Cream of the Crop Read online

  Which I never got, because Logan was so excited that he threw his hands over his head with a roar of victory, forgetting that he was holding the shortbread.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I exclaimed, cookies raining down everywhere. “You guys need some new gossip around here!”

  “You have no idea how long we have watched that poor boy slouch around this town, speaking only in grunts and occasional one-word answers—”

  “But you don’t care, because he’s so much fun to look at,” Chad interrupted as Logan nodded vigorously.

  “He is fun to look at,” I admitted. “I’m still getting the one-word answers, although he’s opening up. Some.”

  “Met the ex yet?” Chad asked.

  “Yes,” I said, now leaning forward in my chair. “Let’s talk about that. What’s going on there?”

  Chad and Logan told me everything they could, which wasn’t much. They’d only been married a short time when they moved into town, and they divorced within a year of that. Still appeared to be on friendly terms, based on the few times they’d been seen out in public together. And because he was as untalkative as he was nonsocial, no one knew much at all about Missy, or their past, or why they’d divorced. She lived in the next town over, was very sweet and nice and kind and quiet, and that was literally all they knew.

  “So you’ve seen her?” Logan asked.

  “You could say that. She came over a few Sundays back when we were there on the porch, and . . . she saw some things she probably shouldn’t have.”

  “Details are not only appreciated, they are coveted, revered, and possibly typed up and framed. So go slow, and make it worth it,” Chad instructed as they sat back to listen.

  “Sorry.” I liked to talk a good game in the abstract, but I rarely gave up the goods on anyone I was involved with beyond a one-nighter. And even then, names were usually changed to protect the satisfied . . .

  “Okay, if you’re not going to give us any tawdry tidbits about you and the dairy god, then at least tell us more about you,” Logan said, determined to glean some information.

  “Me? What do you want to know?”

  “Start with how you got to be so fabulous, and go from there,” Chad said.

  “Honey, we don’t have nearly enough time for how I got to be so fabulous. And even then, my story isn’t really the kind you tell over tea, for God’s sake.”

  A frosty bottle of vodka quickly appeared from the freezer, along with a pitcher of Bloody Mary mix and a jar of olives.

  “You’re like the cocktail Boy Scouts, always prepared.” I chuckled, watching as three drinks were quickly assembled.

  “And they’ll actually let us lead a troop now!” Chad quipped, then pointed at me. “Fabulous. Go.”

  “I’m fabulous now, it’s true.” I paused to take a long sip of my cocktail. “But the perfectly pulled-together awesomeness that you see here today was not always the case. Not even remotely the case in junior high.”

  “We were all in bad shape back then,” Chad said.

  “Not true. Roxie has shown me her yearbooks, and you were ridiculously good-looking,” I corrected.

  His cheeks colored slightly. “I might have made it look easy, but believe me, there was some shit going on inside.”

  “It was junior high. We all had shit going on inside, and most of us were assholes sometimes.” Logan moved closer on the couch to Chad.

  “I don’t know if I was an asshole, but I sure went to school with a bunch of them.”

  “Bullies?” Chad asked sympathetically.

  “No, just normal kids picking on each other. Imagine this lush body”—I slid my hands down my ample frame—“on a thirteen-year-old. Now add braces, a healthy sprinkling of acne, and this smart-ass mouth.”

  “Recipe for junior high disaster,” Logan said.

  “Yes, one that extended all through high school. Though I had friends, I certainly didn’t have any boyfriends.”

  “Me, neither,” they said in tandem, making me smile.

  Then my smile faded. “I’d never kissed a boy until I met Thomas.” I closed my eyes, thinking back to the first time I saw him, how beautiful he was. I was waiting outside St. Francis, the private school I attended up on Seventy-fourth. My parents had hired a driver to pick me up after school, even though by my senior year I was tugging at that leash, wanting more freedom, like all teenagers do. I’d grown up in the city and knew the subway system like the back of my hand, but families like mine didn’t let their kids travel around unattended—so I sat in the back of a town car like everyone else in my class, to and from school.

  But traffic that day had slowed everything to an almost standstill, and as I waited around the corner, I saw him across the street, coming out of the park.

  Tall, and a little bit on the gangly side, he was dressed in that simple carefree way that guys can get away with sometimes, open button-down, white undershirt, jeans that sat low on his hips, scuffed sneakers. It was the hipster beanie that got me. I had a soft spot for guys in those knit caps, their hair all messy and casual and sticking out from under like they’d just come from a warm bed.

  He stood on one corner, and I on the other, and just like in the movies, our eyes met. And I couldn’t pull away, even though everything about me at that time in my life was looking down, or looking away, or pulling my hair lower across my face. I rarely made eye contact with anyone for long, unless I knew them well, and even then I tended to duck and cover. But there was something about this guy; I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  And then, wonder of all wonders, he actually crossed the street. Toward me! One foot in front of the other, eyes still locked with mine, and all I was aware of was that face and my heart, which was pounding in my ears. Sometime between him crossing the street at arriving at my figurative doorstep, a furtive grin crept across his face, as though he could hardly believe it himself, that this was happening, that this was occurring, that this moment was real.

