Chapter 2
2
I finished my bio test early, and with Lia in my class, I knew I couldn’t get away with faking overtime and taking the bus home. Sure enough, Liam met me at my locker, looking sweaty from a practice game of football.
“You okay, babe?” he asked me, taking my backpack from me and putting his hand on my shoulder. I nodded, shoving the sudden desire to cry and ask for help all the way down until I didn’t feel that lump in my throat anymore. I was so tired of coming home to an empty apartment where I did my own laundry, cooked my own dinner, worked for my own money, and felt generally lonely and abandoned until I finally fell asleep to then wake up and do it all over again the next day. My mother never hugged me. We had no photos on the walls in our little apartment. She never asked me how my day was. I didn’t feel cared for. I knew my friends cared about me, but to what extent if I didn’t let them fully in? They knew that my mom was only thirty-three, but they didn’t know how little we interacted with each other. They knew that I loved to thrift, but I wasn’t sure if they realized it was because I couldn’t shop new. They didn’t know that I was tired of taking care of myself. That I would give anything to have a man hold my hand like Carter did with Eva or have so much sex like Liam and Lia that they were late to school because passion overtook their priorities. I wanted to wake up and feel like I mattered to someone’s life. Not just as friends but truly deeply mattered to someone. I craved it so badly that it scared me because it was the opposite of the path and the plan I had laid out for myself. The plan was to finish school. Stay a virgin. Buy a car. Work as hard as possible at the shelter until I could figure out how to open my own. Find a man to love me and fuck me. In that order. And by all means possible, do not get pregnant.
“I’m good. I’m just getting a bit of a headache.” I turned to close my locker and let Liam sling his arm over my shoulder while he held Lia’s hand and led us both out of the school building.
A wind-blown-looking Remi was leaning on the side of the car; the front of his gray T-shirt had sweat marks on it, meaning he had come straight from practice instead of showering first.
Fuckkkkk, I groaned in my head. A clean Remi smelled delicious, but a sweaty, post-practice Remi had me seeing images in my head of me climbing up his body like a Goddamn tree.
“Remi, you drive. I wanna sit in the back with my girl,” Liam shouted as we got closer to the car. Remi looked up from where he was clutching his phone in such a tight grip that I worried he would break it. He nodded wordlessly, and Liam tossed him the keys. Liam and Lia immediately started making out in the backseat, and I resigned myself to a very uncomfortable drive home.
Remi started the car and flipped the cap he was wearing from facing front to sitting backward on his head. I presumed it was so he could see better, though I wouldn’t know because although I had my license, I basically had no driving hours, being that I didn’t own a car yet. My ovaries did a little jump at the sight of him all sweaty, the muscles in his arms popping as he shifted the car into reverse with his backward hat on. I let out a little sigh, to which Remi shot me a look that I did not understand. Halfway through the drive, things got weirder.
“Lia, can you stop tongue fucking my cousin for just a second?” Remi suddenly said, sounding almost aggravated. We all looked at him, surprised, as we had all seen quiet Remi, determined Remi, tired Remi, and excited Remi, but we had never seen a straight-up angry Remi.
“What’s up, bro?” Liam asked, pulling his face away from Lia. Remi paused and seemed to be weighing some sort of list of pros and cons out in his head as he drove rather quickly further away from the school.
“Apparently, my dad has shown up at your house,” Remi finally said. We all remained quiet until Liam corrected him quietly, “Our house.”
Remi grunted out an, “Our house” back at Liam. I was surprised because I had never heard Remi say anything about his personal life. Ever. We kind of had that in common. Lia and I made eye contact, and both gave each other a “holy shit” look.
“So, what do you want to do?” Liam asked Remi. Remi let out a deep breath and gripped the steering wheel as he turned onto my street.
“I cannot go home until he leaves,” he said quietly. Liam looked at me. I looked back at Liam. I had never let any of my friends into my apartment. Back in ninth grade, I had told them that my mom worked the night shift, and I couldn’t have people over, and the topic never came back up. I knew what Liam was silently asking me. I didn’t know any details of Remi’s issues with his dad. Actually, I basically didn’t know anything about Remi’s life before he had come here, and now, with only thirty days left till I could escape the possibility of any unnecessary scrutiny from my school friends if they ever saw my at home persona, I could hear myself saying, “Do you want to come to my place until Liam’s parents get rid of your dad?”
Remi’s head turned so fast, and I could see the look of raw surprise on his face.
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to bother your mom…” he started.
“She has already left to go back to work,” I interjected. He parked outside my building, still holding onto the steering wheel for what looked like dear life. I could practically see the cogs turning in his head as he again weighed the pros and cons of going into an apartment with a girl he had never hung out with alone without the buffer of our friends or going home to face his dad; which clearly by the tense muscles in his back and face, he did not seem to like that option at all. He sighed again and then very quietly asked, “You sure?”
