Riot (20 page)

“You don’t get to do this, Dee,” he says again, his voice cracking. He brushes his thumbs over my wet cheeks and presses his forehead against mine. “Stop crying,” he says in a voice so soft and sad, it breaks my already crushed heart. “You don’t get to cry.”

I want to tell him I love him. But what would be the point? I thought he would be better without me—now I know I was right.

Joel’s lips brush over mine, his blue eyes closing. “You don’t get to do this anymore.” He kisses me again, and my fists bunch in his shirt as I kiss him back. Tears are pouring down my cheeks when he says, “You don’t want me.” He says it between kisses growing increasingly more insistent, and when he backs me up against the wall, he kisses me so deeply that the sound that comes from my lips is more moan than sob. In the next instant, he’s lifting me into the air and I’m pushing my hands under his shirt, needing to feel his skin on my skin and his lips on my lips.

A spark flares between us, and we’re lost. Our kisses are bruising and frantic. My dress is being pushed up, his pants are being unzipped, and my panties are being yanked to the side.

When he sinks inside me, my fingernails dig into his back and a low moan crashes between us. His. Mine. Tears are still dripping down my cheeks, and when I open my eyes, his eyes are glassy too. I hold his face between my hands and kiss him desperately as he thrusts inside me over and over again. We breathe each other as he takes me, kissing and pulling and never getting close enough. I want to tell him I love him, but when I remember the girl waiting for him back inside the club, the way he laughed with her, I can’t. Instead, I kiss his mouth, his jaw, his neck, his ears.

Joel shudders against me, his fingers gripping tighter around my thighs and his hard body pinning me to the wall. I kiss away the sounds coming from his parted lips while he empties inside me, and afterward, his head drops to my shoulder and he slowly sets my heels back to the tile. My arms are still around him, and I don’t want to let him go, but then he lifts his head and stares into me with bloodshot eyes and tear-stained cheeks. His voice is raw with an emotion I feel in my own bones. “I can’t do this anymore.”

When his blurred form turns away from me, I don’t stop him.

When he walks out the door, he doesn’t look back.

Chapter Twenty-Four

A
FTER
J
OEL WALKED
away from me, I wanted to fall to my knees. I wanted to collapse and cry until I had no tears left to shed.

Instead, I ran after him.

It took a few seconds for my feet to move, but eventually, something clicked in my brain. A desperate voice said,
this is your last chance
, and I took it. I swung open the door, I pushed through the crowd, I searched for him. And I froze.

He was leaving—with her. My gaze lowered to their joined hands, and I stared at them until they were burned into my brain. Then, the hands disappeared, and I knew with crushing certainty that my chance with Joel was gone. The chance had passed two weeks earlier in an empty pool, and now it was too late.

I left Mayhem as soon as I was sure Joel wouldn’t still be in the parking lot. In my car, I texted Rowan to tell her I had changed my mind about telling him how I felt. I asked her to give Leti a ride home, and I also asked, very politely, for her to please give me my space.

She showed up at my apartment half an hour later, but by then, I was already numb. It was easy to tell her that I had simply decided I didn’t want to be tied down, that I was sure Joel wouldn’t want to be tied down either. She argued with me and repeatedly asked me if something had happened, but I had no intention of ever telling her about what happened in the bathroom.

Gradually, days turned into weeks and she let it go.

I thought of Joel every day, every night, but I eventually stopped crying about him. He never texted, never called, and neither did I. I avoided Mayhem, and even though I still got asked out on dates almost anytime I bothered brushing my hair and going out in public, I turned them all down. Instead, I focused all my energy on finishing my classes and making T-shirts for The Last Ones to Know.

T
HE WEEK BEFORE
finals, Rowan drags me to IHOP and I let her because I’ve come to a decision she needs to know about sooner rather than later. We sit in a booth, we place our orders, and we’re both carving into high stacks of strawberry pancakes when she says, “How do you think you’re going to do on your finals next week?”

“Honestly?” She waits expectantly, and I give it to her straight. “I’m not even going to bother taking two of them because there’s no way I can pass the classes even if I ace the finals.” Her lips part like she’s going to say something, but I don’t leave her time to interrupt. “Two others are papers, and I’ve already started working on them, but I’ll be lucky if I pass the classes with Cs. The other one is the marketing class, and I better get an A on that one or I’m seriously going to burn the entire school to the ground.”

