I knew my mom blamed herself.
I also knew she loved me and wanted to help. It wasn’t her fault she married a serial philanderer and an all-around asshole. If I’d given a shit about my father, I would have been caught up in all the ways he was ruining our family. It was impossible for her to hold together her marriage, and me, at the same time as her career. Ultimately, she was forced to let both of those things go, but now that I was out, on my way to being clean and sober, and with my dad out of the picture, she was on a mission to make amends.
Her overzealous need to apologize, to shoulder the blame for all the things I had done, and to hold herself accountable for all the ways I had failed was too much. Her guilt felt heavier than my own, and that wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t be suffering more than I was. Her hurt had no right to be bigger and badder than mine. I couldn’t take it. Even after everything she’d done to make sure I got the minimum sentence possible and the money she’d tossed around to make sure I got into the best after-care facility the state had to offer, I couldn’t take her remorse and regret. My own was choking me every time I breathed. Hers was liable to crush me. I shut her out and since she was wallowing in blame—no matter how many times I assured her my actions were all on me and had nothing to do with her—she insisted on taking care of me. If I wouldn’t let her do it, then she was going to send someone in her place.
Someone I had thought about every single day since she told me she hated me.
Someone I watched from the moment she showed up in Loveless looking as lost and alone as I felt.
Affton Reed.
I could see in her pretty blue eyes that she meant it. She hated me. She hated what I did, and it was like she knew the things I was going to do and hated those, too. She hated that she was standing in front of me giving a shit if I lived or died, and it was clear she hated that she knew she was the only one who dared to say something. She hated that she cared when I was incapable of feeling a damn thing.
I wasn’t lying to her when I told her she should join the “I Hate Cable Club.”
My teachers hated me.
Most of my fake friends hated me.
The girls I blew through, used, and left, hated me.
My father hated me. This was clear. Despite every effort my mother made, all the ways she’s shown up since the incident, my father had been absent. He took the opportunity to wash his hands of me entirely and ran with it. He left my mom, and he left me. Now that I was sober and thinking somewhat more clearly, I realized it wasn’t much different than when he’d been around. My mom was still sad about it. I was not. But then again, I was never much of anything. It bothered me that she was hurting, but I could barely take care of myself; there was no way I knew how to be here for her.
And really, I was the president of that particular club.
I hated myself. I hated myself more than anyone else ever could. I didn’t bother to hide it the way everyone else did . . . everyone but Affton.
I was just trying to get under her skin the day she stopped me, tried to save me, and eventually sold me out. I was the one who was supposed to be untouchable. My parents’ money and influence made me bulletproof, but Affton Reed was really the one who was unmatched and unattainable. She showed up one day and seemed to know instinctively that every single person in Loveless was beneath her. She walked through the halls immune and insulated from all the regular high school bullshit that made teenage years miserable and exhausting. She did not engage. Not in the same way I did. I kept my distance because I didn’t want anyone close enough to see my secrets. She kept everyone at arm’s length because she didn’t want anyone to hold her down or keep her from moving forward.
I was being a dick to see if anything could rattle her cage when I told her that she needed to take care of herself before she worried about taking care of someone else. I was shocked that she had seen through all the bravado and smoke screens I threw up day in and day out. I was in trouble, getting deeper in every day, and no one noticed that I was drowning. No one except for Affton. I hadn’t even noticed her watching me even though I was constantly watching her. If I had noticed, I would have done something terrible, something outrageous and unforgivable so that she couldn’t stand the sight of me. I couldn’t have someone as perceptive and honest as her looking too closely at my demons. Especially not someone who recognized them like they were old friends.
I was surprised that my dig about her appearance had done the trick. She didn’t come across as self-conscious or insecure, but she obviously bristled when I pointed out she could put forth a little effort in the looks department. She had a soft spot after all, and because I was a fucking terrible person, I poked at it, hoping she would leave me and my monsters alone.
As far as being attractive went, she didn’t need much help. She was tall for a girl and built with a lot of curves that would fill out stunningly as she got older. Her eyes were a spectacular light blue that hovered on the edge of violet. They were unusual and missed very little. Those eyes saw right through me and picked me apart. Her blonde hair was a million different shades of white and gold. It shimmered like something expensive in the sun. It was messy, but that suited her. If she was put together and polished, it would make her too perfect and completely unapproachable. Her skin was a mellow honey color from the sun, and she had freckles across the bridge of her nose. All of it made for the perfect girl-next-door, the one who half the boys in school fantasized about when they were beating off in the shower. We always wanted what we knew we could never have. What we knew was too good for us.
When I drove away from her that day, I thought it was all said and done. She hated me, but I was nothing to her so I assumed she would let it drop. Imagine my surprise when, the following day, I went home after an all-night party and found my entire room tossed and my mother on my bedroom floor in tears surrounded by my stash. The blonde bitch had ratted me out and had taken her concern to my mother when I wouldn’t listen. I wanted to be angry at her, but I was impressed. No one in Loveless went against a McCaffrey. No one wanted me as an enemy.
