True (17 page)

“What happened?” I asked. “What happens now?”

“I may or may not go to jail, that’s what happens now.”

Fear crawled up my throat. “Are you kidding me? For a few pills on a first offense?”

“I don’t use, so my drug test was clean. So that makes me a dealer in the eyes of the law. Why else would I have eight Oxy pills?” He gave a laugh of pure exasperated fury, yanking his car door open so hard it sprang forward and closed again. “God! Fucking God!”

After he kicked the door three times with me standing there, scared for him, maybe even slightly scared
of
him, he took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down. I could see the struggle, feel his tension as he reined himself back in and reopened the door for me. I climbed in and looked up at him, a silent question on my face.

“You know what? It will be fine. Don’t worry, babe. It’s not enough for a mandatory conviction. Everything is going to be okay.” He bent down and gave me a soft kiss on the lips. “Thanks for bailing me out. I’ll pay you back.”

He didn’t smell like Tyler. He had a foreign odor clinging to his hair, his shirt, one of antiseptic and sweaty palms, and I didn’t like it. “Don’t worry about the money. I don’t care. I’m scared for you,” I told him truthfully. Being called a dealer sounded really bad. Worse than bad. The end-of-the-world awful.

I thought about what my father had said—how no one would hire a guy with a drug conviction to be an EMT. That was bad enough, that was life-altering and plan-ruining. But prison time? I couldn’t even imagine.

“It’ll be okay,” he repeated, and he went around the back of the car.

I glanced at Nathan in the backseat and he studiously avoided looking at me, like he knew this was a lie.

“Can we stay at your place tonight?” Tyler asked Nathan. “I refuse to go home until I’ve calmed down, and the dorms are so empty this weekend they’ll notice if I stay in Rory’s room.”

At least he had included me in the
we
. The last thing I wanted was for him to pull away from me. I had no experience with the legalities of the situation, but I was rational, logical. I could offer advice, comfort. I could feed him, lay down with him. Be there for him.

“Sure.”

Tyler pulled out and we drove half a block before Nathan asked, “So how did you end up with the pills on you?”

“My mom went into the store, so she left them with me. Cop comes up to my window and starts giving me shit. Next thing I know he’s patting me down and searching my car. Mom conveniently never came back out of the store.”

“Your mother let you get arrested for her drugs?” I asked, disgusted. “How could she do that?”

Tyler shot me a look. “Because she knew if she got busted, they’d make her go to rehab, and we all know she doesn’t want to do that. Besides, it wouldn’t be her first offense. Not by a long shot.”

“Why were the cops messing with you anyway?” Nathan asked.

“I don’t know.” Tyler grabbed his pack of cigarettes off the dash. “And truthfully, I don’t feel like talking about it anymore. I just want a shower to wash the smell of loser off me and to go to bed.”

“I don’t blame you,” Nathan said. “When I got picked up for drunk and disorderly, I got stuck in that cell for twelve hours with twenty guys. It smelled like shit and greasy hair.”

Gross. Without realizing I was going to, I promptly burst into tears. I didn’t want to think about Tyler in a jail cell with low-life criminals.

“Hey, hey,” Tyler said, sounding alarmed. “It’s okay, baby.” He shot a glare at Nathan. “This is why you shouldn’t have taken her there, jackass.”

Nathan threw his hands up in protest.

“Don’t blame him,” I said tearfully, wiping at my eyes and trying to get myself under control. “I wanted to be there. I wouldn’t have given him the bail money if he had said no.”

“You didn’t need to see any of that.”

“Well, I did.” As we pulled on to Straight Street, I stared at his profile. “And I can handle it.” Okay, so maybe I had started crying, but it was traumatic. It didn’t mean I wasn’t capable of hearing or seeing the truth.

The look he gave me was dubious enough to be insulting, but I wasn’t going to pursue it. This wasn’t the time.

