Tasting, Finding, Keeping: The Story of Never (13 page)

“Start from the beginning,” Ty says with a Marlboro hanging out of the corner of his mouth and a box of takeout in his hands. I'm sitting across from him at this tiny, little bistro set that's so rusty I can't even tell what it might've looked like before. Ty says it came with the apartment and that it was this way when he moved in. He says it was the only thing he didn't throw away when he cleaned. “I mean the beginning-beginning. Start when you were born.”

“You really want to go back that far?” I ask with a sigh. Ty is right. This curry is
amazing
. It tastes like a hundred countries and a thousand plants and deserts and bazaars and all sorts of other strange, wonderful things. He's also right about the meat. I don't know what it is, and I don't want to know. It better not be cat. I take a sip of my beer and grab the cigarette from Ty's mouth. “Fine, but first, I want to know what your chance is. This is my last one, so if I'm going to trade it for yours, I want to know what I'm getting.”

“You're getting a fucked up mess,” Ty says as he twirls his plastic fork around in his food.

“Good, then it's an even trade.” Ty smiles and we both turn our heads as a couple police cars flash past, brightening up the darkness on this side of the city for just a moment before they disappear. From here, Ty and I have a view of all the disturbing nightlife that calls this place home. I see hookers on the corner and drug dealers in the alleys, but above it all, I see the city stretching away, rising and falling, old buildings mixing with new. It's pretty if you tilt your head to the side and squint. It's all about perspective. “But what's it about? How do I know I can trust you with mine?”

“I meant to tell you, before, about the phone, that I've never left a picture on it that long.”

“You're changing the subject,” I tell him as I lean back and let the cool breeze tease along my skin. Soon, it's going to be unbearably cold out here, but for now, it's just right.

“Even after you called me a whore, I left it up. I've left it up this whole time.”

“Why?”

“I don't know.”

More silence.

“I was born approximately twenty-one years ago in a dingy, little hospital in some Midwest dump.” Ty grins and steals the cigarette back from me. “My mother was young, eighteen I think. She had my sister, Beth, when she was sixteen.” I raise my hand up for him to see and he presses his palm against it, rings and all. My heart flutters strangely and for a moment, I can't breath. I curl my fingers around his and manually open my chest for air. It isn't easy. I point to my thumb first and then to each subsequent finger. “Beth, me, Jade, Zella, India.” I pause and hold up my other hand. Ty takes this, too. I don't know why he keeps touching me like this, but I might have to ask him to stop. It's too confusing, too … I don't even know. Just too. Too. Too. Too. “Lettie, Lorri,” I finish as I squeeze his hand with mine. When I'm finished, we both pull away at the same moment and focus our eyes on the parking lot. There's a couple with a baby down there, trying to figure out how to get a car seat into the back of their dinky, little sedan.

“Seven girls, five fathers.” Ty doesn't judge me which is nice. He just sits there and listens, sipping his beer and smoking his cigarette. I love the way the wind plays with his hair, teases his face with it and curls it gently with its fingers. It's poetic somehow. “My mom got married to my dad when she was pregnant with Beth. Then they had me and then Jade and then Zella.” I sigh. “But my mom cheated. A lot. Constantly.” I hold out my hands, and I notice that they're shaking again. I grab my beer and hold it so that I have something to do with at least one of them. That way, maybe Ty won't notice. “I think my therapist was dead wrong about everything,” I tell Ty with a small smile. “Maybe because I didn't tell her the whole story?”

“Or maybe therapists just suck?” Ty adds. I laugh, but it sounds hollow and empty. Recanting this story is not the easiest thing for me, but it's part of the process, part of this whole healing binge that Ty has just started me on, this path through thorns and rocks and swamps, this path that isn't easy but that has to be traveled. If not, I doubt I'll make it long enough to get my degree.

“I have 'mommy' issues, Ty. If there's anything that's wrong with me, that's it.” I close my eyes and try to remember what it was like to be at home, with Mom hating Dad and Dad despising Mom and all of us in the middle of something we didn't understand. My mind paints me a nice picture, depicts the events and the scenes and the faces the way they should be, but I know it's not real. I don't
really
remember the way it all went down. “Jade was not my father's daughter, not biologically, but he loved her anyway.” I pause and a bit of something comes into my head.
Custody.
Was that what it all boiled down to? Is that why my father died? I swallow hard and Ty can tell that's something's wrong.

“Are you okay, Never.”

