With a vengeance.
With the blaze of a thousand suns.
With every piece of twisted DNA in my body.
Cam is the arrow. I miss being his. Being in control. Being powerful. I want the arrow back in.
Being Cam’s was the only thing that ever made me feel like my life wasn’t orchestrated by a master puppeteer.
“Maybe a little,” I admit.
“Did you call him?”
I shake my head. Not calling Cam is a daily battle, but it’s one that makes me hate myself. Because how can I want to hold hands with Trey and yet still miss Cam like a phantom limb? I am gross. I am disgusting. Miranda is right. I don’t deserve redemption.
“Have you ever gone skydiving?”
I stop and stare at Trey’s non-sequitur as an ambulance zooms down the street, its horn blaring. “What kind of segue is that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we just need a thrill in our lives. Don’t you miss the high?”
“Every day,” I admit as we cross the street.
Miranda forced me to go to SLAA but I knew I belonged there, because I was drugged on love, on almost sex, on power. Knowing didn’t stop me from wanting my drug though. I am dependent. I still am.
Trey stops at the subway entrance.
“Maybe we just need to find the daring in the every day,” he says, then perches on the railing that leads down into the subway station. He’s seated on the edge, holding on with his hands. He leans so far that his back is nearly parallel to the sidewalk.
“Trey!”
He lets himself fall further, so his head is upside down. It’s New York, so most people ignore him, but a few of them on the steps below point as they keep clicking down the stairs. Trey hooks his feet around the bottom of the railing, and then lets go with his hands. His head, arms and chest drop down.
Rationally, logically, I know he’s not going to fall. But all I can picture is his gorgeous face smashed to bits on the concrete far below.
“If you’re worried, just grab me,” he says, as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. I reach for his brown leather belt and jerk it hard, yanking him upright. His face is red and near to mine and the air is crackling like an electrical storm. My heart is racing and my adrenaline is surging, and I’m no longer thinking about Cam. I’m thinking about this guy. So close to me. His mischievous grin. His sparkling eyes. How they know me, see through me. How I let him in that first night, and we talked about everything – music, happiness, the future, even my grandparents who I never see and who I miss terribly some days. I’m remembering too the way I felt when he first kissed me, then touched me. Then, his mouth on my body. All over me. Soft, and slow, and caressing.
Like something I wanted.
Fuck. I can’t go there. I haven’t let myself think about our one night in ages.
“You know I won’t fall.”
I shake my head. “You know that scares me,” I say. I don’t let go of his belt. He places a hand on my hand. Skin on skin. His flesh on mine. I try not to shiver. But it’s useless. I do anyway as my stomach executes a huge somersault.
“I’m like a bad horror film director. I can’t resist scaring you because you’re so damn cute when you get scared.”
He jumps down off the railing and engulfs me in a hug, wrapping his strong arms around me, pulling my face to his neck. God, he smells good. All sweat, and work, and some woodsy scent that’s just so him.
“Sorry about Miranda and your mom and all those stupid guys,” he says softly in my ear, just for me, just to me. “I don’t want you to be with any of them. I don’t want you with anyone.”
I dig my fingernails into my palms to stop from pressing my body into him, from whispering kisses across his neck. Because this Trey, this soft, sweet, caring Trey, is the only guy I ever let touch me without agenda, the only man I wanted to kiss, the only man who’s ever made me come. I never faked it with him. I never knew not faking it could feel so good. That giving in, letting go, could be scary and intoxicating all on its own.
Now, with him so close, arms looped around me, his smell in my nose, his strong body pinned against mine, I don’t know anymore what happened to withdrawal, because nothing feels painful right now. I only feel potential. Possibility. The slim hope of starting over, like a stone skipping across the water, whisking up a few drops.
Maybe this is the new high. He skims one hand once across my back, so lightly it could be a friendly touch, but even through my flimsy shirt, my insides flutter like hummingbirds, and my mind is back to our night.
His hands on my naked skin.
The unfamiliar ache in my body that craved more of his touch, of the way he seemed to memorize me with his palms and his fingertips, as if he needed to trace every inch, to imprint the feel of me, the outline of my body in his memory. Then his lips everywhere, traversing my arms, neck, breasts, belly, legs, ankles, and back up to calves and knees and thighs, then in between. His lips and his tongue made me want to die and live and soar. I’d never let go like that, never moved like I did with him, with abandon, with desire, with the sharp, sweet rush of wanting someone to touch me for the first time.
I let go with him. I gave my body to him. In a way so many of them would have paid top dollar for. But I didn’t ever want anyone to see me like that. To watch me, feel me, hear me come.
Maybe he’s the arrow.
Maybe he’s the thing I’m not withdrawing from.
The one person who knows all my stories, the one person I’ve become best friends with in recovery, is the only one who knows exactly how I feel, what I think, what I want, what I hate, what I need.
Who I am.
I don’t know how to be known like this. In this naked kind of way. Like, I’ve taken everything off and am waiting for judgement.
Or touch.
Maybe they’re one and the same.
I sigh once, then manage to pull away from his grasp and look at him, giving him a quick nod. “Thank you,” I whisper.
He tilts his head to the side, his hair falling past his ear. His hair is light brown with hints of copper. It’s thick and full and he could be a shampoo model, only he doesn’t have that overly coiffed, perfectly combed look. His hair is deliberately undone, purposefully tousled, and all I want is to run my fingers through it and cling to it and never let go. Hold his cheeks in my palms and kiss deeply and without regret.
Hear him groan.
Let him do the same to me.
Look in his eyes, see myself reflected back. Because his eyes, like the rest of him, are beautiful. They’re the color of a forest, of a green beer bottle, of lush grass after it rains. They are the reflection of every girl and woman falling in love with him, because they all do. Then there’s his face — strong cheekbones, the stubbled jawline, and his scar that tells me he’s like me.
He went too far. He hurt others. He was hurt.
But that hurt is part of the connective tissue of our strange friendship that blurs all sorts of lines, that spills over into the feeling of more, even if we don’t truly venture there. Sometimes he looks at me like he wants to go there again, and he can probably tell too that I still want him that way. It’s so hard not to rake my eyes over him. He’s tall and sculpted, and I bet if you turned off all the lights and it was pitch black and there was a sea of shirtless twenty-one-year-olds guys I could find him by touch.
No one has ever felt like him.
But if I acted again on these desires, then he’d be Twenty-Five. And if he’s Twenty-Five, then I’m just the same. And I have to be different. So only when I stop wanting him, stop feeling for him, stop thinking about him, can I have him. But even then he’d never have me, so it’s a moot point. Besides, what do I know about feelings? Nothing. They make zero sense to me. I don’t know if they ever will.