Tameless Read online

  Had she known, had she put it all together, I’m sure she would have let it show.

  Just like I had acted—not holding eye contact, shifting on my feet, and making up an excuse about having to get back to work, which I’m not sure she believed. I didn’t have to work any specific hours, didn’t have to be anywhere in particular at any given time; I just had a certain amount that needed to be accomplished every week and for all my employer cared, I could show up at the stores in the middle of the night and do the work.

  The truth was that I couldn’t sit down with Dawn and have lunch. Not right away, at least, and certainly not minutes after seeing her for the first time in seven years. While I was surprised and uneasy about the fact that we’d been in that private room together, the real reason was deeper than that, and it went back years.

  Dawn’s dad started a tech company in the mid-1990s, and my dad had somehow ended up working there, getting in on the ground floor when the company was just getting rolling.

  Then my parents were killed in a car accident on the way into work one morning, just after dropping me off at school. I was pulled out of class and given the news by the school nurse and vice-principal. I was parent-less at ten years old.

  My grandparents had died young, and my mom and dad had both been only children just like me, so I had no aunts and uncles.

  Of all the thoughts that flooded my head as we sat there in the nurse’s office, the one that stuck with me most was that I was the unluckiest kid in the school. I had no family.

  And then suddenly I did again: Dawn and her parents. They took me in, treated me as if I were one of their own. Life would never be the same again without my parents, but Dawn’s family was close-knit, caring, and they had made me a part of it.

  Their house was bigger than mine. I had lived in a perfectly fine middle-class part of Long Beach, and they lived in Malibu, a decidedly ritzier part of the area.

  I was living a charmed life in Malibu, to say the least. Big house, including a bedroom that was twice the size of the one I’d had in our house in Long Beach. Dawn’s parents gave her everything she wanted, and I got the same treatment.

  By the time I was thirteen, though, I didn’t care about all the stuff they gave me. Well, except for the surfboards. I had several, all the highest quality and most expensive, and I used the hell out of them. I couldn’t get enough of surfing. Couldn’t get enough of the water and the sand and the sunshine. And the beach girls. How could I not mention that?

  Dawn loved the beach, too, but for different reasons. She was always down there collecting things, mostly small ocean creatures that she’d bring back and put in a salt water tank that she would study for hours on end.

  So I had a good life after the death of my parents. Not all was lost, after all.

  And then it all went wrong during my senior year of high school. There was no single event that put it all in motion, but eventually I found myself getting into trouble all the time, getting suspended once, and finally expelled from school.

  That’s when the drugs started and I became almost singularly focused on how and where I was going to get my next fix. My life had become all about pot at first, then coke. I didn’t surf as frequently as I used to. The beach became more of a place to hang out and get high with my guy friends and whatever girls we were trying to screw at the time.

  Dawn’s parents finally had enough and I spent my eighteenth birthday packing up and moving out of the house. I still remember the look on Dawn’s face. I had glanced over my shoulder as I walked out the door, and there stood seventeen-year-old Dawn, eyes watery and plaintive. “Are you coming back?” she had asked. I hadn’t answered, just turned my head facing forward and taking the last step out of that house when she had shouted, “Come back!”

  It had been seven years now. After spending time up and down the west coast, and even some time up in Seattle, I had come back. LA was my home. This was where everything had happened—good and bad.

  A therapist assigned to me after one of my run-ins with the law once told me that I was escaping my past by running away from the place where it happened. She asked if I had any family there, and Dawn’s family came to mind, but I said no. The shrink told me I wasn’t dealing with it at all and that I should.

  Well, I dealt with it, and I had returned to reclaim my life. That’s one of those phrases they use in therapy, reclaim your life.

  So six months ago—two years clean, by the way—I had come back to LA. A metro with a population of ten million people. What were the odds that I’d run into Dawn? Apparently pretty damn good, because I had and now I was dealing with how to handle it.

  Chapter Five - Dawn

  It was a good thing I had a job that didn’t tax my brain very much because I couldn’t concentrate on anything. All I could think of was Wes and whether he would get in touch. I hoped like crazy that he would, and at first I tempered my excitement by telling myself that it would make sense if he didn’t, considering the dramatic way he had left all those years ago.

  Maybe he was embarrassed. Maybe he felt guilty. He didn’t need to feel either of those things with me.

  Maybe with my parents, yes, but I didn’t care about that. I mean, other than feeling extremely anxious when we were all home. I wanted to tell them. I wanted to blurt out that I had seen him and tell them that he looked good. He was in great physical shape, his eyes were clear and alert, something they hadn’t been when he’d been in the grip of drugs.

  But I couldn’t tell them. When Wes left that day, my parents never spoke of him again. They were furious with him. Angry that he’d brought drugs into the house and put me at risk of getting caught up in it as well.

  Wes and I were close, and I suppose it could have happened, but it didn’t and the past was the past. Or it should be, anyway. But considering all the times I had asked my mother and father about Wes and had been told we weren’t going to discuss it, and even after seven years, I saw no reason to think they’d be open to the idea of him being back in our lives.

