Drought.
Set in the Southwest, then. His stuff always is.Was, I remind myself. I don’t know anything about who he is or what hewrites anymore. Familiar curiosity flickers to life behind my rib cage, but I’m back within eyesight of West’s tent, and I don’t want him to see me flipping through the pages or even reading the back-cover synopsis, so I hold the book loosely in my grip, forcing my eyes not to focus on the orange blossoms on the spine. I wait in line as West signs books for two outrageously pretty girls, both of them way too young for him, and I’m annoyed all over again. I didn’t even need to buy this stupid book; he sold two on his own.
The girls leave, and I step up to the table. I slap the book down hard enough that everyone within twenty feet looks at us. West swears under his breath and quickly signs the title page. He closes the cover and pushes it toward me.
“I hope you find it illuminating,” he says, which strikes me as a stupid thing to say. But I can’t fault him too much, as I say stupid stuff at my events all the time.
“I can assure you I won’t,” I say with an acid smile. I turn to leave, but West calls me back.
“Oh, and, Darling?”
Hearing my name on his tongue is like hot lava flowing down my spine. “Don’t call me that.”
He stands up and leans his weight on his hands. His gaze is a wrecking ball of intention. “I will get you back for this,Darling.”
12
12 Years Ago
Sophomore Year, First Semester
“Honey, we’re home!”Amber’s voice carries from the front door to the small sunlit kitchen at the back of the house, where I’ve been deleting and writing the same paragraph for the last half hour.
“Who’s ‘we’?” I yell back. When Amber asked if I wanted to live with her this year, I jumped at the chance. I hit the roommate jackpot with her; not only is she easy to live with and spends half her time at Kyle’s frat, but also her parents bought a house close to campus over the summer, and they’re only charging me a couple hundred bucks in rent.
I’m confident that Amber and I wouldn’t have been friends if we hadn’t been roommates—she likes to party, and I like to spend my weekends talking to people I made up in my head—but the forced proximity and shared trauma of watchingGrey’s Anatomyevery week in a two-hundred-square-foot dorm room really bonded us together. She doesn’t let me get away with being a hermit too many days in a row, and I inexplicably makeher laugh every time we meet someone who asksLike the planet?She never gets tired of my bit, and I love that about her.
The moment I knew our friendship was going to last, however, was the night we couldn’t fit microwave burritos in our freezer because of the frost buildup, so we dragged it down the hall and defrosted it in the shower. Something about the shower spray mixing with our tears of laughter made our friendship permanent.
The door slams, and Amber’s sandals thud against the tile floor as she kicks them off. “Me and Kyle,” she says as she enters the kitchen. “And West,” she adds as he trails after them, ducking to fit under the low archway.
“Hey.” West nods and runs a self-conscious hand through his hair. Bethany convinced him to buzz it over the summer, and now it’s too short to straightenandtoo short to fully curl, so it’s this fluffy sort of in-between that looks like it would feel like silk under my fingers. Last time I saw Bethany, she was bugging him to cut it again becauseit looks better short, and I had to wire my mouth shut to avoid telling her that her opinion sucks.
“We need to talk,” Amber says as she scans the pantry and then the refrigerator and emerges with a tub of questionable hummus and a half-empty bag of pita chips. She offers the hummus to Kyle to sniff. He makes a face but then takes a bite anyway.
“I think it’s expired,” I say.
“Tastes fine,” he says.
Amber shrugs and takes a nibble. “We need to grocery shop.”
“Soon,” I agree. We’ve been saying it for the last five days,though, and I doubt today is the day either of us will make it happen. It’s getting dire, and Kyle’s presence isn’t helping, but I’d be an idiot to argue with two-hundred-dollar rent. “What do we need to talk about?”
She drops the pita chips dramatically on the table and fixes me with a serious face.
“If this is about the dishes in my room, I swear I’m going to—”
“Halloween party,” she cuts me off. “Tonight. Rishi’s house. We’re all going. Plus Bethany, right?” She turns to West for confirmation, and when he nods, she looks back to me for an answer.
I never imagined that West and I would hang out with Amber and Kyle as much as we do, but Kyle was iced out of his fraternity after he reported them for hazing and thus found himself with more free time this year. He’s not so bad. “Okay.”
She frowns. “That’s it?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t have to stay home and study?”
I click to one of the dozens of open tabs on my laptop and tilt it so she can see my trigonometry grade. I’m four weeks away from finally passing this class and saying goodbye to math forever.Hallelujah.
