Wet: Part 1 (17 page)

“With that decided, that I wasn’t getting baptized, she couldn’t associate with me anymore. Since she couldn’t be around me, all my other friends slowly drifted away. I guess having to juggle the two of us—‘If we invite Rhees, we can’t invite Jamie’—they stopped inviting me.

“In eighth grade, one of my teachers brought up the restoration of the priesthood and temple work in class, and the next thing I knew, one of my old friends, Penny, called me the anti-Christ because I wasn’t a member, right in front of everyone.”

“Private school?” Paul interrupted her.

“No. Public.”

“Why the hell are they discussing religion in public school?”

“I don’t know.” Rhees laughed. It’d happened so often, she’d never thought of it as strange. “I guess since it
is
mostly Mormon, they kind of forget that the whole world isn’t. My mom would often tell my dad and me how her morning staff meetings always seemed to turn into a religious discussion. She’d pretend like she knew what everyone was talking about because she’d learned long before that it wasn’t worth it to say anything. My mom was a really nice person. I can picture her sitting through meeting after meeting, squirming, but keeping her mouth shut so she wouldn’t offend anyone, even though they were inadvertently offending
her
.”

“Sounds like someone I’m getting to know,” Paul said under his breath. His eyes darted to her, briefly.

“I’m not saying everyone was like that—like Penny or Jamie’s parents. Most kids were really nice, treated me very kindly. They were polite, but I was an outsider.”

“Wow! That’s rough.”

“We moved to the other side of town just before high school, and I decided to be smarter about it. As long as I went to a few activities and church with them once in a while, they let me feel like I was part of their circle.

“My freshman year of college, I met Sean. He was such a nice guy, not the kind of guy I usually found myself attracted to.” Rhees paused, as if she was putting her foot in her mouth. She glanced at Paul suddenly and then down. She blushed. “Not that any of the guys I ever crushed on returned the favor . . . but Sean was so sweet.

“I worked at a little snack bar at the university. I worked the boring shift so I didn’t have much to do. He’d stop in and hang out with me, keep me company. After forever, he finally asked me out, and we dated a few times. He had this goal, he wanted to wait. He’d never kissed a girl and didn’t plan to until it was ‘over the altar’ at his wedding. So we never had any physical contact . . . I thought it was so refreshing—
sweet
, I mean it was sweet.”

She’d enjoyed their carefree relationship—free of all the physical complications that made her last relationship fall apart. “He asked me to marry him—we got along so well, like real friends, and I cared for him. I have to admit I might have been feeling a little left behind, with everyone I knew getting married. I accepted.

“As soon as I said yes, he asked me what temple I wanted to get married in. I about died. I’d become so good at impersonating one—I didn’t realize he didn’t know I wasn’t Mormon.

“Sean freaked out. I thought it was over. I cried for days, but then he called. I thought he called to tell me he loved me, and it didn’t matter, but instead, he told me I needed to let him baptize me. I heard it as more of an ultimatum.”

“You know he’s gay, right?” Paul glanced at her from the corner of his eye.

“No! It’s actually pretty common, the whole not-kissing-until-the-altar thing. A lot of the boys I knew in high school wouldn’t date before their missions either.”

“Being gay is pretty common too. They’re all gay.”

Rhees giggled at the thought. She looked up at him, sure he had to be joking, but he appeared perfectly serious.

“The religious guilt thing is just driving them to come up with creative ways to deny it to themselves. I’d bet those couples who don’t kiss until they’re married have pretty frustrating, even non-existent sex lives.”

Rhees had never thought about it that way. “They have kids. It’s important to them to have kids.” She tried to decide if Paul just needed to make sense of a world he couldn’t comprehend, or if she lacked the ability to comprehend reality.

“The imagination can do great things. I’ve been with not-so-appealing girls who’ve rocked my world, but only because I have a good imagination.” He actually laughed but stopped when he noticed Rhees didn’t laugh with him. “So why did this make you believe you’re never getting married?”

“Sean thought I’d be excited about having him baptize me—the funny thing is, I
would
have, I’d always thought I would be baptized, eventually, but all I heard was the ultimatum. He loved the idea of baptizing me, but I want to be loved for me, not because I’m a name on a line of some membership record. I spent my whole life being accepted or not accepted, based on that.” At least she’d always told herself that.

“If he really loved me, it wouldn’t matter. If
any
of them
ever
really cared about me, it wouldn’t matter. I’m done with it—I don’t want anything to do with that anymore. I’ve never been accepted and now I don’t want to be.” She’d gone over these thoughts a million times since her parents died—the last—
only
—true relationships she’d ever had.

