Riot (17 page)

He’s staring at a picture that was taken when I was around three. I have little chocolate curls everywhere, and my mom is holding me on her lap. My dad is standing behind her with his hand on her shoulder, smiling and looking as handsome as ever. But my mom is the one shining bright at the center of the photo, wearing my olive skin, my high cheekbones, and my smooth lips.

“Yeah,” I answer, because what else can I say?

“You look just like her,” he says, and I inwardly cringe.

“I know.”

“Are you ever going to tell me about her?” Joel asks, turning on me.

“Do I have to?” I ask. It’s a smartass question, but he answers anyway.

“I’d like you to . . .”

When I walk out to the living room, he follows me. I flop down on the couch, and he sits beside me.

“I told you about
my
mom,” he says, and I know, I know he did. I know I should open up to him like he did to me. And it’s not that I can’t. It’s just that I don’t want to. I didn’t plan for him to show up at my house, or for him to become best friends with my dad, or for him to get invited to Easter dinner. I didn’t plan or want or ask for him to be here.

“Mine isn’t worth talking about,” I say.

“So she’s alive . . .”

“Unfortunately.” Guilt hits me the minute I say it. I don’t actually wish she was dead, but I’ve gotten used to ignoring the shame I feel every time I wish it on her. It’s always been easier than missing her.

When Joel starts to speak again, I cut him off. “Joel, look. You’ve seen my house. You’ve slept in my bed. You’ve met my dad. Can’t that be enough for now?”

I know he wants to get to know me. I’m aware that what’s going on between us is more than just sex now. But I didn’t ask him to come here, and it’s not fair for him to expect that I’m going to bare my soul to him just because he showed up at my bedroom window in the middle of the night.

He searches my face for a long moment, and then he sighs and sits back against the couch, tugging me against his side. “I like your dad,” he says after a while, and I could kiss him for changing the subject.

“I can tell.”

“He loves you.”

“I know.”

“We have a lot in common.”

I tilt my chin up to search his face, to see if he just implied what I think he did, but he kisses my forehead and turns on the TV and it’s like he never said anything at all.

Chapter Nineteen

W
AKING UP IN
my old room is always kind of strange. Like waking up in a past life. It’s easy to imagine that moving away for college was a series of dreams. That the people I’ve met are all just characters my subconscious invented to teach me life lessons.

Leti, to teach me to be more open. Adam, to teach me that anything is possible. Cody, to teach me to always go for the eyes.

And Joel, who seems to be teaching me a lot of things.

Last night, he agreed to stay for Easter dinner, and my dad set him up in the spare room. When it got late, we all went our separate ways, and I lay in bed for what seemed like forever wondering if Joel was actually going to stay in his own room all night. I waited for him until my eyelids got too heavy to hold open, and then I drifted off.

I was sleeping when my door creaked open and he slipped into my room. He closed it silently behind him, and the mattress behind me sunk low.

“I thought you weren’t going to come,” I whispered into the dark as his arm wrapped around me and pulled me tight.

“I wasn’t going to,” he whispered back, nuzzling my hair away from my neck and kissing my sensitive skin.

If I wasn’t still half asleep, that kiss would have been enough to have me turning over in his arms to feel his lips in a million other places. Instead, I stayed facing away from him, my eyes closed and my body languid. I expected him to keep kissing me, to wake my body up so that the rest of me would follow. Instead, he simply snuggled tighter against me and held me until I fell back asleep.

In my dreams, I asked him why he came to my room if he wasn’t planning to, why he drove more than three hundred miles just to see me. But I woke myself up before he answered, certain that I didn’t want to know.

I was alone in my bed, and for a moment, I wondered if it had
all
been a dream. But then I remembered the way his arms had felt around me—warm, safe, real.

When our eyes locked in the kitchen before breakfast, I had the strangest urge to go to him. To wrap myself around him and mold my cheek against his chest. I wanted to feel his arms around me, and I pushed the feeling as far away as I could.

Every moment I spend with him now feels like holding my hand in the fire and liking it. The longer I stay in the flames, the more it will hurt later, but for now, we’re burning. And I like it too much to step away.

We have a breakfast of coffee and marshmallow Peeps and Cadbury eggs, and then we play board games with my dad until lunch. Then more chatter, more burning, until it’s time to start Easter dinner. My dad is in charge of boiling water while Joel and I stand side by side at the counter chopping vegetables.

