by Elle Kennedy
I barge into his room to find him totally alone. I guess part of me expected there to be a skinny naked woman in his bed, but instead, it’s just him, dressed like he’s going somewhere and about to leave.
He doesn’t even look surprised to see me. Disappointed, maybe. “I can’t talk right now, T,” he says with a sigh.
“Well, you’re gonna have to.”
He tries to open the bedroom door behind me, but I stand in his way. “Taylor, please. I don’t have time for this. I need to go.” His voice is cold, indifferent. He won’t look at me. I think I wanted him to be angry, annoyed. This is worse.
“You owe me some kind of explanation. Blowing off dinner plans is one thing, but the Spring Gala was important to me.” My eyes are hot and stinging. I swallow hard. “Now you’re bailing on me hours before the event? That’s cold, even for you lately.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“I’m sick of sorry. I feel like we broke up only you forgot to tell me. Dammit, Con, if this”—I gesture between us—“is over, just tell me. I think I deserve that much.”
He turns away from me, raking his hands through his hair and mumbling something under his breath.
“What? Just spit out,” I order. “I’m right here.”
“It has nothing to do with you, okay?”
“Then what? Just tell me why.” Exasperation washes over me. I don’t understand what he possibly has to gain from all this subterfuge, if not to drive me crazy. “What’s so important that you’re ditching me tonight?”
“There’s just something I have to do.” Frustration builds in his voice. The lines deepen across his face, and his shoulders hold more tension than I’ve ever seen. “I wish I didn’t, but it is what it is.”
“That’s not an answer!” I say in frustration.
“It’s the only one you’re getting.” He stalks past me and reaches for the jacket draped over his desk chair. “I’ve gotta go. You need to leave.”
As he grabs the jacket, it catches on the armrest and a thick white envelope about the size of a brick tumbles out of one of the pockets. From the envelope, several bound straps of twenty-dollar bills splay on the floor.
We both stare in silence at the money until Conor swipes it up off the floor and starts shoving it back in the envelope.
“What are you doing with all that money?” I ask warily.
“It’s not important,” he mutters, shoving the envelope into his jacket pocket. “I have to go.”
“No.” I shove the door closed and plaster myself against it. “No one walks around with that kind of money unless they’re up to no good. I’m not letting you walk out this door until you tell me what’s wrong. If you’re in some kind of trouble, let me help you.”
“You don’t understand,” he says. “Please, just get out of my way.”
“I can’t. Not until you tell me the truth.”
“Fuck,” he grits out, yanking at his hair. “Just let me go. I don’t want you involved, T. Why are you making this so difficult?”
His mask has finally failed. Gone is the aloof, indifferent face he’s held in place all week while he’s done his best to hide the anguish inside. Now all I see is pain, desperation. This thing has been eating him up and he looks exhausted.
“Don’t you get it?” I say. “I care about you. What other reason is there?”
Conor deflates. He collapses on the edge of his bed and drops his head in his hands. He’s quiet for so long I think he’s given up.
But then he finally speaks.
“Last May, back home in California, Kai comes to me one day—I hadn’t seen him in weeks—and says he needs money. Like a lot of money. He got in bad with a drug dealer and had to pay him back or the guy would fuck him up. I told him I don’t have that kind of cash. So he says, you know, ask Max for money.” Conor raises his eyes, as if checking to see whether I remember what he’s told me about his relationship with his stepfather.
I nod slowly.
“Right, so I said hell no, I can’t do that. Kai gets pissed, like, fuck you, I thought we were friends, all that crap, but he doesn’t push it. He just says he’ll find another way and leaves. At the time I thought he was exaggerating about the trouble he was in, that maybe he just wanted a new phone or some dumb shit and thought I could waltz into a giant gold vault and take whatever I wanted.”
Conor takes a breath and rubs at his face. As if he’s gathering energy.
“So then maybe a couple weeks later, Max and I got into some stupid argument. I hadn’t declared a major yet and he was getting on my case about figuring out what I’m going to do with my life. So of course I get defensive because what he really means is that I’m a loser who’s never going to amount to anything if I don’t become just like him. It turns into a full-on shouting match and then I get pissed off and leave. I end up at Kai’s place, tell him what happened, and he says, hey, you know, we can totally get back at him. Just say the word.”
I approach the bed with timid steps and sit down, keeping several feet of space between us. “And what did you say?”
“I said fuck it. Let’s do it.”
He shakes his head, letting out a deep sigh. I can feel the anxiety wafting off him, how hard it is to admit all of this. How far he has to reach into himself to find the courage.
“I gave Kai the alarm code and told him Max always keeps three grand in cash in his desk drawer for emergencies. I said I didn’t want to know when it’s gonna happen. It’d be months before Max would even notice it was missing, and besides, that kind of money is nothing to the man. He’d spend that in a week on dinner and wine. Nobody gets hurt.”
“But…?”
Conor looks at me. Finally. For the first time in a week, he really looks at me.
