by Sunniva Dee
Arria doesn’t understand. How can she when she hasn’t been through anything like it? This… codependency between Bo and me makes no sense to the world of healthy people.
“Sweetie, that was a terrible idea.” Arriane’s expression shows her pity for me. Lyric’s in my lap. I smooch him on a chubby cheek while he’s distracted trying to open my lipstick. It’s bright red, so we’re best off if he doesn’t manage. “A whole year, right? That’s how long it’s been since you guys were together last?”
“Yeah…”
“Listen.” The intensity in her tone skyrockets, and I meet her eyes, waiting. “I’ve been there, okay?”
“No, you have not?”
“In high school, Inga. My first boyfriend and I were on and off for a year, and every time was a new heartache, all right? But then, on the second breakup, I realized what we were doing to each other, and I stayed strong and didn’t let him suck me in again.”
“Yeah, Arria—I get it, okay? That’s why I moved here in the first place, to be away from him. But now he’s moving closer to me…”
“Not that much closer, is it?”
I shake my head, not wanting her interruption. “Arria, hear me out. Thing is, I can’t learn from your mistakes. I need to go full circle on my own mistakes. Plus, look at Leon and you, how perfectly that worked out despite the odds.”
My friend subdues a happy smile. Lets the curtain of her hair cover her face while she strokes the head of the living proof of their love. He grunts, impatient with my lipstick.
“Your situation is the opposite, though, honey,” she says. “I’m sorry I have to say this, but it’s because I care about you. Me, I wanted to chicken out of my relationship with Leon when it got too intense. But you, Inga, you’re too brave. You hang on too hard.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. Press the tips of two fingers in to help it disappear.
“Ingela,” Arriane murmurs. “You are such an amazing person. You don’t need a man to validate your worth. Not that beauty means anything, but you’re beautiful inside and out. Don’t let a Debbie Downer of a man pull you down when you have an entire town’s crop of college students going gaga over you—you dollface, nutty, runway model babe.”
I puff at her exaggeration. “Whatever.”
“No, you realize why a slew of our regulars are regulars, right?”
I scrunch my mouth up, thinking. I can’t come up with anyone who’d be at Smother for me. “Who?”
“Bar stool two, four, five, six and ten to name a few.”
“Main room?”
“Of course main room. Are there that many stools at the patio bar?” She winks at me. “Linebacker boy with Justin Beiber’s face. Short fat guy named Roy or Troy. The biker. Ginger hot stuff who leaves with a different girl every night because you pay no attention to him—”
“Oh, come on,” I object.
“No, I’m serious. And what about that one dude, the handsome funny-guy who looks so much like you he could be your brother?”
“What? I have no idea.” I really don’t. My male clone, if he exists, does not frequent Smother.
Violet eyes glitter with humor in front of me. “No? Well, apart from how this boy isn’t catwalk skinny, he could be your twin. Hmm… how else to describe him.” She quirks her mouth up on one side making a show of roaming for the best portrayal. “Well, he’s pretty extreme. Has a fondness for threesomes he never scores—”
“Cameron.” I smile too—fleetingly. Just his name on your tongue can make a girl happy. Then, I remember how he’s busy dying in Whistler, that I shouldn’t be all perky over him. Sweet boy. Sweet dumbass boy.
She sighs, gaze roaming my expression and reading me. “Anyway, I’m telling you this for a reason. Cut the tie between Bo and you. If I were you, I’d call him back and tell him asap.”
“Naw. No need to. He agrees with you and withdrew his offer to come here. I… ended up pleading with him in the end, and he just said he’d think about it.”
She’s stunned, so stunned at how low her friend has sunk. Tears burn my eyes again, and I squeeze them shut in an effort to squash another stupid meltdown. On my lap, Lyric squirms free and crawls off. Absently, I notice him fling a stocky leg over the seat of his plastic tractor and race off with his stolen prize—my lipstick. “Yah!” he sings.
Then, Arria’s arms are around me, hugging me tight. “Oh. Inga.”
Today’s a kickass day. The weather gods are with us, lending light clouds and minimal wind. I zoom past Dan to the right of Marek, who’s in a corkscrew aerial off a camouflaged jump that initially surprised him. He shouts with glee, no echo hitting him due to the padding created by the snow.
