Love and Other Theories (14 page)

Shelby licks Sam’s stomach, right above the place where his boxers stick out above his pants. She sprinkles salt over the spot she just licked. Now I get it. I know exactly what she’s doing. She and Sam are taking body shots standing up. There’s no room on the counter, and this is Shelby’s glorious alternative. She says something else to Sam, her face still down by his stomach, and he nods vigorously, smiling as he looks down at her. He places the lime in his mouth, holding it between his teeth so the juicy part is exposed and ready for Shelby. Then she does it. She licks the salt of Sam’s stomach, takes the shot, and slides up and off her knees, pressing against Sam as she sucks on the lime he’s got in his mouth. This actually
proves to be way sexier than the lying-down way. I wonder how long Shelby’s had this trick up her sleeve.

“Wow.” Robert laughs quietly, clearly impressed. All the boys look impressed, even Nathan. I can’t really blame them.

“She’s filthy.” Melissa giggles.

“So maybe this really will turn into a VD party,” mutters Celine.

When Nathan takes me home, Shelby and Sam are making out in the kitchen, Melissa’s passed out in Celine’s room, Danica is on Robert’s lap, perched near an open window, smoking and laughing. Patrick calls to Nathan as we’re walking out the door, “You should come back, man! The party’s still going!”

“We’ll see,” Nathan says to him, raising his voice to be heard over the music.

We’re quiet in the car. My leftovers have been sitting in the backseat for the past few hours and the car smells like ravioli. It’s too cold to roll down the windows.

“Thanks for the ride,” I tell him when we pull into my driveway. There’s a layer of frost on the ground, making everything look sharp and slick.

“I wasn’t going to not be the one to bring you home,” he says. There’s a slight edge to his voice. “Not when I was the one who took you out.”

“Thanks,” I say one more time.

I ignore that he won’t look at me for more than just a
brief glance, and that his hands are still holding the steering wheel. I lean into him, putting my hands on his face and turning his head so I can kiss him. He kisses me back, without any hesitation.

When he whispers good night to me, he’s smiling.

I want to ask him if tonight wasn’t enough for him and he’s going back to the party to drink with Patrick and watch Leila dance on the furniture, as she’s known to do sometimes. And if tomorrow he’ll be busy sleeping off a hangover or if he’ll be over me by then, since he knows I’m evolved and won’t punish him for it.

I blow him a kiss as I walk into my house right at twelve o’clock.

E
arl is slamming the door when I arrive at Trip’s on Sunday evening. He called me last night asking me to come over today to help him with two tests he has next week.

“You have my permission to slap him, Aubrey,” Earl says as he passes me. I’ve never seen Earl mad—he always leaves when he’s angry.

The second I enter the house, I understand why Earl left.

“Brey!”

“Housing!”

Zane and Trip are sitting on the couch with the
television turned up way too loud. Neither of them is wearing a shirt. They look like they didn’t shower today and the coffee table is buried in beer cans.

“You’re drunk.” I glare at him and feel the heat rising from my chest to my cheeks.

He smiles at me, like he thinks I might laugh it off. “Just a few beers,” he says. His voice is deep with drunkenness and he’s got that look in his eyes. The one that I used to find charming. All it says to me right now is that Trip finds himself charming.

“Just a few beers?” I repeat back, dumbing it down for them. “Like how many? One? Two? Nine?” I practically yell the last word; I can’t help it.

Zane thinks this is really funny. So does Trip, but he’s too busy giving me his bedroom eyes to really laugh.

“Zane had to spend all day with Jamie, so he needed to relax,” Trip explains.

“Okay, fine. He doesn’t have a test in Psych 101 tomorrow. He can drink as much as he wants!”

“I can still study.” Trip raises his eyebrows. It might really be an attempt to keep his eyes open. “Trust me, Housing. I can do anything.”

“Except pass college.” I can’t stop myself. I’m furious with him and it feels awful, like I want to cry or explode.

Don’t ask for an apology from a boy, because you absolutely will not get a sincere one.

I turn to leave. It feels like more of a good-bye than when I watched his pickup pull out of my driveway before he left for college.

“Don’t be mad, Housing. I’ll make it up to you, I swear.”

I pause at the door. My hand is shaking when I bring it to the knob. In getting wasted the night before his exam, the only one Trip is hurting is himself, but I feel hurt. I think of the way Earl stormed out of here, and I get it.

I turn the handle at the same time as someone else, and when the door opens I’m face-to-face with Chiffon.

At first she’s taken aback—we both are—but a second later she’s shaking her head at me. “Figures you’d be here.” She opens the door and pushes past me, nearly knocking me over. Chiffon looks especially smug now that she’s inside the house and sees that Shelby, Danica, and Melissa are nowhere to be found. I’m all alone. “Your fuck-buddy privileges never expire, do they?” she says.

Some combination of anger and humiliation ticks through me—because how can she say that to me, with all the bad choices she makes; the way she so easily gives herself over to boys like Zane Chapman, who won’t even acknowledge his relationship with her in public.

She shakes her head at me, like she knows I’m coming up speechless, and the tiniest hint of a smile plays across her pale face.

Somehow Trip understands how brutal this is for me
right now, that I’m holding on to so much anger from his being drunk that being here with Chiffon stings extra hard. In a second he’s up, pulling Zane with his right arm. Once Zane is on his feet, Trip pushes him toward Chiffon. Trip takes both my shoulders and ushers me into the dining room. Chiffon and Zane disappear down the hall.

“Sit down, Housing.” Trip kicks aside a chair for me and I obey.

