But I hesitate. “Are you okay?” I ask, just making sure. They’re experienced. She’s not, and I don’t want her suddenly feeling guilty about whatever happened in there.
Not that I think Dallas and Iron would coerce her into a situation she wasn’t comfortable with, but it’s a lot.
But she simply breaks in a smile, zero regret evident. “Is Clay okay?” she teases.
I open my door and enter my room. “Fuck off, Amy.”
And I slam the door, happy to continue our silent hatred of each other.
• • •
“Do you ever feel like you’re living the same day over and over again?” Becks asks.
She tosses her carrot down on the lunch table, and I peel another string off my cheese stick, clicking out of the TikTok video.
“I used to,” I say.
To be honest, I never really considered it a bad thing, though. Just the waiting period I needed to go through before I got to college and started my real life.
“What changed?” she asks as Chloe takes a seat beside me with her tray. “I need advice.”
I smile to myself, but I keep Clay quiet. She’s what changed. I’m not bored, that’s for sure. I wish I could talk about her to someone.
“I’m getting out of here,” I tell her instead. “That’s what changed.”
“Dartmouth.” Chloe feigns a shiver. “It’s going to be cold.”
“Really?” I gasp. “Damn.”
People keep saying that as if I’m unaware I’ll see snow in New Hampshire.
“If you got into Dartmouth, you can get into Tulane,” Becks points out. “Come on.”
“Hmm…” I think, weighing the pros and cons in each hand. “Within driving distance to New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia, or more bugs the size of my fist and a hundred-degree humidity. Tough decision.”
Becks smiles, continuing to eat her carrot. I can always visit New Orleans. I’ve made my choice.
“I booked a limo for prom.” Chloe elbows my arm. “My treat.”
I glance at her, remembering. Prom. “Right.” I hesitate, searching for words. “I mean, in case we don’t have dates?”
In case I’m not going with Clay, and I know I’m not, because Macon is right, but it would be perfect to go with her. We still have a month. A lot can happen in a month.
“Absolutely,” she says. “You should wear purple.”
“I don’t…wear purple.”
“Red, then? With your black hair, it would look niiiiiiice.”
“Black,” I state.
But then she eyes me, her pink lips wet from licking the hummus off her cracker. “With red underneath?”
Her tone is soft and tantalizing, and awareness makes the hair on my arms rise. She’s flirting.
“Maybe.”
Chloe is pretty and she wouldn’t hide me. She would be easier.
I look over my shoulder, seeing Clay surrounded by her friends at a table, hovering over an assignment she’s trying to finish before class. Her eyes lift to mine, as if she already knew exactly where to find me, and all I can see anymore is her wet and on top of me in the shower. The perfect girl with her perfect hair, and her little secret.
Chloe would be much easier. But even if I’d met her before I started with Clay, I still wouldn’t have been able to resist Clay as soon as I saw her. As soon as she spoke, I would’ve craved nothing more than to make her only see me.
“I love this bracelet.” Chloe touches the metal symbol on my leather band. “An hourglass.”
I pull my arm away. “Yeah, it’s kind of a family thing.” I stand up, grabbing my materials and garbage. “I gotta go,” I tell her.
But as I drop everything into the trash bin, Chloe touches my arm, stopping me. I turn, seeing her standing in front of me. “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asks.
Huh?
Jesus. Almost four years at this school, and now people want to make me feel liked and accepted?
“Sorry, I asked Ms. Martelle,” she says, “so I didn’t embarrass myself before I asked you out, and she said she didn’t think so. Will you go out with me sometime?”
I flash my eyes to Clay, seeing her watch us. The look in her eyes, like she’s not breathing, owns me. She owns me.
It takes a moment, but I meet Chloe’s gaze again. “I have a girlfriend,” I tell her gently.
I belong to someone.
“But you’re not going to prom with her?”
I fight not to look in Clay’s direction again. “Maybe.” I hope. “I’m sorry. It’s…”
“Complicated,” she finishes for me. “It’s okay. I think I knew. I mean, how could you not be taken, right?”
Yeah, right.
“See you this weekend,” I tell her.
I leave, heading to my locker and feeling a little badly. If Clay weren’t in play, I would’ve accepted. How nice would it be to have someone any time I want?
I stop at my locker and look down the hall, seeing Mark Calderon leaning into Sophia Herrera, the whispers between them and everything in his body language telling me they’re getting it on.
How nice would it be to be as close to Clay as I want, any time I want, and wherever I want like them?
I could have that with someone like Chloe or Megan. I can have that when I leave for college.
But I really like my crazy-as-fuck Barbie doll with a mouth that pisses me off one minute, and arms that hold me so tightly that I don’t care if I can breathe the next.
I open my locker, a paper dropping onto the floor from inside.
Bending down, I pick it up and unfold the half-sheet.
Fear grips me. It’s probably a hate letter. A threat. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I almost crumple it up, but I see the words and start reading.
It never looks like me, the person in the mirror, the black script reads.
