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Chapter Fourteen
WHEN I STEP OUT OF the bar, Dakota is standing on the sidewalk, raising her hand to hail a cab. I run up to her side and push her hand down.
“Don’t touch me,” she spits, a cloud of smoke puffing out of her mouth from the chilly fall air. I drop my hand and step in front of her. She keeps her arms down, crossing them in front of her chest as if to protect herself.
I immediately begin to explain myself. Or try to.
“It’s not what you think,” I say in a rushed voice.
Dakota turns away from me. She’s not going to let me explain. She never has.
I gently grab her arm, but she wrenches her whole body away as if I’ve burned her. I ignore the judgmental glances of the people walking by and step in front of her.
“Bullshit!”she shouts. “Are you kidding me, Landon?”
The liquor on her breath and the way her bloodshot eyes are focusing, I can tell she’s had more than a few. Since when does she drink like that? Or at all, really?
In my mind, she’s sixteen again, her curly hair pulled up into a bun. She’s wearing gym shorts and high socks, the kind with the red stripes around the top, sitting cross-legged on her bed. We’re flipping through college applications over pizza. Her house is quiet for once. Her dad is gone. Carter is out with Jules. She’s talking to me about how she’s never been drunk, but wants to be.
Her first experiment didn’t work out the way she expected; alcohol doesn’t taste as good as the characters in Gossip Girl make it seem. Ten minutes and three swigs of eighty-proof vodka later, she was hugging the toilet and I was holding her hair while she swore to never drink again. Before I put the bottle back into her dad’s crowded freezer, I dumped out half and added water, figuring in a naïve way that maybe if the alcohol were diluted, his temper would be, too.
Apparently, vodka doesn’t freeze—but water does. And the next morning Carter came to school with a black eye and a sore rib cage because of my mistake.
I never made that mistake again.
“She’s Tessa’s friend,” I say. “I barely know her. I know what it looks like—”
Dakota cuts me off, not even looking at me as she speaks. “She’s been talking about you for weeks now!” Her voice is loud, cracking at the end like a whip.
“He’s sooo sweet,”she croons, mocking a sultry female voice.
Passersby on the sidewalk stare at us as I try to calm her down. One guy in a beanie gives me an I-would-save-you-if-I-could-bro look as he passes with his girlfriend. His quiet girlfriend, who doesn’t seem to hate him. Lucky guy.
I attempt to defend myself, but it comes out as babble. “I don’t know what she’s been saying, but I didn’t—”
Dakota raises her hand in front of my face, waving for me to shut up. Her dress is bunched at her hips, exposing the line of her tights underneath. The more she moves, pacing on the sidewalk, the higher her dress rises. She doesn’t even notice as she continues to stew in her rage.
After a few more seconds of pacing, she turns back to me, her eyes alight as she seems to remember something. “Oh my God! She kissed you! She told us!”
She takes a few steps across the sidewalk and bumps shoulders with a man walking a Saint Bernard. “That’s who she was talking about! It’s been you this entire fucking time.”
Jesus, has Nora been giving Dakota a play-by-play of our every encounter?
Dakota raises her hand to hail a cab again. “Get away from me,” she warns when I touch her elbow to steady her.
I haven’t said anything and I know to be careful about how I approach this. I hadn’t expected the two of them to be sharing stories about me. I didn’t think Nora liked me enough to even mention me to her friends, and if she did, I would have never imagined that Dakota was one of her roommates. How can the world be so small?
“I’m coming with you. How much did you have to drink?” I ask her.
