Delinquents (Dusty #2)

by Mary Elizabeth Sarah Elizabeth

  Bryan Turner's heart pumps blood to places she has no interest in while he licks lips she'll never consider.

  “What are you up to tonight?” he asks, nodding his head when one of his friends calls his name.

  Bliss shrugs, and I detest her wholly.

  Tell him, I urge her. Tell him you're going to wait until your parents are sleeping and then we'll make a twisted trade—memories for hurt. Tell him you're torturing love. Tell him you're going to curl up into a pathetic ball and wish like hell you had the guts to shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from your world-wearied flesh, you fucking coward.

  “I don't know,” she says. “Why?”

  “We're all going down to Cobble beach,” he answers with his eyes on our girl. He looks, but not like Oliver, and nothing like Thomas. “Me and Tanner, some friends from somewhere, Molly …”

  Bliss digs her hands deeper into her pockets, focusing on stinging hurt instead of the overwhelming want to scream.

  “Isn't it a little cold for the beach?” she asks.

  Bryan laughs a little as we approach the French room. Bliss unpockets her fingers to tuck hair behind her ears.

  “Molly'll keep you warm,” he replies, and without any trouble, he takes her hand and writes his phone number on the top of it.

  “Call me,” he says before walking away.

  Love's traitor thinks about it.

  All through French and then all through calculus, she considers what might happen if she called Bryan, went to the beach, popped X at some party with people she doesn't really know, and Dusty found out. She torments me and wears herself out imagining trespasses and consequences, and as the day finally comes to a close, she can't bear the thought of going home—facing interrogating eyes and being in a bedroom she's shared too much with love.

  Texting her mother, she promises to be home before dark and heads the school library. She spreads books out but does no real work, and as hours pass, exhaustion catches up.

  When the sound of librarians cleaning up wakes her, she's the only student in sight. Packing her bag, she buttons her coat and wraps her scarf around her neck. She puts on gloves over palm-cuts and Bryan's number, and pulls up her hood, bracing for the December wind. It greets her cheeks like a slap as she steps outside, and Bliss moves quickly toward the senior parking lot with nothing on her mind but getting to the car and out of the cold.

  Between the freezing breeze and skinny snow flurries, just before we turn the corner of the building, the heart of love steadily hums my name in the frostbiting air. Our chest expands to accommodate my joy, and Bliss' legs almost give out from under her at the sight of our boy.

  Leaned against the front of the Lincoln, which is parked right next to the Rabbit, Dusty has his hat pushed back and his hood off, not hiding any part of his face. Black eyes lock on Bliss, and hands that I long for are loose in the edges of his pullover sweater pocket. Faded and emaciated in dark slim straights, he's got one foot in the grave and the other kicking the bucket, but his old black and white Vans are tied neatly tight.

  He doesn't move an inch as Bliss approaches.

  Love, his heart calls, needing and reaching. Love?

  Love, I call back, needing and reaching, too. Love.

  Bliss resists the pull our entire body feels, and with another step, she notices two shiny new headlights have replaced broken empty spots.

  Rolling her eyes, she walks to her car and opens her door. She wants to get in and drive without a word, but I pulse direly. Leaving her door open, keeping us half behind it, she turns to face the boy with bloodshot eyes and dirty, too-long hair.

  Sky-high and so-unwell looks at us, but doesn't move. She lets him stare until I feel more alive than I have in months, and then cuts fire straight through me.

  “My dad almost shot you,” she says, crossing her arms and stifling the song I'm calling to our soul.

  Love doesn't lift his eyes from her lock. Desperation disguised as carelessness, charading as courage, pretending to be cocky, keeps his posture straight and his stare impervious. His second choice is all over him, filling him with black and covering him in white.

  “Let me be put to death,” he says without a flinch.

  Bliss turns away.

  “I'm fucked-up, baby,” he says louder, the pitch of truth in his voice compelling her with starving undertones.

  “No shit,” she spits, taking off her bag. One of the straps is caught on her scarf or her coat.

