Some Boy (What's Love? #1) (6 page)

“Do you want me to iron those first?” I said, and then I clamped a hand over my mouth.
 

Brendan’s forehead crinkled as he stared at me. “Iron them?”

I shook my head vehemently with wide eyes. “No. Forget it. Forget I even said that. Oh, God, I just sounded so much like my mother I think I’m going to be sick.”

Brendan just laughed and went back to putting his clothes on. “I didn’t even know people did that.”

“What, iron jeans? Yeah and sheets and underwear, if you’re my mum. Or my mum’s housekeeper, I should say.”

From the side, I saw his eyebrows raise, but he kept a straight face. I wasn’t sure if the reaction was in response to the ironing or the housekeeper.

I sat up a little in bed, pulling the duvet up to cover my chest. “How many jobs do you have?”

“A few. Maybe one less after yesterday, since I never showed up.”

“Oh.” I was chewing on my lip and watching him, with a little regret, put his T-shirt on. “Take a shower if you want,” I said.

“Why, do I smell?” He grinned and leant over me, wrapping me up and kissing me.

“You smell good to me. But a little like alcohol.”

Brendan kissed me into silence, and I got lost there for a little while. My fingers skimmed his skin where his shirt met his jeans.

“Don’t tempt me. I’m already late,” he said, and jumped up again. “So I’ll just have to go smelling like the tequila you spilled on me.”

“I did not. Or did I? That one is entirely possible.”

He just grinned as he pulled his jacket on and zipped it up to his chin. He glanced out the window. “Fuck. Is it snowing?”

“Is it?” I scrambled out of bed and ran to the window, dragging the duvet with me and trying to wrap myself in it. “Oh my God, it is.” I was beaming like a fool, and I glanced at Brendan to share my glee. But there was a strange, distant look in his eyes. He was just staring out the window, but clearly looking at something else far away, not the drifting flakes.

I loved snow. I enjoyed the benefits of living in a place where it rarely snowed hard, so it was still fun and mostly not a pain in the arse.
 

But Brendan looked unimpressed. More than that, really, but I couldn’t read his reaction. Then he seemed to rouse himself. He looked at me and smiled, but a flatness stayed in his eyes.

“Catch you later, then,” he said. He leant in and kissed me lightly, then left my room. I stood where I was watching the back of his head until it disappeared through the door. And it was only when I heard the front door click shut down the hallway, too, that I realised I still didn’t have his number.

It occurred to me that Justin probably did, but it seemed strange to have to ask someone else for it, instead of Brendan just giving it to me himself. Or asking me for mine. I looked at my laptop on the desk and considered, for about a split second, searching for him on Facebook, but that would have been even more stalkerish. And what did I want to do? Update my relationship status to Fuck Buddies with Brendan Holt?

I sighed and turned back to the window, leaning into the window sill to watch the snow. The glass fogged up
 
in front of my face, and I wiped it away.
 

Several stories down, Brendan was crossing the lawned area that stretched in front of my housing building, leaving green foot prints in the whiteness that dusted the ground like icing sugar. And as I watched him push his unruly hair to one side, I realised that the movement felt familiar to me. He must have done it often. And yet, even after asking him questions, I knew almost nothing about him. He’d neatly dodged them, giving just enough to distract me, but never any real answers.

He disappeared behind another building and I frowned. I didn’t know him at all, and yet I’d fallen into bed with him three and a half times, now. I didn’t even know when or if I’d see him again. I could still feel the contours of his muscles under my hands, I could probably draw his face, his eyes, from memory, but I didn’t even have his phone number. To contact him I’d have to do my best stalker impression and either get his number from Jason, track him down online, or show up at the student union on the chance that it was the job he was working that day.

Or just wait around for him to pull some stunt and show up in my life again.

I turned away from the window just as Izzy poked her top-knotted blonde head in.

“Hey, chickadee,” she said.

“Hey. How long have you been home?”

“Long enough,” she said, waggling her eyebrows at me.

“Ah.”

“You okay?” She brought the rest of her body into the room and let the door shut.
 

I was going to brush her off, but then I just shrugged. “I like him too much,” I said.