It’s unsettlingly perfect.

Joel steals kisses when my dad isn’t looking, and it’s strange how a simple brush of his lips or graze of his fingertips feels infinitely more intimate, more dangerous, than having sex under my dad’s roof. And not just because my dad is nearby, but because of that flicker—that something between us that I’m becoming more and more aware of.

It’s like swimming with sharks. Like running with wolves.

It’s like falling. Like
leaping
.

“It’s usually just Dee and me at Christmastime, too,” my dad tells Joel after dinner. We’re all still sitting at the table, with our bellies full and mine tangled in knots. “You should come this year. We’d love to have you.”

Falling. Leaping. Vertigo.

I abruptly stand up, and my dad and Joel stare up at me.

“I feel like going for a walk,” I say, backing away from the ledge.

“Now?” Joel asks.

I need to get him away from this table. Away from my dad. Away from conversations about a future that will probably never happen. “Yeah. You coming?”

He follows me without further hesitation, and after he helps me into a jacket and borrows an oversized hoodie from my dad, we finally escape the house. As soon as I’m outside in the chilled night air, I feel like I can breathe again.

“What was that about?” Joel asks, falling in step beside me as I follow a trail of streetlamps leading away from my house.

“What was what about?”

He stops walking, and I stare back at him. In three-day-old jeans and a black hoodie, he’s wearing an uncompromising expression.

I know he wants me to explain, but what the hell am I supposed to say? That my brain is full of chemicals making me want to melt against his skin? That the feeling fucking terrifies me?

I reach out to him, unwilling to say a word, and Joel studies my extended hand before clasping his fingers with mine. We walk in silence all the way to a place I didn’t even know I was taking us.

“Where are we?” he asks as I punch a key code into the security system of the clubhouse where one of my exes works. We used to sneak in after-hours to skinny-dip in the pools or just hook up, and I still know the code by heart.

“A pool,” I answer. The club sports three pools of varying sizes, all of which are empty now—concrete husks drained of water until Memorial Day. Even though I still mess around with my ex from time to time, and I’ve brought other boys here during the season, I prefer to come alone. This place is different without the water—magical, private. Bringing Joel here is like sharing a secret, one I’ve never shared with anyone, not even Rowan.

“How do you know the security code?” Joel asks, and I turn around to walk backward, smirking while drawing him inside.

“One of the perks of dating a lifeguard.”

I lead him through the girls’ shower room, and we grab armfuls of towels before emerging out back in the fenced-in pool area. Most of the security lights around the chain-link fencing dimmed out ages ago and haven’t been replaced. The white moon and pale stars light what the rare orange bulb doesn’t, and Joel and I walk through the shallow pool to get to the lap pool, walking deeper and deeper inside concrete walls until we get to the middle of the twelve-foot-deep circular pool.

We lay the towels down and stretch out on our backs, our shoulders brushing under a blanket of pinprick stars that glow against the walls of the pool and make the dark feel a little less dark.

“I feel like we need to have some cliché conversation about the stars,” Joel says as we lie there staring up at them, and my light laughter echoes off the walls.

“Do we need to?”

“What if someone is watching a movie of our lives? We’d be a huge disappointment.” He smiles over at me, and when he looks back toward the sky, his fingers thread with mine.

We lie there like that, silently breathing in the cold and bearing the weight of the universe, until he says, “I always thought this shit was cheesy. Like when it happened in movies. But it’s kind of nice . . . being here with you.”

Falling. Leaping. His hand should be a lifeline, but it’s pushing me over the edge. His words, batting at my heart.

“Have you brought many other guys here?” he asks after a while, his voice unreadable.

“Not when the pools are empty like this.”

“What about the lifeguard?” he prompts.

I stare up at the sky, knowing I should lie but not having the heart to. “No. Just you.”

I don’t know what we’re doing here. Joel and I aren’t the kind of people to lie under the stars—not holding hands, not having conversations that will haunt me fifty years from now when we barely remember each other’s faces because too many others have come in between.

“I feel like I’m keeping a secret,” he says, and I feel like I’m keeping a secret too. A lot of them. So many. Like how badly I want to pull my hand away and then cry in his arms for doing it.

