Chapter 8
“Fancy seeing a girl like you in a place like this.”
At the sound of Dominic’s dry voice behind me, I startle so violently that my forehead jerks forward and thumps against the glass of the window.
When I lean back again, there’s a perfect grease spot illuminated with the light from inside, which has me questioning my skincare routine.
But my facial cleansing habits can wait; right now I need to come up with a rapid lie for why I’m crouched in the bushes outside his dad’s house.
I claimed just yesterday that our parents weren’t serious; that their relationship would fizzle on its own.
If Dominic finds out they’re here together this late at night, he’ll probably jump to conclusions—the same conclusions I’m jumping to, I admit, but if it turns out I was dead wrong, I’d rather not find out while he’s standing right here.
So as I turn to look at him, I grasp desperately for something else I could say, another reason I might be here.
The pickings are real slim.
“Hi,” I begin breathlessly, my feet grinding into the mulch. But I don’t get a chance to say anything else, because a thorny streak of pain finds my cheek as well as my scalp, a chunk of hair pulling across my face as it tangles in the bushes I’m crouched between.
So. That’s pleasant and great and not embarrassing.
My eyes find Dominic right as I’m spitting hair out of my mouth.
His expression is disconcerted, his arms folded, his lips furled into a questioning frown as he watches me.
Unfortunately he’s also tall, because he’s standing, looming, while I’m all the way down here in the flower bed like a very stupid gopher.
This is not the moment or the month or even the year to notice the backward baseball cap he’s wearing, so I do not. I ignore it completely. Don’t even give it an appreciative glance or wonder what the point of a backward cap in the dark could possibly be.
I just clear my throat and repeat myself, with much more dignity this time. Like this is exactly where I planned to be. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he says slowly. I can’t fully see his expression as he takes a step forward, because some of my vision is obscured by the hair still tangled in the bush and pulled across my face. But I can hear everything I need to in his silence.
Out of courtesy, I give him three seconds. When he doesn’t offer to help, I speak—calmly. “Stop making that face and come help me, please.” My fingers are searching around in the snagged mess that is my tangled bush hair, but I’m making no progress.
Dominic sighs, and then he crouches down in front of me, pulling out his phone and turning on the light. I wince as it finds my eyes and lingers on my face for a moment, but then it swings away. Dom sighs again like I’m a major inconvenience before turning the light off.
“Wait,” I say quickly as he stands up again.
“I’ll be right back,” he says, and then he walks away—disappears out of my sight, his footsteps rounding the corner of the house until all I hear is silence.
I swallow down my humiliation and ignore the pain in my feet, shifting my position as much as possible while blinking furiously. Dominic won’t leave me here, but I don’t know what he’s doing or how long it will take, and I think my face is bleeding.
My shoulders slump with relief when I hear his footsteps returning a moment later, my breath shuddering out of me. He reappears in my vision and crouches once more, but a camping lantern is in his hand now.
“Stop moving around,” he says, and then turns the lantern on, settling it on the grass as his hands reach up and begin working on the tangled snarl of hair holding me captive.
“Is my cheek bleeding?” I say.
I can’t see any of his face, because the light from that lantern is probably visible from space and is shining directly in my eyes, but he hesitates only a second before saying, “You’ll be fine.”
His hands aren’t gentle. He pulls and tugs, motions punctuated by my little ows until finally he says, “Well, stop moving, then.”
“You’re yanking my hair out of my head,” I say.
“Then just—hold still, would you?”
“I’m trying—”
“Try harder.” A beat of silence, and then he says, “Good grief, Berkeley. Did you stick your entire head into this bush? Why are you even here?”
I spit out the first thing that jumps into my mind—the first thing that isn’t the truth about our parents’ midnight rendezvous.
“I came to see you.”
His hands freeze, and somehow I can feel his body tense even though we’re not touching.
“I don’t live here. You’re aware of that, right?” His hands begin working on my hair again.
I am aware of that, actually. He told me himself. But I press forward anyway. “I forgot,” I lie.
His responding hum is about as skeptical as I’d expect. “So you came to see me…in the middle of the night? There’s only one kind of meeting that happens at this time,” he goes on, the words casual. “And I hate to burst your bubble, but did you ever consider that you might not be my type anymore?”
I have no answer for this, but it turns out I don’t need one, because he speaks again.
“You want to know what I think?” he says.
“No.”
“I think you’re here making sure our parents aren’t getting cozy, now that you explicitly claimed they wouldn’t be.”
All I can do is clear my throat and change the subject to buy myself more time. “How’s my hair doing?”
“It’s still attached to your head,” Dominic says flatly, and with one last yank, he leans back. “That’s going to have to be good enough.”
He stands up as I rub the tender spot on my scalp. I brush my fingers over the painful scrape on my face, too, and when I hold them up in the lantern light, there are a few streaks of red.
And instinct is a strange beast, I realize as my mouth opens automatically to speak. Past Reese would have told Past Dominic that in ancient cultures, a cut like this could ruin a woman’s chances for marriage—that her sisters would have to hope for an advantageous match instead.
Past Dominic would have listened to this irrelevant snippet of knowledge with a little smile on his face, and then he would have helped me up, and then we would have gone to the back of his truck, hand in hand, and watched the stars until the early hours of the morning.
But although the stars have stayed their course, we have not, and I find myself wondering how much people ever really change—if we’re different at our cores, or if we’ve simply become different versions of the same people.