I was not sure at all. I could imagine his big body taking up all the oxygen in my tiny, impersonal-looking apartment. His delicious, sweaty smell would permeate the air long after he left. I felt so anxious at the idea, but I nodded again and said, “Definitely.”
He nodded back at me and looked over at Liam.
“Can you text me when the coast is clear?”
Liam rested a hand on his cousin’s shoulder for a second and replied, “Hell yeah, I will, bro.”
Remi looked at me again as if he wanted to say something else, but instead, he turned off the car and opened the driver’s door to get out. Lia and Liam were both looking kind of surprised at how things were playing out, but I just shrugged and made a text-me motion with my fingers. They nodded, and then I also got out of the car.
My building had no elevator, and I was acutely aware of what an eyeful of my ass Remi must be getting as he took the stairs behind me to the fourth floor. He waited patiently as I tapped in the code on the door and felt super relieved that I had already thrown out the late rent notice that morning because I would have been mortified if Remi had seen it. I began to open the door and hesitated, looking over at Remi’s emotionless face. I thought of Liam’s big house with its white kitchen and top-of-the-line pool. Although I had never seen it, I imagined that Remi’s room alone was probably the size of my whole apartment. I wasn’t ashamed of how I lived as much as it was a situation that would lead to questions that I had no energy to answer.
“It’s kinda small,” I said quietly, looking up at Remi. He seemed so much taller and more intimidating in my building’s hallway with its threadbare carpets and the faint, always-present smell of pot. Remi made my whole body tremble when he patted my shoulder.
“It’s okay, Shaen. I’m just grateful I have somewhere to hang.”
I didn’t think I had ever heard him say my name like that before, and on hearing it, my tiny little crush bloomed uncomfortably larger in my chest. I nodded and opened the door.
I walked into the small living room that led into a smaller kitchen and waited while Remi came in behind me and then shut the door, locking it. He turned, and we looked at each other until I broke the silence and asked, “Do you like pizza? I think I’m going to order pizza.”
To which he grinned and replied, “Who doesn’t like pizza?”
“Carter,” I retorted, and I was rewarded with a real laugh. I felt the sound of it throughout my whole body. Remi shook his head, put his backpack down, and followed me into the kitchen, where I went to pull out a pile of restaurant menus.
“Order the pizza, Shaen,” he said in that low, deep tone of his. There was my name again; I physically shivered. I was so embarrassed at how my body rejected every mature thought I had about the direction I wanted my life to go in and, instead, basically melted every time this man spoke.
While we waited for Uber Eats to deliver our pizza, which Remi had insisted on covering the cost of, I sat us down in the living room which had two large chairs and a decent-sized coffee table that we used as an actual table. No couches because that took up too much unnecessary space. The rest of the room was lined with three bookshelves that I had filled with raunchy romance novels. If Remi noticed, he didn’t say anything. We sat there quietly, me freaking out at how awkward the silence was and him seemingly comfortable with it until his phone buzzed, and he said, “Well, shit.” ?I looked up as he turned the screen for me to see a text from Liam that said, “Sorry!” And then his phone rang, and Liam’s name popped up as the caller.
“Coast clear yet?” was how Remi answered the phone, but instead of Liam’s voice coming through the phone, an authoritative, deep voice barked.
“Remiel?!”
I watched the energy get sucked from Remi’s body, and his posture seemed to collapse into the chair he was sitting on. He looked at me, and I bit my lip anxiously, waiting to see how this would play out.
“What?” Remi suddenly sounded cold and guarded.
“Remiel, I had to get another pastor to run tonight’s sermon so I could drive all the way out here, and you don’t respect my time enough to come meet with me?” The man on the other line sounded really pissed in a quiet, controlled way which honestly felt scarier than if he was yelling.
“I have nothing to say to you,” Remi replied through clenched teeth.
His father sighed loudly into the phone.
“Your mother and I have let this little game go on long enough. You wanted to go live with your cousins? Okay, we allowed it and have left you alone in hopes that God would lead you in the right direction.”
Remi visibly flinched.
“But now we find out that you withdrew yourself from the pastoral college that we registered you at for next year? Your mother is hysterical, and I am extremely concerned as to how you have been spending your time spiritually this year, son.”
Remi rolled his eyes. I got a little flutter in my stomach when he did that, and I had to hold back a laugh.
“Dad, I’m not going to a Christian college to become a pastor. I told you that when I moved out. And as far as how I have been spending my time, I’ll tell you what I haven’t been doing—I have not been spending time between the legs of a woman who is not my wife, Dad. That’s where I have not been. Go home. I have nothing more to say to you.” And with that, Remi hung up the phone.
