by Callie Hart
Am I supposed to believe him? Addicts have a tendency of lying. They’re really good at it, too. Jason could have convinced my mother the sky was green most days of the week. Standing there in front of those tombstones, I believed Dash earlier. If I were to spend any significant amount of time adding up all of the reasons I shouldn’t believe him now, I’ll still be standing in my doorway at dawn. But…resentment fills my veins as I take a step back, opening the door to my room a little wider. Dashiell’s eyes widen a fraction—clearly, he wasn’t expecting me to take him at his word.
I arch an eyebrow at him. “What? You want me to tell you to go home for a fourth time?” In a perfect world, he’d turn around, walk back down the hallway and out of the academy. He’d leave, and he wouldn’t look back.
“I can come in?”
Alderman will have my hide for this if he finds out. “Yes. You can come in. For a minute.” I stress the last part.
Dash doesn’t acknowledge the time constraint I’ve put on our midnight meeting. He strolls into my tiny little box room like he’s entering the ballroom of a grand estate, head held high, jaw arrogantly set, like he’s ready to face down the East Coast elite.
The entitled, monied, self-assured energy rolling off him as he surveys my humble, kind of pathetic bedroom makes me want to dive under my bed covers and disappear. He doesn’t seem to notice just how awkward I am, though. He points at the end of my single bed, both eyebrows raised. His hair’s still soaking wet, swept back out of his face, but now a couple of long, dirty blond strands have fallen forward into his face. “Mind if I…?”
So polite. Hah! What a joke.
He does what he wants. Says what he wants. Takes what he wants. What would it matter if I refused his request? He’d do it anyway with a rogue smirk on his face, because no isn’t a word Dashiell Lovett has heard often during his lifetime.
I give him a tight smile, trying to get a handle on my emotions. One moment, I’m reeling at the fact that the guy I’ve been so obsessed with since I showed up in Mountain Lakes is sitting on the end of my bed. The next I’m wishing with every ounce of strength I possess that he will get up and leave. I’ve never been this conflicted. Not even when Alderman told me Jason had died of an overdose, and my mother was finally free of that sick fucker. My rescuer had come to me with the information gingerly, wondering if I’d want to go back to Grove Hill, posing the question with tense shoulders, afraid of what my response would be. I admit that giving him an answer caused me trouble.
Not because I wanted to go back to my mother. Being picked up by Alderman was the best thing that ever happened to me. But there was the guilt. Survivor’s guilt, Alderman calls it. I got the hell out of Grove Hill and I never looked back. My mother wasn’t so lucky. While I was becoming a new person with a promising, bright new future, my mom was stuck there in that house with Jason, being beaten black and blue, working her fingers to the bone to feed her piece of shit boyfriend’s many addictions. She left me with him, though. She knew what he wanted to do to me, and still she left me with him every night, when she could have taken me with her to work. She always used to, before Jason came along.
Dashiell plants himself on top of my duvet, leaning back against the wall, looking around the room, and I resist the urge to laugh out loud. He’s so out of place here. He takes in all of my books and the clothes that I neglected to fold before bed, slung over the back of the chair at my desk, my telescope on its stand in the corner and the polaroid pictures, tacked to the wall next to my star charts…
“You have a lot of stuff for such a small space.”
“Sorry. Should I throw out a few things? Make room for your ego?”
He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Just an observation. No need to snap. We’ll never conduct a civil conversation if you verbally assault me every time you open your mouth.”
“And why are we trying to conduct a civil conversation again? Because I think I made myself perfectly clear earlier this afternoon. I don’t want anything to do with a guy who—uh, whoa, whoa, WHOA!” I nearly drop down dead when Dash takes hold of the bottom of his damp t-shirt and tugs it over his head. I sure as hell lose my train of thought. “Uh…excuse…what…haha! Um. No. No, put that back on. Put that back on this instant.”
