by Noir, Roxie
“I love that you thought it was a secret,” he says. “Fifty people drive past your car in her driveway every night, and you know that nobody in this town can keep their mouth shut.”
“According to Clive, the two of you exchange morning greetings several times a week,” Levi adds in. “That’s her next door neighbor.”
They’re right, obviously. I don’t know how I thought I could keep this a secret in a town the size of Sprucevale, where everyone and their mothers know what kind of car everyone else drives.
“Fine,” I say. “We’ve hooked up a couple of times, it’s not a big deal.”
Seth and Levi look at each other, but mercifully, they don’t say anything.
Chapter Thirty-One
Violet
I’ve had too much to drink.
Or, more accurately, I’ve had more to drink than I probably should at a work function. But then again, the number of drinks one should have at a work function is zero, and that’s no fun.
It’s no fun at all. I, on the other hand, am lots of fun.
“Pivot tables,” Clarabelle Loveless is saying, gesturing with her whiskey glass. “I’m telling you, Violet, once you start using them you’re never going to look back.”
“That’s not the question,” I say, gesturing as well. “The question is, I’ve got all these brides who can only, you know, use SnapFace or GramChat or whatever on their phones to take selfies, how do I get them to use the pivot tables when they don’t even know what Excel is?”
“Everyone knows what Excel is,” Adeline objects, standing next to us out on the lawn. Dinner’s over — it was the first time I’d ever eaten filet mignon off a paper plate — and now everyone under the age of fourteen is sprinting around, screaming their heads off. It’s that kind of party.
“Don’t they?” she says. “Tell me they do.”
I take another sip. I don’t usually drink whiskey, but I don’t usually have this kind of week. I’ve earned it, and besides, my responsibilities here are over. I plan and execute, I don’t clean up.
I just shake my head at Adeline, who looks dismayed.
“Mrs. Loveless, I cannot let them near my data,” I say. “It would be chaos.”
She looks horrified.
“I told you already, it’s Clara,” Eli’s mom says. “And Lord no, child, you don’t let them use your spreadsheets. Just get the information from them and input it yourself. Don’t let other people touch your data.”
I just nod sagely. Of course not. How could I be so silly?
“You know what I’ve gotten really into lately?” I ask her. “Using conditional formatting to color cells. I figured out how to set it up so that the closer a date is, the darker it is, so it’s easy to see what’s the most urgent at a glance.”
“That would also make it very easy to see outliers in a data set at a glance,” Clara muses. “You know, that might be very useful for calibrating the — hello, who’s this?”
“ANKYLOSAURUS!” shouts Rusty, plowing into her grandmother’s knees.
“Goodness!” Clara exclaims, laughing.
“Ankylosaurus says come get ice cream,” Rusty says, grabbing Clara’s hand.
“All right, baby,” Clara says, then holds up her whiskey glass to Adeline and I. “We’ll talk more later. Sweetheart, I’m coming. Violet, you should come to Sunday dinner. Are you free tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I say, my mouth agreeing before my brain can give approval.
Wait, what?
With Eli? And his brothers? And his mom, and his niece?
That’s not our agreement. That’s not our agreement at all.
“Perfect,” Clarabelle says, letting Rusty lead her off. “Four o’clock!”
Then she’s gone. Rusty leads her off, excitedly discussing the sorts of ice cream they’re about to eat.
When she’s out of earshot, Adeline turns to me.
“I have bad news,” she says.
I scrunch up my face, waiting for it.
“I feel like she knows,” Adeline goes on. “It’s just a theory but I’m pretty sure it’s right.”
“Yeah,” I admit.
“I also have more bad news,” she says, taking another sip of her drink.
“Go on,” I say.
“I think everyone might know,” she says.
There’s a spiky ball somewhere in the vicinity of my stomach, sharp points dulled by whiskey but still vicious enough to be felt.
“You think,” I repeat.
“Mindy Drake was pestering me about it maybe ten minutes ago,” she says, making an apologetic face. “She’d had, like, two margaritas but she was saying something about having open arms when he inevitably left you for your cousin? Though she shouted that last part at someone else, it seemed like it wasn’t meant for me.”
She takes another sip. I think I’m not the only drunk person here right now.
My mind is racing, but it’s useless, just people know, Mindy knows people know, oh shit Mindy knows over and over again.
I’m in no state for this.
“I don’t think I have any cousins he could leave me for,” I finally say. “Though I don’t really know, my mom didn’t talk to her sister anymore and my dad, I mean, who the fuck knows where he got to. You could be my cousin.”
“If your dad got around you’d be my half-sister, not my cousin,” she points out.
“Whatever.”
“Right, so everyone in your trailer park knows that Eli’s Bronco has been parked outside your house, like, every night for a month,” she says.
The simplicity of it smacks me in the face.
Of course everyone knows. We would have had to practically build underground tunnels for this to actually be a secret. Sprucevale is a tiny, incestuous, gossipy town and I really should have known better.
“Fuck,” I say.
