by Beth Bloom
“What the hell?” he asked, annoyed.
I shook the flashback out of my head and pushed past him.
Either I’d somehow gotten way drunker sitting in the tub or there were three times as many bodies as before. I scanned around trying to spy Whit or Jody or even Owen, but the lighting was too dim, everyone’s faces looked the same, everyone’s clothes were the same dark blur. Anyone could’ve been Cooper. I thought I saw Dewey for a second over by the kitchen, but when he turned it was someone much older. My heart beat erratically. I bit my lip. Every exhalation was a tiny moan.
I weaved through the crowd to the deck’s edge and leaned against the railing. The hills were blacker than before, no stars and no moon.
Then the ground began to shake. I felt the deck rocking beneath me. Abandoned wineglasses and beer bottles on the railing started to shift, clinking against one another. The overhead lights swayed. The needle on the record player skipped and scratched and then went silent. Everything was vibrating to a low rumble. Everybody grabbed something for support: furniture, a wall, each other. My insides rattled, the wine sloshing against a stomach full of anchovies and mozzarella. I gasped for breath. The planet was tossing us around, trying to swallow us whole. I crouched down into a ball, waiting for glass to shatter, the roof to cave in, the balcony to crash down into the canyon.
And then it was over. Everyone froze for a second, braced for a second quake or a follow-up tremor. But nothing came.
Then the entire party erupted in cheers and shouts and cuss words and drunken whooo’s. I felt hands on my back; Whit had found me.
“There you are!” he said. “Can you believe that?”
Weakly I said, “Yeah, I can believe it.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
People everywhere were still screaming, celebrating.
“Hey, why don’t we go, okay? Meet me out by the car. I’ll be there in one minute.” Then he was gone again.
“Did you feel that, man?” Joey/Owen yelled above the noise.
“Totally.” I staggered, still buzzed, fried.
“How L.A., right?”
I nodded. Then someone put on a new record, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Definitely my exit song. I cut through the chaos all the way to the Camry.
Whit was sitting on the hood of his car when I got there. He looked tan, happy, untroubled. He said, “Hey, you.”
“Hey.”
“How insane was that?”
“Crazy.”
He looked up at the stars. “Kind of a special night.” He paused. “It was good I dragged you along.”
“You always drag me along.” I smiled at him.
I thought about the past ten days, the time it’d taken me to go from meeting Whit to knowing him to trusting him to even loving him. Already he’d been in my life longer than James had. And every extra day that James was gone was another day that Whit was around, driving me all over the city, stuffing my face with goofy foods, drying my tears, making me live, helping me forget. Things were still far from okay, but maybe we were getting closer. I drank in Whit’s face, dark and quiet in the nighttime, already so precious to me. Already transformed from the strange imitation I used to see into an original.
He slid off the hood and stood next to me. “I feel like the earthquake was a sign or something, don’t you?” He was excited.
“Maybe. I hope so.” I looked up at the sky, at the no moon and no stars. I felt like I was back on earth, like I’d been away for a while. And Whit was the one who’d brought me back.
But now Whit was distracted, his eyes on Jody’s front door, waiting for something. Then the door opened and a prim redhead in a tiny turquoise dress skipped out toward us, a small leather bag in one hand and some heels in the other. She was swinging a perfect French braid from shoulder to shoulder. When she got close, Whit hugged her around the waist. What. Was. Happening.
“Quinn, this is Tori,” he said.
“Tori?”
“Sorry to make you wait, had to find my purse,” she sang to Whit, then turned to me. “Whoa, crazy pants.”
“Madonna wore them in a video,” Whit said.
“Crazy.” She made a crazy face.
“No.” I glared at Whit, then stared at Tori. “She never actually wore them. She only tried them on.”
They both looked confused.
“Different pants are in the video,” I explained.
Whit shrugged. “Okay, whatever.”
“Yeah.”
“My ladies ready?” Whit asked. It was, like, the grossest thing ever.
“I can ride in the backseat,” Tori said, opening the door behind Whit’s.
“Well, we’re actually dropping Quinn off first, so…”
My head was trembling. Another earthquake? Another seismic convulsion?
I got in the back. I tried to stare away out the window during the ride home, but I kept catching glimpses of Tori rubbing Whit’s thigh across the armrest. In my head I told myself it didn’t matter, me and Whit were closer than this, I obviously meant more to him than some airhead in a miniskirt. We had something special, we were more…evolved. It didn’t help.
Whit pulled into my driveway and left the car running while he opened my door to help me out.
As I was getting out of the car, Tori turned her cute little head around. “Bye-eee. That’s so cool about Madonna.”
“Yeah, bye.”
I walked up the stairs, realizing I was still drunk, past the tea lights, to my front door. Whit followed. At the door he reached out to fix my hair, moving some strands behind my ears.
I threw his hand off me. “I got it.”
“I just want to leave you as pretty as I took you.”
“Can you not say that, please?” My hands were balled into fists at my sides.
“What’s wrong?”
“Have fun with Tori.” I said her name in the bitchiest way possible.
“Cool, you’re being adorable right now.”
