by Chloe Cox
And that will make it better. After that, I’ll be able to move on.
Thinking about this starts to make me crazy, as it inevitably does when I think about people I’ve lost or could lose, and I pad quickly down the hall on wet feet so I can pull some sweatpants and a t-shirt on. I don’t even bother to towel off my hair before I’m tiptoeing to Dill’s room.
I know it’s not fair, but I won’t be able to sleep until I see that he’s safe.
Which he is, of course. The sliver of light from where I’ve cracked the door open falls right on his bed, and he’s curled up on his side, sleeping soundly. Or he is until I sneak into his room—I can see the shift in his shoulders, the change in breathing, and I know I’ve woken him up. I feel like a jerk, but it’s not like I can stop myself once the anxiety takes hold. I will be up all night, paralyzed with fear, unless I check up on him.
He’s kind of gotten used to it a little bit. Something else I feel bad about.
“You can’t sleep?” he murmurs into his pillow.
My heart breaks a little bit. Dill shouldn’t have to worry about me. I walk over to him, no longer worrying about the sound I make, and bend down to kiss him on the forehead. He makes a face without opening his eyes, registering little boy disgust at any of that mushy stuff, and so I reach down to give him the world’s gentlest noogie on the top of his head.
“Just getting my noogies in before you go away to camp,” I whisper.
He smiles sleepily, excited by programming camp even when he’s half-asleep. “’S not for two days.”
“You’ll be gone for six weeks. I’ve got a lot of noogies to make up for,” I say. “Go back to sleep, little man.”
I close Dill’s door on my way out so I don’t keep him awake, because I’m worried I’ll be up for a while. I’ve taken a massive gamble with that text. Because if I don’t end up on top? If I don’t find the answers I think I need, if I don’t get the closure I want? Then what? I can’t afford to go back to that place Marcus put me in the first time he broke my heart. I can’t do that to Dill.
Marcus leveled me with just one phrase, back at the bar. “Lie to me.” What’s he going to do with six weeks?
chapter 6
MARCUS
I’m standing on an unnamed corner on Kent Avenue, a place that used to be just abandoned warehouses and is now all expensive lofts, watching a bunch of little rich kids get ready to board the bus to go to their computer camp. I’m waiting for Harlow and Dill and the first day of the deal we made. I don’t know if Dill will remember me. I doubt it. I don’t know if Harlow will be able to look at me without wanting to punch me in the face. I doubt that, too.
The last time I felt like this, this out of whack, this out of my element, was the morning I walked to Harlow’s house to beg her forgiveness and found a cop car rolling up the drive, bearing bad news.
Let me explain.
That fight I had against Manny Dolan, the guy who was going pro? The one I trained day and night for, the one I was sure I was going to win in front of my asshole father, the fight that would make my dad finally say he was proud of me?
My old man didn’t show up.
Now, in retrospect, I understand the how and why of this. But I still don’t get the sheer cold-bloodedness of the man, the cowardice of choosing simply not to show. In one sense, I was crushed. In another, deeper way, I wasn’t surprised at all.
You know who did show up? Harlow. And she brought her entire family. For real, all the Chases, cheering me on in a damn blood sport. Imagine that? My head was twisted, I’ll tell you that.
I fought hard.
And the thing is, I won.
I was not supposed to win.
I won’t lie, I wasn’t feeling good going into that fight. It had been childish to expect that my dad’s interest in boxing would overcome his lifelong disinterest in me, and it had been stupid to fixate on that, but I had done both of those things, and realizing my folks didn’t show was a giant mindfuck five minutes before the bell. It knocked my focus.
But I followed Pops out into that high school gym with the ring set up in the middle of what was usually a basketball court, people filling the bleachers on one side, sitting in folding chairs on all the others, yelling and drinking out of paper bags, and I heard one voice above all the others. Screaming my name.
Yeah, Harlow, screaming my name. You better believe I heard that.
