Drain You (17 page)

“Maybe. I hope so.” I looked up at the sky, at the no moon and no stars. I felt like I was back on earth, like I’d been away for a while. And Whit was the one who’d brought me back.

But now Whit was distracted, his eyes on Jody’s front door, waiting for something. Then the door opened and a prim redhead in a tiny turquoise dress skipped out toward us, a small leather bag in one hand and some heels in the other. She was swinging a perfect French braid from shoulder to shoulder. When she got close, Whit hugged her around the waist. What. Was. Happening.

“Quinn, this is Tori,” he said.

“Tori?”

“Sorry to make you wait, had to find my purse,” she sang to Whit, then turned to me. “Whoa, crazy pants.”

“Madonna wore them in a video,” Whit said.

“Crazy.” She made a crazy face.

“No.” I glared at Whit, then stared at Tori. “She never actually wore them. She only tried them on.”

They both looked confused.

“Different pants are in the video,” I explained.

Whit shrugged. “Okay, whatever.”

“Yeah.”

“My ladies ready?” Whit asked. It was, like, the grossest thing ever.

“I can ride in the backseat,” Tori said, opening the door behind Whit’s.

“Well, we’re actually dropping Quinn off first, so…”

My head was trembling. Another earthquake? Another seismic convulsion?

I got in the back. I tried to stare away out the window during the ride home, but I kept catching glimpses of Tori rubbing Whit’s thigh across the armrest. In my head I told myself it didn’t matter, me and Whit were closer than this, I obviously meant more to him than some airhead in a miniskirt. We had something special, we were more…evolved. It didn’t help.

Whit pulled into my driveway and left the car running while he opened my door to help me out.

As I was getting out of the car, Tori turned her cute little head around. “Bye-eee. That’s so cool about Madonna.”

“Yeah, bye.”

I walked up the stairs, realizing I was still drunk, past the tea lights, to my front door. Whit followed. At the door he reached out to fix my hair, moving some strands behind my ears.

I threw his hand off me. “I got it.”

“I just want to leave you as pretty as I took you.”

“Can you not say that, please?” My hands were balled into fists at my sides.

“What’s wrong?”

“Have fun with Tori.” I said her name in the bitchiest way possible.

“Cool, you’re being adorable right now.”

“So you’re going back to your house or what?” I
didn’t even try to hide my pissiness.

“What do you care?”

“I don’t.”

“You’re being lame.”

“Not really.”

Then Whit said, “I’m not him.” He was staring me down. “You love him so much, just wait for him then. Jesus Christ, Quinn.”

I touched his cheek, palmed the side of his face.
No, you aren’t him. You’re someone totally different. You’re alive.

“Sleep it off, okay? Call you tomorrow.” Then Whit was gone, driving somewhere with Tori to do something I had no right to know about.

I stalked through the house stripping, throwing clothes wherever—my high heels and pants on the foyer floor, my purse and keys on a stool in the kitchen, my blouse slung over the back of the couch. The house was silent and dark. Through the sliding glass door, the backyard looked silent and dark too. The pool was glowing and blue.

I climbed down the ladder into the deep end and let my body sink to the bottom, let the night sink away too. I slouched on the floor of the pool, my back against the wall under the diving board, and stared up through the
water at the sky. Earlier tonight at the party I hadn’t been able to see any stars, but now there they were, a few scattered points of light, shining faintly. Then less faintly, as one of the sparkling shapes grew brighter and closer until suddenly it landed softly on my thigh. Not a falling star; a single silver bracelet.

I knew that bracelet.

I gasped and accidentally breathed in and started to choke, racing for the surface, swimming through a half dozen other silver bracelets already drifting down through the water. My head broke the surface and I spun around, scanning the backyard. Then I saw them: along one edge of the pool, fanned out like a display, twenty or more of Libby’s bracelets.

The trees swayed in the breeze, but otherwise there wasn’t a sound. The diving board bounced gently, but nothing else moved. He was playing with me. I hurried up the pool steps and ran into the house, double-locking the door behind me. I stood there dripping wet, shivering in the air conditioning, for a few minutes before I finally forced myself to dry off and go upstairs.

It was two thirty in the morning when I stumbled into my bedroom. I ditched my wet underwear and reached for a T-shirt and slipped it on, not realizing at first that it was soft and blue and smelled like a room with no windows. In the darkness I watched the shadows play across
my ceiling, feeling the aftershocks, trying to calm down.

