I laugh before I can help it. “What?”
Oliver furrows dark brows over darker eyes, sincere and benevolent, but confused. He's seriously asking if Rebecka is going to take back her true love.
"Are you kidding?" I ask.
"No." He pauses and smiles a little, taking the sucker out of his mouth. "No, Smitty―I mean ... what happened doesn't exactly convey that she wants to be with him, you know?”
I shrug. Lightning crawls through the clouds in front of us, and thunder, so far away I barely hear it, follows, and when I look over, his brows are lifted in wait.
“I don't know,” I say.
Because I don't.
If I'd have said yes to Thomas on the beach or at any point over the last few months, if I'd have conveyed that I wanted to be with him, how different would things be now?
Bitter that I wasn't thinking about Dusty and am now, I pull a deep breath and push love out with my exhale.
“Of course she wants to be with him,” I say. “They're so meant to be it's insane.”
Uncrossing my legs, I stretch a little. The soft-rough multicolored fabric on the seat brushes my sun-sensitive skin, giving me a different sensation to focus on, and with another breath, I feel light again.
“How long has it been?” I ask. “Ten minutes? Fifteen?”
Low and assuring, Oliver chuckles, stretching and leaning back like me. It brings us closer, leaving just a few inches of space on the bench seat between us.
“Give or take,” he says. “Why?”
“They're probably already having make-up sex.”
He exhales a full laugh into his chuckle and I turn to face him. Near enough that I feel his shoulder rise with his intake and let go of air, I rest my head on the seat and can smell his mountain spring clean fabric softener, and the slightest hint of strawberry as he slips the sucker back into his mouth. Outside, clouds grumble louder and roll closer, but they're still far away. It'll be evening before they're on top of us.
I bring my knees up and we're quiet in this shelter. Meadowlarks and seagulls and low, psychedelic blues keep us company while the breeze blows through our open windows. Solid reliability invites and promises. Depleted inside and out, everything in me that aches gives in. My eyelids slip and sink in the comfort that comes with this closeness, and solace finds me quickly. I sleep so deeply I don't hear the rain start to fall or the thunder growl. I don't dream or yearn or wonder or worry. I just rest.
But not so deeply that I miss him shifting next to me.
Blinking, I open my eyes enough to find Oliver reaching over me to roll my window up, but I don't wake all the way.
“It's okay,” he whispers, shifting back into the position I didn't realize we were in until he left it: in the middle of the seat with my head on his shoulder.
His sucker is gone and as he rests his left hand on his stomach. I curve my left arm around his right, pressing my hands together between my mid-thighs. I let my eyes close again, and he lays his hand over the outside of my knee.
His smooth palm and carefully strong fingers feel warm and trustworthy. He doesn't stroke his thumb or slide or push or circle his touch. Oliver just holds onto me, gently and barely, but there, soothing.
I nestle a little deeper into his stability.
“Is this alright?” I ask, but I'm already almost back to sleep. I hardly hear his answer.
“Yeah.” Air-light and utterly genuine, his voice drifts between the sounds of the storm, and all I feel is safe.
“You can sleep, Bliss.”
I WAKE to Becka knocking on my window. There's no light left outside. It's gone from raining to pouring, and this girl is laughing while she soaks it up.
“Wake the fuck up,” she taunts, drenched and beaming. “Don't you know it's raining out here?”
Behind her, Smitty holds his hands over her forehead to keep the rain from her eyes, and I catch the corner of his grin as I sit up, cracking my window.
I feel rested, but the immediate weight of love's absence is excruciating beneath my smile.
“What's up?” I ask, drowsy and disoriented. “What's the plan?”
“We're starving!” She reaches behind her to touch Smitty. “And we want real food.”
“Make-up sex will do that,” Oliver says, quietly enough that only I hear. I don't look, but his voice is enough to still the moment.
Nodding, I roll my window closed. As they jog down to the beach, I breathe slow and steady through secret misery and turn in my seat.
