by Callie Hart
“That’s the problem, though, isn’t it?” he says, laughing.
Oh crap. Did I say that out loud? No. No way. I’m not that stupid. “What is?” I squeak.
He sits up straight, rolling back his shoulders and clearing his throat. “Lord Dashiell August Richmond Belleview Lovett the Fourth. When you’re born with a name like that, all people do is tell you that you are better than everyone else. When that kind of narcissism is drilled into you from such an early age, there’s only one thing you can become, pretty little Carrie Mendoza.”
I’m a human torch. Living, breathing, aching flame.
Pretty little Carrie Mendoza…
“What?” I whisper.
Dashiell’s eyes lock onto my mouth. He’s going to look away any second now. Aaaany second now. “A narcissist,” he murmurs. “It’s one of my many faults.”
“Then…why don’t you just change?” The words tumble out all breathy and nervous. Inside, I cringe at how pathetic I’m being, just because a hot boy is studying my lips like he’s imagining what they’d feel like mashed up against his own. Seriously, though. It’s hard to maintain a cool head when it’s Dashiell Lovett who’s doing the staring.
A cocky, calculating smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Why would I want to? What if I like myself just the way I am?”
This statement, dripping with arrogance, brings me back to my senses. Wow. What a fucking jerk. “How can you like yourself just the way you are?”
“That’s just what narcissists do. They love themselves more than anything or anyone else. Hate to let you down you, but I fit the stereotype magnificently. I’m an underperforming, useless, disappointment.” There’s that bitterness again. There’s so much resentment in his words that I get the feeling he’s stewing on something that has nothing to do with me or my criticism of his behavior.
“You’re top of nearly every class. Easy on the self-deprecation there, buddy. Why are you trying to convince me that you’re such a dick?” I reach for the vodka, taking it out of his hand just as he was about to take a drink. He lets out a surprised bark of laughter but relinquishes his grip.
“Because you have that look in your eyes, darlin,’” he says. “That, ‘Will I get a title when I marry him? Will our children have cute little accents?’ look. And I’m sitting here telling you that I’ll never marry anyone, and I’ll never have kids, because I’m physically incapable of ever loving anyone more than I love myself.”
I’ve wondered this for a long time. In my head, when I’ve fantasized about the day Dash finally notices me—a day much like today—I’ve wondered if he’ll be able to see how desperately I like him just by looking me in the eye. I’ve spent weeks practicing the perfect poker face in the mirror. It’s actually been more like months. I thought I’d nailed the whole calm, cool and collected exterior, but that belief has just been crushed in Dashiell Lovett’s palm. He sees it, and me just fine. I hate that I’m that obvious.
“You’re a pig, you know that? What gives you the right to make assumptions about people you don’t even know. You might love yourself, but you assume that everyone else is in love with you, too? That’s just—urgh!” I thrust the bottle of vodka at him, using way too much force. The hard-rimmed bottom of the bottle digs into his ribs, but Dash barely moves. He snatches the bottle away, hurling it into the grass on the other side of the car, and then his hand is wrapping around my wrist, his other hand clamping around the back of my neck.
He moves quick, closing what small gap there is between us, pulling me forward to meet him so that our faces are three tiny, insignificant, inconsequential millimeters apart. His eyes are on fire, his breath hot and fanning my face as he growls, “I’ll kiss you, then. Stop me if you don’t want it. Just say the fucking word.”
A split second ago, my heart was a functioning, healthy muscle. Admittedly, it was laboring a little under the pressure of this strange encounter, but it was still doing its job. The moment Dash’s fingers make contact with the back of my neck and his rough, angry voice hits my eardrums, it throws in the towel and quits on me. Just resigns, like I don’t need it to keep beating in order to fucking live.
What…?
What the fuck am I supposed to do now?
