9. Lilah
LILAH
“Tomorrow?” Paige shouted before shifting to a whisper. “Already. You think you’re okay to start back at school?”
“I’m ready to crawl out of my skin being trapped in this house.
I’m already behind. Losing out on another two weeks will wreck my GPA.
” I’d painstakingly submitted my Windsor application after my invitation.
Now I had to hope they didn’t remove my eligibility if I failed anything.
That and four of my ten college applications had been top priorities.
Although I’d used the Common App for all of them, each had its own little special supplements.
The whole thing made my head hurt so badly I’d checked for a nosebleed after I’d hit submit.
She set a can of Coke and a cup with ice in front of me, then took a seat on the kitchen chair beside me. “There are more important things. You need to be careful.”
Her hovering freaked me out. Constant texts every day even though she knew I could only use my phone for an hour a day now in twenty-minute chunks. The barrage of texts was sweet but had tipped over into annoying territory.
The first time she’d visited, she’d come to collect her clothes with red-ringed, swollen eyes and had squeeze-hugged me so tightly it brought on a headache. She’d gotten better this past week.
“It’s not like I almost died, Paige. You don’t have to look at me like any second I’m going to keel over. I swear I’m not clumsy enough to trip and fall again. I did trip, right?”
“I don’t know. I turned around and you were gone. Maybe you were going to the bathroom.”
A flash of all the hard things I could’ve hit my head on sent a shiver of fear down my spine. “Did I fall in the bathroom?”
“You might’ve gotten lost.”
“So not only did I gash my head open, I was also wandering around a stranger’s house.”
“Something like that.”
“How did you get me to the hospital?”
“I had some help. That night—” She gripped my hand, holding so tight my fingers ached. “It was scary. I’m so sorry I made you go.”
I waved away her sorry and cracked open my soda. “Don’t be sorry. It’s my fault for drinking too much and then knocking myself out.”
Her gaze cut away and she gnawed on her lip.
“Did something else happen that night?”
Her hand shot out and she grabbed my wrist. “No!”
This wasn’t the first time Paige had acted weird when I asked about that night, which was probably why I still didn’t have the clearest picture of what happened.
I winced.
“Sorry,” she said.
“One semi-good thing that’s come out of it is that apparently a few stitches to the head is all it took for Mason to back off.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll see him sometimes when I walk in the garden.
He doesn’t look like he’s trying to glare me out of existence.
” Instead, I felt the tug of that string, the tether between us I’d tried to ignore or pretend wasn’t there.
No, when his eyes found me from behind his balcony curtains—when he might’ve thought I didn’t see him—or walking past my tucked-away spot, the thread added extra stitches like it was trying to embed itself deeper in my chest.
“Usually, he’s gone the next time I look. But we talked yesterday when he was coming back home. He wasn’t…” I searched for the right word. “Awful.”
I shrugged, unable to explain the other reason I knew things had changed between us. I felt like I needed to talk this out with someone else but couldn’t form the words. His voice messages were only for me. I couldn’t share that with Paige. I hardly believed it was happening myself.
“He’s been dropping off my schoolwork for me, since I can’t use the online portal to upload my work. I’d asked Eliza to do it before you offered, but she’d told me guidance told her it had been taken care of. Printouts were dropped off on the porch every night.”
I was still stunned to know it was him.
“Yeah,” Paige said, “Mason was insistent about handling that.”
“You talked to him about it?”
“Kind of.” She picked at the cuff of her sleeve.
Every night, the next day’s assignments were on the doorstep. No note, no interaction.
“Sometimes I swear he’d wait until the second I’d laid down for a nap, and that’s when he’d leave it. It’s weird.”
“Weird.” Paige said the word like she was tasting it for the first time. “Does he pick it up for you too?”
“No, Eliza brings it in.”
“Hmm.” Her noise was a cross between “interesting” and “I hadn’t known that.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Nothing.”
“His hand was all bandaged up too. Looks like I’m not the only one around here getting injured. Did he hurt it in a game?”
“I think there was a fight at school or something. All hush hush. His dad probably smoothed it all over.” She picked up her bag from the back of the chair. “Do you need anything?”