“And Mindy was trying to get me to tell her details and I will have you know that I gave her nothing. Even though she was being super weird. So technically it’s all still speculation because even though I know you two are fucking like bunnies, I haven’t said a thing.”
She looks very pleased with herself.
I hold out one fist. She bumps it with hers.
Everyone knows, I think again. The spiky ball gets pricklier. I swallow, trying to ignore it.
“I think she had a thing with Seth for a while,” I tell Adeline. “Does that sound familiar? And she might still be mad about it?”
Adeline rolls her eyes dramatically.
“Who hasn’t had a thing with Seth?” she says.
“Me,” I say.
“Well, also me,” she says. “But I think it’s just us. Should we be offended?”
“No,” I say. “I’d claim that we prefer a better class of men, but the other residents of my trailer park totally just busted my fuckbuddy and you set me up with Todd in the first place, so I think he’s just not our type.”
“I’ll take it,” she says, shrugging.
I close my eyes for a second. Things are… unsteady.
“I just agreed to go to his family dinner, didn’t I?” I ask.
* * *
A few more hours go by. I don’t get drunker, but I do maintain my current level. I know where the couches are at Bramblebush, and I can crash on one for a while tonight, at least until I sober up.
Apparently all of Sprucevale knows about Eli and me. Apparently they’ve known for quite a while now and tonight’s the first time anyone has bothered to tell me that my secret is, in fact, not even slightly secret.
If Mindy knows, I have to assume that everyone knows. His brothers. His mom. Lydia and Kevin. Zane and Brandon. The cashier at the grocery store. The driver who waved me through an intersection this morning.
Probably even Montgomery, though he doesn’t live in Sprucevale itself like the rest of us so there’s a slim possibility that he doesn’t know yet.
My solution is to avoid Eli for the next hour, like that’ll keep people from talking.<
br />
“I wish they’d widen thirty-nine,” I say to Lydia. We’re drinking by the fire pit at the far edge of the lawn, the party slowly switching over from ‘family fun’ to ‘after dark drinking.’
“You know they never will,” she says, leaning back in her Adirondack chair.
“Every time I drive down it I swear I get stuck behind an eighteen-wheeler doing fifty-five,” I say. “It’s such a pain.”
“Write a letter,” she says lazily.
“I’d rather just complain,” I say, leaning back into the bench I’m sitting on.
There’s a shadow across the fire, a dark space that slowly takes shape.
The second I see it I know it’s Eli. I know how he moves, how he walks. I know how he stands, the way he runs his hands through his rumpled hair when he’s got something he wants to say and is trying to figure out how to say it.
“I don’t think letters work,” Lydia admits.
Eli comes around the fire. My stomach twists, flips, excitement charging through me at his mere presence. A knot pops and sparks fly past his face, his eyes never moving from mine, the heated look in them pooling somewhere inside me.
“This seat taken?” he asks, sitting next to me on my bench without waiting for an answer.
“What if I said yes?” I say, lazily. I slouch on the bench, my head against the back of it, and I turn to look at him. My field of vision sloshes. “Would you actually get up and sit somewhere else?”
“Probably not,” he admits.
“Then why ask?”
“Because we live in a society where manners are expected,” he says, that note of amusement in his voice that drives me up the wall. “Even though it’s obvious that no one’s sitting here, I say is this seat taken and you say no, please sit down, but only one of us managed to do it right. Hi, Lydia.”
She’s trying not to laugh at us.
Does she know? She must know. She knows that this is basically foreplay.
Oh, God.
“Hi, Eli,” she says. “Good party.”
“Thank you,” he says. “Same to you.”
“Thanks,” she says, and heaves herself out of the chair. “You guys want anything?”
We both decline. Lydia leaves the ring of light cast by the fire, and then, for the first time all night, Eli and I are alone together.
“You’re such a dick sometimes,” I say, relaxing against the back of the bench, no heat behind my words.
“You wouldn’t like me if I weren’t,” he says.
Something pops in the fire, sparks shooting upward.
“Do I like you?” I ask, finally looking over at him.
His smile’s slow, deliberate, cocky. He’s drunk too. It’s in his voice, his exaggerated movements, in the way he looks at me with the raw, naked lust he usually saves for in private.
“You like me plenty,” he says. “And there’s plenty of me you like.”
For once, I don’t argue, just look at him and let him know I’m looking: black t-shirt tight around the biceps, across the chest, bulge in the jeans, that easy, relaxed posture that screams I know how to fuck.
I want him to touch me and I don’t. I want him to take my hand where no one can see. I want one stolen kiss.
I want so, so much more.
But I feel like every single person left at this party is looking at us. I’m fire-blind and can’t see more than five feet, right to the edge of the circle of light, but I know I’m easily seen.
We’re easily seen.
“Eli,” I say, unnecessarily.
“Violet.”
“Everyone knows,” I say, my voice hushed.
“Knows what?” he asks, his voice low as gravel, secret and quiet and meant only for me, the voice he uses when we’re alone together.
I pause. Maybe it’s the whiskey but I suddenly realize that I don’t know how to answer the question, not exactly.
Or, more accurately, I realize that there are multiple answers.
