by Lyla Payne
People in books and movies always say stupid shit, like love made their heart sing or their soul happy, but I realized now it was because there wasn’t an adequate way to explain it. The way I felt right now, like I’d swallowed a shot glass of stars and they were gushing inside me like sparklers on the 4th of July. Like happy and sad and honored and terrified, and every other emotion I’d ever named, combined and ran through my blood, swelling my heart to a size that couldn’t possibly fit inside my chest.
Instead of risking whatever idiotic thing might come out of my mouth I bent forward and kissed her. Kennedy’s lips moved against mine, then landed on my neck as she buried her face there.
“Thanks for telling me, strawberry.” I hugged her tight, mesmerized by the strands of reddish hair covering my hands.
She shook as she pulled away and rolled onto her back, smiling a tiny smile up at the ceiling. I propped my head up on my hand and watched her breath for several long moments. The smile slipped and she let her head fall my direction. A tiny wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows, one I wished I could smooth away.
“I’m struggling, Wright. I don’t know how to be okay with being happy. When I’m with you, it catches me off guard. I blink and realize I’m happy, and I don’t know how to stop. Or how to deal with the fact that I don’t want to. I’m not okay, but I’m trying.”
“I know you’re trying, and that it’s hard most days. I watch you all the time.”
She scooted toward me, the serious expression still on her face and in her eyes. “I think I like dating a writer. I don’t have to say everything out loud.”
“I like hearing it out loud. Also, I don’t watch everyone the way I watch you.”
“You’d better not.” A hesitant smile began, one that snuck across her full lips and grew bolder by the inch. “I want to try a couple of things, Wright. In bed. It’s something I’ve never done before, and I bet you haven’t, either.”
My heart thudded, my body and brain unsure whether to be excited or terrified by the proposition. “Okay…”
“Relax. You look like I’m going to ask you to kill someone. This is sex, and it’s you and me. It might be good, but only if you’re up for it. If not, we go with the status quo.”
“You’re piquing my curiosity.”
“Good.” Now that she’d calmed me down, Kennedy appeared more nervous. “First of all, I had blood tests in the hospital—lots of them—and I don’t have anything. You know, like STDs. And I’ve been on an IUD since I was fourteen. How do you feel about not using a condom?”
Like she had to ask. I hated condoms—hated the time it took to get one, the awkwardness of fumbling to put it on, and, for the first time with Kennedy, even the thin barrier between me and her. “I feel like that would be amazing. You’re right that I’ve never, ever done that before, but I don’t have any clean tests to show you.”
Her ocean eyes smiled up at me. “Good heavens, look at you. I called you an Iowa farmboy before, and even though I know you’re from North Carolina, the observation still stands. You’re a little too clean-cut and uptight if you ask me. A real golden boy. I trust you on this, Wright.”
Excitement dribbled through me, speeding up my heart and making me wonder how I’d gotten so lucky. Even with Kennedy’s problems—or maybe because of them—she was more open and willing to talk about the hard things than any girl I’d ever met. It made me crazy, in the best possible way, that she could lay here with me almost naked and have this discussion.
“What’s the second thing?”
“I was wondering…I mean, I was thinking maybe we could try making love? I don’t even know what that means,” she laughed. “It sounds ridiculous.”
“I think we’ve already done that a few times, strawberry. At least I have.”
“Not in the airplane bathroom.”
“No. That was a straight fuck, and it was amazing. This is going to be different.” I paused, feeling heat in my cheeks and my neck and knowing my frat brothers would never let me live down what I was about to say. “But we’re feeling it, and I think I’d like to try making love to my girlfriend on a Friday afternoon.”
The uncertainty coloring her face flickered to happiness for the briefest of seconds, sparking in her gaze, setting her aglow. I helped her T-shirt over her head, and she returned the favor, then I gathered her bare flesh tight against mine and kissed her. We kissed for a long time, with the kind of unhurried laziness that came from knowing we didn’t have anywhere to be, that the person whose lips moved against mine was the one who belonged here, and that the only thing that mattered was us.
Our hands explored, inch by inch. I wanted to memorize the soft skin on her back, the freckles dotting her shoulders. It was like being somewhere holy—I remembered thinking the first time that having sex with her was akin to a religious experience—but now I was free to worship. And I took my time.
The spot at the base of her throat throbbed with her life, made her gasp when my tongue flicked over her pulse. Her nipples tightened between my lips, and she arched against me when my tongue scraped them. The feeling of her fingernails trailing down my abs, the way her palm felt as it squeezed me, stroking from base to tip, her teeth as they nipped my lip…I locked every moment away.
I rolled on top and her legs parted, making room for me. I slid into the slick heat of her, nothing between us, and buried so deep my hips settled against hers. She tangled her legs with mine, our ankles brushing. We wound together from our tongues to the tips of our toes, and I opened my eyes to find her staring back at me. The emotions flooding from that damned tapped well in my middle were too many and too intense to even try to pin down, and in her blue-green-gold gaze, I saw a heady mess of the same indecipherable feelings.
