Chapter Thirty-Nine
Irip the gear stick, accelerating toward anywhere and nowhere.
After my conversation with Laiken, I’m fucking panicking.
Harlen is in my passenger seat, chewing on a guitar pick, and all I can think as I take my wheels to the road is how badly I want to snort a line, sink a bottle of whiskey, and bury myself alive.
“Where are we going?” Harlen asks, turning down the stereo.
I shrug, letting my shoulders fall, adjusting the stick again, hammering my foot on the gas.
“Pull over,” he says, pointing with his guitar pick to a dirt strip on the side of the road, shaking his finger. “There, pull the fuck over.”
I skid off the road, rubber screeching, jamming my foot on the brake. My seatbelt catches me before I’m awarded the opportunity of flying through the window. We jolt forward with the heated stop, and then back again.
“Easy, easy, easy, big boy,” he coos just as I’m cutting the engine.
I’ve barely taken a breath, then I’m slamming my palms against the steering wheel. “Fuck!”
Harlen lets me have it out with the stationary object.
I drag my shaky hands through my hair and press back into my seat, my chest falling rapidly.
I suck down a breath. “I’ve fucked up, man,” I croak on the exhale.
Harlen doesn’t say anything, and it makes me nervous.
Was he thinking the same? I pull at a callous on my right palm.
I’m not looking at him when I speak again, “I never should have watched her, never should have let myself anywhere near her. I was only supposed to get her home…that was it. But he…” I’m shaking my head, curling my fists.
“The freak that fucking raped and murdered my sister, that shot Laiken, is back, dropping off a fresh body at the front of her goddamn trailer park, and I can’t, won’t… stay away. Not now…not again.”
Harlen lifts his arm slowly, and puts the pick back between his teeth. Squinting his eyes, he stares out the front window.
He remains silent, allowing it all to sink in.
I scrub my hands down my face, wishing he would say something, because the quiet lingering between us, of what he might be thinking, eats at me.
My eyes close over themselves. “She thinks I hurt her then…she has no idea what I could…”
“Do to her now,” he whispers, then clears his throat.
And that truth coming off both of our tongues tastes like shit, because me and Harlen, we are the only two people that know where I’ve been, and how much coke I’ve had up my nose, especially in the shadowed weeks leading up to the third anniversary.
It’s precisely why I’d taken my ass out of her life. I knew where I was headed, that I’d end up here.
Harlen pinches his nose, and I catch the way he swallows, as though he has a sore throat, then how my barely voiced concerns have compounded his.
Harlen raises his chin slightly, his face rid of all ease. And I know it’s because today he isn’t prepared to go easy on me; not with these kinds of stakes.
We both knew how her mother had died; we had watched her descent alongside Laiken. And we both knew that if I walked back into her life using the drug that had started her mother’s downfall, it’d kill her.
I’d kill her.
“It’s only a matter of time before I kill you too, Laiken. Save yourself while you can.”
It was one of the two things I was most afraid of, and Harlen knew it. Putting a bullet in her head was the first. But the second was that I would leave her the way her mother did. That she would have to see me like that.
Harlen clears his throat. “It was the right thing, what you did, three years ago…” he tells me, then turns in his seat until he’s looking directly at me.
“Maybe not the way you did it, but for letting her go.” He pauses, snaps the pick, and throws it out the open window.
“You were on the road to fucked up, still are…so, whatever the fuck you do next, don’t make all that for nothing. ”
His words settle around us.
I suck on my front teeth, not responding, throwing my palm against the wheel again.
What the fuck have I done?
Harlen exhales roughly, and I’m tugging my hands through my hair, when he speaks again, “Put your pain into different lines, man. Start writing again. Bleed it onto the paper, drip it through your lyrics, smear it across the fucking music, where it belongs, where Jade and Laiken would want it to go. It’s been three years too fucking long. Or…”
He doesn’t finish his sentence. We both knew what the alternative was.
Or don’t even think about walking back into her life.
I don’t look at him, I look at my thumb, bring it to my mouth and tear at a loose piece of skin.
Too late.
His dark blue eyes drill into my temple with warning, and I swallow, shifting uncomfortably in my seat because I'd never seen Harlen more serious.
“You remember how her mother died, yeah? You need me to remind you?” Harlen whispers my fear.
I close my eyes.
He said it so sharply, and I almost wanted to reach out and pat him on the back, because my best friends got stones, and I fucking respected that—even though he had recreationally dabbled in the same shit I did.
He wasn’t shaming me though. He was reminding me, because he cared about the both of us.
I keep my eyes closed. I don’t reply. Don’t move. I remain completely still.
Because I heard his warning loud and clear. Felt it myself before he’d even voiced it, in the moment I held Laiken inside Devil’s Diner covered in another man's blood.
I swallow, hear it click.
If I wasn’t taking Laiken back to her nan’s tonight, I was making a choice, one I had to stick to, one I had to get out of my nose.
I wouldn’t say I’d become dependent on it, but some weeks I’d needed it more than others. It ebbed and flowed. Some days I was a full-blown addict, others I was just a sad, pathetic drunk.
Personally, I thought alcohol was my problem, but alcohol didn’t kill Sara Campbell.
“She’s lost too many people, Chase…and she already…lost you.”
My chin is to my chest, and I pop my thumb knuckle. “I know.”
Harlen reaches toward me and grabs my shoulder, shaking it. My heart feels like it’s beating in my eardrums.
I swallow the brick jammed in my throat, turning to look at him when he says, “Give her something to believe in, or let her go.”
“You know I can’t do that,” I rasp.
His reply is instant, “What part?”
I bite into my bottom lip, then stare out at the road when the song flicks over to “What I’ve Done” by Linkin Park.
My fingers shake as I reach forward, wrapping them around my keys in the ignition, starting the engine. Pulling out from the dirt, hands quivering around the wheel, I take the road out of town toward the lake house.
I kick my foot on the gas, shift the gears and white knuckle the wheel, speaking under my breath, “The second part.”
He shoots back, “Yeah, so, why are we driving in the opposite direction?” Harlen glances from the window and back to me.
“Got some shit I have to get rid of.”