“So where are we going to get tacos?” She sidesteps around me and hops in the truck, tucking her skirt in as she brings her legs into the truck.
“You pick,” I say as I shut the door.
She smiles a plain, fake smile, not even giving me the benefit of a real one. “It doesn’t matter to me,” she says as I climb into the cab. Then she kicks her feet up on the dash and flops her head back against the seat, looking as calm as can be.
I have to wonder if she really means it. If nothing matters to her, and if she’s beginning to matter to me.
Chapter 9
Violet
We go get tacos, stop by a drugstore, go to the electronics store to pick up a new phone for him because apparently he lost his last night, then go back to his dorm. The conversation is as light as air, which makes it complicated, in my book. It’s too easy to be around him and it’s not supposed to be that way with anyone. Things are supposed to be hard so it makes it easier to keep up my wall and stay detached, so if and when he decides to exit my life, it’ll be like he was never really there at all.
But I can feel my wall collapsing, especially when he didn’t kiss me while we were by his truck. He could have and I could tell he wanted to. I probably would have let him, too, if only to taste the rush of adrenaline that was forming at the tip of my tongue the second he leaned into me. The way I was hyperaware of his body heat and my own was unfamiliar and it terrified me. All I wanted to do was silence the fear awakening inside me, but the closer he got to me, the quieter I got on the inside. He was my escape from my emotions, yet he was putting them in me at the same time. It was the strangest feeling and I had a difficult time deciding what to do. So I just stood there and let him decide and eventually he moved back and I was left relieved and disappointed.
I’m still analyzing why. The only conclusion I can come up with is that all the stress of being homeless and going to the police department tomorrow has caused my head to crack open and I’m not thinking clearly.
Only minutes after being in his dorm room, he leaves me alone in his room to take a shower. He has packed up hardly any of his stuff, which makes me wonder what he’s going to do when morning comes around.
I douse a cotton ball with peroxide and press it to my hand, feeling it sizzle against my dirty, scraped skin. I now have $7.56 less than I did, all because Luke didn’t want me to get an infection. I was fine with the risk, but he insisted it was unsafe. I almost laughed at him. If only he knew just how unsafe life can get for me.
I flop back on the bed that doesn’t have a sheet on it, just a mattress, the one that was Kayden’s I’m guessing, and stare up at the ceiling, rotating the cotton ball around on my hand. It burns and makes my palm ache, but I let it soak into me as I figure out my next step.
I’ve never had a friend before, if that’s even where Luke and I are moving toward. Preston and Kelley were the closest to friends I ever had, but they were more like my crazy babysitters/landlords than anything. There was no one actually caring enough about me to convince me to buy peroxide and Band-Aids, to clean some cut up and properly take care of myself. There was no one who would beat someone up simply because they were groping my breast. Luke had hammered his fist into Preston’s face without even so much as a second thought.
My heart starts to pump harder as I think about it, the way he did it without any hesitation, when the dorm door opens and Luke enters. He’s wearing a towel wrapped around his waist, his skin still a little damp from the shower. His lean muscles carve his stomach along with a massive welt he probably got from the fight. He’s got a serious set of tattoos. Most are sketched in dark ink and tribal shapes except for an inscription that’s too small for me to read from this far away.
I drape my arm over my head, unable to take my eyes off him. “I like your tats.”
He sets his dirty clothes down on the dresser and shuts the door with his foot, his brow curving upward. “Was that a compliment?”
“Perhaps.”
He sinks down on the made bed across from me and disappears out of my line of vision. “You have some of your own, on the back of your neck, right?”
“Yeah, two of them,” I say, returning my concentration to the ceiling, my hand balling around the drying-out cotton ball. “I have more, though.”
“Where?”
“It’s a secret.”
He pauses and the mattress squeaks. “So, do you want to just crash? I’m kind of tired.”
I shake my head, listening to my heart thud in my chest. Even though I’m tired, if I just crash then I’ll have to think about what happened and if I think about what happened I’ll have to feel how I feel about it and if I feel it, I’ll just want to get up and do something reckless. Then afterward, I’ll be content and get tired, wanting to crash, and the whole process will start over. It’s a vicious cycle. “I’m not tired at all.”
He sighs heavyheartedly. “Then what do you want to do?”
I boost up on my elbows to look at him, fixing my attention on his swollen jaw instead of where his towel is starting to open up. “What do you usually do on a Sunday night?”
He reaches for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the desk by the foot of his bed. “Get drunk and get laid.” He watches my reaction as he tips his head back and takes a swig.
“Isn’t getting drunk bad for you… because you’re a diabetic?”
He shifts his weight uncomfortably and then looks away toward the window. “I’m fine. I don’t do anything I can’t handle.”
I seem to be making him upset and I don’t understand why. But I let the subject go, since I’m the last person who should be lecturing anyone on what’s good and bad for them. I sit up and slide to the edge of the bed, planting my feet on the floor. “Well, if getting drunk and getting laid is what you want to do then you’re going to have to go have fun solo,” I say. “Because I don’t do either of those things. Well, I drink sometimes, but not a lot.” I divulge the truth to him, but not deliberately. My brain is clearly tired.
His eyes immediately snap in my direction as he chokes and alcohol sprays out of his mouth and onto the carpet, making my confession worth it. “What?” he sputters, setting the bottle back down.
“What? Drinking makes me act vicious and kind of crazy so I try to avoid it unless I want to act mean and crazy.” I know that’s not why he’s choking though. He’s choking because I said I was a virgin.
“You mean more than you already are?” he asks warily, wiping the whiskey away from his lips with his hand.
