It Happens All the Time: A Novel

What the hell just happened? I thought as I let the Bryants’ front door slam behind me, making my way to the street, where I’d parked my truck. I jumped inside, gripping the steering wheel and gunning the engine, picturing the wide-eyed, undeniable look of fear that had taken over Amber’s face when I walked into her room. She was scared of me. Totally terrified. The tires squealed as I pulled out of my parking spot and pointed my truck toward home, running through three almost-red lights and scaring the hell out of a pedestrian on the way to the freeway.

“Watch it, jerkwad!” the man yelled at me as he jumped back on the curb to avoid getting plowed into by my truck. I flipped him off, then zipped past three cars, cutting them all off so I could merge onto the freeway before them.

Something was seriously wrong. When I’d woken up in the bed without Amber there, I’d called her, but her phone must have been off because it went straight to voice mail. I decided I’d better head over to her house to make sure she had gotten home okay and, also, to find out why she had left. With all the tequila I’d had, I still wasn’t thinking clearly, and the entire night was a sort of fuzzy, amorphous blob in my mind. I remembered the way she and I had danced, how she’d been the one to kiss me. How she’d led me upstairs to the bedroom, how she tore off my clothes, writhing against me and pulling me down on the bed. I remembered how amazing it felt to be inside her. After that, everything sort of went dark, the specifics of the sex we’d had flashing in and out of my head in fractured, disjointed pieces. Why was she afraid of me? Why would she scream at me like that? Had I gotten too rough with her? Had I done something to her in my sleep?

The thought that I’d possibly hurt Amber caused me to reflexively press my foot down on the gas pedal, accelerating to sixty, sixty-five, seventy, then eighty. My blood pressure pounded in my eardrums, the rush of adrenaline filling my veins made my limbs feel heavy, aching with the need for release. What is wrong with me? Just calm the fuck down! Out of sheer frustration, I pounded the heel of my right palm hard enough against the top of the steering wheel that the front of my truck jerked into the next lane. The brakes on the car beside mine screeched, and the driver slammed on his horn.

“Shit!” I said, rushing to right my vehicle. But it was too late. Red and blue lights flashed behind me and the whoop-whoop of the siren sounded. My pulse jittered through my body as I slowed down, using my indicator to signal as I moved over to the side of the road. I turned off the engine and turned on the hazard lights, reaching for my license in my wallet and the truck’s registration from the glove box.

When the officer approached, I didn’t even bother to speak; I just held the documents out the window, wanting to get home, desperate to figure out why Amber had freaked when she saw me.

“Do you know why I pulled you over, sir?” The officer’s blond hair was tucked up into a bun at the base of her neck, and her lips were so thin and pale, it almost looked as though she didn’t have a mouth at all.

“I was speeding,” I said, flatly. Please don’t have me do a Breathalyzer, I thought. I might still be hovering near the limit of legally drunk.

“And you almost drove that Lexus off the road,” the officer said. “Were you on your cell?” She looked to the passenger seat, where my cell phone lay along with my jacket.

“No, I was not.” I reached over and offered the phone to her. “Feel free to check the text or call history for a time stamp of when I last used it.”

She waved it away, then made a note on the clipboard she carried. “You in a hurry to get somewhere this morning?”

I held the tops of my thighs in a tight grip. “No, ma’am. Just wasn’t paying attention. I apologize.”

“You seem agitated. Everything all right?”

I had to restrain myself from unleashing the truth. That everything was far from all right. And just then, as I stared at the officer standing next to my truck, the sound of Amber’s voice pleading with me last night went off like loud bell inside my head—Tyler, wait! she’d said as I was lying on top of her, and a sinking sense of horror crept through me. Did she think that I forced her to have sex? Did she think I raped her? Oh god. Oh fuck. I have to talk to her. She has to let me. I have to make her understand she has it all wrong. I would never do something like that!

I clenched my jaws, feeling the muscles working beneath my skin, before I answered. “Can you just give me the fucking ticket so I can get on my way?”

The officer paused, looking at me with cool brown eyes. “There’s no need for that kind of language, sir.”

