Drowning in You (9 page)

And Dexter, legs spread under a
car, his foot twisting as he stretches farther under.

For a moment I catch his abs,
which either a Hollywood makeup artist has sprayed to perfection,
or is just all-natural Dexter. His knees are bent, making for thick
thighs tight through his pants, and a V-shaped chest.

Okay, so I’m imagining most of
the chest bit because that’s hidden by the car.

I rip my eyes away. Shaking my
mind back into the empty space of my brain cavity, I duck behind a
pickup truck undergoing repair, because I’ve somehow left my car
parked too far away while I was drooling and being drawn toward
him.

What’s wrong with me? What was
I doing?

I check my
phone. A Facebook message from Rosa says,
I’ll be checking in with you. You have a couple of hours and
then I’ll never speak to you again if you don’t talk to him. Shit,
Charlee, at least see if the rumors are true. This is killing
me!

I don’t want Rosa to hate me.
She’ll be coming back to Melbourne in a few weeks and I can’t lose
the only friend who loves me. I step out in front of the shop and
take determined strides forward.

Dexter’s gone, though. My feet
are parallel to the entrance, and a man with a protruding belly
lugs himself over. “You okay, ma’am?”

“
Yeah, um.
Fine.”

“
Need—” he
sweeps his hand over his forehead. It’s less shiny when he sighs
and says, “Need anything?”

I shake my head so little that
he can’t have seen but he shrugs and walks off.

I’m so silly!
Why didn’t I ask where Dexter is? I take in these big cars, and
these greasy guys with rough fingers and piles of heavy tools
everywhere. I can’t ask now. I feel silly here. I
am
silly.

I swivel, then
stop myself. I can’t leave or else Rosa will hate me. Once, I
promised her I’d kiss a guy at a school party and she spent the
whole night ignoring me until I kissed him. It was a pitiful peck
of a thing, barely on the lips, but after I told her she clapped
her hands and whispered, “I read you liked him in your diary so I
was
not
going to
let you get away with not doing this.”

She was right. We dated a few
times, though things didn’t work out for reasons I can’t
remember.

The garage shrinks as I walk
around it. The corrugated roof is shorter, smaller and I’m speeding
up, clearing another corner when—

I see Dexter.

This girl—is her name Raych?
Why do I remember that name?—is in his lap. He’s sitting on a ledge
and she’s mounted him, legs dangling over each side. When his hands
grab her waist and pull her closer, my heart fla-flomps. The
feeling is a sharp pain, as if it skipped a beat. So cliché, but my
head is pulsing and my stomach is churning seeing him. Seeing him
want her. His lips at her ear.

She slaps his chest with the
heel of her palm and his face twists. Guess in my jealousy I
misread the signals. This isn’t an intimate moment at all. A moment
later—even from here I can hear him—he shouts, “What the fuck was
that!” and shrugs her off when she tries to pull him in, his bright
eyes now on me, me, me.

She tugs at his T-shirt,
exposing crafted muscles, flat, hard, and a line of script above
his waistband. He pulls down his shirt and tells her to “fuck off”
again.

She stomps
behind him but pulls up short. She’s seen me.
Wow, I’m dead
. Her lips are pressed
in a thin line, her tread louder than I thought possible. She seems
like the type to prove a lot of my beliefs wrong. She’s screaming
her head off, but Dexter doesn’t flinch. His arms are tensed and as
he stops by my side, those arms focus in my vision, his skin
tightly wrapped over taut muscles. Oh, wow, he’s tall.

She stares me up. Down. Turns
to Dexter, saying, “Who’s this slut, huh? You fuck her last night?
That why you didn’t come to my place?” She juts her head out, in
his space. It’s awkward to be in this; this confrontation is the
last place I should be.

She throws me a disgusted look,
mutters something I’m glad I didn’t hear and storms off. Finger up,
hair blowing in the wind, she doesn’t turn as she calls, “You’ll
pay for this, you asshole!”

Dexter stares at the ground for
a moment and then we both look up at the same time. His jaw is
rigid, his hair messed up, his eyes big and demanding.

