thirteen #2
“So, wanting what you’re not supposed to want just means wanting to fuck a guy every now and then?” he asks, arching a brow as he draws a new cigarette from the pack.
“Not everyone has a family like yours,” I say.
“Oh, you mean my staunchly Baptist, old-money, southern family? You think they’re going to make matching PFLAG shirts and throw me a Pride parade?” He shakes his head. “Fuck them.”
“Yeah, well, not everyone has the luxury of not giving a fuck about anything but themselves,” I say, snatching his cigarette. “You know what my dad did when he caught me again?”
“Made you go cut your own switch from the tree out back?”
“No. He took me to this priest who pulled the wire out of a shock collar made for dogs, and he’d wrap it around my dick and make me watch gay porn, and then if I got hard, he’d hit the button to shock the fuck out of me. I should be glad he’s dead.”
Colt just stares at me a second, but the look in his eyes is worse than all the gloating and taunting, worse than his usual smug indifference. “Jesus Christ, Duke…”
“You know what, fuck you.” I hurl the cigarette away as hard as I can and stand, water sluicing off my skin. “I don’t need your pity. I’m an asshole, remember? I deserve all the bad shit that happens to me, right?”
Colt slouches down in the water, all cool, his tatted up arms lying along the edges of the tub on either side of him. “No one deserves that,” he says, leveling me with those smoky blue eyes, the kind you could wander into and get lost there, never find your way out before it choked you to death.
“I don’t need this shit,” I mutter, turning away.
“Then why’d you come?”
When I don’t answer, he stretches his hand above the water, fingers not quite extending fully because of the burned skin between them, a tight webbing between his knuckles. “You did this. I hate what happened to you, I do. But it doesn’t justify the damage you caused.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you going to apologize to Lo too?”
“Yes, damn it,” I say. “I’m sorry for all of it, Colt. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
“We both know that’s not true.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I want to make it better, to be better, but I don’t know how.”
“You can start by being honest with yourself first, and then everyone else.”
“I’m trying.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, okay? Honesty doesn’t fix anything. Like you said, it doesn’t undo all the damage I’ve done. How do I do that?”
“You can’t.”
“So I have to be punished forever?”
He levels me with a cool look, but there’s still a little of that pity, even when his words offer no mercy. “If living with the knowledge of what you’ve done is punishment, then yeah, I guess you do.”
I climb out of the tub and pick up my jeans, yanking them on without toweling off and then swiping my glasses. “Why are you such an asshole? You act like you want to help, but you won’t tell me anything when I ask.”
“What are you asking?”
“How can I make up for everything I did? To you, and your sister, and Lo, and everyone? How can I be forgiven?”
“That’s something you’ll have to figure out for yourself.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” I grit out, glaring at him. “That’s why I’m asking you. Why can’t you understand that?”
He sighs and stands too. His nipple piercings glint, and all his tattoos stand out stark in the pale morning light, graceful lines curling around his body in patterns Maverick inked onto his skin, a hundred paths I’ll never get to take.
“If you need help, I can recommend a place,” he says.
“I can’t do that for you. I’m sorry. I’ve got enough of my own shit to work through. ”
“What place?” I ask, scratching at the prickling skin of my arms, the itch clamoring inside me. “Do they have Alice?”
“No,” he says, giving me a funny look. “It’s Cedar Crest, Duke. They have a treatment program. It’s nice. It helped me a lot. I think it could help you too.”
“Fuck you,” I say stumbling backwards, the heat going to my head. “I’m not going to rehab. I’m not a junkie like you.”
“Everybody needs help sometimes,” he says. “It’s okay to ask for it when you need it.”
“But when I ask for what I need from you, you tell me it’s my problem, figure it out.”
“I didn’t say to figure it out alone,” he says. “I said it’s not my problem. I can’t take that on, Duke.”
“So, what if I get better? What if I’m not a problem anymore? Then am I good enough?”
“It’s not about being good.”
“Because you know I’m good,” I say, looking him up and down as he stands there all wet, water clinging to the carved muscles of his torso. “You know how good we are together.”
“Duke,” he says. “We’re toxic as fuck together. I give you one thing you need that Mabel doesn’t. Don’t you see that? She gives you everything else. Just be happy with it.”
I shake my head. I don’t want to be with him and Lo. I just want him to tell me he wants it. He has to say it.
“If I went to Cedar Crest, even if I don’t need it, just to prove to you I’m sober, would you do it?”
“No.”
“Then who do I have to run over for you to consider it?” I ask. “That’s what Lo did, right? She ran over Dixie for you to get her out of the way. If I ran over Lo, you’d never forgive me. So what do I have to do?”
He shakes his head. “Listen to yourself. You sound deranged. Even my dick isn’t that good.”
“Fuck you,” I say, because I can’t say what I want to say, what I mean.
That it’s not his stupid pierced dick. It’s everything—the way he hates me that brings me to my knees, the way he acknowledges what no one else does, that I’m not just some spoiled rich boy whining about my champagne problems. That he couldn’t do any better in my shoes, that he couldn’t survive what I have, and he doesn’t see my falling apart as weakness.
That he believes I’m strong enough to fix myself, even when I don’t know how.
And maybe he’s right. That’s the one thing I can’t get from Mabel. What he doesn’t understand is that I can’t just be happy without it. I’ve tried. But even if she forgave me like Olive did, it would never go away. What I did will never go away. Nothing makes it go away except him.
I stumble back around the house and down the front steps. There’s some guy sitting at the picnic table on the front deck, a Darling man I’ve never seen before. I don’t expect to see anyone else when I look back, but Colt is standing there, frowning down at me.
His footprints glisten on the wood, incriminating evidence of his crime.
He followed me.
“You shouldn’t drive, Duke. You’re fucked up.”
“What do you care?” I shoot back. “If I drove off the road and wrapped myself around a tree, would you even come to my funeral?”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
I stare up at him, a lump suddenly in my throat. I won’t ask him what that means. “Would you cry?”
He shrugs. “Maybe.”
“Pussy.”
I turn around and walk away, and even though he said he cared, he doesn’t stop me.
When I reach the car Baron bought me, he finally calls after me.
“Duke.”
I stop and wait, but I don’t look back.
“My sister’s a good person,” he says. “If you can’t be happy with her, let her go.”