His face is that of a Dad who’s just caught some bloke fucking his daughter and I’m set on pissing my pants right there, just shriveling up into a hole.
“Not even if he’s Charlee’s boyfriend?” Darcy adds, nudging his hip into my side.
His nana rests the plate on a counter and makes this noise that I suppose is her laugh. Even Darcy’s grandfather is slapping at Darcy’s shoulder and laughing, glancing between my face and his wife, who is still chortling.
I let out a meek cough-laugh. Somehow the mix-up isn’t that funny for me yet.
After that, the grandparents grudgingly let me go off with Darcy into a room that’s about the size of half my house. The rug is an imitation grizzly bear—an imitation because there’s a sign saying “we love animals” on a wall nearby—and has an overstretched wood-and-glass coffee table on it. There’s a bookshelf two cars long and one car high stretching across one part of the back wall, and two paintings facing each other off on opposing walls, one of them in between windows taller than the length of my room.
“Here,” Darcy says, pulling me to a rug. We fall onto the rug and Darcy pulls out two iPads. “Now, you know this game, right?” he says, tapping the screen. I nod without knowing I’m nodding, and he tells me we’re playing in three, two, one.
This stick figure takes off, and I kill him within one and a half seconds by shattering him against a pole.
“So you just walk in here to see your girlfriend now, do you?”
I clear my throat, choking suddenly. “Um, Darcy?”
He starts pulling back from his game, but there’s a delay before he pauses it and meets my eyes.
“I’m not her boyfriend.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
Good question. It’s taken a ten-year-old to make me wonder why I didn’t check her house first to see if she was here, or just call her up to tell her about my dad. But maybe every phone—Mom’s, Tahny’s, mine—are tapped and it’s not safe to speak about this stuff. Or maybe I’m being a fucking psycho.
“How long is a piece of string,” I answer.
Darcy eats up that one. He chews on it until the question is soggy and he forgets what he was doing and we go back to the game.
“So where’s Charz then?”
Darcy sniggers in his palm. After a moment I remember he thinks my nickname for his sister is funny. “She’s still with Dad. Nana and Pa came by quickly and then told me we had to leave her there with him.” He finishes by shrugging his shoulders.
Darcy puts down the iPad again and comes back with a jumbo cup from The Crooked Shelf where Elliot works. He slurps at the milkshake. I know it’s a milkshake because Elliot brings half the stuff from the menu home with him. Somehow I doubt that they make milkshakes and hand them out, but he still maintains they have exactly two left after some of his shifts that he needs to take with him.
“You like The Crooked Shelf?” I ask, nodding at the cup.
Darcy looks at what he’s holding and seems surprised. “Do you want some?”
“Nah, buddy.”
“I’ve been there a while ago. Mommy and Charlee used to take me. It was our place but now Mommy’s gone and I can’t go anymore.”
“Has your sister been going there just recently?”
Darcy nods. “Yup!” He slurps at his milkshake again, without asking me if I want something, without noticing I’m balling my fists at my side, without seeing my face hot and red, without hearing my teeth grinding together.
“So, just in the last couple of weeks she’s been going back?” I find myself asking.
“Oh, yeah. She doesn’t come back with food for me which sucks bad but today she got me a milkshake!”
Why does everything have to be exclaimed!? “She doesn’t take you, huh? Just goes and comes back without anything.”
“How did you know?”
I make a “never mind” gesture with my hand, because I can’t say anything. He resumes his game, forcing me to shatter my stick figure into poles, plunge him over cliff faces, and crumble him into oncoming cars. It’s all I can do. He lives for fifteen seconds by my last game.
My phone buzzes from inside my pocket. It’s Raych. Fuck.
Sure enough, she says, Hey babe. What are you doing tonight?
Busy, I reply and pick up my game again.
She’s bipolar, I swear. She may not remember trying to make me fuck her at my work, but I do. At fourteen seconds into the game my phone buzzes and knowing it’s Raych makes me lose my focus. My stick figure dies ten milliseconds short of fifteen seconds.
