“You won’t,” I said, taking the ticket, setting it on top of my jacket. “Thank you.” After the officer had returned to her vehicle, I slowly drove away, trying to figure out where I should go next. Heading home wouldn’t do me any good. I needed to sort out the events from last night, and I could only think of one person who could help me do just that.
Ten minutes later, I pulled up in front of Mason and Gia’s house, a small two-bedroom, sky-blue Craftsman in a neighborhood a few blocks off Cornwall Avenue, similar in size and design to the one I’d lived in with my parents across town. Before I left my truck, I shot my partner a text, not wanting to just knock on the door and wake him and Gia or the baby. It was a little after eleven, but I wasn’t sure what time they had gotten in. All I knew was that Mason hadn’t been drinking last night and could maybe help me figure out what had happened with Amber. Maybe he had seen something I couldn’t remember.
Instead of answering my text, Mason opened the front door and motioned for me to come up the front steps and inside. I noted that his dark hair was pushed flat on one side, as though he’d recently gotten out of bed. A moment later I was sitting on the brown leather couch in their living room, a big glass of water that he said it looked like I needed in my hand.
“We’ll have to keep our voices down,” Mason said as he settled into the rocking chair on the other side of the square table in the center of the room. “Gia and the baby are still sleeping.”
“Okay, sure,” I said, the glass trembling in my hands.
Mason saw this and cocked his head. “You okay, bro? Have you talked with Amber?”
“Not really,” I said, in answer to both of his questions. I drank down almost the entire contents of the glass, knowing it was the best thing for me, and then put the glass onto the table. “Do you know how she got home?”
“We drove her,” Mason said, frowning. “She said you were passed out and she felt sick, so she asked for a ride.”
“Oh.” My mind reeled, relieved that regardless of what Amber might think had happened, she hadn’t voiced it to Mason and Gia.
“What’s going on, Ty? You two looked mighty happy with each other out on the dance floor, before you took her into the house—”
“Before I took her?” I said, cutting him off.
“Yeah,” Mason said, giving me a strange look. “You don’t remember that?”
I sat back against the couch, hard, and closed my eyes. “I thought she took me inside. I could have sworn . . .” My words trailed off as I tried to organize the jumbled mess of images flickering inside my head. What else did I get wrong? What else had I forgotten? What did I do that made Amber scream at me and kick me off the bed?
“You were both hammered,” Mason said. “Have you blacked out like this before?”
“I didn’t black out!” I insisted, opening my eyes again.
“Dude! Keep it down, please.”
“Sorry,” I said, lowering my voice. “I just don’t know what’s going on. I went over to her house this morning to check on her and she freaked out. She didn’t want me anywhere near her.”
“Freaked out how?” Mason asked in what I recognized as the same deliberately calm, information-gathering tone he used with victims in the field.
“She screamed at me to leave. Like, crazy screaming. And when I sat down on her bed to try to talk with her, she went nuts and kicked me off it. Then her parents came in and I just . . . bolted. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
Mason was quiet a moment before speaking again. “Did you have sex with her?”
I nodded, fighting the harshly edged ache that had risen in my throat, recalling the look of terror on my best friend’s face when I walked into her bedroom. I’d seen her through many dark moments in her life, but I’d never seen her look anything like that. It finally registered that part of why she seemed so different was her hair. Since last night, she’d chopped it off, up to the line of her jaw.
“And she was into it, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, but my voice faltered, and I shook my head. “I thought it was all her idea. I mean, I wanted it, too. You know that. But you saw the way she was dancing with me. Did you see her kissing me?”
“I did.” Mason didn’t say more, he just stared at me, expectantly.
“I thought it was finally happening, you know? That she realized she’d made a mistake being with Daniel and it was me she wanted. She’s been having second thoughts about getting engaged. She’s been flirting with me since she got home . . . we’ve been flirting with each other. I know we have. And we were kissing all the way up the stairs until we got to the bedroom. It felt like we couldn’t get there fast enough. I didn’t imagine that. I know it happened.” My head ached as I tried to remember exactly what came next. My hand on her leg, pushing up her skirt. Feeling how hot she was for me, how ready. I remembered rolling on top of her. And then again, those two words, her voice, exploding inside my head: Tyler, wait!
“You made sure she wanted to do it, though, right?” Mason asked, quietly.
I didn’t answer, but inside, I was thinking that of course Amber wanted to do it. She wouldn’t have danced with me the way she did if she didn’t want to have sex. She wouldn’t have let me press my erection against her; she wouldn’t have kissed me or let me take her up to the bedroom. She gave off every sign of wanting it as much as I did. I thought about Whitney, how I’d never had to stop and ask her if she really wanted to sleep with me—her willingness to come inside my apartment that first day, the way she let me touch her was permission enough.
But Amber told you to wait, I thought, and the realization that I hadn’t listened, that I didn’t hear her over the loud roar of my desire, made me feel as though I might be sick. What if I did hear her, I wondered, and I went ahead with it anyway?
“Tyler,” Mason said, loudly enough to snap me out of my thoughts. “Please tell me you asked if she was okay with what was happening. Tell me she didn’t say no.”
“She never used that word,” I said, my voice breaking. I cleared my throat. “But I think she told me to wait. She might have told me to stop.” I breathed in, feeling the air hitch and get stuck inside my lungs.
“Jesus, man,” Mason said. He shook his head in disbelief, and his thick fingers gripped the arms of his chair. “Are you kidding me? I thought there was something wrong with her. She seemed jumpy and kind of out of it, like she was in shock or something. But I chalked it up to the booze . . . I told myself I didn’t know her well enough to actually be right about that.”
“We were drunk,” I said. “Both of us, right? So maybe she’s just having second thoughts. Maybe she’s feeling guilty about cheating on her boyfriend and that’s why she was acting weird.”
“Her fiancé, you mean,” Mason said, giving me a pointed look.
I stood up from the couch and began to pace behind it, desperate to think of any explanation other than the one that made me a monster. “Maybe she’s just confused, like me. Maybe her mind is all fucked up because we were drinking. Maybe she’s just trying to figure out exactly what happened, too.”