Chapter 16
WHO NEEDS INHIBITIONS ANYWAYS?
KNOX
Ishould kiss Staten Renault tonight. Or maybe not, considering our first handsy display landed us in hot water. “I want to kiss Staten Renault tonight” is probably a more accurate statement.
I have no idea where Leif fucked off to, but it’s in my favor because the urge to give him a free nose job dwindles with his absence.
If he was a good friend, he’d be happy for Staten, not give her the cold shoulder because she got into a relationship.
Also, he can’t be mad at the situation because he never showed any interest in her in the first place.
If I was Staten, I’d drop the dead weight and focus on being cherished by the best guy this side of Minnesota has ever seen. (That’s me, if you were wondering.)
I think I’m a little tipsy. I don’t remember drinking that much, but I had to metabolize all these feelings of doubt and insecurity somehow.
I’m with the girl of my dreams right now.
The whole world knows it. I mean, sure, everything is “fake,” but maybe it doesn’t have to end that way, you know?
Maybe, after all our heart-to-hearts and unscripted moments that leave Leif pottering behind in the dust, Staten will realize that our act wasn’t just some well-rehearsed lie.
In my twenty-one years of life, I’ve only ever treated my body like a temple.
A horny, woman-obsessed temple. There was a point during my freshman year where I slept with an entire sorority in the span of one week without any of the sisters knowing that they had a goddamn rat in their midst. And the worst thing?
When I got kicked to the curb and ultimately blacklisted, it only allowed me another opportunity to keep up my shitty behavior and look elsewhere.
I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t worried about them dragging my name through the mud.
I didn’t care about anyone, and maybe…maybe that included myself.
But now, on the sad brambles that have grown over my underused heart, the first rosebud of life is blooming in place of a thorn—against all odds. And a part of me doesn’t hate the feeling of being…seen.
With my arm slung around Staten’s shoulders, she hauls me up the stairs with a few grunts, carrying all two-hundred-and-something pounds of me with the patience of a saint.
My vision shivers, yet the heat clinging to my insides is impossible to disperse.
Some kind of mix between a warm, fuzzy feeling and a low-grade fever.
I really don’t want to spend the night with my head over the toilet, but judging by the ominous gurgling in my stomach, that might be an improbable ask.
“Jesus, you need to lay off the protein shakes,” Staten mutters beneath her breath, hitting her shoulder against the railing as I start to list.
“I’m a growing boy,” I slur, trying to reach my hand over to soothe the reddened spot of impact. Of course, the distribution of weight just unbalances us even more, and I’ll be surprised if we make it to a bedroom without both toppling over.
I’ve passed tipsy. A semi-permanent speech bubble of ellipses hangs over my head, I have the reaction time of a sloth, and I keep smacking my lips to mitigate the terrible aftertaste of one too many tequila shots.
Despite taking the necessary (alcoholic) precautions to court my feisty partner in crime, nerves still wrap around my tongue and choke the words the tiny, sober version of myself want to say.
My head lolls against her neck. “Look at you, taking care—hic—of…you.”
“Me,” Staten replies.
“Yes, you.”
“No, I think you meant to say ‘me.’”
“I love it when you correct me. You should do that more. I honestly just love it when you talk,” I confess despite my better judgment, my heart pistoning all kinds of ooey-gooey admiration into the channels of my bloodstream.
Staten laughs, and I kid you not, it sounds like the most melodious song I’ve ever heard.
The trill of mourning doves when the sky is nacreous and the sun has yet to awaken from its slumber; the pitter-patter of a babbling brook somewhere deep in the forest, overlapped by the rustling of lodgepole pines kissed by the north’s incoming wind.
“Mulligan, you’re farther gone than I thought,” she jests, flirtation lapping at her tone.
I love it when she last-names me.
We’re only a few strides away from the first (hopefully unoccupied) room, and she corrects my footing like a parent would a toddler’s.
My articulation may be a bit scrubbed, but my charm isn’t. “Only when it comes to you.”
Staten just shakes her head, shouldering the door open without the courtesy of a knock. To our shared relief, we didn’t just walk in on an MDMA-driven orgy. It’s two hundred square feet of pure privacy. The comforter is as clean as it can get in a frat house, and no visible stains is a good start.
