by Gia Riley
“Something tells me your research was a little different than mine.”
She sets her phone and book on the table before snuggling against my side and resting her hand on the center of my chest. “Do you have any wishes yet?”
Her voice hits me right in the dick, but I’m so wiped from the past forty-eight hours, I just want to lie here and hold her for a while. “At least ten.”
She must be able to hear the exhaustion in my voice, because she doesn’t try to do anything other than what we’re doing now.
“Are you okay?” she finally asks.
“If you don’t mind, I think I’ll save all my wishes for the morning.”
She traces the tip of her finger over the scar on my chest with her cheek pressed against my skin. “After what happened today, I think it’s time we talk about this instead.”
“Even if I told you it doesn’t matter?”
She lifts her head, searching my eyes for answers. “It matters because I love you, Lane. I don’t want secrets between us, and considering Lemon is a pretty big one, I need to hear the whole story.”
I debate what to say and where to start. Instead of jumping into my past or Lemon’s, I take it back to one of the nights we shared together. “Do you remember the other day when you told me my scar made you feel safe?”
Without hesitation, she says, “Of course I do. I still feel the same way.”
I run my fingertips across her back, making mindless patterns over and over, as I tell her the honest-to-God truth. “I cared about you so much before you said that to me, but it was in that exact moment I knew you were mine for all the right reasons—and not because of Midnight Fate.” She stiffens in my arms and tries to roll onto her back, but I don’t let her. I need her close for this.
“I didn’t realize you had doubts about me. Especially since you told me you loved me for the first time right after that.”
“And I meant it when I said it, but hearing you say those words meant everything to me. It probably sealed the deal, too.”
She’s still seeing the negative instead of the positive when she asks, “But you didn’t love me before that?”
“I wanted to, Noelle. You have no idea what it meant to have you waiting for me while I spent night after night driving through city after city. I was surrounded by my best friends, but Easton had Lark with him, holed up in the back bedroom every night. Dom had Gina ever since she took the job working for us. All I had was my phone and your voice to keep me sane, and you were hundreds of miles away.”
Finally, she relaxes. “I didn’t seem as real to you like Lark and Gina because I wasn’t there. I was just that voice in your ear, keeping you up late at night.”
“Maybe, but that’s probably why I think your voice is one of the sexiest things about you. It’s woken me up in the morning, put me to bed at night, and moaned in my ear when we were messing around. It was like having your soul when I couldn’t have your body.”
“And now you have both,” she whispers.
I kiss the top of her head, thankful to have her in my arms. “I’ll never take you for granted, baby, because I understand what it’s like to have to survive without you—and it fuckin’ sucks.”
“You were never without me. I thought about you constantly while you were gone. You consumed every inch of me. That’s why I loved it so much when you told me to pick a star in the sky every night.”
“We’re so damn cheesy, you know that? But every time I asked you to pick a star, I was hoping it made you feel close to me because, for those few minutes, it didn’t seem like we were as far apart. If we were looking at the same sky, at least we were in the same universe.”
“You’re not cheesy at all. You’re romantic, Lane. Sometimes you can be so quiet and introverted, and other times you’re sarcastic and funny, but no matter what, you never have to doubt me. Falling in love may have been out of my control, but there’s nobody else who could possibly love me harder than you do.”
I smile against her soft skin, thankful she gets how much she means to me. Once Midnight Fate took off, there were times I thought I’d never find someone who wanted me for more than fame. But we’ve made so many memories together when we couldn’t even see each other’s faces that it doesn’t get any realer than that. “You’re the one part of my past I want to hold onto, Noelle.”
She leans closer, placing a soft kiss on my scar. “I love you, Lane. You can keep this story safe. I won’t ask you again.”
“Why?”
“Because you were right; it doesn’t matter. I’ll still love you no matter how it got there or who put it there. It’s a piece of you, but it doesn’t define you.”
After all we’ve been through the past couple days, there’s no use hiding what happened. It’s not like I’m protecting Lemon by keeping it inside; if anything, I’m only hurting myself all over again. Maybe Lemon didn’t want to be my sister, mostly because she thought I was ashamed of her, but I’ll always be her brother. And because of that fact alone, I’ll never regret the mark that was left behind as a daily reminder of how far gone she was—and how close to death she came.
It’s time to tell Noelle, even if I don’t know where to begin or how to ease her into the harshness of what happened to the both of us. But she’s listening and, right now, that’s all I need her to do—to hear me out and not judge either one of us based on the choices we made with what little we had.
“It happened right before the holidays. I was eighteen. She was fifteen, acting like she was twenty-one. I still hate how fast she had to grow up.”
“Lemon did this?”
I nod, releasing a strained breath I didn’t realize I was holding. The truth slowly creeps up my throat like it’s begging to be set free. Lemon and I are the only ones who know the truth. Even the local newspapers got it wrong, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Not when I was the one being blamed for her getting mixed up in so-called ‘gang-related violence.’ “I’m sure you could dig up an old article if you wanted to, not that it’s the truth.”
“I want the truth, Lane. Not someone else’s opinion.”
