Chapter 12
Rocking the Hat and the Whip
It dawned on me that my Friday jewellery night was probably going to have to be relocated if I kept spending time with Landon.
He texted me in the middle of the afternoon, Abandon any plans you have tonight. I’m brining pizza.
My first thought was ‘how the hell did he get my number and how they hell do I have him listed in my contacts’ and then I texted him back with a nice I was actually going to take part in an orgy. We’ve been choreographing it for weeks now, I can’t abandon my deprived sex partners!
Unsurprisingly, I was rewarded with a quick replied that read Room for one more?
I answered with Whatever fancy Stripper. That pizza better have bacon on it. And buy cheese sticks too and left it at that.
So that is how I ended up sitting on a lawn chair on my balcony in the middle of a chilly Spring night, sharing a pizza with Stranger-Danger Boy.
“You know what we’re missing?” Landon asked, leaning back in his chair, eyes closed, content smile on his lips.
“Scotch?”
He snorted, not opening his eyes. “That filthy thing you think is alcohol? Please, we have beer.” At the, he grabbed his bottle, cradling it lovingly against his chest. “No, what we’re missing is a nice fire.”
“Yeah, that’s a plan to have Miss Beauregard call the firemen on us.” Hmm. Maybe that would be a nice scenario. Sexy firemen in my apartment and a hot circus stripper. Maybe I was going to participate in an orgy tonight after all. “I bet she’s spying on us right now.”
Landon took a gulp of beer with a bigger smile on his lips. “Probably.”
And because we had been talking about fire and I had many troubling issues I started to sing “Let’s gather around the campfire and sing our campfire song. Our C-A-M-P-F-I-R-E-S-O-N-G song,” and wiggled around on my chair, mostly doing little legs movements in the air, but was slightly caught off guard when I didn’t need to mumbled like a retard in a deep male voice the lyrics like Patrick when Landon sang his lines, and I could just keep singing super fast and in an high pitch voice Spongebob’s lines.
“You really are obsessed with Spongebob,” Landon stated after we stopped singing. “That’s slightly disturbing.”
I threw an uneaten crust at him. “What’s disturbing is that you know the songs too.”
Landon had grabbed the crust I had thrown at him and was now eating it. Freak. “I was a High School slacker. What was I supposed to watch when I was skipping school?”
My answer was instantaneous and unnecessarily loud. “PORN!”
Of course, he ignored my awesome comment and asked, “What about you? What’s your excuse for all that Spongebob knowledge?”
I shrugged, like it wasn’t that big of a deal. “I’d put all the episodes in loop—I had them recorded on VHS—so I wouldn’t have to hear what my parents were doing in the house. Sorry to disappoint. I wasn’t a High School slacker.” I paused, frowned and then added, “I was a college slacker though. A drop out actually. I left before I got my bachelor degree.”
Landon looked at me, his head leaning back on the chair. “What were you studying in?”
“Ancient History.” I smiled a little. “I wanted to be the sexy female version of Indiana Jones.”
Landon laughed. “I could totally see you pulling that one off.”
“It would have been epic…” I trailed, sighing contently. Me, rocking the hat and the whip, finding treasures and killing Nazis along the way. Yeah, that would have been an epic career path.
We stayed silent for a few minutes after that, drinking our beer—or well, bubbly water, really, stupid beer had barely any alcohol in it—and looked up at the sky. Now, of course we were in the middle of a very bright city, the city that never slept, so there weren’t really any stars to look at, but still, the bright buildings were nice to look at.
“So, how’s it going with your boyfriend?” Landon asked, breaking the nice silence.
I rolled my eyes. “How’s it going with your girlfriend?”
“Ex-girlfriend,” Stranger-Danger boy corrected.
“And non-boyfriend,” I pointed out. But then I don’t know why, I had to tell him. “He asked about you actually.”
“How so?”
“Wanted to know if we had sex.”
Landon smiled. “What’d you say?”
I smiled too. “I said the only thing I could answer, of course, I said we were childhood sweethearts, star crossed lovers, and eternal soul mates.”
“Nice” he answered and chuckled before taking another sip of beer. “It’s kind of complicated to explain what we are though, our relationship whatever this is” he motioned to me and him with his beer as he said that last part and added, “is without status.”
“That’s kind of the same problem I have with Victor. Our relationship, is also without status.”
“What? He’s afraid to commit?”
“No, he’s not the one that doesn’t want our relationship to move forward, that’s all me.”
The boy beside me was suddenly very confused. “Why?”
I sighed, running my hand through my hair. “Because when that happens, it makes it…” I took a deep breath, thinking about it, “real, serious, like, for reals, I could be with that guy for a while and thinking back, I never got in a relationship with a guy when I didn’t know it wasn’t going to last.”
Landon let that sink in for a second before saying, “Well, all relationship have their issues, for instance, I was too sexy for my ex.”
I laughed. “Same reason you got fired? People were tired of seeing you with clothes on?”
Instead of getting a witty reply though, as I had expected, I got a frown and a “No, it’s more complex than that.”
I snorted and bumped his shoulder with my beer. “Well, spill it.”
“I don’t know…” he trailed and took a deep breath, “it’ll make things all serious and as magnificent as your boobs are, it’ll make us undeniably closer.”
Very welcomed compliment about my boobs aside, my curiosity was quite teased right there. Fancy stripper boy was going to need to spill the beans. “I motorboated your ass. I think you can hardly get more intimate.”
