Chapter 44 – Josie
chapter
forty-four
Josie
The first text came while Lena was painting my nails.
My phone buzzed against my thigh. I didn’t reach for it. Lena had my right hand pinned to a magazine, and I didn’t need to look anyway. After all this time, I knew his pattern. He sent quick bursts of texts like that when he’d decided I’d done something.
It buzzed again, and then a third time.
“You can look,” Lena said, not looking up. Her voice was warm, but it got tighter the way it always did when Marcus came up. “I’m doing your left hand anyway.”
Trace was sprawled on the other end of the couch with his eyes on Lena instead of the TV, the way he always was when she was in the room. Kimmy was in her four o’clock lab for another hour, which was the only reason the apartment was quiet.
I picked up the phone with my unpainted hand.
Marcus: where are you
Marcus: drove by your building, car’s there but you’re not answering. who are you with
Marcus: answer me
It buzzed again before I’d set it down.
Marcus: so this is what you do now. ignoring me. real classy
Marcus: I know what you’ve been doing. I saw what you were wearing today. you looked like a slut in that sweater. my girlfriend wouldn’t dress like that. or was it not for me
I read it through twice. It didn’t hurt. Somewhere in the last few days, it had stopped hurting. I just needed to be sure he’d actually typed that word and sent it. He had.
“Josie.” Trace had sat up. He wasn’t looking at the TV anymore. “Your face just changed. What is it?”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” Lena held the brush up over the bottle and looked at me. “What did he send you?”
“He called me a slut,” I said. “Because I didn’t answer fast enough.”
I was done with Marcus, with the charade and the pretending. It was killing me.
Lena set the brush down in the bottle, and Trace set the pillow aside slowly and got to his feet.
“Okay,” he said. “What do you need?”
My chest loosened for the first time in days.
“I need to say it to his face,” I said. “Today. Right now, before I think about it long enough to be scared.”
Neither of them told me not to. Lena just looked at me for one long second and nodded, and Trace was already reaching for his keys.
“I’m driving you,” he said. It wasn’t a question, and I didn’t argue.
Trace didn’t try to fill the silence, and I loved him for it.
He pulled up to Kappa Nu and cut the engine. Down the gravel, past the main house, one window in Waylon’s cottage was lit, so he was home. Trace looked at it, then at me. “I’m gonna text Way,” he said. “Not to come up. Just so he’s not blindsided if it gets loud. That okay?”
I thought about all the reasons this was mine to do alone, and they were good reasons. But I wasn’t alone. I had Waylon.
“Yeah. Okay.”
His thumbs moved over the phone. Then he looked at me again. “You don’t have to do the brave thing for me. You can just be a person about to do a hard thing.”
I almost lost it right there in the front seat of his stupid-expensive car, but I didn’t, and I got out and walked up the dead yard and the crooked steps and into the house.
Two brothers were playing something loud on the console and didn’t look up. I went up the stairs and stopped outside Marcus’s door.
I wasn’t going to sit down, and I wasn’t going to raise my voice. Yelling had never changed anything with him. Marcus had heard me for years.
I knocked twice, and he opened on the second, phone in his hand, sweats, and a look that said I was interrupting something.
His room was the one neat thing in a house full of mess.
The gray bedding was pulled tight, the desk was bare except for a single framed photograph of a building, and the closet was closed on whatever he didn’t want seen.
In all the years I’d known him, it had never once looked lived in.
He’d staged himself a girlfriend the same way, I thought, and my stomach dropped.
I stood three feet inside the door and let him close it on the noise of the house.
“I need to say something to you.”
Marcus set his phone on the desk, face up, and leaned back against the edge of it. “Let me save you the trouble. I don’t listen to cheating sluts.”
“I ended this weeks ago. I stood right there and told you we were done, and you nodded like you heard me, and then you spent weeks acting like I never said it. So I’m not here to break up with you, Marcus.
I already did. I’m here because you couldn’t take the hint, like some delusional stalker who won’t take no for an answer.
So I’m going to make it stick. Do what you want with it.
I’m done. I’m free. Consider yourself blocked. ”
His jaw tightened, just at the corner. “That’s not how it went.”
“It’s exactly how it went. But I’m not here to fight you about the story — tell people whatever you want. Tell them you dumped me. Tell them I’m crazy. I don’t care anymore. We’re done.”
Neither of us said anything for a second.
“You think you get to decide that,” he said.
“I already did. That’s the part you never understood.”
His face shifted into the injured look.
“After everything I’ve done for you.” He bit off each word.
His hand settled on the back of the desk chair, knuckles going white.
“You think you just get to walk out of here and keep everything you’ve got?
Your spot at this school? You have no idea how fast my family can make a problem for someone. ”
Not long ago, that would have wrecked me.
“I’m not going to stand here and be threatened,” I said. “I’m telling you it’s over.”
“I saved you.” His voice dropped, which was always worse than loud. “I’ve been the only person holding your life together, and you’re walking away like I’m nothing.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
The injured look dropped away, and what was under it was colder. He pushed off the desk and closed the distance, and his voice started to climb.
“Who is it?”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“Who is it, Josie?” Louder now and close enough that I could smell his cologne.
“It doesn’t matter. There’s no version where I stay.”
“It’s Waylon.” He wasn’t asking. He’d already figured it out, and saying the name out loud set him off. The careful voice was gone. “It’s the Bridgeport charity case. You’re throwing away everything I built for him?”
“I’m not throwing anything away. I’m leaving. Goodbye, Marcus.”
I turned for the door. His hand clamped around my wrist and yanked me back, and he shouted loud enough to rattle the thin walls.
“You don’t get to leave. You’re mine. You have always been mine. Do you understand me? You don’t —”
The door hit the wall hard enough to knock the framed photograph off its nail.
Waylon was in the doorway, and I’d never seen his face like that. I’d seen him cold, and careful, and soft at five in the morning with frost in his eyelashes, but this was none of those.
His eyes went to Marcus’s hand on my wrist, then to Marcus, and he came across the room like a man on a mission.
If Waylon hit him, it would cost Waylon everything and Marcus nothing, so I got there first.
His hand was still on my wrist, his chin up and turned toward Waylon, not toward me.
He’d stopped seeing me as a threat a long time ago, the same way he’d stopped seeing me as a person.
Before I’d thought it through, I dropped my weight and brought my free fist up off my hip into the soft underside of his jaw.
His teeth clacked together, and his head snapped back, and the hand on my wrist let go.
He staggered into the desk, put a hand to his mouth, and it came away red — split lip, blood on his teeth, blood on the back of his pale hand. He stared at it like he couldn’t believe I’d done it.
The room had gone quiet. Even the bass downstairs had stopped.
Waylon froze two steps in, and his eyes came to me.
“Josie,” he said.
My hand throbbed where I’d hit him. Whatever had kept me steady for days was used up in that one swing, and my hands were finally shaking.
“Take me home,” I said. I didn’t say it to Marcus because I would never say anything to Marcus again. I looked at Waylon and said it lower, and my voice broke on it. “Please. I don’t want to be here. Take me home.”
He didn’t so much as look at Marcus. He stepped over the fallen photograph, put his body between me and the room, and closed his hand around my shaking one, careful of the knuckles.
“Yeah, Flash,” he said. “Let’s go home.”