Rowan’s worry lines are deep when she says, “You really can’t pass two of them even if you ace the finals?”

“Don’t look at me like that,” I say. “I tried, Ro. I really did. I mean, you saw me, I—”

“I know you did,” she assures me. “You’ve been working really hard . . .”

I take a deep, heavy breath. “I promised my dad I’d get my grades up . . . but the damage was already done before midterms. I couldn’t get caught up, and then . . . stuff happened.” I don’t need to say what stuff. I stopped saying Joel’s name a few weeks ago. “It just wasn’t going to happen.”

“There’s always next semester,” she suggests after a while, forcing a smile at me even though her eyes are still sad.

I take another weighted breath, knowing I have to tell her and hoping I don’t cry. “Ro . . . I’m not coming back next semester.”

She stops cutting into her pancakes to stare at me. “What do you mean?”

“I’m going home. I’m not coming back. I—”

“You’re
not coming back
?”

My eyes start to sting, so I close them. “I just can’t be here anymore. This isn’t working out for me.”

When she slides into my side of the booth, I open my eyes and look at her. She takes my hand. “Dee, I know you miss Joel, but—”

“This isn’t just about Joel,” I say, and it’s the truth. The past few weeks have been some of the most miserable of my life, but while part of my brain insists that it’s all because of a certain boy I can’t forget, the other part knows that’s not entirely true. It’s also because I’ve honestly been giving college my all, and the more seriously I take it, the more
wrong
it feels, like I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing or in the place where I should be. Over the past year, I’ve tried to quiet the voice, convincing myself that it’s just because I’m lazy or disinterested—because everyone with half a brain goes to college, right?—but it’s gotten to the point where I no longer care what the voice says because I just want to go home.

I want to go back to a place where subjects like math and biology don’t matter. Back where homework doesn’t exist and boys are predictable. Back where I can figure out who I am, because right now, the only thing I’m absolutely sure of is who I’m not. I’m not the same girl who accepted that college was her only option. I’m not the same girl who obsessed over Joel, or who let Aiden drool all over her, or who thought she could use Cody as a pawn to get what she wanted.

And I’m definitely not the same girl who blamed herself for what Cody did.

The girl I am now knows better. Even though there are days when I still think about that night, each time Cody’s face enters my mind, I become more and more sure that I didn’t deserve what happened. A kiss, even one that I enjoyed, does
not
equal consent. I was
not
to blame for what he tried to do to me.

It wasn’t my fault.

It took me a while to believe it, and some days, it’s still hard, but I know Rowan was right when she told me I did all I needed to do when I told him that one word: “STOP.”

Before that night, I was broken, and after, I was destroyed. It was a broken girl who turned Joel away when he told me he loved me, and a broken girl who watched him leave Mayhem holding another girl’s hand. I’m still trying to put myself together, but I need to be able to think to do that, and that’s the last thing I can do when every single breath I take in this town pulls at the fissures of my completely broken heart. If my future doesn’t involve college or the only guy I ever gave my heart to, I don’t know where that leaves me, but I need to figure it out.

“It’ll get better,” Rowan says. “Next semester—”

“My mind’s already made up, babe.” The corners of her lips start slipping into a frown, but my voice stays sure. “I’m moving back home at the end of the month. I already talked to my dad.”

Rowan shakes her head, her blue eyes welling with unshed tears. “What about me?”

I smile and smooth her hair over her shoulder. “You’ll be fine. You’ll stay here with Adam and finish school and be awesome, and we’ll visit each other. And we’ll talk all the time.”

“Dee . . .”

I pull her in for a hug, and she squeezes me close. When the server stops by to ask how we’re doing, she takes one look at us and gives us another few minutes.

“What will
you
do?” Rowan asks when she pulls away. She wipes her eyes and sniffs in the rest of her tears.

“Call Jeremy, see what he’s up to.” She chuckles when I bring up the name of the lifeguard, and I force a smile even though I’m lying out of my teeth. I have no interest in seeing anyone, especially considering it’s taking all of my energy just to crawl out of bed in the morning.

