by Callie Hart
Zen takes a shuddering breath and opens her eyes, slowly turning her head to look at me—the first time she’s looked at me without open hatred on her face in nearly a year. “What did she have to say to talk you into this? Or was the chance to say I told you so too good to pass up?” she asks stiffly.
I have to push around the block in my throat in order to speak; it isn’t an easy task. “I only came for the food. Wednesdays are meatloaf night in the cafeteria.” Zen pulls a face, smiling a little, but the wariness in her eyes lets me know that my presence here is putting her on edge. I’m right there with her. Suddenly, this all seems too much, and I’m too tired and rundown by everything to stand up a second longer. I slump down into the chair Halliday was occupying before, sighing heavily. “I’m not here to make you feel bad, Zen. I’m not here to make you feel better, either. I’m just…here.”
That’s what I needed, back then. To not be alone. I didn’t want the fuss, and the blame, or the pity and the questions. I just wanted to feel like I wasn’t tumbling down into the murky black depths of a bottomless pit all by myself. It would have been comforting to know that I could have reached out at any point and somebody would have taken hold of my hand.
There have been many wrongs committed over the past twelve months. Zen’s far from free of blame, but it serves no purpose to cling onto that at the moment. If she needs me, then I’ll be here for her, because right here, right now, that’s the right thing to do.
At seven, a nurse busts us in Zen’s room and shoos us out before evening visitation hours. She could cause a real stink, since we broke into the ward and flaunted a number of the hospital’s other rules in the process, but she does the kind thing and advises us not to do it again. Halliday and I hurry away from the psychiatric ward like there’s a fire licking at our heels.
As we cut through the emergency room to make our way out of the hospital, a familiar face halts me in my tracks. The woman smiles broadly at me, weaving her way across the crowded E.R. “Hi, Silver. Great to see you up and on your feet. Tell me you haven’t been performing any split lifts, though,” she says, eyeing my Sirens uniform. “’Cause that would not be smart.”
“No, Dr. Romera. I’m starting off slow. Keeping my feet on the ground until I get the all-clear from you guys.”
Behind her, a tall guy in a black sweatshirt and black jeans approaches, sliding a cell phone into his back pocket. The very embodiment of intimidation, he looks like he’s about tear one of the waiting room chairs out of the ground and start trashing the place. A deep, unhappy frown marks his brow. I’m about to warn Dr. Romera that a dangerous-looking inked-up psychopath is about to lynch her, but then the guy slides his arm around her waist.
Well, fuck me.
How ironic is this?
I took one look at Dr. Romera, and I took one look at the guy, and I decided there wasn’t a realm or plane of reality in which they might possibly be together. Which is exactly what other people do when they see me and Alex walking down the street together, holding hands. I look wholesome, the same way Dr. Romera does. Our men both look like they just got spat out of hell because even the halls of the damned couldn’t contain them.
Beside me, Halliday squeaks nervously, plucking at my sleeve. “I’ll meet you by the car. I need to make a phone call.”
I hope to god she’s not calling 911.
“All good?” the huge guy asks, giving Dr. Romera a smile that borders on frightening.
The smile the doctor returns to him is far sweeter. “Just saying hello to a previous patient. Silver, this is Zeth. He’s my…well, he’s mine,” she says laughing awkwardly.
The guy, Zeth, turns his attention to me, nodding just the once, and I almost mimic Halliday and make a run for the door. “Pleased to meet you,” he tells me, in a deep, rough-edged baritone.
“Likewise.”
He brushes a hand possessively over Dr. Romera’s hair, smoothing down an errant strand. “I have something I need to take care of. Be back for you in an hour?”
She nods, and I have to look away from them, embarrassment coursing up and down my spine. The expression on his face is so openly sexual that I nearly burn up from the heat of it. Shit, is this how people feel when they’re trapped at close quarters with me and Alex? I seriously hope we’re not this fucking obvious.