Then the shadows subtly changed shape. Something blocked them, eclipsing the straight slits of the blinds with the outline of a human figure. I jumped up. My nerves burned and my heart pounded.

Stiles. He hadn’t left.

I leapt out of bed and backed up against the wall, away from my window. The shape was closer to the glass now, more familiar, but still in shadow.

It was Whit, on my roof, outside my bedroom, looking in at me. His hand was pressed against the glass.

Something made me step forward. Something made me hold my breath, or maybe not hold my breath, but forget to breathe altogether. I moved closer to the window. Looked at the eyes.

No. Not Whit.

I cried out, felt my heart lose control. Was it? It was.

James. My James.

I couldn’t get
the window open. Then I panicked that if I couldn’t get it open, he might just leave; if I couldn’t get the window open, maybe he wasn’t there at all.

But he was. James tapped on the glass and pointed to the middle of my room, motioning for me to step back. I thought he might break the window, but he just lifted the glass off its frame and stepped inside and leaned the pane of glass against the wall. He studied me in his old blue T-shirt.

I flipped out.

I wanted to throw myself at him but threw myself into the carpet at his feet instead. I lifted my face but didn’t look at his face, didn’t make it past the knees of his jeans, his holy holey Levi’s. They were the same, no dirtier, no more frayed, and it was crushing to think that time hadn’t
passed for him the same way it’d passed for me. I moved enough to reach the hem of his shirt and fingered the fabric. Impossibly, this had gotten softer. And then my body loosened, I got softer too, and my legs wouldn’t stand.

“Hey.” His voice.

“I can’t get up.”

“It’s cool,” James said, and kneeled down next to me. He hugged me and I leaned in, burying my head into the fold of his neck, my lips against the side of his throat. There was that inner stillness, that no pulse, and it scared me more than it used to, but it also comforted me more than I was expecting. This was the sound I’d been waiting to hear: the sound of no sound, of no heart.

Then James looked at me, and even though I wanted to be held, I wanted to be looked at too. I went from drunk to drunker as we drank each other in. The room swam, the walls around him were woozy, but James was just like he was that first night. It was as if he’d stepped out of my memory and into my bedroom. Out of a memory I’d thought I’d lost.

But I knew I wasn’t like his memory of me. I was older, weirder, darker, crazier. I felt like I’d come apart and someone had only just begun to stitch me back together. I was half-alive, half in pieces. I’d become a strange creature myself.

“I thought you were Whit,” I said, already disappointed
at my first words. “I thought he was you.”

“Why would Whit be here?”

“I don’t know.” It wasn’t what I wanted to be saying. “He just dropped me off.”

“So you were out with Whit tonight.”

“James,” I said.

He leaned back against the dresser and eyed my naked legs. Then he looked at his soft blue T-shirt on me. I knew that look, but I’d only seen it once.

“You have to take your shirt off,” James said.

“What?”

“Take off your shirt.”

Then he wasn’t leaning against my dresser, he was crawling toward me. And I wasn’t taking off the shirt, he was taking it off for me.

“James.” It felt amazing just to say his name, but I wanted to say something unforgettable. Something about love and the oneness of us, something he’d be happy he returned for. But all I could say was, “I missed you.”

Now he was over me, touching the outside of my underwear where the elastic met my hip. I arched my back against the carpet, closed my eyes. His knees knocked mine and I cringed and made a small, pained sound.

“Are you okay?” he said, moving his fingers from the elastic band to the bruises on my knees.

“I’m okay.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Relatively.”

Then he forgot about my wounds and pinned me to the carpet, roughly.

“I need you,” James said, smelling my hair, my breath.

“Me too.”

“Right now.” He made his way down my body, his tongue on my hipbone, his hands pulling at the only piece left of my clothing.

“Yes.”

“I’m back.” He smelled my thighs, kissed them, licked the inside of them.

“You’re back.”

It hurt less and more this time, but James was better because he didn’t have to look away, he didn’t have to hide his teeth from me. We each bit down on our lips. As always, our union, pleasure and pain.

Exhausted, sobering up from the wine, still trembling from his touch, naked, lightheaded, about to laugh, about to fall asleep, touching the tips of my fingers with the tips of my other fingers, I noticed James smelling me again. But not in the sexy way from before.

“Yeah, I need a shower.” I didn’t remember having taken one since he left. I usually considered a dip in the pool a sufficient washing.