I’ll just come to you.
I’m busy.
“Is that your girlfriend?” Darcy says, exaggerating the “girl” in girlfriend as kids his age always do, as if I should be embarrassed by that.
“Dude,” I ruffle up his hair. “I’ll tell everyone at your school you have a girlfriend. Whatcha think about that?”
He begs me not to and I give in when the kid looks desperate.
Fuck your ‘busy’ Dex. I know you’re fucking that blonde-haired bimbo right now.
Five seconds later she continues, So say hi from me and that she can’t suck your cock like I can.
I crush my fist around my phone, telling myself to breathe, that it’s okay to let go, that I have to anyway because I’m not a May. I can’t break phones and iPads and cars and buy new ones whenever I feel like it.
I’m not doing this. Leave me alone.
No, we’re going to talk about this now! Tell me what you’re thinking. You’ve already moved on, haven’t you?
Please. There’s no “us” to move on from. You were the one who said being friends was what you wanted. Just been busy.
I storm out of the room, replying to Darcy’s confused tone that I’ll be back.
I will be back—I’m not gonna leave that kid—but right now?
Crack, crack, crack. My knuckles bleed when I shake out my fist. Even expensive bricks hurt like a motherfucker.
“Fuuuck,” I whisper to myself, cradling my hand, then thinking better and shaking my fingers out. I alternate like this for a bit, walking in circles.
“Dex?” Charz says in a wary tone as she heads for the door.
There’s no fucking way she’s getting inside that house without explaining what she’s done with Elliot. I block my hand across the door. She halts, gives a look, and turns to me.
“I really think you need space,” she says.
“I do need space but you’ve fucked everything up anyway.”
I regret the harsh words the second they’re out of my mouth. Part of me knows this isn’t fair since I haven’t asked her to be my girlfriend, but does that matter? Does that matter? Not now.
She gasps, and steps back, tripping. I catch her arm, which reminds me of the first time we met in the rain, by her car, when I was having a hypo and she caught me and stopped me from falling. At least I’m honest with girls. They know what to expect with me.
But remembering how beautiful Charz was with her hair down, and when she tucked one side away behind her ear to reveal that smile at one edge of her mouth—the way she looked at me. It turns my world upside down.
I let go of her arm. I don’t want to think or speak or anything.
Charz just needs to tell me she’s not with my best bud, Elliot.
“Thank you.” She clears her throat. “I’ll let you, err, calm down. Can I make you a tea or coffee inside?”
I grab her shoulder roughly, thrusting her against the wall. The way her body melts at my touch, how she lets me handle her, the way she bites her lip as she sticks to the wall with her legs just separated, waiting for me without knowing how much this makes me want to take her right here—she steals my words. I don’t need much strength to keep her here like this, but my body seems to react to how she knows I could hold her down, against the front of the bricks and she’d want me to hold her down. That’s the look she gives me.
She stares at my arms, so I look down too, and i
t is shocking under the light beam. My veins pop from inside my elbow and run down my forearm. The tattoos are distorted, stretched over the skin and muscles. Charz reaches out and I don’t want her to touch me but at the same moment I do, which is why I end up allowing her to touch my eyebrow piercing with her finger to feel the bar under my skin.
I mumble to myself and look away, letting her go, and she arcs against the wall, her curves marked by shadows under the porch light.
I pace the porch once, twice, glaring at her and doing another round before storming back into her space. She does that half smile again and leans in toward me.
Pressing two fingers to her lips I push her away despite her sweet candy scent breaking my walls apart, and ask, “Are you with him?”
Charz doesn’t ask who. She also doesn’t say no.
19. Loving and Losing
Charlee
To say Dex looks hurt is both shocking, and an understatement. Dex is the perfect actor when he’s around me. He could tell me he won a million dollars in the lotto and I’d believe it just because Dex has a customizable poker face at his beck and call.