His hair is cut too short to be too messed up from sleep, but Oliver pushes his hands through it anyway. Rubbing his eyes with his palms, he yawns. It makes me yawn too, and the deep intake of air feels like relief in my chest.
“I guess that answers that,” he sort of says, kind of asks as he tucks his sunglasses into the collar of his tee.
He reaches for his keys and I raise my eyebrows, not sure what he means.
“Becka and Smitty,” he continues, concealing his subtle smile behind his hand.
“I guess so.”
Reaching for his seat belt, he looks left and right and into the rearview. He glances straight and flips the headlights on, then the wipers. Starting the truck, he looks both ways again, turns the music up and shifts from park to drive, but doesn't actually start to move until I reach for my seat belt too.
“WE DON'T need to call it anything,” Becka says, lining her bottom lid with black pencil while I pull clean jeans on.
We're back in her room and I'm staying the night again since Mom doesn't want me out in the storm. I tug my best friend's hoodie hood up over my still-damp hair. My skin burns warm underneath sweater cotton, but Tommy has the air conditioning on high. It's all but freezing in the Castor home.
“It doesn't matter what we call it,” Rebecka continues, tossing eyeliner to her desk and pulling a sweatshirt on. She nudges UCLA blue cotton off her showered-clean sun-kissed shoulder and shakes her hair out. “We still are what we are.”
The difference doesn't escape me.
Not what they were.
What they are.
Downstairs, the couple-not-a-couple sits side by side on the loveseat and he writes lyrics on her shoe. Laughing low and talking with their eyes, they're together, but it's not the same. It will never be what it was before, and what stands out most to me is that it wasn't sex that took that innocence away.
It was a mistake.
Drunk. Thoughtless. Easy.
I lean my head back onto the overstuffed couch while next to me, with more than a few inches between us, Oliver does the same, but the comfort from this afternoon is gone. It's more than awkward in this living room, and it isn't just the boy and girl across from us.
Eerily loud thunder cracks outside and rain falls in dangerously thick sheets. Lucas sighs in the recliner, trying to cover the storm with the too-loud television. In the kitchen, his wife tries to cure her worry with made from scratch lasagna.
It's not working.
Lightning strikes, making me jump. Ron Burgundy cries out loud in a glass case of emotion, and my phone vibrates in my back pocket. My heart holds its beats, but when I look, it's just my mom.
“Are you okay?” she asks when I answer. “Is everything alright there?”
Nodding, I fib. “Yeah, I'm fine. We're just watching a movie.”
“Safe and sound, Mrs. McCloy,” Becka chimes in.
“I just wanted to be sure,” Mom replies. “I'll come get you if you like.”
I want to scream.
“Becka can bring me home tomorrow.”
"Baby―”
“Mom,” I interrupt. I don't want to fight. I don't want her to come get me. I just want Thomas. “You can pick me up tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she says, softer. “I love you.”
Just like that, I go from frustrated to wanting her to make everything okay, because that's what moms do. It's what they're supposed to do.
But nothing can bring Dusty back except Dusty.
<
br /> “I love you, too,” I say.
Repocketing my phone, I force a smile when I sense Oliver glance over, but I keep my eyes on the television and dig my cold toes under sofa cushions, popping them out of sight.
Lucas gets up and comes back from the kitchen with a torn off piece of bread. He smiles when I look, but worry's sunken deep in his blue eyes. He holds the bread out to me in offering, but I shake my head politely. I'm starving, but the thought of putting anything into my wound-up stomach makes me feel sick.
It's been four days now.
Four.
Days.
Without a single sign of any kind that he's okay.
That he's coming back.
That he didn't just fucking leave―
Panic clenches my lungs.
Fueled with the fear I've carried since the first night I got out of my best friend's bed and snuck to her brother's room, worry takes over everything else. And if I wasn't frozen in place by it, I'd run upstairs to see if anything's missing from his room.
Because what other explanation could there be?
He's finally done it.
And he left me here.
