Always You

by Roxie Noir

She drags me in with more strength than I knew she had, kisses me fiercely.

  “It’s us, Darce,” I say. “It’s us and that’s all. That’s it. The end.”

  We kiss.

  “Me and you and that’s what matters,” I promise.

  She looks up at me, eyes wide and hair wild, lips just barely parted, and there’s something vulnerable and tender in her face, her heart right there on the surface, alive and pounding and more delicate than she’s ever let on.

  And in that moment, I fucking need her. I need her more than I’ve needed anything, more than I need oxygen. I need her skin against mine, need her fingers in my hair, need her shouting and raking her nails down my back, because I’ve handed Darcy my heart and all I can do is hope she doesn’t break it.

  I push her backward, climb between her legs. She unbuttons my shirt, shoves it off me, drags the rest of my clothes off as I pull her out of her dress and she writhes under me.

  We kiss again, Darcy up on one elbow, pushing herself against me. I push her back and taste her throat, kiss her neck. I nip at her collarbone and she gasps, my face buried in her.

  More. I need more, Darcy so intoxicating that I’m lightheaded. I take one nipple in my teeth and she growls at me, sinking her fingernails into my shoulder, pinpoints sending streaks of electricity through my body. My cock so hard it might just explode off my body.

  I kiss Darcy one more time, and she wraps her legs around me, reaches down, and grabs my cock in her hand. I moan into her mouth and she bites my lip, stroking me hard. I know she’s trying to guide me in, lifting her hips and pulling me down, but I resist for half a second.

  “Don’t fucking tease me,” she whispers. “I need you, Trent.”

  In one movement, I push her hand off my cock, push her legs off me, roll her over onto her stomach. She looks over her shoulder, saucy, grinning, as I slide one hand up her spine, push her knees apart, and kneel between them.

  “Good,” I say in her ear, running my fingers over her slick entrance, making her shudder. “Because I need you and I need this.”

  And I push myself inside her, slowly. I want to savor every fucking inch of this heaven, want to let this erase the hell of Low Valley and North Delano State and funerals and brain damage and I just want to be here, inside her, with the one person I’ve ever really loved.

  She curls and arches underneath me, brings one knee up, grabs the bedspread with her hand, and she moans with this slow, breathy moan until I’m buried inside her, our whole bodies lined up skin to skin.

  There’s nothing else. Nothing else at all.

  “This what you needed?” I whisper in her ear.

  “Fuck yes,” she whispers back. “Fucking just like that, Trent, please.”

  I do it again, just like that, and with her other hand she reaches back and grabs my hair, pulling my head close to hers. We’re intertwined, over and under and in each other, and it’s everything I needed.

  She’s everything I needed.

  I don’t speed up, I don’t slow down, I just fuck her slow and steady and deep. It might be a minute or an hour, marked in sighs and whispers, in the way her body moves under me, in the way she flutters around me.

  I think I’m falling apart, pieces coming off me, like I’m flaking to bits, and I don’t care. I just keep going until Darcy’s flutters get harder, tighter, until her gasps become moans. Until her breathing gets ragged, and she’s suddenly pushing back against me harder.

  And then I push myself into her as hard as I can and she comes around me, clenching and jolting and crying out, and seconds later I lose control too, burying my face in the back of her neck and just letting go.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Darcy

  I almost think Trent’s fallen asleep when he finally pulls out of me, kisses my shoulder, then rolls over and flops down face-first next to me on the bed, his arm still slung over my back.

  “I’m glad you came,” he says.

  I wriggle a little, getting closer to him, get my hair off my face.

  “You mean just now, or...”

  “I meant to California,” he says, but he’s smiling. “For as long as I live, I’ll never forget you running across those people’s graves.”

  I scrunch my face, because it occurred to me afterward that dead or not, it isn’t polite to run over people.

  “Mostly because I’ll never forget feeling like there was a glimmer of light in the world again,” he says, his eyes searching mine. “I’ve never been gladder to see someone.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.”

