There was a splash of what seemed to be lime cordial on his open collar. When he dumped the tray, he pushed his hair back and looked at her. “You look like you could use a real drink,” he said indifferently.
“Please,” Holly responded.
Jared leaned over the bar and tipped some whiskey into Holly’s glass. Holly drank it.
“Thanks.” Holly looked up from her drained glass into his eyes. She realized he was looking at her with a certain consideration.
There was no sweet curl to his sullen mouth, no excitement and no nervousness betrayed. He looked just like she felt: as if he would do anything to feel differently than the way he did now. His eyes were beacon-bright. He looked like driving too fast down a dark lane.
Holly met his eyes, and did not look away. Jared put his hand out over the corner of the bar and drew her slowly toward him. She let him do it because nothing about his demeanor suggested that he would care if she pulled away.
“I can’t hurt you,” she asked. “Can I?”
Jared murmured, as if he was telling her a secret: “You’re welcome to try.”
Then she was flush against his body, the corner of the bar digging sharp into her back and his warmth going through her, turning into heat.
Jared leaned forward and set his mouth against hers. The kiss turned deep almost instantly, his hands clenched in the curly weight of her hair. The noise and lights of the bar faded away to a buzz in her ears, light dying behind her closed eyelids.
When the kiss broke apart, Holly’s mouth was stinging and she was staring up at him.
Jared looked down at her. “Want to go up to my room?”
Holly said, “Yes.”
* * *
Jared didn’t kiss her on the stairs or in the hall, didn’t touch her hand or even look at her until he had turned the key in the door. Then he turned to her, motions as mechanical as they had been with the key, and Holly stumbled across the floor of the room with his mouth on hers again. She hit the bed on her back, half bouncing and half arching from the mattress into his body over hers.
He had his arms braced on either side of her body, kissing her as if he wanted to drown in it. Holly grasped his arms, fingernails digging into the tense muscle beneath the cotton, and kissed him back. She was writhing on the bed she hadn’t seen, encouraging him to drown and take her with him.
He pushed Holly’s T-shirt up, making a sound against her mouth that sounded wild. Holly tore his shirt open with shaking hands, steadying them by pressing her palms against his skin and sliding them down the sleek muscle of his chest, the ridges of his abdomen, and against the slight rasp of hair. He kissed her again and again, his mouth a brand on hers.
She made a noise of her own, urging him on, greedy as her hands on his skin, reaching to pull open the button on his jeans, though his hands had not gone near hers. She was desperate to be hurt or used or anything, as long as she wanted it, as long as she could prove it was only this she wanted.
The thought was a cold shock that made her turn her face away, flushed cheek against the heated pillow, and stare at the wall. Messing around with boys was often an escape, but it had always been fun before.
The weight of his body was still pressing down on hers, muscles straining, and she almost turned her mouth back to his.
Jared breathed, “We can’t do this.” He rolled off Holly and went to sit on the window ledge. Holly pushed herself up on her elbows against the pillows and nodded silently.
“I can’t care about you at all,” Jared said.
“I wasn’t exactly asking you to,” Holly reminded him.
His swollen mouth curved. “That’s not what I meant.” Holly looked around the small room: one wall stone and the other plaster, a dusty mantelpiece piled with old books. A na**d bulb swung from one of the beams and cast yellow light on the tangled sheets and the thin chain around Jared’s neck.
“There’s this book,” Jared said. “And in the book a guy said that he would rather touch someone’s hand if she was dead than another girl who was alive. It’s creepy. I know that.” He was staring off into space, as if at some private nightmare. “Nothing matters in comparison. Nobody is real but her. So it feels sometimes as if nothing else matters at all, including other people. She wouldn’t like that. Other people should matter.”
“I shouldn’t have done this,” Holly said. “Kami’s my friend.”
“She won’t care,” Jared said. “I was in her head, once,” and there was feeling in his voice for the first time: longing. “She didn’t want to be tied to me, didn’t want me hanging on her like a parasite anymore. She said that. And if she didn’t want it, I shouldn’t have wanted it either, should I? But I did. I still do.”
So he loved Kami. Holly had never doubted it; she didn’t think Kami had doubted it before the link was broken. But what she couldn’t tell from his words, and what she remembered Kami wondering too, was whether Jared actually wanted her, the way any guy might want any girl. The way he’d wanted Holly the first time they had met and moments before on the bed. She didn’t know if he loved Kami like that. Maybe it didn’t matter, if what he felt was too warped and twisted to be of any use to anyone.
“It must be nice,” Holly said tiredly, “to know exactly what you want.”
“Not when you know what you want, and you know you can never have it again,” Jared told her. He sounded tired too, his voice so worn it was almost soft.
Holly found herself almost wanting to laugh at how badly her attempt at an escape had gone.
“Men,” she said. “Always going on about feelings all the time. I have to go.” She felt a moment of pride at getting out the clever retort, and she was smiling slightly as she tugged down her wrinkled shirt and opened the door.
She found herself staring down into Kami’s startled face. For a moment, Kami looked only startled, her dark eyes bright as if she was expecting something lovely to happen. She had Jared’s ever-present leather jacket over her arm, and her free hand was lifted as if she’d meant to knock. Then the light in Kami’s eyes dimmed. Holly could see the whole thing through those eyes: the rumpled bed, Jared with his shirt and jeans undone.
