.
My parents were pickers, and not the kind you saw on the History Chanel digging through junkyards for priceless antiques. The kind who would pick away layer after layer of my brain, trying to find my secrets and weaknesses so they could fix every last one of them, lest my shortcomings bring them shame. The funny thing was I wasn’t regarded professionally as a man with many faults. I was seen as top of my game, and I knew that, and yet I never felt an ounce of confidence for it when I was in the presence of my parents.
I just wanted to go home to my own place and go back to bed until the next afternoon when I had to meet with the Malcolms. I needed this trip to be over.
Of course I should go to dinner. Of course I had to go. They were my parents. I really did love my parents, but it was not unusual for our meals to end up with all of us irritated at each other, my parents disappointed in my behavior, my choices, my lack of choices, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. They may have ruled my world and everything in it when I was growing up, but they didn’t anymore, and I spared no feelings when making sure that was understood. It led to some disagreements.
My parents were not bad people. They simply cared so much for me that they worried incessantly about every facet of my life, perhaps something to do with my being an only child. Their worry translated into a very micro-managed upbringing with painfully daunting expectations, but it really was all based on their wants for my future and, by extension of that, their own. I could see that now. And I couldn’t even resent them for who they were because, at the end of the day, I was lucky to have such family in comparison to what others had.
Gabe, for instance, would likely kill to have her mother back. Were her mother as overbearing as mine, I’m guessing she’d still do about anything to see her one more time. I understood that.
I just wasn’t sure I was in the mood for it.
“Keegan.” My mother came toward me when I finally entered the front door. Her arms were extended as though I was some long-lost friend from another time. “Your father and I are just thrilled you’re here.” She pulled me into a tight hug, apparently caring not at all that I might wrinkle her perfectly tailored pantsuit. “I only just got home from the office an hour ago.”
My mother, Patrice Lauri-Hensburg, was a policy and compliance analyst for an oversight committee, whose sole goal in life was to regulate, monitor, and observe credit union activity and practices. I didn’t even understand what she did, and for someone who fancied himself capable of understanding pretty much anything I chose to understand, that was saying something.
My father, Gerald Lauri, was a legislative director on Capitol Hill. He’d started out his career—much like I had—becoming involved in campaigns and being noticed for his efforts, effectiveness, and capabilities. He’d become staunchly aligned with his political party of choice, while I had become staunchly unaligned with any and all parties, hence my choice to stay out of the spotlight and focus on the man himself rather than overthinking his policy. The “man” being any man or campaign backed by enough money to afford me.