Chapter 18 Spring Break #2
His mahogany eyes glow in the lamplight, drinking me in with that familiar thirst, but the still, shuttered set of his jaw and the tense slash of his mouth tell another story. Hannah is hugging me, and her boyfriend is shaking my hand, and Josha hasn’t moved from his spot on the floor.
Please say something.
I know I need to move, to beg, maybe to crawl, but Rachael’s beer is weighing me down, and my head is starting to throb to the dull beat of my impending hangover, and now he’s shuffling the cards and looking away, and all that comes out of his mouth is: “It’s your deal, Hannah,” and I
am
so
—sorry—
defeated.
Rachael rolls her eyes and heads back outside, presumably to bring in her own bags.
“Want me to deal you in?” Hannah asks, throwing me a bone as she moves back to her spot on the couch. The boyfriend looks between me and Josha, a small furrow between his brows.
“I’m…” not staying, I almost say, but where the fuck am I gonna go? “…really tired. Is there a room I can crash in?”
“Sure. Top of the stairs on the right is empty.”
“Thanks.” I’ll do better tomorrow.
Like that ever works.
“Rise and shine, party boy.” Rachael breezes into my room the next morning and sends a stab of pain lancing through my temples.
“Go away,” I mumble, smothering my head with the pillow in case she doesn’t take the fucking hint.
“Nope.” Plopping herself on the bed, she plucks the pillow from my hands and tosses it aside. “We’re hitting the river, and you’re coming with.”
“Fuck off.” I squint a glare at her. “I’m sleeping.”
“You’ve slept enough. It’s boring. Josha is moping all over the place, and Hannah is too wrapped up in the disgusting honeymoon phase to notice.
This is my spring break. I’m supposed to be getting laid and having fun, not babysitting.
I dragged you up here to entertain him.” She pokes me ungently in the chest. “Well, and because I couldn’t stand to leave you passed out in your own puke.
But mostly for my little brother. So get your sorry ass out of bed, turn on the infamous Farrel charm, and come to the damn river. ”
I grab the pillow and retreat back behind its squishy shield.
“You’ve got the wrong guy.” Josha and I have barely spoken since last summer when Cheyenne caught us in the woods and stopped whatever might have happened in my molly-induced idiocy.
I’ve been avoiding him—partly because of what he might say to me, but mostly because I’m afraid of what will spill out of my mouth if I open the floodgates on the shit show of the last few years.
“You’re the only guy,” Rachael retorts. Like it’s obvious. Like it doesn’t make it a million times worse.
I know it’s stupid to cling to the illusion. I haven’t been the hero of his fantasies for a long time. What difference does it make if he finally sees who I really am?
His annoying sister slaps something down on my chest before bouncing off the bed. “This will help.”
Reluctantly, I lift the pillow and peer down at what she’s given me. A little bag of white powder glitters in the sun.
“Blow?”
“And it’s the good stuff, so do a couple bumps, and then I want it back.” She heads for the door. Snatching up the baggie, I scramble after her.
“I don’t want it.” The last thing I need is my brain going a mile a minute while I’m trying to shut it the fuck down.
“Of course you do.” Pausing in the doorway, she pushes my outstretched hand back against my chest and then leans in to plant an insolent kiss on my cheek. “Go take a shower. You stink.”
The sound is almost subaudible, a rush of breath roughly swallowed before it betrays its meaning. I lift my head in time to catch a glimpse of Josha’s stricken face before he whirls back into the room across the hall and shuts the door.
Fuck.
“Hey.” I cross the hall and rap lightly on the door as Rachael disappears down the stairs. Josha doesn’t answer. “It’s not what it looks like. She just…” came into my room to offer me drugs? Wants me to charm you out of your shitty mood because she doesn’t know I’m the reason for it?
Realizing there’s no explanation where I’m not an asshole, I drop my head against the door with a thunk. “Rocket?”
“Go put some clothes on, Gem.”
Right. I glance down at my naked body. Shower. Clothes. Maybe a little of Rachael’s coke. And then I can pretend to be okay for a few hours and try to salvage enough of this day to put a smile on my boy’s face.
“Don’t leave without me. I’m coming with you to the river today.”
My “infamous Farrel charm” is failing spectacularly.
After dragging an ungodly amount of crap down to the narrow beach—camp chairs and towels and the girls’ huge beach bags and a cooler stuffed with tallboys and six flavors of White Claw—I spend an awkward half hour listening to Rachael dissect every guy in sight between the age of twenty and forty-five.
