Dexter is even hotter, taller, stronger in my arms than I imagined. That’s what I feel like saying, but things of that weight are simply too hard to type in a message.
A guy can be hot and still do evil, unspeakable things, I type.
I don’t know why I say it. It’s not what I believe about Dexter, but as long as Rosa is on one side, I need to make that clear. Play the Devil’s advocate. I only speak my mind to Rosa. Anyone else and I would have just agreed.
Really, Charlee.
Dad wants to die, I say.
You don’t know that. Your father would not want to die.
He said it, Rosa.
She doesn’t reply and so I stand up and walk back to the pool house to see what Darcy’s up to. He’s standing at the edge of the pool, toes curled over the edge and his hands straight out, level with his shoulders. He pushes up and flips in the air, his jump so perfect that he only makes a tiny ripple in the water.
I grab the towel from the deck chair and tuck it around my hips.
Do you want to know the worst bit? I type.
I’m sorry…about your father. I don’t think he actually said that.
Noo! I reply in between messages but she doesn’t notice.
I didn’t mean Dad. I want her to please stop talking about death because it’s starting to sound peaceful, easy, right.
I think he’s preparing you. In case, you know?
Rosa, I meant Dexter! The worst bit about him…
And now I want to take back the last two minutes and never mention anything. I can’t tell this to her.
What is it? Don’t tell me he’s guilty?
Nothing like that.
I type the letter “I” three times before I know I can’t say, “I still like him.” What type of person does that make me? Intentional or not, he killed my mom, and if my dad sticks to his agenda, Dexter will have killed him, too.
So, what? I have feelings for my parents’ killer.
I run to the bathroom near the pool house, hearing my cell pinging with notifications from Rosa but I drop that on the way because I can’t stand imagining all the things she’s saying to me. This house is so cold now and the wind I create as I dart for the shower sends chills over my skin. They settle on my bones and I’m shaking again. I turn the water on full hot. Steam curls and climbs up the glass walls. I lock the door, step out of my suit and let the water burn my skin.
When I rub water from my eyes, I notice the steam has clung to the roof, curling and slipping through cracks—the door strip, the window, the cabinets. Trying to be anywhere but this hot, hot room with me in it.
Heck, I want to escape me, too.
Rosa. She’s one of the few people in my life who would kill to be here with me, and I’d kill to be anywhere but here. Guilt pushes down on my shoulders until I slide down the shower wall, the glass screeching as my back sticks to it.
When everything finally feels warm and my skin feels like it’s slipping off my bones, I dry, wrap the towel around my body and tuck it under my armpit.
Where did I leave my phone? I find it on the floor, just outside the door.
I don’t want to check it because a niggling feeling inside tells me something bad is on this phone. Rosa has sent me a bad, bad reply and so now I want to check because I can’t stand any more what ifs and…and I gasp.
Of all the possible replies—you like him? You fucked him already? He asked you out?
It’s none of those. It’s two words.
Read this.
I don’t “read this” yet. I decide to change before I do what she says, so I slip on a low-cut tank top and a mini skirt, and then see my reflection and slip into some loose pants and a T-shirt. I look for my gray socks to match my gray T-shirt and they take forever to find.
I put on each one slowly.
I want to be hungry but can’t force anything down, so I empty the dishwasher, and then I’m still not hungry, and Nana has done a fair job at cleaning the kitchen so I can’t do much else.
I curl up on the sofa with my feet under my bum, and open the link Rosa sent me. It’s about the ski accident. After all the coverage, how haven’t I read this article yet? But I suppose I haven’t watched TV or read the news online or in the papers for three weeks now. I gave up because I could make myself feel a whole lot better than the fantastical, unbelievable stories made me feel.
But this is horrible. This story is every one of those articles and news reports and stares from strangers all at once because the first line of the article says:
“Dexter Hollingworth, operating the lift at Mason’s Ski Resort on the day of the fatal accident, has now been reported as a drug addict who frequently has episodes of ‘zoning out’, reveals a source.”
