The Thrill of It Read online

  Trey grips my hand tighter, looping his fingers through mine and I shiver. I’m not cold. It’s May, and it’s warm, and any kind of contact from him sends me soaring. The more I know him, the more I want him, and the more I can’t have him. We are in recovery, and he’s told me many times he wants to make it through.

  “I don’t need another one of these,” he’ll say, then run his index finger absently across the scar on his right cheek. But I love his scar. I want to trace it and kiss it and touch it. Scars are sexy – they say you’ve lived and that you’ve survived. That’s how I see him. But I don’t want to be the one who knocks him off the wagon. So this friendship, this hand holding is all we allow. No fooling around. That’s what we promise to do in SLAA. One year. Alone. Without anything. Without kissing. Without dating. Without relationships.

  But abstinence, withdrawal, a break, whatever-you-call-it doesn’t stop my worn-down, wasted heart from wanting this boy by my side to be more than my friend.

  I squeeze back, taking the slightest bit of contact with him. I’ve never held hands with anyone before. The men who ordered jailbait teenage call girls weren’t the type who liked to hold hands. Shocking, right?

  Trey flashes me a grin.

  “You can do this, Harley. It’ll be over soon.”

  I scoff. “Not soon enough.”

  When we’re one block away from the church, I say goodbye. “And this is where you must go, my sweet escort.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “I should have been an escort.”

  “You’d have been the best. Anyway, I don’t want her to see you. She’ll find some way to dig her claws into you.”

  He looks over his shoulder as if he’s checking out claw marks on his back. “Damn. I still have some other ones there. Scars everywhere.”

  I swat him. Fine, this is another allowed touch. “I like your scars. Besides, I’m sure you had many marks on your back.”

  “Covered in ‘em. Everywhere.” His eyes light up. There’s a part of him too that misses his past. Longs for his drug.

  “Get out of here, boy toy.”

  This is how we operate. I know his past with women. He knows my past with men. And we can tease each other. No one else knows my past.

  “Call me later though, okay? Let’s hang out after I’m done with work?”

  “Of course,” I say because we are addicted in a new way now. To contact with each other. We talk every day, text every day, see each other most days.

  He salutes me and walks off to catch a subway back to the West Village where he’ll spend the evening studying history for his final exams in between making permanent marks on the skin of customers.

  I walk one more block, grit my teeth, narrow my eyes, and tell myself I am iron, I am steel, I am unflappable.

  I enter another church.

  I never thought I’d spend so much time in them for reasons other than worship. I grip my field hockey stick in one hand. I don’t even play anymore. I simply like weapons, and I like flexing my fingers around it as I pass through the musty vestibule, ignore the holy water and the candles, and take my customary spot in the fifth pew from the back, laying the stick across my bare legs.

  I’ve been summoned by my Dark Overlord, and I can’t say no.

  Such is the life of a former teenage call girl who’s being blackmailed.

  It’s a Tuesday afternoon so there’s no service now. I glance around at the other churchgoers; a few scattered faithful are here. Or desperate, depending on how you slice it. As I scan their bent heads, I wonder if anyone hears their silent pleas. Maybe some are even asking for forgiveness for their sins, which is what I’d be doing if I were a religious girl.

  But I’m not.

  I hear the familiar sound of Miranda’s heels clicking across the stone floor.

  Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two…

  When I reach one in my head, she’s sliding into the pew, maintaining a two-foot distance between us as if getting closer to me would infect her. I kind of wish I had pink-eye, could touch my eye, then zoom in on her with the pad of my index finger just to watch her pull away and freak out.

  But then, she’d find some way for me to pay for that too.

  She says nothing as she stares at the sweeping altar ahead of us. Her golden blonde hair is piled high on her head with a clip, her medium length bangs swept over her ear. She looks amazing, especially in her sharp grey skirt that fits well and the pretty indigo blouse she wears. She’s lost about twenty pounds in the last six months.

