Theo and Wes go down to the wine cellar while Clara talks to me about YouTube like I know even half the stuff she does. The Hurleys are on a totally different level from me, not to mention in an entirely different genre, with millions of subscribers and crazy high views. I don’t know the exact stats, but I do know she could monetize circles around me.
“Not to sound rude,” I say, after I hop in the pool and Clara takes a seat on the edge, “but how do you even know who I am?”
In my head, I can practically hear Juniper saying, Since when do you care about sounding rude?
“Like, do you skate?” I go on. “Because I almost never get recognized outside of those circles.”
This time, I really do hear Juniper’s voice in my head: “A skater who’s known throughout his industry...but barely registers on the general public’s radar.”
Clara explains that her sister used to “date” (with actual air quotations) another all-terrain skater who was sponsored by Spiral around the same time I was. Before my fall from grace.
“We got really into it for a while,” she shrugs. “Even took lessons. But we were awful.”
I try to echo her laugh, but I’m too busy remembering the feeling of Juniper’s back when I nudged her down that trail a few days ago. Her little scream when she fell, about as fast as a feather, into the brush.
How softly her fingertips traced my tattoos, now rippling at me from under the water until neither of my last names are legible.
The day blurs. I drink more than I mean to and plant myself in a float when Theo’s Hamptons friends arrive, most sporting fresh tans from even better locations than this one. By dinnertime, I’ve got a headache tearing up my head, and a worse feeling tearing up my gut.
“You plan on offering any to Juni?” Theo asks, when I pile pizza on my plate.
Guilt: that’s what was in my stomach all day. Now it’s one-hundred percent gone.
“You like her so much,” I tell him, Frisbeeing an empty paper plate into his chest, “you do the honors.”
* * *
I make the mistake of drinking more after dinner, with only one goal in mind: to think about anything that isn’t Juniper.
One of Theo’s friends’ sisters drapes herself over my legs in the pool. “Hi, Van,” she purrs up at me.
I think I grunt in response. A-plus flirting, Andresco.
She wets her lips, toying with the string on my shorts. “I’m eighteen, now.”
“Huh?” My hand swats hers away. She laughs.
“Last year,” she prompts, then rolls her eyes like my blank, drunken stare is adorable. “I invited you upstairs, and you asked how old I was? And when I said I was seventeen, you told me, ‘Sorry, sweetheart: I’ll take a lot of stupid risks, but not jailbait.’”
This doesn’t even begin to jog my memory. Nonetheless, I believe her. Sounds like something I’d say.
“But,” she whispers, teeth sinking into the corner of her lip, “I’m eighteen, now.”
“Funny how time works,” I mutter, and swig straight from the bottle in my cupholder. I don’t know who put it there. Maybe me. I’m so damn smashed, I can’t even tell it’s red wine until I squint at the label in the moonlight.
The girl touches the portable speaker somebody threw at me earlier. I left it where it landed, right on my stomach; she traces the lines of the buttons until she gets to my navel, then traces the line of hair underneath.
Appreciate the audacity, I tell her mentally, because my mouth has stopped functioning, but no way in hell.
First: legal or not, I’ve got no interest in a teenager. I probably just said the jailbait thing as an easy out, and was too stupid to realize I’d need another excuse in twelve short months.
And second…not a single piece of me wants her, or anyone else here.
“Happy belated birthday,” I manage, clinking my teeth on the bottle when I take another drink.
She thanks me. “You want to help me celebrate?”
My wasted brain drags my eyes to every window of the house, looking for the girl I’m trying so damn hard to drink away.
There’s not enough wine on this earth.
“No,” I tell her.
Pouting, she sinks her weight back onto my legs.
I fall asleep at some point, which I only know because I wake up in the water.
“What the fuck,” I spit, while the girl and everyone else on the deck laughs their collective ass off.
I curse and belch pool water all the way to the stairs. She keeps apologizing and laughing. I keep ignoring her.
I’m not even mad about getting flipped off my float. It’s a party law. Pass out in your shoes, you get dicks drawn on your face. Pass out in or anywhere near the pool, and your ass goes in the water.
I’m just freaked the hell out, that’s all. And I can’t figure out why.
“Van!”
Christ, there’s about fifty-thousand people in the living room. Or ten. I don’t care. They’re all shouting at me to chill, and I’m not in the mood. I barrel over everybody’s legs until I get to the stairs.
Wes and Clara are at the top, laughing as they duck into their bedroom. It swims in my head like the water I could swear I still feel in my chest.
My room’s dark. The windows are filled with stars and the murky nothingness of the bay.
“Van?”
I spin to face the doorway. Terrible decision: my sense of balance is shot to hell.
Juniper’s features bleed out of the darkness, coming into focus just when I stumble against the bed.
“Are you drunk?”
“Very.”
“Are you having an asthma attack?”
“Yes,” I lie, “but I can’t find my inhaler. That’s...that’s why I came up here. I was looking for it.”
I was looking for you.
“You mean....”
She touches my chest. My heart starts pounding even worse than it did on the deck.
“...this inhaler?” She holds it up. We watch it spin back and forth on its lanyard, still dripping pool water.
