Long after the girls leave, I still can’t bring myself to climb into David’s bed. I don’t know how I can lay on the pillow that smells like him, or slide between the sheets that smell like us. I take a double dose of my anti-anxiety meds—the dose prescribed to help me sleep—and I’m still on the couch when my Kindle starts to blur. I don’t even care about getting a sore neck as I give in and let myself drift off to sleep.
* * *
My dreams are beautifully vivid and perfectly meaningless, and I’m in such a deep sleep that I only vaguely register the creak of the front door, or the muffled rush of the shower running, and when a warm set of knuckles strokes along my cheek, I’m only half-awakened.
I think I hear my name. Or not my name. Bea. But only David calls me that, and I don’t remember where he is, or why, but I do know he’s not here. A sigh, and then I’m being hoisted into strong arms, and my own come up to automatically wrap around the neck of whatever figment my mind has conjured up. But his scent wraps around me like a blanket of David and whiskey, and I let it comfort me. I’m too lost in my own subconscious to deny myself this small solace, and I rest my face in the crook of his neck, inhaling more of him, relishing the scrape of his stubble against my cheek.
Vaguely I marvel at how well my mind seems to have memorized every detail of David, and I wonder how often it will let me indulge in him.
In my dream I’m carried to his bedroom, and I will him to make some kind of move—any move. But he just lays me on the bed and folds his large body around me from behind, nuzzling into my hair. “I’m sorry, Bea,” he whispers. “I fucked up. I always fuck up.”
I try to get my vocal cords to work, but nothing happens. All I manage to do is gently snuggle back into him.
His arms tighten around me. “I’m sorry.”
The next thing I’m aware of is the bright room, and the fact that I am not waking up on the couch I fell asleep on. It’s morning and I’m in David’s bed, but I’m once again alone.
At least he doesn’t leave a note.
Chapter Nineteen
David
I walk into the frat house after my last class and head straight down to Reeve’s basement bedroom. It’s the only one down here, and it’s more like a small studio apartment than a bedroom—at least three times the size of most of the others, with half a kitchen and its own bathroom. But Reeve chose it for the same reason the rest of the guys didn’t—it’s secluded as fuck.
It also happens to be right off the basement gym, and that’s where I find him tonight, getting ready to lift weights. I usually spot for him, which works out, since we both prefer to work out in the evenings. Or we did, before I turned out to be an epic pussy and started doing my workouts in the morning just to have an excuse to avoid Beth. But I need to avoid her in the evenings, too, so Reeve and I take turns spotting and lifting, working ourselves past the point of exhaustion, both running from different versions of the same thing, and neither ever getting very far.
But I don’t know how to face her. Not after what I did.
Beth might think it was just a drunken hookup between friends…but what kind of friend takes advantage of a girl when she’s been drinking—and his best friend’s kid sister, at that? Even if I wasn’t exactly in my right mind, either. But that’s the problem—because even in my right mind, as guilty as I feel over it…I still fucking want her.
And that’s my burden alone. Because wanting isn’t the issue—I’ve always wanted her. It’s this precarious living arrangement that tempted me beyond my restraint, and since Beth’s safety is paramount, I have to find some way to make it work. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do. By keeping my distance. By leaving before she wakes up in the morning, and staying out until I know she’s probably asleep. And by enlisting the pledges as my surrogate bodyguards.
In fact, right now, Rectum Ralph should be walking her home from class, or to the student health center to volunteer. Or not so much walking her as following from a reasonable distance, if you want to get into semantics.
Reeve and I finish lifting and head into his room where I pour myself a double of Jack and down it in one quick swallow before pouring another. I power on Reeve’s laptop and sign into my document cloud, opening the play I finished writing down here these past couple nights—the one I’m submitting to the theater department. The one all about forbidden fruit and addiction and fucking disaster—that, if selected out of hundreds, will earn me a significant grant, and the opportunity to actually have it produced. It’s a pipe dream, but as I read over the words I wrote just last night, it’s one that feels just a bit closer.
I email it to my Playwriting professor with a strange reluctance. It somehow feels a little too personal.
I force the thought away, and check my phone for an update from Rectum, but I know it’s still too early. Beth would have just gotten out of class a few minutes ago. So I take another swig of my whiskey and crack open a window before lighting a cigarette. These past few nights, Reeve and I have spent less time with the rest of the guys and more of it drinking alone down here like a couple of alcoholic recluses. Reeve spends his time drawing angrily in that sketchbook he never lets anyone see, and I’ve been furiously typing away as if finishing my play would somehow get Beth out of my system.
It didn’t. And I just can’t deal with the guys right now. I can’t listen to them talk their big game about pussy, and girls that mean nothing to them, and their pointless, easy bullshit. Not with everything on the line right now—my friendship with Cap, and Beth, my fucking sanity—all of it in danger of crumbling into fucking pieces.
Fucking shit. Why did I have to go and do this? ’The fuck is wrong with me?
For the first time in my defiant, rebellious life, I realize my father was fucking right about me, and it makes me sick to my stomach. Because this is who I am—the guy who always insists on crossing every goddamned line anyone has ever drawn in front of him, as if they only even exist as some kind of test. A way to prove they don’t apply to me. Because they don’t. They never have.
Except this one.
This one line applied—the only one I ever respected. And it wasn’t an accident, either—it was conscious, and deliberate. I knew crossing that line would end my friendship with Cap, and even if that was something I was willing to sacrifice, which it wasn’t—isn’t, I silently correct myself—it’s not like I’d get to keep Beth in my life if I had a falling out with her brother. He was the only reason I ever saw her in the first place. Before she got to campus this fall, anyway.
Cap’s position is clear—has been for years—and now I’m lying to my oldest friend, not only about Beth being in physical danger with Brody, or emotional danger with Falco, but I’m lying about her being safe with me. Because after what happened last week, I can’t continue to pretend that she is. At least not to myself.
Reeve’s phone buzzes with a message, and his mouth twitches as he reads the screen—something he’s been doing more and more of lately, I’ve noticed.
“Is that Lani again?”
“Fuck off,” Reeve replies automatically, and I shake my head at him.
