In Ruins (7 page)

I'm not breathing. I'm not blinking. I don't even think my heart is beating right now. How could it be when he's just so viciously flayed me open and torn it from my chest?

But I hold in my tears. Because if there's one thing my mother taught me, it's how to bury emotions until no one is around to witness them. How to work the façade.

“E-mail me whatever company the rest of you choose. I don't care what we do,” he continues, as if he didn't just say the worst thing he could possibly ever say to me. As if he didn't just hit the delete button on our entire history. “But do not go to his office later,” he repeats.

He needs to go. I need to go. I'm strong, but I'm not invincible, and the tears, they're about to overtake the levy, and I can't let him witness the flood.

“Okay?” he asks, exasperated, and I realize he's waiting for me to agree.

What am I even agreeing to? That we're nothing? That we never were? That the Carl of
Carl and Tuck
never existed and he never really knew me at all? How can I agree to any of that?

Tucker rolls his eyes in frustration with my silence. “Look, you're not switching groups, so you don't need to go to his office. And I don't understand why the fuck he'd need private office hours to discuss a damn project anyway. So cancel, Carl, okay?”

Something about hearing him call me
Carl
again instead of the scornful way he'd said
Carleigh
unlocks the invisible chokehold around my throat. I nod. Because not going to meet Zayne to switch groups is the one thing he's said that I
can
agree to.

Tucker nods his approval and then turns on his heel, leaving me reeling in the now empty hall. I suck in a deep breath and race to the nearest bathroom to let the dam break, and I cry harder than I have since he ended us. Because I didn't know then that he could do something worse than end us. That he could erase us.

Last Year

Dave honks his horn obnoxiously and I slow my gait to punish him for his impatience. “Take your motherfucking time,” he grumbles sarcastically as I climb into his passenger seat.

“You got it, brother,” I retort, and we drive to pick up Cap so we can head over to Andy's for the party.

Cap texted that he just finished his run and needs a few minutes, so Dave and I walk right through his front door without knocking. We both practically grew up here and Cap's house is as much our home as our own.

“Hello!” I call out.

“Back here,” Cap's kid sister, Bits—Beth—calls out from the kitchen, and we head straight back to where she and her mom, Elaine, are eating dessert.

“Score!” I grab a chunk of cookie pie off of Bits's plate and shove it unceremoniously into my mouth as she slaps my arm. Dave pats her head as a greeting like she's some kind of cat, and she smiles the weird, shy smile he always seems to bring out of her.

“Sammy's in the shower,” she tells us as I hop up onto the kitchen counter and make myself comfortable.

Elaine hands Dave and me our own pieces of pie, and we thank her, but I grab another chunk off Bits's plate just to fuck with her. She pokes her fork into my thigh hard enough to make me yelp in a very unmanly way.

“Will you behave?” Elaine scolds me halfheartedly, and I smirk at her.

“Never.”

She smiles. She loves me. And I love her right back, in a second mom sort of way. But I have to admit, if she didn't practically raise me, I would be looking a little lower than her beautiful smile right now. Cap's mom is hot—the reason for the creation of the term
MILF
. And Bits is looking more and more like her every day.

Thing is—when I look at her I still see the little brat with pigtails, whining and nagging until we all agree to munch plastic cookies and sip air-tea out of her little pink tea set.

That's why it was so rough on Cap, and on me, too, when she started high school with us last year. We were juniors and she was a freshman, and it was a hell of a shock to see guys notice her. Not just guys her age, but our friends, too, and one senior in particular.

Brian Falco pursued her from even before the first day of class, and though Cap, Dave, and I gave him a hard time at first, he seemed so sincere. He acted all respectful, and just wanted to take her out, to get to know her, and the idiots we were—we fell for it. Or maybe he really meant it at the time. Or maybe we just had no choice other than to relent. Bits liked Falco—a lot—and she wanted to date him. And damn her, once that stubborn girl decides she wants something, there's no stopping her. She's a lot like Carl in that way.

But in the end, we were right to have tried to protect Bits. She wasn't ready for someone like Falco. She wasn't ready for that kind of serious relationship at all. Who is at fifteen? Because despite his eventual professions of love, which I can only assume led to a physical relationship I'd rather not think about, eventually that “love” died out. Maybe he realized it didn't suit his needs to go off to Dartmouth in the fall with a high school sophomore girlfriend holding him back. Maybe he was just playing her all along. We were all relieved when we heard he was going to the Hamptons for the summer. We thought Bits would finally have the time and the freedom from his perpetual presence to get over him. That's the thing about high school. There's no escaping people you don't want to see. Or in her case, the person she still wanted to see, but who no longer cared to see her.
Fucking idiot.