Juniper uncaps it and presses it into my hand. I stare at her while I use it, then watch dumbly while she sets it on my nightstand.
“Here.” Her hand grabs mine, pressing something else into it.
I pull her into me.
Sixteen
Van’s mouth hits mine, but it’s not a kiss.
It’s far too lacking in the technical details to be called that, for one thing. Yeah, our lips meet, but way off-center and too fast. He’s obviously wasted.
And for another, he doesn’t mean it to be a kiss.
He doesn’t want me. He just thinks Theo does.
We land on his bed. My hands slide on his skin when I push off. His chest might get my silent admiration, but his abs get an accidental elbow as I flop to the floor.
“I was in the pool,” he blurts, while I find the antibiotic I dropped when he pulled me down. It’s halfway under the nightstand.
“Yeah,” I groan, straining until I reach it, “I figured, since you’re soaking wet.”
“No.” When I stand, he’s still lying down, shaking his head too hard and pressing his fists to his eyes. “I fell in. Or got flipped. I—I don’t know.”
There’s a twist, deep in his voice.
It’s not tears. It can’t be. When we met, Van told me he hadn’t been able to cry since before his mother died. Something tells me the last seven years haven’t changed that.
But whatever I hear, it’s the closest thing to tears Van Durham-Andresco’s got—so I take notice.
“You felt like you were drowning again.” I sit beside him. “It scared you.”
Over the bass of someone’s music downstairs, everyone laughing and yelling at each other, I hear him swallow. “Yeah.”
“I didn’t think you remembered that.”
“Me neither.”
Cradling his elbow until he sits up, I grab the other thing I brought him: string cheese. “Here.
” I put both into his curled fingers.
“Wait.” He grabs my arm when I stand. “Don’t go.”
“Why?”
Van takes the pill dry. I tell myself I won’t Google whether or not it’s safe to take with alcohol, the second I’m back in my room...but I know I will. No matter how cruel Van is to me—or worse: how fast he switches from civil to cruel—I feel some strange, irresistible need to look after him.
Maybe even to protect him.
“I don’t want to be alone,” he slurs.
“Then go back to that girl you were swimming with.”
I don’t mean to say this. I don’t want him knowing I saw him with her, or that I concerned myself with him at all after our encounter in the hallway.
My only saving grace is that I say it neutrally, without one hint of jealousy. I might even really mean it.
There are plenty of girls downstairs that could fix his loneliness. He doesn’t need me.
He never did.
“Did you know,” he mumbles, leaning hard against me until I elbow him away so he’ll fall back on the mattress, “that I thought you were, like...actual fucking magic, when we met?”
I stare at the closet doors. Ripples of light from the pool play across them, hypnotizing me as much as his words.
“Magic?”
Me?
Van doesn’t answer. He’s already asleep.
I try to move him up to the pillows, but he kicks and mumbles, no clue where he is or what’s happening, until I give up. I settle for rolling him onto his side.
No matter how much I reason with myself that he’ll be fine, I can’t leave him.
So he gets exactly what he wanted, even if he didn’t really want it: I stay.
* * *
“Hey. Wake up and get out.”
The first thing I see when I open my eyes is a blinding, sun-filled sky, sizzling the room into focus.
The second thing: Van’s impatient face, hovering over mine.
“You mind telling me what you’re doing in my room?” He rubs his eyes with his palms and stretches. The sight, combined with actually getting to touch his bare chest last night, melts my brain.
“Oh.” I get up and push my hair back from my face, still groggy. “I was just....”
“Just sleeping in my bed, hoping for some fun? Maybe you should go bark up Theo’s tree.”
The sunshine illuminates every speck of dust in the room as he moves.
Why do I suddenly feel like one, tiny and pointless and trapped in his orbit?
“Not that I blame you one bit for seeking an upgrade, since I could wear you better than that asshole ever could.” The glance he throws me is so blue, so impossibly cold, it wakes me like a plunge into ice water. “But like I told you, it’s not gonna happen.”
Yep. Should’ve left him on his back.
“You were wasted,” I spit. “You tried to kiss me.”
“In your dreams.” He pulls on a shirt from his duffel bag. A shirt I saved, and washed. A bag I gave him.
When he leaves, I grab the bag and shake every last thing out of it, all over the floor. I don’t care if it’s immature. At least it keeps me from crying.
For about ten seconds.
I try to make it to the Transit outside, but break down at the second landing of the stairs.
“Oh! Sorry.”
I turn. Clara Hurley is on the first landing, peering up at me with an unsure smile. But a friendly one.
And man...could I use a friend, right now.
“And in this corner, arriving slightly earlier than expected: Antisocial Theo, weighing in at a lean one-eighty.”
I punch Theo’s shoulder as I vault the back of the couch. His dead eyes swing from the television to me. “Hey.”
“Hey.” I scoop up a spare controller and start a game. “Did you sleep, like...at all?”
“A little.” He’s probably lying.
“You sure you don’t want an espresso? I’ve already made them for the entire house, one more won’t kill me.”
“Maybe you should offer one to Juniper, instead.”