When we went into the apartment, he went straight to the bathroom, immediately turning on the shower. I had half-expected that he would suggest I join him, but maybe he didn’t want to in front of Nathan. Which was stupid. He wouldn’t care what Nathan thought about us being naked together. More likely, he wanted to be alone. Which kind of hurt my feelings. Which made me irritated with myself. I could not be needy about any of this. I was just going to have to pull it together and be strong for Tyler.

Nathan went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “Want a beer?”

“Yes.” Without question. “What time is it?”

“After one.”

No wonder I felt so drag-ass tired. I took the beer and popped it open, taking a nice, long sip. My throat felt scratchy, my eyes swollen.

Five minutes later, when Tyler came out of the shower in just his jeans, hair damp, I was nursing the beer and watching TV with Nathan, though I couldn’t have told you what I was actually looking at.

“Ready for bed?” he asked me, looking exhausted and angry and sexy all at once.

“Sure.” I followed him to Bill’s room, too strung out to worry that we were crashing in someone else’s bed. We went into the extremely neat room, and I pulled my shoes off. I wouldn’t have minded a shower myself, but more important, I wanted to climb into bed with Tyler and rest my head on his chest. I needed that contact, that reassurance.

He stripped off his jeans, pulled back the bedspread, and climbed into bed. When his head hit the pillow, he sighed. I took my pants off, too, and my sweater, leaving my tank top on. I still felt a twinge of shyness walking around naked in front of Tyler, and I preferred for him to peel off my clothes if we were going there.

But he didn’t seem interested in more than pulling me close against him. “How did you get back to school?”

“My dad brought me.”

“You told him?”

“Yeah, I had to if I wanted to get back here.”

Tyler was silent for a second. “Wow, I’m sure he’s thrilled to know his daughter is dating a drug dealer and that he let me in his house yesterday.”

“You’re not a drug dealer.”

“Tell that to the judge. And your father. I’m sure he hates me.”

Hate
was a strong word, but Dad definitely wasn’t in a happy place about the whole thing. “He trusts my ability to judge character.” I hoped. “If I say you’re a good man, he’ll believe me.”

Tyler sighed, but he didn’t say anything. He just kissed the top of my head. “Good night.”

“Good night.” I tried to close my eyes, but they kept popping back open, thoughts swirling through my head with the velocity of a tornado. Who was staying with Jayden and Easton? I knew that Jayden was almost eighteen, but was he really capable of looking after his little brother? Where was their mother? And how could she let Tyler take the hit for her drug use? It was just incomprehensible.

Tyler’s breath slowed and evened out, and he was asleep within five minutes. Sometime much later, my fingers still splayed across his chest, I fell asleep. Only to be yanked out of a dark and dreary dream about locked boxes by Tyler’s phone ringing next to me.

He leaned across me and fumbled for it, glancing to see who the caller was. “Hello? Yeah, I’m out, man, thanks.” Sitting up, he held the phone away from his mouth and murmured to me, “It’s Riley. Go back to sleep, baby.” Then he slid out of the bed and readjusted the blankets back over me. He moved across the room, opened the door, and headed toward the living room, speaking quietly. “Rory and Nathan posted bail. Yeah, eight Oxys, charged with possession, and my drug test was clean, so you know what that means. Could be twelve months.”

Twelve months? Was he serious? He had reassured me that it was going to be fine, yet he had known that it was possible he could get sent to prison for a whole year? Tyler moved into the living room and I couldn’t hear him speaking anymore, so I sat up and crept over to the door he had almost completely closed. I wanted to hear what else he knew but wasn’t inclined to share with me, his suburban girlfriend who cried after seeing the police station lobby.

“Oh, she did it on fucking purpose,” Tyler was saying. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she called the cops herself.”

I sucked in a breath. He thought his mother had set him up.

“He starts giving me some shit about how I didn’t use a turn signal and why was I loitering in the parking lot. I told him my mom was in the store and I was waiting for her, and he says I have attitude and to get out of the car. It was bullshit, all of it. I was just parked there, doing nothing.”

