Addicted Read online

  “But this isn’t something you do a lot, is it?”

  I shrugged. “Why?”

  “Because I want to know that you want this.”

  “I do. I want it,” I said, clenching his shoulders for emphasis.

  “All right. Just tell me if it’s too much. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You won’t,” I promised, even though I knew Liam was quite capable of hurting me in more ways than one. “Please, I want to feel you.”

  “Good,” he said, then growled playfully, ramming into me with a force I wasn’t prepared for. I yelped in pain but quickly felt the warmth of him spread throughout my body.

  “Stay there a second,” I pleaded, reeling from the fullness of his cock piercing through me like a fleshy sword. I groaned as quietly as possible as he began to move in and out, at first slowly and then faster and with more force.

  “You’re so tight. Like a wet little glove,” he said, his breathing heavy with effort. I could feel the little hairs on my neck rising and falling in time with his exhales.

  Seconds passed that seemed like minutes and vice versa. I lost all sense of time with Liam inside me—there were no worries about the future or the past, just this moment. Again, I gazed at the stars, then down at his beautiful face, which was twisted into a grimace but still undeniably handsome. My body ached with desire. Even as he plunged my depths, I wanted him farther in. If he could overtake me entirely, it wouldn’t be enough. I wondered if anyone had ever wanted someone as much as I wanted him right now. Or if it was at all possible that Liam wanted me just as badly, which—unbelievable though it was—it seemed like he did. For those few, ecstatic moments, we were forces of nature, dipping into each other like two desert-worn nomads diving into a pool of pristine water.

  “I’m gonna come,” he said into my ear, his voice gruff and insistent.

  “No, please. Not yet,” I begged. Desperate for more, I clenched the muscles inside me around his pulsing erection.

  But Liam didn’t slow down. He pushed again and again and smashed his face into my neck. I felt speared, owned, like I had no control but I wanted it that way. I could have died right then and there. Every inch of me was tingly and numb at the same time. Buzzing. Liam panted against the base of my neck and groaned. He kept moving, but slower and slower. I felt him release, but he didn’t stop. Neither of us wanted it to end.

  “Mischa,” he said, as if reminding me of the name I had forgotten.

  No! Too soon! I panicked, feeling him shudder, then gently pull out. My quick, shallow breaths reverberated against his leather jacket. I wanted to rewind the movie to five minutes ago and pause it forever. I had the same sad helplessness that overcame me whenever I reached the bottom of a bag of potato chips, but multiplied. For a moment, we stood there motionless and expectant, as if someone was about to arrive and tell us what came next. Liam knelt down to face me, looking into my eyes as if they held the answer. I smiled and searched his face in return.

  Then, as if he’d just remembered he had somewhere to be, he yanked the condom off, tossed it into a storm drain, and put his pants back on in a hurry. My self-consciousness returning in full force, I did the same, tugging my jean shorts back over the tops of my thighs. Buttoning them took an embarrassing amount of effort.

  “You want a ride back?” I heard him ask, his eyes averted as he headed for the driver’s side of the car.

  “Sure,” I answered, frowning at the notion he would even ask. I glanced around at the surrounding houses, down the sidewalk toward the dark end of the street, to make sure no one but myself was witnessing this pathetic aftermath, and got back into the car.

  We drove the short distance to Julien’s without talking. I was utterly confused that things could turn so quickly after what we had just shared and clung to the hope that maybe I was just missing something, that things were actually okay. From the side, I studied Liam’s face but saw nothing of the determination or resolve that had been there earlier. Instead, there was shame and emptiness, and then I got it. Just like I loved a slice of pizza before it went into my mouth and hated it once it was down my throat, Liam felt that way about me now that I had been consumed. I had been to enough meetings to get it, even if I didn’t want to. The shame he felt came over me too. I wanted to curl up into a ball, make myself invisible, the way I’d toss out an empty pizza box so I didn’t have to look at it anymore. This was not a feeling I wanted to experience in the presence of another person. It was a loneliness that demanded aloneness. As he turned the corner onto Julien’s street, I glanced one last time at the stars through his sunroof and noticed the harsh, impersonal scent of leather that pervaded the car.

