“If you want to fuck her out, you’ll have to get in line,” Lillian shot back. She uncapped the vodka and poured them both another, the overflow beading on her knuckles. “I’m only half kidding. Guys have been sniffing around her since middle school and she barely looks at them. You think you’re the first one to want a piece?”
I grimaced, the burn in my stomach suddenly colder. I didn’t want a piece, I wanted the whole fucked-up animal thing, wanted to turn her inside out and see what was left, if there was anything beneath the rot and brokenness.
I drained my glass, waited for the world to come back into focus. “I was never in line,” I said, voice thick. “I’m not even in the running.”
Lillian watched me like she was measuring how close I was to the edge. “If not with Amelia,” she said, voice low, “I can help with being a distraction. Only if you want.”
I heard the dare in her voice, the recklessness. I should have left, should have put my head through the window and walked back into the sleepy churn of my father’s disappointment.
Instead, I reached for the joint, took another hit, and let the smoke spool tight in my chest. “You saying you want to help?” I asked, my words thick with the warp of vodka and weed.
Lillian tilted her chin, her hair swinging forward to curtain her face. “I’m saying you don’t have to be alone with your poison.”
I didn’t answer. I just watched the way she moved on the bed, the way she rolled the joint between her thumb and forefinger, the way her mouth curled around the filter. If I squinted, I could almost see Amelia’s shape in her. The same set of brow, the same dark drift in her eyes.
Something in me twisted nasty. I wanted to insult her, to cut the moment open with cruelty, but nothing worth saying came to mind. My tongue felt huge and useless in my mouth.
Lillian slid to the edge of the bed, her thigh pressing against mine. “You ever just let go, Caiden?” she said, her voice low. “Or do you always have to be holding the knife?”
I flinched at the sound of my name. It was too intimate, too real. For a second, it was Amelia’s voice saying it, not this older echo, but the girl I’d spent years trying to erase from my own bones.
I put the joint to my lips and inhaled until my vision swam. When the smoke left my lungs I felt a little lighter, a little more suspended. As if, if I cut every anchor, I might just float through the ceiling and dissolve with the heat.
I didn’t look at her for a long time. I just let the burn trickle through the veins in my hands, let the numbness work its way up my arms. I closed my eyes and waited for the feeling to crest, but Lillian’s thigh was an insistent heat next to mine. It was a reminder: I’m here. I’m not allowed to drift. Not when the world is made of corners and people who never fucking leave youalone.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, hating myself for how pathetic it sounded.
She shrugged then took the Camels from my jacket and sparked one up as easy and thoughtless as breathing. “Why does anyone do anything?” she said. “We’re all just flailing around, trying not to choke, giving in to whatever will distract us from the dark.”
I watched the cigarette smolder between her lips, the orange pulse bright each time she sucked in, and for a moment I thought about how easy it would be to just reach over and touch her. Her mouth was the same shape as Amelia’s when she frowned, and the idea made my skin crawl. But it also made my heart ratchet up a notch.
Lillian exhaled, blowing a stream of smoke at the ceiling, and time seemed to dilate. Everything slowed to the birth of a single thought?—
I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to feed the animal. To see how far I could press her, or myself, before something broke for good. It was selfish, it was trash, but the hunger inside me didn’t give a shit about dignity.
She tipped the last of the vodka into her mouth, wiped her lips with the back of her hand, then did something I didn’t expect.
She stood up abruptly, teetered for a moment, and peeled her dress up and over her head in one practiced move, letting it drop to the carpet as she stepped out of it. She stood there in a black bra and lace panties, and for a second I couldn’t breathe.
Her skin was as pale as a crescent moon. She shivered, and for a minute neither of us spoke.
My tongue felt replaced with glass and the sight made me dizzy with a new kind of tension. There was a sick irony to it: sitting in the Langston house, in the room where all the ghosts of my childhood enemies and obsessions were crammed into the carpet and the walls, being seduced into something ugly and reckless by the sister of the girl who had ruined me.
The bile of the day was still hot in my throat, my father’s words and the memory of that dream clinging to my skin. I wanted to smash a window, punch a crater in the drywall, run until my legs snapped.
Instead, I just watched Lillian: the sway of her hips as she kneltback onto the bed, the way she didn’t bother to cover herself, the way she met my gaze head-on, unapologetic.
“Don’t overthink it, Baxter,” she said, her voice thick and slurred but laced with a strange clarity. “You look like you’re about to run, or puke.”
I should have been numb to everything by now, too empty to even register the churn. But my skin prickled with every movement she made, and the animal inside me.
Not the one that fought, not the one that grew strong on hate, but the other one, the one that hungered and starved and pawed at the insides of my ribcage.
I hated this, hated her, hated myself. Mostly myself, for being so weak, for wanting anything at all. I wanted to scream at her to put her dress back on, to roll back the last ten minutes, to erase the sight of her body and the raw need crawling up my limbs. But I did nothing.
She climbed across the bed, movements smooth and deliberate, the practiced confidence of a girl who’d learned exactly how to weaponize her own body.
She stopped a foot from me, kneeling, bare thighs folded under her, arms loose and patient. “It’s not complicated,” she said, voice softer now, almost slurred, like she was talking to herself more than to me. “It’s just chemicals and meat. The body wants what it wants, so you give it something. Then it’s quiet for a while.”
