Hooked (4 page)

“This place is cool.” He smiled, looking around. “It’s exactly how I pictured it. Took you long enough to invite me.”

“I’ve invited you before,” I protested, mashing my knees together to make my legs look thinner.

“Just that one time,” Will said. “When I walked you upstairs, the first night we went out. After that, nothing. What I can’t figure out is whether you’re scared to have
me
meet her or to have
her
meet me.” He leaned toward me and batted his eyes.

“Need I remind you that I’ve yet to meet your parents?”

“You will, sometime soon,” he said. “Not that that’s anything to look forward to. Anyway, your mom has nice taste. Minimal, for lack of a more imaginative word. My parents are stuck in Shakerville. When people come over, they’re like, ‘Dude, you Amish?’ ”

“Maybe they like to keep it simple,” I said.

“Nah, they’re just too depressed to figure anything else out. To change anything. They’re big wallowers.”

“But you,” I said perkily, “you’re not depressed. You’re an optimist.”

“That’s right,” he said, sticking his thumbs under his armpits, mock-proudly. “I said that on our first date, didn’t I?”

I nodded, pulling my hair out of its messy knot, subconsciously channeling my mother and trying to “lift” the front.

Will stretched, reaching his hands behind his head. “So what do you and Mom eat for dinner?”

“Salad in summer, stir-fry in winter,” I said, pulling my T-shirt down over the lower bit of my stomach as I leaned back next to him. “That’s pretty much the way it works around here. She’s a vegetarian.”

He took my hand and slowly waved it around with his. “Rembrandt’s was closed this week because of a flood,” he said, referring to the restaurant his parents went to every night for dinner. “They almost couldn’t cope. Dad made us breakfast last night. Ham and cheese omelets and a head of iceberg with salsa. Real lettuce scares him. He came home at five last night. I couldn’t believe it. Usually he’s home after seven. He likes us to think he’s coming home from a long day at the office, but everyone knows he’s actually been at the Israeli market buying cashews.”

“He really works only two days a year?” I asked, looking
at the brown, braided belt around his impossibly narrow waist, which only reminded me of my never-ending, visceral need for underbaked chocolate cookies.

“Yes, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s not exactly a people person.”

“He must be very smart,” I said.

His left eye darted around my face quizzically. “I don’t think you have to be that smart to get a job like that.”

I didn’t say anything. Even after three months of being together, there was something so intimidating about him.

“Anyway, this is too friendly, what we’re doing,” he said, his gaze fixed on the black and white photos of me and Mom across the room. “I don’t want to be friends right now.”

“You don’t?” I asked, feeling my stomach flip.

“I do want to be your friend—who wouldn’t want to be your friend.” He said it fast as a statement, not a question, putting his hand, which was hot and shaking just a little, on my knee. “But right now I want to jump on you. And if we keep talking, I’m worried it will be too late.”

We looked at each other for this crazy, scary moment that seemed to stretch on and on as the white living room grew gray and hazy behind him. He pushed me backward on the couch and got on top of me, kissing my face, then my mouth, our bodies matching up in a straight line, all the way down. He was heavy, almost too heavy, but I felt safe and enclosed as he undid my jeans with his confident, searching hand. He did whatever it was that he did to me and I felt the couch somehow drop away, and it was like for a few seconds I entered some alternate universe where everything was humming and buzzing and not really real.

It’s not like I was a novice. I had two boyfriends before
Will. First was Bo Brown, the summer after seventh grade. We fooled around a lot. Never anything past second, but he basically had his hands and his mouth all over my boobs all summer. I never got tired of it. We swam out to the rocks that led into the Charter Island harbor once and Bo did his thing, his spit, metallic-tasting from his braces, washing over me with the salt water. It must have been the weekend, because Dad was there. I remember seeing his big, bald head from the water, shining in the sun. He was up on a ladder, painting something on the side of the house.

“Thea Galehouse, for Christ’s sake, are you aware that there’s a riptide?” he yelled at the house, not at me, which made him look deranged. “It could have swept you right out. Jesus!” I hoped he’d seen us.

Michael Cunningham was the second. I was fifteen and he said he was nineteen, but it turned out he was actually twenty-four. I met him hitting tennis balls against the backboard in the park across the street from our apartment. But he was a stoner, and after a while it started to freak me out. There’s smoking pot and there’s smoking pot. Mom got it way before I did, after meeting him for a split second in our lobby.