Of course we memorized the topography here before we arrived; no experienced snowboarder would hit this kind of untamed wilderness without an idea of what he might find. Still, there’s no telling what the glittering surface will reveal once we slice its innocence with the boards. At the speed we’re going, sixty-seventy miles per hour, a fall increases the odds of adding an unnatural twist to limbs and destroying ourselves.
I’m made of adrenaline that obliterates fear and reason. It saturates me with an absolute form of bliss. Nothing, ever, compares to this.
“Yeah!” I shout out as I whizz through the powder. My board scrapes ice underneath it, which speeds me up. The freezing air rasps my lungs. We’re kicking ass, and we’re already so low in altitude that a scrawny pine tree pops up before me. I barely dodge it. At my back, Dan lets out a muffled laugh at my almost-mishap. Low-altitude trees race toward us as we speed downward. We hit a steep part of the mountain again, but I’m too hyped to slow down.
“Fakie Ollie!” Marek yells, warning me to switch it up—I turn in time to fly past where he struggled a moment ago. I don’t enjoy Fakie Ollies, so I’m content a regular lift keeps me clear of the edge that nearly wiped him out.
“Fuck yeah!” I scream and am rewarded with Dan’s stone-age cheer behind me and Marek’s wolf howl at how he survived this time too. Lucky bastard. Nothing like being that close to staring Death down.
Then, everything happens fast. Marek shoots over a snow-camouflaged boulder, indicating to his left with a hand. I curve beyond him without slowing down. Hit a cliffhanger that catapults me out into open air.
I’m flying. I’m fucking flying, and so many thoughts race through my head. This is crazy, epic—I stare down and see the snow approaching way too quickly. I’m twenty feet up, praying the landing will be easy, and at the same time, I’m thinking—
Wingsuit.
Fucking wingsuit.
From my dwindling, seconds-long flight on the snowboard, I imagine wearing my wingsuit, clicking my board free, and soaring forever before deploying the parachute. Sure, we’ve all watched YouTube videos of base-jumping snowboarders—but now?
I fucking get it.
I hit the ground smoothly. Bend deep in my knees, so deep I tumble and stand, tumble and stand, my pace slow until I get my bearings and remain standing. Soon, we’re in thick woods, really fucking close to a cluster of houses and a road. So far so good—Ingela will be happy.
I take one last swing as the terrain smoothens out and slows us down. Dan’s got more speed than me. He dashes past, hits a last-minute rock—I literally see our ride on the road, there, waiting—and faceplants.
The wind is knocked out of him. I’m close enough behind for him to trip me. I slide through an unintentional handplant, which doesn’t help me at all, and the last thing I see is the underside of his board before it connects with my head.
“Um, Ingela?” Dan says. He’s the one calling. No idea why he makes it sound like a question.
“Ja?” she replies loudly on the other end. At least initially, the girl turns to Swedish whenever she’s surprised. “Who’s this? You’re calling from Cameron’s phone—what’s going on? Is he dead?”
I might be the only one with a concussion and a black eye, but Dan’s head hurts too. He’s holding the phone away fro
m his face whispering, “Girl’s fucking loud.”
I snicker. Oh, that Inga. “Tell her I’m not dead. I’ll give her a call tomorrow.”
We’re back in the hotel room after a quick ER visit to verify neither of us are beyond repair. Marek’s chewing on a summer sausage. Straight out downing it with the skin peeled like a banana. “Why didn’t you call her yourself? Or text ‘er?” he asks.
I just point at my head and at the way Dan keeps the cell at arm’s length whenever she’s the one talking… or screaming. He nods once. “But text?”
I cross my eyes, showing how I’m not interested in reading or writing at the moment. Concussions suck ass. Unfortunately, they’re one of my things—I’m predictable; head first, then, whatever else needs to be broken or twisted in my body.
Marek offers me a beer. I use it to flush down an extra round of ibuprofen. I really hope I feel better in the morning when our flight leaves.
I can’t help chuckling, though. What a sight we must have been, rolling over each other in the snow like a bunch of newbies and knocking each other out. Marek jokes that he’ll get us motorcycle helmets for the next trip. Shit. We were going to get wasted tonight. I already feel wasted.
