She nods but asks, “Is that how you see me?”
I lift my gaze to hers and find her expression filled with genuine curiosity—not anger or hurt. I shake my head. “No. Not you.”
“I had dreams, you know. Goals.” She smiles, but looks down, hiding its brilliance. “Now, I’m no different than them. I’m just like all those other women. Fighting, clinging on to the hope that we could be more than arm candy for business functions or designer incubators. That we could be truly loved for who we are, and not what we represent.”
I don’t respond, letting the words hang in the air until they dissipate under the weight of Ally’s pain. She stands and begins to collect the uneaten food. “It’s late. And you need your beauty sleep,” she winks at me, that carefree smile restored. I help her discard the trash as she takes the dishes to the sink.
“Me? Beauty sleep? What makes you think I care anything about beauty?” I take a washed dish from her and dry it with a towel.
“You’re kidding, right?” she smirks, scrubbing a pan. “You possess beauty like most women possess shoes.”
“Not following you.” And I’m not. I could give a f*ck
about what’s deemed beautiful by modern society’s standards.
“Well, first of all, look at this place,” she says, waving a wet hand around the room. “This estate is magnificent. Like paradise in the middle of the desert. Seems almost like a mirage.”
I nod my head in agreement. Oasis is my oasis—my refuge. My escape from all the incessant narcissism and f*ck
ery that comes with fortune. I didn’t end up in the middle of the desert—as far away as I could possibly get from my original home in NYC—by accident. Eleven years ago, when I said goodbye to the noise, traffic and permeating scents of piss and diesel fuel, I told myself that I would never, ever look back at my old life with a sense of fondness. A few years after that, I found Oasis, and I knew I was home.
“And then,” she says, turning to me, her cheeks flushed pink, “there’s you.”
I smirk and look down to hide my own blush.
Yeah. I’m f*ck
ing blushing.
My entire life, I’ve been told I was strikingly handsome, and I’ve always believed it. Dark hair, cobalt eyes, and naturally tanned skin—I was the good ol’ American Abercrombie prototype. That theory was confirmed soon after puberty when girls constantly defied their daddies and tarnished their good family names by spreading their legs without so much as a wink in their direction. As a kid, I knew about sex, but I wasn’t really interested it. Not until my seventeen-year-old Algebra tutor, Jessica, undressed me and swallowed my thirteen-year-old dick during a lesson on linear equations. It was an act of divine intervention that I passed the class with an A-minus, because I didn’t do much more than study every inch of Jessica’s body that school year.
Yet, hearing Allison even imply that she finds me attractive, let alone beautiful, makes me feel brand new.
She hands me the rinsed frying pan, and I take it from her without looking.
My hand covers hers.
Now this is the part in every gag-worthy, chick flick where the guy and girl instantaneously lock eyes and sparks fly. Cue James Blunt or some other sappy cliché as they move in slowly, lips parted in preparation for their first kiss.
f*ck
that.
See, that’s the kind of bullshit that makes it difficult to have real, genuine connections. It’s what gives these women a false sense of hope that their men are anything more than walking dicks with eyes and limbs.
I’m a guy; I should know.
And even though I am so goddamn distracted by her every quirky laugh and goofy grin, that I ache to spend hours tracing patterns with her freckles while she’s spread out beneath me, I’m smart enough to know that this is reality. This isn’t some movie where the underdog wins the girl, saving her from a lifetime of heartache. This is real life, and in this episode of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Lonely” the good guy doesn’t rescue the girl from her philandering husband.
No. He teaches her how to f*ck
him.
I pull my hand back and quickly dry the pan before stepping away from the sink. “This was…fun. Thanks for the sandwich.”
“It was. Thanks for the company.” She dries her hands on a towel and smiles. She’s always smiling at me. I soak them up like precious rays of sunshine, because if she really knew me, if she knew the truth, things would be different. She wouldn’t only pity me—she would loathe me. I’m not sure which one is worse.
I usher her out of the kitchen, flicking off the lights on the way out. The rest of the house is completely quiet and still, and only the pale moonlight illuminates her face.
“Goodnight, Justice.”
“Goodnight, Ally.”
I walk back to my little home, hating the stupid grin on my face. It hurts my cheeks, and gives me hope that I have no right to feel.
I kinda love it too.