I give him the name of my hotel and fall into step by his side. There’s a faster route, one that doesn’t involve cutting through campus, but the ghosts of our past can’t leave us alone tonight, and walking next to him feels less complicated than it did this afternoon. The darkness tends to do that. When I can’t mark the passing years by the faint traces of smile lines around his eyes, it’s easier to chase the shadows of our old selves.
The wind swirls my hair in every direction. There’s no hope for it. If I move my hands from my skirt, West will know the color (light blue) and cut (cheeky) of my underwear.
“Speaking of people who aren’t sober…” I tilt my chin up to look at him. His large jacket slips off my shoulder again, and the chill cuts straight to my bones.
“Is there a question under those ellipses?” he asks dryly. I laugh. West knows as well as anyone about my deep and abiding love for ellipses.
“Not if you don’t want to answer one.”
He glances up at the sky, weighing his words carefully. “The older I get, the more I realize that nothing is as black-and-white as I thought when we were twenty-two.”
We.
My stomach hurts.
“Because of my dad, I saw alcohol as bad, sobriety as good.” He glances sideways, and I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes. An old, sickening feeling settles heavy on my chest, but he continues, unfazed. “Eventually I realized that I don’t want to make my decisions based on his mistakes. I refuse to give him that level of control over my life. And once I loosened the grip on my own anger, he stopped taking up so much real estate in my head.” He turns his empty palms to the sky. “I gave myself permission to stop fighting my past.”
His confession shocks me. I inspect his profile under the blue glow of a campus emergency light. Gone is the anguish that used to surround him when he talked about his dad, and in its place is a hard-fought peace. He looks settled. Confident. Steady.
He grew up, I realize with a start. The sensation of guilt quickly makes room for something different but equally asalarming.Pride. I shouldn’t be feeling either in relation to West Emerson.
“I’m happy for you, West,” I say, and the look he gives me in return is so unguarded that it terrifies me. I need to redirect this conversation away from soul-baring confessions and toward something lighter. “Friday night and nothing is happening. Other than the café, Tucson hasn’t changed at all, has it?”
“It’s not so bad.”
“I’ll never believe it. This city has always been sleepy.”
“Because there’s so much to do in New York?” he asks darkly.
We stare at each other in silence, the absurdity of his question hanging between us.
“Don’t say anything. I heard it,” he mutters, before furrowing his brow in thought. “Are you still willing to do something illegal in the name of sugar?”
“I will always, at any time, do something illegal for dessert.”
West nods toward the Student Union food court. The lights are off and the doors are locked. “Prove it, Darling.”
Ugh.
I roll my eyes and follow him into the dark.
16
10 Years Ago
Senior Year, Second Semester
Amber was relentless,and West was game, so we spent our sophomore and junior years seeing art-house movies at the Loft, getting high and hiking in Sabino Canyon, sneaking into apartment complex swimming pools after dark, and driving all the way to the café at the top of Mount Lemmon for overpriced slices of pie. I studiedjustenough to pass my classes, and by the time senior year rolled around, I’d done everything there was to do in Tucson. You can only get drunk in the desert so many times before the city starts to close in around you.
“There’s nothing to do in this fucking town” was our new motto. In every class, the conversations revolved around making plans to get out. And since I’d only ever had one plan, my nights were once again spent alone, tangled in crumb-filled bedsheets, with an overheated laptop perched on my thighs.
And then, on a random Tuesday afternoon outside Modern Languages, I type the wordsThe Endand feel the world shift. (I later hit backspace seven times; novels don’t announce theirconclusion.) This book is different from all the ones I’ve written before—I know it in my bones. Fox Caldwell and Juniper Devereaux feel more real than my own life.
I give it a title (Torched) and start the email-driven search for a literary agent. After months of obsessing over this book, my obsession reroutes to my inbox. Who needs TV—hell, who needs books or a social life or a boyfriend—when you have the thrill of watching the clock and refreshing your inbox each time the second hand hits twelve? It’s entertainment that doubles as torture, and the fun part is the stakes. At any time, an agent could email me to say that they want to make all my dreams come true.Or—and this is where the true mind fuck happens—they could send a rejection detailing all the ways in which my book is unsellable garbage. It’s a toss-up!
I don’t see West as often as I used to. His grandma was diagnosed with dementia in July, and his family needs help with the medical bills, so before the fall semester started, West withdrew from his classes and gave his tuition money to his family. I panicked when he told me, afraid it meant he was leaving Tucson, a thought that filled me with dread that I didn’t know how to express. But instead of moving home, he quit his job at the soft-serve counter and took one with a pest control company in Tucson that doubled his pay and gave him triple the hours.
It’s a warm day in February when I refresh my inbox again with a sigh. Nothing. Typical for a Sunday evening. Typical for most days, but I can’t break the habit, even on weekends and holidays and while I’m asleep. I once woke up with my phone in my hand and my thumb on the Gmail icon. My sanity is slipping.
