by Callie Hart
He’s fucking insane. He has made his point, though. I tuck my hand into my armpit, wincing against the pain. And I keep my mouth shut.
We fly past Riot House, the building hidden amongst the trees, and the place is in complete darkness. The guy laughs as I watch the turnoff to the house disappear in the Vanquish’s rearview mirror. “Sorry, friend. Not time to go home yet. Don’t worry, though. This won’t take long.”
I bite my tongue. At the bottom of the mountain, the guy turns into the town of Mountain Lakes, driving politely like he’s some kind of law-abiding fucking citizen. I’m stunned when he pulls into the parking lot of Cosgrove’s, Wren’s bar.
The guy parks and gets out, then comes around the car and opens the passenger door for me, raising his eyebrows. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he tells me.
I get out, still pinning my hand to the side of my body with my arm. The guy nods toward the building.
“It’s closed.” Even with the injury to my hand and the promise of even more pain, I can’t help myself. It goes against my very being to make this easy for him.
The guy tuts. Rolls his eyes like I’m a misbehaving child who won’t do as he’s told. “The door’s open. The bartender’s gone home for the night. No one’s going to disturb us, and I need a fucking drink.” His head rocks to one side. “I understand that you’re quite an accomplished piano player, Dashiell. I made sure to miss all of the important tendons just now, but I’m not always so precise, y’know. Get inside before I do some serious damage.”
I go. Inside Cosgrove’s, the lights are off apart from the dim orange glow of the lamp by the till. The jukebox is on, quietly playing Johnny Cash’s ‘Burning Ring of Fire.’ The guy pats a hand on the stool at the end of the bar, indicating that I should sit down. Meanwhile, he heads behind the bar and grabs a couple of glasses from the shelf by the fridges. He sets them both down and takes a bottle of whiskey—Lagavulin—from the top shelf, uncaps it and begins to pour.
“You have questions,” the bastard states. “You want to know all kinds of things, but I’ll start with the most important information first. My name is Alderman. At least, that’s the name you might have heard me referred to by. Ring any bells?”
I shake my head, and the piece of shit smirks. “I’m happy to hear that. Means she’s obeying some of my rules. Drink. It’ll help with the pain.”
I throw back the whiskey, glaring at him, hoping that he understands how much shit he’s going to be in once I do some research and dig up some dirt on him. His smile widens. He shakes his head. “God, you’re an open book, aren’t you, kid. I admire the piss and vinegar. Last person to look at me like that lost a fucking eye.”
“Get on with it,” I snap.
The smile slips off his face. “I’d watch that tone if I were you.” He downs his shot without batting an eyelid. “Now. Introductions are over. You’re Lord Dashiell Lovett the Fourth. I’m Alderman.”
“Alderman who?”
“Alderman, your worst fucking nightmare, that’s who.” I can’t tell what he’s thinking. I’m guessing it’s nothing good. “I am personally responsible for the wellbeing of the girl whose bedroom you just snuck out of,” he informs me.
Oh…
…fuck.
He grins at me. “Yeah. That’s right. Carina Mendoza is my ward. I take the responsibility of her care very seriously.” He pours another shot for himself and then slides the bottle of whiskey across the bar at me, silently suggesting that I can now serve my fucking self. “Carrie’s very important to me. She’s a good girl. Smart. Kind. Loyal. That’s why I’m not surprised that you haven’t heard about me. She hasn’t told you much about her past, has she? Where she’s from? Her family? No real details about where she came from before she arrived here?”
I wrap my mouth around the neck of the bottle, pouring the whiskey straight into my mouth. I won’t justify his question with a response. If he’s trying to suggest that I don’t know Carrie, then he’s barking up the wrong tree. I do know her. She hasn’t given me every detail of her past, but so fucking what? That doesn’t mean anything.
Alderman crosses his arms over his chest, looking down at the filthy rubber mats on the floor behind the bar. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he was grossed out by them. “I’m going to do something I’m not very comfortable with now, Dashiell,” he says. “I’m going to break Carina’s confidence, because I know she never will.”
