Chapter 4
One Night, Twelve Years Ago
Bea
It’s dark and loud in the gym. The oscillating strobe lights streak across my vision, and heat pours off the gyrating bodies around me.
“I gotta pee!” she shouts back.
I put my palms together and stick them above my head like a shark fin. She grabs my waist from behind and follows me through the hormone-addled waters of our fellow grinding teens.
“Your ass looks unreal in this dress!” Merritt hollers over my shoulder.
I wiggle my hips side to side. “I know! Your boobs look fake in yours!”
I can barely make out her bubbly laugh above the din. “You always know just what to say!”
We reach the edge of the crush, and I let out a dramatic sound of relief when we hit fresh air.
“Drink table’s that way,” Merritt says, pointing off to a corner.
“But I gotta go now, and I saw a line. I’ll meet you over here when I’m done.
” She starts walking backward in the direction of the bathrooms and does a shimmy at me.
I wolf whistle back. “Unless Ian grows a pair and asks you to dance!” she calls out in singsong.
“Merritt!” I yell, my head whipping around to the side to make sure he wasn’t in earshot of that.
One month ago, I made a passing comment about Ian Carver being cute, and since then, she’s had her mind set on fixing me up with him.
I’m not interested and have said as much, but she seems to think I was kidding and continues bringing it up.
I think she imagines that if I get with Ian, she’ll naturally get together with his best friend, Silas.
We already hang out with them all the time, and nothing has progressed beyond flirting, and we flirt with everyone.
Merritt is especially adept at it. The only flirt bigger than she is is probably Silas himself.
He and Ian are a grade above us, but Spunes kids always seem to stick together.
I am also actively avoiding this conversation since I have been hiding the fact that Silas asked me to this very dance a few weeks ago.
“Go to prom with me, Marshall,” he’d said, leaning against my old Tacoma after school one sunny day.
He’d been covered in fresh grass stains and smelled like spring.
Gold chain around his neck. I heard he managed to convince the athletic director to let him mow the fields for extra credit in history.
No one bats an eye at him charming his way into special treatment.
I anxiously scoffed before I recovered myself. “I—can’t.”
His head cocked in surprise. Silas rarely hears no about anything, I imagine.
He is the hottest guy in school and has the audacity to be smart and funny and, worst of all, generally decent.
He is also extremely aware of this and manages to limit his arrogance to a level that can still be considered charming.
“Can’t?” he’d said, taking a step closer.
“Can’t,” I’d confirmed. “But we should . . . Actually, Merritt and I were talking about us all going in a group together, anyway.”
Another head tilt. A chuff and a grin. “So, what you actually mean is you won’t.”
Merritt was at soccer practice, but I looked around, anyway. She has pined for Silas Byrd in one way or another for as long as I’ve known her, and this would’ve killed her if she heard.
“I mean I can’t, Si.”
“How come?”
“You know why.” He had to know. It wasn’t my place to lay it out for him, to expose Merritt’s feelings. But he knew.
He looked down at his shoes. Rubbed a veiny hand over his chin. No boy should have those forearms at seventeen.
“We’re friends,” he’d said, and I knew he was referring to himself and Merritt.
He could’ve asked anyone. Any of the seniors. Anyone else in my class, too. That one track star who was rumored to have a full ride to U of O, who told everyone that he gave her her first orgasm last fall. He could’ve asked Merritt, the most beautiful girl in the entire school. Anyone but me.
“So are we,” I replied.
He’d only sighed and taken another step. So close I had to lift my chin to look into his eyes.
“So. A group thing, huh? I guess that sounds cool.” He put on his best good-sport smile. “On one condition.”
Back in the gym, I hear the song change to something slow. The air behind me shifts.
“Time to pay up, Marshall,” Silas says at my back.
I close my eyes and gather my nerve. A dance.
It’s just a dance. All I have to do is give him one dance, and Merritt won’t ever have to know he asked me to be his date.
If she comes out of the bathroom and sees us, maybe she won’t even think too much of it.
Maybe she’ll assume I looked lonely and pathetic on the sidelines, and Silas simply wanted to be a good friend.
I turn on a heel, grabbing him by the wrist and hauling him deeper into the crowd. When I think we’re shielded on all sides, I throw my arms over his shoulders with a huff. His amused laugh brushes across my sweat-dampened temple.
“Try your best to endure it, Red,” he says with a low chuckle.
I make a critical mistake by looking up at him.
I experience the same jolt I get around him sometimes, like the snap of a rubber band between my ribs.
It was the same when Merritt sat in his lap three weeks ago at a bonfire on the beach and his eyes immediately cut to mine, and like any other time we’ve been in a group and I’ve looked his way, only to find him already looking at me.
Like we’re in on some secret no one else is.
It’s the same every time he’s ever touched me, too.
