eleven
1.5 YEARS AGO
Gloria Walton
I sat on my closet floor in the dark, staring at the number on my phone. My thumb hovered over it. I knew I shouldn’t call, but I needed to talk to someone. My sisters would never understand—they kept asking what’s wrong, why I’d been moping around all week. They’d finally laid off when I told them it was because Royal went off with Harper last weekend. If they’d bothered to look, they would’ve seen through that excuse.
Eleanor was going to shoot her shot with him that night, even though I told her not to. Not because I wanted him, but because she actually had a crush on him, and I knew better than anyone that letting your heart get involved was a bad idea where the Dolce boys were concerned. But it was always a good cover story when someone asked me what was wrong, and my sisters were just self-absorbed enough not to question it.
It wasn’t like I could tell Dawson, either. He’d have been furious that I did anything disloyal to Royal. If there was anyone with their nose further up the Dolce boys’ asses than my sisters, it was my brother.
I let my head fall back against the closet wall and squeezed my phone in my hand. I shouldn’t even have been considering this. A good friend would walk away. A good person would delete his number.
But I was not a good person. I wasn’t sure I was even a real person. I was a mirror ball, each tiny surface reflecting back what each different person wanted to see. It had been so long since someone asked me what I wanted that I didn’t think I could answer if they did.
Or maybe I could.
Maybe I’d want to wear a black leather jacket and smoky eye makeup to school, get a tattoo, and smoke a cigarette without someone giving me a lecture on what kind of person would indulge such a filthy habit. I’d like to step over the wall that had always separated me and Royal, tell him all the truths I couldn’t tell anyone else, and maybe he’d understand because he was the closest thing to a real friend I had and the only person at Willow Heights who was more fake than I was. Maybe I’d hang out with the girl who threw a roach in my face and dared to fight the head bitch at school on her very first week.
If I called her now, she’d ask what the fuck I was after. Royal sent me after her on Monday, when they took her to the basement for the first time, to make sure she was okay. That gave me the chance to apologize for the shit I put her through on their behalf and give her some tips for surviving the Dolces, but it wasn’t like we were besties.
I sighed and scrolled through my phone, as if I could find a friend that didn’t exist. I worked so hard to be the perfect girl, the girl who was exactly what everyone wanted, that I was about to crack under the pressure and become the girl no one wanted.
I wished Rylan were here. I missed him, missed the simplicity of life in Savannah, before my dad was a crook and my survival depended on appeasing a bunch of maniacs. I missed being able to be myself, with only the usual pressures to please my parents and fit in.
Here, I’d felt like that for only one moment, as if I’d been cut free of all the ties and obligations and demands. One morning where I thought about only myself, where I was selfish and let myself feel good without worrying about my survival or even my reputation.
I typed in the numbers with shaking fingers, repeating them in my mind, memorizing them. For a while, it was enough just to look at them. But then I heard my sisters giggling and shrieking over something, and Dawson yelling down the hall that he was going out with the guys, and I hit the call button.
“Hello?”
My heart flipped in my chest, and suddenly, I could barely breathe. What was I doing?
“Hello,” he said again, and I could hear the impatience, imagine him about to hang up and toss the phone aside.
“Hey,” I said quietly, barely above a whisper.
I should hang up , I thought. Pretend it was a misdial . This wasn’t like me. I didn’t do reckless things, didn’t act without thinking through the next ten moves and all the possible consequences of each.
“Who is this?” He sounded guarded, suspicious. Of course he did. He didn’t know who was calling, didn’t have my number saved in his phone.
“It’s me,” I said. “Your… Butterfly.”
There was a long silence, though I could hear muffled background noises, like he was moving around. Then he spoke again. “Why are you calling me?”
“I didn’t want to text,” I said. “Too much of a paper trail. You can just erase a call from your call log when we hang up.”
“I meant more like, how’d you get my number?”
“Oh,” I said, feeling stupider by the second. He obviously didn’t want to talk to me. Of course he didn’t. We’d left things on bad terms. “From Maverick.”
He paused. “You went to the sketchy side of town to get my number from my tattoo artist?”
“No,” I said, scowling into the dark. He didn’t sound like he thought I was a psycho stalker. He sounded like he was holding back laughter, which was infinitely worse. “I got his number from Harper, and then I got your number from him.”
“That’s some determination,” Colt said. “I mean, you jumped through hoops there, Butterfly. I wonder if I could use my dick to train circus animals too.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said, biting back a smile even though I felt my face warming. I must’ve sounded so fucking desperate.
“I knew my dick was awesome,” he went on. “But I didn’t know it was that hypnotizing. I thought it was just Dixie. Maybe I should reconsider my career path. I could be the world’s first professional dick-notist.”
“Oh my god,” I said, rolling my eyes. “This is not about your dick. If I wanted that, I’d crawl naked into your bed.”
“Eh, been there, done that,” he said. “Keeping things spicy for me, aren’t you, Butterfly?”
“I just wanted to talk,” I said. “That’s why I called on the phone. And don’t worry, no one will know we’re talking. I didn’t even give Maverick my real name.”
“Comforting to know he’s giving out my number to random strangers.”
“I’m very persuasive when I put my mind to it,” I said, smirking and relaxing back against the wall. “I told him I was looking to book a fight. You said you get clients there, so I figured that wasn’t too suspicious.”
“Wow,” Colt said. “I’m impressed, little Butterfly.”
“Please stop calling me that.”
“The only question is, should I be more impressed with your determination or my dick’s addictive qualities?”
“You’re impossible.”
“Impossible to forget.”
