by Angel Lawson
He sways on his feet before finding his balance, peering down his nose at me. “If you find a way to make this shit with Syd right,” he scoops up his jacket from the ground, “then maybe we’ll see.”
I blink owlishly up at him. “We’ll see?”
He flings out his arms. “It’s not a formal blessing or anything, I’m just saying if you manage to unfuck the mess her head is probably in right now, then I’ll be a lot more fucking inclined.”
I thrust out my hand, and after a long, silent stare, he grips it and shakes.
Ten minutes later, I’m still sitting there on the pavement, thinking over this issue of unfucking the situation. I’m not stupid. He probably thinks there isn’t a chance. That’s probably why he was laughing so hard before, because in the end, he didn’t even need to come between us. But he has to be wrong.
He has to be.
The parking lot is mostly empty, save for the car at my back. At some point, the rumble in the distance descends into a spattering of fat, wet sprinkles, but I’m not ready to move yet. I’m guessing most of the people went off to after-parties, which is confirmed when some of them begin returning to the parking lot, collecting their cars, one by one.
That’s how I discover who the car I’m currently propped against belongs to.
“Um,” comes a haughty voice. “Excuse me. You’re on my car!” I peer up at the girl standing before me, car keys dangling from one hand, her phone clenched in the other. Her eyes widen when she realizes who I am, shoes clicking against the pavement when she takes a wide step back.
I grin. “Fiona.”
I don’t even bother going home.
The first thing I do is gather up my phone and kit, and cross the driveway to her house. It’s raining like a fucking monsoon all of a sudden, little rivers of runoff sluicing down the drive. Emory’s truck isn’t here and the downstairs windows are all dark. It’s not easy pulling myself up onto the roof. There isn’t a gutter here, and the water running off the roof slides right down my neck. My muscles are sore and already exhausted from my scrap with Em, and that doesn’t help matters, either. The knowledge that he looked even worse than me is a meager consolation.
When I finally manage to heave myself up onto the overhang, soaked to the bone and slumped in fatigue, I sneak to her window. The curtains are closed, but that’s no surprise. I grab the bottom of the window and tug, but it doesn’t give. Locked. Also not a surprise.
I mutter a low curse and pull out my kit, having anticipated this. Windows suck. I have a crude jimmy stuffed into my roll, so I pull it out and get to work. It takes even longer than the door to the tech room had. The only light I have to work with is the occasional flash of lightning behind the clouds. By the fifth time my swollen knuckles bang against the frame, I’m beginning to think it’d be a less hassle to just get in through a door. I’m soaked through and it’s not exactly warm out here, as it is.
I’m just about to give up altogether when the lock finally gives. “Fucking finally.”
The window opens without resistance.
I carefully step through the curtains, but it doesn’t matter. I’m soaking her floor, either way I shake it. The light inside is dim and soft, and when the window shuts behind me, it’s quiet. Warm. A stark contrast to what’s happening outside.
Vandy’s on the bed, curled on her side.
I take a moment to gather my thoughts, because I have this whole, like, plan. If I play this right, I can exonerate myself to Vandy and get Emory’s blessing, all in one fell swoop.
“V?” I softly call, not wanting to scare her. The last thing I need is for her to scream. She doesn’t move, so I kick off my shoes, shuck off my jacket, and shuffle closer. When I’m standing over the bed, I touch her shoulder and shake gently. “Vandy, hey.”
Her eyes are closed, mouth parted as she breathes evenly. She’s flaccid when I shake her, like she’s out hard, which isn’t like her at all. Nights of sleeping at her side have taught me that Vandy is a light sleeper, always on alert. I reach out to brush her cheek, warm and pale beneath my palm.
A curled tendril of her hair draws my eyes to the side.
And then I see it.
There’s a pile of pills. A shit-ton of them. They’re haphazardly gathered into a heap on top of her sheets, right next to where her loose fist rests.
“No.” Everything constricts and narrows before exploding into a panicked frenzy. “No, no, no.” I don’t even care about being heard. I take her face in my hands, yelling. “Vandy! Wake up!”
She doesn’t respond.
I try shaking her again, growling out, “V! Come on, baby, come on!” Nothing.
