In Pieces, page 11
The application lets me know he’s typing, and I wait. And wait. But when the next message comes, all it says is, No. They fucking don’t, Beth.
My pulse accelerates and my palms dampen with nervous sweat as I type. Do you know me? So much for the script.
You sure as fuck don’t know me.
I’m trying to craft a response that doesn’t violate half of Bowman’s guidelines when whoever it was abruptly ends the conversation. But part of the appeal of the software—beyond the expected anonymity—is that it only keeps record of the last exchange. So I can’t even go back and re-read the strange conversation. I can’t even be sure that it was a strange conversation. Especially considering some of the exchanges I’ve seen or heard about since I started volunteering here.
But I can’t escape the unsettling feeling that there was something uncomfortably intimate about the way he used my name—in the way he didn’t answer whether he knew me or not, but instead said it was me who didn’t know him.
Did it mean something?
And then vaguely I remember telling Brody about my volunteering that first time we went out for coffee, and we were talking about schedules, and I can’t fucking remember if I mentioned that I manned the chatline alone on Wednesday nights…
But then, this is also a symptom of my anxiety. This kind of paranoia.
The truth is I don’t even know what made me think of Brody. According to David, who spoke to the local detective, the investigation is still ongoing, but if Liz said he assaulted her then I have to believe he did, right? Why would anyone lie about something like that?
But why would Brody contact me at all, let alone anonymously like this?
David’s accusations of Brody being a “creepy stalker”—my own accusations—ring through my mind, and despite logic telling me it was more than likely just a stranger using the program for exactly the purpose it was intended, I can’t escape the gut feeling that there was something personal about it. Maybe even something sinister.
* * *
“Honey, I’m home!” I call out.
The sweet and sour aroma of delicious, greasy Chinese food fills the apartment, and my mouth waters. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.
I find David at the breakfast bar, book in hand, the counter topped with unopened cardboard containers. “You didn’t have to wait for me.”
David closes the book and sets it down. “Food just got here a few minutes ago.”
He’d have waited anyway, and we both know it. David, for all his zero-fucks-given attitude, can be thoughtful when he wants to be.
His phone starts buzzing a moment before Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin’” starts blaring from its speaker, and David silences it without so much as glancing at the screen, or acknowledging it, for that matter. He doesn’t even meet my gaze until I start laughing out loud, raising his eyebrows in question until he notices my attention on his phone.
“Was that your pimp?” I tease. “Do you have to go to work?”
David rolls his eyes, but his mouth twitches, and I don’t miss it. “Bogart programmed his own ringtone,” he explains. “Don’t ask.”
“You could change it, you know.” I try unsuccessfully to suppress my amused smile.
David’s eyes spark with mirth. “I did, actually. He changed it back. And technically he gets to—BEG rules, and he’s chapter president…” His full lips quirk up. “Why, Bea? Are you going to pretend like you still hate hip-hop?”
My cheeks burn with the strength of my grin but still, I shrug, messing with him. “It’s all right, I guess.” But my expression gives me away easily, and, of course, David knows the truth.
And the truth is I did hate hip-hop. I loathed it. I was a daddy’s girl, after all—the daddy he was when he hadn’t been drinking, anyway—and my dad had had me addicted to his favorite classic rock albums since before conscious memory. Literally, in fact, since my mother always swore he played them for me in utero.
The Stones, The Doors, The Who—they were the bands I fell in love with, the songs I learned to move to—to dance to. Music always had magical properties for me, and dancing is—was—one of the very few things in my life that has ever come naturally to me. And as I got a little older and found myself shying away from my classmates, struggling more and more to connect to kids my own age, I would increasingly turn to music instead. Because when my body moved to a song almost on impulse, all of the obsessive thoughts and worries that somehow seemed to both plague me constantly and attack at random were notably quiet. It was almost as if they, too, wanted to hear the music.
Music freed my soul, and dance, my body.
That is, until my father left.