My head snapped around and my eyes locked in on her like I didn’t know how to see anything else. She was smiling, but it wasn’t an innocent smile. More like fierce.
She was beautiful.
I felt every hour I’d spent with her, training. Every time she’d innocently touched me, not knowing how much I wanted her, even though I thought I wasn’t supposed to. Every time I’d gotten her to smile like that. I don’t know how to describe what happened after that. It was the adrenaline rush you get before a fight, but taken to another level. My heart hit my chest in loud, strong beats, and my blood echoed with that strength, rushing through my veins with a pressure I could feel, and I felt like King fucking Kong. I wanted that fight. I wanted to crush Manny Dolan and anyone else who got in my way. I would have fought every fighter in that gym if Harlow asked me to, and I would have won every belt, just to have something to give her at the end of the night.
That’s when I knew I was going to win. Nothing else could happen with her there. I told myself I was fighting for her and everything clicked into place. The air got sharper, the man in front of me moved slower, my punches got stronger. Maybe it was because I didn’t have much to start with, maybe it was just because of who she was, but that was when I knew that she was my world. My everything.
So I knocked Manny Dolan out cold.
I did kinda mess up Manny’s career, set him back at least a year. And Alex Wolfe—or Mr. Wolfe, as I called him at the time, even though the man was my godfather—came back into the girls’ locker room to let me know it.
The fight was in our own high school gym, if you can believe it. They’d given me the girls’ locker room, which, I won’t lie—I had been in there before, only under different circumstances. Usually those circumstances involved a girl, and left me feeling a lot better than I did this time. Never with a cut above my eye and my body aching and my heart pumping from knowing I had kicked some serious ass out there in front of Lo and her family. I’d done someone proud, even if it wasn’t my own father, or, apparently, Alex Wolfe.
“You have no idea what kind of headache this makes for me, Marcus,” I remember him saying.
“Sorry.” I’d smiled.
It was just about then, as I was unwrapping my hands and looking for an icepack to put on my face, that Harlow had come through and Alex excused himself, not wanting anyone to hear what he had to say. Let me be clear: Harlow came in by herself. Just me and Harlow, in the locker room, after I’d just pounded another man into jelly. And Harlow wearing one of those summer time tank tops that kills every man in sight.
I don’t know what it is about a fight that puts you in a certain frame of mind. Maybe the testosterone. But I was very, very aware of the way she smelled and the shirt she was wearing and how alone we were.
Keep in mind, she wasn’t mine. Not yet.
“Hey,” she said, with this big grin on her face.
I didn’t have much experience being self-conscious then, and I still don’t now. But I remember that moment, when I became aware of the fact that I’d just won this fight, but there was no one in the locker room celebrating with me. For the first time I felt the need to explain and I couldn’t. Instead I just told the truth.
“My folks didn’t show,” I said.
Harlow looked at me for a long moment. Then she took the ice pack from my hands and held it to my cheek and said, “I did.”
Yeah. I will remember that until the day I die.
Maybe I was too young to know what to do with a gift like that, I don’t know. But after a little while I smiled back at her to let her know t
hings weren’t serious and said, “Why you grinning like that? You like to see me get hit?”
“No,” she said, rolling her eyes at me while I undid my boots. “But you know what the odds were, right? You weren’t even supposed to last all ten rounds, let alone knock him out.”
“So?”
She gave me that wicked smile I loved. “So I told my dad to bet on you with Mr. Wolfe.”
That’s when I started laughing. Alex Wolfe ran book on this fight with the odds against me? No wonder he was so pissed. He took a bath.
“You did?”
“Of course I did,” she said, switching the ice to my other cheek. “And now my dad says we’re taking you out for ice cream.”
“Ice cream?” I laughed some more. “Like I’m five?”
I thought I might have caught Harlow looking at my arms right about then. Quietly, she said, “Let’s just let him think that for now, ok?”
