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“Hey, we don’t have to stay for the fireworks,” Trevor said. “It’s your call.”
“What do you want to do?”
He smiled and kissed my cheek. “I want to do whatever is going to make sad girl go away.”
Trevor moved so that he was in front of me. His hand still held mine, and I glanced down, reading the tattoo along his knuckle. Strength. That’s what he’d said the symbols meant. Or was it…
I ran my thumb across his skin. “Which one is this?”
“Courage,” he answered.
Courage.
I traced the symbols on his other hand. Strength.
“I want to get a tattoo,” I blurted.
“What?” He was smiling now. “You’re crazy. You don’t just get a tattoo. I mean, I guess some people do, but ink is personal. Ink means something, you know?”
“So you don’t think I’m cool enough to get a tattoo?” I don’t know if I was annoyed or hurt, but I was something.
“I think that a tattoo on any part of your body would be very, very cool.” His hand grazed my shoulder and then up along my neck. “Like right here,” he murmured following his fingers with his mouth. “But it needs to be right. It needs to be you, and well, until you turn eighteen, you’d need your parents’ permission anyway.”
Oh. Right. Downer.
“Do you want to go back to the cottage?” I asked. The rain had stopped, but still, I was done with this place. Done with Baton Rouge. The only place I wanted to be right now was with Trevor back at the cottage, preferably under the covers.
“Like I said, I’m up for whatever you want to do.” His tone was teasing, but the look in his eyes was anything but. The look in his eyes told me that he was as affected by this connection that we had as I was.
I thought of his tattoos. Strength. Courage.
Maybe it was time for me to stop living a life that was a lie. To have the courage to stop hiding behind the secrets and sins of my parents and worrying about what everyone else thought. Maybe it was time for me to just be me and to let myself experience the things that I wanted to experience without any of the guilt. Without trying to be someone other than me.
I wanted to be with Trevor. I wanted to kiss him and touch him and see him. I wanted to experience all of him.
Could he see that in my eyes? Did he know?
“Let’s go,” I said before he could change his mind, or maybe it was more like before I lost the courage that I’d just gained and changed mine. I tugged on his hand, but instead of following me, he kind of stumbled to the left.
“Shit,” he said roughly. “Hold on.”
He looked up at me, and I knew that something was really, really wrong. “Trevor?”
But he was shaking his head, and oh God, his eyes were wonky. I was scared out of my mind, so I couldn’t imagine what he was feeling.
“Trevor!”
He bent over, hands on his knees, and the fear in my gut shot up so fast and so hard that I thought I was going to be sick. The crowd around us suddenly moved back, like they knew something was about to happen. Like there was a disease among them and they didn’t want to touch it.
He glanced up one more time, and I barely managed to grab him before he pitched forward. He ha
lf landed on me and the wet muddy grass, but I had him. I had him. His body was shaking, his hands twisted, and I shouted for someone to call 911. I tried to remember what Mrs. Henney had done in the library.
Nothing. She’d done nothing.
So I did the only thing that I could do. I held him and tried not to cry, pushing his hair out of his face and trying to protect him from the crowd that had gathered. I didn’t want them to see. Didn’t want them to be anywhere near him.
I kept shouting “move back” until my voice was hoarse, and then someone shouted that the EMTs were on their way. Okay. I could do this. I could hold on until they got here. But it seemed that the minutes were hours, and when I felt a hand on my shoulder, I wrenched back, ready to fight or I don’t know, do something, but it was a uniform.
