Lauren Blakely - The Thrill of It

She shakes her head. “Back home. I’m sure Kristen misses me,” she jokes. Kristen and Harley have a run-down railroad apartment not far from here that’s rent-controlled and has been for one hundred years. Or so it seems.

“Cool. I’m going to meet Jordan for a beer,” I say, referring to my buddy who works at the coffee shop next to No Regrets. He hates coffee, can’t stand the smell of it or taste of it from working with it all night long. He needs beer more than ever to get the scent of caffeine off of him, he likes to say.

“Have fun. Tell him I say hi,” she says and gives a playful wave, as if I’d pass that on to my friend. “We should set him up with Kristen someday.”

“Yeah. They might like each other.”

She starts to leave, but I reach for her arm. Damn, her skin is so soft. I could layer kisses on her arms and be satisfied. Actually, that’s not true. Any kiss would make me want more. “I’ll walk you home.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

I take her hand, and the feel of her is the thing I want most and dread most in the world. But I can’t stop holding her hand, even though I’d never know what to do with her for real.

When we reach her building, she turns to me. “Did we even have plans tonight?”

I shake my head. “I just like seeing you.”

Maybe I’ve said too much. Maybe I haven’t said enough.

“I like seeing you too.”

“Better me than Cam,” I say, then want to kick myself for admitting that. For saying those stupid words. But I don’t stop. “Don’t call him. Please.”

I sound like an idiot, begging her.

She stands on her tip toes, and brushes a soft, sweet, dizzying kiss on my cheek, on my scar, whispering, “I won’t.”

I want to believe her.

Harley

“Were you at your writing workshop with the hottie tattoo guy tonight?”

Kristen lowers her red cat’s eye glasses and stares at me over the pages of a script. Kristen is a film major and she always has her nose in a story. She’s scrunched up on the couch in our apartment, studying a marked-up screenplay.

“Yeah,” I say, the lie rolling seamlessly off my tongue.

“Are you guys hooking up?”

I scoff. “No. It’s only class.”

If she only knew.

“Can I have him then?” She waggles her eyebrows. She’s met Trey. She knows he’s unbelievably beautiful. She has no clue how I met him though.

“Sure,” I say as if the thought doesn’t make my insides churn. I don’t want anyone to have Trey. But I can’t tell Kristen about the meetings we go to, the real way I know him. I try to throw her off the scent. “Or his friend Jordan. He’s cute too, don’t you think?”

She nods knowingly. “Honestly, either one of them would be fine. Why don’t you just make that happen, Harley?”

“I’ll text Trey that we should all get together and go see a band or something,” I say, and then fire off a quick message.

Kristen and I have been friends since the start of high school, but she doesn’t even know the half of it. Or the half of me. If anyone were to know about the SLAA meetings, about my past, about my men, it’d be Kristen. She is my closest girlfriend. But that word—close—it’s all so relative. Close means you share clothes, dreams, secrets, maybe even the darkest of secrets. That’s how it’s supposed to be. And sure, I know things about her because we’ve been friends since we played field hockey together at our high school. She was a beast on the field. She took no prisoners and was known far and wide for hitting below the knees. I asked her once why she had so much aggression and she said she took out her frustration over her parents’ crappy relationship when she was playing.

They were divorcing when we were in high school.

Here’s the thing. She’s open. She’s let me in on her secrets. She struggled with bulimia when she was in high school, and she was in therapy our senior year to help her have – as she likes to say – “a better relationship” with food. I know her insecurities too. Sometimes she’s abrasive, or too in-your-face, and it’s all part of her tough gal persona. But underneath, she wants what most people want – happiness. I know her hopes too. After college, she plans to jet west to California and become a screenwriter, chase the Hollywood dream.

But I barely tell her anything. Maybe because she’s so together. Because she’s battled her demons and won. Or maybe just because I’m no good at telling the truth.

She knows I like music and doing make-up, how I take my lattes, that I like to invent stories about animals and magic, that someday I want to live on the beach and soak up the sun and sleep to the sound of ocean waves lapping the shore. She knows that my dad ditched us long ago to move to Europe and that I’m close with my mom. But more than that? I wouldn’t even know where to start. I’m like that person who scatters clues across several states, making it tough for the cops to gather enough info, or enough witnesses, to assemble the whole sordid story.