  I want to tell her it wasn’t the twenty pounds that did it. But she’d never believe me. I’m dog poop on her shoe, a gnat buzzing by her ear, the smoke alarm that won’t stop bleeping.

  I am nuisance made human with killer legs and face to boot.

  I am her worst nightmare.

  Or I was until she realized she could turn the tables on me.

  She bows her head, clasps her hands together and steeples her long fingers, pale pink polished nails meeting at the points. I imagine what one would look like chipped.

  She’d shriek in displeasure, like a kettle on permanent boil. I stifle a smile.

  “You should pray, Harley Coleman,” she says crisply.

  “It’s not my thing.”

  “It should be.”

  “Thanks,” I say, but don’t give in to this request. To others yes, but not this one.

  Rule Number One when being blackmailed: maintain some lines.

  The more you bend, the more your extortionist tries to break you.

  She begins a low prayer, inaudible to anyone else, but crystal clear to me.

  It’s the Catholic prayer of purity. “Jesus, lover of chastity. Mary Mother, most pure, and Joseph, chaste guardian of the Virgin,” she says, the icicles in her voice stabbing at the last word.

  I roll my eyes and bob my head as she continues on, substituting “begging you to plead with God for me” to “begging you to plead with God for Harley.” She finishes with “Have mercy on her,” though she doesn’t mean a word of what she’s saying. There is no mercy for me from her. Well, unless I told my mom everything. And telling her anything or everything is the one thing I will never do. Never as in never-ever-ever.

  Rule Number Two: Know your own lines.

  I’m stuck here. Protecting my mother. I have to protect her.

  “Ah,” she says with a hearty sigh and a hugely false smile. “I feel so much better, don’t you? Cleaner, right?”

  “Like I just took a bath in holy water.”

  She glares at me. “You jest in God’s house?”

  I nod. “I do. I do jest in God’s house. Frequently, in fact.”

  “I’ll take the pages now.” She holds out her long-fingered hand to me, her wedding band with its sapphire and diamonds reflecting across the stained glass windows.

  I dig into a side pocket in my purse and hand her a thumb drive.

  She takes it, looking at it with disdain. It’s part of the routine: I give her a thumb drive every time and every time she regards it like a diseased object. “Hmm. You couldn’t bother to print it out?”

  “I don’t have a printer.”

  She snorts, then slips it into her vast purple purse. “I want this book done soon. One more month at the most. You need to work on the next chapters. And make them tawdry. Make them sordid. Make them as lurid as they can be.” I inhale sharply. This woman is sick. “Then, give her the redemption she doesn’t deserve,” Miranda adds in her cool, calculating voice.

  I stand up, eager to play even a lowly two of clubs in the form of leaving first. “I’m late for my British lit class.”

  “You can expect a followup from me sometime this week.”

  “Sometime, like anytime?”

  She shrugs smugly. “Perhaps any day of the week.”

  Rule Number Three: Know when to bluff.

  “If you don’t tell me the day, I’ll tell my mom everything.” She may hold most of the cards, but the thing about blackmail
is everyone has something to lose. Including Miranda. I don’t want my mom to know about the book she’s forcing me to write anonymously, but she doesn’t want my mom to know she’s making me write it either.

  She purses her lips. “I’ll email you.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  As I scoot out of the pew, she grabs my wrist and her pink nails dig into my skin. I fantasize about brandishing my field hockey stick and whacking her upside the head. There’d be a brilliant gash across her forehead. Blood would ooze into her blue eyes and leave a sticky trail in her blond hair.

  “Don’t. Sass. Me,” she says in a low hiss, determined to have the last word.

  I yank my wrist from her, clamp my lips together and let her have what she wants. My silence.

  I leave, but I don’t go to British lit, because I don’t have classes today. I have a dinner at my mom’s house. It is date night with a new man, and so she needs me there. She always needs me. And I need her.

  Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict…

  Page 3…

  It’s been my mom and me as long as I can remember. I don’t remember much about my dad, so this story won’t be about him. All my memories are of my mom, starting with how unhappy she was after my dad walked out when I was six.

  My mom was miserable for more than a year. She cried late at night, deep tears that could fill rivers and overrun their banks. She thought I was asleep, blissfully in dream land and unaware of her pain. But I heard her phone calls with friends, her “what did I do wrong” pleas, and her desperate, endless self-doubt. She missed the bastard, against her better judgement.

  She tried to hold it together during the days, but I’d still find her crying in her cereal, or wandering aimlessly around the apartment, sniffling, and missing, and hurting.

  “Don’t cry, mom,” I’d tell her, and she’d wrap me in a tight embrace.

  “I won’t, darling. I have you to make me happy.”

  After endless days and nights like that, she started to heal, to let go, and eventually the sobfests died down.

  Then she was ready to start over. To carve out her new happy.

  Dave was the first after my dad. I was in third grade, and Dave spent many nights at our house. He had a son one year older than me. Sometimes, when Dave visited in the evenings, my mom told us to play together. She and Dave wanted to chat and have some time alone.

  “I’m happy again,” she’d whisper to me before she closed the door to her room. “Isn’t it great to see me happy?”

  “Yes, mom.”

  “You’ll play with Dave’s son. That would make me so happy right now.”

  His son was nine, I was eight. We played Monopoly.

  Technically, I count Dave’s son as the first time my mom set me up with someone. Not that anything happened with him. But that’s how it all started, and this is the story of how I became a high-priced virgin call girl by the time I was a senior in high school. Kick back, grab a glass of wine, and prepare for the sordid, salacious tale of how I became Layla.

  (Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Innocent? Ha. As if anyone is.)

  Chapter Two

  Trey

  Elevators were my downfall.

  But I can handle them better now.

  The doors open with a soft metallic moan and I step inside the mirrored elevator in the Lexington Avenue office building. The lift shoots me up six floors to my shrink’s office.

  Dr. Michele Milo.

  I head into the lobby. It’s empty and that’s good because I’d rather not see who else is fucked in the head or the heart. I walk to her office and tap on the door.

  “Good afternoon, Trey,” she says in the calm voice I’m used to. I’m pretty sure shrinks don’t have any other voices. It must be part of shrink training – how to speak in a serenely modulated tone all the time. Never waver. Never vary. I wonder if shrinks are all peaceful and even on the inside too. Unflappable, never bothered by the shit life serves up.

  I can’t even imagine what that would be like.

  Like living inside a Valium, maybe.

  “Hey.”

  I flop down on her couch. She’s been my shrink for six months, and granted, she’s totally my type – maybe a little young since I think she’s in her late twenties – but I’ve never had a single dirty thought about her. Not one. Maybe that means I’m getting better. Maybe I’m not so hooked on older women. Maybe I’m breaking my addiction.

  “So,” she begins, clasping her hands together. “How is everything going for you this week?”

  I shrug. “It’s fine. The school year is almost over.”

  “And your plans for the summer? No Regrets full time?”

  I nod.

  “How are your parents about that?”

  I roll my eyes. My parents. My perfectly plastic, perfectly put together, perfectly empty parents. They wish I were going to school to be a doctor. Yeah, like that’ll ever happen. “Guess how they are with that,” I say sarcastically. “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Whatever you want to talk about, Trey. This is your time.”

  I look away, at the plants on her windowsill, at the books on her shelves. Books with names like Real Choices, It’s Not Love–It’s Addiction, Healthier Lives. All the shit I need to be. I stare at her walls and the framed abstract art. Red squares, yellow brushstrokes, blue lines all mixed together. I’m glad she doesn’t have those stupid inspirational pictures I’m tired of seeing at SLAA.

  She waits for me to speak.

  “Harley,” I say in a low voice. I always want to talk about her.