I’m contemplating how best to back away from them without being noticed when I see someone on the other side of the E.R. that makes my pulse spike through the fucking roof. Narrowing my eyes, I glare at the bastard talking to the nurse at the desk with all the intensity of a thousand burning suns. “Lowell.”
“What the fuck did you just say?” Zeth isn’t looking at Dr. Romera anymore. He’s looking at me, and I really wish he wasn’t. His eyes are sharper than daggers and glint very dangerously indeed. “Did you just say Lowell?”
Dr. Romera’s eyes are on the verge of bugging out of her head. She looks at Zeth, then back at me, tightening her hand around the white lab coat she’s holding.
I’ve said something wrong, somehow, and I have no idea how to fix it. “Yeah, um… A detective with the DEA.”
Zeth’s back straightens. “Here?”
Nervously, I point over to the Detective, unsure if I’m doing the right thing. “He questioned me about what happened when I was attacked. He implied that I’d made it up or something. I accused him of taking a bribe from the Weaving family and things got a little ugly.”
The rigidity in Zeth’s body eases. Even Dr. Romera seems to relax. Zeth’s dark eyes bore into the detective, though, still just as cutting as they were a moment ago. “No such thing as a coincidence,” he growls. “I’ll go talk to him.”
“Hey, don’t,” Dr. Romera pleads. “Go. Run your errands. I’ll make sure the guy doesn’t cause any problems here. It’s all good. Seriously. Please.”
I wouldn’t have thought a freight train could stop this guy once he gets an idea in his head, but that one word from Dr. Romera—please—has him pumping the brakes hard. “Fine. Okay. Let me know if you need me.” He nods to me again, giving me an approximation of a smile. Reaching into his pocket, he takes out a wallet and produces a plain card from inside. “That fucker causes you any more trouble, you call this number.” I take the card from him, noting that there’s no name on it. No address. No business information. Just a Seattle number, printed on the face of the card stock in stark, unassuming characters.
“Uh…thanks?” I’m worn-thin from spending time with Zen, and this weird interaction has officially fried my brain. I need to get the fuck out of here. Bidding the doctor and her whatever he is goodbye would be the polite thing to do, but I’m too turned around to come up with the words. I hurry out of the hospital, ignoring the cold wind that slams me right in the face as I step out into the lot, and I don’t stop walking until I reach Halliday’s car.
“What was that all about?” Hal asks when I throw myself into the passenger seat.
“I have no idea. I really don’t want to know. Come on. Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough of this place to last me a goddamn lifetime.”
Halliday turns the key in the car’s ignition, bringing the vehicle to life. She puts the car in reverse…only she doesn’t execute the maneuver. When I look at her, fat, unhappy tears are streaking down her cheeks. “Jesus. What is it, Hal?”
She sniffs, aggressively rubbing at her nose with the back of her hand, like she’s mad at herself. “I wasn’t supposed to say.” Her voice is thick and clogged up with emotion. “You know me, though,” she says, smiling brokenly through her tears. “I don’t hold up well under pressure. Zen…things are far more complicated than they seem. She’s fucking pregnant.”
My blood runs ice cold in my veins. At the same time, Sam Hawthorne’s voice whispers at me from the grave. “If you wind up pregnant, that’d probably be really bad, don’t you think? You’d have to explain that you went whoring around with not one but three guys…”
Detective Lowell suggested I was thinki
ng too logically when I walked in that pharmacy after Leon Wickman’s party and downed a Morning After pill. Sam planted the seed in my head, though. He’d painted a picture, and I’d wanted to avoid that terrible outcome at all costs.
Doesn’t look like he had the same little chat with Zen.
17
ALEX
The week passes by and things settle into a weird, off-kilter routine. I pick Silver up in the Camaro, waiting in the driveway for her to come flying out of the house with her guitar case clutched under one arm, her hair flying all over the place in the wind.
