Havoc: Mayhem Series #4

by Jamie Shaw

  Eventually, my eyes stop concentrating so hard on his hands. They move to his arms, his chest, his face. I admire the curve of his lips, the shadow of his jaw, the shade of his eyes. Those butterflies start stirring inside me again, and by the time Mike finally takes one final hard swing at his drums, I’m no different than any of the dozens of weak-kneed girls who watch him from the front row of his shows.

  “Your turn,” he says while I stand there breathless, and I finally come back down to Earth.

  “Huh?”

  He hands me the sticks and teases, “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  I sit down at the drums in a daze, and then I can’t help laughing. Because yeah, freaking, right. “How about I do something better?” I ask, and Mike’s eyebrow lifts in question.

  “Like what?”

  I spin toward him and hold the drumsticks up for him to see. Then, when I have his full attention, I start spinning them between my fingers. Five years of baton twirling has prepared me for this moment, and I twirl my freaking heart out. The sticks pick up speed, blurring as they spin between my fingers. I stand up and walk to the center of the garage studio, where I throw the sticks up, spin around while they’re in the air, catch them in my fingers and immediately start spinning them again. “Got it?” I ask, echoing what Mike asked me earlier, and he laughs.

  “No way. You win.”

  I grin and show off by tossing the sticks into the air again, planning to catch them behind my back this time, but when my phone rings in my pocket, they both clatter to the ground.

  Chapter 20

  It’s difficult keeping up with Dee and Rowan on a regular basis, but on a three-way call after the day I’ve had?

  Dee: “You’re going to fuck his brains out tonight, right?”

  Rowan: “Dee—”

  Dee: “He’s single!”

  Rowan: “She doesn’t want to be a rebound!”

  Dee: “Who’s a rebound? He’s in love with her!”

  I step outside into the freezing air, because I would rather die a slow death of frostbite or hypothermia than have Mike hear any of this ridiculous conversation.

  “Hailey,” Rowan counsels, “you know you can take turns staying with me and Dee to finish out the semester, right?”

  I don’t get a chance to answer before Dee scolds, “Don’t tell her that! She’s living with Mike now!”

  “Guys—” I start, but in their bickering, they don’t hear me.

  “Dee, that’s too fast!”

  “You did it!”

  “Guys—” I try again.

  “That was different! I—”

  “How was it different? You—”

  “GUYS.” Dead silence stretches on the line, and I take a deep breath. “I appreciate the offer, but I’m going home to Indiana tomorrow.”

  More silence.

  “Guys?”

  After a moment, Dee: “Why would you do something so stupid?”

  And this time, Rowan doesn’t rush to my defense.

  “What choice do I have?” I ask as a night breeze nips at the tops of my ears. I’m standing outside Mike’s front door, illuminated by his porch light and a sky of October stars. “I can’t afford to stay here.”

  “I can probably get you a job waitressing at the restaurant where I used to work,” Dee suggests. “The job sucked major ass, but—”

  “And next semester?” I counter. “When Danica gets her dad to stop paying my tuition, I’ll have to drop out of school. There’s no way I can afford it on my own.”

  “But this semester is already covered, right?” Rowan asks, and I know she has a point. A semester at Mayfield University is more than I would have been able to hope for just a few months ago, and I know that leaving now would be a waste of all the hard work I’ve done over the past two months. A waste of my uncle’s money. A waste of each time I bit my tongue while Danica made me earn every cent of that tuition.

  But I don’t want to be a burden on Rowan and Adam, or Dee and Joel, or Mike. I know they would let me stay with them for the two months left in the semester, since they’re my friends, but it’s because they’re my friends that I don’t want to let them. They didn’t sign up to be donors to my charity case of a life . . . This is my problem, not theirs.

  “Can’t your parents help you?” Dee asks while I’m lost in thought, trying uselessly to figure another way out of leaving.