Wolf Hall’s very lax when it comes to dress code, but the academy administration insists that its students do wear clothes at all times. I saw Dash in his boxers at the hospital, but I was too stunned by all of the blood to check him out. Now, I’m paying attention. His chest is packed with muscle, his skin a warm golden color. I try not to let my eyes roam downwards, but soon my gaze is shifting from his collar bones, over his pecs, slipping helplessly over his abs, directly toward—
Oh my god. Oh my good fucking god, I just looked directly at his dick.
Laughter fills my little bedroom. “Everything okay, Mendoza? You seem a little flustered.”
How dare he be this pleased with himself. In my bedroom. He shows up here in the middle of the night, soaking wet, cocky as hell, makes himself comfortable, and then takes off his shirt? Seriously, what plane of reality am I living in? I rock my head back, staring at the ceiling as hard as physically possible. “Just put your clothes back on, Dash. I’m not kidding. You’re—Wait! What the hell are you doing?”
I’ll tell you what he’s doing. He’s gotten to his feet; he’s standing a mere eighteen inches away from me, and he’s unfastening his jeans and shoving the denim down his legs.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! You can’t just turn up on my doorstep, get naked and expect me to just…” I flap a little. I must look like a moron, opening and closing my mouth like this, but evidently I’m not coping very well with what’s going down.
Toned legs.
Tight black boxers.
We’re talking skin-tight.
I can see the outline of his junk through the fabric and I can’t stop looking. Jesus, Carina, stop fucking looking!
“What?” Dash chuckles mercilessly, stepping on the wadded-up material at his feet and kicking his way out of his pants. “Expect you to just…what?”
“Sleep with you,” I hiss. “Just let you penetrate me.”
At this, Dashiell collapses back onto the bed, stifling a hail of laughter. “Don’t worry. I’m not planning on penetrating you.”
Okaaaaaay. I rock on the balls of my feet, straining against my need to fling open my bedroom door and bolt out of the building and into the rain. My embarrassment levels are climbing by the second. They hit leave-me-here-to-die levels when he regains enough composure to sit up and look at me, and says, “Bloody hell, girl. You’re killing me.”
Killing him. Like the prospect of him sleeping with me is so hilarious and unbelievable that the very mention of it makes him laugh to death.
So rude!
In an attempt to mask my embarrassment, I step closer and jab him in the chest with my index finger. “Explain yourself then, or I’ll call the floor monitor.”
“Christy?” Dashiell wipes his eyes. “You’re gonna get Christy Deidrick in here? She’s the most religious person I’ve ever met, and I went to a Catholic school before I came here. Nuns and everything. She’ll have both of us expelled, believe me. I know from first-hand experience.” He has to be able to see my anger rising, though, because he holds out a hand, rolling his eyes. “Alright. Simmer down, sweetheart. I’m just showing you something. Look.” He turns his hands palm-up and sticks them out, jerking his head down at them. Specifically, at the crooks of his elbows. “No needle marks. None,” he says, giving me a told-you-so look.
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Why do you think I’m standing here in my underwear? You won’t find track marks anywhere else on my body either, love. Try and find a single needle mark, I dare you.”
So…he did lie. It shouldn’t make a difference to me. If he wants to kill himself with hardcore drugs, then that’s his business. So why, then, am I so relieved?
Dash flips his han
ds over. “Nothing in the backs of my hands. Nothing in between my fingers. Nothing in my legs, or my feet.” He shows me each limb, and like a suspicious, misguided fool, I look to make sure he’s telling me the truth. He doesn’t have a mark on him. Not one injection site.
“What do you hope to accomplish by coming here and showing me this?” I whisper. “What’s the point?”
He thinks. Or stays quiet, anyway, staring at the floor, pressing the tip of his tongue against the swell of his bottom lip. After a while, he says, “People like to believe all kinds of shit about me, Carina. I don’t give a fuck most of the time. But you believing that about me? I couldn’t handle you believing that.”
He picks up his jeans and shakes them out. I watch him slowly put them on, biting the inside of my cheek. It’s not until he’s threading his arms into his wet t-shirt that I let myself speak. “So that’s it, then? You’ve convinced me that you’re not a drug addict. Now you leave? Now you’re free to go back to ignoring me and pretending I don’t exist?”