I cross my legs and the split on my skirt opens up, revealing my thighs. I notice his gaze travel toward them, his eyes blazing with something I’ve seen in guys’ eyes many times. I can’t help but wonder if Luke could be my reckless thing at the moment if I decide I want to go that route. The way he hit Preston, without so much as thinking, and the strip club fight… it makes him seem sort of dangerous, which makes me think he could feed my craving. But do I really want to get involved? Feel a connection? Because when he kissed me in the truck, I’d felt something other than numbness. I felt a spark. Life. Need.
“Yeah, so imagine how bad I can get,” I say.
His heated gaze skims from my legs to my face. “It’s probably a good thing then.” His fingers seek the bottle again, his blazing eyes still fastened on me. He takes another swallow, peering over the bottle at me.
“Does it make you uneasy?” I ask, leaning back on my hands, amused that I’m making him tense over the fact that I’m a virgin, yet he won’t comment on it. “That I am.”
He sets the bottle down again and his tongue slips out of his mouth to moisten his cut lip. “Does hearing that you get crazy and vicious when you’re drunk make me uneasy? Why would it when you’re that way sober?”
“Don’t play dumb,” I say. “I know you’re thinking about how I just told you I was a virgin, which is why you spit out your drink all over the floor… so does it make you uneasy, knowing I haven’t had sex.”
“No, but your bluntness does.” He rubs his eyes with his hands to conceal whatever look is crossing his face. “I… I just don’t get how.” He lowers his hands to his lap, “How you…” His eyes skim up my body, lingering on my legs and then on my see-through shirt. “How you could be one?”
“A virgin.” The word itself seems to make him uneasy, which only makes me want to say it more. “Why don’t you get how? Not everyone wants to have sex.”
“Yeah, but…” He trails off assessing me with his intense brown eyes and now I’m the one that has to work to not fidget. “You dress the way you dress and act the way you act… you fool around with guys… it doesn’t make sense.”
“I dress the way that I want to,” I tell him, tucking my hands under my legs to try to hold still. “And I act how I need to, but I don’t get why that would make you think I’m a slut… Is it because of Callie? I think she might have thought I was a whore or something.”
“Why would she think that?”
I shrug. “Probably for the same reasons you think I am.”
“I didn’t think you were a slut,” he insists. “I just thought…” His eyes enlarge and then he clears his throat. “Anyway, so if I can’t drink or get laid tonight, then what else is there to do?”
“You can do whatever you want.” I put my hands on my lap. “I just said that I don’t drink or get laid.”
He seeks the bottle again and tips his head back, pouring the last few drops down his throat. He gets up and tosses the bottle into the trash by the foot of the bed. I bite my lip watching his muscles ripple like they did when he was fighting with Preston.
“We could play cards,” he suggests, opening the closet door. He bends down to pick a shirt up from off the floor and the towel slides lower and lower on his hips. I’m not sure if I’m so much as fascinated with his body as how my body is reacting to the sight of him. Invigorated. Excited. I’ve never been excited over a guy before. I’ve either been disinterested or afraid. With people in general.
Regardless, I want to feel it more, let it shower over me. “Cards?”
He has a tattoo on his shoulder blade, a dragon. I touch the back of my neck where my own dragon tattoo is as he stands back up and turns around with a deck of cards in his hand. “But the deal is that we can’t play for money.”
“Good, because I don’t have enough to play with,” I say, still assessing his body, but more discreetly.
“Neither do I.” He sits down on the bed with his legs over the edge, so he’s not flashing me, and puts the cards on his lap. “However, I never just play Texas Hold ’Em for nothing.”
“Why not?”
He clears his throat. “Because it was how I was taught to play.”
“By who?” I was taught to play by someone, too, and for money. A couple I lived with for about six months used to throw these Texas Hold ’Em parties and I would sit beside the table while Mr. Stronton explained the rules to me. I got pretty good at it too, but it’s been a while since I played.
He cuts the deck in half and shuffles them. “By my dad.” The way he says it, his voice stressed, makes me speculate if something happened to his dad.
“Where’s your dad now?” I rise to my feet, adjusting my skirt.
He aligns the cards on the bed, looking up at me. “He lives in California.”
I cross the room to the bed he’s sitting on, the navy blue sheet balling up beneath me as I sit down and get comfortable. “Then why don’t you just go live with him?”
He grips the shuffled deck of cards in his hand. “It’s complicated.”
“What about your mom?” I ask.
“Even more complicated.” His knuckles whiten as he tightens his hold on the cards. “What about your parents? What happened to them?”
“They left me on the doorstep of the neighbors when I was six months old,” I lie breezily. I’ve been doing it for years, making up elaborate stories to avoid the painful truth of what happened when strangers ask me. “I guess they didn’t want me or something.”
He cuts the deck evenly in half. “Is that the truth? Or are you making up a story?”
“Why would I make up a story about that?” I ask innocently, tucking my leg underneath me. Again his eyes go to my legs, gradually drifting up to my thighs.
He studies me unnervingly as heat caresses my skin and coils in my stomach. “To avoid the real truth.”
“So are we going to play Texas Hold ’Em or what?” I aim to change the subject.
“Yeah… but there’s a stipulation,” he says. “For every hand you lose you have to tell me one thing that’s true about you.”
“I don’t like that rule,” I tell him. “And I don’t like telling the truth.”
“Why? Are you afraid you’ll lose?” he challenges me with haughtiness.
“I’m not afraid of anything.”
“That can’t be true. Everyone’s afraid of something.”
“Fine,” I give in. “But if you lose, then you have to tell me something true about you—and something good.”
He fans the edge of the cards with his finger, like he’s counting the cards. “What if I don’t have anything good to share?”
“I’ll be the judge.” I stick out my hand toward him. “Now give me the cards so I can deal. I’m dealer.”