For a second, there are no words for how sharp the agony in my heart feels.
Then it beats.
And another possibility splits me in half.
Burying my hands into sweater pockets, I brace myself as fiercely as I can while all my pain and dread disintegrate. They leave only two acutely clear likelihoods behind, and neither hurts less than the other.
Either Thomas has left without me, or something is very, very wrong.
The four letter word that starts and ends with D and haunts my consciousness, turns breathing into impossible torture.
I'm only able to because Tommy steps into the room, and I have to.
Wiping her hands on a dish towel, she smiles and it's made of desperate effort.
“Dinner's almost ready,” she says.
Lucas smiles back, and their daughter gets up. She follows her mom into the kitchen and comes back with a piece of cheese. The house phone rings, but it's just the neighbor from down the street, asking if we still have power, and it's all I can do in the world to make my lungs work.
Slow and steady, I struggle silently around an inhale that burns to take.
“You okay?” Oliver whispers, his voice barely coming through.
I meet earnest auburn eyes and the kindness in them pits my anguish deeper.
“Yeah,” I lie. “I'm fine. I just don't like storms.”
He doesn't say anything else.
Thunder roars with rain and clashes with lightning, and it feels like everything I am stands on end. Becka turns the movie up, adding to the disquiet inside and out. Lucas remains as silent as Smitty, and I can't think. Terror cripples and crushes me, and in this moment, I hate the person I love most for inflicting this on me.
The corners of my eyes water and I look up at the ceiling. Swallowing, I beg a god I rarely talk to for mercy, strength, please―
I clench my hidden fists and concentrate harder, but this is bad.
This is pain I never, ever expected.
He's supposed to take me with him.
He's not supposed to leave without me.
Straining against the pressure of my next inhale, my chest throbs. I close my eyes again and hear Tommy in the kitchen, the sound of glass on glass as she pulls plates from the cabinet. Digging my fingernails into my palms for hurt I can measure and control, I listen as she sets the table, but nothing helps.
I rub my eyes to catch helpless, stupid tears, and I remember the first night Thomas shut the light out and wrapped his arms around me. I remember feeling like my heart was going to pound right out of my chest, and inside I crack open. Under my skin and between all my ribs, I sob and scream and plead. I curse and bargain with God, and swear in secret that I'll do anything.
Just bring him back.
The sound of glass shattering on kitchen tiles tears my lids open.
The storm pours and the too-loud movie echoes, but for a second, everyone freezes.
My skin heats and all my knots and nerves unravel lightning quick. My blood courses quickly, hot and heedless through my veins, while my pulse rushes harder.
In the next second, Tommy's heels clack over broken glass and she whips around the corner.
Outside, a key turns.
The weight on my chest lifts.
My heart flies, and before the door is even all the way open, Tommy pulls her soaking wet son inside.
Everything in me falls apart.
Taller than her and completely soaked, Dusty wraps an arm around his mother and she clutches onto him. With her face buried in his chest, her words aren't words. They're foreign cries that warn and threaten and promise and love.
Thomas just holds her, one-armed, dropping his keys and pushing wet hair from his forehead with his free hand. His cheeks are sunken thin and his skin is pale, and when he looks up from the top of his mother's head, there's no blue in his eyes. Just black.
Ice cold.
Marble hard.
Black.
In my blurry peripheral vision, Becka stands up and walks out, and I know I'm supposed to follow my friend.
Smitty does.
Oliver shifts slightly, but stays.
And I have no framework for this.
There's no precedent for this absence or return, and my head spins with the chaos that's home again. My conscience quavers while my heart beats pure yearning, and I look at Thomas again.
Every part of me aches toward where he stands, but there is nothing familiar about the boy in front of me.
This isn't trouble that kissed my head and reminded me we don't promise.
This is a person who could leave me behind.
And did.
Following careless all-pupil eyes, I find Lucas staring back at his son. While Tommy continues holding on, her husband stands from the recliner, shaking his head.
The whole room moves with him.