Last week, Rowan told me Joel got his own place, and I asked her to stop giving me updates. She told me she didn’t think he was seeing anyone, and I told her I didn’t care.

I’m happy that he finally has a place he can call home, but I don’t believe for a second that he’s been alone all this time, and I hate that some other girl is the one who got to sleep in his bed first. Or at all.

“I actually got an email from Van last night,” I say, showing Rowan my phone to distract us both. This will make her happy, and hopefully that will help me block Joel from my mind for another five minutes. If I take life five minutes at a time, maybe I’ll never need to think of him again.

“From
Van
?” she asks.

“He wanted to let me know he finally got in touch with his marketing people. I got an email from them half an hour later with a contract attached.”

“Seriously?” she says, her face lighting up. “You’re going to make T-shirts for Cutting the Line?”

I force another smile, hoping it looks as excited and genuine as hers. Last night, when I got the email, I should have danced, screamed, called my best friend and freaked the hell out. Instead, I burst into tears.

All I could think was,
This should make me happy. I should be happy. Why am I not happy?
But there I was, crying into a box of tissues.

“Yep,” I answer. “Van actually came through.”

“How are you not freaking out?!” she asks.

“I did, believe me.”

“Did you sign the contract yet?”

“I wanted to sleep on it, but I’m going to.”

Rowan slides back into her own seat as we talk about the terms. Van told me not to be afraid to negotiate any I didn’t like, but the contract was more than generous. Based on the time it takes me to make the shirts, I’ll be making nearly triple minimum wage. My “brand” will also be featured on the band’s website and at their merchandise booth. They want me to send a picture and a bio and make it a whole big thing.

“I think I might also apply to fashion school,” I add, and Rowan’s eyes get big.

“Really?”

Nikki and Molly had been the first to suggest it, and Joel had been the last. “Yeah, maybe. I mean, it’s just something I’m thinking of. I—”

“I think you should do it,” Rowan says. “You’d be really good at it, Dee.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.” She presses the heels of her palms against her eyes when she starts getting choked up again. “I still don’t want you to go though.”

“I know,” I say, because we both know I’m going to anyway.

“I’ll miss you.”

I give her a weak smile. “Nah, you’re going to hate me when you realize what this means.”

She pulls her hands away from her eyes, and I manage a sincere smirk in her direction.

“You’re going to have to tell your parents about you living with Adam.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

O
UR FINAL WEEK
in the apartment, Rowan spends every night either in my bed or camped out with me in the living room. We build a massive fort out of pillows and blankets and leave it up until it’s time to pack everything away.

“They want to meet him,” she tells me as we fold a sheet together, and I laugh. I wish I could see her dad’s face when he sees Adam’s black nail polish.

“Of course they want to meet him.”

We bring the edges of the four-hundred-thread-count sheet together and Rowan gives me a flat stare as she takes over the folding. “You don’t have to sound so happy about it.” When I just smile at her, she says, “He’s going to drive the moving van for us on Sunday and stay the night at my house.”

“They’re going to make him sleep on the couch,” I warn, and Rowan nods.

“I just hope he stays there.”

I laugh and ask, “Are you going to make him dress up?” Adam could be considered “dressed up” if he just wore jeans without rips, took off some of his bracelets, and wore a shirt with buttons.

Rowan shakes her head. “No. I love him the way he is, so they should too.”

I smile, pretending her words don’t sting the open wound in my chest. I wonder if Joel loved me like that—just the way I am—and if he did, how he could stop doing it so quickly. He was the first boy I ever loved, the first boy I ever let inside me with nothing between us, the first boy I ever wanted to really
be
with, and it took him approximately two seconds after fucking me against a bathroom wall to haul some other girl out of Mayhem and probably fuck her the same way.

I broke his heart first, but he broke mine last.

“Do you know what
I
love?” I ask, ignoring memories of Joel, pretending to feel normal. Pretending to be myself. I flop onto the couch and watch Rowan fold. She tucks a long-edged seam under her chin and works her magic.

“What?” she asks once her chin is free.

“This new you. Adam has been really good for you. You don’t take shit anymore.”

