Chapter 15: Grant
Two days later, Vin and I were playing Madden on my Xbox.
“You going to call that chick?” McAvoy asked, plopping down on the couch in the middle of my living room next to Miller.
“Of course he isn’t going to,” Vin said. He was bobbing and weaving with his players as he spoke.
“I don’t know, man,” I said.
My player sacked Vin’s quarterback in the last play of the game. I’d won again. Vin flipped me off.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Vin asked. “She’s just some chick that you had a quickie with in the back room of the League.”
“She looked like a little bit more than a quickie,” Miller observed.
“Bro, Grant doesn’t do more than that.”
“Vin, you blind?” McAvoy asked. “He pulled her onstage, and she introduced herself. How many groupies you know that do that?”
“There was that one girl,” Vin said dismissively.
“Who?” Miller probed.
“Fuck, if Grant doesn’t remember their names, why would I?”
“Guys, chill,” I said, relaxing back into the recliner. “It’s no big deal.”
“Is that code for the three-day rule?” McAvoy asked.
I shook my head. “What the f**k is the three-day rule?”
I needed to get out of this real quick. These f**kers knew me too well not to realize that I was in over my head about Ari. I had a f**king reputation to uphold.
“When you get a chick’s phone number, you wait three days to call her. Just long enough to make her think you’re not interested, but not long enough to actually look disinterested,” Miller filled in. “It’s more of a guideline.”
“Anyone actually follow that standard?” I asked.
“Looks like you are,” McAvoy teased me.
I set the controller on the coffee table, stood, and stretched out. Now would be as good a time as any to make up some shit, so they’d leave me alone. “Nah, I’ve got plans tonight with a hot Puerto Rican chick. I’m going to be getting laid while you ass**les sit around and play video games.”
“See?” Vin said. “My man, Grant, isn’t some pu**y worried about when to call some bitch. He tapped that last night. Wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.”
A muscle twitched in my jaw, and for a second, I thought I might throw Vin through the window. Who the f**k does he think he’s talking about? Aribel wasn’t some slut who f**ked every dude in her path. If I hadn’t done more than kiss her yet, then I was sure she wasn’t letting just anyone dip into the honey pot.
“Vin,” Miller said in the voice he would use when Vin wasn’t paying attention during rehearsal.
I relaxed my jaw, but it was too late. Miller had seen what I was thinking as clearly as if I had laid it out in front of him. The motherfucker knew me too well.
“What?” Vin asked, oblivious.
I walked through the living room and grabbed my brown leather jacket. I didn’t know where the hell I was heading to now that I’d committed myself to going out, but it would be better than sitting around and getting shit about Ari.
I uncovered my motorcycle in the garage and steered it across town. Soon, I was out on the interstate—hitting eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty in the blink of an eye. My pulse rose with the speed of the bike between my legs, and a sense of control settled over me. This was what I’d needed—speed, adrenaline, power—to make me forget everything I was constantly running from.
My cherry red baby, the booze, the girls—they were all the things I’d gotten used to needing in my life. But Ari was different. She was the new distraction to my uninterrupted self-torture. And I didn’t know what the f**k I was doing. I had no control with her, yet I didn’t feel the pain when I was around her.
Everything else did nothing but dull the ache. Ari might have started as a conquest, but I’d never met anyone else like her. Girls would put up with my shit, but she would push my buttons as much as I’d push hers. She’d give shit back to me tenfold and glare at me with those hurricane dark blue eyes, like she was going to chew me up and spit me right back out.
And she was so innocent. She hardly let me touch her, and f**k, did I want to touch her. I had a reputation to protect, yet I’d gone and made a f**king idiot of myself by asking for her phone number in front of everyone. Now, Miller and McAvoy were catching on, and I didn’t want to deal with any of it.
But I’d still call her.
I knew I would. Like an addict, I’d take the morphine hit to forget the pain—even if it was temporary. I had always needed more and more of everything else in my life to stall the pain of what one argument, one kiss from her completely eradicated.
I kicked up the speed on the bike, trying to drown out her face and everything else that originated from being interested in someone like Aribel.
The rain came as unexpectedly as Aribel had into my life—a dribble and then a downpour.
I cursed under my breath, but it was soon lost to the wind howling in my helmet. I checked the next sign and groaned. I was over an hour away from home. I pulled off on the next exit ramp and cut my bike back toward Princeton. I hoped I could outrun the worst of the oncoming storm.
I felt the shift in the weather just as I was making it onto my street. The wind picked up, the rain came down in sheets at an angle, and lightning ripped out of the sky from every direction. I’d never been happier to park my bike in the garage. It had been a cold, miserable hour, and I just wanted a steaming hot shower and to jack off in peace.
I pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket and took the stairs two at a time. I stalled on the landing when I saw that I had two missed calls from Aribel. Fuck! I couldn’t believe she’d called me while I’d been out riding around in this shit. Actually, I couldn’t believe she had called me at all.
When I dialed her number, she answered on the first ring. “Oh my God, you called me back,” she said in that bitingly sarcastic tone she used all the time.
“Hey, darlin’. You miss me?”
She snorted, and it made me smile.
“Grant, I’m stranded.”
“What?” I asked. “Where are you? What happened? Are you okay?”
I probably sounded a bit frantic, but I’d only just met her. I didn’t want anything to happen to her.
“Yes, I’m fine. My car broke down right off campus, and my roommates are in the middle of a movie. I-I don’t know what’s wrong with my car. Do you think you could, um…maybe come help me?”