Her encouragement helps, but it doesn’t take away the pain of reliving the night. No matter how much it bothers me, I tell Noelle anyway because, even though it was a shit storm of legal trouble, I’d do the same thing ten times over if it meant keeping Lemon away from Trey.
“Until today, I hadn’t seen Lemon in years. The last time we had a real conversation, she lied to me about where she was going and what she was doing. After what happened to her, they wouldn’t let me near her while she was in rehab. I had just turned eighteen and she was barely fifteen, but I wasn’t her legal guardian, so I had no say in what happened to her even if I was the one raising her. While I was fighting for her, she was dead set on throwing her life away before she had a chance to really live it. And she has a voice, Noelle. Lemon can sing for real. I was so close to talking the guys into letting her do some songs with us—and she knew that. I thought she was excited about it, too. It gave her a goal to work toward.”
“Are you okay? Your hand’s trembling,” she asks as she listens.
“I’m fine,” I tell her. “I don’t know why I still get so worked up about it. It was so long ago. It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid, Lane. You might be a couple years apart in age and different genders, but you’re more alike than you realize. You both have kind hearts, and sometimes those are the easiest ones for people to take advantage of. You wanting to help her, her being pulled in other directions by people she wanted acceptance from . . . It makes sense.”
“She had a kind heart sometimes, but she was just as good at doing whatever it took to get what she wanted. She wasn’t always like that, but once the drugs started, my sister’s personality disappeared. All of a sudden, it was like she left her own body and went someplace else while it walked around and did whatever it wanted. When she felt like trying, and being sober, she didn’t realize how much shit
she did to hurt people while she was checked out. Taking responsibility for it was something she couldn’t wrap her head around, so she ignored it all and pretended it never happened.”
“You held her accountable. That was the right thing to do.”
“I had to. No one else was and if I didn’t, she’d only get worse. Eventually, she did, and there were only so many times I could fix her mistakes for her before I had enough. It just so happens I reached my limit the same night this happened. I went after Lemon, ready to drag her home if I had to, not realizing what I was walking into until I got there.”
“This is about the drugs, isn’t it?” Noelle asks.
“Once she got hooked, she was at Trey’s mercy without the money to cover what she used. It makes me sick even thinking about what she had to do to get it in the first place.”
“And all these guys are the same ones who have her in trouble now?”
“It’s all of the same deadbeats. We’re right back where we were, only this time it’s not about drug money.”
“Is Trey the one who hurt you?
“I guess you could say we all hurt each other that night.”
The house is quiet when I get there, empty beer cans litter the front porch, and the smell of weed is so strong you’d only have to be inside for a couple minutes to get high by association. Even though I can’t stand any of them, want to punch their faces in for getting my sister into this world, I still knock on the door like a rational human.
Rusty answers and as soon as he sees me, he tries to slam the door. I manage to wedge the toe of my boot between the door and its frame, keeping him from shutting me out. With little effort, I push the door open the rest of the way until he’s on his ass in front of me. He’s so high he just laughs at me, maybe shits his pants a little, too.
“Where’s Lemon?” I ask him, with little patience left.
“Hell if I know,” he says as he stands up and grabs a slice of pizza from the open box on top of the coffee table.
I glance around the rest of the living room, searching the two stoners’ eyes for any signs that he’s lying to me. All they do is hold up their hands in surrender like I’m a damn cop here to ruin their buzz. “Have either of you seen her?” I ask each of them.
A simple shake of their heads—which probably kills even more of their struggling brain cells—sends me elsewhere for answers.
The kitchen has dirty dishes stacked high in the sink, the trash is overflowing in the can, and the table’s being used as a makeshift bar with enough liquor bottles lined up to serve a hundred people and then some.
My shoe sticks to the black and white tile floor that’s straight out of the fifties. I curl my lip, reminding myself not to go in my own house until I clean them off.
After wandering through a hallway and toward the back porch, there are no signs of life outside either. I head back toward the living room, praying she’s not at the top of these stairs in Trey’s bed. I’m so freaked out about what I’m about to walk in on, I have to convince myself to put one sticky sole in front of the other to get there.
It’s been years since I’ve been in this place, back when we were kids and Trey was just a kid on my Little League team I hung out with on the weekends. Most of the house looks the same way it did then, only now it’s rundown and in desperate need of a mop. Since Trey’s mom starting working nights at the diner, the house has become a free-for-all for Trey and his friends.
All the bedroom doors are locked, but I walk straight to Trey’s, putting my hand on the knob and taking a deep breath. The door’s locked when I twist my wrist to open it. Other than the background noise of the TV, I can’t tell what’s happening on the other side.
I don’t know why I do it, but my body takes me to the bathroom, the only place left to check without having to break a door down first. As soon as I flip the switch, my heart’s ripped out of my chest. Lemon’s draped over the side of the bathtub, her pants missing and her tank top hanging off one shoulder, covered in vomit.
Rushing to her side, I pull the shower curtain off the damn wall, letting it hang from one side and drape itself over the toilet. “I can’t do this again, Lemon,” I say to her, even though she’s passed out and can’t hear a word I’m saying.
