Chapter Eighteen. Temperance
When you’re eighteen, you don’t fret about time. Your metaphorical pockets are lined with it, and you throw it away by the handful, saying “There’s more where that came from!” because you truly believe there is. Your concept of time is that it actsfor you, not on you.
The front seat of his old truck was where she’d kissed him for the first time. Last time, too. She’d had more than three years to obsess about the first, but the thing about last times is that you usually don’t even know they’re happening until later. And when you’re eighteen, there’s no such thing as a last time. There’s only forever, because that’s how much time you feel like you have.
They knew the darkest spot in every parking lot in Vesper Valley that summer, but their favorite place was the old drive-in on County Road 25. It was a Wednesday, and Linden’s classic rock station played “Just Like Heaven” by the Cure through the speaker on the passenger’s-side dash. The speaker on the driver’s side hadn’t ever worked, and she knew the only reason it stayed broken was because he hadn’t actually tried to repair it yet.
That was back when she believed there wasn’t anything he couldn’t fix.
It was the same kind of kiss they’d shared hundreds of times that summer. She sat in his lap, facing him. Her knees squeezed his hips, and his hands squeezed her thighs. Sometimes he’d forget to breathe when they kissed, and when he remembered to, he’d exhalehard and hot across her cheek. It always gave her goosebumps when he did that.
Maybe she’d have kissed him differently that night if she’d known it would be the last time. Goodbye kisses had to be different than hello kisses, didn’t they?
The kiss ended because of a nosebleed, and she fretted when the blood got on the front of his shirt. It had happened a few other times in the past few weeks, but they never lasted that long. There were also more bruises than usual on her legs and arms, but she’d just assumed she was clumsier lately because she was tired. She was tired because she spent all her spare time in dark parking lots with him. She needed him more than she needed sleep.
“Do they usually last this long?” he’d asked after she bled through all the Dairy Bar napkins in his glove box. When the bleeding didn’t stop, she had to use the flannel he always kept in the truck for her in case she got cold.
Then he saw the big bruises on the tops of her thighs. They were the shape of his hands. His big, gentle hands.
He cried during the drive to the hospital in Linden.
In the parking lot, she’d held the flannel to her nose and stretched out her other hand so he could take off the little turtle mood ring he’d given her just weeks before.
She’d said, “Just in case.” There was a line on her skin where the ring had been. Pale, vaguely green.
He’d slipped it down to the first knuckle of his pinkie and said, “This way I get to give it to you all over again.”
It wasn’t something someone said if they knew it was the last time.