Mom broke down. She said she should have known, that my behavior had been erratic and hostile for a long time. I thought I was in for a slap on the wrist and maybe some tough love but no . . . she went nuclear on me. She pulled me out of school and told me I was going to a treatment center. There was no argument and no choice. She was locking me down and forcing me to get help. Now, I could look back and see she was doing what she thought she had to do. At the time, I wanted to grab the stash and run. The idea of losing my only relief from the ever-present disgust and discontent made me panic. I said things to her I would never be able to apologize for. What happened when I told her to ‘fuck off’ and escaped in a huff the day before I was supposed to leave is something I would never be able to make amends for. I ruined a lot of lives simply because my mother was trying to save mine.
I took another swallow of cinnamon-flavored booze and made a face as it burned down my throat. Maybe I could breathe fire. I needed to be able to if I was going to make it through the summer with Affton Reed looking over my shoulder. She had some of the strongest shields I’d ever seen. If my fire wasn’t hot enough, it would bounce off her and burn me to a crisp.
The sun was down, and I was pretty much sitting in the water now. I thought about lying down and letting it lift me up and carry me wherever it wanted. I wasn’t drifting anywhere good on my own. I heard splashing and felt the air behind me stir. No longer alone. No longer left to my own devices and bad choices.
I took another swig from the bottle, draining it, and looked over my shoulder at the girl making her way toward me. Her hair looked silver in the darkening light, and there was no mistaking the annoyance on her unmade-up face. She looked at me then shifted her gaze to the empty bottle in my hand. Her lips pulled into a frown, and her eyebrows tugged down into an angry V over the top of her nose.
“You aren’t going to make anything about this summer easy, are you, Cable?”
“I don’t really do easy, Reed.” I looked at the empty bottle in my hand and contemplated tossing it into the Gulf. Knowing my luck, I’d hit some endangered marine life and give the judge one more reason to add months onto my sentence. Instead, I reached up and handed it to the leggy blonde who was now standing next to me, the water well above her ankles.
“Jesus. Did you drink this whole thing?” She sounded incensed, and when I rolled my eyes up to look at her, it was clear she was contemplating hitting me over the head with the very weapon I’d just handed to her.
I shrugged. “Pretty much.” The bubbly teen girls barely had the chance to put a dent in it before I swooped in and snagged their stash.
She sighed from where she was hovering above me. I jolted in shock when she suddenly lowered herself to the wet sand next to me, the water immediately soaking into her frayed cutoffs and swirling around her ankles and hips as she copied my pose, my empty bottle caught between her feet. She leaned forward, rested her cheek on her knee, and gazed at me steadily out of those mesmerizing eyes. “I tried to tell your mother this was hopeless. I warned her there is no helping someone who doesn’t want to be helped. I don’t want to be here, Cable.” Her voice was hard, and I was surprised that her admission hurt a little bit. I didn’t want to be around me most of the time, but I was used to other people flocking to me, vying for my attention. “I don’t want to be here, but I have to be, so that means you’re stuck with me no matter how difficult you decide to make the next couple of months. I don’t have a choice.”
I wanted a cigarette. I needed something to occupy my hands and my mouth. I’d left the smokes and my t-shirt on the steps of the deck off dad’s house. The steps led to the beach, just a few feet from the water. It was a beautiful house on a prime piece of property. With Affton here, it was nothing more than an expensive jail cell.
I knew exactly what means my mother had gone to in order to get Affton to agree to this madness. She told me outright she was blackmailing my former classmate, I think in a thinly veiled attempt to make me care about someone else’s future if I wouldn’t care about my own. I knew if I drove Affton away, her father would lose his job. It wasn’t fair, but my mom had been nothing short of ruthless in her pursuit of my sobriety. “My mom can be very convincing when she puts her mind to it.” She could also be tough as nails and immovable when she wanted something.
Affton snorted and shifted so her chin was resting on her knee instead of her cheek. She looked out over the endless landscape of water and sky, and I shivered even though it wasn’t cold. I lifted a hand to run it through my hair. My unease lived inside of me, crawled all around my bones and under my skin. I wasn’t used to it making its way to the surface because of someone else. There was a lot unsaid between me and this girl. The few words we’d exchanged were powerful, important ones that hung heavy between us. It was so much easier when I looked at her, and she refused to look back.
“I don’t think convincing is the word I would use . . . more like conniving. Either way, she tied my hands, so succeed or fail, you are stuck with me until the end of summer. Let’s get you into the house so you can sleep this bottle off and pray you don’t get popped for a piss test tomorrow.” She grabbed the bottle from where she had plunked the base in the sand and lifted a pale eyebrow at me. “You should have picked something . . .” she trailed off and gave me a shrug. “Less wussy to enjoy your last binge with. This stuff tastes like toothpaste.”
She offered me her free hand, and for a second all I could picture was grabbing it and pulling her under with me, letting the water cover us both and take us somewhere we would both rather be. I didn’t. I took her hand and struggled to my feet. Months of forced sobriety tumbled away under the wash of cinnamon whiskey. I wobbled and almost went back down, but before I could nose dive into the shallow water, Affton was there, arm around my waist, empty bottle pressed into my side, a chilly reminder that I’d already fucked this up and it was only the first day.