She looks like everyone else.
I look around, not seeing anyone else in the hall, except for a few loiterers down by the doors to the lunch room.
I keep reading.
She’s like every woman on his arm—the same hair, the same clothes, the same smile, because to beat she has to compete, right?
I stood in front of the mirror this morning, a mouthful of toothpaste and my hair tangled by your fingers. You sucked my lips swollen last night, and I can still smell your kisses on my skin.
The world swims, how hard I’m used by you.
How all I have when you’re done with me is my bones.
I don’t care what I look like anymore as long as I look like yours.
Marked, raw, tangled, sore, and scented like you—I don’t care.
As long as I look like yours.
My eyes burn, a baseball lodged in my throat as I read it again and again. As long as I look like yours.
A tear spills down my cheek, and I hear a locker open. I look over my shoulder, down the hall, and see Clay watching me as she pulls out a book.
Even from this distance, I can see her eyes pooling too.
The hall floods with students, afternoon classes about to get under way, and I lose sight of her, but my body overheats under my skin, and I’m so hot.
I need her. I need her skin on mine like I need food. More than I need food.
I love Clay Collins.
A text rolls in, and I click it, seeing it’s from her.
As long as I look like yours.
I hover my fingers over the screen, nothing I want to say good enough. I just want to haul my ass over there and press my mouth to hers in front of this whole fucking hallway.
I can’t breathe.
Clay, I’m dying, I type. You’re killing me. Please stop.
A text rolls in a moment later. Can you?
I PULL UP in front of Mimi’s house, parking right behind my mother’s Rover. I check my phone before I get out of the car.
Liv never texted me back.
It was a rhetorical question anyway. I don’t believe for one seco
nd that she wants me to stop. She’s capable of walking away when she wants. She’s proven it.
I want to give her everything she deserves, and I will. Prom is coming. Almost at the end of the school year. After the debutante ball. Near graduation.
I’ll face everything, then. I guess I just thought this would be easier. I thought it was just sex. I didn’t expect...to never want to walk away.
I type out a text. Send me a pic.
I wait, a cool breeze sweeping through the trees as the sun starts to set. I’d stayed at school, knowing Liv had rehearsal today and then had to babysit her nephew, and did my homework in the library, killing time before my weekly meeting with Mimi.
Her reply rolls in, and I click on the image she sends.
A bowl of penne pasta with white sauce, artichokes, and chicken.
I roll my eyes. Of your face, please?
A few seconds later, I see her beautiful lips, a faint blush red, puckered to the camera next to a forkful of penne.
I smile. She must be eating dinner. That mouth is mine in ten hours, I say.
I’ll be done with my pasta by then, she assures me. Because it and me are having a total relationship without you right now.
I send her a kiss emoji with a heart and head into my grandmother’s house.
“Mimi?” I call out, setting my bag down and straightening my sweater vest and Polo underneath. “I’m heeeeere.”
No one answers, and I drift through the living room, den, and dining room, looking.
“Mom?” I say loudly.
I see movement outside, and I walk through the solarium, toward the patio outside.
“That has never been an option,” Mimi bites out.
I halt, moving to the side, behind a fern. My mom and grandmother sit at the patio table on the other side of the glass, the open door next to me allowing their voices to drift inside.
“My family is miserable,” Mom tells her.
“Then, fix it. For God’s sake, I’m not against divorce when it improves a woman’s situation,” Mimi fires back, “but leaving Jefferson Collins and letting some other woman win… How could you live with yourself? What are you teaching Clay?”
“That perhaps she should know when to walk away?”
“A divorce is failing,” Mimi says, “and you are both better than that. And don’t act like you don’t still love him.”
A divorce? I stand there, unmoving. My mother’s actually considering divorce. I thought maybe a trial separation after I graduated, but… Have they already started the process?
“And when my father cheated on you?” Mom asks her. “Do you still think you won anything?”
“Oh, honey.” Mimi picks up her glass of lemonade, the pristine blue of the pool in the yard beyond. “I knew exactly what I was getting into. And I knew exactly what I would get in return.” She takes a drink and sets the glass back down. “Some days were almost unbearable, but I’m still here and those women aren’t.”
My grandfather cheated on Mimi? I guess I’m not shocked. I didn’t know the man well. He passed when I was seven. But Mimi wears it like a badge—the fact that she was his wife.
She goes on. “You will never regret keeping your chin up and making the sacrifices it takes to maintain the life you have spent years building. She will come into your home, not because he loves her, but because he misses you and can’t be alone. Once a man becomes used to being taken care of, he can only live that way. He’ll replace you out of necessity, not desire.”
She. My father’s mistress.
“She will come into your home,” Mimi continues, “and parent your child and spend your money and drive your cars. Fix it.”
My chest rises and falls with shallow breaths. Everything’s changing.
I back away from the patio, heading back into the house and ball my fists.
I knew about the other woman. I even thought there might be more than one. Who could blame him? My mother was a bitch and made the house unbearable, trying to control everyone and everything, and we were all suffocating under the clothes and the makeup and the standards, but…
Is he actually leaving her? Is he making a new life without us?
