Читать книгу The Book Boyfriends Collection: Wither, Wait For You, The Edge of Never - J. Lynn, Lauren DeStefano, J. Lynn - Страница 36

I hate myself for letting him walk out that door, but it had to be done. I can’t do this. I can’t let myself fall into the world that is Andrew Parrish even though everything in my heart and in my desires is telling me to. It’s not just about being afraid of getting hurt again; everybody goes through that phase and maybe I’m not out of it completely yet, but it’s about so much more.

I don’t know myself.

I don’t know what I want or how I feel or how I should feel and I don’t think I ever really have. I would be a selfish bitch to let Andrew into my life. What if he falls in love or wants something from me that I can’t give him? What if I add a broken heart on top of his dad’s death? I don’t want his pain hanging over my head.

I turn abruptly and look at the door again, picturing the way he looked right before he walked through it.

Maybe that’s not even an issue. How conceited of me to even entertain the thought of him ever falling in love with me. Maybe he just wants a friend with benefits, or a one-time thing.

My head is swimming with a chaotic swarm of thoughts, none of which I feel are right and all of which I know are possible. I walk over to the mirror and stare at myself in it, looking into the eyes of some girl that I feel like I’ve met, but never really got acquainted with. I really do feel detached from myself, from everything.

Fuck this!

I grit my teeth and smack the palms of my hands against the TV stand. Then I grab a new pair of black cotton shorts, my new white tee with je t’aime written in script across it, wrapped around the Eiffel Tower and I head for the shower. I spend forever letting the water beat on me not because I feel dirty but because I feel like shit. All I can think about is Andrew. And Ian. And why suddenly I feel this strange, provoking need to think about them both in the same thought at all.

After my skin feels stripped of its top layer by the hot water, I get out and dry off, soaking up the water from my hair into the towel. I blow-dry it naked in front of the mirror and then go back into the room to get dressed because I didn’t bring a clean pair of panties in with me. Finally, I comb out my halfway dried hair and leave it down to air-dry the rest of the way, pushing it back behind both ears and out of my face.

I hear Andrew playing the guitar through the wall again. The TV is still yapping and it pisses me off so I stomp over and turn it off so I can hear Andrew more clearly.

I just stand here for a few seconds, taking in the notes funneling through the wall and painfully into my ears. It’s not a sad kind of tune, but for some reason it’s still painful for me to hear.

Finally, I grab my room key, slip my feet into my flop-flops and leave the room.

Nervously licking the dryness from my lips, I take a deep breath, swallow and raise my hand to knock lightly on his door.

The sound of the guitar ceases and a few seconds later, the door clicks open.

He has showered, too. His brown hair is still wet; pieces of it a little messy in the front above his forehead. He stares at me, shirtless and wearing nothing else but a pair of black cargo shorts. I try not to look at his lightly-tanned six-pack abs or the veins running along the length of his arms that somehow appear more pronounced with the rest of his skin in plain-view.

Oh … my God. Maybe I should just go back …

No, I came over here to talk to him and that’s what I’m going to do.

For the first time, I see the tattoo down his left side and I want to ask about it, but I’ll save that for later.

He smiles gently at me.

“It started about a year and a half ago,” I just come out with it, “a week before graduation—my boyfriend was killed in a car accident.”

His gentle smile fades and he softens his eyes, letting me see just enough remorse to show that he feels bad for me without it seeming fake or exaggerated.

He pushes the door open the rest of the way and I walk inside. The first thing he does before I even sit down on the end of the bed is pull a shirt over his chest. Maybe he doesn’t want me to feel like he’s trying to be distracting or flirty, especially when I came here to tell him something obviously painful. I respect him even more for that. That small, seemingly insignificant gesture speaks volumes, and although it might be unfortunate that he hid that body away, I’m OK with it. That’s not what I came here for.

I think …

There’s a sort of genuine sadness in his green eyes, mixed with something thoughtful. He turns the TV off and sits down next to me, the same way he did on my bed and he looks over, waiting patiently for me to go on.

“We fell in love at sixteen,” I begin and look out ahead of me, “but he waited for me for two years—two years—” I glance over once in emphasis, “before I slept with him. I don’t know any teenage guy who would wait that long to get in a girl’s panties.”

Andrew makes a slight you-have-a-point face.

“I had had a couple of short-term boyfriends before Ian, but they were so …” I look up in thought searching for the word, “… mundane. To tell you the truth, I started seeing a lot of people as mundane by the time I was twelve.”

Andrew looks reflective, his brows gently creasing inward.

“But Ian was different. The first thing he said to me after we met and had our first real conversation was: ‘I wonder if the ocean smells different on the other side of the world.’ I laughed at first because I thought it was a weird thing to say, but then I realized that simple sentence set him apart from everyone I knew. Ian was a guy standing on the outside of the glass, looking in at the rest of us shuffling back and forth, doing the same thing every day, taking the same paths, like ants in an ant farm.

“Now, I had always known that I wanted something more in life, something different, but it was when I met Ian that things started to become clear to me.”

