Addicted Page 4

  I inched to the left so that he could get past me. “Me too,” I said. “This is a real lifesaver.”

  Julien held out his hand for a firm handshake. “Glad it could work out for both of us,” he said. “I’ll leave you to get settled.”

  I smiled and let out an actual sigh of relief as he closed the door behind him. Moving had taken a toll on me, and even though Julien’s talk of cycling had seemed motivational, I was even more inspired by the idea of a nap on his $300 college mattress.

  * * *

  My welcome dinner at Casa Maxwell turned out to be a particular form of torture. First of all, I had been lying facedown on Julien’s prized mattress, drooling on his Amish quilt, when he had knocked on the door to invite me.

  “Hello.” I answered the door out of breath, after running to the bathroom to adjust my clothes.

  “Hey, Mischa, how’s Indian sound? Cecile and I are ordering in.”

  “Oh, no, don’t worry about me,” I said.

  “Please. We’d really like for you to join us. Unless you have somewhere else you need to be.”

  “No, not at all. I’d like that, thanks.”

  The truth? I did not like Indian. Of my many food-related quirks, including a tendency to stuff down my feelings with copious amounts of it, was a total abhorrence of mayonnaise, eggplant, and curry. So when I sat down to dinner, which was fresh from the to-go boxes that sat atop the kitchen counter, I ate a heap of saffron rice while slowly cutting my chicken tikka masala dosas into bite-sized pieces that I pushed around my plate until the inevitable question popped up: “Do you not like your food?” I answered with my stock excuse: “I just have a stomachache. It’s really delicious, though…”

  It wasn’t just the food that made me uneasy. I found myself withering under Cecile’s persistent glare. She probably assumed I had a crush on her father—Gracie couldn’t be his only admirer—and had come to seduce him. I wanted to pull her aside and assure her that I was not a seductress (far from it!), plus I only had eyes for a certain rogue sex addict roaming about town, but that wouldn’t be appropriate. Just the thought of Liam in this family setting seemed to emphasize how wrong he was…

  Despite my abilities as a champion worrier and problem-anticipator, I hadn’t foreseen how difficult it might be to assimilate into this little world I’d landed myself in. Not just because Cecile appeared to be shooting daggers at me from her eyeballs, but because I felt like an interloper in every sense of the word. For one, the house was much grander than the small apartment I had grown up in, or anywhere I had lived during college, and everything around me seemed valuable in that breakable and irreplaceable kind of way. Julien and Cecile possessed exotic good looks that clashed with my Midwestern-ness. They had fancy condiments in their refrigerator and expensive dinner plates, even for their Indian takeout. There was also an obvious void, a dark cloud looming over every room. I couldn’t help imagining the ghost of Julien’s perfect wife looking down on us at the dinner table, disapproving of my pedestrian presence.

  After dinner, I pretended I had someplace to be, got into my car, and headed down the block aimlessly. It was a Monday, so I had no meeting to retreat to, and I was hungry from not eating dinner, but the last thing I wanted to do was embark on another binge, especially the first day after graduation. Coasting along at ten miles per hour, I ogled the neighbors’ houses and my mind wandered to Liam. Where was he right now? Had he fallen off the wagon again with some other woman at his restaurant or a random Craigslist hookup? How was I so obsessed with him already? Didn’t I know better than to go for a guy that good-looking? Would a cheeseburger help me forget about him?

  Stay strong, Mischa, I coached myself through the mach-force, industrial-strength crush threatening to take hold. If there was one thing that would help get me through this, it would not be cheeseburgers but willpower. So instead of autopiloting to Taco Bell, I resigned myself to buying groceries and ran the options over in my head. Just like the quirky, ritualistic schedules I adhered to when frequenting fast-food restaurants (McDonald’s for daytime stops; Burger King and Wendy’s for dinner; KFC during hometown visits; Taco Bell for all other needs), my grocery store preferences were highly specific, with Publix being my number one choice for nighttime/weekday shopping. It was hands-down the most popular supermarket in Oceanside, and therefore crawling with screaming babies and young children anytime before sundown. But after dark on school nights it was like a safe haven. Which is why, when I heard my name called out from the other side of a precarious mountain of bananas in the produce section, I was especially taken aback.

