by Jordan Grant
I lift her onto the countertop, her ass on the edge, and hook my thumbs on either side of her panties. My tongue slips and glides with hers, and she moans into my mouth as I start to pull her pants and underwear off.
She mutters something in my mouth, but I have no idea what.
“Stop,” she says, and the word is so soft I’m thinking I must have imagined it.
Wait. What… I pull back and stare down at her.
“Stop,” she says again, directly at my chest.
I take another step back. Jesus, I must smell worse than I thought.
She hops off the counter, adjusting her panties and her pants as she does it. I watch her as she walks past the kitchen countertop and around the edge, finds her shirt on the floor and picks it up, uncurling it over herself. I pull up my pants and button them.
“You okay?” I ask because she looks like she’s about to cry again, and I really don’t get what is going on here now.
She starts to shake her head, stops herself, and nods, but she is still staring dead-center of my chest.
“I can’t do this,” she says, and again the words are so soft, but I’m about to die of a million soft papercuts.
“Do you want to come over later?” I ask.
Why won’t she look at me?
“It’s not working out,” she says, and I must be hearing her wrong.
“It’s not working out,” I repeat, the words tasting like guilt and disbelief on my tongue.
“What do you mean?” I nearly bark at her, and she winces as though I’ve slapped her. I shake my head, but I don’t dare take a step closer to her. Instead, I ball my fists at my sides and stare at her. “This about Finn? You know I didn’t stab him, right?”
“I know,” she says with a swallow.
Why. Won’t. She. Fucking. Look. At. Me?!
“What is this about?” I demand because this pussy breakup isn’t really doing it for me.
“We need some space apart.” She finally looks at me, and it’s like her gaze delivers two blue icicles straight into my dying heart. “I need space.”
“There aren’t time-outs in a relationship,” I grit out, clenching my teeth hard enough to crack a filling. “You either end it, or you don’t.”
One tear falls. Then two. Then three down her pale cheeks.
“Then I end it!” she says, the words breaking apart with her sob.
I feel the tic in my jaw and the matching clench of my right fist as my fingernails dig into my palm.
“All right,” I say after a moment, “I see.”
Though in reality I don’t see anything at all. I’m blinded by her betrayal.
I nod and give her a once-over. She’s back to not looking at me again as tears stream down her cheeks and slip like poison between her lips. She doesn’t look like she wants this. If anything, she looks like she is going to be sick all over my kitchen. I take one step toward her, then another and another, until the tips of my toes nearly kiss her feet.
She stares dead ahead as I reach around her and open the door to my dorm room, inviting her to leave.
She doesn’t move. She doesn’t so much as flinch when the palm of my hand brushes across her shoulder. I lean in, our noses mere inches apart, and wait, and finally, her gaze flicks up and locks with mine.
“Your pretty lips lie, Weathersby,” I tell her after a long moment. “Maybe if you say it long enough, at least one of us will start to believe your bullshit.” She doesn’t say anything, just lets more tears fall down the perfect face of my nightmares. “I’ll play whatever game this is, sweetness.” My words land like poison in the air. “But remember you fucking started it, and I never lose.”
Then I push her backward, out of my space, and slam my door in her face.
6
Harlow
There’s a chip in the paint on the wall above my bed. It’s small, no bigger than a fingernail.
Maybe some girl before me, a student, did it moving into the dorm room.
Maybe I did it one night when I tried to sneak in without waking Molly after being at Ian’s.
Maybe it’s an original, came with the building.
I study it until I could trace it freehand without even closing my eyes.
The sharp jut to the left in the top corner, the bottom half in the shape of a distorted diamond, the edge mid-way up that looks like with the right hit, it could spread outward like a crack in glass.
It’s beautiful in its imperfection. It gives the wall character, and it gives me something to stare at as I lie in bed, doing absolutely nothing. Tears wet the pillow beneath my face, my cheek pressed into the slightly scratchy fabric as I breathe in the lavender from the fabric softener the laundry service uses.
