Page 25 of Dark

The cab of the truck fell silent. The next song started up, a bassline I’d have recognized anywhere. Since, you know, I wrote it.

At the corner of his instep, in one of the empty spaces of his checkerboard Vans, the faded remnant of a penned-in daisy stared up at me. My toe gently nudged his, our feet rocking back and forth in a lazy rhythm.

Picking up my foot, he tugged it into his lap. “Came to see you once, you know.”

“You mean—?”

He twirled one of my shoelaces. “Down in Austin. It was that show your band played at Hole in the Wall. You guys were amazing.”

“Why didn’t you come up to talk to me after the set? I would have—"

“Because it wouldn’t have changed anything.” His fingers ran absently over my ankle. “I just… needed to know you were okay, I guess, after everything that happened with your dad. And after the way we left things.”

“Wow… okay.”

Ethan’s eyes flicked to mine, irises the heated amber of an autumn sunset. And despite everything, my stomach fluttered. Damn Ethan Caldwell and his dark looks and stupid mouth I both wanted to slap a hand over and kiss senseless.

“Got something to say, then say it.”

“I don’t.”

He looked down. “We doing the bullshit thing now, Daisy?”

I took a sip from the to-go cup he’d brought me from Dark, tasting cocoa, vanilla and peppermint. A wax paper sack of Thin Mints was tucked into the console, a pale-yellow post-it with a cartoonish muffin on it taped to the side of the cup. Three years, and he still remembered exactly what I liked. “I don’t know what to say to that.”

Ethan squinted out at the trees. “You heard from Zane? It’s been, what, four years?”

I shrugged, picking at a frayed spot on the leg of my jeans. “Meera thinks law enforcement or the hospitals would have contacted us by now if he was dead. He owed a lot of people money.”

Ethan’s fingers moved gently back and forth over the bones of my ankle. “Are his dealers giving you or Ellie trouble?”

“No. Not since—"

Blinking when my eyes started to sting, I quickly turned to stare out the window.

When my dad hadn’t come home, I'd done everything I could to cling to the illusion of normalcy for Ellie’s sake. We would find a way, I reasoned, even after he was let go after a week of failing to show up to work. After Ellie and I were dropped from his insurance coverage. When my meager checks at Dark had to go to his dealers rather than paying for food. Every morning I waited until Ellie was at school to call the hospitals, to scream at creditors that I had no idea where my father was, so to stop calling already. I took every shift Ethan could give me at Dark and moonlighted on the weekends in Austin driving for Uber. And it still wasn’t enough.

How easy it had been in those dark, hopeless months for exhaustion, fear and stress to distort the way I perceived the world. I’d finally broken down one night in the parking lot when Axel wouldn’t start, curling up on the sidewalk and sobbing into the frayed knees of my jeans. Ethan had found me there, pressed until I eventually confessed the truth.

A week later, it had all stopped. The phone calls. The late-night knocks on our door. I asked him, just once, if it had been him. No idea what you’re talking about. And, hey. Cappuccino. Table four.

Which had only driven my secret crush to epic proportions.

There was an article Meera had left taped to my door, the one that said kids who grew up in a house without a stable adult figure isolated ourselves, that we were approval seekers who repressed our feelings, confused love and pity, and sought out partners as screwed up as we were.

Was that what I was doing? Maybe. The last thing I wanted was to end up in another relationship where I would be constantly let down, jerked around, and abandoned. Undeniable chemistry aside, if Ethan and I couldn’t get our shit together, we were better off as friends.

“That night you left?” Ethan stared out at the wind whipping through the tall grass. “I should’ve gone after you. It was a dick move to let you leave, let you think I’d just been hoping to hook up.”

“Weren’t you?” I countered. “I thought that’s what you did.”

“Yeah, but not with you.”

“Because I was human?”

“No. I’ve—” He stopped short, fiddling with my shoelaces.

I gave him a pointed look. “Been with human girls?”