  “Hi,” he said.

  I gulped. He grinned and made it okay, made it seem perfectly natural that someone that looked like him would be talking to someone who looked like me. I tugged at my shirt, pulling at it in that way I was always forever tugging at it, to cover, to hide, to somehow trick myself into thinking that if I had an extra half inch of cotton Lycra blend pulled down lower on my hips I’d magically be pretty, instantly be thinner, finally be less than. Because I was always more than enough, and not in the good way.

  He started to walk with me, not away from me, and I started to walk with him, somehow sensing that I was supposed to do that, that this beautiful guy actually wanted to walk with me.

  We walked a block. Another block. By the third block, I’d said hello. By the fourth block, I knew his name. Thomas. By the sixth block, I knew he was a student at NYU, had just come from meeting some friends in the park, and did I want a Frappuccino? He knew my name, that I was a senior, that I didn’t live in the neighborhood but lived downtown, and that yes, I’d love a Frappuccino.

  By the time my driver called my phone for the fourth time, in a panic over what my father would do to him if he didn’t pick me up immediately, I was over the moon.

  As I climbed into my town car, he’d caught the edge of my shirt, tugging me back slightly. “I’d really love to call you sometime. Would that be okay? Natalie?”

  He’d said my name like he was happy to know it. And as I nodded, still not quite believing this was happening, he slipped my phone out of my back pocket and quickly dialed his own number.

  “Save that number, okay? That way, you’ll know it’s me calling.” And he pushed my phone back into my pocket, slowly and deliberately, as though it was his hand caressing my too-big behind. Too big for pretty clothes, too big for the old wooden desks in the oldest part of the school, too big for anything other than ridicule and shame . . . Never a part of my body that w
as beautiful, or desirable.

  “Bye,” I whispered, and into that one word, that one whisper, I put all of my young love angst, my “never been considered, much less kissed,” my “if I can make them laugh they’ll hopefully never notice that I’m red-eyed and lower-lip trembly when it’s prom and homecoming time”—all of that, squashed into one terribly hopeful “Bye . . . Thomas.”

  “Oh my,” Chad said, and I blinked in surprise, brought back to the present, where Chad and Logan were clasping hands and biting their lips, dying to know what happened next.

  My heart racing the way it had that day, and without even thinking, I began tugging at my sweater, pulling it down farther on my hips, shrinking inward. “Sorry,” I said, shocked to hear how shaky my voice sounded even to my own ears. “I don’t talk about this very often.” I went to slurp my drink, and found it just ice and melted water, with the saddest little red rim around the lip.

  “Another?” Logan asked, and I nodded gratefully. “For the rec­ord, I can relate to the never-been-kissed. Casanova over there was super-popular in high school, was covered in tits and pussy from the moment he hit puberty—”

  “It’s true. I knew I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I liked guys, but I also knew that anything hot, wet, and warm felt pretty fucking great,” Chad said.

  I could easily imagine what a big swinging dick he was back then.

  Then he looked toward the kitchen, where his equally handsome partner was fixing another round. “I’ve seen your high school yearbook, and you were smoking hot. The only reason you weren’t covered in tits and pussy as well is—”

  “—because I was scared to death of it. Though to be fair, I was scared of dicks, too. But I got over that pretty quickly at lifeguard camp, the summer before senior year. Stephen Tyler . . . mmmm.” Logan trailed off, his eyes going all faraway.

  “From Aerosmith?” I asked.

  “From Appleton, Wisconsin. I spent the summer up there, and holy shit, could that guy use his mouth.”

  Chad waved him over with the drinks. “No more ‘blow jobs from Stephen Tyler’ stories right now—but feel free to tell me about it later, with more details. Right now I want to hear more about Natalie, and her very own Sex and the City stories.”

  I smiled ruefully. “It was more like a bad CW show than it was Sex and the City. But it does have the sex. And we were in the city.”

  And the city came alive in the company of Thomas Murray, who knew more trivia bits and factoids about Manhattan than anyone I’d ever met. One day we walked up Broadway from Fourteenth Street all the way to Columbus Circle, and he literally guided me through the history of our city as told through architecture. Thomas was planning to be an architect when he completed his master’s program at NYU. In the early days of our . . . whatever it was quickly becoming, I’d spend my days pining my way through calculus and AP English composition, mentally comparing every high school boy in my class to Thomas the College Man and finding them coming up woefully short. He got to study exciting things, fields of interest that would actually lead to something, a career, a real grown-up career, while I was stuck still in high school, spinning my wheels and doodling his name all over everything that would stand still. I’d always been an A student, but for the first time ever, my grades took a dip. And if it wasn’t for it being my senior year and being accepted into all three schools I’d applied to, I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to see him as much.

  Although my parents had no idea how much I really was seeing him.

  The first time he kissed me was on the third floor of a townhouse my father was renovating. I’d brought him there once after school, after hearing him talk on the phone the other night for what seemed like hours about pocket doors and the architectural significance of them. I’d stolen the master key ring my father always kept inside his briefcase, told my parents I was going to study at the library (not an unheard-of thing on a Friday night, thank you very much), and told him to meet me on Seventy-sixth and Madison.