Yeah, I didn’t imagine that. We sat there a moment, quiet together. I let my eyes fall on those perfect breasts, and after a second I was aware that we were breathing together, feeling the rise and fall, the same rhythm. There was a single drop of sweat on her chest, about to fall between her beasts, and I wanted to push her back on that bench and lick it off. But when I looked up Harlow just looked earnest, baby blues wide open and totally unaware of the thoughts going through my head.
“Ice cream, huh?” I finally said.
“Ice cream. I love my dad, but he’s a cheapskate. Maybe next time you let Mike Tyson bite your ear off, you’ll get a steak dinner.”
I grinned back at her. “I could pay for college that way, maybe. Invest wisely, you know?”
“One ear at a time,” she said, and bopped me on the head with the melting ice.
Seems stupid, but what came later was even better. Her parents? Man, they were all over me, her dad talking about the fight like he knew anything about boxing, her mom fretting, getting all worried, making me promise up and down that Harlow was never going to get in a ring like that, making me promise that I wouldn’t do it again, either.
I mostly looked at Harlow.
“You didn’t tell me you wanted to compete,” I said.
“That’s because I don’t. I don’t actually like the idea of getting hit in the head,” she said. Then she threw her maraschino cherry at me. “I like being smarter than you.”
Her dad laughed, and I asked him, “She like this with you?”
Like I knew all of them. Like we were close. It felt easy, comfortable. And then Dill started to wake up, and her parents were going home, but they were ok with leaving their daughter with me for a little while. And as her dad got up, he shook my hand and said, “Call me Paul. And thank you for teaching my daughter how to protect herself.”
Man to man. Looking me in the eye.
One of the proudest moments of my life.
Which, looking back on it, is probably why I screwed up so badly right after that.
In my defense, my attraction to Harlow had been sneaking up on me. All the time, in little increments, getting stronger. It wasn’t just the way she looked—although, damn, the way she looked—and it wasn’t just the way she smelled or the way she carried herself. It was the way she looked at the world. It was a way I wanted to look at the world. I liked who I was when I was with her, and I was becoming that man more and more, and I liked that.
So it was getting harder and harder to ignore how much I wanted her and how well we fit together, but I knew she didn’t have much experience. I knew I’d be her first. And for some reason I didn’t feel right about it.
No, I’m lying. It wasn’t just some reason. Straight up? I didn’t think I was good enough for her. I thought I would mess it up. Thought I would hurt her. That we’d take that plunge and she’d discover who I really was, and then I’d lose her. And again it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to see why; I was aware even then that my parents messed me up. I knew my parents didn’t think much about me. I just didn’t think they were wrong. Not that I would have said that at the time. I would have talked about how she was younger than me, too inexperienced, all that. Just excuses.
Sometimes I wonder what might have been different if I’d made a move after that fight instead of doing what I did, which was go off and screw another girl at the first party I could find. If I’d had the guts to make a move on Harlow, knowing her parents liked me, knowing that it was the real thing, maybe I wouldn’t have known how to handle it. Maybe I would have screwed it up, and her parents would have stayed home that weekend from their couple’s retreat or whatever it was, and never would have been in that car accident.
Who knows?
Instead this is what I remember: walking around the neighborhood with Harlow. Putting my arm around her. Feeling her warmth against me, how she fit perfectly under my arm. How good she smelled. How good I felt just being close to her. Holding her outside on her porch after midnight, knowing she needed to go inside and not wanting it to end.
Kissing her on the damn cheek, like an idiot, thinking I was doing the right thing.
And then going to my buddy Chino’s house, getting fucking wasted, and nailing Rosa in Chino’s bed. It was even worse than that, though, because I was so stupid about it. I was all over Rosa in front of everybody, making it real obvious, so it got back to Harlow at the speed of light, basically. And then I was in trouble. “Trouble” didn’t quite cover it. She wasn’t talking to me.
