Forbidden Love (3 page)

Trisha pretended to think about it. “No
contest,” she said finally. “They wouldn’t get past the first
challenge.” She was impressed with her ability to articulate words
clearly, despite the delay in her head.

“Two of them?” Rusty asked. He was still
cradling her with one arm.

“Well…” Trisha trailed off. She thought about
Lucas. She didn’t like thinking about Lucas, because thinking about
him always broke something in her, a levee of sorts, that led to a
rush of emotion. The thought of Lucas did just fine tucked away
inside somewhere, and unprovoked. “I have three.”

Rusty’s other hand had found the back of her
head, and he was winding her hair lazily around his fingers. He
waited for her to continue. She had to fight against the hypnotism
of his caress.

“Lucas…” She paused. “He’s my best bud. He
deals with some tough tough…” She meant to say “stuff” the second
time but her tongue twisted. “He’s got some difficulties.”

Rusty’s hand stopped coiling her hair. It
dropped to her shoulder. “Difficulties?” He looked at her with
curiosity, his brow wrinkled.

Trisha knew that this was not the right place
and time to talk about her brother. Rusty’s expression was
concerning her. As faultless as he seemed, she didn’t know how he’d
react to hearing about Lucas, who still lived at home, who had
trouble with his social skills in public, who crumbled when his
world was too noisy, confusing, or bright, who was homeschooled by
Trisha’s parents for six years because they couldn’t stand the
thought of him being bullied at Rockport High. No, no, no. She
wouldn’t bring this up now.

“He’s so smart,” she said. “That’s all. He’s
so smart.” Trisha could feel a lump rising in her chest. She draped
an arm around Rusty’s neck, and was thrilled to see his eyebrows
jump in amusement. She was going to distract herself from this
conversation—she refused to ruin this.

A small band had been setting up their drums
and speakers on a small platform at the back of the bar, and now
they began tuning their electric guitars. Some people cheered, some
whistled and clapped. Trisha nodded toward the musicians, three
rather scruffy-looking guys maybe a few years older than she was.
“You ever seen them before?” She took the chance to change the
subject.

“No,” he said, as the guy
at the front mike introduced himself and his partners as
Piebranch Hellchasers
.
“But I’m sure they’re Tyfield’s rising stars.”

The band played. They banged out covers of
Coldplay, Springsteen, and Dispatch, and by the time Trisha had
consumed her third Sprite and Stoli, she was guiding Rusty’s broad
hands to where she wanted them—her ribs, her waist, her backside—as
they moved to the music. There was no room to dance but the spaces
between chairs and tables and bodies melded to one another. Someone
had dimmed the overhead lights, and the air had fogged with
humidity. The strange, sweating form that kept bumping up against
Trisha from behind knocked her closer to Rusty and shot unexpected
chills through her. As Rusty rubbed his cheek against hers, and his
hands wandered tentatively up and over her breasts, she closed her
eyes and lifted her chin, mouth parted, in a way that could invite
him to kiss her but could also look like a surrender to her
surroundings. Within a moment, Rusty’s mouth was pressed urgently
against hers, and his tongue was running across the inside of her
upper lip. There was something invasive and incredibly stimulating
about it. He traced her skin along the neckline of her blouse with
one finger, then two, and tugged on the fabric.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said into her
ear.

Trisha’s head was swirling.
It swirled as Rusty led her out of the bar and helped her into a
cab that happened to be waiting, and it swirled all the way to
wherever they were going, while Rusty burrowed his face into her
neck and flicked his tongue in her cleavage. One of his hands was
between her legs for the entire ride, gripping her left thigh, and
she felt herself pulsing with yearning down below.
This
was utter ecstasy.
How had she managed to win him over? She couldn’t think straight.
Her knight, taking her away in this…this chariot that smelled of
cigarette smoke and—Italian subs, maybe? She didn’t know she had
chuckled out loud until Rusty quieted her with a deep, slow kiss
that reverberated in her toes. He gave her such joy.
Such
joy. She would need
to figure out some way to repay Millie for her generous
gift.

