Off-Limits Box Set

by Ella James

  “Who else watches all your favorite shows with you? And actually likes them?”

  “Touché.” His fingers tighten their grip on mine. “Are you saying my shows aren’t likeable?”

  I squeeze his hand. “Far from. I’m saying only the coolest people like them.”

  “How did you get so cool, Amelia?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think it was my influence,” he says.

  “I think the opposite.”

  “You think you were a good influence on me?” His eyes on mine are hot, as if he sees right through me, to my poor, racing heart.

  I nod.

  “Do you now?”

  I keep on nodding. “I introduced you to our favorite gum.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Trident—”

  “Minty Sweet Twist,” we say at the same time. Dash’s brows are raised. I’m grinning.

  “I’m chewing it right now,” I whisper.

  “I need some.”

  His hand in mine is way too hot, so I let go of it to dig around in my pajama bottoms pocket.

  “Here.” I hold a piece out to him.

  Dash sinks back down onto the roof, lying on his back again as he chews.

  “Best part of this year,” he teases, giving me a funny, sort-of smile.

  “Being out here with me? Why thank you. Wait—the gum?” I stick my tongue out at him. “How much longer now?”

  He looks at his phone. Silence swims between us for a moment.

  “Jerk, don’t check your texts.”

  He gives a guilty smirk. “Eleven minutes.”

  I want to make a snarky comment while he lies there texting someone, but my heart is beating so hard, I’m not sure I can find words. Dash and I have always teased, but lately it feels different. Every word between us has this…echo. Like there’s more to what we’re saying than what we’re saying. Hard to explain…

  I lie on my back beside him and look up at the stars. I can see the big and little dippers, but not a whole lot else. Purple clouds cover one swatch of the sky. The giant trees between the Frasiers’ home and mine block some of the rest.

  Dash puts his phone away. “You have my undivided attention, Ammy. Are you happy?”

  “Couldn’t be happier.”

  “I’m glad to know I make you happy.” He smiles warmly.

  “Are you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well in that case, you make me sad.”

  He blinks, and I take the plunge. “Savannah has a school of art and design, you know. Right here in Georgia.”

  My eyes fill with tears, even as I try to fight them back. I see the moment Dash notices them. His own eyes widen and his mouth goes soft.

  “Aw, Dove.” He reaches out to swipe a tear from my cheek. “Damn. Don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying. This is hate sweat. It comes out the eyes.”

  He smiles a little. “So you hate me now?”

  “I hate me.” I wipe my eyes, inhaling deeply. “I don’t need you here. I’ll sit out on the roof with somebody else.”

  Dash sits up, then takes my hands and pulls me up to sit facing him. His fingers squeeze mine. “C’mon, Ammy Dove. I can’t have you crying.”

  The tears sliding down my cheeks and off my chin won’t stop. Especially not now that Dash’s hands are on mine, and he’s rubbing my knuckles. Oh, what it must feel like to be one of his girlfriends. To have these hazel eyes trained on you all the time.

  “I’m not crying,” I whisper.

  “But you are.”

  I look down at my lap, because I can’t bear to look him in the face, not with his hands around mine.

  “Ammy—look at me.”

  “There’s something interesting down here,” I murmur. My voice sounds dumb and thick, making me feel more childish than I always do around Dash.

  “Am…” He sighs. “I couldn’t stay.”

  I glance up. “Why?” I try to sound casual. Like the answer to it isn’t everything and then some.

  His hands in mine feel hot. He wraps them more tightly around mine. “It’s…hard to explain.” His eyes shut, just for a moment. Then he lets go of my hands. His palms are on his knees, his shoulders rising as he inhales slowly.

  “Just trust me. I’ve got my reasons for not staying close. It’s not that I didn’t think about it, that I didn’t—you know…want to.”

  “You wanted to stay close but you decided to go? Don’t tell me that.” I swat at him. “That just makes me want to scream.”

  “I know,” he says. “I know.” He hangs his head.

  “It’s going to suck without you here.”

  He smirks, glancing up at me before the corners of his mouth tug downward and he shifts his gaze back to his lap. “That’s what they tell me.”

