Drowning in You (24 page)

“
You must like
my sister to stay here when she won’t come out of her
room.”

“
That’s what
friends are for.”

“
But why did
my dad have to die? He was my friend.”

Darcy’s voice is strained, as
if those words are wrestling to stay inside him. Heresy, they sound
like, coming from his mouth. How does a ten-year-old even feel
that? I don’t feel that.

“
I reckon he
was tired of being a sook, Darce,” I say, knowing his head will
whip around with the same slack-jaw thing Charz does before he even
does it. “He told me when I visited once that he was tired of
whining about being sick, so now he’s moved on to the Godly realm.
You know, all shields and capes, and golden gates. He fights and
wins battles against the lesser Gods in this realm, which he’s
happier about.”

“
I’m ten,”
Darcy says flatly.

“
I’m
twenty-one,” I mimic in the same tone.

“
Well,” Darcy
says, “I’m not falling for that.”

We stare at each other out of
the corners of our eyes as he finally continues playing his
game.

“
But that was
rad,” he says, smirking.

I click my tongue in
satisfaction, pretending to be parched as hell as I gulp down more
water just to not look at him.

That’s when I notice it. My
hands are trembling. As I put the bottle down, the world sways, so
I pretend to be all slick and cool as I stop myself from almost
stumbling.

“
Your hand is
shaking…are you sick?”

“
Hey, I’m God
and if you mock me again, sir, I’ll order your head,” I say
standing and slowly walking off, careful not to hold onto anything
or stumble at the same time.

“
Sounds
painful,” Darcy mutters into the game controller as I rest my head
on the wall outside the living room and feel my pockets. No sugar
as per usual. I stumble reaching for the pantry, my stomach
churning for food and my mouth all creamy and my thoughts in a
knot. I grab two chocolate cookies and some rum balls from the
containers, with Betty poised to murder a potato and not even
noticing me come. Or leave.

Without knocking, I slip into
Charz’s room after dusting the crumbs off on my sweats.

I curl myself around Charz’s
body but with a gap between us, resting her head in my hand on the
pillow for fifteen minutes. She looks peaceful, at least, when
sleeping.

But then she tugs on her shirt,
smoothing it over her pants, and curls up into the same position
without saying a word to me, so maybe she just pretending to
sleep.

* * *

Walter is lowered into the
ground while Betty and Jim throw their hands out to hoist him back
up, all the while sobbing to the sky. Between the hundreds of
others here to send him off, I notice most people shake their heads
in their hands, or slump onto the shoulder of the person next to
them, or put on their sunglasses and pretend the silent tears
rolling down their cheeks aren’t there.

Darcy is one of the few here
crying how he should. He stands by my side, swiping tears from his
cheeks, snot on his sleeve and making grunting, shrieking sounds
that make a scene no one has the strength to pay attention to.

But what sticks from Walter’s
funeral, two and a half weeks after his death, and after the
autopsy and all that, is his daughter walking away muttering,
“asshole” to herself so many times the words become nothing but
meaningless hissing sounds.

22. Hot Mess Wreck

Dexter

“
Dex…” Tahny
calls, but pokes her head through my bedroom door anyway. “Are—”
She gives me a once over then stomps down the corridor mumbling to
someone, “he’s there.”

“
Tahny!” I
yell as Charz steps in, knocking on the open door at the same time.
“
Oh
.”

I throw my guitar strap over my
head and push the thing away on my comforter. Charz gives me an odd
look as she hops over a mound of dirty clothes. She gives up trying
to figure out where to go and stands on the spot. Still, she
doesn’t look at my eyes, or my body.

Body.
I look down and realize I have my gym shorts on
and the only thing covering my top half are tats and even more bare
skin. Awkwardly, I pick up something made of material and put it
on, which, naturally, seems to take five whole minutes with my arms
getting tangled in every place but the holes where they’re supposed
to go.