“That’s what I thought,” Dash rumbles. And then his mouth is crushing down on mine, and his fingers are tangling in my hair, and the stars overhead are wheeling, and I can’t remember how to breathe. His lips—lips that look so full and soft when he speaks, or cracks the world wide open with a smile—are forceful and demanding. This isn’t the tender, loving kind of kiss I’ve daydreamed about in our English classes. This is a searing, ravaging, soul-eating brand of a kiss, and it’s hotter than I could ever have possibly imagined. Because this? This is my first kiss. Period. I have no other example to hold it up against.
Am I supposed to feel like this? Like a small part of me has been off out of balance my whole life, but it just clicked into place the second his tongue slipped into my mouth? Like all of the things that haven’t made sense up until this exact moment in my life suddenly come into focus with a crystal clarity?
What are you doing, Carrie? What did I tell you? No boys! This is dangerous territory and you’re walking in blind…
Alderman’s warning paralyses me. This is precisely what he would say if he knew how reckless I was being. I should stop this now. I should push Dash away and run back into the party. This madness leads nowhere good. But…fuck. It’s Dash. He’s here, and he's real, and he’s fucking kissing me.
I kiss him back. What else is a girl going to do, when the guy she’s been besotted with for the longest time kisses her so deep and so hard that she forgets the basic laws of the universe?
I can’t keep up with him. My back arches as he presses his chest right up against me, and my breath slips out in stuttered little gasps. The concept of having someone else’s tongue in my mouth has always been kind of repulsive, but I get it now. It’s the most intimate, dizzying, delicious thing I’ve ever experienced, and I can’t get enough. Dashiell strokes and explores my mouth with a mind-boggling confidence. I follow his lead, mimicking his movements, and it’s as natural as breathing. No clashing teeth. No awkward forehead bumps. No weird, unpleasant probing. It’s perfect.
I get carried away. My hands find their way to his chest—hard packed muscle under a butter-soft t-shirt, and my mind reels at the solidness of him. He feels like a constant. Like safety, and home, even though he is anything but. I suck his bottom lip into my mouth, my teeth biting down ever so slightly, and a low, surprised growl slips out of Dash’s mouth and into mine. In a flash, he’s pulling back, his hands gently removing mine from his chest, and he’s sliding away, down off the hood of the car.
What the fuck? I…I feel like I’ve just had a bucket of ice water dumped over my head. Dashiell’s sneakers hit the grass. He stands with his back to me for a second, his shoulders hitching up and down. He rubs at the back of his neck with one hand, the other planted firmly on his hip. He draws in a deep breath—I hear the pull and push of the air rushing in and out of him—before he finally faces me again.
Cold. Flat. Void. “And just like that, the mystery’s gone,” he says. Ducking down, bending at the waist, he rummages around in the tall grass and then stands erect with the vodka bottle in his hands. He holds it up, inspecting it, but even I can see from my stunned position on the hood of the car that it’s empty. “Fucking perfect.” He launches the bottle over the fence this time, hurling it with all his might, and the thing spins before disappearing into the darkness, landing god only knows where.
I can’t move. I want very desperately to pop down off the car and sprint away from this hideous moment, but my traitorous limbs won’t comply. Half of me is still dumb on endorphins, still feeling his hands on my skin and in my hair, his tongue in my mouth, his frantic breath fanning my cheeks. The other half of me is mortified by the way he just brushed me off so easily.
And just like that, the mystery’s gone.
The words ring in my ears. I’ll be hearing them on repeat until my thirty-fifth birthday. The past five minutes will officially go down in history as the very best and the very worst moments of my life.
Dash won’t look at me. He squints toward the house, like the structure’s a mirage rising out of the darkness and he’s trying to decide if it’s really there or not. “You’d better get down. There are certain things I can get away with and things you definitely can’t. If Pax sees you up there, the aftermath won’t be fun for you.”
Stiff with embarrassment, I slide off the hood, dropping down into the grass. I have to walk past him so I can get away. I put as much space between us as the car and the barbed wire fence will allow, but it’s not enough; Dash grabs my wrist.