  “Bliss, I tried,” he continues, standing straight up, disconsolate and irreparable sounding, suppressed against his will, brittle and abused and destitute.

  Past hope.

  Past help.

  “I was there. I just wanted to go home, but you wanted your fucking candles—”

  Tearing her backpack strap free, she rips her scarf.

  “Open your eyes!” she shouts, turning around.

  Undoing her ruined scarf and opening her coat, she bares her frame against him like evidence. Faded red-blond hair whips her cheeks and cold wind stings unwell skin. Bliss isn't gaunt, but her clothes hang, and in natural light, she knows he can see the bruises under her eyes. Relentlessly aiming the effects of his choices right at him, she pulls the shoulder of her shirt aside and exposes collarbones that have never shown until recently.

  Love's heart beats my name in apology and regret and mourning as he looks. He reaches for her, but she gets in the Rabbit and closes him out.

  I fight as she drives.

  I constrict my atria and strangle my ventricles, and she chokes around how I make her cry, but I don't stop. She drives and drives with nowhere to go and finally pulls over at the end of her street.

  She has to pull her shit together, and I'm not letting her. I hold beats until she hits the wheel the same way he does. Screaming, she digs the heels of her hands into her eyes.

  Stop, stop, stop, she sobs.

  Unable to catch a breath, she pushes her fists into her chest, crushing me and refusing to breathe until gravity wavers and her vision narrows into a dark gray tunnel, and I have no choice.

  I beat.

  FINALLY As helpless as me, Bliss is awake and waiting with the door unlocked.

  Just as drained as she after being forced to work against my will, I flutter only feebly as he turns the handle.

  She sits up as he approaches her room and rises to her knees as he enters, and there's no hesitation. Nothing has harmed either of them as deeply or unmitigatedly as the other, but as they fall together into her bed, everything calms.

  There are no apologies or threats as they gather together. No questions or assurances pass between them, and no clothes come off. There's only closeness, clutching on and clinging tightly all through the night.

  Drugs don't let Dusty rest, but he finds assuagement in Bliss' breathing. It evens out his own as she sleeps, and he slides his fingers through her hair.

  Love, his pulse whispers, found and safe and unceasingly grateful.

  Love, I whisper back in soft symphony.

  Love.

  HE LIFTS himself from us before her parents wake, and when they do, she leaves to spend the day with Daisy.

  Lie.

  She drives straight to the dock.

  I'm here, she texts.

  She drinks coffee to stay awake through waiting, and not half an hour later, he pulls up. Sunglasses hide both of their eyes as she gets out of her car and into his, but his heart reaches for me the same time his hand brings her across the seat, right to him.

  Love.

  Love.

  We rest in harmony while he drives away from the Rabbit, but when he turns onto his parents' street, Bliss lifts her head warily from his shoulder.

  “They're at a charity banquet for the weekend,” he assures her hollowly. “Your secret's safe.”

  There's spite in his voice, begrudging that singes wounds in her that haven't even begun to heal.

  “Ours,” Bliss bites back as he parks. “Our secret.”

  Thomas
shakes his head. “No.”

  Promises flow between his heart and mine in their silence. She slides out his door after he gets out, unwilling to let go of his hand even in their contention, and follows him inside.

  Behind his closed and locked bedroom door, they take off their coats and shoes, and Bliss looks around a little. His curtains are drawn, but even in the mostly dark, she can tell nothing's been touched in too long. This place doesn't smell like smoke or Tide, and when they get into his bed with their clothes still on, his blankets and pillows don't hold any vanilla or trouble. There's nothing to smell at all, until he brings us close.

  Relief lies in the bend of his neck and against his chest. Where Dusty is warmest and I feel him best, he still smells exactly like himself.

  Her rest is deeper than his, but he drifts, too. They spend all day in his bed, and when night falls, they only curve closer, and real sleep finally finds our boy.

  It's there, in the same bed they've shared so much in, while the bodies that carry them relax deeply into dreaming, that I hear his heart clearest. Its rhythm is weaker than ever and his blood is thin. Systole takes too much effort, and dependence clenches every beat.