  “You want to talk about Harley.” It’s not a question; it’s a statement.

  “Sure,” I offer in the most casual, offhand way I can muster.

  “Harley, the girl you spent one night with and have now become best friends through a love and sex addicts support group,” she states, but there’s no judgement in her voice.

  I cross my arms. “You think it’s dangerous that I’m friends with her.”

  Michele shakes her head. “No. I think it’s worth exploring how and why you’re actively focused on recovering from your addictive behavior and you spend most of your time with someone who also has that goal in mind. And yet she also happens to be a young woman with whom you’ve been intimate.”

  “You think we can’t be friends because we almost slept together?”

  She shakes her head. “No. I think you can be friends. I also think the situation is complicated and unusual, Trey. Because you’ve gone from feeling as if your life was spiraling out of control and deciding to go to SLAA, to meeting Harley, to becoming close friends and sharing both the details of your past and your recovery with her. Is that a correct assessment of the last six months?”

  “Yeah,” I say tentatively, and I have the feeling of being subtly cross-examined even though I know that’s not Michele’s style.

  “And yet, you and your parents don’t talk about what brought you to SLAA. You don’t share it with friends. You don’t share it anywhere but here and with Harley.”

  My jaw tightens and my shoulders tense. “I feel like you’re calling me out on something.”

  “I’m not. But I want you to think about why you’re able to be this way with her. Why you go all over the city with her, and she meets you after work, and you hang out in between classes, and you know all about these memoirs she’s being forced to write, and you, by your own admission, are not a terribly open person. So why her?”

  I picture Harley. Her blond hair. Her brown eyes. Her banging body. But then I shift away from the physical, and I flash onto all the other parts and honestly it comes down to pretty much one thing.

  “I can talk to her about just about anything,” I say.

  “You can,” Michele nods. “Except one thing. The why behind all of this.”

  I run my palm over the tattoo on my shoulder, underneath my shirt. The why of all of this.

  Harley

  As soon as I open the
door, the familiar greeting pours forth.

  “You look so pretty,” my mom says in this incredibly reflective air. As if this is the first time ever, in my whole life, I’ve looked so pretty. I’m wearing a short skirt, a t-shirt, and my Mary Janes. I look like I do every day. Still, no matter what, without fail, you can set your ever-loving clock to it, You look so pretty is always the first thing my mom says to me.

  I wish I hated it.

  I wish I didn’t need to hear it.

  But I ache without it. It’s become as necessary as air and sun.

  It’s my confirmation that all is right in the world. She raised me to be pretty. She trained me to be pretty. She is pretty too.

  The difference is she never used her pretty to win things in life. She earned all her accolades, all her praise, all her awards. She doesn’t even hang them on the walls or frame them. She’s so humble, brushing them off as if they’re nothing when people praise her. But they’re not nothing. She’s won national awards from every journalistic association in the world, it seems. She’s earned the most prestigious prizes in her field since she’s a top-notch investigative reporter on “Here and Now,” the venerated show that has exposed government secrets about the wars, not to mention high-profile politician shenanigans. My mom uncovered the Sexting Senator, the congressman who hired young male escorts to give him blow jobs on Uncle Sam’s dollar, and a child prostitution ring run by an ex New York City Mayor.

  Barbara Coleman.

  Her name even sounds like a kickass reporter who takes no prisoners.

  She is the most feared whistleblower in America, and her two non-fiction books have topped the bestseller lists. She’s been called The Cleaner and I’m told that politicians shudder and quake in their boots when she starts investigating them. She’s been relentless in her pursuit ever since my father took off when I was in first grade. She kicked him out after several affairs. Then, with the help of her editor, who plucked her from the assignment desk, mentored her, and fed her reporting opportunities, she refashioned herself into some sort of avenging angel, a righteous doer of good, exposing all the evils behind closed doors.

  She is one of the most admired women in America.