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.)
Chapter Two
Trey
Elevators were my downfall.
But I can handle them better now.
The doors open with a soft metallic moan and I step inside the mirrored elevator in the Lexington Avenue office building. The lift shoots me up six floors to my shrink’s office.
Dr. Michele Milo.
I head into the lobby. It’s empty and that’s good because I’d rather not see who else is fucked in the head or the heart. I walk to her office and tap on the door.
“Good afternoon, Trey,” she says in the calm voice I’m used to. I’m pretty sure shrinks don’t have any other voices. It must be part of shrink training – how to speak in a serenely modulated tone all the time. Never waver. Never vary. I wonder if shrinks are all peaceful and even on the inside too. Unflappable, never bothered by the shit life serves up.
I can’t even imagine what that would be like.
Like living inside a Valium, maybe.
“Hey.”
I flop down on her couch. She’s been my shrink for six months, and granted, she’s totally my type – maybe a little young since I think she’s in her late twenties – but I’ve never had a single dirty thought about her. Not one. Maybe that means I’m getting better. Maybe I’m not so hooked on older women. Maybe I’m breaking my addiction.
“So,” she begins, clasping her hands together. “How is everything going for you this week?”
I shrug. “It’s fine. The school year is almost over.”
“And your plans for the summer? No Regrets full time?”
I nod.
“How are your parents about that?”
I roll my eyes. My parents. My perfectly plastic, perfectly put together, perfectly empty parents. They wish I were going to school to be a doctor. Yeah, like that’ll ever happen. “Guess how they are with that,” I say sarcastically. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Whatever you want to talk about, Trey. This is your time.”
I look away, at the plants on her windowsill, at the books on her shelves. Books with names like Real Choices, It’s Not Love–It’s Addiction, Healthier Lives. All the shit I need to be. I stare at her walls and the framed abstract art. Red squares, yellow brushstrokes, blue lines all mixed together. I’m glad she doesn’t have those stupid inspirational pictures I’m tired of seeing at SLAA.
She waits for me to speak.
“Harley,” I say in a low voice. I always want to talk about her.
“You want to talk about Harley.” It’s not a question; it’s a statement.
“Sure,” I offer in the most casual, offhand way I can muster.
“Harley, the girl you spent one night with and have now become best friends through a love and sex addicts support group,” she states, but there’s no judgement in her voice.
I cross my arms. “You think it’s dangerous that I’m friends with her.”
Michele shakes her head. “No. I think it’s worth exploring how and why you’re actively focused on recovering from your addictive behavior and you spend most of your time with someone who also has that goal in mind. And yet she also happens to be a young woman with whom you’ve been intimate.”
“You think we can’t be friends because we almost slept together?”
She shakes her head. “No. I think you can be friends. I also think the situation is complicated and unusual, Trey. Because you’ve gone from feeling as if your life was spiraling out of control and deciding to go to SLAA, to meeting Harley, to becoming close friends and sharing both the details of your past and your recovery with her. Is that a correct assessment of the last six months?”
“Yeah,” I say tentatively, and I have the feeling of being subtly cross-examined even though I know that’s not Michele’s style.
“And yet, you and your parents don’t talk about what brought you to SLAA. You don’t share it with friends. You don’t share it anywhere but here and with Harley.”
My jaw tightens and my shoulders tense. “I feel like you’re calling me out on something.”
“I’m not. But I want you to think about why you’re able to be this way with her. Why you go all over the city with her, and she meets you after work, and you hang out in between classes, and you know all about these memoirs she’s being forced to write, and you, by your own admission, are not a terribly open person. So why her?”
I picture Harley. Her blond hair. Her brown eyes. Her banging body. But then I shift away from the physical, and I flash onto all the other parts and honestly it comes down to pretty much one thing.
“I can talk to her about just about anything,” I say.
“You can,” Michele nods. “Except one thing. The why behind all of this.”
I run my palm over the tattoo on my shoulder, underneath my shirt. The why of all of this.
Harley
As soon as I open the door, the familiar greeting pours forth.
“You look so pretty,” my mom says in this incredibly reflective air. As if this is the first time ever, in my whole life, I’ve looked so pretty. I’m wearing a short skirt, a t-shirt, and my Mary Janes. I look like I do every day. Still, no matter what, without fail, you can set your ever-loving clock to it, You look so pretty is always the first thing my mom says to me.
I wish I hated it.
I wish I didn’t need to hear it.
But I ache without it. It’s become as necessary as air and sun.
It’s my confirmation that all is right in the world. She raised me to be pretty. She trained me to be pretty. She is pretty too.
The difference is she never used her pretty to win things in life. She earned all her accolades, all her praise, all her awards. She doesn’t even hang them on the walls or frame them. She’s so humble, brushing them off as if they’re nothing when people praise her. But they’re not nothing. She’s won national awards from every journalistic association in the world, it seems. She’s earned the most prestigious prizes in her field since she’s a top-notch investigative reporter on “Here and Now,” the venerated show that has exposed government secrets about the wars, not to mention high-profile politician shenanigans. My mom uncovered the Sexting Senator, the congressman who hired young male escorts to give him blow jobs on Uncle Sam’s dollar, and a child prostitution ring run by an ex New York City Mayor.