Record, Rewind (8 page)

We’d been friends ever since, though I’m not sure what Dwayne gets out of our relationship besides maybe a reminder not to suck at life. I stick around because he’s easy on the eyes, has sworn to teach me the arcane secrets of twenty-sided dice, and occasionally likes to feed me alcohol and sushi.

For the first time, however, I wasn’t looking forward to game night. Actually at this point every spare moment I hadn’t spent at work had been spent lying on Dwayne’s couch and tending to the very intense and busy job of feeling sorry for myself. And why shouldn’t I? I’d had the man of my dreams in my arms. The man of my dreams had confessed that he liked me and was interested in me—that he had been infatuated with me for years—and yet somehow, some way, I’d managed to fuck it up.

“I didn’t even get laid,” I’d say out loud periodically, regardless of whether or not someone was in the room. Now, wounded by Dwayne’s lack of sympathy, I felt this was as good a time as any to remind the universe of this intrinsically tragic state of affairs.

“I didn’t even get laid,” I told Dwayne.

“Yes, thank you, you’ve said that.” He stood at the counter, pouring some kind of super expensive microbrew into a tall glass. “But, and I say this with utmost love, who cares?”

“Me?” I hazarded.

“Exactly,” he said. “You. No one else cares. You have to pull it together, Cassie. This is getting sad.”

I pouted miserably. “I thought we were friends.”

“We
are
friends. I will, until my dying breath, swear up and down that you deserved to get laid by that Dorian guy—”

“Damien.”

“Like it matters. You deserved to get laid by that Damien guy but he didn’t know what a good thing he had in front of him so he let you slip through his fingers.”

“Threw me away like trash,” I said.

“Released you like a beautiful butterfly,” Dwayne countered. “But I
am
your friend, and I have to be real with you. You are overreacting.” He took a long swig of beer. “Nut up,” he added.

He was right, of course. With a sigh I slowly sat up and rubbed my face. I wasn’t wearing any makeup and my hair was a mess. The couch was just a smidgen too short for me, so I tossed and turned in my sleep every night, leaving it gloriously mussed in the morning. It might have been beautiful post-sex hair, except I wouldn’t know what that looked like. Because I hadn’t had sex. And now maybe I never would. Because Damien was a jerk, and I hated him and now, if I ran into him and he asked me which direction he needed to go to pull his head out of his ass, I wouldn’t even tell him where he could buy a map.

I still wanted to bone him, though. I mean, I’m not
stupid
.

I stared at the carpet in front of me and tried to get my thoughts in order. Why was I so upset about this? Sex was sex. It would happen. I’d even find a guy who might actually like me to do it with.

I had still, however, failed to seduce a man with a hard-on.

The realization was demoralizing. In addition to failing in nearly every aspect of my life, including academically, professionally, financially and personally, I’d also failed at even the most basic task of getting a guy to sleep with me. I mean, seriously, isn’t that supposed to be easy for girls? Guys are always trying to sleep with you. Getting laid should have been as easy as falling down a flight of stairs.

Figures I’d suck at even that.

Groaning, I hauled myself to my feet, staggered a bit beneath the influence of one too many beers, and began to gather my things, which were strewn in a very neat heap at the foot of the sofa. Dwayne watched me from the kitchen.

“Go get a shower, Cassie,” he said. “In your
own
apartment. You’ll feel better. Then you can come back for game night.”

“’kay,” I muttered. Arms full of dirty laundry, I let myself out of his apartment and climbed the stairs up to mine. Opening the door I stumbled inside and dumped my clothes in the middle of the living room.

Hey, it’s not like I was gonna have a guy over anytime soon, right?

Stumbling a bit, I procured a glass of water from the kitchen, drank it all down, and migrated to my own couch. It was almost as comfortable as Dwayne’s, and when I sat down I was suddenly overtaken with the need to sleep. Just...sleep. And forget.

*

I
slept for three minutes and was awoken by the sound of nuclear bombs falling on the city.

SKKKRRREEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAEEEEEE—!