There was a pause when obviously Riley was speaking. “Well, you know she totally went off when we got home on Thanksgiving. She was fucking pissed that I took the boys to dinner at Rory’s. She starts going on about how I think I’m too good to eat in her house and how my rich girlfriend is trying to steal her babies from her. Her usual shit, but now she has a new person to blame, you know?”

Me. She was blaming me.

“She threw the leftovers across the room. It was like a Tupperware grenade, man. Stuffing exploded everywhere.” Here he actually laughed, ending it in a cough. “So damn stupid, and actually kind of funny except that she wasted good food. I haven’t eaten like that, ever. I’m sorry you missed it.”

“When does she ever have that many pills at once, anyway? She usually snorts ’em as fast as she can buy them. Or she buys heroin because it’s cheaper. That was five hundred bucks in that bag, so where the hell did she get that money?”

That was a very good question.

“Not that it matters, I guess. All I know is that I’m pretty much fucked. If I’m lucky I’ll get off with parole and a fine, but there’s no way to know how the judge will go. Not that I have the money for a fine, anyway.”

That I could help him with. I wasn’t sure how, but I would figure something out. My dad could loan me the money. Which I’m sure would go over big with him.

“Yeah, I’ll talk to you later.”

I dashed back to bed and slipped in, closing my eyes. My heart was pounding so loudly I was sure he would hear it, but he didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary. He just slid back into bed beside me, his thigh warm as it brushed mine. But he didn’t go back to sleep. I could tell he was looking at something on his phone because the blue screen was squint-worthy with its glaring false light when I cracked my eyes.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

He glanced over at me. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up. Just playing a game.” He slapped his phone back down on the nightstand.

Except he hadn’t been playing a game. He had been doing a search on mandatory sentencing for drug convictions in Ohio. It may have been three in the morning, but I had 20/20 eyesight.

That he was worried, worried me.

I couldn’t think about it or my head would explode.

“I’m wide awake.” My hand snaked down his chest to below his waist. “And I want you.”

It was probably the boldest thing I’d ever said to him, and he reacted exactly as I had hoped he would. He gave a low moan and rolled over on top of me, already tugging my tank top up as he kissed me.

I wanted to hold him close to me, to feel that deep intimate connection, to be alone with him, without our fear and thoughts crowding in.

He clearly felt the same way because he was rougher, more demanding than he had been so far, as if he could release his frustration with sexual desire. “Get on top,” he demanded after a few minutes inside me. “Ride me.”

Keeping us entwined, he flipped over, dragging me with him so I ended up on his chest, hair falling into my eyes. He brushed it back, tucking it behind my ears.

“Sit up,” he urged, his eyes shining with something I didn’t understand.

I did as he asked, pushing off his chest, finding my footing with the unfamiliar position, feeling powerful in how I was pleasing him. Tyler put his large hands over top of mine, holding me tightly in place.

Our movement, our emotions were frantic, urgent, deep and passionate.

I knew that no matter what, I had turned a corner and I couldn’t go back.

I was deeply, madly, truly in love, so much so that it almost hurt.

Chapter Seventeen

Though I texted my dad to tell him everything was okay, I didn’t call him until I got back to my room on Sunday. It was not exactly a fun conversation. I tried to downplay everything.

“So, he has to have a hearing, but it’s a first offense. I’m sure it will be no big deal.”

My dad wasn’t buying it. “I did some research. If he isn’t a drug user, then he gets charged as a dealer and the penalties are more severe.”

Damn it. Why did everyone seem determined to cram that depressing bit of information down my throat?

“There’s no point in speculating,” I told him, which was a ridiculous thing for me to say. I was the absolute queen of speculation. It was my nature to assess something from all angles and categorize all possibilities. Being methodical was normally my path to sanity. If you imagined all the potential outcomes, then you have hypothetically faced the worst-case scenario and you are more mentally prepared if it occurs, which is usually unlikely—like thinking the knock at the back door is a serial killer instead of your next-door neighbor asking if you’ve seen her missing dog.

