The Girl with my Heart (Summer Unplugged #8) (11 page)

A hand slides around my waist from behind me. Then another hand, sliding up the other side. The hands are small and pale and blurry as they slide up my chest, hugging me against boobs that press into my back.

Bay?

“Hey there, handsome,” is whispered into my ear. The words don’t make much sense to me, but the room is spinning so I guess nothing makes much sense. I smell lip gloss, just like Bay’s.

I slide my hand over the hands on my chest. “Hey,” I say.

“Come with me,” she whispers. And then she’s tugging on my shirt and I’m stepping off the barstool. There’s hay on the floor and it’s a little hard to walk. But I follow the blonde hair in front of me, clinging tightly to the hand that holds mine.

I’m briefly aware of one thought…

When did Bay dye her hair blonde?

But I’m drunk and if I ask her she’ll be upset that I didn’t notice it earlier. So I push the thought away and follow her out of the bar.

We step into the warm summer night’s air and I’m tugged along the gravel walkway, all the way across the parking lot to where a few scraggly shops dot the county road next to the bar. The world is a rollercoaster right now and I’m holding her hand tightly, letting her lead me so I don’t fall over.

I haven’t been this drunk in years. I guess it’s true that you lose your alcohol tolerance if you don’t drink for a while. My life has been work and baby and sleep for months now.

I blink a few times, willing my vision to go back to normal but it’s relentless in its shaking blurriness. We reach a darkened glass door beneath a sign that’s not lit up. “Where are we?”  I ask, and I’m whispering and I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s so dark. Maybe it’s from this small headache that tugs at the corners of my brain.

“Smoke shop,” she says, sliding a key into the lock on the door. She twists it and pushes the door open and now we’re inside a shop. It’s dark everywhere, the only light coming from the moonlight outside. It smells like weed and stale old books. Words tumble out of my mouth. “I don’t smoke.”

She laughs and pulls me along through a narrow aisle. There’s bongs of every shape and color on the shelves, t-shirts with stupid sayings printed on them, keychains and hemp jewelry. I barely see it all as we walk past, the moonlight giving me only a hint of what the store would look like with the lights on.

We reach the back wall and she pushes aside a thick velvety curtain that covers another doorway. I reach out and touch it, feeling the soft fibers against my skin. The movement makes me dizzy. I’m pulled into another room and then a dark hallway. My finger slides across the wall, the only thing I can feel around me, besides her hand. Why is it so dark?

A rush of cool air hits me. We’re in another room. It’s small, or at least I think it is. There’s a light in here—a night light? Or a burst of sunlight filtering in through a tiny hole. Except no…it’s dark outside. This place is a closet but there’s futon shoved against the wall. Blankets are tossed all over it. Where the hell am I? Why would Bay take me here?

“Where’s Jett?” I hear myself say. I sound confused.

“Shh,” she says, placing a finger to my lips. Suddenly she’s in front of me, her breath minty and her boobs pressing into my chest. “No one will find us in here.”

“Where are we?” I say. My eyes close. Suddenly it feels like a massive lead blanket is being lowered over my shoulders, pressing into every inch of my skin, making me sleepy and dizzy and drunk as hell all at once. All of that liquor must have kicked in.

“We’re someplace private,” she whispers. “Finally.”

I stumble forward and she presses her hands to my chest, holding me up. There’s a tiny earthquake in my pocket and it startles the shit out of me. I touch my jeans and her hand slips into my pocket. The earthquake stops and the air glows. My phone is tossed to the floor. “No one is allowed to bother you right now,” she whispers, sliding her hands up my shirt.

I nod. “I don’t want to be bothered.” It’s true. I just want to go to sleep. I’m so tired. And I’m dizzy.

And now her lips are on mine and her hands grab my hands and press them to her boobs. I squeeze and something is off. Or I’m just drunk. Too drunk for this. “Sorry, Bay,” I murmur against her lips. “I’m in no condition to—” She cuts me off by kissing me harder. I’m pushed backward until the back of my knees sits something soft. I sit down.

She climbs on my lap and her hands are all over me. My chest, my back, my hair. I close my eyes, wishing the world would stop spinning. “I’ve wanted this so long,” she whispers.

“You can never get enough,” I say with a chuckle. I open my eyes and the room spins so I close them again. There isn’t anything to see anyway—it’s too damn dark in here.