Rusty kept his arm hooked around her as they
stumbled up a set of porch stairs to a three-family, up another set
of stairs inside, and into an apartment. He didn’t bother turning
on lights. Legs entwined, the two of them barely made it to the
bedroom without tripping, and when Rusty threw her down, the scent
of vanilla and lavender rose around her. She recognized it faintly
as pillow spray. Something that a girl would love.

Something that
this
girl loves, she
told herself.

Rusty straddled her, holding himself up with
his forearms on the bed, as he smoothed her hair back from her face
with his hands and gazed down at her. “You are,” he whispered, “the
most enticing little thing I’ve seen in a long time.” He brushed
his lips over her forehead, down to her temple, along her jaw line.
His kisses were dry and light. She arched beneath him, summoning
more. “You taste like—” He inched his fingers under her blouse and
urged it upward to nuzzle her abdomen. “Like cotton candy.”

Trisha giggled. She watched white rectangles
stretch across the ceiling, the headlights from the street casting
through the window panes. “Are you sure you’re not thinking of my
hair?”

Rusty rolled her blouse up and over her head.
She let her arms flop onto the pillow above her.

“Naw. I’m definitely not thinking of your
hair right now,” he said. In a second, his own shirt was on the
floor. Her bra followed. As he surveyed her for a couple of
seconds, she trembled with half-delighted, half-shy
self-consciousness.

God, please don’t let me fuck this up, she
thought furiously.

His fingertips were working her nipples to
standing. The tingling in her breasts was almost unbearable as they
rose and swelled. She entangled her own fingers in his thick dark
waves as his mouth closed over one nipple and pulled on it curtly
with his lips, once, twice, three times. Trisha squirmed, and
hooked her right leg over his back. She wanted to jerk his hips
down, to capture them between her thighs.

“You like that?” He attended to the other
breast. “I know you do, baby.” He reached down and unfastened the
button of her jeans.

Thank you, God, Trisha thought. She shook
away a haunting image of her rendezvous with that asshole the
weekend before. No. That would never happen again.

The loping strum of a guitar hardly disturbed
the air in the room at first. Her ears perked up over her and
Rusty’s soft moaning. On the ringtone’s second chorus, Rusty
growled.

“Fuck,” he said sharply, startling Trisha,
and leaped off of her.

A cool breeze washed over her bare skin. She
blinked, still stunned, as Rusty yanked his cell phone out of his
back pocket. He glanced at the caller ID and rolled his eyes.

He walked away from her in the dimness and
stood in one of the corners of the small bedroom. Trisha felt
clumsily exposed. She groped around for her blouse and found it
hanging off the foot of the bed. She couldn’t help watching as the
muscles in Rusty’s back clenched and rippled while he listened to
the speaker on the other end.

“Okay,” he said gruffly. “Okay. Is he hurt at
all? Did he hurt anyone else?”

The prickling sensation that Rusty had
animated all over her body was receding. Trisha studied the room. A
guitar was propped up against one wall, with a haphazard stack of
sheet music next to it on the floor. A low bookcase was stuffed
with what appeared to be textbooks and manuals, and covered in
random objects—Coke cans, watches, and odd figurines that looked
like they were from foreign countries. A couple of clear plastic
frames held photographs, but Trisha was too far away from them to
see who was in them. Ribbons and certificates were pinned to a
bulletin board over the bookcase.

Rusty sighed laboriously. “I’m just not sure
what you want me to do, exactly, from here,” he said. “I’m about to
start a new gig. I can’t just come home right now.”

A new gig. A new gig. As
Trisha’s mind cleared even further with the vodka wearing off, she
strained to recall whether Rusty had told her what he did during
the day. Did he work? Was he a student? Millie hadn’t given her any
information, either. Rusty’s irritated tone with the caller was
infusing the atmosphere with tension, and Trisha feared that this
night was spinning downward fast. Who the hell could he be talking
to like that? Who
would
he talk to like that? She sensed as though she
was seeing a side of him that he usually concealed.

