Bone Deep (7 page)

Chapter Eight

Friday. Another envelope with just
Wrenn’s address. A tiny, crumpled square of paper inside.

Your angel called in sick today.

What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

I ball it up and throw it to the floor
. Jess’s get-together is suddenly sounding tempting. She called earlier asking if I’ll be there.

Like old times.

I text Ditty a message to grab me on the way and thirty minutes later he’s standing in the living room, pretending to watch as Wrenn paints glaze onto a pot but really stealing peeks down her shirt as she leans and reaches across the coffee table.

“God, she’s hot,” he says as we climb into his truck. “I don’t know how you can live with her and not
jizz in your pants every time you see her.”

I roll my eyes. “She sleeps with my dad. Knowing that pretty much eradicates any desire to
jizz
.”

He stares at me, grazing his inquisitive eyes over my face.
“Still…”

“I think I just disowned you.”

Laughing, he pulls out of the complex. “You could never do that.” He’s right. Not completely, at least. “Oh,” he says after a few blocks of country music slating the silence, “you know Carly Mason? The chick screwing Jordan Liu? Anyway, she sat next to me in Spanish today and we got to talking and she said she saw you at The Rocks the other day.”

With just that name, The Rocks, a flood of memories hit me like a careening train: Cam. Dancing. Hands and stomach and legs and…much, much more.

Jess’s house is dark and quiet. From the front it looks like no one’s home—her don’t-get-kicked-out-of-her-parents’-mansion tactic. If the house appears empty then it must be. Or so her mindless, rich-ass neighbors think. Candles lead us through the maze of halls, dining areas, and living rooms that are in no way lived in as the echo of music filters in from the backyard.

“Tonight’s event is VIP only,” Ditty says, his case of beer and pair of trunks dangling from his grip. He’s got a funny smirk on his face which means there’s
a double meaning to his words. I consider punching it out of him; instead I slide open the glass door and peer out onto the fairly empty patio. No bodies packed together or kegs glistening from inside a trashcan of ice. Nothing that resembles “old times” at all. In the Jacuzzi, two slender necks extend from the water. Jess and another with black hair tied into a knot on top of her head. It could be a number of girls—Melissa Rivel, Brooke Moverta, Maria Lozano—but then I see the dime-sized holes in her ears.

I turn to Ditty and whisper, “Sam Weatherly?”

“What? She’s hot.” The orangey glow of the porch lamp illuminates his face, and I swear his neck flushes bright red.

“You could stic
k your finger through her ear.”

“Leave it to you,
Ledoux, to get all kinky like that. If that’s what gets you off.” He shakes his head and steps out, shoes thumping hollowly on the wooden deck.

“You made it!” Jess sits up and whisper-shou
ts. Thin wisps of steam rises off her skin, vaporizing into the night as she steps out of the water and snatches a towel from the nearby railing. She catches me eyeing her leg, the scar on her thigh from where the doctors had to insert the pins, and apparently Ditty sees it, too.

“You’re limping,” he says from behind me. “Why are you limping?”

The towel sweeps over her, and she tucks her hair behind her ear with a shy smile. “Overworked it in physical therapy.” Jess shrugs against the biting breeze. “Or I don’t know. Maybe it’s the weather. It always seems to act up when it’s cold.” She meets my eyes and even though I know her comment’s not directed
at
me, that’s how I take it.

Because it
was
me who didn’t see the stop sign. Or the two boys riding their bikes in the crosswalk. It
was
me who swerved and kissed my ’67 Camaro to a fucking street lamp. Rearranged the entire engine compartment like a set of K’NEX. Jess was in the car. Got the worst of it when the dash caved in and entombed her thigh. Firefighters cut her out, took her to the hospital where I stayed with her wearing out the words
I’m sorry
until her parents returned from their “business” trip to Cabo.

I’d been distracted due to Dad’s arrest, that’s what she’d said. Due to relocating across town to a shithole apartment with a glazed-eye hippie for a roommate. Due to the fear of seeing my last name crawl across the screen
every time I turned on the TV.

But it was more than that.

Battered and bloody faces—images from the incessant news coverage—haunted me. Found me at every corner. In the weeks following the accident, once surgery to repair Jess’s torn muscle was complete and she underwent intensive therapy, I stopped talking to her. Shut down. As if all the drugs the doctors had given her to numb the pain, deadened me instead. We tried to get back together a few months after, but my guilt and her constant mothering kept us from finding that place we’d been before.

“We could play pool,” Jess says buoyantly, grabbing her beer from the bench
. “Sammy, you know where the fridge is in the garage. Help yourself.”

Sam looks to Ditty’s twelve pack. “I bet Ryan will share.”

“Stay in as long as you want,” Jess says, taking my hand in hers. Hot skin surrounds my fingers. A year ago I would’ve been bustin’ a nut with a half-naked, steaming body in front of me. I would’ve scooped her up and carried her upstairs, rolled around under the covers while the rest of our friends drank themselves into a blurry coma. But I don’t feel like that same person anymore. My arms hang like lead weights at my side. Even the walk through her candle-lit house to the game room tires my legs.

Jess flicks
on a lamp. The game room hasn’t changed much since I was last in here: black-tiled bar with stools along the back counter, dart board’s bull’s-eye zeroing in on me from the wall, pool table the center focus of the room. Jess ties the towel around her in a quick motion and grabs two cues from the rack on the wall then looks at me, waiting.

“Wha
t are we playing? Alabama Eight Ball or Misery?” She points to the plastic triangle in the corner of the table. I scoot it to the center and rack up the balls.

