Without looking at the dartboard, I toss the dart and it almost hits another bull’s-eye. “I learned from the best.”
“Who?” He slants his head as the corners of his lips quirk. “Was it Dell down at the bar?” he jokes, because Dell’s the town drunk and thinks he’s the champion of everything. “Because he’s always bragging about being a super dart champion.”
I swallow hard as vivid memories puncture my brain. “This guy I used to date taught me, actually.” I take another long sip, telling my head to shut up. Don’t go there. Please don’t go there. Not right now.
I hear his breath catch as he probably remembers what happened. Everyone in this town heard about it within hours after it happened, and it’s been kind of hard for everyone to forget. It wasn’t too long after Tristan’s sister died, but hers was by accident, a simple wrong place at the wrong time.
After a gap of silence drags by, Tristan blows out a breath and stands up from the armrest. “You want a shot or something?”
“Yes, please,” I say way too quickly and wind the neck of the nearly finished Corona around in my hand, channeling my tension on it.
He walks over to the kitchen area and digs around in the cupboards, hunting for shot glasses. I sit down on the sofa, tip my head back and suck down the last of the Corona, regretting my decision to come back here. Not to Dylan’s house, but back home. I’d been okay at college—not great, but okay, or at least focused on something besides my obsessive compulsions and Landon’s death.
A giggle floats from the hallway and I gratefully exhale, thinking it’s Delilah. I start to get up but when the curtain is drawn back, I sink back down when a leggy blonde steps out, adjusting her top back over her bulging curves.
She takes one look at me and then plasters on a plastic smile. “Hey… it’s Nova, right?”
I have no idea who she is, but she looks about my age. “Yeah…”
“Like the car.” The sound of his voice is familiar, way too familiar, like the world has decided to play a cruel joke on me. When a guy steps out of the hallway, I just about drop dead on the floor as the similarity intensifies and sends my mind spinning. Everything about him screams Landon, and for a second I really believe it’s him.
It’s not really the similarities in features as much as something less visible. He’s taller than Landon, with dark brown hair inside of black, and it’s shaven short instead of hanging in his eyes. He also has slightly more muscle tone to him, and there’s an indistinct scar over his top lip. All these things don’t match up, but it’s the little details that push an insanity button in my head. Like the charcoal on his hands, or the fact that the laces of his boots are untied, something Landon used to do all the time. The sound of his voice, deep and smooth like melted butter, has a strikingly comparable ring to it. And his eyes. Those goddamn honey-brown eyes with so much sorrow in them it nearly swallows any happiness in the room. I’ve only seen that much sadness in one person’s eyes. Ever. And when they lock on me, it’s like I’m drowning in his sorrow—Landon’s sorrow.
I continue to stare at him, and I can tell it’s making him uneasy, but I can’t seem to look away. It’s like I’m waking up a year ago and he hasn’t left me on the hillside, alone, not just on the grass, but in the world.
“Are you okay?” The sound of Tristan’s voice slams into my chest and rips me from my daze.
I tear my eyes away from the guy and blink up at Tristan. “Huh?”
He has a small shot glass in his hand that’s topped off with a crystal clear liquid. “You look upset.” He glances over at the guy and then back at me. “Are you okay, Nova?”
I nod, snatch the shot out of his hand, and slam it back, basking in the burn. Then I set the empty glass down on the table and press my hand to my burning throat. “I’m fine. I’m just tired.”
Tristan’s not buying it, but he doesn’t press. We’re not good enough friends for him to press. He takes a seat in the tattered leather recliner that’s shredded to pieces. I try to keep my gaze fixed on the popped seams in the armrest, but I can’t help but glance over at the guy with honey-brown eyes, even though I don’t want to.
He sits down on the sofa to the side of me, and the blonde strategically places her ass onto his lap. She giggles as she runs her fingers over his head, but he only seems mildly interested as he retrieves a pack of cigarettes from the coffee table and pops one into his mouth.
“So did Dylan wander back there?” Tristan asks, sipping on his beer.
The guy shrugs as he cups his hand around the end of the cigarette, flicks a lighter, and the end crinkles and shrivels. “I think they went into his room, but I’m not sure.” Smoke snakes out of his lips.
“With that bitch Delilah,” the blonde says, shooting me a malicious look.
Okay, so she knows Delilah and obviously hates her, which isn’t surprising—most girls do. But why does she seem to hate me?
“Oh shit,” Tristan says, smacking his head with the heel of his hand. “I totally fucking forgot introductions.”
“We already know who she is,” the blonde sneers, glaring at me. “That’s Nova Reed.”
I have no clue what her names is, and I think Tristan can tell. “Nikki, quit being a bitch,” he says.
Nikki. It clicks. She used to go to school with me before she dropped out. She also used to have a crush on Landon right before I started dating him at the beginning of senior year. She’s changed a lot, put on some weight in the chest area, and her hair used to be light brown, not bleached blonde.
