The Thrill of It

Chapter One

Six Months Later

Harley

I am more than halfway done.

I tell myself that as I walk purposefully to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, taking a deep, steadying breath. Trey is by my side. He holds my hand. He almost always holds my hand.

Correction: He almost always holds my hand when we’re far, far away from the rest of them. “It’s what friends do,” he says, and I hope he says it to remind himself of our rules – rules we have both followed to the painful, white-knuckle letter – no touching, no kissing, no nothing more whatsoever – but this – this we allow. Only we never talk about why. We never discuss what happened the night before we met again. There is some unwritten rule that we are on the other side.

But I won’t truly be on the other side until I can slice off this albatross.

This debt. I have been up late, up early, and up all around. I have been living and breathing and choking out the words this woman demands of me.

All the tawdry tales. All the names – anonymously – from my list.

She makes me dive into them. Makes me share the story behind the kiss, the man, the where, the when, and most of all – the why. Make them titillating but reviling too, she says. Make sure you come across as someone who desperately needs redemption, absolution.

Sometimes, I wish I could punch a hole in the story of my life that I am forced to write for her – Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict.

Trey grips my hand tighter, looping his fingers through mine and I shiver. I’m not cold. It’s May, and it’s warm, and any kind of contact from him sends me soaring. The more I know him, the more I want him, and the more I can’t have him. We are in recovery, and he’s told me many times he wants to make it through.

“I don’t need another one of these,” he’ll say, then run his index finger absently across the scar on his right cheek. But I love his scar. I want to trace it and kiss it and touch it. Scars are sexy – they say you’ve lived and that you’ve survived. That’s how I see him. But I don’t want to be the one who knocks him off the wagon. So this friendship, this hand holding is all we allow. No fooling around. That’s what we promise to do in SLAA. One year. Alone. Without anything. Without kissing. Without dating. Without relationships.

But abstinence, withdrawal, a break, whatever-you-call-it doesn’t stop my worn-down, wasted heart from wanting this boy by my side to be more than my friend.

I squeeze back, taking the slightest bit of contact with him. I’ve never held hands with anyone before. The men who ordered jailbait teenage call girls weren’t the type who liked to hold hands. Shocking, right?

Trey flashes me a grin.

“You can do this, Harley. It’ll be over soon.”

I scoff. “Not soon enough.”

When we’re one block away from the church, I say goodbye. “And this is where you must go, my sweet escort.”

He raises an eyebrow. “I should have been an escort.”

“You’d have been the best. Anyway, I don’t want her to see you. She’ll find some way to dig her claws into you.”

He looks over his shoulder as if he’s checking out claw marks on his back. “Damn. I still have some other ones there. Scars everywhere.”

I swat him. Fine, this is another allowed touch. “I like your scars. Besides, I’m sure you had many marks on your back.”

“Covered in ‘em. Everywhere.” His eyes light up. There’s a part of him too that misses his past. Longs for his drug.

“Get out of here, boy toy.”

This is how we operate. I know his past with women. He knows my past with men. And we can tease each other. No one else knows my past.

“Call me later though, okay? Let’s hang out after I’m done with work?”

“Of course,” I say because we are addicted in a new way now. To contact with each other. We talk every day, text every day, see each other most days.

He salutes me and walks off to catch a subway back to the West Village where he’ll spend the evening studying history for his final exams in between making permanent marks on the skin of customers.

I walk one more block, grit my teeth, narrow my eyes, and tell myself I am iron, I am steel, I am unflappable.

I enter another church.

I never thought I’d spend so much time in them for reasons other than worship. I grip my field hockey stick in one hand. I don’t even play anymore. I simply like weapons, and I like flexing my fingers around it as I pass through the musty vestibule, ignore the holy water and the candles, and take my customary spot in the fifth pew from the back, laying the stick across my bare legs.

I’ve been summoned by my Dark Overlord, and I can’t say no.

Such is the life of a former teenage call girl who’s being blackmailed.

It’s a Tuesday afternoon so there’s no service now. I glance around at the other churchgoers; a few scattered faithful are here. Or desperate, depending on how you slice it. As I scan their bent heads, I wonder if anyone hears their silent pleas. Maybe some are even asking for forgiveness for their sins, which is what I’d be doing if I were a religious girl.

But I’m not.

I hear the familiar sound of Miranda’s heels clicking across the stone floor.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two…

When I reach one in my head, she’s sliding into the pew, maintaining a two-foot distance between us as if getting closer to me would infect her. I kind of wish I had pink-eye, could touch my eye, then zoom in on her with the pad of my index finger just to watch her pull away and freak out.

But then, she’d find some way for me to pay for that too.

She says nothing as she stares at the sweeping altar ahead of us. Her golden blonde hair is piled high on her head with a clip, her medium length bangs swept over her ear. She looks amazing, especially in her sharp grey skirt that fits well and the pretty indigo blouse she wears. She’s lost about twenty pounds in the last six months.

I want to tell her it wasn’t the twenty pounds that did it. But she’d never believe me. I’m dog poop on her shoe, a gnat buzzing by her ear, the smoke alarm that won’t stop bleeping.

I am nuisance made human with killer legs and face to boot.

I am her worst nightmare.

