Chapter tags: Flashbacks of hard core s#%, racist language (from an asshole), short scene of bulimia, allusions to drug use
Author note: TY for the warm welcome back. I can't always promise daily posts but I will try to get a lot of them up over the next couple weeks! If you want to read ahead, go find me on AO3. I'm also on FB as Tandy McCray and X as TGBMcCray if you want to chat!
Tyler likes the shorts.
This is an unfortunate side effect for which I was not prepared when I picked them out for Edward. He's ordered a round of pissbeer for him and Red Bandana, Blue Bandana. He's scrutinizing my thighs as I lean up to the taps to pour it.
Lauren says you don't pour level unless you're in a big hurry and have to just start pitchers and let the taps run while you make drinks. With individual glasses, you tip the glass to the side at about a 30-degree angle as the beer pours. Voila. Smooth silky piss with a healthy but not too chunky foam.
"You got legs up to your ass, New Girl. I may have misjudged you."
"I wish I could say the same."
"Rawr. Listen to that, boys. She's feisty, today."
"She's feisty every day."
I drop the glass. All the pretty pissbeer seeps into the grates beneath the taps as I flip it off and turn around. My heart is jumping out of my chest. It's the Olympic pole vault in there and oh, the agony of defeat.
Jacob Black is standing at the end of the bar, cash in hand, looking massively other when compared to the middle-aged, very white, construction-worker lunch crowd today.
Tyler's grin is sharp enough to cut my limes. "You her boyfriend or something?"
Jacob says "Yes," at the same time as I say, "No." He glares at me while Tyler and the peanut gallery watch with wolf eyes.
"Do you want a drink?"
"I don't know about this guy, but I do. Bumpkin's got butterfingers." Tyler's so funny. Such a funny asshole. I turn away from Jacob and pour three perfect glasses that I place softly in front of each guy while desperately plotting my next move.
"Do you want a drink or not? I'm working."
"I would like a moment of your time."
"I'm not on break."
"When are you gonna come back and party with us? We miss you, Bells. I miss you."
Tyler hoots but a dirty look from Jacob, probably about the same 250-pound weight, but wired with thick muscles instead of beer cushioning, quiets him down.
Jacob's short for a dude. I'm almost looking him in the eye right now, across the bar, rocking back on the heels of my Asics. When I'm wearing three- or four-inch heels, which is every second that I'm not in here or on a run, I'm taller than him. I can't get serious with a short guy. He knows. This was fun for a while, to piss James off, to wipe James off of me when the time came, to help me forget the torment, but he's short. Come on. I don't have great standards, I'll admit, but this is non-negotiable.
White eyes and white teeth and dark, dark skin. I mean even for a Native American, he's dark. And it's summer, so he just bronzes. I can still hear James in my head, sneering at me while he bent me over his bathroom sink. "Did you fuck your little Indian? Did you pretend he was a black guy? You like those ones your mama doesn't like, don't you?"
I was gasping. He was going hard, almost too hard. It hurt. "Was he big like a buck? Did he fuck you this good? I bet he couldn't. Little dick to match the rest of him." He leaned up and bit the side of my neck hard. "Unf. Nobody fucks you like I do, Bella. Uhm, umm. Don't you ever fucking forget that, sweetheart."
I couldn't speak because his fingers were in my mouth, and then he was coming, rattling me so hard I'd have flat line bruises against my thighs the next day where the porcelain cut into me.
Jacob was really good with picking up the pieces of what little I ever had to offer anybody. He also was really good at worshipping my body in a way that no one else ever did. That, and he always had something to help me relax. He smells like clove and a little bit of whiskey, because I think he starts his days with in it on his French toast.
"Come on." He's used to talking at the brick wall that is me. "Friday night? Come by. Just for a while."
I blink at him. Tyler's watching me with the biggest shit-eating grin. I mean, I bet they don't get this much entertainment in a ten-hour shift building whatever monstrosity is down the street.