“You have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Oh?” His eyebrows rise an inch. “So, you know her name’s not Carina, then?”
This bastard’s trying to get inside my head. I don’t know why, when something like this can so easily be disproven, but he is. “You’re lying.”
“It’s Hannah. Hannah Rose Ashford.”
Lies. Lies, lies, and more lies.
“Six years ago, I found her on the side of the road just outside Grove Hill, Alabama. It was the middle of February, a cold, rainy night, and she was running down the side of the freeway. Completely naked.”
“What is this, man? Why the hell would you make something like that up?”
“Do I look like I’m lying to you, shithead?” His eyes are even. Steady. Focused and serious. “I offered to take her to the cops, but she said no. She was covered in blood.”
I flinch away from the unpleasant scene he’s painting. I don’t believe him. He’s lying. For some unknown reason, he’s spinning me a load of bullshit that he really wants me to believe, and it’s so vile that I can’t even tolerate imagining it.
“She didn’t even put up a fight when I stopped the car and put her in the passenger seat. She was in shock. Her eyes were unfocused. She had this hoody in her hand that reeked of cigarette smoke. She sat there in silence, listening for a long time, and I just drove. I told her I was heading to the west coast. I told her I would take her with me if she wanted me to. I had every intention of finding her a safe home once I reached my destination, but then somewhere around the Wyoming-Montana boarder she started talking. Opened her mouth and couldn’t stop. Her mother was with this evil piece of work called Jason. An addict. Anything he could get his hands on, he snorted, smoked, swallowed or put in his arm. Her mom goes to work one night, and Jason wants her to leave Hannah at home. The woman can’t say anything, because Jason will beat the living shit out of her for talking back. So, she goes. She leaves her eleven-year-old daughter with this disgusting asshole. Jason invites his friends over. One of them, Kevin, deals smack. Starts sharing his wares around. And Hannah? She’s stuck in the middle of all of this, wondering when something bad is gonna happen. And it does.”
“Stop.”
Alderman’s eyes bore into me. “Jason can’t afford his heroin, so Kevin makes him a deal. He offers a trade. Hannah for the drugs.”
“Bullshit. Just…Christ, you’re sick. Where do you get off, making that shit up? That’s dark.”
“Only, Hannah’s smart. The sick fucker offers to get her high, and she says yes, because being high is better than being fully conscious when you’re about to be raped, right? And then the guy’s feeling her up, touching her places she doesn’t want to be touched, and the needle full of heroin is just sitting there—”
“STOP!”
Okay, I believe him. I don’t want to admit it, but I believe him, and picturing this, knowing that Carrie went through it—I can’t fucking take it. I can’t take that I wasn’t there to protect her. I couldn’t have been. I was still in England. I was still a child. I would have died saving her from that kind of horror if I’d had the chance, though.
Alderman leans forward, planting his hands on the bar. “Oh, I’m not done. She picked up the needle and she drove it into that motherfucker’s eye. Shot all that H straight into his brain. Took him five seconds to die, but his body just…kept…shaking. I looked it up on the local news a couple of days later, once I had her safe in Seattle. Took some finding. Even backwater bumfuck nowhere Alabama news
sites don’t bother reporting about dirty fuckers dying of their addictions. The guy had two prior convictions for child molestation. One for assault and battery. He was a welter weight boxer, too. Could have given a grown man a decent run for his money, but he was taken down by a skinny eleven-year-old girl. That’s the girl you’ve been fucking,” he says, looking away as he runs his tongue over his teeth. “I assume you’ve been fucking her. I can’t think of any other reason a kid your age would be sneaking out of a girl’s bedroom in the middle of the night, prancing around like he’s some kind of fucking rock star.”
She killed him? She stabbed that guy in the eye with a needle full of heroin. I can’t wrap my head around anything else. I should be paying attention to the dangerous edge in Alderman’s voice while he talks about me fucking Carrie, but my mind’s snagged on that one piece of information and it’s repeating over it like a skipping record, unable to move on.
