Slow Burn (10 page)

I laughed.

I could hear that Griffin was chuckling too.

“I’m serious,” she said. “You’re my best friend, or at least the closest thing to one I have since I got sober. And Griffin is ruining our ability to bond.”

“Well,” I said, “we can always go to the bathroom at the same time. He doesn’t come in women’s restrooms.”

“Perfect!” she said.

I surveyed myself in the mirror. “I don’t like this dress. I’m going to take it off.”

“No, you don’t. Not until I see it.”

“Fine,” I said. I opened the door. “I’m showing you. What do you think?”

Stacey popped out of her dressing room. “Oh! Gosh, it’s way too frilly, isn’t it?”

“Told you,” I said.

Stacey turned to Griffin. “What do you think?”

He eyed me. “Um, I like it.”

Stacey rolled her eyes. “Boys. They’re useless. You’ll have to try on something else.”

“Okay,” I said. “I like yours, though.”

Stacey preened. “Thanks! I like red. Matches my hair.” She darted back into the dressing room.

I went back into my side. “I don’t know why we’re trying on these dresses anyway. I don’t have anywhere to wear it. I can’t go out anymore. Too easy to get tempted or to run into the regular crew.”

“They’re sober dresses,” she said. “A reward.”

I tugged a different dress over my head. It was yellow. Really yellow. How had this ended up in my pile of clothes to try on? I didn’t think I’d picked it out. “But what use is a reward if you can’t use it?” I opened the dressing room door. “I’ve got another one to show you.”

“Okay, give me a second,” she said. “You know, Griffin, if you’re bored, you could go hang out with Jack in the arcade.”

“I can’t do that,” said Griffin, grinning at me. “I have to stay close enough to watch Leigh.”

Stacey came out of the dressing room. She had on another red dress. It was cute.

“Oh, I like that one,” I said.

“Me too,” she said. “But yours is so... yellow.”

“I know,” I said. “I swear I didn’t pick this out. You did, didn’t you?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But it looks yellower now that you’re wearing it.” She squealed. “Oh my God, I just had a really awesome idea!”

“Is it about making it not so yellow?”

“No,” she said. “Don’t be silly. It’s about where we can wear our fabulous new dresses.”

“Where?”

“A party.”

I shook my head. “No, I can’t. It’s a bad idea. The last time I had a party, I ended up going straight to my dealer afterwards.”

“It’ll be a sober party,” said Stacey. “A party to commemorate your one-month sober. Isn’t that awesome?”

“I can’t,” I said. I looked at Griffin. “Back me up, here.”

“Where would the party be?” asked Griffin.

“At Jack’s and my place,” she said.

“How many people are we talking about?” he said.

“I don’t know. Just NA people,” she said. “People our age. Not the meth ladies from Grafton or anything.”

I laughed. “Still...”

“I think it’s fine,” said Griffin.

“You do?” I said.

He shrugged. “Sure. As long as it’s small and contained and you’re not strung out on cocaine.”

“But I thought that you would think it was a really bad idea.”

“Well, I don’t,” he said.

Stacey clapped her hands together. “Awesome. This is going to be so cool, you’ll see. Jack and I are going to the Morgantown NA meeting next week, and we’ll invite all our friends from there.”

“This is really going to happen? I haven’t found a good dress yet.”

“Try on the blue one,” said Griffin.

“The blue one?” I ducked back into the dressing room to look through the dresses that were hanging up there. There
was
a blue one. I took it off the hanger. “Okay, I’ll try it.”

It was periwinkle blue, with sparkles. It was simple, but nice. It had thin straps, and it hit about mid thigh. The color looked nice with my skin. I pushed my way out of the dressing room.

“How’d you know?” I asked him.

He looked me up and down.

“Seriously, Griffin, do you have fashion talents that I don’t know about?”

He shrugged. “I noticed that you look good in blue. And, I, uh, I like that dress.” He was still taking me in.

As his gaze swept my body, I felt a little tingle every place his look settled. I drew in a breath.

“You should buy it,” he said.

I nodded. “I think I will.” And then I stood there gaping at him like an idiot until Stacey came out of the dressing room to gush over the dress too.