"If I don't have to work," I say, and I don't choke on the words because I need to relax and Jacob is Linus's blanket, and we both know the score here. "Sure."
"Order up, Bella."
My head snaps around like the crack on James's clay pigeon thrower. I imagine myself shattering like the clay discs, and drifting, falling down into the field, lost to the world.
I almost trip getting over to the side of the bar to take the giant hot ham and cheese platter with the obnoxious pile of artery-clogging fries from Edward's hands.
"Thanks, Edward. You didn't have to bring this up!"
There's that dimple. His eyes are green, like deeper and sweeter than a Green Dragon at the end of a long night of drinking, green. Fuck me running, how much did he hear?
"I didn't see any runners, and it was getting cold. It's no trouble."
There's plenty of trouble up here already, but I can lead you to more.
"Well, thanks. I really appreciate it. You want a Diet Coke?"
"Sure." He watches me while I get the gun and take the lid off his cup. "Better today?" He looks down the bar toward Jacob, and further on, to Lauren, checking out bottles from last night. I ignore Jacob's stare.
"Yeah, it's not so bad. I figured out how to pour the beer."
"She gives good head, man." Tyler raises his glass at Edward. Mother fuck. I can't even imagine how red I am right now. Corvette red.
Oddly, Edward colors a bit, and it suits him so well, that flush, like how he looks when he's probably a little exerted, working at it, you know? "Watch your mouth, Tyler." He's gruff. Tyler's just smirking, hands up, like don't look at me. He looks like Donald Trump with that dumb shit smile. He's the greatest construction worker drunk to ever be on a crew, the best.
"Hey, thanks again."
His head tilts. "Any time." One hand reaches up toward my head, and I think he's going to tweak my braid, but he grabs a napkin from the stack by the server station, and walks away, sucking down the Diet Coke.
I turn and drop the plate in front of Tyler. "You are…un-fucking-believable."
"Not me." He's already chomping a fry and using another to gesture toward me for the benefit of Red and Blue Bandanas. "You're twitter-pated."
"What?" I look but Jacob is gone. I saunter down to pick up the napkin I dropped there and fist the bill he left behind. It's a hundred, which is just so Jacob, but I don't care. I need it. I stick in my pocket quick before Lauren notices. "Jacob's just a friend."
A server appears with the rest of the food for Tyler's friends and I hand it out and run for refills, getting them settled.
Tyler watches me, all smiles as I rush around, kind of flustered still from the Edward-afterglow.
He swallows a hulking bite of his sandwich, mopping at the oozing cheese on his chin with his fingers.
"Not Geronimo, New Girl. Cullen."
Alice is going to lap me if I don't get it together. She's practically treading water beside me, waiting for me to kick it back in gear. Nobody on this street looks like they run. This is part of the issue with living in Chicago. Physical fitness isn't high on the list of this particular lower income community's priorities.
Ghetto. It's a ghetto. Black, white, brown. It doesn't matter. We're all broke as fuck and wish we were anywhere but here.
"What's the problem?" Alice, the model, the giraffe, the gazelle, the skinny little bitch, towers over even me. She's two inches taller and twice as intense. My rock of Gibraltar and friend numero uno. She'll be back on a plane in a few days. Her next job is back in Atlanta. It's too far. I need her help.
"Tyler calls me bumpkin. I should've never told him I was from Georgia. It's not like I've never lived in a city before."
"So why did you?"
"I don't know. I don't want too much of myself here. I just want to work and disappear, you know?"
She huffs and stops a second to adjust the string on her purple and blue Asics. We are serious runners. Distance over time. It helps Alice decompress between shoots and keep her figure in that nearly anorexic state that is required for her job but so unusual for a girl that loves to eat like she does. It helps me. It helps me, I don't know, exist.
She tightens her long ponytail while I jog in place. "Then you shouldn't have moved to James's hometown. And Jacob's. I mean, what the fuck, Bella?"
"I told you, I was supposed to have work here."
