The Beauty in Between: Too Close (A Beautiful Series Novella) (11 page)

There was a
slight sadness in her eyes as she looked at my lips and then back
into my eyes. “Is this going to be our tradition?” she said into my
ear.

“What is?”

“You kiss me on
the night of a formal and then dump me in the morning?”

“Trina, it’s
not like that,” I told her, cupping her face in my hands and
looking into her eyes. “It’s not like that.”

“Don’t David.
Don’t ruin what we have by going down this road again. You hurt me
too much last time.”

My mouth fell
open as my hands dropped to my sides and Trina turned away and
walked off the dance floor. For a moment I just stood there
dumbstruck, feeling like an idiot for nearly kissing her again on
top of feeling horrible for not realising how much I hurt her the
first time.

I watched her
move through the crowd toward the bathrooms and realised that she
deserved someone far better than me. I was lucky enough to have her
in my life as a friend and I was a bastard for trying to push past
that boundary.

Suddenly, a
relationship beyond friendship with Katrina, seemed unattainable. I
needed to let her go. I needed to understand that we were friends.
Nothing more.

I spent the
rest of the night watching over her as she danced with a group of
girls who she'd obviously met in the bathroom. They kept heading
back to the bar and drinking, eventually Katrina caught the eye of
some guy, and they danced together for a while before he walked her
off the dance floor and into one of the darker areas of the night
club.

Knowing she was
drunk and not wanting anything to happen to her, I moved to where I
could see her better, fobbing off a few drunken girls who wanted to
dance with me on my way.

By the time I
reached her, they were already all over each other. Despite
understanding that I needed to back off, I was drunk and watching
her kissing and grope at another guy was like being kicked in the
guts. I got her message loud and clear – she didn’t want me in the
same way I wanted her. Well, that was fine. But it didn’t mean that
watching what she was doing in front of me, didn’t make me jealous
as all hell.

Walking up to
them, I tapped her on the shoulder. “Trina, we need to go,” I said
loudly.

Breaking the
kiss, she looked up at me, all glassy eyed.

“Who the fuck
are you? Her brother or something?” the guy she was with
slurred.

“Something like
that. Come on Trina,” I said pulling on her arm.

“Leave me alone
David! Can’t you see I’m having fun with someone who actually wants
me,” she yelled over the music, stumbling over her words in her
drunken tongue.

“Please don’t
do this,” I begged her. “Just come home with me.”

“Hey mate, she
said she doesn’t want to come with you,” the guy directed at me,
puffing up his chest a little.

Trina put her
hand on his chest and stumbled toward me a little. “No, it’s fine.
I’ll go.”

“Whatever,” the
guy spat, turning away and disappearing into the throng. I breathed
a sigh of relief that it didn’t escalate beyond that and turned to
Trina.

She was really
struggling to stand up properly, so I put my arm around her and
walked her outside to get some fresh air and make our way to the
train station.

We got maybe
ten metres away from the bar when she pushed at me feebly. “Let me
go!” she complained.

“Trina, you’re
drunk. I’m trying to get you home.”

“Don’t act all
nice like you care David,” she drawled. “You have no idea how much
I’ve wanted you to like me. But you don’t give a shit do you? You’d
prefer to fuck bitches like Cassie instead of having something
meaningful with me.”

“You don’t know
what you’re talking about,” I told her stopping with her as she
leaned up against the wall of a building.

“Yes I do
David. If you cared, you wouldn’t try to kiss me when you know you
don’t want anything more from me.”

I placed my
hands against the wall either side of her head and leaned in close.
“Maybe I do want something more with you Trina. Maybe I’m scared
that I’ll fuck it up, and you’ll hate me. Have you ever considered
that I care about you so much that the fear of losing you eats me
up inside? I want you Trina. I want you with everything I have. You
are my world. My everything. If I fuck this up, I’ll have nothing
Trina. I can’t risk that. Don’t you understand?”

