I’m Weak for You, Bastard
Summer
I should be asleep by now. My body’s tired, molded to the bed, but my mind’s racing, wanting away from the shadows on the walls, tree limbs looking like beckoning arms.
I shift, kicking off the covers, and sighing as the floor fan’s breeze touches my legs.
“Adam.” I snap out the whisper, then let my frustration simmer down before turning on my side to face his back. He’s on his stomach, arms under his pillow, the fan blowing wisps of his hair. “Adam,” I whisper again, a desperate sounding lilt for him to wake up and talk with me into the night, like we used to do when one or both of us couldn’t sleep, before sleeping became an escape.
An escape he has mastered better than me, snoozing soundly, while I’m only adding noise to the room and motion to the bed.
I press my fingers into his back, and he groans a protest, moving in a jerk to throw off the thing that’s trying to disturb him.
It’s me.
It’s me.
I open my mouth to say his name again, then clamp it shut with a sigh as I flop to my back, gracelessly enough to make more motion, but still not enough to stir my boyfriend.
My brain says out and I jump out of bed, flinging off my sleep shirt to change back into my knotted shirt and ripped shorts.
More noise as I pad around, yank up and yank on, huffing and puffing with the movements, giving Adam the chance to stop me.
He doesn’t move, and I’m out the door.
The crickets are singing tonight.
The mosquitoes are biting . I’ve slapped once at my arm and once at my leg.
Why am I out here again?
I can sense why. Like a chill along my skin in this heat.
When my life is broken, I walk. Pace through it all. Hoping to find something that will fix it. Change it.
I know that something can be me—myself. But I also have unfinished business that won’t let me rest. So I’m back in a pace, around the witching hour, floating down darkened streets while everyone is asleep. Everyone is quiet. Nothing is expected of me.
My feet slow to a stop, my gaze glued to the area of sky in the distance above the dock, to the memories of a rainbow of colors lighting up the black.
We arrived just after the Fourth. We just missed the fireworks on the bay. But I got to see them in that glory my last summer here after senior year. On the Gilligan with Elliot and Isolde, and Levi and Adam and a couple of their friends. I stood in between Levi and Adam, feeling Levi’s arm brush against mine, more than once.
My body leaned into the subtle touch instead of away into Adam’s. . .
“Where’s your head?”
I blink at the voice, low enough to draw me out of my thoughts and not startle me, and I whip my focus to Levi, finding me again.
He’s standing a bit out of my space, his gaze searching mine with an almost pleading tinge, like he needs to be inside my mind, a softness like he wants to comfort me.
My thoughts weren’t dark, but I was frozen in them, and as I relax the edges of my face, I know my expression told him something different.
We’ve seen each other during some of my visits with his mom, but we haven’t been alone like this since the bay.
Since I showed him my body, and he still turned away.
He was right to. I’m not his to look at, but something in my chest grows hot, and achy, when I remember the heated claim in his eyes anyway as they roamed my bare curves. The what if of us.
His eyes now are keeping their connection to mine as I’m noticing again a heavier shade of blue that wasn’t there before his dad died.
“Fireworks,” I answer, low back, a similar softness in my voice from wanting to comfort him too.
But as he glances up toward that area of sky, I breathe out the feeling and breathe in the warm air, that burn he gave me, one more fresh.
“Stop helping my father,” I order him, my voice hard now, but there’s a shake in the words that clenches my teeth together.
Levi reconnecting his gaze to mine is slow, but not swayed. “You don’t want me to do that.”
I’m spinning and walking back the direction I came in a flash, not caring how well he thinks he knows me, not caring what was within the lines of my tone. I said what I said and that’s the end of it.
“Summer, you don’t,” he insists, right behind me, the slapping of his shoes against the pavement competing with mine.
I spin on him, halting us both in the glow of a streetlight, my heart thudding out of my control. “He hasn’t had another heart attack, so he should be fine now. Stop helping him.” I push those last words, three dragon breaths. “He doesn’t deserve it.”
“You wouldn’t have wanted me to let him die,” Levi argues back, the blue of his eyes glossing even heavier for his personal pain, and with such sympathy for mine, it peels at his personal scar he put on my heart.
“I never wished for him to die, but what he did to me needs to,” I throw back, fighting through tears I won’t let fall, my father still affecting me, the neglect and the isolation—all of that still with me.
