by Joelle Knox
“In a minute,” he yells back, his eyes still locked with mine. “Gibb’s getting antsy. I’ll see you around.”
I twist on the stool. No one would ever wonder why girls stare at Gibb Blair. He’s sexy in all the usual ways and has been trouble for as long as I’ve known him. If my parents had their way, I never would have. Sean may have provoked their stern disapproval, but the one time they came home to find Gibb sitting at our dining room table, my father made it clear that Cait could find a better class of friend or he’d help her do so.
Boarding school was always my family’s version of threatening to send us to a convent.
Gibb’s dad has been the town drunk since before I was born. My father did his drinking in secret, while rich, which made it socially acceptable—until he wrapped his car around a tree. From the look Gibb is giving me, he remembers being tossed out of the house by my hypocrite of a father. He probably won’t offer to put his number in my phone in case I need anything.
The silence has stretched into awkwardness, but I still manage a smile. “Sure, Sean. Thanks for the drink. And...it was good to see you. I never really got to say goodbye. To either of you.”
“Same here.” He hesitates, his gaze flickering to my second drink. “Do you need a ride home, Hannah?”
I don’t know him well enough to tell him the truth. I don’t have a home—at least, not one I want to go to—but my options are limited. Find a hotel. Sleep in my car. Or go spend the night with all the ghosts in a house I never want to see again.
It’s going to take at least one more drink before any of them seem manageable. “I won’t be stupid, Sean. I promise.”
2
»» sean ««
I line up my shot—number three in the side pocket—but the ball spins wildly, smacking into the eight and almost sending it into the corner.
My angle’s off. Everything’s off.
Cait’s little sister is still sitting at the bar, knocking back drinks like it’s her job. Maybe it is—she wouldn’t be the first Casey to master the art of refined alcoholism.
“Don’t even think it, man.” Gibb tosses the chalk aside and circles the table to study his options. “Not your problem.”
I pitch my voice low, just in case Hannah can hear us. “And let her crash her fucking car because it’s not my problem?”
Gibb shrugs. He’s more interested in his next shot than Hannah’s situation, his gaze fixed on the table, flicking from one spot to the next, judging the angles. It takes him two seconds to line up a complicated bank shot that sends the fifteen spinning into the corner pocket. “So do something about it. She’s what, eighteen or nineteen? Get her ass booted out of here.”
Getting Hannah arrested and Joe fined isn’t on my agenda, so I shut my mouth and lean on my cue.
Five years. She looks different, grown up. Not at all like Cait—not that it matters. If I’m feeling charitable, our relationship was rocky. If I’m not, it was straight-up fucked, over way before it ended. By the time she lit out for her grandmother’s house the summer after graduation, I was burned out, crushed by the constant fighting.
But I still expected her to come home. I needed her to come home. To explain, if nothing else.
Instead, they shipped her back in a box.
Gibb sinks another two shots before glancing at me and then at Hannah, and something in his expression softens. He never had much use for Cait or her family, but he knows all about drunk fathers who fuck up their kids’ lives. “Fine. If she looks like she’s about to crawl behind the wheel, stop her. The kid had a shit day, no doubt.”
“That’s an understatement.” I’d lose my shit if I had to face burying what was left of my family, but Hannah seems to be holding it together. Except for the row of empty glasses piling up in front of her.
“Yeah, it’s a raw deal.” He finally misses, knocking the cue ball just a little off. It wings the thirteen, which bounces from one side of the pocket to the other before rolling back out onto the table. “Great, now you’re so depressed you’re throwing off my game.”
“Shut up.”
“Watch it, or I’ll leave you to Boone’s mercy tomorrow night.”
Boone is decent in the pits, but I wouldn’t let him near an engine—and neither would Gibb. “Liar. He might screw up the car, and then you’d have to kill him.”
“Yeah, I would.” Gibb retrieves his beer and gestures to the table with it. “It’s a good thing you drive better than you shoot pool.”