“Is there any such thing?” Izzy grinned, but it wavered.

“There is when you know nothing about him. Not where he lives. Not even his phone number.”

“Oh.” Izzy sat down on my bed and drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them. “Do you know his last name? I still don’t know Tom’s.”

“Salsa guy?”

She nodded and flushed as she smiled. I laughed.
 

“He does have my phone number, though. Said he’d call me, but we’ll see about that.” Izzy looked me up and down. “Are you starkers under there?”

“Uh, yeah. Kinda.” I tightened my grip on the duvet and came to sit next to her on the bed. “Want to do something?”

“I’ve got an exam I’m meant to be studying for, so, yeah. For sure. What?”

“Snow angels?”
 

Izzy grinned. “I’ll go put my boots on,” she said and jumped up. But she paused at the door. “Don’t stress, okay. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. And for what it’s worth, I saw him with you last night, and there is no way he is not into you.”

“How do you remember last night and I don’t?”

“You haven’t had as much practice as me,” she said.

And for a while, as we channeled our inner children and made pitiful excuses for snow angels in the thin snow, laughing like loons, everything was okay.

And I didn’t even think about Brendan Holt for like, a whole five minutes.

I
WAS
LOOKING
through Justin’s contacts. He’d left his phone on the table next to my purse while he went to the bathroom. And the thumping music from the speakers behind me hid any sound of his return.

Suddenly his face was right beside me as he leant down to peer over my shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

I had frozen and tried to think of some plausible reason I would be snooping, but my tipsy brain wasn’t up to it.

“Uh…looking for Brendan’s number,” I said and hung my head in shame. He plucked the phone from my fingers.

“I don’t have it anyway,” he said, sliding onto a stool beside me. “I don’t think he has a phone.”

I screwed up my face. “Who doesn’t have a phone these days?”

“Huh?” Justin leaned closer to hear me over the music, which had just escalated raucously.

I flapped my hand, telling him to forget it. Then stared morosely into my drink.

“He hasn’t been at lectures, either,” Justin said close to my ear. I looked at him and he leaned back again, shrugging.

“Is he okay?”

“Huh?”

I leaned in closer. “I said, is he okay?”

“Probably just busy. Or in jail,” Justin shouted back to me. Then he laughed at my wide eyes. “Kidding. Henry got it all sorted. He’s fine.”

I rolled my eyes at him, then drained the last of my drink. If everything was fine, then why hadn’t I seen or heard a thing from him in five days? That’s what I thought, but I didn’t say it. Because even as I was thinking it, I was berating myself for being ridiculous — we’d been to bed, we weren’t in a relationship. Five days was nothing, considering he had no obligation to ever see me again.

Except I’d told him I liked him. That little fact was wound up tightly in my chest. Maybe that small confession shouldn’t have come weighted with any expectation in my mind, but it had. It did. I expected something more.

Maybe that was the very thing keeping him away. All he’d said was that he liked it when I said his name — in comparison, I must have sounded like I was declaring my undying love. No wonder he had split.

I shook myself and stuck out my tongue, like I’d just tasted something bad. My own ridiculous emotions, perhaps.

I scanned the room for Izzy and Steph, dancing in the crush, then I turned my face to Justin and smiled widely.

He frowned, suspicious, and I flicked my eyebrows in the direction of the object of his affection, then waggled them. I was truly happy for him, and I pushed away my own melodramatic misery. I saw his mouth twitch, even though he tried to keep a straight face, and I jumped to my feet, punching him in the shoulder.

“Come on. Dancing time,” I said. I grabbed his hand and pulled him off his stool too, leading him to the dance floor where I handed him over to Steph. Who was at the floppy drunk stage already. She threw her arms around Justin’s neck, hanging off him while she made an attempt at sexy dancing. Attempt being the operative word. But I had never seen Justin happier. The look in his eyes, when she had arrived at our place earlier in the night, had shocked me, but also given me warm fuzzy feelings. Justin had never looked at anyone like that before, that I had ever seen, or ever expected to see.

