Underneath Everything (5 page)

When I’m a step away, Hudson breaks our gaze. He looks toward the bar and, with a quick nod, curls a dark hair behind his ear.

I look too, and catch the last trace of concern fade from Cal’s face as he turns back to his crowd with a cocked eyebrow, a brown bottle, and a joke.

“Can I sit?”

Hudson tips his head to the empty space next to him.

The seat is a few inches lower than I think, so when I finally sink into it, I fall a bit, spilling even more of my beer. I wipe at the drops on my jeans.

Hudson doesn’t notice. He’s rolling the loose white thread at the knee of his jeans and stealing glances at Cal, who’s setting up the shot glasses at the bar in some kind of pyramid. He’s always been a showman.

Between him and Bella, this party basically has professional entertainment.

“You and Cal are still close,” I say, figuring it’s a safe place to start. But I know I’m wrong as soon as I see the deep crease form between Hudson’s eyes.

“Some people stick around,” he says. The beer turns sour in my mouth. He’s still angry.

This was a mistake.

I’m about to get up when I feel a tap on my shoulder.

I jump in my seat, until I realize it’s just the guy to my left, offering me a hit.

“I’m cool,” I tell him as I take the pipe and pass it to Hudson. He passes it to the girl on his right, who nods yes, takes a huge hit, then proceeds to have a hacking fit, the kind where you cough and cough and cough and can’t catch your breath. She shakes her head and, still coughing, passes it to the next person.

When the music changes, Hudson and I speak at the same time.

Me: “I’ll leave you alo—”

Hudson: “Want to get out of here?”

It’s what we always said to escape from parties. Neither of us liked being around so many people. But why would he say it now when, obviously, he’s mad at me? Why would he ask me to talk when he’s been ignoring me for more than a year?

When I don’t answer immediately, Hudson wipes his palm on the knee of his jeans. “I mean, it’s cool if you don’t want to.” He brushes a stray curl from his face and tucks it behind his ear.

I’m still having trouble speaking, but now it’s not because I don’t know what to say. It’s because the words rise up in me too quickly—the explanation I never got to give; the things I wanted to scream the day I saw him walk into school with Jolene, wait at her locker, hold her hand, and pretend his fingers hadn’t run through my hair a week before. I waited, day after day, but I never got a chance to say them. Now they’re as familiar to me as my jeans, and just as worn. But here he is. Right in front of me. And I’m angry, too. I could do it. I could say he doesn’t matter to me, that he barely exists, that when I see him, I see nothing at all.

But I’d be lying.

“There’s a guest room on the other side of the basement,” I say, standing up. “Follow me.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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CHAPTER 5

HUDSON FOLLOWS ME out of the cave, past the flip-cup game, the Ping-Pong table, the couches, and the flat screen. I don’t look over when people scream and throw their hands up in victory or turn when they laugh at something on TV. I just stare straight ahead at the door on the far end of the basement and picture what’s behind it: two bedrooms on the left, both small and blue and traditional, and one on the right, enormous, with lavender walls and an attached bathroom. It’s hard to forget the bathroom. It has shell-shaped soap, shell-patterned hand towels, and a glass-door shower with shell etchings. Or, at least, it used to.

I push open the door and step into the dark hallway. Hudson follows me, shutting out the sound and light from the rest of the basement with a soft click. I flatten my palm against the side of the wall and slide it around, searching for the switch. It should be right here, but for some reason I can’t find it. The farther I reach, the faster I breathe. Hudson must hear me, because by the time I finally find the switch, so does he.

Our fingers meet. I feel high—dizzy, disoriented, like I’m spinning. And it’s not from the secondhand smoke or the warm beer. It’s him. In the dark. On the fringe. It’s how we’ve always been.

The first time Hudson held my hand was on a Saturday night, sophomore spring. Cal’s parents were out, so he threw a party at his duplex. And since Cal was friends with pretty much everyone, the place was packed. Kris was with Jim. Bella was dancing. Cal was bartending. Jolene was off with her latest plaything—each boy fell hard, then fell away. Jolene always came back to me. But she wasn’t finished yet, so I did what I always do at parties: I searched for a corner, a place away from all the noise and voices, to wait for her. I found it in a small den off the living room, lit blue by a finished movie. That’s where I found Hudson too.

