Without Scars (20 page)

I met the dealer whom the Miami City alum knew at a coffee shop in a nearby city. We didn’t even make any small talk. Nothing beyond a nod. He produced the bottle of pills as soon as he sat down and was a ghost once the cash was counted.

Patches of the bottle’s original label were still visible. A prescription for something with an L and an X. How did I even know that all of this was actually what I wanted? This could’ve been reckless drug dealer chemistry. There wasn’t a Yelp for pushers. Fuck. I’d definitely upped the sleaze factor. Shame and guilt stiffened my muscles as I left the coffee shop.

Nikki was sitting on the edge of the fountain outside of the bookstore when I got back to the campus, and she patted the spot next to her. She hugged me tightly and inhaled against my shirt. “Let me see it…” she said. I nervously passed the bottle to her, and she held it tightly for a second but stayed silent. I’d been intuitive enough to take some out of the bottle and put them in my pockets before getting here.

“Just a few more weeks—”

“How many more
few weeks
, Charlie?”

“Not many,” I mumbled. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her shake her head.

She pulled her purchases out of a plastic bag. “I spent more than two hundred dollars in there,” she said. Her voice was shaking but her mood was lightening up. “I saw a cute shirt for dance rehearsal, and then there were baby clothes for Lux.
Future Leeward Student
t-shirt? How could I pass that up? Leggings for me with ‘Leeward’ going down the sides, too.”

“Nice. So, Erin sent me a text. She really likes you. Said I hope I know how lucky I am.”

“I really like her, too. I kind of felt like I made everyone uncomfortable, though.”

“Wasn’t you. There’s a story.” I sighed. “Erin and I had a really bad breakup a few weeks before her birthday my last year here. I slept with someone else after a major argument. I cheated on her. We weren’t even speaking by her birthday. I wasn’t talking to any of the people who were at Benihana tonight, anymore. I wasn’t really on good terms with them by graduation. We’ve only recently rekindled our friendship within the last year or so.”

Nikki’s face slowly wrinkled into concern. “Why?”

“My writing was getting rejected a lot at the time. It was hard but I still wanted it, you know?
The dream
. So, I figured it was time to learn my craft, learn trends, and get better. My mom’s friend from law school practices entertainment law, and she got me an internship with Richard Mauser. He’s an agent who sells scripts and manuscripts to movie studios. He’s a juggernaut, with a lot of box office wins and hit TV shows under his belt. I interned for him the summer between freshman and sophomore years in L.A. During sophomore year, I formally asked him to be my mentor. During senior year, I worked two jobs on campus to earn money just to be able to fly down and be his weekend assistant, too, Thursday to Sunday. I’d crash with a friend of my parents and make the forty-minute commute to Mauser’s house or his West Hollywood office.

“I never brought up
How to Fuck up a Friendship.
I kept my mouth shut and helped him get through his slush pile of manuscripts. I asked a lot of questions about the industry. He let me sit in on a few meetings with the authors he represented, and I talked to them, too. He made me feel like I was a part of it. And maybe he boosted me up because he knew how badly I wanted it, and he saw a way to keep me around as his assistant. Because I was willing to do anything—pick up his grandkids and drive them to Orange County and babysit them for the day, take his clothes to the dry cleaners, and run errands in the middle of the night, if he needed it. Anything.

“I was working up the nerve to ask him to take a look at
How to Fuck up a Friendship
. I was going to do a formal submission with a query letter and everything. I was planning to ask him first, though. I guess in my anxiety over the whole thing, I left the manuscript at the intern desk, and someone else included it with the manuscript submissions. One day he called me into his office, and there it was. Except things didn’t go well. Mauser just laughed. He was so angry. I don’t know if he thought I was using him to get ahead or what, but he trashed it. He was my mentor and he just…destroyed it, in the worst way. It wasn’t constructive at all. He made it personal. He finished by saying I needed to remember
my place
. And that I was
just
a favor…
”

My voice shook and I got silent. Nikki squeezed my hand. “Tell me,” she urged. The memory was grating my psyche, and every part of me felt raw and ready to bleed.

“It’s not that I thought I deserved recognition, Nik. I just wanted the chance. Being a writer is the only thing I’ve ever wanted in the whole world, but I had to face it. I wasn’t good enough, especially if it was coming from a guy who knew the industry, who had best-selling authors walking through his office. Regardless of his feelings about me trying something underhanded, if my work had been good he would’ve told me so.
I felt like a failure. And failing at
this
was different. So I thought I would never
be
good enough. I knew right then I couldn’t write anymore, and I stopped. There was too much pain associated with it. But getting to the point where you decide to give up on your dream is worst than any rejection; it was a death itself. I didn’t know who I was without it. The loss ripped me open. It tore my soul out.

