Random Acts of Hope (15 page)

“We should call Guin
n
ess. Might be a world record.”

“Look at this one, Charlotte.
I wh
is
pered a prayer on Liam’s cock and now all I gotta say is #RAOCROX.”
 

“Nice. That’s Marcia Higgins.
A poet and she doesn’t know it.
”

“Isn’t she the university chaplain’s daughter?”

“Yep.”

“
W
ell, then.”

The gurgle of my coffeemaker ended with a loud hiss, like a long sigh. I mimicked it, then stood, pouring us both coffees and coming back to stare dumbly at the screen.

“You ready to talk about what really happened?”

“You mean you don’t believe he fucked seven different women in the dorm and singlehandedly strangled the boa constrictor that a Muslim terrorist planted in his car?”

She squinted at the screen. “Is that the latest mashup of rumors?”

“Pretty much. Give it another day and I’m sure the rumors will devolve into his fucking the boa constrictor in the car while seven women made love to the blowup doll.”

“
That’s better than some of the shit people are claiming on Twitter. Did you see this?”
 

The tweet:
The only snake that matters is in my pants. #RAOCROX
 

“From Liam McCarthy’s Twitter account.”

“Oh, man. He tweet anything else?”
Leave it to Liam to go on the offensive. Why play it cool when you can be arrogant and cocky?
 

Maggie nodded slowly, then turned away from the screen. “You need to talk about this.” That was not a question.

“I need,” I said, peering around her to read the screen, “to know what else he tweeted.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

“
No, seriously.”
 

“Maggie!”

She moved. I read.

His tweet:
And the only woman who matters is the one who won’t admit I was in her room.
 

“Oh, shit,” I muttered,
suddenly flushed,
but it wasn’t just the coffee warming me up.
Five years of silence, of being completely frozen out, and now we were thawing slowly.
 

Slowly
might have been a misnomer, because of all the ways I’d envisioned reuniting on any level with Liam, having part of it cap
tur
ed on photo and video and including a
crazy
snake wasn’t in the dreams.

I took a big gulp of coffee and then yawned.

“Caffeine not cutting it?”

“I barely got
three
hours of sleep and it’s”—I looked at the computer clock—“8:42 p.m. We stil
l
have reports to write and all this social media bullshit.” While university policy said that social media accounts were private for the students, and residence life could not impose policies on anything a student admitted to doing online, we also had the right to review social media—anything public—for the sake of making sure the dorm community was a safe and inclusive one.

#RAOCROX had exploded as a hashtag and Maggie and I were learning quite a bit. I now knew which freshman had banged Liam, that an addition
al
four sophomores had given him blow jobs on the stairwells, and two of them had slept with him at prior concerts in the Boston area.

I knew the
seven bangings and
four blow jobs weren’t true, but those concerts…  A giant red ball of anger grew in my stomach. I tried to douse it with coffee. Didn’t help.

“The man has the refractory period of a porn star,” Maggie marveled.

And the body to go with it,
I thought.
Not that I’d been able to enjoy it. Between a thousand questions racing through my mind, the shock of being against his body after five years away, and the pure unfamiliarity of being touched by any man—sexually or just affectionately—the entire night had been a very perplexing experience.
 

A
nd a horny one. A very, very horny one.

She pretended to count on her fingers, reaching ten and turning to her exposed pinky toe for number eleven. “Eleven sex acts involving ejaculation in one evening. We should hire him to come give community service talks on healthy sex attitudes. He’s quite sex positive.” She waggled her eyebrows in a leering way.

“
T
he man limped out of here with a hard-on and bl
u
e balls bigger than Rachel’s rack.”

“Oooo, meow. Someone’s catty.”

She
was
right. “I don’t know how to feel,”
I admitted.
“How am I supposed to feel? I run into the ex-boyfriend who dumped me w
h
en I was pregnant with our baby. He’s stripping at a party where I’m the sex toy hostess. Then he orders a raunchy plastic fuck tunnel, asks me to deliver it, and when I do he kisses me!”

Maggie just stared, listening.

“
I slap him and run away, and he tracks me down. He comes to my apartment to talk, refuses to talk, and instead we cuddle in bed and fall asleep. When I order him to sneak out my window a crowd of groupies surround him, and a boa constrictor ends up face-f
u
cking his sex toy doll.”

Maggie
wa
s beet red from trying to stay composed.

“So, Maggie, where’s the manual on how to feel about all that?”

“I think you have to write it as you go along.”

“I think Liam McCarthy operates through life without a manual. I can’t create a color-coded spreadsheet that is detailed enough to manage him.”

“If only emotions were as neatly charted as
dorm
room condition reports.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice.”

We both sighed and drank deeply from our respective coffees.

“Not really,” we said in unison.

Maggie hit the refresh button on my computer. “Thirteen new tweets for #RAOCROX. Oh, look! An eighth sex partner has come forward.”

“I thought Liam was at eleven.”

“I’m counting the blow jobs separately.”

“Doesn’t everyone.”

I closed the laptop slowly and put my mug of coffee on the desk. Without meaning to, I sank my head down into my hands, fingers sliding into my unwashed hair, the nails meeting resistance. Had I even combed my hair toda
y
? The hours flew by in a blur. Security services. Animal control. Making sure Liam was okay. Watc
h
ing him leave. Dealing with the uproar over his presence. And the snake.

“Oh, here’s a good one on Facebook:
Liam McCarthy from #RAOCROX was here to film a new music video—their first!—in my dorm today. He even brought a sex toy doll and a six-foot boa constrictor. FUN FUN FUN love being a student here!
”

“Who was that?”

“
Joey
Lennon.”

“His mother would be so proud. Is he a creative writing major?”

“Political science.”