“
Count to a
million,” I tell Charz, while she watches me do laps of my box of a
bedroom. “I’m serious! One, two,” I say, starting.

“
Three, a
thousand,” she says.

“
Quit cheating
and count properly, Charz. Now,” I growl, a smirk threatening on my
lips. She presses her lips together and turns, combing her long
blonde hair back from her face to reveal that smile that melts my
insides.

In the end she counts to one
million by thousands at a time. I’ve thrown one pile of clothes in
the laundry basket and have hand-scooped another pile of
I-have-no-idea-what-it-is junk into my closet and shut the door
when I turn to collapse on the bed.

Charz is sitting with the edge
of her butt on the corner of the bed, leaning over to read my
paperboard. My pape—

I rush over, yanking it from
the wall and flipping it around so the words are hidden.

“
I’m sorry, I
didn’t mean…”

Crap. Her chin is hidden from
how far it’s dug into her neck. She begins pulling her hair back
behind her ear, although it’s already there. So instead she flicks
the ends over her shoulder again and again.

I come beside her and touch her
arm, just because I need to, and she looks up at me through her
eyelashes.

“
I didn’t mean
to pry.”

“
This room is
a fucking mess,” I say, understanding why my mom can’t stand to
walk in here anymore.

Charz chuckles into her
fingers. I love when she does that.

You love when she does that?
Take that back, you idiot.

“
Why are you
here?”

Her face pales in a second. I
swear it does.

“
It’s just
that you’ve…I wanted to, um…”

She meets my eyes. “Yeah, I’ve
got no idea what I’m trying to say, actually.”

I throw up my hands to protect
my face. “Whoa! Stand back. Charz is stepping out.”

She falls stiffly, on her side,
back on my bed. Unsure what I’m meant to do, or what I’ve done, I
shuffle back a bit. She’s on her side as she was sitting, with her
hands shoved between her knees. Staring? I’m not sure, because her
thick eyelashes cover her gaze from this angle. Suddenly she
sobs.

I take a step off the bed and
flick the door shut with my hand, crawling back beside Charz half
on my knees and half on my stomach.

“
Hey, what’s—”
I begin saying, only to find my voice seems to spur on even more of
something from her. This can’t be crying; it’s her soul breaking
apart, I’m sure. Her spine twitches but she remains mostly stiff,
refusing to pull her hands out from her legs, and so with her head
planted in my bed she cries out the word
asshole
about, oh, ten or eleven
times, before breathing in deeply and sighing the tension
out.

It’s gone. Her eyes are red and
so is her face but you’d never be able to tell she just lost
it.

“
Okay,” I say,
clenching my hands between my legs and falling stiffly to face her.
She tries to keep back a laugh as I hold my back stiff, and scowl
with my eyes, and then do a girly sigh. It’s a crappy imitation of
her. “Okay, you have to teach me how to do that,” I say, in all
seriousness.

“
What?”

“
Flip the
switch the way you did.”

“
You need to
learn how to stop crying?”

Shit, crap,
shit. I happen to know that girls do
not
like guys who cry and weep about
all their problems. I hope she doesn’t think I’m a wimp or
anything. “No, no—I mean that control. Usually I just punch things
until some part of my body gives up, so, really, a skill like yours
would save my skin. Literally.”

It doesn’t occur to me until
now how close we are. With her sitting there all quiet, thinking,
licking her lips and looking through me, our noses just inches
apart, well, it’s now that I estimate there’s less air to breathe
as my pulse picks up. It’s now that with red and puffed up eyes
she’s never been more beautiful. I reach out to touch the spot at
her temple, just to see if it feels the same as it looks.

She closes her eyes in
anticipation when I stroke her face.

“
I’ve missed
you,” she says.

“
I missed you
too.” I missed your waist, which is the place my hands fit around
you. I missed you pulling me down, your hands linked behind my
neck. I missed seeing that tiny, corner-of-the-mouth smile and the
way you brush back your hair out of your face that way.

