Thugs and Kisses (5 page)

“Save it for Dev Frye, Odelia.”

“But I thought you wanted to know.”

He closed his eyes a minute, then opened them. They were shiny. “I would like to know. But right now I am much more interested in your future … our future … than I am in your past.”

The phone rang. I made no move to get the call, and he didn’t invite me to take it. Greg and I looked at each other in silence as the ringing continued several more times, then stopped. Greg was about to break the silence when his cell phone, clipped to his belt, chirped. He looked at the display, shook his head slowly, then answered.

After listening, he said to the caller, “No problem, she’s here and she’s fine.” He listened. “I’m sure she’ll want to talk to you about Oliver.” He listened a bit more. “No, now’s fine. Come on over.” Then he hung up.

“That was Dev Frye,” he explained. “He called just now and got worried when you didn’t answer. He’s on his way over to ask you again about Donny Oliver. He said the police want to talk to you, but he wants to hear it first.”

He turned his chair and rolled around me, heading for the front door.

“Aren’t you going to stay?” Panic rose in my throat like bile.

“No, I’m not.”

He paused, and for a minute I thought he was going to change his mind. Silly me. Then the last and most deadly land mine exploded.

“I think we need to take a break from each other, Odelia.”

My heart stopped, or at least it felt like it had. Donny Oliver may have been shot in the chest, but I’d just been slammed into, full frontal, by a freight train.

“Donny Oliver was my first,” I began, not looking at him.

“First boyfriend? First kiss? First what?”

“First everything.” I hesitated. “Well, maybe not my first kiss. That happened in seventh grade at Patti Newler’s birthday party. It was my first boy/girl party, and we played spin the bottle. I think the boy’s name was Brian.”

He gently cut me off. “Back to Donny Oliver.”

“Yes, back to him.” I curled my legs up under me and leaned back into the thick upholstery of my sofa. I closed my eyes and dug into the deepest and darkest of my banished memories. It was a lot like excavating on an archeological dig.

“It happened the summer just before our senior year. We were both working a summer job at a local restaurant, just a family place with good, cheap food. I waited tables, and he bussed them and helped with the dishes. It was the first time I’d gotten to know Donny outside of school. He was different, nice and normal—no bravado or cockiness. At the restaurant he wasn’t captain of the football team. He was just minimum-wage summer help, like me.”

Seamus jumped up on the sofa and settled in next to me. I stroked his soft fur. “Most of his friends were gone for the summer, but his parents and the football coach made him stick around and work and go to summer school. In spite of being quite smart, his grades were low. Too much partying with his friends, probably. He had to get them up if he wanted to play his senior year and be eligible for a college football scholarship.”

I picked up my soft drink from the end table and took a long drink. Confessing was dry work. Seated across from me on the floor, with his back against an armchair, was Dev Frye. He took the opportunity to take a bite from the slice of pepperoni pizza he was holding, then washed it down with his own swig of soda. The rest of the pizza was in a box on the coffee table. My own half-eaten slice was on a plate in my lap. I picked at the crust with nervous fingers.

“We knew each other from school,” I continued, “but ran in different circles. Or rather, he ran with the popular kids, while I was mostly alone, except for Johnette, of course. But that summer we became friends. At first we just said hello, then we started having lunch together. Soon I was helping him with his summer schoolwork. In time, we went to the movies together and stuff like that. Nothing romantic—we were just two kids hanging out over the summer. It was nice.”

I felt tears starting and cleared my throat. “I was a lonely kid. And that was just a year after my mother disappeared, and I had to move in with Gigi and Dad. It was great to have a new friend.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad.”

“No, that summer was very nice. But I was no fool. I knew that once school started, the chance of our friendship continuing was meager. Donny was too driven by peer pressure and popularity. He always had to be the center of attention, even if it meant at other people’s expense.”

I nibbled a piece of pepperoni and thought about what I was going to say next. Dev didn’t rush me, which is good, because my mind kept reverting back to Greg and our fight. Donny and Greg: both painful things to think and talk about, yet here I was, immersed in both. But in spite of Donny being dead and Dev needing answers, the issue with Greg crowded my mind and pushed all other thoughts aside, demanding attention like a crying, angry child.

