Random Acts of Hope (3 page)

I began moonlighting from my day job doing these parties about three months ago, and quickly bec
a
me the third-highest seller
in the district
. With a degree in health education and working on my master’s degree in higher education administration, I was (sort of) the perfect candidate.
Most of the other sellers just thought of this as an easy way to make money. I saw it as the perfect opportunity to empower women sexually—and make even
more
money.
 

The curse part came in two ways. One—all those orders had to be hand-entered into our online system. I was staring at two to three hours of work entering item numbers, credit cards, addresses, and so on.

And two—because of my day job, I had to be careful no one at work knew I was moonlighting. When you work as a Resident Director for a
residence hall
at a smaller state university
in western Massachusetts
, things get tricky.

The job fell into my lap
at
the end of senior year, and I’d been a
R
esident
A
ssistant for two years. Miscarrying in the middle of my freshman year just as the RA on my floor came into the bathroom had turned out to be the only bright spot in an otherwise horrific life moment, because Candy and I had become best friends after that mess. From comforting me to calling Campus Medical Services to holding my hand during the D&C, she’d been there.

And what better way to help others than to emulate her? Plus, R
A
s got free room and board on campus. My
mom
loved that, and it meant my student loans weren’t too bad.

My own Resident Director had suggested I go into higher education administration and become a residence life specialist. I thought I’d be a health teacher, instructing students on sexuality issues, but this was even better. Live in a dorm with a free apartment, get paid $30,000 a year, free grad school tuition and benefits—
could it be more perfect
?

Well…I kind of forgot that whole part about living with three hundred eighteen- to twenty-year-olds.

If word got out
in the dorm
that I conducted vibrator races at parties where strippers prevailed, my credibility would be shot. So I took great care, scheduling parties at least
fifty
miles from my college.

What I never expected was that an even bigger risk loomed out there.

And it had come to life last night.

I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Liam in a g-string, oiled up and being drooled over by a room of customers didn’t help, either. Sybil’s words cut through me like a knife.

To call last night a shocker would be an understatement. Who the hell did she think she was? And what had Liam told her to make her react like that?

My phone rang. Caller ID said it was my mom. If I didn’t answer, she’d just leave voicemail after voicemail, hunting me down like I was Katniss.

“Hey, Mom,” I greeted her.

“
Charlotte
, how are you? How
is
the start of the new year?
Find any flaming underpants yet?
”
Mom had moved to the United States from Britain when she was a teen and still had that razor-sharp prep-school British accent. She was one of the oldest moms, having me at forty-one, and it sucked when the Harry Potter books and the Dolores Umbridge character were popular, because Mom looked just enough like her—short, greyish hair, a penchant for boiled wool suits—to make people tease me.
 

We moved from New York to
M
etro
W
est Boston when I was in seventh grade, the same year I met Liam. He
had
never teased me.

I laughed, “No, Mom, no flaming underpants yet. But it’s early in the semester.” Last year had started with a courtyard campus barbeque that inexplicably led to a group of freshman men stripping naked and setting their underpants on fire. Unfortunately, they used a little too much charcoal fluid and singed off their eyebrows and half their hair.

“Thank goodness. Give it time, though.”

We chatted a bit as I tried to keep my voice in check. Dad died the year before we moved, his heart condition finally winding his body down like a child’s top, inertia no longer enough to keep it upright and in motion. Losing my father at eleven had been damn hard.

The only event harder than that had been losing Liam and then, the baby.

I’d never told Mom about any of it.

“I do think the move to Portland might be just the right answer,” Mom said, making me realize I’d faded out of the conversation.

“What? Move?”

Exasperation filled her voice. “Charlotte! You weren’t listening.” Only someone who knew her intimately, who had known her for decades, even, could catch the trace of a strange, hard-to-pin-down lisp. Three years ago Mom had a mini-stroke that had gone untreated for half a day. She’d gone to bed feeling “fuzzy” and woken to movement in only half her face, a weak right arm, and the awareness to dial 9-1-1.

“You’re thinking about moving? Why?”

“There’s a buyer for the house. Someone who lived in it as a child and who has made a generous offer.”

“Buy the house?” We lived in a tiny two bedroom home, the kind you rarely found in a good school district, and most of my middle school and high school years had been spent helping
M
om fix it up.

“Yes. I can retire comfortably off the proceeds and my pension.”

“Retire? Mom, what are you talking about?” Mom worked as an administrator at a local
boy’s
prep school. “You’re not old enough to…”

Wait. I did the math as she laughed softly.

A low whistle came out of me. “Sixty-five. You’re turning sixty-five
in December
, aren’t you?”

“No need to make a fuss,” she said primly.

“
You’re really leaving the school? And selling the house? And moving to Portland?” We’d spent summers in a lovely beach house in Maine that Mom rented with another British ex-pat family.
 

“I’ve found a very reasonable, adorable little one-bedroom cottage with a den for guests, and it’s only five houses away from a lovely beach!” she exclaimed.

“It’s affordable?” I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my voice.

“I’ll own it outright if all goes well, and
my
pensions and what’s left from your father will do me just fine.”

I blew out a long sigh. “Wow.”

Her voice was gentle as she said, “We all grow up sometime, my dear. You had to let me go eventually.”

My laughter filled the room like hot air. “Oh, Mom. When will you come visit me?”

“When do the young men parade around without their
underpants?”
 

“Mom!”

“And, of course, I’ll come to enjoy a weekend with you, dear. But it couldn’t hurt…”

I
got off the phone as fast as I could, because Liam’s stripping and Mom’s joke were just a little too close to be comfortable.