I’ve obviously discovered the tick that gives away his game. Dex isn’t the guy who plays girls how I thought he did. Which makes my heart shiver. His two fingers dropped from my lips the moment I don’t answer. Of course I want to jump him and say I am his, but that isn’t sensible or right given the situation with my parents and Elliot.
Or that both yes and no never seem to work with us.
Shaking my head, I work something out. “Wait, you know Elliot?”
“Elliot Sanders? Er, he’s my best bud.”
You know there’s this gaping space between us, and if I leaned forward I’d grab Dex’s shirt without ever touching him. You know there’s a three-inch-thick glass wall separating us.
Now we know, too.
“But I’m not with him,” I say, finally answering his original question.
That “Dex” poker face doesn’t go back up. My lips still burn with the memory of his fingers on them. And for once, all this skin-deep attraction to each other makes sense. Wasn’t that what it was before? Two strangers who thought each other attractive?
It doesn’t feel like that anymore.
I get how people call their partners their soul mates now. It’s because you can’t explain why you love someone. Why would anyone want to risk their sanity and secrets with someone who fights with them daily and annoys them beyond the capability of any other person on the planet? It’s because finding your soul mate, your love, isn’t a choice and when you know it, it’s already happened. You’re linked.
Expressionless once again, Dex says, “Took a while.”
In the spur of the moment, I cross the distance and smash my lips to his. He paws at my hips with his huge hands, grabbing the skin under my tank top, but still not touching what he seems to need—or perhaps just not enough of it.
Our lips move together, tongues lashing at each other’s. I don’t relent and neither does he, pulling me tight against his crotch, and moaning softly into my mouth. I can’t breathe with him holding me so close, one hand cupping the back of my head and the other clenching my waist, massaging my skin, burning me with his touch.
Realizing we’re under the porch light by my front door, I shuffle us backward. He follows my lead. We move with his lips still hungry against mine, now both of us suddenly struggling to breathe. I rasp what sounds like a noise of pain and he grunts into my mouth, holding us together, chest and pelvis, until we tumble onto a wooden bench, whose tie-up cushions break our fall.
I lift one leg and curl it around him so I’m straddling his front. He starts framing my waist, but in a flash his huge hands circle my breasts, moving in a kneading motion until Dexter grunts and reaches into my bra to—
Oh. My. God. Is this what it feels like having a man touch you? I don’t think I’ve actually ever been touched before. Not if this has always felt like tickling and Dex’s fingers instantly dampen my panties.
His fingers trace up until he finds my nipple and alternates between a soft pinch and vibrating his finger over the tip. My body trembles, though I am embarrassed to the highest heavens and back for looking so silly, and a very O-sounding noise escapes my lips. I’m already wet between my legs and my nails are imbedded in poor Dex’s back, which I’ve only just realized, way after I lost control of my body.
He sucks at my lip until I pull back too far and it pops from his mouth.
Sweet Lord!
“My dad is in serious need of a load of cash and it seems like he’s been stalking your parents for years,” he says too fast, his eyes shut.
I repeat what I think he said in my mind, and the words in the sentence only make sense once I do.
Why does he have to do this? It’s not the shocking things he says, but it’s as if he knows how much they hurt at certain times and that’s why he says them when he does. He always does this once we get too close.
I’m suddenly aware of the pressure I’m sitting on. The first time he is hard against me will now forever be remembered as the moment I hate Dexter Hollingworth. Why would his dad do this? Lisa is one of Dad’s nurses. I’m in love with Dex. This doesn’t make sense.
Dex matter-of-factly lifts me off his body, just puts me down next to him. We sit in a silence choked with tension. He’s joking, I think. He’s pulling some kind of fast one on me. That has to be the answer, so I grin to myself and nudge Dex’s shoulder. “You’re such a good actor!” I say, pinching his chin and turning his face towards me. “Look at you. You haven’t blinked, or broken into a smile, or done that thing where you mess up your hair when you’re nervous. Nothing.”
