What You Leave Behind (14 page)

Harper takes his face in her hands, leans in and whispers against his mouth, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Austin lets out a whimper as her lips connect softly with his and unravel him, and he squeezes his eyes shut. He concentrates wholly on the warmth of her mouth, on the way her hands fist in his shirt, on the way she arches toward him and climbs down onto his lap. When she pulls away, his eyes remain closed as he licks his lips, afraid that if he opens them she won’t be there and this won’t be real.

“Austin,” she says, her hands on his cheeks, “I understand it, I do. But it’s not okay and I’m still hurt—you’ve hurt me, Aus.” She leans in and kisses him again. “But hurting you isn’t going to make me feel any better.”

“What will?”

“Kiss me.”

CHAPTER TEN

The bourbon is cheap and Liam cuts it with some apple cider from a chipped glass bottle that he found at the corner gas station when it was still early, and Austin’s week-old words rang fresh in his ears. It was the last bottle in the cold case, tucked in the back behind soured milk. He called it fate at the time—fate is a good excuse for most things. Once it’s gone, he drinks the bourbon straight and thinks fate is bullshit as he stares bleary-eyed at the headlights that flash through his hotel window as they careen down the highway, toward homes and hearts. He thinks of getting in his car, feeling the steering wheel beneath his fingers, but his vision shifts from alcohol and tears, and he can’t even fathom walking to the door, let alone through it. There is nothing that waits for him beyond it anymore and that’s kept him pinned to Arizona for the last week. Instead, he takes a bottle from his pocket and uncaps it, shakes an indiscriminate number of pills into his palm, and chases them down his throat with a wash of bourbon. Somewhere in Texas, he wrote himself a prescription for pain killers—ethics ignored—because something had to stop the pain that coursed through him when he couldn’t stop thinking of her and what he’d done. He falls asleep with thoughts of Harper swirling through his drug-addled mind—thoughts about how she is no longer his, how his heart no longer has a home.

Morning comes too soon and the headlights are replaced with sunshine, blistering slants of light that viciously pull Liam from his fit of slumber. He squints against it and rolls over, the nearly empty bottle of bourbon jabbing against his ribs. He pulls it out and twists the cap from the bottle, swallows down what remains, and blindly drops it off the edge of the bed. It hits the carpet with a soft thud. For a moment, he considers the sound to be lifeless, and it is—the sound of an inanimate object—but he hears it in a whole other way. He hears a minute replica of what his own lifeless body would sound like crashing against the low pile carpeting. The thought sickens him and he begins to wretch, moving his hand to cover his mouth as the tears flood his eyes again.

“Fuck,” he mutters, his hands bracing against the dingy countertop in the bathroom.

Spit drips from his lips in long streams, falling into the sink at a pace slower than his tears, and he cannot bring himself to look up at his reflection. Even if he could lift his head, he would not recognize the broken man looking back at him, nothing more than a blur through his tears. He bawls heavily for a while, until the sun has risen high enough to not peek directly through the window shade, and when he’s finished, his throat aches and his eyes are rimmed in red. It is then that he sees his sickening reflection, and his fist connects with the glass before he’s even fully processed what he’s seen. The blood spills quickly from around the shards of glass that have lodged into his skin, and he stares down at his limp hand as if it isn’t a part of him. After a while, the bleeding stems, and he wraps a towel around the reddish-brown blood that has caked itself to his skin. He ceases to think of it as he lies in bed, swallows down a mess of pills, and waits for them to hollow out his mind.

The phone rings and the loud, tinny noise crashes against him in waves. It takes Liam longer than it should to realize it’s the phone on the table beside the bed causing the sound. Blindly, he gropes for the receiver, forgetting the wreck he’s made of his hand, and after a few false grabs, he wraps his hand firmly around it, tearing open his wounds in the process.

As Liam presses the phone to his ear and grumbles an incoherent greeting, his father sighs a relieved “Finally,” from the other end of the line.

“How’d you find me?” Liam slurs, staring blankly at his hand as bright red blood seeps between cracks of brown.

“Your debit card and some nice folks at the Ashland Police Department,” Dan tells him and Liam only shrugs, as if Dan can see his indifference. “Not staying in one place helped you for a while, but you’ve been in Arizona all week. You really should have kept moving, if you didn’t want to be found.”