On the way to Raleigh, I make a point of discussing what’s going on inside my head, even though it’s dark, and fucked up, and I don’t want to. I’m no good at talking about my fucking feelings like a little bitch in therapy but sharing things with Silver is different. She doesn’t judge me for whatever I’m thinking. I don’t feel any less Alex, the unstoppable, undefeatable rebel of Raleigh High, for revealing the tender, raw parts of myself to her. If anything, I feel like I’m beginning to understand myself better by looking inwards instead of burying everything down and ignoring it the way that I normally would.
Giacomo maintains his distance. I teeter on the brink of forgetting that he’s even here, poisoning the Raleigh air with his toxicity, but I don’t quite manage to pull it off. A part of me can sense the fucker lurking in my peripherals, just waiting for another opportunity to swoop in and turn my shit upside down again. I vow to myself that I won’t let his presence affect me, though. For the most part it works.
After our pseudo fight in the gym, Zander gives me a wide birth, though he does jam the odd Post-It through the vent of my locker, bearing highly creative, colorfully offensive names that I assume are all aimed at me.
Goat Ball Licker.
Gooch Stain.
Jizz Monkey.
Occasionally (and disturbingly), the name-calling is accompanied by a diagram depicting the name in question. At first, I screwed up the Post-Its and tossed them in the trash, making sure Zander could see me do it, but I gave up halfway through Wednesday and started collecting them instead. The inside of my locker door is covered in pink, orange and lime-green sticky notes with doodles on them that would make a sailor blush.
When Friday rolls around, I wait for Silver in the driveway like usual, but when the door swings open…it isn’t my girlfriend who comes stomping down the steps. Wearing a thick black puffer jacket over his red and black flannel pajamas, Cameron evidently hasn’t spent much time prepping for his day yet. His hair is a fucking nightmare. I cringe as he makes his way around the Camaro, opens up the passenger door, and climbs on in like it’s totally fucking normal.
He looks out of the windshield, back up toward the house. When he lifts his mug of coffee to his mouth, the steam from the hot liquid inside fogs up his horn-rimmed glasses. “Asshole,” he says into the cup.
“I’m sorry? Did you just call me an asshole?”
He nods. “You bet I did.”
I mull this over. “Well…I’d say you were the asshole. Where’s my coffee?”
His stupid puffer jacket rustles when he turns his head to look at me. “It’s in the pot. In the kitchen. Inside the house. You remember how that works, right? You actually get out of your car. You walk up the stairs. You knock on the front door. No, wait, y’know what? Fuck it. You don’t even need to knock. You already know you don’t. We moved past that stage a long fucking time ago, didn’t we?”
“Are you mad that I haven’t come over to say hi, Cameron?” I ask flatly.
“It’s more of a manners thing,” he counters, his voice weirdly trailing up at the end. Blowing into his coffee, he leans forward and turns the radio on, scrolling through the channels until he finds some CCR. “You and I went on a mission to make another man bleed. You’d think that might earn me the odd hello every once in a while.”
“This is cute. You’ve missed me. It’s my charming, sunny outlook, right?” I slouch down into my seat, breathing down the front of my jacket, trying to spread some warmth into my torso. My nipples are so cold, they could cut glass.
Cameron scowls, his lip curling disdainfully. Grumbling, he holds out his mug of coffee. I accept it, taking a deep slug. The liquid inside is scalding hot and bitter as hell, and I almost cry from how beautiful it feels, thawing out my insides. When I go to pass the mug back to Cam, I notice the curly black script that wraps around the white ceramic.
“You’ll always be my Daddy?” I read out loud.
“Silver gave it to me on Father’s Day when she was six. It’s my favorite mug.”
“Can I keep it?”
“Stop talking, Moretti, before I rip your tongue right out of your head.”
He saw my, ‘she calls me Daddy now,’ joke coming a mile away. “Okay, okay. That might have been a little on the nose.”
Cam glowers at me out of the corner of his eye. “My fist’ll be on your nose if you’re not careful.”
“You trudge out here in the snow and the cold just to call me names and threaten me, old man? You need to get out of the house more often.”
He takes a sip of coffee and then hands me the mug again. I drink from it and pass it back without comment this time.
