“What’d you bring?” Ellie demands as they climb out of the car.
Hunter holds up a brown paper bag. “Jack and Coke.”
“Good boy.”
The four of us head up the lawn, and the front door opens before we reach the porch. “Hey,” Taylor calls from inside. “You made it.”
“Hey, Jet,” Everett calls back, and my stomach flips again. But then I’m falling in line behind Ellie to pass through the front door, and I order myself to follow my friend’s advice and stop acting like a teenage girl.
I avoid Taylor’s gaze as everyone says hello and removes their jackets. I can feel him watching me, and I know I’ll blush if I look up. “Guys, this is Fred,” he says, and I finally raise my gaze to look at our host.
He’s not at all what I expected. Taylor had assured me Fred wasn’t like Preston, so I think I assumed he’d be more like Jet—tattoos and scruffy hair. Instead he looks completely…average. Short brown hair, black rimmed glasses, fairly tall. He’s dressed in faded blue jeans and an Avett Brothers t-shirt. I see Ellie’s gaze flick down to his bare feet and grin to myself. She has a weird thing about guys in jeans and bare feet. Immediately she sidles an inch or so closer to him.
“Fred, this is Everett, Hunter, Ellie, and Zoe.” He gestures to each of us in turn.
Fred looks at me for a second too long, and I wonder what Taylor has told him. He beams at me.
“Nice to meet you guys,” he says, but he’s still looking at me. “Glad you could come.” Fred leads us through the kitchen to the basement steps. “It’s nothing fancy, but we have some couches down there. It’s not a bad place to chill.”
I end up at the back of the group, next to Taylor. He takes my hand before I can follow my friends down the steps. “Hey,” he says, his voice low and scratchy. It sends a little shiver through me. I imagine what it would be like to hear that voice against my ear, whispering dirty things, and heat floods through me.
“Hey,” I say back, hoping he can’t see how affected I am already. He grins, and I know he knows. It seems like he always knows.
“I’m glad you came.” He tugs on my hand a little, pulling me toward him. Immediately I’m breathless, yearning for his lips to touch mine. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about last night.”
“Me too.” I lean forward until our foreheads are touching. “I wouldn’t mind a repeat performance soon.”
He smiles and brushes his lips against mine, groaning softly at the contact. The sound sends my heart into overdrive. “Want to ditch them?” he whispers.
I laugh. “Since none of them know each other, I’m thinking that’d be kind of shitty.”
He sighs dramatically. “Fine. Let’s go join them.”
When we reach the basement, I note both Ellie’s and Fred’s eyes are on us and try not to let it bother me. We gather on the couches, passing around beers. After a few minutes of general chit chat, I relax. Fred seems like a really nice guy. He’s polite, asking us each about what we do and where we go to school. I tense slightly when he says he goes to U of M, wondering what he’ll think of my community college, but instead he just asks me about my classes, not batting an eye when I tell him it’s my first full year.
I’m two beers in and feeling pretty good when Ellie groans. “I’m getting antsy,” she says. “Let’s play a game.”
I give her a warning look. We tend to play a lot of drinking games when we’re chilling like this, and I’m pretty good at some of them. But, knowing Ellie, she’s going to pick something that will embarrass me. Sure enough—
“What’d you have in mind?” Fred asks.
Ellie sits up straight, rubbing her hands together as she considers it. “How ‘bout Never Have I Ever?”
I groan softly. Ellie knows I hate that game. It’s far too personal, particularly with our current company.
“What’s that?” Fred asks. I can tell already he’s eating right out of her hands. I can’t blame him—I’d seen many men felled by the force of Ellie Canter’s overwhelming magnetism, and she’s been making eyes at him since we first walked in the door.
“We go around the circle and everyone says one thing they’ve never done,” she explains. “If you have done that thing, you take a shot.”
I can see Taylor watching me out of the corner of my eye. I wonder what he thinks of this game—he’s not the most open guy in the world.
“Ells, that game is lame,” I say. “We should play Let’s Go Camping or Kings or something.”