“You smell like me,” James said, his head in my hair.

“Then I don’t ever want to shower again.” I looked up at the Hole poster on my ceiling. “Unless…do you shower?”

“Sometimes.” He laughed and touched his greasy hair. “Come with me,” he said, getting up off the floor.

He helped me stand and led me to the bathroom. In the darkness James turned the faucet on. I stepped over the edge of the bathtub and lay down as he filled warm water up around me. When it came to just below my shoulders, he turned it off.

I dunked my head down, slid up, knotted my hair into a wet bun. James sat on the bathroom floor, arms folded on the side of the tub, his head resting on his arms, his eyes watching me.

“So.” I blew bubbles on the top of the bathwater.

“So, I’ll tell you.”

“Okay, tell me.”

“Let me ask you first…you’ve been hanging out with Whit this whole time?”

I blew more bubbles. “Kind of.”

“So he’s been taking care of you.”

“It’s been bad. The worst.”

He picked up a bar of soap and rubbed it across my neck, my shoulders, down my arms, across my chest. “I told you I was coming back.”

“I didn’t know.”

“It’s been, like, two weeks.”

“It’s been, like, forever,” I said quietly, and took the soap out of his hands.

“I know forever.”

I nodded apologetically but whatever, two weeks for me
was
an eternity. A lot changes, and a lot had changed, and I wanted to tell him that.

But he said, “What kind of stuff have you and Whit been doing?”

“What do you mean? Who cares?”

What hadn’t we been doing? Kissing. Talking about you.

“Maybe I care, dude.”

“Lots of random daytime stuff.”

“Daytime stuff. Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Aw, you’re making a joke.”

“Am I such a bummer?” He lathered shampoo into my hair.

“Not even, like, a little bit.”

“Whit’s funny.”

I dunked my head. Whit was totally funny. He could make a lonely, pissy, bratty burr laugh. He could make a dead girl crack up.

“Yeah.”

Even though James was back, Whit wasn’t gone.

I said, “We’re close. I think.”

“Close is cool,” James said.

In a rush I said, “We’re not that close,” but it sounded forced. “I mean, I’m not in love with him.” I didn’t know why I said it. But there was the truth—I felt love for Whit—and there was the deeper truth. Whatever that meant.

“Well maybe
I’m
in love with
you
,” he said.

“You just love my bloody nose.” I splashed the water across from me. “Get in here.”

James, still in his boxers, climbed in the tub.

I flicked some water at him. “Talk, you.”

“You haven’t told me anything you’ve been doing.”

Blah.

“You haven’t even mentioned Libby.”

Double blah.

“She’s whatever.” I looked down in the water at my pruned fingertips.

“Fine. I went to Cambridge. I tried to convince some friends to come back with me.”

“And?”

“And they weren’t in the mood for a fight.”

“I thought they loved to fight.”

“These are good dudes.”

“But good dudes fight bad dudes,” I said, certain of it.

He shook his head. “Why would they kill the twins for doing exactly what they exist to do?”

“I guess.”

“I went for you.”

“Don’t say that, I didn’t want you to go.”

“I know. But I had to try.”

I squinted at him. “Did you try hard enough? I mean did you tell them how Stiles and Sanders are evil and that they deserve to die or whatever you call it?” I tried to keep my voice even, but I could feel myself getting frantic.

“So they deserve to die but I deserve…you? How does that work?”

“Now you’re on their side?”

“Quinn. I’m kind of permanently on their side. If there are sides.”

“No, you’re on my side.”

He rubbed his temples, looked frustrated with me.

“Because you hate them, James.”

I pulled his hands away from his face.

“Because you love me.”

I touched his forehead to mine.

“And you’d never hurt Libby.”

He closed his eyes and said, “I’ve hurt tons of Libbys,” like I didn’t get it.

But I didn’t want to get it. His fate was mine now. “Don’t say that.”

“Everyone’s someone’s Libby,” he said.

“I know that,” I shouted, climbing out of the bathtub, splashing water everywhere. Then I slipped on a puddle and banged my knee right on the most banged-up part of my knee and shouted again. James started to move toward me, but I held up my hand. “So I’m supposed to wish you didn’t exist. So I’m not supposed to love you. Great, cool, I’ll do that.”

He said, “Quinn,” but before he could say anything else I grabbed a towel and walked out of the bathroom.

In the bedroom he found me already under the covers, facing away from the door, my nose an inch from the wall. I felt him come beside the bed and sit on the edge of the mattress.

