I close my eyes. “I’ll stay here. Enjoy my shut-eye time.”
I reach out blindly and pat his shoulder twice.
“Get back out there. Sing more Taylor Swift.”
“You’re really calling it a night.”
“Yes.”
“All right.” He stands. The bed releases. “But tomorrow we’re talking about this behavior. This is not normal.”
“What’re you, my dad? Fuck, Stan.”
He laughs.
He starts dancing his way to the door. I open one eye and watch him do it. He is doing the thing where his legs go one way, and his shoulders go the other, and he flips the light off on his way out, and just before he pulls the door shut, he leans his head back in.
“I’ll keep an eye on her for you, big Blue.”
The door closes.
I lie in the dark and close my eyes.
The bass picks up downstairs, and I hear him shout when he reaches the bottom step.
Christ.
Chapter 3
Melly
Iwaketothetaste of something foul in my mouth and the kind of headache that lives behind your eyes. For a long moment, I don’t move. I don’t open my eyes properly. I let them crack just enough to register the low-amber light bleeding around the edges of the curtains. My pillow is damp on one side where my cheek has been pressed against it for hours. My hair is stuck to my neck.
Someone is asleep beside me. And when I finally turn my head, slowly, like my skull is a glass I might tip and shatter, I see Mila Brooks. My best friend. We used to have homeroom together in the sixth grade, and I cannot imagine my life without her. She’s on her stomach, one arm hanging off the edge of the mattress with her hair fanned out across the pillow in a dark,tangled spill. Her mouth is slightly open like I imagine mine just was. There is a thin line of drool on her cheek.
I try to put the night back together in pieces, and I can’t. I have flashes of Mila’s hand wrapped around my wrist like a tourniquet as she dragged me out of the kitchen at the Hawthorne House. I remember Chase’s tone when he told me for hundredth time that he wanted to leave. I remember stumbling in my bathroom –– my new bathroom, the bathroom in the apartment I still cannot believe I get to live in — as I brushed my teeth and watched my own swaying reflection in the mirror like she was a stranger.
The rest of it is nothing. A black space where there should be memory. I turn my head again, more carefully this time, and that’s when I see Chase on the floor. He’s stretched out in the navy sleeping bag he keeps rolled up behind the seat of his truck for jobs that run late, for emergencies, for nights like last night when his girlfriend gets too drunk and blacks out. The bag is unzipped to the middle of his sternum. His arms are out, folded loosely over the top of it, and even in this dim, forgiving light, I can see the freckles along his forearms, the small white scar on his elbow from the time he tried to fix his mom’s gutter without a ladder, the curve of muscle that comes from a year and a half of hauling equipment around job sites with his father.
He’s awake. His phone is held just over his chest, the screen washing his face from underneath in a pale-blue glow that makes him look younger than twenty-one. His jaw is shadowed with the rough stubble he hasn’t shaved in a couple of weeks. His hair is flat on one side. There’s a pillow crease pressed into his cheek.
He has no idea I’m watching him. And for a moment, I let myself look at him the way I used to. Back when I was nineteen and brand new to him, when his attention felt like something important. He’s handsome. The kind of objectively handsomethat other girls notice in Walmart. Strong jaw. Kind eyes. He is, in every measurable way, a good man. And the truth that has been sitting at the back of my throat for months rises up again now in the quiet of this room. But I silence it because a good man should be enough.
I shift, and the mattress creaks beneath me, and the spell breaks.
His head comes up. The phone goes dark against his chest in one quick motion.
“Good morning,” he says, and his voice is rough with sleep, soft around the edges.
“Morning.”
“How are you feeling?”
I have to think about that. I have to actually run the question through whatever filter is still working up there and decide what the honest answer is and how honest I’m willing to be.
“Like I owe somebody an apology,” I mumble into the pillow.
He almost smiles. The corner of his mouth lifts, and his eyes crinkle.