My hair-of-the-dog approach to the hangover is losing to the jittery cocaine high, and it takes three beers before I stop feeling like I need to sneak off and hurl in the bushes.
Hannah and her boyfriend abandon us immediately, opting for a PG-13 make-out session involving a lot of laughing and a pink inflatable inner tube they commandeer from the nearby parents of a napping toddler.
Josha hasn’t looked at me since we left the cabin. He’s nursing his drink—a Black Cherry White Claw that I’m not sure is meant to be a statement or an actual preference—and making sarcastic replies to Rachael’s running commentary.
“He’s carrying three children. The one on his back is at least twelve years old.”
“Single dads are hot.”
“His wife is literally right there.”
And two minutes later:
“Pretty sure the fact that he’s kissing another guy means you’re not his type, Rach.”
“You don’t know that. They could be bi. Maybe they’re into some MMF.”
“Jesus.” Josha tosses his can back in the cooler and gets to his feet. “I’m going for a swim.”
“What the fuck is MMF?” I ask, watching him wade into the water past a trio of giggling teenage girls. I don’t know why we had to pick such a crowded beach.
“A threesome with sword crossing.” Rachael arches her eyebrows. “You’ve seriously never tried it?”
“Why would I—you know what? Never mind. I’m gonna go find Josha.”
“Good idea. It is what I’m paying you for, after all.”
“You’re not paying me.”
“So I can have my shit back, then?” She holds out her hand, peering at me over her sunglasses. Rolling my eyes, I dig the little baggie out of the pocket of my swim trunks and toss it on the coarse sand between her painted toes.
The river, mostly snowmelt off the Sierras at this time of year, is cold enough to pebble my nipples and send my balls ducking for cover, but I know from experience that the best thing to do is dive in and get it over with.
How long has it been since I lived somewhere I didn’t need a 3mm wetsuit to swim without catching hypothermia?
I come up gasping, blinking water from my eyes and squinting into the sun.
There.
Josha has wisely abandoned the water and is perched twenty yards downriver on a sloping slab of granite away from the shrieking, splashing crowd of college kids and families.
He hasn’t seen me yet—or he’s pretending—so I have time to study him as I approach, soaking up all the little details I missed last night in my fog of misery.
He’s taller. Over six feet now, while I’ve topped out at five-foot ten.
And though he’s still lanky, traces of the boy he was lingering in the narrow wrists and slim waist, he no longer looks like he’s outgrowing his skin.
In profile, I can see the man he’s becoming in the faint copper stubble along his jaw and the proud, clean line of his shoulders.
He’s gonna have guys falling all over him if he ever gets his head out of his ass and—I shut the thought down hard without poking at this new flavor of my old jealousy. Slipping back beneath the water, I slink toward the rock, hugging the river bottom until I burst upward with a splash.
It’s a kid move, something I would have done before at our swimming hole off the Big River haul road. Three years ago, it would have made him laugh, throwing his head back with the vigorous abandon only I was lucky enough to witness.
Now he only scrubs a hand down his face with a sigh.
“I saw you coming,” he says, and I drag my gaze away from the long fingers skating over his Adam’s apple and try not to think about the feel of his pulse under my thumb.
“I think your sister’s a sociopath,” I blurt, and then stifle a wince. Why the fuck did I bring up Rachael?
“What are you doing here, Gem?”
“I’m freezing my ass off in this goddamn snowmelt while you sit up there all cozy in the sunshine.”
“You know what I mean.”
“It’s spring break.”
“So you decided to come home and, what? Not tell anyone except Rachael? Do you even have the same spring break at ENC?”
“Busted.” I try for a grin, shaking my head to spray him with more cold droplets. He shoves me away with a foot to my hip.
“Knock it off.” The chill coming off him is frostier than the water swirling around my thighs.
“Fine.” I scrub at the goosebumps on my arms. Because of the cold. Nothing to do with the pit gnawing at my stomach. “Maybe I”—missed you—“was homesick.”
He snorts, and yeah, after months of avoiding all contact with anyone from Big Top, I guess that one’s a hard sell.
“Why aren’t you at school, Quill?” The soft, careful way he asks, the hint of impending pity, the nickname—all of it raises my hackles in a burst of fight-or-flight. And I’ve already tried running away.
“I got caught in the aerial gym after hours. With the dean’s daughter. And an eight-ball of blow.”
He doesn’t even blink, and some small, tragically hopeful part of myself dies defeated.
“You got kicked out.”