“Why are you telling me this?” I whisper.
“Why do you think? Let’s do a little review, shall we?” He pouts, pretending to think. “I get a phone call from your Principal, telling me that your nosy ass roommate is sniffing around in records that are sealed, that have nothing to do with him. Then, I detect a breach in the school’s firewall. Likely from the same asshole, right? And then, THEN,” he says, emphasizing the word, “you hold a party at that little fuck pad you share with your friends. There are drugs everywhere—something I know Carrie would not have been comfortable about for obvious fucking reasons—and then one of her friends goes missing. There are cops crawling all over the academy. People are starting to look too closely at things they shouldn’t be looking at. Do you know what would happen to Carrie if the cops dragged her back to Grove Hill?”
My mouth is dry as ash. I can’t breathe. Can’t swallow. “She was eleven, for fuck’s sake. She was defending herself.”
“Right. But there’ll be an inquisition. A hearing. This is the deep south, not Surrey, England. There’s every chance they’ll find her guilty of some bullshit charge and send her to juvie for a year at least. A year might not be much to you or me, but what do you think a year in a place like that would do to Hannah? Sweet, kind, honest, smart, loyal Hannah?” His expression makes me want to vomit, because he doesn’t look very threatening anymore. He looks horrified, like he knows what it’ll do to her and it’s nothing good. “I don’t want to find out. If you’re willing to find out, then you should be very, very scared, because that means you’ve been screwing a girl that I care very deeply about, and you have zero respect for her. And that, my friend, will one hundred percent lead to you losing both of your balls.”
“What…” Jesus, I can’t think straight. My hand is screaming in agony, but the pain’s hardly background noise at this point. The image of Carrie, eleven years old, being groped and manhandled by a tweaker. Having to act so rashly and defend herself at such a young age, because she was afraid…
I swallow down the bile climbing up the back of my throat. “What do you want me to do?”
“Do what fuck boys like you do best,” Alderman snaps. “Break her heart. Move on. Make sure she never fucking wants to have anything to do with you or your friends again. The further she is away from you and your roommates, the safer she’ll be.”
I think. Process. Try to, at least. And when that turns out to be impossible, I take a deep drink from the bottle of whiskey. A second. A third. When I come up for air, I say, “Why? Why did you pick her up on the road? Why are you here now? Are you in love with her or something?”
Open disgust ripples across his face. “You should feel dirty for asking me something like that. I helped her because she reminded me of another friend I tried hard to help once.”
“Oh. So, one success story, playing the good Samaritan, and you thought you were qualified to—”
“I never said I was successful,” Alderman interrupts. “She died, dumbass. And I’ll be damned if I ever let anything like that happen again.”
33
CARRIE
I wake up smiling. Despite everything that’s happened lately, I wake up with a grin plastered on my face, and I feel happy. I’m sore from Dashiell’s attentions last night. My body aches pleasantly, reminding me of teeth, and hands, fierce kisses and breathless orgasms. For a while, the memories are too pleasant and comforting to cast off, so I curl over onto my side, throw the comforter over my head, and I allow myself the luxury of replaying the night, from the moment Dashiell silently snuck into my room to the moment he stealthily crept out.
It's better than chocolate. Better than music, or mathematics, or the stars. I’d never look through the lens of another telescope ever again if it meant I got to feel this delirious every morning when I woke up.
Soon, it can’t be avoided any further, though. I have to get up. Presley made a point of demanding that we actually eat breakfast this morning. I usually don’t bother, but Pres is ravenous in the mornings and has developed a tendency of wilting like a flower in need of water if she doesn’t at least have some oatmeal. I suppose grabbing some coffee does sound like a good idea, now that I think about it. I get up, shower, and get dressed, still on a high from how amazing last night was, and he’s all I can think about. The only thing that matters.
We’re going to college together. We’re going to have a life and a future together. One more year at Wolf Hall, and we’ll be free—eighteen, adults, capable of making decisions for ourselves. His father will cause holy hell once he realizes that his son is bringing an uncouth American back to England with him, but he’ll get over it in time. At least I hope he will.