Tears prick my eyes.

“I can't do this,” I say and Ty leans over, puts his hand on my knee and just waits. That's the one plus side of hanging out with other tortured souls. They know when to press, when to stay quiet, and when to stop. Usually.

“You can,” Ty whispers, but I've kept my past locked away for so long that opening it up has opened me up. It's burst out before I was completely ready and torn me to shreds. I drop my beer to the pavement of the patio where it crashes into a million pieces, just like me. I'm breaking, cracking, splitting. I had thought, at first, that Ty's voice could slither into my psyche and rip me apart, but now that he's sitting there across from me and speaking so softly that I can barely hear him, I know that that isn't true, not entirely. He has that ability, sure. He has it because I'm attracted to him, like there's this magnetic force between us pulling us together and pushing us apart. He has it because I'm so sure that he could break me if he wanted to. That's the part I was right about. What I was wrong about was Rick. Rick could not have glued me together like I'd imagined. He couldn't have because his pull wasn't strong enough, not like Ty's. Ty's. Ty McCabe's.

I gasp like I'm coming up for air, and suddenly, I'm just sitting there with these big, fat tears rolling down my face. I think my nose is running, too, and I'm hiccuping, finding it hard to stop my hands from shaking so bad that they hurt.

“Never,” Ty says as he pulls me off my chair and onto his lap. He wraps his arms around me and holds me while I cry. And cry. And cry.

I cry into Ty's perfect shoulder and breathe in the scent of tobacco on his shirt. I run my fingers through his soft, soft hair, and I wait for the feelings to subside, to die down, to relax into me instead of take over me. At first it doesn't seem as if they're going to. Normally, in this situation, I would look for someone to have sex with, but I know I can't do that anymore. If I want to deal with my past instead of just bury it, I have to let shit sit with me for awhile.

“Tell me about Noah,” Ty says and I laugh through my tears. “That's better,” he says as I sit back and he runs his thumb under my swollen eyelids. “That's the sound I want to hear.”

“Scoping out the competition?”

“There is no competition,” Ty says and the words, I think, are fiercer than he meant them to be.
What the hell?
Ty smiles and moves on as if he hadn't said that. “So. Noah Scott. Was he bigger than me?”

“Ty,” I say, but it's funny enough that I laugh a little bit, that I pull back from my fears enough that I can breathe, that I can speak without hiccuping. “I don't remember,” I tell him honestly. “What I do remember is that the first boy I ever loved had blue eyes and blonde hair. He had a perfect smile and a soft touch. He's studying business now,” I add as an afterthought. I can look at Noah online, spy at him though rose colored glasses, see what he wants me to see, but I can't really know what's going on with him, if he missed me after I left, how he felt when he woke up alone and found my note. “We started dating freshman year of high school,” I tell Ty, wondering vaguely what he was like in school. If we'd found each other then, would we have suffered like this? Did we need all of this pain and hurt to make us who we are or would we have fallen together like a fairytale couple, gotten married, had kids? “We dated up until I left. He used to write me poems.” Ty smiles.

“Is that why you hated it when I tried to quote you poetry?”

“Noah always had his own words. I guess I can't stop comparing everyone I meet to him.”

“Why not just call him?” Ty asks as if the solution is that simple, as if I can just pick up a phone and call a boy I haven't seen in five years.

“That didn't go over so well with Beth,” I say. I have over a hundred missed calls on my phone now. I looked when I was in the bathroom earlier. I've thrown my sister a line, and it's only a matter of time until she finds me. “My last name isn't Ross by the way.” I pause. “Well, it is now, legally. I was born Never Regali.”

“Ah,” Ty says, still wrapped around me, chin resting on my shoulder. This is a rare thing for me, snuggling a guy like this. I tell this to Ty.

“I haven't had anyone hold me since Noah.”

“Was he your first?” Ty asks and, determined to tell him the truth, I answer honestly.

“Yes.”

“Why did you leave?” Ty asks, digging straight down through all the bullshit to the root of the problem, to the core of my issues and my pain, to the seed that started it all.

“You saw the video,” I tell Ty. “You heard her announce her engagement?” He nods. “Well,” I say as I wait for Ty to light a cigarette. It's a Djarum Black this time, and without hesitation, I pluck it from his fingers. Smoke kills, but secrets kill faster, and if I'm going to say this aloud, for the third time in my life, I'm going to need it. “The man she was planning on marrying was the one who killed my father.”