Levi steps closer, and I tell myself to step back, but I can only move my mouth. “Summer—”
“You couldn’t save your dad, so you’re trying to save mine,” I cut through, and his stomach visibly jolts with the verbal punch. “You saved him. It’s done. You can stop now. You can leave him alone, just like he left—”
I swallow the rest. Or more so the strain in my throat steals the rest from me. The root of my pain and anger.
Levi can fight for my father , the man who made me feel so alone and ashamed to be myself, but he couldn’t fight for me.
He’s even closer now, leaning toward me, a plea back in his gaze, and that cruelly comforting jerk in his jaw. His hands lift the slightest bit to reach for me, instead doing so with more of his words, words that put a punch in my own stomach, a blow of guilt and shame and something else I can’t describe. But it makes me almost madder.
“I know how this is gonna sound, but I promise you, I helped him for you. You told me once how much you wished he’d change. He wants the chance to turn things around, Summer, and I trust that he means it.”
I suck in a breath at the memory of that wish, the one thing I’d ever wanted that I believed for that second I could have.
Besides the man right here in front of me.
But Floyd Kinnison would never. Every time I reached out over the years and he didn’t reach back. . .
“Well, I don’t trust you,” I tell Levi, a lie, and the quick edit is another thing out of my control. “I don’t trust that you know him like you think you do. Not like I do.” I’m shaking my head, trying to calm down my emotions, and Levi’s nodding, agreeing with me, but not done arguing with me.
“If I’m wrong,” he starts, a determined bend in his brows, “and he hurts you all over again, fuck him. I’ll leave him alone. And I’ll remove myself from your life too,” he adds with some hesitation, this promise tight in his throat, like doing so would hurt him, too, but also with a certainty that he’s right about my father and won’t have to feel that pain.
But my heart still thuds with it, a blending pain, from too many people and too many things, deep in my sternum, my father’s churning the hardest for the first time in a long time, because of Levi, that wound again reopening.
“I can’t go back in that house alone,” I admit to him, a flinch from the sting, my teeth clenching again to shut this all off. But I’m still in defensive mode, the world around me hazing as I spill, “And I hate myself for it.”
My eyes squeeze closed in protest of myself, to black out the image of me standing outside my father’s house earlier this week, behind the safety of a bush, and I couldn’t go in. “I’m not weak anymore—”
“It’s not weak, Summer,” Levi rushes to assure me, breaking through what was starting to become one of my chants, his familiar defense for me in more of his determination, and a hint of his own madness that snaps my eyes open to his. “You were never weak.”
My knees become more unsteady the longer he holds my gaze, as unwavering as his hold on my heart, almost hypnotizing me into doing something really wrong—or finally right?
“I am weak,” I say, the strength I’ve let slip nowhere in my voice. “But you’re not.”
The lilting sadness in me, the blue that’s from him, and the breathless disappointment showing itself, cracks his seeming steadiness at what I mean. I’m weak for you , bastard.
His own breathing thins, as if now realizing the amount of space he’s closed between us.
The smallest gasp parts my already parted lips more, like they’re waiting for the seal of his, at seeing the spark again, the anguish, telling me maybe he is weak for me too.
Water hits my face. One droplet. Then another.
Levi and I blink and look up at the same time, as more droplets fall, fatter, with less seconds between them.
It’s a random night storm in Rosalee Bay. And we’re about to be drenched.
“Shit,” hisses from my mouth, and when I look back at Levi, he’s halfway through taking his shirt off.
“You—” I stammer over words as droplets slide over my arms. “Don’t—”
But he already does, standing half-naked and thrusting his shirt at me.
“I don’t need to see your chest, Levi,” I snap out, when it was on my tongue to say I don’t need his shirt , I’ll be fine, but now I’m growing weaker at the sight of that gorgeously defined chest as it gets damper by the second.
“I saw yours,” he rushes out, and another layer of sweat breaks over my skin. “Now use my shirt before I drop my shorts and make us even,” he threatens, and it’s so sudden, the rain coming on much stronger, with a loud rumble of thunder, that I snatch the dark fabric. “This way.” He spins around and starts running, and I follow, holding his shirt over my head.
It’s good material. It’ll keep me from getting too soaked, as long as wherever we’re going is close by.
Our feet are fast, making little splashes from the water that’s already collecting in little puddles, and the whole time I’m following him, half blind and battered by rain, I’m thinking, yes, let’s run, run, run!