After Greg declared we needed a break, we stared at each other in shocked silence, neither believing the words that were now out in the open—raw and stinging, like a fresh, jagged wound. Both of us seemed afraid to say anything more, frightened perhaps to make matters worse, worried that even the most carefully uttered comment might pour gasoline onto the already heated blaze of anger and frustration. Over the two years we’d been together, we’d had our share of arguments, but this was a full-blown fight, the kind of blowout that leaves couples changed forever—sometimes for the good, sometimes not. After a few moments of awkward silence, Greg bundled Wainwright into his van and drove off, leaving me in a mixed state of shock, anger, and pain.

When Dev arrived, he found me sitting on the floor in the middle of the living room, sobbing my eyes out into the afghan I kept on the sofa. I don’t know how long I’d been there, but when Dev rang my bell and received no response, he’d tried the door and found it unlocked. He got me up and held me until I was cried out. Between hiccups and nose blowing, he managed to understand that Greg and I were no more.

Dev had done the decent thing and said we could talk another time. It had to be soon, but it didn’t have to be on the heels of my break up with Greg. I told him it didn’t matter; why not get all the pain over at once? But Dev knew I needed some time, even if I didn’t. He left, promising to be back around dinnertime.

In between Dev’s departure and return, I spent hours pacing, moving from room to room, clutching my favorite photo of Greg, crying, and calling myself a bleeding idiot—and sometimes calling Greg worse. When I was too tired to pace any longer, I crawled into bed and spent time staring at the ceiling. The pain was so acute that even the gunshot to my ass a few years ago couldn’t hold a candle to it. I literally thought I was going to die, that my heart was going to stop dead in its tracks just as Donny’s had the night before. For a minute, I even envied him: better dead than to feel this way. It was a pain I was sure would never end, not ever, not until the day I did finally die.

The phone beside the bed rang, bringing me out of my stupor of disbelief and agony. I only answered it in the hope it was Greg. Maybe I had pulled a Rip Van Winkle. Maybe a day or two, or maybe a week, had passed, and he was calling to tell me the break was over. Quickly, I snapped out of my wallowing and into a muddled rage. How dare he call the shots! If he wanted an
us
relationship, then
us
, meaning
me
, had better be part of the break up and/or make up decision. I snatched up the phone and barked hello into the receiver.

But the caller wasn’t Greg. It was Zee, and as soon as I heard her loving, velvety voice, I melted once again into a soppy, broken-hearted mess. She wanted to come right over and comfort me, but I told her no, that Dev was coming by soon to talk about Donny Oliver. I promised her I’d be fine. I promised her a call when Dev left, if it wasn’t too late. She told me to call back no matter what time it was. Then I called my father and assured him everything was fine. No sense worrying him over what was going on with Greg and me. All Dad knew was that there had been a murder at my high-school reunion. It was all he needed to know. And he certainly didn’t need to know about my past relationship with the murder victim.

So that’s what brought me to be huddled on my sofa, drinking soda, eating pizza, and spilling my guts to Dev Frye about Donny Oliver.

“So he seduced you that summer?”

“Huh?” I turned my attention back to Dev.

“Oliver,” he said. “Did he seduce you that summer with his attention?”

I laughed. “No. He was actually quite the gentleman, especially considering what happened later at the prom.” I took another drink of soda. “The seduction part was more on my side.”

Dev’s left eyebrow raised in question.

“Don’t be so surprised.”

I excused myself and disappeared into the downstairs bathroom. When I returned, I was armed with a fresh box of tissue, and Dev had repositioned himself from the floor to the armchair. Instead of pizza, he was now chewing his signature wad of gum and held his small detective’s notebook.

“Is that necessary?” I asked, indicating the notebook. “After all, you’re not officially on the case, are you?”

“No, but I want to be able to give the guys working on it as much info as I can, to see if they will leave you out of it.” He clicked the top of his pen and readied himself for details.

