Chapter Fifty-Four
I’d stupidly left my bag in his car, and I knew that meant he wouldn’t be far.
My fingers quiver when I take the spare key I’d discreetly snatched from Nan’s on my way out, attempting to unlock the dented door at my trailer. I jiggle against the curved metal when it becomes stuck.
“No, no, no…” I rear my foot back in panic, giving the base a solid kick.
The lock clicks, and relief settles in my chest when it pops open. I step through, slamming it shut, then I make good on shifting the locks, along with the deadbolt that sits at the top, before whirling around and pushing my tailbone into the door, sliding to the floor.
I try moving, only my bones halt me, screaming in agony. I let go of my breath.
I don’t try again.
I had never much liked storms, nothing good ever came from them. Thunderstorms fed on the weak, and in the eye of Chase’s storm, I knew there was no chance I’d survive.
Stippling my fingers at my side and shifting to my knees, I rise to my feet and walk slowly across the room until I’m in the kitchen jamming a glass of water under the creaky faucet, moistening my dry and aching throat, trying not to choke.
“I needed her, too.” Chase’s words whirl a sick spiral in my head.
I want to chew on the glass, and swallow the shards to puncture my heart.
Chase had never been a liar, and yet, he’d mastered telling the truth all while withholding the core information that sat at its roots.
How did I know that?
Because you didn’t need someone that you purposely spent three years away from, unless there was something you needed more.
It’s why I believe he let go in the midst of our storm.
Grief was the clear answer, but we were both battling that. I knew it was something else.
Perhaps it was drugs. Maybe he’d learned to numb the same way my mother had, and maybe he was trying to save me from all of that.
He knew what it had done to me, how it had violated me, as a daughter who had just wanted to be enough for her mother.
A sick sensation leaks into my gut.
Maybe that was where Chase had been. For three years, quietly numbing. It would make sense, and I hated that—I hated so much that it did.
I worry my bottom lip with my teeth, turn on the faucet, and kill another glass of water.
If he was using, he’d be fucked for life. In my lived experience, I knew that there was no return from a release that reminded you things could be quiet again.
I fight down a tide of rising nausea.
I saw what drugs did to my mother. I’d watched the festering that gnawed behind her hollow eyes.
The kind that took to her pulse and coerced it to beat for the release, for that chemical high.
And the truth is, I never want to experience that again.
If Chase had started using, I believe he knew that too.
It was the only honest explanation for his lengthy absence.
And maybe that was why he was back now, maybe he’d been one of the lucky ones that somehow made it out. But there was a pain inside of me that told me that I didn’t need to know the roots of his truth, that I needed to leave them buried, to abstain from tugging at a possible malignant growth.
I swallow, wrapping my fingers around my throat, then I sink the tips into my carotid, pressing against the heightened beat when a loud bang sounds behind me.
A sharp, single rap. The pound of a fist.
The glass in my hand slips, shattering into the sink, and when I whirl around, grappling for the bench, I catch the meat of my palm on a shard of stray glass jutting out of the countertop.
“Fuck,” I cuss, pressing the wound to my mouth.
I suck back on it, holding my breath, waiting, hoping that it’s him, and also praying that it’s not.
Chase’s voice follows his fists, and even though he is one of the last people I want to see right now, there is someone else…someone that I fear much more that could be standing beyond the door.
“Open the door, Laik.” Chase’s voice is low, racking a shiver through my body.
I suck into my palm harder until blood touches the back of my throat.
“Just go, Chase,” I muffle my words.
I listen to him scoff, and the derisive sound sends something similar to rage thundering through me. Reaching for a piece of glass in a bruised and bloated cloud of fury, I turn and throw it. It shatters against the wall and my heart pulses rapidly behind my ribs.
“I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to be around you. I can’t fucking stand looking at you!” I scream, an echo of the exact same words he’d hurled at me three years ago.
Chase’s voice is surprisingly calm when he repeats, “Open the door.”
He doesn’t use my name this time.
Anger and fear and need propel me forward, and I unhitch the lock. But before I can register what’s happening, before I can catch my next breath, Chase is through it, one hand on my throat, the other at my waist, his forehead pressed to mine, backing me against the wall.
“Didn’t take you for a coward, Laik.”
My statement is received with vehemence. The glare in Laiken’s eyes could cut glass.
