by R.S. Grey
My first instinct was to shove Trent so far away from me that he'd never come back, but I just stood there, completely still, waiting for life to continue as planned. It felt like we hung there staring at each other for hours, until finally Kimberly nudged Chase's side and pressed up onto her tiptoes to whisper in his ear.
Seeing her there felt like a punch to the gut and I had to fight the urge to bend forward and grip my knees until the sensation passed. I counted to three. One. Chase and I used to be friends but we aren't any more. Two. Kimberly was there for him when I couldn’t be. Three. I'm here with Trent and he's here with her. Done.
“Did you hear me Lilah? Do you want a drink?” Trent asked again.
I shook my head. “Want to go out back?” I asked, turning toward our small band of misfits.
Ashley and Duncan were taking turns sipping from the vodka water bottles. They'd be completely wasted in thirty minutes or less.
“You should get some water, Ashley.”
“Thank you, mother, but I'll be fine.” She rolled her eyes and turned toward Duncan so he could sweep her up into a sloppy kiss. I wanted to throttle the pair of them, but I swallowed past my annoyance just as a hand touched my shoulder. It was too strong and too familiar to be Trent's.
“Lil, can we talk for a second?”
I turned around to see Chase standing beside Trent, towering over him by a few inches. I hated seeing them standing so close together. It was impossible not to compare them and I knew Trent would never stack up. Chase might have been more handsome with his classic golden boy looks, but it wasn’t about that. Chase was my childhood, my memories, and my happiness—things I worried I’d never get back.
“Lil?” Trent repeated my nickname, testing it out for the first time with a furrowed brow.
Chase smirked. “I've called her that since we were kids,” he clarified, letting go of my shoulder at the same time Trent broke his connection with my waist.
“I was about to get Lilah a drink,” Trent said, crossing his arms over his chest.
Chase narrowed his eyes on him for a moment. “Perfect timing then, thanks buddy.”
I nodded at Trent, unable to find words to mask the awkwardness.
We moved past Trent and started heading toward the backyard. I could see the bonfire through the windows and just before I pushed open the back door, I saw Chase's reflection in the glass. His face was focused, sharp. His eyes held none of the humor they usually did.
Four massive logs sat on the ground, framing the bonfire. They’d be completely covered with partygoers later, but for now they were empty and waiting for us. He held the door for me and then pressed his hand to the small of my back to lead me toward the fire. One of Chase’s fingers slipped past the fabric of my shirt and sent a shiver down my spine. I inhaled a deep breath and sidestepped out of his grasp to sit down on one of the massive logs, at once relieved and sad to lose the connection.
I stretched my legs and crossed my feet as Chase took a seat beside me.
Silence hung between us as I waited for him to speak first. When he didn't, I bit the bullet.
“Why did you want to talk to me?”
I peered over to see him watching the bonfire. The shadow from the flames danced across his features.
“Why are you with Trent?”
“I'm not.”
He grunted in disbelief.
“We’re not dating. He just wants to sleep with me. Not that it’s any of your business.”
Chase cursed under his breath and leaned forward to rest his forearms on his legs. His hands were clasped together so tightly his knuckles turned white.
“You shouldn’t ask questions if you can’t handle the answers,” I spat with narrowed eyes.
He shook his head. “He’s not enough for you.”
“I’m not asking for anything more.”
“You should be.”
I leaned forward to match his posture and we let the silence wrap around us once again. It'd been so long since we'd just sat together. It felt like I was taking a trip down memory lane and the comfort pulled questions out of me that I hadn't thought about for years.
“Why aren't you as messed up as I am, Chase? After everything that’s happened?”
The edge of Chase's mouth curved skyward. “You're not messed up.”
I looked away.
He continued. “I decided a long time ago to just live in the moment, to forget the past and just exist in this”—he pointed to the ground—“exact moment. Believe me, it’s not easy. I have a dad that can't sober up to raise me and you had a mom that couldn't sober up to raise you.”
I bit my lip, listening to his words and wondering if I could ever apply them to my life. “We're a regular afterschool special.”
He finally peered over at me. “Yeah well, this is life. Not everyone gets a happy ending.”
I laughed sadly. “So then why do you insist on trying to give me one?”
He took a moment to answer my question, but when he did, I listened to every syllable as carefully as possible. “It’d be a damn shame if all this turmoil was for nothing. Don’t you think?”
I stared into the fire and nodded, letting his words sink in before I spoke up again. “What if I’m past the point of return?”
His hazel eyes scanned down my face. “You aren’t. You just need a little help.”
I rolled my eyes. “And you think you’ll be the person to help me?”
He smirked and leaned in so that I caught a whiff of his cologne. “I can definitely do a better job than Trent.”
My eyes fell to his lips as he leaned in, dangerously close. Half of his features were illuminated by the firelight and half of them were cast in shadows. It was a dangerous image: Chase dipping into the darkness to help pull me to the light.
“What are you doing?” I asked with a shaky breath. I wanted him to kiss me, to finish leaning forward and press his lips to mine. It would have stolen my breath, I knew it.