“Tell me it’s just marijuana,” she said.

“Huh?” I asked.

“What’s he on?”

I shook my head. Too dumb to play dumb.

“I’d rather you didn’t spend time with him. Irrelevant, I realize, but don’t do drugs with him. Come to me if you want to get high.”

But the stuff with Bo and Michael had been nothing like
this
. I get it now, I kept thinking as I lay underneath Will, I get it. After a while I felt a wet spot by my hip.

“I told you, I’m a class act,” he said, embarrassed. “Sorry.”

I nudged him to my side and we lay like that forever, in a little astrodome of lips and rough, salty skin amid the fading Friday-afternoon light.

“Galehouse Rock,” he said, running his finger along my hairline. “G-Rock. Your eyes are always open. Every time I open my eyes, your eyes are open.”

“Like bug-eyed?” I asked. “Like I’m a meth addict?”

“No, you freak.” He laughed, prying my eye wider with his thumb and index finger. “You’re just taking it all in. You don’t look like you have a lot of judgment going on in there. I like it.”

“I judge,” I said.

“I know you judge yourself. I’m going to bet you give yourself the business. Anyone who has Fiona Galehouse for a mother can’t help but be a little cracked.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I mean it as a compliment,” he said, bumping his nose against mine. “You’re welcome.”

We ate hummus and carrots, drank Mom’s white wine and talked, finally falling asleep on the rug under the coffee table. We woke up Saturday and fooled around all day, did everything but, then did it for the first time Sunday. We were going to do it, then we weren’t, and then we finally did, right before he was about to leave.

“You don’t want to wait a little longer?” he asked, sliding a condom on dexterously with one hand. It was clear to me he’d done it before.

“Nope,” I answered.

“Big of me to ask, though, right?”

It was a big deal, but not in the way I expected. I was
expecting to be transformed into someone I felt like I was supposed to know, but hadn’t met yet—the ten-years-older version of me. I’d imagined her hiding behind a midnight-blue velvet curtain, and I thought that when I finally had sex, the curtain would go up and there she would be—the new me, and the
old
me, that little girl digging her short fingernails into an orange on a January night, she would disappear forever. But she was still there, with her goofy secret wave and all.

After we did it, I took a picture of Will lying in between two of my bears. They lay in the same position, the three of them naked with my pink flannel sheet covering their chests, each with their left arms sticking out stiffly at their sides. I lined up their heads in the frame and got on top of Will.

“You know,” I said, framing the shot, “when I was little and I went to work with Mom and saw that guy in the cage at Fiona’s, his giant penis scared the crap out of me. It was covered by his green leotard, but it was, like, you could see the outline of it, which was almost scarier than the real thing. But yours is different. It’s friendly looking. Pretend you’re sleeping.”

Will closed his eyes, trying not to smile. “Do you think the bears have feelings?”

“Of course,” I said. “I know they love
you
, for one thing. They just have a hard time showing it.”

I heard heels clonking down the hall and froze. “I’m home.” Mom peered into the room. The clock on my desk said six-thirty. The last time I’d looked it was two o’clock. I was straddling Will on top of the covers and thanked God I’d thrown on a tank top and my underwear. “I see you’re having a cozy time of it.”

Will stared up at the ceiling, frozen like the bears.

“How was the conference?” I asked, not looking at her.

She moved farther down the hall to her room without answering. We got a grip, threw on some clothes and crept toward the kitchen. Will was right on some level: I hadn’t had him over because I wasn’t sure Mom would like him. You had to prove yourself first, have a story of intense personal suffering to be worthwhile in her eyes.

“Why is everyone so stupid today?” she said, crashing into the kitchen counter with some plastic shopping bags. “That damned Rolf.” To an outsider she would definitely look slightly mad, with her red eyes and smudged fire-engine-red lipstick.

“What’d he do?” I asked, relieved that the focus was off us and our sexual misadventures.

“He’s just a tosser,” she said simply. “That thing I needed to go out Friday morning before I left is still there. Such an attitude. I wish they’d fire him.” She looked pointedly at Will. “Hi.”