She shakes her head, grinning widely, and I know she knows exactly why I don’t want to play this game.
“We need cards for Kings,” she reminds me. “And the last time we played Camping you picked the hardest places. We all got wasted, and you were stone-cold sober.”
I glare at her, but she only continues to beam at me. “Who’s in?” she asks the guys.
“I’m game,” Hunter says, tossing his empty beer can on the coffee table.
“Me too,” Fred says.
Everett nods.
I look at Taylor, who raises his eyebrows at me, as if in question. I sigh. “Fine.”
“Good,” Ellie says. “Hunter, come over here. We need to be in a circle.”
We arrange ourselves into a loose semi-circle on the ground, Ellie grabbing the bottle of Jack and a few plastic cups from Hunter’s paper bag. She passes around the cups and sets the bottle in the center of the circle. I sit with my legs crossed, leaning against the couch. Taylor stretches out next to me, lounging on his side, supporting himself on one arm. I stare at that arm, at the way the weight of his body makes his bicep strain under his dark-green t-shirt. One of his tattoos peeks out from the tight fabric, a tendril of something in vivid blue. I want to run my finger along it, lift the arm of his shirt up to see what else is inked there. He chuckles softly and I look up to see his eyes on me.
“Whatcha looking at?” he asks, clearly amused.
Embarrassed, I look away, but he leans into me.
“I can show you my tat later. In fact, I can show you all of them.”
I laugh in spite of myself. I should be mortified that he caught me ogling his body, but, somehow, when he teases me this way it takes away my embarrassment, makes me want to laugh right along with him.
“Okay,” Ellie says, and kneels up. “I’ll get us started.” She stares straight at me and says, “Never have I ever taken my top off while standing on a bar in a packed club.”
I am going to kill her. I know this was what she had in mind when she suggested the game. She wants me to spill all my secrets in front of Taylor—it’s her own twisted way of trying to push us close together. Or she just likes watching me squirm. Giving her my best death stare, I grab the bottle of Jack from the center of the circle and pour a shot, which I swallow quickly.
Everyone laughs. Of course, I’m the only one to take a drink.
“Yeah, I’m gonna need some details on that one,” Fred says.
“I was drunk, and it was a dare,” I say, glad that at least I’m not blushing. “I’m not the kind of girl to back out on a dare.”
Taylor reaches over and rubs his palm over my knee. “Wish I’d been there,” he mutters, and I tremble a little.
“Okay, my turn,” Hunter says. He thinks for a moment. “Never have I ever…had sex with a girl.”
“Nice,” I laugh, watching as Taylor, Fred, and Everett pass the bottle between them, each pouring his shot. When Ellie grabs the Jack from him and takes a drink straight from the bottle, I’m pretty sure Fred’s eyes are going to pop out of his head.
“Are you kidding?” he asks.
She winks at him. “What can I say? I like to expand my horizons.”
“My turn.” I think for a moment, trying to determine what might embarrass my friend. The problem is that she’s so damn confident about everything. She doesn’t have any secrets and doesn’t feel embarrassed about her mistakes like normal people do. Finally, I grin. “Never have I ever surprised a boy at work with
candy and a teddy bear.”
If looks could kill I’d be melted by the sheer heat of her glare. Instead, I just laugh as she takes a gulp of Jack. “The first person I see smirking gets a kick to the nads,” she growls.
“We’re not smirking,” Everett says, patting her shoulder. “We think it’s really great you’re secretly such a sweetie.”
“Let me go before Everett loses his testicles,” Taylor says drily. “So…never have I ever left the country.”
Fred and Hunter both take drinks. “Wow,” Taylor says, looking around. “Not a very sophisticated bunch, are we?”
It goes around like that for a few rounds. Most of the statements are fairly benign, though every question Ellie asks seems custom designed to embarrass me. I do my best to get my own back at her, racking my brain to remember every sappy, girlish thing she has ever done and will now be ashamed of.
“I’ve got a good one,” Hunter says. “Never have I ever been arrested.”