She pushes me backward and I fall onto the futon, scrunching up a blanket into a makeshift pillow behind my head. Somehow my shirt is gone. Where did it go? Her nails slide up my chest and she grinds against my jeans, leaning forward and kissing my neck. Her scent is so unfamiliar, like some kind of berries or fruit. Why is she back from her mom’s already?

“Where is Jett?” I ask, feeling like I’ve already asked that before. She bites down on my shoulder, hard.

“Stop asking questions,” she growls. Her hands find my jeans and unbutton them. The zipper cries out in the silence and then she’s sliding her hands across my junk. A drunken panic hits me. We had sex just before she left and now I’m drunk. I’m not sure I can perform as well as usual. I’m too fucking wasted.

“Wait,” I say, reaching for her. I want to apologize, to promise better sex after I’ve had a nap. I can’t function right now. And my head is pounding.

And then her tongue slides down my shaft and I’ve forgotten everything I was going to say.

“You like that, don’t you, Jacey?” she says with a giggle.

I moan something in reply but her mouth is too busy to talk anymore. I don’t know if we do anything else. I don’t even know if I finish—I am too tired. Too sleepy and too blissfully, pathetically drunk.

My head has exploded. It’s exploded and it’s in pieces and that’s the only explanation for why I am in so much pain. An atomic bomb has landed in my skull. I swallow, clenching my eyes tightly. When I open them the room spins and it’s dark and I feel like I’ve been sleeping for years and yet only a few seconds. My stomach lurches and twists, filled with liquor it’d rather puke instead of digest.

I grit my teeth and draw in a deep breath, rolling to my back. The mattress squeaks. This isn’t my quiet memory foam bed. This is something else, something thin and uncomfortable. And I’m missing my shirt.

What the hell?

I shuffle up onto my elbows, propping myself up on this weird bed. What do I remember? The bar, Park. Quitting my job. I look to the right, toward a little nightlight shoved in the corner. It glows, lighting up the orange walls around it. I’ve been in Park’s new house and this is not it. It smells like a skunk in here.

I kind of want to make sure my kidneys haven’t been harvested or some shit like that. But my spinning, throbbing head is almost too much to bear. I throw my legs off the side of the futon mattress, grab my phone off the floor and attempt to sit up.

“Going home so early?” a high-pitched voice says.

I freeze. My skin turns ice cold and my head really does explode. I know that voice. It is not my wife. It is not the voice of a friend. Carefully, I turn around, my eyes trying to adjust to the darkness.

Natalie sits up, letting the thin quilt slip off her body as she rises. Her bare boobs bounce in the glow of the nightlight and she gives me a sultry look. “Don’t you want to get some breakfast?”

The silence is deafening. My throat is nails and my lungs collapse and the entire room blurs out of focus. I glance down and my jeans are unzipped, sagging at my waist. Chills erupt over my bare flesh. I can’t think. I can’t move or talk or function.

This is not happening.

This can’t happen.

Please, God, I’d rather die.

I spin on my heel and the room collapses underneath me. Somehow I find a doorknob and I wretch it open. Blinding sunlight slams into my eyes, lighting up my already roaring headache. I stumble into a wall and then follow it down a hallway until I crash into an emergency fire exit. I push it open and an alarm erupts into the quiet air, screaming out an emergency wail. This is an emergency. This isn’t happening.

My feet shuffle out onto a gravel parking lot and I see Big Max’s sitting quiet and deserted in the distance. Cars zoom by on the county road, oblivious to my nightmare. This didn’t happen. This didn’t happen. This isn’t happening. I’m in a coma—I’m in hell. Something—anything. This isn’t real.

I hear the heavy emergency door slam closed behind me and the alarm stops. I fall forward, my hands gripping my knees and I puke until my throat is burning and raw. My head pounds and my chest heaves and I’ve had concussions and bone fractures and a collapsed lung in the past but I’ve never wanted to be dead more than at this very moment.

When the nausea subsides, I force myself to walk, shirtless, drunken and aching all over. I reach the road and look over. My truck isn’t here. We took Park’s truck last night. My truck is somewhere back in Lawson, back at the BMX park. Just a few miles from where she’s staying at her mom’s. My heart rips into pieces at the thought of her. I can’t think of her. I can’t do it. Not now.