“Holy
shit!”
Straight from dreamland, do not pass
Go,
I jumped to my feet at the terrible, booming, high-pitched grinding noise that was surely Manhattan going up in a mushroom cloud. My heart hammered in my throat and I looked wildly about my apartment.

Any second now all the pictures are going to fall off the wall and then I’ll be vaporized, oh my
god—

“Testing? Testing? Can you hear me, Cassie?”

At first the words, delivered over a loudspeaker, didn’t even register with me. I was too busy waiting to be zapped into my component molecules.

When that failed to happen, I blinked and rubbed my hand over my eyes.

What?

“Cassie? Oh, Caaaaaaassssiiiiieeeeee...”

I knew that voice. I’d know that voice anywhere. The only question was, why was that voice
here,
and why did it appear to be coming from outside my apartment window?

These are questions to which a girl needs to know the answers.

I didn’t try to fool myself into believing I was still asleep. My life had been too topsy turvy in the past five days for me to question that this was, indeed, reality. Instead I staggered over to the window and peered down into the street.

There, on the sidewalk in front of my walk-up in a crustier part of town, was Damien Colton with a guitar, a microphone, and an amplifier. The world-ending noise had merely been feedback.

Dazed, I opened the window and leaned out.

“Oh!” Damien said, spotting me. “There you are, Cassie.” He held the microphone to his mouth, even though amplification wasn’t necessary between the ground and the second floor. His voice was booming out over the neighborhood. I was probably about to become very unpopular.

I tried to line my thoughts up into something resembling order.

“Damien,” I said finally. “What are you doing here?”

He grinned up at me, and it was somehow both wicked and wholesome. His green eyes twinkled even at this distance. “Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “I’ve come to woo my Juliet.”

“Juliet died,” was all I could think to say.

Maybe it really was all my fault. I didn’t seem to have a romantic bone in my body.

My pedantry did not seem to faze Damien in the least. “Rest assured,” he said, “I am not angling for a suicide pact.”

I thought about this. “Are you drunk?”

“Nope.” He said it proudly, as if that somehow made this better.

“Well, I need to be,” I told him. “Why don’t you come up?”

His face fell. “But how am I supposed to apologize to you without a balcony serenade?”

I tried not to roll my eyes. “You could come up here and say you’re sorry,” I told him. “I mean, that’s just a suggestion. But it’s, you know...it’s a good one.”

“No way,” he said. “I need to sing a song to you.”

Oh my god. He just wasn’t going to let this drop, was he? Other windows were opening now, and people were coming out of their own buildings to see what the ruckus was.

I’ll admit, part of me was completely charmed. But it was a small part. The much larger part of me was worried that Damien was going to get arrested. “How long is the song?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t written it yet. I was going to gaze upon your visage and let your loveliness inspire me.”

I stared at him some more. “Okay, forget drunk. Are you high?”

He coughed. “Not at the moment.”

I scowled.

He coughed again. “I mean, a few well-placed tokes may have contributed to this idea, but I still think it’s a pretty good one now that I’m sober.”

I was honestly torn. On the one hand, I wanted to be serenaded by one of the most desirable and talented men in the world. I wanted everyone to know that he wanted
me.

On the other hand...

Well, okay. I really couldn’t think of a reason for him to
not
serenade me. Just a little one. Really quick-like.

“If you promise to make it
short,”
I said, “then go ahead.” More people were gathering, and now I could tell some of them had recognized Damien, because cell phones were coming out and video was being recorded, and the vague buzz of people talking was rising higher. Damien didn’t seem to notice any of that, though.

He only had eyes for me.

He grinned up at me. “For you, Cassandra Lauren,” he said. He slotted the microphone into its stand and began to strum.

I closed my eyes and listened. Notes cascaded past me, through me, dipping and diving. I couldn’t help but gasp with each peak and sigh with each valley. Damien had magical fingers, whether they were on my breasts or on a guitar, and I wanted nothing more than to give myself over to his music.

Eyes shut, I swayed in the window, waiting for his serenade to begin.

After about five minutes I opened my eyes and looked down at him. He seemed perplexed and not a little embarrassed.

“I thought there would be words,” I shouted.