But I guess we all underestimated her heartbreak. We knew she was sad—it was impossible to miss—but girls got dumped all the time, and I thought they just ate ice cream, cried, and bashed the guy to their friends until they got over it. Never in a million years did I consider that someone like strong, stubborn Bits could do something like
that
. Neither did Cap, and he's been beating himself up over it ever since. And compensating for it by being obsessively overprotective of her, and God knows I can't blame him for it.

I'll never forget his face that day, or the grief in his voice. How in a single split second, that morning went from the best of my life to one of the absolute worst.

I had Carl—the girl I'd been lusting over since she'd first sprouted tits—in my bed for the first time ever. I'd woken up with her in my arms, her sweet thigh hooked around my hip, her stomach pressed up against my exceptionally vengeful morning wood. I lay in bed that morning just watching her sleep, enjoying having her so close, because I knew the moment she woke up she would be gone. I was positive that even if she did remember the night before, she would regret what we almost did. I didn't consider for a moment that Carleigh Stanger, the girl I've crushed on for as long as I could remember, whose beauty literally takes my breath away, might actually want me when she was in her right sober mind.

And then she opened her eyes. Stunning bright jade glittered sleepily from under those long, thick lashes, and they did not hold regret. They held
desire
. So when she slid her thigh around me and pushed her hips against mine, I thought I might still be dreaming.

But I wasn't. Because not a single one of my many, many dreams and fantasies had ever lived up to what happened next. My limited imagination, it turned out, was unable to conjure up the sheer perfection of her naked body. The magnum opus that was the sound of my name on her sweet, swollen lips, in that breathy, sultry version of her voice. Nothing could have prepared me for the sensation of being inside her, or the vision of watching this girl who only knows how to challenge and spar, give in to me in the most decadent way.

And for the first time in my life, after I was done, I wasn't
done
. Physically sated, the usual urge to move on and out was conspicuously absent. Carl was in my bed. With me. Naked. A multitude of thoughts swirled through my head, all with the same goal in mind—figuring out how to keep her there. But I guess she wasn't on the same page, because her next thought was to check her phone. So I did the same.

And then suddenly the girl in my bed wasn't the one who had my attention.

Over twenty texts from Cap alerted me immediately that something was very wrong. He's never been a guy to chase you down. So as much as I wanted to ignore him and focus on Carl, I opened his messages. And thank God I did.

It was strange—even as I read the words, they didn't register in my mind as quickly as they did in my body. I could feel the exponential acceleration of my pulse and the anxiety explode in my gut, but still my brain refused to make sense of the words the screen revealed. But then my brain did catch up, and I started to panic. Because I needed to
go
, but what the fuck was I going to say to Carl? I couldn't tell her the real reason I had to leave just minutes after sleeping with her, not when Cap's texts explicitly told me not to speak to anyone about it. No one is more private than he is, and no matter could be more private than that one.

But I couldn't even think up an excuse. My mind was bombarded with fear for another girl—one I've known most of my life, and love like my own sister. I was in such a rush to get to the hospital, in fact, that it didn't even occur to me until the following day to be offended by Carl's non-reaction to my abandoning her right after sex.

Nothing could have prepared me for seeing Bits like that. For the pallor of her usually bright pink cheeks and the deep gray shadows under her eyes. The tubes protruding from her nose and the skin of her arm. It wasn't until that moment—seeing her lying unconscious and unstirring in the hospital bed that seemed too vast for her small, delicate body—that my brain finally processed the reality of it.

Bits had tried to kill herself. She almost succeeded. And even though we already knew by then that she would pull through, what gutted me was more than the fact that we'd almost lost her—that she'd almost left us. It was that
she'd wanted to
. And for me, it hit far too close to home.

In fact, if it weren't for Carl coming home with me that night, Cap would have spent the night at my place as planned, and he wouldn't have found his sister in time to make her throw up the pills, or for the ambulance to get her to the hospital so they could pump the rest from her stomach.