  I managed to keep it to myself for one week, then two, and no word from Wes. No text, no phone call, nothing. Maybe he had decided not to get in contact at all.

  Honestly, it was starting to piss me off.

  It was a distraction when I was out with Scott one night. We were having dinner and planning to see a movie. I’d been quiet, I knew I wasn’t being my normal self.

  “What’s up with you tonight? Everything okay?” he had asked.

  “What do you mean, what’s up with me?”

  He looked surprised by the edge in my voice. “You’re just really quiet.”

  I shrugged. “I’m just…I don’t know. Long day at work, I guess.”

  Scott looked annoyed, but he dropped the subject, we finished dinner and went to the movie and the night was…fine. Just fine.

  Things were always just fine. Never horrible, never amazing. Never bad, never great. Just fine.

  Scott was a great guy, smart, driven, sure to be successful in life. And while all of that is a great foundation for a boyfriend, there was something missing.

  There was no passion.

  We were like two older people in a marriage, resigned to be with each other, getting along in life and everything’s…just fine.

  Sad to say, but I had a strong feeling that telling my parents that I’d had enough of being with Scott would be harder than telling Scott himself. How fucked up was that?

  Being with Scott was easy. Too easy. There were times when I wanted to grab him by his shirt, shake him, and say, “Challenge me! Convince me to try something I’ve never tried before! Tell me I’m wrong about something!”

  You know: passion, intensity. We lacked any kind of fire between us, including in bed. There wasn’t even a spark, never mind a fire.

  All of my girlfriends noticed it. I was in denial for a while, but they were patient enough to wait for me to admit it. When I finally did, you would have thought I’d announced that I had found out I was pregnant
and won the lottery on the same day, from the way they reacted.

  And yet I was still torn. I didn’t want to hurt Scott. I didn’t want to have to deal with my parents after the break-up, which would be nearly impossible considering I still lived at home. I was trying as hard as I could to find a better job so I could begin to change all of that.

  So it’s not a stretch to say I was feeling stuck, confined, caged in. This wasn’t good. Not good at all.

  And now Wes had appeared in my life again, breathing new excitement into my daily existence, even though it had been a couple of weeks since we ran into each other and there was still no word from him.

  All I had were memories…

  I thought about the time Wes and I were in seventh grade and this guy on the basketball team was making fun of my glasses in a terribly unoriginal way (calling me “four eyes” and asking me if my glasses had been made out of the bottoms of Coke bottles) and how Wes moved up to my seat on the bus, sat down next to me, and the guy never bothered me again.

  I thought about the time we were home alone and were playing with a volleyball in the house and I got a little over-eager and swatted it into an antique mirror my mother had placed above a marble table in the living room. Wes took the blame. When I tried to stop him, he wouldn’t let me, and when I tried to thank him, he wouldn’t let me do that either.

  I thought about that one night when Wes wanted me to watch a movie he had been raving about, and when I told him I had too much homework, he insisted that I watch it and he did my English homework for me.

  I thought about the time I caught him smoking a cigarette—we were sixteen—and how I had begged him to let me take a puff. I only wanted to do it because he was doing it, but he refused to hand it to me.

  I thought about the times I would be down at the beach, collecting stuff, and Wes and his friends would be surfing. Some of them would tease me about being a “nerd” for collecting aquatic life, and Wes would always make them stop. That was back when I was only thirteen, maybe fourteen. By the time I was sixteen, Wes was keeping his friends away from me for a different reason. “They’re just trying to fuck you,” he’d say, and it would shock me, but I figured he knew what he was talking about.

  I thought about all those times we would watch movies in his room late at night, lying on his bed, and how all of that stopped the summer before our senior year because he was sneaking girls into his room. I remember being in my room, the adjoining wall separating us, and feeling jealous of whichever girl was there that night. Not jealous in a sexual way, just jealous that she was in the same room with Wes and I wasn’t.

  I thought about the way he was so confident, almost cocky, but never arrogant. Just so sure of himself. Like when we were seniors in high school and he didn’t ask a girl to go to prom, he told her she should go with him. She said yes, but I didn’t see them all night. Turns out he took her to a punk club instead.

  I thought about him telling me so many times that I shouldn’t be so quiet. That I should talk more, stand up for myself, go for what I wanted. He had a phrase that I was pretty sure started out as a motivational mantra but later turned into a justification for his near self-destruction. It was simple, a phrase people say all the time: “What do you have to lose?” He would say that to me in a positive way, even when I knew he was saying it to himself in a negative one.

  All of this despite the fact that he never seemed to let his self-doubt show to anyone other than me. There was no other guy like that in school. Every guy wanted to be like him; every girl wanted to be with him; and all of that changed in that last year.

  I always looked up to him, no matter what he might’ve done wrong, and how bad it hurt when he vanished from my life. Wes had shown me a new side of life, and then he was gone, and left me to question whether any of what he had said and done was real or all bullshit.