I give his lips a peck, which feels so odd, because it’s the type of thing boyfriends and girlfriends do, and we’re nothing at all. “I’m impressed.”
“Dad,” Dex says, glaring at me without flinching, “has been having conversations with his old gang about plans to steal money from Walter’s account. He even has a bank statement with your dad’s details. I am absolutely not kidding.”
Dex hangs his head after this, running a hand through his dark hair. If he’s thinking about the joke I made about his habit at all, he isn’t showing it. When he takes his hand from his head, it’s shaking. His face is pale.
I stagger to my feet and backwards. “You’re kidding.” I’m not asking him; I’m telling him.
“He needs a ton of money to get him out of a motherload of a mess.”
I want to yell at him that he’s lying, but I keep my mouth closed instead and shake my head.
Dex storms over to me. For the first time I’m scared of him. Even more scared than the night a car followed Rosa and I down a dark street at three in the morning, after we’d left a nightclub looking for a cab home. If Dex’s dad is anything like him, I should run. I should end my fantasies and take Darcy somewhere where the season isn’t the same as this one, somewhere that far.
“Why won’t you fu—” Dex shocks himself, and tries again. “Why won’t you believe me?”
Inside Dex’s grip, my fingers are beginning to tingle and lose feeling. My pulse is pumping like it does when I touch the wall after a race but my mouth doesn’t open for air. Good use I am.
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Oh, that’s right, he did try. At the pool house. But I shut him down.
“I didn’t know what he was going to do for sure, and it’s not the type of thing you dial the cops about. ‘Just had a feeling, sir.’ My dad has documented a lot. It’s not all locked away, so we can find a way to get in without him noticing.”
“Wait a minute.” I hold up a finger. “You’re going to be ‘investigating’ this on your own?” I hold my palms by my shoulders in a gesture of surrender. “You’re on your own. I’m reporting this to the police, so investigate all you—”
“Charz.” Dex tilts his head at me, giving me a serious look. He steps in, head still tilted, saying, “You don’t call the cops on Dad’s old gang. You
buy them a bottle of Royal DeMaria and say sorry for getting confused with whatever you heard wrong.”
“It’s people like that who need to be sent to jail.”
“People like that know what school the jail warden’s son goes to and knows what that warden’s wife’s breast feels like in his hand.”
I gape at Dex. That poker face is back up. He sucks in huge lungfuls of air through his nose since his lips are a thin line.
Should have stuck to my head. My head was right when it told me a billion times Dex looks like, and is, trouble. Instincts are the problem; you leap at the innate reaction and it gets you face-to-face with your crush, who’s best friends with the guy you kissed and has you involved with one of the most dangerous families in the country.
What should we do? Do we pack up and escape? Do I have to organize to have my dad transferred to a high-security room with extra guards? How do I do that? These are the questions I imagine myself asking Dex as I spin and bolt to my front door. As I’m reaching for the knob, I feel something pull me back.
I fall into Dex’s arms and he holds my weight upright. I push out of his grip, and grab at the handle again, but he grabs my waist from behind and drags me back. I spin. I spit in his face, but he’s practiced. He holds onto me with one hand as my shoes lunge at the decking, and wipes away the spit from his eye and cheek with the back of his other hand.
When he pulls me in by my chin, the exact way I’d caressed his skin before, it’s so soft and easy to slip away from that I actually don’t move from him. I fall into him and slam my palms to his chest, leaving them there, feeling hope drain from my fingers like melted butter.
For as much as I wanted to escape, a rush of adrenaline hits me now that he won’t let me go and I don’t want him to.
“I know how this works. I will stop this from happening, but you have to trust me, Charz.”
My nickname spins through my mind, tearing me apart between fear and love. I trust him more than I trust almost anyone but my dad, but going against the law is a different issue. What’s the point in even having rules and regulations if you’re going to take the law into your own hands anyway? Why not everyone run amok, if that’s the preferred way of handling crime?
Drowning in You Page 15