Andrew smiles gently and says, “Established and matured before twenty—that’s a rare trait.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I say, smiling back at him and then I let out a small laugh. “You wouldn’t believe how often Damon or Natalie or even my mom and my brother, Cole, messed with me about how ‘deep’ I was.” I quote ‘deep’ with my fingers and roll my eyes.

“Deep is good,” he says and I glance over coyly because I detect the attraction even though he’s taming it very well for the sake of the conversation. But then his smile fades and his voice drops a little. “So when you lost Ian, you lost your partner in crime.”

My smile fades, too, and I prop my hands on the edge of the bed and let my body slump between my shoulders. “Yes. We were going to backpack across the world after graduation, or maybe just Europe, but we were determined; had that much planned out at least.” I look straight at Andrew now. “We knew we didn’t want to do the college thing and end up working the same job for forty years—we wanted to work everywhere, try everything while on the road!”

Andrew laughs. “That’s actually a pretty cool idea,” he says. “One week you’re waitressing at a bar and bankin’ on tips and the next week, in a different city or town, you’re belly-dancing on a street corner and tourists are tossing money in a jar as they walk by.”

My slumped shoulders bounce softly with laughter and I blush, looking over at him. “Waitressing, sure, but belly-dancing?” I shake my head. “Not so much.”

He grins and says, “Ah, you could pull it off.”

Still with a hot, blushing face I look out ahead of me again and let the blush fade.

“Six months after Ian died,” I go on, “my brother, Cole, killed a man in a drunk-driving accident and now he’s in prison. And after that, my dad cheated on my mom and they got divorced. My new boyfriend, Christian, cheated on me. And then, of course, you already know about what happened with Natalie.”

That’s all of it. I told him everything that, combined, made me want to get away. But I can’t look at him because I feel like I shouldn’t be done, like he’s thinking to himself: OK, where’s the rest of it?

“That’s a lot of shit to dump on a person’s lap,” he says and I look back up when I feel him adjusting on the bed beside me. I smell his minty breath now that he has turned fully at the waist to face me from the side. “You have every right to be hurt, Camryn.”

I don’t say anything, but I thank him with my eyes.

“I guess I can see now why you weren’t hard to convince to go on this road trip with me,” he says.

His face is unreadable. I hope he doesn’t think I’m using him to mimic that part of my life I had planned with Ian. The whole road trip situation seems similar, even to me now that I think about it, but it couldn’t be further from the reason I left with Andrew. I’m with him now because I want to be.

It’s in this moment that I realize I haven’t been thinking of Ian and Andrew so much because I’m trying to find Ian in Andrew … I think it’s guilt … maybe I’m trying to replace Ian completely.

I stand up from the bed and shake those thoughts from my mind.

“So what are you going to do?” Andrew asks from behind. “After this road trip is over, what do you plan to do with your life?”

My heart hardens in my chest. Not once during this trip with Andrew, or even before I met him after I left North Carolina, have I thought beyond the present. It wasn’t ever that I tried not to think about what lies ahead, I simply just didn’t think about it at all. Andrew’s question wakes me up and now I feel panicked inside. I never wanted a dose of that reality; I was content with my illusion.

I turn around, my arms crossed over my chest. Andrew’s beautiful eyes are gazing intensely at me.

“I … don’t really know.”

He looks mildly surprised, his gaze becoming more contemplative and his eyes stray.

“You can still go to college,” he says, offering ideas to help me feel better, I guess, “and it doesn’t mean you have to get a job afterwards and work there until you die—hell, you can still backpack across Europe if you want.”

He stands up with me. I can tell the thinking gears are churning in his head as he paces the dark green carpet a few times.

“You’re gorgeous,” he says and my heart flutters, “you’re intelligent and obviously have more determination than the average girl; I think you could do just about anything you wanted—shit, I know that all sounds commonplace, but it couldn’t be truer in your case.”

I shrug. “I guess so,” I say, “but I don’t have the slightest idea about what I want to do except that I don’t want to go home to figure it out. I think I’m afraid that if I go back there, I’ll be drowned in the same crap I pulled myself out of when I got on that bus that day.”

“Tell me something,” Andrew says suddenly and my eyes lock on him, “what part of being around everyone else frustrates you the most?”

Frustrates me?

I think on it for a second, my gaze fixated on the brass lamp mounted on the wall beside the bed.

“I-I’m … not sure.”

He steps up to me and places two fingers at the bend of my arm, guiding me to sit back down with him and I do.

“Just think about it,” he goes on, “based on what you’ve told me already, what is different between you and them?”

I hate it that it’s taking me longer to figure something out that he seems to already have an idea about. I stare down at my hands within my lap and think about it long and hard until I come up with the only answer I feel might be right, but I’m still unsure of myself:

“Expectations?”

“Is that a question, or your answer?”

I give up.

“I really don’t know—I mean I feel … restricted around everyone, with the exception of Ian, of course.”

He nods and listens, letting me go on without interruption while the answer is hanging on the tip of my brain.