I’d think of a way to insult him back, but Hannah is easing off her stool with the exaggerated movements of someone who knows she’ll tip over if she moves too fast. Considering the number of empty glasses she left behind her, the fact that she’s walking at all is impressive.
She doesn’t go far, just two steps toward the door before she stops to stare down at her hands. When she looks up, she’s staring straight at me.
“Here, take this.” I shove my pool cue at Gibb.
Gibb complies with a sigh. “You want me to follow in your truck?”
“No, I got it.” I can drive her home, leave her car in the lot, and have a couple of the guys from the shop take it over in the morning. She’ll probably still be sleeping off the whiskey by then, or at least wishing the guy in her head would stop it with the jackhammer already.
She’s swaying a little by the time I reach her, and I steady her with one hand on her shoulder.
She shivers, looking as lost as ever. “I’m sorry. I forgot that you can’t just call a cab here.”
“Come on, let’s get you home.” I push some money across the bar at Joe and grab her purse.
It’s darker outside, despite the harsh glow of the streetlight on the other side of the gravel lot. It washes her out, makes even the liquor flush in her cheeks seem pale and delicate.
She’s not, though. Delicate, I mean. She’s tall and slender, with wispy blonde hair that curls just past her shoulders. Right now, the word that comes to mind is fragile.
She braces a hand on my truck as I open the passenger door, but stares at the seat like the idea of climbing up is too exhausting to contemplate. “Do you ever get tired of cleaning up my family’s messes?”
As if I’m some kind of savior. At best, I’ve been an observer, standing on the sidelines, watching all of them self-destruct. Sometimes, with Cait, I could hold it off, distract her. But, in the end, it always felt inevitable. I’m pretty fucking sure that, sometimes, I even made it worse.
“I’m not a hero, Hannah,” I mutter, then lift her onto the seat. “Buckle up.”
She’s buckled in by the time I slide behind the wheel, clutching her purse in silence. She doesn’t speak, not until I’m pulling out of the parking lot. “Did you go to the funeral?”
I know which one she means, and it isn’t the one from this morning. “I went, yeah. It was a nice service,” I lie.
Or maybe it isn’t a lie. I don’t remember much of it. It rained that afternoon, and all the mourners clustered under black umbrellas. White coffin, white flowers, and all I could hear over the buzzing in my head was Cait’s wry voice. What a fucking circus.
“I wanted to go,” Hannah whispers. “It didn’t feel real forever, because they never let me come back, not even to pack my stuff. Sometimes I’d just...forget. Like I was staying at Grandma’s and Cait was off at college or something.”
“Your parents wouldn’t let you come to your sister’s funeral?”
“It’s inappropriate for a child,” she parrots in a dead-on impression of her mother.
“That sucks.”
“Right?” She tilts her head back against the seat. “They wanted it to all go away. They wanted her to go away.”
Cait said the same damn thing more than once. Her parents didn’t like her friends, and they didn’t like me. Hell, they didn’t seem to like Cait very much, either—she was too wild, too outspoken. Unwilling to bend in all the ways they wanted.
Still, the moment screams for a denial, some
sort of comfort...and I can’t bring myself to give it. I can’t defend people who would keep a kid from saying goodbye to her big sister.
Hannah lets out a hitched breath, almost like she’s crying, but when I peer over at her, her cheeks are dry. She stares into the intersection for a few tense seconds and then looks at me. “I don’t want to go back there.”
Oh, shit. “Your house, you mean?”
“They turned her room into a gym, Sean.” Her voice cracks on my name, and she turns to the window, and now I think she really is crying. “There’s nothing there but flowers and ghosts.”
Christ, if I take her home with me, Gibb will give me eighteen different kinds of hell, not to mention that look he gets when he knows I’m about to fuck up. Bad. “Do you have anywhere else to go?”
She swipes her fingers over her cheek. Quick and sneaky, like she’s trying to hide it. “I was thinking of the motel out on Shady Grove Road.”