“It’s not that I don’t think you’re hot.” His tone is colder than the grave. “We’re just not cut from the same cloth, Carina. There’s nothing to be done about it. Go on. You should go.”
The horrified expression on my face worsens. I must look pathetic, but it’s taking all of my energy not to cry. I have no hope of channeling the same cool disregard he’s treating me with, so I finally do the right thing and I follow Alderman’s most important rule. I wrench my wrist free from his grasp, and I run.
If only the Firebird was further away. At least then, I might fade into the dark, out of sight, and he might not get to witness me fumbling with the door handle with my numb, useless hands. He might not hear my choked-out gasp of misery when I finally get the damn door open and throw myself into the driver’s seat. And he might not hear my yelp of surprise when I realize that there’s someone sitting next to me.
“That didn’t look like it went well.”
“JesusfuckingChrist!” I hold a hand to my chest, considering a quick faint. My pulse thrums like my entire body is some sort of infected papercut. “Pres, you scared me!”
“I assume, after that little run-in, that you wanna go home?” she whispers.
I look at her askance—the disheveled fiery hair; the twin streaks of mascara down her cheeks; the graze on her upper arm, and the wretched look on her face—and my heart trips and tumbles down a flight of stairs. It lands with a sad flop in the footwell of the car, right between my wedges. “You look how I feel.” I fish the keys to the Firebird from my purse. I hold them, a terrible thought presenting itself to me. “You don’t wanna go back in there, do you?”
Presley laughs a touch manically. “God no. We need to get back to your room and break out the secret chocolate stash. I’m declaring this a state of emergency.”
I nod grimly as I start the car and throw it into reverse. “Couldn’t agree more.”
I hit the gas, spin the car, and burn out of there, not giving a shit that I’ve just torn up half of the field. I don’t look back to see if Dashiell’s still standing there by Pax’s Charger, pale-faced and sullen in the moonlight. I know he is. I can imagine the broody, arrogant look on his face just fine without—
“Carrie?”
“Yeah?”
Presley slides down in her seat, covering her face with both hands. “He knew my name. Presley Maria Witton-Chase. He said all four words. Out loud and everything.”
Oh, lord.
Beneath her hands, I think she’s grinning.
7
CARRIE
I’m not going to go.
I tell myself I won’t, but when two a.m. the next night rolls around, I find myself getting out of bed, just like I do every Saturday.
It turns out the Dashiell who was so rude to me on the hood of that car and the Dashiell I watch in the orchestra room every weekend are two very different people in my head. The Dash who kissed me was brash and awful. He broke something inside me and it fucking hurt. The Dash who plays piano in the dark is a silent ghost. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t mock. He stirs me to life the way he did outside the party, yes, but he has never rejected me afterwards. He simply plays. I simply listen. So I have to go.
I’m still smarting from the way he dismissed me last night as I pad along the corridor on my tiptoes. It’s stupid that I’d even want to see him so soon after what he said to me, but this weekly pilgrimage is a ritual that I haven’t broken in so long. It would feel wrong to do so now.
When I reach the orchestra room, he’s already there, seated at the low bench in front of Mr. Linklater’s ancient baby grand. His hands slam at the keys, his touch heavier and angrier than usual. The massive swell of music isn’t a problem—the orchestra room is sound-proofed—but the roar of it makes my heart skip as I slip through the small side door and up the narrow staircase that leads to the gallery.
I’m so practiced at sneaking in here that I find my way to my favorite seat with ease, set back in the blackest of the shadows. Dash never looks up. Why would he? Most students leave Wolf Hall on the weekends if they can, and those that remain wouldn’t bother breaking into the orchestra room in the middle of the night. They’re too busy sneaking contraband alcohol into each other’s rooms for that. As far as Dash knows, he’s alone here, and I’ve never given him a reason to believe otherwise.