  “I did say something horrible to you. And you didn’t even know I’d gone.”

  “They told me later,” I say, and reach out, tracing a swirling tattoo across his shoulder blade. “I’m sorry for saying you shouldn’t bury your brother because he wasn’t perfect.”

  “Eli was a long way from perfect,” Trent says. “And I get it. You haven’t got anyone like that.”

  “I’ve got you guys,” I say softly. “And I know it’s not exactly the same, but I remember when Liam and Gavin OD’d all the press was about what terrible people they were, how selfish, how they were lowlife scum who didn’t deserve hospital resources because they’d done this to themselves and oh, my God, Trent, I wanted to fucking murder everyone I saw.”

  “Was that when you called some reporter a worthless fucking cockhound?”

  I stop, mouth slightly open.

  “Was it?”

  “You definitely said that at some point. I think it was in the hospital after Gavin woke up.”

  “What does cockhound even mean?”

  Trent grins, his face half-mashed against the hotel bedspread.

  “Why are you asking me? You said it.”

  “Anyway, I knew then that the people saying all that shit were kind of right, that they did it to themselves, but I still wanted to punch anyone who said anything bad about them.”

  Trent’s fingers are tracing slow, lazy circles on my back, and even though it’s barely seven-thirty I’m fighting sleep.

  “I know I don’t really have a family, but I’ve got you guys, and it’s sort of close. If they found Liam in a ditch in Yorkshire tomorrow, I’d want him buried right even though I haven’t even seen him in a year.”

  Trent wriggles closer, plants a kiss on my forehead. I think we might have just made up from our first fight.

  Briefly, I wonder if I should call Joan and Gavin and give them a ‘first fight solved’ report, since they’re the ones who took away the vodka and told me to stop being a child.

  Maybe tomorrow.

  “Is it too early to go to bed?” Trent asks, his lips still millimeters from my head.

  “It’s still kinda light outside,” I say, half drifting off myself.

  “We’ve got blackout curtains.”

  “A 7:45 bedtime isn’t very rock and roll,” I murmur.

  “I think sleeping when you want is very rock and roll,” Trent laughs. “Besides, I think I’ve gotten seven hours of sleep in three days.”

  “I haven’t slept since yesterday,” I admit, though I don’t mention that I slept until noon that day. “I had to be at the airport at three in the morning to catch my five a.m. flight.”

  Hungover, five-in-the-morning flights: I don’t recommend them.

  “Five a.m.,” Trent teases. “Shit, you were serious.”

  “Of course I was serious,” I tease back. “I stomped over a bunch of graves and horrified your mom because I was late.”

  “Next time, just get me a subscription to a sock-of-the-month club or something.”

  “There’s a sock-of-the-month club?”

  “Probably.”

  I should get up, go wash my face and brush my teeth, but this is so perfectly comfortable and cozy that I don’t want to move, but I finally prop myself up on my elbows.

  “By the way, Gavin and Joan know. Probably Nigel too, by now.”

  Trent stretches, rolls over, and yawns, his arms b
ehind his head.

  “You finally told them?”

  “Turns out they knew,” I say.

  I don’t say because apparently I’m really loud and they’ve just been polite for the past month or so.

  “Is Gavin pissed?”

  “Nah.”

  “Are you?”

  I just laugh.

  “No,” I say.

  We finally get up and brush our teeth at the same time, both standing naked in front of the mirror, foaming at the mouth. I know I didn’t fix everything by showing up. There are a thousand tiny things to do when someone dies, even if they were in prison, and it’s not like Trent’s mom can really help with anything.

  And Eli’s still dead. Once all the legalities are over and done with, that’s still going to be true, and it’s going to be true forever.

  But I’m here, and we’re brushing our teeth together naked. I don’t know what to do for Trent besides be here, so I’m doing it, and I’m gonna keep doing it for as long as he can stand me.