I know he’s keeping secrets too. I’ve been trying not to guess what they are.

“Some secrets are better off kept,” I say, pleading with him to keep it.

“I love you.”

I close my eyes, my heart silently breaking. Part of me knew this would happen, but I was too selfish to stop it. “No, you don’t.”

The words have been said to me before. From some guys, that’s all they were—words. From others, they were a misguided belief that left them brokenhearted. This time, I’m the one who breaks.

Joel sits up, still clinging to my hand. “Dee, I nearly killed a man for hurting you. I changed my whole life to be with you. I bought a car to drive three hundred miles just because I was going crazy not seeing you. You don’t have to say it back, but don’t tell me how I feel.”

I don’t say it back. I can’t.

“Say something,” he begs after a while. My eyes are still closed. If I don’t have to see his face, maybe this won’t hurt as much.

“What am I supposed to say?”

“Anything.”

“I’m sorry.” I open my eyes, and the broken way he looks at me grips at my heart. I sit up, wanting to hug him close, wanting to apologize for apologizing, but I’m doing this for both of us. Because neither one of us is the type of person anyone should give their heart to. Not if they want it kept in one piece.

I take my hand from his.

“I think you should go home.”

“What?”

Years of practice help keep my face blank. “You should go home.” I begin gathering the towels, but Joel grasps my hand again, like he’s the one falling and he needs me to hold on to.

“Why? Why are you doing this?” I pull my hand away, and he says, “Is it because of your mom?”

Ice shoots through my veins, freezing me in place. “What do you know about my mom?”

“Your dad told me about her this morning—”

“He
told
you?”

“I didn’t ask. He just brought it up. I know that her leaving must have messed with your head but—”

“You know
nothing
,” I spit, standing up in a rush of frustration.

“Dee . . .” Joel says, standing up to face me. His voice remains soft in spite of the way I’m glaring at him. “I want to be with you. I don’t give a shit about your mom. You’re right, I don’t know anything. I only know that I’m in love with you. Like
seriously
fucking in love with you.”

I gather the blankets while he just stands there. “I’m sorry you think you fell in love, Joel. The good news is you’ll get over it.”

“I won’t.”

“You’ll have to.”

His expression hardens, and I’m glad. If he hates me, this will be so much easier.

“Are you fucking kidding me right now? You made me fall in love with you just to throw me out like the fucking trash?”

There it is. I
made
him fall in love with me. Just like all the others. I’m no better than my mother. The only difference is, I care enough about him to walk away before it’s too late—before this spark between us grows and grows and fucking grows until there’s nothing left but ashes when it finally runs out of fuel.

“Is this what you wanted all along?” Joel snaps. “Was this your fucking plan? To fucking
crush
me?”

“Go home, Joel.”

With the towels in my arms, I walk away from him.

I don’t look back. I can’t.

Chapter Twenty

I
ARRIVE BACK
at the house before Joel, walk right into the dining room, and pull a bottle of tequila from the liquor cabinet.

“Dee?” my dad asks when he enters the room behind me. “Joel just pulled out of the driveway. Did something . . .” He trails off when I finish pouring myself a glass and turn around. “What the hell are you doing?”

“What, it’s okay for me to date rock stars with tattoos and piercings but I can’t have a freaking drink?”

My dad’s brows turn in as he studies me. “What happened?”

“Oh, you know,” I say, swirling the liquid in my glass. “Classic case of girl meets boy, boy saves girl, girl hangs out with boy, boy tells girl he loves her, girl tells boy to get lost.”

When my dad just stares at me like I’m a creature that possessed his daughter, I say, “Why’d you tell him about Mom?” His face pales, and I challenge, “It wasn’t enough for you to ask him to stay for Easter and invite him to Christmas, you had to go and tell him about Mom too?”

“She just came up,” my dad stammers.

“Of course she came up!” I slam my untouched drink on the table, and it splashes onto my hand. “It’s been seven years and you still can’t stop fucking talking about her!”

“Deandra,” my dad says, but I’m too far gone to heed the warning in his voice.

I wipe the back of my hand on my jacket and say, “No, Dad, tell me. It wasn’t enough to have her pictures all over the walls, you had to rub her in my face by telling Joel about her too?”

