Landslide (9 page)

Personally, I couldn’t sleep a wink if I’d even tried. Not that I did try after she and I both finally cooled down while I held her as she cried herself to sleep.

I swear to
God
, all I wanted to do was the
right
thing. So help me, I just didn’t know what the right thing was. Last night was like an all-out war. Nay, an apocalypse; my bed Ground Zero. And I had no fucking clue what side I was supposed to fight on. I couldn’t see the enemy. Not during the fire-fight, anyway.

‘What red devil of mendacity
 

Grips your soul with such tenacity?
 

Will one you cruelly shower with lies
 

Put a pistol ball between your eyes?’

Uh…something, something, something… Oh yeah…

‘Deceiver, dissembler
 

Your trousers are alight
 

From what pole or gallows
 

Do they dangle in the night?’

Seriously, the fuck is that shit?

Poetry. Pretty sure it’s actual,
literal
poetry. I’m now waxing lyrical with mental poetry.

Kill me now.

With my petulant mind rebelling against my demand by continuing to taunt me with actual fucking
poetry
dredged from my memory by a stupid kid’s rhyme, and the big bad K’s intro to what I can only imagine will end up being one
Hell
of a punishing soundtrack for the story of my life still playing, I blow out a quiet breath and drag my free hand over my face, rubbing at it and my tight, tired eyes…and, remembering.

There was
so
much heat. Although rationally I know it couldn’t ever be possible, I still felt in that one single, blinding moment when I stole her breath and Holden’s name from her lips, that if I were to open my eyes I would see real flames directly from the pit of Hell itself had erupted around us. There wasn’t a single flame flickering or even a few smoldering embers, though. However, if there had been… Well, all of it would’ve no doubt been doused by the crashing wave of guilt she was hit with, the enormity of which had her desperately clinging to the life preserver I’d instantly become while she audibly sobbed for forgiveness; with me holding her tight, silently sure it'll never be granted to one of us. For her it will be, but not to me.

I’ll admit that just as she finally drifted off, I wept without sound. Afraid a mere sniffle or any movement whatsoever would disturb her hard-won struggle for sleep, I left my iPod on and let my tears crystalize on my cheeks while I laid there for hours, trying to block out what’d happened in the moments before I started shedding salt water from my eyes. It wasn’t working. I was too angry. Rather than acknowledging most of what I was feeling, I stared unseeing into the darkness of my room until the sun began to break into a new day. With the coming dawn came light; light that shone the way and brought an end to my search for a pair of feet to lay blame at.

I chose Holden. Similar to Erica’s, my rationale was all based on the fact that if he hadn’t made her whatever asinine promise he did—that I think had something to do with them having sex—and then gone ahead and died, I wouldn’t have ever heard the call of duty in the first place. And honestly, it’s not like I can blame Erica or even be mad at her. Not during the hellish dead of last night and not in the light of this day or future ones either. I mean revenge is not only a dish best served cold, but Holden and Karma had probably had enough time to compare notes and decide that I had it coming. After all, fair is fair…
 

I don’t know if it’s a commonality we share or not, and Erica doesn’t know it, but my first kiss was with her. Even though it was something that happened long before his radar ever picked her up and I hadn’t really considered it that big of a deal, I decided I should maybe tell him once they’d made things official, which they did by way of changing their stupid Facebook relationship statuses. I’d only meant the information to be a “By the way just so you know in case she ever mentions it” kind of thing but as it happened, the one and only time in history Holden’s face showed anything other than his trust and unconditional acceptance of me occurred when I told him about the time I bullied Erica into playing a combo game of Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven at a birthday party she and I were at.

It happened the summer before she went into eighth grade and I dropped to the bottom of the totem pole again and became a high school freshman. Holden was away at a football camp that my dad wouldn’t pay for so I was flying solo at the party. I was socializing instead of just hanging with my best bud like we usually would do when a popular clique of people I didn’t really like invited me to play; among them was a girl who
constantly
tried to steal my baseball hat and I fucking
hated
that.