He breaks away, elbows forming
triangles when he clasps the back of his head. “Charz…”

What do I say? Why’s he still
calling me by a nickname? We’re not that close.

He doesn’t know what to say,
either. He stands in front of me, hands behind his head for a
while, perhaps saying something, but it’s too low to hear.

“
Can we…?” He
leaves the question hanging there. Giving me the power to take this
conversation away. So I can make the decision to say no thanks, I’d
rather not get involved in this mess. But he steps in and catches
my breath before I suck it in.

How do I turn off my feelings
after all these years? I’ve seen him at school, at the store, at
parties. Everywhere but lying with me and now that I know I can’t
do this, I want him more.

You’re sick, Charlee. Sick.

He licks his lips, all the
while staring at mine. A rush plays over my skin.

I think no, and almost say no,
almost pump up my willpower to cuss at him, but then I sigh, my
breath escaping, my body deflating.

He sees this. For a moment I
think he can read my mind.

“
Hey,” he has
my elbows resting in his palms. We lock stares for the umpteenth
time. He asks, “Is it okay if I talk to you, Charz?”

I nod.

This isn’t the type of thing I
do, confronting a guy I’ve been in love with, confronting rumors of
how my mom died and how my father was critically injured.

This isn’t the type of thing I
do, finding out if the guy I’m in love with is a murderer.

9. Reservoir Revelations

Charlee

Dexter asks me if I’d prefer
somewhere quieter to talk. We snake down a path that leads us from
the mechanic’s, the garage shrinking into my imagination when I
turn around not long after. Or maybe it is long after. Walking with
Dexter has a way of clouding what’s real and what’s in my mind.

The houses are far in the
distance, making me wonder if my neighborhood has vanished, never
having been established in the first place. Somehow, this oasis has
existed behind my estate all these years, and I’d never thought to
check. The path ends at a block of concrete and continues with
gravel. Dexter turns, looking me over as if to see I’m still
here.

We walk in step for the
remainder, as grassy hills flood the parkland. Trees are few and
far between. It’s just Dexter’s and my breaths picking up as we
walk deeper into our paradise, moving in sync no matter whether I
slow down or speed up.

“
I’m not, you
know, with her. Raych.” Dexter says randomly as we plateau on a
hill.

Below—well, there isn’t a
below. For a moment I’m nothing, not human, just a piece in this
Earth’s plan. The reservoir is a blanket of deep blue-gray water
disappearing beyond my vision, surrounded by a wall of trees on the
horizon to my right.

“
Feeds
everyone in the south area of Melbourne,” Dexter says, nodding
ahead.

“
Oh,” I hear
myself say. This makes my brain kick into gear. My arms are
plastered by my sides, my body like a pole jammed in the ground.
“It’s…”

“
Amazing?”

“
Yes.”

We turn, catch each other’s
looks and then he shoves his hands in his pockets, rocking back on
his heels. With my gaze, I sweep the endless water again, wondering
how I’ve never known something this beautiful has been so close to
me all my life. Guess Dad was too busy flying around the world for
conferences, and Mom always too busy scrubbing dirty dishes,
crouching on her knees collecting mine and Darcy’s toys, badgering
us to at least finish our homework.

“
Will you come
up here with me?” Dexter says, pointing to a watch point, a brick
platform with its own roof.

He surprises me. He won’t admit
to romance—I’m sure he’s that type of guy—but I’ve never felt this
breathless around a guy before and this isn’t even a date. He lets
me go before him.

Still behind me, he says, “Is
your dad okay?”

Weeks. Weeks
I’ve been trying to type this to Rosa, but by the time I’m usually
halfway done messaging, I think:
I can’t
type this out; I can’t say this; what do I say?

“
No.” I shock
myself saying that, the jolt shooting just under my skin making me
shiver. “I mean—oh, wow, that was a bad thing to say.” I hang my
head.

Something, I realize it can
only be Dexter, nudges my shoulder.

“
He says he’s
hopeful but he’s doing all this talk.”