Dashiell runs his hands through his hair, which is slightly dryer than when he first entered my room but still wet enough for the strands to be clumped together. “What’s the alternative? Are we supposed to get to know each other? Share all of our deepest, darkest secrets? What, you wanna date me, Carina Mendoza?” He laughs coldly. “We’ve been through this. I’m not datable. I’m fuckable. I’m hate-able. I’m plenty of things…but you do not want to date me, Carrie. I can promise you that.”
“And you know me so well?” I’m stewing, alive with anger, my blood churning in my veins, hating the fact that there’s this sick, miserable feeling of disappointment welling in the pit of my stomach. He’s rejecting me all over again. “Don’t tell me what I want and I don’t want, asshole. You don’t know shit about me. If you’re not interested in me, then have the balls to say that and be clear instead of all of this dancing around, and side-stepping, and…and being so godddamn English.”
“Most people find my Englishness charming.”
“Well, I don’t. It’s annoying. You’re always skirting around whatever you want to say. You can never take a direct, straight line from point A to point B in a conversation—”
“Straight lines are boring. Where’s the fun in straight lines?”
“—You have to meander and take the longest, most obscure route possible. And on top of all that, then you’re so unclear about your motives or goals that no one can ever get their head straight—”
“I can’t be direct like you people. I’ve tried. It causes me physical pain to be so abrupt. But fine. If you insist, I’ll give it a go.” He straightens, standing up tall, cracking his fingers as he stares down at me, his eyes full of ice-cold flames. “I’d fuck you, love. I would. But I’d probably never speak to you again. And you’d hate me. And I wouldn’t care, which would only make you hate me even more. Graduation will eventually roll around, and I’ll make some kind of speech. You’ll sit there in your chair on the second to back row, and you’ll be filled with a burning hatred for me. And I…I won’t notice any of it. I won’t feel a fucking thing. I won’t care. It’ll be a miracle if I even remember you exist.
“So, like I said. You’re better off forgetting all about me, love. Once you’ve come on my dick, I’ll move onto the next pretty girl with a decent sized rack, and that’ll be that. You won’t hear from me. There won’t be any texts. We won’t go skipping, hand-in-hand, down the corridors of this dumpster fire. I’ll have ruined you. I’ll be this ugly sore of a memory that never goes away, festering in the back of your head, poisoning every future relationship you ever have because I made it impossible for you to trust all other men. And then I’ll be back in England, sitting on my spoiled ass, re-reading the classics and fucking the housekeepers ’cause I’ve got nothing better to do. Not thinking about you…” He steps closer, reaching up, taking a piece of my loose hair, winding it thoughtfully around his finger. “Not remembering you. Not caring that I hurt you.” He pauses, and this is when I finally reach my lowest and my most despicable. Because his words hurt more than the sharp edge of a razorblade—I’ve never felt as awful as I do in this moment—but I’m still leaning into him. I’m still craving his touch. I’m still dizzy on his nearness, and the fact that I can smell the night and the rain on his warm skin, and no matter how hard I hate myself for it, I still fucking want him.
He inches closer. Closer, still. God, his mouth is so close to mine that he could kiss me. It wouldn’t take much. Just a couple of millimeters. “It’s not about knowing you, or what you want, Carrie,” he whispers. “I know myself. I’m bad news for anybody, darlin.’ Don’t go thinking you’re special.”
A worrying heat burns at the back of my throat; my eyes are stinging like crazy. At long last, I realize how weak I’m being and scrounge together a scrap of self-respect. Stepping back, I look away from him, forcing myself to swallow. “Get out. I mean it. It’s time for you to leave.”
I hear his hushed laughter. Mercifully, I save myself from seeing the ruinous smirk that he’s undoubtedly wearing, though. “Atta girl. Made me believe it that time.” He goes to the door and opens it, but he doesn’t leave right away. Of course he has to get in one last parting shot across the bow. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t say hi next time we cross paths.”
“Am I supposed to be upset by that?” I hiss. “You’re acting like you just ruined my life. I hate to break it to you, but I’ve survived way worse than you, Dashiell Lovett.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” he croons. “You’re mistaken. There is nothing worse than me.”
