“He’s an artist.”
“Cool.” My scope of small talk completely played out, I decided to go in for the kiss. Our noses bumped the first time and I could hear the shaky nervousness in her laugh. The second time we got it right, but I forgot to take the sour apple gum out of my mouth, so my tongue was all over the place as I tried to kiss her and hide the gum at the same time. It started out sloppy and ridiculous, but eventually we got it right and I remember my fingers sliding through the waves of her hair.
Nothing else happened. We just stood there, pressed against each other, kissing. Until Paige’s voice told us our time was up. I didn’t want to stop and was about to suggest we drop out of the game, when the door flew open. Paige grabbed Harper by the wrist and pulled her back out to the party.
She was tangled in a whispering knot of girls when I came out of the laundry room. All my friends wanted the details of what happened between me and Harper. They expected something good, so I embellished. Said she let me feel her up. By Monday, my lie had taken on a life of its own. People were saying Harper had sex with all the guys who crashed Paige’s party. Calling her a slut. I don’t know how it got so out of control, and I could have told everyone what really happened, but I didn’t. When she came up to me in the cafeteria, I ignored her. By the following weekend, Paige was my girlfriend.
“Hey, Charley Harper, can I buy you a beer?” It’s not the smoothest opening line I’ve ever used, but I’m not feeling smooth. I’m jagged. And drunk.
She lifts her nearly full cup but won’t look at me. “Got one, thanks.”
Okay.
“You might not remember me, but—”
“Travis Stephenson,” she interrupts, her words like a roadblock. “Welcome home. Now leave me alone.”
Damn, she’s hostile.
“What’s your problem?”
Harper stares at me a moment and I’m mesmerized by the green of her eyes. So I don’t see it coming when she punches me in the face. “Are you kidding me?”
“Jesus Christ—ow!” My eye socket throbs—she definitely doesn’t hit like a girl—and I’m going to have a black eye. “What was that for?”
“I was thirteen years old, Travis!” Harper is yelling at me and everyone is staring, including Lacey and her dirty biker. “I still played with Barbie dolls in secret when my friends weren’t around. I didn’t have sex with anyone at Paige’s party, but you told everyone I did. And when I tried to deny it, no one believed me. You trashed my reputation and now I’m supposed to think it’s cute you remembered I’m not named for Harper fucking Lee?”
“I didn’t—”
“You didn’t what? Didn’t do it? Didn’t mean it? Save the excuses.”
I want to defend myself, but this moment is a lot like boot camp. It doesn’t matter if I’m guilty or not. She’s spent years believing I’m an asshole and the only thing that is going to fix it is an apology. “Harper—”
The bartender comes over. “Everything okay here?”
“Just fine,” Harper snaps. “I’m leaving. You can put my beer on his tab.”
Jesus, that was a cool move. And although she hates my guts, I’m kind of turned on and I wish she weren’t leaving. “Add a shot of tequila, too,” I tell the bartender, but he shakes his head. “You’re done.”
Which sucks, because I’m not nearly drunk enough. I down the rest of my beer and drop a pile of bills on the bar, hoping it’s enough to make up for the drama I’ve caused here tonight. I turn to leave and Paige is standing there, her mouth all smug. I hate how she does that.
“Rye’s looking for you,” she says. “He’s ready to go.”
“Okay.” My eyes wander down to her ass as I follow her out of the bar. Force of habit, I guess. Also, it’s nice. Kind of bubbly.
“So, Harper Gray, huh?” she asks as we walk up the middle of the street.
“When it’s your business, I’ll let you know.”
She snorts a laugh. “You can do so much better than her, Trav. She’s beach trash.”
“Shut up.”
“Do you want me to come over later?” she asks.
“For what?”
She catches her full lower lip between her teeth and looks up at me from under her dark lashes. It’s an innocent act that used to get me hot. I have to admit, it still works. “I think you know.”
“So let me get this straight,” I say. “You hook up with my brother behind my back and now you want me to do the same to him?”
She flicks her ice-blue eyes toward the night sky. “It’s not like it means anything.”
Somewhere in the recesses of my beer-soaked consciousness, I think this is meant to hurt me, but it doesn’t. When I think about what Paige and I have had, love has never entered into it. “That’s so messed up. You know that, right?”
“Do you want me to come over or not?”
“No.”
“I’ll be there at three.”
Even before I open my eyes I can feel the presence of another person in my room, and the hair on the back of my neck puts my body on alert. Hand-to-hand combat is not usually the Taliban’s style. They’d rather take our money at the local bazaar and use it to buy weapons to kill us. They prefer ambushes, roadside bombs, and sniping from windows and rooftops. But there is someone here with me in the dark and I’m not going to wait to be killed.
I surge upward, grabbing the intruder around the knees, and drop him to the floor. I pin him beneath me, the tip of my knife at his throat. In the slashes of moonlight coming through the blinds, I realize he is not a he. It’s Paige. And for the first time since I’ve known her, she looks scared.
“Oh, shit!” I drop the knife as if it’s red-hot and scrabble backward against the side of my bed. “Jesus, Paige, what the fu—Did I hurt you?”
Her fear falls away as she registers my surprise and she laughs as she picks up the knife. “You’ve always liked it a little rough, Trav, but this is extreme, don’t you think?” She crawls toward me, the knife gripped in her hand, and straddles my lap. “But…” Her lips are so close to mine I can taste her breath. “I think I like it.”
I take the knife from her and put it on the bedside table, on top of the book I’ll never finish. She slides her tank top off.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“That”—she fishes a condom from the pocket of her tiny denim skirt—“should be obvious.”
She unties her red bikini. This is so not something I should be doing, but her skin is warm and familiar and… here.
It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten laid, but I’ve been living in the middle of a desert, where women are hidden under burqas. Besides, Muslim women… well, the Qur’an forbids nearly everything fun anyway, so even if you could see their faces, there’s not much point in even considering it.
I did kiss a Muslim girl once. When Charlie and I arrived at Camp Lejeune, the rest of our unit was on pre-deployment leave. We had to stay on base for a crash-course version of all the training the battalion had done while we were still at infantry school. Just before we were scheduled to deploy, Charlie and I were given a few days’ leave so we could go home. Instead, we went to New York City. Kevlar—we didn’t even really know him very well, but he was new like Charlie and me—invited himself along.
At a club the first night, Charlie was hitting on this girl from Smith College. She told me her roommate had just broken up with her boyfriend and a kiss from a hot—her word, not mine—Marine would restore her friend’s faith that not all men are assholes. As Charlie’s wingman, I knew there was a better than average chance her friend was a dog, but I was committed and drunk.