But I couldn’t help what my subconscious had connected to that music—music that, no matter their melody or lyrics, would do nothing but slice open festering, unhealed wounds. My loyalty to my father’s classic rock bands disappeared with the man himself, so in the years after he left, with years still to go before he’d come back into our lives, I’d lost not only my father and the music I grew up loving, but the freedom of dancing to it—dancing at all—as well.
It wasn’t a conscious decision. It just happened. When you have a pain response to a stimulus, you avoid it at all costs. You burn your hand on the stove, and you don’t touch the stove the next time. A song gut-punches you until you can’t breathe, you turn off the damned radio app. And you don’t turn it back on. By the time I realized I’d been avoiding music altogether, I’d already stopped my dance lessons and quietly quit the team.
I don’t know if David even knew that when he reintroduced me to hip-hop, a genre I’d thought I couldn’t stand.
He gets up and starts opening the Chinese food containers before handing me a pair of chopsticks.
“All right, huh?” David nonchalantly clicks around on his phone until Jay-Z’s Hard Knock Life album starts playing, and he bursts into laughter as, after no more than a minute max, my shoulders start bobbing of their own volition as the song demands, bounce with me, bounce with me…
I concede with a smile, and get us each a bottle of water from the fridge. I wonder just how much he remembers about that night. If he ever realized just what he’d given back to me in offering me music that sounded nothing like my father’s favorites.
“Do you remember that club you snuck me into in Puerto Rico?” I ask him. We’d continued our shared family vacations after my dad left, and one night, on a trip to Puerto Rico, Sammy had met a girl, leaving me alone with David. I hadn’t complained.
David’s smirk stretches wider. “You mean the hip-hop club?”
“Ha.” But I take a massive bite of my egg roll just to give my mouth something to do other than grin like an idiot. It was only months before I met Brian, and I was schoolgirl-crushing on David hard. The resort we were staying in had a couple of nightclubs, including a teen club, and a few of the other kids had invited us—well, really just David—to join them there that night. I’d been upset because there was a minimum age requirement of fifteen, and I was still several months shy, so when David declined, I stayed quiet.
“How did you know?” I ask him suddenly, and he cocks his head in confusion. “That I wanted to go to that club?” Because I hadn’t said anything. I hadn’t done anything except follow him around like a loyal puppy dog as he walked along the beach and drank tiny bottles of Jack Daniel’s he’d stolen from a stranger’s minibar.
David’s shoulder lifts in a half shrug. “I saw your face when that girl reminded you how old you had to be to get into that cheesy teenie club.”
I keep my gaze trained on the broccoli in my chopsticks. “But you didn’t take me to that cheesy teenie club…” I remind him. No, David snuck me into the eighteen and over club, by tricking a busboy into letting us in through the back.
David scoffs. “Fuck that. I heard that bullshit techno music coming from that place. No way was I going to subject you to that shit.” He practically oozes self-satisfaction.
“Oh yeah? And how were you so sure we wouldn’t get caught, huh?”
David shakes his head in mock reproach. “She has the nerve to doubt me. Tsk, tsk, tsk…”
I meet his laughing gaze. “Maybe you have a little too much confidence. Has anyone ever told you that?” It’s utter bullshit, and I suspect he knows it.
“I seem to remember you calling me the bravest person you know.” David’s self-satisfaction grows to epic proportions before imploding in on itself, and I know he’s recalling the rest of that conversation as vividly as I am, because it’s written all over his handsome, bemused face.
David had led me past the teen club and around to the back of the one we were supposed to have needed ID to get into. He hadn’t let me in on his plan, but I’d gone along with him implicitly—excitedly. He’d angled me away from the door, pulling me too close, as if he’d brought me back there not to sneak into a dance club, but for something else entirely. It had sent my heart racing to match the hip-hop beat emanating from the venue.
“Just stand like this,” he’d whispered. “Pretend we came out here for—you know—privacy.”
Pretend. Right. Duh.
“Good girl,” David had praised quietly. “Just relax.”
