Chapter 15
Darcy sits cross-legged on a bench under a streetlight, curled over a book in her lap. She sent me to get the ice cream while she secured our spot, and she’s never without something to read.
I take a moment to look at her from a safe distance, the way her hair falls over her shoulder, thumbnail between her teeth as her eyes trail down the page.
“Whatcha reading?” I ask, pulling her out of her trance as I sit across from her on the bench.
She looks up at me with a cheeky smile, taking her ice cream cone. “Three guesses.”
“More gargoyle erotica?”
Her lips quirk as she tries to keep a straight face. “No, I finished that one, but I did want to discuss incorporating a passage as a monologue between songs at our next show.”
“Request approved. It will be a lovely surprise for Kale.”
“Bold of you to assume he isn’t the one that introduced me to the banging gargoyles.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me that he emotionally resonates with stone.”
Darcy laughs, and the sound lights a candle in my chest. I try to cool it down with a bite of ice cream. “Next guess?”
I make a show of tapping my chin. “Everyone Poops?”
“Obviously. Have to stay in tune with the wonders of my ever-changing body.” She waves a hand down her torso, and I have to keep my eyes glued to her forehead so they don’t linger anywhere they definitely shouldn’t.
I grasp the wrist of her hand holding the book, turning it so I can see the cover. Pride and Prejudice.
I should’ve known.
I study Darcy’s worn copy that she’s had for years, its scars and cracks along the spine.
Along with romance novels, she’s one of those people who genuinely enjoys reading classic literature and somehow manages not to be pretentious about it, and Pride and Prejudice is her most read. It’s how she got her name, after all.
Darcy’s parents have told her from the time she was born how much they’d hoped she would be a boy.
Mrs. Burton always finds a way to talk about how badly she wanted to raise a little boy to become a striking, romantic man like Fitzwilliam Darcy or some weird, emotionally incestuous shit like that.
I can’t think of anyone more opposite from cool, aloof book Darcy than my bubbly, insatiably charming real Darcy.
She’s spent most of her life compensating for not being the perfect son her parents wanted by trying to be the perfect daughter they could tolerate.
If a toddler could be classified as Type A, Darcy would have been the blueprint.
When we were little she was rigid in her ways, playdates and tea parties held with a decorum fit for a queen.
Schoolwork and grades came first, our music a guilty pleasure she hid from her parents as study sessions.
It wasn’t until year ten that she finally realized she could snap her spine in two for her parents’ approval, and it still wouldn’t be enough.
They’ve always quietly accused me of corrupting their daughter—her pink hair and septum piercing and love of music all my fault—and I secretly love the idea that maybe I did. Maybe I was lucky enough to play some small part in helping her unlock her cage.
“I haven’t seen you read this in a while,” I say, dragging the pad of my thumb over the worn edges of the pages. “Not since we tried to pierce our cartilages.”
Darcy lets out a startled laugh, then sighs, taking a few licks from her ice cream cone. “God, that was a night, wasn’t it?”
We’d just graduated from high school. Darcy had waited until the final hour to tell her parents she wasn’t taking her spot at university and instead was going to try to make our music really work.
They’d kicked her out of the house on the spot, saying they didn’t raise some useless lowlife. She’d shown up sobbing on my doorstep, makeup smeared down her cheeks, and I’d pulled her to me immediately, not needing to know any details, only that she was hurting.
That wasn’t the first time they’d given her the boot for speaking up about what she actually wanted out of life. Every few months there was some issue or another that brought us back to this point—Darcy crying at their latest cut as I tried to stitch her back up.
After she’d filled me in, I’d swallowed down my rage at her parents and spent the rest of the night trying to make Darcy delusionally happy, which somehow resulted in us poking needles in our earlobes, neither one of us brave enough to get it all the way through, until we were both crying and laughing and holding each other with swollen, bloody ears.
When we’d slipped into the quiet of our thoughts a little later, she’d pulled out her book, the sound of the turning pages like a lullaby as we both found a sense of peace—her in the book, me in her presence.
“I think about that night a lot,” she says, voice rough and eyes fixed on her dessert.
“What about it?”
Darcy swallows, and I watch the movement of her throat, the flutter of her pulse at the hollow between her collarbones. I have the sharp urge to press my lips to the spot.
