Tasting, Finding, Keeping: The Story of Never (8 page)

There's a zombie cupcake sitting on my bedside table. It has a purple wrapper and white frosting with a green face piped onto the middle of it, tongue lolling out to the side, red gel icing dripping like blood from its empty eye socket.

“What the hell is this?” I ask Lacey who's sitting up in bed, working her comb through her pretty, blonde hair. She isn't very careful about it and I cringe as I hear strands snapping with each stroke. With one last yank, she sets the blue brush down on the bed next to her and curls her hands over her knees.

“That's for you,” she says, grinning and flashing me the skinny gap between her two front teeth. I knock the cupcake to the floor and roll over with a groan. Lacey's there in an instant, grabbing my shoulder and shaking me like she's not a hundred percent certain that I'm still alive.

“Come on, Never! You've been a zombie for days. What the hell is wrong with you?” I ignore her and stare at the wall beside my bed. There are black marks there that I drew with eyeliner. One for each day since I kicked Ty out, seven in total. I reach out a hand and smear them across the textured wall so that they look like soot. Lacey sighs and bends down, presumably to grab the cupcake. “And here I was, thinking that you were on your way to being cured.”

“Cured?” I ask as I look over my shoulder at her. She's adjusting her pearly pink sweater with her long, yellow nails, positioning it just right so that it frames the small swell of cleavage she's managed to dredge up with a push up bra. Unfortunately, the sweater is a perfect match to her lipstick. It's too pale and makes her look washed out, but I don't say anything about it. I'm too curious about her previous statement.

“Yeah,” she says, not getting how important her words are to me. They might not mean anything, but they might mean everything, too. I have to hear someone else say it. I just have to. “Ever since you started hanging out with Ty, you've been … I don't know, thawed out or something.”

“Are you calling me frigid?” I ask, voice stiff and kind of scary. Lacey stops fidgeting with her outfit and meets my eyes. She looks tentative now, though, like she might retract her previous statement. I admit, I can be kind of scary sometimes. “Sorry, I know you didn't mean that.” Lacey sighs again and hands me the cupcake. Miraculously, even though it's taken a fall, it looks, for the most part, unscathed. My breath catches in my throat.

“I just meant that when we first met, you were kind of … I don't know … cold? Like you didn't care about anything.” Lacey shrugs her shoulders. “Lately you've been … normal?” she asks this like a question. I stare at her for a long moment that stretches uncomfortably between us while Lacey fidgets and looks at anything and everything but me.

“Normal?” I ask her and she jumps in surprise.

“God, Nev,” she says, giving me a nickname. It's something I haven't had in years. Despite everything, I smile. “Don't scare me like that,” she says, noticing my smile and relaxing a bit. Lacey stands up and pulls my blankets off of me. “Yes, normal. You know, I didn't even know you
had
sisters let alone their names. Then all of a sudden, you've got these pictures and this smile, and you're just a different person. I wasn't sure what it was at first, but when I saw you at the game with him, I figured it out.”

“Figured what out?” I ask, sitting up and watching Lacey move across the room to my dresser. She opens the top drawer, extracts a lacy, black bra and tosses it to me. I take it and clutch it to my chest while I wait for her to answer me.

“That you're good for each other,” she replies as she nibbles at her lip and picks through my shirts with her fingernails. When she finds one she likes, she pulls it out and throws it over the back of my computer chair.

“We're not a couple,” I protest as I swing my feet out of bed. I stand up and check my phone, but there aren't any messages. Rather than discouraging me, it puts this fire under my ass, this itch to get out, to get going. I don't quite understand it, but I want to roll with it, see where it takes me. Isn't it amazing how one, nice comment can change your outlook on something? Or maybe I'm just tired of being depressed. Seven days is a long time to lay comatose and feel sorry for oneself.

“You don't have to be a couple,” says Lacey as she hands me a pair of dark wash jeans to go with my red tank top. “You get each other, isn't that enough?”

I grab the pants, dress in record time, and ask one, final question.

“Can you drive me?”

Lacey drops me off next to the gatehouse at Ty's apartment complex.

The guy working the morning shift is sympathetic, but tells me he can't let me in without permission from one of the residents.

“I could give him a call?” the man asks as I run my hand through my hair and try not to pace. I don't know why I'm so nervous. Ty might not even be home. Besides, I should've called first. I don't even know why I'm here. Suddenly, I get this panicked feeling in my chest; my heart's fluttering like a butterfly, battering my insides and making me feel sick.