That night changed Cap. It was there in his eyes when I finally got to the hospital that next morning, drawn in lines of worry and guilt in the skin around them, and it's been there ever since. Bits rolls her eyes in exasperation when she notices me giving her a once-over. Any other girl would assume I was checking her out, but Bits knows we still worry about her, and it bugs the crap out of her.

I raise my eyebrows, daring her to give me shit for it when she knows full well she's earned my concern. She looks away, glancing at Dave, who's watching her with similar concern and what, if I didn't know better, I might think is attraction. But Dave's been around as long as I have, and Bits is as much a sister to him as she is to me.

“What's up, assholes?” Cap greets us as he emerges from the stairs.

“
Sammy
,” Elaine chastens, but he just kisses her on the cheek, which Dave and I mimic before following him out the door.

“Later, brat,” I tell Bits, and she gives me the finger.

I grin. But she's not paying me any more attention as she slips on her shy Dave-only smile, and I freeze when I think I see his eyes slide down her body. But a second later Dave is following behind me, and I assume I must have seen wrong. Because Dave wouldn't look at Bits like that.

Right?

“Never have I ever gotten—or given—road head!” Dave bellows.

I laugh and shake my head at the one friend I can always count on to make me look less ridiculous by comparison. I take a sip of my beer and look around Andy's living room. The point of the game is to force people to admit to things they have or haven't done, but it's all bullshit. Most of the guys will drink even if they've never gotten a blowjob while driving a car. Half the girls who drink do it because they think it will make them more appealing to the guys, and half the girls who don't, don't for the same reason. I know for a fact, for example, that Molly has done it, since I was there and all, but she simply blushes and stares down at her beer. Cap never plays—he's too private—but I also know for a fact it's something he's experienced, and not just once either.

But there's only one person I'm really looking at. Carl doesn't take a sip, she just looks around the room with interest, no blush, eyes completely guileless, and I believe her. In fact, lately I've been wondering if she's even less experienced than I realized. The thought excites me, and it's a strange reaction for me. Normally the more experience a girl has, the better. It means they're more likely to be game for some fun, and that I won't have to show them what to do.

But any time I think of Carl doing any of the things I've done with her—or the things I fantasize about doing with her—with someone else, it makes me a little crazy. Not just jealous. I've been jealous over her for years. But lately it makes me basically lose my mind. And it's frustrating, because as much as I enjoy her friendship, and the new benefits we've started to indulge in, she's made it clear she's not interested in taking it beyond a casual hookup. Because she's
Carl
.

She's not like any other girl in existence, and she never acts the way I expect. Everything I've learned about girls' emotions is utterly useless when it comes to her, and I wonder if in our little scenario…if
I'm
the girl. Not something I particularly want to think about. But she just doesn't seem to want the same things I've been dodging from other girls since hitting puberty. And yet for me, if I let myself go there, with her…I think I would be up for more.

Or maybe Carl does want those things, too. Maybe she just doesn't want them
with me
. Not that I can blame her. What would I know about
more
? Trying out an actual relationship? I'd fuck it up, for sure, and then we wouldn't even be friends.

But casual means I have no real claim on her, and she's free to do whatever she wants, with whoever she wants. And fuck, to think of another guy putting his hands on her, kissing her pretty pink mouth—it makes me want to hit something. When I think about another guy actually fucking her, being inside her, watching her come for him, I turn into The Incredible fucking Hulk…on the inside, anyway.

I swallow the thought back down before it completely destroys my mood. I consider getting up and going to another room so I can stop picturing Carl in every
Never Have I Ever
scenario. The party is slammed, and though there are only about twenty or so of our friends in this room, there must be close to a hundred people around the house and in the back. But I can't bring myself to do it. The curious masochist in me wants to see what Carl drinks to.

“Never have I ever had anal sex,” Sarah says with a giggle.

I glance at her, because I've heard that isn't exactly true, but I wouldn't know for sure. Not that I care either way. I look at Carl, who once again doesn't sip, and I have no doubt she's never done that. Only three people sip, and I suspect only one of them has actually done it.

Carl is watching me, though she's trying to hide her interest, and I realize she wants to see if I take a drink. It pleases me deeply, and I smile wryly at her. She scowls at being caught giving a shit, and my smile stretches wider.

“Oh
please
, Dave! Who have you ass-fucked?” Chelsea accuses. She doesn't believe him, but he's probably the only one who drank that has actually done it.

Dave just smirks. “Wouldn't you like to know? Or are you jealous, Chel? Should I take you upstairs and show you how much fun it can be?”