I kneel down beside her, lifting her head off the porcelain tub. My heart stops as I wait for her to take a breath or give me a sign she’s not already gone.
Her eyelashes flutter the slightest bit and I think I might have imagined it, but then a tiny groan reverberates from her throat, giving me hope that I’ll see her blue eyes again.
I’ve never been happier to hear such a pathetic, garbled sound because at least she’s alive—even if she’s barely hanging on.
After I shove a towel under her head to keep her from choking if she throws up again, I dial 911 and beg the dispatcher to send someone to help, just like I did for Mom. Even though I don’t want to leave her and they tell me to stay on the line, there’s enough adrenaline pumping through my body that the desire to end Trey Bradford begins to consume my thoughts.
I hang on the line, thankful it only takes the medics about five minutes to get here. They barge into the bathroom, the stretcher knocking a dingy tile off the corner of the wall. It clatters against the floor, equally as broken as everyone around it.
“What’s she on?” the medic asks, like I’m the one responsible. I could take a couple guesses, but it wouldn’t do them any good or help them fix my sister.
“I don’t know, but give me two minutes and I’ll have an answer for you,” I tell them in a rush before I’m back in front of Trey’s bedroom. I don’t even feel my foot crash against the wood door when I kick it open. It’s like I’m a spectator in my own life, watching from a distance as Trey’s about to get what he deserves.
I know he’s just as fucked up when he doesn’t even budge from the mattress he’s lying on. There’s an almost full bottle of vodka on the nightstand next to the bed, so I twist off the cap and pour it over his head.
He jumps up so fast he slams his leg on the table, his voice hoarse as he screams from the pain of his leg and the alcohol burning his eyes.
“What’d you give her, fucker?” I yell in his face.
He can barely see me through the slits in his eyes, but he recognizes my voice. “What the hell is wrong with you, Lane?”
“I asked you a question. The paramedics are in your bathroom trying to save my sister. You’re eighteen with a minor in your house, barely breathing.”
He wipes his face off with his shirt and reaches for the bottle of water that was next to the vodka, pouring it over his eyes in a shitty attempt to flush them. “I’m not her babysitter. What she does is on her.”
“You’re the only one who gives her shit, Trey. Don’t fuck with me. She needs help.”
Like he finally hears the urgency in my voice, he says, “She smoked and probably took some pills. Alcohol, too. She likes fruit punch with rum in it.”
He gave me the answer I was asking for, but I still thank him with a fist to his face. One punch will never be enough though, and before I know what’s happening, I’ve landed at least three more to follow the first.
I pull back for another just as he ducks and white lightning pierces my chest, knocking me backward against the closet door. Glancing at my hand, blood from Trey’s nose drips off my knuckles. The redness seeps through the slash in my T-shirt, gravity forcing the rest of the blood on a journey through the hardened ridges of my abs until it drips off my skin and onto the toe of my boot.
I can hardly breathe but I stand tall, charging at Trey like a man possessed. I wrap my fingers around his throat so hard, my only intention to choke him until his head explodes.
Instantly, the pressure against his trachea forces him to drop the knife. It clatters to the wood floor beneath us just as two cops rush the room and pull me away from Trey.
As soon as they see I’ve been stabbed, they let go of me, ushering me to the edge of the bed while they lung
e for Trey before he can get away. I take their moment of distraction for what it’s worth and chance a run back to Lemon.
I’m already thinking of all the things I want to say to her. All the apologies I have for letting her down and not paying enough attention to her when she needs it. The first ‘I’m sorry’ is on the tip of my tongue when I barge through the door. Only this time, she’s not in the bathtub when I get there. She’s already gone—and I have no idea if I’ll ever see her again.
My eyes are heavy this morning and my head aches a little bit. I didn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time, and each time I did let myself doze off, I’d wake up in a panic, mad that I let myself be so careless.
Lane was so exhausted he passed out about a half hour after he told me about the scar. He’s had years to come to terms with it in whatever way he’s needed to, but for me, the wound is practically bleeding, still way too fresh for me to be able to close my eyes without picturing Lemon in the bathtub or him with blood trickling down his chest.
This morning, my feelings haven’t changed; if anything, I’ve become more protective of the both of them—even more desperate to ease their pain and work toward a happier ending for once. If Lemon wants me to hold her hand, I will. If she needs to cry on my shoulder, I’ll let her. I’ll do whatever it takes.
She doesn’t hear me when I open the bedroom door, so I wait to see what she’s doing. Wearing Lane’s T-shirt and a pair of faded jeans, she stands in front of the trash can with her foot on the pedal to hold the lid up. After a few seconds of deep breathing, her thin frame heaves, and she throws up into it.
My heart wants to run to her and rub her back, but I wait her out, giving her the space she deserves. As soon as she finishes, she ties up the bag and walks to the sink where she washes her hands and rinses her mouth out. She stares mindlessly out the window, even though she probably has more running through her head in any given moment than I could imagine.
After she dries her hands, she glances at her stomach and runs her palm over her belly. I’m about to ask her if she’s hungry when she tears a banana off the bunch and tucks it in her back pocket. Like she has a plan, she moves to the door to the condo and glances over her shoulder, her hand still on the knob.