“No, fuck you! You selfish prick.”
“Boys!” The voice booms from the other side of the ice.
We both turn and see Coach Braddock standing at the end of the visitor’s tunnel. I don’t know how much of that exchange he caught but he definitely caught the part where we told each other to fuck off. “Can I ask why my future co-captains are screaming at each other like scorned lovers?”
“Just some brotherly bickering, Coach,” Nash replies, the bitterness and anger evaporating from his tone. "Sorry, you had to hear it. Won't happen again."
“Good.”
I give the coach a tight smile. “See you at practice, Coach. Later, bro.”
I storm away without looking back.
Chapter14
Liv
Istand outside the door of the classroom at Royce Hall, and I swear to God my whole body itches. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t want to go in. Tenley mentioned it casually yesterday morning, and somehow I’m here. Outside the Trauma Survivors Support Group meeting.
Clearly, Tenley thinks I should attend or she wouldn't have mentioned it as we were both heading out the door yesterday. I was off to classes, and I guess I seemed tense. Tenley was off to shoot some additional footage with the crew she put together to pitch this documentary she's working on.
She believed me when I said I left Marmont and went to meet school friends for drinks across the street from Marmont and that I ended up crashing at Maria's, a girl from one of my classes. Then I had to text Maria and tell her I was using her as a cover because Tenley is the girl who would bring it up the next time she sees Maria. Maria happily agreed to lie for me and even sent me a high-five emoji and an eggplant because she just assumed I was with a guy. And I was. That's the first time someone has assumed I was hooking up and I actually was, which made me smile.
It's been a little over a week since my birthday and Tenley hasn't even brought it up again. The family group chat also believed my lie, because, of course, virginal shy Livvy wouldn't be doing anything else. Anyway, Tenley has stopped talking about my birthday night and started talking about the college's trauma group which is supposedly a "really positive thing. They don't dwell on what happened to people, they focus on how to move forward. A girl on my crew goes because she was held up at gunpoint. She's really grown in so many ways, not just gotten over the trauma.”
It was the most unsubtle thing Tenley has ever said to me. She’s really bad at subtlety it turns out. Shocked, not shocked. And I guess I'm heinously bad at ignoring her because here I am. But I'm frozen. The idea of stepping into that room makes me want to puke and scream at the same time. I'm fine. Well, Iwillbe fine, but not if I keep dwelling on this… giving validation to the awful feeling I get every time I'm alone and think of that night. Especially at night. When Tenley isn’t home at night I lock every single door and window and crank the AC, even if it’s not that hot, just to drown out the sounds of our apartment building because they suddenly make me jumpy.
A woman brushes by me and walks into the room. She’s got her head down, eyes glued to the tile floor. She’s shuffling instead of walking. She looks beaten down mentally and possibly physically. She looks like a victim. I hate myself for thinking that. It feels mean and I amnota mean girl. But I’m also not a victim.
I was raised by the strongest woman on the entire planet, everyone in the entire Garrison family—hell everyone in all of Silver Bay, Maine, will say that. Uncle Jordan once said at a family BBQ, that it was tungsten that ran through my mom’s veins instead of blood and what he got in response was a bunch of bobbing heads agreeing with him. Not a murmur of dissent in the bunch.
I was about eight or nine at the time and I sleepily asked him what tungsten was. It was late and I was curled up in my dad’s lap half asleep and wrapped in one of his hoodies. “Tungsten is something they use to make steel stronger,” Jordan had explained with a gentle smile.
“But steel is already strong,” little Tate, who was a kid like me at the time, had argued as he roasted a marshmallow, probably his seventeenth of the night.
“Not as strong as Callie,” Dad replied and my mom had stood up and waved a hand around dismissively.
“Stop flattering me you two,” she’d laughed.
But it was true. I grew to learn, year after year, that my mom truly was incredible. She'd lost her own mom young, had already been abandoned by her dad, and then dumped by their grandmother. She and my aunts Rose and Jessie raised themselves from the age of early teenhood. Everyone says my mom was the fiercest. And I saw the way she protected us kids. She was the definition of a Mama Bear.
I never once saw my mother cry sad tears. She only cried happy ones, and even that was rare. And I know the whole family teases that I'm the polar opposite of the woman who gave birth to me. That I got none of her DNA. I roll my eyes at the way my mom overshares, has loud opinions on everything, and voices all her emotions, good, bad, and ugly… but the truth is, Iwantto be like her. I think if I had been more like her, this jerk wouldn’t have picked me. No one would ever dare try and attack Callie Caplan. And if, God forbid they did, she would make them pay. And she would also suck it up and never be a victim. So I won’t be either.
My feet start to move, and I walk out of the building, and straight to my car. That’s how I find myself driving toward Venice three hours early for my job watching Dylan. Mallory and Tate want a date night so I'm taking over from their day sitter and Mallory is going straight from her classes at USC to meet Tate at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
The fact is I don’t want to head home in case Tenley is there. She knows when this trauma group meets so she will know I ditched. I don’t want to explain myself to her, or anyone, so I find myself parking in a visitor spot at Tate's old townhouse because I remember the code for the gate and they have free visitor parking. And it's only two blocks off the beach. I mean, yeah, technically it's also where Crew lives but… I mean there's no guarantee I will run into him. I'm not here to accidentally do it, but, like, if it happens, it wouldn't be a bad thing….
“Olivia?”
At the sound of his voice, as confused as it is, all my anxiety starts to melt away. I slowly turn my head to the left and see him standing on the small front porch of the unit Tate occupied for years. He's wet. Crew's hair looks darker and is kind of plastered back on his head. He’s wearing a pair of sweats and nothing else, not even socks or shoes on his feet. He’s holding a mug. I stare like a deer who has never seen headlights before. “I… hi. Hello. I just needed a place to park.”
“Oh.” His disappointment is heavy, like a layer of humidity in the already warm California air. He shoots me the most dazzling but poignant smile. “Thought maybe you were here to beg me for another orgasm. You wouldn’t have to beg, by the way, just ask.”
WWMD, my brain yells at me. What Would Mom Do? My mom would completely, without a second thought, jump into bed for another round with this fine specimen of a man, who also happens to be a pretty sweet, nice guy… not that my mom would care about that. She’s told me before how she didn’t give a rat’s ass about a man’s heart or soul until my dad.
I have always tried to ignore the gory details of my mom’s youth but she’s talked freely about it in front of us since we were in the higher end of our teen years. She was sexually liberal. She didn’t want a relationship with anyone, not even my dad, at first. Everyone blames her childhood trauma. She says there is nothing to blame, she did what-slash-who she wanted and she was content with it.
Crew’s standing there watching me, probably waiting for me to go on my merry way so that he can call one of the million women who would kill to get an orgasm from him. But I don’t go to the beach like I’d planned. I just stand there by the gate staring at him. And that’s when I notice the brace on his left wrist.