I’d blown out a long breath. “How do you never get nervous?” I’d whispered a little resentfully.
David had stared down at me. “Not never, Bea,” he’d rumbled. His voice had begun to grow deeper in those days, and it would strike me every time.
“Please,” I’d scoffed, “you’re the bravest person I know.” I remember wincing inwardly. ‘You’re the bravest person I know’? What am I—his groupie?
But David’s brow had furrowed. “Like I said,” he’d breathed, “not always.” The back of the building hadn’t been as brightly lit as the rest of the resort’s pavilion, but David’s hazel eyes had seemed to be struggling with an uncertainty that seemed like it couldn’t possibly belong to him.
“I find that hard to believe,” I’d admitted softly.
“Believe it.”
I’d frowned up at him, and his brow creased even more.
“Remember what I told you outside the temple that time? About my parents?”
I’d blinked at him for a moment, stunned not only that he was bringing up telling me about his adoption—which hadn’t been spoken about since—but equally stunned at the suggestion I might not remember.
Was he freaking insane?
“Of course,” I’d breathed.
David had nodded, satisfied. “Not brave enough to meet them,” he’d murmured, as if to prove his point.
“I thought you said you didn’t want to?”
David had stared a beat, as if surprised I’d remembered that, too, before shrugging.
“Then meet them,” I’d said matter-of-factly. But hadn’t it been a matter of fact for David? Hadn’t it been as simple as doing what he wanted, because he wanted to? That’s what he’d always told me.
The corner of his mouth had twitched and his forehead smoothed. “Maybe I’m nervous, Bea.” He’d given me a small, halfhearted smirk, teasing me, not unlike he’d been doing just seconds ago. “Maybe I’m not brave enough.”
“Then maybe you should be.” It’d just slipped out, and I hadn’t meant to sound insensitive—I just couldn’t reconcile the idea that David March could not find the courage to do something he wanted to. “Unless you don’t really want to.”
I swallow anxiously. I hadn’t meant to come off so callous, and I can’t help but wonder if David is thinking about those words, too. I watch him cautiously over the cartons of food. We haven’t spoken about his birth parents or his adoption since, and it takes every ounce of courage I can muster to bring it up now.
My voice is small and hesitant. “Have you thought about it at all since? You know…meeting them…?” Nothing he’s said indicates he even remembers the details of that conversation, but I know David well enough to read him, and he’s gone from teasing to sober in a heartbeat.
But David acts like he doesn’t even hear me, let alone know what I’m talking about. He changes the subject to the egg rolls, and I take the hint, and let it go.
I consider telling him about the strange conversation on the student chatline this evening, but the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced I’m just being paranoid, and the last thing I need is to give David yet another reason to be overprotective.
I catch sight of a sliver of tanned, perfectly carved abs peeking out from beneath the hem of his T-shirt as he rolls his shoulders like he’s trying to loosen them up. He’s been doing that all week—since the second day I was here. I’ve asked him if it’s because of the couch, and he swore he just overdid it at the gym. But I’ve been here over a week now and it doesn’t seem to be easing up.
I come up behind him and rub his shoulders, digging in my thumbs to feel his traps.
He’s caught off guard and he winces. “Shit,” he barks.
“This isn’t from lifting weights. Your back is all knotted up!”
He turns and shrugs me off, but I reach around to feel the back of his neck. This time he holds in his reaction, but the stiffness doesn’t lie. I retract my hand. “It’s the couch—”
“It’s not the fucking couch!” He cuts me off.
I glare at him. “Fine. If the couch is so comfortable, then I’ll sleep on it tonight. You take the bed.” I grab another piece of broccoli with my chopsticks and pop it into my mouth.
David watches me carefully. “Not happening.”
I shrug. “But it’s so comfy. And I’m the guest. I want to experience this incredible, comfy couch.” I dig into the veggie lo mein, unperturbed by his resistance.
“I didn’t say it was more comfortable than the bed. And I never fucking used the word ‘comfy,’ for the record,” he adds.