The strumming faded away. “Yeah,” he said. “I kind of thought there would be. Maybe I should have written some down.”

From below me came Dwayne’s distinctive voice. “Loser!” he yelled through his window, and Damien blushed bright red.

Ah. The regret of a pot-idea. I couldn’t blame him, though. Sometimes things just sounded like really good ideas when you were high. Now he was laid low by performance anxiety.

Well. Dalton Rooker
isn’t
perfect after all. Or is it Damien Colton?

The question was too philosophical for me. “You’d better come up,” I said to Damien, then closed the window and retreated, waiting for the wonderful feeling of being pursued, and when the buzzer on my door sounded, I smiled.

“H
ow’d you find my apartment?” I asked a very nervous-looking Damien as he sat on my beat-up sofa and sipped a cup of three-day-old reheated coffee.

“Called your parents,” he said.

Of course he did.

I studied him from my perch a few yards away on the coffee table. I wasn’t comfortable being too near him yet, but I also didn’t have any other furniture. That sofa did triple and quadruple duty sometimes.

He sat awkwardly, nothing like the suave and confident rock musician who had showed up on the street outside my window. His knees knocked together and he held his elbows in his lap as though he were trying to protect his nuts from a beating.

Which he might very well be doing,
I thought. I probably had every right to kick him in the nuts, actually. You don’t go confessing your love to a girl, give her the most intense orgasm of her life, and then tell her not to call you.

He knew it, too, because he wouldn’t meet my eye. Now that he wasn’t wearing the armor of his guitar, he seemed vulnerable and small.

“So,” I said finally, “is there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

He bit his lip and I tried not to forgive everything then and there for the chance to bite his lip for him. “Yes,” he said. “There is.”

“...And?”

Damien took a deep breath. “I want to start over.”

“Yeah?” I said. “You and everyone else in the universe.”

He finally met my eyes with a pained look. “I mean start over with us.”

I pursed my lips. “You mean like with our smoke break?”

“No,” he said, “I mean like with our whole relationship.”

“So you want to start over at the point where you got onto the elevator?”

His jaw clenched. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “I mean we should go all the way back to the beginning. When we met in high school.”

“We never really met in high school,” I couldn’t help but point out.

“Yes,” he said, “and that’s the problem. I don’t know about you but I’ve been carrying around this little flame for you for years, but when we finally met on that rooftop you were nothing like I remembered.”

He must have seen the dismayed look on my face because he hastened to add: “I mean, you
are
like I remembered, but you’ve changed a lot, too. And that’s great. I think I might like you even more now.
Especially
because this is the version of you I’ve actually spoken to.”

I had to smile at that. I’d been thinking the same thing. And I knew the reverse was also true. Was I talking to Damien, or Dalton? The boy I’d known, or the man I didn’t? And did it matter? I’d never really known Dalton anyway, except as a girlish dream. “I get what you’re saying,” I told him, “although I think you still have an idealized version of me in your head.”

He frowned. “Really? Why?”

I tugged on my ear, nervous. “Because I’m not...you really liked the smart girl, remember?”

“Are you saying you somehow got dumb since high school?” The idea seemed to amuse him.

“It happens,” I said. “Especially to people who smoke too much weed.”

“Okay, fair enough. Still. You think you’re stupider now?”

I shook my head.
How can one person be so dense?
I thought. “I mean I’m a huge failure now.”

There. My big
issue,
the problem that gnawed at my soul, on the table for him to see.

He stared at me blankly. “I don’t get it,” he said at last.

I sighed, exasperated. “Look, the reason I didn’t want you to notice me was because I am completely, utterly ashamed of how badly I’ve fucked everything up. I’m a failure at twenty-five. How bad at life do you have to be to be a failure at twenty-five? And you!” I waved at him. “You’re the biggest success to ever come out of our silly little town, and I was just...
ashamed.”

Tears pricked behind my eyes and I angrily blinked them away. “I didn’t want to face the guy I’ve always crushed on like...like
this.”
I pointed to myself, to my shitty little rathole apartment, to the bare walls and piles of laundry and dishes stacked in the sink. “It was humiliating.”