Chapter 3
Melly
I wake to the taste of something foul in my mouth and the kind of headache that lives behind your eyes.
For a long moment, I don’t move. I don’t open my eyes properly.
I let them crack just enough to register the low-amber light bleeding around the edges of the curtains.
My pillow is damp on one side where my cheek has been pressed against it for hours. My hair is stuck to my neck.
Someone is asleep beside me. And when I finally turn my head, slowly, like my skull is a glass I might tip and shatter, I see Mila Brooks.
My best friend. We used to have homeroom together in the sixth grade, and I cannot imagine my life without her.
She’s on her stomach, one arm hanging off the edge of the mattress with her hair fanned out across the pillow in a dark, tangled spill.
Her mouth is slightly open like I imagine mine just was.
There is a thin line of drool on her cheek.
I try to put the night back together in pieces, and I can’t.
I have flashes of Mila’s hand wrapped around my wrist like a tourniquet as she dragged me out of the kitchen at the Hawthorne House.
I remember Chase’s tone when he told me for hundredth time that he wanted to leave.
I remember stumbling in my bathroom –– my new bathroom, the bathroom in the apartment I still cannot believe I get to live in — as I brushed my teeth and watched my own swaying reflection in the mirror like she was a stranger.
The rest of it is nothing. A black space where there should be memory.
I turn my head again, more carefully this time, and that’s when I see Chase on the floor.
He’s stretched out in the navy sleeping bag he keeps rolled up behind the seat of his truck for jobs that run late, for emergencies, for nights like last night when his girlfriend gets too drunk and blacks out.
The bag is unzipped to the middle of his sternum.
His arms are out, folded loosely over the top of it, and even in this dim, forgiving light, I can see the freckles along his forearms, the small white scar on his elbow from the time he tried to fix his mom’s gutter without a ladder, the curve of muscle that comes from a year and a half of hauling equipment around job sites with his father.
He’s awake. His phone is held just over his chest, the screen washing his face from underneath in a pale-blue glow that makes him look younger than twenty-one.
His jaw is shadowed with the rough stubble he hasn’t shaved in a couple of weeks.
His hair is flat on one side. There’s a pillow crease pressed into his cheek.
He has no idea I’m watching him. And for a moment, I let myself look at him the way I used to.
Back when I was nineteen and brand new to him, when his attention felt like something important.
He’s handsome. The kind of objectively handsome that other girls notice in Walmart.
Strong jaw. Kind eyes. He is, in every measurable way, a good man.
And the truth that has been sitting at the back of my throat for months rises up again now in the quiet of this room.
But I silence it because a good man should be enough.
I shift, and the mattress creaks beneath me, and the spell breaks.
His head comes up. The phone goes dark against his chest in one quick motion.
“Good morning,” he says, and his voice is rough with sleep, soft around the edges.
“Morning.”
“How are you feeling?”
I have to think about that. I have to actually run the question through whatever filter is still working up there and decide what the honest answer is and how honest I’m willing to be.
“Like I owe somebody an apology,” I mumble into the pillow.
He almost smiles. The corner of his mouth lifts, and his eyes crinkle.
“Yeah,” he agrees, gently.
I push up onto one elbow. The room tilts. The headache pulses harder, indignant about being made to participate in movement.
“What time is it?”
“Six-forty.”
I scrunch my face. “Why are you awake?”
“Couldn’t sleep.” He sits up inside the sleeping bag, raking a hand through his flattened hair to wake it up, but it does nothing. “Wanted to beat the traffic. My dad’s wrapping the Whitlock job today, and I told him I’d come in for a few hours tomorrow to make some of the hours back.”
“Oh.”
“I should head out.”
“Now?”
“Should’ve left fifteen minutes ago, honestly.” His mouth pulls into a slow, sheepish grin. “I’ve just been pulling at your toes to try and wake you up.”
The laugh is out of me before I can stop it, muffled into the blanket I drag up over my face.
Of course, he has been lying there on the floor of my bedroom, trying to coax me awake by yanking gently on my toes through the covers, because he cannot bring himself to leave without saying goodbye, even though I would understand if he had. That is who he is.
He’s already moving. His duffel is by the door, packed. His boots are paired up next to it, laces tucked inside. I notice that he showered. I didn’t even hear the water run. His hair is darker at the temples, where it isn’t yet dry.