There’s only the tiniest bit of satisfaction in knowing that Chiffon probably won’t be enjoying herself dealing with a drunken Zane. Then again, I’m sitting next to my own drunken Chapman.

Trip keeps his hand on my shoulder. He bows his head, finally looking somewhat ashamed. He gets up to mute the television, glancing at me on his way into the living room to find the remote, like he’s afraid I’m going to leave like Earl did. He’s sitting in front of me before I can muster up the courage to go.

“This isn’t working, Trip. I’m leaving.”

I want him to say something. I want him to shut up. I want him to stop me. I want him to let me go. I need Trip to tell me what I want.

“Please.” He closes his eyes. His hand reaches for me, knocks against the table, my knee, then finally finds my hand. He squeezes it. “Aubrey. Please. I really need your help.”

I move my hand just slightly, but he lets go. His eyes
fly open. If he wasn’t drunk he might look surprised. Trip leans back and his chair creaks. All the chairs around the Chapmans’ cedar table are different, but they’re all made of the same cedar. “Probably even from the same tree,” Earl once told me.

“Maybe I’m just a lost cause.” Trip laughs, small chuckles escaping from his lips as he rubs his hands over his eyes.

Maybe he’s right. Maybe I feel bad for him because he used to be a god and now he’s nothing but a mere mortal. Maybe it’s like my mother said and he’s manipulating me.

“Where’s your book?”

Maybe I’m the lost cause.

Trip reaches into the beat-up backpack resting under the table—the same backpack he carried around all four years of high school—and slides his psychology book across the table. It looks so new and shiny, I wonder if he’s ever even opened it.

“What time is your test tomorrow?” I have to know if I’ve agreed to a hopeless situation.

“Three.” He looks optimistic because he knows the one thing he did right was fill his schedule with afternoon classes.

I pull out my flash cards and highlighter. Even though he’s drunk, Trip can still write. Perhaps tomorrow he’ll be coherent enough to memorize at least some of the material.

Thankfully, Trip knows which chapters he’s being tested on. He brings his laptop to the table to show me where the teacher has posted the lecture notes online. We sit in silence for a good hour. I highlight the parts of the chapter that coincide with the lecture notes and Trip makes flash cards based on the highlights.

My phone rings around nine. It’s not my mother, but I’m sure her phone call is just minutes away. It’s Nathan.

“Hey,” I say into the phone. It’s a relief and a rush to hear him say “Hey” back. “Let me call you in fifteen minutes. I’m still tutoring.” Nathan agrees to this, but there’s impatience in his voice. I feel impatient too then. I flip through the book, happy that there are only a few more pages to go.

“So,” Trip says, his voice slow and tired, “you’re
tutoring
me? I thought you were helping me.” He doesn’t look up from the flash card he’s writing. He’s either upset or too tired for formalities like eye contact.

“What do you think it’s called when someone helps someone else with schoolwork?”

Trip stops writing to smile at me, though only half of his face is cooperating. “I just mean . . .” He mimics me, raising his voice just slightly, just enough so I can tell it’s unnatural. “
I’m still tutoring
. You didn’t make it seem very friendly.”

“Well, Trip.”

“Well, Aubrey.”

“We’ve never been very friendly.” It’s the truth. He’s never been my friend. He’s been my crush, then the boy I was kissing, the boy I was screwing, the boy I said good-bye to.

“We’ve always been friends.” He looks genuinely offended. His pen rolls across the table and into the book when he sets it down, and I watch it. “You were my best friend.”

“But we were—” It pains me to finish. “Together.” It’s the wrong word. It’s the right word. It’s the only word.

Trip isn’t surprised by the word. Maybe even Trip Chapman understands that when one person gives over her virginity, the term
friendship
doesn’t quite cut it. “Yeah. But isn’t that what everyone wants? To be with their best friend?”

There was laughter, a lot of it, between Trip and me last year. I had a spot at the dinner table in the cedar chair with the tall back, and I knew where everything was in the kitchen. I knew how Trip liked his coffee and how many beers it took him to get drunk. I knew that he’d given up on pleasing his mother a long time ago; that no matter how much he fought with Zane, it took them all of two seconds to forgive each other, even after a bloody lip or a black eye. But he’d seen me naked. I’d seen him naked. He’d kissed me until my face was red and given me hickeys in places my mother would never find them.
Besides, it’s impossible to be best friends with a high school boy.

I try to reason with him. “We were just having fun.”

“Yeah. With each other.”

“Fine,” I say, handing him back his pen. “We were friends.”

“We
are
friends,” he corrects. His lips curve up at the word, but his eyes are still serious.

“We are friends.”

He nods once, satisfied with my less-than-exuberant admission. He shouldn’t be. I was lying to him.

I feel the rush of something again—a dull fury, an annoying sadness. I want to ask him how he could leave me like that if he really believed we were best friends. Best friends who were
together
. And why he came back only because he needed something from me.

Shelby’s right; he just needs to borrow my brain.

“You know, you could stay tonight,” Trip says, not looking up. He sounds like he desperately needs a drink of water. He also sounds like he’s smiling. “Help me study in the morning.”

Leila’s right too. He wants to
borrow
more than just my brain.

“Trip—” But I’m overcome with a smile. It’s so typical and so familiar. “I have school tomorrow, remember?” I’ve said this to him before, more than once last year when Trip wanted to drink tequila until sunrise, drive until we
didn’t recognize the street signs, or bury ourselves under his comforter until we couldn’t tell up from down or left from right.

He smiles back at me. “I’m lucky to have you.”

I don’t correct him.