Presley raps against the door, even though I’ve left it open for her. I think she learned her lesson the last time she barged into my room and saw more than she bargained for. She grins at me. “Put the blusher brush down. You’re perfect. Come on, let’s go.”
As we’re heading down to the dining hall, my phone dings in my pocket. I take it out, a little giddy when I see who the message is from.
DASH: Not coming today. Bad headache. Meet me at the observatory at 8?
Disappointment tugs at me. I was looking forward to seeing him this morning. I’ve grown accustomed to our silent communication across the hallways and classrooms of Wolf Hall. Still. A meet later at the observatory is plenty to look forward to.
“Are you gonna tell me what you’re blushing about, or am I gonna have to guess?” Presley groans.
“Probably better if you don’t do either,” I tell her. “You’ll wind up scarred for life.”
She pretends to shudder in disgust, but I know she’s only teasing. “Well. I’m just glad that everything’s working out for you, dude. I have to say, I was worried as hell when I found you two spilling out of that tiny single bed, but I’m impressed. It’s been two whole months and Dashiell Lovett’s proven that he’s capable of behaving himself. I doubt Wren or Pax could have done that.”
Pres grabs a blueberry muffin from the dining hall. I treat myself to a double shot espresso, even though we’re not supposed to help ourselves to the senior’s coffee supply. I’m buzzing, bouncing all over the place for the rest of the day. Four different teachers comment on my sunny disposition. Even the sight of Fitz flirting with Damiana Lozano outside his den isn’t enough to put a dampener on my mood. By the time last period is over and I’ve completed all of my assignments back in my room, I’m bursting at the seams. Only two hours to go. Two hours until I take the winding pathway up to the observatory and see the guy I’ve fallen so recklessly in love with.
Outside, it’s already dark and the wind is howling over the top of the mountain. It moans through the narrow gaps in the window frames next to my desk, but the eerie sound doesn’t bother me. I’m looking forward to wrapping up in a warm jacket and climbing up the hill. The chill and the exercise combined will be a great way to burn off the excess nervous energy that’s skipping through my veins.
I pick out what I’m going to wear for my date with Dash—tight black jeans, and a
thin white sweater with blue stripes. I put on some adidas sneakers instead of the black Cuban heeled boots that called to me when I opened my walk-in closet; the sneakers are a smarter choice than anything with a heel, given the rocky dirt path I’m going to be hiking up in the dark shortly.
Once I’ve fixed my hair and applied the smallest amount of makeup, I lie down on my bed and watch TV for a bit, but nothing can hold my attention. I’m too excited to think straight. In the end, I perch myself on the edge of my bed, turning my phone over in my hands, thinking about doing something very rash. I shouldn’t. I one hundred percent definitely should not do what I’m considering doing…but there’s been a weight on my shoulders for weeks now. It’s guilt. I’ve been hiding this for way too long, and every day my remorse has grown more and more crippling. My mind’s made up. I unlock my phone and head to my contacts, and the number I’m looking for is right there at the very top of the list: A1.
Not his name, of course. He made damn sure I didn’t enter his number under Alderman. A1 seemed like the easiest option. Since he was the person I texted most when I first came here, having his number so easily available made sense. I can’t remember how long it’s been since I’ve messaged him. Far, far, far too long. He’s going to have so many questions for me, and this time I’ve decided I’m going to tell him the truth. He's not going to approve of this. Likely, he’s going to spend the next ninety minutes extolling the virtues of celibacy until the age of twenty-five, which I always agreed with before. Boys were not something that concerned me. None of them. I didn’t need them complicating my life or fucking up my attention span at school. It’s easy to swear off something when you’ve never experienced how amazing it can be, though. And it’s not as if this is double choc-chip ice cream or a really good cup of coffee. This is Dashiell Lovett, the sexiest guy a-fucking-live. Now that he’s been in my life, there’s no way I’ll ever be able to put him aside and be happy again. I’ll always know what I’m missing. So, the time has come to be honest with Alderman.