  “If they could, do you think I would’ve spent the past two and a half months living with Danica?” I sigh and squeeze my eyes shut, already feeling the sting in my heart from saying what I need to say next. But they need to understand—they need to understand that none of this is that easy. My voice is quiet with confession when I explain, “I don’t wear thrift-shop clothes because I’m eccentric . . . You two realize that, right?”

  “Hailey,” Rowan immediately cuts in. “First off, you’re beautiful and your clothes are amazing, so shut up with that crap. And second . . .”

  When she doesn’t finish, I ask, “Yeah?”

  “Well . . . I don’t really have a second thing yet. Let me think.”

  The three of us stew in silence while I sit down on Mike’s front porch. The cold bites through my back pockets, and in the green Ivy Tech hoodie he rescued for me the first night we met, I wrap my arms around myself.

  “I’m going to research scholarships,” Rowan finally decides.

  “Me too,” Dee agrees.

  I anchor my stare on the moon, helpless as the world turns round and round and round toward tomorrow. “There’s no point,” I tell the two girls I’ve grown to consider close friends. “I’ve already researched them all.”

  “Hailey, becoming a vet is important to you . . .” Rowan starts, but I can’t think of that right now. I can’t because there really is no point. I can’t because it hurts.

  “I know, but—”

  “I’m researching them anyway,” Rowan insists, and Dee echoes the plan.

  “Me too.”

  I want to tell them I’ll miss them when I leave—I’ll miss coffee with them at school, I’ll miss their insane phone calls I can’t keep up with, I’ll miss Dee’s crazy texts and Rowan’s silly laugh.

  “What does Mike say about you leaving?” Rowan asks, and I hold myself tighter against the cold.

  “He thinks all this is going to blow over. Like Danica is going to grow a heart overnight or something.”

  “I still don’t understand how he could spend so many years with her and still have no idea who she is,” Dee criticizes.

  “She was different around him,” Rowan argues.

  “He knows,” I say, and silence creeps into the three-way conversation. I sigh before I continue. “I think Danica was different when he fell in love with her”—the word love feels so gross in that sentence, but I press on anyway—“and he’s just been holding out hope these past few weeks that maybe she was still that same person deep down. That maybe she’d come back to life.” I know the feeling, because I’ve felt it myself. But Danica isn’t the little girl who giggled in a chicken coop with me, and she’s not whoever Mike fell in love with either.

  “I think you’re right,” Rowan says, and the understanding in her voice makes me wonder if she knows the feeling too . . . if she knows what it’s like to grieve the loss of someone who’s still walking, talking, breathing. “Sometimes it’s hard letting go.”

  “But you shouldn’t hold on to a mistake just because you’ve spent a long time making it,” Dee argues, and all three of us agree.

  “I’m assuming you told Mike there’s no way Danica is going to change her mind about this?” Rowan asks, and I use a frizzy brown curl to cut off the circulation of my pointer finger.

  “Yeah. He offered to let me stay with him to finish the semester, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “He doesn’t know that it’s not just the apartment that Danica’s family pays for. He doesn’t know they pay for my tuition, my bills, my groceries—”

  �
��Why don’t you want him to know?” Rowan wonders, and I guess this is the part that I need to say out loud . . .

  “Because it’s embarrassing.” Embarrassing. Embarrassing. I know I shouldn’t feel it, but there it is. “I hate that I have to bring coffee from home. I hate that I can never buy clothes with real tags on them. Mike is this freaking rock star, and—”

  “Mike doesn’t care about any of that,” Rowan interrupts.

  “I know that, but—”

  “But nothing. Do you hear me? Mike doesn’t care about that stuff. Mike isn’t a rock star. Mike is just Mike.”

  As if on cue, yellow light spills onto the porch when the door creaks open. Mike pokes his head out and sees me with my arms wrapped around myself. “Hey, sorry to interrupt, but . . . it’s cold. Do you want a jacket?” He holds a black canvas jacket out for me, and my heart constricts when I accept it.

  “Thanks.”