Nikki huffs, poking her chest out as she crosses her arms, then she reclines against the guy’s chest. “Quit being an asshole,” she snaps at Tristan, and then bats her eyelashes at the guy.
The guy shifts his weight, throwing her off balance, and she slides off his lap and lands on the couch. “Sorry, but he’s my cousin and this is his house. If he says quit being a bitch to Nova”—he glances at me with a quirk at his lips and a furrow at his brows—“then quit being a bitch.”
I don’t like the way my heart leaps in my chest when he says my name or that he remembers my name when he only heard it a minute ago. I hate how I can’t seem to look away from him and find something to count, because if I could, then I could call down the storm building in my chest.
Nikki looks pissed, but she keeps her lips sealed. The guy takes a deep inhale from his cigarette as he reaches for the remote on the coffee table. Tristan gets up from the recliner and heads down the hall. It grows quiet, and the guy whose name I still don’t know picks up a remote and flips through the songs on the stereo. Nikki makes it her mission to glare at me, but I barely pay attention. All my focus is on the ghost of a memory sitting next to me. I know he’s really not Landon, but he’s chillingly comparable, even in the way he moves.
Eventually, looking at him becomes too much, and I get up and walk out of the house. I step into the cool night, place my hands on the railing, and hunch over, battling back the memories as they thrust their way to the surface, counting under my breath, doing everything I can to focus on the numbers instead of the images, but the images conclusively win.
“So if you could only paint one thing over and over again for the rest of your life, what would it be?” I hold on to the stairway railing and watch Landon sit on the bottom step and sketch the old oak tree on the hill in the backyard. “That tree?”
“I wouldn’t paint anything,” he says. His hand moves perfectly along the white sheet of paper, staining it with shades of gray and black. He pauses, glancing over his shoulder at me, with a ghost smile touching his lips. “You know how much I hate painting.”
I scrunch my nose and sink down on the step beside him. “Okay, then, what would you sketch?”
“If I could only sketch one thing?” he asks, and I nod. He taps the end of his pencil on his chin, leaving black smudges. “Probably you.”
I stick out my tongue, but my heart dances. I’ve often wondered what it would be like if he really did like me, if he kissed me, if he were my boyfriend instead of just my friend. “You so would not. If you were to actually pick a person, which I doubt you would, you’d probably pick someone like Karisa Harris.”
He wavers. “I have to admit, she does have a nice rack.”
I slap his arm, pretending to be offended, even though I’m used to it. We’ve been friends for four years, and he’s a seventeen-year-old guy. Being a pervert is kind of a given. “That’s so gross,” I say.
When he rolls his tongue to hold back his laughter, I swat his arm again, and his laughter slips through. Landon rarely laughs, so even though he’s irritating me, I let it go and laugh with him, because the sound of it makes it hard to stay angry. Eventually he quiets down and licks his lips, almost licking the charcoal off.
Shaking my head, I reach forward, place my thumb on one of the smudges right by his lips, and rub it away, trying to ignore the intensity in his gaze as he watches me. “You always have this stuff on you, even when you’re not sketching,” I remark as I pull my hand away. But he stops me with a touch of his fingers. I freeze as he wraps his hand over mine, and my heart starts to flutter inside my chest.
“I’ve been thinking.” He brings my hand back to his mouth. “About trying something,” he whispers against my palm.
“Oh yeah.” My voice cracks and I can’t stop staring at his lips.
He nods, without taking his eyes off me. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while…” He takes a deep breath and then lets it out, seeming uneasy. “About kissing you.”
My pulse quickens as he pauses, like he’s waiting for me to say something, but my throat is thick with my nerves and I can’t get my lips to form words. I’ve never kissed a guy before, and Landon isn’t just a guy. He’s my best friend. Even though I’ve thought about it many times, I’ve also thought about what it would be like to lose him. He’s the only one who keeps me connected to the world ever since my dad died. Without him, I don’t know what I’d be, or if I’d be anything.
I start to protest, but then he shuts his eyes, and my doubts temporarily wash away from the feel of his lips against the palm of my hand. He kisses it gradually, like he’s savoring the moment—and knowing Landon, he probably is. He moves his lips down to my wrist and he does the same thing there, only this time he slips out his tongue and I bite down on my lip as I shudder. My eyes close on their own accord, and I hold my breath in anticipation, waiting for him to kiss me. I wait. And wait, but nothing happens.
“Nova,” he says in a low, husky voice. “Open your eyes.”
I obey, marginally disappointed because I really thought he was going to kiss me.
His honey-brown eyes are smoldering cinders in the fiery sunlight. His lips part and then he seals them together again, eyeing my mouth before sighing. “I wasn’t lying,” he says, looking back at the tree as he puts the tip of his pencil back to the paper. “I could spend hours—even days—sketching you. It would be perfect.” He delicately touches the corner of my eye with his fingertips, before pulling back, the uneasiness in his eyes amplifying. “Especially those.”