Hours ago. I was there, and I saw it. Him gripping the passenger-side door where Darcy was—I should have kept Darcy away!—as if he was going to lose it if he didn’t have something solid to keep him up. How he was leaning into my face the whole time, the acidic scent on his breath.
When I caught his arms I saw symbols running up the inside of one forearm and a forest intertwined with what seemed to be a thorned heart on the other. How far did his tattoos run? Then there was the bar from his eyebrow ring making me want to see what it felt like under his skin.
And now I know it for certain.
I’m the most despicable person alive because I’ve never been more attracted to anyone than I am to the druggie who ruined my family.
4. Want, Wish
Dexter
That blonde hair again. I see it when she grips Darcy’s shoulder and skulks out of the hospital’s revolving entrance. I shouldn’t, but I text my mom and say something’s come up, can’t meet.
I follow. I duck and slip the hoodie over my head and shove my hands in my pockets. The slouch in her shoulders causes me to stiffen and anger ripples down my neck and builds in my knuckles.
Because I did this.
Because I tore her family apart.
So why am I following her? Do I need her to think I’m a stalker? Before they were all dropped, I had enough charges from the accident on my head and that’s as close as I’d like to be to trouble again.
None of that matters when I watch Darcy get his fingers into her tummy, hips, underarms. That boy is all she has left. Even from here, I hear Charlee growl a lethargic sound that seems like she can’t be bothered to laugh or even chide her brother, and it’s so real, so packed with hurt and beaten spirit that I call out, “Hey, Charz!”
I’ve done the wrong thing. Her eyes are scornful but she shrugs off that hateful look and turns in the other direction. She was either going the wrong way all that time or she’d rather wing it and try some other route that doesn’t involve me.
“Charz!” And that’s me calling, making myself look like an even bigger dick when I didn’t need to look more pathetic. But I can’t help it. I can’t stop myself. I pick up my pace and sort of half-run closer to them. Darcy has stopped and turned to look at me. I can tell Charlee would rather keep on walking, but she won’t leave her brother, either.
“Hey. Dex,” she replies, not looking at me.
I eye a paved retaining wall littered with dying, cracked leaves. I sit on the edge, careful not to sit on the leaves and snap them off, crumble what’s left of their lives. Darcy jogs up and shakes my hand, saying, “Hi, dude!” and I tell him things aren’t bad and he seems satisfied.
On a whim, I ask Darcy how things are with Walter so I won’t have to watch Charlee coming this way. I’d rather not see her now. She’s a poisonous animal in my world—the type of animal who rocks bright colors and is utterly irresistible to other wildlife until the prey gets cocky and wants that stunning animal for itself and then dies from her poison.
She sets her bum down first next to Darcy then slides her weight onto her propped hands. My palms are sweating, so I rub them down my jeans. It’s such a giveaway.
Nudging her shoulder, I grin and say, “You camping in there or something?�
��
“No, of cour—” Charlee stops herself when she gets I’m kidding.
Her cheeks are red and I’m not sure if she was flustered before she sat, her slim legs next to me, her boobs rubbing at the lining of her top. Now I’m rubbing down my pants again and my heart is pounding.
“I’m joking, relax,” I say, laughing it off.
“You wanted to know how Dad was?” Darcy asks. I nod, kicking my mind and body and everything I am that my badly timed question is coming up now with Charlee and me sitting here together.
“Well, Charlee said he was getting better and that soon he’d be doing a ton of stuff like playing with me but…”
I tear my gaze off Charlee’s leg and look at Darcy’s head hanging down. His heel bashes the wall behind his legs.
“But he’s not,” he says.
Charlee is looking at him and I can tell she understands him, even if she doesn’t like his choice of words. Then she meets my eyes. We share a look again, and her skin is so touchable, but I’d rather stay like this until I could map out the way her hair kicks out at the ends, or describe her lips from memory.
