by L V Chase
“Because she’s not the type of girl to be conned by his nice guy act,” I say.
He nods several times. “Alright, but we could still team up.”
“No,” I say, looking straight at him. The idiot has blood on his cheek. “I’m going to win, Roman. I don’t need help. If you help, you should throw in the towel.”
I snatch the cloth from him and toss it into the garbage. As I kneel down to check the drawer’s slides, Roman mutters some curses and slinks back to his table.
I open my hand, where I’d been clenching one of my screws. The threads have cut into my skin, creating a ladder of slices. I tighten my hand around it again.
Damn. This is harder than I thought.
13
Sadie
I sit in the middle of my closet, searching for a pencil sharpener. I know it’s unlikely to be in here, but I’ve looked everywhere else in my room, and I’d rather sit in my closet like a moody child than go downstairs to look for one.
I love my grandmother in my own way—we have a strange relationship where I remind her of her son and she reminds me of my dad—but she’s been pestering me about school. The questions are piling up to the point that I can’t shift them around anymore, and the lies are starting to get repetitive and shameful. I don’t want to lie to her, but, more than that, I don’t want to stress her over how confusing and difficult school has been.
I pull out my shoe boxes, four of them, and pull out each of my shoes. One of them belonged to my mother. I remember that much, but even if I hadn’t, I’d know they weren’t mine. The red leather has faded into an ugly brown shade, and a button that the strap hooked onto is holding on by a single worn thread.
I lift the shoes, the leather feeling soft under my palms. I’d like to imagine that if my mother were here, she’d tell me the exact way to handle everyone at school and turn my experience into a better one, but I know there’s no right way to handle this. I know she’d comfort me, but kind words won’t fix my problems.
The mistake is that I put all of my hopes into being seen as normal. I never considered how badly that could be inverted. I should have gone to school without any expectations. At least I wouldn’t be so disappointed.
I pull on the shoe’s broken threads to try to make it long enough to fit back into the button’s holes. As I tug, I tip the shoe. A tiny piece of paper falls out.
The stark white paper is folded into a small square. I pick it up and unfold it.
You’re more than I can take, but I’ll take you every time. I love you.
The words hold a charge in my head. I try to imagine they’re words that my father wrote to my mother, but the paper is too new and the words are too intimate.
Someone wrote this for me, and they aren’t the type of words a parent would tell a child. This is someone who loved me, and I’d swear on my parent’s grave, the one I remember in the public garden loved me.
But something must have happened. He hasn’t come to find me, and my mind has made sure that I can’t remember him.
As my fingertip traces the ink, I try to recall who loved me so recklessly. A crashing noise interrupts my thoughts.
I jump to my feet. I drop my mother’s shoe as I lurch toward the doors. I yank it open and run down the stairs, nearly tripping over my feet. Words get caught in my throat, so I pass through the central hallway and move to the living room. When I don’t find anyone, I head into the kitchen.
My grandmother is on the floor, a cup of water spilled beside her. She’s struggling back onto her feet. I grab onto her arm, steadying her.
“Sit down here.” I guide her to the tiny table that acts as our dining table.
She sits down in her chair. She told me that it was passed down to her from her grandfather. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not ready for it to be passed down to me yet. I sit down in the other chair, keeping ahold of her hand while my thoughts pound in my head.
Roman’s accusation that I don’t care about my grandmother drills through my thoughts. Even though she’s been raising me since I was nine, I’ve never felt especially close to her, but I still love her. She’s my last living relative that I know of.
My mother’s parents were both deceased—lung cancer and coronary heart disease—and my father never knew his father. My mother had a sister, but she moved to England, and I never met her.
My father’s death may have created a wall between us, but she’s everything to me right now.
“What happened?” I ask. “Did you trip?”
She shakes her head, her cloud of gray hair flattened on one side. I reach forward and try to fix it for her, but that only makes it messier, giving her the appearance of a mad scientist.
“No, no. Sometimes I a little lightheaded. It’s fine, Sadie. I’m fine.”
“You fainted?” I ask. “Has this happened before? We should call an ambulance—”
“No!” she says hurriedly. “Don’t. It’s just a little dizziness.”
Even as she says the last word, she cups her elbow. She lets out an unsteady breath as I roll down her sleeves. The skin is pink right above her elbow.
“Grandma, you need medical care if you’re fainting,” I say, taking her hand again. “They can find out why you’re lightheaded. When you told me you’d been having some health problems, you never told me about this. This is different than forgetting things or not being as spritely as you used to. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You had enough on your plate,” she says. “I’ve gone to the doctor, too. They’re trying to figure out what it is.”
“Well, maybe the hospital doctors can figure out more,” I say, grabbing her phone off its charger. “Especially right after you fainted, maybe the machines will tell them something.”
“Don’t, Sadie,” she says. She grabs onto my hands, stopping me from going farther than the dial pad screen. “Don’t call. I can’t afford another hospital bill.”
“Grandma, your insurance will pay—”
“No, it won’t,” she says. “I can’t afford the deductible. They changed it last year. It’s too high.”