  * * *

  By Sunday afternoon, the reality had settled in that Liam was not coming back for a do-over. He wasn’t knocking down Julien’s front door demanding to see me or following my car in traffic, even though I kept checking for him in the rearview mirror. He hadn’t magically procured my phone number. He had probably forgotten my name, for all I knew. It was exactly what I had feared when he had so unceremoniously dropped me off at Julien’s house on Friday night: The most amazing, unforgettable, mind-blowing night of my life was, for Liam, just another empty one-night stand.

  I hadn’t slept at all the night it happened and didn’t fare much better on Saturday. So when the time came for my weekly trip to Isabella’s, I seriously thought about canceling. Then I remembered how skinny she had looked the last time I saw her, and the half pound of grass-fed butter I had purchased last week for the express purpose of sneaking it into her food, and made haste to her condo.

  “What is wrong with you?” she asked for the fifth time as I overpeeled a carrot, barely holding back tears. “You’re infusing my food with sadness! I will die if I eat this!” she exclaimed.

  “I’m sorry. I’m fine, really. I must have PMS,” I said.

  Isabella winced at the crack in my voice. “Don’t try that with me. I’m too old. What happened?”

  I looked across the counter into her large brown eyes, which appeared haggard under her penciled-in eyebrows. Instead of saying anything, I just shook my head until she walked over and removed the peeler from my hand. “Let’s take a ride, shall we?”

  In her retirement community–issued golf cart, Isabella drove me to the eighth hole of the golf course, otherwise known as her “thinking perch,” just down the street from her house. It was early afternoon, hot and muggy and bright enough that nobody was outside. As the cart came to a stop at the edge of the green, we were surrounded by nothing but silence and an endless stretch of crisp, pristinely mowed grass.

  “Did somebody die?” she asked, sounding grave.

  “No.” I sounded as if I wished someone had.

  “Then what, darling? You have my undivided attention.”

  I sighed, knowing she would get it out of me sooner or later. “I slept with someone.”

  “Well that’s cause for celebration, is it not?”

  “It was a one-night stand.”

  “Even better!”

  I shook my head. “I feel horrible.”

  “That will pass,” she said. “Are you in love?”

  I shook my head again. “That’s the pathetic part. I mean, I hardly know him.” I shifted in my seat to face her. “It’s Liam. I told you about him. The sex addict.”

  Isabella coughed out a laugh. “Ha! There’s no such thing.”

  “I think it’s pretty real. He goes to meetings for it.”

  “Well, if there’s meetings for it, I guess that makes me a sex addict too. Except I’ve been in severe withdrawal for the past ten years. And look! I haven’t died!”

  She got out of the cart and crossed her arms, walking onto the golf course in her prim white ballet flats. I followed her out, wishing I had a hat as the sun beat down from directly above. “This is the Australian, no?” she asked, raising a bony hand to block the sun from her eyes. I nodded in response. “So how was it, Fluffy?” She had co-opted my mother’s nickname
for me ever since I had told her about it. She tended to use it whenever she noticed I was down, which seemed counterintuitive, but I don’t think Isabella had ever fully grasped that it was a reference to my weight.

  “It was good,” I lamented.

  “You don’t do that very often, do you?” she said.

  I shook my head, wanting to cry for the millionth time that weekend as I stared into the distance, cursing my weakness. I thought of grief-stricken Julien and how he managed to drag himself out of bed every morning and put on a brave face for the day, raising a teenage daughter, writing a book. In comparison, my problems were trifling. What was I even so sad about? I hardly knew Liam, yet he had gotten under my skin more than anyone I had ever met. I wanted to know him and desperately wanted him to know me. Half of me believed we were kindred spirits. The other half thought that must be a sham if he could walk away so easily.

  “Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret,” Isabella said, and sauntered up to me, playfully grabbing my elbow. “You got the best of him! That’s all he’s good for.”