He doesn't say a word, but tension feels like doom as he shuts the television off.
Sudden silence, save for rain, bears unflinchingly down, and as Tommy steps away, damp-shirted and red-faced, father and son hold eyes. Neither backs down, and Dusty's so-spun blacks look like they could swallow everything.
Anxious in the wide-open exposure of his little white secret, my heart races. Uneven, discordant, and desperate, it trips over the sound that sets everything off.
Thomas sniffs.
Everybody handles Thomas’ absence differently. Tommy drinks, Becka’s angry, I teach myself how to breathe, and Luke stands superior in the face of complete fear and gross disappointment.
"Bliss, go upstairs," Lucas says with fisted hands in his pockets, and dim eyes, aimed at his only son, ready to shoot.
“Okay,” I say, standing up. Lightning flashes from outside, momentarily illuminating the room in silver-blue light. Cracking thunder follows the bolt of electricity, mimicking the sound of my breaking heart.
“The boys need to leave.”
Oliver waits patiently at my side.
“Stick around, princess girl,” Thomas adds sarcastically. Water drips from the ends of my boy’s dark blond hair to the floor around his feet. Drenched clothes hang off his body, eyes as dark as the sound of his bitter laugh. “You don’t want to miss this.”
Dusty drops onto the couch where Oliver was just sitting, and Tommy wipes tears from under her eyes. In an attempt to help, the sweater giver takes my hand and laces his fingers between mine. With a soft pull I’m led toward the stairs.
“The seat’s still warm,” Thomas comments as we walk away. “Thanks, motherfucker.”
Thunder crashes and windows quake, and it’s like Thomas is the cause—of the lightning, of the rumble, of the rain.
Oliver follows me to the stairs, but I turn and face him, removing my hand from his. “Wait down here.”
Brown eyes downcast, he presses his lips together befo
re asking, “Are you okay?”
I look past my skater boy; Thomas sits on the couch, head back, legs relaxed—a dark silhouette. Indifferent to the emotional massacre he continues to inflict upon us, he yawns and stretches his arms above his head. As badly as I want to run to him and bury my face in his chest, I have to act as if my best friend’s brother doesn’t have my heart jarred up.
“I’m fine,” I answer with a slight smile.
Swallowing hurt, I leave Oliver behind and run up the stairs. My bare feet beat into hardwood, and my face crumbles as I allow myself one second to feel the pain plaguing me. Stinging sadness burns my eyes, but when I reach Becka’s closed bedroom door, I pull my hood up and wipe my face clear of Thomas-evoked tears.
I knock before entering, and thick tension in the room chokes me. Rebecka sits in the center of her bed, hair up and eyes focused, texting on her phone. Smitty, her not-really boyfriend stands against the furthermost wall with his arms crossed over his chest while his girl types away.
“If he knew where Dusty was, Bliss…” She falls short.
She doesn’t have to say exactly who he is; Smitty and I know.
My best friend’s phone rings once, and she answers it before it sounds again. Lacking consideration for me or the boy leaning against the wall, Becka shuffles from her bed and walks past both of us and says into the receiver, “Thomas just walked through the door, Petey.”
She goes into the bathroom and closes the door.
Smitty and I shift tension into unease as he stands up straight and I avoid eye contact.
“Lucas said you have to go.” To avoid seeing my own pain mirrored in his expression, I pretend to look for something on Becka’s dresser while he takes in my words.
“Tell her to call me,” Smitty mumbles as he exits the room.
I follow behind my childhood friend and take a seat at the top of the stairs in time to see him and Oliver open the front door to leave. The storm has calmed, but mugginess and humidity enter the house from outside with the scent of rain water and wet dirt. Within seconds, the warmth of my hoodie intensifies my discomfort.
As the back of my neck warms, I pull my knees up to my chest and inhale steadily. Luke watches impatiently as they leave, rocking back and forth on his heels. Tommy gives a sad attempt at normalcy by smiling at our departing guest.
Delinquents (Dusty #2) Page 2