I don’t know how long I’ve been lying here, but I don’t feel like getting up. I want to stay here until it goes away, until I forget what I did and how he looked at me, like I ripped out his heart and placed it in a blender. I did it too, and I need to come to terms with that.
Memories replay like a bad documentary in my head. I want it to stop. I want to stop watching it, but I am glued to the bed, swimming in the reminders that swallow my brain.
Ian standing there with that look that he rarely shows the world, the one where he’s not in complete control, when he’s confused, and he’s got that slight furrow between his brows.
His fists clenched at his sides, his eyes narrowing on me and staying there as I watched him consider my words, the slight tilt to his head like he was sure he had heard me wrong.
The fury that seemed to ooze from his pores, from underneath that mask of control that he wore oh so well, even when his face turned to stone and gave nothing away of his thoughts.
What is this about? he had asked me, a question I can never answer, not until Finn is gone and Ian is free and clear and the threat of vicious blackmail doesn’t loom over all of us.
Ian telling me he’d play the game, whatever that means, when it doesn’t feel like a game to me. It feels like my execution.
The look on his face, a mask of indifference, before he slammed the door, shuttering himself away from the world and locking me forever out.
He thinks of himself as having a black heart, as being the untouchable king of Voclain Academy, but I don’t think that’s right.
He didn’t have a black heart before, but maybe he does now. It’s not because he’s a dark prince either. It’s because I just set fire to what we had and left him charred and broken in the ruins.
I regret it.
I want to explain everything and say I’m sorry.
But I can’t, not until he’s all right.
His future has been saved and ours destroyed in an instant.
William would tell me to pick myself up and be sure to dust my knees off on the way up, to look presentable when I arrive back in the world, but he’s not here anymore. He died and left me with what ifs about what he would have said, what he would have done, how he would have helped.
He was always the fun twin, my brother, who could make a room burst at the seams with laughter. He was pragmatic though, when he needed to be, and dead serious when it counted, when it was about our family—well, until the end at least, when all he cared about was his next high, but I don’t like to think of him like that, and I refuse to have his memory tarnished by his addiction. In my mind, he’s healthy William with white-blonde hair and a blue-eyed gaze just like me.
He’s still my twin, my blood and flesh since before birth, the one who picked me up when Jake Wrenoby rejected me in seventh grade and I thought it was the end of the world, that I would just die.
I had been crying on the sofa, stuffing my face with a pint of cookies-and-cream and box of double-stuffed Oreos, when he found me. He didn’t even ask what happened. He knew without words. He just sat down on the sofa beside me, put his arm around me, and plucked an Oreo from the half-empty container.
“Whatcha going to do, champ?” he had asked.
I shrugged, sniffled, and a
te another spoonful of ice cream, in that order.
William sat there, saying nothing while I cried into my pint, while I sniffled until there were no more tears left, and when I finally stopped, he said, “Wanna know what Mom told me once when Becky Billings broke up with me last year?”
I nodded.
“What star are you going to be?”
I looked at him, and he pointed at my face and clucked his tongue. “Exactly my thoughts, too, when she asked me that.” He licked Oreo dust off his fingers, smacking his lips as he did it. “So what is it, twinsie? You going to be a supernova and go out in beautiful brilliance or a black hole, sucking the life out of everything?”
I snorted and sniffled into a tissue. “That’s so cheesy.”
“That’s what I thought too,” he said with a grin that promised trouble, “but Blaze Lahey is having a kickass party later today, wanna blow it up with me?”
“Sure,” I said with a smile, “just give me a moment to get ready.”
Get up, I think to myself because this isn’t healthy, because I can’t let it get the best of me, because it’s not what William would have wanted. I need to get ready for school tomorrow. I need to shower and straighten my hair and try to look presentable because Voclain has standards that you’ll earn a demerit for not meeting. I have new teachers I’ve never met before, and I’ll need to make a good impression.
