Tangled (13 page)

She
didn’t miss the double entendre. “Why don’t you sit on a dick and spin?” she
clipped out childishly. How could Cameron not sense the tension beating its heavy
wings between them?

“You
and that mouth.” Poison belied honeyed baritone. “I wonder if it’d be better
put to use elsewhere. Haven’t you wondered that, Cam?” he asked louder.

Fear
piggybacked atop panic as her eyes broke toward the bed. But Cameron was
consumed by the game, too used to the back and forth to pick up on the sexual
undertones embedded within their usual hostility. “Leave her be, Adonis.”

She
hiked an eyebrow, challenging him to say something. Jaw twitching, she saw him bench
his next remark. So he wasn’t completely willing to sacrifice his friendship
all for the sake of bringing her down.

Interesting.

“See
you.”
 

“I’ll
drive you back.” Cameron jammed his feet into his checkered Vans and swiped his
keys from the nightstand. “C’mon. We can stop and get food first.” He placed a
hand on the small of her back.

Tess
couldn’t help but slide Adonis a look of utter smugness as they passed by him.

Round
two to her.

Chapter 7

He was unraveling.

He could feel the urge paring from bones
and joints, probing for freedom.

It began well before dawn, extracting him
from a restless slumber. So he kept moving, occupying fevered, jittery fingers.
He tore through his room. Making his bed. Dumping clothes into the washer.
Organizing his dresser. Throwing clothes into the dryer. Racing through
homework.
Folding clothes and sorting them into drawers.
Starting another of his projects.
 

It helped. Marginally.

He went to the gym. Ran five miles. Swam
ten laps. Benched
two-hundred
.

But his breath still came too fast, his
pulse a hammering gavel behind his eardrums.

Too twitchy to roll a joint, he smoked a
bowl.

He smoked two.

By the third, he felt more stable, more
in control. But it didn’t erase that kernel of doubt. Of panic seeded in the
furthermost reaches of his mind.

What had triggered the compulsion?

Anger?

Guilt?

Or was it beginning of something else…

The prospect of the latter made him pack
another bowl, but the plastic baggie was empty. He sped-dialed his dealer.
“More already,
bruh
?”

“What do you think?” Adonis barked.

Instead of taking offense, he just
laughed, no stranger to his customer’s moodiness. “Come by the crib.”

Feeling disjointed, he pocketed the phone
and grabbed his keys
.
He headed out
the back door, not wanting to attract attention. Someone called his name anyway
as the screen door cracked behind him.

His car snarled to life. Strapping in, he
blasted down the skinny side street, the Ferrari a voracious wolf amongst
suburban sheep. The sun was a flattened disk squatting over the horizon. It was
night already? Shit, there went another two classes missed. At this rate he’d
be lucky to make it to midterms.

Several minutes later, dirty blond dreads
greeted him at the door of a dilapidated brownstone. The man herded him in.
They made the exchange.

Adonis turned to leave when the sweetest
of temptresses planted
herself
in front of him. “You down?
It’s so lonely doing it by myself.”

Bull-fucking-shit.

He used to do it by himself all the time.

An eight ball was child’s play.

He didn’t spare the girl a glance. His
gaze clung to the baggie swinging between her forefinger and thumb, greeting
him like a long lost lover. The white powder shone like freshly fallen snow
under the hooded, hallway lights. He swallowed reflexively and licked his lips.
His sinuses burned and gums itched. “I’m clean,” he said woodenly.

“One bump won’t hurt.”

He closed his eyes. He remembered
cresting the highest pinnacles of ecstasy. Remembered the subsequent flameouts.
The last had been a crash and burn that burned and burned. He almost hadn’t
come back. Not after broken bones and blood staining his hands and being
handcuffed and thrust into the back of a flashing red and blue.

He couldn’t take that road again. He
couldn’t do it to himself. He couldn’t do it to Cameron.

He couldn’t do it his mother and brother.

“Maybe another time,” he gritted through
the pain and steered around her.
 

It whispered behind him, a powder-white
finger crooking, beckoning.

He kept his gaze forward until he sat in
the driver’s seat.

Adonis clenched the steering wheel and
exhaled hard through his nose. It’d get better, they’d told him. Time heals all
wounds.

No. Time was a scab.
A
flimsy patch on a leaky pipe.
Enough pressure and it would burst. Just
like everything else.

He mashed the accelerator to the floor,
as if the convertible could somehow outrun his demons.

But there would be no escaping the devil.

He always collected his due.

_________________

Cameron scowled as the front door slammed
behind Adonis. More than familiar with his friend’s pattern of behavior, he
recognized the signs: the excess energy, the OCD urges, and cranky
irritability. In a few days melancholy would take their place and then he’d
balance out.

So the itch was back in kicking force. He
would have to keep an eye on him in the meantime. He didn’t like keeping tabs
on his best friend, but after the
shitstorm
that had
went down back in April, there really wasn’t any other option.
 

After receiving the call, Cameron had
booked a red-eye flight out to Berkeley, California. If uniformed officers
hadn’t escorted him to his jail cell, he wouldn’t have believed it. The
emaciated, gaunt-faced man whose hollow-eyed stare pleaded with him through
steel bars had almost made Cameron disgorge his in-flight breakfast. Nothing
about him resembled the guy with whom he’d grown up. Yes, Adonis liked to push
the envelope as far as drugs were concerned. But what rebellious, red-blooded
adolescent didn’t, even amongst the upper echelons of the leisure class.

