My bare feet brush across the ground, granules of gray dirt seeping between my toes as I move toward the idling truck, curling around the front and beating a fist lightly on the driver's side window.
Chase snaps his head in my direction, still laughing. He extends his hand toward the door, manually winding thewindow down further. Another laugh vibrates through him when Jade pinches his arm.
I prop my elbows into the opening of the dented frame, bend at the waist, arching my spine and raising my chin. Cigarette between my lips, I tell him to, “Say it to my—” Only, Chase snatches it away, silencing me.
“I said you’re a little brat.” He smiles, flicking my forehead.
“Fucker,” I moan, pressing an open palm to the place he just got me, reeling back.
He laughs and turns away, shoving the trunk between his own lips, his chest and throat rippling as he takes a hit.
I tell him, “You’re gonna have to replace that, big brother.”
Chase slowly rolls the back of his head over the headrest, his gaze leveling with mine. He exhales through his nose.
I smirk, raising my brow in challenge.
And he follows, the small tilt at the corner of his mouth stirring the butterflies he’d manage to hatch deep inside my stomach a long time ago.
He wets his lips, takes another pull, reclines his head. And I can’t help but flick my eyes toward his arms, focusing on the left one, the one that carries the scars I gave him nine months ago.
“I’ll replace it, Laik, don’t worry about that,” he says his words on a tilted exhale of smoke, and I feel myself swallow.
Jade unclips her seatbelt, and Chase snaps his attention toward her, and when their eyes meet, I watch something dark and shadowy pass between them.
“Thank you,” she whispers, and any playfulness that had sat between them disappears.
Chase’s throat dips.
“What happened?” I ask, injecting myself when I notice the strain, the weight of his pain.
Jade scoffs. “Dad was being a cunt again.” She jumps out of the truck, slamming the door closed behind her.
“The Diary of Jane” by Breaking Benjamin rattles its way through the speakers and into my ears.
Jade hikes her bag onto her shoulder and rounds the rear of her brother’s truck. Her denim shorts sit tight around her petite waist, her cropped red T-shirt high around her chest. I snap my attention back to Chase, finding his eyes vacant. His dark orbs don’t reach mine, even though I so desperately try to catch them.
He drops his head backward, the rear of his skull bouncing off the headrest, taking another hit from my cigarette.
I swallow, watching the orange pull from the bottom of the trunk between his lips.
“What did he do this time?” I ask Jade when she slips up beside me, curling her arms around me. We fall into a hug, the kind that sways back and forth. And I laugh, twirling a lock of her long dark hair around my pointer finger.
“He—” Jade starts, only for Chase to cut her off.
“Something he will never do again.” Chase’s words are hard and rough, harboring the hammer of a force I hadn’t yet felt from him.
And I shiver, violently.
I’m still holding onto Jade. “Is he okay?” I whisper quietly in her ear, feeling the trembling crack of Chase’s rage spark through me.
“Yeah, he will be,” she says, and I turn back over my shoulder to look at him. He’s shuffling in his seat, pulling something out of his front pocket.
I turn back around but quickly find myself spinning toward the truck again when Chase calls, “Yo, Laik.”
He hauls a pack of cigarettes toward me, and I catch them.
“We are even now,” he states.