  “I ordered pizza,” Mike says. “They didn’t have banana peppers, but I got you olives.”

  My throat is thick when I thank him again, and when he disappears back inside, I squeeze my eyes shut tight against the sting of the air.

  “I still say you should screw his brains out tonight,” Dee suddenly suggests, and my nose is stuffy when I laugh. “Look,” she insists, “if you really are leaving soon, I say you should go out with a bang.”

  Crickets.

  “Get it? Bang?”

  “That was so corny,” Rowan scoffs, but none of us can keep from laughing. And that’s why I love them—because even on my worst night, they can make me laugh. It’s why I’m going to miss them, along with Mike and school and the dog shelter and everything else about this town.

  Well, almost everything.

  I eventually make an excuse to get off the phone, and I promise the girls I won’t leave until we explore every option. I know that Rowan is going to stay up all night researching scholarships and housing solutions for me and that nothing I can possibly say will stop her from doing so. And I know that Dee’s grand plan is probably to physically hold me down until she can brainwash me into marrying Mike and having a dozen of his babies, because she refuses to believe he only likes me as a friend. But I don’t try to change their minds. I just let them care about me. I let them care about me because, when I inevitably have to move back to Indiana, I need to know that this mattered somehow, that all of this wasn’t for nothing.

  Inside the house, Mike and I sit side by side on the couch, game controllers in hand, pizza slices on paper plates beside us, beers on the table in front of us. We join a map with Kyle the PussySlayer and bomb the ever-loving hell out of him until I laugh so hard, I forget about real life. I forget about needing to leave. There is nothing but the way Mike laughs with me, the way he turns to me and smiles.

  “What?” I ask sometime around 3 a.m., giggling at the expression on his face.

  “I think this might just be the best night of my life.”

  I snort. “You’ve had too much to drink.”

  He shakes his head, that goofy smile still plastered on his face. “No, I’m serious.”

  “I think you mean delirious.” When he just keeps grinning at me, a blush spreads across my cheeks. “You need to go to bed.”

  “Come with me.”

  That blush turns into hot, molten wildfire. “I’m not tired.”

  Mike sets his controller on the couch. “Come anyway.”

  My nose catches fire. My ears catch fire. My neck catches fire. “Why?”

  “So I don’t have to stay up.”

  “I’m pretty sure you can go to bed without me.”

  “Yeah,” Mike says, turning a remote toward the TV and shutting it off, “but I don’t want to.”

  Chapter 21

  I’m not sure what being on drugs feels like, since I’ve never done any, but I imagine it must feel a lot like having Mike Madden order you to go to bed with him. Reality spins, time picks up speed, and my whole body buzzes with nervous anticipation.

  It’s late—really late—and I’m pacing back and forth in Mike’s hallway bathroom. My fuzzy blue socks eat a line into the slate-gray tile.

  When I was thirteen, I kept having this recurring dream that a six-foot-tall blue mouse broke into my room to play hopscotch on my bed, and that made more sense than everything that’s happened with Mike tonight. I pace toward the bathtub, remembering the way his thumb massaged my shoulder, the way he refused to go to bed without me. Then I pace back toward the door, remembering the way we scarfed down pizza and played war games together like twenty-year-old frat brothers. Toward the tub—how tightly he held my legs last night. Toward the door—the fact that it took him weeks to break up with Danica, even though I’ve been here the whole time.

  His voice at the pond echoes in my mind: You’re one of my best friends now.

  I sit on the lid of the toilet and press the heels of my palms into my eyes. I’m exhausted, I’m drained, and I’m making something out of nothing. Mike rubbed my shoulder to tease me, like friends do. He wanted me to come to bed so we could keep talking and laughing, like friends do. He carried me through the woods, he picked me up from the animal shelter, he confided in me about his feelings for Danica, because those are all things that friends—really, really good friends—would do.

  He’ll miss me when I’m gone. But not like I’ll miss him.