Ty doesn't ask me to explain anymore after that, but I do anyway. I tell him how my father was murdered, how he was strangled from behind for eight long minutes. Six minutes where I sat and did nothing, just watched as the man that loved me, that I loved back, died with his eyes glassy and his face purple, choking on vomit and bile. I've blocked a lot of it out, fortunately, or I might not just be a sex addict. I might be a whole lot worse. I've forgotten the gurgling sounds that he made as he died, and the way his body slumped to the floor. I forgot the long hours where I sat there, still as a statue with my arms wrapped around my knees.

What I didn't forget was my mother's face when I told her what happened, when she walked in with Beth and Jade and Zella and found me sitting there. I remember how dry her face was, how she didn't cry at Dad's funeral, how she called me a liar.

“He was Jade's biological father, you know,” I tell Ty whose eyes are focused on the floor but whose ears are all mine. “He disappeared for awhile after that, but when he came back into town, my mom started dating him again behind my back. All my sisters knew when she got engaged; she told them all, but she didn't tell me, Ty.”

“So you found out at the performance?”

“I confronted her,” I continue. I bet my eyes are glassy now, glazed over with old memories. Now that I've started them, they won't stop. If Ty taped my mouth and chained me up, my brain would run through them again and again, never stopping until someone was there to hear. Someone has to hear, and I couldn't be happier that that person is Ty McCabe. “I told her again what I'd told her before, that he'd killed my dad.” I shake my head here because this is the hardest part to tell, the part where my sisters gang up on me, where they belittle me and side with my mother. This is the part where Beth slaps me,
hard
, cracks me right across the face because she doesn't want to hear me say anymore. This is the part where a piece of me dies, where I know they all care far more about themselves then they do about me. “They didn't believe me. Jade, especially, was angry.”

Her eyes flash from hazel to black, filled with a rage that I,
alone, can't possibly be responsible for. No single person could be responsible for that much hate, but it can be targeted at one person and that person is me.

“I hate you, Never,” she hisses at me. “From the bottom of my heart, I hate every last inch of you.”

I blink a couple of times to regain focus and grab Ty by the chin. His dark eyes are sympathetic, understanding. One day, he'll give me his story. I just have to be willing to wait for it.

“They said their worst, did their worst, and I ran out on them. I went to Noah knowing that it was the last I'd ever see of him. I gave him the best performance I could give, danced for him in a way I could never have danced for anyone else. We slept together and I snuck out before dawn. I left and I never went back.”

“Wow,” Ty says, and he tries to smile to lighten things up. “That's quite a story.”

“Isn't it?” I ask as I inhale and watch a pair of teenage boys start a fight on the street corner. Now that it's out there, now that I've said it, made into words the thoughts that have been swimming in my head all this time, I feel healed, just a little. This is only the beginning, I know that now, but it's a good beginning, a start to something beautiful. “Winter break's coming up, Ty. I think I should go out there. I think I have to see them.”

“I think that you're right,” he tells me as I stand and stretch. Ty runs his hands down my sides and pauses when he catches me looking at him. “The more I learn about you, the more I want to know.” I don't know how to respond to that; I'm not prepared for it. I smile at Ty and grab his hands, pull him to his feet, and put my forehead in the crook of his neck.

“You promised me zombies,” I tell him as he lifts my head up and grins.

“I did, didn't I?” Ty asks and I can tell he feels what I'm feeling, like there's this invisible string wrapped around the two of us that wasn't there before.

“Show me,” I say and he does. We sit together on his couch and we drink and we eat and we walk, and I know that we care about each other because we
don't
have sex. Later, I fall asleep and wake up to Ty carrying me. He puts me in his bed, lays me down gentle, and steps back. He doesn't try to touch me or sleep me with, and he certainly doesn't kick me out.
I'm the first girl in his bed,
I think as I curl into a ball and wrap the blankets around my shoulders. As strange as it sounds, it's comforting and my heart lulls me to sleep with a gentle, peaceful lullaby.

I wake up early the next day, look at the clock and get dressed for class, putting on my yellow SOG tee and not caring what anyone thinks about it. When I head into the living room, I see Ty lying shirtless on his back on the couch, chest rising and falling with every breath. I move over to him and stare down at his face. His sexy lips are curved in a meaningless frown, and his eyelids are fluttering like butterflies. I brush Ty's hair from his forehead, plant a kiss on his cheek, and disappear out the front door. In his sleep, he smiles.