Chapter 6
One Night, Eight Years Ago
Bea
“You cannot seriously be ditching me for him, Mer.” Again, I leave unsaid.
She finishes changing into her favorite white tank top of mine and pulls her long hair free with a small wince.
Her head lolls back with annoyed exasperation, those puppy dog eyes aiming at me across my apartment bedroom.
“Don’t be like that, BB. Please? It’s just the same party that happens every month. I’ll go to the next one with you.”
I silently rummage through my outfit options some more.
“He just wants to talk,” she explains. “He and Keri broke up, like, a month and a half ago. I could use some closure, too.”
“I just hope closure isn’t code for fucking him,” I say, shaking my head before I walk down the hallway and shut myself into our shared bathroom.
I hate this. I hate being this person, sounding this judgmental over my best friend.
But I hate Stephen more. Before Stephen, Merritt was not someone who slept with someone else’s boyfriend.
She wouldn’t lie or skip plans to sneak around with anyone, especially not some asshole with questionable politics and a penchant for too much cologne.
After three months trapped under the sorcery of him and his allegedly magic penis, she managed to break free, but .
. . I’m not so sure. It’s been two months since then, and she still isn’t the same.
She’s too tired too often, always sore from the gym.
Always preoccupied or mentally far away.
I stare at my reflection between the toothpaste flecks on our bathroom mirror, grumbling under my breath before I pull out the cleaning supplies from below the sink.
Most nights, Merritt is passed out on the couch before she even finishes her dinner—forget washing her dish—so I guess shirking the bathroom cleaning isn’t exactly a surprise.
She thinks I’m too militant about it, anyway.
But it’s just another thing that’s off. We took so much pride in this little place after suffering in the dorms our first two years away from home.
Home. Homesickness rocks me like an uppercut, and I sway on my feet. Damp air and windswept trees and seagulls squawking in the eternal breeze. Savvy’s almond poppy seed muffins. Bonnie’s cabbage rolls. My mom’s marionberry cobbler.
Maybe she really does need closure with Stephen, but maybe home is what Merritt needs, too.
I hear our front door creak open and rush out of the bathroom.
“Wait! Mer!”
“Hmm?”
“What do you think about a trip home next weekend?”
She brightens instantaneously from head to toe and I go dizzy with hope. “Yes,” she moans. “God, I miss my old mattress in my old room. I even miss our parents.”
“I think I miss everything lately,” I admit. The way we were, too, I don’t say.
She closes the door again, and we automatically walk toward each other with our arms extended like mummies, then lock into a tight hug.
“Perfect,” she says. “We’ll jet out Friday morning and stay the whole weekend?”
“Perfect,” I agree. “But, Merritt? For real . . . don’t sleep with him. He’s a succubus, I’m sure of it.” Even now, in my arms, she feels smaller.
Her laugh shakes through her before she pushes out of my embrace and jogs my arms, expression going distant again, shutting me out once more. “I won’t, I won’t, all right?”
I nearly make her promise, but something tells me I shouldn’t. I don’t want to risk setting her up to lie to me.
“Stay strong, I mean it,” I urge her retreating form. “Hey! Love you!”
She pokes her head back through the door and blows me a fleeting kiss. “Always!”
This party really is a repeat of every other party that seems to happen on a loop.
Same songs fighting to be heard over the same shouted conversations and beer pong cheers.
Looking around, I’d venture to guess that most of the people here are, like me, old enough to legally drink but poor enough for this sort of group setting to be more economical than barhopping.
I check the time on my phone. Less than thirty minutes and I am already wishing I’d stayed at the apartment. A bottle of Two Buck Chuck and an old romantic movie on TV. Maybe I could hit up one of the reliable hookup buddies I made the quarter before.
Eh. I’d be better off reaching into my nightstand.
I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn toward it, only for a voice to speak over my opposite side.
“Can I get you a beer?”
I hate that trick and have to stop my lip from curling, but I recognize Shane’s voice. One of the aforementioned hookup buddies, a guy I met in women’s studies last semester. I paste on a smile and tip my head his way.
“Hey, you.”
“Hey, pretty girl,” he says, and my smile gets more earnest. Shane is nice, reliable, and plenty cute, if a little baby-faced.
He golfs with his dad every other Sunday and single-handedly won trivia night at the bar he once took me to for a date because that evening’s theme was all things Tolkien. He wants to be a pediatrician someday.
He’s great, honestly. An all-around decent dude.
