I go brush my teeth and head to bed. I settle under my covers. Try to go to sleep. But other things keep coming back to me.
The fact that when he fed me the grape I could feel his hard chest against my breasts and his breath on my face.
The fact that I could always seem to smell him when the air hit me a certain way, and hear him above everyone else.
I try to push these thoughts away, but the more I try, the more they surface. God, I don’t want to dwell on this. I don’t. But if I want this exposé to be good, I can’t block out parts. I can’t pick and choose what’s convenient for me to deal with and what’s not. I grab my pad again and start with one word.
Electric
He electrifies the air.
Then I write down a few more.
Consuming
If he’s around, you hardly notice anything else.
Stubborn
He’s impossible to bargain with.
HE STILL LOVES TO TEASE ME!!!!!
He poked and prodded me about the picture, the grapes, the shirt, even being Rosie’s hero. . . .
I set the pad aside and turn off my lamp, but even in the dark, I still see him watching me in the water from above. And I still feel his fingers on my shoulders as I hopped onboard the yacht again only to feel him wrap a warm towel around me.
10
CAMPOUT
For the last twenty-four hours, I’ve been surfing the Net and clicking through all his newly tagged pictures. There are also some older pictures of girls in bikinis playing mini golf at his place. And pictures of him getting out of a chopper with girl pilots wearing nothing but tiny shorts.
“It really bothers me, seeing all these pictures, because a lot of these girls go to him, he doesn’t ask them to come cling to him,” I tell Gina.
“Dude, Saint is big on whoring around. Must be all the attention he never got as a kid.”
“More like he’s a healthy male and women just throw themselves at him. I’ve seen YouTube videos dedicated to him, of women stripping or washing their cars, offering to come wash his. In fact, look at this. . . .”
We watch a video of a woman with no bra wetting her T-shirt and smiling. “Saint, I’ll wash your cars any day, and clean your pipes, too.”
We burst out laughing.
“He’s got a huge car collection, apparently. There’s a picture, see? There are like thirty cars here. Very rare ones. He’s got a thousand and one toys. Doesn’t that say something?”
“What?” Gina asks.
“When you have everything and nothing is ever enough?”
“How should we know? We barely made rent this month.”
“Come on, be serious. When nothing is ever enough, on some hidden level of his psyche there’s something about this man’s life that’s absolutely empty. I see him work, Gina; it’s like he . . . is obsessed with it. Like it helps him block out something else.”
“What?”
“Forget it.”
She laughs. “You’re so deep, Rachel. Such a philosopher. Send him the bill and save him the therapist.”
I continue with my links and end up viewing a video of him next to his father taken when his father refused his mother’s last wish to give Saint a seat on the board of his father’s company.
“The only good thing he has going for him is his name,” his father says to a reporter who asked why Malcolm had not been allowed into the family business. Malcolm doesn’t flinch. He smiles ironically, says nothing, just keeps himself in check. This video only made everyone cheer on Malcolm rather than his dad. Still, did it damage his psyche in some way?
“What an asshole,” Gina says late that afternoon when I watch the video one more time, this time watching only Saint’s expression, revealing nothing—like he expected the blow and was braced for it.
“No wonder Saint’s an asshole—he was bred like that.”
“He’s not an asshole.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s not an asshole,” I say casually.
“Who’s touchy?!”
“I’m not touchy. I’m just stating a fact.”
“Okay. You don’t like what we have in the fridge, when it was your turn to stock us for the week; you’re obsessed with that computer; you have circles under your eyes; you’re wearing an E for exposé on your forehead and an X on your ass screaming at Saint to fuck you right there. You’re crushing on him, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Well good, ’cause you’ve wanted this your whole life. Look up all the pictures of women all over him. Hell, with their tits almost in his face. That is the guy you like?”
I stare at the YouTube video. “I like this one,” I mumble as she leaves, then I scowl at myself. No, you don’t like him, Rachel. You want to be fair—you want to be truthful.
I go grab my sleeping bag for the End the Violence campout.