Even though he begged him not to, Cameron
tracked down Adonis’s father, who’d been conducting business in Beijing. In
less than a day, Lionel Benoit had gotten the charges dropped and his son
released into the tender-handed care of rehab.

Detox hadn’t been pretty. Cameron stuck
around for a couple of days, but it’d been enough to turn him off drugs
forever. Buckled in restraints, Adonis had been a half-raging, half-sobbing
wretch. He threatened suicide, cussed out nurses, attempted to bite fingers off
doctors, and tried to bribe the orderlies with obscene amounts of money.

It was the reason why, after treatment,
Cameron agreed to go with him abroad. Adonis needed time away from the
sycophants who posed as his friends and only exacerbated his reckless behavior.
They saw Adonis as a source of entertainment. He was the life of the party, an
energy source to which people were inexplicably drawn. Well, that and the party
favors, which ranged from free booze and blow to access into exclusive clubs he
rented out for shits and gigs.

Part of Adonis’s recovery regimen had
been to calculate how much money he spent recreationally. In the past year
alone, Adonis had blown through hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Instead of interpreting his son’s tacit
cry for help, Lionel had merely smiled and said, “Boys will be boys.” After
ensuring all parties—plaintiffs, prosecutors, judges—were suitably
compensated and grievances laid to rest, he withdrew from the scene entirely.

Cameron wondered if his parents’ coffers
ran that deep if he’d be allowed to wallow in pure, indulgent excess and engage
in such diversions without consequence. Unlike Cameron, Adonis’s resources weren’t
tied up in trust funds and stipulations. College didn’t serve as the foundation
for a
vocational safety net. It was merely a pastime.

Perhaps that was why he lacked direction
and ambition.

On a whim, Cameron suggested Adonis
transfer to his school, since there would obviously be no going back to
Berkeley. Hopefully he wouldn’t live to regret it.

So far he’d been behaving.

Cameron scrubbed his face and tried to
remember how he’d ended up as caretaker to a grown man.
 

Adonis had always been a moody, insolent
child. The older they became, the more it showed. Temperamental and without the
iron-tight dictatorship that governed Cameron’s life, Adonis had taken his
unchecked freedom to the head. But after the crash involving his mother and
brother, his behavior nosedived.

At eleven he started bringing vodka in
water bottles and smoking pot. By thirteen he’d graduated to snorting lines in
the bathroom and dropping acid. By high school, Cameron had become accustomed
to his highs and lows of his drug use.

There was only one destination for the
path he traversed and it ended with an oblong box.

Half an hour later, Adonis charged into
the house. Cameron cocked a brow. “Where’ve you been?”

“What’re you, my fucking probation
officer?” he snapped as he paced back and forth, seemingly unable to sit still.
His suspicion proved true as Adonis roamed into the kitchen and came back with
a bottle of vodka. He sat, got up, returned to the kitchen, came back with a
plastic cup, and plopped down again.
  

“What
did you take?”

“I
haven’t taken shit! Do you want me to piss into a bottle and have it tested for
you?” Adonis lashed and then after hearing himself, shook his head. “Sorry,” he
said gruffly. “I’ve been in a shitty mood all day.”

“Really?
I couldn’t tell.” He either didn’t hear the sarcasm or chose to ignore it.

“I
can’t shake it.” Adonis shot up and resumed patrolling the length of the den.
“I’m pissed and I don’t know why. I want to break something. I can’t fucking
sit still.”

“Because
you want to use?” Cameron deduced.

He
raked an agitated hand through his shaggy black hair. “No. Yes. Fuck, I don’t
know.” Adonis took a seat and emptied his pockets.

Several
Ziploc bags of weed spilled onto the coffee table. Cameron watched as his
shaking hands pulled bud from stubborn stems and retrieved a bowl from his
jacket pocket. “You can’t go on like this forever.”

Fire
torched green and lungs stretched to accommodate unfolding smoke. Resentment
garbled his chuckle. “What choice do I have?”

“Don’t
give me that. Look how far you’ve come.”

“Getting
here wasn’t the problem.” Exhaustion bracketed his vision as gravity bundled
his limbs. He reclined back as a comforting layer of fog compressed his brain,
rerouting his tempestuous stream of consciousness to more placid waters. “It’s
staying here that’s the issue.” A half smile hung at his lips. “I have to smoke
half an ounce a day to stay sane.”

“The
cravings will lessen, eventually.” Or at least Cameron thought.

“It’s
been five months.”
 

“You’ve
been on this shit since you were thirteen. Don’t expect it to disappear
overnight.” Cameron allowed the silence lapse for a minute or two before
offering a quiet suggestion. “Maybe you should see a doctor. Just in case.”

For
a second, stark terror petrified his soul. “No. I’m not like them. I’ll lay off
the drugs for a while.”

“Still,
you shouldn’t rule out the possibility.”

Adonis
ignored his last comment. He refused to accept that the same shit that’d laid
waste to his family would sideswipe him. He wasn’t like them. He was stronger.

What
the fuck did Cameron Reynolds know anyway?

Pressure
stabbed his larynx. Fucking Boy Scout Cameron with his perfect family and
perfect life and a girl who worshipped the ground he walked on.

Why
did he have to be so noble?

Why
couldn’t he be a scumbag piece of shit like all the other pieces of shit in his
life? Why did he have to care?

Cameron
was a true friend. More than what Adonis deserved. Did growing up together
justify such unfailing loyalty and trust?