“I’ll walk you out,” I say.
“You don’t have to.”
“Say less.” I fall back against the pillow and look up at this man who has been mine for two years and who is, slowly, day by day, becoming someone distant. I know he feels it too. I’ve felt it for some time.
He crosses the room and brushes my hair off my forehead with the back of one knuckle, and the touch is so featherlight that guilt cracks my chest open. I’m well aware that I must have kicked him out of my bed last night, and I hope I didn’t say anything stupid.
He kisses my forehead. His lips are warm and dry, and they linger for a second longer than they need to. The smell of him is so familiar — soap, the cedar of his deodorant, the faintest trace of his work truck — that I close my eyes against it like the smell itself might somehow undo me.
“I’ll see you later,” he murmurs.
“Text me when you get home.”
He nods. Once. Decisive. Like a man taking an order.
And then he’s gone — duffel in one hand, boots tucked under the other arm, the soft click of the bedroom door behind him so quiet I almost don’t hear it.
I lie there in the warm dent of the mattress and stare up at the ceiling.
I should feel something more than I do. He didn’t ask why my best friend ended up in our bed and not him.
He didn’t ask the questions I have been bracing for, the questions I keep waiting for him to ask, so I won’t have to be the one to start.
He just kissed my forehead and went. And I — selfishly, horribly, ungratefully — let him.
I roll onto my side and pull the blanket up to my chin and close my eyes against the shape of all of it. The headache moves with me, sloshing.
I’m asleep again within minutes.
It’s after nine when I wake up the second time, and the world has tilted into something more forgiving.
The light is full now. Mila is just beginning to stir, groaning into her pillow.
My hangover is still there, oh, it is absolutely still there, but it has been demoted from siege to occupation.
I can negotiate with it. I can move around it.
I shuffle down the hall in last night’s t-shirt and make coffee, because making coffee is the one thing I know how to do unfailingly, even when everything inside my skull is rioting.
The smell of it fills the kitchen, dark and bitter and grounding, and I press the heels of my hands against my eye sockets while the machine hisses and gurgles and try to remember how to be a person.
I carry two cups back down the hall.
Mila is sitting up against the headboard when I push the door open with my hip — hair a complete tragedy, last night’s mascara smudged in dark half-moons under her eyes, my borrowed t-shirt slipping down over one bare shoulder.
She looks like a girl in a music video about regret, and when she sees the coffee, her whole face changes.
She makes a small, wounded sound. She holds out both hands like a child.
“Oh, my god. I love you. I love you. I love you so much.”
“It’s nice and warm. Don’t spill it.”
She takes a slow sip with her eyes closed and groans like the coffee has personally saved her life, and I climb back into the bed beside her.
I lean my shoulder against the headboard, and for a long, blissful minute, we don’t speak.
We just sit there, side by side, and breathe, and let the heat of the mugs seep into our palms, and it is so good I could cry.
This is all I ever dreamed of.
Every time she would FaceTime me in her Camden U dorm, I envisioned these days, and they’re finally here.
And somehow it’s even better than I could imagine.
The room is warm. The bed is warm. The hangover sits on my chest like a small, fat cat, heavy but no longer trying to claw me.
I am not, thank God, a vomiter. I have always been grateful to my body for that one small mercy.
Whatever I drink, my body just absorbs and processes like an industrial filter, leaving me with the headache and the dry mouth and the spiritual remorse, but nothing more dramatic than that.
“Your roommate,” Mila says, eventually, in the voice of a girl who has been chewing on her thoughts. “Is so chic,” she goes on. “It’s aggressively offensive. She walked in here last night in that coat.”
I smile into the rim of my cup. The coat.
God, the coat. Camel-colored, belted at the waist, soft as butter.
Penelope had drifted in from the party, her cheeks pink with cold, the hem of that coat brushing the back of her knees, and she had smiled at the two of us — at me, swaying slightly against the kitchen counter, at Mila, raiding the cabinets for water — and she had said, I’m so happy you girls came, it was a lovely night, and then she had gone to her room and closed her door.
“Yeah,” I say. “That coat was incredible.”
“I love her.”
I smile because I do too.
“I think she likes me.”
I agree. “I think she does.”