Without thinking, I shove my arms beneath her and wrench her limp body up into my arms. The journey from the bed to the bathroom is completely lost to me in a blur of velocity and my own flooded lungs. Her arm swings floppily when I push through the door, rushing to the bathtub.
I lay her in the tub, but when I go to turn on the water, my bruised fists are shaking so hard that I can barely keep a grip. Cold water bursts from the shower head in a hissing stutter, and I fight to pull my phone from my sopping pocket. But for some reason, the phone won’t turn on. I keep swiping and pressing, but the screen remains black.
Swipe, press. Black.
Press, swipe. Black.
Over and over again, nothing. I’m struck with the impossible notion that I’ve forgotten how to even work a phone. How long has it been since she left with Sebastian? Two, three hours? Long enough to make a stomach-pumping dubiously effective. Long enough to ignite a spark of resentful anger at Emory for holding me there, for fighting with me, when his sister was…
I hear a wet sputter and my eyes lurch away from the screen.
Vandy’s face is screwed up in a grimace, turning away from the spray of water.
I drop the phone, falling to my knees and cupping her cold, wet cheek. “Hey, hey, look at me! Wake up, V! Come on, look at me.”
She blinks against the water, cringing away. “Huh?”
“How many,” I demand, forcing her chin toward me. “How many did you take?”
Her bleary eyes finally fix to mine, a weak hand rising to block the spray. “Reyn? What?”
“Come on, V, focus!” I give her cheek a firm tap. “How many pills did you take?”
Something in her eyes shifts, growing a little more alert. When it does, her face falls. “Fireflies,” she mumbles.
My jaw locks. “Listen to my voice, V! How many!”
“Two!” she yells back, feebly shoving my hands away. “I took two! God…”
“Two?” My eyes dart back toward the room, to the pile of pills on her bed. “Are you sure?”
She wraps her arms around herself, shivering. “It was just my normal dose. Think it knocked me out.”
Reluctantly, I reach over to turn the water off. My hands aren’t trembling any less violently. “Jesus Christ.” I slump to the floor, my back against the tub. My heart feels like I’ve been running laps all damn day. My head is pounding, lungs aching. “Jesus Christ, Vandy. You don’t have a tolerance anymore. That’s how overdoses happen.” The words are rote, mechanical. I can’t even bring myself to look back at her. If I do, she’s going to see this wild, terrified thing that’s not letting go of me.
“What are you doing here?” she curtly asks. I can hear her teeth chattering and I should do something about it, but my limbs are just numb. “Why are you all bloody and—?”
“The plans I had,” I let my elbows dig into my knees when I press the heels of my palms into my eyes, pushing against them until I saw sparks, “were that your brother wanted to kick my ass.”
There’s a loud, horrible squeaking sound from the tub when she shifts, sitting up. Her voice is flat, lifeless. “Because of what you did with Sydney.”
“No, Vandy.” I finally crane my neck to meet her glazed blue eyes. “Because of what I did with you.” She’s shivering harder now—just as hard as I am—wrapping her arms around
her knees. “There is no Sydney. If you would have given me the chance to explain, I could have told you that it was all a dumb trick.”
She blinks at me lazily and I hate it. I hate the flat look in her eyes and the way her head lolls on her neck. “The picture—”
“Was completely fucking staged. And I have the video to prove it.” I lift my phone. It hadn’t been easy to convince Fiona to send it to me. It had been less easy to force her to permanently delete the copy on her phone, and then the one on ChattySnap.
She repeats a slow, teeth-chattering, “Staged.”
I try again to turn on the phone, but it suddenly dawns on me why it won’t. “Son of a bitch,” I growl, shaking the water from the case. All that rain from the roof had gone straight into my fucking pockets. I deflate, flinging it aside. “Phone’s fucked. I might need a little more time to—maybe some rice, or—”
“It’s okay.” She doesn’t look like it’s okay. She looks miserable. “Why would she do that?”
“Because she’s jealous, V.”
“Of me?”
I shrug. “Yes. And me. And the Devils, and the Playthings.” I still remember the bitterness in her eyes, and the despair hidden underneath it. “Sydney wanted to hurt us.”