I set the phone down. “There has to be a way around that, Grandma. You can’t just stop going to the doctor.”
She forces a smile. “It’s the only option, Sadie. Don’t worry about it. I’m feeling better already. I was getting ready to make those microwaveable calzones. You like those, right? I heard you liked those in the hospital.”
I never liked a single piece of food in the hospital, but I get up and start preparing the calzones for the microwave. I keep turning to look at my grandmother, who pretends to be playing a game on her phone, but she’s lingering at the home screen of a match-three game. I feel her eyes on me as I cut the plastic wrap around the calzones. If my intention was to stop her from worrying about me, I’ve failed over and over again.
As the calzone slowly turns in the microwave, Roman’s offer turns in my head. He’s right, in his own way. If I truly cared about my grandmother, I’d do anything for her, including prostitution. Selling myself would be the fastest way to earn money, and with my grandmother’s uncertain health issues, I can’t twiddle my thumbs and wait for a stack of paychecks to come in. It would be difficult, and it would violate who I see myself as, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. If I didn’t help my grandmother, it could be the end of her life, and that’s infinitely worse.
As the microwave beeps and the light inside it flashes off, a new thought twists in my mind.
How did Roman know my grandmother needed money for her health before I did? And how did the person who made the prostitution ad know?
Because it’s the same person, and Roman knows far more than he’s been letting on.
14
Sadie
Secrets never remain private for long because secrets have a way of seeping into everything, into our very breath. The secret gets stuck in our throat, and when we exhale, it comes out in the way we talk, the way we kiss, and the way we lie. But it’s
not just that. Our body structure changes. Our secrets turn us into something new and unknown.
I like it.
His bed is a temple, where we worship and get worshiped by each other. After we share our touches, some more holy than others, we sink together into the plush depths of his comforter.
His hand finds the crook of my arm. My skin is still sensitive, and his touch summons all of my nerves, desperate for more contact.
I throw my leg over his waist, straddling him. We kiss, blessing each other in ways that would make angels blush and devils green.
When I pull away, he has one hand on my hip and the other settled on the side of my neck. His expression reminds me of someone drunk and struck with a love for everything. But he’s not drunk and the only thing he’s looking at is me.
His hand moves from my neck to my cheek, his thumb brushing against my cheek. I turn my head to kiss the inside of his palm.
“How long do you think I can keep this?” he asks, his hand gripping harder on my hip.
“Me? As long as you want,” I say. “How long do you think we can keep this a secret?”
His hand moves down to my ass. “Until we’ve eloped and found an island no one knows about. We’ll call it Sadie’s Island.”
I trace the center of his chest with my fingertip. “I’m serious. How long can we keep this up?”
“As long as we need to,” he says, his grip tightening on my ass. He moves his hands back up, tracing up my spine. He looks straight at me. “And I was being serious.”
We kiss, the texture of his lips shooing all of my concerns away. I press my body against him, thoroughly enjoying the feeling of his heart rapidly beating underneath me.
But it’s too late. The door barely makes any noise as it opens.
I sit up, waking up so abruptly that part of me still thinks I’m dreaming. I blink in the darkness, slowly recalling that I’m at my grandmother’s house and not the psychiatric ward. As the knowledge sinks in, I play back the memory. It’s a brand new one. Before I only ever dreamed and remembered the gazebo scene.
His face was still indistinct, though. I recalled sections of his body like the smoothness of his chest, but everything else slipped from my mind as soon as I woke up.
I had considered that he did something so terrible to me that my brain erased him, but he doesn’t feel like a threat to me. More than anything else, he feels like safety.
But this man who monopolizes my dreams hasn’t come to find me. We seemed to trust and love each other, but after I was in the psychiatric ward, he vanished.
I should resent him for that, but the emotions from my memory spill over, and all I feel is an overwhelming sensation of safety, love, and restless desire. He was clearly everything to me, but I wasn’t everything to him. I should accept that.
I collapse back down on my bed. It shouldn’t hurt when I don’t remember him except for those two blurry memories, but it does. It’s not just secrets that change people’s body structure. It’s grief, too, even when we don’t understand the reason behind it.
Finding Roman at school is easy. He always has a group of people gathered around him, attracting attention like a lighthouse. Nearly four minutes before we have to be in homeroom, he’s standing in front of the school’s trophy case, telling a group of four guys and three girls a story about his time in Maui.
“The helicopter tour was disappointing, but not too bad. The pilot was hot, but she didn’t talk a lot, and the guide kept on talking on and on about the history of every damn thing. For real, if I wanted a history lesson, I’d go to the library. But the sight of the island from above is something that can’t be described. Like, you don’t feel like a real man until you’ve seen all of Hall-lee…Hall-like…Haleakeela…the volcano on the island. It’s life-changing. And the hula girls are sexier than any strippers. Not only do they have huge asses, they know how to move their—”
I cut into the crowd. “Roman, I need to talk to you.”
He glances at me. “Hi, Sadie. Unless you have a seductive offer for me, I’m not much interested in a one-on-one.”