  As Leigh shifts, nestling her nose along his skin and he strokes the small of her back, bending his neck to unconsciously curve more near, I listen closely to his run-down tricuspid and mitral valves, and it hurts.

  Addiction is a fist around Dusty's heart.

  And all I can do is beat.

  Love, his pulse promises, defenseless and vulnerable, nervous.

  Love, I whisper back, made of it and aching.

  Love.

  LEIGH AND Thomas are more stolen than ever now, a ghost and a shadow, half-alive and even-less, but it's not like before. Our girl eats enough to sustain me while unsubstantial death wears away at our boy, but they don't stay away any longer than they have to. Their voices go unused more often than not, but my beat and his weaker one never treat each other with silence.

  The coming end of December covers everything with snow, and Tommy calls on Christmas Eve.

  “We miss you, baby,” she says, cry-hoarse and chardonnay-tanked. Her attempt at good tidings splinter apart. “You know you're still welcome here anytime.”

  Bliss spends the holiday fake-smiling and counting the hours until love shows up with snowflakes stuck to his hair. His thin cheeks burn with cold when she sneaks him in. His teeth chatter and his hands shiver, and not just from the winter. Our entire soul trembles, inside and out, and no matter how tightly she wraps around him, it's not enough.

  No matter how hot she runs the shower, it's still not enough.

  No matter how closely she presses herself when she steps inside, fully clothed with him, it's never enough.

  Love's strung out at the end of his rope. He shakes all the way to his bones and crushed under dependence; his heart stumbles just as badly as his words.

  “Don't fucking leave me,” he stutters, discordant in the steam and breaking under the stream. “Why are you always leaving?”

  “Shh,” she whispers, holding on with every ounce of love we're made of. “You have to be quiet.”

  Thomas groans too deeply.

  “Get off me,” he tells her, gripping bruises into her sides. “Let me go. Let me fucking go—”

  WE SPEND New Year's Eve at a party with Daisy, Bliss, and me. Too drunk to do right, she presses her mouth to her friend's when the clock strikes twelve and kisses her deeper when everyone around them cheers.

  She's that girl now, and I'm drowning.

  In the middle of the party, she pulls her phone out and dials love.

  “Bliss,” he answers, but it's too much.

  She wanders outside and stumbles a crooked line down the middle of the street in just her dress. She calls him again and again and can't see through falling snow and champagne tears. The Lincoln pulls right up next to her, and she doesn't even realize it.

  Stopping in the road, Thomas gets out and pulls her roughly inside. It's warm, but Leigh's frozen, and love curses at her.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” He sounds regret-filled and angry, but far away to her ears. He presses his hands over them and rubs her scalp and shoulders and back. He unbends painfully-stiff fingers with his stronger ones, and when he brings her close enough to cup his palms around her mouth and breathe heat across her blue lips, it's too much again.

  Bliss pulls on our boy, and lips that haven't touched hers in months taste like Jameson and broken rules. He kisses her back, but it's desperate and stricken, nothing more than every effort to go backward.

  JANUARY IS twice as cold as December, and February feels no warmer.

  Dusty's gone more, and Bliss grows closer—as much as any half-alive liar can—to Oliver. She gives in to his dependable strength, and love can always tell when she has. Her shelter brings her flowers on Valentine's Day, and her storm brings only black eyes. When he sees the bouquet on her vanity that night, his heart weeps behind cocaine's grip, but his fingers dig and his teeth sink.

  “Do you think he's better than me?” love asks Leigh, pinning her down, cutting off my circulation in her arms. “Is that what you want?”

  She shakes her head.

  Lie.

  “You could have it,” he tells her, letting me flow.

  Love? His heart chokes, closer to death than life. Love?

  Love, I never stop promising what Bliss can't. Love.

  LEIGHLEE AND her mother spend the last weekend of March at Puget Sound. They tour the campus and fill out enrollment paperwork.