“I know.” She looks away, chin dipping. “I know she did.”
“Where did you get all those pills?”
Softly, she answers, “Around. I had them stashed in… places.”
I take a second to wrap my head around that, the fact that Vandy’s been sitting on a fucking mountain of narcotics. I point to the space beside the toilet, voice accusing. “You stood there—right there—and promised me that was the last.”
I don’t hear anything for a long moment, and when I do, it’s just the wet sound of a sob. It startles me into finally turning to her, eyes landing on her shivering form, curled in on itself.
“I lied,” she says. “I didn’t want you to know that I—”
“Hey, no,” I gently pry her hands from her face, surprised at how cold they feel. “Fuck, you’re freezing.” Idiotic statement. I was the one who blasted her with cold water. I’m not faring much better, still dripping wet from the storm outside.
She lets me pull her shirt over her head. Helps me take off her shorts and underwear. Sits there and blankly watches as I run a hot bath, plugging the drain.
Her hand wraps around my wrist when I pull back, though. “You’re bleeding.”
I only barely caught a reflection of myself as I rushed in here, but I saw enough to know how grisly I must look. “Just my nose.” My tongue prods around inside my mouth. “And my lip.”
She looks at me with her wet, wrong eyes, pulling in a long sniffle. “Get in with me?”
She doesn’t have to ask me twice. I begin peeling off my suit, hissing when the heavy, weighted fabric grazes against my bruises and scrapes. She lets me get into the tub behind her, pulling her into my chest as the tub fills. The water is bordering on too-hot, but it relaxes my aching muscles, and she’s stopped shivering. Too much adrenaline for one night, I bury my face into her neck and breath in the scent of her, alive and okay. God, if I’d lost her. If she’d taken more of those pills…
When it’s full, she grabs a washcloth. “Let me…”
I don’t argue when she turns, gently dabbing the cloth over my chin. Her eyes are a little clearer now, watching raptly as she cleans the blood away. Her small sniffle is still loud in the silence. “I’m sorry about Em.”
I shrug. “You might not be when you see him.”
Despite everything, the corner of her mouth quirks up. Her eyes fall to my chest, her legs all crowded between us. “I think I was… glad.” Her forehead creases. “Or not glad, but maybe… relieved? Grateful?”
“Grateful for what?”
When her eyes meet mine, they’re full of guilt. “I was talking to Tyson earlier, and I was telling him that things are so much better now. That I don’t need the pills—the escape. Because I have you and the Devils, and things are so… so good for once. And then I saw that picture…” Her face goes tight, shuttered.
Comprehension dawns over me. “It gave you a reason.” I still her hand, gently taking the cloth away. “Maybe Em was right. Maybe you’re not ready for this.” It hurts like a bitch to admit, but I can’t ignore it.
Her eyes fall closed. “Don’t say that, Reyn. I can take it from my parents and him, but not you.”
“Baby, look at me,” I say, touching her chin. When her blue eyes open, so full of fear and sadness, I explain, “I like being the reason you don’t need it anymore, but I can’t—I won’t be the reason you do need it.”
Her lip wobbles and I still it with a kiss, tender and full of things I can’t bear to say. “I promise I won’t do it again.”
“I don’t think that’s a promise you can make.” I gently add, “You have a problem, V.”
She blinks and the tears spill over, running tracks down her cheeks. “I don’t want to.”
“I know.” I pull her into my chest, palm cradling the back of her head. “I’m sorry,” I say, pressing a kiss into her hair.
“Does this mean you’re—” The words get swallowed by a sound that I feel more than hear—a hard jerk in her chest. Her shoulders quake against me, and I hold her tight.
I know what she needs to hear, but maybe there are promises I have no business making, either. “It means that I love you. The rest? We’ll figure it out. But tomorrow, okay? Tonight’s been a long… week.”
“Will you stay?”
This promise is easy to make. “Always.”
The warmth from the bath dissipates the second I reenter her room, seeing the pills on the bed. She’s still in the bathroom, pulling on clothes, so I swiftly gather them all up and stuff them into the pocket of my damp coat. I’ll get rid of them my-fucking-self.
