The more she talks about it, the more the color vacates her cheeks and her breath chops up again.
“Okay, let’s distract you until we get moving again.” I roam my brain for something to take her mind off the imagined fall to our death. “What’s the weirdest place you ever had sex?”
Yep. The girl I’m supposed to be not trying to screw, and that’s the question that comes to mind. Live by the dick, die by the dick, I guess. No going back now, so I just wait for her response like it’s not a moronic question.
“Um, how do you know I’ve had sex before?” Her eyes and her grin collaborate to tease me. “Maybe I’m a virgin.”
“Weren’t you the girl who screamed ‘I like dick’ at the top of her lungs last night on the dance floor?” I throw my head back and guffaw, in honor of Jimmi and her word-challenged self.
“Oh my God.” Pink washes over her high cheekbones. “I can’t believe I did that. It was the Grey Goose talking.”
“And warned me that you were horny like you might pounce on me if I got too close.” My laugh dies down to a smile, even though this conversation is making my jeans tight.
“Okay, you can stop humiliating me now.” She’s only half joking but twists her mouth to the side. “Coat check.”
“What?” Is the height going to her head already? “What’s coat check?”
“That’s the weirdest place I ever had sex. It was at my debutante ball, and—”
“You were a debutante?”
“Don’t ask. My mother’s doing.” She sighs and offers a wry smile. “But my date and I snuck into the coat check closet and did it. I had on this huge white dress and he was struggling to find the condom and the heel on my shoe . . .”
She waves her hand dismissively and grins.
“I guess you had to be there.”
That would have been awkward.
“I think I get the picture,” I say. “Your turn.”
She sobers in a few seconds, and her mouth gradually flattens into a soft line.
“What’s your greatest regret?” she asks softly.
“You’re kidding, right?” I turn my knees in, pressing my back against the side of the cart so I can see her squarely. “I ask you a funny sex question, and you go for the jugular with this?”
“You didn’t place any prerequisites on it.”
“I didn’t know I was dealing with a sadist, or I would have.”
“Well, you didn’t.” She smiles a little, her eyes softening. “Greatest regret, and you have to be honest. Not something stupid like never seeing The Goonies.”
“God, of course I’ve seen The Goonies.” I run a hand over my face, scouring all the regrets crowding my past to find the one that’s the worst. And once I have it, I’m not sure I want to be honest with her. If I am, it means I have to be honest with myself, too.
“Okay.” I cross my arms over my chest, tipping my head back to contemplate the stars in the darkening sky. “I was like, twelve years old.”
“Is this gonna count?” She drops a skeptical look on me. “That’s pretty young for regrets.”
“Not where I come from,” I say softly. I unfocus my eyes, looking back through the years until I find that day on the playground. “This cop stopped me and my cousin Jade.”
“For what?”
“For . . . nothing.” I shrug. “It isn’t like what you’re used to. They didn’t need a reason. And this was in the nineties, so drugs were huge in our neighborhood. And kids our age were slinging on the playgrounds. So, we didn’t think anything of it.”
“What happened?”
“He searched me, and of course, found nothing. I was a good kid.” A staccato laugh comes quick and short. “I watched movies, went to school, and wrote poetry. Not exactly a gangbanger in the making. My mom made sure I kept my head down and kept moving. You didn’t have to find trouble in my neighborhood. It found you.”
I glance over my shoulder at the ground, which is so far away the people below like a colony of ants, and turn back.
“Then the same cop searches my cousin.” I pause and swallow the heat blistering my throat. “He . . . she had on this dress, and he . . . touched her.”
I’ll never forget Jade’s indrawn breath. He’d told me to stay against the wall, to face the wall, but when I heard her gasp, I looked at them. I wasn’t a rule breaker, but I knew this one time, I should break the rule. I should step in when I saw his hand working under her dress, when I saw one tear slide down her face. He had a gun. He was a cop. I didn’t know what to do. Jade just shook her head at me, thinking the same thoughts and holding the same fears. It was only a few moments, but that was all it took to turn the whole world upside down.
“I don’t know why we never talked about it,” I say to Bristol. “And we never told anyone. Jade didn’t want to. She was ashamed, I think. I know I was.”
“You were kids and he was in authority.” There’s a world of emotion in Bristol’s eyes when they bore into mine. “That’s awful.”
I blink away the tears filling my eyes as that day suffocates me again.
“And some days, I look in the mirror, like just brushing my teeth or whatever, and I’ll say it out loud. I’ll say ‘Don’t touch her.’ Just like that. Just that, and maybe he would have stopped.”
But there’s no rewind button. There are no do-overs. There’s no delete key that undoes the damage or the guilt or the shame. I’m sorry, but I can’t make it un-happen, and that’s why it’s called regret.
“Things just kind of changed after that, between me and Jade, I mean,” I say. “I mean we still talk, but . . .”
I shrug, giving up on words to articulate my complex relationship with the cousin I still love so much.
“We all make mistakes and do things we wish we could do differently,” Bristol says softly, drawing my attention to her pretty face in the carnival light. “That’s part of life. You and Jade should talk about it someday. Tell her you’re sorry it happened, and that given the chance, you would have done things differently. We only get one life, but it’s filled with second chances. That’s why I came here to try again with Rhyson.”
I don’t reply, but we smile, and I want to tell her that I’ve never spoken about this before. I want to tell her how good it felt and that I could talk to her all day. That this wheel could be stuck up in the sky for hours, and I wouldn’t get tired of hearing her talk or watching her listen.
I look over the side of the car again, wishing I could hurl this shame and hurt down to the ground but knowing I’ll live with it forever. Even though it has faded through the years, it isn’t gone. It won’t ever go away completely, but at least today, for the first time, I shared this load.
And it feels lighter.
Bristol
I SHOULDN’T HAVE asked that question.
“I’m sorry.”
I whisper it, but Grip hears. He’s looking over the side, maybe composing himself. There were tears in his eyes when he talked about his cousin Jade, and that dark, dirty day. When he looks back to me, his eyes are clear of tears but they are still shaded with emotion.
“Sorry for what?”
“For asking you . . .” I lift one shoulder, hoping it conveys things I can’t put into words. “I’m nosy. It gets me in trouble. I ask too many questions, and then I—”
“I like it.” He cuts in softly.
My breath swirls around in my chest and furiously circles my heart like a cyclone.
“You . . . you like what?” I ask.
“That you’re curious and ask questions that make me think. That challenge me. People don’t always do that.”
There’s a disparaging twist to my lips.
“Because it’s called casual conversation,” I say with a husky laugh. “And I seem to have trouble keeping things casual.”
With you.
I don’t say the words aloud, but our eyes exchange them nonetheless.