“You trust me, don’t you?” I ask.
He puts his nose in the hollow of my neck. “You know I do,” he rasps. “Just … let’s keep our clothes on, okay?”
I suppress a smile. Four rules knocked down to one. It’s not even Thanksgiving, and I’m going to win that bet. Maybe, if I’m really gentle, I’ll get to keep him in my life.
He scoops me up and lays me on the bed, settling over me until my thighs press against his. Limbs tangle, feet touch. My hands go to his stomach. His hands go to my cheek, my chin, my neck. They slide between my breasts, exploring my body through the robe. We’re breathing hard, and I grind against him, tease him with the feel of my chest against his. My pelvis moves up and down as his hand slides up my thigh and beneath the satin. His fingers play with my thin, lacey underwear. He cups my butt and holds me against him.
I slip off my robe and toss it to the floor.
This is the moment I expect him to stop. Instead his eyes turn to molten pools of hunger. He kisses my neck, cups my breasts through my bra, lifts his arms as I take off his shirt. My heart is racing; my skin is on fire. I need him to fill me, take away the hollow space, complete me with his … I curl my fingers around his erection.
He inhales sharply. “I want you so bad,” he says.
Running a hand down his chest, I hook my thumb in the waist-band of his pants.
I can do this, take his virginity. It would feel damn good, and it’s what he wants. But then the room starts getting darker. The lights from the Duvall house are dimming as someone runs from room to room, turning them off one after the other.
A shiver goes up my spine.
Mike.
I remember the rainy day he took me on a drive in his Lexus, when he spoke in a tender voice and promised to treat me with respect. His hands had been warm as he held mine, his eyes so soft and earnest and sincere that when he said he’d never rob me of my innocence, I believed him.
And I realize that even though the relationship ended when he cheated, the fairy tale lost its appeal when he demanded my body as proof I loved him. When he used it as a means of comfort mere hours after Roland’s funeral. Two bodies merging in the back of his Lexus, my eyes on the ceiling as rain pummeled the fogged-up windows.
Does seducing Quinn make me just like Mike?
I look into my lab partners darkened eyes.
When I made that bet with Tasha, I didn’t know or care about this warm-hearted Mormon boy. But now … damn, I see myself in him, or at least the self I used to be. The thought of hurting him, of ruining his life, makes my heart hurt. And that’s when it hits me—I’d rather have something real with Quinn than destroy him with a night of reckless sex.
I move my hands from his perfect Ken doll body, roll sideways and swing my legs over the edge of the bed. I walk to the closet and throw on a pair of gray sweat pants and an oversized shirt. It’s the only thing I’ve done today that feels right.
“We have to stop,” I say, realizing this principled boy was ready to throw away his morals for me.
He should be angry, maybe throw a pillow across the room. Instead he curls sideways and buries his head in his hands. He’d better not be crying. I take a cautious step forward and poke him in the arm.
He looks at me with sullen eyes. “Kat, I’m sorry. I should have stuck to the rules. Coming here was a bad idea. Maybe you should call Molly.”
He puts on his shirt, his left shoe, his right. His shoulders slump; shame comes off him in waves.
My tongue is frozen in my mouth.
“I’ll call her myself if you want,” he says.
Without asking my permission he picks up the receiver on my nightstand, listens for a second and then puts it back down. A line forms between his eyebrows.
“Hm,” he says.
“What is it?”
“There’s no dial tone.”
I grab my cell phone from under my pillow, turn it on and watch the screen light up. Six missed calls, all from Mike. The first was at twelve o’ five, the second at twelve ten, the third at twelve fifteen and so on and so forth.
My blood runs cold.
He stopped calling around the same time Quinn arrived at my house. Coincidence? I think not. There’s a crash in the hallway followed by the sound of a fist hitting boxes, shoes smashing against metal appliances, an object thrown against my door. Damn.
I give the phone to Quinn and push him into the closet. He hits his head on a low shelf and winces.
