Without Scars (19 page)

“Well, your mom just sent me a text. She didn’t want to interrupt you. She said she’s watching a live stream of the event. Did you know
How to Fuck up a Friendship
was mentioned in
Entertainment Weekly
’s ‘The Must List’ during premiere week? She says this is exactly how she felt when she put your first Student of the Week certificate on the fridge. She also said she’s so proud of you.” Her face lit up. “I am, too.”

“Means a lot. There’s no one else I wanted here with me.” I tilted her head back and kissed her. “I love you, Nik.”

Shit.

It had slipped out, but her expression was so priceless I wanted to say it again. Right now.

“You love me?”

“I love you,” I said with more confidence than I had the first time.

“I’ve been working myself up to say it. Then it felt like maybe it was too soon. And I didn’t know what you were gonna say…but I wanted to say it so badly.”

“Well, now you know. And I do…like crazy.”

“Good. I like
crazy.
I like it a lot.” Nikki hugged me. Then she whispered apologies as she squeezed past people already seated in the row.

I didn’t talk much during the first half of the program, but then one of the other panelists directed a question my way about budgeting and cost-cutting methods during the first season of
How to Fuck up a Friendship
. I nailed it, aside from having to restrain my laughter every time I looked at Nikki and she gave me a wide-eyed, thumbs-up look.

When the panel ended we attended a small reception before going to the next event at another college. Then we headed back to our hotel to get ready for dinner with my friends from college. I wore a navy button-down with gray pants, and Nikki had on a short black dress with a diamond-shaped cutout in the back. I slipped a few pills under my tongue while she was buckling her sandals. I didn’t want her to see. Sometimes when I took them in front of her I saw her tense up or roll her eyes. She kept quiet, even though we both knew the issue was bothering her. Elliott’s pills had brought me close to my high of the very first days of use. It was a stable, ten-hour euphoric rush. I could exist on cloud nine an entire day without a low. I had woken up every day this week at six, gone to the gym, given myself a boost around ten or eleven, powered through scripts the entire day—sometimes I remembered to eat—and then hung out with my girl at night. It was going to be hard to give this up.

The front desk rang to say our cab was outside, and Nikki and I hurried down to the lobby. I ran my hand along her back as she ducked inside the car, and she grimaced. “You okay, babe?” I asked.

“Funny story, actually,” she said, turning to me with an amused expression. “No one tells you how dangerous study carrels are.” We’d gotten carried away and had a quickie in the library before the workshop at the University of San Jose. Things had gotten a little rough. “It really should be printed in university brochures, for our protection. It’s a real problem.”

I kissed the nape of her neck when I climbed in after her. “You should get a massage before we leave tomorrow.”

“Well, if you can’t get sex related injuries with your best friend…” She trailed off when our cab driver cleared his throat, and we both failed at holding our laughter in.

The drugs had my head buzzy, and I was ready to take her clothes off. I tapped my fingers up her shin to her knee, smiled, and whispered, “I’m so sorry.” Nikki smashed a grin to my shoulder.

Her legs opened. My fingers moved inward in circles—teasing, slow. “No, you’re not…” she whispered into my sleeve, a tiny crack in her voice. She inhaled deeply twice, her thigh trembled, and the driver’s eyes flicked up to the rearview. Nikki ignored him, cupped the back of my neck, and angled her lips up to mine.

It was hard to describe what happened to me when she took me in like this. It wasn’t a sense of being
more
alive but an acute awareness of her. Knowing the exact shade of brown in her eyes. The spot on her lip she always bit. The C-shaped scar on the tip of her nose. And the longer I stared the more everything outside of us shattered into a million insignificant pieces, until it was just her and me and a soundless world that stopped rotating.

“You know what I regret? I should’ve told you I wanted to be with you the night of the premiere party. I was just as crazy about you then. We could’ve been like this forever ago,” I said.

“Grabby?”

“Yup. Could’ve been swinging each other’s dicks.”

“You’re
so
romantic. Why were you
ever
single?” She snorted in amusement.

“Waiting on you…”

“Oh, you’re
good
.” She smiled, but then her eyes glimmered with tenderness, and she drew her thumb along my jaw. “Was it worth the wait, though?”

“Every agonizing second. I would’ve waited longer if it still meant being with you in the end. I hope, no matter what, you and I are inevitable.”

“Oh, you’re
really
good. And I love you, Charlie. I love you. I love you. I love you. I never said it back today,” she whispered against my neck. “But I do. I really do.”

There wasn’t a whole lot to do in the immediate area around Leeward, but there was a downtown lined with restaurants, where students and Northern California’s elite warred over reservations, and a few bars that would have been dive-y anywhere else. “Damn,” I whispered when Nikki got out of the cab at Benihana. Her dress swung up to the top of her thighs, and I got a quick shot of cheeks.

“I was wondering when I’d get my ‘damn’ for today. Even though you said it to my butt,” she teased as I paid the driver. I stopped her before we went inside, linked our hands behind her back and pinned her against the exterior wall under a light as gold as white wine. We got a disapproving look from an older couple walking by. “
Baby,
we’re
outside
,” Nikki whispered.

“I just wanted you to myself for a few more minutes.”

Her eyes sparkled with a wicked glow. Nikki ran her tongue over both her lips. “Yeah, right. You were probably thinking about boning me against this wall,” she said.

I frowned. “Who the fuck says
boning?
” Wrestling her hands out of mine, she wrapped an arm around my neck. The kiss that followed was soft, but she gathered the front of my shirt in a fist.

We somehow managed to calm ourselves down enough to walk inside. Eventually. “Remind me again…Joel co-owns a winery, right? But by day, he’s a…what?” Nikki asked.

“Math teacher and one of my best friends from college.”

