Good,I think again.For both of us.
And when she reaches the door, I’m still watching her, my entire body having settled into a comfortable tremor now there’s space between us.
I bite another cigarette.
Laiken glances over her shoulder and drops her bright green eyes down the length of me, wetting her lips, and I hate that I shiver.
Laiken Campbell just had to look at me to remind me that I had a heart, and I’ve always fucking hated her for that.
Tilting my chin, I exhale a cloud of smoke, and when she disappears, and the door thuds behind her, I turn and roll my forehead against the window of my truck, screwing my entire face in agitation.
“What the fuck have I done,” I whisper through my teeth.
Irip the gear stick, accelerating toward anywhere and nowhere.
After my conversation with Laiken, I’m fucking panicking.
Harlen is in my passenger seat, chewing on a guitar pick, and all I can think as I take my wheels to the road is how badly I want to snort a line, sink a bottle of whiskey, and bury myself alive.
“Where are we going?” Harlen asks, turning down the stereo.
I shrug, letting my shoulders fall, adjusting the stick again, hammering my foot on the gas.
“Pull over,” he says, pointing with his guitar pick to a dirt strip on the side of the road, shaking his finger. “There, pull the fuck over.”
I skid off the road, rubber screeching, jamming my foot on the brake. My seatbelt catches me before I’m awarded the opportunity of flying through the window. We jolt forward with the heated stop, and then back again.
“Easy, easy, easy, big boy,” he coos just as I’m cutting the engine.
I’ve barely taken a breath, then I’m slamming my palms against the steering wheel. “Fuck!”
Harlen lets me have it out with the stationary object.
I drag my shaky hands through my hair and press back into my seat, my chest falling rapidly.
I suck down a breath. “I’ve fucked up, man,” I croak on the exhale.
Harlen doesn’t say anything, and it makes me nervous.Was he thinking the same?I pull at a callous on my right palm. I’m not looking at him when I speak again, “I never should have watched her, never should have let myself anywhere near her. I was only supposed to get her home…that was it. Buthe…” I’m shaking my head, curling my fists. “The freak that fucking raped and murdered my sister, that shot Laiken, is back, dropping off a fresh body at the front of her goddamn trailer park, and I can’t,won’t…stay away. Not now…not again.”
Harlen lifts his arm slowly, and puts the pick back between his teeth. Squinting his eyes, he stares out the front window.
He remains silent, allowing it all to sink in.
I scrub my hands down my face, wishing he would say something, because the quiet lingering between us, of what he might be thinking, eats at me.
My eyes close over themselves. “She thinks I hurt her then…she has no idea what I could…”
“Do to her now,” he whispers, then clears his throat.
And that truth coming off both of our tongues tastes like shit, because me and Harlen, we are the only two people that know where I’ve been, and how much coke I’ve had up my nose, especially in the shadowed weeks leading up to the third anniversary.
It’s precisely why I’d taken my ass out of her life. I knew where I was headed, that I’d end up here.
Harlen pinches his nose, and I catch the way he swallows, as though he has a sore throat, then how my barely voiced concerns have compounded his.
Harlen raises his chin slightly, his face rid of all ease. And I know it’s because today he isn’t prepared to go easy on me; not with these kinds of stakes.
We both knew how her mother had died; we had watched her descent alongside Laiken. And we both knew that if I walked back into her life using the drug that had started her mother’s downfall, it’d kill her.