For a moment,
her eyes searched mine, before, all of a sudden, she sprang into
action, crashing her mouth into mine and sliding her tongue inside
my mouth while pulling at my hair. I responded with equal fervour,
pressing my body against hers as her leg wrapped itself around my
waist.

I threaded my
fingers through her hair as our tongues explored each other’s
mouths, the alcohol in my veins dulling my senses just enough so
that I didn’t think of the consequences of what we were doing, or
the fact that we were doing it on the side of the street in the
middle of the city.

We broke the
kiss momentarily, pausing to look at each other and check that this
was actually happening. Trina’s drunken eyes were slightly glazed
as she smiled at me, then coughed and turned her head to the side
and spewed all over the pavement.

“Oh god,” I
said to myself, holding her up while I watched her heave repeatedly
on the ground. “Come on Trina, I’ll get you some water,” I told her
when she’d finally finished. Sliding my arm around her waist to
hold her up, I started to walk with her again to the station.

Her body leaned
fully into mine as she struggled to walk. “Where’s David?” she
mumbled as her head rolled into my shoulder. “I’m supposed to wait
for David.”

“I’m here
Trina. I’m taking you home.”

That’s when I
realised, that I’d finally had the guts to do something and mean
it. But she was too drunk to even remember it. On the train ride
home, I started to think that maybe it was a sign that I should
leave her alone. Maybe we weren’t meant to be.

Trina didn’t
remember much at all about that night, she claimed that the last
thing she remembered was taking the shots and dancing. She had a
vague memory of dancing with some girls she didn’t know, but beyond
that, she didn’t have any clear memories, and I wasn’t about to
remind her.

I resigned
myself to the fact that Trina and I as a couple, just weren’t going
to happen and pushed any thoughts about her that way out of my
mind. We had our HSC marks and then our university acceptance to
focus on.

Over the
Christmas period, I went for a job packing shelves at the local
supermarket at night to try and help my mum out a bit. She had a
good job, but I knew that she struggled trying to give me
everything she felt she should. The job was only supposed to be
from mid-December to New Year’s, but they decided to keep me on
indefinitely.

On the day our
Higher School Certificate results came in, Katrina came running
over to my place and wanted to open them together. We sat across
from each other and counted to three before ripping the envelope
open and reading the contents to ourselves before swapping and
reading each other’s.

“Jesus David,
what are you? Some kind of genius? You flogged me,” she breathed
reading over my results. “At least you’ll have scored high enough
to get into Sydney Uni. With this score, I only qualify for
UWS.”

I took my
papers back from her and looked them over again. “Maybe. It depends
on how many people they have applying for my course. I might not
get into Sydney Uni either.”

She smiled at
me. “You'll get in. I know you will. But I’d love it if we both got
to go to the same Uni. That way, we’d still get to study with each
other.”

“Whatever, you
just want me there so you can ride my big brain all the way to a
finished degree.”

“Get lost!” she
laughed, whacking me on the side of my head with the thick piece of
cardboard that stopped the envelope from bending.

“That’s it.
You're gonna get it now,” I told her getting up to chase her as she
jumped up squealing and ran out the front door of my house.

“Don’t David,”
she laughed, dancing from side to side across one of the garden
beds where I couldn’t reach her. I leant down and picked up the
hose. “Don’t you dare!” she shrieked as I pulled the trigger on the
handle and released a jet of water that hit her straight in her
face.

She put her
hands up to block the spray, trying to jump out of the way laughing
her head off as I continued to rain water down upon her. Finally,
she sought shelter on the other side of my car and called, “I give
up! I give up!”

Walking around
to her, I held up the end of the hose and pointed it at her. “Are
you going to hit me over the head again?”

“No, I promise
I won’t,” she assured me, tapping the ground next to her to ask me
to sit down. I complied, keeping a hold of the hose as I was
slightly wary of retaliation. “It’s cool if we don’t go to the same
Uni you know. If you get into Sydney, you should go. It’s the
better school.”