Her eyes move to her lap and then she sends a quick, gentle smile to Darcy, but they return to me. Once, twice and the third time confirms I could have her. We could be something, one day. And I could sink into her company, her comfort.
Her comfort would numb so much shit in my life, which is why I need to remember not to flirt. I need to remember what a piece of lowlife crap I am. Knowing I’ve killed someone and getting a reward—Charlee as mine—is plain wrong.
“So…” Darcy begins. The emphasis on the “O” and how he drags it out tells me he’s going to ask a really horrible question, that it doesn’t matter if I’m cleared because the talk around town says I’m— “So are you two like boyfriend-girlfriend or something?”
Charlee splutters and when I pat her back her muscles tighten at my touch, so I release her so she can cough up whatever went down wrong. When my hand is cold and empty, I realize it’s too late to remember what her skin felt like on mine.
“No, Darce!” Her voice is strong. You’d never know she just coughed her lungs up. “You’re so ridiculous. I don’t even know this guy. I don’t even…”
“Yeah, bud,” I throw in, lying as badly as she does. “Charz and I don’t really know each other. We just went to the same school.”
“Charz?” she says, a look on her face.
“Yeah. Charz,” I say. That look she’s given me is imbedded in my mind. “Charz” is stuck whether she likes it or not.
“Hmf.” She wipes away her smile with a flick of that long hair. “No one’s ever called me that.”
We say goodbye about ten seconds or three minutes later, after the longest silence in history. Their bodies shrink along the path down to the corner where they’ll disappear.
But as I watch, Charz turns and says something to Darcy before she jogs back to me. She catches her breath, her hair full of air.
“I do know you, Dexter Hollingworth.”
Shock from those words makes them so alien, so far from what I was expecting or from what I can grasp at this moment. I don’t know this Charlee. I tilt my head, trying to process what she wants. There’s a flicker of that sweet candy perfume but the wind carries that off and stiff eyebrows and a hand clutching her hip replace it. This pose is possibly the scariest thing because it’s turned her sexiness into that poisonous animal again, and she’s bright red from anger, I suppose, and I’m unaware—the prey about to be eaten.
“I do know you, Dexter.” She steps in closer. Here, with her nose an inch from mine and anger flaring from her nostrils…it reminds me of Dad. I sink back into my heels, though, and don’t straighten up to stand taller, or tense my shoulders. She isn’t Dad.
“I know what type of person you are, know what state you were in when you let my mother die. And you should know you’re…you’re…” She squeezes her eyes shut and tips her head to the sky. She’s about to explode and shower me in the worst type of rain that’ll haunt me for nights.
But she doesn’t. Charz shakes out her neck and shoulders, calls to Darcy, and slips around the corner.
I whip out my cell to call my buddy, Elliot, to see if he wants to do anything in the world to keep my mind busy and he says, sure.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Wishing can be bittersweet because on the way home I remember her windblown hair when she came back to me, and her teeth close enough to me behind those sweet lips to rip my head off.
Wishing can be a funny thing because I bet I could sketch her face from memory.
It still wouldn’t be as hurt and disappointed in me as she really is.
Now, with a pounding chest and a splintered heart, my punishment is finally real enough to feel.
5. Pick-up Truck
Dexter
Elliot and I sit with our asses glued to the sofa for so long I get cramps in my butt. It doesn’t help that the living room is only wide enough for one sofa and a lamp along the back wall and the rest is piled with junk.
Elliot drops his controller and links his fingers behind his head at the same time I do.
“Had enough?”
“What else do you wanna do?”
Stupidly, I look around as if this cramped, messy room will suddenly have something fun to do in it. “Meh. We can play another round?”
He cracks his fingers and toes and starts a new game. He picks the Zonda again. I pick the Lamborghini. We choose a different track to race on.
“So. Nothing more with the cops still?”
“Nope. Been told I’m cleared.”
“Do you trust ‘em?”
