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Chapter Twelve
Consuming copious amounts of alcohol in a short space of time was meant to have dulled my senses, yet with Tricia sitting close by, lust filled every square inch of my body. If Tricia noticed she masked it well, and I felt relieved when Rhea dragged her onto the dance floor to join in with a popular line dance tune.
The dance itself was very lame, but due to Tricia’s sense of fun and by adding her own unique twist to it, most of the men in the room, some a good fifteen years younger, stood enthralled by the sexy way she moved.
“Fuck,” Bradley blurted out, and my eyes slid immediately from Tricia to him. He rubbed the back of his neck and pulled at the neckline of his T-shirt like it had suddenly gotten too hot for him. I almost growled at the gesture.
“So you went to school with Tricia?” I asked, distracting him from watching her.
“Yeah. Tricia was the coolest chick in the whole high school, even at sweet sixteen. She’s still the coolest to this day,” he added, nodding toward the dance floor again. She was playing up to the audience and my fists curled tight at how Bradley couldn’t keep his eyes off her.
“You dated her back then?”
Bradley’s eyes narrowed then softened and he shrugged. “Yeah. It took me years to get past her. The girl broke my heart.”
“But you were only kids,” I stated, in reference to their ages when they’d dated. The thought he may have taken her virginity fucked with my head.
“From fourteen to sixteen, Tricia Mattison was my first love. You always remember your first.” Fuck.
“First everything?” I probed, raising an eyebrow like I was teasing him. I had no I idea where the question came from, but I’d had to know for sure. Either that or I’d turned into some sick fuck who loved to torture myself with gory details.
“Are you asking if I slept with her?”
I snickered, sheepishly. “Forget it,” I said quickly backtracking, what they were had nothing to do with me.
“It’s okay, I don’t mind. No… not back then.” My hand tightened around my tumbler and it was a wonder I never broke it. “That honor went to the school quarterback, Donovan fucking Clark.”
“But you have, just not when you were in school?” I pushed, as I tried to clarify the relationship they had.
“These days that would be between Tricia and me, and if you want the answer to that you’d have to direct that question toward her.”
“Her first time was with the quarterback?” Bradley must have thought me a sick fuck, but by then, I couldn’t care less what he thought of me. Anything that explained why Tricia behaved so conflicting had merit.
“I’d spent the summer in Illinois at my grandpa’s farm,” he began, “summer vacation lasts a lifetime in small-town Ohio, when you’re sixteen and you have nothing to do all day. Tricia… well you know how she is, flirty and bubbly…” He fell quiet and glazed over like he was remembering back to then. I waited quietly until he sucked in a sharp breath and his eyes darted back to mine.
“She moved on?” I asked, clueing into him being absent and her being home.
He nodded. “I don’t think it was entirely her fault. According to Alice, her best friend, her crew kept badgering Tricia to go out. Eventually she caved and went to a house party with them. Donovan Clark was her boyfriend before me, obviously at thirteen we all went through girlfriends and boyfriends like candy bars, but he was a bit older than us and I knew he was still sweet on her. They were friends and had been neighbors forever…” He shrugged and shook his head. “And they still had an easy friendship together that used to piss me off. That guy was the only thing we ever fought about.” He paused and looked down at his drink. “Rumors were he plied her with alcohol until she could hardly stand up and they slept together.”
“Fucker,” I muttered. “That all sounds a bit clichéd.”
“Right,” he agreed, “but true. She told me herself, she’d slept with him, when she called me a few days after to break up with me. Anyway, going to that party changed her. When I found out I was pissed more with him than with her, but when I went around to her parents’ house, she refused point blank to talk about it.”
“Not at all?”
Turning his beer bottle around between his fingers, I knew it still frustrated him all those years later. “The girl totally ghosted me after that. Meanwhile, Donovan acted like he was a king while he trashed her reputation to anyone who would listen. Back in school that fall semester there was even a rumor she was pregnant with his kid, and he started telling us all he wasn’t the only one who’d slept with her. When I challenged him on that he wouldn’t name names.”
“Pregnant?” I asked, my tone lifted in shock because I couldn’t envision Tricia with children.
“That wasn’t true either. Being insane with jealousy I even calculated she would have been due a few weeks after Easter. But, as time went on and there was no kid, myself … along with everyone else, realized Donnie had been blowing smoke up everyone’s ass.”
“What a dick,” I spat, my blood instantly boiling she’d been treated that way. Hearing her story went some way to explaining why Tricia was so independent. My experience with Charlotte made me instantly more empathetic toward her.
“That he was, the damage he did to Tricia and her relationships with others was irreparable. She stopped going out and soon after graduation she moved away to college in New York. Obviously with her sister deployed all over the world with the military, her parents moved closer to Tricia in New Jersey and they all ended up settling there.” He shrugged, his face registering his resignation. “I guess with her parents gone she had no reason to move back to Ohio after she finished business school.”
“To look at her you wouldn’t know any of that, she’s always upbeat,” I replied, seeing her for the first time in a new light. It dawned on me Tricia’s behavior might be due to how she coped with her mistrust of men.
“Shortly after I graduated college, Donovan passed through town on a fleeting visit with a new girl on his arm, still behaving like the big-headed jock. It was weird, because Tricia returned a week later for the funeral of a family friend. Seeing them both again in such a short space of time brought the whole incident back for me. So I found out where she was staying and paid her a visit. We’ve never really discussed that time or what really went down, but we’ve been friends ever since.”
