Back and Forth
After our long day at the office, I go home and begin calling up all of my sketchy friends again. It takes a while, but I finally manage to find someone who assures me that if I drop by in an hour, they’ll have what I need waiting for me.
When I drive away from the guy’s house, my shiny, clean truck looking out of place in that neighborhood, I wonder when I became this guy. When did I go from a casual smoker to someone making shady drug deals in neighborhoods where he probably needs to carry a gun? It isn’t me. Or is it? Nothing in the last few months has felt like me, but when I remember that I’m doing this for Carrick… it gets a little bit closer to okay.
It keeps feeling okay for most of the drive home, but that drive involves passing by our office. Taylor’s car is still parked outside, and as soon as my eyes land on it, that feeling vanishes just as quickly as it came. I’m slowly coming to a strange realization. I love Taylor. I know I do, and I know I always will. But it’s not the sort of love that feels good. I can pinpoint the last time he brought me happiness, and it felt like nothing else in the world, but it faded. The pain he causes me more often is even deeper, deeper than that happiness can probe.
So why do I want him? Why do I want something that causes me so much anguish? That’s a question I can’t answer.
Putting aside the questions best that I can, I shove one hand into the pocket of my hoodie that holds the twenty I bought for Carrick and another twenty for myself, and speed on back to my apartment. As soon as I’m inside, I toss the weed on the counter and pull my cell phone out to send Carrick a quick text. He’s bought himself a little moped to speed around town on—because his presence wasn’t conspicuous enough in Tulsa, I suppose—and he promises he’ll be at my apartment in just a few minutes.
Even a few minutes is too long for me.
I waste no time packing a bowl and rolling a few joints while I wait for him; it gives me something else to focus my mind so I don’t go insane during the grand total of seventeen minutes it takes Carrick to brave the traffic and ring my buzzer.
“You got the goods after all,” Carrick remarks when I open the door.
“Yeah,” I reply, breathless like I’ve been running laps around the apartment instead of just sitting there waiting for the arrival of my not-boyfriend. “I, umm, made a few more phone calls. Finally found someone who wasn’t out.”
“Good deal,” he says, then strolls right into the apartment like he owns it, like he’s been here a billion times before.
I wish he had been. I wish he’d never leave.
While he settles onto the couch, I grab my lighter and the joints I meticulously rolled while seated at the island. Carrick plucks one of the joints from my hand and turns it over in his fingers a few times, before finally cracking a smile.
“Not bad,” he finally offers, then sticks the joint between his lips and raises an eyebrow.
I know what he wants, and like anything else, I’m more than willing to give it to him. I cup his chin with one hand to steady it—and because I can’t resist an opportunity to touch him—and bring my lighter up to the joint with the other hand. I watch and feel Carrick’s cheeks hollow as he sucks in. With a satisfying crackle, the joint catches fire and a serene smile crosses his face as he continues to draw the first hit from it.
Once he’s satisfied with the hit he’s taken, he passes the joint to me. His eyes are heavily lidded as he watches me take a draw on it, and something about his expression makes getting high an even more sensual, even sexual, experience than it usually is. As if I needed any more reasons to love my growing drug habit.
As we pass the joint, then the bowl, back and forth, the room grows hotter and hotter—a side effect of both the drug and Carrick’s presence, I suppose. But he feels it too, and so we both start stripping off layers of clothing. We don’t stop until we’re down to nothing but our boxers, and even though the room is still like a sauna, I can’t resist scooting closer to him. Our legs tangle together and we take turns passing each other hits that turn into lazy kisses.
The bowl burns down to nothing but ashes and resin, and I sprawl myself across Carrick’s lap while he attempts to pack it again. It takes him at least twice as long as it should, but he doesn’t seem to mind the distraction, if the way he moans when I start running my fingers through his chest hair is any indication. I know I’m completely shameless and more than a little ridiculous, but I don’t care. Maybe it’s the weed or maybe it’s just Carrick, but I feel so free right now. There’s no judgment. I can say or do anything and it won’t matter.
“I love you.”
Well, maybe not anything. Definitely not that, judging by the way Carrick just froze.
“I mean, I…” Great, Zac. Backtrack and take it back. Tell him you don’t love him, because that’s sure to be what he wants to hear now.
Carrick leans over me to set the bowl down on the coffee table and I brace myself for his response. I can’t bring myself to move from his lap, though, so I’m stuck staring up his nose while I wait for him to let me down gently or something.