Time stands still, but only for a moment.
“You bastard.” She tries shoving me, but I’m quick to catch her wrists.
I jerk her arms down to her side, backing her against the same wall she just flew off. She’s panting, her tits pressing against my chest, her breathing erratic, matching mine.
The grip I have on her is tight enough to hurt, but she isn’t squirming or trying to get away.
Her mouth pops open. Her bottom lip trembles. Her teeth click.
“I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to be around you. I can’t fucking stand looking at you.” Her voice is dead calm, echoing my words back at me, no longer behind closed doors and thin walls.
A muscle in my jaw ticks. I wet my lips. “Too bad. I’m not going anywhere.”
Something dark, almost volatile flickers in Laiken’s deep green eyes. Tension quickens between us.
“You’re too late, Chase.” She presses her hands against my chest, forcing me back.
And I let her slip past. Just this time.
My gaze tracks her as she storms toward the kitchen, the barrel of her gun brushing against the bottom of my spine when I twist. A cold and sharp reminder to make sure she knows what she is doing with it, even though I have no plans on leaving her alone with it.
I curl my arm around to my lower back, dragging the alloy metal out of the waistband of my jeans and throwing it onto the table beside me with a thunk.
She’s at the sink, and spins around, her vacant eyes instantly finding the culprit of the thud. She keeps them there, recognition flickering. Dark and terrified. Determined.
“You know how to use it?” I ask, again.
“Fuck you,” she bites, then she levels her eyes to mine.
And when I stare back at the only girl in this world I give a single damn about, all I see is hell in her eyes, a deeper subtext layering into the chill between us. Crossing my arms at my chest, I drop my shoulders to the wall behind me, asking her what I’d wanted to a couple of nights ago.
“Why was I your flinch?”
She freezes. Time stretches. She knew exactly what I was asking. The truth she handed me the other night when she’d told me that every time she’d tongued the barrel of her gun she’d seen me.
“I was so fucking scared, and you left me. Do you know how many times over the past three years I was ready to do what my father did? What my mother did? How many times I have cried helplessly against the barrel in my mouth? Do you know how many times I just wanted to end the…”
Agony trickles down my spine.
“Because I couldn’t stop seeing you.”
My sister's best friend laughs, and the sound is one I do not recognize.
She spins around, offering me her back, and I instantly try to swim my way through her wave of levity as she lays her palms flat to the countertop, dropping her head between her shoulders. The sad sound becomes a ghostly echo, and it chills me to the bone.
The small room is eerily quiet now. The only sounds are our breaths, choppy waves we attempt keeping at bay with our hearts.
I cast my eyes to the floor, looking at the shimmering shards of the glass she’d thrown at the wall.
“Get out.” Laiken’s voice is nothing but cold.
I don’t move.
I watch her grind her palms into the broken glass at the countertop, tracking the lines of crimson that follow as she savagely opens the flesh at her hands.
And she doesn’t flinch when she does it, simmering instead, “Right now.”
I stay still, pulverizing my molars.
Laiken had always had a temper, and I had always had a bad way of feeding off it.
I jerk my chin, even though she isn’t looking at me.
“Cut deeper, Laik. I dare you to feel something.”
That got her, there’s the girl I remember.
She spins around, pressing her palms into the glass deeper at her sides, shaking her head.
“You make me fucking sick.” The words hiss through her teeth. They do nothing else but dump adrenaline through me. “In here,” she presses her hand to her flat stomach, then to her temple. “Here.” Laying her palm over her heart, she finishes, “And right fucking here.”
“Do I?” I take one calculated step forward, toward her, lifting my chin higher. “Then why was I your flinch, Laiken?”
She laughs again, pushing off the counter, and when I take another step, reaching for her, she hits my arm away, pointing to the front door.
“Get the fuck out, Chase!” She’s panting, her chest heaving.
“Of my house, of my business, of my fucking life. Just get the fuck out!” She screeches now.
“You have no right…no goddamn right to pry open doors you…” She points at me now.
“Permanently shut.” She wets her lips. Her finger trembles.
“I don’t want you, and I don’t…fucking need you. You mean nothing to me.”
Her last few words fall on a whisper, along with a tear she savagely shoves away.
I’m nodding, pressing back, moving away, giving her a once over. Her arms are akimbo, and anger scrawls across her face.