She wipes the sweat off her throat with the bottom of her expensive tee shirt. "Yeah, well. Couldn't they let you out of your lease? I mean, they can't have the most honest renters around here. Probably happens all the time."
I don't know how to explain it. I needed James nearby, so if I ever wavered, it would be easy to check up and see the evidence of why I moved on.
A ghetto cruiser slows down beside us and Alice flips it off with a perfectly manicured finger and begins to run again in earnest. We fall into a side-by-side pattern, with one of us easing ahead or behind when the sidewalk narrows with a fire hydrant or trash or broken concrete. The sky is steel gray, as ironclad as the walls we build around ourselves.
Run, just run. Stop thinking about James and Jacob and God forbid, Edward.
I wonder what his girlfriend is like? I want to know how old he is? He's the middle brother, and I just have no frame of reference, other than that Jasper stopped by before I left today, and mentioned classes at Loyola. Psych 338. That's upper level, so he's what? Twenty-one or 22? Almost our age. Edward could be 28 or 34. It's so hard to tell with men, and he seems so grounded, so far beyond me. Living with a girl?
That implies grown-upness, commitment. Or it should. It doesn't have to, I know. I mean there's James. He tried to move me in and it was all just bullshit, a front, so who knows?
I don't want to fuck anything up for Edward. He's good. I don't know how I know this, but I can tell, he really is, and I am just a user, a loser, a loss. I don't want to suck him into my well. He probably thinks I'm a kid anyway.
What kind of woman snags a man like Edward Cullen? What kind of woman gets to crawl into his bed every night and lick those lips and wash away all his worries from a long day at work? I don't want to know.
I don't.
We eat Mexican for supper and have margaritas, and Alice moans about the white cheese sauce and how mad Enrique is going to be if he has to rip the stitches out of the panels on this one dress she's fitted for already.
We stumble back to my two-bedroom, up the rickety wooden steps, straight up at the top of this old house that used to be beautiful before somebody spliced and diced it into low-level apartments. The windows are great though. Great big floor-to-ceiling ones in the living room that angle around the way Victorians should. I always wanted a bay window as a kid, to read in, but this is better. My Big Lots ottoman is cheetah print, and Bails looks like a panther on it, perched in the falling moonlight of the windows.
"Did you skin this kitty, Bails? You couldn't stand the competition, could you?"
He kicks up the motor on his purr-machine, my little black Corvette kitty, friend numero dos. He's not little anymore. He's fat. I should leash him and make him run with us. That's so funny I can't stop laughing, and I want to tell Alice, but she's missing.
I drag my drunk ass into the kitchen. I hear the shower running, but the bathroom door there that connects gives when I push on it. Alice is on her knees in leather leggings, puking.
It's not the food. She's had her fingers down her throat. Her makeup is smeary, black mascara tracks messing up her pretty face.
"We ran, baby. Please stop. Don't do this to yourself. You said you wouldn't do this anymore." I get a washcloth and start cleaning her up, getting the tears that are silently leaking out of her show-stopping hazel eyes, eyes that have launched fragrance ads and brand partnerships, graced hundreds of magazine covers, and last season, opened for Chanel. She doesn't speak. "You said you were well," I prod, while trying to be soft with her. "Why did you lie?"
She blinks at me. "We're all liars, aren't we?"
I don't speak, and we just sit there, both of us sniffling now. I told her all about Edward at dinner, and Alice, who knows all, she told me to stay away, to save what's left of my heart.
I sigh, picking at my nail polish from my perch on the edge of the big old tub. I don't have a shower curtain. I can't afford anything but a cheap plastic one that would smell like chemicals anyway. "You're beautiful. They're not going to fire you if you weigh an extra pound."
She's mouth breathing. "I can't stop."
"Yes, you can. Damn it. Yes, you can!"
She reaches for the toilet paper, my last roll, and takes a wad to blow her nose.
"Let's go to Cullen's tomorrow," she says. "I want to see these Cullen boys."
So we do.