Is he leaving me with her?
Or is she leaving him? It sounded like my grandmother was trying to talk her out of something.
Where do I go when I come home for holidays? They don’t know me anymore. Do they even want me around—my mother forced to keep up appearances, and my father forced to support a family he no longer wants?
Jesus, do they even know I’m still here?
I rub my hands up and down my face, drifting down the hallway, past all our photos that my grandmother will keep up, because we look like a happy family, and my grandfather looks like a doting husband.
I drift, until I find my way upstairs and in my grandmother’s room, veering straight for the hidden cubby drawer in the mantel of her fireplace.
Reaching inside, I dig out the stack of letters I’d found there when I was eight that now make a lot more sense since Macon told me about Two Locks—the old, abandoned farm on Harley Creek my family owns where he said my grandmother hid her affair.
I stare at the stack—more than fifty letters probably—yellowed with age and secured with a white ribbon. At the time, I’d thought it was adult stuff. Letters were how old people communicated, thinking my grandmother was much older than she was and didn’t have a phone or some shit.
I never thought they were romantic gestures.
I hold the tattered envelopes, sifting to the bottom of the stack and take note of the postmarks and dates.
They start in 1983. They end in 2017.
Thirty-four years.
Carefully, I set them back in the cubby as something I don’t like winds through my stomach, making me feel like I’m in a place I don’t recognize. Surrounded by strangers.
I don’t want things to change. I won’t recognize my life, and I’ll be lost. Nausea rises up my throat, and I groan. I don’t like this feeling.
I want my father back. I want my mother and Mimi to be proud of me.
I want our life back together.
Without telling them that I’m leaving, I jump back in my car and think about going home—or to Liv—but in minutes, I’m in front of Wind House instead. The parking lot is empty, and Mrs. Gates’ car isn’t in the driveaway.
I park and drift past the door I usually come in during business hours, sneaking through my same window and down into the basement. I switch on the lights and look around, finding it empty and quiet, all the tables vacant and the tiny hum of the coolers making the only noise in the room.
Such a sharp place. Hard and cold, and I don’t know why I find it comforting.
I walk over and put my hands on the sterilized steel table Alli laid on all those weeks ago, images running through my head that she’s now ash. Gone.
Forever.
If she could go back, would she make the same choice? It makes sense to suffer for who you are rather than who you aren’t, but ultimately, nothing is as bad as dead, right?
There’s only so much a person can take. We all have a limit.
Without thinking, I hop up, sit on the table, and swing my legs over before laying my whole body down on the freezing metal table.
I settle my back in, molding myself to the surface, and rest my legs slightly apart with my hands at my sides.
Everyone that lays here is dead. They don’t get to stare up at the stark fluorescent lights and let it sink in that their shot is over. That was it.
I’ll be here someday. Done. Never to speak or love or kiss again.
What will I regret?
What if I’m alone?
“SO, I WAS kind of thinking,” I say quietly as students make their way into the women’s locker room. “I could cancel shopping with Megan and Chloe and go shopping with you instead?”
Clay sits on the bench, pulling on her sneakers and tying the laces. Her beautiful hair is flipped to one side as
she leans over in her black leggings and sports bra.
She doesn’t answer.
“Clay?” I press.
“Shopping?” she repeats, not meeting my eyes.
I tighten my ponytail, looking around for eavesdroppers. “Dress shopping for prom?” I remind her. Did she even hear me?
She meets my eyes, looking like a deer caught in the headlights. “Oh, um…”
What the hell is wrong with her? I sent her a proper sexy pic of me last night, after the dumb one of me with my pasta, and she didn’t answer, and she’s barely made eye contact since we walked into school for our morning workout.
“Uh…” She swallows, standing up and avoiding my gaze. “I actually already have my dress.”
She has a dress… Okay, so what does that mean? I stare at her, her body language all wrong. What the hell happened between yesterday and today? She can’t go shopping with me?
I fight to find my words, but she sees me staring and meets my eyes briefly. “I mean, we said we’d keep this casual, right?” she says, letting out a laugh. “The date last weekend was enough risk for a while, I think.”
Enough risk…
Why won’t she look at me? Maybe I can stand being a secret for a little while longer, but I don’t like this distance that’s there all of a sudden. I’m not just some fuck.
I turn and take my phone out of my locker, grabbing my earbuds, too. “I like spending time with you outside of bed too, Clay.”
But she doesn’t want that. Or she’s not ready to admit it.
She reaches for me. “Liv…”
“Just forget it.” I move aside and close my locker. “Macon was right. He always is. I’m the stupid one.”
She slams her locker and moves past me, murmuring, “Meet me in the shower now.”
“No,” I tell her. “I’m over it.”
I’m not doing this anymore. Shit’s changed. I want to go to prom, and I want to go with my fucking girlfriend. That’s it.
Tryst Six Venom Page 35
