I smell Tash before I feel her. The scent of my shampoo and her lotion hits me like a puck to the face. I try to untangle myself from the sheets and get out of bed before she reaches me, but I’m not fast enough.
She straddles me and her palm comes to rest on my throat. The light beside my bed comes on, brightness blinding me. Long, dark hair tickles my chest, and the spiders are back, crawling under my skin. Goose bumps rise across my arms. Not the good kind. She pulls down the covers until they reach my waist, then stretches out on top of me. She’s topless. Braless.
“Get off me.” I reach out to grab her wrists, but she shifts around next to me.
“Whoa, Romance, calm down, bro!” Rookie says. “Hey don’t do that.”
Tash’s cheek presses up against mine. “Smile.” The flash blinds me again.
“Fucking Christ. What’s wrong with you?” I’m faster than she is this time. I grab her waist and flip her so she’s face down on the bed and I’m on top of her.
The other girl is staring at us, slack jawed.
Rookie tries to pull me off Tash, but I’m not seeing anything but red right now, so my first instinct is to punch him in the face. He goes reeling back, and the other girl screams.
“Give me the goddamn phone,” I yell at Tash, who’s laughing underneath me.
I stretch out over her, pushing her down into the mattress. In that moment I recognize how close I am to the edge. I wonder if this is what it was like for my mum, if she was always at this point with my dad, if he did the kinds of things to her Tash does to me.
The thought sends my head to dark places, where all the bad things I’ve done over the years taunt me.
I want to hurt Tash the way she’s hurt me. But she’s fucked up. Worse than I am, maybe. And as much as I hate her, I get that her head isn’t right, just like mine.
“You’ll have to fuck me for it,” she laughs.
“Just give me the phone.” I see movement out of the corner of my eye, and the other girl has her phone out. “Don’t.”
It’s too late, though. I know it by the way her eyes jump from me to Tash and back again.
“Sent,” she tells Tash.
Tash stops fighting and drops her phone on the comforter. I nab it and push off the bed as fast as I can, so I’m not touching her, and she’s not touching me.
“Who did you send it to?” I ask the other girl.
She cradles her phone to her chest, seeming a little scared.
Rookie looks super confused. “What the hell is going on? Do you know her?”
I bark out a bitter laugh. “Unfortunately, yeah.”
A flash of hurt passes over Tash’s face before she gives me one of her sneers. “When did you stop being fun?”
“When you decided to keep bringing me gifts I didn’t want.” I turn back to the girl. “That picture you took, I wanna see it, and I want to know who you sent it to.”
She passes over her phone. “I didn’t post it publicly or anything.”
A sick feeling washes over me as I take in the image. I’m wearing a pair of boxers, and I’m fully lying on top of Tash. Most of my face is in profile, and I look pissed. But it’s her expression that makes the roll in my stomach become a knot. Tash, who is very clearly topless, is smiling directly at the camera. Like she planned this.
“Who did you send it to?”
“Me,” Tash says. She’s sitting on my bed, long hair cascading over her shoulders. She’s still shirtless.
I pick her shirt up off the floor and toss it to her. “For Christ’s sake, put this on and delete the damn picture,” I bark.
She doesn’t catch the shirt, letting it fall on the bed. “And Poppy, of course.”
“Bullshit.”
“She has all sorts of social media accounts. Posts all kinds of pictures of the flowers someone keeps sending her.”
“You’re stalking her? Jesus, Tash, what the fuck is wrong with you?” I ask again.
Her face falls, the anger I’ve witnessed before pushing to the surface. “Just interested in finding out what gossip is true and what isn’t.”
I laugh. She’s said that to me before—when I said I wanted just her, when I tried to make it work. She would hit me with words, and then she’d take them all back with apologies and promises, only to slice me apart again when she brought me another present in the form of someone she could fuck.
“You don’t even want me. Why can’t you leave me alone?”
She gets up on her knees like she’s thinking about touching me, so I take another step back. “What if I do want you?”
I have no idea how much of this is a show for our audience and how much is her manipulating as she does.
“You don’t. And I don’t want you. Not anymore. Not for a long time, Tash, and especially not after this.” I motion between her, the random girl she’s using, and Rookie.
Her smirk fades, like maybe she realizes, finally, that this game she’s playing with me has real consequences. But Tash doesn’t know how to be any other way.
I get that, because before Poppy, I didn’t know I could be another way either.
Tash pulls the shirt over her head and jumps up off the bed. “Whatever. It’s always the same thing with you.” She holds out her hand for her phone.
“Tell me your passcode so I can delete whatever pictures you took first.”
She purses her lips, then smiles, but there’s a waver to it.
“Twenty-one twenty-one.”
“Seriously? Did you change it just for tonight?”
She drops her chin, and for a second I’m sad for her. I understand exactly why I kept going back, over and over again, for the same crap. Because under the psycho bullshit is a broken person. And that was something I could relate to. But I can’t fix her. I don’t know that she wants to be fixed. And I can’t be responsible for changing anyone but myself.
I spend the next few minutes scrolling through her phone, deleting the three blurry pictures she managed to take, and then deleting my contact information. Once I’m done, I go into every single one of her accounts until I find the picture her friend sent and delete that, too. I don’t care that she’s yelling at me, or telling me I’m invading her privacy. I don’t even react when she starts slapping me and Rookie has to pull her off.
I check her browsing history; she’s not lying about stalking Poppy. She has every one of her social media accounts bookmarked. It’s almost creepy. Or rather, it’s super fucking creepy.
“I need a minute,” I say to Rookie. I point to the wide-eyed girl. “You need to take her somewhere.”
“What?” He looks confused.
“I need to talk to Tash without an audience. Go hang out on the balcony or something.”
“Can I have my phone back?” the girl asks.
“Not until I erase all the pictures.”
“I only took one.”
“You know we can have you sign an NDA right now, and if you post anything—any little fucking thing about me or Rookie—you’ll have a lawsuit so fucking fast your head will pop off.”
Her bottom lip trembles. “I-I’m s-sorry.”
“Don’t listen to his bullshit. He’s pissed off that we came up here with his friend.”
I spin to face Tash. “Don’t you ever get tired of the head games?”
That shuts her up, at least for now.
I delete the image from the girl’s phone before I pass it back to her. Rookie takes her by the elbow and heads for the door, which I sincerely appreciate.
“I’ll message when Tash is on her way down.”
He gives me a long, worried look. “If you’re longer than twenty I’m bringing her back up.”
As soon as the door closes, Tash takes a step toward me. I hold out my palm. “Don’t fuckin’ touch me.”
She raises her hands in the air and backs up a step.
I grab my shirt from the end of the bed and pull it on, along with a pair of track pants, because there’s no way I’m having any kind of conversation with Tash until I’m fully clothed.
“Seriously, Tash, why are you here?”
She just kind of wilts. “To see you.”
“This thing you think is between us? That’s done. It’s been done for a long time.”
“Are you still mad about last time?”