Landon laughed and groaned at the same time, throwing his head back in defeat. “Fine. You ever wondered what I was doing in the hospital that day we met?”
I frowned a little. “Figured you really had some venereal disease.”
“If only.” He snorted. “I’ve got a cardiac arrhythmia.”
That didn’t sound kinky. “A what?”
“My heart is fucked up.” Glorious. “I learned about it last year. That’s why I lost my circus job. You can’t have a performer on stage who could have an heart attack at any moment.”
I frowned more. “You could have a heart attack at any moment?” That didn’t sound nice, not one bit. Suddenly I wondered why I had asked. It would have been nicer to not know. It was more fun when he was just a Stranger Danger boy or a fancy stripper, not when he was a human being with problems and emotions and that really made me sound like a bitch.
“Well, I’m taking medication now, so no. It’s under control. But I’m still not in perfect condition. Sometimes my heart will start to beat frantically for no reason and that’s no good while spinning around a pole.”
“Seriously, it’s like you want me to make stripper jokes.”
That had the expected effect and Landon chuckled. “Shut up.” He gave me a flick on my shoulder. “So, that’s why I lost my job and I had to move out of my apartment and with my mother because even if I have money saved up, the medicine is very expensive.”
“Wow, that sucks,” I trailed, nodding.
“Yeah…” he nodded too. “And now no one will ever hire me because I’m a liability and I have no idea what to do with myself other than sleep in and watch TV because being a circus performer was the only thing I ever wanted to do.”
“No plan B?”
“None.”
Poor Moonpie. “Not even high pay stripper?”
“Maybe I should consider it.”
“You should. I’d probably buy you permanently Moonpie,” I added with a mischievous grin.
“You’re ridiculous,” he said over his beer with a small smile on his lips. “Well, now that I’ve opened my can of worms, how about you do it.”
I made a ‘you crazy, boy?’ face. “Huh?”
“What made you emotionality distant, and slightly effed up. And what was the part of that Neil guy in it?”
I looked at him in disbelief. How had he made that connection? And did I really want to talk about it with him, with anyone? I never talked about my feelings, my real feeling with anyone, not even my best friend Abbigail, and never with my non-boyfriend. Why would I tell a fancy stripper?
What was the most unnerving in all of this though is that I found myself talking without even wanting to. “When I was a freshman in high school, there was this guy, a senior. He was hot, he was intelligent, he was kind and he was just a little bit shy. He was just perfect, and he was like the babe in school. I had a huge crush on him. Now, one thing you don’t know about me is that my parents are polygamists. They can sleep with other people. As a matter of fact, I pretty much grew up with a second set of parents in the house because they were my parents boyfriend and girlfriend. Because of that, people at school assumed I was going to follow in my parents footstep and was as sexually liberal as them. Everyone figured I was huge slut. I wasn’t though.” I smiled thinking about the fact that I got my first kiss pretty much at the same thing I had sex for the first time. “So, I let people think whatever they wanted, but I never had the guts of telling my crush I liked him. I never even talked with him. Until my parents introduced me to him. When he got out of high school and went to University, he went where my mother taught and she got her claws on him so you might see how that kind of screwed up with me. He became a regular at my house though I never saw any kind of PDA between him and my parents for the most part. Sometimes, he’d actually come to our house and my parents weren’t there and he’d help me with my homework.”
I sighed, feeling sick in my stomach just thinking about the rest of the story, but for some reason I had to say it, “And then, one day, I felt pretty sick at school, so I came back home. School wasn’t too far from my house so I walked back. I walked pass the living room and that’s when I saw them. My mother, she was riding him like a prize stead and the bitch saw me. And she didn’t even stop. She just kept on riding. I ran to my room, traumatised and you know what? I could still hear them. I would have run the fuck out of the house but I couldn’t because I was too busy puking my freaking heart out. My father arrived, maybe half an hour later and I thought, yes, finally, it’s going to stop. But it didn’t. He just fucking joined them. At that point, puking or not, feeling like dying or not, I didn’t care, I just got out of that fucking house. And that night, I gave up my virginity to Quick-Draw-Jesse.”
After few very long minutes of silence, Landon finally said, “And that guy, that was Neil?”
“Yes.” My voice cracked when I answered him and tears I hadn’t even realized had gathered in my eyes, feel down on my cheeks. How freaking pathetic.
“Well, what did you know? We both have fucked up hearts.” Landon whispered.
I chuckled and sniffed, trying to stop my nose from running, and rubbed my eyes quickly with the sleeve of my hoodie. “Yeah, fucked up in every way.”
“You can go and take out that fancy crao you call booze now, if you want. I think you need it now.”
I laughed but didn’t wait to be asked twice. I walked back inside, leaving Landon behind and headed straight to the liquor cabinet getting my cheapest Scotch out—no way was crying over my pitiful crush over Neil worthy of my good liquor.
When I walked back on the balcony, Landon was sitting straight up and pointing at the sky, “Look, a shooting star! Quick, make a wish!”
I threw a glass his way, rolling my eyes. He caught it easily. “That’s an airplane dumbass,” I informed him, and sat back on my chair, purring us both liquor in our glasses—I gave myself more.
“Shut up! Just make a damn wish, woman!”
I cracked a smile at his tone but gave in.
Closing my eyes, I wished I had never met Neil Trotter, that way I wouldn’t be messed up and I could be serious about Victor the way he wanted me to be. I wished I could be serious about anyone not because I knew it was doomed to fail but because it was what I wanted. I wished I could know what it was I wanted.