I dig my elbow into his ribcage, but not all that hard. My anger’s overshadowed by pity.
Of course he can’t stay away from her. For one thing—look at her.
Add in the fact he’s desperate to feel a connection, to feel anything, and…well. I know how that goes.
When you’re broken enough, you’ll believe in anything. Anyone.
“You’re her new friend with benefits,” I tell him. “I’m sure she’d rather get her room service from you.”
“What?” His brow furrows, but that’s the only sign of anger I get. Damn, it’s not even fun arguing with him when he’s in his shut-out mode. “You’re fucking nuts, dude.”
I abandon the game and spend most of my day in the pool, until a friend of Theo’s tells me “my girl” is asking where I am.
“Mine?” I fumble out of my float. “You mean Juniper?”
He shrugs. “The hippie girl. I don’t know.”
My laugh settles in my stomach. Sounds about right.
I find her on the side of the house, tearing up the Transit’s cargo area.
“Heard you were looking for me.”
She spins to face me. Her hair’s plastered to her face with sweat, and her cheeks are deep red like she’s been running laps. “Where’s my pocketknife?”
“Why? Planning to shank me?”
“It’s not funny, Van. I’m also missing my charging block, a pillowcase—”
“Wow,” I drawl, pivoting on my heel to nope the hell out of this mess. “Well, good luck with that, and your future paranoia diagnosis.”
She yanks me back by my shirt hem. “Why are you like this?”
Uh-oh. Tears.
I don’t do well with women crying. It should be classified as biological warfare or something, because it’s too unfair that I could spit the most cutting, cogent remarks possible, but get KO’d by a few drops of saltwater.
My hands push through my hair as I sigh. “I didn’t take your stuff, Fairy Lights. Calm down.”
From the other side of the driveway, a car door opens. It’s Clara and Wes.
“Come here.” Juniper grabs me by the wrist and yanks me farther into the side yard, out of view.
“Okay.” She shuts her eyes and breathes. “Let’s say you didn’t take my things.”
“I didn’t. All those crime podcasts are screwing with your head.”
Her face reddens again. “For all I know, you took my things to do exactly that.”
“Maybe so,” I smirk. “I did say I’d like to psychologically torture you until you paid me back, didn’t I?”
I step closer. Even closer than in the hallway.
“Or maybe,” I whisper, “I really don’t have any clue where your shit is. Because, unlike you, I’m not a thief.”
Juniper stares up at me, unblinking, even when her eyes cloud with more tears.
“No,” she sniffs. “You’re just a fucking bully.”
She shoves past me, back into the vehicle to continue her search. I linger a moment, honestly too stunned to realize now is the getaway I wanted: I think it’s the first time she’s ever cursed in front of me.
It’s official. Something’s definitely wrong with me, because I think I like it.
Seventeen
Over a week passes without Van and me crossing paths.
It’s not a miracle. It’s entirely orchestrated by my hand, calculated with so much precision I’d be proud of my brain for aligning our schedules so perfectly...if I wasn’t so ashamed of my heart for caring.
A few times, late at night when he’d been drinking, I heard doors opening up and down the hall, and someone whispering my name.
He was looking for me.
Always, he’d find a local passed out, or two locals tangled together instead, and mumble some excuse before shutting the door and continuing to the next room.
He even checked Wes and Clara�
�s room two nights, whispering “Oh, right” to himself when he found it empty.
Clara gave me her number after our talk on the landing that morning, but stopped answering my check-ins and memes once she was gone.
I didn’t take it personally. Rumor in the house was that she and Wes were history, so I figured she was nursing a broken heart.
Or cursing a foolish heart, for letting her fall for a Durham in the first place.
That’s what our talk had been about: how much she and Wes used to dislike each other, until something changed. When I asked her what, she laughed under her breath and said she still wasn’t sure.
Part of her, she said, was afraid nothing had really changed at all.
So when I heard Van searching the house for me, I kept my mouth shut and my light off. Nothing was any different here than in the Transit. He still hated me. He just had alcohol in his veins and a long, lonely night ahead of him.
And that’s exactly why I chose the storage room, instead of moving into Clara and Wes’s room once Theo told me it was empty. Van couldn’t find me here; he had no reason to check behind this door.
Yes, it seemed a waste to spend what would no doubt be my only-ever week in the Hamptons holed up in a storage room, but I reminded myself this wasn’t a vacation. I was atoning. It wasn’t meant to be pretty or comfortable.
Besides, the storage room was a misnomer. Theo only called it that because it had no clear purpose, stuffed with mismatched furniture (including a bed, television, and dresser) and his father’s zoology textbooks.
Every morning, Theo woke me early for breakfast before Van was up, and the two of us would tiptoe past the snoring bodies in the living room to drink coffee and eat on the deck. Half the mornings, he was talkative; every other day brought a strangely quiet version of the boy I was, slowly, considering a friend.
More than once, he asked me why I didn’t just leave.
“No offense,” he said, halfway through the week, “but I think you’re insane for doing this deal. Driving him here, I could understand—you didn’t want to leave him stranded at the lake. But why not haul ass now, while you still can?”
Seven Sins: Durham Boys, Book 2 Page 12