Deeper We Fall (23 page)

“I’m sorry” he said, and the apology hit me like a punch.

“Oh yeah?” I turned my head so I could look at him, my rage over the injustice of it all boiling to the surface. “Tell me how
sorry
you are.”

“Can’t we just talk?” he said.

“We are talking.”

“I’ve spent every single second of my life since I woke up in the hospital remembering that day and thinking about it and wishing it could have happened differently. It’s one of the last things I think about before I go to bed and one of the first when I wake up. I see the scars every day.” His eyes locked on mine and I couldn’t look away.

“Scars?”

“Yeah. I’ll show you.” He stood up and started pulling his shirt off. I almost put my hands in front of my face, but I didn’t.

In between noticing his stomach was toned, and he had those v things on his sides that dipped into his pants, my eyes traced the ropes of scars that covered his left side.

Since his skin was so dark, the scars were lighter, and thick with tissue. They covered the left side of his body from his stomach to his shoulders and partway down his arms.

There was one more thing that made me stare. Interweaved between the scars was a tattoo that covered most of that half of his body. A tree with gnarled and bending branches that reached out and down his arm. There was even a little bird perched on one of the branches.

I’d never seen something so heartbreaking and so beautiful at the same time. It made me want to cry, except I already was.

“Do you want to take a walk with me?” I blurted out.

Chapter Twenty-three

Zan

“It’s a little cold out,” I said after recovering from the shock of her asking me to go somewhere with her. “But I don’t want you going out alone.”

“You can put your shirt on,” she said, motioning to my bare chest.

“Oh, good.” I slid it over my head as she tried not to stare and failed. I held my hand out to help her up from the floor. She let go as soon as she was on her feet.

“Just let me get my laundry into my room and grab my coat. Looks like I’m going to have to re-wash everything.” I picked up my clothes, including several pairs of boxers.

She wiped a few more tears from her cheeks. I wanted to know what had caused them. Charlotte didn’t cry easily.“Are you okay?”

“I have quarters. You know, if you need some. My mom gave me and my brother a whole box of them as a present. Will’s barely used his. I have to bug him all the time to do his laundry. One of these days I’m going to have to do it for him,” she said, not answering my question.

I tried to think of something to say, something to get her to talk to me, but nothing came to mind as I held my laundry basket. “Thanks. I’ll be right back.” Bravo. I was a moron.

I threw my stuff in my room, grabbed my jacket and gloves and threw on my grandfather’s hat. I needed all the luck I could get.

She was swinging the lanyard when I got back. I smiled to myself as she put it away before looking up.

“Shall we?” I said.

She went in front of me, but I dived forward to open the door for her. Being a gentleman couldn’t hurt at this point.

The night air had a bite to it, and she immediately shoved her hands in the pockets of her coat. Forgot her gloves again. Silly girl.

“Here,” I said, handing her my gloves. “I figured you’d forget them again.” Another point in the gentleman column.

“Thanks.” She put them on and they dwarfed her hands. I got a weird kick out of the fact that her hands were in my gloves.

Sick, I was seriously sick.

I looked up, but there was too much light pollution to see the stars. There were only a few cars driving down the main road, but otherwise it was pretty quiet, except for a blaring bass coming from one or several dorm rooms.

I had to walk slowly, since my legs were so much longer than hers.

“Why were you crying?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. We walked a few more steps in silence before she said something else.

“Sooo…That’s a beautiful tattoo.”

“Thanks. My mother wasn’t very happy when I got home after getting it.” Her screams still reverberated in my brain. One month later Zack had come home from a visit with his own ink and she’d exclaimed at how beautiful it was.

She nodded in understanding. “I bet. My mother would hang me up by my toes if I even thought about getting one.”

“Mine just about did.”

A car drove by us and honked before shouting something suggestive out the window at Charlotte. Get in line, asshole. Charlotte ignored it. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened to her.