I rouse slowly. Painfully.
There’s this ray of sun stabbing right into my eyelids, but when I try to turn away from it, it awakens every single ache in my body. I wonder how Emory’s feeling right about now, and I hope like hell it’s as bad as this.
I squint against the light, my eyes blearily taking in the room. The spot beside me is cold and vacant, but it only takes a second to find her. She’s sitting at the desk, hunched over her laptop, lip trapped pensively between her teeth as she scrolls with a fingertip. There’s something hard and determined in the set of her jaw.
I try to sit up, groaning at the tug of my muscles.
Her head whips around first, and then she turns in the chair, angling her body toward me. “Hey. I wasn’t sure if I should wake you, but…” The way her eyes rove over my injuries tells me everything I need to know. I must look like shit.
“It’s cool.”
Her eyes are completely different from the glazed deadness of last night. Here, they’re wide and eager, full of that warm spark. “I have a plan,” she starts, rushing up from the chair. She must have woken up a while ago, because she’s beyond alert as she jumps on the bed, knees tucked beneath her. “I’m going to go back to seeing Doctor Cordell. I turn eighteen in soon, right? So when that happens, I can tell him about everything, because I’ll be an adult and he can’t tell my parents. In the meantime, there are these groups online, completely anonymous. I joined one, and—I mean, I know it’s not ideal. I know it won’t cure me. But it can help, maybe. Until I’m eighteen, until I can tell my doctor.”
I gingerly rub my eyes, her rush of words pouring through my fuzzy head like a sieve. “Wait, wait. Slow down.”
She just charges on, “So I know it’s not like a full-on, immediate solution, but this can work for now, can’t it?”
I squint. “Work for what?”
“For us,” she answers, hitching forward. “So you know I’m ready. So you won’t… you won’t leave.”
The memory of our talk in the bathtub last night rushes back to me, and my face falls. “Vandy.” I reach out to cup her cheek. “I’m not leaving.”
Her ey
es flutter before pinning me with a stare. “I know I messed up. I let Sydney get to my head and I…” She sighs, eyes dropping. “No, I’m not going to blame it on her. It was me.” She shrugs, simple. “Because I have a problem. I need you to know, I get that now. I worked past the physical dependence and I didn’t understand that there was more to it. But just because I’m still figuring stuff out doesn’t mean I’m not ready,” she insists, eyes blazing. “I had a weak moment, Reyn, but I’m not a weak person.”
“I don’t think you’re weak.” I take her hand in mine, watching as my thumb sweeps over her delicate knuckles. “I think you’re strong.” I bring her hand to my mouth. “Beautiful.” A kiss to the back of her hand. “Smart.” A kiss to her knuckles. “Funny.” Flipping her hand over, I press a slow kiss into her palm, eyes trapping hers. “Mine.”
She breathes, “Reyn,” but I go on.
“I’m yours for as long as you want me to be, Baby V.” I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, letting my fingertips linger there. I beg. “But please—please—never let me be the reason you do that. Send me away if you have to. Have Emory kick my ass. Do it yourself, for all I care. I’ll let you. But don’t let me drag you down.”
“You won’t,” she exclaims, face crumbling. “Reyn, you could never—”
Instead of finishing, she pushes forward, pressing our mouths together. I take the kiss without reluctance, tangling my fingers into her hair and holding her close. When she swings a leg over my hips, I steady her, arm wrapping around her waist.
This.
This is all I’ve needed and I take it in greedily, hungrily. The warmth of her skin against mine. The rush of her breath against my mouth. The veil of her golden hair around us, shutting out the world. The feeling of her hand on my chest. The way she rocks against me. I know it can’t be this easy—nothing this good ever could be—but even though it’s flawed and messy and gut-wrenchingly scary, it’s ours.
My busted, swollen lip is screaming, but I hardly notice it, too wrapped up in the push and pull.
She pulls back, only to rip off her shirt. My mouth is on her instantly, tasting the soft skin around her peaked nipple. My hand glides up the other side, cupping her in a gentle palm, and the way the column of her neck looks, head thrown back, draws my mouth upward.