  We sleep for almost thirteen hours and get up at nearly nine in the morning, groggy and sleep-drunk. That day and the next are full of bureaucracy and circular, maddening nonsense: Trent needs a death certificate to get the order for the prison ward to sign off on Eli’s belongings, only to discover that the prison has a policy of only issuing death certificates through the local hospital, where Eli never went, and of course the prison infirmary doesn’t have the capacity to issue a death warrant, despite having signed over a dead body two days before.

  It’s mind-boggling, maddening, and since I’m not the next of kin there isn’t all that much I can do to help. Trent’s fucking worn out and exhausted from all this, from having to deal with a ton of bullshit, from seeing his mom and repeating every conversation three times. Every so often I’ll find him just staring into space, and I know what he’s thinking about.

  I don’t really know what to do, but I try to give him space sometimes but I try to be there when he needs me. He gives me a temporary pass to his mom’s nursing home, so I take Gwen out for a manicure and pedicure, even though I can tell she doesn’t like me.

  It’s the second one I’ve gotten in my life, and I can tell she doesn’t approve of the electric blue color I pick. We make repetitive, awkward conversation for a couple of hours. It’s hard to tell what she remembers and what she doesn’t: the fact that Eli’s dead, yes. The fact that Trent has a girlfriend, yes. But I she doesn’t actually remember the funeral, the dinner afterward, any of that, because her memory doesn’t seem to be stories any more, just facts.

  When she’s not looking, I find the dent in her left temple. Trent’s told me about that night, the chair leg that put it there, the hospital afterward. The way his father would always bring a massive bouquet of roses, the world’s most loving and adoring husband.

  How even though the hospital staff couldn’t have possibly believed that Gwen was always falling down the stairs or burning herself on the stove, they never did much of anything. No one did, except Trent, and he fucking paid for it.

  When I get back that night, Trent’s already on the bed in his t-shirt and boxers, watching TV. He looks exhausted and beaten, but when he sees me, he smiles.

  “Look what I found,” he says, pointing at the TV.

  I take off my shoes and jeans, climb onto the bed next to him.

  “Which part is haunted?” I ask, watching footage of a rolling green golf course, ominous music playing over it.

  “Just wait,” he says.

  I wait.

  Slowly, from one side of the screen, a golf cart rolls onto the grass and stops. There’s no one driving it. The music crescendos, and then the picture freezes, turns black and white.

  “You’re kidding me,” I say, grinning.

  “Just wait,” Trent says again, and something pops up on the screen:

  THE SIXTH HOLE SPECTER?

  We both lose our shit. Trent snorts, he laughs so hard, and I laugh so hard I cry and then get the hiccups. By the end of the episode — which, yes, is about a haunted golf cart — Trent’s sitting between my legs, leaning back against my chest, and I’m stroking his hair.

  It feels oddly familiar, a mirror-reversal of Tallwood, of all the time we spent watching dumb shit while my back was too fucked up for me to do anything.

  And despite everything that has changed, this feels the same.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Trent

  I wake up face-down on the pillow, one hand on Darcy’s ass. I don’t know how it got there, but I don’t move it.

  Eight-thirty in the morning. It’s an hour I don’t see too often, given that my usual bedtime is around four in the morning, so I squint at the clock, double-checking.

  Yup. Eight thirty-two.

  Next to me, Darcy rolls over, pillow lines on her face and hair everywhere.

  “When’s our flight?” I mutter.

  “Nnnggh.”

  “Not until later, right?”

  Darcy’s been a fucking angel. It’s a weird thing to say about someone who’s anything but sweet and swears like a sailor, but it’s true. The last few days have been impossibly rough, but she’s been here helping out however she can: getting us fed, making arrangements, getting plane tickets back to the east coast, even hanging out with my mom.

  My mom who doesn’t like her, and even though Darcy hasn’t said anything, I can tell she knows.

  “I lied,” Darcy murmurs.

  “Don’t tell me it’s earlier.”

  She pushes herself onto her elbows and yawns, stretching.

  “It’s tomorrow,” she says.

  I’m too barely-awake to process this, so I just stare at her, waiting for an explanation.

