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Tonight’s no exception. Those tendrils are messily arranged over his temples and forehead, brushing over his shaped eyebrows, and somehow adding darkness to his mud-brown eyes.
Every piece of him comes together, knits into one painfully handsome guy that—just the sight of—shreds Billie’s insides.
She almost turns around to head back inside.
Almost.
But the cigarettes (and if she admits it to herself, just being around Preston) call to her. Still, she’s sour, so her face puckers with a fleeting look of annoyance before she plants herself on the porch bench.
Preston doesn’t speak. It surprises her a little, but not enough to be the one who breaks the quiet between them.
He just keeps the joint pinched between two fingers and lifts it to his shaped, pink lips. The red glow intensifies in the dark.
Billie rams a cigarette into her mouth then—balancing the vodka in the other hand—scratches at the cheap lighter. Much less elegant than Preston opposite her.
“Stealing?” Preston’s dark gaze flickers down to the pack of smokes in her grip, then to the vodka before coming back up to meet her eyes.
“What’s it to you?” The snark is followed swiftly by the sound of the lid unscrewing from the vodka bottle.
“Those are mine,” he says flatly, then exhales the smoke in a long winding pillar that floods the space between them. “That’s what it is to me.”
With a shrug, she takes a harsh gulp, one big and cold enough to chill her insides. “What are you even doing here?”
In other words,‘I didn’t know you would be here.’
“Why amIatmyfriend’s house?” He scoffs a light sound, even making that sound elegant and refined, then turns his cheek to her. “The eve of my birthday, no less. What a fucking mystery.”
She swigs from the bottle. Cool vodka sloshes against the glass as she drops it back down to her lap. She hikes a leg, the heel of her foot resting on the edge of the porch bench.
Preston says, “You should have come to me that night.”
Takes her a long moment to get his meaning. So many ‘that nights’ have happened now, but it’s his tone that sets the night he’s talking about apart from the others. The one that started it all. Henry Maxwell’s night.
She smiles something grim. “And what would you’ve done about it?”
“I’m in the family of coverups Billie,” he says flatly, as if to remind her of some obvious fact—and it is an obvious fact.
But that wasn’t the issue. “You weren’t here,” she says with a dark look aimed his way. “You were never here. And you dumped me on an answering machine, remember?”
His eyes flicker down to the joint. It’s gone out now, left abandoned for too long. “You think it’s my fault.”
Words he’s spoken for the first time since that night, one she’s implied in so many fights over the years but never said.
Yes.
“It wouldn’t have happened if—”
“Always looking for someone to blame.” Preston slides off the railing and gently sets the dead joint down on the bar. “Youdid this.”
She’s silenced.
Her lips turn inwards with a frown. Instinct has her lifting the bottle to her sharp mouth, and she pauses only for a beat before she takes one, two, three gulps.
Guess this is the night of words unspoken now spoken.
It is her fault. All of it.
She’s carried that truth with her into every bottle since.