  “Your many admirers,” I tease.

  “No…”

  “You know it’s true. You like to be a player. That’s just how you roll.”

  “No. I don’t. I’m just…” He shrugs, and for a moment, he looks terribly uncomfortable. “How do you do this, Amelia?”

  “Do what?”

  He shakes his head. “I just…tell you things.”

  “Well, you have to tell me now. Now I’m in suspense. What are you going to tell me?”

  He presses his lips flat. “Stress.” He heaves out a long breath. “I get fucking stressed out. And…I like to be distracted.”

  My imagination springs into overdrive, painting a picture of Dash on his burgundy silk sheets, naked and covered to his hips, hard under the covers, stressed out and needing assistance.

  My face blazes as blood rushes to my cheeks.

  He’s confiding in you. Say something. I inhale quickly. “Why are you stressed out? Just…like…everything?”

  He nods, then sighs. “Am, I have to tell you something.”

  “Okay,” I say softly.

  He reaches into his pocket, pulling out a bandana. It’s tie-dyed, bright blue and orange and yellow. “Would you— Ammy, can you wear this? I started smoking.”

  “What?”

  “I want to smoke. A cigarette. But I don’t want you to breathe it, so…I brought you this. I stopped by the studio space one last time. I grabbed it for you.”

  My mind is a whirring blur of ecstasy and puzzlement and joy. He thought about me in advance. Not Alexia; me. Followed by, He’s smoking.

  I can only nod.

  Dash ties the bandana around my head, positioning it so it covers my mouth, as if I’m some kind of bandit.

  Then he turns his wide eyes on me, digging again in his pocket. He’s frowning as he brings out a pack of Marlboros and a small, green lighter.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, taking a cigarette out of the pack.

  “Tell that to your lungs, hombre.” I reach for him, brushing my fingertips over his forearm. “Don’t say sorry to me.”

  He lights up and inhales deeply, blowing the smoke away from me. The wind carries it further in that direction. I watch as his taut, tense shoulders slowly sag.

  “Fuck. I understand…why people get addicted.” I watch his chest expand as he inhales again.

  “You have to quit.” I hold my hand out. “Leave these with me when you go.”

  “Your dad would flip if he found them.”

  “That’s true, but I won’t let him find them. I’ll get rid of them.”

  He looks at me, then at the pack, before handing it to me, reluctance written in the frown lines on his face.

  “Wait, though. Are you going to feel like crap if you don’t have them on the drive?” I fish into the pack, the firm smoothness of the filters strange against my fingertips. “Here.” I hold one out. “If you feel crappy when you get to your new campus, maybe you could bum one. But only one.” I kiss the filter. “Make this your last one from a pack that’s yours. You promise?”

  I watch the furrow in his brow as he flicks ashes on the roof. He lifts his gaze to mine. “Promise.”

  He inhales
again, shutting his eyes. “Fuck.” He blows the smoke out. “You don’t know how it feels…” he tells me with a small, tired smile.

  “To smoke one?”

  He nods, face tilted to the sky.

  “What’s it like?”

  “Just…freeing.”

  “Yeah?”

  He nods. “Like a vacation from your brain.”

  And that, he’s telling me, is what he needs. Freedom. A vacation. My mind whirrs, devouring information about Dash, then spinning outward, searching for an adequate reply. “Maybe moving will give you that. Do you think?”

  “I don’t know.” He sounds pessimistic as he stubs the cigarette out. “Places aren’t that different really. I don’t think there’s anything special up in Providence.”

  “Why’d you pick there, then? Why, why?”

  “It’s a good art school,” he hedges.

  “Yeah, but there’s a ton of good schools. Like the one here in our freaking state.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He blows his breath out.

  “I’m teasing. I’ll leave you alone.”

  He pulls one big knee up, rests his forehead on it. He looks so tired, after a moment I scoot closer to him. My hands are itching to touch his hair. To comfort him, the way he’s soothed me probably a million times since I moved next door. Still, I tell myself I can’t. That when he lifts his head, I need to have my greedy hands folded safely in my lap. I’m so worked up, I start to count the seconds. When I get to seventy, I take a halting breath, then slowly wrap my arm around his shoulders.

