Notes from Ghost Town (23 page)

We stop outside a door marked
#608
and we kick our sandals off and organize them beside the door. The hallway carpet is plush, very soft. His cell phone, our only source of light in the windowless hallway, makes our toes look like bright little aliens against a floor of material dark as mulch, soft as fresh dirt.

“Well, here we are.” He almost sounds nervous as he jiggles the keys into the door and pulls it open for us.

“Whoa. Here we are, indeed.” I’m temporarily amazed as we step inside the palatial condo, its marble floors flooded with slowly waning sunlight from the floor-to-ceiling windows looking right onto the ocean. I feel the heat off Austin’s body centimeters behind me, feel it at my back, against my skin as I walk to the big glass
door leading to the porch and slide it open so sweet salty ocean air floods in to us, sends my hair wild for a moment around my face.

My whole body is buzzing—wondering what Austin’s hands will feel like on my skin. Wondering how he’ll touch me, if we’ll work, wrapped in each other, what his mouth will feel like on my mouth. Wondering if being with him will quiet all the anxious, spinning wheels of my brain.

I come back in and we sit down on the cold marble floor beside each other. I feel him looking at me, searching for something, and then something comes—a quiet sob I try to suppress but can’t. Despite my attempts to blot them out, the events of this afternoon are still beating through me. Stern is still beating through me. I push him away, with every cell of my being, to focus on Austin.

Austin is life, new life—beautiful, funny, unexpectedly kind Austin—big hands and freckles and muscles and reassuring confidence.

“Olivia,” he says, urging me to look at him. I do, finally. “Remember what we talked about? You need to let it go. Let all this shit go with your mom. Please, promise me.”

I shake my head. He thinks this is about Mom—and I know that, in part at least, he’s right, and this tugs at me even more. “All this
shit
?” I repeat.

“I didn’t mean it like that. You know I didn’t. Come here, Red.” He grabs my shoulders, and I try to shed his hands but he won’t let me, his grip strong, insistent. “Just relax.”

“It’s hard to relax when someone’s telling you to relax.”

“I’m not telling you. I’m making you.” His fingers knead along my shoulders, up my neck, down my spine, down, down. I shiver beneath his touch. “Does that feel good?”

“I don’t know,” I answer.

“You don’t know?” He sounds hurt, like no one’s ever told him before that he can actually do something less-than-perfectly.

“Harder,” I answer.

“Really?”

“I’m not going to break, Austin.”

A pause. His hands find my ribcage, move slowly upward, fingers very close now to the bottom of my breasts. I shiver some more, waiting, wanting him. He moves his mouth right up to my ear. “You sure about that?”

“Yeah,” I murmur. “I’m sure.”

“Well, then …” And then he flips me around—strong hands, strong arms—to face him and his mouth is touching my mouth, slow and electric, and he’s kissing me. Sentence left unfinished, hanging there forever between the cliff and the long, steep, rocky fall. His big hands move up and down my arms, my waist, my legs, grip me hard, like he’s never wanted to touch someone so badly before. Like he can’t get enough.

Austin’s lips, Austin Morse’s lips, are soft. Our tongues move together, test the ridges of each other’s teeth and lips. He wraps his arm around my waist and pushes my
back against the sliding glass door, running his hands over my chest, soft, then moving them downward as I feel my legs go to jelly, my brain go to jelly, everything in me rushing, buzzing, humming.

“Olivia.” He runs his fingers, slowly, to the button of my shorts. He works quickly. I help him. I want them off. Our fingers work together at the button until it comes loose, and he pulls at the zipper, slides it down, slides the shorts down over my legs, over my feet, to the other side of the room. His hands return to my legs, to my thighs, to the soft triangle of my underwear.

I move my hands up and down the ridges of his chest, slide his shirt up over his head. He pulls my tank top over my head. I’ve never hooked up with a boy like Austin before—a boy so flawlessly sure of himself, he doesn’t even need to ask me what I want.

“You’re beautiful. God—you’re so beautiful,” he whispers into my ear, his breath tickly and warm. “I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.” He kisses my mouth, and the little divot in my neck.

“Wait—” I freeze beneath him—I hear something.
Someone
.

He kisses my neck, my ear. “What’s the matter?” He tries to pull me closer to him but I inch away.