The door clicks softly closed behind him.
14
DASH
Yeah.
Now you’re getting it.
I am an asshole.
A grade-A, motherfucking, piece-of-shit, break-your-heart, rude-as-hell, evil fucking cunt.
I think this as I sit in English the next morning, affecting an expression so bored and supercilious that even Wren shoots me a mocking, ‘who shit in your cornflakes?’ look from his sprawled-out position on the leather sofa beneath the window.
I feel soiled. You can’t call me a man at this point; that’s too generous a title. I am a golem, constructed out of flaming bags of shit and garbage. On the other side of the room, Carina sits next to Mara Bancroft. I can feel her throbbing with embarrassment and anger—her mood generates a heat that can be felt from the other side of Fitz’s Den. It’s blistering my skin, giving me radiation poisoning, singeing my nerve endings, and yet no one else seems affected by it. No else seems to have even noticed.
She hasn’t looked at me since she entered the room and dumped her bag down at her feet. Just as I promised her last night, I haven’t looked at her, either. Not directly. I’m really good at watching her in my peripherals, though; my eyes have wandered the room, skipping from the white board at the front of the class, to the ceiling, to out of the window, but the only thing I’ve been able to focus on is the girl wearing the bright purple jeans on the other side of the room.
I’m supposed to fuck a random at Cosgrove’s soon, to convince my friends that I don’t give a shit about this girl. I do, though. Really fucking do. I can’t stop thinking about her. Can’t stop being mad at her nosy ass. Can’t stop thinking about how cute she is when she’s mad. I’d pay someone good money if they could tell me how to get the image of her tight little nipples poking through that t-shirt out of my head, too. That’d be fucking nice.
I can’t be interested in her. I just can’t. So I pretend.
My disinterest requires me to be convincing. I yawn. I stab the tip of my ballpoint pen into my notepad. I kick my feet out and cross my legs at the ankles, and I do not look at Carina Mendoza.
Fitz is still banging on about The Count of Monte fucking Cristo. I tune him out. When I do take a moment to check back into reality, I can’t help but paint a picture of what was going down between my friend and that motherfucker in the maze the other day, and my insides noodle themsel
ves into knots. My dislike of Fitz, which might have been a little unjustified before, now feels perfectly justified. Too smooth. Too polished. Too fucking cool. He’s an English teacher at a school for spoiled rich kids, for fuck’s sake, and he walks around this place like he wrote fucking Catcher in the Rye. He’s not cool. He’s a fucking rat, and I do not like fucking rats.
If he does anything to mess with Wren, and I mean anything that has a negative impact on my friend, I will destroy him.
Wren’s never been one to make safe choices. He’s smart as hell, but that often doesn’t translate to careful. I could throttle the dumb bastard, really. If he wanted to have an illicit tryst with a Wolf Hall faculty member, he could have chosen literally anyone else and made a better call. Miss Naismith from the I.T. department? She’s got a stick shoved a mile up her ass, but then again, saying that, it’s a fine fucking ass. He could have had plenty of fun with her.
And if this whole thing was more about experimenting with a dude, then fine. I have no issues with that whatsoever. But what was wrong with Sam Levitan? Levitan’s the head of the Math department. Way hotter than Fitz. Wolf Hall’s female demographic are constantly pissing and moaning about the fact that Levitan’s actually gay and none of them stand a chance with him.
Fitz typically dates women. Or should I say girls. It’s common knowledge that he used to fuck senior chicks in the gazebo all the time back when we were freshmen. It’s so unexpected and unlikely, this weird connection between this asshole and Wren, that something about it just doesn’t feel right.
Halfway through class, Fitz notices me staring at him and pushes his glasses up his nose, squinting. “I’m sorry, do I have something on my face, Lord Lovett? You’ve been drilling holes in my skull for quite some time now.”
Oooh, look at you, being all observant and shit. Wren, who’s been feigning sleep for the past thirty minutes, cracks an eye and looks at me. Everyone’s looking at me. Everyone but Carina, who keeps her eyes affixed on the door, like she’s fantasizing about making her escape.