“Yeah I know,”
I said, dropping the hose out of reach on the lawn in front of me.
“It’s just the last few years of any sort of school for the rest of
our lives. I wouldn’t mind doing them with my best buddy you
know.”

She got up on
her knees in front of me and placed her hands on my legs, looking
at me seriously. “David, I mean it. If you get into Sydney, you
need to go. We’ll still see each other. It’ll be fine.”

“Sure Trina,
whatever,” I said, looking at the street as I saw the flash of
yellow from a car driving past.

“Promise?”

“I
promise.”

“Good, because
I don’t want to go to uni with a drowned rat anyway.”

“What?” I asked
turning my attention back to her as she pulled down on the trigger
and squirted a burst of water in my face. She then continued to
spray me until I was completely drenched.

“Little girl,
you’re asking for a world of pain here.”

“No I’m not,”
she said dropping the hose on the ground and spinning on her feet.
“I’m going home!” She took off down the street toward her house,
and I gave a half-hearted chase until she rounded the corner and
then went back home.

When the
university acceptance letters came, I received two. One for Sydney
Uni and one for UWS. Without giving it a second thought, I went
into my mum’s home office and sent the Sydney Uni one through the
shredder. I then called Trina to let her know that I was going to
UWS with her.

University was
a whole other world for me. I still spent a lot of time with
Katrina as we had all of our law classes together, but where she
had chosen to do humanities, I had chosen to do commerce. So we
weren’t together all the time.

Katrina had
been doing really well in her triathlons and was asked to join the
national team for under 19s, so she didn’t have a lot of time for a
social life. So while she was busy training, I immersed myself in
uni life, visiting the campus bar with friends every Wednesday and
Friday and going to a lot of parties and nightclubs with them on
the weekend.

I always asked
Trina if she wanted to come, but she would only go out when she
wasn’t training for an important event, and with worlds coming up,
that was all the time. She assured me that when she got back, she’d
ease up on training to focus on uni, and then she could come out
with me a bit more.

I think the
separate social life was something that I really needed to make a
clean break from my feelings for Katrina. At the end of the day,
I’d prefer her in my life as a friend than to risk losing her by
forcing a relationship on her. Because, let’s be honest here - I
had no clue how to be the right kind of guy for her.

My
relationships with girls consisted of hooking up at a party and
screwing each other’s brains out until we either stopped, or she
started hinting that she wanted more from me.

I really don’t
think I was being mean. I was always clear that I wasn’t interested
in a relationship. Although, I guess that some girls agreed to it,
thinking that maybe they could change my mind some time later.

Monica was my
favourite girl in the circle I ran with. She only ever wanted me
when she was drinking or in between boyfriends. When we saw each
other at Uni, we’d say hi and maybe hang out a bit, but she never
went up to Katrina acting like she owned me, and she never acted
all clingy with me at other times either. We had a pretty good
thing going on until she met this guy, Jake, at a nightclub. He was
a tradie, I think a plumber or something like that. But one night,
after Trina had finished up her world travels and was out at a
nightclub with a bunch of us, I was introduced to him and his
mates.

I shook hands
with each of them and was perfectly nice – no hard feelings on my
side. I didn’t consider Monica my girl anyway, but he and his
buddies didn’t seem to like me very much. They did, however, like
Trina.

One guy in
particular, Christopher, took a great liking to her and showered
her with his attention all evening. There wasn’t any one thing that
he did that bothered me, because when I think about it, he was
completely respectful of her. He bought her drinks, listened to her
all night, danced with her and then when he was about to leave he
actually asked her if he could kiss her.

She blushed
like crazy and agreed, while I stood there watching, quietly
seething.

“Wow,” Katrina
said, when she joined me after he’d left. “That guy was something
else.”

“I don’t like
him,” I told her flatly.

“Oh come on
David! You haven’t liked any guy that I’ve liked.”

“Sure I have. I
used to be friends with Ben, and I always got along fine with
Ethan.”