“No—stop for a sec.” I crane my ear toward the wall to my left. “Do you hear that? Someone’s crying….” I sit up. “Do you really
not
hear that?”

He sits up, too, hair mussed, his bee-stung lips moving
toward my ear. He nibbles at it. “You’re probably just hearing the gulls outside.”

“No. It’s—it’s not coming from outside.” I meet his eye. He bites his bottom lip. “Has anyone moved in here yet?”

“Nope. We’re all alone. Trust me. Okay?” He moves one finger to my chest, traces a line between my breasts, down my belly button. And the rush in my skull just then mutes every other sound.

“Okay,” I say. And we’re at it again. He lifts me so I’m on top of him, my legs wrapped around his hips. He lowers me back to the ground, kissing my stomach, kissing lower, and lower, and lower. Even though the marble floor is cold and hard against my spine, I don’t notice it. I don’t notice anything else. But his lips. His tongue. His breath on my skin.

Buzzzzzzzz
. His cell phone. We pause, breathing hard. “Ignore it,” he says.
Buzzzzzzzz
.

I smile, playfully, reach my hand out toward the pocket of his discarded shorts. “You supposed to be fooling around with some other chick tonight, Morse?”

“Hey—stop. Just put it down—” he tries to bat it out of my hands.

“Don’t worry,” I say, opening the screen. “I won’t tell her I’m—”

But then, I freeze, eyes locked on the text on the screen.

Are you keeping an eye on her?

“Who is it?” Austin asks. But I barely register the words he’s saying.

I just keep staring at the message, trying to make sense of it:
Are you keeping an eye on her?

“
Who
is it, Tithe?”

Are you keeping an eye on her?

I push him off of me, grab my shirt from the floor, start to re-dress. “Ted,” I answer, staring at him hard. “He wants to know if you’re
keeping an eye on me
.”

He grabs his phone from the floor, stares at the screen, looks back at me, horrified. “Olivia—I can explain.”

“What does he mean,
are you keeping an eye on me
?” I’m suddenly so cold, I can barely stop my teeth from chattering. “Answer me, Austin. Have you been, like,
baby-sitting
me or something? Is that what this is?”

He reaches for my hand but I scoot away, searching for my tossed-off clothing. “No. Please, Olivia. Not at all.” He shakes his head, rubs the back of his neck. I grab my crumpled-up shorts and underwear and wriggle them over my legs.

“You’re lying,” I spit out. “And you suck at it.”

He sighs, grabbing up his own clothes, holding them up to his chest instead of actually putting them on. “Okay,” he says. “Ted asked me to take you on a date, as a favor. But that was only at the beginning—”

“A favor?” My voice comes out like a screech, like the sound of the distant gulls. I close my eyes, open them again. The room is spinning. “So, I’m some
charity
case?”

“Listen—it was just at
first
.”

“And what were you supposed to get, huh? What was your big prize for doing him that favor?”

Austin looks away. “A new car,” he mumbles.

“A new
car
?” The room is spinning. I have to get out of here. “Oh,
awesome
, that’s
fucking awesome
. You know what? Fuck you, Austin. I never should have fucking
believed
you were honestly this
changed—
”

“Olivia,
listen
to me. I’m trying to be honest with you. I like you! I really do! I wouldn’t have done anything with you if—”

“Yeah, well I wouldn’t have done anything with
you
, either!” I’m fighting to get into my jean shorts. My fingers are shaking so hard I can barely get them buttoned. “You think that every single girl in the world is just
dying
to hook up with you.”

“Come on, Olivia. Please. Don’t be like that. I’m trying to be honest.”

“It’s a little too late for that, Austin. I know what I am to you. I know what I am to Ted. Totally bat-shit insane. Just like my mother.”

“You’re wrong. What do I have to do to convince you?” he moves toward me, tries to grab me at the waist. I scoot away, put my hands over my chest.

“Some crazy who needs to be watched all the time. You never actually cared.”

“That’s not true.”

I grab my purse from the floor, run to the door, and let
myself out—Austin still only in boxers, clothes hugged into his chest, calling to me as I make my stumbling escape through the dark: “Come on. Quit it with the bullshit, Olivia. Come back here.”

Finally, I reach the lobby, run across the marble floor, breath ragged. I hear the sobbing again, the distant wail of a girl, and it is not until I’m outside that I realize I’m the one crying.

