It filled her tiny room, briefly.
And stayed with her all through the night.
—
She didn’t think about his expression again after the conversation with Lydia. Mainly because Lydia was very good at taking her mind off it. She did things like suggesting they walk to class together, without a single bit of hinting. And when they got there, Lydia sat with her. She pulled the armrest desk up for her and admired her array of pens and laughed about the last lecture when Harrison had said shit instead of sits.
As though friendship was supposed to be this effortless.
Watching out for the insults hidden in every word was the aberration.
Life could be normal, she thought.
And then she went through the double doors that led to the south-side stairwell, and there he was. Just sitting on the steps that led up to the library, as if lying in wait like he used to. What other reason could he have for being here? Though even as she thought it, she was taking in all the little details that told a different story. He wasn’t just sitting on the stairs, primed to leap as soon as the doors opened. He was hunched over something, oblivious to anyone who might come through.
And that something was a notepad. He was writing with all the care and attention of someone who definitely did not think trying hard was for losers. She could see from here how much he had written—his tiny, blockish handwriting smothered page after page, each word so firmly rendered it created a kind of jagged Braille on the other side. In places he had even torn the paper.
But he appeared as oblivious to that as he did to her.
He didn’t look up—not even when she started backing away. Usually he seemed to sense when she tried to escape, yet somehow that didn’t happen here. He was too intent on his task, to the point where she was able to figure out that they were class notes. He was copying class notes from the page he had clenched in his left hand, occasionally squinting at the even shittier handwriting of the owner before painstakingly transferring it to his own notepad.
Even more astonishing: he sometimes referred to a book Harrison had put on their reading list. That was open on his broad knee, too, just beneath the pad. And when he got to a certain point, he ran a finger underneath a particular line. Like the line was vital.
Like all of this was vital.
It made her wonder seriously terrifying things, like what if he’d always been this creature underneath? Certainly he reacted differently from the Tate she knew when he noticed her presence. He almost jumped up, spilling everything off his lap in the process. Then, when he realized how this looked, he tried to hide it. He snapped the book shut—The Monstrous-Feminine, she saw, and tried not to goggle—and flicked the cover of the notepad back over.
But he did it all very poorly. He lost pages; he screwed others up. His bag refused to take everything all at once, and more things spilled all over the ground.
As they had once for her, about a thousand years ago.
Now she was supposed to laugh and say look at the nerd studying—only she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The words cleaved to the roof of her mouth. Even simpler ones were a struggle, in this brand-new and baffling territory. But she eventually got them out.
“Are you trying to take Harrison’s class in this stairwell?”
He took a while to answer her.
So long, in fact, that she could see the lie before he said it.
“I have no idea what would give you that impression.”
“The…fact…that you…are clearly trying to take his class in this stairwell. Those are the hipster kid’s notes, right? I see his name there—Bartleby Winnamaker.”
He immediately tried to cover the ornate writing at the top of the page with his thumb, but the damage was done. And he knew it. He even rolled his eyes in that way she remembered from various classes, when he mispronounced a word or answered a question wrong.
Come on Tate, it seemed to say. Get it together.
And then he tried to do just that.
“Maybe he was just helping me out. Maybe my eyesight is super bad and I need someone to see the shit Harrison scribbles on the board in his crazy small handwriting.”
“I think your problem might be that you’re trying to read his crazy small handwriting from outside the lecture hall. Maybe even farther than that—you’re never there when I come out.”
“You said you wanted me to not be there when you come out.”
“That isn’t how I remember our conversation at all.”
“Oh holy fucking fuck, am I lamplighting you again? How do I keep doing this?” He threw up his hands, while she did her best not to roll her eyes and correct him. Gaslighting, she wanted to say. The term was gaslighting. “Look, okay I know you did not exactly say that—you said stay away. So I have stayed away. I have stayed as far away as I can humanly get without slipping into another dimension.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say something snarky back. Something like I wish you would slip into another dimension. It was what she would have told him back then, after all. Yet when she went to, something happened. The words caught in her throat. They got all tangled up in that eye roll he just did and his expression now: like someone trying to scale the sides of a glass building after a sudden rainfall.
And his expression then, in the video when he had carried her. The one that she had refused to believe was concern, but had to now. Everything he was doing just kept bludgeoning that realization in harder, until her insides ached with it. Her mind spun with it. Much longer and she was going to vomit.
“When I said that I wanted you to stay away, I definitely didn’t mean that you should miss lectures to accomplish that. At the very least I didn’t mean that you should try to take down information from those lectures in a stairwell.”
“There’s nowhere else I can go. Bartleby won’t let me take his notes back to my dorm building because they come back smelling like pot.”
“Well, there is this thing called a library. And last time I checked that place was drug free.”
“Ha fucking ha. I can’t do this in the library.”
“Because that’s where nerds go?”
“No because that’s where you go. Like all-the-time-constantly-twenty-four-seven in the library. If I go there I might as well turn up for class.”