“So one weekend we all go to Tahoe. I wanted to stay behind but Mom gave me a guilt trip about spending quality time together. So the house is empty for a few days, and Kai makes his move. He was probably high or wasted on some shit—the kid never had a fucking dimmer switch, you know? He slips in quiet enough, but then he trashes the place. He grabs one of Max’s golf clubs from the garage and smashes up Max’s office and the living room. We came home a couple days later and it’s obvious the place has been robbed. The messed up part is, Max blamed himself. Figured he must have forgotten to set the alarm. But whatever, no big thing, he says. Insurance will cover the damage.”
My forehead wrinkles. “They didn’t wonder why nothing else was stolen?”
Conor barks out a sardonic laugh. “Nope. The cops decided some teenagers probably just wanted to trash the place. They said they’d seen it a million times, a crime of opportunity, and that maybe the teens got scared off by something.”
“So you got away with it.”
“Yeah, but that’s the thing, right? The guilt tore me up from the moment we stepped inside the house and I saw what Kai did. What I did. Somehow in my head I convinced myself that it’d feel good to see the look on Max’s face. But it fucking hurt. What kind of asshole trashes his own house? My mom was terrified for weeks afterward that whoever did it would come back. She couldn’t sleep.” His voice cracks. “I did that to her.”
My heart hurts for him. “And Kai?”
“He found me at the beach a couple weeks later and was asking, you know, how’d it go. I told him I couldn’t hang out with him anymore, that he’d gone too far and it was a bad idea to begin with. And that was it, we were through. In his head he thought he was being a good friend, like he was sticking up for me or something. That’s probably the best example anyone could give you of how his brain works.”
“I’m guessing he didn’t take the break-up well?”
“Nope. I think more than anything he was worried I’d rat him out. But I reminded him that doing so would be mutually assured destruction. And we went our separate ways.”
“Until Buffalo.”
“Buffalo,” he agrees ruefully. “Then Saturday at the beach. He followed me there, gave me the same old st
ory. He owes money to bad people and they’ll kill him if he doesn’t get it. Except this time he needs ten grand.”
“Shit,” I say under my breath.
Conor laughs sadly in response. “Right?”
“You can’t give him the money.”
He cocks his head at me.
“No, I’m serious, Conor. You can’t give him the money. This time it’s ten, next time it’s fifteen, twenty, fifty. He’s blackmailing you, right? That’s what this is all about? Mutually assured destruction? And the contents of that envelope…I bet you didn’t get the money from your family.”
“I don’t have a choice, Taylor.” His eyes turn angry.
“Yes, you do. You can tell Max and your mom the truth. If you come clean, Kai has no more leverage. He’ll leave you alone and you can finally get on with your life without worrying about the day he’ll show up again to derail your whole life.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You have no—”
“I know that because of this shame and embarrassment you feel, you’ve blown me off, fucked your family over, and done who knows what to get that money. When’s it going to stop? When is it enough?” I shake my head at him. “There’s only one thing you can do to fight back, or you can be a slave to this secret forever.”
“Yeah, you know…” Conor gets up. “This really doesn’t concern you. I told you the truth and now I’ve gotta go.”
I jump up and try to intercept him, but he sidesteps me with little effort on his way to the door. I grab his hand as he turns his back on me. “Please. I’ll help you. Don’t do this.”
He snatches his hand away. When he speaks, the coldness and detachment has returned. “I don’t need your help, Taylor. I don’t want it. And I definitely don’t need some chick telling me what to do. You were right. We shouldn’t be together.”
He doesn’t look back. Down the hallway and out the door. Not a single hesitation.
He just leaves me there with the poisoned memories of this room, with my makeup smeared and hair falling down.
Conor Fucking Edwards.
31
Conor
There was this girl when I was growing up. Daisy. She was around my age, lived a couple doors down in the old neighborhood, and she used to sit for hours in her driveway drawing with little rocks or broken pieces of cement because she didn’t have chalk. When the sun turned the concrete slab into a griddle or the rain wrinkled her skin, she’d throw stuff at us when pre-teen Kai and I would ride past on our skateboards. Rocks, bottle caps, random trash, whatever was lying around. Her dad was mean as shit and we figured she was just like him.
Then I watched one day from my porch. I watched her getting off the school bus, knocking on her front door. Her dad’s truck was in the driveway and the TV inside so loud the whole neighborhood could hear the sports highlights. She kept knocking, this skinny girl and her backpack. Then trying the window where the bars had been torn off during a break-in and never replaced. And then finally giving up, resigned, and picking another rock from the side of the street that from some decaying part of the neighborhood eventually tumbled its way to her.
Next I watched Kai rolling down the sidewalk on his skateboard. Stopping to talk to her, to taunt her. I watched as he did donuts over her drawings, then pour a soda out on the pictures and flick the bottle cap in her hair. And I got it then, why she threw stuff at us whenever we passed her. She was aiming for Kai.
The next time she sat alone in her driveway, I brought my own rock and joined her. Eventually we left the driveway and explored the world. We watched the highway from a tall tree, counted planes from rooftops. And one day Daisy told me she was leaving. That when the school bus dropped us off, she was just going to walk away and go somewhere else. Anywhere else. You could walk away, too, she’d urged.
