Tameless (7 page)

Chapter Twelve – Wes

As depleted of energy as I was, my brain still managed to conjure up thoughts of what it would have been like if we’d fucked back when we lived in the same house. I knew she was thinking the same thing.

“It would have been so easy,” she said. “My mom and dad never would have known.”

“Something tells me they would have found out.”

“Who cares?”

I lifted my head and kissed her, holding my lips to hers for a moment. “I don’t. Not anymore.”

“What do you mean
anymore
?”

And here it was. Confession time.

“I always wanted you,” I said.

Her head tilted to the side a little and the corner of her mouth crept upward into a smile. “No way.”

“Yeah way. I’m serious.”

“Then why didn’t—”

“It would have been bad,” I said, cutting her off mid-sentence. “Look at what happened to me. You could have been dragged into the middle of it all. I didn’t want to do that to you.”

Suddenly, she burst out laughing.

“What?” I asked.

She put her hand over her mouth and stifled the laugh long enough to tell me what had gotten her giggling.

“My dad,” she said, and then laughed again. “Sorry.” She composed herself. “I just remember how mad he was that night you left. And the way things went down, you know? We were back inside the house and his face was red. My mom was trying to get him to calm down, but he kept ranting about how we never should have had a boy living in the same house with a teenage girl. And then…” She laughed a little more. “All of a sudden, he points, like he’s pointing in the direction you had left, and he said, ‘That kid is tameless!”

“Tameless?”

She nodded as she laughed. “I didn’t even know that was a word.”

“It doesn’t sound right. Untamed, yes.”

She said, “I actually looked it up. It’s a word. It was just so weird hearing him say it while he was in a rage. Oh God, it’s funny now. But anyway, I wasn’t exactly innocent myself, remember?”

I did remember, and I knew exactly what she was referring to. Just after Halloween our senior year, she and some friends had managed to get a bag of weed. I was surprised when I found out. Dawn? Good girl Dawn? Smoking weed? I never would have guessed, and I might have never found out if she hadn’t let it drop out of the glove box of her car when she was reaching for the school parking tag…right in front of the rent-a-cop who watched over the lot all day.

I’d been in the car that morning, as usual, and when the security guard saw it, we both froze. Dawn froze a little longer than I did, and I reached for it and quickly put it in my coat pocket. I knew the guy had seen it, so my plan was perfect.

He had told me to get out of the car. I did. Dawn protested, saying it wasn’t mine. I looked at the guard and said, “She’s trying to save me from getting in more trouble.” I turned my head back to Dawn. “Not gonna work.”

She tried again to insist that it was hers, but the guard knew me—who at school didn’t?—and there was no way he was going to believe it was hers.

It was my first suspension. I’d had plenty of detentions, so many in fact that anything I did next would result in suspension. A bag of weed, no matter how small it was, triggered it.

“I still can’t believe you did that,” she was saying now, and she rested her chin on my chest.

“No big deal.”

“It was a huge deal, and you know it.” She looked away from me, right at the wall, at nothing, and I could tell she was contemplating something. Without looking back at me, she said, “I used to blame myself.”

“For what?”

“Everything that happened to you after that day.”

I pulled her closer. “Look at me.” She didn’t look. I put my hand under her chin and lifted her head. Her eyebrows were knitted tightly, like she was in pain. “You’re being ridiculous. Nothing I did was your fault.”

“I just…I just feel like if you hadn’t gotten in trouble that day, things would have been different.”

I shook my head back and forth slowly. “Of course things would have been different. But the outcome would have been the same. I would have been skipping school. I still would’ve pulled the fire alarm during the athletic award assembly, or whatever that shit was called. You didn’t do anything to cause me to do the tuna fish thing.”

She sat up quickly. “Oh my God, I almost forgot about that.”

One day the school cafeteria had served this awful tuna casserole, which was really nothing more than canned tuna with some noodles and some kind of disgusting cream sauce. I put mine in a plastic bag and, between classes, took off the side of the math teacher’s desktop and placed the tuna inside. That afternoon, the heat and the fan produced a stench that had the entire wing of the school shut down. They eventually found the tuna, but never solved the mystery. Only Dawn knew I had done it.