“I understand that,” Rusty went on, through
gritted teeth. “I get it. And look—I appreciate everything you do.
But if you think I’m not following through with what I’ve started…”
He trailed off, looking at the ceiling.

When he finally ended the conversation, Rusty
flung his phone and it knocked a soda can and some loose change off
of his bookcase. The clatter made Trisha jump.

“Fucking disaster,” he said. He stood there,
many feet away from her, his hands in fists by his sides. “So
goddamn typical.” He paced across the rug, running his hands
through his hair, bearing down on his skull so hard that his arms
shuddered.

It was as if Trisha could physically see the
promise of the night dissolving. Rusty’s ocean-blue eyes, with
those dark eyebrows furrowed in darts over them, looked almost
demonic in his anger. A twitch of uneasiness actually surfaced in
her stomach. She almost asked if everything was okay, but obviously
it wasn’t.

Rusty swiveled to face her. “You need to go,”
he said.

Trisha’s jaw fell. His words crushed her. “I
need to…to go?”

Rusty swiped up his tee-shirt from the floor.
“That’s what I said. Don’t make me repeat myself. I hate that.” He
wrenched the shirt over his head.

Heart drumming and tears stirring in her
throat, Trisha fumbled to retrieve her bra, the Victoria’s Secret
Bombshell bra, that she had charged on her already-steaming credit
card at the last minute on her mall excursion. She had been high on
the possibility of finding not just sexual chemistry, but love.
Now, shaking almost uncontrollably, losing her fingers in the
distorted twists of her purple blouse, she felt her heart plummet
and her nausea rise.

“Hurry up,” Rusty snapped. “My roommates will
be back any minute and I don’t want to have to explain things.”

Trisha scrambled to collect herself. She was
desperately glad that she still had her boots on. As she passed the
mirror over Rusty’s bureau on her way out of the bedroom, she
caught a glimpse of her wrinkled top and her smudged eye-shadow,
which, in the semidarkness, gave her face the illusion of having
been punched. Rusty placed a hand on her shoulder, his touch cold
now, and steered her out of the apartment, down the flight of
stairs to the first floor, and out onto the porch. He hadn’t even
given her time to put her coat back on.

“It’s a short walk to campus,” he said. Then
he turned around and was gone. A storm door slammed behind her.

Trisha stood for a few minutes in shock, her
knees bumping together in the frigid air, sight completely obscured
by tears. So this was what devastation felt like.

Trisha spent Sunday lying
in bed, dozing off and on. She would open her eyes and the entire
horrible scene from the night before would storm into her
consciousness. Her disappointment was so sharp, she felt like a
child who had discovered, upon sneaking downstairs early in the
morning, that Santa had not come. When these awful feelings flooded
her she would turn over and sob back to sleep. Intermittently, she
worried about crossing paths with Rusty somehow, somewhere, but she
couldn’t remember whether he had told her what the hell he did
every day. Had he lived on the edge of campus, in one of those
three-stories, where she always thought grad students held keg
parties for the undergrad girls?
Could
he be a grad student? Where
had he come from? Had what happened between them even happened at
all? Or had it been one wicked nightmare?

Millie came by and left a
package of Ramen noodles on the hallway floor, and Trisha ate them
under her covers, watching episode after episode of
Grey’s Anatomy
on Hulu.
Trisha had gone right to Millie’s room when she returned from her
arctic walk of shame at ten past one that morning, but she could
see through the crack under the door that the light was out. She
had texted to Millie one word—
Disaster
.

By the time Monday rolled around, against
Trisha’s vehement wishes, her eyes were so swollen that she wore
sunglasses to her Intro to Music Theory and History of Contemporary
Culture classes. She had a biology teacher in high school who used
to show up on Mondays wearing shades, too, and the rumor was that
he smoked marijuana all weekend and had to hide his bloodshot eyes.
This was the first full week of the spring semester, and she was
probably looking pretty questionable to her professors. But neither
of them flinched. They just made sure she was present and conscious
by calling her name off the roster.