“
I need you. I
need your lips, and the feel of your waist, and that sexy leg
wrapped behind mine, but…”

But my head is racing with the
possibility of us. I don’t want to push her away anymore, but when
I don’t she’s so fucking hot I want to rip off her clothes and slam
her against a wall because anything else will not satisfy this
hunger in me. And that scares me because I’ve rushed things and I
don’t want this thing between us to crash just as quickly. She’ll
get over the sex, I’ll never get over the sex, and I swear to God
after five years of crushing, this sudden thing with us is a damn
whirlwind.

Her answer to my “but”, the
worst filler word in the world, is a gaping glare, so huge and
painful for her more than me, but she doesn’t hide her shock. I
know the feeling. She doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. You can
tell by the blank look on her face. Charz finally curls her toes up
on the bed and scoots back, resting her weight on her elbow.

I roll onto my back and rest my
head on top of linked fingers, staring at the cracks in the
ceiling. I can’t see that hurt I put on her face anymore.

Suddenly, her
head blocks the crack and casts a shadow over my body. She
straddles my hips and leans down to rest both forearms by my
shoulders, since she’s too short to reach higher.
Omigod
our lips would be
touching if she were taller. Instead, she lines up our hips, which
shows that at least some part of me meant more than a
“but”.

I hold her waist. Her weight
would be easy to lift clean off me while I lie on my back. I
practice this at the gym every session, so it should be just as
easy to lay her body down beside me as it is to do my bench press
reps.

She’s hovering an inch from my
body. We both peer down to estimate the gap between me and her
leggings. Actually she just shamelessly stares at me and I’m frozen
with her above me, torn between her boobs in my face and the edges
of her ass that I can see from behind her shoulders.

I snap my eyes shut and pull
her beside me. “Charz…” I let out a breath and press back my stupid
hair from my eyes. “What’s up with you?”

She shakes her head and presses
a finger to her lips, telling me to shut the fuck up. I shut the
fuck up. She leans in.

“
No, no, no,”
I rush out, leaning back.

Lily, the last girlfriend I
had, was wrapped around a tree along with my brother by some random
whose name I’ll never know. Since then, I’ve hurt more girls than
I’ve meant to trying to eliminate the possibility of more pain that
my heart doesn’t have the ability to take.

Charz isn’t Lily and she’s not
those random girls I’ve hooked up with, which scares me. “Friend”
doesn’t suit what she is to me, and neither does “girlfriend”
because I can’t put a label on something this intense. I don’t know
what Charz is but she always consumes my thoughts, and I can’t take
her along for a ride while I figure out what we can be.

“
This is a
mess,” I say, not knowing what I mean by it.

“
We’re a
mess,” she says quietly.

“
There’s no
us, so don’t worry. You’ll have plenty of guys loving
you.”

I look away,
hearing my mistake as it came out of my mouth, too fast for me to
stop, and so slow that I wondered what was taking so long, and why
I didn’t just say that
I
love her.

Charz begins crying again, the
same cycle as before, but this time she puts her back in to it,
crying into her forearms crossed over her face and into the
bed.

That’s when I hear the sound,
an echo of days before.

Asshole.

Shit!

I cover her with my body,
breathing apologies over and over into her ear. She eventually
stops crying again, but this time she won’t meet my eyes and her
cheeks are beet red.

“
I should go.”
She clambers off the bed and realigns her bed hair and messed up
low-cut top. Her leggings hug every bit of her ass and legs, and I
realize watching her like this right now is just wrong so I’m the
one now looking away.

At the bedroom door, she says,
“Did you write those lyrics yourself?”

“
Um,
yeah.”

“
She must be a
sweet girl.”

I look down to my socks. “Yeah,
she is.”

“
Wait,
please?” I say, scrunching my eyes shut, because I don’t know what
to do or how to say what I need to say.