“I know you don’t wanna talk about Ben,” he says quietly. “At least not with me. I wouldn’t want to either. But I have this cool architectural software I wanted to show you. Figured you might be interested in it. It pisses all over CAD. You can build these 3D liquid surfaces that make buildings look fucking crazy.” He chuckles, sipping again, and I try not to feel like he’s just punched me in the fucking gut.
I’m so used to most men being monumental let-downs on the father figure front that I’m always taken aback and surprised by how consistently good Cameron Parisi is at this. Sure, he might not be my father—I don’t want him to be—but he makes a pretty fucking epic friend.
Before I can change my mind, I lean across the other side of the car and I pull the dumb bastard into a quick, tight sideways hug. I release him right away, returning to my side of the vehicle, clearing my throat as I grab his mug from him again. It’s easier to drain its contents than it is to meet his eye. Cam sits in stunned silence for a second before he says, “All right. Well. Cool. I guess we won’t talk about that either, then.”
“Probably for the best. I finished your coffee.” Fidgeting in my seat, I lean on the car horn, willing Silver to hurry the fuck up and come outside so that this tragically uncomfortable moment can be over. “I s’pose I’ll come up and grab my own on Monday. Just to be polite.”
Cameron smiles, his eyes creasing in the corners, but he does a magnificent job of holding in his laughter. Opening up the passenger door again, he gets out of the car. “Sounds like a plan. See you then.”
The door slams with a thunk, dislodging a chunk of snow from the Camaro’s roof which slides down the windshield, onto the hood. Silver’s dad ambles back up to the house, his mug dangling from his index finger. Just before he disappears back inside, he turns and flips me the bird, grinning from ear to ear.
18
ALEX
“Class, this is Detective Lowell. He’d like to ask a few of you a couple of questions. He’s assured me it won’t take long.” At the front of the room, Dr. Harrison looks nervous, like he’s secretly been cooking his own meth in the science labs, Heisenberg style, and he’s afraid that this DEA Agent might smell the crime on him. The Agent in question—a shortish guy with a wolfish look to him, doesn’t look like he works for the Drug Enforcement Agency. From his slicked-back hair, black bomber jacket, and his Nike high tops, he looks like he’d fit right in at a men’s clothing store. The kind where hipsters pay through the nose for vintage Gucci fanny packs and secondhand Versace jeans.
I already fucking hate him.
I hate him even more when Silver passes me a slip of paper that reads:
That’s the guy who made out I was lying about Jake.
My knuckles crack spectacularly when I crus
h the slip of paper in my fist, eyes narrowed at the greasy punk standing in front of the class. He radiates smugness in a way that makes me want to take the heel of my fucking Stan Smiths to his face.
“Thanks, man,” Detective Lowell says. Dr. Harrison recoils, stepping behind his desk, probably unsure how to proceed since no one has ever called him fucking ‘man’ before. He’s just not that type of guy.
“Before any of you start freaking out, I wanna make it clear that no one here is in trouble,” Lowell announces. He twists a gold ring around his pinkie finger, his eyes skipping over the faces of the students on the front row. “There have been some accusations made against one of your fellow students, and I’m just here to try and get to the bottom of the whole thing. No stress. No drama. This whole thing is gonna be dealt with nice and quick.”
Asshole.
It isn’t until Silver boots me under the desk that I realize I’ve hissed the word out loud and at least three other people have heard me. Still, I stand by my accusation. This piece of shit is trying to make light of what happened to Silver. By the way he’s speaking, you’d think he was here to investigate a missing fucking skateboard.
I don’t care who he is, or what government agency he works for. If he causes problems for Silver or even thinks about pulling some dodgy shit to get the charges against Jacob dropped, then I will end this cunt myself.
“First up, I’d like to talk to, uh…Cillian Dupris?”
This…mother…fucker…right…here.
“Uh, I’m sorry, Detective Lowell. You may have your paperwork mixed up. Cillian Dupris isn’t in this class anymore. He ended up with a severe case of hypothermia last year and unfortunately he’s taking a while to recover—”