“Congratulations,” he says dully.

“Liam, this has gone on long enough. We’ve tried to be patient, but it’s time to come home,” Dan says wearily across the line, but Liam isn’t listening. He’s picking shards of glass from his knuckles, coaxing fresh blood to the surface, and meets it with pours of vodka—one for his hand, one for his mouth. Dan waits a beat and when it becomes clear his son doesn’t hear him, he sighs to himself and then asks, “What are you doing? What in the hell are you doing, Liam?”

“I’m dying,” Liam replies, his voice distant and dry, his answer more
big picture
than
at the moment
. “What else can I do? She’s with someone. She’s—”

“Do you care? Honestly, Liam, do even you care?” Dan is loyal to Liam, but only to a point. But Dan’s blood in his veins only gets him so much allegiance, and what he did to Harper is reprehensible at best. Dan didn’t raise a son who would do such a thing. “What you did to Harper—”

“I know,” Liam cries out at the sound of her name. The last time he heard it was out of Austin’s mouth, and the pain of the news rushes back to him as he repeats a strangled, “I know.”

Dan says nothing, listens as his son chokes on well-deserved sobs, and offers no words of comfort. He loves Liam, but now, it needs to be the tough kind of love, and there are no words of comfort he’s willing to offer. Dan knows the reality of what Liam has left behind—he’s spoken with Hilary, and knows the news of who Harper’s
someone
is would slay Liam. The line quiets after a bit and Liam is the first to fill the silence. “I think I broke my hand,” Liam says, the words empty. “I can’t really feel it.”

“Try not to move it, and don’t leave. I’ll be there by tonight,” Dan promises, and then the line goes dead.

Liam drops the phone from where it’s pinned between ear and shoulder and stares at the fresh droplets of blood that have sprung from the places the glass has been. He pours more vodka over his hand, watches as it hits the floor by his feet, and then he drinks, and he drinks, and he tries to forget her, as she has already forgotten him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“You’re sure you want to do this?” Clare asks, her mouth twisting to one side in vicarious uncertainty. Harper solidly nods her confirmation and Clare follows it with a subdued, “Okay, but there’s no going back, if you do. You know that, right?”

“Clare,” she says sternly, “just put it in the fire.”

The fire crackles ominously as Clare approaches the pit in the Reed’s backyard, a teddy bear clutched to her chest for one final embrace, before she dangles it over the flames and looks away as she drops it in. The faux fur ignites and the polyester filling quickens the burn once it catches, and before long, there are only charred remains drooping over the logs. Clare frowns at the sight of it, her watery eyes gleaming like sapphires in the firelight, but Harper’s face remains impassive as she looks away from the fire and down to the items that remain in the box at her feet. In the glow of the fire and pale light of the moon, she can’t see much, the edges of the box too high to let enough light in, but she knows exactly what the box contains. Reminders of her life with Liam are held within its walls, awaiting their execution by fire.

“I’d just like to remind you that you’re the one who decided we should burn things, instead of throwing them away, so you can stop looking at me like I’m a sociopath for sending a bear to its death without remorse.” As Clare pouts dramatically, Harper bends down and sifts through the contents of the box until she comes upon a heap of photographs. Pointedly, she stalks over to the fire pit, her eyes on Clare as she goes, and tosses them into the fire with a flourish. Some scatter aside in the wind, missing the flames, but there’s one of Harper and Liam kissing on skis atop Mt. Ashland very clearly burning on the outskirts of the pit, the flame licking away at her face until it disappears. She motions toward it and asks dryly, “There—I just set pictures of myself on fire. Are you going to mourn my attempted suicide, like you’re mourning the loss of Barry Bear?”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous. And Barry Bear is a horrid name.” Clare bends and gathers up the photos that drifted away from the flames across the deadened grass, sets them one by one into the fire, looking at each discerningly. The last in the stack is a close-up of Liam’s high school graduation photo, and as Clare tosses it into the fire, she smirks and says, “Though
I do like that, in a sense, I’ve just burned off Liam’s face.”

“Me too.”