“Shoot,” she said, her eyes filled with tears. She wanted to kick herself for allowing the loss of her parents to creep back to mind. She missed them so much. She cried every time she thought of them so she rarely let herself.

“Hey, don’t cry . . . I really don’t know what to do when women cry. Rhees, I don’t know how to fix it—what am I supposed to do?” Paul started to put his arms around her but hesitated. In his experience, that always turned out to be a bad idea. Girls tended to dislike being hugged after being told, just after sex, that he didn’t love them and would never love them.

When they did let him comfort them, he just ended up wanting to have sex again, but then they would cry all over again because having sex didn’t change his mind about loving them.

Rhees wasn’t crying because they’d just had sex. He decided to try to hug her after all, hoping she would stop. “I’ve never been able to figure it out, I do everything I can to avoid this.”

She stiffened and pulled away as if he’d just shocked her with a cattle prod. He chalked it up to guessing wrong. A half a second later, she laughed and reeled in her emotion and tears.

“I’m sorry. I talk too much.”

“I like listening. I could do without the tears though,” he admonished.

“The word on the street, probably from the
few
girls who aren’t madly in love with you, is that you’re callous. I’ll bet your reaction to, or your intolerance for, crying women has something to do with that,” she said. “I didn’t mean to give you a hernia, putting all that strain on your sympathy.”

“I think you have it wrong. The girls I . . .
hang out
with don’t love me. It would have to be the girls who do. They’d be the ones who’d call me callous because I have to make it clear that I don’t love them back.” He put his hands in his pockets, dropped his head, and twisted his mouth in contemplation. He didn’t feel callous. He cared. It bothered him they always wanted more from him than he could give. It was just a result of who he was, a man who could never fall in love. He didn’t believe in it.

She giggled, and he looked back up at her, relieved she’d stopped crying.

“That’s how it works?”

“For me,” Paul said, embarrassed. “Maybe not so much for them.”

“I think you may not be a good judge at telling the difference. I think that even your Coitus Club groupies are in love with you. They’re just better at hiding it than the girls who don’t make it into the club.”

Paul’s face twisted into confusion. “Coitus Club? Groupies? What the fuck is that?”

“Oh shoot!” Rhees squeezed her eyes shut tight. She looked almost sick. “Nothing.”

He glared at her, not accepting her answer.

“It was either that, or Paul’s Playmates, but that sounded too much like Playmate of the Month or Playboy Bunnies, as in Hugh Hefner, and more women line up for that than they do to be in your club, and I didn’t want anyone to be confused that I thought of it as a good thing, not that I call it that to anyone, except maybe Claire, once or twice, but—”

“You’re rambling.”

“You’re right. I’ll shut up now.” She took a long drink of her beer.

“I’m still not sure what you’re talking about.”

“The girls at the shop—there are others too, they swing by the shop sometimes to join in on the impromptu meetings—but they sit around and talk about you, discuss who you’ve been with, compare notes on . . . your performance.” She hung her head and looked so embarrassed. She actually looked around as if searching for a hole to crawl into. She made him laugh.

“So you think I’ve let a few of the wrong girls slip through the cracks and into the club? I’ll draw up a questionnaire, start weeding them out more carefully.”

“How do you tell? How do you determine, or what clues you in that they’ll fall for you, more than you want them to, you know, after just . . . just once?”

He half laughed again. “That’s my secret.”

“Oh.” She accepted his answer so readily. It disarmed him.

“They wilt.”

“They wilt.”

“Yeah, they wilt. At some point in the process, while we’re going at it, sometimes all I’ve done is kiss them, haven’t even had a chance to get to the really good part yet. They just kind of . . . melt on me. It’s the best warning system I’ve come up with so far, at least I thought so. Thanks for the heads up, I’ll get to work on that questionnaire.”

“Any time. Do you stop?”

“What?”

“When you get the early warning, do you stop, before it’s too late, so you don’t have to break her heart?”

He didn’t really want to answer that one, but he did with a guilty frown. “No.”

“You’re kind of a self-destructive masochist then.”

He didn’t mean to laugh so loud. “You’re very observant.” His laughter slowly subsided as the reality of that hit home. He put his beer bottle to his lips and took a drink to stall while he thought about how observant she really was. “I prefer to use the terms
self-indulgent, self-gratifying, and son of a bitch
. There’re a lot of girls out there who prefer my terminology as well.” He remembered what she’d called him the night of the dance contest. “And asshole. Someone recently called me an asshole.” They started walking again.