Dan shakes his head and hands me the phone.
“Inga?”
“You prick. You almost died!”
I roll my eyes. “No, I didn’t. And now you owe me another go in the sack for surviving. No, hey—you owe me a threesome. Your choice, any of the BB chicks except the old cleaning lady, or the juggiest of the Smother girls.”
“In your dreams,” she laughs out. “Dan says you smashed your head in?”
“Mmm, not exactly what happened—can’t imagine what that would look like, Kitty—”
She growls at me for calling her that again. Fuck, it’s so tempting to tease her even if my head can’t take her entire presence on the phone right now. “Purr for me?” I keep going.
“Shut up! Tell me what’s up with your face. Did you smash it?” I picture a French bulldog in my mind.
“Nope.” I whip up the mirror app she downloaded to my cell a couple of months ago and look at myself with the speakerphone on. “Got a purple ring around both eyes and a, hmm, black stripe that’s swollen right between my eyes.”
“Your eyes are matching? How convenient.”
I exchange glances with my buds, who are as mystified as I am. “How’s that convenient?”
“You know, sort of like war paint. Girls love war paint. Plus, it’s Halloween… at some point.”
“Oh good.” To spare my rattled brain, I choke back the laughter. “Now, how are you, Inga?”
“I’m okay.”
No, she’s not. She took a moment before she answered, which isn’t her, and then there’s that telltale dip in her voice. “You’re lying. What’s up?”
“I’m just…” She puffs before she changes her mind. “We’ll talk later. When’re you in town again?”
“Tomorrow night if the flight gods permit. I’ll pop by Smother if I’m not dead by then.”
“Shhh, don’t say that, Cam.”
Wow. Now she’s afraid of jinxing it? Yeah, we do need a chat about these things.
Thanks to Arriane, I’m hyper-conscious of the regulars eyeing me at the bar. It’s Sunday night, and the one named Roy or Troy is on his stool. The hot ginger who tends to leave with different girls most nights saunters into the room late tonight. He responds to my quick hand wave with a wink. Yeah, Arria might be right. They’re all acting weird in one way or another.
This morning, I woke up hell-bent that I’d have a good day. I refused to go Bo-obsessive and managed surprisingly well, with Arriane and sweet Lyric’s support. We took him to the theater for the first time, and the joy on his face as he watched cartoon characters splattered over an entire wall was priceless.
After the film, he pooped out and got, what Arria calls, “bossier than his dad.” At the coffee shop where we’d planned to wind down, the most adorable brat in the universe demanded honey on his leftover popcorn and his mother’s red-hot espresso with a straw. We ended up paying in a hurry and hauling a tantrum-ridden cutie-pie off before we got ticketed for disturbance of the peace.
I’m pouring a Miller Light for Troy slash Roy when Cameron walks in the door to the main room. He sees me immediately and flashes the sunniest grin known to mankind. I instinctively grin back. Lean my elbows on the counter and wait for him to make it over.
First, he needs to greet half the football team, though, which has congregated close to the patio door, and a BB girl with the night off. She’s here looking for Cam. Guess she’s in luck—for a moment.
But then, he’s behind the bar. His first move is to hike my skirt up several inches in the back and pinch my butt cheek.
“Ouch, wuss!” I shout out, laughing.
“Wuss means coward, remember? I’m no wuss. ‘Dick’ works. Or ‘prick.’” He slides around to the front, still under my skirt, and massages my upper thighs.
“Note to self,” I yell over the music. “Don’t ever wear skirts at work. Smother’s full of grabby little boys.”
He snorts through a snicker, and I turn in his arms, twisting his hands off my body.
“Let’s see the damage,” I say, touching small cuts and bruises on his face. He’s so sexy. I was right; the violet rings around his eyes make him look like some sort of warrior. I pull him under the light by the cash register, and his irises shine greener than ever now, at the center of those bruises. Clearly, he’d do well with violet shirts too. Yeah. I should find a way of making him wear violet.
“How did you manage not to break your nose?” I ask, because it’s obviously whole. He’s got a medium-sized, well-defined nose. Actually, everything about Cameron is perfectly formed. Not all of him is medium-sized, though. Warmth spreads in my lower region, reminding me of certain non-medium-sized parts.