Thanks to Stacey, being sober wasn’t boring in the slightest. I spent most of my time with her and Jack. Griffin seemed to like them too. At least he didn’t complain. I didn’t go out trying to score cocaine. I didn’t have crazy, wild parties. I went to bed at a decent hour, and I got up with plenty of sleep. I went to class. I ate lunch with Stacey and Jack at school. I came home and did class work. Sometimes, we went to their place for dinner or to hang out. Sometimes, I asked them to come to my apartment.

My party was scheduled for the end of spring break, which was when I’d have been sober for a month.

I could hardly believe so much time had passed. It had gone quickly, and it had been easy.

A lot of that was because of Stacey.

She was my best friend. If I was honest, I hadn’t had a best friend since elementary school. I didn’t know how it happened exactly, but I’d somehow missed out on having friends that were girls. I remembered that my last best friend had been named Jackie. We’d been thirteen when Jackie stopped speaking to me.

It was over a boy.

She liked this guy. I don’t even remember his name. But he was the heartthrob of our class. Everyone liked him. The way I saw it, it wasn’t like she had any kind of dibs on him.

But she still got mad when I made out with him.

I don’t even know why I did it. I guess it seemed like it would be cool.

But whoever that guy’s name was had only made out with me because I let him feel me up. It didn’t go anywhere. I kind of thought it would. I always thought guys were going to be more interested in me than they were.

I’m not saying that I used sex to try to get the attention of guys.

Well. Maybe I am. I was pretty young when I lost my virginity, and the guy I did it with—Aaron—was a few years older than me. He didn’t care that I was fourteen, though. He was a senior in high school. I was a freshman. It wasn’t like he was taking advantage of me. I knew what I was doing. But it was kind of the same thing.

I gave it up.

And then he promptly lost interest.

It wasn’t always like that. I did have several boyfriends in high school and, of course, there was Eric in college. So not all the guys were jerks who were just after one thing. Some of them were really nice guys. (Of course, I wasn’t always nice back. I had some issues in high school.) But there were enough of them only interested in sex that I should have learned my lesson. I should have realized that having sex with a guy was not the way to make him like me.

But I guess the problem was that it did kind of make them like me. Not always for a very long time. But for at least a few minutes, sometimes a few weeks if it took a while for them to get bored. When they were having sex with me, they weren’t paying attention to anything except me. That was a cool feeling. I liked that feeling. So, I guess I had sex with a lot of guys.

I sort of got a reputation.

And for some reason, I didn’t have a lot of friends that were girls after that. They all thought I’d steal their boyfriends, or at least make out with them.

The sad thing was, they were probably right.

When Stacey talked to me about doing everything in her power to get noticed, I identified. I hadn’t pierced my tongue. I’d spread my legs. You couldn’t see what effect that had on me on the outside, not like Stacey’s piercings. But...all in all... I thought piercings might have been a tad healthier than what I’d done.

I was glad to have her around. She was awesome, and I felt better than I had in a long time. Almost... normal. Which is weird, because here we were, two chicks who’d both done scads of cocaine and spent our adolescence doing whatever we could to get people to pay attention to us. We were the opposite of normal.

Stacey constantly teased me about Griffin. She said that there were definite sparks between us, that the air was thick with tension when we were close. She said this in front of Griffin, because he was always there. But occasionally, when we were all hanging out in her house, she and I would manage to get one room away from the guys. Close enough that Griffin could hear me scream if something bad happened, but far enough that I could talk without him hearing.

And that was the only time I could talk about how I felt about him. I didn’t know what it was. It might not have been anything. Maybe it was just the fact that he was swoon-worthy and that he’d saved my life a few times. (I couldn’t tell Stacey that, of course.)

But I thought it might be something big. I thought I might really like him.

And I didn’t know what to do. “I don’t want to screw it up. Because, you know, in the past I’ve gotten physical really quickly.”

“There’s nothing wrong with getting physical,” said Stacey. “Nothing at all.” She shrugged. “But it
is
cooler when you do it with someone you love.”

“And you love Jack?”