  I sighed, inconsolable. “I know you think like that, but I don’t.”

  “This isn’t opinion I’m giving you. It’s fact. There’s only a few people on this earth—only a few men, I should say—who will ever really care about you and whom you will care about. And even then, it probably won’t last. But this one? He doesn’t sound like he’s on the short list. So you got the best of him. See?”

  I nodded, mostly to appease her. As much as I wanted to think like Isabella, or Gracie for that matter, there was no changing the fact that my heart was highly breakable, prone to unrealistic flights of fancy. Still, I continued to take in her words, even after I’d coached her through every last bite of her dinner, stowed away the rest of the red beans and rice and chicken étouffée I had made in Pyrex dishes, and driven home. Just before bed, after eating a grotesque combination of snacks in what must have equated, calorie-wise, to an eight-course dinner, I repeated her assessment of the situation like a mantra—I got the best of him… I got the best of him—then collapsed from exhaustion into a (mercifully) dreamless sleep.

  In the morning, for a few blissful hours, I felt magically recovered. With Cecile’s blessing, I brought my juicer in from the trunk of my car and made a large batch of “Rise and Revitalize” juice—something I was in the process of perfecting for my cleanse—with organic produce I had rushed out to buy first thing. Although she turned up her nose at the ingredients (dandelion greens, beets, ginger, and bee pollen among other things), Cecile drank the concoction without gagging.

  “Is this gonna make me skinny?” she asked after gulping down all eight ounces of it and examining the greenish-red sediment left behind in her glass.

  I hesitated before answering such a loaded question. “Well, not in and of itself, but once I have my whole cleanse perfected, yes. Weight loss will definitely be one of the benefits.”

  “So what else do you have to do? For the cleanse, I mean?” Cecile was now hovering over the juice pitcher and sniffing the drink as if she was still forming her opinion on whether or not it sucked.

  Oh no. This is dangerous territory, I thought. I wanted to say that a teenage girl shouldn’t be cleansing at all, but I didn’t want to make her feel bad for being curious. “It’s just a mixture of juices and healthy foods. I haven’t finished working it out yet,” I said. In truth, like most other cleanses, it was an agonizing, ten-day, liquid-only affair, the goal of which was to rejuvenate your insides and outsides and do the work of three months’ dieting in a fraction of that time. The difference between mine and the other ones out there, I hoped, would be the “illusion of fullness.” I wasn’t quite there yet…

  Cecile lowered her voice and leaned across the counter in my direction. “I wanna lose fifteen pounds. Can you help me?”

  No, no, no, no, no. “You need to wait until you’re done growing to worry about that,” I said matter-of-factly, taking it upon myself to act as an authority. On the one hand, I knew exactly how she felt, having wanted the exact same thing at her age, but I could guess the right and wrong ways to answer. “Eat healthy, stop when you’re almost full, and get involved in physical activities that make you happy. Do you play sports?”

  “I swim. I used to play tennis with my mom too. Do you play?”

  “No, I wish I did.”

  “That’s okay. I wouldn’t want to play with you anyway.” She looked me up and down. “You’re probably too slow.” With that, she picked up her bejeweled iPhone and shuffled out of the room.

  I winced in a delayed reaction to Cecile’s comment, which was an obvious dig at my weight. I had forgotten how mean teenage girls could be. The tiniest part of me wanted Liam to magically appear so that I could drag him into the house, point him out, and say, “See this? Look who I slept with the other night! A god among men, that’s who! So keep the body snarking to yourself!” But my affiliation with that god among men was not one that currently filled me with pride, and his “approval” of my body, as I now understood, was no more than a transient, passable attraction to a willing and available subject.

  The fact was, I cared whether or not Cecile liked me, accepted me, thought of me as attractive, because I needed her and Julien more than ever now. With every passing day, they felt more and more like family, and I’d always wanted a sister or a brother, even if that meant enduring her adolescent mood swings.