In hindsight I know the hat stealing thing was because she had a crush on me, but at the time, I didn’t know she was flirting. Girls doing shit like that was just flat out annoying as fuck anyway. Besides, I was kind of in my own world a lot of the time and was sort of a late bloomer I guess you could say. At fifteen, I was still more into all the shit that younger teenage guys are, like the latest and greatest video games, music from before my time because I thought listening to the Descendants and other old bands like that made me cool, as did the act of combining all the flavors available to produce the Atomic Slurpee, as well as pouring over hot rod magazines while we were hanging out at the 7-Eleven on the corner before school. And if I’m being honest, I was also
still
of the belief that girls pretty much carried cooties. That’s right, I still believed in cooties the summer before I started high school. I’ll own it.

So anyway, to sum it up there I was, allowing myself to be a victim of peer pressure, because I
so
did not want to play a game that would force me to kiss or do anything else with a girl not of my choosing or in my timing. However, I also didn’t want to look like a chicken shit scaredy cat or announce my lack of intimate experience in a group of people, some of whom I’d seen making out in the hallways at school and some of them rumors had begun circulating with the news that they’d already done the deed. So, I talked the only girl at the party I could even stand and sort of trust to not transfer her cooties to me to play and cheat with me. I figured having survived bathing with the chick, I was probably immune to her strain anyway. She didn’t really want to play either but I kept at her until she grudgingly agreed, and then while more players were being rustled up, she and I hid and practiced to make sure that when I spun the bottle to select my partner in crime, it would land on her and vice versa.

I remember that once we were sitting cross-legged in the closet under the stairs of Jimmy Meyer’s house, we just sat there, facing each other and practically twiddling our thumbs when after maybe three or four boring and uncomfortable minutes ticked by, Erica sighed and whispered, “Let’s just get it over with, okay?”

I leaned in to kiss her, but she had something different in mind. It’s sort of ironic, but I vaguely recall my eyebrows shooting into my hairline at the unexpectedness of her casually pulling her tank top off over her head. As my pubescent good fortune had it though, the tank top was one of those spaghetti strap things that have an inner lining at the top so that girls don’t have to wear a bra with them. Totally dumbfounded by her brazen display, I stared at her. My heart rate sped up, my palms had started sweating, and I seem to remember thinking she was bustier than a lot of girls her age, but with clarity I remember the precise moment that my eyes must’ve finally relayed the visual to my dick so that it could register the sight and jump to the same page as the rest of me. Rather than shifting or pulling at my pants like how I wanted to though, I simply shrugged and mumbled quietly, “You didn’t have to do that.”

She shrugged as well, like it was no big. “Eh…it’s not like you’ve never seen me naked before. Plus, Rachel had the nerve to whisper in my ear and dare me right before we came in here,
and
the b-word called me prissy pants, and so help me, I will not give someone like her the satisfaction of being able to call me a chicken too. And double plus, I don’t like how she talks about stuff she wants to do with, like,
every
boy she knows, including you, and you don’t like her anyway. So, if you wanna announce to everyone out there that I stripped for you, fine by me. In fact, you can rub it in Rachel’s fat face for all I care. Prissy pants, my butt…”

That was when I gained a new appreciation for Erica’s seldom seen temper and started to better understand the saying, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. I finally leaned forward and with a quirk of my lips at her defiant expression and my hands gently framing her face, I kissed her. Not once, not twice, but three times. And she kissed me back. Tongue and all. I mean I can’t even explain how proud I was of the two of us for secretly standing up to the hat stealer like we did.

Why either of us never thought to just make shit up and lie to the other game participants on the other side of the door who were waiting with bated breath for us to emerge, I ain’t got a clue…
 

*****

Jolted awake by a door slamming, I roll onto my back. My hands go to rub the sleep from my eyes; instead they get a handful of masculine light blue-encased memory foam from the pillow on top of my head. Bone tired. That’s what I am. Another door bangs shut, probably a cupboard in the kitchen just across from my room by the sound of it.

