Havoc: Mayhem Series #4

by Jamie Shaw

  Chapter 25

  I’m in love with her.

  Someone gasps. Me? Danica? All I can do is stand there convincing myself that I couldn’t have just heard what I think I just heard. Mike is standing by the door, his hair still a mess from a night spent on my pillow, and his brown eyes make the world fall away. He says it again.

  “I’m in love with her.”

  My lips part, and a violent scream tears through the room. My eyes dart to Danica just as she chucks her gift basket against a wall, sending soup cans rolling in every direction. She continues screaming as she balls her fists, stomps her foot, and storms out of the house.

  Mike looks at me, I look at him, and I don’t know what to say, so I say the only thing I can. “You should follow her.”

  He scratches his hand through his hair, and my eyes beg him to go. I need a minute. I desperately need a minute. And when he gives it to me, closing the door behind him, I stand there trembling from my fingers to my toes.

  There was no mistaking those words. He said them twice, just to make sure I understood them.

  Mike is in love with me.

  He’s in love with me?

  He’s in love with me.

  I sit down on the floor because my knees are too weak to hold me up, and I bury my fingers in my hair, trying to think. When? How long? Why? How?

  Danica is going to bury me after this—absolutely bury me.

  Mike loves me. He loves me.

  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I just sit there staring at a spot on the floor. Sharing my pillow: it meant something to him. Asking me to go to bed last night: it meant something to him. A dozen “sweet dreams”: they all meant something to him.

  Our late-night phone calls. Our walk in the woods. The way he kept pushing his hat onto my head.

  He loves me. All of it meant something, and not just to me.

  When the front door opens again, Mike isn’t alone. Danica walks right over to me, and from my spot on the floor, I crane my neck to stare up at her. Her makeup is smeared from tears that I’m guessing—hoping—didn’t work on Mike, and when her hand drops in front of my face, I realize she’s offering to help me up.

  It’s the scariest thing she’s ever done.

  “Come on,” she orders when I hesitate, and I obey simply because I’m positive the alternative would involve me getting kicked in the face. I let her pull me up, and then I stand there waiting for her to push me back down.

  “I’m not mad at you, Hailey,” she says, and she might as well be speaking a foreign language, because none of this is making sense in my head. “I feel terrible about kicking you out.”

  Wait, what?

  “I just want to go home, okay? This is all my fault.”

  All her fault . . . ?

  Danica hasn’t accepted responsibility for her actions since she was old enough to realize that her pretty smile is the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card. Broken toys, bad grades, missed curfews: they’ve all always been someone else’s fault. And it clicks for me then: what’s happening. I can almost see her too-big smile hiding behind the act she’s putting on, and I resist my fight-or-flight instinct. My feet stay planted in place. I’m a dormouse about to be eaten alive.

  “I’m going to make this right,” Danica says, and there it is: that smile.

  I decide right then that I don’t want to be eaten alive. I don’t want to be fucking eaten at all.

  “You’re full of shit,” I say, and Danica’s smile vanishes. Mike is standing behind her, so he can’t see the way her eyes narrow into slits.

  “Hailey, I know you didn’t sleep with Mike. I—”

  “Oh, I know you know that,” I agree. “But you’re not sorry.”

  Danica stands there—assessing, calculating. And then she steps forward and wraps her arms around me, pulling me into a threat of a hug. Low, so that only I can hear, she whispers in my ear, “I didn’t call my dad yet. But keep pissing me off, you little bitch.” And then, for Mike’s benefit, she says more loudly, “I mean it more than you’ll ever know, okay? I want you to come home with me. We’re family.”

  She pulls away, her pearly white smile daring me to challenge her again. One wrong word, and she’ll make my nightmare a reality. She’s giving me a chance to stay here, to stay in school and finish what I came here for. One chance.

  “Do you need help gathering your things?” she asks, and when she starts gathering them for me, I let her.

  If I leave with her now, I can finish my degree. I don’t have to move back to Indiana. I don’t have to leave Mike for good. I don’t have to grow old on that farm.