Dexter’s eyebrow perks up, just
one of them. A surge of jealousy burns my face seeing this. In
vain, I’d dedicated most of my third grade as an eight-year-old
watching my reflection in the mirror try to do this. It’s so much
hotter on him.

The hill’s incline increases
and I’m almost lunging by the time we reach the watch point. “It’s
like…” I finish off my sentence with a huff.

There’s a waist-high railing
with a plaque inside, explaining the reservoir’s significance.
Although it’s just a roof above us and a platform underneath, I’m
aware of how close Dexter and I are. I could touch his forearm from
here. Like me, he leans on the railing. He’s a head taller than I
am, so he has to hunch over more to do it. The muscles in his
forearms tense under his shirt, which is bunched up at his elbows,
smeared with grease. Again, my mind wanders off into thoughts of
those tattoos. Are they for that girl, Raych, he was with? Is he in
love with someone else? Is he inked just to look good? (If so it
absolutely works.)

Somehow, I feel it’s deeper
than that because guys don’t go tattooing their arms with hearts,
even if they’re stabbed with thorns. And they don’t go writing
symbols or names on the skin for a crush. Maybe he’s a different
sort of person than I’ll ever get to know.

“
He’ll live
though, right?”

Dexter’s voice catches me. Did
it just quiver? I steal a glance but he’s squinting at the
reservoir, leaning over in a carefree way, rocking back, then
forth. Basically looking hotter than my imagination has ever served
me.

I should say no, but I reply,
“He’s trying to.”

In my peripheral vision,
Dexter’s fingers wiggle along the rounded top of the railing. They
were an inch farther from mine last time I looked.

“
Isn’t that
the most important part, though?” Dexter asks. Then he tears his
face away, to me, but still clutching the railing so tightly his
tendons are sinewy under his snug-fitting shirt. Moments from
tears, I want to look in those eyes and collapse in
them.

“
Isn’t what
matters that he’s willing to fight despite his chances, rather than
sooking and being a pain in the butt?”

My self-control bursts into
hysterical laughter. I sound like a witch, a dirty witch, is what I
think, but I can’t stop these laughs. Not from where they rock my
body, too deep to find how they started. It’s weird that Dexter
uses “sook” like I do, weird that I’m looking for ways to associate
him with me.

Dexter’s mouth turns up and he
nudges my shoulder again. When our breathy cackles slow to gasps
and then silence, it’s then that it registers his fingers are
tangled with mine. Too much time has passed since we sparked the
first touch, so now I’m caught between feeling like I should rip my
hand away, and never wanting the wind to blow too hard or the rain
to start or for time to pass so we don’t ever have to move an
inch.

“
Your accent’s
weird,” I say. It’s the first and worst thing I think of, fumbling
for any sort of words in any combination to come out of my
mouth.

“
I get that.
Mom and Dad were born in Australia, though.”

That’s all Dexter says, and
although it’s not a complicated answer, I find myself unable to
look at him, instead tracing the contours of the water with my
gaze, still so confused as to how something this breathtaking was
here. All. This. Time.

“
So you are,
or were, American?”

“
Once upon a
time. I grew up in Chicago.” He pulls my hand tighter into his and
I glance over at him. He looks at our tangled fingers, the first of
us to acknowledge the heat swirling at where our skin meets. His
eyes wander over my fingers, wrist, arm.

“
Okay,
so
Dex
. If you
call me that ridiculous ‘Charz’ name, then I get to call you Dex,”
I say, surprising myself at shortening his name. Is that the terms
we’re on? It feels too intimate.

“
Great!” He
throws up a hand. “Great, my name is a joke.”

“
I didn’t mean
it like that. I actually think it’s—”
Do
not say that word!
“—easy. That’s all. A
slightly weird but—”

“
I was
joking—or at least trying to.” Softer, he mumbles, “It was beyond
lame.”

In my embarrassment at having
him explain his joke—this should never, ever be done—I manage to
simply nod.

“
I’m sorry if
I’m short,” he says.

“
It’s
okay.”

How did he step into my space
just like that? My heart picks up, and I’m too stunned to think of
something witty, sexy, or remotely cool to say. All I’m thinking of
is the proximity.