She wouldn’t come down to train the morning after that, either. And because I knew I was wrong, I got mad about it and acted like she was overreacting or something. So I went to the gym without her and worked out. By the time I was done I had worked through all that stupidity and was well aware of just how badly I’d messed up, both by screwing Rosa and by pretending Harlow didn’t have a reason to be upset about it. So, all sweaty and sorry, I practically ran back over there to apologize, to beg her to forgive me. I didn’t have much of a plan after that. I don’t know if I would have told her we had to wait or what, but it turned out not to matter.
I knocked on the door and got nothing. She was still mad. Fine. I would just stay there until she decided to hear me out. She was there alone, her parents away for the weekend, Dill was with Maria; I could hang out on that porch all damn day. And the way it happened, you wouldn’t believe it if you saw it in a movie or something. Harlow finally came downstairs and opened the door, and I could tell she’d been crying. Seeing that was like getting kicked in the balls. I’d made her cry.
I don’t even know what I said, exactly. I said I was sorry about a million times, I know I admitted I was wrong, that I was done sleeping around like that, that I didn’t know what we were, but I knew that what I did hurt her. I remember saying that. I remember saying, “It was wrong and dumb because it hurt you, and I swear to God, Lo, I would take the hurt on myself if I could.”
I said that, and it was like God said, oh yeah? Try this.
Because it was at that point that I noticed her eyes weren’t on mine anymore. She was watching something behind me. So I turned around, and that’s when I saw the cop car and two police officers walking up the steps, both of them with sad, sad looks on their faces.
This is all just to say that the moment I realized I loved Harlow Chase was the moment that her world ended. The moment I realized I would do anything for her, I was asked to. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing—I couldn’t even get loving her right, and now I needed to figure out how to help her deal with the worst thing that had ever happened to her. I had never felt that lost, and I had never felt so determined to step up.
I don’t remember the actual words. I know the cop said them several times. I know it took me a while to get it—the Chases flipped their car, dead on impact. But I don't remember the exact words.
I do remember the exact moment Harlow understood what they meant. Her face…cracked. And something inside of her escaped, something left, seeped out and floated away. She fell against the door before I could catch her and
I just remember that she didn’t look like she was all there. Like part of her was gone. And that was when I was sure, really sure, that seeing her in pain hurt me, too. It hurt me physically to see that on her face, to see how much she hurt. I felt it right in my chest, this ache, this hole, this thing I didn’t know how to fill. So I just gathered her in my arms and held her as close as I could.
The police had to stay until social services decided what to do with Harlow and Dill, so they were still there when she finally came to and just…exploded. She just started punching things, anything, walls, the bannister, whatever she could. She threw anything she could get her hands on. She screamed. They were going to call the paramedics, take her to a fucking hospital, so I just swallowed her back up in my arms and let her beat on me until she dropped from exhaustion. Even then, I didn’t let go. I didn’t know how to.
That’s mostly what I remember: Harlow. The details of the rest are hazy. I do know the whole neighborhood came out, everyone trying to figure out what to do. There was an aunt somewhere, but the aunt didn't have a good relationship with them, and she wouldn’t be there right away. So the neighborhood came through, mostly Maria Ruiz, who lived next door, doing all the organizing, making sure Harlow got put in with a foster family nearby, volunteering to take care of Dill until the aunt got there. Everyone staring at Harlow like she was a bomb waiting to go off, and me not wanting to let her go. Mr. Mankowski, the guy who would be her foster father, I remember him coming forward carefully, like either of us might go off at any moment, and I just explained that I was coming with them, and he said that was fine in a real calm voice.
I slept on the Mankowskis’ couch that night, waiting until everyone was asleep to go sneak into the room they’d put Harlow in. She wasn’t sleeping. Or maybe she was crying in her sleep—it was hard to tell. But I just lay down next to her, not knowing what else to do, and then she took my hand and squeezed as hard as she could. I stayed until her grip softened and her breathing calmed down, and eventually I found my way back home. Only when I got there, I knew it wasn’t where I was supposed to be. Not anymore.