“Hey Chase, Kimberly needs your help,” a voice called from the back door, interrupting our moment. I glanced up to see Connor standing in the doorway, waiting for Chase to get up. His eyes shifted to me and he shrugged apologetically.
Of course Kimberly needed him.
I closed my eyes and built reality back up around me. Any hope of Chase and I ending up together was based in delusion.
“Duty calls,” I said, pushing up off the bench and walking away from the bonfire. It was the first real moment I'd had with Chase in two years and I’d been so close to letting him in again, so close to closing the gap between us and kissing him senseless. But Chase had said it best: this was our story and happy endings are few and far between. We’d forever be moving in opposite directions—after all, he was the golden boy, and I was the lost girl.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chase
I watched Lilah go back inside and felt her slipping away even faster than before. When she’d arrived with Trent, I’d moved toward her without a purpose. I’d touched her hand, and I’d mentioned her old nickname like I was trying to jog her memory.
I’d managed to pull her away from Trent for a few minutes and I knew I was getting through to her, but it wasn’t enough. I needed more time.
I stood and shoved my fingers through my hair, restraining an annoyed groan.
“Were you about to get it on with Lilah?” Connor asked with a smirk.
I shoved him, hard. “You’re pushing it.”
His eyes widened and he held his palms up in surrender; I'd never once yelled at him like that. “Whoa, whatever man. Just come help. Kimberly is drunk and throwing up in the bathroom. She keeps asking for you.”
When I walked inside the house I scanned the room for Lilah, but she wasn't in the living room, which meant she was probably off somewhere with Trent. I balled my hands and followed Connor.
We found Kimberly in the master bathroom, leaning over the toilet with her blonde hair spilling out around her. When she heard us walk
in, she turned toward me with a dopey smile.
“Chase! You came!” she exclaimed before breaking into a fit of laughter. Brian sat behind her on the lip of the bathtub, wrestling with himself. He watched her with concerned eyes, which were magnified by the fact that he’d had a thing for Kimberly for as long as I could remember.
“How much did you drink tonight, Kimberly?” I asked.
“Actual shots or just the little ones?” She giggled before starting to tick off drinks on her fingers. When she passed one hand, I shook my head.
“Brian, do you think you could take her home?” I asked.
His eyes lit up and he shot off the bathtub. “Yeah, definitely.”
She pushed her bottom lip out. “No. No. I want you to take me!”
Brian stepped back toward the bathtub, wounded by her rejection. I’d known from the beginning it was a mistake to date Kimberly. Each time something started between us, I’d try to tell myself I had feelings for her. I was dumb enough to use her as a distraction, hoping my feelings would eventually catch up to hers, but they never did. She was smart, and gorgeous, and kind, but she wasn’t Lilah.
It was time to end it for good.
“I'm not leaving yet. I need to find Lilah.”
Kimberly wasn't a fool; even in her drunken state she caught what I meant.
She let her bottom lip slide past her teeth and glanced back toward Brian. “Okay, Brian would you mind taking me home?” She smiled. “Pretty please?”
Brian, unscathed from the earlier snubbing, looked like he'd just won the lottery ten times over. “Sure! Yeah, let me go get my car. I'll meet you guys out front.”
He shot out of the bathroom, leaving me alone with Kimberly. I stepped forward to help her stand up and she threw her weight against me. I pulled her arm around my shoulder and wrapped my hand around her waist so I could carry some of her weight. The second we walked out of the bathroom, she started giggling again.
“I should have known nothing had changed. You love Lilah soooo much. It's so cute. You know she's really nice and she tries to hide with all the black hair, but she's still so pretty. I wonder if she'd want to be my friend again.” She kept rambling and I couldn't help but smile down at her. At least she was a bubbly drunk.
We’d made it midway through the living room when I looked up and spotted Lilah standing with Trent against the wall. His arm was caging her in on one side as he leaned down to talk to her, but she wasn't watching him. Her eyes were locked on me and Kimberly. She watched Kimberly smile up at me and then her gaze fell to my hands wrapped around Kimberly's waist.
She pinched her eyes closed as she processed what she thought she was seeing. When she opened them again, they were a shade darker and narrowed in anger. I watched her lift up onto her toes, wrap her hand around Trent's neck, pull his face toward her, and kiss him. He’d been in the middle of a sentence, but she kissed him hard and stole the rest of his words.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Lilah
I don’t know why I kissed Trent. In the past, seeing Chase with Kimberly had lit a dull flame in the pit of my stomach, but now it was a wildfire, burning me from the inside out. Seeing his arm around her, seeing her smile up at him, seeing their features perfectly complement one another was enough to send me over the edge. I pulled Trent's face down to mine and tried to channel every ounce of rage into a kiss, but it didn't work. His breath tasted like stale tobacco and when I closed my eyes, I still saw Chase’s hazel gaze staring back at me.
I pulled back and took a deep breath.
When I glanced over to where Chase had just been standing, he was gone. He'd left with Kimberly.
Good.
They could go fuck each other somewhere else.
“I like when you take charge,” Trent said, dipping his head lower and kissing the side of my neck.