I could say they know we’re sleeping together. Simple and true, but in this moment, firelit and drunk, it feels incomplete.
I could say they know we’re dating. I could say they know we’re together.
I could say they know you’re my boyfriend or they know we’re in love or any one of a hundred other things, and I think they’d come true, just like that.
Words have power. Labels have power, and right now, it all lies with me. I can name what I want and form reality.
But then I remember what and who I’m talking about. It’s Eli. If I said they know you’re my boyfriend and we’re in love he’d laugh and say then they’re wrong.
So I go ahead and strike boyfriend and together and in love out of my lexicon, because none of those things are true.
We’re not in love.
We’re not even in like.
“That we’re sleeping together,” I say.
Eli just sighs. If he senses the weight of everything I didn’t say, he doesn’t show it. If he thought, for a moment, that I might label us differently, I can’t tell.
“I know,” he admits.
“Then why’d you ask?”
“Levi and Seth discussed it with me,” he says, ignoring my question.
“Mindy Drake asked Adeline about it,” I say.
“You told Adeline?”
“Of course I told Adeline. You didn’t tell your brothers?”
Eli sighs, running one hand through his hair.
“Just Daniel, for obvious reasons,” he says.
“Not the others?”
He looks at me, green eyes serious. The fire makes the bones of his face stand out, makes his cheekbones and jawline sharper. He looks like a painting, breathtakingly beautiful.
Maybe it’s just the whiskey, but suddenly I want to trace every angle with my fingers.
I don’t touch. I can’t touch. I don’t dare.
“I thought you didn’t want me to,” he says.
“I didn’t,” I say.
“And now?” he asks me, the syllables low and quiet, secret.
“Now it’s not up to me any more,” I say.
Whenever I’m in his orbit, I always feel too far away and right now is no exception. I want him, his touch, his skin on mine. I wake up wanting it. I go to bed wanting it.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s a pointless question,” I say.
“Violet.”
“Does it matter what I want if it runs counter to reality?” I say.
The truth is, I don’t know what I want besides him. I want him whispering dirty nothings in my ear while he fucks me. I want him teasing me with kisses in a parking lot behind a barbecue shack. I want his arm slung over me as I fall asleep at night and I want him there in the morning, his weight on his side of the bed soothing.
“Look at me.”
I do it.
Eli slides his hand into mine, hidden in the valley between our legs where the light doesn’t reach. My heart dips and rolls, my head swimming, my impulse control nearly gone with the whiskey.
“Kiss me,” he says.
“We’re in public,” I murmur.
“And?”
“And everyone can see us,” I whisper.
My eyes drop to his lips.
“Let them watch,” he says. Shivers roll down my spine, the rough pads of his thumb move over the back of my hand. “I’ve been waiting all night to kiss you. I’ve been waiting since I left your house this morning.”
Me too, I think.
A pause. I don’t breathe. His thumb keeps moving, tracing small circles on the back of my hand.
I want it. I want him, his kisses and more, so much that the wanting is palpable, physical, like a cloak I’ve wrapped myself in.
“Not here,” I whisper, my voice barely audible.
“Where?” he asks.
I swallow. My mouth is dry. I know the right answer to this question: at my house, after we both sober up enough to drive home.
It’s no
t the answer I give.
“The wedding barn’s right over there,” is what I say.
“Can we make it?” he asks, his thumb still circling. I swallow hard, shutting my eyes for a moment so I don’t have to look at him.
“I have a key,” I whisper, still breathless, eyes shut. “I’ll go first. Follow me after a few minutes.”
I can feel him lean in, the heat that radiates from his skin.
“You won’t kiss me in public but you’ll fuck me in the barn?” he asks, teasing.
“You make this sound so dirty.”
“That’s because it is.”
I open my eyes, drink him in again. Lord, he’s beautiful.
“You promise?” I ask.
Eli just laughs softly.
“All this time together and you still want a promise?” he teases. “And here I thought maybe I’d proven myself.”
He leans in by millimeters. If anyone’s watching, there can’t be any doubt about what we’re up to, but I can’t stop it. I don’t want to.
“Yes, I promise,” he says. “I promise that I’m drunk enough to throw caution to the wind and fuck you in the barn. I promise it’ll be dirty and perfect and you’ll think about it every ten minutes for the next week.”
His eyes flick to my lips.
“And I promise that if you don’t go right now we’re going to do it on this bench,” he whispers. “Get outta here.”
In the last sensible moment I have that night, I go.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Violet
The wedding barn is dark. I hadn’t thought that part through very well. It’s dark and possibly full of spiders, because even though we hold events in here all the time, don’t spiders naturally gravitate toward barns?
Seems like they would.
I step inside, wait for my eyes to adjust. The barn has high windows and skylights, and after a moment I can see in the moonlight filtering in. Tables and chairs stacked at one end, audio equipment, other various wedding accoutrement.
I walk in. It still smells of hay and dirt, even though there hasn’t been an animal in here for twenty years, even though there’s a chandelier over my head and a wooden floor under my feet.