Daniel had said his dad beat them for years, long enough to permanently damage his mom on some level. I wanted that knowledge to soften me toward her, but it didn’t, not when Daniel was the one still suffering. When he finally focused on me, I could tell he hadn’t heard me in the way I wanted. The words meant nothing to him because he didn’t believe them.
He took a deep breath and pushed his hair back from his face. “I don’t want to do this anymore. Any of it.” His eyes found mine. “Except you.” Both hands caught my arms and I didn’t know if he was trying to draw me in or if he needed someone to pull him up, anyone.
I never knew the answer to that question with Daniel.
“Let’s get out of here. Anywhere. We can drive to the Grand Canyon or Mexico.”
His grip was inexorable. There was a desperate pleading note so naked in his voice that I couldn’t move away even though I was so suddenly, painfully, convinced that I needed to. “Daniel, I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry, but you know I can’t.” I didn’t need to list all the reasons why. I could see them hit him one by one until his eyes went dim again and he dropped his hands before leaning back in the couch.
“Hey.” His eyes wobbled a bit in their sockets before steadying. “I’m sorry I puked on you. And what I said.”
He was pale and he had a slight sheen to his skin. His hair had picked up some of the dirt and gravel from the yard. The T-shirt I had found for him was much too small. And I couldn’t forget what it concealed.
I sat down and plucked a pebble from his hair and dropped it into his hand. “You need better friends.”
“Like you? Do I have you, Jill?” It was like part of him had completely shut down. Gone was the broken boy struggling to understand his mother’s animosity. He’d boxed all that up and what was left seemed unsteady and uncomfortably intense.
“I did get you inside and—” I glanced at his shirt. “I’m still here.”
“You fixed my Jeep.”
“And I fixed your Jeep.”
Daniel leaned into me, or maybe he fell into me. “And you smell nice.”
I pushed him back. He was heavy. And didn’t smell so nice. “I smell like chlorine from the water park, and I smell a little like puke because of you.”
Daniel ran his eyes down to my legs and then back to my face. “You are sort of pink.”
I was a lot pink. I was gonna hurt so bad tomorrow. I explained about Sunsplash, but Daniel didn’t seem to be listening all that well.
“Does it sting?” He slid his hand up my forearm.
Not when he did that it didn’t. “It mostly feels tight. But you shouldn’t be touching me.”
Daniel moved his hand up to my shoulder and rubbed his thumb back and forth. “It’s redder here.”
Did he even know what he was doing? I looked into his face, noticing the heavy-lidded, glazed look in his eyes. I doubted I was more than a blurry pink shape in front of him. He was probably a minute away from passing out. If that. My eyes started to sting and I squeezed them shut.
It wasn’t fair what he was doing to me. Making me realize things that I really didn’t want to. He was so messed up. His parents had done that to him and neither one cared that they’d damaged something so fragile. And Daniel was fragile.
He’d told me before that I was the only one he knew out here—I refused to count Jake/John—and at the time that knowledge was heady. It made me feel special to think that I was all he needed. But it wasn’t true, not in the way I thought. His world had shrunk to include only his mom and me, and he’d latched onto me because he needed someone. Maybe anyone. I had people, love. Daniel didn’t. All he had was me and the impossible relationship we were navigating. I knew that if his life had been different, a hair less awful, he’d have been able to stay away from me. He’d have known what I was finally forcing myself to accept. Sooner or later—and I was guessing sooner—we were going to crash. I’d already begun to brace for impact.
I dropped my shoulder and Daniel took the hint and stopped touching me. “Sorry.”
I shook my head. “It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt that much.” Other things hurt though. Other things were just beginning to throb with pain that promised to be so much worse than physical.
Daniel was muttering something and then he was touching my hair, running his fingers through the strands that weren’t all the way dry yet. He was half leaning, half falling toward me again.
I leaned back but he kept coming.
I hadn’t thought my first kiss would be from some drunk guy pressing me back against a lumpy couch and smashing his mouth against mine with enough force to bang our teeth together. I hadn’t thought he would stink of cigarettes and taste like puke.
One of his hands tangled in my hair and the other slid up to grip my shoulder tightly, too tightly on my sunburned skin.
This wasn’t a kiss in Sean’s old tree house during a rainstorm, or at a bonfire, or any of the ways I wanted my first kiss to be. Daniel wasn’t telling me he cared about me in that crazy intense way I craved. He wasn’t telling me anything. He wasn’t even looking at me.
Last night, for the first time, I dreamed about being kissed in a pool with a sky of twinkling stars watching. For the first time, I dreamed about a guy with dark hair instead of blond.