  And anyway, even if he did like me like I like him, it’s not like it would matter. He’s a rock star. He’s going to be ridiculously famous. He’s going to have girls throwing themselves at his feet in every country in the world, starting next week when he goes on tour. Most of his life is going to be spent far away from Virginia. Far away from Indiana. Far away from me.

  Maybe he was always just meant to be my one exciting story. Fifty years from now, when I’m still living on the farm my parents lived in and my grandparents lived in, when my own granddaughters have tired of a thousand boring stories about livestock and weather and crops, I’ll tell them about the hot drummer I pined after during my one semester in Virginia. Maybe I’ll even tell them about the night I slept in his bed. They’ll probably think he’s the one that got away, and maybe I’ll think that too . . . but I’ll smile anyway, because there are worse things than being Mike Madden’s friend—I could have never even known him at all.

  Ignoring the sting in my chest, I push open the bathroom door and pad down the hall to Mike’s bedroom. In the dim light of a corner lamp, he’s straightening the sheets of his oversized bed. His brown eyes lift to mine, dark under thick lashes in the soft lamplight. He straightens to his full six-foot-something, in a white T-shirt, red workout shorts, and black ankle socks, and it strikes me how big he is—how if he wrapped his arms around me, I could get lost in them completely.

  “Which side do you want?” he asks.

  “Whichever side you don’t normally sleep on.”

  “I normally sleep in the middle.” Mike drums his fingers on his leg, and I curl and uncurl my toes against the floor.

  “It’s your bed. You pick.”

  “I guess I’ll take that one,” he decides after a while, pointing to the side closer to the door. I nod and chew on my lip as we walk past each other at the foot of the bed. The faint scent of his cologne makes my heart ache. It smells like running through the rain, like being carried through red leaves.

  Mike and I climb under his covers at the same time—me, teetering on the edge of the mattress; him, getting comfortable on his side. When his eyes find mine in that soft yellow light, I nearly roll right off the bed.

  I expect him to crack a joke about how awkward this is, or ask me if I’m comfortable, or say something, anything, but instead, he just lies there, and so do I. In the gentle light, I let him study me, because it means I get to study him. I take in the curve of his black lashes, the golden undertones in his eyes, the strong slope of his cheek, the adorable shape of his ear. It feels forbidden, staring at him like this, being this close. But not because of Danica. It’s because
he’s too perfect. How soft his hair looks against his navy pillow. The way it fades perfectly into the scruff on his jaw. The tempting shape of his lips.

  I close my eyes and try to commit it all to memory, because I want to take this moment home with me. I want to keep it close forever.

  “I missed wishing you sweet dreams,” Mike says, and his quiet voice persuades my eyes to open. I find him still lying inches away, studying me with that gaze that pulls the strings inside me.

  I want to ask why he stopped, but I already know the answer. It’s because I stopped responding. I didn’t want him to realize I had a crush on him, and I still don’t. I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering if that’s the reason he never talks to me again once I leave this town behind.

  “Me too,” I say, and when my gaze twines with his, I let it. I let myself fall into those eyes, and fall, and fall, and fall.

  “Sweet dreams, Hailey.”

  My fragile heart bangs in my chest, threatening to break with every beat. I force myself to swallow, force myself to breathe. “Sweet dreams, Mike.”

  When he turns off the light, I close my eyes again. And in the dark, I listen to my heart splinter beneath the weight of saying goodbye.

  Chapter 22

  In Mike Madden’s room, in Mike Madden’s bed, it’s no wonder I can’t sleep. Not even the light of the moon penetrates his thick blackout curtains, so there’s nothing to claim my attention except the thoughts racing through my head.

  Tomorrow, a call from my uncle Rick will show up on my phone. He’ll recount Danica’s accusations, and I’ll deny them. I’ll be careful not to use words like jealous, or delusional, or psychotic when describing his daughter, but I’ll defend myself. I’ll tell him I would never, ever do something like steal her boyfriend, and maybe he’ll even believe me.