“So you’re going back to your house or what?” I didn’t even try to hide my pissiness.
“What do you care?”
“I don’t.”
“You’re being lame.”
“Not really.”
Then Whit said, “I’m not him.” He was staring me down. “You love him so much, just wait for him then. Jesus Christ, Quinn.”
I touched his cheek, palmed the side of his face. No, you aren’t him. You’re someone totally different. You’re alive.
“Sleep it off, okay? Call you tomorrow.” Then Whit was gone, driving somewhere with Tori to do something I had no right to know about.
I stalked through the house stripping, throwing clothes wherever—my high heels and pants on the foyer floor, my purse and keys on a stool in the kitchen, my blouse slung over the back of the couch. The house was silent and dark. Through the sliding glass door, the backyard looked silent and dark too. The pool was glowing and blue.
I climbed down the ladder into the deep end and let my body sink to the bottom, let the night sink away too. I slouched on the floor of the pool, my back against the wall under the diving board, and stared up through the water at the sky. Earlier tonight at the party I hadn’t been able to see any stars, but now there they were, a few scattered points of light, shining faintly. Then less faintly, as one of the sparkling shapes grew brighter and closer until suddenly it landed softly on my thigh. Not a falling star; a single silver bracelet.
I knew that bracelet.
I gasped and accidentally breathed in and started to choke, racing for the surface, swimming through a half dozen other silver bracelets already drifting down through the water. My head broke the surface and I spun around, scanning the backyard. Then I saw them: along one edge of the pool, fanned out like a display, twenty or more of Libby’s bracelets.
The trees swayed in the breeze, but otherwise there wasn’t a sound. The diving board bounced gently, but nothing else moved. He was playing with me. I h
urried up the pool steps and ran into the house, double-locking the door behind me. I stood there dripping wet, shivering in the air conditioning, for a few minutes before I finally forced myself to dry off and go upstairs.
It was two thirty in the morning when I stumbled into my bedroom. I ditched my wet underwear and reached for a T-shirt and slipped it on, not realizing at first that it was soft and blue and smelled like a room with no windows. In the darkness I watched the shadows play across my ceiling, feeling the aftershocks, trying to calm down.
Then the shadows subtly changed shape. Something blocked them, eclipsing the straight slits of the blinds with the outline of a human figure. I jumped up. My nerves burned and my heart pounded.
Stiles. He hadn’t left.
I leapt out of bed and backed up against the wall, away from my window. The shape was closer to the glass now, more familiar, but still in shadow.
It was Whit, on my roof, outside my bedroom, looking in at me. His hand was pressed against the glass.
Something made me step forward. Something made me hold my breath, or maybe not hold my breath, but forget to breathe altogether. I moved closer to the window. Looked at the eyes.
No. Not Whit.
I cried out, felt my heart lose control. Was it? It was.
James. My James.
15.
AFTERSHOCK
I couldn’t get the window open. Then I panicked that if I couldn’t get it open, he might just leave; if I couldn’t get the window open, maybe he wasn’t there at all.
But he was. James tapped on the glass and pointed to the middle of my room, motioning for me to step back. I thought he might break the window, but he just lifted the glass off its frame and stepped inside and leaned the pane of glass against the wall. He studied me in his old blue T-shirt.
I flipped out.
I wanted to throw myself at him but threw myself into the carpet at his feet instead. I lifted my face but didn’t look at his face, didn’t make it past the knees of his jeans, his holy holey Levi’s. They were the same, no dirtier, no more frayed, and it was crushing to think that time hadn’t passed for him the same way it’d passed for me. I moved enough to reach the hem of his shirt and fingered the fabric. Impossibly, this had gotten softer. And then my body loosened, I got softer too, and my legs wouldn’t stand.
“Hey.” His voice.
“I can’t get up.”
“It’s cool,” James said, and kneeled down next to me. He hugged me and I leaned in, burying my head into the fold of his neck, my lips against the side of his throat. There was that inner stillness, that no pulse, and it scared me more than it used to, but it also comforted me more than I was expecting. This was the sound I’d been waiting to hear: the sound of no sound, of no heart.
Then James looked at me, and even though I wanted to be held, I wanted to be looked at too. I went from drunk to drunker as we drank each other in. The room swam, the walls around him were woozy, but James was just like he was that first night. It was as if he’d stepped out of my memory and into my bedroom. Out of a memory I’d thought I’d lost.
But I knew I wasn’t like his memory of me. I was older, weirder, darker, crazier. I felt like I’d come apart and someone had only just begun to stitch me back together. I was half-alive, half in pieces. I’d become a strange creature myself.
“I thought you were Whit,” I said, already disappointed at my first words. “I thought he was you.”
“Why would Whit be here?”
“I don’t know.” It wasn’t what I wanted to be saying. “He just dropped me off.”
“So you were out with Whit tonight.”
“James,” I said.
He leaned back against the dresser and eyed my naked legs. Then he looked at his soft blue T-shirt on me. I knew that look, but I’d only seen it once.
“You have to take your shirt off,” James said.