“Stay in there until he’s gone. Don’t make any noise!” I hiss.
“But Kat—”
“I said stay … unless you have a death wish.”
The moment I slide the closet door shut, a gun goes off and I jump. My bedroom door flies open and Mike walks in. His oily brown hair is in his eyes, nostrils flaring, gun aimed at the floor.
I should be scared, but instead I’m angry. How dare he try to control my life!
“What are you doing here?” I scream.
“Don’t blame this on me, Alley Kat. It’s what you want. You invited some guy over in the middle of the night to mess with my head and make me jealous. Once a slut, always a slut. Now where is he!”
I shake my head. “There’s no one here but me.”
He blinks and sways on his feet, more drunk off his ass than I’ve ever seen him.
“There’s a car,” he accuses, his words slurred.
“What car?”
“Parked near your house.”
“Do you recognize it?” I ask.
“No.” He glances at the floor.
“It could be anyone, Mike. Have you gone to the Johnson’s, the Flynn’s, the White’s … threatened the Changs with a weapon if they don’t tell the truth?” My voice rises and shakes with fury. “How dare you bring a gun into my home!”
“Just say you love me, Kat.” He demands, putting the barrel to his head. Tears stream down his face, turning his cheeks a shiny red.
“Put the gun down,” I say.
“No. This is what you want! Don’t deny it. You’re glad that Roland died because now you have his friends. No more being tag-along Kat, forced into the shadows to do his dirty work. No more having to defend yourself against jabs and insults you don’t deserve.”
He sniffs, steadies himself against the wall and grips the gun handle tighter. “You meant to kill him when you looked the other way. Now you want to kill me too!”
My hands shake. I hate the way he makes me feel. Like he’s an innocent victim, and I’m a psychopath villain with a heart of stone. He’s cruel, but refusing to say those three small words is crueler. Burying my brother was hard enough. I can’t watch Mike die.
“I love you,” I whisper.
“Louder,” he says, metal shaking in his hand.
“I love you,” I yell.
“I don’t believe you. Prove it.”
If I could cry, I’d do it now because for the first time I understand that sex with Mike was never about love. All those times I’d given myself to him in the name of love had been a lie. He wanted power. Love had nothing to do with it.
“How do you expect me to do that?” I ask, my voice shaking and breathless with fear. Dangerous as Mike can be when he’s drunk, I can’t believe he’d force himself on me.
“Get on your knees and beg for forgiveness.” He waves the gun in the air, pointing it to a spot four feet in front of him. “Right on top of the mud stain in the carpet. Like a worm. You need to grovel like a worm.”
“I won’t.”
“You will or I’ll shoot,” he puts the gun to his head again.
I drop to my knees on the carpet and say everything he tells me to say. About how I’ve hurt and manipulated him, slept around, taken him for granted, about how perfect he is and how hateful I am. My worth is torn to shreds by my own voice. Bitter words float from my tongue to my ears until my brain begins to believe them. My eyes drop to the floor.
“Forgive me?” I squeak out.
“Not this time,”
Mike grunts. When I look up, he’s pointing the gun at my head. How many times has my ex gotten into fist fights with strangers, screamed obscenities at friends and threatened girls who said no to him? How many times have I bailed him out of jail and taken him to the hospital, all while telling myself he’d never treat me like that?
He always had a reason. It was always someone else’s fault. Mike wasn’t bad, he was misunderstood. I saw the good in him when no one else did. My breath catches; my body freezes in terror and shock.
“Mike, you wouldn’t.”
“I trusted you.”
“You’re drunk.”
Mike’s eyes harden. I can feel his rage in the silence, see it in the set of his mouth, in the barrel of the gun as it inches closer.
And that’s when I know it’s over.
Mike is going to kill me.
Everything happens quickly. The sound of sirens cuts through the night, and I’m pushed to the side as a shot goes off. My cell phone lands at my feet with 911 lit up on the screen, and there, right there next to the phone is my sweet blond hero in his Spiderman pajamas bottoms. His face is in the carpet. His shirt is limp like his too-still body.