“Jesus, Hannah. The place gets busted for meth twice a week.” Fuck Gibb and whatever he’s bound to think. “You can crash at my place.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” I flick the signal and make my right turn without waiting for the light. “It’s no big deal.”
She’s quiet for another block, silent except for the hitching breaths she’s trying so hard to hide. But they fade soon enough, because she’s dragging herself back under control like a good soldier. “Thank you,” she says finally. “I’m just tired. It’s been a really, really long day.”
And not only because of the funeral. “What did they say at the hospital?”
“She’s on life support, but it’s only a matter of time.” She makes a pained little noise. “They want me to decide. When to let her go.”
No, there isn’t anybody else left, is there? “I’m sorry.”
“She has a DNR, but they still want me to decide.” She laughs, broken and edged in pain. “She’d be so horrified. She even has her funeral pre-planned, just like my father’s. The last thing she’d want is to have to rely on me for this.”
I don’t stop to think. I reach out and cover her hand with mine. But better words don’t come as easily. “I’m sorry.”
“It sucks.” She clings to my hand, hard enough to make my fingers ache. “I don’t know how to do any of this.”
Three more blocks and one more turn. I hold her hand through all of it and pull up in front of my garage apartment. Chipped white paint over block construction, concrete steps with a pipe railing, the windows bare except for cheap plastic blinds. It’s a far cry from her parents’ house in the hills.
Right now, it’s the best thing she’s got.
I tell her to wait until I come around for her door, but she’s already opened it and slumped halfway out of the truck before I reach her. Up the steps, trying not to wake my landlady, who’s seen too many episodes of CSI to let this kind of thing slide.
Herding a visibly drunk girl into my apartment? Mrs. Wells would conk me on the head first and call the police later.
I manage to juggle my keys in one hand and unlock the door. The lamp near the kitchen is still on, so there’s plenty of light filling the cramped space as I guide Hannah to the couch. “Sit.”
She does, but mostly because her legs fold when I let go of her. The hem of her dress drifts across her thighs, baring her knees. One has a scar on the outside—I remember the summer Cait climbed the tree in the backyard and Hannah tried to follow. She broke her leg in two places, and Cait spent the next month drowning in guilt.
Things just seemed to happen that way.
“I’ll get you some water.” I grab a bottle from the fridge and crack it open before settling on the cushions beside her. “Finish it.”
She takes a careful sip and makes a face. “I was only going to have one or two drinks. But I kept thinking, one more, and I can face going back to that house.”
“Now you don’t have to, okay? You can think about it later.”
She doesn’t answer, but her hand creeps into mine again as she takes another sip. So desperate for some sort of contact, some comfort. It doesn’t seem right that she has to find it in a virtual stranger.
I let her drink half the bottle before breaking the silence. “I’ll take the couch.”
“No, it’s okay.” She kicks off her sandals and tucks her feet beneath her. Her shoulder bumps into mine, and she almost spills her water as she curls up on the cushions. “I could fall asleep like this. I just need a blanket.”
“It’s not up for debate, Hannah.”
She makes a grumpy noise, but she doesn’t argue. Maybe she’s relieved there’s one decision she doesn’t have to make. She drains the rest of the water and hands me the empty bottle. “Thank you.”
“Yeah.” I lead her down the hall—not that I really have to. Besides the living room and the kitchen, there’s only my bedroom and the bathroom. She can’t exactly get lost.
I close the door behind her and retreat to the couch, stopping to grab an extra sheet from the hall closet. I pull off my shoes, lie down, and close my eyes.
Instead of darkness, I see Cait. Wild, impulsive Cait. I remember the way her eyes would sparkle when she wanted to break the rules, when she decided it was time to be a little bad. The smiles, the laughter. All the times she came tapping on my old bedroom window, looking for trouble.
Most of all, I remember the tears.