  Alone in the kitchen, I cleaned up the mess from my juicer and thoughts of Liam popped into my head like pernicious little fruit flies. I reacted by swatting at the air, as if something so simple could make them go away.

  Chapter Seven

  Julien and I had driven to campus separately because he had a meeting or somewhere else to be that afternoon—I couldn’t remember. When I got back to my car in the parking lot by the lit building, there was a note tucked under one of my windshield wipers that read: “I need to see you. Meet me at Trio @ midnight. I’ll leave the back door open—L.”

  My initial reaction was to crumple the paper in my hand and search the parking lot for a trash can. Then, on second thought, I uncrumpled it and read it over again, studying the precise block letters. It surprised me that Liam had nice penmanship. It surprised me, too, that he knew where to find me, not to mention that he had recognized my car and written me a note in the first place. He should have forgotten about me by now. Realistically, a girl like myself was a dime a dozen in his world. But somehow this had happened. Out of sheer curiosity, I had no choice but to follow Liam’s trail of breadcrumbs back to the fancy restaurant he owned across town.

  When I got there hours later, the back door was ajar as promised. I made my way quickly across the darkened parking lot, noting that there were two other cars there, not one. When I entered the kitchen, only half the ceiling lights were on, and I almost tripped over a mop handle that had tipped over from its resting place on the wall, but I caught myself just in time. Putting the mop back upright, I heard a faint sound, like a tiny squeal, and moved into the dining room, taking smaller and smaller steps as I heard another, more intense squeal. As I got closer to the sound, I determined that it was coming from a woman. For some reason, at first I worried that Liam was hurting her, but then I came to my senses and realized they were having sex. Someone else had gotten to him first. How was this possible? Had he left fifteen notes exactly like mine lying on other car windshields around town? Probably, I figured. Liam, of all people, must be aware that successful booty calling was a numbers game. Apparently, I had become jaded overnight.

  Liam’s office was down a short corridor, past the bathrooms. The door had a large glass pane that offered a view inside, only somewhat obstructed by wooden blinds hanging on the opposite side of the door. Like the hero in an action movie, I slid my back against the wall and craned my neck to peek through the glass pane. In a strange twist, I felt curious without being angry or upset. More than anything, I just wanted to see.

  “Oh shit! Fuck me!” the woman
cried, her bare buttocks buoyed up against the edge of his desk as Liam propped his hands on her shoulders.

  Shoving aside a laptop and stacks of paperwork, Liam, who was fully dressed except for the pants dangling around his ankles, repositioned the girl so that she was lying on her back. I could see her muscular legs and arms reaching up for him, begging him to take her. This was not the lithe model type I’d pictured him with. She was more like a stocky personal trainer with small, pert breasts that sat atop her sternum like pectoral muscles that had been slightly inflated.

  “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” she demanded as Liam’s massive cock came into my view before disappearing inside her. She was tan, her muscled body slick with perspiration. I watched in awe as she groped him, then touched her own breasts as he thrust inside her, gritting his jaw.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I’d never been witness to real live sex before—I had hardly even watched pornography. The sights and sounds of it were titillating. My self-awareness melted away as I plastered myself against the glass door, nose practically smashing against the glass as I drank in the scene.

  Pulling out, he slid his hands up the back of her legs, pushing them up so they rested against the length of his body as he went at it again.

  Don’t stop, I thought, then, Holy shit! I am a voyeur. How did I not know this? I inched forward for an even better view. I didn’t want to get caught, but at the same time, I couldn’t stop watching. Is this why he’d invited me here? Had he assumed I wouldn’t be able to resist the sight of him doing what he’d done to me to someone else? Did he instinctively know that I’d be turned on?

  I could see his erection now that her legs were pinned back. It was moving in and out of her in time with her own thrusts, like they were two parts of a well-oiled machine. The force of him pushed her farther and farther over the edge of the desk so that her head was hanging back now. Lost in the peep show, I let out a little sigh, which prompted Liam to whip his head around and catch a glimpse of me through the blinds.