My head shakes, in denial or in a futile attempt to shrug away the horrific thoughts that float through my mind. A sob rises in my burning throat and I fall to my knees on the side of county road two forty-nine.

I find my phone in my pocket. It is six in the morning. Zero eight zero nine. The password works this time. Twenty three missed calls from Park. I press his name and put the phone to my ear. He answers almost immediately. “Jace? Are you dead?”

“Maybe,” I say and my voice is raw. “I need you to come get me.”

Like a good friend, Park doesn’t say a word when he picks me up on the side of the road. I climb into the passenger seat and buckle my seatbelt. The band scratches against my bare chest but I don’t care.

“You hungry?” Park asks, casting a sideways glance at me as he pulls back onto the road.

I shake my head.

“Okay. Just checking.” We drive in silence, the only sound coming from the breeze of the air conditioning through his dashboard. A few minutes later Park pulls into the shopping center parking lot, right up to where my truck waits for me in front of the BMX park. Everything is closed at this hour. Park stops his truck and cuts the engine.

I look over at him. “I would never hurt her,” I say, opening the door.

He nods once. “I know.”

I climb out and close the door behind me. I don’t have to say anything else to him. He knows to keep this between us. That’s what a good best friend does, even if their best friend doesn’t deserve the courtesy or respect.

The apartment is a barren wasteland, or at least that’s what it feels like when I trudge through the front door and look around at all the emptiness. All of our stuff is here, but she’s not. I am alone and I deserve to be alone. Clenching my jaw, I strip off my jeans and my socks and my boxers. I throw them all into the trash and then I put on a robe and carry the trash out to the dumpster—the one that’s the farthest away.

Then I shower until the hot water runs out and my bar of soap has disintegrated into nothingness. My head rests against the tiles in the shower as cold water pours over me, chilling me to the core. I do not feel clean. I am not clean. I’ll never be clean again.

I cry until there is nothing left to cry.

And then I haul myself out of the apartment and head to the local clinic.

“Takes about a week,” the nurse says, peering at me over her knobby nose. She’s a large woman with some kind of cartoon monster decorating her scrubs.

“I need to know quicker than that,” I say, shifting my weight on the thinly padded table. “Like by Monday.”

She snorts. “STD tests take longer than that, honey. There’s a lot to process and many diseases to test for.”

My stomach churns at the thought. In the hours since I’ve woken up, I’ve thought it over a lot. It’s all I’ve thought about. There’s no way I had sex with her. There’s no possible way on this freaking planet that I would have agreed to that with someone like her. I am not a cheater. I’m not a man whore and even if I was, I’d still never sleep with her. Even if I was a damn porn star—the world’s greatest porn star—I wouldn’t get close to Natalie. I hate her enough to know that as a fact.

But a mammoth-sized weight of doubt creeps into my heart and settles there for the long haul. I know I wouldn’t have slept with that bitch, but I was drunk. I can remember the bar and I can remember the camera flash of taking pictures. Everything else has been wiped from my memory. How I got there in the back room of the smoke shop, where my shirt went and why I was too drunk to function. It’s all gone.

What if I did sleep with her?

What if I have ruined every single thing I hold dear in this world?

“I’ll pay whatever it takes,” I hear myself saying as I glare at the nurse. This bitch is lying to me. She’s lazy. She doesn’t want to help but I’ll make her help. “You want ten thousand dollars? Twenty thousand? Whatever it takes. I need these results by Monday.”

She gives me a dismissive glance and then checks her watch. “HIV results won’t even show up until six weeks after you’ve had contact with an infected person,” she says.

And this is it. Right about now my entire world collapses.

I can’t stay away from Bayleigh for six weeks. She’ll know something is wrong. She’ll know I lied to her that I betrayed her and took all of her love and faith in me and threw it to a pack of wolves.

I swallow and close my eyes. “Just fucking test me for everything.”

And she does. She takes my blood and I pee in a cup and I’m swabbed and prodded and then sent on my way. I don’t know how I’m alive right now—how I’ve managed to keep breathing beneath the weight of what I’ve done.

Somehow I get home and my head is still an ocean of pain. I lie down on the couch because I’m not worthy of being in the bed I share with my wife. And I sleep for the next two days.