“I don’t know…” She lets out a long stream of air between pursed lips. “Just how much it meant to me.”
“Meant we had to get on antibiotics for our botched piercings,” I joke, trying to escape the thick tension between us with a laugh. It’s delicate and precious and my impulse is to break it before it breaks me, before I seek comfort in it only for it to be ripped away. She doesn’t take the bait.
“I’m serious. It meant so much to me. Means so much to me,” she whispers in a way that has me leaning toward her, hanging on every word.
“I was choking on this idea of my life, losing myself more and more every day to try to be what they wanted. Something about that night … How you let me be sad and angry and impulsive and myself … You pulled me out. You were always pulling me out.”
I see the pain crawl across her beautiful features, sitting heavy and hurtful at the corners of her eyes. I grab her hand, not wanting her to sink too far into the bad memories.
She stares at our hands, breathing hard.
Then she settles her features, fixing a smile on her face.
Lifting her head, she steals a bite of my strawberry ice cream and I squawk in outrage, pushing her away with my palm against her chest. She laughs, smile turning more genuine.
With a puppy-dog look, she tilts her cone of maple bacon toward me as a truce, but I wave her away.
I’m a habitual strawberry girl, the perfect mix of sweet and tart.
Darcy has never ordered the same flavor twice, always trying something new and adventurous, and she instructed me to get her whatever seemed the weirdest on the menu.
She consumes ice cream in the same way she consumes life, like there are too many amazing things to try for her to linger on a safe choice.
I take another lick, then flinch at a shock of pain that zips along my jaw from the cold.
No. Not ice cream. I can accept a lot of betrayal, but not from ice cream.
I make a mental note to floss more (and by more, I mean at all) and brush better.
It’s gross, but I haven’t been doing that simple act of hygiene as often as I should.
I wake up feeling so empty and depleted every morning that it would take a Herculean effort to lift the toothbrush to my mouth, and I’m so drained by the time night rolls around I collapse face-first on my shitty mattress because neglecting myself is easier than trying.
“How are you getting on with the new song?” Darcy asks, tucking her book in her bag.
“Which one?” We have a dozen half-baked at this point that loop around my brain at all hours of the night.
Darcy takes a savoring lick of her ice cream, and my stomach swoops, heat pooling low and fast as the image of her tongue ingrains itself in my mind—the smooth glide, the perfect pink of it, the quick flick of the tip across her full bottom lip as she licks up a creamy drop.
I clear my throat, looking away and shifting on the bench.
She starts to hum, and I clock the beat.
Ignorance is bliss, I’d lose myself to forget your kiss.
Cuz these memories, they haunt me,
All the things we used to be.
It all slipped like water through the cracks of my hands,
Now I’m dying of thirst in our no-man’s-land.
I’d accidentally typed the rough lyrics in our shared note instead of my private lyric folder, and she’d jumped on them, wanting to work out a melody as soon as she read them. She thinks the song is about Connor. I will go to my grave lying to her that she’s right.
“I’ve put it away for now,” I say with a shrug.
“May she rest in peace,” Darcy whispers, making a quick sign of the cross and dipping her chin to her chest. We’ve buried enough unfinished songs between us that this is nothing new. “But also … why? It was so good. I loved the direction it was heading.”
I shrug again, looking off to the side. A curl of wind blows my hair across my face, and I hope it hides the emotions burning along my cheeks. “It … it hurts to work on.”
Darcy makes a sound deep in the back of her throat, and her free hand lands on mine, squeezing tight.
“It all hurts to work on,” I whisper. I find the backbone to look at her, and understanding is etched across her face.
“I know, Cubby love.”
I let out a shaky breath, shoulders slouching in relief. Darcy always gets it. Harry brings out my light and playful side, the parts people on social media like to see, but Darcy brings out me.
She leans forward, wrapping her arms around me. We get ice cream on each other, but neither of us care. All that matters is this warm hug on this old bench in this tiny town.
“Creating something always feels like breaking a bone just to document its healing,” she says as she pulls away. “And sometimes it’s hard to pick which bone to break.”
I nod, then shake my head. “Yeah, but I don’t think that’s my issue. I know what I want to talk about. What sore spots I want to poke at and write down the results.”