“I was embarrassed because Devin, Mark, Erin, and Joel had been rooting for me. They were all so sure that this was going to be my big break. After that, I shut down and got distant. Cut my friends out. I lashed out a lot. Said a lot of things I wish I hadn’t to them. Erin, especially. She saw me go into that girl’s room that night. I was probably the cruelest to Erin. But it was all just to get them to stay away from me. I didn’t want them to see me being such a fucking loser, you know? Samira was the only person who managed to get through to me and pull me out of it, but by then everyone else was done with me. It took me a really long time to pick up
How to Fuck up a Friendship
again
.
I saw everything that was so fucking shitty about it. Mauser was all over it.
I know it seems stupid that I would let something like this debilitate me—” I cut myself off when Nikki shook her head. Her palms landed on my cheeks, and there was comforting reassurance in her eyes.

“It doesn’t seem stupid. At all. Look at how much worse I made things when I lost SCB. It was much easier to slide into the spiral when it was gone. I get it. We’re people who
live
our art. So it’s possible for it to kill us, too…”

“I just have all these worries, Nik. Did I get lucky? Did Hillington see my skill or a popular show they could capitalize on? Am I good enough now? I don’t know the answers and that scares me more than anything.”

Chapter Eleven

Nikki

“You want it…” Charlie said, his smile spreading slowly above me.

I nodded. “I do.” His legs tensed on either side of my shoulders. With my head nearly hanging off the bed, I reached up and curled my fingers into the waist of his jeans. My thumb brushed over the button.

“…Like this?” he continued.

“Yes,” I said. Charlie grinned devilishly. The thing I loved most about our sex life was that we hadn’t awakened any beasts in each other (this beast was awakened when I bought my first vibrator at sixteen); we’d only acknowledged what was already there. Now we were just feeding it. I’d always thought people took their luck for granted when they landed someone who was really sexually compatible with them. I wanted to do
everything
with him. Enter: upside down blowjob—there were benefits to being Generation Porn.

Charlie already saw galaxies when he was in my mouth. But I hoped this move would become so legendary that he’d jerk off to this
very
moment whenever we weren’t together. I hoped it would become The Thing he’d jerk off to.

His breaths stalled and he grabbed my wrists. As he stared down at me, I saw the same violent need in his eyes that was building in my chest. It made me squirm. Made me fumble with the button of his jeans. He got to me even while I was getting to him.

“Okay then. Open…” Charlie stroked my lips with his thumb until they parted. “No…
more
.” I formed a bigger O-shape as he helped me unfasten his jeans. They fell. Then his boxers did, too. He held his hardening dick over my face.

“Baby?” I said.

“Hmm?”

“Slowly…okay?”

“Of course.”

“And keep your balls off my face?”

Charlie laughed. I worked my jaw for a moment. Hm. It was different from this angle. But I could totally handle this. Or maybe I would overpromise and my gag reflex would make me under-deliver. Taking his shaft in my hand, I brought the tip down to my mouth. As the head of his cock teased my bottom lip, I swirled my tongue over it. He sucked in a wisp of air. He guided himself into my mouth slowly, thrusting gently between my lips as I sucked. Within seconds, Charlie was groaning unlike anything I’d ever heard out of him. It was so damn hot. I drove my fingers inside myself, got turned on by my own wetness, and worked my hand until my wrist hurt.

Charlie squeezed my breast as he moved back and forth, his legs bumping the bed in a rhythm. I tightened my mouth around his dick, humming a moan—I was coming already. I pulled my mouth away and he finished me off with his fingers. Grabbing his length again, I sucked harder this time as he pumped.

There was a rumbling grunt from him, fingers pressing into the flesh near my neck. “Fuck, I’m—” No more words were there. Dick deep in my mouth, throbbing against my tongue, he came. I was indifferent about swallowing. But chalk it up to one of those things I was willing to do for love. On occasion. For the sideways blowjob. “Fuck…ah, fuck…” he said in a strained voice. I went in for the kill. Kept sucking. Charlie was nearly crumbling to the floor by the time I let him go. He stepped back slowly. Then stumbled backward all the way until he ran into something. Laughing, I flipped to my stomach. “You’re gonna fucking kill me, Nik…” he whispered. His grin was lazy and the wall was definitely holding him up. Upside down blowjob was a win. “Do we have to go to dinner with Tyler and Lola? Because I’m cool with dying right here instead.”