I felt like all the tectonic plates of my inner self were shifting madly, a shaky vibration inside me making life hard to live moment by moment. This feeling wasn’t new, but it was firmly rooted in the past. For six months after my miscarriage, daily life had been unbearable, so
m
ething to be endured hour by hour, minute by minute as the aftereffects of everything from Liam’s rejection to my body’s betrayal felt like a conspiracy against me.

Thank
G
od for student health services, both medical and psychological. Without both, I’m not sure I’d have risen from the ashes.

Memories of his display last night made me curl inward, my sex on fire, heart racing to pump blood where it found the most heat. No way to erase that. He’
d
moved with the grace of a large game lion, with eyes that couldn’t stop turning back to me. Challenge filled his look, a deeply smoldering stare that made me wet against my will.

Once again, my body
had
betrayed me. All because of Liam.

I’d tried to leave the room but the way he’d ripped off his costume so fast, right in front of me and Sybil, meant the women came running like pregnant women to an ice cream sundae.

And he was good enough to lick, I’ll tell you that. My mouth watered at the memory. The landscape of that body, sandy hair scattered across thick muscles, his six-pack more of an eight-pack as he moved his hips and shot every woman in that room (other than his mother) a cocky grin full of fake promises, surface sex that was designed to sell.

None of those grins reached his eyes, though.

Until he looked at me.

The heat in his eyes
burned
so
bright
it was like a blue flame
morphed
to white, reaching so
far
into the color spectrum it threatened to turn invisible, taking me and Liam and every molecule of matter with it. In that look I saw want and need and apology and regret, but the look wasn’t enough. Would never be enough. He displayed his body like a trophy, like an object, but his eyes…those were a weapon.

Whatever made him turn so cold, so cruel, five years ago still lived inside him, and I could never trust him again.

That didn’t mean I didn’t want him. Grieve him. You would t
h
ink that spending years
mourn
ing our would-be child would have taken all my sorrow, but I had so much more to spend on the Liam I thought I knew. He’d been my friend long before he became my lover, and the betrayal that cut me through the core wasn’t that he’d left me as a pregnant lover.

It was that he took away the friend I needed most in that moment. The emptiness, the lon
e
liness—the pure abandonment—in that phone call and his words as he dumped me unceremoniously on the telephone were like being eviscerated.

Why?

I had no answers. Had spent five years trying desperately to find one that was logical—hell, one that was
illogical
would have been fine
—and countless hours in psychologists’ offices brought me no closer to the truth.

All I could know was my own experience.

Whatever he was thinking and feeling remained a mystery.

I had to put him out of my mind.
Had to
. The stack of orders stared back at me, begging for attention. Like my sex drive,
except
I got paid to process th
e
se orders.

Sighing, I picked them up and began to key the first few in to the online form that the company used for party hostesses like me. So many butt plugs and anal beads.
So
many. The dirty little secret about sex toys is that backdoor action is where it’s at. People are curious, but inhibited. Sex toys break through that, because you can’t ignore a six-inch, squat little cone made of sili
c
on that vibrates.

You bring that into the bedroom and you pretty much have to talk about it.

I was in my office, door closed, trying to get this done when a soft knock on the door interrupted me.

“Charlotte? You in there?” Maggie, one of my fellow Resident Directors.

“Co
m
e in, but be quiet,” I said.

Technically, I wasn’t on duty. When you live in a residence hall with three hundred undergraduates, boundaries fade fast. You have to hold your ground. I lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment on the
first
floor,
with my office right next door.
Sparsely furnished, but it did the trick. Ancient couch, a desk and chair, and a ton of filing cabinets that might have been useful in the past, but with the “paperless university” in full force, I found them useless.

Maggie entered the room and swiftly shut the door. Bright green hair and
D
ay-
G
lo blue eyes were the first thing you noticed about her, and then you saw the nose piercing. Five earrings on one ear. And a giant scar up the side of one prominent cheekbone. She was five years older than me and we were grad school classmates, both
second
years in the two-year master’s degree program that would probably stretch into three years for us, given our full-time work in the dorms.

Maggie had been viciously attacked and raped on her midwestern campus five years ago while she was a junior. The incident made headlines nationwide and she’d been in ICU for weeks. She hated pity. Despised it. So she filter
e
d the world through reactions to her appearance.

It seemed to work, because assholes pretty much gave her wide berth
and nice people deferred to her
.

“You’re missing a diversity training meeting,” she whispered, eyeing my orders. “Ooo
h
, a glow-in-the-dark butt plug?”

“New this summer. BPA free,” I added in my best salesperson voice. We both giggled. Maggie was the only person at the university who knew about my moonlighting.

Her hand reached for mine. I knew what was coming and my stomach clenched before she even opened her mouth. Her eyes, so fierce and guarded, went soft. “I have one for you,” she said.

“Shit.” My hand squeezed hers back. “Who?”

“Marian on the second floor.”

“Marian? The
k-
through-twelve Catholic girl who goes home every weekend?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice. Marian was a freshman, and she’d only been here for three weeks. Two of those had been Freshman Orientation.

Maggie sighed and let go of my hand. She picked up a stack of bright sticky notes and worried them. “I know. She goes home to her boyfriend every weekend. I guess the ‘summer goodbye’ hit the jackpot.”

“Fuck.”

“From shit to fuck. That about says it all.”

“How far along is she?” Maggie sent the pregnant students to me. I sent the victims of sexual and domestic violence to her. It was an uneasy division of labor, but it seemed to work.

“She just missed her period. Says she’s normally like clockwork. Can you visit her today? Her roommate is freaking out because Marian crawled into the top bunk, pulled the covers over her head, and refuses to talk.”