He was sitting on the couch, running his thumb over the ink he’d penned on the rubber strip that lined the bottom of his sneaker, like he was by himself instead of at a party. I sat down next to him. We didn’t talk at first. It wasn’t what either of us had gone in there for. But after a little while he looked at me (steady, studiously) for so long, it started to feel like he was the only person in the world who’d ever
seen
me. I’d caught him looking at me before, a few times in the hall, but it had never felt like this.

When Hudson finally spoke (his thumb didn’t leave the sole of his sneaker), he asked me about loyalty, whether or not I thought it existed. I took my time answering, the way I imagined he did, choosing each word, and each person who heard it, only after careful scrutiny. I said I hoped loyalty did exist. He said he hoped so too but that it was hard to believe in when your mom—the person who is supposed to be there no matter what, the one who’s supposed to keep promises—just up and leaves, and all that’s left of her is boxes. What does that do to loyalty, he wanted to know. Promises?

I shook my head, said I didn’t know. He said he didn’t know, either. Then he kept working on his sneaker. And I kept sitting with him. And the sitting was a kind of speaking, too. Just being together. We sat as music swelled and glasses spilled and words slurred in the other room, as kisses finished and doors opened and girls went in search of their best friends. We sat until the party began to feel far, foreign, a forgotten star. We sat until Hudson wasn’t the distant one anymore; they were. Then I felt his fingers run lightly across my knuckles, draw circles on the inside of my palm, thread between mine, and settle into the grooves, like they’d always been there.

We flip the switch and blink.

“Sorry,” I say.

“No worries.” He takes his hand off mine. He’s still looking at me, though, waiting. And it takes me one, two, three counts of staring back at him until I realize I’m leading. He doesn’t know where he’s going.

“It’s down here,” I say, turning on my heel. I close my fingers over my thumbs and fight the memory as I walk down the hall and swing open the door to the lavender room.

“Interesting,” Hudson says, pausing in front of the enormous bed.

I forgot about the bed.

Hudson shifts his weight and brushes a nonexistent hair behind his ear.

I bypass the lavender canopy and decorative pillows on my way to the reading chair in the corner.

“What?” I ask, in a lame attempt to make light of the massive mattress. “Your room’s not like this?” I try for a smile, but the corners of my mouth sink as soon as I lift them. Hudson and I never made it to his room. We met on stoops and sidewalks and driveways. We talked about family and fear. Loyalty. For a few months we shared things that felt more intimate than kissing (which we did) and more sacred than sex (which we didn’t).

And for fifteen months we haven’t talked at all.

I slip off my shoes, sit down, and fold my legs under me, as if by making myself small somehow I can shrink the room and transform the bed into the couch off Cal’s living room, where it was small and dark enough for us to be honest.

“Not quite.” Hudson runs his finger along the metal bed frame as he walks across the room. He sits down on the wide, white cushioned chair opposite me.

We listen to the tread of feet above us, a smattering of dull thumps on the ceiling. As the silence grows, my heart joins in, thudding for each second I don’t say the words swelling in my chest and screaming in my head. But after nearly a year and a half of being ignored by him, and ignoring almost everyone myself, I’m good at holding my tongue.

Hudson stares at the loose laces of his Vans, runs his fingers inside the loops. I sink farther into my chair. Voices drift in from the hallway. A high giggle. A deep murmur.

A door shuts.

The longer we sit, the more I get used to it.

The silence stretches, tethers us together. And as I sit there, with the hum of the bass above me, in Hudson’s company, my anger wears away. Being with him stops feeling strange.

“Why are you here?” Hudson asks finally.

I sit up in the chair. “You asked if I wanted to get out of there.”

“No, not in this room. Why are you here? Tonight?” Hudson slings his sneaker over the worn knee of his jeans and leans the full weight of his gaze on me. As if the blue of his eyes, or the way they crinkle at the sides, will act like some sort of truth serum.