And then out of nowhere, the answers just come:

“No one wants to do what I want to do,” I say and my explanation begins to unfold more quickly now that I feel more confident in the answer. “Just like with living free and not taking the ordinary route, y’know? No one wants to step out of their comfort zone to do that with me because it’s not something most people do. I was afraid to tell my parents I didn’t want to go to college because that’s what they expected me to do. I accepted a job at a department store because my mom expected it to fulfill me in some way. I went with my mom every Saturday to visit my brother in prison because she expected me to go, because he’s my brother and I should want to see him even though I didn’t. Natalie relentlessly tried to hook me up with guys because she thought it was abnormal that I be single. I think I’ve been afraid most of my life to be myself.” My head whirls around to face him. “In a way, that was even true with Ian.”

I look away quickly because that last part was not something I really expected to say out loud. It just came out while the realization was taking shape in my mind so fast.

Andrew looks inquisitive, but at the same time, unsure if he should probe.

I’m not sure if I should elaborate.

He nods.

Apparently, he decides it’s not his place to further this particular subject.

He twists the inside of his cheek in between his teeth. I watch him for a moment, always trying to force down the obvious attraction I have for him, but it’s becoming harder to do. I glimpse his lips and wonder what they taste like. And then I force my eyes away—I’m doing it again. Right now. I’m afraid to tell him what I want. Or, at least what I think I want.

“Andrew,” I say and his face quietly reacts to my voice saying his name.

Think about this, Cam, I say to myself. Are you sure this is what you want?

“What is it?” he asks.

“Have you ever had a one-night stand?”

It feels like I just let slip the biggest secret I’ve ever been told while standing in front of a microphone in a room full of people. But it’s out of the bag now. I’m still not entirely sure if it’s even what I want, but it’s there in my mind and has been for a while. I remember vaguely thinking about it while up on that roof with Blake.

Andrew’s face loses all emotion and he can’t seem to find words to say. Instantly, my heart freezes and I feel sick to my stomach. I knew I shouldn’t have said that! He’s going to think I’m a slut or something.

I jump up from the bed.

“I’m sorry—God, you must think I’m—”

He reaches out and takes my wrist, “Sit back down.”

Reluctantly, I do, but I can’t look at him. I’m completely fucking mortified.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asks.

“Huh?”

I look back at him.

“You’re doing it right now.” He motions his hands to emphasize ‘right now’; his eyebrows are knotted.

“Doing what?”

He licks his lips, sighs as if disappointed and finally says, “Camryn, you started to tell me something that maybe you’ve contemplated a time or two and just when you got the courage to speak your mind, you did a one-eighty and regretted it.” He looks deep into my eyes, his full of intensity and knowledge and something else I can’t yet place. “Ask me the question again and this time, wait for me to answer.”

I pause, searching that tense look on his face, unsure of it. Or, maybe it’s just me that I’m unsure of.

I swallow and say, “Have you ever had a one-night stand?”

His expression doesn’t shift or fall. “Yes, I’ve had a few here and there.”

He’s waiting for me now, even though I’m not sure yet how to make myself feel comfortable in this awkwardly-developing conversation. It’s like he knows I’m squirming inside, but to teach me a lesson he’s going to make me do the talking instead of being my shrink like he’s been since I came into his room.

His eyebrows arch a little as if to say: Well?

“Well, I was just wondering … because I’ve never done something like that.”

“Why not?” he says so casually.

I look down and then back up at him so he doesn’t scold me for it.

“Well, it’s just kind of slutty, I guess.”

Andrew laughs and it surprises me.

Finally, he relieves me somewhat of my torture.

“If a girl did that a lot,” he draws out that word with a squeamish smile, “then it would be slutty, sure. Once or twice, I don’t know …” he motions his hands at level with his shoulders as if shaking the numbers around in his mind indecisively, “there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Why isn’t he taking full advantage of this right now? I start freaking out a little inside, wondering why he’s still all shrink-mode rather than amping up the flirting and getting down to business.

“Alright, so …”

I can’t say it. It’s just not me, to be able to casually talk about my sexual anything. I can only vaguely do that with Natalie.

Andrew sighs and his shoulders slouch over. “Are you wanting to sleep with me, to have a one-night stand with me?” He knew I wasn’t going to come out and say it, so he gave in and did it for me.

The question, although obvious for both of us, stops my breath. It embarrasses and mortifies me with him saying it as much, maybe more, than if I would have.

“Maybe …”

He stands up and looks down at me and says, “I’m sorry, but I’m not into you in that way.”

The biggest fist in existence just slammed into my stomach. My hands go rigid, gripping the edge of the mattress, making my arms all the way up to the top of my shoulders completely unmovable. All I want to do right now is run out that door and lock myself inside my room and never look at Andrew again. Not because I don’t want to see him, but because I don’t want him to see me.

I’ve never been so embarrassed in my entire life.

And this is what speaking my mind got me!

I don’t know whether to accept it as a lesson learned, or to hate him for making me do it.