  I tell myself these things as I begin helping my soulless cousin. For the fifteen seconds it takes to finish shoving my belongings into my backpack, I avoid eye contact with the man who just told me he’s in love with me. But as soon as I’m finished, my eyes find him across the room.

  He’s standing by the door, not bothering to hide the fact that he’s watching me. “You can always stay here, you know.”

  “Are you ready?” Danica asks, shoving my backpack into my arms, and when I just stand there, her tapping foot begins counting the seconds I have left until she explodes.

  “Give us a minute,” Mike says, and Danica dramatically wipes her finger under her eye.

  “Really, Mike? Really?”

  Mike frowns and rubs his forehead, but then he takes in the expression on my face, and something in it makes him press on. He walks past Danica and takes my hand, leading me out of the room. “Just a minute.”

  In the kitchen, he pulls me close enough that Danica can’t hear us, and he says, “I meant what I said.” His fingers stay clasped with mine, the tip of his thumb nervously circling mine as he gazes down at me. “Earlier . . . before I went outside . . . I meant it, Hailey. I need you to know that.”

  I want to hug him. Or kiss him. Or just cry in his arms. But instead, I simply swallow. I swallow hard, and I float on the surface of those deep brown eyes.

  I believe him—however impossible it should be, I believe him when he tells me he loves me.

  And I also believe Danica will never, never allow it to continue.

  I stare up at Mike until he leans down close, eye-level with me. His voice is hushed but firm, a low whisper that sends goose bumps up my arms. “Pick up your phone tonight, Hailey. If you don’t, I’m coming over.”

  In Danica’s car, in Danica’s passenger seat, I stare out the window wondering if she’s going to intentionally crash the car into a tree and kill us both. She hasn’t said a word, so I know something’s coming. I know something’s coming because I know Danica.

  She looks over at me, and I continue staring out the window.

  “When did you become the kind of girl that steals other girls’ boyfriends?” she asks, shaming me.

  I want to tell her that I didn’t steal him—that she threw him away—but I ignore her, resting my head against the window.

  “I mean, I know you don’t like me, but stealing my high school sweetheart? Spending the night with him? Having him tell you he loves you right in front of me?” Danica looks back out at the road, shaking her head. “I never would have imagined you’d hurt me like that.”

  I know what she’s doing. She’s making this my fault. She wants me to accept the blame so that she can pile it on and pile it on and pile it on. And if enough is piled on top of me, I’ll never be able to find my way out. She’ll be the only person who can unbury me.

  I swallow the “I’m sorry” creeping its way up my throat, and I concentrate on the trees blurring a path back to my prison of an apartment.

  Danica glances at me again, no doubt reevaluating her strategy. “Do you believe what he said?”

  One tree, two trees, three trees.

  “Aw, sweetie,” she says with faux concern. “You do believe him, don’t you? You think he really loves you.”

  Nine trees, ten trees, eleven trees.

  She sighs and pats my leg. “I should let yo
u learn this the hard way, but I’m still your big cousin, so . . .” She glances at me, waiting for a reaction, but she doesn’t get one. “Some guys just like being the hero. Mike always likes to say he fell in love with me from the moment he saw me. But do you know when that was? Third grade, when I moved to his school.” She pauses her delivery for dramatic effect, and I resist the urge to look over at her. “And do you know who I was back then? I was this sad little girl who had to move away from everything she’d ever known, including her best friend.”

  I can’t help it—my neck turns, my eyes find hers, and I get caught in her web.

  “Mike likes them broken, Hailey. It makes him feel important.”

  My gaze slowly swings back to the window, because counting trees is easier than trying to digest anything she’s saying. I don’t want to believe her, and I know I shouldn’t.

  “You don’t want to be with a guy like that, do you?”

  Sixteen trees, seventeen trees, eighteen trees.

  Danica faces forward again, and after a moment, she releases an exaggerated sigh and says, “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  I look at her again, alarms sounding in my head. When she turns her chin in my direction, her brows knit into a pitying expression.