“So how did you skip a grade?” she said, brushing a stray hair from her ponytail back from her face.

“After I left the youth center, I was assigned a social worker who really cared about me. She didn’t put up with my crap, and told me I was better than what I was doing.” I didn’t know how much Charlotte knew about the trouble I’d gotten into after the accident. “She pushed me to do better in school and pushed me to apply here. I never thought I would get in, even though my grades were good.” I didn’t need to say the reason why. We both skimmed over that issue without diving into it.

We’d reached the football field, which was wide and empty now.

“You want to walk around the track?” I said. I wanted to know why she’d been upset, and I was going to walk in circles all night if that’s what it took to get it out of her.

“Sure.”

We walked several times, sometimes talking, sometimes not. She did most of the talking. I couldn’t find anything to say that didn’t involve talking about the one thing I didn’t want to discuss.

“Let me know when you’re ready to go back. I don’t want you walking on campus alone.”

“Why, do I look vulnerable?” she said with a small laugh.

“No. I just know that when guys see a pretty girl alone, he can get ideas, and not all of them are good.”

She stopped walking. “You think I’m pretty?”

“Oh, Charlotte,” I sighed.

Lottie

“What? You just said, ‘When guys see a pretty girl alone,’ so am I the pretty girl? Or were you talking about girls in general and not just specifically –”

It was stopped by a pair of lips on mine.

I froze for a moment, my brain trying to understand what was happening. There were lips on mine. Zan lips. Warm, soft Zan lips. Kissing, that was what this was called.

Only, I’d been kissed before. By Clark and… what was the other guy’s name?

The lips pulled away from mine, and he rested his forehead against mine. He was so tall, he had to bend quite a bit.

“Has anyone ever told you that you talk too much?” he said, moving his thumb across my bottom lip.

“All the time,” I whispered. “What was that for?”

“It was the only way to get you to stop talking.”

“So you wanted to shut me up and you thought that was the best way to do it? What is wrong with –”

There it was again. The lips. On my lips.

I froze again, and he pulled away.

“Stop thinking,” he said, before trying again. Persistent, he was.

My brain wanted to think about the fact that I was kissing the boy who was responsible for not only ruining my life, but the life of my best friend, but for once, I told it to shut the fuck up.

My hands placed themselves hesitantly around his neck and shoved themselves into his hair. My lips started working with his and he responded, pushing me farther, closer, hotter, more, more, more.

It was so easy to open my mouth and let him in. For the first time, he hesitated before sliding his tongue into my mouth. I’d tried that with Clark, but it was always awkward and weird and I felt like I was drowning in spit.

This was…He tasted like crisp leaves and rain and cinnamon gum.

I never wanted it to stop as my body sang. His hands caressed the sides of my face and stroked my hair and finally came around my neck, pulling me closer until I was pressed against the scratchy wool of his coat.

We broke apart and breathed in unison for a moment.

“Wow,” he said, wiping my hair away from my face. The wind had blown it all around. I hadn’t noticed the wind at all. I was on fire from my fingertips to the ends of my hair to my toenails.

“Uh huh.”

I held onto him and we stared at each other. This close, I realized his eyes weren’t just dark. No, they were blue and green and gold and brown and black and every color an eye can be. They were like a Monet painting that looked like one color from far away, but when you got close you could pick out all the little pieces.

“I’ve wanted to do that for so long,” he said.

“I haven’t.”

“God, I love how honest you are.”

Wait, love? Did he just say love? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold the phone.

I pulled back from him and reality crashed down. I clamped my hand over my mouth.

“Oh, shit.”

“What is it?”

“I kissed you.”

“Technically I kissed you and you let me.” Oh, it was more than that. If I’d just let him kiss me, my face would have been still. Not moving against his like I’d been practicing my whole life and this was my one shot at kissing him.

“This never happened.”

He took a step back too, and let go of my face. I started shivering the moment his skin left mine.