In this case, however, it was statistically likely that the worst-case scenario would become reality, and the idea of Tyler sitting in prison for twelve months was something I couldn’t even allow to enter my brain for more than a half second or I would go insane.

“I just want you to be realistic,” he said. “There will be a punishment of some kind—there is no question about that.”

Dad of Doom. Geez.

“What do you want for Christmas?” I asked him, in arguably the most obvious attempt to change the subject in recorded history.

“For my daughter to not be dating a drug dealer.”

Subtle. Dad brought it full circle. Foiled at my own game.

Irritated that he insisted on referring to Tyler as a drug dealer, I told him I had to go, and he didn’t even attempt to draw out the conversation.

Team Macintosh was experiencing in-house fighting.

***

My roommates were suitably horrified and sympathetic in a way that was much more satisfying. They took Tyler’s side and called his mother nasty names, which I appreciated because then I didn’t have to be the one who said them. It seemed morally cleaner that way.

“What was jail like?” Kylie asked Tyler as we sat around playing beer pong on Sunday night, though I was fake-playing because I had an early class.

It was a tactless question, but she was that girl—she never realized she had said something rude until after the fact.

Tyler was drunk. I’d never really seen him loaded, and wow, was he wasted. Like slurring words, stumbling, glassy-eyed, shit-faced drunk. Before the beer, I had seen him take four shots of Jack Daniels in a very short amount of time.

“It was like watching two unicorns fucking,” he told her. “All glitter and jizz.”

“What?” she asked, frowning in confusion. She looked to me for guidance, but I had no idea what he was talking about.

Tyler and Nathan seemed to think this was very funny and tried to fist bump, only missed. This made it even funnier.

“You guys are weird,” Jessica said, attempting to put her hair into a topknot, but only succeeding in creating a sloppy bun.

Nathan’s roommate Bill was back in the apartment and he was almost as drunk as Tyler, mentioning that he and his girlfriend had broken up the day before. “I don’t ever drink,” he told me for the fourth time. “I’m so fucked up.”

When people say it isn’t all that fun to be sober when everyone around you is drunk? They are one hundred percent correct. I was tired and I felt impatient with the conversation, or really lack thereof. It made sense to me that Tyler needed to blow it out, given what had happened on Friday, but I felt the opposite. I just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep for about three days to avoid the reality of the situation, not drink myself into a fuzzy stupor.

I was clearly in the minority.

After another hour, I realized there was no way we were getting back to the dorm unless I drove Tyler’s car, and even that seemed unlikely since I wasn’t sure I could shoehorn a drunk Jessica into the car without help. And no one in the room was in any position to assist me in anything other than making me feel good about my ability to pronounce my
T
s and
S
s.

It was decided that Jessica could share Bill’s bed, and Tyler and I would sleep on the couch. Which meant that I was crammed against the back cushions in approximately twelve inches of space, while Tyler snored loudly, out cold. Every time he moved, he pulled the blanket off me, and I was in and out of a restless sleep, cold and stiff.

Which was why I was actually awake when he rolled toward the coffee table and vomit shot out of his mouth.

Holy crap. I leaped over him and ran for the kitchen wastebasket. Angling it under him, I held it, stroking his head while he heaved over and over. “It’s okay,” I told him, adopting a soothing voice I used on agitated stray animals that needed grooming. “You’re okay.”

“Fuck,” he said finally, wiping his mouth and falling back onto the couch, his eyes watering. He gave a weak cough.

I tied off the trash bag to minimize the smell and got him a damp paper towel. I swiped it across his face. He grabbed it from me, annoyed. “I got it.”

He turned his back on me, and I was forced to take the edge of the couch, which was worse than the interior I soon discovered. I woke up on the floor twice before rousing Tyler at seven in the morning.