“
Yes.
Remember
other people
? We’ve been indoors
way
too much.”

“Fair enough, but I still…hmfph…whoa.” He tripped over his suitcase on his walk back to the bed. I rolled my eyes. His crap was all over my apartment. I wasn’t the neatest person but my clutter was manageable. He’d been sleeping—
living
—here since we got back from California, only going home to replace dirty clothes with clean ones. My place was apparently quieter when he needed to work on scripts
.
I thought he had another reason. But this place wasn’t built for two. And I sure as hell wasn’t ready to have a live-in boyfriend.

“Can you put that somewhere it won’t kill either of us? Like where you
live
? And while we’re on the subject…you’re moving my things around, and not putting them back where you got them.”

“Damn,
okay,
babe…”

“I’m serious, Charlie,” I grumbled.

“Got it…” He chugged from a glass of water that was on my bureau. I sighed. He’d just taken more meds. I knew it. When we locked eyes, he knew that I knew. God, I’d lost count
now,
but he’d taken at least six today.
Six.
God. He was barely sleeping. I had to remind him to eat sometimes. His heart rate and blood pressure…what were those like? What if Charlie fainted one day? What if his heart just stopped? What would I do? I didn’t remember CPR. I sat up suddenly as panic closed around my lungs. His skin looked flushed. But from pills or blowjob?

After he made sure his suitcase was no longer a deathtrap, he hopped back to the bed, pinning me beneath him. I didn’t bother with the charade of trying to break free. There was no fight in me when Charlie’s body was on top of mine. Not when he stared at me like he was still peeling away layers and finding more parts of me to love underneath. It was a beautiful thing to see. It was a beautiful thing to know.

Already my worry was fading, my skin trilling under his fingers. Wow. Being in love could just drug you into submission. Sink you into fiery oblivion. And you’d let yourself burn. You’d burn with them. No one really wanted to
just
be loved anyway.

We wanted to be consumed.

Sometimes in the moments right after we were done fucking, when he was still inside me, and I was all doped up on oxytocin, my nails still digging into his back, I almost told him I belonged to him. It scared me that I could think that, but he owned so much of me. It scared me even more what I could probably convince myself to do for Charlie.

Except letting him move in with me, of course. Because
no. No. Nope. Nooo.

Way too much
adulting
. Plus, I was already turning a blind eye to something else he was doing that I didn’t like.

“You wouldn’t mind it so much if you just got used to me being here…for a long while,” he said. Drawing his fingers down my sides and over my bare stomach, he kissed between my legs. Soft lips on wet lips. Charlie flicked his eyes up to mine; his were full of hunger and taunting restraint. Then his tongue swiveled. My back arched.

“I know what you’re doing, you jerk,” I croaked out. But God I loved it when Charlie went down on me while we were talking.

“I haven’t even begun to do what I’m doing,” he warned before biting my thigh. Charlie flopped onto his back and stroked his cock. “Now, come get on my dick.”

Damn.

I straddled him and eased myself down onto him once he was hard. Charlie stuck his thumb in my mouth then rubbed my clit as I rode him. As much as his being here was wearing on my nerves, we were taking full advantage of his presence. My bed had become a deserted island where the stranded inhabitants spent the time fucking each other into exhaustion and watching
Breaking Bad
reruns. Sometimes at the same time…

“You have
a key…
” I said when we were finished and I lay next to him. Orgasms weren’t going to stop this discussion. “You’re not moving in here.”

“I don’t think it’s safe for you to be coming home by yourself to an empty place, as late as you work sometimes.”

“I’m a big girl, and Mr. Donovan and I get home around the same time. He always waits for me and walks me up to my floor, even though he’s two floors down.”

“Is he into you?”

“Um…no.”

“Wait, why isn’t he into you? You’re amazing!”

I laughed. “Charlie, I’m serious. Stop moving my things around. And pick up your shit. I’m going to get in the shower, so we’re not late.” I jumped when his palm collided with my butt. I sighed with a smile and went into the bathroom. Stepping into the tub, I leaned against the tile wall as the shower water warmed. I didn’t get under until steam was overwhelming the bathroom. I liked imagining that Charlie wrote things on my skin he would never share with anyone when he traced the curves of my body: his scenes and his sins. They were there—all his secrets—until I rinsed them away.