“I took enough shit from Brady to last me a lifetime,” she says, and I toast a half-empty margarita glass into the air. I’m sucking at its salted rim when Leti knocks on the front door. He pushes it open without invitation and strolls inside with Kit on his heels. I’ve seen her a few times since she joined the band, and if I were sticking around, I think we might’ve even become friends.

“Help has arrived!” Leti says with both arms thrown in the air.

Rowan, the genius that she is, insisted on throwing me a packing party disguised as a girls’ day, and I figured it was a brilliant way to secure some cheap labor. Tomorrow, she’s throwing me a birthday-slash-going-away party, for which everyone is required to bring a present
and
help us load the moving van. We’re having the party in my empty apartment, and then I’m going to Rowan’s to spend the night at her place. By then I will have said all my goodbyes, and on Sunday morning, I’ll leave this life behind.

“You’re not packing up the fort, are you?” Leti asks with an exaggerated amount of alarm, keeping me in the present instead of a future that feels just as lonely.

“Yes?” Rowan says.

“But I brought my jammies!” He lifts a backpack in the air, and I manage a chuckle.

“I was promised a fort,” Kit says, and Rowan shrugs before shaking the blanket back out.

With Kit’s help, we pack up most of my things and build a fort even better than the one we had before. Mismatched bedsheets—some lavender, some pink polka-dot—are hung over couches and lamps and packed cardboard boxes, and the entire fort is full of comforters and pillows. Two tiny lamps illuminate the inside, and we camp out within the dryer-sheet-scented walls.

Kit credits her fort-building skills to her older brothers, who I suspect can also be credited with her willingness to cram herself into a tiny space with Rowan, Leti, and me. Even though we’ve only hung out a handful of times since her audition a couple months ago, I like her, and as long as she continues lacking any interest in Joel, I’ll keep liking her. She’s pretty and she knows it—but in a tough, impenetrable kind of way. She’s not sweet like Rowan or girly like me, but she’s got a sort of playfulness about her that is as feminine as it is tomboyish.

“I feel like I’ve been a horrible friend,” I say to Leti while he finally lets me paint his fingernails. He said it would be his birthday present to me, and I was twisting off the cap of the sparkliest, purpliest nail polish I own before he even finished his sentence. “What ever happened with that Mark guy?”

“Who?” Leti asks, not looking at all comfortable to be on the receiving end of what I insist is the most fabulous manicure he’ll ever get. He furrows his brows at the polish like it might make his fingers fall off, and he only half seems to hear what I’m saying.

“Mark. The fireman.” Leti raises his eyebrow and I say, “You met him at Mayhem a few weeks ago . . . dated for a while . . . We joked about him being hot enough to be Mr. February in the firemen’s calendar . . .”

“Oh!” Leti chuckles. “Mark, right. You know he wasn’t an actual fireman, right?”

Now it’s my turn to raise my eyebrow. Leti’s smirk sinks even deeper.

“I just nicknamed him that.”

“Why?” Rowan asks, and a mischievous spark glints in Leti’s eye.

“Because he put out a fire in your pants?” I ask, and Leti grins while shaking his head.

“Because he had a really big hose.”

“Oh my God,” Rowan says, and she and I break into a fit of giggles.

We’re still giggling when Kit, staring at a random polka dot on the wall of our fort, says, “I slept with Shawn.”

All of the sound gets sucked out of the room. Three sets of eyes lock on her and three jaws drop open. She glances at each of us, as if just realizing that she said it out loud, and gives an embarrassed smile.

“You
slept
with
Shawn
?” Rowan asks, and the apples of Kit’s cheeks redden.

“Not recently . . . It was a long time ago. When we were in high school.”

Rowan shares a look with me. She’s gone to a few of the band’s practices with Kit, and she’s told me how weird Shawn acts around her, but I know Rowan’s loyalty is to Shawn over Kit, so she chooses her words carefully. “Has he brought it up?”

Kit shakes her head. “He doesn’t remember.”

“Are you sure about that?” I ask. The girl code in me wants to tell Kit I think she’s wrong, based on what he said about her at her audition, but just like Rowan, I’ve been friends with Shawn for a lot longer.

“Why, has he said something?” she asks, and I can hear the dusting of hopefulness clinging to the edges of her voice.