  “Oh, sweetie, you didn’t think I was going to let you keep flirting with my boyfriend, did you?” She admonishes me with a shake of her head. “I’m doing you a favor. You realize that, right?”

  “What are you saying?” I ask point-blank, tired of the charade that Danica won’t stop playing. Concerned cousin. Loving girlfriend. Decent human being.

  “I’m saying that if you ever see him again, call him again, even talk to him in passing again”—her mask slips away, revealing the monster underneath—“you’ll be lucky if all I do is put a call in to my dad.”

  Chapter 26

  Dee Dawson and Rowan Michaels are good at many things. They’re good at finding replacement computers, which they claim they got for free from some guy who got it from some other guy who got it from some other guy. They’re good at cleaning up trashed bedrooms and unflipping flipped-over desks. And they’re good at making sure that when Mike Madden calls me when I’m in bed that night, his name shows up on my phone as “Dee-licious-andra” instead of “Sexy as Fuck Drummer.”

  “Hello?” I say on the fourth ring, after I stop gnawing on my thumbnail and summon the courage to hear his voice.

  “Hey.”

  My door suddenly flies open, and when Danica points at my phone, I roll my eyes and show her the screen. Satisfied that I’m talking to her arch nemesis instead of her ex-boyfriend, she makes a face and leaves me alone.

  “Hey,” I reply.

  “Hey.”

  I crack a tiny smile at the ceiling, marveling once again at how easy it is for Mike to make that happen. “How long are we going to keep saying hey?” I ask, and his reply makes my butterflies flutter.

  “Until I get tired of hearing your voice.”

  I sigh, and I’m not sure if it’s because that was such a perfect thing to say, or because of how hopeless this all is. I like Mike, he likes me, and Danica hates us both. If she knew I was talking to him right now, all hell would break loose. I’m extending a personal invitation to the very nightmare I’ve spent the past thirty-six hours trying to avoid.

  Two years. It’s going to take me at least two more years to finish my bachelor’s degree, which doesn’t even include my plans for my doctorate, and Danica plans to be here for just as long. Talking to Dee-licious-andra on the phone in hushed conversations isn’t going to cut it for that long, but anything more will land me back on the farm.

  Either way, I lose. Danica makes the rules, and no matter how I play the game, I lose.

  “How have things been since you left?” Mike asks, and I decide to start with the good.

  “Dee and Rowan helped me clean up my room.”

  “That’s good . . . What else have you been up to?”

  “Pretty much just working on all the homework that was due today so I can turn it in tomorrow.”

  “Danica hasn’t been giving you any trouble?” Mike asks, and I find shapes in the pattern on my ceiling. A snowman. A dog. A three-headed Hell Beast with long, sharp teeth.

  “She said you only like me because I’m broken.”

  It feels like a confession, so I say it extra quietly. I’m acknowledging I remember what Mike said. I’m asking him to tell me if Danica is right.

  “What?” he asks, the word a gust of disbelief. When I don’t reply, he demands to know, “How are you broken?”

  Instead of naming a thousand ways, I simply say, “I don’t know.”

  “You’re smart. You’re in school. You’re working hard for your dreams.” I can hear the anger in his voice. It’s like a bold underline beneath every word he says. “You’re beautiful. You’re funny. You’re kind. You work at an animal shelter, for God’s sake. Everyone loves you. How the hell are you broken?”

  Beautiful. Smart. Funny. Kind. I let his words comfort me, not wanting to argue.

  A sigh of frustration cuts across the line. “Look, Hailey, Danica is going to say lots of things to you because she’s upset. She hasn’t stopped texting me all day—”

  “She’s been texting you?” An unfamiliar pang of jealously flares in my chest, but Mike douses it in an instant.

  “Not since an hour ago. I blocked her. But listen, just . . . don’t let her ruin this, okay? You’re not broken, and that’s not why I said what I did. If anyone is broken, it’s her, and that has nothing to do with either one of us.”

  I know he’s right. I know he has to be right. “Okay.”

  A moment of silence passes, and I find more shapes on the ceiling. A hippopotamus. A sunflower. Half a heart.

