48
PRES
* * *
“The path of least resistance doesn’t always mean taking the easiest option. Sometimes it means your soul finding its way home, toward something it loves, after you’ve held it back for too fucking long.”
The words ring in my ears as we head down the mountain. Dad remains resolutely silent in the driver’s seat next to me. It’s not ideal that he caught Pax’s little fuck you to the academy faculty and our classmates’ parents, but…honestly, I’m too tired to care what Dad thinks of Pax. The past week has been horrible. Police report after police report. Endless questions from so many different sides. Mom, sobbing on the phone, riddled with guilt that she had no idea what I’d been going through. The silence in between all of that has needled at my ear drums, too loud, too obvious, making me want to scream. Dad’s been stumbling through life like a zombie, not saying anything, too shocked to react to the news that his son has been sexually assaulting his daughter for years. I was amazed this morning, when he announced that I had to get ready and attend graduation. He said it was a rite of passage I’d regret missing out on down the line, and it was about time we tried to get back on track.
It’s going to take Dad a long time to ‘get back on track’ after this. A lot longer than it’s taken me. I’ve been dealing with this madness for years, though. This is an open wound for him that won’t just close overnight. He thinks I can’t hear him rushing to the bathroom to throw up three or four times a day. But I can.
“The path of least resistance doesn’t always mean taking the easiest option. Sometimes it means your soul finding its way home, toward something it loves, after you’ve held it back for too fucking long.”
Pax didn’t use that phrase by accident. I know he didn’t. What he said into that microphone right before he stormed off the stage made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. They were meant for me.
“Are you in love with that mouthy reprobate, then?” Dad mutters, as he steers the car down the road.
I nearly jump out of my skin. I’ve been so lost in my own thoughts, and Dad’s been so quiet in general of late, that hearing him speak surprises the shit out of me. “What?”
“Pax.” He says his name warily. We haven’t really spoken about him much, but Dad knows there’s something between us now. Pax was with me at the police station in New York. Dad knows from the multitude of statements I’ve had to give that Pax saved me, too. Not just in New York, but that night outside the hospital as well. No one thought to mention to my father that I was dumped from a moving vehicle, or that I’d been so close to death, my blood pouring out of me, when a boy smoking a cigarette came to my rescue and saved me from dying.
Dad diligently stares straight ahead, out of the windshield, but he repeats his question for a second time. “Are you in love with him?”
This not a question I ever foresaw my father asking me. To my surprise, I’m not uncomfortable answering him, though. “Yeah. I have been for a while now.”
He nods. After a second, he says, “All right, then.”
Before I get a chance to ask him what that means, he slams on the brakes, slowing down, and then begins to perform a tight U-turn on the hairpin road. “Whoa! Dad! What the hell are you doing?”
“I did my research. I know where he and those friends of his live. All three of them are trouble, but…if you love him…”
He barely has enough room to turn the car; the guardrail is frighteningly close. “Dad!”
“Please, sweetheart.” He rolls his eyes. “I was in the military for a long time. I know how to drive a car through a tight turn.”
Barely thirty seconds later, he’s taking the turn off that leads to Riot House.
I have no idea what’s going on. I’m too stunned to comprehend what he’s doing. I’m still trying to figure it out when he pulls up in front of the house made of glass, surrounded by trees, and nods towards the building. “Go on. Go. I know you want to see him. Just be home by midnight. And tell him he’s to come to the house tomorrow. I want to meet him. Officially.”
Is he being serious? The look on his face says that he is, but surely he’s joking.
“Go on, Presley Maria. Before I change my mind. He’s rough around the edges, but I know he’s gonna look after you, at least.”
I grin for the first time in a week. Quickly, I plant a kiss on his cheek, then squeeze him tight. I know how hard this is for him; he’d rather swaddle me up in cotton wool than let me go hang out with a boy at this precise moment, but I think he knows this is what I need to keep my soul alive.
“Thanks, Dad. I love you.”
No one’s home.
Luckily, the front door isn’t locked. The boys must have forgotten to secure the house on their way to graduation this morning. I let myself in, kind of creeped out by how silent the place is, and I head straight upstairs to Pax’s room. Unlike the other times I’ve been here, it’s as neat as a pin in his bedroom. There are no clothes on the floor. His bed is made. The surfaces are spotless. Everything is neat and tidy.
I should text him and find out where he is—he could have gone out with Dash and Wren to celebrate graduation—but I wouldn’t even know what to say to him in a text message. I’d rather wait and speak to him face-to-face. So that’s what I do. I lie down on his bed, and I wait.
An hour passes, by which point I’m fighting to stay awake. The weird, low hum of the air filtration system was strange at first, but soon I find it’s soothing me to sleep. When I wake later, it’s dusk, and a soft, bruised purple light is washing shadows up the walls.
Pax sits in the leather chair by the window, six feet from the bed, watching me. His face is still a little bruised from his run-in with Jonah. He’s wearing a black button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His jeans are black, as always. His feet are bare. Dressed in shadows, his head resting on the back of the chair, his expression so very serious, he looks like…he looks perfectly like himself.
He doesn’t say anything, though I am very obviously awake now. He traces a circle on the arm of the leather chair with his fingertips as he watches me watching him.
“Sorry. I was supposed to be awake and alert when you got back. I just…”
“I don’t mind,” he says quietly. The tiniest of smiles plays at the corner of his mouth. “I thought I’d walked into some Brother’s Grimm Fairytale when I came through that door. There was a beautiful, fiery-haired angel sleeping peacefully in my bed.”
My cheeks burn. I’m suddenly very shy.
“You want anything?” Pax whispers. “Water, or…?”
I shake my head. “I’m okay. Unless you happen to have a random chocolate milkshake in your fridge downstairs.”
He laughs very gently down his nose, taking his phone out of his pocket. The screen lights up as he taps on it briefly, then puts it back in his pocket. “One chocolate milkshake. Coming right up.” There’s no death metal blazing from the speaker system. No violent video game raging on the TV. His room is silent as he continues to just…look at me.