The Dirty Ones

Admission, I realize. It’s a shrug of admission.

“If you’re tired, I can just… hang out in the living room and… shit. You don’t even have a TV.”

“I’m not tired,” I say. “It’s not even seven o’clock.”

This makes him laugh. “God, what a long fuckin’ day.”

I raise my eyebrows. Because it didn’t feel like a long day at all. I wrote a bunch of words this morning. A cool, dark erotic story I’ve been working on the past few weeks. Then I put some music on and drank half a bottle of wine. Kinda drifted off and when I forced myself to get up the music was still playing and Connor Arlington was cursing his way down my snow-packed driveway.

“Do you… eat?” he asks.

And I huff out a laugh that is probably more genuine than any other laugh I’ve laughed in the last several years. “Yes.”

“Well, I could cook something if you’re hungry.”

“I have Totino’s Pizza Rolls,” I offer.

His laugh sounds so nice, I forget about the book, and the past, and the problem. “Sure,” he says. “Sounds great.”

I inhale and hold my breath. Because I don’t know what else to do with it.

And then Connor is up next to me, his hand on my shoulder. And even though that bullet-hole scar stopped hurting years ago, when his fingertips brush past it, I feel the pain of that night so clear…

“Come on, Kiera. Come out of the closet and I’ll make you some pizza rolls.”

“You were always good at that,” I say. “And I never thanked you for it.”

“Good at what?” he asks.

“Keeping my insanity in check.”

“It’s not insanity if it’s real. We’ve talked about this before.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m thanking you, dumbass.”

He smiles, unleashing that chin dimple on me. Oh, lonely, sex-deprived-housewives of New York, you better get in line now, bitches. Because by the time you discover what a catch Connor Arlington is, it’ll be too late. “You’re one of a kind,” he says. “And I always knew that.”

“Yeah,” I say, blowing a stray piece of still-damp hair out of my eyes. “That was always my problem. ‘Kiera has trouble fitting in.’ Do you know every teacher in grade school put that on my report card?”

“It’s a compliment if you ask me. Who wants to be like everyone else, anyway?”

“Not me,” I say.

But on the inside that’s not what I say at all. Because I stood in front of every single birthday cake from the time I was six and blew out those candles internally chanting the same wish year after year.

Make me like them. Make me like them. Make me like them.

But I learned that lesson early.

Wishes are bullshit and dreams aren’t the future.

Dreams are just… fucked-up versions of your own sad reality.

I sit on the couch and watch him in my tiny kitchen. You’d think a competent guy like this wannabe US senator would have a handle on this whole frozen junk food thing by the time he was thirty, but then you’d have to assume he’s just like us.

And he’s not.

I’ve been to his family home. It’s one of those historic mansions off the North Shore of Long Island where it takes almost no imagination at all to picture yourself at one of Gatsby’s opulent parties. Drinking, and laughing, and dancing like a maniac. Drunk on money, and pretty people, and the idea that mortality is for the commoners outside the lavish garden walls.

It was his parents’ thirtieth anniversary and all of the Dirty Ones went because the buddy system was in full force by then. We went nowhere alone. I slept in Sofia’s room, or Sofia slept in Camille’s room, or Sofia slept in my room, or Camille slept with both of us. And the guys were sharing a house on campus already, so they were all set. But by the time that anniversary party rolled around in the early spring of senior year things were… bad.

Or, if I’m being honest, good. I mean, no, they were bad—but I got good things out of that year and Connor Arlington’s friendship was one of them.

We went nowhere alone and I liked that. My six-year-old self who had no friends really, really liked that. And we all know that adults are just six-year-olds in grown-ups’ bodies. You carry that shit with you for life.

I met his mom and dad that year. All his siblings. Jack, Olivia, Stenton, and Baby Beatrice, who was seventeen at the time, but everyone still called her Baby.

This was no tent garden party with a string quartet. No. That’s not how the Arlingtons do things. This was a first-floor mansion kind of event. In the ballroom kind of event. With a chamber orchestra kind of event.

There was a seven-course sit-down dinner for more than two hundred guests in the grand dining hall, an eight-tier champagne fountain in the foyer, and more than fifty parking attendants taking special care of Bentleys, and Porsches, and Jaguars, and of course, the Rolls.