“Rhees, you’re only twenty-four, nowhere near an old maid. You know that, right? Regardless of the culture where you’re from, by the rest of the world’s standard, you’ve got more than enough time.”

“That’s what I told myself when I left home.” She said the next words with a sense of humor, emphasizing each word. “I have since come to the conclusion that I won’t be marrying a Utah boy, because I refuse to be baptized.” She giggled and then changed her tone back to normal. “The boys in the rest of the world, however, can’t get past the first date if a girl won’t full-out put out.”

He stopped again to look at her.

“Hey! Don’t look at me like that. It’s true. I learned that from experience—a very good source. I have to face it. I may never get married.”

“And what source would that be?”

They finished their beer and threw the bottles in a trash bin on the side of the road.

“The famous world-class drummer,” she said quietly.

“Are you kidding me?” Paul let out a string of cuss words, expressing a surprising amount of anger. “I
knew
there was something about that asshole!” Paul huffed incredulously. He wasn’t just trying to make her feel better. “Danarya, that asshole doesn’t know which end is his fucking brain, and which is his fucking ass.”

“Hey Pauly Pockets! Calm down. He was very nice about it! He asked me to show him the sights, but when I told him I was new here, he suggested we go exploring together. He was cute, and funny, and we had a really good time.” She grew pensive. “He kissed me.”

Paul still had a hard time hiding his anger and the only other expression he could manage came across as disbelief.

“He asked me if I wanted to go back to his room. I told him I didn’t do that on the first date.” She looked at Paul again with a trace of humor in her eyes. “I decided to try a new approach, after what happened the last time I tried to shoot someone down kindly.

“He said he had a long tour coming up—meaning I wouldn’t get a second date. I said, ‘So, it’s a date. Shall we say, seven o’clock, twenty years from now?’ And he said, ‘I’m not a patient man. Let’s make it ten’. We laughed, he walked me home, and then he left . . . and I’ll never see him again, and that’s when I realized I may never get married, because I’m afraid I might be too old-fashioned for the world outside my home state.”

Paul wiped the contented look off his face when he noticed the way she stared at him, probably wondering why her rejection pleased him. The drummer thing had been driving him insane.

“Do you always tend to be so melodramatic?” He still looked too amused. “You’re much too young to be thinking that way, and marriage is highly overrated anyway.”

“Marriage is ingrained into my whole being. I think I was born with a desire to be married.”

“That’s why you were sad.” His eyes lit up, proud of himself for figuring it out. “At dinner, with the Swensons.”

“You noticed that, did you?” Rhees closed her eyes, embarrassed.

“You’re not the only one who’s observant.” He rushed on with the next bit to distract her from what he’d stupidly said. “She’s married, has two kids, a prize of a husband.”

“A prize of a husband?”

“Isn’t he everything a woman wants in a husband—tall, dark, handsome, powerful businessman, prolific, rich—”

“How about already married—when he
prolific
-ized her the first time? Yes, I had a
moment
of envy when I realized the new and improved model of Mrs. Swenson was no older than I am, and she has what I want, minus the fact that there is a discarded version of her out there somewhere—I could never consider a cheater a prize. I don’t know their specific circumstances and I don’t mean to judge, but for me . . . I draw the line at cheating.”

“Prolific-ized?” He chuckled. “So as much as you want to be married, and you don’t think you will be, but if you did hit the jackpot—as in, the way you’d see it, you’d still toss his sorry ass to the curb if he cheated?”

“I’d rather die alone, on my own, than die alone because my man is in another woman’s bed.”

His brow flashed up and then down as he considered what she said.

“I did make a decision recently though,” she continued. “I’m thinking if I’m not married by my thirtieth birthday, I’m going to give up on my dream and—maybe just turn all
promiscuous
or something.” She laughed, mocking herself. A long moment of silence ensued between them.

“Will you promise me something?” he asked, his tone suddenly very serious. “Promise me you’ll invite me to your thirtieth birthday party?” Another moment of silence before she finally broke out into loud, happy laughter. He laughed a little too, but the humor didn’t quite resonate in his expression. He wondered if a spell existed, one he could cast to make sure she wouldn’t marry by then.

They arrived at the yard at Oceanside. She thanked him for walking her home, and unceremoniously dismissed him before he could walk her to her door. He hung on, not wanting to say goodbye until it started to get awkward. He finally had no choice.