“Stupid pranks,” I said. “The shrink told me I was acting out for attention but I think she was wrong. I know why I was doing all those things. Same reason I was doing drugs. It was the only thing that made me feel alive. It was like the thrill of doing something dangerous made me feel human. I had been so dead to everything after the accident, you know?”

She lay back down, putting her chin on my chest again. She didn’t say anything.

“The same was true of sex. That’s why I was with different girls and never could stay with just one.”

She let out a heavy sigh, her breath warm on my chest. “I don’t want to talk about other girls.” She looked up and her eyes met mine. “I want to know what you thought about me.”

“Sometimes when you were in my room and we were watching movies, I wanted to lock the door and take all your clothes off and fuck you on my bed.”

Her face blushed a little.

“Or,” I said, “sometimes I wanted to pull you into the bathroom with me and do it in the shower.”

“I had no idea. I mean, you never seemed to even give any hints like that.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I was a pretty decent liar back then, so hiding my true feelings was easy.”

I waited for her to tell me she had thought about us back then, but instead she said, “You did an excellent job hiding it. All those girls you brought into your room? Nice touch.”

“Jealous?”

She squeezed my nipple. “No.”

“I think yes.”

She squeezed harder without saying anything.

I kept my expression blank. “Squeeze all you want. Maybe I like that.”

I started to reach for her nipple, and she let go, backing away, wrapping herself in the sheet. Almost squealing. Laughing. Rolling away from me as I tried to unwrap her.

So this is what it might have been like…

“Why do you have a lion tattoo?” she asked, her fingers tracing the outline of the ink on my left peck.

I told her the story: When I was in rehab, I had a therapist who suggested I pick something to think about that makes me confident and strong when faced with temptation. She said it could be a line from a movie or song or book, a saying of some kind, or an image—just anything I could quickly conjure up in my mind to get me through a moment of potential weakness when my addiction was calling.

As a kid, I was fascinated with lions. I had books about them, video documentaries, stuffed animals, plastic figures, you name it. I had none of those things left by the time I had moved in with Dawn and her family, and never sought to replace them. So when the shrink suggested I pick something, it was obvious: a lion. Getting the tattoo was one of the first things I did when I got out of rehab. I considered getting it on my arm, my shoulder, maybe the inside of my wrist, but finally settled on getting it over my heart.

“I remember you touching my tat in the club,” I said.

“I liked it. Now I like it even more.” She was looking up at me, her eyes a little watery after hearing the story behind the tattoo.

Chapter Thirteen – Dawn

I didn’t see Wes all weekend because I was working so much. One of the assistant managers was out sick and I had to cover double-shifts both days.

I wanted to see him. I even found myself missing him during lulls at work, where my mind would go immediately to Wes—some of the thoughts about the past, some about Friday night. And the sex. My God, the sex.

I got home Sunday evening and Mom had made dinner. It was a Sunday tradition. Family dinner. Used to be four. Now three. The empty chair across from me used to be occupied by Wes, and all I could think about now was what my parents would think if they knew he had been in the house just days earlier.

Perhaps this was paranoia, but I kept thinking they somehow knew he’d been there. It was something about the way they were acting. There wasn’t as much talk at the table as there usually was, and they both had concerned frowns etched on their faces.

I asked about their trip and the response was short, clipped, obviously incomplete. And that’s when I started to realize their behavior probably had nothing to do with any hint that Wes had been in the house, but rather it was due to their trip.

“What’s up with you guys?” I finally asked.

Mom looked at Dad. I looked from her to Dad.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said.

“I didn’t say wrong, I said up.” I looked at each of them again. “Is something wrong? Because something seems…off. I don’t know.”

“We’re just tired,” Mom said.

Dad said to mom, “Pass the asparagus?”

I dropped it. They were definitely acting strange. It couldn’t have anything to do with me. They weren’t the type of parents to hold off on questioning me about any kind of issue—big or small—that came up. That’s another thing that started when Wes began to go off track. My parents grew more intrusive in my personal life. That hadn’t subsided at all.