I heard a muffled voice in the background, and a stupid little dart of jealousy pierced my heart. “Where are you?”
“I’m at Dixie’s,” he said, his voice going super quiet.
“Oh.” I bit down on my tongue so I wouldn’t say more.
“I broke up with her after I left your place the other day,” he admitted. “But she wants to stay friends, and we’ve been through a lot. She stuck with me through everything…”
“I know,” I said quickly. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me. I’d never ask you to give up your friends for me.”
Even as I said the words, I knew they weren’t true. I hated myself for being such a petty bitch, but I never claimed to be a good person. I hated that he was with her, that I couldn’t help but wonder if he went over there to fuck her. I hated that I knew he genuinely cared about her. Maybe they were never official, but what they had was at least real. If Royal ever dumped me, that would be the end for us.
“My only friend,” Colt said quietly.
“It’s fine,” I said. “We both have a friend with benefits who calls us when they need us.”
“I came over to get my stuff,” he said. “She was crying, so I stayed a while. But I should go. She’s in the other room, and she’ll wonder who I’m talking to.”
“Right,” I said. “Remember to erase your call log.”
“I’ll meet you at our spot at midnight.”
He hung up without waiting for an answer, and I wanted to fucking explode. I was furious that he was so presumptuous, that he was sure I’d be there. I was furious with myself because I knew I would, that I couldn’t resist him.
It was like a chemical reaction, like the worst craving for ice cream when your mother banned you from eating it and suddenly it was all you could think about. You could practically taste it, and every cell in your body was screaming to go to the fridge, and if there was none there, to fake some excuse to take a run and then sneak to the gas station and shovel it into your mouth before you got in your car because you couldn’t risk that a drop would get on your seat and your mom would know. It wasn’t just about being punished—it was about the shame of your own weakness because you should have the willpower to resist. And when you were done inhaling it, you realized you didn’t even taste it, you only tasted the bone-deep relief of giving in.
That was the way I wanted that cretin. What had he done to me?
I lay down on my closet floor, ignoring the shoes digging into my back, and squeezed my eyes closed. Dixie was my friend. I was shit for wanting her boyfriend. But I couldn’t help but wonder if she was manipulating him, making him feel guilty because she stuck by him. Would he always be tied to her by obligation, or was that just an excuse so he could keep fucking her and get some from me on the side? When he was ‘comforting’ her over there, was he fucking her?
When I got tired of my spiraling insecurities, I got up and took a shower, thinking about the upcoming tryst. My heart flipped every time I pictured closing the pool house door behind me, being alone in the dark with Colt again. A giddy little grin kept popping onto my face when I wasn’t paying attention, when I was running the razor up my shin or washing between my thighs so I smelled nice for him.
I hadn’t felt this way since… Rylan.
I swallowed the thought and shut off the water. Rylan was my first love, and he always would be. But we were kids. I couldn’t dwell on it forever. There was nothing wrong with having a little bit of fun. It was a rare commodity around here.
Even though I’d been with Royal plenty of times, and even the twins, being with Colt was different. First of all, it was my choice. I knew it was just hooking up, that it couldn’t be more. Royal was not my boyfriend and never had been, and he let the twins have their fun with me whenever they wanted, but he would murder Colt if he knew he’d touched me. Not to mention what he’d do to me.
Not that he hadn’t already done it.
Only a girl as fucked up as me could love someone after that. But sometime last year, on the days when we’d sit outside the Hockington and smoke a cigarette or a joint on my break, as we talked about parental pressure and our favorite beaches and where we’d go to college, I forgave him, though he never asked for it. He kept my secrets, so I told him about my father and about Rylan, and when I cried, he held space for me. Slowly, I began to see the boy under the football star, the bully god, the psychopath. I fell in love with that boy.
Despite what I felt, he never loved me, and eventually my feelings faded. Without love, it all felt hollow and empty, even when we were hooking up. I shared so much, but he never saw me. He never even tried. Now that I’d stopped trying, now that my heart was free, it had chosen the only boy whose love was more unattainable than Royal Dolce’s. The one boy I could never have.
But I could have him tonight.
I slid into bed and waited for Mom to do bed checks. I set my alarm in case I fell asleep, but there was no way I would. I was too excited, my heart beating so loudly in my chest I thought Mom would surely hear it, and maybe she’d demand to know what boy made it thunder like wildebeests in my chest, so she could make sure he didn’t break it. But she only kissed my forehead and told me to get some sleep so I didn’t have undereye circles in the morning.
I lay in bed another hour, then slipped out the window, scrambled down the tree outside my room, and raced across the lawn to the Montgomery pool house. I groped around under the fish for the key, but it was gone. My heart flipped as I checked the door.
Unlocked.
I stepped inside the shadowy room, my pulse racing. “Are you here?”
“I’m here,” Colt drawled in his refined, Southern accent. “Turn on the light.”
I glanced over my shoulder, but the Montgomery house was as dark as ours. Everyone was asleep but us. I felt around for the switch and hit the lights.
They came on, the ambient lighting falling over the bed where Colt lay, completely nude, leisurely stroking his cock. I gaped at him for a second, taking in all the ink on his tattooed body, his pierced tip, and the red petals scattered across the bed around him.
“Did you seriously put rose petals on the bed?” I asked, not sure what to even think of that. It was something Rylan might have done, but Colt was about as far from a sweet little emo boy as you could get.
He cracked a smile. “You said that’s what you wanted, Butterfly. I got us some champagne too. Now get over here and sit on my face until that delicious cunt drips down my chin.”