Daddy’s home. Yay.

Bolt upright with the knowledge, I swing my head to stare shocked at my alarm clock.

“Shit!”

Blankets are kicked and shoved as I try untangling myself; the sheets transforming into tentacles intent on keeping me in my empty bed. Finally free, I jump up, knocking over a beer bottle and a framed picture of my car by banging my knee on the nightstand. Ignoring the zap of pain that shoots up and down my leg, I go to take a step and feel something not right about my foot.

“What’s wrong?!” Erica emerges from my bathroom, holding my hairbrush in her hand and wearing a pair of my basketball shorts and my Social Distortion concert shirt. Also, looking as weary as I feel, but a lot more like herself.

“What in the—”
I stumble, hop on one leg, and untangle her panties that are wrapped around one of my ankles and catching between my toes. “I overslept. I’m supposed to be at the Mason’s in fifteen minutes.”

“Oh…you scared me,” she murmurs, blushing and lowering her eyes to take the incriminating satin from my hand, crushing the evidence into a tight ball inside her fist, “I’m sure they’ll understand if you’re late. I made coffee.” 

My eyes follow hers through the doorway of my bedroom to the kitchen, my nostrils taking over from there to drink in the rich aroma tinged with hazelnut of caffeinated Columbian goodness wafting heavily through the air. I shake my head, firmly dismissing the idea of slowing my roll long enough to pour the carafe’s full-bodied contents down my throat like I want to. “Nope, don’t have time. Don’t like being late. I can make it if I skip a shower.” I don’t just dislike it. I
hate
being late for work. If my upbringing has taught me anything, it’s a solid work ethic.

Turning and twisting at the waist, my eyes locate a pair of work jeans laying in a corner. I grab the Iron Maiden t-shirt off my dresser and plop back down on the foot of my bed to quickly slide out of the basketball shorts I’d slept in. Only three seconds of thought leads to my decision that my boxers are clean enough for me to wear while installing the last of the windows in the Mason’s new garage apartment.

“Um…”

Erica clearing her throat is like a warning. One a moviegoer would hear playing right before something evil and scary as fuck is about to grab hold of its next victim and subsequently rip its victim’s throat out with its jagged, yellowish-black teeth.

Time to get your game face on, Cole. Time to lie so fucking smooth that not a single living soul can see that even though he’s already dead, how badly you want to kill your best friend for putting you and his girlfriend through the entirety of last night.
Because if Erica sees how pissed you still are, she’ll think she has a reason to feel guilty. And she absolutely doesn’t.
 

I push to my feet and take her face in my hands, forcing her eyes to meet mine.

“About last night, I’m—”

“Don’t. You had a nightmare. Nothing happened.”

Uh, yeah it did. You were there, remember? We covered that right before you pinned the blame on Holden and went frolicking down memory lane and then passed out. For like four hours, by the way. Now you’re gonna be late for work. Way to go, asshole.

“That’s not exactly tr—” she tries arguing the point.

“Okay fine, something happened,” I concede, “I bailed on Holden’s funeral, you threw a beer bottle at my head, we talked, you did some crying and, we slept together, alright?”

That’s not all you did together, liar,
but hey, why not keep going?
You’re getting good at this and the Mason’s garage apartment can finish the job itself.

“I’m cool with all that if you are. It won’t be a thing unless one of us makes it one, and I know I’m not gonna.”

She blows out a shaky breath but decidedly nods her acceptance of our pact of half-truth without further question, her tears receding before they even breach the brim of her eyes. “Okay, I won’t either then. I was just afraid…well, I wasn’t sure about, you know, what you’d think of me now.”

I sigh. “Sweetheart, nothing happened to make me think
any
different of you this morning than I have since the day we met, okay?”

Ha!
Fuck you, guilty conscience, that one was true.

“You sure?”

 
“Absolutely sure. Nothing’s changed, I promise.”

Oooh. Watch out for those promise things. I hear they can fuck your shit up pretty good. Wouldn’t you agree? I mean after last night and all…