She had this magazine picture of Yosemite and got it in her head that she would live there, at a campground or something. Because they’d have everything you’d need and it doesn’t cost anything to camp, right? We talked about it for weeks, making plans. It’s not that I truly wanted to leave, but Daisy needed so much for me to go with her. It was the loneliness she feared the most.
Then she got on the bus one day and she had purple bruises on her arms. She’d been crying and suddenly it wasn’t a game anymore. It wasn’t some story we were writing about a great adventure to pass the time between school and sleep. When the bus pulled up at school, she looked at me, expectant, her backpack hanging heavier on her shoulders than normal. She said, We leave today at lunch? I didn’t know what to say to her, how to not say the wrong thing. So I did something much worse.
I walked away.
I think that was the moment I learned I wasn’t any good for anyone. Sure, I was barely eleven years old, so of course I wasn’t running north with nothing but a backpack and a skateboard. But I’d let Daisy believe in me. I’d let her trust me. Maybe I didn’t understand at the time what was really going on in her house, but on a conceptual level I got the fucking gist and yet I didn’t do anything to help her. I simply became another in a long line of letdowns.
I’ll never forget her eyes. How in them I saw her heart break. I see them still. Now.
My hands shake. Gripping the steering wheel, I barely see the road. It’s like tunnel vision, everything narrow and far away. I’m driving by memory more than sight. A tightness in my chest that’s been building for days now clamps down, climbing my throat. Suddenly it hurts to breathe.
When the phone buzzes in the cup holder, I nearly swerve into oncoming traffic, startled by the sound that feels louder in my head.
I hit the speakerphone button. “Yeah,” I answer, forcing my voice to work. I can’t hear myself. The static in my mind makes me feel like I’m underwater.
“Making sure you’re still coming,” Kai says. There’s noise in the background. Voices and muffled music. He’s already there at the stuffy Boston college bar where we arranged to meet.
“On my way.”
“Tick tock.”
I end the call and toss my phone on the passenger seat. The ache in my chest becomes unbearable, clenching down so hard it feels like I might snap a rib. I cut the wheel and veer onto the shoulder, slamming on the brakes. My throat’s closing as I frantically tear out of layers of clothing until I’m in just a wife-beater and sweating. I lower the windows to fill the Jeep with cool air.
The fuck am I doing?
Head in my hands, I can’t stop seeing her face. The disappointed look in her eyes. Not Daisy, the little girl from my past. But Taylor, the woman of my present.
She expected so much better from me. Not what I’d done back then, but what I was choosing to do now. She would’ve let me off the hook for acting like such a jackass this week if only I were strong enough to make the right decision when she gave me the chance.
Damn it, Edwards. Grow a pair.
I promised myself I’d be better for her and try to see myself through her eyes. See myself as more than just some gutter punk kid or an aimless loser or a walking one-night stand. She found the value in me, even when I couldn’t. So why the hell should I let Kai take that from me? Because he hasn’t just hijacked my life, he’s stolen from Taylor. I should be at a dumb dance with my girlfriend, not having a panic attack on the side of the road.
Shaking my head in disgust, I grab my discarded sweater and pull it on. Then I reach for the gearshift and put the Jeep in drive.
For the first time in my life, I find the courage to respect myself.
My first stop is Hunter’s place. Demi answers the door, greeting me with an inquisitive if somewhat hostile look. I don’t how much she’s heard since I last spoke to Taylor or what Hunter might have said after he wrote me the check.
I kiss her on the cheek as she lets me in.
Demi kind of recoils in response. “What’s that for, weirdo?”
“You were right,” I say with a wink.
“Well, obviously.” She pauses. “About what, though
?”
“Hey man.” Hunter approaches us cautiously. “Everything okay?”
“It will be.” I pull out the envelope of cash and hand it to him.
Demi narrows her eyes at the handoff. “What’s that?” she demands.
Hunter takes the money, confused. “But why?”
“Answer me, monk,” grumbles Demi, tugging on Hunter’s sleeve. “What’s happening?”
I shrug and answer Hunter. “Don’t need it anymore.”
He appears understandably relieved, though I don’t envy the interrogation he’s about to endure from his girlfriend.
“Go easy on him,” I tell Demi. “He’s a good guy.”
“You want to stay and order a pizza?” Hunter offers. “We’re just chilling tonight.”
“Can’t. I’m late for a dance.”
Leaving Hunter’s place, I call Kai. Already the tightness in my chest has subsided, and my hands are steady as the phone rings.
“You here?” he says.
“I don’t have your money.”
“Don’t fuck with me, bro. I make one phone call—”
“I’m going to tell Max it was my fault.” The resolve in my voice surprises me. And I become more assured of my decision with every word. “I’ll leave your name out of it. For now. But if you call me again, if I so much as feel you sniffing around, I’ll out you in a heartbeat. Don’t try me, Kai. This is your last chance.”
I hang up on him. Then, steeling my nerves, I make another call.
32
Taylor
I violently don’t want to be here.
As in, I’m considering grabbing a steak knife off the nearest table and taking a hostage on my way out a shattered window to make my escape.