“No reason not to.”
“Don’t think they’re playing you?”
The moment I try to gauge where he’s going with this my half-a-million-dollar car swerves and I save it just before it hits the guardrails. “I don’t know. They said there’s not enough evidence and that’s that.”
I sound believable out loud. Some other part of me is standing in the corner of this room and evaluating me. My knees are bent and my toes shoved under the fringe of the rug, and I’m glued to the TV because this is the race I need to win if I want to be able to show my face to Elliot again. I know I seem carefree because of careful evaluation. I’m good at hiding what I want.
Why would Elliot suspect anything? That police investigation is all over.
After the game finishes, he says, “You’re a lucky son of a bitch, you know that.”
I get to my feet. Standing, I have the urge to run. “Sure do.”
Then he says something about an article that labeled me a druggie. I can’t hear more of that shit today. I can usually block it out, but all I can think about is Charlee suddenly hating me because of this particular story.
“I’ll come back with some soda,” I tell Elliot and stumble into the kitchen, knocking over a pile of Lego blocks in the process. I pick a handful of them up and close my fist on them but they’re too small and too well engineered to crush and snap in my fist. Doesn’t mean I don’t spend the next thirty seconds bashing a few under my foot, slamming my heel on the blocks until pain won’t stop shooting up the back of my ankle and calf.
“Hey!” my sister yells, hands flailing as she drops to my feet. She picks up her kid’s mess and bundles it in her hands. “Why the hell are you breaking Adam’s toys?”
“Give it a rest.”
Tahny slams her palm to the wall, creating a barrier between the kitchen and me. I shrug her off. Her one year on my age stopped being a problem at thirteen.
“What are you doing back here? Isn’t your new dude’s place too far to drop by annoyingly like this all the time anymore?”
“Funny,” she says, unamused. “I’ll answer that when you tell me why you’re breaking my child’s toys. You’re a shit uncle. You know I can’t afford to buy him new toys, let alone have to replace this stuff. Aghhh!” she mumbles. “You and Dad are just the
same.”
Finger pointed at her face, I say, “I’m not doing this.”
“You are!” she follows my trail as I peer into the empty fridge, devoid of soda, and adds, “Like now. You can’t admit you’re wrong and you’re an asshole.”
I must have rolled my eyes at her because she’s staring at me even more pissed, veins popping from her neck.
“What?” I say.
“You think he’s so horrible for being at the bar and on his phone and watching TV, but you do it too. You’re at the gym or with Elliot or on the guitar. Adam could need someone and you’d be in the same room and not notice.”
Tahny sighs, the fire suddenly gone. The Lego blocks clink and clank all over the table and she seems tired, so far from the bitch sister she was a moment ago.
Adam comes waddling around the corner holding a toy stuffed with a god-awful rattling thing inside. I glance at Tahny but she’s crouched down, her butt sticking out from under a counter, so I turn away.
“Get him will you,” she tells me.
I look at the floor below me, hoping Elliot doesn’t mind waiting. It’s not that I hate Adam. It’s the opposite. I scoop him up and prop him over my forearm as if he were a doll on display. He bounces in my arms, so I give the little daredevil a scare and he slips through my arms two or so inches before I wrap him tighter into me.
Tahny pokes out of the cupboard with a colander and spoon thing to scoop out spaghetti with—guess she’s making dinner since Dad is who-knows-where and Mom must be working a late shift at the hospital—and grins at Adam and I.
The feeling hits me square in the chest, rocking my feet off-balance.
I try to avoid having too many moments where it’s just Adam and me. Spending time with Adam is like
a thousand pick up trucks shattering against a tree trunk.
a thousand times letting Jack walk away without getting to say goodbye.
Spending time with Adam—with the same round eyes, freckled skin, and gaze—makes me relive the day my little brother Jack and my girlfriend Lily left to go pick up some groceries and were run off the road by some asshole and left for dead. And reminds me that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
Drowning in You Page 3
