Page 14 of Let It Be Me

“I’m sure White Bread would gladly take you out for a drink or five.”

I realize I haven’t thought about Brad all evening. “It’s okay, I’ll just head home.”

“You want company?”

I smile. He does this every time it’s dark, offering to walk me even the shortest distances despite Shafer’s notoriously safe campus. “My car’s at your house, so we’re going the same way. Let’s head out.”

On the darkened street in front of Lorenzo’s place, he opens my car door but stands there so I can’t get in and gives me an appraising look.

“Can I help you?” I ask.

“Are you really going home?” His voice is low and full of meaning.

“Yeah. Where else would I be going?”

He hesitates. “Brad’s.”

“If I was going to Brad’s, I wouldn’t be lying to you about it. Now move.” I push his shoulder and he steps back, just enough to let me pass, not enough to create much distance between our bodies. And even though I touch Lorenzo all the time, something about the way he doesn’t smile or playfully fight back makes my entire body take note of the warm sensation of his skin under my fingertips.

“Okay. Drive safe.” But he’s watching me expectantly.

“What is this thing you have about Brad? He’s a good guy.”

“I never said he wasn’t.”

“Is it because he’s on your team?”

He shakes his head quickly like suddenly he doesn’t like this subject. “He’s just not the guy I picture you with, Ruby.”

“Then who is?” Lorenzo has always disliked the guys I dated, but he had good reason, because all of them were shit. Brad’s completely different, though.

His dark eyes linger too long on me. “I don’t know.” He blinks and looks away. “He doesn’t exist yet.”

I’m halfway home—afull half block—when I realize I left my training materials at Lorenzo’s. I make an illegal U-turn and head back to his place.

He doesn’t answer the door, but it’s unlocked, so I step inside. “Just me, L!” I call out. “I forgot my stuff.”

He’s nowhere in sight but my materials are, right in the kitchen where I left them. Music plays from his bedroom, the whiny, emo kind from our middle school years that Lorenzo occasionally revisits when no one else is around. Ha ha. I’ve busted him before for listening to this crap, and I don’t think I can resist doing it again.

“Hope I didn’t walk in on you having a good cry,” I holler, heading toward his bedroom. As I do, I pass the bathroom, its lights on and its door half open, and I stop in my tracks. I realize that’s where the music is coming from. And I realize—too late, far too late—what I’m staring at.

Lorenzo is in the shower, his body angled away from me. His eyes are pinched shut in concentration, head tipped back and wet lips parted. His fist is wrapped around his cock, pumping slowly up and down. All my breath leaves my body. It feels like minutes as I stand there frozen, staring as water sluices down his tense, primed muscles. But of course it’s only seconds. That’s all it takes to sear the image of Lorenzo’s naked body into my mind in criminally explicit detail. The wide back tapering downto his waist, the perfect, symmetrical contours of muscle. It’s the tattoos etched across his skin that make me finally turn on my heel and walk, stunned, out the door.

I hear myself clear my throat a ridiculous number of times on my robotic walk to my car. I tell myself to think about something else. The job. My annoying parents. The fact that it’s starting to rain. But I can’t think about anything except Lorenzo and his perfect naked body and the tattoos that will never not transport me straight back to high school.

Lorenzo wasbad in high school.

Drinking, drugs, cigarettes, petty theft, trespassing. And the tattoos; oh, the tattoos. There wasn’t a single girl at our preppy school that wasn’t knocked completely senseless that Monday morning in April when Lorenzo walked into school with a tattoo on his muscled forearm. And as hard as I worked to pretend he was just the same old kid he’d always been, I was as enthralled with him as anyone else.

In the real world, I guess he was nothing more than a typical good kid going through a rebellious phase, but given our entire world was our small private school, Lorenzo was irresistibly dangerous. And until the accident, he never paid a price for it.

I got my first tattoo with him. Lorenzo’s cousin knew someone in the next town over who didn’t take the whole “parental consent” thing too seriously. That’s why, when I extend my forearm, you’ll find a miniature Homer Simpson in vibrant blue and yellow ink, his mouth agape, drool spilling over his lip, his eyes at half-mast and gazing lustily at something. And you’ll find that something only when Lorenzo lays his arm next to mine and you see the hot-pink donut tattooed on his skin, complete with rainbow sprinkles. My only regret is that I was ina pink-hating phase when we made that choice. The donut is so much cuter.

And maybe if Lorenzo had stuck with cute-and-girly designs when he then decided all his spending money would go toward racking up tattoos, his body wouldn’t have been such a threat. Unfortunately, his choices took a darker and sexier turn, and by the end of high school, most of his arms and back were covered in ink, all of it distinctly masculine ... and completely fucking panty-meltingly sexy.

There was something about knowing those tattoos were there, hidden under the crisp, formal button-downs of his private-school uniform. Sometimes, when he leaned forward just so and his shirt stretched across his muscled back, you could catch a glimpse of the dark ink outlines through the starched white fabric. That tease, tempting my eyes to stare at the swaths of his body I wasn’t allowed to touch ... Lorenzo’s tattoos were a core memory of those years, defining high school as much as prom and graduation and senior week.

Of course, the tattoos weren’t really the reason I fell in love with Lorenzo, but in my memories, that’s where it all started. The donut tattoo, to be precise. Matching tattoos were his idea. And while I was bumbling my way through dramatic, terrible relationships with one trash boy after another, to have a boy like Lorenzo want to bond himself to me so permanently brought the love I’d probably harbored for him for years into the dead center of my awareness. Lorenzo was always so sure of his choices. He was sure ofme.As soon as he had the design in mind, he was ready. And for weeks afterward, everywhere we went we had a story to tell. A story of us.

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