I lie there, blinking at the off-white wall.
Get up!
I inhale the scent of lavender deeply as my tears dampen my pillow. My eyes burn, the salt drying on my eyeballs.
Get the fuck up!
I sit up in bed like a puppet being pulled to life, still dressed in my flannel pajamas. I swing my feet to touch the floor, the first time they have all day, when I hear Molly open the door to our shared apartment and barrel inside. She’s typically so quiet, but right now, she sounds like a charging buffalo, probably intentionally making herself louder to give me time to make myself presentable. She walks past my room, holding an envelope in each hand. She drops the key to my PO box on my desk.
“I checked the mail,” she says, giving me a once-over that does not hide her concern. “Yours and mine. You got something.”
She lays the envelope on the comforter next to me, and I glance down at it.
“Thank you,” I tell her.
“No problem,” she says. “You need anything?”
She asks the question so casually, with her back turned as she walks into her room and rifles through papers on her desk, but I know she’s not really reading the Voclain Student Handbook or her desk calendar.
“I’m okay,” I tell her. “I don’t need anything. Thanks, though.”
I stare down at the envelope on the bed next to me and the emblem there, embossed in red and gold, the school’s colors.
The crest for Columbia University, my first choice—Ian’s first choice too—stares back at me.
Molly walks back over to me, and I can feel her standing there in the doorway.
“Want me to help you open it?” she offers, and I don’t have to look at her to know she’s doing that thing she does when she gets nervous, where she curls her hair around her index finger repeatedly.
“It’s okay,” I tell her, offering her a small smile as a condolence. “I’ll do it later.”
I don’t say the rest though. That I can’t do it here, in my room, where tears stain my pillow, in this place I’ve spent hours grieving.
I stand and offer her a smile. “I’m going to go for a walk. Wanna join?”
She shakes her head. “Nah. Thanks though. I gotta call Atticus and watch Blue’s Clues with him. I promised.”
“Cool,” I manage. “Call me if you change your mind?”
She nods though I know she won’t. Her son means everything to her, and I don’t blame her for that one darn bit. He’s her mini-me, and she’d do anything, absolutely anything for him.
I grab clothes from my dresser and trudge to our shared bathroom as she settles in her room, shutting her door to FaceTime with Atticus. I shower quickly, but I don’t really feel the hot water as it pelts my skin. I’m just going through the motions.
Shampoo. Rinse. Conditioner. Rinse. Bodywash. Rinse. Dry off.
I brush my teeth, comb my damp hair, and dress in a pair of jean shorts, t-shirt, and a pair of bubblegum-pink Chucks. Then I leave my dorm room and trudge down the hall, the letter shoved into the front pocket of my shorts. I take the stairs one at a time, and my pace is slow, but at least I’m moving. People say hello, and I reply automatically with a fake smile I hope sells because I’ll need it starting tomorrow. Nothing but perfection and keeping up appearances is acceptable at Voclain.
I am on auto-pilot, even as I walk through the air-conditioned communal room, past the sectionals expertly placed there to make it feel like we could all get together for a big chat in our dorm, and outside.
Damn, it’s bright, so very bright. I squint straight ahead. I could go inside and find my sunglasses, but the sun’s setting already, at that exact angle where it gets into my eyes.
I turn to the right and begin to walk past mingling freshman exploring campus for the first time, past Vic Rothschild, who says something about a small party at his place, which I politely decline, past parents still touring campus and taking photographs before their little angels start school tomorrow at a fancy boarding school.
I walk past all of it and keep walking until the sidewalk turns to pebbled gravel, and the pebbled gravel turns to grass, and the grass beats down into a well-worn trail that weaves through the forest that surrounds campus. I am in the trees, and everything is glowing with a burnished gold from the setting sun. I can see the outline of the stadium through the forest when I finally see a spot I can sit and be alone, on a fallen log beneath a willow tree with a trickling creek that bubbles softly behind it.