We watched each other, our sweaty foreheads pressed together, as I thrust up and she pulled down against my shoulders, our bodies moving without being told what to do. When she came, tightening around me and whispering my name, she didn’t shut her eyes. The pleasure and fear, what might one day be sturdy love, leapt from her eyes into my soul.
When I couldn’t hold on I came inside a girl for the first time, holding her gaze so that she could see how she made me feel, I knew that I would never get back what I had given her.
And I didn’t want to.
*
She lay in my arms afterward, beautiful and gleaming with sweat. The sheet covered my lower half and she had a leg thrown over mine, her head on the hollow of my shoulder. Our fingers twined together on my chest, her hair tickled my chin, and all in all, this entire evening had been the most eye-opening, amazing of my life.
I felt alive, as though I could win wars or conquer diseases, neither things that appealed to me, as long as this woman stayed at my side. As though everything in my world was right, and even though it wouldn’t stay that way, just knowing it could be was enough to get through anything.
I also felt like a complete toolbag for thinking any of that, but I wasn’t trying to be a doofy sap. It was just there. Maybe it was orgasm feelings, like Em said, but I didn’t think so.
“What are you thinking?” She asked, her jaw moving against my shoulder.
“That my life is painfully, exquisitely perfect at this moment. What are you thinking?”
“That I’m happy. And for now it’s okay.”
Fatigue from the week of studying, the late nights, and the stress and worry that came with constantly being on edge about Kennedy dragged in my blood like sediment, and my eyes refused to stay open, no matter how much I wanted to live in that moment forever.
I slept a long time—it hadn’t even been dinnertime when we’d fallen asleep, and my phone claimed it was well after midnight when I struggled to clear my vision. Something felt different, but the long nap had hung cobwebs in my brain and it took a few more moments to figure it out.
Kennedy was gone.
Chapter 22
She didn’t come back the rest of the weekend. I tried not to panic, but nothing dulled
the worry—or the pain. We’d had a breakthrough. She’d told me how she felt, and confessed her fears. We’d made love, she’d lay in my arms. How could she disappear?
I worried she’d gotten hungry, gone out for food, and maybe something had happened to her. But I didn’t call campus police or report it to anyone, because in my gut, I knew she’d simply left. The reason why, whether or not she’d come back, or what kind of shape she’d be in if she did, was anyone’s guess.
My calls to Blair and Audra had turned up nothing. There wasn’t anyone else to call.
My two Monday finals went smoothly—after all of Kennedy’s help, my accounting project was a breeze, and television production wasn’t a real brain-buster. We just turned in our recorded newscasts and critiqued everyone else’s. I had one on Wednesday and two on Thursday, so my next couple of days was free. I wasn’t sure that was a good thing, because not knowing where Kennedy was or whether she was okay was slowly driving me insane.
I’d stopped sleeping, worried I might miss her. My eyes burned and looked like they belonged to an addict when I took a minute to look in the mirror. Reporting her missing to campus police could come back on her, since she wasn’t exactly supposed to be living with me at the SEA house, so in the end, I convinced Blair to meet me after her Monday finals so we could go to campus police together.
She sat at a wrought iron table outside our campus deli, her long brown hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun. The dark circles under her eyes and the large coffee in her hand said she’d been studying at least as much as me, and maybe worrying about Kennedy, too.
“Hey, Blair. Thanks for doing this.”
“Sure.” Her lips tightened into a grimace. “You know, I never wanted anything bad to happen to her, but I kind of always knew it would.”
“We don’t know anything bad happened. Maybe she was just tired of my ass.”
Blair tried a smile, but it didn’t quite catch. “Maybe. But we both know if she left you, she went back to what she knows, and whether or not any of those people will take care of her is dubious at best.”
“Wait, what people?”
She shook her head, standing up and shouldering her backpack. “There is a whole side of Whitman you’ve never guessed exists, because you keep your nose so damn clean. Hell, I never would have guessed if I hadn’t won Kennedy in the roommate lottery.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, Toby. You and I grew up in the same world. Private schools, parties that would shock Lindsay Lohan, kids strung out on crack and heroin by the time we hit high school. There’s always been the flip side to the kind of lives we lead. The dark, ugly, substance abuse side. Whitman is no different. There are the people who get wasted at frat parties, and somewhere in someone’s filthy basement, there are the people who couldn’t tell you their names sharing dirty needles and thinking daddy’s money can save them.”
She started walking the direction of the police station, her feet dragging a little. Everything she’d said was true—I’d avoided those parties in prep school because of my dad, but I’d certainly seen it. I’d dragged Trent out of more than one, and plenty of my classmates had been through at least one stint in rehab by their sixteenth birthday. I guessed Whitman was big enough that those groups had more room to spread out.
Come to think of it, I’d never crossed paths with Kennedy except when Blair had brought her to some kind of event or Greek outing. In her way, Blair had been trying. I would have been pissed if I’d drawn a roommate that was trying to kill himself, too.