“Yeah, sure, okay, call him,” I say as I sit down on the edge of the curb and put my face in my hands. What if he tells the guy to tell me to fuck off? What will I do then? I look up suddenly and glance over my shoulder. The guard has just started to dial the numbers. It's not too late to stop him. “Wait!” I say as I stand up. The man pauses and looks at me strangely through the pass-through window. “Um, I bet he's not even home. Don't worry about it. I'll call him later.” I start to turn away when a familiar voice sends chills down my spine.

“Liar,” Ty says from behind me. I spin around to see him coming through a small gate next to the security office. He smiles at the guard and pauses just a few feet in front of me. He looks really … good. I find myself tongue-tied as I try to figure out what to say. Actually caring about someone I've slept with is a new thing for me. I'm not used to having to deal with the feelings that sex can bring out in a person because I don't stick around long enough to have them. I swallow hard and take in Ty's ripped jeans, his brown boots, the black T-shirt that only emphasizes the flatness of his chest and belly.

“Liar?” I ask because I don't know what else to say. Ty licks his lip and plays with his lip ring, a sign that he's thinking really hard about what to say next. I don't like that; I don't like that at all. He has a red jacket tossed over his shoulder and his hair is perfectly arranged. It kind of looks like he's getting ready for a date. I blurt out my thoughts and cringe. “Got a hot date?”

Ty laughs, but it's a little bitter, a tad cynical.

“You never call,” he tells me as I cross my arms over my chest and shiver at the icy breeze.
Tank tops in winter; I must be a true California girl.
“That's why I called you a liar.”

“It goes both ways, McCabe,” I say as I shift back and forth between my feet and pretend that I don't notice that the guard is eavesdropping on us. “You could've called me, too.” Ty looks down at the cement for a moment, and I get this terrible feeling that he's going to tell me to get lost. Neither of us asked for this relationship, whatever it might be. Maybe neither of us was ready for this?

Then he looks up and tosses me his coat.

“Here, put this on,” Ty says as he pulls a cigarette out of his pants and lights up. “You're going to need it. We have a long walk ahead of us.” He smiles and gives me a once over with one eyebrow raised in amusement. “Hope you didn't walk all the way down here in that top?” he asks this as a question as I slip my arms into his fleece lined coat and bum a cigarette out of the front pocket. Ty hands me the lighter as I put it between my lips.

“Lacey drove me,” I say as he steps forward and my heart skips a beat.
Are we even going to talk about what happened?
I wonder as Ty reaches out and grabs the zipper on the coat. He pulls it all the way up to my chin and smiles. I kind of hope he just ignores what happened between us, that he and I can just pretend that we never slept together. Apparently, he feels the same way, but he's got a whole different set of torture ready for me. While I've been wasting away in bed and watching daytime television, Ty's been picking up the pieces of his life and arranging them together just so.

“Good. I'd feel awfully guilty if I knew you'd frozen your ass off for this, but I'm glad you're here because honestly, I was on my way over to get you.” Now it's my turn to raise my eyebrows.

“Huh?” I ask as I pocket the lighter and fall into step beside Ty. He's heading in the direction of the university and walking briskly enough that I can make an educated guess about where he's going. “You have an appointment?” I ask, and he nods. There's this little, pesky smile on his face that I'm not sure about. “Job interview?” But then, why would he have been on his way to get me for a job interview? That doesn't make any sense.

“Nope,” Ty says as he lets the cigarette hang from his mouth while he fishes in his back pocket for something. “Better. Keep guessing and maybe I'll tell you.”

“This is stupid,” I tell him, but I watch his hand emerge with a brochure and find that my curiosity is piqued. He holds it out to the side with one hand and pulls his cigarette from his mouth with the other.

“Guess,” he says again as he blows smoke into the wind. It catches in the air and swirls around me, enhancing the smell of the coat which already stinks like tobacco. Maybe it would bother some people but for whatever reason, I find it comforting. I roll my eyes like Lacey.

“Um, we're going to another game?” Ty wrinkles his nose.

“No, do you really want to?” I can't help but laugh, but as soon as the amusement dies down, I'm glaring at him.

“I fucking hate surprises,” I say and Ty hands me the brochure with a sigh.

Student Health Services,
it says.