I’m not really in a competitive mood, and even though Jess has taught me every variation of this game—soft eight, last pocket, Missouri—I’m
suddenly having a difficult time even standing up straight. Maybe coming here was a mistake. “How about standard tonight?” I suggest.

She gives me a look like I’ve just told her I ate worms for dinner. I start to tell her I’ll play whichever version she wants, but then her look softens and she says, “
Okay, but you know standard is like playing Go-Fish instead of Poker.”

The cue ball glides down the green-
felt table and slams into the triangle of balls with a crack. Balls skitter. Two drop into the corner pockets. Both stripes.

“You’re solids,” she announces with that stern voice she gets when she plays. I used to think it was cute. I used to not be able to keep my hands off her as she stretched over the side of
the table to reach a shot. Now, I stand at the edge of the room with my back against the wall and watch as she sinks ball after ball into the pockets with the thought that if I want my life back, I should want her back, too. But I don’t.

And then as two more balls disappear from the table I think that maybe it’s like that saying
Alessi once told me: If you want to be something, start acting like it and you’ll become it. Back then, during my internship, he was talking about glassblowing professionally—pretending I was a pro, living, eating, breathing like one and
poof!
I’d magically become one. Right. Obviously glassblowing is out of my future, but being with Jess requires much less concentration. The movements, the routines…

They might come back. If I low
er the barrier and permit them.

Leavin
g my cue along the wall, I come up behind Jess. My legs press against hers. She looks over her shoulder at me with a mock glare. “No distracting the players.”

My fingers find the fold in her towel and slip it loose. It catches on the edge of the table and hangs. “It’s no fun playing with someone who wins on their first turn.” The words come out flat, like whatever emotion I’m supposed to be feeling was left outside in the cold.

She leans. Aims.

I slide my hand down her back, struggling to notice things about her. Skin, warm and still damp. Blond hair a little frizzed from the steam. The arch in her back as she concentrates harder on her shot: yellow straight into the corner pocket. My fingertips graze the waist of her black suit just as she shoots. The cue ball taps the eight ball, avoiding the
yellow ball like it has rabies.

“That’s not fair!” She turns into me, smiling, and whacks me softly across the chest. “I get a redo.”

A redo. Erase what happened and start fresh. Retune my mind to its settings from a year ago, when I couldn’t keep my hands off her. I close my eyes, pull her close. Her body crushes against mine. She smells like chlorine. Her hand slips under my shirt, fingernails trace a line up my chest. Chills don’t scatter from her touch, not like they used to. Not like they did with Cam—

Fuck.
I’m thinking too much.

I take her face in my hands, slide my tongue into her mouth
, and kiss her deeper and deeper, but the feeling doesn’t come.
Nothing
comes. And I can’t keep dragging Jess into this shitfest that is my life.

“I have to go,” I say
. I’m out the front door before she can protest. She doesn’t follow. Eight months of chasing me around and maybe she’s finally learned to let me go.

~*~

Sparks of moonlight shimmer off the silver metal, zipping lines of white up and over my trembling fingers. The glove compartment snaps shut and, careful not to knick myself with Ditty’s ridiculously sharp whittling knife, I tuck the blade beneath my belt at my back.

Fuck the letters.

And double fuck to the person sending them.

I’m tired of this shit, and it’s time I put a stop to it.

Black
, lightless puddles conceal me as I jump out of Ditty’s truck, cold air beating against the beads of sweat on my forehead.

Up the cracked driveway, Rachelle Lockwood’s house stares at me with its windows glowing from the second floor like wolf eyes. She’s the l
ast one on The List—the only family left to be writing me the letters.

You’re obsessed.

Ditty hasn’t seen it—the messages, the words, the half-full wooden box. He might be standing next to me, spewing
I’ve got your back
s if he did.

Tall and skinny, the house hovers over me. I hop up the steps and slam my fist on the door, hard and fast. I don’t know much about the Lockwood family. Rachelle Lockwood was an employee of
Chanton Unified, a teacher most likely, though not at Templeton where I went. Jeremy, her husband, I’m guessing, is a mechanic downtown.

The neighborhood is quiet. Silhouettes of a jungle gym and monstrous trees hang in the shadows from the park across the street. Houses, all similar to the one I stand before, line the street, fences touching like they’re reaching out to each other. Jess would call this place quaint; her way of saying things are small and cute without trying to sound conceited like her parents.

I should call her, say sorry for dumping her with Ditty. Or running out—

In front of me, the beige door creaks. I reach back, grip the knife’s handle. A little scare…that’s all. A flash of the knife, a sharp warning to leave me the fuck alone. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want all of this to stop. My legs tense, but I
can’t run now. The door opens farther. My fingers tighten around the knife. Eyes peer out, big and brown and very, very familiar.

“
Krister?” A girl. The door gapes. Her voice is a low whisper. “What’re you doing here?”

“Cam
?” Her long hair is pulled out of her face. A gray sweatshirt hangs to her knees. Quickly, I release the knife. “You know the Lockw—”

“How do you know where I live?” she says at the same time
, her head cocked to the side.

“
Live? Wait.” I hold up my hand to stop her words. It suddenly feels like I’m in a speeding train, everything whizzing past me too fast to see what it is. “
Your
house?” I choke out. “I thought you lived in the dorms.”

She nods. “This is my family’s house. I stay here…” One bare foot covers the other, legs crossing. “…um, sometimes when…” Her words trail off as she glances over her shoulder. When she looks back to me, her mouth is playing with a frown. “…just, whenever I can.”

No.

No, no, no.

My knees start to wobble, and I rub my face. She can’t live here—this can’t be her house. Because if it is that means…

Shaky words spill out of my mouth. “Your mom is—”