  “Mischa! You’ve got to stop following me around like this.” Liam’s irresistible Australian brogue hit my ears like a clap of thunder, and I was as stunned as if actual lightning had struck.

  “Hello,” I said, deer-in-headlights style. Remembering where I was, I furtively glanced into my basket—it would have been instant mortification had I already hit the snack aisle, or worse, frozen foods—and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw a single, respectable bunch of kale.

  “You disappeared the other day. I’m starting to think you don’t like me.” Liam’s devilish smile was a little more tentative than the last time I had seen him, as if he actually cared.

  “Of course not, no—” I reached out for a banana and the entire display began to tumble, prompting Liam to rush over and stop the mini-avalanche with his body. I dropped my basket and collected the fallen fruit from the floor.

  “I thought this only happened in movies,” Liam said as I helped him put the bananas back in place.

  “My life is just that magical,” I joked. Liam turned to me and smiled. What he didn’t know was this moment was actually magical for me. I couldn’t believe I was seeing him again, as if all my obsessing had dreamed him into reality. The thought I’d had driving away from U-Haul the day before came back to me: If I see him again, all bets are off.

  We stood there for a moment, a Lionel Richie song and the hiss of produce misters providing a soundtrack to our awkward silence. “Anyway, I don’t want to keep you,” he said.

  Oh no. Now Liam was the one fleeing, waving at me and sauntering away before I even had time to respond. A panic alarm set off in my brain—I had to do something. “Wait!” I called out, having no idea what I planned to say.

  He turned on a dime, his eyebrow raised à la Jack Nicholson, as if to challenge me. “Yes?”

  “Umm…” I was trying to recall something we had talked about, a conversation starter, but nothing came to mind. I drew a blank, too transfixed by the fluorescent-lit sparkle in Liam’s eyes, visible from ten feet away. And then my food-driven brain kicked in and remembered the pivotal detail from our first conversation in the Baptist church parking lot. “Remember how you mentioned that gelato the other night? The one you make at your restaurant?”

  “Yes,” Liam responded with a knowing smirk.

  “I’ve been thinking about it…,” I said.

  By the look on his face, Liam understood that I had been thinking about a lot more than gelato.

  “It’s still there,” he said with an easy shrug.

  * * *

  Liam’s sporty black Mercedes sped down Citrus Street, Oceanside’s main drag, as I followed in my beat-up Honda. My fear of losing him as he zoomed through several nearly red lights kept my thoughts only partially occupied, while the rest of me questioned what exactly I was doing. Obviously we were not just going to eat gelato and share our life stories, but was I really prepared to sleep with this stranger? And would it make me a horrible person if I did, knowing that sex was Liam’s drug of choice? If it weren’t you, it would be somebody else! I heard Isabella call out from the depths of my consciousness. Just go for it!

  He slowed down outside a gravel parking lot and pulled in past a sign that read TRIO. Suddenly, I knew exactly where I was even though I had never been there—it was the favorite restaurant of my former boss, Sasha Myers. I had booked her reservations there a million times. “The
only white tablecloth establishment for miles,” she liked to say when recommending it to clients at her luxe day spa. Ironically, I had always wanted to eat there but could never afford it, and now here I was with very little intention of eating.

  Winding around behind the restaurant, we parked side by side in the cramped, employees-only parking lot. There were no other cars there, and only one streetlamp provided a dim, yellow beam that hovered over the otherwise dusky, moonlit lot. As I turned off my car and got out, the dense fog that had descended at the grocery store lifted from my brain and reality hit me like a smack to the forehead: What I was doing was reckless, unsafe, and above all, terribly un-me. Yet Liam looked so flawless in the moonlight.

  “Is anyone even here?” I asked, timidly exiting the safety bubble that was my car.

