“He is NOT in love with her,” she whispered. “You’re so worried. It’s silly. He never liked Jes. Carey liked Jes. But Tyler is only Jes’s friend.” She laughed and repeated herself, changing the order. “Tyler is Jes’s only friend.”

I watched Tyler and Jes, at the way they looked at each other, and wondered what Carey would have done in this moment. Probably walked over there—taken his drink—or her drink—anchored herself in front of him—then turned on her light, so that he couldn’t look anywhere else. She would have blinded them.

I leaned against the refrigerator, with the petulant jades of jealousy and the insistent reds of frustration coating my insides—and did nothing at all.

Chastity

Chastity

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

Falling in love is a fever, a disease, euphoric and despairing, a rush through the body that warms everything. Suddenly you have twice as much blood as you did before—you are bursting with it. You make enough blood to dissolve the hardened internal plaque of your loneliness. With each new cell you grow ever more swollen and tender and fragile, your skin stretches thinner and thinner, enough for other people to see your heartbeat from the outside. When it is thin enough for someone to take in all of you—your bones, your nervous system, your deepest internal self—then you’re a goner, with someone else’s breath inscribed so deeply on your heart that nothing could erase it.

The next morning when the sun came up, I went directly to the studio, refusing to look in Tyler’s windows as I drove past his house, wanting to keep him from my mind. I spent a heroic amount of energy trying to drain my body and quiet my heart, but it was too late—I was already sick with him, feeling the illness of him settle in my stomach, heating the back of my rib cage, shadowing my every thought.

The moment the clock hit eight, I was out the door, speeding to the Mission, where—sure enough—Tyler waited for me, sitting in “his” chair, and I flew into his arms for more of those endless kisses, this time not so endless.

We went into the Mission, pulled the curtains shut, locked the door. I climbed onto the bar top and soon my clothes were the only thing between us, and then those were gone, then I was pulling him inside me, holding him against me and looking into his eyes.