Some of the guys in the group exchange looks. One of them nudges his buddy next to him, looking at me like I’m edible.
“Oh, I have a seductive offer.” I put my hands on my hip, summoning my last scrap of courage. “But I can’t quite remember…did you want me to dress up like Mr. Miller or Mr. Reilly this time?”
His face flushes. A few uncertain laughs spill out of his crowd. They fall silent when Roman shoots them a threatening look.
“She’s joking,” he says, the anger transforming into a quick smile with a speed that’s unnerving. “But the two of us do need to talk for a sec, so you all go back to your lives. Maybe Kevin can talk to you about his time working as a waiter.”
The seven people disperse, going their separate ways with a level of obedience that seems almost absurd.
“You have quite a bit of control over your friends,” I say.
“I don’t know most of those people,” he says. “They just come to me like you did. Why did you…come? I’m thinking it’s not about what we talked before, or you wouldn’t have embarrassed me like that.”
“Are you embarrassed?” I ask.
He runs his tongue over his teeth, a sly smile creeping onto his face as he shakes his head. “Nah, I’m just playing. Tell me what you want. We have to get to homeroom soon. I mean, you do. Mrs. Richardson doesn’t care if I walk in late. She doesn’t care if I don’t show up at all.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “I want to know the truth.”
“The truth about your fantastic ass or those—”
“I want to know the truth about how you knew about my grandmother’s issues,” I interrupt. “Specifically, how you knew she couldn’t pay for them. I didn’t even know that.”
His head rolls back with a heavy sigh of exasperation. “I heard you were paranoid. Jesus, what are you assuming? Do you think I’ve been stalking your grandma? You think I have a thing for little old ladies?”
“It sounds like you’re avoiding the question,” I say. “And it sounds like you’re good at persuading people. Add in the fact that everyone hates me, and all of that could make someone paranoid, especially someone who’s insane and unstable.”
With the last ten words, I whip my hand back and forth between us. It feels good to rant. It feels better to give in to the reputation that was built around me before I stepped into the school.
“Maybe you should have learned more about me and my family, like I hinted earlier,” Roman says, standing up straighter.
The way he looks at me is significantly different than the dumb, lovable jock from before. There’s something under his skin that’s dangerous, deadly even.
“My parents own the bank in town, among others,” he says. “So, over a family dinner, I mentioned that you were a new kid and that you seemed lost. My parents know I’m a good guy who would want to lend a hand, so they mentioned that your grandma tried to get several loans. They couldn’t give it to her because her credit score is shit. So, I’m sorry if my minimal interest in you caused you to think I was a desperate stalker, but you’re a dime a dozen, which is far more than your grandma has in her bank account. Got it?”
I bite the inside of my cheek. I hadn’t thought about that. I recall now that Ethan had told me Roman’s father was a hedge-fund manager, but I hadn’t thought about how else his family could be involved in the town. I also hadn’t considered Roman would talk about me over a family dinner. I hadn’t even imagined his family to be the type who would sit together for dinner.
And, despite knowing more, I have the same old problems.
I taste blood in my mouth, forgetting that I’m biting the inside of my cheek. I relax my jaw. I’d been clinging to this idea of Roman’s deception to avoid recognizing that, no matter what, my grandmother’s financial issues would continue to exist. It didn’t matter if Roman was a creep or not when my grandmother was terrified to go to the ho
spital.
“Did you want to talk about something else or are you going to accuse someone else of being your stalker?” Roman asks, gesturing to a group of other people standing about fifteen feet away from us. “Because you’re going to be late to homeroom, just like you’re late to every other class. It’s not a good impression. The teachers already think you’re insane. You don’t want them thinking that you’re so far behind that you can’t read a clock.”
He’s right. I’m running out of time. If I’m going to dive forward into these dangerous waters, I need to do it now. I won’t catch him alone like this for a while.
“Hypothetically,” I say, leaning against the trophy case to appear as casual as possible.
He turns towards me, curiosity slowly purging the viciousness that had crossed his face.
“If I wanted money for my grandmother, what would you want me to do?” I ask.
“Oh, I’ll do anything past third base,” he says. “Anything before that, I might as well be playing with my own balls.”
“So, if I jerked you off, you’d pay me?”
He snorts, his lip curling up in distaste. “No. That’s second base to me. Third base is when a girl uses her mouth for something other than gossip. I’ve heard that crazy girls give crazy head. You can prove it.”
“You seem to hear a lot of things,” I say. “Not necessarily true things.”
“Don’t be so self-critical,” he says, stepping closer to me.
I don’t move. He moves closer, his shoes bumping up against mine. He leans forward, his minty breath hitting against my cheek “I’ve seen the way you move your ass. You know exactly what you’re doing and exactly how every man is watching. You like the attention.”
His hand brushes against my arm. He moves it across my ribs, climbing up toward my chest. An image of my dream, with that man gripping onto my hip, flashes in my mind. It’s nothing like this, and it flickers in my thoughts like it’s meant to calm me.