“Tyler, I need to get to class. Can I borrow your car?” I whispered.

He jerked awake and looked at me like he’d never seen me in his life. He groaned and rubbed the top of his head. “God, I feel like ass.”

“I put water and aspirin on the coffee table. Where are your keys?”

“My pocket.”

He made no move to retrieve them for me, so I went under the blanket and dug into the pocket of his jeans. The only acknowledgement I got was a brief opening of his eyes, then nothing. I knew he was hurting if he didn’t use the opportunity to point out how close my hand was to his penis and how much closer still it could be.

I checked on Kylie and Jessica, but Kylie waved me off and Jessica never even woke up, despite my shaking her gently. She was snoring loud enough to wake the devil, but it didn’t seem to be disturbing Bill, who inexplicably was sleeping with his glasses still on his face.

For some stupid reason, instead of feeling grateful that I wasn’t hungover like the rest of them, I felt lonely. Like I had missed out on a mutual experience.

Or maybe I was just acutely aware that Tyler was stuffing his emotions down his throat alongside the beer and not leaning on me the way I would like him to. It bothered me that he hadn’t shared with me that he and his mother had fought over his Thanksgiving trip to my house. I had waited for him to explain what had happened, but he hadn’t, and that hurt my feelings.

Ironic, considering I had never been one to share the majority my thoughts with other people.

***

It snowed again on Tuesday, and Kylie and Nathan had the brilliant idea to go sledding. We only had two sleds, but it seemed like a great way to continue to ignore Tyler’s hearing, which had been set for mid-December at the tail end of exams week. There was a substantial hill behind Nathan’s apartment, so Tyler and I went to his mom’s house to collect the two sleds he was sure were in the garage. I wasn’t thrilled to be going to his house, because I was kind of scared of his mother after hearing she had thrown such a fit about Jayden and Easton coming to my house, but she was sleeping on the couch.

Jayden and Easton were in their bedroom, playing video games that Tyler had rented from the library for their ancient gaming system.

“Come on, guys, get some warm clothes on,” Tyler told them. “We’re going sledding.”

“Really?” Jayden asked eagerly. Then he frowned. “Sledding is for little kids.”

“No, it’s not. I’m doing it.”

That was all the permission Jayden needed. In five minutes, he and Easton were wearing sweatshirts and coats, their hands crammed into gloves. Tyler and I had retrieved two sad-looking sleds out of the garage, and when we went into the kitchen, Riley appeared.

“Why does everyone look like they’re about to cross the Bering Strait on foot?” he asked, leaning against the kitchen counter with a disposable gas-station cup of coffee in his hand.

“We’re going sledding. Want to come with us?” I asked. It didn’t seem like a Riley kind of activity, but I was being polite. Besides, I wanted the chance to get to know Tyler’s older brother a little better.

He stared at me, then at his brothers. Finally he shrugged. “Why the hell not?”

“Woot!” Jayden said.

Riley plucked his flannel shirt off the kitchen chair, and we filed out. I rode in the backseat between Jayden and Easton and listened to Tyler and Riley banter in the front. It felt good, warm, cozy. The best I’d felt since I had gotten that text from Nathan on Friday. When we got back to the apartment, our friends were waiting for us on the hill, tossing snowballs at each other. Kylie looked like the pink abominable snowwoman, dressed from head to toe in fuchsia fur. I wasn’t even sure where each piece stopped and started. It was just one giant fluffy assault on the senses.

“Is that a Care Bear?” Riley asked.

He and Tyler laughed.

“Ladies and children first!” Kylie declared as we all hiked up the hill.

“That’s Rory and Easton then,” Tyler told her with a smirk. He handed me the sled he was carrying and kissed me.

Kylie smacked him.

Jessica was busy amassing a snowball stockpile, so she didn’t look like she cared about getting first dibs on sledding. So Easton and I lined up next to each other, my feet awkwardly jutting out in front of me, gloves curled around the handles. That hill looked steeper from the top than it did from below. The lamplight of the parking lot cast a harsh glow over the sparkling snow, fresh flakes falling gently on us.