“Okay…and Devin, who you met during orientation, is a Department of Defense contractor now. Mark is an anchor at a local ABC station. So that leaves Erin…the ex.”

“Works in media.” I laughed. “And nothing you need to worry about. She just popped out a really cute baby with
Jerron, her husband
.”

“Who said I was worried…” Nikki curled her arms around my waist possessively, and the hostess led us to the table. I hadn’t seen any of my old friends since graduation three years ago, but the way we greeted each other, it was as if no time had passed. I was happy for that. Glad that a lot of things from back then were water under the bridge now.

After a quick round of introductions of everyone’s significant others, Devin shook his head at me, exasperated, holding up his phone. “Dude, when are you casting my role? How come Erin gets a character?”

“You guys were watching
How to Fuck up a Friendship
just now?” I said, pulling out Nikki’s chair.

“Yeah. Devin’s never seen it,” Erin said. “And you’re kinda late. We had to kill time.”

“Fuck Devin. He doesn’t even watch. He doesn’t deserve a character,” Joel joked. “I watch, so if anyone—”

“The Ari character isn’t
really
Erin. She’s just—”

“Chuck’s rebound. I know. But why did you break Chuck and Sami up, anyway? They just got together,” Erin said. She rolled her eyes in pretend anger.

“That is
exactly
what I told him,” Nikki chimed in, rubbing the back of my neck.

Shit. They were all glaring at me, waiting for an explanation. “He’s afraid to be too happy with the past hanging over his head,” I said.

“Does he even like Sami?” Nikki asked.

“What?” I frowned. “He loves her.”

“No, Charlie. I get that. But does he
like
her? Because here’s what I don’t get. He had this amazing woman in his life, and instead of taking a chance with her, he tortured himself and watched from afar. It’s like he’s drawn to her but doesn’t want to be. He blames her for him wanting her. And they’re so mean to each other. It feels so toxic sometimes. Then Chuck turns himself into the bad guy by breaking up her relationship, like he needs to eventually have a reason for her to hate him. Their
current
situation was
fine.
” She was right. Chuck and Sami were doing well the last few episodes. They were having sex, and they were sleeping in the same bed every night. Her ex had moved on. But then Chuck told Sami out of the blue what he’d done to her previous relationship, and Nikki had been upset about it since. In fact, the episode had probably gotten the most thumbs-down of any episode. “If he likes her, why can’t he just love her without this turmoil?” I stared blankly at her, but she had expected this underwhelmed reaction, so she shot me a defiant, displeased look back.

“It’s ending this season, right? They end up together, right? If not, that’s so damn evil.” Erin almost looked feral. They were my first beta readers, so they all knew I’d taken pieces of our college years, but I had no idea any of them was really invested in
How to Fuck up a Friendship
after all this time
.
I felt like I was under a microscope, and I really didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

The hibachi chef walked up right then, relieving me from the interrogation, and gave the standard instruction on how dinner operated here. He performed tricks with cooking utensils, like creating a volcano of onion rings, and then flicked pieces of food at the guys for us to catch in our mouths.

Joel kept ordering shots, so we were drunk (most of us) by the time the theatrics were over; our table was probably the loudest one in here. “Can you believe Kev the bartender still remembered us when we got here tonight? Probably because we started the night of everyone’s twenty-first in this place,” he said to me.

“Oh shit. We actually got kicked out during Devin’s. His lightweight ass couldn’t handle the sake bombs,” Mark joked.

“Okay, I’ll take that.” Devin chuckled and tossed a balled up napkin at him. “But someone else had it worse, though. I remember having to go back to campus in a cab to drop someone off because they were too drunk to keep going. A bunch of us went out, anyway. Had to be Erin.”

I clenched my teeth as a memory I didn’t want to revisit pinged. “I think I liked it better when we partied on campus,” I said.

“Wait. Erin had the drunkest party? Oh really?” Nikki giggled and turned to me. “Oh God. Babe, did you stay with her or go out that night? I bet you went out, didn’t you? I want to hear about it.” The old memories finally rippled across everyone’s faces, and some of the energy at the table died. “Oh…I…uh,” Nikki stammered as she realized she’d crossed into weird conversation territory.

“I wasn’t there…” I explained.

“He wasn’t able to make it…” Erin said, a nervous smile on her face for a moment. She glanced at me with a look that was simultaneously forgiving and apologetic. She squeezed Jerron’s arm. “We should check in with the sitter. Whitaker gets up around this time like clockwork. Hey, Samira Morris…Harrison has a baby, too, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, taking the out she’d thrown me, “Lux Charlotte.”

“Oh, she’s Lux now?” Nikki teased. “He calls her Booger.”

“I can’t believe she got Fratty Pat Harrison to settle down. They were always cute together, though. I bet Lux is adorable,” Erin continued. I nodded and passed my phone to her so she could see pictures. The conversation shifted and stayed light after Joel announced that he and his girlfriend had a No Babies Ever pact going. But as I spied my girlfriend strangling her napkin on her lap through the rest of dinner, I knew she felt like she’d done something wrong.

We declined the invitation to go barhopping in San Francisco because our flight was so early the next morning, and took a cab back to Leeward so Nikki could see what it looked like at night. She also wanted to get some souvenirs before the campus bookstore closed. I told her to take her time inside and that I’d be right back.

“You’re gonna go buy pills, aren’t you?” she asked, frozen in front of the store. “You’ve been watching your phone a lot today…”

“Yeah…”

“From a student? A drug dealer? Who?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Nik.”

“I want to come with you.”

“No. Absolutely not,” I said, backing away from her. “I love you, baby. I won’t be gone more than an hour.”

The look of defeat on her face almost killed me. “Okay, an hour.”