  I’d never done something like this before. But I’d grown up on my dad’s job sites, I knew the codes, I knew exactly how to execute this sneak attack. And when I walked Thomas inside, and he saw the breadth of the renovation my father was taking on, he was in awe.

  Looking back now, it was easy to see that not only was he in awe of the townhouse, he was likely also in awe at the ease with which he’d managed to sweep the chubby and slightly lonely daughter of one of New York’s prime real estate developers off her Crocs.

  I certainly didn’t feel lonely when he pressed me up against one of those very pocket doors I’d seduced him with, and kissed me until I was seeing stars.

  And when his hands slipped around my waist, and I instinctively shrank from his hands on that part of my body, a part that no one ever touched, he tugged me tight against his torso and broke that first kiss. “You’re beautiful, do you know that?”

  My heart soared.

  “I know most guys mind a little extra padding, but not me.”

  My heart soared higher.

  His lips kissed a path down my jaw, stopping just below my ear, where he whispered, “Though not too much more, right?”

  “Right,” I answered breathlessly.

  He kissed me right out of my head, and when he pushed his hand under my shirt and grazed the underside of my breast, I was certain that if he’d asked that night, I would have let him do anything he wanted to me.

  But he waited. A gentleman? Sure, let’s go with that.

  The rest of that spring I spent with Thomas. If I wasn’t physically with him, I was thinking about him, dreaming about him, mooning over him. He couldn’t always be with me, of course; he had studying to do, projects to work on, and I would never think of interrupting him when he was working on his master’s thesis. But when he had a break, I dropped whatever it was that I was doing to be with him. After all, as he’d pointed out numerous times, I was a senior, and really didn’t need to spend as much time on my studies as he did. Last semester senior year was just a formality, right?

  Until my midterm grades came in, and my B’s had fallen to C’s, D’s, and one very upsetting F.

  My parents had met Thomas by now, and while they liked him, and liked that their daughter had a boyfriend (I had a boyfriend!), they weren’t crazy about me spending so much time with him. Especially after my grades came out.

  A war was waged in our brownstone that day, a war that had been waging between teenagers and their parents since the dawn of time. And I was going to fight to the death to be allowed to continue to see Thomas.

  For a girl whose world had been mostly observing the world happen to other people, now I was actually experiencing things, doing things, wanting and being wanted. It was intoxicating, and nothing could have stopped me from what I wanted, what I needed.

  And what I needed, more than anything, was Thomas. Never mind the fact that I never once met his friends (it’s not the same as silly high school parties; my friends are all busy either studying or working their two to three jobs because not all of us were lucky enough to be born into wealthy families), never once met his parents (they live in New Jersey and I don’t have a car, and no, you can’t just take a town car everywhere), or even went out to a nice dinner (if we stay in, you can practice your cooking skills. I mean, really, Natalie, how can you not even know how to make toast?).

  The first time he put his hands on me, he told me how pretty I was, how soft I was, and how I should never feel bad about my body, that I just wasn’t meant to look like most girls my age.

  The first time he put his mouth on me, with his head between my thighs and a serious expression on his face, he told me it was natural for women to love this, and if I didn’t love it, too, that maybe I should think about how lucky I was that someone was willing to do this, considering the obvious. And that even though he personally thought I had a pretty cunt, perhaps I should visit
a spa and have some of that au naturel look taken care of.

  The first time he let me put my mouth on him, he told me how perfect I looked on my knees, and that he was so very glad that I’d never done this before, because he wouldn’t have any bad habits to break. And for fuck’s sake, he wasn’t an ear of corn, to control my teeth and the urge to not gobble like I hadn’t eaten in a month, which of course would never happen to someone like me.

  The first time he was inside of me it didn’t matter if it hurt, because that’s what love was, it was supposed to hurt a little so that you knew it was true and real and worth having, and that don’t worry, it will get better, and if I could figure out how to finally have an orgasm like regular girls, it wouldn’t be something I’d have to think about anymore.

  Looking back now, how fucking stupid was I not to see what was going on? But when you were in it, you didn’t know it, and when your life had finally started to happen, it didn’t matter what else you were giving up for that life. It only mattered that you were special—to someone—and that you were very lucky indeed to have that someone. And everything else should just fade away and become background noise.

  Background noise like prom, which I could have finally gone to because, hello, boyfriend! But, hello, college guy, and why the hell would he go to some stupid high school prom with other stupid uppity rich kids?

  Background noise like college essays, because even though I’d been preaccepted, I still had to go through the formality of being actually accepted into the schools I’d been dreaming of attending since I was in junior high and beginning to plan out my life carefully and methodically.

  Background noise like my high school paper, of which I’d been the editor, but now was lucky to get an article in every other month

  . . . like my brother’s birthday

  . . . like my parents’ anniversary

  . . . like my graduation.

  I missed my high school graduation, spending it naked on a mattress on my hands and knees, getting fucked in the ass by someone who told me I would absolutely love it, and if I didn’t, then there must be more wrong with me than he originally thought, and that it was only because he loved me so much that he hadn’t dumped me weeks ago.