The first time I stumbled across him playing, I was out past curfew watching the Perseids. The meteor shower was particularly bright that year, and I was sneaking back in after watching the stunning light show. I hadn’t needed my little telescope. I wouldn’t have been able to refocus the observatory’s ’scope to enjoy them in any effective way, either—it’s way, way, waaay too big—but sitting out on the grass in my PJs on an August night had been enough. The show was amazing, comets uncounted streaking across the sky. So goddamn beautiful. I came back inside, high as a kite on what I’d just witnessed, only to see Dash disappearing into the orchestra room.
God only knows why I’d followed him, but the music that bled from his fingers that night affected me even more than the raining fire in the sky had. It did something to me that I still don’t understand. I went back to the orchestra room every night for a week. Sunday: nothing. Monday: nothing. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday…Friday… Nothing. And then, the following Saturday, he’d returned.
I don’t know why he comes every Saturday, but he does. And I’ve joined him, half-asleep and bone tired and determined. I know it makes no sense. If any of my friends confessed that they were engaged in this kind of obsessive behavior, I’d be really worried. Alderman…hah. I refuse to even think about what Alderman would say. None of it makes a difference. I come because I have to come.
Head bowed.
Back straight.
Eyes closed.
Jaw clenched.
The music he plays is often peaceful, but Dashiell’s never comes across as at peace. It looks like it costs him something when he sits down on that bench and positions his hands. He can’t sit still as his fingers move to hit each note.
Tonight, the music he’s playing is a summer storm. He’s even more agitated than usual. He starts at the bass end of the piano, and the music is rolling thunder. A fever dream. He works his way up the keys, the complexity of the notes and chords he plays increasing with every second—a dervish, a nightmare, a hurricane—and I know that this isn’t the work of Beethoven or Bach. Dashiell loves Bach. Before I stumbled across him playing that first night, I couldn’t have identified Bach out of a line up, but I’ve learned to recognize him over time.
Shazam has helped. I always triple check that my phone is on silent before holding it up to detect what’s being played through the app. Dash’s renditions of the greats are typically so precise—even without the sheet music—that it takes all of five seconds for the title and composer of the music to appear on my phone’s screen. But tonight, when I hold up my phone, turning the brightness all the way down as I hold it up to listen, the app renders no results. No title. No artist.
This is something new.
This music belongs to Dash.
It’s wild and it’s frantic. It’s electric and terrifying. It’s an outpouring of his soul, an evacuation, an escape, and it brings tears to my eyes. The
music is pain, and frustration, and desperation, and it surges from him like a tidal wave. How is this wild, energetic, fearsome creature the same person who tossed me aside last night? He bears no resemblance to him at all. That version of him felt nothing as he told me to get down off the hood of Pax’s Charger. This version of him clearly feels everything. I try to marry the two of them together, and the pieces just don’t seem to fit. They are diametrically opposing forces, canceling out the other’s existence, but this is a fallacy, a trick of the light, because they are one and the same…
I just haven’t figured out how they fit together yet.
8
DASH
Lovett Estates
Mon 4.47 AM
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: Dashiell Lovett
Are you trying to offend me, boy? You’re either slacking off on purpose, or your work is suffering because you are, in actual fact, profoundly stupid. I worry about your diminishing mental acuity. Should I have Hansen transfer you to a school for students with learning disabilities?
Get your shit together.
— Dashiell Lovett III, The Rt Hon. Duke of Surrey.
Location scouts visit Wolf Hall all the time. They arrive in their shiny black SUVs with their tinted-out windows, and they stand in front of the building with faded, scruffy-ass ball caps on back-to-front, gaping up at the façade of the school like they just hit motherfucking pay dirt. See, Wolf Hall is a movie-maker’s wet dream. Crenelated turrets on both east and west wings. A sloped central roof with an eerie-looking window—the kind of window you might expect a shadowy, sinister figure to appear in at any moment, only to vanish into thin air the next. The hulking grey stone that forms the fascia is choked with thick, green ivy, its leaves tinged poisoned-apple red.