“The bonfire,” I tell him. “Didn’t want to miss it.”

“You didn’t want to miss a bunch of people you don’t like, doing something you’d rather ditch?”

Hudson drops his eyes and starts tracing the hand-drawn letters scrawled across his sneaker. My heart pangs at the familiar pose.

“Unlikely,” he concludes.

“Why do
you
think I’m here?” I ask him.

“Don’t know.” He shrugs. “Why are you here tonight? Why weren’t you there last year? I’ve stopped trying to figure you out.”

Guilt seeps, thick and viscous, through my chest. It was slow, getting to know Hudson. Every word was earned. Each confidence, a gift. But losing him, that was easy.

Quick.

“Kris needed me.”

Hudson’s hand hovers over his sneaker.

“
I
needed you.” Each word is quiet, clipped. The same way he sounded the night of the manhunt game.

Meet me,
he’d said, mouth pressed close to the phone.
Promise.

But I wasn’t there.

I clutch the arms of my chair and think about Jolene, bare shouldered and buzzed on the couch upstairs, waiting for him.

“Seems like Jolene was a decent stand-in.”

Hudson sinks back in his seat and stares at a point in midair, as if Jolene’s sitting here, between us.

I look in the same direction.

“She was there.” He casts a quick glance my way, drops his crossed leg to the floor, and runs his hands up and down the thighs of his jeans. “She got what I was going through.”

The back of my throat burns. Jolene didn’t
get
him. I
gave
him to her. She drew him out of me on so many June afternoons. Word by word. Story by story. I told her how he hated to talk on the phone. How his hand felt in the dark and his skin smelled up close. How his mom had left and his dad was drinking, picking fights with him. How he was shy, then bold, closed, but opening. I talked and talked and talked, and she ingested everything I said until it was hers, and so was he.

“At least she did back then,” he says.

“And now?” I ask tentatively.

“Now? I don’t know.” Hudson tenses at some memory, like it physically pains him. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I don’t have to. I know Jolene. I’ve got plenty of my own scars itching to open up and bleed.

“I shouldn’t have mentioned her,” I say. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” he says, and sighs, resigned. “That’s why I broke up with her.”

“No shit,” I exclaim. The idea of Hudson, or anyone, willfully disobeying Jolene seems completely impossible to me.

“Shit,” he confirms, rolling a stray strip of sneaker rubber between his fingers.

And then everything about tonight falls into place. Why Hudson was hanging back in the shadows at the bonfire. Why he told me I was blowing his cover. It wasn’t just about him keeping the usual distance from everything. It was because he didn’t want Jolene to see him.

“Don’t act so surprised,” he continues. “It’s not like I’m the first person to walk away from her.”

I lower my eyebrows. He raises his.

“Really?” he asks. I shake my head. I don’t know what he means.

Hudson props his elbows on his knees and leans his whole body toward me. “You didn’t just leave me that night. You left her, too.”

I
left
her
.

Technically, he’s right. I walked away from Jolene. Twice. But it didn’t feel like leaving. It felt like being bent. Like breaking.

“Hey,” he says, his voice closer to me now, so close I can smell his breath—the mix of mint and beer.

“Are you okay?”

My hands are shaking. Hudson takes them in his and tightens his grip until they’re still.

“Thanks,” I say, staring at his hands, how they cover mine completely.

“It’s cool,” he says. And for a second I worry he’s going to take them away, but he doesn’t. Instead, he runs his thumbs up and down the insides of my wrists.

Now that my hands are still, the rest of me trembles.

Until heavy thuds beat down on us, shaking the ceiling and swaying the chandelier. The dance party must have started. Either that or a stampede—people running from the police. I stiffen again. Hudson’s grip tightens. I can feel the curve of his silver ring on my wrist.

We look up. Listen. The heavy thuds settle into a rhythm. So it’s dancing then, not a signal to escape.

We’re safe. I relax my hands into his.

“I still can’t believe you left,” he says under his breath.