  “I want to take you out,” Mike says, and my pulse quickens. “Tomorrow. Can I take you out to dinner?”

  He’s asking me out. On a date. A real date . . . Oh my God. “I have a lot of homework to catch up on,” I stammer in a panic.

  “What about Friday?”

  “I have to work at the shelter.”

  “Saturday?”

  “Saturday is your music video.”

  “Breakfast the next morning?”

  My heart is hammering in my throat, pushed there by the unease thrashing in my stomach. If I say yes, I’m risking everything. And for what? Even if I ignore the fact that Mike is way out of my league, that he is my cousin’s ex-boyfriend . . . he is still a freaking rock star. It’s impossible to forget the way he looked when I first saw him: covered in sweat at the back of the stage, pounding his drums under laser-blue lights for girls who giggled his name later out on the sidewalk.

  And I am Hailey Harper. Farmhand. Big sister. Yard sale frequenter. Future veterinarian, if I’m lucky. I don’t belong on a stage or beside a stage or anywhere near a freaking stage.

  I hesitate too long. Too, too long. Insecurity creeps into Mike’s voice when he says, “If you don’t want to, that’s fine. I just thought—”

  “I want to,” I rush to assure him. “I do.” In my mind, I’m screaming, You have no idea how much I want to. Sleeping in my own bed is never going to cut it again after last night!

  “But?”

  I scramble for something to say. I search the shapes on my ceiling, but come up with only an overweight dolphin, a crescent moon, and a potato.

  “Hailey,” Mike says, “I didn’t mean to throw all that at you today. It’s okay if you just want to be friends. I never expected—”

  “Your arms,” I blurt, and absolute silence replies.

  “Huh?” Mike finally says.

  “When you asked me what I thought was so hot about you.” I take a deep breath and close my eyes. “Your arms . . . And your eyes. And the way your left cheek dimples when you smile. And your laugh. And how good you are at the drums. And the way you carried me through the woods when I hurt my leg at the pond.”

  With my eyes still squeezed shut, I throw my
covers off, burning up. I’m having a goddamn hot flash, I am so completely embarrassed. And when Mike doesn’t respond, I lie there dying. I’m dying. “Are you still there?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says, his heated voice making the temperature in my room spike even higher. “But I wish I was with you instead.”

  I am officially breaking out in hives. The implication is clear in his smoldering words, and I am stripping my shirt off just to keep from self-incinerating into a pile of ash. Why is it so goddamn hot in here?!

  “There’s no way I’m leaving on tour before I see you again, Hailey,” Mike promises while I practice for my audition as the Human Torch. “Come to the video shoot on Saturday, okay?”

  “Okay,” I agree, mostly because if I don’t get off the phone soon, it’s going to be a nonissue. My parents won’t even need to bother cremating my remains because I’ll just blow out the window where it’s nice and breezy and cold.

  When Mike chuckles, it’s a miracle I manage to form a more-than-one-word reply. “What are you laughing about?”

  “I can hear you blushing,” he says while I’m in the midst of kicking my pants off. They’re made of silk, but I swear to God, they might as well be a woolen-polyester blend right now. My legs are melting, melting.

  “Shut up,” I scold, and he laughs even harder. “I’m getting off the phone now!”

  I can hear the dimpled smile in Mike’s voice when he says, “Sweet dreams, Hailey.”

  And in spite of everything—Danica’s threats, Mike’s upcoming tour, my clearly malfunctioning thermostat—I smile too, because for the past week, I’d missed those words and the sound of that smile. I take a deep breath, I let it go, and I grin at half a heart on my ceiling. “Sweet dreams, Mike.”

  Chapter 27

  There are good days, and there are bad days. There are days when you wake up with Mike Madden on your pillow, when you realize your dreams might not be crushed after all, when you fall asleep with butterflies in your stomach. And then there are days when your professor won’t accept your late homework, when you get chewed out by the shelter director for missing a shift, when you realize you forgot to log on to Deadzone to play with your little brother at the appointed time.