I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I’m sorry. Really.” Getting arrested was all I needed right now; I needed to tone it down. “The thing is, I’m a paramedic and I guess I’m used to being able to push the limit, you know? Sometimes it happens off-shift without me even realizing.” I didn’t mention that Mason drove our rig the majority of the time.

“What district are you with?”

“City of Bellingham, under Captain Duncan.” I held my breath, hoping that this thin alliance between my job and hers might encourage her to let me off with a warning.

The officer looked as though she were contemplating a decision to do just that, and then she spoke. “You might want to avoid driving when you’re this upset,” the officer said as she finished writing out the ticket and handed it to me. “I’m dinging you for the speeding, not reckless endangerment, but I’d better not catch you out here pulling that crap again.”

“You won’t,” I said, taking the ticket, setting it on top of my jacket. “Thank you.” After the officer had returned to her vehicle, I slowly drove away, trying to figure out where I should go next. Heading home wouldn’t do me any good. I needed to sort out the events from last night, and I could only think of one person who could help me do just that.

Ten minutes later, I pulled up in front of Mason and Gia’s house, a small two-bedroom, sky-blue Craftsman in a neighborhood a few blocks off Cornwall Avenue, similar in size and design to the one I’d lived in with my parents across town. Before I left my truck, I shot my partner a text, not wanting to just knock on the door and wake him and Gia or the baby. It was a little after eleven, but I wasn’t sure what time they had gotten in. All I knew was that Mason hadn’t been drinking last night and could maybe help me figure out what had happened with Amber. Maybe he had seen something I couldn’t remember.

Instead of answering my text, Mason opened the front door and motioned for me to come up the front steps and inside. I noted that his dark hair was pushed flat on one side, as though he’d recently gotten out of bed. A moment later I was sitting on the brown leather couch in their living room, a big glass of water that he said it looked like I needed in my hand.

“We’ll have to keep our voices down,” Mason said as he settled into the rocking chair on the other side of the square table in the center of the room. “Gia and the baby are still sleeping.”

“Okay, sure,” I said, the glass trembling in my hands.

Mason saw this and cocked his head. “You okay, bro? Have you talked with Amber?”

“Not really,” I said, in answer to both of his questions. I drank down almost the entire contents of the glass, knowing it was the best thing for me, and then put the glass onto the table. “Do you know how she got home?”

“We drove her,” Mason said, frowning. “She said you were passed out and she felt sick, so she asked for a ride.”

“Oh.” My mind reeled, relieved that regardless of what Amber might think had happened, she hadn’t voiced it to Mason and Gia.

“What’s going on, Ty? You two looked mighty happy with each other out on the dance floor, before you took her into the house—”

“Before I took her?” I said, cutting him off.

“Yeah,” Mason said, giving me a strange look. “You don’t remember that?”

I sat back against the couch, hard, and closed my eyes. “I thought she took me inside. I could have sworn . . .” My words trailed off as I tried to organize the jumbled mess of images flickering inside my head. What else did I get wrong? What else had I forgotten? What did I do that made Amber scream at me and kick me off the bed?

“You were both hammered,” Mason said. “Have you blacked out like this before?”

“I didn’t black out!” I insisted, opening my eyes again.

“Dude! Keep it down, please.”

“Sorry,” I said, lowering my voice. “I just don’t know what’s going on. I went over to her house this morning to check on her and she freaked out. She didn’t want me anywhere near her.”

“Freaked out how?” Mason asked in what I recognized as the same deliberately calm, information-gathering tone he used with victims in the field.

“She screamed at me to leave. Like, crazy screaming. And when I sat down on her bed to try to talk with her, she went nuts and kicked me off it. Then her parents came in and I just . . . bolted. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

Mason was quiet a moment before speaking again. “Did you have sex with her?”

I nodded, fighting the harshly edged ache that had risen in my throat, recalling the look of terror on my best friend’s face when I walked into her bedroom. I’d seen her through many dark moments in her life, but I’d never seen her look anything like that. It finally registered that part of why she seemed so different was her hair. Since last night, she’d chopped it off, up to the line of her jaw.

“And she was into it, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, but my voice faltered, and I shook my head. “I thought it was all her idea. I mean, I wanted it, too. You know that. But you saw the way she was dancing with me. Did you see her kissing me?”