I look over at Taylor, wondering how he’ll react when I take the bottle, only to discover he’s reaching for it himself.
“You’ve both been arrested?” Everett asks. “Jeez. Talk about a match made in heaven.”
Taylor flips him off as he hands me the bottle. I take my swig quickly, not wanting to be reminded of the night I’d been forced to spend in the city jail. Not one of my finer moments.
Taylor gives me a rueful smile. “I won’t ask if you won’t.”
“Deal.”
It turns out to be quite an illuminating game. By the time we’re all too drunk to continue, I’ve discovered that Taylor has been arrested, has been in more than one bar fight, has smoked pot but never tried anything harder, and has never been in love. In turn, I’ve had to admit that I’ve done ecstasy, broken a girl’s nose, shoplifted, and been suspended from school. Even better, Ellie’s had to confess that she cried over Jonathan Rigby for four days straight, that she sleeps with a night light, and not only that she goes to visit her grandmother in a nursing home every other week but that she also plays bingo while she’s there. In spite of my steady buzz, I’m feeling pretty proud of myself.
“I need food,” Everett says. He leans back against the couch and closes his eyes. “If I don’t eat, I’m going to be sick.”
“I’m too wasted to go out,” Fred says. He’s lying flat on his back on the floor, his torso and head under the coffee table. I’m not sure why he chose that spot, but hearing him talk from under the table makes me giggle.
“Come on, tipsy,” Taylor says, holding out his hand to me. “Let’s go upstairs and scrounge up some food.”
I take his hand, still laughing, and he guides me up the stairs.
“You feeling okay?” he asks, looking over at me. “I think Ellie was out to get you down there.”
I scowl. “That’s Ellie. She gets a kick out of embarrassing me.”
“Don’t worry, you held your own and got her back. Besides, I don’t think anything you revealed was all that bad.”
We reach the kitchen, and I lean against the counter, watching as he goes straight for the pantry. “Not too bad, huh?” I ask. “Including the arrest thing?”
He shrugs, riffling through the boxes and canned goods. “Nothing worse than I’ve done.” For a minute I wonder if he’ll go back on what he said and ask me about it, but he doesn’t. Instead, he turns to face me, a blue box in his hand. “What do you think? Mac ’n cheese sound good?”
I nod, and he fills a saucepan with water before dumping in the macaroni. He knows exactly where to find the pan and the spoons, clearly familiar with Fred’s kitchen.
“You hang out over here a lot?”
“Yeah, I guess.” His back is to me, and he’s fiddling with the dials on the stove. “Fred is one of the few friends I have that stuck around…after.”
I know he means after his brother died. I frown. “Your friends ditched you over that?”
He has the water set to boil now, so he turns to face me, mimicking my pose against the opposite counter, his arms crossed over his broad chest. “Not ditched me, so much. They just didn’t know how to deal with me. I wasn’t acting quite the same, you know?”
“You were going through some serious shit,” I say, and he gives me a smile that’s part grimace. “Yeah, I guess. They couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t snap out of it, why I didn’t want to play baseball anymore. We would have gone to State that year. They looked at my quitting as letting them down. And I kept getting in trouble at school—suspensions, coming to class trashed. My friends weren’t really the type to waste time on burnouts.”
He breathes deeply and rubs his hands across his face. “To be honest, it was my fault. Some of them were genuinely concerned about me, you know? But I pushed them away. I didn’t want to be okay. I didn’t want to get over it. I sure as hell didn’t want to pretend like things were the same as they used to be. It was easier to just push them away. Move on.”
This was all sounding way too familiar for comfort. “I know how that feels.” My voice is soft, and I’m suddenly a lot more sober.
He watches my face for a moment. “Yeah?” he finally asks, pushing off from the counter and coming to stand in front of me.
I nod. “Yeah.”
He’s close enough to touch now, so I do, reaching out to rest my hands against his hips. He pushes a lock of hair behind my ear. “Anyhow. Fred is the only one who refused to be pushed away. He just kept coming back, even when I was acting like a total dick.”