  I want to say something—something helpful; something meaningful—but I find my throat won’t work with Dash so close: his muscled back and shoulders firm and warm under my arm.

  I can feel his lungs expand and then relax, can feel the micro-motions of his skin: as if he’s shivering.

  “I feel like you’re…not happy. I’ve thought that for a while,” I whisper. “Seems like something’s wrong…”

  I feel him exhale, long and slow. Then he lifts his head and meets my eyes. “Not everyone is meant to be happy, Amelia.”

  His words hit me like an anvil. I’ve seldom heard such dramatic statements, at least outside the books I read, and Dash…well… All my life he’s seemed so happy. Carefree, easy-going, witty, fun. He’s Dash. Everyone likes Dash.

  I take a moment to absorb the weight of his statement before shaking my head. “I disagree. Everyone deserves to be happy. Especially you.”

  He leans against my arm, still wrapped around him. “You’re too good, Am. That’s why you don’t get it.”

  “I’m not good. I’m just normal. Remember that time you made your parents throw a joint birthday for you and Hollis Smith?”

  “We have the same birthday.”

  “Oh, c’mon…” Hollis Smith has some kind of rare syndrome, and he can’t speak or walk. He can’t even understand what someone tells him, at least not in the usual way. “What you did for him was really nice.”

  “I was twelve.”

  “I know. That’s the point I’m making.”

  “I didn’t do it again, did I?”

  “You’re always vacationing on your birthday.”

  “Not always.”

  “Almost always.” Dash is a New Years baby. I lean my head against my shoulder, which, with my arm still around him, is kinda propped on him, and I try to think about Dash being sad.

  I could feel it—before now. Had found him over and over again at the periphery of my mind, wandering those fields with a strange blankness on him. I sift through my recent memory, searching for some event or conversation… a clue of what went wrong. What and when?

  I tighten my arm around him, letting out a big breath of my own. I feel his back flex underneath my arm. Maybe I should move my arm, but…I don’t want to. Not yet.

  I look up at the sky, surprised to find tears gathering in my eyes again. He’s leaving in the morning, and after that, things will never be the same. He’ll move on, and I’ll get older; I’ll move on myself. All these years will go into the vault of memory, locked, collecting dust: a relic I can’t touch again.

  I want to tell him how important he is. How just as Alexia is like my sister, Dash is like my brother. How I love him like a brother. How I want him to be happy. The party for Hollis is just one of a million reasons I love Dash.

  Once, when I was in middle school, deeply embarrassed over my thick glasses and obsessed with both Rainbow Brite and pencil erasers, he ordered me a huge box of vintage Rainbow Brite erasers, then bribed the ladies in the office for my locker combo, broke in after school, and left them for me to find the next morning.

  For my whole life—at least the years I remember—Dash has walked up onto the diving board with me when I was scared to jump by myself, ripped off chunks of the aloe plant for my sunburn, paddled beside me when I was learning to water ski, told me what books to read, and even, one time, when I’d had my tonsils out in fifth grade, climbed into my window at night to give me painted rocks he made.

  I love the way he makes ridiculous pancakes, with whipped cream and chocolate syrup and bananas. He always smells like gum—either sweet mint or actual bubble gum flavored gum. He uses pink princess toothpaste because he loves the taste and still takes good care of his colossally old, decrepit turtle he rescued from the road when he was nine and I was six. Shakespeare is for real his favorite author—Macbeth his favorite story—and even though he’s smarter than almost anyone, and a seriously incredible artist, he doesn’t see himself that way.

  I move my arm off Dash’s back, because being near him is making me so sweaty I’m afraid he’ll feel it.

  Dash stretches out on his back again, seeming to take up the entire roof. “I think we missed the space station.” He gives me a smile, one that makes me feel…wanted. Like he wants my company. It’s a feeling I don’t have that often.

  I smile back, then scoot over nearer to him. I think of lying on my back, too, but I think the position will make my nightshirt cling to my chest, and I’m suddenly self-conscious.