“Race ya,” he told me with a smile.

“You’re smaller than me,” I told him. “My weight will slow down the pull of gravity.”

To which his response was “Go!” as he pushed off.

“Hey!” I wiggled back and forth until I finally shot down the hill after him.

Holy crap, immediately I was going faster than I would have thought possible. Yet instead of being scary, it was exhilarating. The wind swept past my cheeks, my hair whipping back behind me, cold air filling my lungs. I could hear the guys up on the hill, cheering us on, and the whoosh of my plastic sled over the crystal snow. It was cold, only in the twenties, so it was perfect snow for sledding, crisp and icy, not wet and heavy. Enjoying the freedom, I only panicked briefly when I got to the bottom and realized I was careening straight toward the parking lot. Easton was already standing up, having beat the snot out of me in our race. I hurled myself sideways off the sled into the snow with a clumsy but effective dismount. The sled kept going and hit the concrete speed bump at the edge of the parking lot and flipped up into the air.

Standing up and smacking the snow off my butt, I high-fived Easton.

“That was awesome!” was his opinion.

“Totally!” I grinned at him as we collected the sled and trudged back up the hill. My butt was wet, but it was worth it.

“My turn!” Kylie said, and this time, she took the sled directly from me, not waiting to hear anyone else’s opinions.

She and Jayden squared off, and Riley gave them both a shove to get them going. Both shrieked the entire way down the hill, Kylie’s pink hood flying off her head and flopping on her back.

Tyler gave me a grin. “Damn. I’m not sure who screams more like a girl.” He pulled me into his arms. “By the way, sorry again for puking on you.”

I snuggled into the warmth of his chest. “I told you, it wasn’t on me. It was the floor. And it’s no big deal, for the third time. You took care of me when I was hungover. I’m just sorry I had to go to class. I felt guilty for leaving you.” I did. I’d gone back at lunch with some soup from the food court, but Tyler had still been sleeping, so I had headed back to campus for my afternoon classes.

“There wasn’t anything you could do but let me sleep off that whiskey, which is what I did. I did eat the soup eventually, at seven.” He shook his head. “So stupid. I can’t believe I had to call off work. Lost fifty bucks for no reason.”

I was about to tell him he was entitled to get drunk after the weekend he’d had, when I heard Jessica’s voice rise.

“Your opinion is meaningless to me since I don’t even know who you are,” she said, voice haughty as she glared at Riley.

He seemed to be offering her a suggestion on snowball packing, given that he was squatting down on his haunches and had a handful of snow. “Fine, have shitty snowballs,” he told her, standing back up and letting the half-formed ball fall out of his hands. “And I’m Riley, Tyler’s brother. Who are you?”

“Jessica. Rory’s roommate.”

Neither one said it was nice to meet the other, as it apparently wasn’t. Tyler shot me an amused look when Riley rolled his eyes and moved away to take his turn, which he did by running and diving onto the sled on his stomach with a whoop. I laughed.

“Please,” was Jessica’s opinion, her eye roll matching Riley’s earlier one.

Kylie started shrieking when Easton hit her with a snowball. It was a bold move for him, but I guessed the fuzzy pink target was too tempting. She looked like the snack food Sno Balls, and I would imagine that at ten years old, sugar factored into the majority of his fantasies. He probably couldn’t help but be fascinated. Nathan took a turn down the hill, and Tyler and I went together, me tucked between his legs.

But we were too heavy as a two-man team and stalled halfway down the hill..

“That was a rip-off,” he said as we trudged back up to the top. “The only good thing about it was your ass rubbing on my junk.”

Now it was my turn to roll my eyes. It was like guys came with a manual titled
Gross: The Least Romantic Things Ever to Say to Women
. All of which seemed to crack them up.

“Don’t be a tool,” I told him, which also seemed to crack him up.