“If you want it that way.”

I nodded.

“This didn’t happen. It can’t happen. Please, I just…”

“It’s okay, Charlotte. You don’t have to explain it to me. I shouldn’t have done it. But I’m not going to take it back.” He licked his lips, as if he was trying to taste me on them.

“Then why did you do it?”

“I stopped thinking and just ran with it.”

So did I.

Zan

“So what happens now?” she said as we walked back to the dorm. I was replaying the moment when I’d leaned in and found out her lips were just as sweet and soft as I’d always imagined them to be. No, they weren’t. They were better than I imagined. Kissing Charlotte was better than fucking every single girl I’d ever fucked. I’d have to be careful so I didn’t show her how much I liked the kiss.

“What do you want to happen now?” I said.

“This can’t be a thing. It just can’t.” She motioned to me and back to herself. “I’m an emotional train wreck right now and I’m not thinking clearly, and this can’t be a thing. If you were someone else…”

She had no idea how many times I’d wished I was someone else.

“I understand.” She pressed her fingers to her lips, and it made me lick my own to taste her still on them.  “Will you at least tell me one thing?”

“What’s that?”

“Why were you crying?”

She breathed out slowly.

“Lexie. Something happened to Lexie.”

“What?”

She wrapped her arms around herself. She should have told me she was cold. “I don’t think I should be talking about this with you.”

We were almost to the dorm, and once again, my time with her was being cut short.

“You can talk to me about anything, Charlotte,” I said, wishing it were true.

“No, I can’t, and that’s why this can never happen. You and me.” My heart pounded when she’d said ‘you and me.’

“There will always be this thing between us. I’m never going to get past it. I can pretend, but I just can’t. It’s between you and her and I choose her.”

I’d asked for this. I’d asked for these words.

I shouldn’t have kissed her.

She smiled sadly as I held the door open for her.

“Can I walk you to your door?” This was the end.

“Sure.”

She was just about to open her door when we both heard something that made her blush and me want to roll my eyes.

Katie and Zack were going at it, loudly, and from the sounds of the squeaking bedframe, very energetically.

“Oh my God,” Charlotte said, moving away from the door as if it was diseased. “I can’t believe her.” Katie let out an especially loud moan and Charlotte gave me a look of revulsion.

“You can come down to my room and wait, if you want. My roommate is almost never here,” I said.

Zack yelled out something that we couldn’t make out and Charlotte’d had enough and booked it toward the stairs with me following.

“It’s just disgusting the way they go at it like rabbits. It’s like he makes her lose all common sense.”

“He has that effect on women.”

“I know.”

We walked the rest of the way to my door in silence.

Chapter Twenty-four

Lottie

I hadn’t really looked at his room the last time I’d been inside it. How had I not noticed the enormous amount of books?

“You read?”

“Yeah.” He stood in the doorway, as if he was afraid to come inside. “Can I get you anything?”

“No, I’m fine. Look, I can just go knock on my brother’s door.”

“Will you just do one thing for me? Before you go and this night becomes another thing we have to pretend didn’t happen?”

“That depends on what it is.”

“It’s not what you think it is,” he said, going to his closet and getting what looked like a very old, ugly yellow suitcase out, along with an old red milk crate.

“This was my grandfather’s,” he said, setting it down in the middle of the floor and opening the top. Inside was a turntable, and the crate was full of records. He pulled several out before choosing one and bringing it back over. He didn’t say a word as he put the record in place and set the needle.

“Lie down,” he said, getting down and lying with his head on one side of it.

“What?” I had no idea what he was up to, but I wasn’t going to just lie on the floor with him.

“Just lie down. You can hear it better. It’s not some sort of twisted game. I just wanted you to hear this. I think you’ll appreciate it.” He closed his eyes and patted an empty space beside him.

What the hell. I couldn’t go back to my room, and if I went to Will’s now, he was going to know something was up, and I didn’t want to deal with him.