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I push myself upright on the seat, trying to blink myself awake. Duke sways on his feet in a drunken, slow-motion battle with the alcohol in his system. Someone turned the recessed lighting around the edge to the red setting, and the glow haloes him in his true demonic color.
He tips his chin at me. “Get up. You still owe me one.”
“Where’d everybody go?”
“Home,” he says. “It’s three in the morning. If I knew you were going to punk out at your own party, I would have given you one of these.”
He digs in his pocket for what feels like minutes on end, at last producing a tiny, sealed baggie from his pocket. He opens it and dumps the round, blue pearls in his hand. Then he just stares at them, squinting in the dim red light, trying to count them.
“Fuck it,” he says, starting to lift his hand toward his mouth.
“Duke,” I bark. “What the fuck? That’s like ten pills.”
“Help me put ‘em back,” he slurs.
“Dumbass.” I stand and take the baggie, then take his hand and turn it over carefully, spilling the drug back into the bag. I’m still fucked up too, but not as bad as he is. I’ve had a few hours to sleep it off while he kept going. My head feels thick and cloudy from the pills though. I try to remember how many I took today, tonight. If I took more after Dixie left.
Fuck.
Her words in the truck come back to me, how serious she looked, the way her tears looked so real this time. I took another one as she drove away. Three used to be enough. I must be in the double digits by now.
“Where’d you get these?” I ask, my tone turning bitter as I’m reminded of where I have to get the pills now that Dr. Swift capped my script. “Maverick?”
Gloria Fucking Walton had to go and ruin that too. Mav was the closest thing to a real friend I had, but now she’s left her demon imprint all over him, and every time I see him to pick up my pills, I have to know he’s with her, and I can’t do shit about it because I’m with Dixie.
Fuck her, and fuck Dixie too. I can’t be responsible for either of them.
“Give me one of those,” I say, picking one out of his palm and swallowing it dry before it tumbles into the bag. The bitter burn of the coating grips the back of my throat in protest.
“Me too,” Duke says, stumbling into me.
I steady him with my hold on his hand and take the last pearl, holding it between my finger and thumb and shooting him a challenging look. “Open wide.”
He frowns at me, but he opens his lips. I place the pill between his lips, waiting for him to clamp his teeth down on my fingers, try to take off another one of them. Instead, his tongue curls up between my thumb and finger, caressing my skin as itdraws the pill back into his mouth. He closes his lips around my fingers, giving them a hard suck that presses them together inside his mouth. His eyes hold mine as his suction increases, his pace slowing as his tongue strokes over my thumbnail, circling my fingers. My cock stiffens as I watch his lips puckered around my fingers. He stumbles forward into me again, dragging his hand from mine and grabbing my hip, grinding against me.
I shove him back. He stares at me with unfocused, confused eyes, a look that makes me chuckle despite myself. I pat his cheek. “Good boy.”
“Fuck you,” he says. “You owe me.”
“You mean all my past sins aren’t forgiven now that I’m a king like you?”
“That’s not how debt works.”
“Fine,” I say. “Then let’s get it over with and be done with it.”
“Yeah?” he asks, regarding me with suspicion, like he must be missing something. Probably because I’ve always refused him when he’s fucked up. So I guess he is missing something—the fact that I’m fucked up too this time. Too fucked up to care. I’m done with this shit, with him and all of them. I’m done with the rest of them pretending they never treated me like I was infectious human waste; done with him pretending I still am.
I grit my teeth and glare at him. “Get on your knees and crawl like a little bitch for me.”
“I’m going to fucking kill you,” he says, grabbing up a cooler and storming down the boardwalk and then across the lawn. I watch him go for a minute, until he stumbles and falls on the wet ground.
I sigh and make my way over to where he’s fallen, not far from Grandpa Darling’s treehouse. “You still alive?” I ask, nudging him with my toe.
He rolls over onto his back with a groan. “Suck my dick, loser. Like you’d care.”
I reach for the cooler that rolled away when he fell, righting it and finding an IPA in the melted water and ice left at the bottom. I twist the top off inside my elbow before tipping it back. The astringent, yeasty cold washes away the chemical taste of the Pearl Lady.
I leave the cooler open and return to Duke, dropping onto the colorless grass beside him. “If you were dead? No, probably not.”