I guess it doesn’t matter either way.
“Oh, that’s not bad,” I say to myself instead as I glance at the faint streaks of blood on my fingers, and I swallow all the words I can’t speak.
Then I rise on unsteady legs as I get to my feet, grabbing the lantern and passing it up to Dom, who turns the light off and pitches us into darkness once more.
“I assume you’re here spying,” he says as I shake the buzzing discomfort from my legs. “Did you see anything?”
I hesitate for only a second before sighing.
“Not yet,” I admit. “Alvina snuck out of our room earlier, so I followed her because I was worried she was coming over. She’s been in there maybe…
” I bite my lip, thinking. “Twenty minutes?” I turn back to face the window, stepping slowly through the bushes that held me captive before. “I wasn’t sure—”
But the words die on my tongue as two figures appear, almost like I’ve conjured them.
It’s Alvina and Daryl, of course. Who else would it be? Somehow the sight is still shocking enough that I startle, my eyes widening.
Alvina is much better dressed than I am—not in a negligee, thankfully, but about as casual as she gets all the same. I suppose I’d rather her wear her fitted blue pants and gray top than anything more revealing, but it’s still an odd choice for the middle of the night.
Not that I can judge.
She and Daryl drift into the room, talking and laughing as they settle on the couch. They scoot closer together, a little red flag popping up in my mind as they do. The red flag turns into a blaring siren when they look at each other—a tornado siren, in fact, accompanied by a rotating red light.
I can’t see both of them clearly, because Daryl’s back is to me, but when Alvina’s expression goes soft in a completely foreign way, I begin to panic. When Daryl lifts one hand to touch her face, my panic grows.
“No,” I breathe, and a small noise of disgust sounds from next to me as our parents lean closer, closer, closer—
“Gross,” Dom breathes as our parents begin to kiss.
“No,” I groan as my stomach churns. I lean forward until my nose is almost pressed against the chilled glass.
“No, you two—stop it. Stop it!” But my eyes widen in horror as the kiss from hell grows more passionate still, and I’m frozen until self-preservation kicks in and I lurch backward, shaking my head desperately.
I turn to look at Dominic, whose expression resembles that of a faintly ill rollercoaster rider. His eyes are glued to the scene unfolding before us, and against my will, my gaze is pulled back too.
“Okay. It’s two consenting adults kissing,” I say, but my voice is high-pitched, and my stomach is rolling worse than ever. “Let’s be mature about—about...oh, no.”
We have roaming hands.
I repeat: WE HAVE ROAMING HANDS.
“Those are our parents,” Dominic says grimly. “I do not have it in me to be okay with this—”
But he breaks off as my stomach finally rebels completely, and I double over, heaving into the bushes and hacking almost as hard as I did when I spit water all over the man now eating my mother’s face—
I heave again, and on my back I feel a few thumps.
“Get it all out,” Dom says, his voice absentminded but tinged with disgust. Then the thumping hand disappears, and the leaves beneath us crunch as he turns away from the window.
I stare watery-eyed at his worn work boots, pointed toward me now, and when he speaks again, his words are firm.
“This is revolting, Berkeley,” he says, his voice filtering down from over my head. I’m not sure if he’s talking about me or our parents. “I’m going to need lobotomy to forget about this. Help me or don’t, but I’m breaking them up.”
The image of our parents kissing flashes into my mind. “I’ll help you,” I gasp, sucking air into my greedy lungs as my stomach finally begins to settle. “I’ll help.”
“Will you really?” he says, and even though I’m not looking at him, I can picture the challenge in his raised brows. “Or are you going to back out?”
“I said I’ll help.” My snippy tone probably doesn’t do me any favors, but it’s all I’ve got right now. I can still taste bile on my tongue. “I’ll help. Okay? We just—” I break off, and when Dominic doesn’t speak, I go on. “I want to be subtle about this, okay?”
Into my head pops the part I don’t say out loud: So that Alvina never finds out.
“If you’re going for subtle, you should stop throwing up,” Dom says unhelpfully. Then, a second later, he adds, “Are you sick?”
Hmm.
“I guess I have been feeling a bit nauseated,” I admit as I look at things in a new light. “And…I’ve had a headache. And I’ve been sort of shaky today?”
He gives a disbelieving laugh. “And you didn’t think something might be wrong?”
“I thought I was just nervous to see you again,” I say, irritated. “What—like you felt totally fine after six years? And our parents are dating.”
He goes quiet at this, silent for several long seconds until he takes a deep breath like he’s preparing himself. Then he asks one more tense question: “You’re not—pregnant, are you?”
This, finally, is too much. “Of course I’m not pregnant,” I snap. “Be realistic.”
“Just checking,” he mutters, but there’s unmistakable relief in his voice.
Something occurs to me, and swiveling my head to look at Dom, I ask, “Why are you here?”
“Rosie was over here earlier,” Dominic says, jerking his chin at the window. “And she thought she heard him making plans, so…” He grimaces, his shoulders twitching into a shrug. “I came over to see what was going on.” He eyes me, his frown growing. “We should go.”
He’s right. I can’t vomit in any more bushes, and I certainly can’t watch any more of Alvina’s nighttime activities.
“Yeah,” I breathe. “Let’s go.”
And I try to stand up—I really do. I give it a brave, valiant effort.
But all that happens is my legs give out, and I topple instead right into Dominic’s arms.