Harper throws Liam’s SOU sweatshirt into the pyre as the photos turn to ash. The flames claim it slowly, warming her like the clothing never will again, as she holds her hands toward the blaze and savors the heat. Clare hands her something else from the box and without looking at it, she throws it in. Then another thing and another and some more, until the box is empty, at which point, she breaks down the cardboard and throws that in, too.

“So, that’s it, then,” Harper says calmly, watching as the fire burns through the cardboard, until all that’s left is the wood at its base. She brushes her ash-flecked hands on her jeans and rubs them together at the edge of the fire pit. “Want to go grab dinner?”

“That’s it? That’s your grand segue out of the
I just purged my evil ex-boyfriend from my life
events of tonight? Do I want to go grab dinner?” Harper shrugs, and Clare shakes her head in mock disbelief, or what Harper assumes is mock disbelief. She stands beside Harper with an arm around her shoulders while the other gestures grandly toward the fire before them, and explains, “Harper, darling, this is a celebration.”

“Okay, so, would you like to go grab a
celebratory
dinner?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Clare muses, looking over at her with a mixture of delight and relief. “Now, go get dressed,” she instructs, patting Harper on the back and guiding her toward the house. “Go, go. Time’s a wastin’.”

“I am dressed,” Harper tells her, as she’s moved into the porch light. Clare shoots her a skeptical glance and shakes her head. In reply, Harper motions toward her outfit, slowly drawing attention to one item at a time, head to toe—black skull cap, thick grey sweater, black skinny jeans, and lace-up leather boots that reach almost to her knees. As she does a little twirl in the circle of light, she says, “You even complimented the boots when I put them on.”

“I did. They’re great boots—for being outside and burning things. But they’re not for celebrating. You’re one mask shy of going to rob a bank, one veil away from going to a very casual funeral,” Clare says bluntly, at which Harper points enthusiastically toward the bonfire, still burning behind Clare’s back. Without looking over her shoulder, Clare waves it off and says, “Not what I meant. You need glitz, glamour, drama—”

“Oh no, I don’t,” Harper protests, her hands raised as if to reject anything of the sort. “I’ve had more than enough drama.”

“Just humor me and put on something pretty,” Clare whines.

“This isn’t some 90s teen movie, Clare. Josh Hartnett isn’t going to sweep me off my feet just because I put on a slinky dress and sparkly heels and wander about like a lost deer in the frigid night. Because it is—it’s frigid. This is not slinky dress weather.”

“What girl doesn’t want to be rescued by 90s Josh Hartnett, though?”

“A girl who doesn’t need rescuing, that’s who—like me.”

“Fine, put on something with color and we’ll call it a truce. That’s my final offer.”

Without another word, Harper heads into the house, the back door hanging open as if expecting Clare to follow behind her. Clare remains in the yard though, watching the fire lick away at the wood, offering cracks and pops every now and then, and as she stares at it, she thinks about what Harper said—how she doesn’t need rescuing. It’s so far removed from who Harper was a mere week ago, when she called Clare and said, “I know we’re not really friends, but I—I just need someone right now, and Kevin said I could give you a call.”

The door swings shut behind Clare and she jumps at the sound, whirls around to find Harper standing on the patio, unchanged, aside from her emotions.

“I thought we agreed color was—”

“This dress,” Harper says blankly, looking down at the dark garment as it lay in her hands. In the dim light, it looks black, but Harper knows it is midnight blue, remembers the way it looked against her porcelain skin. She hasn’t seen it since then, hasn’t even thought about it, and when she found it tucked behind a long forgotten basket of clean clothes in the laundry room, it felt like a kick in the chest. No matter how much she burns him down, the pain of that night will still blaze through her—just as it does now. “I wore this dress that night.”

“Which—oh.” At the realization, Clare rushes across the yard to her and covers her hands with her own, the fabric pressing between them. “Do you want me to—”

“No,” Harper says determinedly, looking past Clare to the blazing fire with tear-filled eyes. “I’ll do it.”

With Clare at her side, Harper walks slowly toward the pyre. When they reach the bricked edge of the pit, Harper closes her eyes, tears falling down, and wonders if the lick of flames reflected hotly against her cheeks will dry them before they fall. Fall, they do, though. They drip down onto the blue lace, and the wetness of the fabric is another reminder she doesn’t need. Nodding, she balls the dress up and drops it neatly into the flames, watching it burn up and away.