I settled back onto the sofa and started where I’d left off.

“Like I said, I was the one who did the actual seducing, such as it was. His folks had a nice house with a pool, and often we would go to his house to swim after we finished at the restaurant, which was mid-afternoon. Usually we swam with his younger sister, Amelia, but one week his sister was away at camp and every afternoon his mother played tennis, so we were alone a lot.”

I blew my nose and continued. “I never fantasized about Donny being my boyfriend. I was having fun, but I wasn’t all that attracted to him romantically. I was an odd creature, a teenage girl without romantic notions, but I was sexually curious, and Donny had a great body. I approached the whole thing rather methodically. I decided I wanted to lose my virginity and that Donny might be the best candidate. My only concern was that he might reject the idea of sleeping with a fat girl, and I didn’t want to face that rejection. So I tested the waters the week we were alone. First, I made sure he got many great views of my ample cleavage.” I laughed. “Let’s face it: at that age, I was one of the few girls at school with big boobs.”

Dev quickly looked down at his notebook, but I noted a smile on his face.

“Although I’ll admit, the first time I saw him with an erection through his trunks, I almost bolted. Knowledge is one thing, putting it into practice is quite another.”

Dev laughed and shook his head. “Odelia, you are something else. I wish I had known you then.”

I shrugged. “I wasn’t much different than I am today, just a bit lighter in the weight department and a lot more naïve. And I was just as thick-skulled and single-minded.”

Dev put down his pen and smiled again, this time directly at me. It was a knowing smile, a smile full of tenderness and patience. In that moment, I knew that Zee was right: I wasn’t being fair to Dev last night. Maybe after the pain of losing Greg passes, who knows? But that would be a long time, maybe forever, and Dev was far too decent and caring a man to be a consolation prize.

“Anyway,” I continued, “I baited the hook, and he bit. Now the question was: did I want to reel him in?”

After laughing, Dev got up and went to the kitchen. He retrieved the bottle of soda from the fridge and refreshed our glasses. I thanked him, noting how comfortable he was in my home.

“I gather you did reel him in?”

“Sure did.”

Dev raised his eyebrow again. “Did you use protection?”

“Donny wasn’t a virgin and had some condoms hidden in his room. I had some in my bag, but I didn’t tell him that. I didn’t want it to seem planned.”

He chuckled. “Did that change your relationship any?”

“We had sex a lot the rest of that week and through the end of the summer. In a way we became a couple, but in my mind we were still just friends. I broke it off right before school started. Donny wasn’t happy about it. But I knew he had no intention of making me his public girlfriend, and I wasn’t about to be hidden away like a teenage mistress while he escorted cheerleaders to the dances. Besides, while our summer fling was fun, I had to pick up my regular routine of studying and getting ready for college.”

I took a drink and adjusted my legs. “He was mad at first, but soon he had a regular girlfriend and forgot about me. Then, a couple of months after school started, rumors circulated that I was a slut. For a while, a lot of boys, especially those from the football team, were asking me out, but I turned them all down. I knew that most rumors die if there’s no fuel to feed them, and soon the rumors about me did stop, especially after Mary Josephs got pregnant and accused one of the math teachers of being the father. Everyone forgot about me after that.”

“I can imagine.” Dev paused. “Was it the rumors about you that ruined the prom?”

I took a deep breath and counted to five. We were getting into the ugly territory of my past, the part I had tried to suppress for three decades.

“No, but they did have something to do with it.”

I paused again, wondering if I was ready to say what had to be said and knowing it had to come out. Others at the reunion might have already told the police.

“I went to the prom with Tommy Bledsoe, another nerd and loner. We were lab partners our senior year in biology. Johnette’s date was a shy boy named Curtis, Curtis Johnson, who was killed a few years later in a car accident.”

“I remember Oliver mentioning Bledsoe’s name last night.” He wrote the name down in his book, then underlined it twice and stared at it. “Is that Thomas W. Bledsoe, the owner of Amazing Games Software?”

“Yes, that’s Tommy. He was one of the first of the video game pioneers—made a fortune.”