I had no idea how either one of us was going to survive the summer, and if we did, I had no idea how I was supposed to survive beyond that when I was once again left to my own devious and duplicitous devices.
Affton
THE HIKE ACROSS the sand back to the towering beach house was no easy task. The sand sucked at our feet and Cable was anything but steady as I struggled to keep both of us upright. He smelled surprisingly good—part salt water, part cinnamon. He looked ragged and scruffy. He sounded despondent and disappointed. For all the things that had changed since I last spoke to him, an alarming number of things had remained the same. I wasn’t sure how I thought the incident, then a year and a half in prison, plus a stint in forced rehab, would change him, but I was shocked at how familiar he seemed and how similar he was to the Cable who always got under my skin.
His dark blond hair was a little shorter, his face a little harder, and his mouth set tighter in the frown that seemed to be his default expression. His dark eyes still appeared fathomless and void of any kind of basic human emotion, but there was a vulnerability about him that was new. The disaffected shell he’d always been wrapped in before seemed to be missing pieces, and the tender, torn parts that reminded me Cable was, in fact, a human being were peeking through.
I thought the old hatred that burned through me would flare to life, but instead, all I felt was sympathy. Neither of us wanted to be here. Neither of us wanted to be in charge of saving him.
When he staggered to his feet, I noticed he was taller than he had been the last time I saw him. He was also bigger . . . everywhere. His shoulders were broader. His muscles were no longer lanky and lean. They were hard and solid, obviously his time locked up had been spent improving his body instead of his messed-up mentality. The hand I was holding as he leaned heavily into my side was wide and rough. It wasn’t the hand of a teenager who never had to work for anything and was given everything he’d ever wanted on a silver platter. The hand in mine belonged to someone who had not been living the good life for quite a long time. It had struggled. And suffered.
When we reached the back stairs that led up to the sweeping deck circling the entirety of the beach house, Cable pulled away from my grasp and almost face-planted onto the wooden steps. He lost his balance when he bent over to grab his shirt and the pack of cigarettes laying on top of the crumpled cotton. The moonlight highlighted the stretch and pull of his back muscles as he worked to regain his balance. It also illuminated the intricate black and gray tattoo that covered one of his shoulders and circled down around his bicep. I wasn’t sure if that was something he had when we went to school together since I’d never been in a situation where I would have seen him without a shirt, but whenever and wherever he got the tattoo, it was beautiful and impressive. He also had an elaborate and delicate looking spider web inked right where his thumb bent, crossed the back of his hand, and spread down his middle finger. I was sure that one was new, as was the skull and crossbones he had inked on the knuckles of each of his index fingers. He was too blond and refined to really pull off the ex-con look, but the tattoos helped give him a dangerous edge that hadn’t been there before he got locked up.
He’d changed. And so had I. It had been almost two years since I’d seen him last, enough time and distance for me to really reflect on the terrible last words I lobbed at him. I told him I hated him, and then he’d gone away. There was no getting around the fact that I was the one who set those wheels in motion. I was partly responsible for the fractured shell he was still trying so desperately to hide inside.
“I need a smoke.” He awkwardly lowered himself to the step next to my feet and worked a
t getting the cancer-stick between his lips. It took three tries, since he kept dropping the stupid thing, and he tried to light the wrong end. I sighed, took the lighter from him, and touched the flame to the right end.
I took a step back as he blew out a cloud of the acrid smoke. I waved a hand in front of my face and told him, “That’s a disgusting habit.” I preferred it to the gnarly wads of chew that were so popular among boys my age in the heartland, but really, it was all gross. Why anyone would want to turn their teeth yellow and shorten their lifespan on purpose was beyond me.
He puffed out another toxic breath and tilted back his head so that he was looking up at the night sky. “It’s the least disgusting habit I happen to have at the moment.”
His words were slow and slightly slurred together. It was a stark reminder that he was already doing exactly what he wasn’t supposed to be doing. This summer—and his mom’s wishes for his miraculous recovery—were already in the toilet. I wasn’t surprised, but I was unexpectedly disappointed. I wanted to believe when something terrible happened, when tragedy struck, it had the power to change someone for the better. There were a lot of lessons Cable should have learned after the incident, and it didn’t seem like he’d opened his eyes to any of them.
“Is there a particular room you want me to take?” I sounded annoyed because I was. I wanted to be compassionate and understanding for all that he’s been through, but the boy still had the ability to rub me the wrong way without even trying.
The house was huge: three levels of designer furniture and expensive design. There was no shabby, beachy goodness to be found, and I was terrified to touch anything. I had no clue how many bedrooms there were, but I assumed he already had one he used and he would want me in the one that was farthest away. I hadn’t broken the news to him, but I was going to be regularly tossing the entire waterfront mansion for any kind of contraband he might try to hide. I was a pro at finding a secret stash—years of practice for a competition no one would win.
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