No one except Trey.

It’s weird that one person can know your before and your wish for after.

And that’s not Kristen.

Because I haven’t told her a thing about my mom’s habits. And, honestly, there is nothing I want to say. My mom is my mom. She needs me. I need her. She took me to every doctor’s appointment, tended to every scraped knee, and read to me every night before bed. So what if she had men over all the time? She wasn’t cheating on anyone. She was the one left. She was the person abandoned, and she finally found a way to be happy again. It doesn’t matter that I knew all her boyfriends, that I heard her late-night moans and groans, that I know what it sounds like when my own mother has an orgasm, that I’m too familiar with the things she says when she’s getting turned on. No one, no one, no one in the whole wide world can be privy to the fact that my mother, who has done more good for society than most people, has another side. The side that turned her daughter into a prostitute.

Those secrets are lodged so far and so deep inside me I don’t even know how I’d get the words out. I’d need more than a shovel to dredge them up. I’d need a bulldozer to exhume them. And even if somehow, some way, the words could tunnel out of me, I know they’d spill out my mouth all disfigured and unrecognizable, a foreign tongue no one could understand. Sometimes when I say the words silently, in my head, at a whisper, I can still feel a fierce red blush covering my cheeks. I was a call girl.

But yet, the real reason I don’t tell her is this–because I loved it. I loved the crazy burn, the rush, the thrill of the power. Because I needed it, I wanted it, I craved it.

I still do.

I’m not cured.

SLAA hasn’t fixed me.

If Kristen knew where I really go when I say I’m at the writing workshop, she might not want to be friends with me. She wouldn’t want to have lattes with me or share an apartment with me. I’d be the slut, the sex addict, the whore that everyone would think I am. That Miranda thinks I am. That all those stories – true fucking stories – that Miranda makes me write prove I am.

No wonder Trey won’t touch me again. No wonder he keeps me at a distance. He’s getting healthy, he’s healing, he’s moving on from his past and he can see me for what I am.

Dirty. Slutty. Whore.

Soon, he’ll walk away too. That’s why I don’t tell Kristen about Layla. She’d walk straight the other way. This is what people do. They leave when you get too close.

“Are you hungry?”

“Nah, I ate at my mom’s,” I say.

“Damn. I wanted to split a pizza.”

“I’ll eat a slice if it’ll make you happy,” I offer. I can do that. Kristen doesn’t like to eat by herself. Says it reminds her of the times when she scarfed on food alone.

She claps once and smiles widely. See? This is so simple. I made her happy by saying I’d have a slice. She dials her favorite pizza delivery place and orders a cheese pie. I wish I could do the same – have a healthy relationship with love.

I wish love were like pizza.

She kicks her feet up on the coffee table. “We should have a girl’s night out Friday. Let’s go somewhere. Meet some guys. There’s no one at this college I like. I want a man. Not some stupid frat boy.”

“No you don’t,” I say. “You don’t want a man.”

I’ve had men. Most of them are awful.

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I didn’t sleep with any of them. I could lie and tell all sorts of sordid stories about being seventeen and fucking forty-two-year-old men, but I won’t. Because I didn’t do that. My pimp loved me. He took care of me. He would never have sent me on jobs like that. Sometimes, I played the escort role to the buttoned-up guys who wanted the sexy young girlfriend at a fancy dinner function. Or the suit who had a hankering for a schoolgirl on his arm at a bar.

But I was also assigned the middle-aged men with weird fetishes.

Like one of my regulars. His name was Gerald, and he was a banker. We met every Friday at 4:15 when the markets closed. He wanted me to wear my green plaid skirt, starched white blouse, and my good old faithful Mary Janes. Our regular meeting spot was a hotel in midtown because no one knew him in midtown. He liked to hear about my day at school, the things I learned in class, but he especially longed for my stories of what my friends and I talked about in the locker room. I made it all up. I told him we discussed lingerie, and what kind of lacy underwear we preferred to wear when we masturbated.