“Don’t know. I lucked out, I guess. But it’ll happen soon enough.” He touches my cheek, and it’s sweet, without his customary sexual innuendo.
He sighs. “I just wanted to see you before I went home. You okay?” He’s alluding to our phone conversation yesterday, where I all but fessed up to feeling shitty. A closer look at him, now that I’m done ogling pretty eyes and thinking about his penis, reveals how exhausted he is.
“Ja. You’ve got a headache, huh?” I nod at him for confirmation.
“Yup. It’s a damn blizzard in there,” he chuckles, giving his melon a swift rap with his knuckles.
“Because you’re an ass and go on dangerous trips,” I explain.
He arches a brow. “So not a wuss, then?”
“Pfff, no. I know what that means: coward.”
Cam’s shoulders shake as he laughs. “Right on, Inga. You’re getting there.”
It’s the morning after Cameron returned from Whistler. My Monday class got canceled, which would usually send me to Arria’s place for tea or decaf. Today, though, I’m heading to Cam’s dorm. I’ve never been the motherly type and have no instinct driving me to check up on sick people, but Cameron’s one of my best friends in Deepsilver so it’s different with him. I guess I should’ve thought about bringing remedies or what have you, but I forget until I’m at his door.
Dan opens. His brows arch under his short, stiff bangs before he mutters over his shoulder, “Cam. Your loud date is here.”
I shove past him, not in the mood to be embarrassed. I got that part taken care of on the phone while they were in Whistler. Cameron is still in bed, and it’s eleven a.m. Honestly, I’m not sure of his morning schedule. Maybe this is him when he doesn’t have classes.
“You babysitting for a while?” Dan scratches his head.
“I guess?” I say. My answer must be good enough for him because he grabs a jacket and mumbles something I don’t catch on his way out.
The two of them either left the blinds up last night, or Dan opened them this morning, leaving a stream of sunshine to flood Cam and his wounds. Judging by
Dan’s unmade bed, he’s not one to focus on chores first thing; my guess is no blinds all night.
Cameron’s face is all puffy. “You look like crud,” I tell him. Sit on the edge of his mattress and tap his nose with a finger. “Like. Crud.” My digit emphasizes each repeated word.
He laughs a hoarse, sexy, unused voice sort of laugh and says, “‘Crud’ isn’t you, baby. Try ‘shit.’”
“How ’bout ‘you’re, like, the opposite of nice-looking,’” I suggest instead, tipping my chin up in fake question.
“Well, you look delicious. Here, here, kitty,” he teases. “Hurry, deadbolt the door.” Clearly, even though Whistler chewed up and spit him out this past weekend, Cameron’s doing fine. His eyes gleam with amusement, expecting some smartass remark from me instead of compliance—and his lips… are quite kissable at the moment. Those are two reasons, right there, for me to slam the deadbolt in place.
Back by his side, I climb on top of his covers and straddle his hips. Cameron sobers quickly, that playful smirk draining from his features as realization sets in; the boy might just get lucky.
“Hey, you,” he murmurs, waiting for my next move. I don’t leave him in suspense. I lean down. Feather light, I place my lips on his. There’s a small rift in his lower lip where the skin is smoother and tastes of blood. I lick it. Cameron’s response is a low-pitched grunt that puckers my nipples.
Strong arms launch up and grab my waist, pulling me flat against his body. Firm and sinuous beneath my frame, he juts his hips upward, making me experience firsthand how he hardens with my nearness.
“Hey, yourself,” I purr out. Then, I rock on top of him. Cam is all for my sexy game. With both palms cupping my butt, he presses me closer, his body’s movements perfectly in sync with my own as we make out.
“Fuck—can you come by more often? I like your visits,” he whispers. Eager fingers roam under my shirt, pulling it up. His mouth goes to my throat, suckling, biting, and letting out little groans of desire. My own hands slip beneath the covers on both sides where I can caress him, skim lower… until I find him between us.
I sink down on the mattress on one side, and he instantly takes advantage. Nudges me flat on my back so he has full overview when he scrunches my top up over my breasts. The bra goes next, and suddenly I’m bare, with a scorching green stare perusing my skin.
