Obsessive (8 page)

“Okay…but what does that have to do with the other night?”

“Honestly?” I shake my head, then lean forward, elbows on my knees. “Nothing. That was something else.”

“But you’re not going to tell me what…right?”

I can’t look at her, because I’m afraid she’ll see the truth. So I look toward the front door, still open a crack since I forgot to close it. I can’t believe I forgot something like that. I usually close everything behind me, and lock it, repeatedly. It reminds me of how this all started.

“Why was the door open?”

“What?” Tash looks irritated, probably because I’m changing the subject, again.

“When I got here, the door wasn’t just unlocked, it was open.” I don’t know why, but I’m suddenly feeling angry. Wait, no, yes I do. It’s because of Trent Gibson, and what happened this spring.

“After everything…why would you leave the door unlocked?”

Tash unfolds her legs, glaring at me. “I didn’t! My mom left for work like an hour ago! How the hell am I supposed to know she left the door open?”

“Seriously?” I look at the door, then back at her, like this one thing is the only thing standing between us and being okay. Even though it isn’t. Not by a long shot. “How could she be that careless, after…after what almost happened to you here?” I can’t take it anymore. I stand up and push the door shut with my foot. “He knows where you live, Tash! Doesn’t your mom realize that?”

Tash doesn’t answer. I turn around again, just in time to see her turn away. It’s not like her. She never runs from a fight. That’s when I realize.

“She doesn’t know, does she?”

She stands up and starts walking toward the kitchen, keeping her back to me. But I grab her by the arm. She tries to jerk away, but for once I am truly not in control of my temper, or my actions.

I pull her toward me, spinning her around until she has to look me in the face. “Tash, how could she not know about the attacks? She’s your
mom
. Why wouldn’t you tell her?”

Tash shakes her head, looking at the floor. “It’s not your problem, Grant. Just let it go.”

“Let it go?” Now I’m the one shaking my head. “You know, you keep saying that. But I don’t think I can ever stop thinking about that night. About how scared you looked. No matter how tough you act, he was bigger than you, and stronger than you. There wouldn’t have been anything stopping him…I have nightmares about it, Tash. All the time. Tell me how to get over that. ”

“God, would you just fucking stop!”

She pushes against my chest, hard. I take a step back.

“What part of ‘it’s over’ don’t you understand? Yes, it happened. It sucked. There’s nothing either of us can do about it. It’s not like it’s the first time I had to—” Her voice cracks. She stares at the ceiling, then closes her eyes. Takes a deep breath. “Forget it. Just, fucking forget it. I don’t know why I thought I could just
be
with you, like a normal girl, without this bullshit getting in the way…but of
course
it does. It always will. Story of my fucking life.”

Tash turns to go back down the hall, and I follow her. She stops, just long enough to say, “Message received, Grant. I get it now. You don’t have to spend an hour, awkwardly struggling to explain it. Please lock the door on your way out.”

She’s halfway down the hall when I finally blurt it out.

“Tash, I’m a virgin.”

She stops, but doesn’t turn. I realize she’s probably too mad to have heard me clearly. So I clarify.

“I know it’s probably not all that surprising, knowing what you know about my…issues. But I didn’t know if you’d figured it out already or not, because these days, most people just assume. Like the guys on my soccer team, they just acted like I was like them. So I did, too. I never lied, I just kind of…let people think that I was dating. I mean, I’m straight. I like girls. Why wouldn’t I be trying to get together with them?” I’m probably going too far with this whole honesty thing, but I feel like I owe it to her, after everything. “In middle school, I even had a fake girlfriend from summer camp. I’d tell my friends about her, her name was Julie. We dated for like, a year. I’ve never even been to summer camp. I just didn’t want people to start asking questions. But the truth was, I never even tried. I just kind of…shut that part of myself off. …Until now.”

Slowly, Tash turns around to face me, arms folded. Posture defensive. Expression guarded.

There she is, the fighter. The girl who tells it like it is, no matter what other people might think. The girl I started falling for, all those years ago, in Mrs. Patterson’s sophomore American History class. It just took me almost three years to realize it. Thirty-four months, approximately a thousand days. Twenty-five thousand hours. Countless minutes. Just because I’m smart enough to do the math, it doesn’t make me any less of an idiot.