  “We’re not open on Mondays.” Liam sounded colder than he had when we had embarked on this little adventure ten minutes ago, and it began to sink in how absolutely strange, in every meaning of the word, this stranger really was as he rustled through his large keychain and located the key to the heavy back door. He unlocked the dead bolt and pushed inside, flipping on the ceiling lights that cast a bluish glow over the well-equipped, steel-countered kitchen.

  Like Alice stumbling down the rabbit hole, I tentatively followed him in. All my life I had done the opposite of this—hiding, making myself invisible, vanishing into the woodwork—and I decided perhaps Alice really had materialized from the written word and was currently inhabiting my body.

  “All right, the ice cream’s in here,” he said, ducking into a walk-in freezer and emerging with a stainless steel tub that gave off a little cloud of cold steam. He placed it on the counter and turned around to find me staring, clueless as to what to say or do now that I was officially alone with him. “We’ll let that sit for a second. Let me show you around.”

  Liam smiled and walked ahead of me as I followed silently, feeling the tiny hairs stand up on the back of my neck and edges of my ears. In the dining room, he flicked on half the lights, which were dim to begin with, giving the restaurant that five-star, candlelit ambiance that people who like to pay a lot of money for their food are accustomed to. Not looking back at me, he held up an index finger, disappeared into a stockroom, then reemerged with a neatly folded white tablecloth that he draped over a corner booth.

  “Is that the VIP table?” I joked, tapping my fingers on the wall beside me as Liam leaned against the booth.

  “Only the best for my late-night gelato customers.” He made a dramatic sweeping gesture over the table and smiled big enough so that I could see his straight white teeth for the first time. It was an earnest smile, and I felt almost at ease—what stopped me was how handsome he looked as he stood there waiting for me to approach. Hoping to calm my nerves, I tentatively explored the dining room, letting my fingertips graze the tables and chairs in the middle of the room.

  “It’s weird being in a restaurant with no people,” I said.

  “Yeah, it looks better with a crowd, I guess.”

  “No. It’s really nice. Where did you get these chairs?” I grabbed the back of one of the white, upholstered chairs and drew it toward me, pretending to inspect it.

  Liam laughed. “Really? You wanna know where I got the chairs?” He walked over and gently placed his hand on the small of my back.

  I looked up at him, blushing, and let the chair go. A bead of sweat made its way down my neck. “I just like the white fabric. Anything white, really—I like the color.”

  “Virginal,” he retorted, “like the driven snow.”

  “Right.” I chuckled and felt my face flush. This is flirting, Mischa. Say something sexy. “It’s hot in here,” I said, plucking my shirt away from my body as I let myself lean into him, my shoulder just grazing his arm.

  “Yeah, the manager has the AC on a timer. I don’t know how to change it. I’d better get that gelato, eh?” He let his hand drop and started toward the kitchen.

  “Okay!” I watched him go, thinking, This is good. This is my pace. I didn’t notice as I made my way to the corner booth, preparing myself for a little dessert before the main course, so to speak, that Liam had slowed down. By the time I reached the edge of the table, he had come up behind me and laid his hands on my shoulders.

  “Just a warning, it’s even hotter over here,” he said.

  “Really?” I reached my arms out as if to feel the air, then caught myself. I was acting clueless, which is exactly what I was. I had never been involved in a real seduction before. In fact, I had only ever slept with my ex-boyfriend, Bradley, whose idea of foreplay was the drunken groping typical of any college freshman. I decided to face my fear and turned to look Liam in the eye. “I don’t know, maybe it’s just you,” I said, sensing his actual body heat as he pressed up against me.

  “Maybe it is.”

  “What about the gelato?” I lowered my gaze at his broad chest in front of me. “Are you just gonna let it melt?”

  “Hey, Mischa?” Liam took a step back and stared at me with his green eyes. “We’re two people doing things we shouldn’t be doing, right? I think the less we talk, the better.”

  In an instant, Liam braced my hips and lifted me onto the table so that my legs were straddling his waist. I felt myself shaking like a leaf. I had the same excited, scared sensation as being whipped around by a carnival ride, and felt like I should close my eyes like I always had on roller coasters. This was officially no longer my life. It was like I had entered somebody else’s much more exciting narrative. Wake up, I thought. Or don’t. Let the dream play out.