“Totally.”

“And you always loved him? Even before you had sex?”

“Well, maybe not before we did it the first time,” she said. She grabbed my hands. “Look, it feels different with Griffin because it
is
different. When it’s a big deal, you know. I knew with Jack. You know now.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “But I don’t know anything. All I know is that Griffin is really attractive, and that when I look at him, I feel a little weak all over. And that I’m really glad he has to be around me all the time.”

“So, there you go,” she said. “That means something.”

I pulled my hands away from hers and ran them through my hair. “Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. We don’t even really know each other, Griffin and me. I don’t know anything about his family or his past. I don’t even know what year he graduated from high school.”

“You’re around him all the time. Ask him.”

“No, I can’t. It never feels like the right place or time to ask him those things. And besides, I’m always busy with school work.”

She grinned. “But it’s spring break next week. No school work.”

I raised my eyebrows. “What college are you going to? I’ve got two projects to work on over spring break.”

“So get them done now, and you and Griffin can go do something romantic.”

“Like he’s going to go for that,” I said. “He’s completely against anything happening between us because he says it’s unprofessional.”

“And sleeping on your couch isn’t unprofessional?” Stacey rolled her eyes. “He’s making up excuses. The boy has it bad for you.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“He calls you doll.”

“That’s just his New Jersey slang thing. He calls all girls that.”

“He doesn’t call
me
that. He likes you.”

I didn’t know if he did. He’d made that little speech about me, about what kind of girl he thought I was and why he wanted to keep me alive. But that didn’t mean he had romantic feelings for me. Why would he? “He doesn’t have a reason to ‘have it bad’ for me. It’s not like something happened one night, our eyes met, and fireworks were going off in the distance.”

“Do
you
have a reason for liking him?” said Stacey.

“Well...” I thought about it. “I guess not.”

“That’s not how love works,” said Stacey. “It’s not back and forth like in romance novels. It’s not bursting in at the last minute, stopping someone before they get to the altar. It’s not a slow burn. It’s an explosion. You meet someone. You talk. You feel something. Or you don’t. It’s simple.”

I groaned. “If it’s so simple, then why has
nothing
happened between us?”

“You guys did kiss that one time.”

“Yeah, and then he rejected me, and I went and got more drugs. It was my hitting bottom moment. Not romantic at all.” I sighed. “I thought that when a guy liked you, you didn’t have to chase him everywhere. I saw that episode of
Sex and the City
, ‘He’s Just Not That Into You.’ If a guy’s playing hard to get, it means he doesn’t want to be gotten.”

“That’s a television show, not real life,” said Stacey. “And besides—”

“What are you girls talking about in here?” Griffin’s head appeared in the doorway. He was grinning, and he looked
so
good.

“Nothing,” I said, standing up. When Griffin came to find us, it meant girl talk was over.

We joined Griffin and Jack in the kitchen, where the two of them were eating vegan cheesecake. It was actually really good, even though Stacey had made it from tofu. We sat down at the table.

“How many pieces of that have you had?” said Stacey.

Jack shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Because,” she said, “I did make it, and I kind of wanted there to be some left for me tomorrow.”

“Sorry,” said Griffin. He set his fork down. There was half a piece of cheesecake on his plate. “You can have the rest of this piece.”

“Oh, I wasn’t talking to you, Griffin,” said Stacey. “I meant Jack.” She narrowed her eyes at him.

He held up his hands in surrender. “Geez. I’m sorry.”

“Good,” she said. “As long as you’re remorseful.” She smoothed a flyaway piece of crimson hair. “So, Leigh and I were just talking about what she and Griffin were going to do over spring break.”

Griffin looked confused. “We’re doing something?”

I didn’t know where she was going with this, but I imagined it had something to do with the idea that Griffin and I needed to do something romantic.

“Yeah,” said Stacey. “Don’t you think it would be neat to do something together, just the two of you?”

Griffin ate a bite of cheesecake. “Look, Stacey, I don’t know how to tell you this, but this matchmaking thing you’re trying to pull off between me and Leigh? It’s not going to happen.”

I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. The air went out of me.