Iflew out of the truck, barely remembering to yank the keys from the ignition, before running next door.
“What happened? Is he okay?” Heedless of the spectacular sunburn I’d gotten that day with Claire, I dropped to my knees on the graveled yard and bent to see Daniel’s face. “Daniel…?”
The driver laughed. “He’s just drunk off his ass is all.”
I glanced at the driver before turning back to Daniel, who had rolled onto his back and was staring up at the sky with unfocused eyes. I sat back on my heels and sucked in air that suddenly stank of alcohol and cigarette smoke.
Drunk.
I hadn’t ever seen it in person, up close. I hadn’t smelled it before either. It started to mix with the chlorine that clung to me and the combination turned me almost as green as Daniel.
It was sobering, for me at least. Daniel was too busy trying to keep his eyes from rolling back in his head.
Driver Guy squatted down next to Daniel and patted his face. “Yo, Daniel, you cool if I take off?”
Daniel was apparently cool with anything at the moment.
“Are you kidding? You can’t leave him here like this.” I watched Driver Guy walk back to his car. “At least help me get him inside?”
Driver Guy unlocked his door. “Nah, I’m good.”
And without another word he drove off.
A single laugh that was more a gasp than anything left me as I stared after his fading taillights.
I knelt there for at least a solid minute running through a list of possible scenarios that ended up with me successfully getting Daniel inside his house.
The list was pathetically short.
I focused on Daniel. Drunk was not a good look on him. He never opened his eyes for more than a second or two, but I could see that they were puffy and bloodshot. He didn’t look anything like the guy from the night before in the pool; not even like the guy from after the pool.
I didn’t ask him why. I thought that was pretty obvious, but another thought quickly chased that one away: I didn’t know him well enough to make that call. We’d spent the past couple weeks together caught up in our own perfect little bubble, for the most part, isolated from people who would point out all the many reasons why our little bubble needed to pop.
Maybe drinking was what he did. I couldn’t blame him, but the possibility made me less unsure about pulling away the night before.
Daniel made a noise, a groan, as he tried to sit up, and I became aware that the gravel beneath my knees was long past stinging. I stood and brushed off the pebbles, looking at Daniel’s front door some thirty feet away, then at Daniel who was actually swaying where he sat. It might as well have been a mile. Daniel outweighed me by at least fifty pounds and “drunk off his ass” meant he was dead weight.
I winced when I dragged Daniel’s arm over my shoulders and pulled him to his feet. He was every bit as heavy as I’d feared, and unsteady. The friction of his skin against my sunburn was brutal as we shuffled along.
But I wasn’t letting go.
When we got to the door we were both sweating. I propped him against the side of his house with my hip and my palm. “Don’t fall, okay?” Daniel would end up face-first in a cactus if he went down.
I was relieved when the door opened. I had not been looking forward to playing find the house keys with the drunk guy.
Daniel’s knees buckled once after we got inside and I made a grab for the back waist of his jeans and gave a vicious yank. That sobered him up and I stopped worrying he was going to puke down my neck at any moment. Mostly.
He pushed away from me when we reached the kitchen and almost went down again before he caught himself against the wall.
I reached out to help him and he jerked away.
“I’m fine.” His words were slurred.
The first two intelligible words he’d spoken to me, and they were a complete dismissal. When Daniel first fell out of the car, I’d gone from panic, thinking he was hurt, before shifting to pragmatic mode to get him inside. I’d completely bypassed anything else. But I was hot and sweaty and the sunburn along my shoulders was screaming from supporting his weight. And I was so confused by my own feelings that anger seemed like the only safe one.
“You’re fine? You sure about that? ’Cause I just had to drag you inside from where your buddy—who’s super by the way—ditched you on the side of the road.”
Daniel’s answer was to throw up all over the place.
