I don’t hear the response on the other side, but the air in the cab changes.
“Hatley …” Tristen drags out and the hairs on my neck stand. “Hat, what did you take?”
I swallow hard and peek out from behind my fabric barrier.
“H-Hat, just …” Tristen’s gaze flips over to me, his irises darker than normal, and my stomach drops. “Stay where you are. I’m coming. No!No. J-just stay there. I’m on my way.”
He signals his turn, but instead of going down the side street, he busts a U-turn I’m pretty sure is illegal. The motion is quick and jerky, sending me crashing into the door and the road trip bag to slide into my lap. I just manage to catch things as they fly out, hurriedly stuffing them back in the crinkling plastic and dumping it on the floor.
Tristen guns it through a yellow light, one of the few in Barren Ridge, and I reach for the seatbelt.
“What’s wrong with Hatley?” I ask quietly to his profile, the muscles there so tense that he looks like he’s chiseled out of stone.
Is his jaw always that square?
“He took something.” It comes out mumbled and distracted as he speeds right past the city limits sign.
It feels odd to see it, it’s proclaimed displeasure of departure from the town, and feel …
Nothing.
Even though this morning was the first time I’ve ever left the town I was raised in. Even though, somewhere behind me, my mother sits in her house with a cigarette between her fingers and utter silence surrounding her.
Somewhere behind me, my life sits on pause, waiting for my return.
Yet not a single part of that life has sought me out since I’ve been gone. Not a well wish or a visit to my hospital bed.
I watch the sign in the rearview mirror grow smaller and smaller with each mile that separates us.
And with it … something in my chest tightens up with each inch that it shrinks.
“What do you mean he took something?” I ask as anxiety and dread rolls through my stomach.
“He’s …fuck.” The truck sputters out its resistance to Tristen’s attempts to make it go faster. “He just needs me and I’m sorry, but I have to get him.”
Chapter 16
Tristen
My pulse hammers asI wade through the thick of swaying bodies.
Some of them are slumped over, heavy-lidded. Barely moving to the deep bass beat rattling the foundation.
The scent of weed and alcohol is so thick that I can barely breathe. The flashing lights fucking with my vision.
It’s dark and my fingers are prickling with that familiar tingling.
Not now. Not with Em outside.
I just have to find my best friend among the incapacitated and drag him back home.
Focus.
Forcing a breath I regret with how thick it feels, I swallow back the nerves that rise and head up the stairs.
“Hatley!”
Door after door does nothing but reveal bodies fucking, snorting, shooting and my palms itch.