3
»» hannah ««
Waking up with a hangover is nothing new—and that’s not something I’m proud of—but today’s is particularly bad. It’s the kind that feels like someone has their fist around the place where your head meets your spine and they’re squeezing it over and over.
Everything in my skull is throbbing. My stomach’s not doing so great, either. I roll over for the bottle of water I keep next to the bed and smack my hand into an alarm clock, nearly knocking an iPod out of its dock.
I’m not in my room. I’m not in Atlanta at all.
I’m in Hurricane Creek. And this—
This is Sean Whitlow’s bedroom.
Remembering that makes me sit upright, at which point Sean Whitlow’s bedroom turns on its side and spins a few times. Fighting a whimper, I fall back on the pillow and cover my face with one hand.
I don’t really remember getting here, but I know this is Sean’s bed. I know because all I do remember about last night is him. Watching him shoot pool. Humbling my pride and letting him drive me home. Crying in his car. Holding his hand.
I crack my eyes open and peer around. The walls are white. Except for a couple of T-shirts thrown over the back of a chair, the room is neat and tidy. A place for everything, and everything in its place. I have the hysterical thought that my mother would approve.
Maybe I’m still a little drunk.
I sit up more slowly this time, and the room remains steady—more or less. My silk dress is wrinkled and I’ve left my sandals somewhere, but otherwise I’m fully dressed.
And I can’t hide in here all day.
I pull open the door and step into the hallway, awkward and unsure until I reach the living room. Then the feeling only gets worse.
He’s standing in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal. His hair is wet, still dripping on his white T-shirt, and he’s wearing battered jeans. The bad-boy vibe was strong in that sketchy bar, but it’s worse here, surrounded by so many mundane things.
It’s his nose, I think. Such a silly thing to fixate on, but it’s crooked. His face is all hard angles, like it’s been smashed a few times, and his nose healed just a little wrong. He has scruff, too, which is new. So are the muscles. His T-shirt hugs them, and I wonder what he does for a living that makes his arms so...big.
Standing barefoot in his living room in my rumpled dress with tangled hair and smudged makeup, I feel fifteen again. So gawkish and awkward I can only manage a single word. “Hi.”
“Hey, you’re up.” He flashes a quick smile. “How’s the head?”
“It�
��s been better.”
“I bet.” He nudges my keys to the end of the counter. “Sorry, but I had to go in your purse this morning. Your car’s waiting outside. Two of the guys from the garage just dropped it off.”
“The garage?” A stupid question. That must be where he works. If I’d thought about it for long, I probably could have figured it out. Sean has always loved cars.
“My garage.” There’s that smile again. “You wouldn’t know it from the shitty state of my apartment, I guess, but I have my own business.”
His smile is so proud, so pleased, I can’t help return it. “That’s really great.”
He shrugs one shoulder. “Pretty much every dime I have goes into that or the racing.”
“Racing, like, cars?” There’s a track not far from town, but it’s not the sort of place my parents ever let me go.
Sean laughs. “Yes, like cars. Me and Gibb. Well, he’s the performance guy. I drive.”
Yes, I can see that. I can see it all too easily. Sean behind the wheel of a car, pushing it as fast as it can go without fear, even though there are a hundred ways it could go wrong. Chasing thrills in spite of the danger has to be his thing for him to have stayed with Cait as long as he did.
Their relationship had ended with a fiery crash. A worse one than he knows.
I reach for my keys just to have something to do, because if I look at him right now, he’ll see the secrets in my eyes. “I should probably get out of your hair, then. Thanks for last night.”
“Hey—” He tears a piece of paper from a notepad on the fridge. “You remember Evie Galloway?”
Evie was my friend in middle school. We bonded over a shared love of music and art, and I was devastated when she left to attend a performing arts school in Atlanta the summer before high school. “I do. I haven’t heard from her in a while, though.”
“She’s back in town, and she’s been looking for a roommate.” He holds out the scribbled note. “Just in case staying at your parents’ house doesn’t seem any more appealing in the light of day.”