  “I have a surprise for you,” she says.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “What kind of a surprise?”

  “Goddamn it, Trent, it’s a surprise.”

  I don’t normally like surprises, but right now, I’m in no mood to not like anything Darcy does. She wants to surprise me, she can surprise me.

  An hour later, we actually get up. Darcy grabs us both coffee from the lobby, and we get dressed drinking it, even though she still won’t tell me what the surprise is.

  All she’ll tell me is that no, I shouldn’t wear my suit, and no, I don’t need anything special.

  Instead of the hotel breakfast, we head to a diner on the north side of Bakersfield. It’s another hot fucking day in the Central Valley, in the upper nineties by the time we’ve eaten sausage and pancakes.

  When we get back in the car, Darcy drives north.

  “Fresno,” I guess.

  “Why would I take you to Fresno?”

  “Visalia.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Another town that’s kinda like Fresno,” I say.

  “How pissed would people in either place be if they heard you say that?” she asks, grinning.

  I laugh, leaning back in the passenger seat, air conditioning blasting full-force on my face.

  “Probably kinda pissed,” I admit.

  North of Bakersfield, though, she gets on the sixty-five freeway, not the ninety-nine, so we’re clearly not going to Fresno or Merced or anywhere that I’d assumed. The two roads go the same direction, north, only the sixty-five veers further east, toward the Sierra Nevada.

  “Are we going to the mountains?” I ask.

  Darcy doesn’t answer, just flicks on her blinker as she passes a truck at eighty-five miles an hour, but there’s a smile around her eyes.

  “We could be going anywhere,” she says. “Just chill.”

  In the next town, we stop at a cafe, where Darcy gets us sandwiches and chips and still won’t tell me what’s going on.

  We’re definitely going to the mountains.

  After a while, we turn east from the dead-straight highway sixty-five onto another dead-straight road, and I laugh.

  “I knew it,” I tell her.

  “M
aybe I’m taking you to Fresno by a really roundabout route,” she points out, but she’s grinning.

  “I’ve only been up here a couple of times, believe it or not,” I say, watching the Sierra Nevada grow slowly closer through the windshield. “We weren’t exactly the ‘go hiking’ or the ‘family vacation’ types, and after everything happened and I moved away, it just never occurred me to. Even after I joined the band and moved to L.A., I never went.”

  “Well, I hope you still like big-ass trees as much as you did the one time when you were a kid,” she says.

  “I told you about that?”

  “You told me you visited an aunt once and really loved the big trees and never went back,” she says, her voice suddenly softer. The foothills are closing in, the landscape getting taller and greener, the road bending slightly. “I thought about taking you into L.A. or something, but I feel like we’d just end up running errands or checking on my cat, and I thought you needed an actual surprise day trip.”

  “I’m surprised you remembered that,” I say.

  She gives me a weird look, then tears her eyes away, back to the road, which is suddenly getting winding and curvy.

  “I remember a lot of the stuff you tell me,” she says, her voice slightly puzzled. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  Because it seems like the small, unimportant details of my own life, I think. Because there’s so much of it I don’t really want to remember that it baffles me anyone would try.

  “It’s just bullshit details is all,” I say.

  Darcy laughs, braking as she steers around a big curve in the road. In the past ten minutes we’ve driven from wide, flat farmland, to the low, muted brush of the foothills and now we’re in full forest, deep greens and patches of sunlight everywhere. It’s only taken a little over an hour to get here, but I always forget how close this is from Low Valley.

  It just seems so... different.

  “Sometimes the bullshit details are the important part,” Darcy says, swinging around another curve in the road. “That’s what makes all this shit... I don’t know. Real?”

  I lean my head back against the headrest. She’s playing music on the car’s stereo, something chill and acoustic, the sort of folk-rock she’s been kinda into lately. For a second I almost reach out to take her hand, kiss it, maybe kiss her, but then she swings around a sharp bend in the opposite direction and I decide to let her drive for now.