If only all my friends weren’t married and at least one of them wanted to be roommates, or if only I could land a higher-paying job, I could get out of this house and be on my own like a real adult instead of feeling like an overgrown teenager whose parents were still a factor in her personal life.

Exhausted from a long working weekend, I went to my room after dinner and called Wes. Before he could finish saying hello, I said, “Will you come over later and climb up the lattice to my window?”

He made a sexy, deep groaning sound. “Don’t tempt me.”

“I just had the worst dinner.”

“Why?” he asked. “What happened?”

I told him about the awkwardness at the table.

“I didn’t leave a scent like an animal, did I? You think they can smell me?”

I laughed. “I’m serious.”

“You’re just being paranoid.”

“I thought that, too,” I said, “but then I talked myself out of that and now I’ve talked myself back into it.”

I heard him sigh a little. “Dawn, it’s going to be fine. They don’t know. And if the time comes to tell them, you tell them.”

“Right, easy as that. Wait…why did you say ‘if’?”

He chuckled. “
When
. I meant when.”

I let it go. Yes, there was still trust issues with him. It would take more than great sex and the excitement of him being back to erase the fact that he’d vanished from my life once before.

“When am I going to see you?” I asked.

I heard him opening a drawer. “You’re the one with the busy schedule.” I heard him pouring cereal.

“Not after today. It’s back to normal.” I was anxiously twisting the edge of a blanket around my fingers.

“Then you should definitely come over tomorrow after work.”

I felt an adrenaline rush from my chest to my stomach.

“And if you don’t,” he said, “I’m definitely coming to climb that lattice.”

. . . . .

Later that evening, I heard my parents arguing in their bedroom.

“Where did you last see it?” my Dad was saying.

“If I knew that, then I’d know where it was.”

Dad made a frustrated sigh and mumbled something.

“Dawn!” Mom called out.

I walked down the hallway to their door.

Mom turned around from her dresser. “Your father and I have a big event this week and I can’t find the diamond necklace I got for Christmas.”

I didn’t mean to, but I know I furrowed my brow. “Okay…”

“Have you seen it?”

Dad was in their walk-in closet.

“No,” I said.

She tilted her head a little, just like she used to do when I was a kid and she wasn’t convinced I was telling her the truth.

“I haven’t seen it, Mom.” My words came out flatly, not like I was trying too hard to deny it because I really hadn’t seen it.

“Well, it’s been in this jewelry box since January first—I know because I wore it out New Year’s Eve—and now it’s gone.”

She started rifling through that huge box faster, fingers diving in and moving things around.

And then I had a sudden flash of horror.

Wes. He’d been in the house.

Mom said, “Are you sure you didn’t wear it to work? It’s okay if you did. I’d rather you ask, especially if it’s something that expensive….”

Her words faded out as my body went cold, almost numb. I was trying to remember if Wes had been upstairs without me at any point. And why would he do that? Would he really steal something like that from my mother? Was he lying about having kicked the drug habit? Did he need money?

Was he lying to me?

“Dawn,” my Mom said. “Did you wear it when we were gone?”

I shook myself out of the horrible train of thought I’d conjured up. “No. I swear.”

I felt like I was ten years old again, being scolded, questioned, not trusted.

I know Wes wasn’t upstairs without me. We’d been up here together…

But I did use the restroom downstairs a few times.

Dad stepped from the closet, the necklace dangling from one finger.

“It was on the floor. Great place for it.”

My mom let his sarcasm slide. She was just happy to have that necklace back.

I turned and walked down the hall. I really needed a change. Needed to get out of this house. I opened my laptop and furiously scanned every website I could think of that listed job openings. If I couldn’t find something that paid more, I could always find a second job.

The necklace incident made me feel untrusted, and I resented it, but I was doing the same thing to Wes at the same time. Jesus. My mind must have immediately gone to him because of what happened years ago, and the seeds my parents planted in my mind about what a bad guy he was.

I felt guilty for thinking even for a second that Wes would have stolen anything, let alone the diamond necklace.

I felt resentment toward my parents for everything that had happened.

Worst of all, I felt confused. Maybe I didn’t really trust him like I thought I did.