“Okay, so where do we find her?”
Blair shook her head, knocking loose a long strand of hair that drifted down onto her shoulder. “I don’t know. I can’t go looking for her, Toby. I just can’t. But I’m sure you can find out if you want to. There are a few SEAs who are probably pretty familiar with the underbelly.”
We walked into the campus police station. An officer took our statements the way we’d worked them out, that Blair was her roommate and hadn’t seen her since Friday, and that I was her boyfriend and hadn’t seen her since then, either. He promised to file a report and send it to the local P.D., but the more questions he asked, the less worried he seemed.
I’d seen the attitude before, more than once. When a junkie disappears, the cops have a pretty good idea where they’ve gone, and also that they won’t come up for air until they’re out of drugs or dead.
Blair gave me a sad smile and headed back to the freshman dorm. I slogged back to the parking lot next to the communications building, one of the newer ones on Whitman’s campus. I ran into one of the film profs outside the back door, who reminded me that the deadline to submit screenplays for the senior project was the last day of classes.
I told him I hoped it would be ready, unsure I’d have the time to focus on it before then. I hated to turn it in the way it was, because I knew it was missing something. Creative works were never finished. We were forced to abandon them, to call them done, otherwise there would be no end. That’s what people said, and I’d found it to be true. If I waited to feel as though something was perfect it would never make it off my hard drive and into anyone’s hands, but this was different. It was a matter of me figuring out the missing piece, not me trying to tweak it to death.
This was a big deal. I needed to focus on my own goals, like Em had said.
Every time I walked into my room, my heart pounded in my throat, hoping to see her long legs and strawberry hair sprawled out on my bed. Today, like every day for the last four, disappointment crushed the air from my lungs, flattened my heart until it hurt with every beat.
This was why I didn’t date. Why I didn’t have friends. Why I had taken care not to let anyone under my skin in the four years since Trent left. Really, since he really started to go off the rails. It hurt too much when they left. When they chose the fix and I laid awake at night replaying every interaction, every conversation, wondering how I fucked it up or what I could have said to get a different outcome.
In some ways, Kennedy hurt more. Maybe because I’d let her in so deliberately. I had been a fucking idiot, to think that would mean I’d be prepared.
I had to try to get some sleep before my final, but every time my eyes closed, all I could see was all of the things that could be happening to her. If she’d gotten drunk or high, maybe passed out without anyone to look after her, to care if she needed help. If she was with a guy who would take his pleasure from a girl barely conscious, or go too far, be too rough—it killed me to think of her with someone else, but reality was an honest bitch.
I couldn’t have been asleep for more than an hour when the phone rang. A headache pounded in my temples and I felt as though someone had stuffed old socks in my mouth. I fumbled for the phone without checking the caller I.D. “What?”
“Is that always how you answer the phone or am I special?”
“Quinn?”
“Yeah, man.”
My stomach crunched and twisted. I waited for him to talk, because I couldn’t think of one good reason he’d be calling me in the middle of the night that didn’t involve Em asking him to. And there was only one reason she’d do that.
“Kennedy’s here.”
“Where are you?” I sat up, yanking on pants and digging for a shirt in the dark.
“I’m at the beach house. French Open.”
“You’re having a party during finals week?”
“Sebastian. You know.” He took a deep breath. “You’re not going to like this, but Emilie thought you should know. Audra told Cole and Ruby you guys had been worried, and she looks fucking terrible. Or she did before she disappeared with Hunter.”
“How did you let that happen? After what he did to Emilie, you know he’s not exactly into asking. We should’ve kicked his ass out then.”
“Take it easy. I wasn’t here, and you and I both know it’s not that your girl isn’t exactly unwilling, and everyone knows it, too. Nobody was going to call him out with her.”
Disgust soured my stomach as fury boiled my blood. People would fucking fight to the death for Emilie because of their loyalty to Quinn, but the girl who had been basically living with me was fair game. I guess this was my punishment for staying aloof.
“Whatever. Please don’t let her leave until I get there.” Hunter or no, whether or not she wanted to be with me, I had to make sure she was okay.
I had learned from my own experience and watching Em with Quinn. My priority had to be getting her better, mentally. I couldn’t put my feelings or our future or anything in front of that.
“You got it. And for what it’s worth, there’s no fucking way I would have let Hunter or anyone else take her anywhere. The guys should know there’s a difference between an easy target and someone on the lip of a goddamn ledge.”
He hung up and I threw on shoes, racing out to my Jeep and hopping behind the wheel. It took less than twenty minutes to get to the beach house, and the first asshole I saw was Hunter. He stood at the bar, a drink in his hand, hair a mess. My vision went red when he turned and caught my eye, a lazy smile spreading across his lips. I have no doubt that I would have gotten into a heap of trouble if cold fingers hadn’t wrapped around my forearm right then.
“She’s out on the beach with Ruby.” Emilie’s dark gaze communicated her sorrow, but also held a flicker of her typical fire. “Hunter’s a dick, Toby. Not worth whatever it would cost you.”