  Thomas doesn't come over when she gets back. He's gone forever, and when he finally returns, they touch but don't speak. They kiss eye corners and elbow bends and sternums, but not lips. They make codependence and comfort, but not love. Dusty and Bliss have squandered love. Their words have twisted it. Their hands have marred it, and their choices have poisoned it.

  All that's left of love is whittled down to knowing.

  And it's only ours now.

  AS SPRING warms the world, Rebecka turns eighteen on the first of April.

  “Happy birthday,” Bliss tells her as they pass in the hallway.

  “Thanks.” The girl who used to be our best friend doesn't even look at us now.

  TWO WEEKS later, there's an acceptance letter and housing packet from Puget Sound waiting for Leighlee McCloy on the kitchen table.

  Smile lines creased with pride, her mother cries.

  Bliss fills it out, seals and stamps it to send in the morning, and when Thomas sees it on her desk, he breaks her skin. He wants to break her bones. He pushes and pulls and bites so hard I think his teeth might finally sink into me, and I know this mark will last forever, but I'm not afraid of love like this.

  Dusty might hurt the girl that carries me, but his heart would never. His heart is the best heart. It's brave and strong and blessed-special. It talks to me, and it needs me, and I'm dying for it.

  MEASURED BY pitiful tears, too-little-too-late beats, and hands that once held every part of one another, a thousand years pass over the course of the next few weeks.

  May shines too warm to feel so dead.

  The day before Saturday's graduation is overcast and humid. At school, Bliss plays the part of a normal senior on her last day. She smiles high and hugs friends and signs yearbooks, but inside, she's beyond burned out.

  Overexerted and overextended, she doesn't want to face this.

  The end.

  If she had it her way, she'd sleep through the next twenty-four hours and wake wherever she's meant to be with the choice made for her.

  If she trusted me, we'd end up exactly where we're supposed to.

  Mishandled and past cure, I run on beats made of anxious anticipation as she sits down to dinner with her family.

  Her father's parents are here for the big day tomorrow, and Bliss plays it up perfectly. She acts the part of the good daughter, but her stomach knots around food she forces into it. Her tendons and ligaments tense,
and I'm so crippled with worry and missing that I'm beating unevenly without meaning to.

  But I'm buried so deep now she can't even feel my faltering.

  We're both still steadily disappearing, just as we have been since last October: slowly, secretly, and alone. It doesn't matter that we're surrounded by people. No one notices.

  Until her phone vibrates, and everyone looks.

  Keeping her expression casual and her posture at ease as she silences love's call, she stands with her phone in her hand.

  “Excuse me,” she says, leaving the kitchen for the hallway.

  He doesn't leave a voicemail, but a text comes through.

  Come out.

  Teri's less likely to say no when Bliss asks for something in front of company, and there's no guilt in our girl as she does exactly this. There's no hesitation in lying straight to all their faces and there's not a single slip or crack in her demeanor.

  Shameless and refined, the ghost of Bliss is every bit as flawless as she always was.

  “Not too late,” her mother calls.

  Rolling her eyes behind her sunglasses, Leigh nods.

  Outside, she sits in the driver's seat for a moment, fingertip-smoothing out what's left of today's makeup. She puts the Rabbit's top down and pulls clammy-damp and air-flattened curls up into a bun. Sitting back, she breathes out and concentrates on breathing in, but I can't slow my swiftness.

  The black cherry Continental is waiting for us when we pull up.

  Leaning against the trunk, Thomas is in black jeans and a black tee. No hat. No shades. Just a hopeless dusty delinquent smoking a joint while he waits.

  I listen for his heartbeat as she gets out, but it's hard to focus when he looks at her like he is right now.

  Even after she's locked him out and turned her back and ignored his call, even though she's made every plan to drag him through perdition for another four years, even with a tomorrow that's supposed to be theirs hanging uncertainly over their heads, his eyes see all that she is, and he looks with nothing but love.

  Blowing smoke upward as she approaches, he offers her the joint when she stands in front of him. He flicks it when she shakes her head and I listen hard for languishing beats, but I can't hear anything over the ocean.