“Oh my god, you should turn up for class. You have to turn up for class. I cannot be the reason that you, Tate Sullivan, are barred from studying that you actually want to do. That would be even weirder and more gross than if you tried to take a picture of my naked butt when I was in the med room.”
“Jesus, do you honestly think I would do that?” He paused, long and hard enough that she knew he was figuring it out. His expression shifted from amusement to confusion to something that came very close to horror, in under thirty seconds. “Wait. Did you think that was the reason I was there?”
“It did cross my mind once or twice.”
Or a few thousand times.
“Letty, I was there because—”
“I know why, okay.” She closed her eyes for just a second, remembering that look on his face as he carried her. The concern all over his features, which she still couldn’t quite accept. “But maybe we could just…not go into that. Ever. Just never talk about it.”
“Hey, if you’re willing to talk to me at all we can do it about anything you want.”
She fell silent then, though not through choice. All the oxygen seemed to have left the stairwell, and it took her words with it. The only thing she could do was stand there, staring at him, but even that was a problem. It gave her too much time to take in a million new things about him—like how soft his gaze suddenly was and how serious he seemed. That smirking humor she had come to know so well was gone, replaced by some other weird thing she didn’t recognize.
She would have called it sincerity on anyone else.
But she couldn’t with him. Not now, not ever.
“I think this might be pretty much my limit.�
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“Okay, well…that’s fine, too, I guess.”
“All right. So…goodbye then.”
“Yeah. Goodbye,” he said.
But he didn’t stand up.
He just kept on making way too much eye contact.
Heavy, hypnotic eye contact that she had to get away from right now.
“You don’t seem to be going anywhere.”
“Neither are you.”
“Because I need to go up.”
She pointed, and in response he shuffled to the left.
Not that it helped particularly.
“Do you really expect me to squeeze through that tiny amount of space you just opened up? I doubt I could get a toe in there, and am pretty sure you know that.”
“Don’t know anything of the kind. I’m betting you could slip through, no problem.”
“Careful, Tate. That kind of sounded like a compliment.”
“If it’s a compliment, then how come you’re backing away?”
She honestly hadn’t realized she was. It just seemed to be a reflex when it came to him. He started talking, and suddenly she was doing her best to escape. In fact, she was sort of surprised she hadn’t already. The fire escape was barely three feet behind her. He was still sitting on the step, and didn’t seem inclined to move.
Running would have been easy, yet still she stayed.
And talked. God, they were doing a lot of talking. More than they’d ever done, and most of it so lighthearted she couldn’t wrap her head around the words.
They made her want to laugh and puke at the same time.
“I’m not backing away. I’m just naturally leaving in an ordinary manner.”
“Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure you usually leave facing forward.”
“I was just about to turn. You didn’t give me a chance.”
“So…do you need like total silence or…?”
“That would be a start.”
“And maybe I should close my eyes.”
“Sure, why not?” she said.
Though she didn’t expect him to really do it.
Or to stay that way for what seemed like forever.
She almost took a step toward him before she remembered who he was and what he was capable of.
“Like I’m going to fall for that old trick.”
“Closing your eyes is a trick now?”
“You’ll open them just as I think I’m out. And then…grab my legs.”
“I’m not some creature hiding under your bed. At least let me grab your shoulder.”
“And then what? Let me guess: you decapitate me.”
“I was thinking more like…patting you reassuringly. Though I guess I could pat too hard with my giant meat hooks and accidentally dislodge your head. How well is it attached to your neck?”
“Hard to tell. Getting hit by a truck probably loosened it a little.”
Silence fell after that, though it wasn’t the sort she was used to. There was no sense of waiting for some terrible punch line, no hint of mischief in his eyes. If anything, his eyes had gotten softer—as though those words had hit him there and left a bruise.
“Letty, I—” he started.
But she cut him off before he could finish.
“I know you carried me.”
“I wasn’t keeping that a secret from you, if that’s what you mean.”
“No, that wasn’t what I meant. I meant…you know. Gratitude.”
“You don’t have to be grateful. In fact, maybe don’t ever be grateful because I don’t know how to deal with it. Let’s just say I’m really in the red, and it’s going to take me like twenty good deeds before I get anywhere close to the black. Then you can say thank you.”
“I think by the time you got to deed twenty I would be long dead. This all on its own is making my palms sweat so much I think I might be getting dehydrated.”
His laugh was an electric shock to her already jangled nerves—too loud and brash and scary.
She reacted to it before she’d even let it sink in.
“Why are you laughing? No, stop, okay, I take that back. I take it back I’m not nervous at all.”
“Letty, no no—”
“I was just trying to see what you would do if I showed you some weakness, and now you’ve revealed your true intentions I can safely murder you.”
“Honey, no, you’ve got the wrong idea. I was laughing because it was funny.”
“Funny as in what? Like funny looking?”