“That isn’t fair—”

“You know what’s not fair?!” I shout, startling him. “You not letting me forget her! It’s not fair I had to teach myself how to put on makeup or how to shave my legs. It’s not fair that Rowan’s mom had to tell me how to use a goddamn tampon!” Tears burn my eyes, but I ignore them and shout at the top of my lungs, “She doesn’t deserve to have her pictures on our walls, Dad!”

He reaches out to touch me, hesitant like he’s afraid I’m going to burst into pieces. “Dee . . . calm down and just tell me what happened.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. The tears are coming. They’re acid in my eyes, sulfur in my nose. I walk past him and grab my keys off the breakfast bar.

“Where are you going?” he asks as he follows after me.

“AWAY!” I shout, and I slam the front door behind me.

In my car on the way to Rowan’s, I can barely see the road through the tears that have sprung free from somewhere deep inside me. They’re clouding my vision, and the sob that tears from my throat racks my whole body. In her driveway, I’m crying too badly to move, so when my car door opens, I don’t bother lifting my head from the steering wheel to see who it is. Slender arms wrap around me, and I shift to let them hold me.

“Shh,” Rowan whispers, hugging me tight. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

“I can’t fucking do this, Ro,” I cry, hating myself for being this person. This person who can’t take care of herself. I can’t believe I snapped on my dad, or that I was so cold to Joel, or that I cried about my mom after seven years of managing not to.

“What happened?” Rowan asks me, rubbing my back.

So much has happened, I don’t even know where to start. I just shake my head against her shoulder, and she holds me until I calm down enough to breathe.

“Let’s go inside,” she tells me, but since I’m not sure I’m done crying and I don’t want to wake her parents, I shake my head again. “Then let me take you to the hideout,” she says, and I let her help me out of the car.

We enter her garage and climb up into its attic, a tiny space we set up in seventh grade. It’s filled with oversized pillows, beanbag chairs, and old lamps we collected from yard sales. I turn on my favorite one and it flickers purple and green light all over the eggshell walls before I sit down in my zebra-print beanbag and drop my head to my hands.

Rowan sits on her blue beanbag across from me, rubbing my shoulders and my knees until I take a deep breath and say, “He told me he loves me.”

“Joel?” she asks, and I huff out a single humorless laugh. Even Rowan can’t believe he’d say it. He was supposed to be different.

“Yeah. Joel.”

“Then what?”

His broken face flashes into my mind, his words echoing in the fissures of my heart.
Was this your fucking plan? To fucking
crush
me?

I sit up, wiping my eyes with the heels of my palms. “I told him to go home.”

Rowan frowns at me, and I stare down at the floor.

“Why?” she asks.

“I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Dee,” she says, rubbing my shoulder, “you’re hurting right now.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“What about him?”

Another wave of tears stings my eyes, and I hurriedly wipe them away. “He’ll be fine too. This is for the best, Ro. We’re no good for each other. You said so yourself.”

“I said that
months
ago, Dee . . .”

“Nothing’s changed.”

“Are you sure?” she asks. I know she has a point, but it’s one I don’t want to think about.

“I yelled at my dad,” I say to avoid her question. More silent tears. I lift the bottom of my shirt to wipe them away. “He told Joel about my mom, and Joel used it to try to psychoanalyze me when we were fighting and . . . I don’t even know, Ro. I just . . . I was just so . . .” A sob bubbles out of my chest, and I bury my face in my arms.

Rowan drops to her knees beside me to drape her arm over my back, trying to rub my pain away.

“I threw it all in my dad’s face. I took it all out on him. He didn’t deserve that.” The sobs start coming hard and heavy, my entire body aching with the force of them, and I say, “He’s been through enough. He’s always been such a good dad.”

“I’m sure he’ll understand,” Rowan says, and I know she’s right, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. If anything, it makes me feel worse.

“I just don’t know what to do.” My words are muffled and stuffy. My eyes are swollen and I’m too congested to breathe.

“Just tell him you’re sorry—”

“No, I mean about
everything
.” I sit up and wipe my nose with the back of my wrist and my eyes with the tips of my fingers. “He’s never going to talk to me again.”

“Your dad . . . ? Or—”

“Joel,” I answer. “We can’t be friends. Not anymore.”

“Do you love him?” she asks, and I shake my head, tears falling between my knees.