  I watch as Dash shuts his eyes and lets out a long breath.

  “Are you sleepy?”

  “Kind of. Not enough to sleep.” The words sound heavy.

  With my heart coiled in a ball inside my throat, I touch his soft hair. “You’re going to like it up there, I think. Up in Rhode Island. We’ll miss you here, but I think you’re going to be happy there. You’ll see. Just write me letters, okay? Or emails. I want to know how you’re doing. It’s going to be amazing, though. Everyone else at your school is an artist, too, right?”

  He nods, and I can feel him turn his forehead slightly toward my stroking hand. The fingers are shaking, but since I don’t think he can see, I keep on sifting through his hair, my heart beating staccato, my body lit up like a forest fire.

  “And real winter. Won’t that be awesome? To see the snow. You can drink hot chocolate when it’s cold and not feel like a fraud because it’s really only fifty-five degrees.” I smile down at him. “You’ll need at least one scarf, maybe even two, because this isn’t vacation, it’s real life. I think you should buy a Keurig and drink coffee while you study. When you get your dog, you should get one with lots of hair, so he or she won’t be too cold. Although if they were, I think they make doggie shoes and scarves!”

  He laughs.

  “I’m serious. Your dog is going to need some winterwear. I can tell. And Kermit the Turtle…well, I guess he’ll be right at home as a cold-blooded creature. Is he riding in the front seat of your truck during the drive?”

  “He is.”

  “That’s great. I’m sure he likes ole Mozart more than I do.”

  “Yeah,” Dash says. It’s almost murmured. His eyes are still shut, his lips turned up a little at the corners, so I keep my hand moving in his hair.

  “Think about fall, too. All those pretty red leaves. I like all fall leaves, but the red ones are the best. They don’t make that color anywhere else. Well, I mean, I guess i
n paint they do, but it’s not a normal color red. There’s something special about it, maybe a pink kind of undertone. Anyway, all those leaves are going to be yours. There’s a harbor there too, right? Because it’s on the ocean. Near the ocean. It’s going to smell like ocean. I’m not sure why you haven’t visited before now, but I think it’s safe to say you’re going to love that ocean smell. Think about the term ‘divine providence.’ I just have a feeling about this move. I think it’s going to be a good one for you.”

  That’s when I notice Dash’s face is slack and still. His chest rises and falls in steady rhythm. Because he’s asleep. Dash is asleep, spread out here on the roof like boy buffet, with my hand in his pretty, soft, Dash hair.

  I shut my eyes for just a second, sending up a prayer of thanks to the god of girls’ obsessions. He might be leaving soon, but for now he’s right here, and he’s all mine.

  I can’t help admiring him as he rests. In the last few years, Dash has grown tall. Six feet tall, to be exact, and probably still growing. Compared to me, at five-foot-three, Dash is a giant. I’ve always secretly thought his body was beautiful, but it’s become even more so in the last few years. His calves, on display right now since he’s wearing shorts, are thick with muscle, his legs long and tan and hair-dusted. His arms are shaped…well. Just well-shaped. Something in the dimensions of them is elegant and clean. His neck is strong and thick, his throat smooth enough to run my tongue down.

  Except I can never do that, because Dash is like my brother.

  A brother that I love.

  I close my eyes so I can stop my thoughts. I didn’t ask for them, don’t even really know when they started.

  If I was stranded on a desert island…

  If I had to be a child bride…

  If we were on the Oregon Trail and I had to marry off at fifteen...

  Dash.

  It’s only Dash for me.

  And who could blame me? Who wouldn’t want this strong, kind boy—well, sort of man now, I guess. Who wouldn’t grab onto him with both hands and hold him if they could?

  I know I would.

  I know I never can.

  So I just hope he’s happy. It’s going to hurt like hell when he pulls out of the driveway in a few hours, but that’s my problem. It’s my secret crush. Since I started nursing it, I knew I was doing myself no favors. Feelings like these burn bright in darkness. It’s my secret. One I know I’ll probably carry to my grave.