There just wasn’t anything more between us, and I couldn’t force it. He wanted things to move past our casual fling, and I didn’t. I was up-front from the beginning and he changed his mind, and that was that. No hard feelings. No big feelings at all. I fight off the urge to sigh.
“How’ve you been?” I ask. “I’m actually on my way out, I think, so I’m good on the beer.”
“That’s too bad,” he says. “Guess I’ll let you go.” His grin turns smarmy, like he is preemptively smug about his next line. “Again.”
“Ha ha. Good seeing you, Shane.”
“Yeah, yeah. See ya, heartbreaker.”
I wiggle my fingers at him and beeline toward the front door. I’ll order a ride when I hit fresh air.
Except I don’t hit fresh air when I step onto the front porch.
I walk straight into a cloud of weed smoke so thick it stings my eyes. I fan it away and lock onto something gold.
Someone gold. A golden boy who has fully grown into a man, perched beneath some string lights bathing him in a yellow glow, and wearing Silas Byrd’s face.
He’s half seated on the porch railing, long legs kicked out to brace him, and taking a drag from the joint between his lips. There’s another guy in conversation with him, but Silas has homed in on me.
Snap. Right between my ribs, right when our eyes snag.
We’re three hours away from Spunes, but seeing him right now feels like crossing the big green bridge that leads into town, that first glimpse of the Point and the sharp hills and turns that welcome me home. Familiar and exhilarating all at once.
He doesn’t say anything, just stares me down with a hot gleam in his eye, then takes the joint out of his mouth and lifts it my way, pinching it between his middle finger and thumb.
“Interested?” he asks, smoke tendrils curling out from his crooked grin, the light catching on the gold chain around his neck. He looks like the devil himself, asking me if I’m interested. Interesting word choice, indeed. My heart hiccups over the memory.
“Sure.” I say it as airily as I can, but the smile taking over my face is a feral thing.
His friend notices me now and gives me a quizzical look. “Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?” he says.
“Not sure,” I reply, though I am positive I’ve never seen him in my life. Warm brown skin, shoulder-length black hair, and nearly black eyes. I take the joint from Silas and pretend it doesn’t set off sparklers beneath my skin when his fingers brush against mine. “What’s your name?”
“Ravi,” he says with a winsome smile, doing a slow, intentional perusal of me. “You go to Willamette?” he asks.
I angle myself Ravi’s way and give him a coquettish look, blowing out some fragrant smoke. In my peripheral vision, I see Silas cross one ankle over the other. “Nope,” I tell Ravi.
“Are you from Eugene, maybe?”
“No,” I laugh, handing him the joint next.
“Somewhere nearby, then? Come on, I wouldn’t forget your face.” He takes a long, deep pull and winks at me. “Or that hair.”
“Maybe you know me from porn?” I offer flatly.
Ravi’s eyes round before he dissolves into a coughing fit so loud and violent I can barely hear Silas cackling over it.
But the golden man finally pushes himself up and lifts me into a hug, molding and pressing me against him.
He smells like minty soap and smoke and something else I can’t pinpoint.
It makes that homesick ache of earlier burn all over again.
“It’s good to see you, Red,” Silas says, chuckling into my hair.
“You two know each other?” Ravi spits before he starts a new hacking spell.
“Why are you here?” I say into Silas’s collarbone.
And why did the sight of him bowl me over with fresh loneliness?
Between feeling disengaged in school, the gnawing worry over Stephen and Merritt, and Merritt’s strange distance lately, I am .
. . I don’t know what I am. Suspended in a state of directionless floating?
Stuck in a holding pattern? And why is my throat going tight? How strong is that weed?
“I just finished the fire academy out here,” he says, his palm running a quick circuit over the back of my head down to my mid-back. “I’ve been living in Eugene for the last four months.”
Stepping out of the hug feels like letting blood return to a limb that’s fallen asleep. Mildly painful but necessary. Tingly.
“Four months?! You should have called me,” I say.
His head cocks, an amused frown pulling at his mouth. “I should have?”
Yeah . . . I suppose that might’ve been a little weird.
I’ve only seen him back home a handful of times over the last four years, and typically, our interactions have been limited to a wave or a nod across the crowd at Savvy’s.
Maybe a quick Hey, hi, how are you at O’Doyle’s.
Brief, polite smiles when we pass each other by at Spunes’s summer festival.
After prom and convincing Merritt that what she’d seen had meant nothing, that if any feelings were involved, they’d been one-sided, it’d been easy to forget it wasn’t the whole truth.