“Are you sure you aren’t, like, saving yourself for marriage or something?”

I shake my head. Not that the excuse hasn’t occurred to me before, but my family really isn’t all that religious. And the thought of marrying someone and chaining them to me forever without finding out if
that
side of things could work, well, it always seemed like that would be really unfair. To them.

“So…what are you saying?”

What am I saying?
I’m at a loss. Or maybe that’s because I feel like I already said it.

“I don’t know.”

She takes a step toward me, a small one.

“Why are you wearing a tie?”

I exhale.
Finally, a question I can answer
. “It’s for my new internship. At the mayor’s office.”

Her face is still mostly in the shade, but I can see a smile forming. “You look very official.”

I don’t really know what to say to that. My hands find a home in my pockets. “Thanks.”

Another step. “Have I ever told you that I have a thing for ties?”

“No.”
Gulp
.

Apparently, admitting that I have no idea what I’m doing has had the opposite effect on Tash. Instead of backing off, it’s made her more confident. She moves toward me like a predator closes in on its next meal. But before I can get really nervous, she stops, just in front of me.

“I’m sorry I yelled. And swore at you.”

My throat is dry. My mouth is dry. There’s a pounding in my ears. “That’s okay.” I swallow again. “I deserved it.”

“No, you didn’t.” She shakes her head, touching my chest with her fingertips. Through the thin material of my dress shirt, I can just feel pinpricks of heat. I count them. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

“Grant, can I kiss you?”

I nod, and she does. I was right—today, she tastes like toothpaste. Her skin smells like something clean and sweet, like oatmeal. Or maybe cocoa butter. It makes me hungry, but not for food.

Ten is a natural, even number. It’s the base of the decimal numeral system, by far the most common system of denoting numbers in both spoken and written language.

“Can I take off your tie?”

Ten is a composite number. Its proper divisors are one, two and five. Ten is the smallest noncototient.

Tash pulls my tie off, sliding it out from underneath my collar. Then, she goes back to kissing me, pushing me gently back toward the couch. Unlike before, there’s no mute button, no thundering rain to drown out the thoughts. But I don’t need them, because the feelings are louder. The sensations, the emotions, everything. Instead of a slow burn, it’s like every nerve in my body is a lit fuse.

“Can I take off your shirt?”

Again, the answer is yes. I count each button as it disengages. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. I take that as a sign that it’s okay to keep going.

When my shirt is gone, I find I have no problem letting her push me gently down onto the couch. Like before, she climbs into my lap, but this time there’s no steering wheel or stick shift to get in the way.

After a few more minutes, we take another break from kissing, long enough for her to whisper in my ear.

“Can I take off
my
shirt?”

Holy shit. Keep it together, Grant
. I now know what it feels like to be a keg of gunpowder. Sitting under a candle with an open flame.

“Yes,” I tell her, and my voice comes out sounding a little bit strangled.

Where was I? Ten? Ten is the second discrete semi-prime of…I can’t remember anymore. And also, I don’t care.

“You can touch me, if you want to,” she says.

I want to.

A few minutes later, she asks if she can touch me, too.

I say yes. And I keep saying yes, until slowly, I discover what I’ve been missing.

We don’t go all the way, but we come pretty close. Tash keeps asking though, because she’s learning how to handle me. She knows I need to keep my focus on what I want, instead of what I don’t want, what I’m afraid of, what I’m still not sure if I’m ready to try.

All this time, I’ve been avoiding crossing that line and losing control, exposing myself completely, which is the one rule I swore I’d never break. But as usual, Tash is teaching me how to bend the rules. As it turns out, it’s easy to surrender control, as long as you do it a little bit at a time.

CHAPTER SEVEN

It’s my first official day at my new internship, and I am grinning like an idiot.

When I walk into the mayor’s office, Melody looks up from her computer. “Wow, someone’s excited to be here.”

I just shrug. “It’s a nice day.”

It’s not like I can tell her the truth, that I’m smiling because when I woke up this morning, I could’ve sworn I tasted cinnamon lip gloss on my tongue. Or the fact that just putting a tie on made me blush, because I was already thinking of letting Tash take it off after work. Not only would that be inappropriate of me, but it’s really none of her business.

“Is the mayor in his office?”