But he doesn’t.
He runs his fingers through my hair and while I expect to see some sort of mixed feelings on his face, I don’t, and I only feel kindness in his gentle movements. Finally, he gives me a genuine smile and asks, “Do I have to say it again? I’ve been telling you over and over in so many different ways… do you really not know?”
“I suppose I don’t,” I reply, deciding that I can pull off dumb blonde pretty well even when I’m not chemically altered.
“Of course I love you, Zac,” he says softly. “You know that. Maybe you’ll never understand what it really means for me, but you know it’s true.”
I’m too far gone to contemplate what all of that really means, so I settle for smiling up at him and trailing my hand through his chest hair and up his neck, bringing it to rest on his cheek. He tilts his head into it, still smiling at me, although I could swear that’s a little bit of sadness to the smile now. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am, because I can’t understand why he would be sad right now.
“Hey,” he says lightly, pulling me from my troublesome thoughts. “Why don’t you order us a pizza or something and we’ll light this up. See if they can deliver a pizza in one bowl or less, hmm?”
I know he’s just trying to distract me, and I am more than willing to be distracted. Carrick knows my weaknesses, and three of the biggest ones are weed, food and him. For the moment, I’m willing to ignore that the biggest one is my own brother, and I hope Carrick is ignoring it, too. I only need to press my lips to Carrick’s stomach and taste his skin to push all thoughts of Taylor safely to the back of my mind.
While I’m still peppering him with kisses, Carrick lights the bowl up. After a few hits, I manage to peel myself away from him and hunt down my cell phone to order two pizzas—meat lovers for me and veggie for the guy I’ve just admitted to being in love with.
I probably shouldn’t be so calm about the conversation Carrick and I just had, but I am. That’s definitely the weed talking, because I know that was a major admission on both of our parts. But right now, with him sitting nearly naked on my couch, holding out a smoldering pipe to me… I really can’t be worried about anything.
We pass the bowl back and forth a few more times, but my heart really isn’t into it. All I can focus on is the man handing that bowl to me. He may say I don’t understand his feelings for me, but I’m not so sure he knows how I feel about him right now, either. Then again, maybe he does. The way he presses his hand into my chest as we share another little cloud of smoke says he just might be thinking the same thing I’m thinking.
We’ve still got some time before the pizzas arrive, and I decide to take full advantage of that time. I take one last hit and hold the smoke in while I set the pipe on the coffee table. Once its out of range, I pull Carrick to me and press my lips to his. When his mouth falls open against mine, I breathe the smoke out into it. My tongue follows closely behind, every part of my body aching to be as close to Carrick as possible. To that end, I push him backward on the couch, laying my body over his completely.
The position only highlights the differences in our bodies, my feet resting somewhere along his shins and my arms straining to keep all of my weight resting against him. But again, Carrick doesn’t seem to mind. Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything at all in the world that he does mind. When it comes to me, he seems to take almost anything I give him, even when I know what I’m giving him sucks.
Right now, though, I’m giving him all the love I tried to express earlier, and all the passion I don’t have the words to say unless I set them to music. The idea of singing about him gives me a strange thrill that makes me kiss him with even more urgency and roll my hips down against his, feeling that he’s just as turned on as I am.
It takes a lot of effort to slide my hand between our bodies and into his boxer briefs, but I need more. I need to touch him. I need to give to him rather than take from him, and I hope he notices and understands the difference.
I’ve only just wrapped my hand around him when the buzzer sounds. The pizza guy seems to be putting his entire weight against it, and as hungry as I am, pizza suddenly isn’t really what I want. But this guy is insistent, so I rush to press the button that will let him into the building without bothering to speak to him. He knows which apartment to come to, and I don’t trust my voice right now. Once I’ve done that, I grab my wallet from my pants and slip back into the wife beater Carrick managed to fling onto my tv stand. I’m still not wearing pants, the apartment reeks of pot and there’s no way my boner is going away before the pizza guy makes it upstairs, but at least putting on a shirt makes me feel somehow more decent and presentable.
I keep my back turned to Carrick, because I don’t trust myself not to rush back to the couch and tackle him again if I get a glimpse of him, and rock back and forth on my feet while I wait for a knock at the door. When it comes, I fling the door open, ready to shove a few bills into the guy’s hand and slam the door in his face again, but I don’t get the chance. There’s no guy. There’s no pizza.
There’s only Kate.