Jared was absolutely still, staring at Kami.
Kami was the first one to speak. “I’m terribly sorry,” she said, her voice almost ludicrously polite. “I just wanted to give this back. I’ll go.”
“Don’t!” Jared said, his voice too loud, as if giving an order. Holly turned at the sound: he caught Holly’s eye, and flushed so red it made his scar burn livid white. He looked away.
“Please don’t go on my account,” Holly said, and then her attempt to be casual collapsed. “Oh God,” she said. “I’m really sorry, this isn’t—”
“It isn’t any of my business,” Kami told her with conviction. “And you have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I was just leaving,” Holly said. “I’m sorry. I’m going to go now.”
Kami’s hand went to Holly’s sleeve, as if she might ask her to stay. The idea was so hideous that Holly dodged around her and hurtled down the stairs, through the pub and into the street, where she started to run.
Holly didn’t even know where she was going until she found herself in front of Angela’s house, staring at the blank black windows. Angela wasn’t in. Holly didn’t want to stop, or admit to herself what she was doing, so she barely halted before the gate. She just turned around and headed for the grocer’s shop. Rusty and Angela were always training, and must be doing so now more than ever: Angie must be there.
Holly ran so fast she was panting, and if the pants sounded a little more like sobs as she went, she told herself that it didn’t matter. The grocery was dim as she walked through it, shelves stocked with shadows. Holly was relieved when she got to the stairs. She ran up the steps, then stopped dead with her hand on the door.
Through the wire-meshed glass, Holly could see Rusty and Angela sparring on the mats, fluorescent lights giving the turquoise room the appearance of an aquarium in the night. Rusty had his back to her, though she could hear the rumble of his voice. He must have been saying something funny, because Angie was smiling.
Angie was wearing a ponytail, the shining-straight length of black hair spilling over her shoulder. Her mouth was gleaming, her teeth a glint behind the glossed curve of her lips, made up even when she was wearing sweatpants and a tank top. She always looked like a girl in a movie. She made the world act like she was in a movie, everything else going out of focus as the camera slid from the dark fall of her lashes against her cheek to the pale slim line of her neck and the shadowy dip of her collarbone, the soft swell and gentle curve inward of her body under the stretched white cotton.
Except there wasn’t a camera, and this wasn’t a movie. It was just that Holly was looking.
Holly sat down on the top step and put her head in her hands.
She wasn’t sure how long it had been when she heard the creak of the door opening and felt her body tense and then relax as Rusty said, “Holly? What’s going on?”
He sat down on the step beside her, big shoulder jostling her as he settled, and Holly looked up at him. Her lashes were sticking together with tears, and in her spangled blurry vision she saw the angled lines of his cheekbones and the sometimes-curling, sometimes-tender line of his mouth. He was like Angie, but he was a guy; a ton of girls in school had a crush on Rusty Montgomery. It would be perfectly all right.
And maybe because of that, and maybe because she was frightened, Holly lunged forward and grabbed Rusty’s face in her hands, bringing his lips to hers.
Rusty almost started out of his skin. He grabbed her shoulder and held her back. “Whoa,” he said. “Steady there. What are you doing?”
Holly’s shuddering breaths turned to real sobs. She couldn’t look at him: she buried her face in her hands again.
“Hey now,” Rusty said, and patted her on the back in a slow rhythm. “Easy. No need to get so upset. It’s only natural to crave a taste of my sweet, sweet love. You are by no means the first.”
Holly hiccuped out a laugh between sobs and between her fingers, and Rusty laughed with her, steady and calm, like the hand patting her back.
“And I am always flattered,” Rusty continued, “but I love my sister. Not in an ‘I love my sister and I want to make out with her’ way, that would be terrible and disturbing, but in an ‘I love my sister, and I’m not going anywhere near the girl she likes’ way. Be a big mess. Life is hard for me, with all my irresistible sexual magnetism. It’s a real problem, almost as bad as the fact that my steps are now the number one crying spot in Sorry-in-the-Vale. I have to maintain control of the situation at all times or my life would devolve into a nonstop romantical frenzy.”
Holly tried to swallow her hiccups down. It was ridiculous, how Rusty could sit there at perfect ease, completely aware of how Angela was and not even seeming to mind. Her family would have minded a lot.
“You don’t understand,” she said.
“You think I underestimate the effect of my appeal on the general populace?” Rusty nodded thoughtfully. “Could be.”
“Some people are that way,” Holly burst out. “And it’s okay. It’s okay, if that’s how you’re born. I know that. But what if you weren’t born that way, what if you were just some sort of freak, if you’d been with a ton of guys and you still liked guys and then if you were . . . if you started noticing, what does that even make you? What kind of person can’t just choose to be one way or the other?”
“Uh, bisexual people might be the kind of person you’re thinking of ?” Rusty suggested. “I’ve also heard it called ‘sitting on the fence and admiring the view on both sides.’ Holly. Being able to love more than one kind of person, in any kind of way—that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with you. Well, you are pretty hair-trigger with the whole kissing thing; you should learn to check that kissing is cool in the future. I was fine, obviously, but others have nervous dispositions and might well be taken aback.”