The sirens grow louder. Red lights flash through my bedroom blinds. Mike stuffs the gun into his jean and stumbles from the room.
I turn over my lab partner.
“Quinn?”
There’s a growing red spot on the floor, blood gushing wet and hot between my fingers as I press the heel of my hand into the gunshot wound below his ribs. It oozes around my fingers. I hope to God I can stop the flow, that I can keep him from bleeding to death so the EMTs can work on him.
“Don’t be dead,” I whisper to the body in my arms. “Damn it, Quinn, you have to stay alive for me.”
43
Katarina
I call the Walkers and ride in the ambulance with Quinn. The EMTs speak in urgent voices as they hover around him, stopping to exchange worried glances every few seconds. They might as well be speaking Greek with how much I understand.
What’s worse is that whenever I glance at my lab partner lying on that stretcher with monitors hooked up to him, straps tight around his body like Frankenstein in a black and white movie, I feel as if this can’t be happening. None of this is real.
Except it is.
When we arrive at the hospital, Quinn’s dad is there in sneakers and a ratty bathrobe. He’s already filled out a mountain of papers and confers with doctors as I sit in a corner—watching, waiting, biting my red-painted nails. There’s dried blood all over my sweatshirt, and I notice people staring, like they think I’m the one with the gunshot wound who needs to be rushed to emergency surgery, which I could be … if it weren’t for Quinn.
Please God, keep him alive! I wonder if he’ll answer the prayer of a Christian who fights with her pastor father, if he’ll have mercy on a Mormon boy who sneaks out in the middle of the night against his family’s wishes to be with a girl who’s bad for him.
Mr. Walker crosses the emergency room and sits beside me. When I glance at him, his eyes are swollen, his face splotchy and red.
“Thank you, Kat,” he says in a rough voice.
I stare at him in shock. He can’t be serious. Thank you for what. For calling his son in the middle of the night and trying to take his innocence before possibly getting him killed?
He pulls out a rag from the pocket in his robe and hands it to me. “You kept him from bleeding to death before the ambulance arrived.”
I walk to the water fountain, wet the rag and wipe blood from my face and neck, wishing I could erase the last hour from my memory. The perpetual shock, the guilt, the look of horror on the policeman’s face when he saw me wrapping Quinn’s body with a ripped-up bed sheet.
As soon as I told that officer the story, he called for backup to deal with Mike. Not that it mattered. The coward had run off.
Through the commotion I knelt beside Quinn, pushed on the wound with the palm of my left hand, tightened the bandage with my right and waited for the ambulance to come. Officer Seamus called my father and explained everything. Then he handed me the phone so my dad could say that he and Mom would be on the next plane home.
I sit next to Mr. Walker, who senses my distress and tells me there’s no way I could’ve known Mike had a gun. He tells me Quinn makes his own decisions, and I’m not to blame.
“Just pray for him, Kat. God hears the prayers of those he loves.”
Quinn’s father is too nice. He doesn’t know how everyone around me dies. Not just my brother, but my parents and friends who’ve each suffered an inner-death in the last few months. My mother tries to hide it with her computer addiction, my father with his workaholism, Mike with his constant drinking, and now I’m losing Quinn.
He had more life in him than anyone I knew.
I bury my head in my hands and imagine they’re still red with the blood of each life I’ve ruined. Quinn had a squeaky clean record before I came along. No dealings with the principal. No run-ins with crazy jocks.
John’s voice pops into my head plain as day, You brought this on yourself, Kat. Now leave that boy alone.
Why didn’t I listen?
***
Her eyes are sad.
I rise from the waiting room couch as Mrs. Walker comes closer. I’ve been at the hospital three days praying for Quinn to wake up, restricted from seeing him while he recovers. And his mother arrived a few hours ago and went immediately to his room.
“You must be Kat,” she says, the worry lines around her eyes deepening as she shakes my hand.