“I did.” Mason didn’t say more, he just stared at me, expectantly.

“I thought it was finally happening, you know? That she realized she’d made a mistake being with Daniel and it was me she wanted. She’s been having second thoughts about getting engaged. She’s been flirting with me since she got home . . . we’ve been flirting with each other. I know we have. And we were kissing all the way up the stairs until we got to the bedroom. It felt like we couldn’t get there fast enough. I didn’t imagine that. I know it happened.” My head ached as I tried to remember exactly what came next. My hand on her leg, pushing up her skirt. Feeling how hot she was for me, how ready. I remembered rolling on top of her. And then again, those two words, her voice, exploding inside my head: Tyler, wait!

“You made sure she wanted to do it, though, right?” Mason asked, quietly.

I didn’t answer, but inside, I was thinking that of course Amber wanted to do it. She wouldn’t have danced with me the way she did if she didn’t want to have sex. She wouldn’t have let me press my erection against her; she wouldn’t have kissed me or let me take her up to the bedroom. She gave off every sign of wanting it as much as I did. I thought about Whitney, how I’d never had to stop and ask her if she really wanted to sleep with me—her willingness to come inside my apartment that first day, the way she let me touch her was permission enough.

But Amber told you to wait, I thought, and the realization that I hadn’t listened, that I didn’t hear her over the loud roar of my desire, made me feel as though I might be sick. What if I did hear her, I wondered, and I went ahead with it anyway?

“Tyler,” Mason said, loudly enough to snap me out of my thoughts. “Please tell me you asked if she was okay with what was happening. Tell me she didn’t say no.”

“She never used that word,” I said, my voice breaking. I cleared my throat. “But I think she told me to wait. She might have told me to stop.” I breathed in, feeling the air hitch and get stuck inside my lungs.

“Jesus, man,” Mason said. He shook his head in disbelief, and his thick fingers gripped the arms of his chair. “Are you kidding me? I thought there was something wrong with her. She seemed jumpy and kind of out of it, like she was in shock or something. But I chalked it up to the booze . . . I told myself I didn’t know her well enough to actually be right about that.”

“We were drunk,” I said. “Both of us, right? So maybe she’s just having second thoughts. Maybe she’s feeling guilty about cheating on her boyfriend and that’s why she was acting weird.”

“Her fiancé, you mean,” Mason said, giving me a pointed look.

I stood up from the couch and began to pace behind it, desperate to think of any explanation other than the one that made me a monster. “Maybe she’s just confused, like me. Maybe her mind is all fucked up because we were drinking. Maybe she’s just trying to figure out exactly what happened, too.”

“Maybe . . .” Mason said, but he didn’t look convinced.

“I wouldn’t hurt her!” I said, coming to a sudden stop. I gave my partner an imploring look. “You know me. I’ve loved her my whole life. All I want . . . all I’ve ever wanted . . . is to be with her. To make her happy.”

“I get that,” Mason said, “but you know as well as I do that people do some crazy shit when they’ve been drinking. How many drunk drivers have we taken to the hospital after they’ve killed someone with their car? Most of them don’t remember the accident. All of them say they didn’t mean to do anything wrong, but the fact that they were fucked up doesn’t absolve them of responsibility for what they did.”

“Are you saying that you think I raped her? That I could do something like that?” The pressure that had been building in my body since the moment I left Amber’s house, increasing since the officer pulled me over and gave me a ticket, amped up and felt like it might burst open the valves of my heart.

“I think under the right set of circumstances,” Mason said, carefully, his eyes not leaving mine, “pretty much anyone is capable of horrific behavior.”

I was silent, unmoving, bracing myself with my fingertips pressed against the spine of the couch, staring at him. I let what he’d said sink in as best I could, still trying to fight off the worst-case scenario as possibly being true. This had to be a misunderstanding. Maybe Amber and I both just needed to recover from our nasty hangovers, and then try to talk again. Even during the most difficult times in our lives, we’d always been able to sort out our differences. I told myself that that would happen again. Amber and I would talk and the truth would find its way to the surface, and everything—and everyone—would be just fine. I had to tell myself these things, because the alternative, a world without Amber in it, a world where I’d committed an unthinkable sin, was one I didn’t want to be a part of.