The whole night goes by and I talk to losers while Fortune hits on every girl in the room but me. I tell myself I don’t care, but the more drunk I get, the more upset I am about it. At three o’clock, now thoroughly drunk, I tell Jasmyn I’m going to the washroom and then I’ll be leaving.
After I’m done in the bathroom, I open the door and find Fortune’s face right up in the crack. He smiles, all chilled. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I say coldly, and try to push the door open to leave, but he’s holding it still. “You gonna let me out?”
“You gonna let me in?” He smiles so damn sexy I want to kill him.
“No. You fucking kidding me? Where is your girlfriend?”
He laughs. “Which one?”
“Yeah, exactly,” I say, pushing harder on the door.
“I’m coming in,” he warns, and pushes through, starts kissing me, and locks the door behind him. I’m so weakwilled, I don’t even fight him off. “Oh, babe. I wanted to kiss you all night,” he whispers.
I push him back. “You didn’t even look at me once.”
He ignores my comment and leans in to kiss again, hard this time. He wants me so badly, I feel it all over. It’s like he can’t get enough of me. And I’m so happy that he chose me. Of all the girls he could be with tonight, he chose me. And I’m going to make sure he knows he made the right choice. I welcome his warm, soft lips, and then his hands, and then he pulls down my jeans and underwear and lifts me onto the bathroom counter.
Later, when Fortune drives me home, he’s like a different person, all mellow and sweet. He tells me about his family and I realize he’s not as big a jerk as I wanted to think he was. Which is a damn shame, because it means I might end up liking him for real after all. He tells me he lives at home because he takes care of his mom and his little brothers, who are something like eight and ten. His mom is sick, she’s got chronic fatigue syndrome, and he says sometimes she doesn’t get out of bed for days. He’s basically the father around his house, which for some reason he doesn’t seem to mind. All that makes me like him even more.
Even though he gets all soft talking to me on the way home, he doesn’t kiss me goodbye like last time. He basically just stops the car and keeps his hands on the steering wheel, like he’s in a rush to go somewhere else. I pretend everything is cool, and tell him I’ll see him around. I watch the reflection of his car lights in the lobby window as I walk away.
If I can’t be with Michael, then I might as well be with Fortune. I promise myself that I’ll try to give him a chance, even though my heart is somewhere else. And to be honest, it feels good to have someone wanting me.
Thirty-Three
Today was Bradley’s birthday. It’s probably why I’ve been thinking about him so much lately. He was cremated, so there’s no grave to visit. Instead, we go every year to the park behind our old apartment complex, where he used to play. It’s a few blocks away from where we live now, but we might as well just go outside our own home because all the apartment playground parks look the same, with the same rundown equipment and dirty gravel ground, as if a nuclear bomb had wiped out all trees, grass, and anything vibrant and just left behind a skeleton of metal.
We bundle up and sit on a bench. My mom sets up a framed photo of Bradley, her Discman and speakers in between us, and we have to listen to this sad Cat Stevens CD. I don’t mind this tradition, but I don’t understand why we can’t celebrate his birthday in a restaurant or somewhere normal. It seems so morbid here in the park.
There are a few kids in the playground, running around, laughing and shouting and tripping over themselves. They are all about how old Bradley would have been, which makes the whole thing even sadder.
I try to lighten the mood by talking about something happy. “You remember that wacky ice cream truck with the handpainted cones and soft drinks on the side? It would play that out-of-tune music?”