“Go home,” I said. I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me or looking away. “Go home and tell Naomi and Whit that we’ve agreed not to love each other. They’ll be thrilled.”

He didn’t move.

“Go,” I said.

“What’s happening?”

“I’m telling you to go.”

“I just got back.”

“I know.” It shouldn’t have taken all my strength to not screw everything up, but it did. I couldn’t unclench my muscles. And I still held on to a sliver of that anger
until he slipped in bed and lay next to me. We stared up at the shadow patterns on the ceiling, not talking. But I didn’t resist when James made a move and held my hand.

“What did Whit and Naomi say when they saw you?” I whispered.

“I haven’t seen them yet. I came straight here.”

“Oh. Whatever, they’ll be happy to see you.”

“It’s pretty dangerous for them when I’m around.”

I couldn’t say we’d be safer without him. But what was “safer” anyway? I’d still be hiding out. I’d still be hyperventilating every night when the sun went down. James may have pissed the twins off, but I’d done my own damage.

“Tonight was the first night I’ve been out since you left,” I said.

“Because you’re afraid.”

I nodded.

“Don’t be. Nothing’s happened. They have what they want, that’s all they care about.”

“Didn’t you come back to fight for Libby?”

“No. I came back to be with you.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“I can’t start that kind of mess. It wouldn’t end.”

I didn’t say anything to that either. I was already wishing I hadn’t mentioned Libby’s name.

“I called Whit, didn’t he tell you?”

“No.” It stung. “He told me you had to ramble, or something.”

“What?” James paused, then said, “Doesn’t matter, I guess.”

“Well, if you won’t fight you should’ve stayed in Massachusetts.” I folded my arms.

“I was worried. I thought you’d…I don’t know.” He thought I’d be stupid and try to rescue Libby.

“Never mind,” I said. “I’m happy.”

“Me too.”

“One more time, James, before you go tonight.”

It was complicated, but so was everything.

I tried to be sexy, but there was nothing to strip off. I tried to move closer, but we were already on top of each other. I felt like a decadent body, like I deserved to feel this good forever.

And now I could sleep. The kind of sleep I’d been without for days, the kind that I couldn’t have when James was gone. Between slow, heavy nods I watched him slip into his T-shirt and jeans. I held loosely on to one of his belt loops while he sat on the edge of my bed to tie his shoes.

The earth had opened up tonight. But it hadn’t swallowed me.

“I want to wear your blue shirt,” I whispered. He grabbed it off the floor and put it on me.

“The sun’s coming up. I’ve got to take off.”

“Can’t you sleep over?”

He didn’t answer, just pointed to the shadows above our heads. Across the ceiling the thin slits cast from my blinds looked more menacing than I’d remembered. At dawn those thin lines would light up the room with morning.

“Toaster caked, huh?”

He nodded. “Listen, I know you’re freaked out, but you don’t want this Libby back. Time to move on.”

I held my breath. I closed my eyes as tight as I could.

Then I told him, “We got Libby back.”

There was a bad pause.

“How’d you do that?” he asked, too calmly.

“Wait, look.” I peeked at him. “I’m safe, Whit’s safe, Libby’s safe. It’s cool.”

“Is it?” He raised his eyebrows. “Is it cool?”

“I had to.”

“Whit helped you.” Not a question. Didn’t need a response.

“You told him to take care of me.”

“I told you to let Libby go, I told you to take care of yourself. I told you I was coming back. Didn’t you believe me?”

“Not really,” I whispered.

“Why?” His voice weakened, emptied, hollowed out with one word.

I didn’t know. I had an answer but it was pitiful, weird, boring: because I figured I loved him way more than he did me. I imagined he’d be relieved to not have to worry about loving me or hurting me or saving me. Or killing me.

“I was being stupid,” I said.

“So…what are you saying? Now the twins are after you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What about Whit?”

“They don’t know about him. It’s just me they want.”

“And me.” He shook his head. “You’ve made this worse. They’ll be vicious now.”

“They were vicious before.”

“You’ve made it worse.”

“I know.”

“They’ll try to kill my family.”

“No.”

“Damn it, Quinn. Damn it.”

I remembered the last time I’d heard someone say that: in Stiles and Sanders’s living room, under the window, burning from the heat, sticky with sweat and tears, ready to make the decision that would take me here to this moment, to the moment James would yell the same words as Whit. This just kept being my fault, over and over.