“Mom, this is Will,” I said.

“Hello, Will.” She held out her hand.

“How do you do,” he said, shaking it.

“Very well, thank you,” she said, an amused smirk sneaking across her face at his formality. She turned away and pulled toilet paper and toothpaste out of the bags.

“What’s going on?” I asked as nonchalantly as possible.

“Sort of a rubbish weekend,” she muttered, twisting the plastic bag into a knot and throwing it into the cabinet under the sink. “Had an unpleasant meeting with Don Trainer. I’ve known this man for twenty-five years. But he’s a bridge burner, which you should never be in that business.” She peeled waxy paper away from a hunk of dark yellow cheese. “Will, would you like to try some Old Amsterdam?”

“I’d love some, thanks.”

She scraped a thin slice. “I shouldn’t share this, it’s too good,” she fake whispered.

“I appreciate it, Fiona,” he said. I looked at Mom. She didn’t seem to mind the first name.

“I thought you said you didn’t want to work with that guy,” I said.

“I didn’t but he called again, and you know.”

“Mom.”

“What?”

“Lose the losers in your life.”

“Don’t I know it.” She winked at Will, chewing.

“You’re right, this is very good,” he said. He got up and went to the fridge and pulled out a can of Diet Coke, which he cracked open and drank. Again, Mom didn’t bat an eye.

“You keep saying you want to pursue the real estate thing, so why don’t you partner up with someone you actually like?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Thee.” She sighed, leaning toward the kitchen counter. “I don’t know.”

Will stayed for dinner; he helped Mom by chopping up broccoli and dumping it into the pot when she said, “Okay, now.”

“I like him,” she said when we were on her bed later that night. “He’s gorgeous, Thea, you didn’t tell me.”

“Yes, I did,” I said. I was sitting next to her on the bed with the purple mess of yarn Vanessa had given me to crochet the scarf. It had been sitting in a sad pile on my radiator for months, but for some reason that night I was determined to untangle it and roll it up into a neat ball, even though I had many, many unread pages of biochemistry sitting on my desk.

“What’s that?” she asked, as though I had a dead mouse on my lap.

“Just some yarn Vanessa gave me,” I said.

“Anyway, he’s gorgeous in that truly American way,” she said, fishing for the TV remote, which was buried under a pile of magazines and notes to herself. “Like someone is pointing a blower at him, keeping him awake and bushy-tailed. He’s got no pretension. He’s an old soul.”

I rolled my eyes, leading the end strand of the yarn through a series of snarls and pulling.

“What?” she asked. “I’m not saying it lightly. He has a maturity about him.”

“When you say ‘old soul,’ it cheapens it.”

“Oh, well.” She scowled. “Terribly sorry to cheapen it. What’s wrong with his eye?”

“You mean, how it wanders?” I asked, rolling what I’d untangled into a small, kitten-sized ball. “He looked up at an acorn tree when he was little. Isn’t that cute?”

“He can get it fixed,” she said, muting the TV. “He’s quite funny, actually. He’ll seem sort of serious, but then he breaks into that lovely grin, quite at the drop. Which is nice. You don’t want anyone too heavy, Thea. That’s for sure. I was always going for the darkish ones. Like Daddy. But dark is actually boring, lo and behold. Anyway, Will is welcome anytime. You can tell him I said that.”

“You’re not mad at me?” I asked.

“I’m not mad,” she said. “A little jealous, maybe—”

“Mother!” I said, dreading what was coming next. I don’t like talking about sex. I don’t bond over it. My mother has always provided me with far too many details. About how Bruce, her orange-tanned, social-worker ex-boyfriend, nibbled
his way up her thighs until he found her spot and brought her off, or how one of the backers of Fiona’s who she ended up screwing had a penis that curved like a scimitar. Mom was purposefully graphic because, she said, she didn’t want me to be a victim.

“I’m kidding,” she said, laughing. “That was tacky. Sorry. Just don’t do anything stupid. Should we put you on the pill?”

“I don’t know,” I said. The pill was for older, more mature people who were serious about sex. “Yeah, maybe. Please don’t tell Dad.”

“Oh God, why would I do that?” she said, starting to read the program guide on the screen. “He’d just blame me. You’re seventeen, for God’s sake. It’s none of his business.”