“Ah. Makes more sense. The guy has a solid future
in
a politician’s communications office. Spin, spin, spin.”

“
Maybe Liam really was here to film a video.”
 

“Maggie,” I growled.

“What? It’s possible! Maybe he’s Superman and can please elev
en—
twelve—women in one night, wrestle a snake, and fuck a blowup doll, too, all without breaking a sweat.”

“And strip like something out of
Magic Mike
. And sing and play guitar.”

“Marry a man like that while you can.”

Something in my chest gave when she said that. Instant contrition covered her features.

“I’m so sorry. That was uncalled for.”

“It’s okay. We were just joking around.”

“No, it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t, and I should know better.
I
t’s like when people make rape jokes around me. I know they don’t mean it, but…”
Maggie’s face tightened.
 

“Rape jokes?”

“You know, like commenting that a pedophile will get a taste of his own medicine in jail. Or that being raped will ‘cure’ an arrogant person.
T
hat kind of thing.
I
t’s not that people mean anything specific against me. Or ag
a
inst rape victims. But it still stings.”

“
I
t’s okay. You don’t have to keep apologizing.”

“I do if you’re hurt.”
She gave me an insistent look.
 

“Not hurt. Just…confused.”

“
I
f you don’t want to talk about it, I can go.”

“No!”
I’d spent the day busy and overwhelmed, but being alone somehow seemed worse right now.
 

She sat slowly. “
T
hen tell me what’s going on.”

“I don’t know what’s going on! I woke up to the first man in five years in my bed, and it’s the same one from five years ago.”

“D
é
j
à
vu.
” She chuckled.
“He’s here, though. Right?”

“What do you mean?”

“So
m
ething’s changed in these five years if he’s here. By choice. He’s come back on some level because he’s seeking something from you. What is it?”

“He didn’t really say anything. But we both seem to want something.”

“
I
t’s time to talk.”

“It is so hard, though. Like once the words come out I won’t be able to stop talking. And some of the words inside me are not pleasant.”

“I’d imagine it’s the same for him.”

If she’d slapped me I couldn’t have been more shocked. “
Him?
Why would he be angry with me? He’s not the one who got left.”

“But he left for a reason.
Even if Liam never told you that reason, there is one.
”
Compassion filled her face. A bit of confusion, too, as her eyebrows drew inward.
 

“I wish I knew why!”

“Then ask.”

“What if I ask and it’s a horrible reason?”

“What’
s
the worst possible reason?”

That made me pause.
“Because he’s a cold, cruel, selfish bastard.”

“
H
ow would that change anything?
To know that for certain?
”

“
I
t would…it would…” I lost my breath in that one question. How would it?
How would it change one damn thing from the past five years? Wasn’t he already a cold, cruel, selfish, fucking horrible human being for what he did to me?
 

And what did it mean about
me
to be so hung up on him that I still missed him, even after what he did to me?
 

It m
ade me feel warped. Damaged somehow, like someone who didn’t know who to trust, so she blindly wanted al
l
the wrong people.

For all the wrong reasons.

It was why I chose celibacy. Because if I didn’t, I’d have fucked everything and
a
nything that would have me, just so I could bury Liam’s rejection as deeply as possible.

All or nothing. Black or white. Good or evil. Accepting that there might be a middle ground
i
n the face of being rejected so firmly, so q
u
ickly, and with such force was impossible. How could there be a middle ground when someone like Liam could choose to treat me so poorly?

What did it say about
me?
 

For five years I’d fought that feeling. That fear. Va
c
i
ll
ating between self-loathing and Liam-hating. Never finding an answer.

And now Maggie was asking more answerless questions.

“
You don’t have to answer me,” she said, then sat up quickly. I knew that move. Yanking her phone out of her pocket, she read a text.
 

“Brawl in the men’s bathrooms on the third floor.
Pr
obably fighting over a woman.”

“Go.”

“You okay?”

“No.
B
ut I will be.”

“You really will.”

“You say that to everyone.”

“
B
ut I mean it with you.”

Liam

What do you do when you finally have a quasi-breakthrough with your ex, but the big conversation you know i
s
building and needs to happen is waiting like a giant zit, not quite ready to pop but aching as it r
ip
ens?

H
orrible analogy. Never mind. Gross. Now I’m thinking about pizza face.

This analytical crap wasn’t cutting it. I wanted to talk to Charlotte, to clear the
air, to let her know I forgave her and that we could move on. She ripped my heart out all those years ago and stomped it into ground hamburger, and while I felt like a douche and an idiot combined for not being able to let her go and forget about her, for not being able to move on, at this point I realized something more powerful than worrying about all that.
 

Love isn’t rational.

I’d been so deeply in love with her all those years ago that the torment created by her betrayal was so big. Like a tornado inside a blizzard. A force of nature so destr
u
ctive and ruinous that when she told me she was pregnant, and I knew—knew!—it couldn’t be mine, her very existence was like learning my own mother had become the bride of Satan.

Such an unthinkable act that the only way to react was to shut her out. Pretend she didn’t exist.
Pretend that her pregnancy was...hers. Some other guy’s, and not my issue. I’d wondered, of course, and when I’d seen her here and there around town (from afar), when friends whispered rumors that she’d aborted or miscarried...I just took it in. Didn’t know what to do with the information.
 

Still didn’t.

I c
lose
d
off and wall up the part of me that loved her because even recognizing it was there was a source of constant pain that meant I couldn’t feel.

Couldn’t be.

Couldn’t live.

And now…now…well, right now, this very minute, all these thoughts raced through me
as
I shook my cock in the face of a woman who looked disturbingly like my physics professor in college. “
You Can
Leave Your Hat On” was the song of choice, and she looked like she wanted to put a rubber hat on me and ride me like a pogo stick.