She waits for a long moment, holding my gaze, and then says, “Are you sure?”

I shake my head again, and she sighs and brushes her thumb over the apple of my wet cheek. “When you told Joel to go home, what happened?”

“He went.”

“Did he say anything?”

He told me he wouldn’t get over me. He practically pleaded with me not to push him away. He told me I was crushing him.

I shake my head. “He just left.”

“Maybe you should call him . . .”

“And say what?”

She frowns, because we both know there’s nothing to say.

“I need a fucking drink,” I say, already feeling the sting of new tears and desperately trying to hold them at bay. I need a buffer, something to help me forget. Something to help me sleep until being awake doesn’t hurt so much.

Rowan stares at me for a moment, and then she nods. “I’ll be right back.”

A few minutes later, she returns with a bottle of Jack Daniels I’m guessing she stole from her parents’ liquor cabinet. She unscrews the cap and hands me the bottle, and I take a big swig before holding it back out to her. “Let’s just get drunk.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” she asks, not taking the bottle.

“Yes,” I insist, never so sure of anything in my entire freaking life. I push the bottle into her hand, and Rowan takes a little swig before handing the bottle back to me. I take a big swig, then another, before sending it back her way, and we keep going like that until my tears stop falling—until most of the whiskey is gone and so is the aching in my heart.

“Dee,” Rowan says later that night, waking me with a light touch to my shoulder that makes my head throb. “Dee, your dad’s here.”

I try to sit up, and the whole room spins. I feel big hands steady me as the world slowly comes into focus, and then there’s my dad’s face.

“What . . .” I mumble, not sure where I am or why I’m being woken up.

“Come on, kiddo,” he says, and then he helps me to my feet. The night seeps back into my consciousness in bits and pieces. Joel, crying, Rowan, Jack Daniels.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I slur, my eyes thick with burning tears as we walk down the stairs into Rowan’s garage. He shushes me, but I turn under his arm and wrap my arms around him. “I didn’t mean it.”

“I know,” he says, holding me upright and rubbing my back. I hear him whisper something to Rowan, and she whispers back, but I’m too busy sobbing in my daddy’s arms to care. “Let’s get to the car, okay, sweetheart?”

I nod but don’t stop hugging him, and eventually he picks me off my feet and carries me the rest of the way.

I fall asleep sometime during the car ride home and don’t wake up again until four o’clock in the morning. The alarm clock on my nightstand glows an angry, fuzzy red, and I realize I’m still in my clothes, but my shoes and jacket are off and I’m snug under my covers. My eyeballs feel too big for their sockets—and my brain, too big for its skull. I press my fingers against my temples until I’m sure my head isn’t going to explode, and then I reach for my lamp and flinch away from the light when it smacks me in the face.

I lie in bed with my eyes squeezed closed for another few minutes before summoning the strength to roll out of bed. Then I lumber down the hall and rummage through the bathroom medicine cabinet until I find the aspirin. With three of them in my hand, I turn on the faucet and dip my mouth under the water; then I swallow the tablets down and brace my hands on the sink, lost in deep blue eyes and a voice I’ll never forget, words I’ll always remember.

I only know that I’m in love with you. Like
seriously
fucking in love with you.

I pat the back pocket of my jeans, closing my clammy fingers around my phone and pulling it out. I have missed calls from my dad and missed texts from Rowan and Leti.

Nothing from Joel.

Go home, Joel.

My heart twists, and I bite the inside of my lip to keep from crying again.

I did what needed to be done. I extinguished the fire before it consumed us both. Now I need to let it go.

After shutting off the water, I find myself walking away from my room instead of toward it. I slip into the guest room at the other side of the house and stare down at the unmade bed Joel was sleeping in less than twenty-four hours ago.

I feel like I’m keeping a secret.

Some secrets are better off kept.

I take off my jeans and crawl under his covers, wanting to be close to him even though I can’t be and won’t ever be again. My knee brushes against something soft, and I pull a T-shirt out from under the covers. Yesterday morning, he borrowed a clean one from my dad, and last night, he didn’t come inside to get his old one before leaving.

I love you.

You don’t have to say it back, but don’t tell me how I feel.

I lift the shirt to my nose—breathing him in, missing him, wanting to go back in time even if nothing could have changed—and then I tuck the shirt under my cheek and fall asleep alone.