Chapter Nine
Raucous vibrations shake the closed bathroom door.
The slapping beats of a persistent palm grating up my spine.
“Open up, I need to piss,'' says the guy who had been slurring the same words over and over for the past ten minutes.
“Erh,” I growl, slapping my lip-gloss down on the white shimmering marble countertop and taking two determined strides toward the rattling timber, a short second away from opening it and punching him in the throat. Instead, I beat it back with a “fuck off!”
Over my shoulder, my best friend sits on the toilet, picking at her nail polish unfazed, her knees turned in.
She was drunk, and so was I.
After the fight between Chase and Colton, and Chase trying to make decisions for me, I couldn’t get a drink into myself quickly enough.
Tonight had already been a lot.
The guy beyond the door beats it again, and I press my mouth to the gap and bark, “Find another one, or piss yourself. Your choice.”
There’s an exaggerated breath on the other end, another slap, then a kick, then, “Bitches.”
“Fuck you!” Jade yells, ripping at a handful of toilet paper, balling it in her palms, throwing it in the direction of the door, only for it to fall to the floor.
She’s laughing at herself and it’s so light and carefree that I’m forced to join in, easily forgetting the impatient asshole on the other side of the door.
I return to the vanity, tightening the ribbon in my hair as Jade slides up beside me and washes her hands, drying them on her bare legs. Then I’m hiking myself onto the counter, telling my best friend, “I really don’t like that girl.”
My statement is blunt.
I’ve always been a little more intuitive than most—and Aria, Colton’s girlfriend—her energy feels dark, fucking off.
Jade drags all of her dark hair to one side, pulling it over her shoulder where she works on braiding a loose and messy plait that falls from the large bow still tied in her hair.
“What girl?” she asks, biting the hair tie and tearing it off her wrist.
“The one your brother…” I don’t finish.
She laughs, shaking her head. “Trust me, that would have meant nothing to him.”
I swallow, feeling hope squeeze through my chest.
“Do you think that’s why they were really fighting?” I ask, pausing to bite the inside of my cheek. “Not because of what Colton had said to me, but because of her?”
She reaches toward my thigh, pinches it, and I bristle a snarl.
“Silly little girl,” she whispers.
“What the…”
She is shaking her head, a smile twinkling into her eyes, her fingers gliding the cubic zirconia ‘L’ that my mother had bought for us from a thrift store—over in Shadow Heads—across the silver chain clasped around her neck. I had the same one, but mine held a ‘J’.
They had been the last two.
L and J, us, written in the stars.
“It may have been why Colton was. But my brother was throwing fists for you, sis.”
When I don’t reply, grabbing for my own necklace, she pinches me again, and I’m about ready to pinch her back when she says with a quirk of her brow, “Do you need me to give you another lesson?”
Said lesson and her words from earlier in the day sift into my head.
“I just wanted to prove to you that my brother cares about you too. And see…” She pauses, throwing her hand in the direction he just left. “He does, that’s why he’s coming tonight. He cares about you so much more than you realize, Laik.”
I sigh, smoothing a palm over the small lumps of hair at the top of my head, twirling my ponytail around my hand.
“I can’t believe you told him that I liked Colton.”
I feel myself screwing my nose up, disgust the cause of an abrupt and violent shiver. Even speaking of it made me feel dirty.
Jade shrugs, follows it up with a weightless grin. “Well, proving my brother’s loyalty to you was worth the lie.”
Silence swells between us when I don’t reply.
I can’t help but wonder if he ever really had a choice.
Does Chase feel like he has a responsibility for me because I’m his sister's best friend?
Because my mother’s a drug addict, and my father killed himself, and aside from my nan, I don’t have anyone else I can depend on?
I didn’t want to be a thorn in his side, and yet I wanted to be the force that jammed it in there.
My cheeks heat.
“Do you wanna—” Jade starts to speak.
“Leave?” I jump from the counter, stumbling, my hip bone catching the corner of the vanity.
I palm it, chew on my tongue.
Jade nods, fingers lacing with mine and when she wrenches open the door, a weightless body falls.
The guy that had been beating at the painted timber stumbles to his feet and shoulder checks me as he walks past us. With no apology, he slams the door shut at our backs.
There’s a suspicious puddle of something on the ground where he was seated and we burst into laughter, tip-toeing our drunken asses around it.
Holding onto each other for dear life, we make our way down the stairs and when we reach the bottom we set out on finding the boys. Weaving ourselves through the room, I do my best to spot golden curls and a dark brown head of wavy hair to no avail.
“Can you see them?” Jade asks, squeezing my clammy palm tighter, chin raised higher as our eyes bounce from wall to wall, corner to corner.
I’m on the balls of my feet, my sight not as clear as it would have been if I was sober.
“Nope,” I shout over the music, noticing that Colton is also missing, along with Bryce and Aria.
I temper the shiver that serpentines my spine. Slipping my hand from Jade’s, I step in front and bend over, yelling over my shoulder, “Get on my back, take a better look.”
She does. I catch her legs and rise to standing. Jade returns to her feet when she doesn’t spot them.
“Well, we tried,” she says, pulling me toward the kitchen.
I sink my teeth into my bottom lip when she snatches a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the counter and closes the space between us and the front door.
We slip through it, stumble down the stairs, laughing, then running, toward the end of the driveway and onto the dark road, where we each tear off our black sandals, discarding them before they cut at our ankles.
We leave them to melt on the blacktop behind us, moving toward the centerline.