Or I was until she realized she could turn the tables on me.

She bows her head, clasps her hands together and steeples her long fingers, pale pink polished nails meeting at the points. I imagine what one would look like chipped.

She’d shriek in displeasure, like a kettle on permanent boil. I stifle a smile.

“You should pray, Harley Coleman,” she says crisply.

“It’s not my thing.”

“It should be.”

“Thanks,” I say, but don’t give in to this request. To others yes, but not this one.

Rule Number One when being blackmailed: maintain some lines.

The more you bend, the more your extortionist tries to break you.

She begins a low prayer, inaudible to anyone else, but crystal clear to me.

It’s the Catholic prayer of purity. “Jesus, lover of chastity. Mary Mother, most pure, and Joseph, chaste guardian of the Virgin,” she says, the icicles in her voice stabbing at the last word.

I roll my eyes and bob my head as she continues on, substituting “begging you to plead with God for me” to “begging you to plead with God for Harley.” She finishes with “Have mercy on her,” though she doesn’t mean a word of what she’s saying. There is no mercy for me from her. Well, unless I told my mom everything. And telling her anything or everything is the one thing I will never do. Never as in never-ever-ever.

Rule Number Two: Know your own lines.

I’m stuck here. Protecting my mother. I have to protect her.

“Ah,” she says with a hearty sigh and a hugely false smile. “I feel so much better, don’t you? Cleaner, right?”

“Like I just took a bath in holy water.”

She glares at me. “You jest in God’s house?”

I nod. “I do. I do jest in God’s house. Frequently, in fact.”

“I’ll take the pages now.” She holds out her long-fingered hand to me, her wedding band with its sapphire and diamonds reflecting across the stained glass windows.

I dig into a side pocket in my purse and hand her a thumb drive.

She takes it, looking at it with disdain. It’s part of the routine: I give her a thumb drive every time and every time she regards it like a diseased object. “Hmm. You couldn’t bother to print it out?”

“I don’t have a printer.”

She snorts, then slips it into her vast purple purse. “I want this book done soon. One more month at the most. You need to work on the next chapters. And make them tawdry. Make them sordid. Make them as lurid as they can be.” I inhale sharply. This woman is sick. “Then, give her the redemption she doesn’t deserve,” Miranda adds in her cool, calculating voice.

I stand up, eager to play even a lowly two of clubs in the form of leaving first. “I’m late for my British lit class.”

“You can expect a followup from me sometime this week.”

“Sometime, like anytime?”

She shrugs smugly. “Perhaps any day of the week.”

Rule Number Three: Know when to bluff.

“If you don’t tell me the day, I’ll tell my mom everything.” She may hold most of the cards, but the thing about blackmail is everyone has something to lose. Including Miranda. I don’t want my mom to know about the book she’s forcing me to write anonymously, but she doesn’t want my mom to know she’s making me write it either.

She purses her lips. “I’ll email you.”

“I can’t wait.”

As I scoot out of the pew, she grabs my wrist and her pink nails dig into my skin. I fantasize about brandishing my field hockey stick and whacking her upside the head. There’d be a brilliant gash across her forehead. Blood would ooze into her blue eyes and leave a sticky trail in her blond hair.

“Don’t. Sass. Me,” she says in a low hiss, determined to have the last word.

I yank my wrist from her, clamp my lips together and let her have what she wants. My silence.

I leave, but I don’t go to British lit, because I don’t have classes today. I have a dinner at my mom’s house. It is date night with a new man, and so she needs me there. She always needs me. And I need her.

Page 3…

It’s been my mom and me as long as I can remember. I don’t remember much about my dad, so this story won’t be about him. All my memories are of my mom, starting with how unhappy she was after my dad walked out when I was six.

My mom was miserable for more than a year. She cried late at night, deep tears that could fill rivers and overrun their banks. She thought I was asleep, blissfully in dream land and unaware of her pain. But I heard her phone calls with friends, her “what did I do wrong” pleas, and her desperate, endless self-doubt. She missed the bastard, against her better judgement.

She tried to hold it together during the days, but I’d still find her crying in her cereal, or wandering aimlessly around the apartment, sniffling, and missing, and hurting.

“Don’t cry, mom,” I’d tell her, and she’d wrap me in a tight embrace.

“I won’t, darling. I have you to make me happy.”

After endless days and nights like that, she started to heal, to let go, and eventually the sobfests died down.

Then she was ready to start over. To carve out her new happy.

Dave was the first after my dad. I was in third grade, and Dave spent many nights at our house. He had a son one year older than me. Sometimes, when Dave visited in the evenings, my mom told us to play together. She and Dave wanted to chat and have some time alone.

“I’m happy again,” she’d whisper to me before she closed the door to her room. “Isn’t it great to see me happy?”

“Yes, mom.”

“You’ll play with Dave’s son. That would make me so happy right now.”

His son was nine, I was eight. We played Monopoly.

Technically, I count Dave’s son as the first time my mom set me up with someone. Not that anything happened with him. But that’s how it all started, and this is the story of how I became a high-priced virgin call girl by the time I was a senior in high school. Kick back, grab a glass of wine, and prepare for the sordid, salacious tale of how I became Layla.

(Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Innocent? Ha. As if anyone is.)