“Which is why you should take the bed, at least until you recover from your weight-lifting injuries,” I snark.
David grinds his teeth, his jaw tight with frustration. “No.”
“Why—”
But he’s had enough of my snarky sarcasm and he blows up. “Because it’s the least comfortable fucking couch in the history of couches! Because its cushions are filled with fucking rocks and the bones of the men it’s killed before me!”
Finally. I keep my composure, casually invading the sweet and sour chicken carton he’s holding and grabbing a piece. “Then you shouldn’t be sleeping on it. I’ll be okay. We can take turns, or at least until you feel bet—”
“I’m not letting you sleep on that fucking sofa from hell.” He is adamant.
I lift my gaze to meet his. I know my next suggestion is stupid, but it’s also perfectly reasonable. I am like a sister to him, after all, right? “Your bed is big enough, David. We can share it.” I may be contending with a serious crush, but it’s not like I can’t sleep beside him without controlling myself.
David glares at me like I’m insane.
I shrug. “We’ve shared a bed before.” I remind him of the time our families went skiing and Sammy slept with Tucker and I shared with him.
“You were five.”
True. “So? It was a full. Now you have a king.”
“It’s not happening.”
But it is. And after we finish eating and doing our schoolwork in the comfortable quiet I’ve grown accustomed to over the past week, I let him make up the couch like usual. Only this time, when he’s in the bathroom washing up, I climb between the sheets and close my eyes. I twist and turn over and over again, trying to find a comfortable position, but David was right; it does seem to be impossible. There’s no way I can let him sleep here. Especially since there’s no telling how long I’ll be staying.
Brody hasn’t been in class and I haven’t seen him lurking around campus, but I also know he hasn’t been arrested as the investigation is still “ongoing.” Even Lani is still staying in Campus West. David might be willing to spend the foreseeable future wincing in pain, but I’m not willing to watch it, not when I can do something about it.
“’The fuck are you doing, Bea?”
“Sleeping.” I roll from my back to my side, trying to get comfortable.
“The fuck you are.”
“The fuck, fuck, fuck. I can curse, too. And I can sleep on a sofa. And you can take a night to get your back straight.”
“So you can barely turn your head tomorrow?” he snarls. “Fuck that! Get up!”
I don’t move. He’s not angry with me. He’s just being stubborn and he knows I’m right. But still, his shouting renders my voice soft and unsure. “I can’t watch you wince in pain every time you move your neck, David.”
He blows out a long-winded exhale. “You’re not sleeping there.”
“Then I’ll go back to my dorm.” It’s an empty threat, but he won’t take that chance.
His eyes close and he huffs in deep, exasperated breaths. “Fucking fine,” he practically growls, and then stomps off to his bedroom in defeat.
* * *
I wake up to the shirtless form of an Adonis. David is tucked along the opposite edge of the bed, lying on his back, his muscular arm thrown over his head as he breathes softly in his sleep. More than a week of waking up to this exact image has done nothing to desensitize me to it. My heart short-circuits at the first sight of him, just like it did yesterday and the day before that, and I struggle to swallow down the familiar wave of longing that surges in my chest, and lower in my body.
There’s at least a foot of space between us, and I’ve once again stolen the entire comforter in the night and hoarded it for myself, my new modus operandi, apparently. The white bed sheet covers David only up to his lean waist, the defined grid of his abs rising and falling with his relaxed breathing.
I take in his muscular chest, the lines of muscle and sinew in his shoulders, his bicep curled around his mess of mahogany bed-head. I flush with heat. I am not five anymore. And then my gaze shoots to the bed sheet, to the massive tent his body creates, and I swallow again.
I am not naïve enough to think there’s anything personal about his body’s reaction. I know about morning wood; I grew up with a brother, after all. But my own body’s reaction to the sight of it—that is entirely new, and very personal to its owner. It is also the perfect example of why this arrangement might not be the best idea. But neither David nor I have come up with a better one, so I guess we’ll have to suck it up.