  I was pretty sure I had answered that question by my sophomore year in college. It was all real, and it had just gone all wrong. Wes was there, and then he wasn’t, and I had a life to live.

  Now all my memories of Wes—the good ones as well as the bad—were swirling furiously in my mind. I had questions. The word “curious” wasn’t anywhere strong enough to describe what I was feeling in the two weeks since I had seen him at the mall.

  So one afternoon, while I was taking a lunch break at work, I decided that it was stupid of me to wait for him. I could call him. I should call him.

  What did I have to lose?

  Chapter Six - Wes

  “I moved,” I told her, when I picked up the phone.

  “Where?”

  “If I told you that, there wouldn’t have been any point in moving.”

  She huffed. “Oh, so you moved because of me. Great. How fucking nice of you. Whatever.” And then Meghan/Skye hung up.

  It wasn’t true that I had moved because of her. I had moved because I’d been crashing on Brad’s couch for the last six months and it was time for me to get out of there. Meghan not knowing where I was going was just an added benefit. I had told Brad not to tell her where I was going, just play dumb and say I moved while he was out for the day or something. Meghan had just called me from outside Brad’s apartment so it looked like he had kept his promise.

  My new place was a small apartment on the outskirts of Santa Monica. I’d saved up some money to get the bare basics for the place. Some kitchen stuff, towels, and a bed, which the store delivered the day I moved in.

  I’d been here for two weeks now, but I still hadn’t been to the beach. Sooner or later, I’d get around to it, hopefully sooner. All was going smoothly at work, I was feeling better about having my own place (a big step toward my ultimate goal of getting my life back), and Meghan couldn’t show up and knock on my door.

  She could still call, of course, and despite her getting mad and hanging up on me, I knew she would call again. It was time for a new phone number.

  I sat in my one chair in the living room, eating a bowl of cereal, when I called and had my number changed. Then I scrolled through my contacts to see who I should give the number to right away, the people I kept in touch with the most.

  That’s when I wondered what I should do about Dawn.

  It had been three weeks since we had run into each other at the mall, and she had called about a week ago. I let it go to voicemail and immediately deleted it, and didn’t call her back. She called again two days later. Same response. Then the texts started. She was worried about me, asking me to please just answer her, let her know I was okay, and that she really wanted to see me but she wouldn’t push it if I didn’t want to.

  So, yeah, I was being a dick about the whole thing. I admit it. With all the upheaval in my life over the last month, I hadn’t really had time to decide whether I should see her.

  It was fraught with risks, mainly emotional ones, for both of us. I think she was more curious than anything else, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find myself wondering more what it would be like to be around Dawn again.

  And that past included a secret I had never shared with anyone. I was crazy about Dawn. I was attracted to her physically, intellectually, and emotionally. She was the one girl I really wanted back then, and the one I never tried to get. It was more than not trying; it required actively fighting the urge to go for it.

  I had my reasons. Damn good ones, too, which I was sure would all come back into play if we spent any time together. I knew my reasons would be tested.

  The most pressing issue at the moment—how would I tell her the truth about the VIP room?

  I figured I would have to. It wasn’t exactly something you can keep from someone you are, or were, so close with, when you’re trying to make contact after years of not being in touch.

  A lie of omission is what it was. And I just wasn’t sure I could act normally around her. Something would give away the fact that I was keeping something from her. That’s how it used to be, anyway. We had been so close, we acted like twins sometimes, knowing what the othe
r would say before it was said, finishing each other’s sentences, making jokes so dumb and dry that we were the only two people in the world who would think it was funny.

  I didn’t plan on ignoring Dawn forever, and now that I had changed my number I needed to send her a message so she wouldn’t think I had changed it because of her.

  I sent a quick text: It’s Wes. I changed my number. Long story, but wanted you to have it.

  It was early, just before 8 a.m., and I had no idea if she was up and getting ready for work or…

  Then her text came through: Thanks for letting me know! I was worried about you. Everything okay?

  Me: Yeah, I’m fine. I was kidnapped by aliens but now I’m back. No big deal.

  Her: Shut up. What are you up to?

  Me: Finishing some cereal and then off to work.

  Her: Let me guess…Baisin Bran?

  Of all things, she remembered my favorite cereal.

  Me: I’m a loyal guy.

  I was trying to be witty with that response, but the second I hit send I realized that I’d have a pretty hard time defending that statement. I hadn’t been loyal to her. I’d left and had been out of touch for seven years.

  A minute passed, then another, as I made my way to the bathroom, started the shower, and slipped off my shorts and t-shirt.

  Her: I’d really love to see you.

  It was time to push aside my concerns and do this.

  Me: Then let’s get together. What’s your schedule like?

  I was getting a towel out of the closet when my phone rang and her name appeared on the screen. I picked it up and she spoke before I could say anything. And goddamn, that voice of hers drove me wild.

  “Before you say it, I swear I’m not one of those people who replies to texts with phone calls,” she said. “That’s so annoying.” I heard what sounded a little bit like a quick nervous laugh. “I just figured it might be easier to make plans this way.”