But if I really thought I was so special to him, the keeper of things
that
sacred, why was I fighting the chance to have our own corner of the world right here? Hmm. Okay, maybe soon I’d let him win this round and try out this cohabitation thing. It would be a trial run, of course.

I was out in a flash, and I slipped on a simple black sheath dress and a pair of silver flats while Charlie was showering. On the bed next to his clothes was a gift box for Tyler, a watch for his birthday. I’d told him he didn’t have to, but he’d insisted. The actual day of Ty’s birth wasn’t until the following week, and Charlie was meeting my parents during that birthday dinner. He’d even bought a cake for Ty, for us to take over there.

Charlie got dressed even faster than I did. We’d probably beat Lola and Ty to the restaurant. His cell rang just as we reached his car. When he answered, he was barely able to get a word in after hello. “It’s Lola...”
She’s hysterical,
he mouthed as he passed the phone to me. “She said she’s been trying to call you.”

“Hey? What’s up? We’re on the way to Tin Roof. Are you okay? Is Ty okay?” I said to Lola, fright igniting my nerves. He’d been spending today with his friends. My mind became a flipbook of accidents and traumatic injuries: someone ran him over with a jet ski and he cracked his head open. He was jumping from a roof into a pool on a dare and he cracked his head open. He was running and he cracked his head open.

His head was cracked open.

And every time I imagined that it involved alcohol.

Oh God, I didn’t want to be right.

“No. It’s… He got into a fight with Jimmy. They keep…oh God. Jimmy, stop! Please come, Nikki! I don’t want them to do anything to him. Please come!”

“Jimmy Dunham?”

“Yes.”

“You’re at their beach house?” I whispered. I really didn’t want to go there.

“No, my house. People came over earlier today, and it got a little out of control. We’ve been trying to get them to leave, so we could meet you. Just…please.” She hurriedly gave me the address, and I repeated it for Charlie.

Then there was another voice on her end. Really close to the receiver. Maybe Tyler’s. I couldn’t be sure. She dissolved into sobs and her end got unintelligible for a moment. She was screaming when the sound was clear again. “Tyler! Don’t. Stop! Stop fighting! This is so stupid. Stop, you guys!” Then the line went dead.

It started raining on the drive, and the overcast sucked all the color from the world. I adored the rain showers in Miami; I usually found them calming. But right now it wasn’t helping to ease my anxiety.

I tried to call Lola back on the way, but it was going straight to voicemail. She’d been calling both of us for an hour before she reached us. Between the messages on our phones we figured out that some joke amongst the guys had gone too far. Lola wasn’t in the house at the time, but Jimmy Dunham was bleeding and threatening Tyler by the time she heard them yelling at each other over the music. The disagreement kept escalating and the boys kept exchanging blows. Now her stepsister was insisting that Tyler leave or she would call the police on him.

The trip lasted forever, but at least the rain finally let up before we got there. Lola and Ty were huddled together, sitting on the curb down a ways from her house. She was in her bathing suit and my brother was in surfing shorts. Thank God his cranium was intact.

The smell of alcohol wafted off them. Lola stood up and hugged me, pressing her wet face against me. My brother remained sitting and staring at the asphalt. He was bleeding from his face—each cut was small and superficial, but all together it was clear that he had taken a beating. He’d doled out one, too. His knuckles were red and swollen.

“What happened, Ty?” I asked, kneeling in front of him. He got up with such force that he almost knocked me backward. He glared at me with fury.

“Hey,” Charlie said, gripping my brother’s shoulder as he tried to walk away, “she’s talking to you.” Tyler yanked away from Charlie’s grasp. Then
oh my God
he swung. He fucking swung a fist sloppily at Charlie. Lola and I both gasped. His hand smashed into Charlie’s jaw. An audible pop sounded.

I stumbled backward from a sudden dizzy spell.

Time didn’t stop. But, oh God, I wished it had.

“Charlie…please. He’s…” I didn’t know what to say. I had no explanation for Tyler’s behavior. Until I did. “Drunk.”
He’s me. He’s like me.

Charlie shoved him back once and laughed bitterly. “Dude, you don’t want to do this.” But my brother only became more agitated. He stormed toward Charlie, who looked completely unfazed that he’d taken a hit to the chin. My blood ran cold. My breaths were getting shorter.