For You

Chapter TEN

SAWYER JONES

That attempt to kiss Aubrey on Thursday afternoon damn near cost me my life.

I was riding home, mindful of the misting rain turning the roads into a hazard. I missed the turn to go to my house, probably because it was the last place I wanted to go. The damp was setting in, but the rain hadn't gotten serious yet. I decided not to loop back, but to keep going—get out on the highway and clear my head. Something about the air whizzing past made the thoughts rinse clean and pure, leaving me only with what I needed.

What did I need?

Aubrey.

Maybe I didn't need her, but I wanted her, right from the top of my head to the soles of my feet and everywhere in between.

I hadn't been with very many girls since Janine, and she and I ended well over a year ago. I wished that when we'd made love, I would have known it was the last time, but you never know if you're the guy. And you never see the end coming.

Janine was one of those girls who always said she wasn't hungry, but you could hear her stomach growling. Whenever we got naked, I had to be careful to keep the lights off, and to keep her focused on me, or better yet, her eyes closed. If she caught sight of my thighs right next to hers, she would get upset by how big hers looked in comparison.

Through my eyes, Janine had a beautiful body, but she didn't see herself through my eyes. I always told her that a healthy body that was free of disease or injury was the greatest gift a person could have. In retrospect, that was not the right thing to say. I should have told her she was a goddess. I wouldn't have been lying, either—I would have gladly worshiped her body. I thought it was an unspoken truth she knew. I hadn't considered how important it was for girls to hear those positive words.

When Janine told me she'd booked an appointment for liposuction, I'd actually laughed. I thought that was just her funny excuse for eating half the fries off my plate, as usual.

The lipo was no joke. They drew lines on her body with felt markers, and then they put her under and suctioned the fat away from around her thighs, and that round part beneath her navel that I liked to rest my hand on when we were in bed.

After the surgery, she had terrible pain, and took enough pills that she had me worried she might not wake up. I slept over at her place, but on the couch so I wouldn't see her naked until she was all healed up.

When she finally did invite me into her bedroom, I was giddy with excitement. Being around her and smelling her skin but not being able to touch her had made me crazy. She made me sit on a chair and watch as she stripped for me. It was a weekend afternoon, raining and cold outside, and her roommate was out shopping. As she took off her shirt, I started to feel nervous, and it wasn't just my hard-on. She was looking at me funny.

I clapped my hands and whistled, the way I imagined you were supposed to react when someone was stripping for you.

She gave me a withering look, and I dropped my hands to my sides.

“You don't have to be a prick about it,” she said. “You know I did this for you.”

I was speechless. The idea that her needing to have liposuction had anything to do with me was preposterous. Right then, I should have realized that she and I did not share a similar belief system. We were barely even on the same planet. But… I'm a guy, and she took her skirt off, and once we were both naked, we didn't seem so different after all.

Together, we made it through the long, dark nights of winter.

Spring came, and we talked a lot about “getting ahead.” I'd ask who it was we were supposed to be getting ahead of, and she'd say it wasn't people, but bills. We'd get ahead of the bills, and once she was out of school and working, we'd buy a condo together.

I never did meet any of her teachers, even though I'd heard so much about them. She finished her schooling to be a Registered Massage Therapist, and she took some other guy with her to the graduation party. So I heard, through friends of friends. She broke up with me three weeks before her course finished, giving me some bullshit line about us having different destinies.

She had her destiny, with her new career and her shiny new boyfriend—I heard he was in law school—and what did I have?

A motorcycle. That's what I went out and blew a stack of cash on.

By the time I met Aubrey, a year later, Janine seemed like someone who happened to another guy, like one of those urban legends guys tell each other as a warning. Like the story about a girl poking holes in a condom.

Here's my urban legend: Girl gets liposuction, forgets about boy who supported her emotionally and financially through all but three weeks of school. Girl ditches idiot boy and upgrades to wealthier boyfriend. Girl gets engaged immediately. Girl shows off enormous diamond ring to ex-boyfriend's mother at grocery store.

Be warned, guys. Be warned. If the tuition you're paying isn't for a course you're taking, you might be getting played.

Yes, Janine really did show her engagement ring to my mother at the grocery store. When my mother told me, I couldn't tell who she was more disappointed in.

The second thing I noticed about Aubrey was she didn't wear a diamond. The first thing I noticed was her eyes. You know how you can hear the ocean when you hold a seashell up to your ear? Sure, it's just the sound of your own blood rushing in your veins, but it's a cool trick, all the same.

When I looked at Aubrey's eyes, so gray and pure, I could feel the pull of the moon.

As I rode away from her that night, my body steering the bike on instinct without the help of my conscious thoughts, I could feel the moon pulling at me.

The moon teased me.

All my instincts were wrong, and I couldn't trust my feelings. I'd tried to kiss her, but she'd pulled away, and I was so sure I'd ruined everything. Even if she wasn't married, as I suspected, she probably thought even less of me after that.

I cursed myself for being such a f*cking idiot, and I rolled through a stop sign. A truck honked as it bore down on me. I was already out in the middle of the road, and the best evasive maneuver was to gun it, but I hesitated. What scared me was my willingness to die, to be free of all the emotions and heartbreak of this world. What scared me was the tiny blossom of acceptance.

I hit the juice at the last possible minute and peeled out of the way. The truck couldn't have rubbed my back tire. It couldn't have come so close to killing me, then simply nudged my back tire enough to give the bike a wobble as I crossed the street, but it did.

To the right of me, on the sidewalk, two boys stood holding their bicycles, both of them with their mouths open, staring at me.

I came to a stop, my feet on the pavement, and yelled to them over the sound of the engine, “Did you see that?” Had they seen my near-transformation into an organ donor?

The boys looked at each other like they were about to get in trouble, jumped on their bikes, and pedaled away quickly.

I wondered, where were they off to in such a hurry? Did they also feel the pull of the moon, telling them to do things they knew they shouldn't?