Teenage groupie…XXXVII
A grim and distant AJ walked into my
one-bedroom apartment that Sunday evening, greeting my excited embrace with a
shrug and a mumbled greeting. Then he took his sweet time to survey the
apartment, peeping into the rooms face first, a little shoulder, and a walk-off
once he had taken that room in, sort of the way an ex-girlfriend browsed into
rival territory. He complimented my array of plants and the nice garden I was
keeping in the little yard at the back. My life size black and white print
poster of them on the living room wall caught his eyes immediately. It was so
high up it stood taller than he was.
“Didn’t know this was
here?” he shuddered, pointing to the poster.
I beamed proudly. “Nick…bought it
for me as soon as I moved in. Cool, isn’t it?” He had sent it to me the
first time I moved into the apartment during my therapy days, in commemoration
of my affinity at healing from their posters; but it was much smaller than it
was now. I enlarged it, framed it, and made it into a black and white life size
poster to evoke their presence in the house on entry.
He gave me a sneer. “That boy, I
swear you’d be the death of him one day…” he brushed off.
This got my ears attention. I
grabbed his arm, pulling him to my pasty blue sofa, sat him down, knelt in front
of his goggled face holding his hands in my search for an end to all this
malice. “Did Nick say anything about me? Tell me AJ...did he?”
He avoided my gaze, and folded
his arms revealing some new tattoos I had not known about. I took off his
glasses, and placed them beside me on the rug. “What is wrong with you all?
First Nick doesn’t want to speak to me…now you come in here like I’m your
enemy…did I do something wrong, if I did I want to know about it, did I?” I
sat on the floor with AJ’s legs spread around me, one at either side of me
suggestively.
He reached into his pocket and
pulled out a check. “Here, this is for you.” He handed me the check, I took
it without looking at the figures and placed it on the floor beside his glasses.
“We went into a lot of trouble to get that money young lady, better not
disappoint us in college, you’re the first college student from the Backstreet
clan,” he warned, sternly. “That’s what the fellows said I should tell
you. Brian said he’s mighty proud of you…and so am I.” He said the last
part in a whisper as if concealing the sentiment in the message.
I sat up and hugged him. “And
Nick?”
“Geez, girl, quit asking me
about Nick…” he wriggled his small frame out of my embrace. “I said he’s
fine...heck I don’t know why the boy is avoiding you, all he does is talk
about you all the damn time.” This made me smirk. “He broke up with Tiffany
some weeks ago,” he continued on the subject of Nick. “But he’s doing
mighty fine now…” he shot up and walked around the apartment again. “You
guys should talk soon, well at least that’s what he said to me...he said he
was going to call you soon…so expect his call, okay.” He consoled with a
forceful cheery smile. I handed him back his glasses.
“How are you? Sorry I was too
selfish to ask…sometimes I forget that not too long ago we had it going on,”
I said, morosely, folding my arms.
“Yeah, we did, didn’t we?”
He stopped to think. “Seems like so long ago.” He closed his eyes and
thought with a faint smile forming on his face, throwing his head back he let
our precious memory play in his head. “But you were always something, Nikki.
The energy and heat you packed, in and out of bed. It’d make any man
shudder… Hmm…” he demonstrated with a shudder of his own like a thunderous
bolt had passed through his feeble body. Perhaps he was possibly replaying our
melodramatic relationship in his head and it gave him chills just thinking about
that time.
I
stood there and reminisced too. It was so surprising that I didn’t have an
inkling of romantic attraction to him again. My nerves didn’t twitch and my
body didn’t hunger for his touch. It was like I was cured of all that madness
and infatuation. There was a time the mere nearness or feel of his skin next to
mine would send us into an amorous rave. Not anymore.
“AJ… did you... ever... hit
Vikki? Did you?” I asked, politely. I remembered what she said to me in the
bathroom and the day we kicked her out of his room. I wanted to believe those
were just mere angry words from a woman scorned.
He raised his eyebrows with surprise
and put his glasses back. He walked to me and beckoned for me to escort him to
the door. “Let’s not talk about that time…okay… because as much as I can
remember… it was one hell of a long time ago…hell then you were different,
and so was I. Look at you now, if anybody had told me that Nikki would be a
college student I would have said…go fuck yourself…now see,” he joked
considerably, as we walked to the door. “Sometimes, some things are best left
in the past.”
I guessed that meant yes…but I
am sorry I did it, my sinister mind deduced.
At the door, he finally gave me
the smile and the warm embrace I had been missing since he walked in. “Do us
proud okay,” he urged again, lifting up my chin. I agreed to, I knew I dared
not disappoint them.
With that, AJ left, and I never got to
see him again throughout my freshman year in college.