She deposits me onto the bed with enough caution to circumvent a field of bear traps, and I unceremoniously face-plant onto the mattress, feeling it sag underneath me. A few moments later, she rolls me onto my back so I don’t asphyxiate.
“How are you feeling?” she asks, concern blizzarding across her face.
The alcohol is beginning to drain the reserves of my sensibility, though it’s not surprising considering I’ve been seeing two of Staten ever since she saved me from the bad decision of another drink.
“Was this your plan? To get me into bed with you?” I tease, waggling my eyebrows.
She takes a seat next to me. “Actually, I would’ve been content with leaving you stranded on a couch somewhere.”
I sway a little, poking her in the arm. “But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Ugh, she’s so hard to read sometimes. Did she help me out of the goodness of her heart? Did she help me because leaving her fake boyfriend alone and inebriated would reflect badly on her?
Nobody ever talks about the comedown after imbibing. Probably because it’s a minimal tradeoff for a night full of dulled inhibitions. My buzz is starting to fade, similar to logs of firewood that have been drenched by unforeseen rainfall, unable to catch fire.
The negative space of loneliness inside my chest isn’t as empty as I thought, and it dawns on me that this is the first time someone has ever taken care of me. Maybe out of obligation more than anything, but still.
“Thank you…for taking care of me,” I say with a concerted effort to enunciate, my eyes drowsy, my bones heavy in my skin, and disorientation obfuscating my mind like a heavy coating of fondant after a night of endless snow.
She freezes for a second, as if she didn’t expect me to pay my gratitude. “Yeah, of course. It’s no big deal, really.”
If only she knew how wrong she was.
I wish I could reverse-engineer our past. I made a promise to myself that I’d salvage any chance of a friendship from the ruins of my stupid mistake and inflated ego, and I won’t rest until I right my wrongs. But tonight, words are a pain.
Absentmindedly, I nudge my nose into her neck, breathing a sigh of relief at how warm her skin feels.
“I’m really glad I hit you with my car.”
“What?”
“Otherwise, I never would’ve met you,” I explain dazedly, a hunger opening in my belly despite the surfeit of attention that Staten has always given me, good or bad. I want her more than some stupid NHL dream. “And I think you’re someone worth knowing.”
Staten’s cheeks redden like twin cherries, but it reads as embarrassment more than flattery. As if nobody has ever told her that they value her as a person—a crime that should be punishable, by the way.
She releases a heavy breath, her shoulders turned inward, and then she hits me with a question that doesn’t quite load into the network of my brain.
“Why did you pay for my hospital bill?” she asks, her tone seasoned with a newfound hurt that I’ve never heard before.
My stomach plunges. Wouldn’t she be happy that she doesn’t have to dip into an emergency fund? Why does she look so sad?
The room is fucking spinning, and the guilt is stripping everything back but my burning core. “Because it was the least I could do after what I put you through.”
“You barely knew me.”
I have no idea what response reloads on my tongue, but I don’t want to pull the trigger. “I just didn’t want you to worry about anything besides your recovery.”
“Is it because you think I can’t pay my own expenses? That I’m some sad burden you took under your wing?”
I normally can’t decipher her feelings, but this time, I’m really out of my element. The alcohol is starting to lose its potency, and the only thing that’s lasting about this night is the way her accusation embeds itself into my skin like a fresh tattoo. Bloody, swollen.
“You think I did it because I view you as some burden?” I exclaim as frustration claims its foothold inside me.
“That’s why you’re still hanging around me, right?
Because you pity me? The prime-time loser who can’t get her crush of two years to even acknowledge her as something more?
” she mumbles beneath her breath, a shiny gloss over her eyes.
They glimmer like wetlands when the sun splices through the reeds just right, bouncing off the surface of brackish water.
Fuck, I shouldn’t touch her. But she’s just sitting there, believing the worst things about herself. I know there’s a high likelihood of her running, yet I don’t have control over the hand that caresses her cheek—the thumb that’s ready to catch the teardrop wallowing on her vermillion waterline.
“Of course not, Staten. I could never pity you, and you’re not a loser. I hang around you because…”
A pause, perhaps the creation of my very own breaking point. If I say what I want to say, it has the possibility to change the future of our lives completely. I wish the truth wasn’t so painful. I wish it flayed me in one fatal slice instead of a thousand paper cuts.
“Because I don’t want to let go of the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” I finish, a thin sheen of water over my own eyes.