“My
dad
left at six-thirty this morning to play golf with the rotary chair. He won’t be in until later, which means I’m in charge of you.” Smiling pleasantly, Melody gestures to a chair right behind her. “Have a seat, intern.”

Her desk is horseshoe-shaped, like a waist-high cubicle made of stained oak. It’s clearly not a two-person work space. I raise my eyebrows.

“Going to be a tight fit.”

“I’m going to show you how to log into the system, and you need to be able to see what I’m doing,” she says, her face innocent. “Don’t worry, I’ll scoot over.”

With that, she scoots her rolling office chair exactly one inch to the left. I clench my teeth down to keep from saying something rude, or as Tash would say, ‘very un-Grant-like.’ There’s no reason I should already be feeling this irritated. It’s not like Melody has
done
anything to me…except be kind of condescending and mock me in front of her dad. I remind myself that I’m off my meds, which means I need to self-regulate. That’s the only way this is going to work.

Mind over matter. I think, therefore I am. I have a disorder; the disorder does not have me.
…And other such useless platitudes, by people who claim to know what they’re talking about.

Cautiously, I move into the cramped circle and slide into the empty chair. My knee bumps against Melody’s for a split second, and I immediately grab the edge of the desk and push myself back again.

“Sorry.”

She’s wearing pearls again today. I never really noticed or cared what kind of jewelry girls wore before now. But ever since Tash told me that story about her mom and Urban Dictionary, I’ve never been able to look at pearl necklaces the same way.

“That’s okay,” Melody says. Thankfully, she doesn’t make a big deal out of it. She just turns to her computer and walks me through the process of logging into the network. As she types and talks, I take notes on a pristine legal pad, using my own pen. Or, more accurately, pens—plural. Black for addresses, blue for logins, red for passwords. If she notices that I keep switching every few minutes, she doesn’t comment.

About an hour later, Mayor Patrick finally shows up. That’s what I’ve started calling him in my head, as kind of a compromise. Even though he’s been nothing but nice, I can’t really overhaul a lifetime of being trained by my dad to respect any and all authority types.

“Good morning, kids!” He smiles at us, and I fight the urge to stand up and salute him. “Anything exciting happen while I was gone?”

“Oh definitely,” Melody says, before I can answer. “We deleted about a hundred different junk emails, and Grant made a rainbow.”

She points at my notes, and I feel my face start to heat up. I should have just done them in black, then taken the notes home with me and copied and color coded them later, like I used to do in school. It’s amazing how easy it is to forget that people are always watching, always judging.

I won’t make that mistake again, at least not around Melody. I smile and give a half-hearted laugh, like what she just said was some kind of inside joke, between the two of us. “She’s a great trainer.”

The mayor looks slightly confused, but he doesn’t pursue the subject. “Alright then, well why don’t you show him how to work the coffee machine next, Mel? I’m feeling a little beat up after Joe Baxter ran me ragged all over the green.”

“Sure thing, Daddy.”

The second Mayor Patrick disappears down the hallway, I stand up. “Do you mind if I use the restroom?”

“Sure, just don’t take too long. My dad gets pretty cranky when he doesn’t get his coffee.”

“Where is it?”

Melody gestures off in the direction of the mayor’s office. “You can use the private one if you want. It’s the last door on the left, right before my dad’s office.”

I thank her, even though it pains me, and make for sanctuary as fast as I can. When I’m finally by myself in the tiny, but thankfully clean bathroom, I rip off my tie. My face feels feverish, and my hands are shaking. It’s got to be withdrawal from the meds, because it can’t be over something as stupid as the mayor’s bratty daughter making fun of me in front of her dad for the second time in two days.

Suddenly, I’m overcome with sweat-related paranoia. I look in the mirror, raising my arms, expecting to see giant tacos of sweat starting to form. But there’s nothing there. Still, just in case, I strip off my shirt and hang it carefully across the back of the stall, then wash my hands and arms and splash cold water on my face. I know I’m ritualizing, that I’m freaking out, that I’m seconds away from going off the rails, but I can’t seem to stop washing. I have no idea how long I’ve been in the bathroom, but I know it’s too long to be normal. Someone is going to notice. If not Mayor Patrick, then definitely Melody. I was an idiot to think I could pretend. She’s been watching me like a hawk since I got here, just waiting for me to screw up. Hoping for me to screw up, more like it.