“What?”
“Take off your shirt.”
Then he wasn’t leaning against my dresser, he was crawling toward me. And I wasn’t taking off the shirt, he was taking it off for me.
“James.” It felt amazing just to say his name, but I wanted to say something unforgettable. Something about love and the oneness of us, something he’d be happy he returned for. But all I could say was, “I missed you.”
Now he was over me, touching the outside of my underwear where the elastic met my hip. I arched my back against the carpet, closed my eyes. His knees knocked mine and I cringed and made a small, pained sound.
“Are you okay?” he said, moving his fingers from the elastic band to the bruises on my knees.
“I’m okay.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Relatively.”
Then he forgot about my wounds and pinned me to the carpet, roughly.
“I need you,” James said, smelling my hair, my breath.
“Me too.”
“Right now.” He made his way down my body, his tongue on my hipbone, his hands pulling at the only piece left of my clothing.
“Yes.”
“I’m back.” He smelled my thighs, kissed them, licked the inside of them.
“You’re back.”
It hurt less and more this time, but James was better because he didn’t have to look away, he didn’t have to hide his teeth from me. We each bit down on our lips. As always, our union, pleasure and pain.
Exhausted, sobering up from the wine, still trembling from his touch, naked, lightheaded, about to laugh, about to fall asleep, touching the tips of my fingers with the tips of my other fingers, I noticed James smelling me again. But not in the sexy way from before.
“Yeah, I need a shower.” I didn’t remember having taken one since he left. I usually considered a dip in the pool a sufficient washing.
“You smell like me,” James said, his head in my hair.
“Then I don’t ever want to shower again.” I looked up at the Hole poster on my ceiling. “Unless…do you shower?”
“Sometimes.” He laughed and touched his greasy hair. “Come with me,” he said, getting up off the floor.
He helped me stand and led me to the bathroom. In the darkness James turned the faucet on. I stepped over the edge of the bathtub and lay down as he filled warm water up around me. When it came to just below my shoulders, he turned it off.
I dunked my head down, slid up, knotted my hair into a wet bun. James sat on the bathroom floor, arms folded on the side of the tub, his head resting on his arms, his eyes watching me.
“So.” I blew bubbles on the top of the bathwater.
“So, I’ll tell you.”
“Okay, tell me.”
“Let me ask you first…you’ve been hanging out with Whit this whole time?”
I blew more bubbles. “Kind of.”
“So he’s been taking care of you.”
“It’s been bad. The worst.”
He picked up a bar of soap and rubbed it across my neck, my shoulders, down my arms, across my chest. “I told you I was coming back.”
“I didn’t know.”
“It’s been, like, two weeks.”
“It’s been, like, forever,” I said quietly, and took the soap out of his hands.
“I know forever.”
I nodded apologetically but whatever, two weeks for me was an eternity. A lot changes, and a lot had changed, and I wanted to tell him that.
But he said, “What kind of stuff have you and Whit been doing?”
“What do you mean? Who cares?”
What hadn’t we been doing? Kissing. Talking about you.
“Maybe I care, dude.”
“Lots of random daytime stuff.”
“Daytime stuff. Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Aw, you’re making a joke.”
“Am I such a bummer?” He lathered shampoo into my hair.
“Not even, like, a little bit.”
“Whit’s funny.”
I dunked my head. Whit was totally funny. He could make a lonely, pi
ssy, bratty burr laugh. He could make a dead girl crack up.
“Yeah.”
Even though James was back, Whit wasn’t gone.
I said, “We’re close. I think.”
“Close is cool,” James said.
In a rush I said, “We’re not that close,” but it sounded forced. “I mean, I’m not in love with him.” I didn’t know why I said it. But there was the truth—I felt love for Whit—and there was the deeper truth. Whatever that meant.
“Well maybe I’m in love with you,” he said.
“You just love my bloody nose.” I splashed the water across from me. “Get in here.”
James, still in his boxers, climbed in the tub.
I flicked some water at him. “Talk, you.”
“You haven’t told me anything you’ve been doing.”
Blah.
“You haven’t even mentioned Libby.”
Double blah.
“She’s whatever.” I looked down in the water at my pruned fingertips.
“Fine. I went to Cambridge. I tried to convince some friends to come back with me.”
“And?”
“And they weren’t in the mood for a fight.”
“I thought they loved to fight.”
“These are good dudes.”
“But good dudes fight bad dudes,” I said, certain of it.
He shook his head. “Why would they kill the twins for doing exactly what they exist to do?”
“I guess.”
“I went for you.”
“Don’t say that, I didn’t want you to go.”
“I know. But I had to try.”
I squinted at him. “Did you try hard enough? I mean did you tell them how Stiles and Sanders are evil and that they deserve to die or whatever you call it?” I tried to keep my voice even, but I could feel myself getting frantic.
“So they deserve to die but I deserve…you? How does that work?”
“Now you’re on their side?”
“Quinn. I’m kind of permanently on their side. If there are sides.”
“No, you’re on my side.”
He rubbed his temples, looked frustrated with me.
“Because you hate them, James.”