Like when I nearly stumbled on some rocks at Founder’s Point until his hands caught me from behind, fingertips slipping under my shirt.
When his knee pressed up against my thigh in organic chemistry last week.
It frazzles me, and I refuse to let some guy frazzle me.
Especially the guy my best friend has carried a torch for since we were ten.
“Silas, I’m not interested in hurting my friend,” I say. He laughs again, and I bristle. “I’m not sure why that’s funny to you.”
His face goes uncharacteristically serious, and my heart starts to race. It is such a rare expression on him that I find it even more disorienting.
“Because I know you don’t want to, and I don’t want you to, either, but I think interested was . . . an interesting word choice,” he says.
“If you don’t want me to, why’d you make me agree to this?” I complain.
“If you’ll recall correctly, I said I’d agree to the group thing if you agreed to a dance,” he says, just this side of frustrated.
“You’re the one who then said you’d dance with me if I never told Merritt I asked you.
I wasn’t the one who made that a condition, Bea.
All you had to do was ask me not to tell her, and I would’ve agreed.
” He searches my face and clenches his jaw once.
“I think you’re projecting whatever guilt you’ve got onto me because you do, in fact, feel guilty. ”
We’ve stopped moving, but our arms are still wrapped around each other. “Why the hell would I feel guilty?! I turned you down.”
His nostrils flare, and something swoops in my stomach.
“Good question. Why would you feel guilty unless you actually had something to feel guilty about?” His palm presses harder into my lower back. One of his thumbs sinks into the flesh of my hip. “I think maybe because part of you wanted to say yes. Maybe because part of you was interested.”
My mouth falls open before I snap it shut. There’s a heartbeat in every place his hands are on me.
I don’t know why I don’t lie. Why I don’t roll my eyes at him and make some quip about his inflated ego.
“It doesn’t matter” is what I say instead. “She’s my best friend, and I would never. I will never.”
His eyes soften again. He looks away briefly and moves us back into a rhythm. “You know what they say about nevers.”
“I mean it,” I tell him, my voice melancholy. Resigned. “Not ever.”
A quarter smile lifts at his mouth. “I got it. Guess we better just enjoy our dance, then.”
So, we do. After the chorus comes around again, I try for small talk.
I ask him if he’s excited for his postgraduation plans, and he says yes.
The last time we had all spoken about it, he’d said he was going to get into the nearest fire academy to become a firefighter like his brother.
He asks me if I’m excited for senior year, if I’m excited to be the official Queen Bea.
I brush it off, telling him I’m more excited to get through one more year so I can head off to college, wherever Merritt and I can both get in.
“I don’t know,” Silas says. “I bet you’ll miss this place.” I don’t dignify this with a response other than an unimpressed, doubtful shrug.
“I get that this probably doesn’t make me very cool,” he adds, “but I hope someone will keep me posted on Whitley and Halsberg. I know there’s something going on there.”
I let out a laugh at that. He’s convinced our principal and English teacher are secretly dating. He is also convinced that Miss Whitley is moonlighting as an erotica author on the side.
“I’m telling you, I know I saw G. K. Whit written in a doc on her laptop that one day. And she asked me if I knew a synonym for swelled that other time.”
I don’t know why it delights me to imagine him still caring about anything that goes on here after he’s gone. Or why I automatically equate his nosiness to caring at all, rather than just plain nosiness. I am so ready for somewhere bigger I can’t imagine missing anything about this place.
Still. “I’ll keep you up to date on any hot goss, Si,” I say.
“Yeah?” he asks brightly.
“Yeah.”
His grin sprawls outward, and I get a little caught in it.
“You know it, right?” he says, so close the words kiss my cheeks. “You know you look beautiful tonight.” He sighs, and it sounds pained. “You always do.”
I give in to the urge to trace a finger up the back of his neck and twist into one of his wavy curls, running over the clasp of his chain on the way.
“You know you look good, too.” So good it’s honestly annoying.
I lean my head into his chest and close my eyes, the scent of his cologne and boutonniere in my nose.
I keep my eyes shut when he tips my chin up, when I feel him studying my face.
I clench them tighter and hold my breath when he slides his thumb over my brow, swooping along my cheekbone before it travels a path across my jaw.
I sense him hesitate before he brings it to my bottom lip.
I put the tiniest bit of pressure against it.
Only the suggestion of a kiss. His hand comes to rest in the nook beside my throat for the remainder of the song, his palm warm against my collarbone.
When the last of the music fades away, I force myself to pull back, and some of my hair catches in his rose.
“Bea?”
I turn too fast toward Merritt and stumble an extra step away from Silas. It’s a series of jumpy movements only a guilty person would do.
Her stare bounces between us. But Silas—when I glance anxiously at him, Silas is still looking at me. I turn back to Merritt in time to see her eyes fill with tears, just before she whirls around and runs off.