I
think of Mom as I half-jog-half-walk home, down the boardwalk, from Ghost Town.

I think of how it started for her—when her brain started twisting things up and spitting them out her mouth all wrong.

All these people—the well-meaning people trying to keep me safe—I know, logically, that’s all they want to do. So why do I feel so much resentment? Why does every new truth feel like a knife in the gut? And why does it feel like
I’m
the only person in the whole world on the outside of what’s going on
inside
of me?

Damn
. Austin. I was just supposed to be using him. As a distraction. As a not-Stern … as an anything-but-Stern. It wasn’t supposed to get this far. I wasn’t supposed to maybe on some level kind of
like
Austin.

But I do. I did. I really liked being around him. I thought he’d grown up a little, that he was different, that we had something there….
God
. To think I really believed that Austin-fucking-Morse actually, truly cared for me, of his
own volition. To think I
bought
into his bullshit act. Austin Morse dated me for a new car.
A car
. Jesus.

I’m so stupid. So, so stupid. So blind. To think I’ve wasted even a spare minute of time with him, when I’ve got so little of it to spare.

Four days. It’s all I’ve got.

Stern, Stern, why did you have to die? Why didn’t you stay?

I turn my cell phone back on. One new text from Dad:
Be safe, darlin’. Not too late. Luv, Dad
. The only times he’s calm like this are when he’s immersed in Heather. And I’m actually grateful for it. If not for her, he’d be his own one-father-crazy-show by now—forty thousand texts per every hour he doesn’t hear from me. He probably wouldn’t even let me out of the house anymore, not at this point.

The seagulls shriek from the sand, shaking their bills, flurrying their wings. Their cries sound nothing like the cries I heard in Ghost Town.

I can’t imagine what Austin’s doing right now and I don’t care. Maybe he’s still standing gape-mouthed in the doorway, expecting me to return, to strip naked right before I fall, desperate, into his chest, to confess to all my pathetic weaknesses and ask him to save me from myself.

Then that warm feeling floods my legs, just for an instant—his hands on my waist, my chest, his lips on my neck.
Ugh
. I almost let him take off my underwear.

I stuff my hands into the pockets of my shorts and kick some crumpled-up trash out of my path as I walk. The sky
is dark now. I wonder if Austin really thinks I’m beautiful, sexy, amazing … or if Ted bribed him to say all that, too. Maybe it was Ted who told him all the moves to make:
Get her loosed-up with a massage. Compliment her. And then undress her, son. Compliment her some more. Pretend not to care if she’s wearing granny-panties
.

But Da-ad …

Don’t ‘but dad’ me, Austin. Olivia really needs our support right now. If you don’t tell her how much you like her boobs, she might just go kill herself
.

I’m halfway home when my phone buzzes inside my purse. Probably Austin, calling with more excuses. I lift it out, blink at the number on the screen.

Unknown.

I skirt a clot of preteens clogging up about half a block of the boardwalk, find a quiet bench ahead before I answer. “Hello?” My voice comes out all wobbly.

“Olivia?” A woman’s voice. An older woman.

“Yes …?” I wait.

The woman sighs. “Oh, good. I was worried I’d written the number wrong.” She laughs a little, then clears her throat. “It’s Deb Kilmurray—Greg Foster’s neighbor. We met on Saturday?”

My belly releases some of its knots. “Oh, yeah. Of course.” I try to keep the confusion from my voice. I can’t imagine why she would be calling. I expected Dad, or Austin, or Raina. Not her.

“How are you, honey?”

“I’m fine,” I say cautiously. “How are you?”

“Fine, fine. You said to call if I had any more information about your uncle,” she says, clearing her throat.

“My …?” For a second I forget that I told her Greg Foster was my estranged relative. I catch myself just in time. “Oh, right. Of course.” I press the soles of my sandals against the edge of the bench, fiddle with a loose splinter on the arm. I wait for her to continue.

“Well, really, it’s not new information. That is, I mean, I was just wrong. I’m not even sure whether it matters….” I hear the sound of rustling behind her—she’s sorting through papers? “Oh, dear. I’m bungling this, aren’t I? I just thought you might want to know. I was wrong about where—where Greg—excuse me, Mr. Foster—left his money. I think I told you he left it to a nature preserve, but—”