I shake my head. “No, but . . .” I don’t even know how to finish that sentence. I don’t want to give her false hope, but I recognize something in her that I see in myself every time I look in the mirror anymore. A quiet longing for something lost. “But I think you’d be hard to forget.”

She gives me a smile that seems bigger than it should be, like she’s fighting to keep it on her face. “I didn’t look the same in high school. I was way more of a tomboy—T-shirts and flannels, less makeup, no tattoos or piercings, glasses.”

“Hot enough to sleep with,” Leti offers, and Kit gives another forced smile.

“Why don’t you say something to him?” I ask, watching as her smile grows both warmer and colder. It’s a troublemaker smile, the smile of a girl who grew up with four older brothers and knows how to take care of herself.

“It’s fun playing with him. I’ll tell him eventually . . . maybe.”

I chuckle, and Leti pouts. “Well, it’s official. I’m the only one here who hasn’t slept with someone in the band. Shawn, Adam, J . . .” He trails off on the ‘J’ sound, and we all know why. Shame colors his face, and his apologetic eyes swing to meet mine. “Shit.”

“Consider yourself lucky,” I say, taking one more purple swipe over his pinky before twisting the nail polish shut. “It looks like Rowan is the only one who got a happy ending out of it.”

When I sit back, she frowns at me. “Are you sure you don’t want me to invite him tomorrow?”

“In what world would that turn out okay?”

“What happened between you two?” Kit asks, and Leti subtly shakes his head, freezing when I catch him doing it.

“A lot,” I answer, and when she continues waiting, I add, “Too much.”

“Were you in love?”

The answer is that we were. The answer is that I still am. I love him, and I hate that, and if I could shut it off, I would. Part of me wants him to be happy, in his own place with his new life, but the other part of me hopes that he can’t sleep, can’t eat, and never gives his heart to anyone else. I hope that when the next girl tells him she loves him, he tells her to go home. “Who wants another margarita?”

That night, after I’ve drank enough to forget about Joel and everyone else has drank enough to stop bringing him up, Leti and Rowan both wrap me in a cocoon of arms. They do it as a joke, and we all giggle, but no one pulls their arms away, and eventually we fall asleep like that. In less than thirty-six hours, I’ll be moving home, and next semester, Leti will be graduating. The cocoon is precious, a memory not yet a memory, and we hold on to the night for as long as we can.

In the morning, I wiggle out of my tight spot between them still feeling more like a caterpillar than a butterfly. I crawl over an unsteady mountain of pillows, slip through the exit of our fortress, and find Kit groaning in the kitchen.

“I can’t believe we packed away your coffeemaker,” she says, her layered black-and-blue hair wild and untamed. Her lashes are so thick and dark that they frame her eyes even without eyeliner or mascara, and I hate her just a little for it.

“Let’s wake up Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming so we can go to IHOP,” I say.

I’m walking back toward the fort when Kit replies, “I
love
their pancakes.” My mouth tips up at the corners, and I know with absolute certainty that we found the right girl for the band.

After pancakes, Adam, Shawn, and Mike show up at my apartment with the moving van and start loading my stuff into the back—my bed, my dressers, my boxes and boxes and boxes of shoes. Not all of this stuff is going to fit into my room at my dad’s, and I wonder if maybe I should get my own apartment back home. Maybe a roommate. Hopefully not a weird one like I had at the dorms. If I can find the band a kickass guitarist, I should definitely be able to find myself a not-weird roommate, right?

Considering Rowan will still be here, over three hundred miles away, I can’t imagine liking anyone I’d be living with. She could be the most amazing person in the world and she’d still feel counterfeit—I’d always hate her for not being Rowan.

“What’s wrong?” Rowan asks as we watch Mike and Shawn carry my dresser into the van. Leti and Kit are taking a break on the grass, and Adam is sitting in a basket chair waiting to be loaded, smoking a cigarette and looking downright cozy.

“Nothing.”

“Liar.”

I sigh, and she turns her gaze back toward the boys. There’s no point in telling her I’ll miss her. I’ve told her a thousand times.

“Me too,” she says, and she bumps her shoulder against mine.

I wish she was the only one I’ll miss, but looking out at the boys, I can’t help thinking that I’ll miss them too. And I can’t help knowing that one of them is missing.