His lips swept across my skin, dipping toward the neckline of my t-shirt. My hands wrapped around his biceps as I tried to force my attention onto the guy in front of me instead of the one who’d just left.
“Guys, guys, guys.” Duncan stumbled toward us, his eyes dilated wide. “Ashley is freaking out.”
“Whatever, tell her to chill,” Trent groaned.
“No man, it’s serious. She’s really bugging.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Duncan led us to the restroom Kimberly and Chase had left a few minutes prior. Ashley was sitting on the ground with sweat covering her forehead. Her dilated eyes matched Duncan's, and when I felt her forehead, she was burning up.
“Trent, go get some water from the kitchen.”
Ashley was clutching her knees and grinding her teeth. I tried to get her attention, to get her to focus on me, but her eyes were darting in every direction but mine.
“Ashley, are you okay?” I snapped my fingers. “Ashley, focus.”
“I don't feel good,” she murmured so softly I could hardly hear her.
“Do you think you can throw up?” I asked, trying to think of the fastest method to get all the crap out of her system.
“No. No,” she cried. “I don't want to throw up. Don't make me throw up.”
She didn't sound like herself and the way her eyes were darting around the room was starting to scare me.
Trent rushed back into the bathroom with a glass of water. I gripped the back of Ashley's head and forced most of the liquid down her throat. She didn't want to drink it, but her body was dehydrated and even if she wasn't my best friend, I wasn't going to let her die from being a complete idiot.
The water settled in her stomach for a moment, and then she twisted toward the toilet and threw it all up.
“Good,” I said, holding her hair back as a wave of déjà vu swept me back in time to my house before my mom had left.
When I was seven, there were a few months when my mother must have started to realize her addiction was no longer manageable. She tried to hide her increasing dependence on alcohol, but I'd come home from school and find her in the bathroom, throwing up and mumbling things I couldn't discern. I’d hold back her hair—the same way I now held Ashley’s—and wonder if this was what other seven-year-olds did when they got home from school.
“I got her some more water,” Duncan said, stumbling back into the bathroom.
I held the glass of water to her lips again so she could take small sips. If she could absorb some of it before throwing up, she’d start to feel better.
I’d been around people like Ashley in Austin, other kids who liked to push their limits. I’d even done it myself from time to time, hoping to find the same solace my mom had found. I wanted to feel what she’d felt. I wanted to know what was so appealing about getting so far out of your head you couldn’t recognize yourself any more. I was starting to think maybe she and I weren’t wired the same. To me, the high was never worth the fall.
The guys eventually abandoned us and Ashley leaned against the toilet dry heaving. I couldn’t leave her yet and I was tired of replaying shitty memories, so I scanned the bathroom for something to distract me.
There were crosses everywhere, the kind you find at small country boutiques with ribbons and bedazzled gemstones. A small collection hung directly behind the toilet, which seemed like an odd location to display faith, but I didn’t dwell on that fact. Instead, I turned for the medicine cabinet.
Medicine cabinets are a veritable trove of pharmaceutical secrets, but it takes a trained eye to discern the juicy from the mundane. A thyroid medication could treat an underactive thyroid, or it could be mommy’s favorite weight loss pill. The devil was in the details. I turned to check on Ashley, but she wasn’t watching as I popped the door open and peered inside.
Sasha’s parents had a twenty-acre ranch, a 6,000 square foot mansion, and a four-car garage, but they also had a neat little row of pill bottles lining their medicine cabinet.
Viagra.
Erectile dysfunction.
Ephedren.
Illegal weight loss supplement.
Male pattern baldness.
Xanax.
A benzo for days when the four-car garage just isn’t enough.
Valium.
For when the Xanax isn’t enough.
It wasn’t until later as I laid down to go to sleep that I remembered Sasha’s mom was the journalist who’d written the exposé about my mother for our town’s newspaper. It was a page-long article highlighting the darkest points in my mother’s pitiful life, and it was printed in the same newspaper that later ran her abbreviated obituary.
I wondered if Sasha’s mom had come clean about her family’s own dependencies in that article, or if all 2,000 words had been reserved for my mother’s demons. Maybe she knew as well as I did that there’s power in shining light on other people’s secrets; it makes it that much easier to hide yours in the shadows.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Lilah
The next morning I made my way downstairs to find Chase and my dad in the kitchen making breakfast. Chase was scrambling eggs, and my dad was mixing pancake batter. I hated having Chase there; his casual presence seemed wrong in every way.
“Morning Lil,” Chase said as my dad tipped back on his heels to kiss me on the top of my head.
“Morning,” I responded weakly. I'd already seen everything I needed to on the way down the stairs and his affinity for low-slung sweatpants was starting to annoy me.
“You know one day I'm going to go in my closet and find that all of my t-shirts have disappeared,” my dad noted with a smile.
I’d started stealing shirts out of his closet when I was younger and I’d never stopped. They were old and worn and they smelled like him. I wasn’t sure why I still wore them, but I had no plans of stopping.
“You can borrow some of mine,” Chase whispered so my dad couldn't hear over the sound of the whisk.
I ignored him, trying hard not to imagine getting to sleep with Chase's scent wrapped around me.