“Um, okay?” I say as I hand it back to him. He takes it and turns it over. In blue pen, there's a simple schedule written out.
Noon-thirty: Me. One: Never.
He shows me this, too. “You do know that SHS is for students only.” Ty nods and tucks the brochure into the front pocket of my coat.

“I know,” he says, and this time, the smile on his face is so genuine that it highlights his dimples and his perfect cheeks and makes his eyes look a million times brighter. His spine is straight and he's walking with a pep in his step.

“You didn't?” I ask because my guess can't possibly be right. “You got into the U?” Ty's face just explodes into this massive grin and suddenly he's hugging me, wrapping his warm arms around my waist and swinging me in a circle. When he sets me down, this fount of laughter just bubbles from his throat. “How? It takes weeks, months for them to approve an application.”

“I know,” he says as he takes my hand and doesn't let go. We keep walking. “I filled it out right after I met you. I filled out the
federal application for student aid,
too,” he says with a wink. “The FAFSA. Plus, I got a scholarship through the housing authority program, so I'm covered for next semester, Never. I'm in.”

“I'm super proud of you, Ty,” I say as we pause at a street corner and dump both of our cigarettes into the nearby ashtray. “Really, I am.” I look up and see that he's staring at me with a strange expression on his face like there's more. I make an incorrect assumption about his look and blurt out, “About what happened … before … I … ”

“Never,” Ty says as he touches a finger to my chin and pulls my gaze from his butterfly tattoos and up to his face. “Listen to me. You and I, we both have problems.” I push his hand away and look down at the cement. The wind is blowing my hair into my face, obscuring my vision with ebony and crimson. Ty sweeps it away from my eyes with his ringed fingers. He's wearing mostly pearls today which is strange. Every other time I've seen him, he's had a myriad of different gems in all sorts of colors.

“Thank you, Captain Fucking Obvious,” I say because standing here on this street corner with Ty McCabe, I feel exposed, like I'm naked on the top of a mountain, revealed for the world to see. I don't like it. Not one little bit.

“What if I said we could help each other through those problems?” I stare into his eyes and wait for the other shoe to drop.

“Okay?” I say, and I sound sarcastic and bitter and completely unpleasant. I close my eyes and force myself to take a calming breath. Ty is trying here, so I owe it to him to try, too. I open my eyes and notice that he's shivering. I realize how cold my face and hands are and immediately wrap my arms around him.
He did give me his coat after all.
“How?”

“You know how alcoholics have sponsors?” he asks me, and I don't really like the analogy.

“Sure, yeah.”

“Well, that's what we're going to be.”

“Sponsors?”

“Yep.”

“But neither of us are alcoholics,” I say as I step back. The light has changed and we've finally got an opportunity to cross the street. “You want to like, go to an AA meeting or something?”

“No,” Ty says as he grabs my hand again and pulls me through the crosswalk. “I want to go to an SAA meeting.”

“SAA?” I ask as we head towards the hill and the massive white and beige buildings of the campus. “What the hell is that?”

“Sex Addicts Anonymous,” Ty says simply and my heart jumps into my throat.

Oh. Shit.

I dig my heels into the pavement and refuse to take another step.

“There's no way in hell I'm going to one of those meetings,” I protest, and I feel hot and jittery, like there are ants marching over my skin and making me itch. I shake my head and turn away from Ty so that I'm facing the inside of a sub shop. There aren't any people inside at the moment, and two of the employees are lip-locked behind the counter. It's not a pleasant sight, so I switch my gaze to the sidewalk.

“Never, we need this. Both of us. Or at least, I need it, and I need you to help me.” I shake my head. I am not capable of helping anyone with anything.

“I can't, Ty,” I say. I'm panicking right now and deep down, I know why. It's because he's right. He's right. He is so fucking right that I can't stand it. I should've gone out with Rick, hit the straight and narrow, got married and had babies. That's what I should've done, but here I am, standing with Ty McCabe on a street corner talking about sex addiction. How perfect is that? Somehow, even though I can't admit it to myself at the moment, I think that I'm right where I need to be. How fucked up is that? “I can't do this right now,” I whisper even though I know I will. I will do it.

“That's okay,” Ty says as he steps up real close to me and lights a cigarette next to my ear. When he exhales, I inhale and try to find some modicum of peace when the smoke fills my lungs. “You don't have to go right away. The meeting isn't until later. Right now, you and I have something else to do.”

“And what's that?” I ask because I can't handle the suspense.

“You and I are going to get tested.”