I can breathe out here in the open, alone. I sit down on the log and listen to the sound of the air whistling through the branches, the sound of nothingness.
I tug the envelope free from my pocket, ripping it a little as I do it. Then I lay the envelope across my lap and smooth the paper across my thighs.
Like it will change the outcome.
Like I know what I want anymore when denial is the opposite of everything Ian and I had planned and acceptance would be utter torture for the next four years.
I rip open the envelope unceremoniously, and it’s ugly and jagged and not at all pretty anymore. My heart beats a hundred beats a minute beneath my ribs, probably more, and this pressure sits on my chest, like I can’t breathe, as I stare down at the fancy paper.
I skim the letter quickly, barely even reading the words.
Pleased to inform you.
Accepted.
Welcome.
With no one to hear me and no one watching, I tilt my head back, looking up at the tree tops, squeeze my eyes shut, and scream.
7
Ian
The coffee hits my tongue like sludge, and it tastes about as good as it feels sliding down my throat. I grimace at whatever I’ve made in my coffee pot, probably poison—it certainly tastes like it. I should be at the campus coffee shop with Harlow, watching her fizz with nerves and excitement like a true nerd waiting for classes to begin with the ring of the bell. Instead, I am in my dorm room, choking down what certainly is not Hawaiian Kona blend. Well, fine, it is—or was—but only Harlow can actually operate the coffee pot. She insisted I go old-school with the drip coffee maker, even though she doesn’t even like coffee, because, as she put it, it smells better.
I am a dumbass, and I should have bought a Keurig or a Nespresso or something that did all of the work for me.
The edge of the countertop bites into my back, an unforgiving jab right on top of my spine. My laptop bag sits a few feet away from me on the counter, and I could go sit at a barstool…or on my sofa…or on my bed…or hell, I could sit at the common area downstairs. I prefer the kick in the nuts first thing in the mornin
g though, right below the kidney level. I prefer sullen, self-induced solitude.
I slept like shit last night, thinking about her, wondering where it all went wrong and trying to understand what exactly I did this time to fuck it all up. I stared out the window into the night sky and wondered, but my life isn’t a fairytale, and no fairy godmother came to whisper answers in my ear, and no mice squeaked their opinions from the corner. So here I am, drinking sludge and debating once again what happened to ruin it all.
We were good, better than good even. We were Ian and Harlow, the couple no one could break, not the godforsaken rules that tried to rip us apart the moment we met; not Aurora and her conniving, bitchy coven; not my predestined fiancé; no one. We were unstoppable, and senior year was supposed to be ours. Then we’d leave together for college. We’d applied together, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, and NYU, plus a couple of safety schools as well. Our whole future planned out, or so I thought.
But she stabbed me in my heart and kept pushing until the blade went straight through my back as well, a bleeding heart and a betrayal all in one swift blow. It still doesn’t feel real, like I’m going to wake up from this nightmare and she’s gonna be smiling over at me, messing with my hair, and telling me to stop looking so serious. She was the light in my dark, a breath of levity in a world so goddamn serious beneath the expectations of my father to carry on his kingdom. Now, I’m just one lonely fucker in a world of other lonely fuckers.
I could find a good bottle of almond liqueur or a spiced rum and spike the sludge. Everybody knows Darren Palacion likes to tempt girls into his dorm room with the promise of alcohol-infused whipped cream, and I bet he’d give me the canister if I offered him the time of day and a handshake. I want to go do all of those things and spend my day one part Energizer bunny and the remaining parts buzzed.
A spiked cup of joe is exactly what I need to wake the fuck up, but I don’t go search the dormitory for liquid vices—one, because I’m feeling incredibly lazy this morning, and two, because I’m not supposed to drink. I’m the flesh-and-bone version of the snowball effect, and by the end of the week, I know I’d be popping pills like they are Tic Tacs in between classes, any time my knee hurts, when football practice decides to kick me in the ass, or just when I need to get away from everything.