“Sounds like a good friend.”
“He’s the best. It helps that he was pretty close with Jim, too.” He pauses before he says his brother’s name, like he needs to prepare himself for the sound of it. “So I know he gets it, I guess.”
Suddenly he looks so sad that it makes my stomach hurt. I move my hands up over his chest, his neck, until my fingers brush against his face. “Want to know a secret?” I ask. “A real one?”
He nods, his eyes steady on mine.
“Sometimes I resent my mom. For being sick.”
Saying the words feels good. Like, really good. I’m not sure why. I only know that he’s been honest with me, and I think that’s hard for him. I want to give him something back, so he knows he can trust me. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”
Without breaking eye contact he leans forward until our foreheads are touching. “I’ve never really grieved for my brother.”
His voice is so quiet I can barely hear him. It’s such a terrible thing, and I feel awful for him. But I’m also freer somehow, knowing he trusts me. Knowing I can trust him. I avoid talking about this shit so much that I practically make a career out of it. Who would have guessed it’d be so freeing to tell someone?
“Thank you,” he whispers. “For telling me that.”
“Thank you for telling me about Jim.”
He breathes out when I say his name, and I wonder if I’ve done something wrong. But then he brushes his lips across mine almost like he’s thanking me.
Something sizzles behind him on the stove, and he jumps back.
“Water’s overflowing,” I say.
“Shit.” He runs over to stir the noodles and turn down the heat. “These are probably ready.”
I help him finish up the food, handing him milk and butter and getting out a stack of bowls. Once we have everything ready we go back down to our friends.
This time, I’m the one who reaches for his hand. And I don’t let go.
Chapter Nine
Taylor
After that night at Fred’s house, Zoe and I pretty much start spending all of our free time together. Neither of us has brought up what, exactly, this means. She made it pretty clear that first night in the park that she wasn’t interested in anything serious. Not that I am either; I’m clearly way too fucked up to be someone’s boyfriend. And Zoe deserves the most awesome, kick-ass boyfriend ever.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be with her, like, all of the time. Our friends get along
really well, which makes things easier. We meet up at parties, at the bar, in the park. Wherever people are hanging out I know I’m likely to find Zoe and her friends, having a beer and just chilling. I don’t take any chances though—I always make sure to ask ahead of time where she’ll be. It would really fuck up my confidence if she didn’t reciprocate, but, for the most part, it seems like she’s just as eager to be with me. She has class every day during the week, and I have my shifts at the garage, but even so I’ve started spending a few of my lunch breaks on campus with her.
And I am fully aware that all of this makes me a giant pussy. I have never been the kind of guy that chases after a girl the way I chase after Zoe. To his credit, Fred doesn’t give me a hard time about it, though I’m sure he’s laughing at me on the inside.
I just can’t help it. I’ve spent so long feeling shitty and lonely and closed off from everyone and everything. I want it that way, for the most part. It’s just easier to block people out, push them away. But Zoe is different. I don’t want to push her away, I want to figure out a way to bring her closer. She makes me feel better, calmer, clearer. In a life full of bullshit and anger she stands out. She’s a place where I can be quiet and…real.
Nothing else in my life is so completely and entirely beautiful and good.
A few weeks after we start seeing each other, Zoe texts to let me know that her mom isn’t feeling well and she won’t be joining her friends in Kennedy Park that night after all.
I feel a stab of disappointment, followed by concern. She never tells me much about her mom. All I know is that she’s not well and it has something to do with her mental health. I want to ask Zoe about it, want her to confide in me more, but she never brings it up. I know from experience that you just don’t push when it comes to personal stuff like that.
Can I help? I text back.
No, thanks. Call you later?
Sure.
I put my phone down, lean back in my chair, and take a sip of my beer. Faced with a night on my own, I’m not sure what I want to do. A house party is going on a few blocks over, one of the local kids home from school. The only good thing about the summer, as far as I’m concerned, is the increase in parties with free booze. It seems like every asshole who comes home from college is determined to christen his parents’ house with a massive kegger.
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