I bought us both earplugs the night after his first sleepover.
I tried not to think about him because I didn’t want to give him that satisfaction. He seemed to delight in irritating me, in being as cruel as he could without drawing the attention of my mother or my brother, whom he mostly ignored.
It was just me he hated.
I didn’t know why, and I pretended I didn’t care.
No one in my life had ever hated me before.
At school, I kept to myself because I didn’t have time for parties or extracurricular activities, but I was friendly with the entire grade and never longed for company.
People at the diner liked me and I liked them, they were the closest thing to a community I had.
To everyone in town, Bianca Belcante was a quiet, studious girl with a penchant for daydreaming at the bus stop and chastising people for wasting water or not recycling.
To Tiernan, I seemed to be the freaking antichrist.
But he was right, Aida didn’t care that I hated her boyfriend. She just clucked her tongue and accused me of being overly loyal to my dead father.
“I’m a woman,” she’d say every time. “I have needs. You’ll understand one day when you’re older.”
As if I was a kid and not a seventeen-year-old woman.
I might have been a virgin, but I had needs.
I knew what it was to feel heat pool wetly between my thighs, to feel the tick of arousal beat in my low belly, to want something only rough hands on my body could gift me.
She didn’t know I lay awake at night trying not to let the low growl of Tiernan’s voice issuing demands in the room across the hall from my bedroom affect me. She didn’t know how often I failed and gave in to the impulse to play my fingers between my legs.
The shame of it burned holes through my soul, but I found myself inexplicably attracted to Tiernan’s meanness. There was some intangible chemistry in our barbed words, crackling between us as potent as the hatred we shared for each other. He was callous and cruel beneath the suave veneer he applied in front of Aida. I saw him for the monster he was, so how could I be attracted to him?
It was difficult to admit that I’d never met anyone like him before. He was older, powerful, so attractive even with the slashing scar across his cheek that I had to swallow the drool pooling in my mouth every time he showed up on our doorstep. I simply wasn’t worldly enough to deal with a presence like his. He turned me inside out with rage and upside down with deviant curiosity. It was a dangerous cocktail of temptation and revulsion.
I was in the kitchen late one night getting Lucky Charms cereal because I couldn’t sleep with the noises coming from Aida’s closed bedroom. I refused to succumb to my perverted desire to touch myself imagining someone eliciting those sounds from me.
Music thrummed through my earbuds, Billie Eilish’s smoky voice thumping through the speakers. I swayed my hips to the beat, fingers drumming on the countertop quietly in time with the tempo as I poured the cereal into a bowl with the other hand. Eyes closed, mouth open to wordlessly form the lyrics about bad boys, I was wholly unprepared for the firm grip that manacled my arm.
Startled, I tossed the cereal box into the air, tiny pieces of sugared goodness spilling out from the open top like confetti from a canon. Morsels caught in my hair and in the deep crevice of cleavage exposed by the old black sports bra I wore to sleep. I spun to face the man who grabbed me, panting and wide-eyed with fear.
And there he stood.
The monster that kept me from sleep.
Tiernan stared at me impassively, taking in my disheveled hair and worn sports bra and baggy sweats as if I were some criminally boring obstacle in his way.
“You scared the crap out of me,” I accused breathlessly, one hand pressed to my panting chest while the other ripped out my earbuds. “What are you doing lurking in the night, huh?”
A tiny smile flickered at the edge of his ruddy mouth. I frowned at him as he reached toward me, plucking a piece of candied cereal from where it was slightly tucked into the crease between my breasts. I gasped in surprise and outrage at his audacity, but my nipples furled into hard peaks at the brush of his rough knuckles against the swell of my chest. His eyes were so clear I thought I should have been able to see straight to the bottom of his thoughts, but they were utterly fathomless. Just a color as pale as frost.
I watched with my heart beating in my throat as he took the anchor-shaped piece of cereal to his mouth and placed it on his tongue. He crunched into it, then swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his tanned, strong neck.