“Come on. You know you’re witty as fuck. I know you know that. No matter what happened you could never hold that part of yourself back.”
“Yeah. Guess I should have kept quiet and spared myself, huh?”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant that you were always at your very best when I was at my worst.”
She heard something crack and splinter the second he got to that last word. But it took her a second to realize the cracking and splintering came from somewhere inside herself. That thick layer of granite she had carved around her heart had just developed a fissure, and things were starting to leak through.
Bad things, like hopes and dreams.
And in a second he was going to notice. Her eyes were already starting to sting. Every breath she took seemed too fast and too shaky. But even more horrendous: there were words pushing against her lips. Stunned, disbelieving, desperately thankful words.
Words she could never, ever trust him with.
“I have to…I just remembered I promised a friend I would eat a grilled cheese sandwich with her. It’s a whole thing. That I need to do. Right now.”
“Sure, okay. I guess I’ll see you later.”
“Later I will be busy. I will always be busy.”
“Cool, I get it. Busy.”
“Goodbye, Tate.”
“Goodbye, Letty,” he said.
Though she wished to god he hadn’t.
It left her thinking about how wistful he had sounded for the rest of the day.
Chapter 5
They sat cross-legged on the mostly unmade bed in Lydia’s dorm room—the same shoebox shape as her own, only three times messier and twice as cool—when she first confessed. It just jolted out of her in the middle of easy conversation about some trashy TV show, like a gunshot in the middle of a party.
She expected blood and screaming and traumatized silences to follow.
Instead, Lydia barely finished chewing her mouthful of grilled cheese before she replied.
“He bullied you. He was your bully. That guy who carried you. Was your bully.”
And man, the relieved breath she let out when Lydia was done. It felt as though she was doing it for the first time. Like she had never really breathed before, and now finally, at almost twenty-one, she was allowed.
“I know, it feels kind of like I hallucinated it all, too. But I swear to god, I didn’t.”
“Oh I believe you. I just wanted to super emphasize how shocking it is.”
“I know right? Like really, really shocking.”
“They could make a Lifetime movie out of you.”
“My Deadly Bully.”
“A Bully Among Us.”
“Fatal Bullying.”
They were laughing as they went through the titles, but it was the silence that followed that Letty appreciated most. It was the equivalent of settling into an overstuffed leather seat after three hundred miles of hiking. Everything about it was comfortable—even the way Lydia watched her steadily as she took another bite of her sandwich.
It was a patiently waiting kind of look, she knew.
Not a stop eating, you fatty kind of look.
“So what did he do to you? Like insults and things?”
“He sat in the passenger seat while his friend rammed me off a cliff with his truck.”
This time, the silence was a little less comfortable. For a start, Lydia’s mouth was open through it. And then there were her eyes: suddenly pitch-black and as wide as moons.
“Okay, just so you know, never let your new buddy make stupid Lifetime movie jokes when all the while that is a thing that happened to you. Holy shit, Letty, I’m so sorry.”
“No, to be honest it’s better if you keep them coming. That way I don’t have to think about it too much.”
“How about we call your movie Attempted Murder.”
“It wasn’t attempted murder,” she said, though she had no idea why she did. To make it seem more palatable to her friend? Or to make her conversations with Tate more palatable, in light of it? Neither seemed acceptable. “Or at least, that’s what the cops said, after Jason told them it was an accident.”
“Jesus. They just bought it? He says my foot slipped and they believe him?”
“He was a high school wrestling champ. So was Tate.”
That darkness in Lydia’s eyes shifted then. Became something sharper somehow, yet no less comforting. Clearly, Lydia would never tell her that she had to stop doing whatever she was doing that goaded Tate. There would be no calls to the college’s office to talk about the transfer she should get, instead of the one he should. Just like that, someone who was not her family was on her side.
“That is fucked up. That fuck is so upped it might never get down again.”
The laugh startled Lydia when it came out. But it startled Letty more. It wasn’t even brittle or bitter—it was full-bodied and thrumming with life. Like the sort of laugh she heard other people sharing all the time.
And when Lydia tentatively joined in it was just…
It was like slipping into a suit of normality.
“Man, you are really easy to talk to—I feel about a thousand pounds lighter. Mentally, that is. Physically I just finished off half a pound of premium cheddar.”
“I think a half pound of premium cheddar is warranted, to be honest.”
“I don’t know. I just don’t feel so bad about it lately.”
“Maybe it’s just that you have some distance now.”
She shook her head and came very close to doing something normal friends did.
Like squeezing Lydia’s hand. Or giving her a hug.
“No, it’s definitely that you are super awesome. I mean, I have zero distance from it right now. The accomplice to the attempted murder just sort of apologized to me in a stairwell,” she said, half laughing over it as she did. So it came as a shock when the half laugh suddenly tipped over into something else. One second it was light and happy, the next it sounded almost like a sob.
Never Sweeter (Dark Obsession #1) Page 3