The air was thick with my unasked questions and his unspoken answers. He stared at his phone for a moment longer and then held the side button down and slid the prompt on the screen to shut it off completely.
“Do you have alcohol?” he suddenly asked. I stared at him for a moment until I unfolded myself from the oversized living room chair and went to the fridge.
“My mom has a bunch of Trulys in here,” I called out to him from behind the fridge door.
“That’ll work. Bring the bunch,” he called back. So I did.
He was three cans in when the pizza came. I had ordered half a meat lover’s pie for him and half a mushroom pie for me. We sat in my living room over my secondhand coffee table, eating oily, cheesy pizza, while he drank Trulys like they were water. At one point, Remi had asked me for my phone and my password, which I promptly gave him, and he found my music app and put on one of my playlists. The apartment, which always felt cold, clinical, and empty, was suddenly my favorite place to be because he was here, taking up all the oxygen in the best way possible. In fact, his big body made the oversized chair look small. As he finished his last slice of pizza and began to work on his fifth Truly, my phone rang. It was Liam.
“Hello?” I answered as Remi left his chair and began to crowd me in mine, trying to lean in to hear what Liam was saying. Apparently, Trulys made Remi kinda touchy-feely. I put a hand on his chest to push him back, and he ended up falling backward till he was sitting on the floor in between my legs, pawing at my phone. I was enthralled since I had never seen Remi drink this much, let alone get as playful and happy as he was acting right now.
“Shhh,” I admonished him, laughing. “Stop it, I’ll put it on speaker,” I whispered. He nodded, finishing his drink and popping the tab on the sixth can of the night. Four more remained on the coffee table; a fifth sat half-finished in my hand.
“Shaen?”
I could hear Liam calling my name, so I quickly switched the call to speaker and said, “What’s up?”
“Is Remi still there, babe? I can’t reach him. His phone keeps going to voicemail, and it’s been three hours since the call with his dad. And I’m sorry for that. He just took my phone. I had no say. I swear I didn’t say anything about anything… Do you know where he is?” Liam was uncharacteristically babbling; his anxiety that his cousin might be mad at him was showing.
“Liam… Liam… calm down,” I interrupted. “Remi is still here…”
Remi’s back straightened when I said his name, and his whole body seemed to grow still. His legs that were in between mine shifted, and his knee was suddenly resting on mine. My legs felt hot, and the heat was traveling up from where his body was touching me all the way up to my face, which I swore was probably bright red now.
“He’s fine. He’s not mad?” I looked at Remi with that statement, and he nodded in agreement. “He’s not mad,” I repeated with more confidence. “At least not with you.”
Liam let out a sound of relief.
“Okay, good. Shit, what a clusterfuck. His dad literally just left. Does he want me to come pick him up?”
I looked at Remi, who had now chugged his sixth drink. His gaze seemed to latch onto mine, and suddenly, his fingers were touching my ankle. So gently, I barely felt it, but the clench my body made as my underwear grew damp had my breath picking up in faster puffs as my lungs suddenly seemed desperate for air.
Remi slowly shook his head. I covered the phone with one hand and leaned my head down toward his.
“You don’t want him to pick you up yet?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t want him to pick me up at all.”
My body stilled at his words.
“But what will you do?” I asked slowly, trying to process that a drunk Remi was half leaning on the side of the coffee table and half resting on my thigh while his hand had now started working its way gently up from my ankle to my knee in soft, warm strokes. I needed to do something, or I was going to combust or come right here in my living room.
“Remi.” I tried to get his attention again. His words were muffled against my leggings when he said, “I’ll shower, and I’ll sleep, and he can bring me clothes tomorrow when he picks us up for school.” He paused and then looked up at me with those annoyingly beautiful brown eyes of his.
“If that’s okay with you, Shaen.”
Fuckkkkk, my brain thought. How was I going to hide this beast of a linebacker in my apartment on the off chance my mom decides to get home before I leave for school for the first time in my entire school career? Where would he sleep? I only had my bed and my mom’s bed. We didn’t have any blow-up mattresses or even a couch, for that matter.
“Shaen? Am I coming to get him now?” Liam broke the silence and my racing anxious thoughts. Remi shook his head against my leg again.
“No,” I breathed out quickly. “Can you bring him more clothes tomorrow when you come pick us up in the morning?”
Remi made a pumping movement in the air with his fist, which made me laugh.
“Okaaaay.” Liam sounded unsure. “I’ll tell my mom he’s with Carter, and we’ll figure it out tomorrow. Are you sure you’re okay with this?”
Remi’s hand was back to holding my ankle, and I gulped out, “Yeah, it’s fine. Happy to help a friend.”
As Liam disconnected the call, Remi mumbled, “Are we just friends, Shaen?”