That she wasn’t a stripper and wasn’t even wearing a low cut mini dress and fake eyelashes would have been enough to tell me something was different about this girl. And that she was a lightweight, giggling, flushed and drunk before the rest of us had barely arrived at tipsy, was just another point in her favour. She’d admitted that she rarely drank, and that Justin was a bad influence on her, but she said it with so much adoration in her eyes that Izzy and I had made gagging faces behind her back.
 

 
I turned my back on them now, turning to dance with Izzy who was whipping her undone hair around dangerously. She was drunker than I thought — once we’d ventured into the hair whipping stage, the crying in the bathroom stage was never far behind. I could see the frowns of nearby dancers as she flung herself around with abandon, but I knew better than to get in her way. I just laughed, and shrugged apologetically at a few people. Then joined her, getting lost in the music and the strobing lights.

Izzy disappeared and came back with shots for each of us, but while she was distracted by the song that came on — “This is my favourite song, ever!” — I took hers off her, and downed the rest of what she hadn’t already spilled. She didn’t even notice, confirming my thought that she really didn’t need it.

Not like I did, either. I was definitely moving beyond tipsy now.

I caught sight of Justin and Steph being lovey in the corner, and I thought of Brendan, and Justin’s comment to me in the kitchen the morning after about dirty dancing in the corner.
 

I missed him.

It came over me with a pang of longing in my chest that took my breath away. I missed him. I wanted to be dancing with him now. Or falling into bed with him, stripping off his clothes and feeling his skin against mine.

I wanted to be mad at him. Blame him for making me feel like this and then disappearing. But it wasn’t his fault. I was the one who had invited him in. And kept inviting him in. I’d never asked him for anything more, he’d never offered it.

And if it was just a hot guy’s body I wanted against mine, then I had plenty to choose from here. As if proving something to myself, I turned to the nearest one and gave my best come-hither-stare. I probably failed miserably, but he was drunk enough not to notice. It gave him the message, at least, because he was beside me immediately, his hands on my hips as I writhed and twisted them against him.

I even let him kiss me. I responded at first. But then suddenly his tongue in my mouth felt horribly slug-like; I pulled away abruptly. I mumbled something about the bathroom and escaped, and when I glanced back, pausing at the bathroom door, I could see tongue-guy already grinding with someone else.

I was both disgusted and relieved.
 

I locked myself in a a cubicle and sat on the closed lid of the toilet with my head slumped down to my knees. But that made me feel dizzy and sick, so I sat up again.

It wasn’t just anybody that I wanted. It was one specific body. And the way I saw it, I had two options — go home now, and go to sleep, hope that he showed up sometime. Or get so drunk right now that I’d just take someone home, anyway, even if I didn’t want to. And then I’d still hope that Brendan showed up someday, just with a lot more shame than the first option, but also more sex.

I blew air out of puffed cheeks. Neither option felt that appealing. Both came with a creeping loneliness, but one also came with an extra-helping of self-loathing. Why did I always lean towards the choice that came with self-loathing?

“Time to go home,” I heard someone say outside the cubicle. For a moment I stared at the closed door, disoriented, like the person had read my thoughts. But then I could hear someone else, crying and jabbering drunken nonsense. “Come on, Livvi,” the first voice said again, in the patient, slightly bored tones of the least drunk friend, her default reward for moderation being the charge of her legless companions.

It made me think of Izzy, and I thought I’d better at least check on her. And then leave. It was like a sign, and I was surprised to find myself not needing much encouragement to actually just go home. Alone.
 
I emerged from my cubicle, gave an empathetic smile to the girl picking Livvi up off the floor, and went out.
 

Izzy was fine, of course, and when I tried to ask her if she wanted to come home with me she just laughed me off and kept dancing with a guy who was trying to make his move, but being thwarted by her oblivious and enthusiastic movements. Justin was also occupied, so I just made for the door.

It was when I was waiting for the girl in coat-check to find my jacket that I saw him. Just out of the corner of my eye, and then I stayed staring straight ahead in panic. I didn’t know whether to acknowledge him or not; if he just happened to be there, and didn’t want to run into me, I didn’t want to make it anymore painful than it needed to be. If I pretended I hadn’t seen him, then he could sneak past and go on with his life.