“No. Thanks for lunch though.” The oversized portions of chicken Caesar salad and a couple fillets of grilled salmon would last me a few days, and the groceries were once again down to bare bones. Paige left and promised to be waiting for me at school when I got in.
The rest of my day was swallowed up by lying in bed, setting a timer to read through my chemistry homework and forcing myself to stop when it went off. Long showers had become a new favorite simply for something to do without feeling like I was losing my mind.
The concussion protocol was a sensory deprivation tank for my brain, which wasn’t used to not juggling twenty things at once.
At least my headache after studying for thirty-minute chunks with hour-long breaks was only mildly throbbing, not cracking-my-skull-open painful.
The only entertainment had been drawing in my sketchbook, which was now almost full.
I would find inspiration by searching through my fabric scrap stash and let my imagination flow onto the page, breaking out the colored pencils to finish the design in my own grown-up coloring book.
Other than that, concussion recovery sucked. Brain rest sucked. Being trapped inside the house with nothing to do other than sleep and take a twenty-five-minute walk sucked.
My twisted evil genie wish of being home with nothing to do had come true. At least Eliza had picked up some of the slack and cooked a few times. Burned lasagna or dry grilled chicken was better than nothing.
Dad had even checked in on me during work hours a few times over the past two weeks. He’d brought some spare lemons from a farmers’ market friend and asked if I could make lemonade. At least it was something to do.
After my nightly walk and another shower, I lay in bed, earbuds in with lo-fi relaxation music playing while Kelsey went through her evening routine, which only seemed to get longer and louder. At least now it wasn’t so noisy that it gave me an eye-throbbing headache.
A notification pinged in my ears. It wasn’t Paige.
I’d silenced her that first week, so I knew even before I checked who this was.
The little blue dot next to Mason’s name.
I tapped on the voice note play button, but unlike the first time, when I’d braced for sulfuric acid levels of hostility, I relaxed and closed my eyes.
The first time I’d gotten a text from him, I’d been replaying my mom’s soothing voicemail.
He’d interrupted my little daydream of my mom running late from work and asking me to take the chicken out of the freezer.
The best part was when she forgot she’d already said “I love you” and said it again.
Although the message was only thirty seconds long, it went on for over four minutes.
She hadn’t ended the call. The background noise of her talking and walking around was a comfort.
I’d listened to it at least thirty times a day since my injury.
Mason’s first short, clipped voice note popped up at close to midnight and sounded almost like he was making it at gunpoint. I hadn’t thought of blocking his number until the message appeared like a head-injury-induced hallucination.
I’d tried to prepare myself for some new terrible torture. His voice was tight, but not angry or sarcastic. Five minutes into the fourteen-minute recording, his words finally clicked.
It was the first chapter of the final book in the vampire saga I’d been waiting three years to read. It had come out a week after my accident. The same one Mason had made me promise I’d wait to read with him when he’d devoured the first and second books in the pool house with his head in my lap.
He was reading it to me.
With my limited screen time and even more limited funds, I hadn’t even preordered my copy of the book, and when I’d tried to use five minutes of my precious screen time to buy one from my local bookstore using my birthday gift card from Rye, it had been on back order with a three-week waiting list.
But here on my phone was Mason’s honeyed baritone reading it to me. Over the course of the message, his voice loosened and he dipped into and out of the voices like trying them on.
By the fifth night and fifth chapter, he made it a full-on vocal performance.
That was probably what led to the dreams. For the past two weeks, I’d fallen asleep to Mason’s voice.
Stupid, all-too-real dreams revisited me each night.
This was what happened when I couldn’t stay distracted for fourteen hours a day, studying until I fell asleep with my notebook glued to my face.
My already-disoriented brain started to make up its own fairytales to keep me entertained.
These nighttime, hazy, imagined versions of events were a cruel trick, just like the night of the party. I’d been down this path with Mason before. Only in my dreams, he begged me for forgiveness and told me it had all been a mistake.
Every day I promised myself I’d block his number, delete the message, or just not listen to it or any that had come before. I’d buy the audiobook version instead of drip-torturing myself with his smooth voice in the quietest hours before I fell asleep.