  Liam buried his face in my neck, then dragged his chin down into my cleavage, which was exposed in the same ratty V-neck T-shirt I’d worn to the meeting where I first saw him. He kissed my chest and grabbed at both my breasts, growling like a predatory cat. The heat of his body against mine reminded me of the simple magic of being touched, something I hadn’t experienced for so long. I wanted to give in to it, but I was also terrified by the foreignness of it all: his masculine smell, his strong hands on the small of my back, the scratchy stubble on his chin, my heart racing a mile a minute. I had no idea where I was or how I’d gotten there. When his lips, soft and pillowy, came to meet mine, I squeezed my eyes shut, and the roller coaster took its first drop. The tip of Liam’s tongue slipped in past my parted lips and danced around with my own. His hand found the back of my neck and braced me as his kiss went deeper. My thighs were squeezed against his body so tightly, I could feel the seams on the sides of his jeans making an impression on my skin. Trailing his fingers from the back of my neck down my spine, Liam moved his kisses to my collarbone, then once again buried his face in my cleavage.

  In an instant, I felt my elation turn to panic. Liam’s touch felt so good yet terribly wrong at the same time, like the first time I ever masturbated. All the out-of-body motivation that had brought me this far dropped away without warning, and I knew I had to stop him from going any further, or I’d be lost forever. Someone like Liam—so good-looking, so experienced, so messed up when it came to sex—would crush me in a second, because I wouldn’t be able to forget him.

  “I can’t have sex with you,” I blurted, then shoved him away with a level of upper-body strength I didn’t realize I had. I slid down from the table and adjusted my shirt, avoiding direct eye contact as I muttered an apology. To my surprise, Liam stayed where he was, dragging a hand across his mouth as I moved farther away. The look on his face was blank, neither angry nor relieved… just blank.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” I said, to which he shrugged in response. Hoping to feign the same indifference, I waved and flashed a ridiculously fake smile before turning to go.

  My hasty exit from the restaurant was a blur. In something close to a blackout state, I found my way back through the kitchen and out to the employee parking lot. It wasn’t until a couple minutes later that I came to, registering a red light above me as I sped through it like a getaway driver. My heart racing, I glanced back at t
he intersection to make sure the automatic camera didn’t flash my license plate and thanked God I hadn’t killed anyone.

  The questions swirling around my head were overlapping each other and therefore hard to discern, but the one that kept popping into the foreground was, Why? Why did I just leave that incredible-looking man wanting more? Why didn’t I want him back? Am I so afraid of having any semblance of a life that I have to run from every opportunity?

  The truth was—I realized after I’d talked myself down from the ledge—that I felt unsafe, first and foremost, which made sense because Liam was a sex addict whom I’d hardly spoken to. But his looks did confuse things. He was just the right amount of hot to be forgiven most trespasses, the kind of guy who could actually get away with murder. Which, I suppose, justified my actions, him being a potential homicidal maniac. And then there was the obvious darkness about him. He had demons that he was fully aware of and battling, one day at a time. Although the same could be said about me, my food addiction seemed like a silly, light affair in comparison with this man’s lack of inhibition on the highway and weakness for anonymous Craigslist sex. We were as opposite as opposites could get—on one level, it was probably why I was so attracted to him.

  But I had gone as far as following him inside an empty restaurant and he hadn’t even threatened me. When I walked away, he didn’t chase me with a knife or promise to haunt my dreams. Perhaps the only reason to believe he was a killer was to alleviate my disappointment in myself. The harsh reality was that a girl like me would probably never get an opportunity to sleep with someone like him twice. I’d blown my chances at one of those unbelievable one-night stands that people store in their minds and revisit for years to come—those who are wise enough to seize that kind of fleeting moment.

  Without thinking, I drove back to my dreary apartment complex before I remembered I no longer lived there. My mind still a million miles away, I turned around in the parking lot and reluctantly steered my car back in the direction of Julien’s.