She phrases the sentence just like her son would, as she pushes her blond hair away from her face. Wow. He got his mother’s hair. My heart constricts when I think of my lab partner’s blond curls on the floor of my bedroom.
“Is he okay?” I ask.
“He’s asking for you.”
I glance back at the couch where my mother is sleeping, her head on the arm rest, her mouth halfway open. I’ve been amazed at the outpouring of love and concern my parents have shown since returning from Texas.
“Hold on, I need to tell my mom,” I say.
My knees hit the carpet by the couch as I nudge her in the shoulder. “Mom,” I whisper.
Her eyes snap open.
“Quinn’s awake. He’s asking for me.”
She squeezes my arm. “That’s great, Kat.”
Her once-dull eyes are filled with emotion, like she finally remembers her child who’s alive. There’s a squeaking sound and a burst of air that blows hair back from my face.
My father walks through the sliding door carrying coffee and a paper bag from McDonalds. His jacket is undone and his jeans have a hole in them. It’s a look he hasn’t sported since before my brother died.
“I have news,” he says. “Mike’s been apprehended.” A smile splits across his face.
“Quinn’s awake,” I tell him, watching as he sits next to my mom, drapes an arm around her shoulders and gives her a kiss on the cheek. The skin over my breastbone warms. My parents love each other.
“Well.” He clears his throat. “Go see him. Thank him for saving my daughter’s life.”
My heart squeezes. What, that’s it? No lecture about his religion, no warning that I’ll lose my soul to the sweet-faced demon boy?
I glance over my shoulder and see Mrs. Walker standing there. She leads me into a room that smells like alcohol. Quinn is attached to monitors. An IV is in his hand.
Amy sits at his bedside until she sees me come into the room. Then she saunters over and warns me that her brother is being emotional.
I hold my tongue. Of course he’s emotional. After what he’s been through, what does she expect?
Mrs. Walker and Amy stand on one side of the bed while I sit in a chair, stroking the blond hairs on the back of Quinn’s knuckles. His eyes are glassy when he finds my face.
“Amy … Mom,” he rasps. “Can you give us some privacy?”
Mrs. Walker and Amy exit the roo
m.
When it’s only him and me, he squeezes my hand and speaks in a weak voice.
“The things Mike made you say—”
“It doesn’t matter now,” I point out, running my fingers up his arm.
“They were horrible, Kat. None of it was true. He made you sound selfish and heartless.” He shudders. “I couldn’t stand to hear it.”
My eyes drop to the metal wheels of his bed. When is Quinn going to open his eyes and see that Mike is right? How will he feel when he finds out he risked his life to save a girl who set out to hurt him? Ruining a nice boy’s future to win a bet is by far the most heartless thing I’ve ever done. To hell with my video camera, to hell with Tasha’s laptop, give me back the pure heart I was born with.
“I love you, Kat. And I’d do it again.”
No, no, no! A lump forms in my throat. He can’t confess his love to me. Not when I don’t deserve it. I think of how I cursed at his limp body on the floor, called him stupid, reckless, foolish. Why couldn’t he let me die? If only he’d let me die. I wouldn’t have to say goodbye to him, to feel the empty ache in my chest whenever I think of him.
“Kat?”
I glance up, but everything is blurry. The IV coming from his hand, the beige blanket the nurses have tucked below his shoulders, his eyebrows which have merged together.
“Quinn, please … stop talking,” I rasp.
I don’t want him to risk his life for me. It was selfish to think I needed him before. It wasn’t love. It was obsession. I didn’t care if his hanging out with me would mean more trouble at school for him, if it would injure Molly and Preston, or if my ex would make Quinn’s life a living hell. I didn’t care if I hurt him because I was only thinking of myself.
I am selfish and heartless.
“Hey,” he says, squeezing my hand in his. “This is not your fault.”
Right, how could I forget? Nothing is ever my fault with Quinn. He gladly takes on all the blame. I clear my throat.
Chaste Page 21
